PRAGUE – Nestled between a McDonald's and a casino – two clear signs of the changes since 1989's Velvet Revolution – just a few blocks from Wenceslas square, one can find the Czech Republic's museum of communism. This is new Europe. The Czechs call themselves Central Europeans – pointing out that Prague is farther west than Austria's Vienna – and would rather not be lumped in with the less developed former Soviet Republics. Even though they insist on different names, the Czech's still share a common identity with all of those escaping communism and embracing freedom. They are the prototype for the rest. Having elected strong conservative democrats and embraced a free market, they now enjoy a standard of living on par with Western Europe. The past represented in that museum gives the Czechs a worldview that is different from Western Europe and closer to that of America on many critical issues.

The museum could represent the past of any nation behind what Churchill labeled the Iron Curtain. It documents the bloody early stages of Lenin and Stalin's regimes and the imposition of this ideology on the good people of Czechoslovakia. The museum continues with stories of life under the secret police and the danger of simply existing in the country after its Warsaw Pact neighbors invaded to crush the Prague Spring. Daring to think or act in support of freedom would land you in prison or worse. The Czechs know that the previous regime was evil.

The recently deposed regime in Iraq was known to abduct children for the pleasure of the leader's family. Dissidents were tortured in amazingly brutal ways. Ethnic minorities were attacked with mustard gas. That too is evil.

Or at least that is how Americans think. When President Bush declares that America is out to get "evildoers" we understand what he means. Some may critique our President's pronouncements as hokey, but Americans generally believe in the existence of good and evil. One of the most religious societies in the west, America is founded on Judeo-Christian ideas. Even those who are not religious understand the language of Middle America.

The intelligentsia in America's universities and the liberal elites in the media also bristle when Bush mentions evil. But these people are not reflective of the rest of the country. They are adherents to a pseudo-nihilist worldview and denounce any absolute pronouncements except their own absolute (that there are no absolutes) and see the word "evil" as a judgmental term. Calling something evil is the evil thing to do. This postmodern philosophy has a big role in the American media, but it is a minority in American itself. In Western Europe postmodern philosophy is the dominant strain.

Prime Minister Blair of Britain has been Bush's greatest ally since September 11. He did not hesitate to use the word evil to describe the attack or the actions of regimes that support those tactics. But Blair is still an anomaly. An old-style Gladstonian liberal, Blair is reputed to be a religious man. His staunch support for Bush has gotten him into domestic trouble with a people who have, even if not as thoroughly as France, adopted a post-modern view. Though Blair as a leader is an exception to the rule of Western Europe, his people are not.

In the weeks leading up to the Iraq war, Central and Eastern European countries sided with the US and ignored Germany and France's opposition to pre-emptive war. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld described the diverging camps as Old Europe and New Europe. It was clearly a dig against the French and a comment on the rising relevancy of the post-communist states. But is there something more to this? Do the states and peoples of New Europe share a strong ideological bond with America? Do they believe in evil?

The American Ambassador to the Czech Republic sees the understanding of evil as a critical tie between New Europe and America. Ambassador Stapleton, a close personal friend to President Bush, said the Old Europe / New Europe distinction is "Neither temporary nor superficial." He reports that former President Havel told Bush "The lesson for the Czechs is that you have to deal with evil in its time." A recognized playwright, Havel was a man who used the word evil frequently as a literary device. But he truly believes that there is a real-world difference between good and evil.

Recognition of the concept of evil has significant policy implications because it is a part of an over-all anthropological view. If humans are capable of good and evil, then governments must be constructed around that notion. It is the idea of man's inherently fallen nature that inspired our founding fathers to create checks and balances. The foreign policy implications of this worldview are often overlooked by the intelligentsia. If the terrorists are evil and the ideas they believe are fundamentally evil, then no amount of foreign aid will change that. Helping them to get better jobs won't stop their actions. Correcting our foreign policy won't eliminate the problem; it will just make America a less immediate target for their movement. Evil cannot be negotiated with; it can only be confronted. Americans have always believed in good and evil, but are now more conscientious of it in the international sense. For Bush, Stapleton says, evil is about September 11.

The attacks were not just a loss of 3000 lives. American's internalized the feelings of that day. September 11 remembrance ceremonies draw tears from Americans with no direct connection to the attacks. But many Americans do have a personal connection, especially the policy and defense community. Stapleton pointed out that nearly every Congressman knew somebody who suffered in either New York or Washington.

And though the citizens of many nations died in the World Trade Center, the internalization of the attack is an American thing. We must wonder if the Czech's internalized their own suffering under communism and if it helps them to understand our references to evil in ways that Western Europe has forgotten.

The Press Secretary of the Czech embassy in Washington seems to think so. Addressing questions from a group of young journalists, he said that the use of the word "Evil aroused passions in France and Old Europe, but was understood in the Czech Republic…because of our past." France and Old Europe have experienced their share of evil under Hitler's boot, but that past is not as recent as the totalitarianism visited on Czechoslovakia. It is distant enough from their mind to fade from their worldview. To France the word itself is something that the uneducated would use. Having a stated foreign policy objective of crushing evil is just silly and stupid.

Jarosalva Moserova, senior Czech Senator and recent presidential candidate, draws a parallel between America's new aggressive foreign policy against the tyrants of the Islamic world and the tyrants of yesterday. "Europe," she said in reference to the doves in France and Germany and the Franco-puppet state of Belgium, "did nothing to free the old Soviet Satellite states." This personal understanding of what it is like to live without freedom has drawn the Czechs closer to America's foreign policy.

Though America did not send troops to liberate the people held behind the Iron Curtain, it was still a stated policy goal of America to help them. Ronald Reagan declared the Soviet's an "Evil Empire" and launched an economic, political, and military strategy designed to bring the regime down. Czechs and people throughout Soviet-occupied Europe heard the message of hope and freedom through Radio Free Europe. Though we did not do enough to protect them in the first place, the people of New Europe still have gratitude because at least America cared and did something.

In spite of this, New Europe adopted a conciliatory attitude towards Old Europe after the French President Chirac demanded the new democracies of the east "Shut up." This and the recent landslide elections to join the European Union in several Central European countries shows that their economic interests must tie them closer to those willing to sit idly by as evil terrorizes the world and not as strongly to America as we would like to assume.

Perhaps supporting America was only a move to advance their interests. A senior advisor to Czech President Klaus told young journalists "There is no real cultural divide between Old and New Europe." He claimed that vehemently siding with America in the war against Saddam was just "realpolitik" to gain US favor. While Old Europe thinks only of its economy, New Europe still has enough fear of foreign threats to see the need for a transatlantic alliance to protect it from being engulfed again. From the perspective of a resident of Prague, a city whose standard of living is much higher than the rest of the country, the administration official suggested a growing cosmopolitan culture, where the real divide is urban versus rural, not a product of national identity. When it comes to culture, he explained, young people in London, Seoul, and Prague have more in common with each other than their kinsmen in the countryside.

Perhaps New York would have been added to his list of examples prior to September 11. His suggestion raises questions as to whether the postmodernism and disbelief in value judgments like evil was as prominent among average Czechs in their cities as in Western Europe.

The man on the street didn't seem to share the official view of the Czech government. Bringing up the war issue in Prague pubs –the popular henrys and mega-hernys that go all night -- didn't generate an anti-American backlash as it might in a Paris cafe, but there wasn't much support for the war. A telecommunications analyst asked me why America even cared and implied it was either oil or Israel or some combination of the two. A food-service worker seemed to think Bush was just a rowdy American. When the conversation was directed to evil, though, the pub goers unanimously agreed that there was such a thing as good and evil. They weren't rabid postmodernists. They could also accept parallel's between the regimes of the Middle East and of the Soviet Satellites. But, they wondered, why should the Czechs get involved?

There were bigger things to deal with in life -- new girlfriends and gossip about old girlfriends, consumer electronics, new jobs and fears that compliance with EU rules might hurt some old jobs, and other products of the growing prosperity experience by the people under a new regime of freedom. The prosperous have more important things to deal with than conquering evil.

Democracy may very well produce the seeds of its own destruction. The prosperity of peace and freedom leaves no time to consider the forces of oppression in the world. Many Czechs are forgetting about the brutality experienced in their past as they enjoy the luxuries of the present. This is the first step to the postmodern worldview. The communist party even captured a big block of seats in the parliament as some of the youngest voters acting in rebellion joined with old hardliners.

Americans are not just people who believe in evil; we are ones with the resolve to act out against it. We share an understanding of the nature of evil with our friends abroad; they because of their past, and we because of our tradition of faith, yet they are now willing to ignore evil just as we were but two years ago. After the fall of communism we turned our heads as the forces of terror grew as quickly as the NASDAQ. We ignored the warning shots in Kenya and Yemen and Saudi Arabia. But when we woke up to evil on the morning of 9/11 we changed. We are now resolved to defend the world against it, even if they aren't interested in being helped. Those of us with a vivid memory of 9/11 must work to make sure the small children of today do not -- like the youngest Czechs who lived through 1989 -- grow up to forget the past. We must ensure that America will be the force for the next century to "deal with evil in its time."