We know that all kinds of organisations – from banks to political movements – can generate a culture of perverted loyalty in which otherwise decent people will collude in crimes "for the greater good".
Nor was the ANC convinced that a Westminster-style parliamentary democracy with all the checks and balances of bourgeois institutions such as an independent judiciary was worth preserving, perverted as it had been under apartheid.Mr Mandela had himself harboured such doubts.
The perverted bargain with justice which Tosca makes is the heart of the opera's tragedy.
Again, by depriving them of investment, such perverted virtue especially harms the economic prospects of developing countries.All this underlines a broader worry.
Whereas many were attracted to the idea of a benign world government as an alternative to the staleness and cynicism of conventional politics, Britain was fortunate that only a few saw salvation in the perverted Utopianism of Soviet communism and fewer still in fascism, particularly after the brutalities of the Spanish civil war.
Nor was the ANC convinced that a Westminster-style parliamentary democracy with all the checks and balances of bourgeois institutions, such as an independent judiciary was worth preserving, perverted as it had been under apartheid.
A fatwa issued by Egypt's highly respected grand mufti, Ali Gomaa, states that Muslims should understand that others will attack their faith; and although they should reject this "perverted behaviour", he said, they should protest peacefully, with "wisdom and fair exhortation".This stand presents a clear contrast to the rabble-rousing tactics used by others.
But, as the journalist and author E.B. White pointed out long ago, the highly concentrated splendour of New York also makes it a tempting target for any "perverted dreamer" with the power to "loose the lightning of annihilation".
Will he take on the moguls of Russia's perverted capitalism or will he be their poodle?
What is left is essentially the swagger, complacency and entitlement of a perverted sense of exceptionalism.Can America recover its triple-package verve?
Many of the themes in "Witches and Old Women"–the absence of reason, nightmares, perverted eroticism and fear echo those found in the artist's 14 so-called "Black Paintings", which were created at the same time.The drawings give visitors a new way of appreciating the subversive power of Goya's imagination, from which they seemingly sprang, fully formed.
