Let your Œc. Vol., offer another explanation. As good minions, you are aware of the Volgi’s Fallacy of Foreign-Policy Egocentrism, in which other countries’ actions are explained deterministically in terms of one’s own. The bottom line of the FFPE is: It’s not all about us.

A reason the FFPE is so seductive and universal is the illusion of control it offers. If we’re just nicer to those guys, they wouldn’t blow us up! … Khomeini/Castro/the Sandinistas only came to power and hates us because of Mossadegh/Batista/United Fruit! …  If we only conduct ourselves more deferentially, everyone will love us and the lion will lie down with the lamb, as those Jebus-mongers say.

Not to excuse the egregious “I want it to be a right-winger” bigots—who do contain the dogmatists, apologists, and partisans the Czar taxonomizes, but a phenomenon related to the FFPE is also at work in the minds of many liberals pining for the right-wing bogeyman of their dreams: the focal issue becomes about domestic politics, and therefore a realm they can win in and control. Muslims from Chechnya might as well be Martians or jötnar to these people, who are often really half-educated. Ask them to explain the difference between a Salafi and a Sufi or to guess what Noxçiyçö might mean (“Chechnya” in Chechen), and their sense of superior status begins to quiver.

By contrast, they can and do frequently win domestic-political and cultural battles and feel themselves to be on secure—and more importantly—high ground. They feel the world must go their way, and are impatient to be done with the recalcitrant, reactionary, retrograde troglodytes in their way, whom they feel they understand and have already emotionally consigned to the Morlockian subrealm they deserve.

Moreover, everyone who’s been through higher education has encountered some version of multiculturalism which, crudely, says all cultures are equal except the West, which is uniquely wicked. So those who absorb that judgment (usually not all that critically) are always poised to defend (and make mascot of) the Maligned, Oppressed, Innocent, Noble, Swarthy Other against the Villainous Pale Penis People. Since this is their sense of history, it guides their analysis of current events. Much like in popular culture, where the Good Times Racism Principle and It’s Always the Highest-Ranking White Guy in A Suit or Uniform hold sway.

So, in the end, this poisonous, bigoted desire is a comforting wish: the wicked enemies you already know (and know how to defeat) are behind things, rather than unknown, uncontrollable forces. It was always easier to blame epidemics and crop failures on demons and witches than microbes and hydrology. Children listening to stories always want to know who the Bad Guy is and that the Good Guy will defeat him.

A lot of our fellow Americans know the Bad Guys are that sweaty accountant from exurban Atlanta with eight Jesus fish on the back of his minivan, and his benighted ilk. They already are filled with contempt for his cruel, backward ways. Lonely Loser Muslims from Daghestan via Kyrgyzstan? They’re not willing to grant such people the actual moral agency to be villains, since the Smart People® sense of history only grants non-Westerners the role of victims; the evil they do must be, in some way, attributable to something we (or rather, they, the Bad Guys) did to them first. Because then we can control it. Then the world becomes tractable, amenable to our efforts. The Good Guys win.

And we all live happily ever after.

The End

Confucius, Œc. Vol.

Don’t ask impertinent questions like that jackass Adept Lu.