What you and I see as the fruits of peace, they think are the fruits of victory. What we see as the fruits of justice, they expect only from oppression, for the benefit of the oppressors. What we know comes from hard work, they think comes from trickery. They think of us as victorious oppressors constantly engaged in trickery, and they think such is the secret of our success. When they react to calamity all around them by furious violence, they think they are pushing for a victory somewhere. When they see the misery caused by tyranny and torture, they see safety only in becoming the tyrants and torturers, instead of the tyrannized and tortured. When we pay them oodles of cash for their oil, they think it must be some kind of trick, and that we are exploiting their natural resources.
The wildest conspiracy theories are constructed, when necessary, to make whatever happens fit into categories like those, and to avoid anything that appears the opposite. I realize when all rolled together into that depressing a litany, it can seem as incomprehensible as where you started. And it is not true of all, obviously. But more people than you can imagine really believe that is just what the real world is like.
There are two main classes of reason for this. One is simpler and more basic, and lies behind that ingraditude you sense. In the overall scheme of things, it is a human weakness that provides fertile soil for the other class of reasons, which I will get to. But first this basic one. It is psychological, a species of wounded pride.
It is easier to admit they have just lost important fights, than to admit their hatred and endless fighting with one another has destroyed the lives of their children. Think about it. A defeated man can dream of victory. A man who knows his own vices have wrecked what he most cares for, feels himself to be a worm. It is easier to admit a clever sharper has fooled him - which after all is mostly the sharper's fault, his greed - than it is to admit he has wasted his time in fruitless pursuits and failed schemes. It is easier to call the punishments he has felt, injustice than to call them justice. Any fine upstanding fellow may suffer injustice. But only criminals are punished justly.
All of that is in human nature. You or I can be as susceptible to it as the next man. We may know these things to be moral errors, and may manage to avoid them. But we are exposed to making them, because we are merely human. It is a frailty more than an evil, although certainly it can result in folly and injustice. This sort of cause is merely fertile ground for the second sort, which is far worse in my estimation. The second cause is deliberate, done by some men to others, on purpose, for the ends of the first.
Remember that we have been involved in a century long struggle for dominion of the earth with some very nasty people driven by very twisted ideas. The cold war, and before it the period of the world wars, spread the vapors of that struggle over the entire world. And our enemies in those struggles were men who would say anything and do anything to make trouble for us. They were armed ambassadors of cynicism.
You or I, here in this country, can look back on that long struggle and remember that we knew we were on the right side, that we acted nobly on behalf of the good of all mankind, and that we were confident right through it that we would win through in the end. We know such things in our bones, despite moments of wavering and despite some domestic forces that lacked that faith. But all of that is not how the whole thing was experienced in much of the rest of the world.
Armies went forth and proclaimed that our prosperity was not a result of peace but of successful war. They taught wherever they could that our trade was not mutually beneficial but exploited and oppressed the wretched of the earth. They made out every intervention on the side of the threatened or downtrodden, a cynical imperial adventure serving the greed of wealthy corporations. And the average person somewhere between the power blocs, did not know which of the stories to believe. Some of them may have listened to native charity, or may have been encouraged by actions we took that directly brought benefit. But others beside them listened to the whispers of their wounded pride, and believe the cynical story their egos wanted to believe.
This did not all magically go away when a wall fell in 1989. Hundreds of millions of people had been evangalized by a bottomless cynicism, and plied with a thousand tales of our wrongdoing. The spiritual results of the catacylsms of the last century have scarcely begun to heal. And along the way, a thousand little wannabees have dreamt of themselves as the next tyrant to rise by the arts of propaganda and civil war. They are still out there, like boys from Brazil. We are still mopping up the spiritual mess made by a general political crisis, which raged for a lifetime in the last century.
I hope this helps make some sense of the attitudes you rightly detect.
I really appreciate your explanations. Thanks!