The Useful Idiots and the Magical Thinkers
About two years ago, I wrote an article suggesting that the path of peace was the only sane and coherent way forward for the US, Europe and the rest of the world. Although the article was generally well received it also got a curious amount of negative feedback. There were even a few people that claimed to be pro-peace who referred to my article, to me, as “one of the useful idiots”. In their opinion, the peace I was suggesting was the wrong kind of peace. The right kind of peace, according to them, was the kind of peace that didn’t include dialogue with those who they perceived to be “the enemy”. For them, peace consisted of a particular idea of a future in which “the enemy”, who they believed to be completely “evil”, either voluntarily, willingly stepped aside or were made to step aside via the use of military force. Mind you, these were people who absolutely did not want to be involved or have their children involved in a war, let alone a nuclear war.
This sort of one-sided magical thinking is a thought virus that has infected a notable portion of the Western world over the course of the last 4 to 5 years. It’s the kind of thinking that’s turned “peace” into a dirty word by subtly filtering it out as an achievable option and linking it to collusion with “the enemy”. At a deeper level though, this sort of thinking is a product of the hubris that many Americans and Europeans have developed over the course of the last 35 years in the “unipolar era”, an era in which the US and NATO have been able to do whatever they want to pretty much whomever they’ve wanted to do it to.
The Cool Kids’ Point of View
“What do you mean we can’t have peace without dialogue? Are you suggesting that ‘the enemy’ might have a description of events, a point of view worth listening to? Don’t you know how evil they are? Don’t you know that they can’t be trusted? Are you suggesting that we, who are the sane and more sensible ones, might have had something to do with the way this conflict began and has developed? You’re obviously a victim of ______ propaganda. You’re obviously a useful idiot.”
I’ve heard different versions of the argument in italics above put forward by people from the “left” and from the “right”. I’ve witnessed highly educated people express (exactly) the same sentiments in a more politically palatable form. I’ve seen and heard the same basic ideas put forward, consistently, on FOX News as well as in the NY Times, the Guardian, The Globe and Mail, etc.. Without realizing that it has happened, a sizable portion of the Western public has allowed itself to slip into a tier of ignorance that, if it were happening in any other realm (other than politics), would be spotted as Junior High School level reasoning, at best.
This knee-jerk biasedness, which is often accompanied by a firm unwillingness to self-reflect, is overlooked simply because it’s been baked into a long-cultivated narrative which is so ubiquitous that it’s been internalized by much of the Western public as a given. Europe is on the brink of destroying itself because its most prominent leaders simply will not let go of this narrative. They will not, seemingly for any reason, including to save the lives of the European population, entertain the idea that perpetual war might not be the best way forward. It doesn’t matter to these leaders that they are, daily, becoming more and more despised by the public. I’m not being hyperbolic here, I’m speaking very directly about what appears to be a suicidal level of ideological fundamentalism. I’ve written about it here: https://www.pressenza.com/2026/06/europes-increasing-tensions-with-russia-are-provoking-a-sad-but-likely-direct-conflict-with-nato/
In the US we’ve had pretty much the same narrative put forth with some minor variations during the last few years. In both cases though, in the US and in Europe, war and mass destruction (as well as genocide) have been a central feature of the West’s modus operandi.
The Choice
Fortunately, the younger generations don’t seem to be buying the “mainstream” narrative the way Baby Boomers and too many of Gen X have. In this decade (2020 – 2029) the US and the rest of the Collective West are being faced with a choice: We will either attempt to forcibly prevent the already accelerating changes that are sweeping over the planet, or we will recognize the futility of taking on the tidal wave that is the shift from a Unipolar world order of US dominance to a Multipolar world order of cooperation between nations. https://www.pressenza.com/2022/07/its-the-end-of-the-unipolar-world-as-we-know-it-and-i-feel/
In short, we’re either going to try to bomb and kill our way back to 1995 or we’re going to move in concert with the evolutive historical procession of events, doing what we can to generate peace within ourselves and in those around us. Peace is not a dirty word. In fact, it’s our only way out of the mess we’ve gotten ourselves into via the use of perpetual wars and violence.: https://www.pressenza.com/2025/01/the-real-possibility-of-peace-on-earth-in-the-21st-century-part-1/