Maggie's Farm

It must be some failure of multicultural education in the West when we imagine that other people in the world want what we want. Things like peace, material well-being, freedom, etc.

Bruce Thornton notes The West fails to imagine that its adversaries might have different values. One quote:

Munich in particular illustrates the dangers of projecting one’s own motives or goods onto an aggressor. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain failed to imagine that Hitler and the Germans, fired by revanchist passions and the lust for recovering lost prestige and power, were eager for conflict and had spent most of the interwar period preparing for it. Worse yet, this ignorance of true motives puts one at a disadvantage when dealing with an aggressor, who can conceal his aims under the pretext of diplomatic negotiation (as Hitler did), thus buying time and misdirecting his adversary by the duplicitous endorsement of ideals he knows are important to the West.

Yes, you could make a case that the Sudetenland was part of Greater Germany - Austria too - but that's not what it was about.

Thornton's piece is mainly about militant Islam. In the West, we often prefer to be in denial of the evil intentions of others. I'm sure there is a psychological explanation for that. To me, it just seems like a pleasant Edenic fantasy.