You might be right. It was mostly before my time so I can't say for sure what the atmosphere was like back then. I wonder if China and Iran are potentially a bigger military presence now than they were in the 60s and 70s. Russia feels less so, as it's really struggling to complete its objectives in Ukraine, a country which is in some sense a proxy for the West. But I also feel like there's a growing potential for coordination between Russian, China, and Iran, and that's quite worrying.

In the UK immigration is definitely on the rise, but I can't see how it's relevant to what I'm talking about, nor can I see how it's as apocalyptic as you make out.

Is that a fair assessment though? I mean, the West has a great deal of failings and hypocrisy and books can be filled but it's also full of people who do value human rights and have effective political means to apply counter pressure.

Unfortunately it seems that humans just aren't equipped with the proper intuition for how to handle the behaviour of enormous masses of people grouped in societies. It seems that we apply the same moral intuitions used for individuals, judging "the West" or "Muslims" or "China" as if they were a single person with a single unified mind.

Each society hosts a variety of people with different individual attitudes and values, and each society produces and consumes a different mix of ideas some of which may be beneficial or problematic (both domestically and Internationally). Ideas like exploitative capitalism or jihadism or whatnot; powerful ideas that have real effects.

Yet people are people and have far more things in common between each other than what our instincts prime us to think.