The Evil Empire from the East

How 9/11 retriggered two thousand years of Orientophobia

Selections from “the Cowboy and the Yogi: Ideals shared by India and America”

Complete book available at this Link
Fear evolved long before rational intelligence. Consequently, a creature who fears, but cannot think very well, will make many errors, and it is better for those errors to be false positives than false negatives. If a rabbit fears a rope because it thinks it is a snake, it will waste some calories running away. But if it mistakenly thinks a snake is only a harmless rope, it gets eaten. Unfortunately, when our scattershot fear mechanism works in harness with our formidable rational capabilities, we waste far more than a few calories. Expensive and useless weapons get built, innocent people become needlessly harassed or even killed, and cherished human rights get trampled, all to sooth an inflamed fear that was only partially caused by a real threat. How can we protect ourselves from this kind of overreaction? One way is to acknowledge that our experience of The Other is always heavily stained by our subconscious view of history, and the stories we have told ourselves about it.

Ever since Xerxes and Darius tried to invade Greece around the 4th century B.C., Western Europe has been haunted by the fear that a…