In [American opinion makers'] master narrative, increasingly threadbare after Donald Trump’s twin victories but still being recycled by anti-communist historians such as Timothy Snyder and Anne Applebaum, Western democracies were/are permanently ranged against totalitarian or authoritarian enemies.

This discourse ably served the Cold War’s political purposes and propaganda needs, but it also made for self-deception. Fixated with the crimes of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and the miserable realities of Soviet and Chinese communism, many American intellectuals became prone to believe too much in their own idea of the free world as a custodian of liberalism and democracy, heir to the Enlightenment and nemesis of totalitarianism. Oblivious to the long centuries of genocidal violence and dispossession that made Europe and the United States uniquely powerful and wealthy, they could not see the future, either: that the world to come would be shaped by ideas and movements occurring among the vast majority of the world’s population, in countries geographically remote from, and historically hostile to, the West; that the Chinese Revolution of 1949 would hold greater consequences for the wider world than the Russian Revolution of 1917, and Mao Zedong’s declaration that ‘the Chinese people have stood up’ after a century of humiliation by Western countries was more than just boosterish rhetoric.

— The World After Gaza by Pankaj Mishra, Mikhail Sen (Narrator)