Failure to appreciate the impact on others of one's own statements and actions can also lead to misunderstandings. Politicians are frequently unable to anticipate reactions to their speeches and policies, because they have very little idea of what views other people are likely to hold. It is easy to build up a dream world about the history of one's own country and to be self-righteous about its actions and aspirations. It should be appreciated, however, that other countries do not necessarily agree. There is no better example than Britain itself. In the 1770s it unsuccessfully attempted to prevent its American colonies from gaining their independence. In the 1820s, on the other hand, it was helping the Spanish colonies to free themselves from Spanish colonial rule (one reason, no doubt, was because it could trade more easily with them when they were free). Throughout the nineteenth century, however, it was building up its empire in South Asia, and in the last decades of the century took part in the scramble for Africa. Yet by 1935, when the Italians set out to annex Abyssinia, the last large territory in Africa remaining outside European control, Britain had again changed its attitude towards colonialism, and opposed Mussolini. However brutal the Italians were towards the Abbysinians in this campaign it is hard to deny their claim that the British were hypocrites. It is easier to disclaim responsibility for the actions of our compatriots of one or a few generations ago than to explain, let alone justify, an inconsistent policy of this kind to others.
Excessive preoccupation with one's own views and viewpoints can also lead to a misanthropic attitude in world affairs. The Soviet Communist Party professes to sympathize with the workers of the world, yet its party newspaper Pravda is not the only Russian publication to include articles anticipating an economic depression and gloating over working days lost in strikes and high unemployment figures in capitalist countries, however much inconvenience and misery these bring to the workers themselves. Many US publications are no less jubilant about bad harvests, shortfalls in industrial output and rumours of unrest in the USSR, even if the ordinary Soviet citizens, rather than the members of the Communist Party , are likely to suffer the consequences. We in Britain have the misanthropic habit of lamenting industrial progress in Germany and Japan, yet this results in betters conditions for the Germans and Japanese. After all, we can hardly blame the Germans for losing the war; they did their best to win it.
The large number of vague terms and terms that lend themselves to imprecise thinking and talking makes it easy to become hypocritical and misanthropic in connection with world affairs. Terms like the capitalist world or the free world are vague and difficult......or counter-revolutionary. The free world of the US press is everywhere outside the Communist bloc, yet it includes countries governed by European powers. The capitalist powers of the Soviet press include not only the USA, where the Post Office is the only large civil enterprise run by the Federal Government but also the UK and Italy, where many branches of the economy are state-owned. Numerous other ill-defined terms confront the student of world affairs. Among them are democracy (but several countries with a Communist regime style themselves democracies) and Communism; aggression aggression and justified armed intervention; satellite and ally; indoctrination and education.
We may blame politicians and journalists for introducing, distorting, and disseminating terms of this kind, but we too are responsible if we continue to use them, at least without endeavouring to decide what they really mean in any particular context. Only when escape words of this kind are abandoned or defined, and personal views put aside, can world problems be studied with impartiality.
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