One of the standard tropes that political insurgents and frightened people use in troubled countries at election time is that “outside forces” or “subversives” are negatively influencing the country. Those forces can be other countries with malevolent intent, or shadowy groups or cabals. How the outside forces are actually negatively influencing the country is usually never specified in detail.
What you are hearing is standard conspiracy theories, nothing more, nothing less.
Like the early James Bond books and movies, the “outside forces” comprise a series of stock villians.
The list of stock villians outside the USA usually comprises one or more of the following:
1. The Illuminati
2. Jewish financiers (often those are alleged to be the same people as 1)
3. The United Nations
4. Muslims
Inside the USA, the list of subversives expands to include just about any part of the Federal government (although the military, being on a high pedestal, is usually pretty close to exempt, as is law enforcement). Any group perceived to be ideologically different is also listed as “subversives”. So if you are a GOP partisan, socialists, communists and marxists are all subversives, as are atheists if you are an adherent to most of the standard Western single-deity religions.
Many partisans also add the mass media to the list, who they suspect of being “in the tank” for subversives or the outside villians or The Establishment.
All of these obsessions with outside forces and subversives, of course, come at the expense of self-examination.
You don’t have to be an expert in psychology to know that when societal groups (families, corporations, countries, communities) run into problems, their first instinct is to blame outside forces or events. You may also know that behavior pathology as denial. Denial is very powerful emotionally, since it is a defense mechanism against self-examination that might require fundamental changes in behavior.
The difficulty in processing conflicting messages is also known as cognitive dissonance. Humans hate cognitive dissonance, and want no part of it until the pain of continuing with existing behaviors becomes too great.
So, any time that you read somebody here or elsewhere ranting about any of the villians listed above in an attempt to explain why things are going to hell in a handbasket and We Are All Doomed unless we give My Guy the keys so he/she can take charge and Save Us All From A Fate Worse Than Death, grab hold of that bullshit detector, since you are going to need it real quick. It is almost certain that the people doing the whining are in denial about events that they do not like, and rather than analyze how they or their group arrived in the mess, they have to blame outsiders, because, good lord, there is no way that they and their buddies could have made mistakes and ended up causing their own predicament. No sir.
