Beyond the obvious arena of modern imperial foreign policy, magical thinking is a well-known psychological concept.  It is "the belief that wishes can impose their own order on the material world." It is driven by human goals of fulfillment "without consideration of the constraints of the external world."

We've been reminded of this concept in many different ways over the past few weeks.  The befuddled fumbling old man in the White House insulting reporters who ask him about his memory lapses, then demonstrating his disability several times later in the press conference.

He wishes to remain President, yet he is incapable of being President.  He wants that particular fulfillment regardless of its fundamental impossibility.

We see the same in many modern political leaders, no doubt Canada's Trudeau, who was upset that Putin, in a wide ranging interview last week, mentioned the Canadian Parliament's celebration of World War II Ukrainian Nazi Yaroslav Hunka, a 98-year-old surviving member of the Waffen SS Galicia Division.  Zelensky had just spoken, and all present sincerely wished that killing Russians was great Western tradition, habitual and just.  Instead we saw the impossibility of wishes making their own reality, their own order; the impossibility of changing fact to fantasy, and fantasy to fact.

Access to the most casual and shallow history of World War II should have revealed to any one of the hundreds of educated and cosmopolitan MPs, and the media covering the event, that those killing Russians in WWII were either part of Nazi Germany, or allied with Nazi Germany.  It is modern Russian intolerance for Nazis that we find to be traditional, habitual and just.  The propagandized West seeks a better world through magical thinking, not through the embrace of reality.