A Hypothetical Scenario
There is a large population of an uneducated, disenfranchised, poor, and ignorant ethnicity with no real future. They are trapped in a situation they cannot change. This is true for no reason other than that they are unaware of the real dynamics of their surroundings and are unwilling to change themselves. This has exactly nothing to do with their ethnicity.
A small group of sociopaths with great wealth and political power (acquired through unethical and criminal means), professing an ideology based on a psycho-spiritual psychosis, uses the media and other means of mass communication to exacerbate their anger and frustration; and direct it towards an aggregate of people with opposing political ideologies, different religions, and different ethnicities. The poor and ignorant majority are instilled with the idea that their circumstances are the fault of the "others," and that these "others" are responsible for a social movement that will inevitably end with their extinction (this is not actually true and exists only in the disordered fears-fueled imaginations of these people). The poor majority are spurned into a state of blind xenophobic bloodlust.
A small group of intelligencia from among them concoct elaborate justifications for the chaos and ruin they are creating. They employ imaginative means of propagating their ideology; none of which is distinguishable from a subtle and pleasurable form of mass brainwashing.
The small group of sociopaths whips the poor majority into a quasi-patriotic frenzy. This frenzy creates a permanent state of cognitive dissonance wherein they are incapable of rational thought and reasoned deduction. Their own leadership goes so far as to admit to their faces that they lied to them and manipulated their emotions to get them to do what they wanted. This is met with thunderous applause.
The sociopathic leadership commits irrational acts on a daily, almost hourly basis. Nothing they do fails to create chaos and ruin. Their followers filter this abominable spectacle through the lens of their cognitive dissonance and interpret it as improvement. Their loyalty becomes more and more inflexible. And every time irrefutable evidence of the destruction the sociopathic leadership created becomes inescapable, the propagators and poor majority believe it to be the fault of their political rivals, and not their leadership who had actually committed the atrocities (they even blame natural disasters on their political rivals).
Does any of this sound familiar?