Mith you just bring forwards the pessimistic reality.
We tended to be "enlightened" for a couple of hundred years but now at the times of "the war on terror" we're slowly crawling back to the caves from where we will take that old stance: those thinking and behaving like us are good and right, those who don't are evil.
How about we asked for the reasons for all this hatred against the western world first? If those who hate us are not evil as such (as they can't be) then there has to be a reason.
And to come back to the topic of Tolkien: why didn't he make it clearer if he was such a pacifist we tend to think he were? So individual orcs weren't bad but it was the evil system that forced them to be that way? Do we ever find that on Tolkien?