Sympathies

What determines where our historical sympathies lie? I'm talking about that purely arational affinity that you feel when reading about a conflict. I've certainly picked a side in nearly every history I've read. Sometimes your rational and arational sympathies coincide: you want your civilization to win because you like it more than the other. This doesn't mean you necessarily condone the conflict or your side's actions, just that you like them better.
Other times your rational position and arational affinities are opposed. You know, intellectually, that one side is better than the other, but there is something just irresistible about that other side.

Most of the time it is predictable: You root for the side which has a greater civilizational similarity to your own. For me, a partial list of these cases are:

Protestants over Catholics in 30 yrs war
Catholics over Umayyads in Spain
Crusaders over Arabs in Palestine
England over France pretty much always, even though
America over England in the Revolution
(remember, these are arational sympathies -- they don't have to make sense)

What about civilizations whose connection to your own is more tenuous? For me:

Byzantines over the Turks --indeed, over those Crusader dogs as well!
Arabs over the Turks in WWI
Chinese over Japanese, pretty much always (although if a conflict developed today it might be different)
Greeks over Persians
Persians over Arabs
Britons over Normans

For conflicts like these, the causes of our sympathies are not immediately obvious. A lot of the time, it can be something as simple as this: you sympathize with the side whose part was taken by the first book you read on the subject. Other times, you might see one side as more blatantly aggressive than the other, and throw your sympathizes toward the victim. Still other times, its simply a mistaken instinctual feeling of civilizational continuity. For example, its likely that I would have found much more in common with the Normans in 1066 than with the Britons. But, because of the names, it FEELS like I am siding with those damn frogs! As for my sympathies for the Arabs over the Turks, I can narrow it down to two causes: THAT movie; and the fact that I am still bitter over that 1453 business.