The expression my country right or wrong—perhaps a misquotation of the American naval officer Stephen Decatur, but also attributed to Carl Schurz—is the extreme form of this belief.
The fact is people watched him like he was a strange animal, and they preferred to enjail him into the unreal world rather than accept him as a member of them.
Most people, fortunately, do not believe in such extremes, yet most people also appear to be ethnocentric enough to believe, at least just a little, that their own race is superior to others.