In the past 40 years how many countries has the US invaded and how many has China?
What the US does can be criticised by its citizens, and protested. People can be punished. Wrongdoing can be exposed. Plenty of people in the US criticise the invasion of Iraq. I doubt many Chinese will find it safe to criticise the occupation of Tibet.
Democracies can and do bad stuff, but internal opposition and accountability limit it, and often but an end to it.
The only authoritarian regimes not allied, nor neutral, with the US are Cuba, Iran, NK, Russia and Venezuela.
It's not present day but let's not forget the series of military genocidal dictarships supported, founded and allied by the US in south america in the second half of 20th century.
You won't be protesting in the U.S. without significant risks to your economic and social status. BTW - The Iraq war was several wars ago, and most of the people chatting here weren't even born for the first Iraq war.
2017 became the year the censors and suspensions of anti-social media started. Now with A.I. mods owned by an entitled parasitic elite, we get a highly censored world were your only recourse is offline, often in solitude.
If you care to test your theory, that you can criticise who you like in the U.S., I suggest you protest Israel, loudly and often.
People do, and are.
Go to China and protest about Tiananmen Square. You'll be picked up, and put away in minutes, no due process, no independent court, nothing. Who knows what happens to you, or when you get out.
China is now a dictatorship.
Dictatorships sooner or later, if they think they can get away with it, invade their neighbours.
When you see a dictatorship which is under no threat engaging in a massive military build-up, invasion is on the way.
i wonder about this ‘dictatorship inevitably goes to war’ - a glance at WW2 and you could be forgiven for concluding the exact opposite re: the Iberian peninsula
But that's not what I wrote.
I may be completely wrong, but what I think is that a dictatorship will, sooner or later, go to war if it thinks it can win.
So if you have say Russia next door, but you're strong enough Russia think it can't win, you do not get invaded.
It's about keeping western capital interests in line, stopping developing nations from nationalizing key resources etc. Bolivia is a good example of a country that has persisted against it.
China wants to change the entire ordering of the world - that is a much bigger deal than the US invading Iraq or Afghanistan.
China is actively directed by a small group of well coordinated, evil raccoons. See, you know, the constant genocide.
This is really exactly my take, too.
The US Government has done incredibly stupid and catastrophically foolish and harmful things - being hoodwinked into Vietnam by the French, for example - but the Government is not inherently, actually evil, in any way, shape or form.
This is not the case for China.
The French worked as hard as possible to get American military support in Vietnam so they could remain the colonial power. They did a very good job of it.
It was all an appalling tragedy. All the Vietnamese wanted was independence, and in particular from the appalling misrule of the French.
The Myth of American Idealism https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/738224/the-myth-of-...
We exist in a time where nuance is sometimes harmful in public discourse.