The West aren't good guys and have never been the good guys. We talked a good talk about democracy when we had communism to compare it to, but without that to contrast with, we look increasingly like the managed democracies you see out East.
- It's why you don't have to fear getting put on a show trial if you piss off the wrong people or they just want your stuff
- It's why the rich (and not so rich) are safe storing their wealth there, knowing the bank won't collapse tomorrow, or they won't confiscate their wealth on a whim.
- It's why you know the water's safe to drink and the food's safe to eat
- It's why you can produce steel good enough so that your buildings don't collapse, and others will buy your cars know they won't fall apart, due to being relying on a shady subcontractor.
- It's why people are willing to pay taxes, knowing they get functioning public services.
Places like China are finding out why you need these things, and are building these systems so their society can succeed.
Democracy's just an (Western) artifact of enforcing and maintaining rule of law.
For example, there once was so-called Bill of Attainder, which basically meant that a certain person was labeled as an outlaw, traitor, and handled as such.
It was an actual law, voted on by the Parliament, but even though usage of Bills of Attainder was perfectly consistent with rule of law, it was not that different from a classical Stalinist show trial in effect.
This is also why Bills of Attainder are banned by the US Constitution.
The trouble with this is that it isn't compatible with prosecutorial discretion. It requires that if someone is breaking the law, they get prosecuted for it. Otherwise unenforced laws accumulate until everyone is breaking a hundred laws at any given time and then only the disfavored get prosecuted.
But if you want laws to be consistently enforced then they need to be few and simple enough for people to understand and comply with them, and that was historically the magic formula, which we've increasingly abandoned, much to our detriment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Scott_(criminal)
> It's why the rich (and not so rich) are safe storing their wealth there, knowing the bank won't collapse tomorrow, or they won't confiscate their wealth on a whim.
https://troymedia.com/lifestyle/your-money/debanking-is-otta... https://www.theglobeandmail.com/investing/personal-finance/a...
> It's why you know the water's safe to drink and the food's safe to eat
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flint,_Michigan
> It's why you can produce steel good enough so that your buildings don't collapse, and others will buy your cars know they won't fall apart, due to being relying on a shady subcontractor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_steel_pro...
> It's why people are willing to pay taxes, knowing they get functioning public services.
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/02/22/tax-evasion-by-wealthiest-am...
I mean, I get that it could be worse, but...
Civil asset forfeiture suggests that's very much a thing to fear.
> It's why you know the water's safe to drink
Tell this to the people of Flint, Michigan. Or the many communities near fracking sites.
From the perspective of the Gazan parents watching their children starve to death, yes, China probably seems a lot better than the UK, which is directly responsible for their situation.
The Ukrainian parent suffering Russian bombing is likely has a much better opinion of the UK for their support, but that doesn't make the UK the good guys. Just less bad in that particular situation.
You sound like someone who is excusing domestic violence by saying, "if she didn't want to get hit, she shouldn't have talked back".
Fuck Hamas, I don't support hamas, but like, Israeli actions in Gaza are clearly inexcusable.
But if you want to talk about "real" genocides, China is backing Myanmar.
How is it a genocide? It's pretty clearly a war in an urban environment where there will be a lot of civilian casualties. Was the battle of Stalingrad a "genocide" too?
You're on the wrong side of history and a despicable human being.
Considerably fewer civilians died in say, Srebrenica. Bosnian Muslims still live there. There are still Jews in Germany, Tutsis in Rwanda. The original inhabitants of the Americas and Australia still live there.
I'd also note -- as someone who's lived there -- that what Israel as a nation really excels at isn't tech, intelligence or manufacturing. Plenty of other countries are equal and above. I'd say it's marketing and comms.
The problem is you don't know how you are actually behaving towards the global south, so your perception is very skewed and people outside the west will have a vastly different perception than you, that you will never understand. Like some people in the west are waking up on Israels behavior now, but the rest of the world was aware of their genocidal terror for over half a century while you lived in innocent bliss. They see your support for Obama and Dove emojis in your profile picture while their entire extended families are getting systematically murdered by your bombs to this day.
Meanwhile in your made up fantasy land, its China that is this great threat to world peace.
Apart from their appalling behaviour during their recent expeditionary wars, their current support of the Israeli genocide in Gaza, their sexual and physical abuse of locals near British Overseas bases, they also have an incredibly poor record with their own citizens.
British behaviour in Northern Ireland was itself genocidal, and involved the regular murder of civilians from decades. Even today they are continuing the legal protection of the perpetrators.
But we have all been subjected to particularly US propaganda portraying the West as the global good guys, and specproc challenged that worldview in the comment to which you replied. Ironically, you criticised him for being naive as he was challenging the concept of the West as the good guys, something you now call naive yourself.
So it seems you aren't internally consistent.
Do you believe this is the US?
Modern voter registration laws, which are gathering pace today, are largely targeted at keeping minority voters from exercising their democratic rights.
Great timeline here: https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2021/05/politics/black-v...
Edit for clarity.
Now they are doing the very same things they pointed fingers about and, now there's no structured information flow to hide this.
As I sometimes tend to say: "God has an interesting sense of humor".
> managed democracies you see out East
Japan, Korea, Taiwan, India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, and Indonesia all have fairly robust democracies. Yes, some of them probably look and feel different than those of NATO, but they are a great improvement over previous colonial administrations, monarchies, theocracies, and "single party democratic states" (Korea and Taiwan before late 1980s/early 1990s break-throughs).
Coming at it here from a broadly UK perspective. We have:
- Very little difference between ruling parties on core issues since the seventies, I'm thinking largely on the economic and foreign policy front here.
- Prison under terrorism offenses for peaceful protest.
- Arrests for (checks notes) complaining about the management of your local school in a WhatsApp group.[1]
People who argue we're somehow better than the people we happen to be fighting need to take a long hard look around. And maybe also remember that when we're not fighting folks (e.g., Saudi, Israel) abhorrent behaviour is tolerated and supported.
> Japan has had a ruling party in power almost continously for 70 years.
You can't think yourself a free thinker to realize the west is a force for evil in the world and simultaneously believe the western's propagandist depiction of what communism is it makes for a very incoherent world view. "It says here in this history book that luckily, the good guys have won every single time."
The main problem with communism was that it was much worse than Western propaganda portrayed it to be. Because if Western propaganda had tried to depict it truthfully, no one would have believed it. Communism is so much worse that it is literally unbelievable, so anti-communist propaganda has to make communism look good in order for anyone to believe it.