Everything you know about these “shitty dictatorships” has been told to you by a media and a government that has a direct monetary (and by extension, power) interest in maintaining and legitimizing the current system you live under. They are free to lie to you as long as they make it believable enough. Not to mention how the ruling class would have profited immensely from assimilating the resources and labor of these “shitty dictatorships”. When that fails, they will profit by generating war and weapons contracts.

This is accomplished by lying and manipulating half truths in order to call them “shitty dictatorships” that need to be dealt with through military action (and destabilization via propaganda and collective punishment to make conditions favorable to accepting capitalism as their way of life). They must justify their actions to the American people in order to generate the least friction within their system, but when it does generate friction, they do it anyways, because their power ultimately lies in capital and not in the people’s opinion of them. This is often when things turn to fascism, but let’s be honest, it’s not “not fascism” just because it’s done in the light of polite society.

This is unique to imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism, which “shitty dictatorships” like China do not practice. China takes advantage of western capitalist’s greed to fund their socialist project, but they are not themselves capitalist. They are in what they define as their first stage of socialism with Chinese characteristics, which has already lifted millions out of abject poverty. The presence of a market-based economy does not make a system capitalist, just as the presence of social welfare does not make a system socialist. Being openly vigilant (which likely means far less than you imagine it does) to intentionally subversive western propaganda does not mean they can’t be democratic in far more meaningful ways, without the burden of constantly re-hashing information that has already been proven faulty.

We are the last people that should be telling China how to run their country and media. Because, in contrast,

Americans are, of course, the most thoroughly and passively indoctrinated people on earth. they know next to nothing as a rule about their own history, or the histories of other nations, or the histories of the various social movements that have risen and fallen in the past, and they certainly know nothing of the complexities and contradictions comprised within words like ‘socialism’ and ‘capitalism.’

Chiefly, what they have been trained not to know or even suspect is that, in many ways, they enjoy far fewer freedoms, and suffer under a more intrusive centralized state, than do the citizens of countries with more vigorous social-democratic institutions.

This is is at once the most comic and most tragic aspect of the excitable alarm that talk of social democracy or democratic socialism can elicit on these shores.

An enormous number of Americans have been persuaded to believe that they are freer in the abstract than, say, Germans or Danes precisely because they possess far fewer freedoms in the concrete.

They are far more vulnerable to medical and financial crisis, far more likely to receive inadequate health coverage, far more prone too irreparable insolvency, far more unprotected against predatory creditors, far more subject to income inequality, and so forth, while effectively paying more in tax (when one figures in federal, state, local and sales taxes, and then compounds those by all the expenditures that in this country, as almost nowhere else, their taxes do not cover).

One might think that a people who once rebelled against the mightiest empire on earth on the principle of no taxation without representation would not meekly accept taxation without adequate government services.

But we accept what we have become used to, I suppose. Even so, one has to ask, what state apparatus in the “free” world could be more powerful and tyrannical than the one that taxes its citizens while providing no substantial civic benefits in return, solely in order to enrich a piratically overinflated military-industrial complex and to ease the tax burdens of the immensely wealthy.

Also *waves generally at the current state of things in the US*