Many of us (worldwide, I'm not American) watched China massacre thousands of its own children at Tiananmen Square. The US is descending into totalitarianism, but it hasn't reached that level yet.
And China may have changed in some ways but there have been no signals it would not repeat that event if it thought circumstances warranted.
Also, many of us have lived in countries actually freed thanks to the west’s (mustly us) intervention, and we felt the support during the Russian occupation pre 1989
Many of us have lived or live in countries that are constantly affected and destabilized by past and even modern interventions from the U.S. (the only blame the rest of the "West" bears here is just watching without ever acknowledging the harm done). Just look at Latin America.
edit: Not trying to say "US bad, China good." Just there is perspective to everything.
And some of us have a sore lower back after playing tennis, while some of us have terminal stage four cancer. Who is to say which is worse?
I think right now there's a kind of global propaganda competition playing out and the thing that does the most damage is false equivalences that encourage loss of perspective.
The only instance of false equivalence I see is the mention of lower back pain vs cancer.
Us? wow, tell us your story
And which countries are those?
How many not-so-smart and not-so-intelligent people can claim Russia occupied you? Never mind, your liberation by the West will come back to haunt you, mark my words... and very soon! You'll remember how well you lived during the years of the USSR and the Warsaw Pact!
those countries were liberated 35 years ago, GDP and other essential metrics increased significantly. How longer they should wait to start feeling remorse?
Comments like this is spot on.
Communism is the cool thing now for young people. China propaganda on TikTok is huge. Huge. And I notice the third world eating it up due to resentement. And young people in my country of Sweden.
But mention how Poland, Baltics, Eastern EU never ever ever would go back to communism and they have 0 arguments.
China hasn't been communist for a really long time. It didn't truly stay communist for a long time either, it was more of an authoritarian autarky run by a nutjob.
What is is today is state sponsored capitalism. You have cronyism, nepotism, lobbying and rent seeking. All of which are also found in the US.
China's social spending is far lower than many other developed nations.
Tiananmen Square was obviously horrible but not even 10% as bad as the current war against Iran or 1% bad as the Second Gulf War, and those are both very recent conflicts.
Bush sacrificed a few thousand Americans on 9/11 so that they could get away with killing a million or so Muslims.
> no signals it would not repeat that event
Of course there is, there's anti riot gear now when there wasn't before.
Whether a country massacres its own people is not really a good litmus test since there are countries that treat its own citizens well but foreigners really badly. One such country is… oh the US!
How could you think those two, massacring your own people and buying plane tickets home for people illegally here are on the same scale at all. We are not ideal here at all but we don’t do that and I think if it were tried there would be an uprising against whoever was calling that unimaginable shot.
You might be omitting the foreigners that are not in the United States that are being treated rather badly by the United States. I suspect that's what GP was referring to.
How about bombing a school?
This is a really, really messed up opinion.
Who cares if a country installs a panopticon to monitor their citizens and runs them over with tanks, look at this other thing over here.
Yeah that "other thing over here" is totally irrelevant. It's not like it's the actions of the second country in the comparison or anything like that.
Suppose country A kills 1000 people and country B kills 1000000 people and people are criticizing country A for murder while calling country B a better alternative. What is relevant here?
Are you implying China treats foreigners well?
How many schools has it bombed recently?
You sincerely think a country that massacres its own people is better than the relatively good conduct of the US during war (or the treatment of foreigners on its soil)?
Why do we keep on getting into these wars in the first place?
"Good conduct during offensive warfare" is one of those contradictory expressions like "clean coal".
The US has massacred millions of people of other countries, is that better?
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Don’t you think that it’s a signal that the last major event you can point to is decades old?
Others may say “what about Uighurs?” or “what about Hong Kong?” but I think that the rest of the world is not doing all that much better on terms of civil repression.
In the UK, you can be arrested for voicing disagreement with the rationale for another person’s arrest (not generally, but on a specific hot button issue they’d rather not anyone talk about). French politicians are attempting to make illegal criticism of Israel, carte blanche. Don’t even get me started on Germany, which is so self-shamed from the last century they have overcorrected into legitimating an external state above all else. Across the pond, you hardly even have to convince anyone that it’s on the downtrend, unless they’re 30% of the population who believe the Don is christ alive (but don’t like if he says it).
The world is very unstable at this point and China is a country that strongly values and incentivizes stability, at the expense of individual rights. This is contra a lot of the west which is both unstable and actively undermining individual rights.
There is no such thing as individual rights. In our universe, there are only privileges. What a government gives, a government can take.
Oh, sure, putting a million or more Uyghurs in internment camps, sterilizing people, and trying to systematically erase a culture and a religion is "just as repressive" as the what is happening in Europe, as long you one is willing to ignore nearly everything relevant about the scale, recourse, and consequence of the PRCs atrocities.
Also, reducing Germany’s complex, decade-long process of grappling with the Holocaust as "self-shame" is... a choice.
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Can you share the video where thousands of children were massacred in Tiananmen Square? I haven’t seen it yet and am very curious!
Make your claim directly, without weasel language. This is a tiresome way to communicate.