(07-07-2018, 11:06 PM)Cynic Hero Wrote: What an idiotic analysis. North Korea is not a threat to America because North Korea is communist, North Korea is a threat to America because it is pointing Nuclear Missiles at the US. Stop with this Regime Change Nonsense, the objective if there is a war ought to be annihilation of North Korea, land and people.
China is basically capitalist even if its government demonstrates the structure of a nominally-Communist party that accepts Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Mao as icons if abandoning their techniques except upon command-and-control of the government. The Chinese Communist Party might as well replace those icons with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, except that that would be shocking. The People's Republic of China may be no democracy, but it has a couple of features that American economic elites would love: no protections for workers from the power of ownership and management, and the complete absence of a welfare state.
I have a huge problem with Donald Trump ignoring or gutting the political wisdom of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Roosevelt (actually all three of them -- and that includes Eleanore), and Martin Luther King, Jr. in return for vague promises of some super-prosperity that will be worth the loss of personal freedom and dignity. The best that Donald Trump and his followers have to offer is a gilded cage for us all with the stupefying pleasures of mass low entertainment so long as we acquiesce with the absolute plutocracy that Donald Trump offers us. You can imagine what I think of the offer of Donald Trump and his ideological supporters -- or you can read my posts and see what I have to say.
But I will say this of the PRC -- it at least recognizes the need for a consumer society and the wisdom of offering it as an anodyne for the poverty of China... and the complete lack of personal freedom. I'm guessing that the Chinese self-described Communists are perfectly welcome to watch American-style or even American mass low culture at will. But we had that before Trump, so here it is a question of taking away other things in return for offers of vague benefits worth empty, miserable, stupefied lives.
North Korea is a veritable Hell with a lunatic leader. That makes all the difference in the world.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.
