I guess the saying holds.

If you can remember what happened over a week ago that makes you a tankie

Where have I ever been hyper nationalist or even nationalist at all? You just don’t want to contend with the fact that you’re pro imperialism and colonialism and an outright chauvinist as long as it has good pr.

Your comments here are soaked in US chauvinism.

Cuba is already sovereign. It does not need to be “invited” into the empire that has spent over 60 years trying to strangle it. Treating another nation as a potential US “state” or “test lab” is naked colonial thinking.

Also calling the islands places for “A/B testing” social policy is grotesque. You’re talking about real people, not sandbox populations. Cuba already guarantees universal healthcare, free education at all levels, housing rights, and food subsidies despite being under one of the longest economic sieges in modern history. The US can’t even provide those basics to its own working class.

The blockade isn’t some abstract policy disagreement. It blocks fuel, medicine, banking access, shipping insurance, medical equipment, and even disaster relief. It’s collective punishment imposed by the United States. Every year almost the entire world votes at the UN to end it. Washington ignores them.

To add to this Puerto Rico is not some inspiring example of US “opportunity.” Puerto Rico is a US colony with no voting representation in Congress, crushed by debt, austerity, and privatization imposed by Washington. If that’s your model, it’s an indictment of your beliefs.

And finally Cuba does not need Amerikkkans to teach it socialism. Cuba built a functioning public health system, biotech sector, disaster response model, and mass literacy campaign while under siege something the US ruling class hasn’t even properly accomplished for its own despite ruling most of the world with a bloodied iron fist.

If you actually cared about Cubans, you’d drop the annexation fantasies. Your grotesque idea of “testing grounds.” and ridiculous imperial “offers.”

Yeah I probably should have specified last natural famine. Even then kulaks worsened it beyond what it should have been through burning crops and slaughtering livestock.

The “holodomor” is Nazi Banderite propaganda. There was a famine in an area that was prone to famine for centuries prior. It was not targeted at Ukraine, it also affected Kazakhstan and western Russia. It was also the last time they had a famine.

You’re not “keeping it intact to prevent harm.” You’re keeping it intact because you benefit from it.

The US led system isn’t something you stabilize and then dismantle later. It only exists through massive violence. Every extra year you preserve it is more sanctions, more bombs, more dead people.

And “after Trump” is always the line. It was “after Reagan”, “after Bush,” then “after Trump,” then it will be “after the next Republican.” There is always a new emergency to justify doing nothing to even attempt to slow the immisiration machine.

Nobody else can fix your chauvinism for you. That takes introspection. You need to start considering the rest of us as fully human whose suffering is not secondary to your comfort.

The facts are: Both parties support the imperialist empire. Both fund genocide, sanctions, coups, and proxy wars. Both uphold capitalism and the systematically broken policing system. Both expand surveillance and repression. “Voting blue” has never stopped any of this, it just puts a nicer face on it, the equivalent of sticking a smiling face sticker on the orphan crushing machine.

If you actually want to do something: Stop treating Democrats as harm reduction. Consider third-party or abstention instead of laundering war crimes with your vote. Join a communist organization. Study theory. Do material work in your community. Organize. Build power locally. Arm yourself. Do literally anything other than vote for a war criminal every 2-4 years.

If you want to vote, vote just stop trying to justify yourself as super moral for voting for the personable war criminal over the more openly cruel one.

You’re being chauvinist. You may not want to admit it, but it’s the only way this position makes sense.

Your “lesser evil” logic only works if you implicitly treat people in the imperial periphery as expendable, as if our suffering matters less than your domestic anxieties. Your entire framework centers US comfort while mass death abroad becomes background noise.

Who backed the genocide in Gaza? Who destroyed Libya and turned it into a failed state with open slave markets? Who armed proxies that helped give rise to ISIS in Syria? Who backed decades of rape and mass killing in Afghanistan?

It was bipartisan. Every time. Enthusiastically bipartisan.

Permanent war, sanctions, coups, and the immiseration of the Global South are the foundation of the system. Democrats and Republicans agree on this completely.

So when you say “one leads to fascism and the other leads back to the status quo,” you leave out the key point: the status quo already depends on mass death elsewhere. Your stability is subsidized by bombs, blockades, and starvation.

Yes, Republicans are more “meaner” at home. Democrats use nicer language. That’s PR. Democrats provide legitimacy for the same imperial machine while managing the decline more “politely”.

From Palestine to Haiti, there is no meaningful lesser evil just continuous catastrophe.

Your argument boils down to: as long as things don’t get too bad too fast here, everything else is negotiable.

That’s peak chauvinism.

The fact that you can’t process a basic argument about institutional continuity yet feel confident calling someone else stupid is wild. Kids were already in cages, detention capacity was already expanded, and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Department of Homeland Security were getting pumped with funding year after year under Obama, you think that had zero relationship to what came after? Infrastructure doesn’t materialize out of thin air just because you discovered the word “fascism” in 2017. Pretending the machinery was harmless until someone you dislike used it more aggressively just makes you look like you have the memory of a goldfish and no object permanence. Or does it only count when white people get hurt?

Certainly an interesting character but one best kept in their village as entertainment as opposed to holding any serious position

Well you’d be SEEING less thanks to the likelihood of copmala having way better pr but in reality us of the periphery and USian minorities would still be subject to much the same just with a better spin for the Euro-Americans.

Remember Obama destroyed Libya. The Clinton’s bombed Yugoslavia and Iraq as well as the entire Somali debacle.

In reality if you see non white suffering as counting odds are the net would be within the error bars if you graphed it.

Didn’t she tell the Irish they don’t know what it’s like to have their country partitioned?

Look I understand a lot of where you’re coming from given your background, however:

Basically everything you “know” about politics and political economy is seemingly somewhere between wildly exaggerated and outright fairytale, and you don’t yet grasp the scale or sophistication of the narrative control you’re actually living under.

You say you prefer to know you’re being lied to, but in the West you usually don’t. That’s the point. Through ownership, framing, omission, and repetition, discourse is managed in the boardroom long before anything reaches you. I already linked you Inventing Reality by Michael Parenti for a reason: every story shown or not shown, every angle chosen, exists to shape what feels “normal” or “thinkable.” That ideological hegemony is deeper and more effective than the cartoon version of censorship projected onto China and socialist states in general.

Your second paragraph still rests on the same misunderstanding, communism isn’t about silencing people to “keep the peace,” it’s about suppressing reactionary and bourgeois forces so they can’t sabotage collective development as they have repeatedly proven themselves to do historically as their class interest is diametrically opposed to the interests of the masses.

Finally, this rise of conservatism(fascism) you’re talking about isn’t some temporary cultural mood swing, it’s capitalism in decay. When imperialism can’t externalize crisis anymore, its violence turns inward. That’s why you’re feeling it now. The teeth of empire always come home eventually. If you’re serious about understanding any of this, you need to move past liberal intuitions and actually study political economy. Hope without analysis just leaves you disarmed. You really should read the books/articles I linked in the last reply.

I was right you’re one of those. Best of luck to you in life I hope you don’t regret it when you get what you want.

This has to be trolling right? There’s no way you misunderstand the issue “tankies” have with electoralism this badly unless you’re doing it purposefully.

Why waste time canvassing and voting and taking part in the system that is from its inception designed to keep you down? Take that time and effort and put it into something meaningful like organising a militant party of those with theoretical grounding to build up a counter power structure and make real change.

No Israel is a settler colony that has no right to exist. Much like Rhodesia.

You are stupid and you are wrong. Just to preempt it because I know it’s coming: this is not an ad hominem. You’re not wrong because you’re stupid, you just happen to be both.

Who do you think laid the foundations for the ICE Gestapo? Was it perhaps the “Deporter-in-Chief” and his party, who repeatedly approved massive funding increases, expanded detention capacity, normalized local–federal cooperation, and stifled every serious attempt to dismantle the apparatus once it existed?

Hillary bragging about deportation numbers isn’t some abstract endorsement of “targeted and humane” enforcement. She’s boasting about participation in a system that already relied on mass detention, racial profiling, family separation through removal, and routine due-process abuse. The only difference is that under Obama and Clinton it was wrapped in technocratic language and better PR.

Your chauvinist ass is treating racially targeted state violence as acceptable so long as it’s quiet, bureaucratic, and doesn’t visibly impact white citizens or comfortable middle-class communities. Obama-era deportations didn’t feel like “Gestapo tactics” to you because they were overwhelmingly inflicted on undocumented and non-white migrants, out of sight and off camera. Raids, cages, deportation flights, and shattered families were already happening. You just didn’t care, because it wasn’t framed as a crisis for white Americans.

It’s peak liberal chauvinism. Migrant lives are disposable, but the moment enforcement becomes louder or uglier, suddenly it’s a problem.

Also it is objectively, morally and in every other conceivable way correct to hate the Clinton’s, Obama, the Bushes and Reagan alongside basically every high level American politician. They are a cabal of pedophiles who have immiserated the world on an industrial scale for decades.

“I don’t pretend to know everything about leftist theory,”

This goes so far beyond that. You don’t even know the basics. What you’re doing is building a house of cards out of vibes on top of an ingrained liberal foundation. There’s no material or really any serious analysis across any of your comments, just assumptions about “power,” “freedom,” and “human nature” that you’ve inherited from Western ideology and never seriously interrogated. You think it’s simple because you’ve taken a vibes first approach to it as opposed to doing any study which might challenge your comfort.

If you’re British, German, American it doesn’t matter you are situated in the imperial core reaping the rewards of imperialism. You received concessions from the bourgeoisie to keep you from seriously challenging the largest most advanced immiseration machine in human history. Hence I used the term Euro-American. I could also just say white/western “leftist” or shitlib or radlib or whatever other word for privileged member of the imperial core it doesn’t really change much . Your class interest is aligned with the imperialist empire and in direct opposition to the oppressed of the world. You should read Settlers and Imperialism the highest stage of capitalism

Then you try to lecture me(someone actually from and living in China) about how corruption is handled here, and you’re simply wrong. Anti-corruption trials are public. Everyone knows about them. Officials, executives, generals(people right up to the very top) are investigated, removed, and jailed under the Communist Party of China. In the West, corruption is largely legalized through lobbying, revolving doors, and finance. And even when the line is crossed, it’s usually overlooked as long as it doesn’t threaten the moneyed class.

You also claim things “generally improve in the long term” in the West. Improve for whom? Whatever social-democratic gains Europe and the US had were built on and sustained by imperialism and neocolonial extraction. Euro-American countries raped and looted the periphery for centuries to fund the “treats” you now point to as progress at home. Meanwhile, without plundering the Global South, China alone lifted nearly a billion people out of poverty through planned socialist development. While your comfort was subsidized by other people’s misery.

Your fixation on “individual freedoms” just confirms to me your liberal foundation that you refuse to reckon with. You’re poisoned by hyper-individualism. You talk about freedom as personal expression divorced from class power, ownership, housing, healthcare, or production. That’s just consumer ideology. You don’t seem to understand that collective material conditions matter more than abstract personal liberty. Reactionaries and bourgeoisie current should be repressed, they should not have the freedom to exploit others.

And on “free speech”: you seriously overestimate how free it is in the West. Read Inventing Reality by Michael Parenti. He explains in a way that should be easy for you as a beginner to understand how media ownership and elite filtering manufacture topics and angles long before anything reaches public debate. Look at what’s happening right now: protesters arrested and brutalised en masse across Europe and the US, specific to your location Palestine Action being designated a terrorist organization in the UK, and in Germany open criticism of Israel being criminalized. So spare me the fairy tale about open discourse. You’re allowed to talk, as long as it doesn’t threaten capital or the empire but don’t forget who’s holding the reigns it’s not the people.

Finally, coming back to your “no hierarchy + automation + abolish money soon” vision, it avoids every serious question: how do you suppress bourgeois forces, organize production, defend society, and prevent capital from reasserting itself? You don’t answer any of that. You just gesture toward a futuristic fantasy. Marxists have already long addressed this: money and the state only wither away after global class abolition. Pretending we can skip the transition period is utopian fantasy. Try read Socialism: Utopian and Scientific and Critique of the Gotha Programme