It’s fascinating to me how the same people who like to do purity tests for China or Vietnam claiming they’re not actually communist are also the ones who’ll defend places like US or Canada saying yeah it’s not perfect, but it’s the ideal of the system that matters.
It’s such an incredible example of cognitive dissonance. These people able to recognize that their own system doesn’t live up to the ideal they have in their heads, but still treat it as a valid interpretation of the idea, but when it comes to a system they dislike then the same logic doesn’t apply all of a sudden.
The “TL;DR” version of below is that it is not bad to have opinions of how other places do things. I agree with you. It is stupid to demand that other places do things while the place making those demands can’t even make good on those same things. I like that I have a right to free speech and many other rights. But it is also very true that the people and orgs with the real powers in the US give zero fucks about violating those rights. So pretending that we are “number one” while others are completely evil is stupid.
Hardest part I run into is trying to just simply get more of my liberal/progressive friends/co-workers to see the self-traps they set for anything changing (outside of “vote blue and stop trying to make it easier for the Republicans!”). I both catch the shit about how “evil the CeeCeePee” is and the Russia of it all. I don’t really care about what they are doing in the way that those I know do. They see me as being brainwashed (more or less even if they don’t say it out loud) for “always defending them.” But what they misunderstand is that I am not “defending” and just try to point out how they don’t really attempt to even see the other side and how they are not questioning why our outlets seem to sync up on shit. How those outlets treat similar things done by any AES or post-socialist nations vs the US or other Western nations. I am not in those nations and just really want for those friends/co-workers to simply get out of the headspace of being binary about it all. At which point I do find the post-9/11 push for war as a good point of reference as to how most of the US was super for it up until they weren’t.
I have plenty of things I don’t agree with or support in China/Russia/etc, but I also think that the US is the only nation I have any real reason to change. As it is the nation I live in, and it is not our place to be the sole voice of what everyone should do because we say so. We can somehow send so much money and weapons to “help” everywhere, but we can’t find fucking resources to fix our own home. Even if for some reason another nation did want us to “nation build” them. It would be a farce from the jump, as the poor and houseless in the US would be pissed off to see us make that other nation in any way better than the poorest part of the US. So it means that our efforts need to be in putting our home in order, and try to help out and work with other nations (when they actually ask for it and not by force) after. Having opinions are fine and can be helpful, but they don’t if they are just “they need to do it our way or no way.”
There will always be things that one place does that other places will dislike. The best way to deal with many of those things requires that we unlearn the idea that we can only “fix” it by force. To be the best examples of how we would like to be treated by how we treat others. Which are nice words that lots of people of the whole class spectrum say in some form to appeal to their populaces (while most certainly acting otherwise). I think that socialism/communism are the most realistic ways to actually put those words into practice (though I will be fair to say that many real revolutionary anarchists do truly wish for this as well even with real differences in how to do it). While also requiring the most effort from each person to be alert enough to keep watch for regressions and bad faith actors that try to use the revolutions for greed.
This is actually another interesting aspect of the whole thing. People keep dredging up how bad things were in USSR, or how authoritarian China is today, etc. as if people are proposing just mindlessly replicating that kind of a system in the west. It’s a really naive argument because each country is uniquely shaped by its culture, history, and its material conditions.
USSR was the way it was because of all the factors that was present when it was created. China is the way it is because of its conditions. It’s a fallacy to nitpick negative aspects of these systems and fear monger about them. The reality is that if there is ever a serious socialist movement in the west then it will necessarily be rooted in western culture, history, and the conditions that are present in the west today. It’s going to be a unique project with its own positive and negative aspects.
When we point to USSR or China as examples, we’re not saying that we just want to copy that. We’re showing the positive achievements these systems accomplished that we too could accomplish by learning from their experience. However, as long as people keep refusing to even learn about these systems then no positive change is possible.