this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2024
1096 points (89.3% liked)
Political Memes
5516 readers
630 users here now
Welcome to politcal memes!
These are our rules:
Be civil
Jokes are okay, but don’t intentionally harass or disturb any member of our community. Sexism, racism and bigotry are not allowed. Good faith argumentation only. No posts discouraging people to vote or shaming people for voting.
No misinformation
Don’t post any intentional misinformation. When asked by mods, provide sources for any claims you make.
Posts should be memes
Random pictures do not qualify as memes. Relevance to politics is required.
No bots, spam or self-promotion
Follow instance rules, ask for your bot to be allowed on this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I can agree with the text while being against the authoritarians pictured.
I just hope people don't think that everyone complaining about US imperialism is somehow fine with Russian or Chinese actions of the same hue.
The US as least has a flawed democracy.
It's actually a breath of fresh air to see your comment. It seems way too common in certain communities and instances that "Because US has Its flaws, any opposing regime must be perfect".
I'm not American, and most of my political standpoints boil down to anti-authoritarianism, bordering anarchism. But I'm also a pragmatist who'd take Biden over Mao any day.
Fun fact: I'm on Xi Jinpings payroll. Not directly, but follow the hierarchy far enough upstream, and you end up with him. How's that for pragmatism?
Anyway, I forgot where I was going with this, but it was probably my usual point: I'm fine with communists (to a certain degree). I'm not sure if you consider yourself one, but the fact that you're not a tankie who thinks Stalin did nothing wrong earns you points in my book. I'll pass on the word to Santa, Stoltenberg, Harris, and the other decadent imperial leaders to let them know that you deserve more than coal for Christmas or whatever your preferred winter holiday is.
I would consider myself socialist/communist/anarchist fluid lol. The more faith I have in the goodness of people, the more anarchistic I feel. I'd say it boils down to the same for most. We all want a better world, but disagree on what will actually work to get us there
Personally, I'd be interested in seeing anarcho-syndicalism implemented on a large scale, but there's a lot of societal infrastructure that needs to be in place first.
That generally clears up more by familiarizing yourself with theory, whichever way you end up falling, ie Anarchist vs Marxist. Reading more theory will generally help you fall more into one camp than the other.
List any in the past 40 years
Idk but I'm not fine with them.
So you openly admit you're just talking out of your ass and judging without knowledge?
If that makes you happy then, sure.
What do you mean? Ofc I'm not happy. You're openly saying "I don't know what china has done for the past 40 years but I don't support it", it makes me the opposite of happy that you're so openly brairotten by antichina propaganda
How about their navy harassing indonesiian, philipine, and Japanese boats? And the whole genocide of the Uyghurs? Stealing technology and property of international companies? Shall I go on? Because that's all within the past 5 years. Let's start with those, yeah?
More black people in the US have gone through the prison system (you know, the one with actual slave labor) since the Uyghur "genocide" started than Uyghurs ever went through reeducation camps. Harassing boats isn't imperialism. Fuck intellectual property, especially that of corporations (i.e. stolen from their workers).
Very telling that the only things you can bring up to the table of Chinese "imperialism" are: a "genocide" which lasted a few years in which nobody was confirmed died, intellectual property violations, and harassing of boats. How is any of that imperialism? Go read a book on what imperialism means.
The American prison system doesn't castrate people or do medical experiments on them. And although they do target black people, it's not just black people.
I agree with fuck corporations, but they're stealing money, and technology that gets funneled into Chinas dictatorship. So fuck them too.
Harassing ships is a big deal, and we've gone to war over it. Those 3 countries just don't have the capability to defend themselves against china, even combined. Not to mention the fake islands they're making to try to legitimize their claim for territorial waters and shipping lanes that aren't there's. Stealing that is just as much imperialism as stealing land. And let's not forget Taiwan.
Neither does the Chinese. There are no reliable reports of any generalized behaviour like this. The amnesty international reports are mostly based on interviews to "anonymous sources". On the contrary, during the times of the "one child policy" in China, Uyghur were mostly exempt from this as an ethnicity. Again, quite the weird genocide when you force the major ethnicity in the country to have fewer children but exempt others.
Funny that you call it "China's dictatorship". Sure, China doesn't have the most democratic system, but where do we have democracy? In the west, most policy routinely goes against the wishes of the majority. Study after study shows that the public opinion of the majority has basically no correlation with the policy applied by the party in power. Examples that come to mind are the lack of socialized healthcare in the US (which about 70% of people support), or the austerity policy in EU countries that defunded healthcare and education after the 2008 crisis. If you look at polls of the level of approval of their government, Chinese people consistently and significantly give higher levels of approval to their government than people from the US or the EU do. Neither system is democratic, it's just ours pretends more successfully to be so (in the eyes of westerners ofc).
Good thing then that China, unlike the US, doesn't have a history of militarism, of massive expenditure in weapons, of usage of their intelligence agencies and military coups to destabilize other regimes, or outright invasion on the other side of the world like Iraq.
The countries you've mentioned have US military bases on their soil. The US literally sails warships between Taiwan and China. Can you imagine the response of the US if China had military bases in Cuba and started to sail warships between the island and Miami??? Again, thankfully, China doesn't do those things, and it doesn't enter military alliances with countries like Mexico or Cuba... Unlike the US does with Japan or Taiwan. China doesn't "invade other countries' waters", the US has established a network of vassal states surrounding China by sea, and China very reasonably doesn't like this. If you call these geopolitical tensions against US allies "imperialism", again you're showing me that you either don't know about the nature of these conflicts, or you dont know about the nature of imperialism.