Afaik this happened with every single instance of a communist country. Communism seems like a pretty good idea on the surface, but then why does it always become autocratic?
Afaik this happened with every single instance of a communist country. Communism seems like a pretty good idea on the surface, but then why does it always become autocratic?
The US may collect as much or more information as China but their enforcement actions taken based on this information are far far more limited.
Not always. The US bombed striking workers on Blair mountain, and bombed a Philly neighborhood in the 80s to target activists. A portland protestor who shot a fascist demonstrator in self defence was summarily murdered by the cops days later before they even announced their presence. An unarmed cop city protestor was shot dead after one cop pretended a gunshot behind him was from the protestors. And god help you if youre a Boeing whistleblower or sex trafficker to the politicians. Even if China does this more often its hard to ascribe that to communism if the most anti communist nation in history does the same thing but just less often. These targeted things hide in the statistics for killings by cops because cops in the US kill more people annualy than mass shooters do.
The US has many flaws and these incidents were terrible. But these largely didn’t involve the modern intelligence apparatus we are discussing. We have large numbers of people here on Lemmy actively calling for a socialist revolution but they’re completely safe as long as they follow the law.
Try calling for revolution in China and see how it goes. Leaders of even relatively non-political protest movements or advocates for minority rights are frequently disappeared or executed. In the US, there may be isolated incidents of this nature (typically by local law enforcement) but largely social critics are free to organize legal resistance to the state without repression.
Of course, there are reasons to worry we might be headed in that direction. All the more reason to organize and resist while you still can.
To be clear, I don’t ascribe these actions to communism. China is not communist by any reasonable definition. I ascribe these actions to authoritarianism. While the US is somewhat authoritarian, it is less so than China (at least within its borders—foreign policy is a different can of worms).