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.
Exactly, and the sad part is that all this is just a rehashing of the exact same arguments that happened at the start of the 20th century. You can pretty much take what Lenin said in What Is To Be Done verbatim and it’s still just as relevant today.