I see a lot of Americans begging China to “save” the US.

I think they want justice. The US is a terrorist state. Unopposed, it is going to do a LOT more damage militarily in the near future. We shouldn’t forget the US bombing of Middle East and African countries happened just this year.

China is a rising superpower but I don’t think it’s at the military level to stop that yet.

This tracks with the impression I get. That some of this thinking of “just wipe things away / reset / etc., even if through indiscriminate violence” comes from a kind of depressed and worn down worldview. And I think, is also an extension of the normalization of imperial violence, but turned in the other direction. In other words, there are imperialists who think indiscriminate violence is good and fine because it’s against “bad” people. How does this point of view differ from what’s being said here? It’s just changing who is categorized as “bad”. To be clear, I’m not accusing of bad intention. The point is that if you come from that socialization and you change who the target is but you don’t change the mindset, then it’s not surprising you will still have some belief in indiscriminate violence.

Indiscriminate violence benefits colonial/imperial/capitalist interests of expansion and replacement. It does not benefit those who want peace or want to value human life. What matters is ending the institutions of white supremacy, colonialism, imperialism, etc. There’s no getting around the fact that violence is required in that process at one stage or another because ruling classes don’t hand over power willingly after being told “swiper no swiping.” But there is no benefit to the cause of liberation for it to be indiscriminate, wanton violence.

On the other point about “saving”, I think it’s normal for people in difficult conditions to have some desire to be saved. Maybe more so where Christian socializing and narratives of literal saviors are a thing. But also, I agree that China trying to step in to “save” the USian people would be the least of its priorities. The US’s level of notoriety is only because of its economic and military might and the way it has used that to terrorize the globe. Otherwise, it would be, to most people, just another region that they don’t know a whole lot about. Global anti-imperialist efforts have some motive to defang and stabilize the US and the imperial core in general, so that it doesn’t go even more violently rogue than it has been. International communist efforts have some motive to look after the USian proletariat, the colonized indigenous, the marginalized minorities to the extent that they can build ties with them and do mutual benefit and work toward strengthening their liberation efforts, but not in some exceptional way more so than the rest of the exploited peoples in the world. And that’s a critical point to keep in view. No matter what the socializing says, USians are not actually exceptional; neither exceptionally good, nor exceptionally bad, or exceptionally talented or exceptionally weak. The character of the actions can be better or worse (and good god are some of the US actions terrible), but the underlying humanity is much the same. Filtered through a different lens of material conditions and socializing, yes - but these things are mutable, they just don’t change all at once and often don’t change easily.

TL;DR: If you are from the imperial core, try to learn from other, non-imperial cultures, mindsets, and organized party efforts, and how they have gone about handling liberation, in both the beautiful victories and the devastating losses. Remember that changing your allegiance doesn’t immediately change how you are socialized.

“George Jackson mentioned the advent of this phenomenon when TVs killed revolutionary motivation among prisoners.” I loved reading blood in my eye and soledad brother but I cant remember this quote, do you remember where he is saying this?

I also really understand why communists (and even a lot of non-ML leftists) say things like that. We are up against an empire that regularly imprisons and tortures whoever stands up against it, even (and sometimes especially) people who are US citizens. The desire to have an outside force save you from the hard fight ahead is very human and none of us should feel bad for having it sometimes.

But the reality of the situation we are in is that no one is coming to help us anytime soon. Whether or not it would be prudent or justified for China to directly intervene in the domestic US struggle, they have clearly chosen not to, and there isn’t another power that realistically could intervene. We have to plan to do this ourselves. The good thing is that we, as the proletariat, have the power to win if we can organize effectively.

That said, I very much understand people who feel they need to leave. At the end of everything, we each have only one life, and you need to live it the best way that you can. Many of my friends are trans (as am I), and many of them have talked about moving out of the US. If that’s what it takes to have a life worth living, I wish them the very best. And I know they will be doing the work where ever they end up. Just because it isn’t here, doesn’t mean they are giving up on their politics.

This is just a…idk. My brain gets very emotional when i see logically contradictory things. It’s just that whenever i see “I hope every American gets glassed,” it’s like…I get it I guess. But I remember a little while ago someone wrote a memorial to the victims of the Dresden bombing, and the German government wiped it away. And when it got posted here it was a lot of people basically saying the bombing was unnecessary and that the German government was wrong for removing it.

So my brain looks at those two statements and it kinda just fries a little. And i don’t want to get angry or anything, and I always feel like I have to be in this little box of outward hatred towards people I know. Im…I’m not built like that. I can do self hatred, I’ve been doing self hatred for basically my entire life. But I can’t look at the people in my life and say they deserve the things I read in Last Train to Hiroshima.

For the China stuff, i always go back to what Franz Fanon said. “The Cold War must be ended, for it leads nowhere. The plans for nuclearizing the world must stop, and large-scale investments and technical aid must be given to underdeveloped regions. The fate of the world depends on the answer that is given to this question.”

It’s exactly that coupling and reliance that the US has on China that has allowed China to do its BRI. The peaceful development also what makes a lot of anti-imperialist countries comfortable with exchanges with China, when before Iran and other countries were wary to work with the USSR because of their heavy handedness [see: Assasinations in Afghanistan. I love Andropov but I feel like that was one of his biggest mistakes, besides dying].

But in any case, China has had a mixed history with internationalism as it was practiced during the age of the third international. Specifically with how many leaders of the CPC became somewhat…lazy in their thinking, simply attempting to copy And paste the soviet model of army, strategy, etc. [Although many good things came out of the cooperation as well] So I think it’s not only fair, but respectable of them to have learned lessons from that