Once again, China sees the United States more clearly than we see ourselves

25 August 2023

There is something favorable to be said for Confucian rationality

Consider the wisdom of China's insight, regarding the United States' self-destroying politics:

Trump’s mug shot ‘shows sickness of US politics, to further polarize society’[.]

Li Haidong, a professor at the China Foreign Affairs University, told the Global Times on Friday that Trump's mug photo and its fallout would further polarize US society, just like Trump has done in the past few years.

"For China, it's a funny episode in US politics to watch, as the sickness of US politics is presented to the world in a vivid and impressive way . . . US politics is getting more extreme and more irrational, but unfortunately, what seems crazy in other countries will become more common in US politics."

Sun Chenghao, a research fellow from the Center for International Security and Strategy at Tsinghua University, told the Global Times that the legal and political offensive against Trump is comprehensive, and the Trump team's approach has been an effective response.

"As the election season approaches, polarization and hostility in American society are amplified," Sun said, "candidates attack and suppress each other by taking advantage of systems, making the election a game of 'picking the least bad one,' instead of choosing a truly qualified leader."

It indicates that some alienation has resulted in the design of the American political system, Sun said.

According to the expert, many Republican voters also believe that American politics itself is corrupt or ineffectual, and that the charges against Trump are politically motivated.

Either indulging or punishing Trump in accordance with the law would bring more chaos and division to the US, which makes the tradeoff between law and politics a massive challenge, Li said.

In other words

We Americans have voluntarily railroaded ourselves into an irreversibly system-destroying position.

Pertinent to our nihilistic condition . . .

. . . is Australian Caitlin Johnstone's observation that:

The US is indisputably the most tyrannical regime on earth.

Only the US is instigating wars around the world, circling the planet with hundreds of foreign military bases, starving populations with massive unilateral sanctions and blockades, and working to destroy any nation which disobeys it.

No other government has spent the 21st century killing people by the millions in wars of aggression; only the US has.

Continually trying to destroy anyone in the world who doesn’t obey your dictates is as tyrannical as it gets.

The correct debate to be having is not whether Putin was right or wrong to invade Ukraine in response to western provocations on its border, the correct debate is whether Putin did anything the US wouldn’t have done in response to the same kind of provocations on its own borders.

Arguing about whether Russia’s invasion was “bad” is an infantile conversation for mental midgets.

Mature adults are interested in talking about the real world as it actually exists and how governments behave in it, not how they’d behave in some imaginary hypothetical fantasy land where the US isn’t constantly making all those moral positions meaningless with its own actions and aggressions.

Certainly

When evaluated in light of inarguable facts, our hegemonic American societal perspective is psychotically derived.

The moral? — Should we — (I mischievously ask) — hire rationally thinking China to act as the United States' psychiatrist?

We can reasonably conclude that, left to our own devices, we will do ourselves worse — than we might — if left in the fiduciary-based psychiatric care of a communist Chinese Confucian.

Such a health intervention might, paradoxically, return the United States to the original American republic's non-psychotic, pseudo-democratic foundations.

Just don't count on anyone — in our thoroughly nutso country — to recognize this better societal health possibility.

PeteFree.com

Once again, China sees the United States more clearly than we see ourselves