1) To be fair, you could have answered the question yourself. 😛

2) Several actually did answer the question! You might need to click the button to see all replies?

Thanks for writing this informative article. I just wanted to clarify that one small point. 😉

No, I just want to avoid the bog standard genocidal slaughter, starvation and misery the Exceptional And Indispensable People have wrought in Iraq, Syria, Palestine, Yemen, Libya, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia, Ukraine, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Chile, and half a hundred other places. Countries like Cuba and DPRK have thus far avoided that fate. If and when they open up their political systems, they may well suffer the same fate.

No, just very wary of the motivations of people hyperventilating about the evil commies and “a million Uighurs in concentration camps” given the proven track record of the same people.

You support totalitatianism, so which one is the best? HK governors? CCP? Pol Pot? Hitler? Stalin? You?

No need to bother about trivia like 2 million dead Iraqis, 20 million starving Yemenis, 1.2 million cholera cases, or the thousands gunned down in Gaza by IDF kiddie killers

It’s all binary with you Mark. I am equally appalled by what “our side” has done and what the CCP and others have done.

The author, and apparently you, diminishing the deaths of hundreds of student protesters as some kind of sacrifice for the “greater good” is no less than cold blooded psychopathy.

Is this what passes for debate on this site? I think I much prefer The Guardian. Your comment is riddled with racism.

What I’m really worried about is that China, the Philippines, Malaysia and West Africa are going to send back to us all the garbage we’ve exported there, Duterte style.

When I was in India and Africa, people would sometimes ask for a photograph. I’d say sure, give me the camera and stand there. They’d say no, we want to take a photo with you, we want a photo with a white person. Women in particular would tell me they wished they had white or light skins, though their skin was smooth and silky and very attractive. Some of them used those stupid bleaching creams.

Mohammed Marandi made some interesting points in a lecture he gave. He pointed out that from the 18th to 2oth centuries, western travellers in Turkey/ Persia/ Arabia/ North Africa noted that at that time those places had a far more tolerant attitude towards homosexuality than European countries, where it was criminalised and suppressed. And that women in those places dressed in a far more revealing way than in Europe, where women covered everything except their faces. These were both taken as evidence of western cultural superiority, that “we’re superior to these filthy foreigners.”

Now the positions are reversed. Western countries are far more tolerant of homosexuality, and western women dress far less modestly. These things are now taken as evidence of western superiority. Whatever is the norm in the west at the time is automatically assumed to be superior.

It was the same with colour. When the Spaniards first arrived in Central America, they found the copper colouring of the inhabitants attractive, and commented favourably upon it. At the same time, the Natives found the paler colouring of the Spaniards unattractive, though they would have had a relatively dark Mediterranean complexion. Probably a case of cultural imperialism over a long period.