Occamsrazer
While there is certainly some truth to what you are saying, I feel that your interpretation of events and motivations is way too cynical. But regardless, it's pretty tough to argue that the US has not provided a net gain to humanity, given the advancements in technology, medicine, arts, and so on that could not have occurred in a different society.
Hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, died directly as a result of the Chinese cultural revolution and Mao's great leap forward and I don't think it should just be brushed off as an unfortunate side effect of a necessary revolution. But I generally agree with the principle behind the rest of it.
Yeah you might be right. Any government will inevitably grow corrupt and needs healthy fear of the people to keep them honest. Or as a wise man once put it: "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."
Also the environment was devastated and hundreds of thousands (if not millions) died. Also how do you feel about China's current treatment of indigenous Tibetans? Maybe you should take off your red colored glasses and look around.
Sometimes it's more about what that person symbolizes. Take George Floyd for instance. By almost any metric he was not a good person, but he didn't deserve to die, and the way that he died became a symbol, a representation of an entire people who have seen injustice at the hands of the police. George Floyd is practically a saint in the eyes of many, despite all his flaws as a person. So why not the founding fathers?
So do you think that slavery would have ended sooner if the American revolution never happened? Do you think there was any net benefit to humanity as a result of the American revolution? Is it possible for good men to do bad things or does bad things make them bad people?
If I were a slave, I would probably be less concerned about who exactly is holding the whip, and more so the fact that I was getting whipped. Whether the colonists were considered terrorists or some kind of freedom fighters would be largely irrelevant to me in that case, despite that perspective mattering a great deal to the rest of the world at the time and even still to this day.
Makes you wonder if our success as a nation had more to do with explosive growth, immigration, and opportunity. Or maybe the system worked well under those conditions, but now the whole environment is steady state and it doesn't work quite as well.
Many civilizations came and went over the ages, displaced by integration into other civilizations or straight up genocide. Most of these we have little record of, other than a few shards of pottery or other artifacts. I'm not advocating for that approach, but you also can't look at history through some kind of idealistic lens, acting like people were any different back then.
Hmm, interesting question. That depends if you think that the society they have now is better than the one preceding? The two situations aren't entirely analogous since one involved separation from a foreign power while the other involved dismantling of the old culture and society in order to make a brand new one. I think that China is more powerful now than they would be otherwise, had they not gone through their cultural revolution, but it came at a great cost where centuries of culture was destroyed. I don't think it was worth it, but that's also easy for me to say because I don't live there and because my perception is certainly skewed by Western perspectives. I think they lost something of great value with how the cultural revolution played out and the Chinese people are irrecoverably different as a result. Makes me a little bit sad, but we can't change the past, so it doesn't really matter.
I agree