this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2025
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Slave society, slave society, slave society, and the Eastern/Western dichotomy laid out in the centuries-old political literature that you uphold in such high esteem was established by race science-touting imperialists and other chauvinists
You're not talking about what esteem we hold the government's in, or they're assorted ills. We are talking about the structure of government, being representative, or being autocratic. You can say but those representative governments were mean! No shit? That is not what is an issue here. You could discount any event from history with the logic you are trying to use here.
You're insisting on a separation that doesn't exist. You want to analyze the "structure" of government, representative vs. autocratic, in a vacuum, divorced from its outcomes and the material conditions it creates.
But a structure that consistently produces "assorted ills", genocide, exploitation, and vast inequality, is not a neutral, well-functioning machine. It is a failed structure. You dismiss these outcomes as "mean," but they are the direct result of the system you defend.
Your "representative" model is not some pure form. It is a structure that has always depended on external exploitation, slavery, colonialism, and imperial extraction, to function for its citizens. The "freedom" of the West was built on the enforced servitude of the Global South.
Meanwhile, you label systems you don't understand as "autocratic" while ignoring their material successes: ending famine, providing housing, and lifting billions from poverty, outcomes your "representative" system has failed to deliver for its own poor.
The structure is not separate from its results. The results are the proof of the structure's failure. You're defending a blueprint for a house that consistently collapses, while attacking other blueprints because you don't like the architect's title. Judge the house by who it shelters, not by the label on the door.
You cannot blame representative government for imperialism, that happened under the absolute monarchs more than any.
Imperialism is not a thing of the west either, all cultures have had these problems. If able a group will eventually subjugate others.
Look at mongals, mughals, islamists, ottomans, russia, imperial china, etc. All imperialist as far as they could as autocracies.