I agree with you. This is why populations, no matter which population it is, are more likely to accept the government who has substantially increased the quality of life of the average citizen. This is a very hard position to disagree with, I think. Many citizens in the Western world also have had stable political systems despite the massive wrongdoings of their governments because for the most part, governments have not overstepped their bounds in comparison to the stability provided.
It's like having a goodness-to-shittiness ratio that each citizen subconsciously evaluates with an accompanying flowchart. The average citizen thinks to himself or herself: Is my government doing bad things? Yes. Is my government doing good things? Yes. Is the government doing enough bad things to make me care? No. If the answer is yes, then the next question is: Do I care enough to do something about it? Most of the time, the answer is no because society pushes me to remain being a busybody (job, life responsibilities, etc.) or I just don't care.
> Could you point to a specific year in the 20th century after WW II that no Western government was conducting an unethical experiment?
I could have phrased that better: All governments are capable and have a history of some kind of unethical experiment. I think that it is rarer that it is at this level of scale and with this level of technical sophistication. My thought was that generally, a Western government would not successfully pull off this prototype with neither the degree of success or extent.
I personally do not know what is happening at the granular level and I do not pretend to know. I wish I did, and for that matter, at any point in time there will be shady things going on that we do not know. Maybe we will learn in a few decades.
For the first time, we get to see what control through the digital lens of information technology looks like when combined with the capacity to enact state-sanctioned violence. It's like the cyberpunk genre, except privately-owned corporations do not yet have a significant capacity to use violence. Maybe we'll have the honor of seeing that by the end of this century.
On that note, the closest thing the USA has done in subjugating populations of citizens in a systematic way is the internment camps of Japanese Americans for no reason. They apologized 4 decades later. What good is an apology if you've been waiting for most of the victims to die anyway? Nonetheless, it still gained notoriety (eventually), and people still fought for recognition afterward.
Totalitarian states tend to have a good run, where they have a good leader and energetic administration, then they become lethargic and dysfunctional, and because there's no mechanism to correct this, they start falling apart. (However, this can take centuries).
As an aside, I don't think the West has ever been particularly keen on democracy. I think Israel is the only democracy that has ever received substantial military and economic support. For dictatorships, this kind of support is basically routine (see Egypt, for a typical example).
If you look at transitions like the english civil war, or the french revolution, the clear precondition of revolution is not 'stability', as you think, but rather systemic dysfunction compounded by incompetent leadership. This kind of situation is one which democracies, in theory, should be much less vulnerable to.
Your ideas about the relative balance of power between state and people make some sense, I think, but they only matter when the threat is internal dissent. Most of the states in modern europe had a form of republicanism enforced on them by the French, who were able to invade all their neighbors because their republican government was (while very dysfunctional) more efficient and able to field talented officers and large armies.
A modernised military, moreover, consists of normal people - and they will also feel the disillusionment and apathy that grips really dysfunctional regimes. Saudi Arabia, for example, fields armies of terrible soldiers, using the most advanced weapons available.
China is an interesting and very weird state, because it's a very old civilization with deep roots, with very different basic ideas to the west, and they have turned marxism into a kind of managerial culture for an extremely capitalist society. I don't know if they will follow any of the typical patterns that totalitarian states follow. You can't really use the USSR as a point of comparison, because the USSR was a very European project, coming directly out of the enlightenment, and the western political tradition. Nor would Korea make sense, since they were colonized, and both North and South represent different reactions to colonial subjugation.
The precondition of the English civil war in my opinion was more the funds that facilitated it promised by financiers from Amsterdam who ultimately went on to be granted charter to found the BoE.
As you know the result of this civil war was to wreck the fine castles, history and heritage of the English. Destroy many a dynasty and teach the Irish to hate the Brits for all eternity.
Issac D'Israeli produced a worthwhile read on Charles [1] if you'd like to know more on his character and quarry.
[1] https://archive.org/details/commentariesonli03disruoft/page/...
The teeth was taken from all monarchies, or BDFLs, after Bolsheviks were sent from Germany to murder Tsar Nicholas and his family in an act that ultimately condemned 66m Russians.
In my opinion if you want a stable democracy you enfranchise those who would look to a future beyond their own. e.g. one vote per family. If you franchise those who live for today with not a stake in the future democracy becomes not a viable form of governance.
Are you justifying unethical experiments on Uighurs by the chinese government ?
As for unethical experiments, Mao's certainly top the charts.
> I frequently think that what is happening over there are the emulations of unethical experiments that the Western world would never be able to pull off.
Could you point to a specific year in the 20th century after WW II that no Western government was conducting an unethical experiment?
I seriously cannot think of an example so Im open to the fact you know more about my known unknowns.