You can protest the government. You can talk shit about the leaders. You aren't jailed or killed for any of these things in the US. And 'as recently as 1970s' is half a century ago.
I'm European btw.
While they might not be going full Maoist China on it's dissedents, they exercise more subtle methods to control the narrative and compromising movements as well as outright assassinations of prominent figures.
This is absolutely not unique to the US of course and this goes on in Europe as well. They're just among the most irritatingly self rightous about their imaginary respect for dissent.
The powers that be always want to continue being. But methods matter. How many politicians in the US or Europe have been poisoned by the state in the last decade? Don't you think there are politicians that the government would rather didn't exist? Yet they don't kill them or fabricate charges.
It is ridiculous to compare liberal democracies with autocratic regimes.
But it is true that we really need to keep our guard up to retain our liberal democracies, they are being attacked form within as well as outside.
While I cannot disconfirm the former (though there have certainly been some high profile cases with fishy circumstances- such as JFK), what about the Russiagate nonsense with Trump? I might hate him but the manchurian candidate theory was transparently bs from the very beginning, even before the investigation that proved it. He's certainly not the first politican that this line was used on and will probably not be the last. It seems to be a bipartisan thing to simultaneously shift focus of the public from national level corruption in favour of a foreign bogeyman and simultaneously slander opponents.
In a so called representative democracy, you do not need to outright murder or imprison your opponents to enforce control, you simply either have to relegate them to irrelevance through skewed or absent corporate media coverage or buy them out. See Bernie Sanders, Tulsi Gabbard, Andrew Yang, early Nancy Peloski, AOC, etc.
The tactics might differ from a transparently autocratic regime but the intentions are the same, and the end result is not really as different as liberals like to paint it. For all the unpopular politicians that are allowed to continue, there is police violence, surveillance, torture, imprisonment, and outright assasinations of prominent figures in activist groups. Then there is what they get up to outside the confines of US citizenship and borders.
Look at the state of Bolivia, Columbia, most of Central and Southern America actually. They have death squads from paramilitary groups backed by US multinational companies for the sole purpose of brutally putting down any attempts at collective bargaining or real democracy. Just because it's not visible in your backyard doesn't mean your country is not responsible for that mess.
The collusion allegations were not a Manchurian candidate theory and were never disproven by any investigation. (To the contrary, prior to being pardoned by Trump, several people either plead guilty or were convicted at trial for lies to investigators the key substance of which was falsely denying active actual ot attempted coordination with Russian state actors by Trump campaign officials.) The story that Trump was somehow exonerated is itself a propaganda story from the Trump camp that waa deliberately facilitated by AG Barr’s deliberate distortion of the Mueller investigation findings.
> He's certainly not the first politican that this line was used on and will probably not be the last.
He's definitely not the first politician to actively seek foreign assistance against domestic political opposition, nor the first to be sloppy enough that it gets noticed in time for it to be used against him (see, e.g., Louis XVI of France.)
Mueller specifically did not make a statement on it because he determined it to be Congress’ job and especially because he did not want to put up an appearance of political prosecution.
He left it to Republicans in Congress to do the right thing but they failed to do so.
This is the fallback excuse Democrats always play when they either don't really want to implement something (such as a $15 minimum wage) or they know they don't really have a leg to stand on - blame the Republicans. Same excuse made by Obama and the same excuse now being made by Biden.
When you have decades of experience dealing with a political opponent that has proven time and time again to be acting in bad faith, defering to their sense of decorem and morality is being complicit in their actions in my eyes.
And no, it did not exonerate Trump. He's obviously corrupt to the bone but the specific angle was significant Russian interference and Mueller completely failed to substantiate it. It's also worth noting that despite the media making a big song and dance around Trump meetings with Putin, the actual policies during his administration were significantly more adversarial towards Russian economic interests than Biden's administration has been so far.
So, you're telling me the victims are still alive? 50 years is not a long time
Someone has some reading to do.......
Don't hurt yourself moving those goalposts.
The United States and China are nothing alike. Try flying a Winnie the Pooh blimp (makes fun of China’s leader) in China and see how long before that gets shut down. We can also freely talk about what is going on in China/HK/TW/wugiwers here, where such speech would be prohibited in China.
While I would still prefer to live in the US, you would find by talking to Chinese citizens that they feel exactly the same way about their country. The same applies to Russians and other large nations. We are all being fed propaganda, it doesn’t matter what country you live in.