Communism is an It, not an Us. Misunderstanding this historical and theoretical and practical fact is what allows it to retain romantic appeal in the minds of soft headed and desperately needy and ignorant morons.
I really like that Shen Yun has the slogan “China before Communism”.
But it also occurs to me that unless they represent all the regions of China, they are really representing a part of China. That is all to the good, but winding my mind down this particular road, it occurs to me to comment that Imperial China was precisely that: an Empire. The Mandarin speakers imposed on many other de facto nations the same sort of control that the British and others did on China as a whole. Canton speaks another language. They speak other languages, effectively, I think, in Sichuan and Xi’an, and other places I don’t know about.
It’s interesting that I think they can use the same ideograms to communicate, but in my understanding pronounce them COMPLETELY differently. It’s a sort of meta-language, or so I understand.
But could one not reasonably stipulate that any nation which includes disparate linguistic and cultural groups–and particularly one which imposes a Lingua Franca, like Latin or English–is almost definitionally an empire?
I think we need to reverse direction, away from centralization, and towards the fragmentation of nations. If we develop elements of a global culture worthy of the name, then we can readily make our peace with one another, and keep what fragments remain, at least those worthy of keeping.
Is Deglobalization a word? It must be, since my typewriter allowed me to type it. I am a Deglobalist.
And to be sure, I would like the status of women raised around the world. I would like ignorance based shunning and discrimination to cease. But we can do this culturally, slowly, and over time. People open up when you stop pushing.