The lessons of the Cold War, a substantial duration of which I lived through, should not include "actually the American system and the Soviet system were equally bad".
The term "useful idiot" has no expiration date, and is more relevant now, in the age of social media, than ever. The world's major powers still attempt to propagandize their rivals.
> The lessons of the Cold War [...] should not include "actually the American system and the Soviet system were equally bad"
I was arguing that the Cold War, a substantial duration of which I also lived through, introduced a mistrustful "us vs them" kind of thinking that is harmful. The Soviet system is no longer relevant, and unfortunately "the end of history" didn't happen as Fukuyama predicted. What matters today are the successes but also the failings, lies, and fabrications of the systems that endured, and it's not all China.
Cold War mentality is what makes you (specifically you, in this context) mistrustful of any narratives not dictated by your country. So when someone else, as in this thread, praised an article for showing points of views other than the dominant narrative [1], you instantly questioned what the user meant, out of suspicion. You cannot deny it was suspicion, because in other comments you clarified what kind of "criticism of the West" you meant (and tellingly, you equated listening to other narratives to criticism of the West!): that "as often as not" it's "absurd" whining about Churchill or about the term "Iranian regime", or (in another comment) claiming that "China is freer than the US".
> The term "useful idiot" has no expiration date
As long as you acknowledge it's a term of propaganda. It has no value today other than as a relic of the Cold War past.
I hope you're not trying to use it as a thought-terminating cliché to criticize anyone who wants to say something about China that doesn't belong with the usual tropes.
> The world's major powers still attempt to propagandize their rivals.
Yes, though we would likely disagree about which is the major world power more likely to engage in this tactic today.
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[1] what's even more puzzling is that I think TFA actually shows the same point of view as the Western narrative: China doing China things, secrecy, military projects, enclosed towns, executions. This wouldn't feel surprising or novel to an English-speaking reader, it would just confirm what they already thought of China!
"Useful idiots" etc is the language of Cold War logic.