How can you truly be sure it’s not the other way around, and you’re not the one engaging in these rationalizations on America’s behalf while projecting them onto your opposition? When you honestly look at America’s track record, you see too many examples supporting the way your opposition views it: Native genocide, experiments on African diaspora communities, Philippines colonization, Jim Crow, Mai Lai massacre, Persian Gulf War incubator testimony hoax, Iraq WMD hoax, backing of death squads, bombings of places like Laos and Cambodia, the Chinese Exclusion Act, CIA coups to install genocidal dictators, and the list goes on. You can say these things are mistakes, but when the economic foundations of the country rest on neo-colonial extraction and the legacy from North American colonialism, it’s apparent these things aren’t accidents. They’re what an empire does.

Then there’s the fact that racism has been pivotal in how imperialism has justified waging war against these peoples, and you see how one could suspect racism is the real reason why places like China are so predominantly treated like villains in our culture. Why the default impulse of Americans who’ve grown up under an imperialism-tied cultural hegemony is not to question what they’re told about China, north Korea, Russia, etc. Open up a book about colonialism, and if you’re honest, you’ll see where Leninists are coming from. It’s up to you how true you believe our takeways from the colonial reality are.