Source: trust me bro, he was a communist so that means he's bad

As opposed to multiple leaders of the united states with access to their own intelligence agencies

The title is missing a "wink"

Hey, i appreciate the chillness and will try to respond in kind. I can understand feeling conflicted, but personally I severed any emotional connection with this country several years ago after I could no longer reconcile my shrinking self-conception as "an american" with my growing self-conception as a human being. It's not just that they were seperate; they were fully att odds with each other in a very physical, material way. If I recognize that there is no deep fundamental difference between my humanity and anyone else's, and if I consider myself part of the human family, I can't ignore the devastation that this military-economic-cultural thing we call America has wrought on our family. If I see myself as a cell in the body of nature, I can't help but look at the effects of America and see it for a cancer. That doesn't mean everyone in it is "bad" or "evil" of course, and i personally don't believe in these concepts to begin with. The reality is more messy and complex than any quick moral assessment can say, but at the highest level the practical assessment is simple: America is a boat anchor on the neck of humanity. It's military enforces an economic system that's killing the world, the ideology it spreads is parochial and antisocial, and we who live inside it are both it's victims and it's accomplices, forced to work our lives away for rich pedophiles while economically supporting atrocities on other people elsewhere.

The desire to hold leaders to a higher standard is totally understandable, but the question of what they lead renders it moot in this case. American leaders are people who sit at the helm of a world-spanning death machine, and no decision they make, no matter how high-minded and well intentioned, can change it's basic function, which is to churn human, plant and animal life into profit. Like Darwinism, the evolutionary pressures of capitalist imperial politics actively selects for these wretched people, and against anyone who might even try to rein in it's excesses, even as ineffective that would be. The only way to hold the leaders of this system to a higher standard is to hold the system to a higher standard, and the highest standard this system can realistically be held to is to be dismantled and replaced with something capable of producing stable and equitable results. Capitalism itself is like a nanobot Grey Goo apocalypse: instead of breaking down everything to produce more nanobots it breaks everything down into profit. I consider it an existential threat to life on earth,and anything that upholds capitalism or stands in the way of it's destruction to be an acceptable loss for the preservation of the biosphere.

I hope I haven't gone on too long, but I feel that gets to the heart of it. For the love of humanity and all living things, I've forsaken any attachment to this predatory so-called society.

👈👈

All imperialism is economically motivated.

The term imperialism was coined by ~~Lenin~~ Hobson, and it's definition has remained constant for over a century. It's actually liberals who have tried to flatten and bastardize it's definition to hide the inevitable systemic nature of their crimes against humanity. The fact that you were introduced to the wrong definition first doesn't make it the right one.

expressed a desire to return to the days of the Russian Empire

Show me. Pull up a shred of evidence for this obvious propaganda. Show me Vladmir Putin expressing the desire to reform the pre-1917 Russian Empire.

"Material concerns? Physical reality? Oh ho ho, how charmingly naive, my dear boy. The true core of the matter is actually very simple, you see. Pushes glasses up anime-style Russia...is evil."

Oh no no no. Not both sides. One side.

Campism is when you can remember things that happened more than two weeks ago. And if you can remember things that happened more than three weeks ago, oh buddy, that's tankie

If you actually believe they're doing even a tenth of "everything" the US is doing, you are woefully underinformed to be having this conversation