not creating creepy secretive self-surveillance programs like you see in the US, China, and other major players.

So no modern security state apparatuses then? What’s your take on China’s booting out the CIA in recent decades and the constant attempts of the west- as well as its long and well-recorded history- of destabilizing and destroying states through “color revolutions,” insurgencies, etc?

Some Americans even rationalize the genocide of first nations by arguing that it resulted in the United States, which is a good thing in their opinion

Shitting on dumbass Americans is fair enough, but we all know that no one is promoting settler-colonialism and genocide here. There is no such thing as a retroactive justification, nor is genocide ever an acceptable answer. But you and I both know there’s no disagreement in this thread on that matter.

I personally reject the notion that a just and equitable future can only be built on a pile of corpses.

Personally I reject the notion that the idealistic path should be taken as the first option- that’s my response to that. Does a better future have to be built on a pile of corpses? Not necessarily, no. But the times when such a path has been possible are a rare, extreme minority, and in many cases throughout history- the establishment of the Soviet Union, PRC, and many post-colonial and revolutionary governments (including many of the now status quo “liberal, democratic” western governments) it could not be done.

Idealism has its place- where and when it can be afforded. For instance, if you look up how modern Communist China re-educated and rehabilitated Puyi, the last Qing emperor and a infamous Japanese collaborationist- it really is something that impressed me, reading it at the time. But that was during a time when Puyi had been truly defanged in every way possible; in comparison, would I blame the Bolsheviks for their handling of the Russian imperial family, or the French revolutionaries for their handling of theirs? Not at all, rather the opposite- these nobles still had their fangs; look up the letters and actions of Marie Antoinette seeking to call foreign interventions from her relatives, for instance (not to mention the other reasons of varying validity, for her charges of treason- the actions of sending the royal treasuries abroad, for instance), or consider the royal family’s significance to the cause of the Whites and to the multiple interventions by pretty much every other global power during the Russian civil war. Consider in the French revolutionaries’, or the Bolsheviks’ circumstances- how many more lives were spared by these actions, than not? Why is there such a focus on the “martyred” nobles, putschists, landlords, kulaks (farmer-landlords), plantation-owners, and all sorts of varying reactionary figures when contrasted with the mountains of corpses from deprivation, disenfranchisement, and abuses of all kinds that always existed behind the maintenance of the former order’s status quo, the sheer brutality brought to bear under their name and through their actions against those seeking to free themselves from their tyranny, etc?

What I’m describing is not limited to individual cases, nor the system of nobility alone- the same goes for liberals, for all manners of tribalists, reactionaries, all sorts of petty corruption, injustices, and criminality alike. Any sensible system will weigh the price of inaction or insufficient action- the “collateral damage” that comes in the form of innocent lives lost to reactionary backlash, irredentism, sabotage, and from merely the typical behaviors of those who are not properly reformed before being allowed loose on the world again.

A “just and equitable” future requires those involved to be willing to defend the process necessary to to create it, from start to finish. Anything else is just willful martyrdom- and I can promise you, while people might remember the countless martyrs of this world fondly, their peoples always, always, would have rather preferred they succeeded in the end, and the outcomes of their martyrdom are near always infinitely worse than if they had managed otherwise.