• purpleworm [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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      5 days ago

      Many other problems aside, you’re doing “great man theory.” Do you really think that Kim Jong Un wouldn’t be hastily replaced by another Kim who was judged by the bureaucracy to be able to serve the same functions? And Xi likewise replaced by China’s central committee with someone who would continue to pursue China’s geopolitical aims? Do you imagine that Belarus is being dominated by the sheer dint of Lukashenko’s personality and scheming?

      I admit that it might cause real problems for Russia,* and then that would have knock-on effects with the rest, but the idea of a “problem” being “fixed” by the bomb is suggesting that the head executives are the problem itself. Momentarily setting aside that I disagree with you almost completely about which geopolitical forces are problems, your analysis will never get anywhere if it’s this caught up in distilling problems relating to the governance of ~2 billion people down to 5 or 50 individuals. There is no such thing as a country that is simply under the power of one person. Every country on Earth is ruled by a class or sometimes a coalition of classes, and it is the interests of those classes that decide the actions of the state.

      I believe, perhaps unlike you, that the US is the most malignant force in the world in an absolute sense (some others may be called more malignant relative to their power, like Israel and ISIS). Killing Trump wouldn’t fix that, as entertaining as his meeting a violent end would surely be. In fact, to the extent that it would matter in the long run, it would probably make things worse, because he is currently operating as the face of a great machine that is in some respects constrained by the fact that the face has a will of its own, but if the face is stripped away or, more likely, if the face dies but remains covering the machine in death, the machine can now operate with that particular vector of chaos removed and pursue its aims more efficiently. We must nonetheless remember that without the machine, the face would be powerless, but without the face, the machine would still be quite powerful.

      *Incidentally, people forget that there are much, much more earnest forces of reaction than Putin in Russia (formerly including Navalny the ethnonationalist) and the power struggle in his absence might ultimately expand their power.