askchapo

It's a tough question, really. Like, "love the people, hate the government" is just a reskin of "love the sinner, hate the sin" that liberals employ to smugly and thinly veil their Sinophobia etc, but there is still some truth to it, right? The "Samsung Republic", for instance, is a reactionary hellhole because the peninsula is abounding in revolutionary potential that the bourgeois powers-that-be must continually suppress. Everywhere on Earth, there are people fighting for a better future, and every society where the people in general have fully internalized their own oppression and exploitation and reproduce it dutifully, is a society where the people in general can at any point become dignified.

For some countries, becoming dignified would mean entirely shedding the colonial identities built to obscure the true nature of bourgeois dictatorship, and obscure the construction of segregated spaces and oppressed masses of marginalized "living dead"; many people say that countries in this category are not "real countries". Seppoland/USA, Canada, Australia, the Zionist entity etc.

For other countries, becoming dignified would mean understanding that the only reason they've been artificially kept separate from a larger neighbor has been to serve as a tax haven or as a strategic military outpost near a maritime chokepoint or socialist power, and again shedding their artificial identities and merging with their larger neighbor; many people say that countries in this category are also not "real countries". Monaco, Liechtenstein, Singapore, Taiwan, the Samsung Republic etc.

But excluding these two groups, what "real countries" remain, and do any of them really deserve to be called the worst?

You can look at every country on Earth through at least two perspectives like this. Germany, for instance, is a country full of racist Hitlerites extracting wealth from the Global South and Eastern Europe. It's also a country full of people that the racist Hitlerites are racist Hitlerites towards. It's also the birthplace of Karl Marx, and half of Germany was once the German Democratic Republic, a country which is now an effective colony of West Germany — "robbed blind" by the metropole in a manner easily obscured by the lines on a world map and the flags on Germany's flagpoles. The racist and extractive part of Germany is definitely up there among the "worst countries"; the communists, the marginalized people, the people who remember the good old days of the GDR, I wouldn't say that they're among the "worst countries".

"German" is at the end of the day not much less of an arbitrary identity as, say, Togolese, anyways. The "German" nation had to be constructed through the imposition of a centralized identity, language, culture, symbols, and infrastructure on disparate regional groups of people.

I don't know where I'm going with this, really. I guess I recognize that this thread is just for fun, but I still want us to remain aware of how countries are just social constructs or something.