It's probably for the best that you lose friends who willingly choose state-propaganda over the truth. In communist countries, these are the sort of people who will rat out 100 other men to reduce their likelihood of being arrested by 1%. And keep in mind, their claims don't even have to be true when acting as a rat, and sometimes rats even get rewards.
Perhaps this is a somewhat alarmist reaction (and hopefully that's all it is). But don't forget that communist revolutions have happened several times in history, and there's no physical law preventing them from happening in the western world. In zero of the countries in which they occurred would anyone have believed accurate predictions of such events, because the cruelty far exceeded their wildest expectations.
Its not alarmist in any way. That is exactly what the world is going for. Sometimes before the public backlash hits they dont even bother to rebrand the things they are directly taking from China.
Its worse than you know.
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