The Democracy of the founding fathers was Greek Democracy, predicated upon a slave society, and restricted to only the elite. This is the society we live in today, even with our reforms towards direct representation. The system is inherently biased towards the election of elites and against the representation of the masses. Hamilton called it “faction” when the working class got together and demanded better conditions, and mechanisms were built in (which still exist to this day) that serve to ensure the continued dominance of the elite over the masses. The suffering of the many is intentional. The opulence of the wealthy is also. This is the intended outcome.
I don’t think that’s an inherent truth. Just look at Koenigsberg/Kaliningrad. After WW2 the local Germans were expelled and the city and adjacent lands were completely resettled by Russian settlers. You could try to justify it in a million ways, although I don’t know if ethnic cleansing can ever have a justification, but that’s what happened in the end, in Communist USSR, under Stalin. The reason why today’s old Prussia is Russian instead of German, or Polish or Lithuanian.
And the USSR did the same thing in many other places like Poland, DDR, Moldova, Ukraine etc. Settler-colonialism has nothing to do with capitalism or communism. It has more to do with power and controlling the land.
I appreciate that insight, and while I don’t agree, it does give me something to chew on for a while, and another excuse to read the soviet archives to see what they were discussing internally at that time. That archive is a godsend, it’s how you can prove definitively that the Holodomor was not intentional, and that attempts were made to not only ease it, but to preempt it from happening. Attempts which were sabotaged by a class of people who wanted to keep their privileges and place above the ordinary people.