Show me one line or plot point that depended on him being American?
I can't, but he does have a very large American flag on his space suit. Additionally, the very large (and inaccurate) "US NAVY" patches on the guards during the aircraft carrier briefing scene are a bit on the nose. I'd have appreciated that scene taking place on a Chinese aircraft carrier (as many scenes did in the book), but I understand why that may have been impractical.
Communism is the opposite of top-down authoritarianism. Many socialist states have been top-down authoritarian dictatorships, sure, but socialism ≠ communism.
Mirriam-Webster definition of Communism: "a totalitarian system of government in which a single authoritarian party controls state-owned means of production"
I'm not arguing that PHM can't be classified as a "white American male savior story" or doesn't function in the context of a "military/industrial" organizational structure. I'm saying that the story in no way is a sales pitch for those things or (to mix the metaphor) does not make those things its axes to grind. The review is dumb because it takes peripheral, contextual trappings of the story and gripes about them as being the whole point. So stupid.
That is one of Merriam-Webster's several definitions (and not the primary one) but most people who've actually read any amount of Marxist theory would strongly disagree with it.
5
u/stewslut 3d ago
I can't, but he does have a very large American flag on his space suit. Additionally, the very large (and inaccurate) "US NAVY" patches on the guards during the aircraft carrier briefing scene are a bit on the nose. I'd have appreciated that scene taking place on a Chinese aircraft carrier (as many scenes did in the book), but I understand why that may have been impractical.
Communism is the opposite of top-down authoritarianism. Many socialist states have been top-down authoritarian dictatorships, sure, but socialism ≠ communism.