That’s well put, thanks!

I would say much of that also applies to China, and precisely because a country that doesn’t truly exist for its people cannot be socialist, I’d say there has never been a socialist country on this planet yet.

And then, if we choose to say that socialist countries do exist, then socialism stops meaning that the country really cares about asocial issues, and starts meaning a system where all means of production are held by the elite.

Lenin killed socialism and communism by trying to do them the bestial Russian way. (Of course that had to do with Marx’s thinking, but I still Lenin is to blame the most)
Still: if you have a dictatorship, you will inevitably veer far away from being for the people.

At the moment the countries that have come closest to the core point of socialism have been the Nordic countries, in that they’ve put the freedom and welfare of the individual in the middle, but they’ve done that that without socialism, using a strongly regulated capitalism as base instead.
…Plus, spent the last two decades trying to dismantle all that was good here, chasing the neoliberalist dream.