It’s just because of media propaganda of lines of tanks and soldiers marching in red square or in the DPRK or China which are vilified as bad and oppressive and the thinking goes look how they’re marching evilly through the streets for the benefit of their leadership who live like gods while the rest exist in slavery under the boot of their aggressive military machine which they are saber-rattling at the world through their parades contained entirely within their capital city unlike us with all our peaceful wholesome bases all over the place and our “freedom of navigation” infringements on air and sea-space borders and our “deterrence” war games that occur right on their borders and cannot be told apart from an actual attack.

So they spun up this idea that military parades = evil commie oppression and that’s a sign of bad things and they beat that home until people see only things like that, signifiers as a sign of goodness or badness and ignore the sprawling naked empire with all its bases, wars, aggressive creeping up to the borders of rival states, war games near their borders, etc because it doesn’t have the right signifiers.