have a face of democracy being in reality a ruthless, drug dealing dictatorship ruled by killers

Sounds just like the US today, the British empire during the mid-19th century or Florence in the 15th century.

Here's the thing:

All these 'systems' whether capitalist, socialist, fascist or whatever, are systems of people in hierarchies. And what is quite clear is that all these 'systems' end up filtering the worst, most deceitful and conscienceless people to positions of power and control.

In In Sheep's Clothing: Understanding and Dealing with Manipulative People Dr. George Simon outlines the dynamic of of how this works in interpersonal relationships. So therefore I think it's safe to assume that this dynamic scales to large scale groups as well.

In essence people develop conscience along a spectrum - underdeveloped conscience (psychopath) to overdeveloped conscience (neuroticism). A underdeveloped conscience is naturally adept at manipulating a more well developed conscience. So therefore wherever pre-existing hierarchies exist (I'm excluding newly formed hierarchies since underdeveloped consciences usually go hand in hand with low intelligence e.g. Al Capone) the potential for filtering people with underdeveloped consciences to the top of hierarchies exists.

This is one of the reasons I believe Sergey Lavrov to be a more trustworthy source of information than John Kerry.

Capitalism seems to fare better regarding this problem due to the fact that it usually destroys and rebuilds itself every few generations (business super-cycle).

Unfortunately the hierarchies formed before that last business super-cycle are mostly still intact and therefore we see things like the genocide in Syria (Google neutron bombs in Syria if you haven't seen it yet).