Remembering to look for and ignore folks with that telltale indicator has made the fediverse so much more enjoyable.
this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2025
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I usually start people on the COINTELPRO entry on Wikipedia unless I'm explaining to someone that they're using the word "Anarchy" as a synonym for chaos because of a concerted effort by the authorities to depict anarchists as violent and out of control criminals.
My point being that actual CIA propaganda was a godsend to MLs. They can use the existence of it to deny anything bad about their movement to outsiders and while avoiding any painful self-reflection of their own failures. While somehow always refusing to accept that the USSR and other ostensibly socialists countries or countries opposed to the west would ever themselves engage in similar propaganda efforts.
The most nuanced discussion I've seen of communist crimes is in ML circles. Deportations of ethnic Koreans and Crimean Tatars in the USSR, excess repression during the eve of WW2, freedom of speech and discussion in the late USSR... All of that receives extensive detail discussion in ML works such as Albert Szymanski's "Human Rights in The Soviet Union" and "Is The Red Flag Flying", long discussion in "People's Republic of Walmart" with an entire chapter devoted to repressions in the USSR, and an in-depth analysis in Robert C. Allen's "Farm to Factory" and Alec Nove's "An Economic History of the USSR". I'll update you when I read Domenico Losurdo's book on Stalin.
The fact that we don't uncritically swallow anti-communist propaganda fiction works such as The Gulag Archipelago, and refuse "historians" who worked with guesswork before the opening of the Soviet archives doesn't mean we deny atrocities. The point is that despite big mistakes in the construction of REAL socialist states, they've still been the most emancipatory and anti-imperialist projects on the face of the earth, and have brought untold good on the people who lived under them