I’ve spent the last few years devouring Soviet history. Books, papers, blog posts, podcasts, all of it. I can’t get enough. Not to brag, but I do feel as though I’ve achieved a certain level of understanding about the USSR, its history, and eventual collapse. But I’ve also put the work in.
And yet, whenever I engage people I know IRL or online, I’m amazed by how doggedly people will defend what they just inherently “know”: that the Soviet Union was an evil totalitarian authority dictatorship that killed 100 million of its own people and eventually collapsed because communism never works. None of these people (at least the people I know IRL) have learned anything about Soviet history beyond maybe a couple days of lectures and a textbook chapter in high school history classes. Like, I get that this is the narrative that nearly every American holds in their heads. The fact that people believe this isn’t surprising. But what is a little surprising to me is that, when confronted with a challenge to that narrative from someone they know has always loved history and has bothered to learn more, they dig their heels in and insist they are right and I am wrong.
This isn’t about me, I’m just sharing my experience with this. I’m just amazed at how Americans will be completely ignorant about a topic (not just the USSR) but will be utterly convinced their views on that topic are correct, despite their own lack of investigation into that topic. This is the same country where tens of millions of people think dinosaurs and humans walked around together and will not listen to what any “scientist” has to say about it, after all.
Nationalism. Their nationalist mindset forces them to have an automatic negative reaction to anything that challenges it. Because they believe that their nation are the good guys and anything else that their nation labels "the enemy" is the bad guys. When you challenge the state's narrative on the bad guys, which they have accepted as correct and good, you are also challenging their decades of nationalism and by extension their support for their nation makes it feel like a challenge against them as a good or bad person (for supporting the good or bad guys).
The method to successfully make people question these things is to first create massive negative feelings about the state, this opens them up to questioning their nationalism and leads them to a crossroads between two choices. One is the reactionary RETVRN ideology in which a person doubles down on the idea that nationalism is good but not for the current state, it must be removed and replaced with a state that will RETVRN it to greatness. The other is internationalist ideology, in which people reject nationalism and start viewing states from a larger distance as citizens of the world instead of citizens of their nation.
I'm a stuck record on this but time and time again it comes down to this.