Like, I've seen many smart people that are even, in theory, supporting of socialism and against imperialism who are well aware that there is a propaganda machine in the US and the west, who when it comes to anything about AES/past socialist states, they will just regurgitate state department propaganda without question.
Like, even if you bring up, for example, Xinjiang, and how virtually all evidence comes from some really bad research by a guy who clearly has an agenda, they will say something along the lines of "maybe that's true, but that doesn't disprove there's a genocide there". Which... is not how burden of proof works. Mind you, these are also people who clearly know about shifting of the burden of proof when it comes to climate change or evolution, but here? Then it's every logical fallacy, no critical thinking.
So what is it about these things that remove critical thinking from otherwise smart people?
Most people haven't seen opposition to it that they didn't already discard. These AES countries like the PRC or Cuba, they don't have good safe white people like the USSR, or safe white theorists like Lenin (who is portrayed pretty positively in many lib history classes), or the safety of having already been annihilated by imperial power.
But maybe more so, I think these are people have an ultimately Utopic view of socialism/communism and don't know it. They have an idea of socialism that corresponds to the egalitarian shared poverty of early PRC or USSR. They're so traumatized by capital and never seeing a leftist victory for themselves that they just want to get right to the not having to do any more unequal labor. They have no sense of what a DotP actually is or means. They think it means getting rid of all inequality immediately. I think because people have all of these theoretical issues in their socialism, they buy into liberal narratives about freedom and journalism and state capitalism. They can't imagine a government by and for regular people, that has a different end goal than imperial core but genuinely need to grow productive forces to get there without getting crushed.
I have a lot of friends with super bad, easily debunked takes about AES countries, and it's always a failure to consider the possibility of good actors in places of power.
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