Title, I'm a leftist but after reading some things on lemmygrad and here it seems I might have been lied to all my life. I have talked with some people from Cuba and Venezuela (expats) that support the west narrative about poverty and mismanagement. I "believe" that Russia is attacking Ukraine for selfish reasons and that China censors access to foreign information using the Great Firewall, please prove me wrong. Furthermore, it ultimately depends who do you want to believe or there are hard facts from reputable sources that are simply a hidden by the mass media?
EDIT: Thanks everyone for your very civil responses. I'll answer as many as I can!
What I mean, is that if you can't fact-check and hear different versions it's difficult to know what is true. I understand science censorship of false things but it isn't as clear cut in ideology and politics, or you can say 100% you are in the true and everything else is wrong and should be banned? Who decides what is true in things outside of science?
In terms of ideology and politics that China censors, it's fascism and other related ideologies and politics that aim to harm the working class people for their own benefit
Sure, there's no mathematic formula to say fascism is bad but why would you give fascists the ability to spread whatever they want to spread?
This applies to all parties that mean harm including America, Europe, and all the other Anglo countries that have colonized the entire world, bombed countries to dust, sanctioned people to starvation. couped governments for natural resource access, ruined economies for their own companies, etc. etc.
You should probably read more philosophy and politics if you question that fascism might not be bad and deserves free speech. No coming at you. Just genuine advice
Chinese call their censorship red, yellow and black. Black is crime, criminal activity, mafia, that sort of thing. Yellow is porn, in China yellow is the color of sex, in the way we used to say "blue movies" for porn back when it was shown in movie theaters. No T&A, and if you even show cleavage (of T or A) it gets censored. Red is anti-Party activity, organizing against the State, Falun Gong, Eastern Lightning, that sort of thing.
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They would probably answer with a similar argument but saying that they are capitalist not fascist and that it's communism that does all that, who do you believe? they are saying the same thing but changing the suspect. Does China allow Anarchist ideologies? or that also goes against the working class?
Hate speech and fascism shouldn't be allowed, you can't be tolerant with the intolerants because they will use that tolerance against you.
Funny thing about this question is that Marxism seeks to be scientific to the point that it's really the basic foundation of the ideology. Marx was at the forefront of what would be called sociology today along with his pioneering economic and historical theories. Determining what is true and pushing the boundaries of where we can say that there is predictable truth is vital to Marxism.
So if you think that there is such a thing as misinformation on psychology and not merely physics and chemistry and math, then the Marxist contends that we should continue to make a science out of as much as we can, being careful not to declare something a "science" that is not adequately developed but also not shying away from considering a category of event in the physical world something that can potentially be analyzed scientifically.
A favorite example of mine is that somewhere in the preambles of Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, Engels goes on a tangent about science and the evolution of paradigms over time. During his own age, life was often considered to be founded on what would later be coined Elan Vital ("vital impetus" or "vital force"), such that the presence or absence of this nearly-unquantifiable thing was what separated a living body from a fresh corpse. Engels rejected this notion and claimed -- as some scientists and philosophers certainly did at the time -- that there is no evidence for living organisms having in them anything that isn't irreducible to physical phenomena (setting aside the body-mind problem, which is a slightly different domain). Because of this, he says that there is no reason to believe -- and great reason to think it virtually inevitable -- that people will be able to create living organisms whole-cloth out of non-living material in laboratories one day! Of course, he turned out to be right, but the clarity of reasoning to see that in the mid-19th century is very impressive to me.
No, it actually isn't. It is for us in the west because we are given things free of context and education. We are specifically feed disinformation propaganda all the time so we can't develop informed opinions on matters.
So yeah, I dunno. Maybe Iraq had nukes. They didn't, anyone with the context would know they couldn't, and the drumbeat of it only served to help Americans support the war and make the world worse. In every possible way simply preventing that from being as widespread would have been an improvement