Once again, this is an actual question; and I’m hoping to broaden my horizons and have a good conversation or two. I’m relatively new to commie subs, still trying to read political theory to figure out which one I like the most, so this might come off as uneducated. But why am I seeing so many positive posts about Stalin, followed by some comments that boil down to “Stalin was good, if you think he wasn’t, that’s just western propaganda” I’m thinking of the post that mentioned the 1921 Soviet Famine as a specific example. I know that Stalin didn’t create the famine, it was a byproduct of almost a decade of war, unrest, and a ton of other factors. But Stalin did do some bad shit. Things like sending 14 million people to gulags to work as slave labor, and killing millions more in his purges. I would argue that he used communism to become an authoritarian. Similar to how Putin is ruling now, stuffing ballot boxes, starting wars, and pushing propaganda. (I realize that we get pushed propaganda, too in the form of faux news, MSNBC, and most media outlets. I don’t wish to have a discussion that boils down to “we do it too, you just don’t see it”)
It’s understandable to cling to some mainstream Western media sources in the beginning. It took a few months for me to realize that they all have a history of warmongering and telling blatant lies in the service of imperialism, and when you actually try to fact check them you’ll find that they either just reference themselves or reference other bourgeois outlets (and so on). That’s not to say that they’re always wrong (there’s usually an element of truth if you read between the lines and exclude the writer’s commentary) or that all journalists working there are deliberately lying, but when there are no solid sources all you can use to judge an article’s truthfulness is the outlet’s and writer’s track records (contrast this with a journalist like Seymour Hersh – his article on the Nord Stream bombing uses anonymous sources, but he has a history of telling the truth about US imperialism, so while it’s not proof, he’s a significantly more reliable source than more or less anyone working for bourgeois media). Bourgeois media articles can be useful to expose inconsistencies in other bourgeois media (sometimes from the same outlet), and some journalists focus mainly on doing this; I would recommend the YouTube channel The New Atlas for this type of content, particularly on Xinjiang as well as historical context for the war in Ukraine, even if he has some political views that don’t align with Marxism-Leninism.
It was also initially shocking to learn that the history taught in schools in the imperial core is largely either manufactured or manipulated to reinforce anticommunism, but if you look at your old history books I’m sure you’ll find a lot of missing citations, a lot of dubious sources, and/or a lot of extremely important omissions