I'm anti-vegan and i agree with your point.

Dude, are you just the king of bad takes on the fediverse?

How was OP trolling? They simply called out the strawman in the OOP

Where is OP trolling?

Ideal communism is what you described. Not communism in practice

Define authoritarian

Ok, then i think we've landed on somewhat the same page then. Maybe I'll read that Blackshirt and Reds book next so you can stop badgering me with it.

Eh, I think it's kind of a stretch to say thinkers like Parenti and Losurdo are ‘erased’ Their works are widely accessible online and they have dedicated followings. I think it's less about suppression and more about a general lack of interest in radical critiques among the broader public which is why thinkers like Chomsky and Orwell are held to such a high standard as they present a sort of more close-to-home type of dissent. This can also be applied to your assumption about the dominance of a narrative. While funding plays a role, the public’s demand for certain types of stories—like conflict and sensationalism—also influences what becomes dominant. Dissenting narratives can also gain traction even if they're not beneficial to the capitalist class and resonate with the people's lived experiences - the whole Luigi Mangione saga is evidence of this.

All in all, this still doesn't address the fact that China also doesn't hesitate to tweak the narrative to suit their own agenda. Evidenced by the Uyghur pogroms in Xinjiang where the state censors reports of forced internment, reeducation camps, and cultural erasure, labeling them instead as ‘vocational training’ or ‘anti-terrorism efforts'. Also by efforts to control the narratives surrounding Xinjiang by enlisting the help of Chinese influencers to show Uyghurs 'thriving'. Yes, i don't doubt that Western media over-exaggerates some aspects of the situation but the Chinese government is also culpable in that they deny any wrongdoing when this isn't so.

This is why i think it is sensible to conclude that both the West and China engage in rhetoric twisting and why we should be skeptical of all governments and not just Western ones.

These narratives get passed along uncritically today, even if they directly contradict the Soviet Archives opened in the 90s.

That's why we often don't just take the words of the CIA for instance, but we back it up with accounts from people that lived under these governments. There's a lot of interviews out there of people sharing their experiences. Sure their memory of events might not be completely accurate, but you can't just dismiss it as entirely false either.

Also your Tiananmen Square example strikes me as being a bit nitpicky. Yes, it's important to question dominant narratives, but the focus on whether deaths happened on the square itself seems overly semantic. Even if most deaths occurred outside the square, it still feels like you're/they're trying to downplay the broader violence against unarmed protesters and the suppression of their dissent. Similarly, wouldn’t state-controlled narratives in China have an interest in minimizing the scale and nature of the violence to preserve legitimacy?

Further, you’re right that Wikipedia and YouTube shouldn’t be treated as definitive sources, but isn’t that why they include citations to trace information back to its origins? Let's accept that Robert Conquest’s work is controversial; dismissing all scholarship on the USSR from Western historians because of bias that may or may not be there seems like overcorrection.

Also the point you made about how all media echoes the biases of the bourgeois is kinda reductive. I agree that dominant Western narratives often align with elite interests, but doesn’t the diversity of perspectives in democratic societies complicate that? Investigative journalism, academia, and even dissenting voices within the West often challenge these narratives. Wouldn’t it be more constructive to identify when elite biases appear rather than assume all narratives are controlled?

You just said leftists support some form of socialism. According to the Wikipedia page, a social democracy is a social, economic, and political philosophy within socialism that supports political and economic democracy and a gradualist, reformist and democratic approach toward achieving limited socialism.

So social democrats have to be leftists then

Are you that cheap?