The people of China and Vietnam have vibrant discussions of ideas, and they democratically steer their governments. Their voices have more effect on their states than ours here at home. There isn’t a ban on Winnie-the-Pooh in China, and the people are generally vastly better informed on the 1989 Tian’anmen Square riots than we are.

• The Tian’anmen Square ‘Massacre’: The West’s Most Persuasive, Most Pervasive Lie.
• 1989 Tian'anmen Square riots
• A Note on the Tiananmen Protests
• Images from Tiananmen 1989 the West never shows (NSFW / CW: violence and death)
• Tank Man video footage. Tiananmen Square, Beijing, 1989

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You seem to have uncritically accepted every single thing you’ve been told, which, to be fair, I largely had as well, until I witnessed in real time how obviously fabricated the justification for the Iraq War was, and how seemingly credulously the media propagated it. It took me the last 20 years of investigation to dig myself out from under a lifetime of imperial core propaganda.

"Not allowed to discuss ideas the governments disagree with" in a myth, a fairy tale told by the kind of people who get banned from everywhere they go for "just having different opinions."

What are the opinions? What are the ideas? The US Civil War, by these terms, could be boiled down to "a clash over different ideas", it's not a useful metric. The fact is, no government on Earth is going to let you actively advocate for their violent overthrow, especially not when theyve just clawed their independence from, in many cases, centuries of colonial rule. And when you actually look into the historical events that anticommunists gesture vaguely at as examples of "communist authoritarianism", that's what it always turns out to be. The cycle goes like this:

Western capital foments fascism--> western capital arms fascists---> western capital directs fascists against socialist state, attempts to topple government for sweet natural resources-->socialist state cracks down on fascism--western capitalist press goes into overdrive about the plight of the poor fascists-->"Actually socialism is as bad as fascism, haven't you read this article in the Bezos Post?"

What are you even talking about? Communism is democratic