It’s difficult for a lot of people to separate the difference between Cold War propaganda and the very real harms committed by states like the Soviet Union, China, and North Korea. And this confusion affects both sides of the conversation.

On one side, some people absorb old Red Scare narratives so deeply that every socialist idea gets reduced to gulags, famine, and dictatorship. They can’t distinguish between genuine socialism and the authoritarian regimes the U.S. used as fear weapons for decades. For them, anything left of liberalism automatically becomes “communist tyranny,” even when the actual history is far more complicated.

But the other side has a similar problem in reverse. Some leftists are so determined to reject Red Scare propaganda that they swing too far and dismiss or downplay legitimate criticism of those states. They end up defending governments that committed real atrocities, or they romanticize those histories in a way that erases the people who suffered under them. Rejecting propaganda shouldn’t mean ignoring real authoritarian violence.

Both reactions, blind hatred and blind admiration, come from the same inability to separate myth from fact. The truth is that the U.S. exaggerated many things, and those states carried out policies that were deeply harmful and oppressive. These two things exist together.

If we want to build a liberatory, democratic, socialism today, we have to get comfortable with that complexity. We can reject anti-socialist propaganda without pretending that authoritarian regimes were models to follow. And we can criticize the failures of those systems without accepting the fearmongering that was designed to kill socialist imagination in the first place.