In short, its because we get indoctrinated with capitalist ideology all our life. In school, through the media and through other people we talk to. In fact there is so much of this capitalist propaganda, that its hard to avoid even when you are fully aware of it. Also note that the propaganda is much stronger in the imperial core, compared to countries in the periphery, or colonised countries.

It is better to acquaint people to the contradictions between the reality and the rhetoric of their own liberal democracy because you have the material conditions on your side. Part of the difficulty in convincing people to change their views about the USSR is that you can’t witness it yourself and the non-stop bourgeois propaganda means the waters of the discourse are very muddied.

Edit: get them to read Blackshirts and Reds

As others mentioned, the primary reason is that people are subjected to propaganda their whole lives. I grew up in USSR and it’s both hilarious and depressing to hear what people in the West think life there was like.

Having lived experience it’s easier for me to debunk this stuff when I start hearing this nonsense, however even that isn’t convincing a lot of the time. I find Anarchists in particular have the most hostility towards USSR because the concept impinges on their conception of freedom.

unlearning propaganda fucks up your ability to function in society

I remember watching a Sunday morning news article on CBS in like 2002 as a kid, that talked about how ‘evil’ communist Russia ‘executed’ and ‘imprisoned’ people for being religious, and that modern Russia’s sudden boom in religion is only proof that ‘communism is evil’. In school I was only ever taught to believe that communists were always on the side of ‘evil’, often having communism be directly described as such - because the capitalist propaganda machine wants us to truly believe that communism was and is pure ‘evil’.

People in the west are dogmatically propagandized into believing that communism is a terrible ideology that only seeks to starve and kill its citizens. It’s really hard to convince westerners to see passed that, if you want people to realize that they’ve been lied to their entire life, you can only point out contradictions and hope they start asking the right questions to depropagandize themselves. If they can come to accept that American media has totally made up a lot of the bullshit they claimed about Venezuela and Bolivia last year, then maybe you can get them to accept that maybe western media lies often about ‘enemy’ countries, and maybe the USSR isn’t what western media says it was

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