This post at Chrenkoff has the quote of the day, by a Czech who might be presumed to know what he's talking about:
'...the ultimate crime of Communism is not that it destroyed democracy and the rule of law. Not even murdering its opponents makes it uniquely evil. Nor even its murderous frenzies when people were murdered just to instil terror in those left alive could be regarded as unparalleled in history. Its ultimate crime consisted in forcing millions of people for decades to express publicly and cheerfully their consent with something they regarded as criminal, untrue or idiotic. The numbness was thus for all but few the only way to preserve sanity.'
Quite right, and a good point to make in those endless tiresome debates about ideological body counts and the Cold War. If there was ever a society which (pace Michael Moore) went out of its way to remain stupid it was the USSR. I am usually unmoved by accusations that one or another democratic leader is lying, when what's usually the case is that all accountable leaders typically mix truth, half-truth, quarter-truth and hyperbole together, but rarely tell bare-faced flat-out lies. (Any politician who never told anything but the absolute whole truth wouldn't get beyond the parish council.) One can develop a decent filter, especially if you're as much of a news junkie as I am.
Some journalists seem to get a thrill from passionate excoriation of politicians' deviousness, to settle their own bad consciences, perhaps. Whatever. Such denunciations tell us more about the journalists themselves, especially if they combine such writings with apologia for tyrannies which are a pack of lies from beginning to end.
Further reflection: the Communist experience ought to be a decisive argument against Marxist theories of ideology (in the pejorative sense), hegemony, or manufactured consent. For seventy years, the Party had the kind of media control that Rupert Murdoch could only dream about. How much consent was it able to manufacture? Not enough, demonstrably. So how can one use the theory of manufactured consent to argue that entire populations are fundamentally deceived about their own best interests? Yet that is the explanatory load the theory is expected to bear: such mass brain-washing, we are told, is how the reactionaries hold their power.
At this point, of course, one starts getting into repressive tolerance or the like, whereupon one can start to play a little game, Come Up With A Phrase As Inherently Bonkers As 'Repressive Tolerance'. 'Passionate dullness', perhaps, or 'biassed objectivity'. Or how about 'fake but accurate'? Oh, wait...