What you are seeing in ‘tankie’ and “read theory” communities is an anti scientific epistemic style that treats ideology as a filter that outranks evidence. When they say the reasons are “complex” and involve propaganda, they are not doing ordinary source criticism that checks documents, reconciles contradictions, and updates beliefs under constraint.

In the sciences, “theory” is a deliberately fragile summary of what has survived contact with data, it must expose itself to being wrong through clear predictions, and good practice means you actively cultivate the ability to withhold belief when the evidence is thin or messy; in a lot of sociology, and especially in Marxist derived subcultures, “theory” often functions less like a falsifiable model and more like a lens, a vocabulary, or even a doctrine that tells you ahead of time what counts as evidence and what must be discounted as “ideology,” which flips the direction of inference so that evidence is recruited to serve the framework rather than constrain it.

Tankies are invoking a built in rule that inconvenient data about a favored regime can be dismissed as structurally tainted by bourgeois institutions, Western media, liberal academia, or intelligence services

That move makes the worldview functionally unfalsifiable, because counterevidence is reclassified as propaganda while any supportive anecdote is treated as proof. Historically this connects to Marxist Leninist political practice where the vanguard party claims privileged access to historical truth and where “correct line” competes with open inquiry, so truth becomes something defended for its political usefulness rather than tested for its correspondence with reality.

The Cold War did involve real propaganda and information warfare on multiple sides, and that kernel of truth gets inflated into a blanket permission slip to disregard any hostile reporting and to treat doubt as ideological contamination. Online this becomes a status ritual in which fluency in canonical texts substitutes for empiricism, and where moral anger at capitalism plus anti imperial identity incentives push people to defend any state positioned against “the West.”

The result is that atrocities are minimized, rationalized as necessary, or outright denied, not because the evidence is genuinely ambiguous but because the community’s habits convert theory into a replacement for falsifiable claims.