What do you call someone who believes people who lie to them all the time? I’d call them naive, gullible, uncurious, or maybe willfully ignorant.

• Mainstream published estimates (PDF link) of the total numbers of “victims of repression” in the 1930s have ranged from [3.5 million to 20 million]. The bases for these assessments are unclear in most cases and seem to have come from guesses, rumors, or extrapolation from isolated local observations… [From research into Soviet archives,] the documentable numbers of victims are much smaller.
• The Chinese government estimates more than 300 fatalities [in the aftermath of the Tiananmen demonstrations]… Student leader Wu’er Kaixi said he had seen 200 students cut down by gunfire, but it was later proven that he left the square several hours before the events he described allegedly occurred… A BBC reporter watching from a high floor of the Beijing Hotel said he saw soldiers shooting at students at the monument in the center of the square. But as the many journalists who tried to watch the action from that relatively safe vantage point can attest, the middle of the square is not visible from the hotel… When a journalist as careful and well-informed as Tim Russert, NBC’s Washington bureau chief, can fall prey to the most feverish versions of the fable, the sad consequences of reportorial laziness become clear. On May 31 on Meet the Press, Russert referred to “tens of thousands” of deaths in Tiananmen Square.
• Moreover, three of [The Black Book of Communism’s] main contributors (Karel Bartosek, Jean-Louis Margolin, and Nicolas Werth) publicly disassociated themselves from Stéphane Courtois’ statements in the introduction and criticized his editorial conduct. Margolin and Werth felt that Courtois was “obsessed” with arriving at a total of 100 million killed which resulted in “sloppy and biased scholarship”, faulted him for exaggerating death tolls in specific countries, and rejected the comparison between Communism and Nazism.

Anti-communist propaganda is full of mistakes, guesses, rumors, and outright lies. This is a fact even harsh critics of communist governments readily admit. You can’t take any of this junk at face value, even if there are grains of truth.

You also have to place the bad things communist countries have done in context. Say someone is arrested for working with a foreign government to overthrow the existing government – nearly every country on the planet arrests people for that, but it’s supposed to be some damning indictment when a communist country does it? Or compare FDR rounding up Japanese Americans (with little-to-no evidence of sabatoge) and putting them in concentration camps to Stalin deporting “unreliable” groups (some of whom actually were violently opposed to the USSR) to Siberia from the Eastern Front. Why is FDR portrayed as a great man, and his concentration camps are simply a tragic blemish, but Stalin is portrayed as a genocidal maniac, where the vast good he did (no individual was more responsible for defeating fascism) is irrelevant compared to his wrongs?