It’s the opposite. Most MLs in the West were raised to believe in the West inherent superiority and developed all the socialized habits of minimizing or excusing atrocities as errors in judgment or outright denying them as anti-West propaganda. We have spent many years dismantling this, and each step of the way we are faced with contradictions and nuance.

What eventually happens is that people need to find a worldview, a framework, a set of theories that can situate the facts as they discover them into a coherent picture. Marxism-Leninism is one such framework. Under that framework, we start to see that while nuance is critical and cannot be ignored, there are indeed overarching patterns that guide things and staying stuck in small scope details is insufficient.

For example, let’s take the nuance of the embargo on Cuba. First, I think everyone is now clear that the US is starving Cuba. This was not clear to many people until recently. Some still deny it. But it is also true that until recently the greatest amount of aid to Cuba was also provided by the US, particularly through Catholic Charities. We can stay mired in these nuances for a long time - did Cuba make bad decisions with their investment in their economy, why don’t other countries trade more with Cuba, how much does the US actually provide to Cuba, how much US wealth was appropriated by the revolution…

But the nuance, while real, is not important to communicating and articulating a position on what’s happening. The US is killing children, sick, and elderly all over Cuba through modern-day siege warfare and it needs to stop, it needed to stop 60 years ago, it was never justifiable, it was never reasonable.

We have to deal with nuance all the time, because we are constantly bombarded with specially crafted narratives that pull out all sorts of specifics that feed into the US State Dept narrative and we have to constantly research, analyze, situate, and integrate all sorts of phenomena into the world view. It’s exhausting just dealing with the constant stream of propaganda, but then on top of that we have the propaganda amplification done by true believers and by unexamined believers. We are constantly confronted with nuance and contradictions that are real or imaginary or exaggerated or understated and we process it. Becoming an ML in the West is a huge exercise in nuance. Nuance is how we get to the place where we are willing to be open-minded about potentially having our beliefs about the world changed. And then eventually some of us determine that we need a unifying theory and the MLism fits the bill. And then we turn around and try to communicate the overarching theory and conclusions and get told we don’t understand nuance.