Geniune question. If China, North korea, Cuba etc are doing undemocratic things to protect themselves from captialism what's with the censorship.
If the remiges were good, speech wouldn't threaten them and they could afford to have things completely unregulated. Heck, the US gets away with free speech and we complain all the time and yet you think its an evil empire!
The only threat I could see is a flood of propaganda from captialists, but really, are the citzens of these countries, gullible enough to fall for propaganda? Are they really too stupid to see there own self interest. Come on.
I think this question starts from a liberal assumption I reject outright: that "free speech" exists outside of power. It doesn't.
Every society reproduces itself ideologically. Liberal capitalism does it. Socialism does it. Feudalism did it. The question isn't whether ideology exists. It's which historical order is reproducing itself through it.
Every hegemonic order rests on three mutually reinforcing pillars: material capabilities, institutions, and ideas. Ideas aren't decorations sitting on top of society. They're one of the things that holds society together. Schools, media, universities, films, NGOs, think tanks, even the language we use to describe politics, they all participate in reproducing a particular "common sense."
Which brings me to the United States.
People often say, "But America allows criticism!" Sure. You can call the President an idiot. You can complain about healthcare. You can say Congress is corrupt.
What you generally don't do is question the basic legitimacy of capitalist property relations themselves, because those assumptions have already become common sense. That's hegemony. The system doesn't need to silence every critic when most people already understand the world through concepts the system itself helped produce.
Socialist states came into existence under very different historical conditions. Civil wars. Coups. Sanctions. Invasions. Covert operations. Colour revolutions. Intelligence agencies funding opposition media. Whether one agrees with their policies or not, it's not irrational that they view information as another terrain of geopolitical struggle rather than some neutral marketplace of ideas.
"But if socialism is good, why would it fear criticism?"
I would probably flip the question around. Why assume criticism exists outside the struggle for hegemony?
Ideas don't descend from heaven. They come attached to institutions, funding, ownership structures, and international power. A newspaper isn't just a newspaper. A social media platform isn't just an app. They exist inside a historical structure dominated by particular states, corporations, and class interests.
Now, does that automatically justify censorship?
No. But I'm not in the business of handing out moral gold stars.
A genuinely confident historical bloc should ideally rely more on consent than coercion. If a state finds itself increasingly dependent on repression to preserve itself, that may indicate its hegemony is weakening rather than strengthening.
But the inverse liberal assumption, that information is naturally neutral until the evil state contaminates it, is just as ideological.
Finally, the point about people being "too smart to fall for propaganda" misunderstands how hegemony works. Hegemony doesn't require people to be stupid. It requires institutions that make one worldview feel so normal that alternatives stop looking like alternatives at all.
That's why I'm reminded of Robert Cox's most famous line: "theory is always for someone and for some purpose."
The same applies to speech. Speech is never just speech. It is always embedded in institutions, material power, and competing projects of world order. The real question is not who censors, whether censorship is bad, etc, but which historical structure is being reproduced, and whose interests that structure ultimately serves.
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