The Western and the liberal consensus on Joseph Stalin:
Stalin was an evil autocrat who seized all power from his people to establish a brutal and murderous authoritarian regime.
Stalin in reality
Stalin: Please, let me resign in peace. This is the fourth time I am submitting my application.
The central comittee: Dear Comrade Stalin, we have rejected your request for the fourth time. See you at work tomorrow.
That’s not how “knowing your enemy” works. 🤦♂️ “Hey, lemme go argue the side of nazis, gotta know your enemy and all that.” The world is not changed in the land of debate bros. If you haven’t even encountered someone who actually made this argument to you, it’s baseless. Theory has a place, but it still needs to be grounded in actual practice.
There is a difference between considering how something can unfold in order to better anticipate how to deal with it vs. putting forth a tunnel vision claim that it will unfold a single way without evidence. The realities of dealing with people are messy and you’re missing the forest for the trees here. If it was the case that this document was straight up not written by anyone in the CIA, I would agree with you that no one should be referencing it as representative of the CIA. That is not what you’re saying though. You’re getting into the weeds of what qualifies something as representative of the CIA, which is a level of analysis most people aren’t going to be thinking about in the first place. I can speak for myself as an example when I was very liberal, it wasn’t even on my mind what the hierarchy of the CIA is or who all each piece of information linked to it comes from. I just know at a certain point I had a kind of institutional trust and I gradually moved away from that.