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americans are some of the only people in the world who genuinely believe their country's founding myths
That's obviously untrue.
Americans with literally any topic. And in their minds the fact that it’s like the default opinion just reinforces that it must be true. Not even a moment of hesitation that maybe it’s the default opinion because we utterly despise teaching anything besides business and trades.
Most of us come out of college with barely any deep understanding of anything in history. Just a Wikipedia glossary full of stubs.
usians are the most propagandized people on earth
The fact that people believe this isn’t surprising. But what is a little surprising to me is that, when confronted with a challenge to that narrative from someone they know has always loved history and has bothered to learn more, they dig their heels in and insist they are right and I am wrong.
Nationalism. Their nationalist mindset forces them to have an automatic negative reaction to anything that challenges it. Because they believe that their nation are the good guys and anything else that their nation labels "the enemy" is the bad guys. When you challenge the state's narrative on the bad guys, which they have accepted as correct and good, you are also challenging their decades of nationalism and by extension their support for their nation makes it feel like a challenge against them as a good or bad person (for supporting the good or bad guys).
The method to successfully make people question these things is to first create massive negative feelings about the state, this opens them up to questioning their nationalism and leads them to a crossroads between two choices. One is the reactionary RETVRN ideology in which a person doubles down on the idea that nationalism is good but not for the current state, it must be removed and replaced with a state that will RETVRN it to greatness. The other is internationalist ideology, in which people reject nationalism and start viewing states from a larger distance as citizens of the world instead of citizens of their nation.
I'm a stuck record on this but time and time again it comes down to this.
Want to hear something embarrassing? I never even knew who Lenin was until I was 17...and I had to Google it myself. And I was actually well above average in school. The American education system is a fuck and there's so much I had to learn on my own.
It's funny, the education system was engineered to make us workers, but employers don't even want to hire us anymore and would rather stick to piling on more work to the people already hired, leaving a generation stuck with dead end minimum wage jobs at best even if they have master's degrees.
In 1981, Americans thought the Soviet Union was an Evil Empire that would battle the US for eternity.
In 1991, Americans thought the USSR's collapse was inevitable and obvious while questioning only why it didn't happen sooner.
energy. He "studied communism" for 20 years by being really mad at the USSR, collecting memorabilia of the USSR, naming his daughter after Gorbachev, and reading nothing about communism except maybe the manifesto.
it's even worse with the descendants of euro-immigrants. I know a polish guy, gay, super liberal, who is absolutely convinced of the most bloodthirsty and reactionary narratives about the USSR because he's from a polish family, and his polish grandma would never lie. If I'm talking about any kind of effort to improve society somewhat 
he will go full 
and say "socialism is a good idea in theory, but never in practice, I should know, I'm polish, and both hitler and stalin genocided my people." He's generally a kind and friendly person who has been helpful on numerous occasions in the decade I've known him, but the second we start talking politics the gloves come off. He has a STEM background and gets paid fairly good, so I especially don't care for the way he talks about working class people like they're all ignorant trumpers who just need to learn to code.
Mass media has huge influence on people, it is unbelievable in what they can convince ordinary citizens.
It is not only US or it's stance on USSR, it is still happening all over the world. You can study this effect in real time right now.
My own parents don't believe me anything until they hear it on TV. And will never believe me if TV is claiming opposite.
I just dropped idea of truth, there are just some (probably corporate) interests and easy to manipulate sheeple.
My parents are also absolutely certain that I'm the one lying to them.
Next you'll be telling us that there's more to the DDR than what's contained in The Lives of Others!
Which books do you particularly recommend?
I really like The Soviet Century by Moshe Lewin. Anything by J Arch Getty. Trotsky’s history of the revolution is pretty great. Sheila Fitzpatrick wrote a good history of the revolution + years after too (she’s a good revisionist historian and was instrumental in pushing back against the Cold War idea that the Nazis and Soviets were the same… but she does kinda have some anti-communist brainworms sometimes). Carlos Martinez has a really nice multi-part mega essay on the collapse of the USSR on the Invent The Future website. I haven’t read Losurdo’s book on Stalin but I will soon.
And most of what I’ve cited above (Lewin, Getty, Fitzpatrick, at least) are from historians who have the respect of the academic history profession, not Soviet apologists or anything.
Im simultaneously understanding of it (as I’m sure many of us here are in general, since many are Amerikkkans and used to be libs) while also baffled by how much gaslighting there is. People will legit look at you like you’ve grown an extra head if you don’t automatically take for granted that the USSR was a famine-riddled nightmare state and Stalin personally executed a hundred people himself daily for sport.
The tank man image is the perfect demonstration of this anticommunist conditioning. If you show an American the tank man image and ask what happened, they'll tell you he was run over by the tank. If you show them the full video where he walks away unharmed, they'll say "they probably killed him later".
By the end of high school when Tank man is shown to you, you're already trained to extrapolate bad information about [state dept. designated enemy nation], even with zero context or proof.