basically this parenti quote applied to anyone and everything that doesn’t match the state department

"In the United States, for over a hundred years, the ruling interests tirelessly propagated anticommunism among the populace, until it became more like a religious orthodoxy than a political analysis. During the cold war, the anticommunist ideological framework could transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence. If the Soviets refused to negotiate a point, they were intransigent and belligerent; if they appeared willing to make concessions, this was but a skillful ploy to put us off our guard. By opposing arms limitations, they would have demonstrated their aggressive intent; but when in fact they supported most armament treaties, it was because they were mendacious and manipulative. If the churches in the USSR were empty, this demonstrated that religion was suppressed; but if the churches were full, this meant the people were rejecting the regime’s atheistic ideology. If the workers went on strike (as happened on infrequent occasions), this was evidence of their alienation from the collectivist system; if they didn’t go on strike, this was because they were intimidated and lacked freedom. A scarcity of consumer goods demonstrated the failure of the economic system; an improvement in consumer supplies meant only that the leaders were attempting to placate a restive population and so maintain a firmer hold over them.

If communists in the United States played an important role struggling for the rights of workers, the poor, African-Americans, women, and others, this was only their guileful way of gathering support among disfranchised groups and gaining power for themselves. How one gained power by fighting for the rights of powerless groups was never explained. What we are dealing with is a nonfalsifiable orthodoxy, so assiduously marketed by the ruling interests that it affected people across the entire political spectrum."

Yes, and it also depends on priming with negative sentiment. The premise must always be, “X is a bad country” whenever X is mentioned. An entirely different lexicon is uses for liberal-designated enemy countries and most people don’t even recognize the ways in which they have been manipulated to think this way. The enemy has regimes, dictators, strong men, censorship, and are very dangerous and bloodthirsty. In contrast, liberals have governments, elected leaders, decisive action, combat misinformation, and only take careful “interventions” to preserve “freedom and democracy”. They even use these terms to describe fascists and even monarchies so long as they are currently on the “friends” list.

Many words are perfect synonyms except with positive or negative connotation and this is effective for manipulation and messaging. They literally have no additional meaning aside from the connotation but people read into it as if it is insightful. For a term X, it’s “X but it is bad” or “X but it is good” and someone using the term thinks they have reached a salient point just by using the term. Russia has foreign agents, we have NGOs supported by official democracy funding, and in fact if a country tries to force our smol bean NGOs to register they are an anti-democracy regime. When an enemy state restricts the press or creates its own networks, it’s censorship and propaganda against the free press. When our friends in the UK create and run the pro-genocide BBC and allow full corporate control of all other media, well that’s just freedom and democracy.