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Anyone who listens to the wise, educated, and informed opinions of right-wing podcasts and revisionist historians, who possess the courage to dismiss all the collective judgment and scholarship of their peers, knows that it is an unquestioned fact that communism and fascism are two very similar branches of the same tree firmly rooted in the politics of the left.
What is surprising is that the people of 1941, who were living with the active and expanding aggressive wars of both the fascists of Italy and Germany, were so ill-informed as to make the same blundering error as the woke-infested historians of our days and see communists and fascists as somehow opposites, as left vs right. This shallow understanding of true political knowledge is perfectly displayed in what many scholars of cinema call the finest motion picture ever produced, Citizen Kane.
The film opens, after the on-screen death of Charles Foster Kane (Orson Welles), with a newsreel covering the man’s public life. (In the days before television, short films of the nation’s and world’s news played in theaters before the cartoons and movies.) To dramatize how the fictional character was seen so differently and in directly opposite natures by so many millions across the nation two clips are used, one from a banker and one from a labor leader. Here is that clip.
The filmmakers, the screenwriters, and the audience were far too ignorant to understand that communists and fascists were the very same thing, even as they watched the events of the Second World War unfold around them; they remained dumb to the reality of those events which only a few very special people today can perceive accurately.
Of course, it is not even remotely possible that these conservative posters and revisionist historians have their own self-motivated reasoning that draws them down this path of equating the two philosophies. They are far too noble, too objective to fall prey to such human frailties. This forgotten relationship between communism and fascism is not the product of conservatives trying in dire desperation to distance themselves from the mass murderous thugs that populate their history. The postings and tweets from real Americans sharing the depictions that make it plain that the images of the hammer and sickle and of the swastika are in fact completely equivalent are not convoluted rationalizations.
