Something else occurred to me this morning. Lets say that I’m a Moor and I’m sitting in Spain. I’m looking out across the continent of Europe and considering France and England. What would I see? Well both have a king. Both are populated by smelly illiterate Christians. Both pay homage to Rome.

In short, the similarities would far outweigh the differences. The French and the English on the other hand, would declare themselves to be very different from each other and would take offense at the idea that they were essentially the same. Tell an Englishman and a Scot that they are the same and the reaction will be even more violent.

When two groups are at odds, and the differences between them are very small, then the members of each group will seize upon whatever minor distinctions there are in order to define themselves as opposites. This is standard ingroup/outgroup behavior.

So when someone gets upset when Communism and Fascism are placed together ideologically, what they are really saying is that they are either a Fascist or a Communist, usually the latter.

Both of these ideologies are deeply evil. Both are founded, in part, on the idea that the evils of the world are due to the existence of undesirable groups of people who must be killed. Fascism tends to define these groups by ethnicity or nationality, while Communism tends to define them economically, except of course when they don’t - just ask the Ukrainians and the Jews. Fascist states and communist states are both totalitarian dictatorships in which the party elites are indistinguishable from sociopathic mafiosos and the common people are made to suffer, starve, and are randomly chosen to be hauled off to death camps at the whim of apparatchiks.

The only way in which these two differ is in the propaganda used to justify the identical crimes that each commits. Judging an evil regime that is inspired by an evil ideology based on its propaganda is the very definition of what it means to be a useful idiot.