The enemy of my enemy is my friend, or so the saying goes.
It is precisely this line of thinking that has seen people like Darryl Cooper, who Tucker Carlson recently interviewed on his show, align themselves with the Nazi regime—because the Nazis were enemies of the Soviets, and the Soviets are communists, and the modern Left is communist, therefore, the Nazis must not be that bad, because they opposed the progenitor of my enemy.
Except it’s this line of thinking that had the United States ally with the Soviets in the first place—because the Nazis were one of the most bloodthirsty and expansionist regimes in modern history, and the Soviets opposed them, therefore, the Soviets must not have been that bad.
The enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend. The enemy of my enemy can still be my enemy—just a different enemy. Just because the Soviets opposed the Nazis does not magically make them good people—and just because the Nazis opposed the Soviets does not also somehow magically make them good people.
Both the Soviets and the Nazis were horrible, evil regimes that murdered millions upon millions of people, ruined the lives of tens of millions more, and gobbled up territory like almost no other regimes in history.
In modern political parlance, we—that is, Americans—like to equate the Soviets and communists with the far left and the Nazis and fascists with the far right. Both of these equations are, ultimately, incorrect—because fascists and communists are not opposite ideological ideas, rather, they are warring siblings in the family of Marxism. Instead of opposite sides of a line, fascists and communists are more like the two very close ends of a horseshoe.
Nazis and Soviets—fascists and communists—are both Marxist. They both buy into what is known as the “material dialectic” of Marxism, which is itself an adaptation of the German philosopher Hegel’s historical dialectic. Put simply, both Marx and Hegel saw history inexorably advancing towards an “end” of history. Marx believed that this end of history would result in the abolition of private property, the holding of all things in common, and a global community where everyone was equal.
Communists, who can also be known as Marxist-Leninists, read Marx’s work and believed that the best way to achieve this community was to force a violent revolution now and stamp out the “bourgeoisie ideals” through government oppression and force. In the early days of the Soviet Union, believers in Marxism thought that the revolution would quickly spread and engulf rest of the world.
Obviously, it did not.
Fascists saw how ineffective the “global revolution” was and decided that the issue with communism was not the oppression and force or the dialectic or even the question of private property—no, for the fascists, what the communists did wrong was globalism.
That’s pretty much it. Replace communist globalism with some nationalist ethno-centrism and boom, you’ve got fascism.
Still tyrannical. Still the antithesis to liberty. Still anti-capitalist.
So, when it comes to opposing fascists—the communists are not our friends. When it comes to opposing communists, the fascists are not our friends. They’re both terrible, and they’re both an enemy of liberty—and thus our enemy.
This is a fact that’s not often taught because the communists sided with us to defeat the fascists, and we’ve bought into the idea that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. However, I had the opportunity to grow up with a grandmother who lived through both the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia as well as the subsequent governance under the communists. I asked her what the difference between living under the two was, and she told me this:
Both systems were brutal, they centralized power, and they had no respect for human life. They both plundered the lands. They both confiscated our guns. They both punished you if you failed to show your support for the government. They both butchered history and replaced it with their own version of events.
If I had to say a difference, I would say that the Nazis were louder. Arrests were loud affairs, full of pomp, loud sirens, and trucks packed with well-armed soldiers. The Communists arrested more people, but they did so at 3 a.m. and removed their shoes so as not to wake the neighbors. The Nazis demoralized you with arrests, under the Communists, people just disappeared.
But they both killed millions, and because the Communists were around for three generations, they killed hundreds of millions more.
The enemy of my enemy is not my friend, and the real takeaway from the past century of history is that neither communists nor fascists are friends to freedom, and wherever we see that totalitarian bent creeping in, we should cast it out with utmost haste.