I've seen a few complaints lately about people saying "What about Antifa" when the subject of the evils of neo-Nazis comes up... I get it, I really do. The optics of saying "What about ___" *sort of suggests a defense of Nazis, even though it shouldn't. *

Unfortunately, we live in a world where there are a lot of truly evil authoritarian ideologies with different labels.

But the reason I'm saying "what about" a lot right now is because I actually think damn near everyone, everywhere in the world already knows that Nazis suck.

They have only been a staple villain in American film & television for 6 decades.

We've all had a chance to dive deep into the concentration camps, the horrifying and grotesque human experimentation, the cold-blooded murders, the lampshades made of skin, the gas chambers, and the work camps. We've got major societal heroes like Oskar Schindler, Anne Frank, and the entirety of the WWII generation of soldiers -- who we literally call "the greatest generation" for beating Nazis and saving Europe.

Nazis are now, as they have been for a very long time, seen by nearly 100% of the US population as the worst of the worst in human history -- notwithstanding the couple hundred assholes in this country of 325,000,000 people who think they're cool (and lose their jobs and friends for even being remotely affiliated).

However.... At the same time, **I fear that American education on the evils of Communism is utter garbage. **

It's a problem to the point where over the last several weeks alone, I've encountered a number of actual self-described Communists, including one this morning who defended the Antifa guy stabbing a young man for nothing more than his haircut ("Nazis should fear being stabbed", and "Probably not going to be a great time to get the Hitler youth haircut in the US.")...

I recently had a long conversation where I introduced a really decent (politically liberal) guy to the utter horrors of the Soviet Gulags and he was completely blown away that he'd never even heard most of those stories; I've met countless people who don't have the slightest clue that Mussolini was a Communist and editor of the Italian Socialist Party's newsletter and built his ideas of Fascism around many of the same core principles and end-goals, while mainly making changes to tactics -- a lot of those people have even gotten mad at even the suggestion that Fascism and Socialism are connected...

And I've met a ton of people who have absolutely no clue about the historical context of Antifa, including the fact that the entire premise behind the organization was always an explicitly violent wing of Stalinist agitators vying for authoritarian control over Italy and Germany, but who believe that Antifa is totally cool because hey're supposedly "anti-fascist" and nobody who describes themselves as such could be bad.

Few people I meet even realize that between 1939 and 1941, Hitler & Stalin were allies with the USSR providing tons of material support to Germany as it was gearing up to roll their tanks and troops throughout Europe and that their pact only ended when Hitler tried to invade Russia.

**There are almost no movies about the evils of Communism. **There's little cultural interest in it beyond presenting Soviets as a very generic villain. Even in the cases where such movies exist (ie. Enemy at the Gates, Crimson Tide, Red Dawn), there's nothing that even comes close to showing the true horror of what Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, etc. were doing to their people in the way we have films that show the horrors of Krystalnacht and the Holocaust and the horrors of being a soldier in WWII.

There's no Spielberg epic. No Tarantino cathartic gorefest. No Michael Bay schlock. No Zemeckis screwball comedy.

Hell, to the contrary, there are a bunch of movies lionizing heroes of Communist regimes like Che Guevara (ie. Motorcycle Diaries, Che).

Even movies like MASH (the film and TV show), which are ostensibly set around an anti-Communist war spend basically no time digging into what's wrong with Communism and instead tend to focus on the horrors of war itself... Just like virtually all the Vietnam War movies do.

Where's the horror of Communism present in Full Metal Jacket, Apocalypse Now, Platoon, or even Good Morning, Vietnam?

Where's the History Channel marathons covering the utter destruction of Russia, China, and the tons of other nations that those countries' governments terrorized?

**You won't find it. **

And I think Americans are much poorer in their knowledge and concern for that history as a result.

In fact, over the course of my whole life, I've met hundreds of people who believe themselves to be socialists, and dozens who actually consider themselves to be communists. I've directly talked to people -- including this very morning -- who claim that the Holodomor and the other mass murders & genocides committed by Communist regimes is fake.

And yet I have actually NEVER personally met a single person who even denies the Nazi Holocaust happened, let alone who identifies positively as a Nazi.

Not one.. At least not one that would admit it to me.

Now, I know those people exist... They're certainly out there, and some of them were willing to go on camera in the last few weeks (including one guy who I've known about for a long time but never personally met, and who has always been widely believed to be garbage by everyone I know who did meet him).

And of course, the result of those idiots going on camera has uniformly been to engender the greatest possible contempt from the American people at large and many of them now have warrants out for their arrests, many have lost their jobs, many seen their website hosts boot them from the internet.

That, too, should show you that these people aren't riding a wave of widespread popularity.

As most of my friends would surely attest, I've cultivated an incredibly diverse and often no-holds-barred Facebook presence over the years. My page is generally known for a pretty wide range of debate. The downside to this openness has always been that my threads tend to attract some of the craziest people out there from across the political spectrum and many points well off the grid.

Yet... In the last 10 years, I've met tons of self-described Communists, literally hundreds of "Socialists" and sympathizers of socialism...

**And zero self-described Nazis. **

Zero.

That's why I say "What about Antifa". I don't think most people in America actually knows what they stand for or why they're dangerous, but I'm pretty sure everybody's basically clear on how bad Nazis are.