It is interesting that you can travel to Russia - the old Soviet Union - and take a tour of Stalin's dacha, complete with pictures of him on the wall and even dummies of him dressed like him sitting at the desk where he no doubt signed the execution orders of countless victims. You can walk past the embalmed corpse of Lenin - founder of the most murderous regime in modern times - and pay your respects. The Soviet star - symbol of that regime - is still a common sight in Russia. It is still displayed on Russian military aircraft, in fact.
But you'll be arrested - in Germany - if you attend a model RC airplane show with your Messerschmitt BF109 displaying the period-correct symbol of national socialist Germany on its vertical stabilizer. The former headquarters of Reichsmarschall Goering's Luftwaffe still exists, but there is no indication it ever was the headquarters of Reichsmarschall Goering's Luftwaffe. The eagles holding swastikas on the plinths in front are long gone - and there are no pictures of Der Dicke - the Fat One - hanging on the wall, let alone effigies of him dressed in one of his gaudy uniforms.
It is absolutely verboten, of course, to display a portrait of you-know-who and it is inconceivable to even imagine that - had his body survived the war - you'd be able to walk past it encased in glass and guarded by government soldiers.
This is interesting when you ask why this is.
Why is it apparently ok to display the symbols of communism but not those of national socialism? Why is it ok to display the body of the founder of the communist Soviet state - and effigies of the man who was responsible for the mass murder of tens of millions (rather than six million) but it is absolutely verboten to so much as paint the historically correct national emblem on a model airplane?
Let lone the real thing.
Well, the Soviet Union won the war, of course. But it is deeper than that. The real reason why is that communism won.
It is still winning.
A communist in everything but name is running for president. Communist ideas are politely entertained - even though we have the knowledge (and the body count) as regards where those ideas inevitably lead.
National socialism - it is important to say it out loud and to spell it out loud rather than to say and use the acronym that obscures the socialism - was an authoritarian collectivist system very much in practice similar to communism in that the individual was considered a widget, the collective everything. In both cases, the party ran things; "the people" ran nothing. The leader ran it all.
But communism is ok. Politically acceptable. Including its various avatars. National socialism isn't.
That's interesting.
You can safely wear a Che Guevara T shirt or even a Marx T shirt on any college campus in the United States. But you take your life in your hands if you wear a T shirt with you-know-who's face on it.
This is not an attempt to say national socialism is ok. It is not. Like communism - which is the more aggressive etiolation of socialism - it is system that is based upon rigid hierarchies kept in place by force. Either will kill you - the individual - if you dare to assert yourself as an individual. Your individual existence means nothing and counts for nothing except insofar as it serves the collective, which amounts to serving the interests of the minority that controls it. The party appartchiks and - ultimately - the leader.
Communists like to pretend their dictatorships are of "the proletariat." But it was Lenin - then Stalin - who ran things as absolutely as did you-know-who.
So, both forms of the same thing are at least equally loathsome because both are equally murderous - including literally but also figuratively, as of the human individual. But communism is ok because they say it is ok. Rather, they insist it is ok. While - at the same time - insisting its nationalist (rather than internationalist) iteration is very much not ok.
This is very interesting.
They hold positions in academia and the media and - of course - government, where they are able to aid and abet communism while at the same time excoriating national socialism. It is schizoid. Or - perhaps more accurately - it is self-interested. A tenet of communism is that anything goes when it comes to advancing communism. Orwell - better than any other writer - dissected this habit of mind in his novel, 1984.
For a communist, nothing matters more than communism, including objective reality. If the party says 2+2=5 rather than four, then it does equal five. Just as a man who says he is a woman is a woman. This is not feigned. It is taken as literally true, in a fanatic way, because it is what the party says it is (per Orwell).
Communism persists because it never went away. And it never went away because it is still regarded as ok. More finely, because it is ok to regard it as ok. Whereas it is very much not ok to regard its dark twin as even remotely ok.
A pithy quote attributed to the 18th century French philosopher François-Marie Arouet - better-known by his pen name, Voltaire - says that "To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize."
As it turns out, Voltaire didn't say that. An admirer of national socialism by the name of Kevin Alfred Strom apparently did. Strom wasn't a nice man but that is entirely beside the point.
His statement is born out by the dissonant facts - and that's a very interesting thing, isn't it?