History offers uncomfortable lessons. In the early years of World War II, two regimes that claimed to stand on opposite ideological poles — Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin — revealed striking similarities in practice. Total control of media. Suppression of dissent. Centralized authority. Militarized politics.
The Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939 was not born of shared values, but of shared interests. Only Hitler’s long-term ambition to conquer the Soviet Union ultimately shattered that uneasy alignment. But for a moment in history, the “extreme Right” and the “extreme Left” cooperated when it suited them — despite their supposedly irreconcilable ideologies.
That lesson matters today.
Modern “progressive” movements often present themselves as morally superior — defenders of justice, tolerance and democracy. At the same time, they increasingly support censorship, punish dissenting speech, weaponize institutions against political opponents, and dismiss national identity as inherently suspect. When ideological purity tests replace open debate, and when political opponents are treated as enemies of the state, the resemblance to authoritarian systems becomes difficult to ignore.
