Hollywood does something far more dangerous with Stalin, Mao and Lenin, compared with Hitler.

They do not make movies about them, but there’s plenty of movies and series where the characters will refer to communism as evil, usually with an off-hand matter-of-fact statement, often outright equating communist leaders (especially Stalin) to the story’s villain or to other evil people in history (e.g. Hitler), and then quickly move on to whatever else is going on in the film. This is extremely prevalent, especially when the film revolves around espionage, international intrigues, political dramas, science fiction, historical films, etc.

This is way more dangerous than films dedicated to them (and the liberal propaganda against them), because the audience is focused on something else. Their defenses are down, and propaganda seeps in. The confidence with which such statements are made, from characters that the audience usually has spent the last hour or so empathizing with, reinforces the acceptance of the audience. And these occurrences are often enough, that over time, the audience takes it for granted that communism is evil, that Stalin, Mao and Lenin killed way more people than Hitler and that they should treat communism as a joke.

On the other hand, western movies about Nazi attrocities are not made to criticize the Nazis as such. It’s actually very rare to see the Nazi ideology being connected to the attrocities being committed. Almost universally, one can see that the Nazi characters are evil, but not that they are evil because they are Nazis. Only that they are sadistic, abusive psychopaths. Usually, there’s going to be at least one Nazi/German character that is shown to be a somewhat decent human, who either objects to the attrocities, or accepts them as a necessary step to saving Germany, or is outright oblivious of any attrocities and is just misguided. Film-makers might intend to show that even good people can fall for Nazism, but at least some of the audience are likely to take it that Nazism isn’t necessarily that bad. It just attracted the wrong kind of people who gave Nazism a bad name.

Doubly so, when western movies focus on Western European battles, where Germans (and Italians when they appear) are shown to be tragically heroic, fighting for the other men in their units, and eagerly missing their families back home. It’s extremely rare to show major German characters in such movies participating in attrocities. If any attrocities are performed, they are usually perpetrated by unnamed characters who often appear only to perform the attrocity and then go away, while our heroic Germans are dumbfounded and sad.

There’s also the matter for how Hitler or high-ranking Nazis are portrayed. Often as outright crazy or delusional, almost always as bubbling fools but somehow charismatic at the same time. The film Downfall is especially guilty here, as it often tries to present Hitler in a sympathetic light, a tragic figure that got swept away by hubris.

All of this might not be done intentionally. Film-makers might be going in with the best of intentions and are just trying to balance making a good film, with presenting an anti-fascist message, their own liberalism, the studio’s desire for money, and political pressures from various sides.

However, the result of this contrasting presentation leads to a simple sub-conscious conclusion: Communism should be dismissed outright as evil, inhuman and foolish. No need to talk about it. No need to examine it. There’s definitely no good role models to look at. Every communist is as evil as the dictator Stalin. Fascism though, requires thought and discussion. Every facet of fascism should be examined. Sometimes good people become fascists after all. Maybe fascism isn’t so bad, it’s just the people who represented it made mistakes or used it for their own personal villainy. We shouldn’t assume that just because someone is a fascist they are inhuman, or even bad people.