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“And they know nothing about the threat of fascism.”

During WWII, the allies had a problem with what to call the axis powers. It was decided to call them “fascists.” However, the word fascist doesn’t mean the same thing as “Nazism”.

Both are national socialist, which means extensive control of the economy combined with nominal private ownership of property. You could say that Russia today is fascist, and that China today combines fascism with communism. The difference between fascism and Nazism was that Nazism combined racism with fascism.

Italy under Mussolini wasn’t racist, but was (merely) fascist. Ditto fascism throughout the Catholic world (e.g., Spain and Argentina). Mussolini himself had a Jewish mistress; and, Italian Jews could be and many were members of Mussolini’s fascist party.

True, once Italy aligned with Hitler’s Germany, Italy drifted into anti-Semitism. The Holocaust Museum describes this drift. Even so, Italy never had the kind of death camps associated with Hitler’s Germany. Italian citizen Jews were barred from certain occupations, but weren’t sent to internment camps; and, foreign national Jews were removed to internment camps, where they “lived under bearable conditions: families stayed together and the camps provided schools, cultural activities, and social events.”

The Nazis made a really big mistake being racist in Ukraine (the Nazis were racist against Slavs and Africans as well as against Jews). If the Nazis could have somehow discovered that Ukrainians were partly Germanic or Nordic, as they did the with certain other peoples, they could have raised many more fighters and workers from among Ukrainians. As it is, they still were able to recruit two fighting divisions, and perhaps a total of 250,000 police and auxiliaries. Imagine if the Nazis had recruited a million Ukrainians!

But, fortunately in a sense, the Nazis were irretrievably racist and, furthermore, following Hitler’s book Mein Kampf (My Struggle), the Nazis were specifically out to steal the land and mineral resources of Ukraine and the Caucuses.

Today, Germany is a democratic country that engages in international trade, and doesn’t need to be self-sufficient in grain and mineral resources (Hitler’s policy of lebensraum). Germany can focus on its strengths, including in manufacturing, and import from the strengths of others. With this economic policy, it is easy to see other people not as enemies but as partners in trade and other relations, maybe even to become friends.

International trade is not the same as no borders. A country like Hungary, being the homeland of a distinct people, can keep its language and culture, while engaging in trade. We, the U.S., a great country, can regulate the number and qualifications of immigrants, so we keep our language and have our culture change slowly enough that our people aren’t threatened. Also, economically, that our system of social insurance isn’t swamped by poor immigrants who never paid-in.