Chapter 20, 21

I feel like it wasn't until reading this week that I really understood, or at least bothered to think about, the difference between fascism and communism.  Fascism had been so quickly glossed over in school growing up that all I truly remember about it are the names of a couple of dictators, and that it was inherently un-american.  Reading about how fascism came about, and how different it is than communism, made me stop and feel embarrassed about how little I knew about the whole ideology.  We maintain the American hero narrative around WWII, and study the Holocaust, but rarely do we talk about how global the recession was after the Great War, and how other countries perceived their rise to prominence.  We take for granted our American position as world leader, as less than a century ago it was quite the opposite.  We only entered wars when it was in our best interest, and not to spread democracy in areas ruled unjustly.  The isolationism after WWI isn't mentioned as much as the "New Deal" and cultural icons of the time.  Only in recent years have I been exposed to movies and textbooks that take up the Japanese narrative of this portion of history, and it is eye opening.  Of course the treatment of women is always of issue to me as well.  How they can be valued, contributing members of a wartime economy, only to be shoved back in the kitchen upon the men's return, and treated so horribly as the spoils of war- a notion we attribute to ancient or medieval times, but less in our modern era.  Another interesting aspect of the history of communism is all that it was built up to be, and the ideal to which so many people still hold it, as a work in progress and the means to a utopian end, when the reality has been so oppressive and dismal.  Is it a matter of the geographic places that it has been tried with the people in question?  Would communism have fared better somewhere else at another time?  It's amazing that so much pain, destruction and division could have resulted from Enlightened ways of approaching modern times.