… 80 years ago today.

On August 23, 1939, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was signed. Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany were in alliance. Nazism and Communism, twin religions, united with each other.

Victor Davis Hanson writes at The Daily Signal:

Eighty years ago, on Aug. 23, 1939, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, formally known as the “Treaty of nonaggression between Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.”

The world was shocked—and terrified—by the agreement. Western democracies of the 1930s had counted on the huge resources of Communist Russia, and its hostility to the Nazis, to serve as a brake on Adolf Hitler’s Western ambitions.

Great Britain and the other Western European democracies had assumed that the Nazis would never invade them as long as a hostile Soviet Union threatened the German rear.

The incompatibility between communism and Nazism was considered by all to be existential—and permanent. That mutual hatred explained why dictators Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin both despised and feared each other.

Yet all at once, such illusions vanished with signing of the pact. Just seven days later, on Sept. 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland. World War II had begun.

After quickly absorbing most of Eastern Europe by either coercion or alliance, Hitler was convinced that he now had a safe rear. So he turned west in spring 1940 to overrun Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, and the Netherlands.

Hitler accomplished all that relatively easily, failing only to conquer Great Britain with an exhaustive bombing campaigning.

During all these Nazi conquests, a compliant Stalin shipped huge supplies of food and fuel for the German war effort against the West. Stalin cynically had hoped that Germany and the Western democracies would wear themselves out in a wasting war—similar to the four horrific years in the trenches of the Western Front during World War I.

Communism then easily would spread to the Atlantic amid the ruins of European capitalism. Unlike Czarist Russia in 1914, this time around the Soviets wanted to stay out of a German war. Instead, Stalin rearmed during the nonaggression pact with Hitler.

Stalin, of course, had no idea he had created a Nazi monster that would quickly devour all of Continental Europe—and turn to its rear to eye a now-isolated Soviet Union.

Much less did Stalin realize that the battle-hardened German war machine would soon overrun his country in a surprise attack beginning on June 22, 1941, a little less than two years after the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.

The nonaggression pact in a way had also ensured that a European war would soon turn into a global massacre that left roughly 65 million dead.

At the time of deal, imperial Japan was fighting the Soviet Union on the Manchurian-Mongolian border. The Japanese were de facto allies of Nazi Germany. They had assumed that Stalin’s fear of an aggressive Germany meant the Soviet Union would have to worry about a two-front war against both Germany and Japan.

But now, the surprise agreement stunned the Japanese, who saw it as a German betrayal. It left them alone against the superior forces of Russia’s eastern armies.

Japan quickly withdrew from its losing Russian war. In time it signed its own nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union, in April 1941—ironically, just months before Hitler’s planned Operation Barbarossa, the massive invasion of Russia.

Japan correctly concluded by the betrayal that Hitler’s Germany could not be trusted and deserved tit-for-tat duplicity. So Japan never joined Hitler’s surprise invasion of Russia. Instead, the Japanese turned their attention to the Pacific and especially the vulnerable British and American bases at Singapore, Burma, the Philippines—and Pearl Harbor.

In sum, the August 1939 nonaggression pact ensured the German attack against Great Britain and Western Europe. It also convinced Hitler that Russia was vulnerable, gullible and appeasing, and could be overrun in weeks following an invasion.

Finally, the deal ended all Japanese ideas of fighting the Soviet Union on the ground from the East in partnership with Nazi Germany invading from the West. Instead, Japan turned toward the vulnerable British and American eastern forces.

In sophisticated times, we sometimes forget that time-honored concepts like the balance of power and military deterrence—not good intentions and international peace organizations—alone keep the peace. When the pact destroyed fragile alliances and encouraged German adventurism, war was certain.

The final ironies? The Soviet double-cross of the Western democracies eventually ended up almost destroying Russia, which bore the brunt of an empowered Germany.

The redirection of Japanese war strategy to target America finally brought the United States into World War II, which ensured the destruction of Japan and Germany.

Add this all up, and in some sense World War II really started on Aug. 23, 1939, 80 years ago this summer.

August 23 of every year is Black Ribbon Day. It is the anniversary of the 1939 Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, whereby Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin conspired to divide large parts of eastern Europe between their twin tyrannies.

It is a day when the victims of Russian Communism and German Nazism are commemorated together.

Beyond a certain point, it becomes difficult to distinguish degrees of tyranny and cruelty. National Socialism and International Socialism are equally evil totalitarian systems. Both have  destroyed hundreds of millions of lives, wrecked them, wasted them, killed them. If the Nazi concentration camps weigh heavier than the Soviet gulags in the scales of judgment, the balance of evil is restored by the fact that the Soviet oppression lasted much longer then the Nazi persecutions: 70 years as against 12 years.

Rex Murphy writes (in part) at the National Post:

We have various darkling lodestars of modern inhumanity, the grimmest manifestation of the ferocity of evil … being the Hitlerian inferno. There is only a single qualification to be placed on that eruption: that it was unique, that it so completely fulfilled the concept of what is utterly and irredeemably detestable that … [it] is universally repellant. …

So can nothing be compared to Hitler’s Germany?

Yes. Stalin’s Russia, Mao’s China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia.

Anything that is happening now?

We can, alas, compare North Korea. Does its starvations and repressions not elicit recall of China’s gruesome Maoist Cultural Revolution? Or the drear miseries and state sadism of Stalin — the king of famine and the gulags? Who cannot still weep for Cambodia’s days under Pol Pot’s communist Khmer Rouge — an interlude of torture, death and determined savagery that earns a place in the same theatre of depravity as North Korea.

There are more. The communist islets of Eastern Europe during the Cold War. East Germany itself with its Stasi, a whole country spying on itself. That fragment of a bankrupt ideology we know as Cuba under the Castros. Che Guevara, a sapling in the same huge dark wood.

Yet throughout the Western world, Communism gets a pass!

The salient difference between all of these and the Hitlerian nightmare is that the latter was a plague that choked on itself: while communism — all its horrors confirmed with every repetition or variant of the model — is epidemical.

Communism has powers of replication that defy its own history. Despite the world of tears that follow its every instalment, it inexplicably does not excite in parts of the world — that must know better — a repulsion equivalent to that which greets Nazism.

That is a shameful state of affairs. And there is another ideology comparable to both Nazism and Communism, which, like Communism, enjoys a good press in the free world: Islam.

Nazism, Communism, Islam. All three would rule the world. All three are doctrinally murderous. All three, when in power, torture people of all ages. All three designate certain classes of people as worthy only of being enslaved and killed.

All three are equally foul.

(Hat-tip to Cogito for the Rex Murphy article which gives a heart-rending picture of North Korea. Read it all here.)

One of the villainous deceptions that the Left has gotten away with is its labelling of Nazism as “right-wing”.

In fact the Nazis were what they said they were: National Socialists.

For a year and ten months (August 23, 1939 t0 June 22, 1941), the period during which Stalin’s Russia worked with Hitler’s Germany to carve up Poland between them, the International Socialists refrained from criticizing the Nazis. For that period, Communism was not the “opposite” of Nazism – as the Left had claimed before the iniquitous Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was signed, and has claimed ever since it was broken by Germany’s suddenly attacking the Russians’ stolen piece of Poland before invading the Soviet Union itself.

The real political Right in the Western world is conservative. It is essentially individualist and forever profoundly, immovably against collectivism. That is why real conservatism is the real opposite of both Communism and Nazism.

But as we said, the Left has brought off its lie. Nazism is commonly regarded as being a “far-right” ideology. The mass media in general, all over the Western world, habitually label politicians who oppose the Islamization of the West “right-wing”. (See for example here and here and here.) They seldom say that a politician on the Left is “left-wing”. Whenever they say “right-wing” they know, and surely intend, the connotation of “Nazi” to hover round the label.

And when they say “far-right” they certainly mean “Nazi”.

This aura, this spell, put upon the Right has worked wonders for the Left everywhere, and especially now for the left-wing governments of western Europe. (All the governments of Europe, and the Dictatorship of the European Union, are actually left-wing, even though some ruling parties call themselves “conservative”.) Any organized opposition to their nihilistic policy of handing over their countries and the continent to the ruthless Mohammedan invaders who are slowly and steadily seizing power, has only to be called “right-wing” or “far-right” for millions of their voters to reject that party, that movement, that campaign, that leader. Because Nazism.

Yet the Mohammedan invaders – invited in, richly rewarded, protected by the state and the law courts from any penalty for crimes and even from criticism –  are in fact like the Nazis. Islam preaches and practices the same authoritarianism, the same intolerance, the same genocidal intention against the Jews, the same ambition to conquer and subjugate the rest of the world.

Islam enslaves women; punishes the victims of rape and acts of private consensual sexual freedom with death; kills gays (while many Islamic leaders and imams habitually practice homosexuality); treats Blacks – even Muslim Blacks – as inferiors; routinely tortures prisoners; denies evolution; imposes theocracy; hates liberty and dreads free speech.

Yet the international Left passionately supports it, promotes it, helps its accelerating advance.

And lies about it even to itself.

Even such atrocities as the bombing of spectators at a concert in Manchester, England, on May 22, 2027 –  which killed 22 and maimed at least 59, mostly young girls – do not move the hearts of the European, and at least nominally Christian, leaders.

Here’s one who is actually a devout Christian, talking through his hat. We quote German Finance Minister Responds to Manchester Attack: Christians Can Learn from Muslim Migrants,  by Virginia Hale, at (British) Breitbart:

The growing number of Muslims in Germany represents not a threat but a learning opportunity, said Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble, discussing Islam in the wake of the Manchester attack.

 “It is fanaticism, not only in Islam, that leads to terrible crimes,” he said, speaking on German public radio station Deutschlandfunk … when asked about the Islamist attack in which 22 mostly young people, including an eight-year-old girl, lost their lives.

“It is certainly a misunderstanding of religion when belief slips into fanaticism or, at worst, violence. The world’s great religions all preach the message that one must look upon others as their sisters and brothers, and that one must live with the other because man cannot live alone,” Schäuble told presenter Christiane Florin.

Wrong! Islam does not “preach the message that one must look upon others as their sisters and brothers”. It preaches that the infidel must be forced to convert to Islam, or else be killed, or – if spared – pay tribute to Muslim overlords. Schäuble had simply not troubled to inform himself about Islam at all. Deliberate ignorance of what Islam preaches is common to the members of the ruling class of western Europe.

On top of choosing ignorance, Herr Schäuble has the cheek to assert this:

“‘Islam is part of Germany’ is a sober, factual statement,” the minister remarked, commenting on sentiments voiced by Chancellor Angela Merkel on more than one occasion – which are not shared by the majority of Germans. “Anyone who denies this denies reality and is therefore not suited to being a politician, because politics begins with the confrontation of reality,” he added.

The country’s rapidly growing Muslim demographic presents an “opportunity” for “Christians, and all who live in Germany”, Schäuble stated, adding: “We can learn from them. Many human values are very strongly realised in Islam. Think of hospitality, and other things like, what is there … And also tolerance, I believe, for example.”

He hesitated. He didn’t know what “human values are very strongly realised in Islam”. He had heard of the stereotyped Arab’s hospitality, but he was hard put to think of anything else. He opted for “tolerance”. Sucked it out of his thumb. In fact, no ideology could be more intolerant than Islam.

Discussing his recently published book, Protestantism and Politics, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) minister said the church has no monopoly on truth and criticised voices within who “argue too much in secular matters from a point of religious conviction”.

So why does he believe what he purports to believe if he doesn’t believe it is the truth? Well, other “truths”, he implies, are no less true, even though they contradict the Christian Protestant “truths” that he believes in – sort of.

And here is comment on Schäuble’s bilge, from Jihad Watch, by Christine Douglass-Williams:

The German Finance Minister’s outrageous statements may be an attempt to absolve himself and his party of any responsibility for what Muslim migrants are bringing to his country. Germany spent more than $21,000,000,000 on refugees in 2016, as its Muslim migrant crisis outstripped state budgets. In addition, the number of migrant criminal suspects soared by more than 50% in 2016.

Germany has been brutalized by Muslim migrants, with an epidemic of sex assaults, attacks on churches, and a massive crime surge. 

Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble’s shameless propaganda in the face of this chaos is the all too common pose of leftist politicians as they continue to burden taxpayers, betray their own citizenry and tradition of democratic rule. They are astoundingly insensitive to victims of Muslim migrants.

In its insane passion for protecting the invited Mohammedan conquerors from the least criticism, the present government of Germany is acting like the Nazi and Communist regimes that ruled Germany in whole or in part in the last century.

An article by Chris Tomlinson at Breitbart illustrates this:

A computer scientist in Germany has been fined over 3,000 euros after he complained in 2015 that criminal asylum seekers were being let go by police after robbing supermarkets.

The 52-year-old German made his comments on August 22nd of 2015 at the height of the migrant crisis, Wochenblatt reports. He noted that asylum seekers were going into German supermarkets and helping themselves to items and instead of being arrested they were let go with warnings.

He wrote on Facebook: “I am in favour of the setting up of civil defences and the punishment of flogging, then they might feel at home when they get their skull smashed with a truncheon. Violence is probably the only thing that they understand, and we should try to make them understand us.”

After his post, the 52-year-old was arrested by police and taken to jail. He was then put on trial and accused of attacking asylum seekers’ human dignity, slandering them, and insulting them. He was eventually convicted and forced to pay a fine of 3,150 euros. …

The case is another in a series of convictions in Germany for either speaking out about the migrant crisis or against migrant crime. Last year German police raided 60 homes in an operation against “xenophobic” speech online.  Federal Criminal Police (BKA) president Holger Münch said the raids were to prevent “verbal radicalisation” online.

A couple in the German town of Vierkirchen were also sentenced for “hate speech” after they formed an anti-asylum seeker group on Facebook.

Peter M., one of the defendants, said after the conviction: “One can not even express a critical opinion of refugees without getting labelled as a Nazi. I wanted to create a discussion forum where you can speak your mind about refugees.”

More recently the German government has set its sights on the social media companies themselves. Last month the German government was slammed by social media giants after passing a law that would introduce heavy fines for sites who do not remove hate speech posts in a timely manner.

Why cannot the electorates of western Europe see that in trying to avoid a return to Nazism, they are inviting it to come back and rule them again?

This time for keeps.