I wouldn't worry about the communists, except for a few scattered holdouts, like N Korea and Cuba, they are pretty much on the dustbin of history (to borrow their own phrase). But fascism keeps coming back, always adapting to the situation with a new face and a new program. Old wine in new bottles.

I've just finished re-reading Shirer's "Rise and Fall of the Third Reich", and a useful companion to it, Flannery's "Assignment to Berlin". The latter is the diary of the broadcast journalist who took over Shirer's job when he was forced to leave in late 1940. Flannery himself managed to get out late in '41, just weeks before the USA entered the war. It gives a good account of day to day life in the Reich, and answers the question, at least for me, of how could that brilliant, cultured, gifted people have fallen for that brutal nonsense?

Communism would have collapsed eventually, from the weight of its own contradictions. It did in Russia as well as in China. Fascism, on the other hand, had to be taken down by force. That is the real difference between the two. Fascism was stronger because it actually gave people what they wanted.

I don't know if you recall my telling you, but I once asked a Cuban refugee, an opponent of both Castro and Batista, why he supported the Junta in Argentina (the one Margaret Thatcher dispatched). He said it was because they created a reign of terror that kept the communists from rising up and taking over the socialist and centrist opposition movements. When I asked him what possible difference could there be between a fascist and communist dictatorship. He answered,

"Both fascists and communists can kill you and torture you. But if you don't give the fascists any trouble, they'll leave you alone. The fascists will let you keep your business, let you keep your property, let you keep your money, and you can send your kids to whatever school you want."

The communists claim to be the dictatorship of the working class. But fascism is the dictatorship of the middle class. And unlike the Reds, they deliver. They have popular support because they rely not on giving the poor what they want, but by guaranteeing the middle class what they are afraid they are losing.

That's why I fear them the most.