Another example of media alchemy turning leftist evil into “fascism.”
Posted by Ed Folsom, April 6, 2026.
How can an Associated Press movie review about Soviet Russia in 1937, during the height of Stalin’s great terror, not use the words communism or socialism even once? How can it instead suggest that a cinematic story about the Soviet Communist Party in practice depicts “fascism?” It reflects the left-centric viewpoint of our major news outlets, which operate as a monolith, presenting all leftist political evils as creatures somehow not of the political left but of the political right.
At first glance, Jake Coyle’s Associated Press (AP) review of Ukrainian film, Two Prosecutors, looked interesting. It’s a tough read though, as if English might be a little unfamiliar to Coyle. The review tells us that Two Prosecutors is the story of a freshly-minted Russian prosecutor exposed to the workings of Stalin’s state terror apparatus during the Great Purge (a/k/a the Great Terror).
For those who might not know, Joseph Stalin was the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in 1937. He was pursuing a project that he described as building “socialism in one country” (the USSR).
As part of that effort, Stalin set in motion a series of purges of government officials, show trials, summary executions, and sentences to forced labor in the Soviet gulag system. Estimates place the number of people executed between 700,000 and 1.2 million, and the number of those sentenced to forced labor at 1.5 to 1.7 million during this period. The murdered and imprisoned were accused of being “wreckers” (of the great Soviet project of building socialism in one country), and of being “fascist” or in league with “fascists.”
Even Stalin’s fellow Bolshevik revolutionary Leon Trotsky was accused of being a fascist in league with Hitler’s National Socialist German Worker’s Party. A Soviet henchman later caught up to Trotsky in 1940, in Mexico, and buried an ice axe in his head.
So how can anyone write a review of a movie about the Great Terror and not once use the words communist, communism, socialist, or socialism? How — when the Communist Party that imprisoned and murdered the victims of the Great Terror, itself, accused its victims of being fascists — could the movie reviewer decide to tell us, “‘Two Prosecutors’ has the neatness and timelessness of a parable, one that…could resonate in any era where the naively courageous challenge fascism.”
How does a movie about an episode of the Communist Party building socialism in the Soviet Union become a parable about naively courageous people challenging fascism. If it’s a parable of anything, how is it not a parable about the naively courageous challenging communists building socialism, or challenging socialism in practice?
It becomes that way through leftist alchemy, through the media’s commitment to always presenting the political left as good and the political right as evil. Although we are always told that socialism and communism are on the political left and fascism is on the political right, the media still faithfully tell us that the evil deeds of socialists and communists are fascist because they are evil.
In this view, because the political left is good, any evil done in this world cannot be the fault of the political left, because only the political right is evil. All evil must be fascist, even when it is in fact committed by communists building socialism.
By this token, the starvation caused by Mao’s forced collectivization campaign, The Great Leap Forward, and the murder and forced labor under Mao’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, must similarly have been fascist. The story of its victims must stand as a timeless parable of naively courageous people challenging fascism.
The same must be true for the collectivization campaign of the Communist party of Democratic Kampuchea, the Khmer Rouge. It was evil, so it must be fascist. It cannot be yet another murderous example of the evil inherent in the acts of building socialism, because socialism is of the political left, which is good.
The point of this media nonsense is to saturate the public square with the left=good, right=evil lie to make it part of what Vaclav Havel called “the panorama of everyday life.” It is to grease the skids for one more full-steam effort to “build socialism,” this time in America.
A.P. reporter Jake Coyle has done another bit for the leftist panorama, teaching that the Great Terror episode of socialist evil was fascism. After all, Stalin himself blamed the bad stuff that happened during the Great Terror on fascists, so why not the Associated Press too? Fellow travelers will be fellow travelers.
Related: https://edfolsomlaw.com/2025/02/the-ultra-low-moral-foundation-of-the-fascism-fascist-epithet/
