Commies and Nazis and Americans

When I was a kid, going to grade school in the 1950's I have a vivid memory of one of my teachers telling the class the difference between America and those commies. My memory is vivid because, although I was a 5^th generation Texan, my mother had grown up in Nazi Germany and I always perked up when a teacher mentioned the Nazis, in this case she said that the Nazis had been just like the commies.

There were two ways to tell the difference between us and the godless commies -- one was that in communist countries you couldn't travel without being prepared to show identification (been in an airport in the US lately?). The second was that those commies encouraged you to inform on your family and neighbors, even children were encouraged to inform on their parents. Of course such evil could never take root in God-fearing America, she assured us.