World War II wasn’t a simple clash between “freedom” and “tyranny.” It was a global conflict where wildly different ideologies—Nazism, Fascism, Japanese ultranationalism, Stalinist communism, liberal democracy, and colonial conservatism—collided, coexisted, and sometimes even aligned.

In this episode, we dive into a comparative study of WWII’s political ideologies, exploring:

• How Nazi racial mysticism, Italian corporatism, and Japanese State Shintō differed but shared a rejection of liberal democracy.

• The contradictions of the Allies—fighting for liberty while maintaining segregation, empire, and repression.

• Why pragmatic wartime alliances like the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact or the US/UK partnership with the USSR were marriages of necessity, not shared vision.

• The fragile ideological bargains that won the war but unraveled into the Cold War.

By tracing the gap between ideology and practice, this episode reveals WWII not just as a fight for survival, but as a collision of worldviews whose aftershocks still shape our politics today.