The Soviet Union and Nazi Germany had one thing in common that the current capitalist system does not: competition. You are correct in pointing out that both tried to silence dissent: The Soviet Union by abolishing the church and Germany by co-opting it. Authoritarianism seeks to squelch all opposition so that its voice reigns supreme and the populace has no alternative to its narrative. While Nazi Germany was able to pretty much accomplish this, the Soviet Union did not. Post-war Soviets admired the West and sought out their music and their clothing. They mostly rejected their own country's propaganda but fell for ours.

The United States and the capitalist system that was established in the West has been able to accomplish what no other ideology has before: creating a global system. Rather than using overt force to advance their ideology, however, the consumer/capitalist system has used more subtle persuaders. They are not merely capable of controlling our behavior, they are capable of controlling our attitudes.

In other words, the Nazis and the Soviets sought to control their people, but none have been so successful as the United States' model. It has co-opted religion, as Nazi Germany did. It is also busily burying the past and all alternative ways of thinking that might lead anyone to question the consumer/capitalist system we now have. Whatever censorship The Soviet Union might have been guilty of, they stressed literacy and classical thinking. Your typical American is never taught the basics of logic, let alone the thoughts of the great thinkers. Say what you will about Marxism, you can't teach it to people incapable of abstract thought.

America has chosen the dystopia of Brave New World rather than 1984. Erich Fromm, a Jewish psychiatrist and sociologist who lived in and eventually fled from Nazi Germany, spent the better part of his life trying to understand and convey the warning to other nations that his experiences had taught. He warned that the U.S. would not accept the kind of authoritarian government that involved a strong man but would instead fall for what he called "anonymous authority". We would fall for what we thought was "public opinion". We just needed to feel that we were not straying too far from the herd. The problem is that the media and the propaganda is so strong and so all-pervasive that it is able to manipulate our perception of what public opinion really is.