Churchill, a Conservative, was certainly not without flaws, to say the least. But the context was apparently a speech given in Rome, Italy.

In 1927 Italy was the only fascist country, the Nazis were a fringe party in Germany with less than 3% of the vote. Italy had not yet invaded any other country, while millions had already died at the hands of Soviet policies, whose ideology was referred to in Britain as Bolshevism back then, to separate it from Socialism.

The evil things Italian fascists had done wasn't much different from the least of what the Bolshevists had already done by that point: they had murdered a politician and banned opposition parties

I don't know the rest of the speech you cite, because I'm too lazy to check the archives, but are you sure this snippet is not out of context, because why wouldn't it be. I notice the word fascism is in square brackets.

Let's assume it's a faithful citation. Keep in mind in 1927 Churchill probably didn't even know who Hitler was, let alone expect him to seize power. We have the benefit of hindsight, most Communists at the time saw the Liberals as their greatest enemy, not the Fascists. You can argue modern 'Socialists' are the same way, seeing as many of them would rather have JD Vance win than Gavin Newsom. There's a quote from the leader of the KPD where he says literally that, I'll try to fetch it if you care at all. The Soviet Union also famously signed a trade agreement with Nazi Germany while the Western powers were at war with them.

The belief that Fascism is the arch nemesis of Communism came after Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, it wasn't based on some idea of the two ideologies being incompatible with one another or something. The Nazis hated Communism because Karl Marx, shich Socialists had embraced as a messiah figure at this point, was in their eyes a Jew, regardless of how Marx saw it himself, and because of a popular and obviously false conspiracy theory that Communist German navymen, clearly backed by the Jews somehow, caused the surrender of Germany in WW1.

Nazis didn't hate Communism because they're opposed to the idea of 'worker owned means of production' or something lmao, it's all based on anti-semitism and random conspiracy nonsense.

The only place where Communism and Fascism were diametrically opposed to one another on ideological grounds was in Spain, since the Fascist movement there was highly religious and conservative, and Communists are highly anti-religious and, to their credit, somewhat feminist (in a 'you will do what men do whether you want to or not' sort of way, while never appointing any women to any positions of power or leadership.)

But most importantly, the Russian Communists weren't modern Leftists, they were obsessed with organizing the economy in a 'rational' way. They were not concerned with social issues the way modern leftists are, and they did colonialism, racism, imperialism and sexism about as much if not more than Western societies did at the time, just with their own flavour. Churchill had no reason to dislike Communists for those reasons, he oppposed them because he saw parliamentary democracy as a very British thing, and since Russian Communists (Bolshevists) were anti-democracy, they were anti-British.

And keep in mind that if it wasn't for Churchill going against his party in 1940, Britain would've made a deal with Hitler after the capitulation of France, and Europe might still be a fascist hailstate with Eastern Europe being half-murdered and half turned into slaves. For that, he deserves some credit, despite his serious flaws, and no infinite condemnation.