The Rise of Interwar Fascism

Amid the economic ruin and wounded national pride of the years after the First World War, Mussolini in Italy and then Hitler in Germany rode to power promising order, revival, and someone to blame. Both dismantled democracy from within, using its own freedoms to destroy it, and drove the world toward its deadliest war. It is the strongman-from-disorder pattern at its most catastrophic — the logic of Augustus and Napoleon, now armed with industry, propaganda, and the modern state.