Overview

In a world that still mistakes ceremony for strength, this book shows how a regime rehearsed conquest in plain sight-and how a watching continent learned to look away. It takes you inside the authoritarian playbook, from the first choreographed parade to the first gas canister dropped over the highlands. You will see how the invasion of Ethiopia turned into a live laboratory where propaganda, logistics, and law-evasion were perfected-and how those lessons travelled to the Rome-Berlin Axis and beyond. For readers of history who want more than dates, and for citizens who need tools, it unpacks how propaganda and spectacle can outrun rules, how League of Nations sanctions faltered by design, and how early resolve can still change the calculus of would-be aggressors. - Understand the mechanics of international law and aggression when language is used to blur lines - Read a crisp case study of colonial war that exposes the costs behind the pageantry Learn a usable framework for spotting the next ""rehearsal"" before it scales For students, journalists, policymakers, and attentive general readers, this is a hard, clarifying look at the prelude to World War II-and a field guide to preventing the next one. If you have ever wondered how democracies lose time, and how autocrats manufacture inevitability, you will find here a map, a mirror, and questions you can put to work now.

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9789390349241

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Luca Romano writes about power, memory, and the fragile line between ceremony and violence. Raised among the archives and piazzas of Italy's twentieth century, he traces how ideas turn into institutions-and how institutions learn to look away. His work moves between the committee rooms of Geneva and the mountain passes of East Africa, attentive to the lives on both sides of the rifle. He believes history is a grammar of responsibility: if we learn its syntax, we need not repeat its sentences. When not following paper trails, he walks old rail lines and reads newspapers a century late, listening for the tones that once made the unacceptable sound reasonable.

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