The Second World War was fought with troops from all continents and produced seventy million dead, the vast majority of whom were civilians, thousands of destroyed cities and towns, immeasurable human and material losses in the context of systemic cruelty never seen before. That fire was the most devastating event in human history.

The road to war may begin with a fratricidal struggle in Spain, which confronts the Republic with a military uprising and suffers, due to the indifference of Western governments, the use of German and Italian weapons that the putschists used to fight against the Republicans, but also to attack the defenseless population. This was the factual background of the cooperation agreement signed by Hitler and Mussolini, who a year and a half later turned it into a military pact, sealing the fate of Italy and dragging it into an imminent world war.

In 1938, Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia, and Austria was also annexed after popular consultation. A few months later, Italy invades Albania after a difficult and ridiculous war of conquest against Ethiopia, with the illusion of restoring the old Roman Empire.

Much thought was given to the tolerance of Britain and its ally France towards the aggression of the totalitarian powers. At the time, London and Paris had the most powerful armies in the world, but they had no will to curb expansionism early. The very last episode of German expansion before the world conflict was the invasion of Poland after the pact signed with the Soviet Union, a country that also deployed its army to invade Poland and then Finland to recapture independent territories that had previously belonged to Imperial Russia.

The disaster was probably not inexorable. Territorial annexations by force, rearmament policies, plebiscites with geopolitical consequences, but above all indifference to realities that were considered foreign or distant, made hell possible.

Nine decades later, the possibility that the last days of the world are a tangible scenario calls for looking to the past with concern for the future, because a new world war, if it were to happen, would be fought in all corners of the world, and because there are too many similarities in the images and discourses with those of the last century around the perception of insecurity and the ambitions of various governments regarding the war against Ukraine.

The last days of Europe is a book, a documentary novel, by the Neapolitan writer Antonio Scudari that describes the years before the European war and, in particular, how Mussolini’s arrogance, machismo and power fantasies, inflated by the adulation of the Italian fascist hierarchy, entangle him in delusions of grandeur that lead him to failure, his own destruction and death, as well as millions of other human beings. (OR)