Un mundo en llamas

The First World War, the Russian Civil War, the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, the Spanish Civil War, and the Second World War formed a bloody thirty-year historical period that destroyed the world as we knew it until then. In 1918, once the Great War was over, the victorious nations gathered at Versailles imposed severe financial compensation on Berlin that angered the Germans and sowed the seeds of a new world conflict that would break out twenty years later. The rise of fascism and Nazism in response to the communist threat and the dire economic consequences of the financial crash of 1929 also contributed to the outbreak of the Second World War, which was the last and most dramatic chapter of those three decades of massacres. The devastating social, political and economic scenario that caused the Great Depression is partly reminiscent of the one we suffer today in the West with the rise of populism and the constant threat of a devastating economic crisis that once again calls into question the value of democracies.