This is how it Starts

di Markus Raddatz (Autore)

Markus Raddatz, 2026

"My grandfather was a Berlin architect who served in the Wehrmacht. He came home and never spoke of it. I have spent a lifetime trying to understand why. This book is what I found." The names change. The playbook doesn't. For decades, the author worked as an engineer across the world's democracies. Again and again, in different places and different eras, he watched the same sequence unfold: a leader who claimed to speak for the real people, a press labeled as the enemy, institutions bent to serve one man's will, and ordinary citizens who told themselves it would pass. It never just passed. This Is How It Starts is not a polemic. It is a pattern-recognition guide — written by a German-born engineer who served during the Cold War, witnessed the great peace demonstrations of the early 1980s, and has spent a lifetime watching politics from the outside. Drawing on the history of the Third Reich, the psychology of propaganda, and two decades of observing democratic erosion from his home in Australia, he maps the mechanics that authoritarian movements rely on — and that comfortable, distracted populations consistently fail to see until it is too late. Inside you will find: — How the Big Lie works, and why intelligent people believe it — The psychology of cult leadership and why charisma becomes control — How scapegoating builds permission structures for cruelty — Why democracies erode gradually, and what the early signs look like — The danger of comfortable numbness — how prosperity makes free societies vulnerable — What resistance actually looks like, and what the evidence says works — Why the generation that remembers is the last line of defence, and what happens when it is gone Compact, honest, and written without jargon, This Is How It Starts sits alongside Timothy Snyder's On Tyranny and Levitsky and Ziblatt's How Democracies Die as a guide for citizens who sense that something is wrong but want to understand it more clearly — and do something about it. The question history keeps asking is not whether you would have been a fanatic. It is whether you would have kept your head down. Would you?

• Autore: Markus Raddatz
• Anno edizione: 2026
• Editore: Markus Raddatz
• Formato: EPUB3 con DRMFREE
• Lingua: Inglese
• Compatibilità: Tutti i dispositivi (eccetto Kindle)
• Layout: Reflowable
• EAN: 9798233349225