“Did You do that?” - asked the German officer, pointing to “Guernica.” “No,” Picasso replied, “you did that!”

These books, published at the end of the nineteenth century, explained the mechanisms that allowed the tyrants of the past to seize power and became the “textbook” for the dictators of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. They show how ordinary people can easily be used to create a mindless mob ready to kill other people for no rational reason.

In The Escape from Freedom (1941), Fromm explores the reasons that make man "give up his freedom to dictators, turning himself into a small cog in the machine: not a free man, but a well-fed and well-dressed automaton."

This article by Denis Dragunsky was published on February 25, 2022, i.e. the day after his state launched a full-scale armed invasion of a neighboring sovereign country.