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Strongman: The Rise of Five Dictators and the Fall of Democracy

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Strongman: The Rise of Five Dictators and the Fall of Democracy
by Kenneth C. Davis (Author)

Booktalk: What makes a country fall to a dictator? How do authoritarian leaders–strongmen–capable of killing millions acquire their power? How are they able to defeat the ideal of democracy? And what can we do to make sure it doesn’t happen again?

See how it happened in these profiles of the most notoriously ruthless dictators in history–Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Saddam Hussein–by examining the forces in these strongmen’s personal lives and historical periods that shaped the leaders they’d become.

Snippet: Learning from the experience of history requires recognizing the patterns of dictatorships–the Stongman’s Playbook. Each of these profiles as laid out a set of steps that go into the making of a dictatorship. This blueprint typically includes the following:

  • Extreme nationalism that calls for restoring a country’s past glory or greatness.
  • Placing blame in a single group–usually an ethnic or religious minority, or foreign threat.
  • Warning of an emergency, often nonexistent, or responding to severe economic distress that threatens the nation.
  • Calls for “law and order” and eliminating corruption.

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