Giving priority to ethics over aesthetics, Fabio Mauri has penetrated the West’s heart of darkness, analyzing the falsehoods of the ideologies that have characterized twentieth-century European history, revealing their pervasive mechanisms of cruelty. His rigorous inquiry focuses on the system of signs and symbols that Nazism and Fascism used to create consensus, seductively manipulating the masses. Investigating the forms—and even the beauty—through which totalitarian regimes have represented themselves, he asks us to personally participate in historical contradictions and to confront