War & Peace Quote by Galeazzo Ciano

Implacable is doing double duty here: it’s a diagnosis and an alibi. Ciano frames Germany’s choice for war as something beyond negotiation, beyond bargaining, beyond ordinary statecraft. The line “Even if they were given more than they ask” is meant to pre-empt the most embarrassing question for an allied or wavering Italy: Why not cut a deal and avoid catastrophe? By insisting concession is useless, he clears a moral lane for resistance or, just as plausibly in Ciano’s world, for fatalistic alignment with the aggressor under the logic that events can no longer be steered.

Then he reaches for metaphysics: “possessed by the demon of destruction.” That language doesn’t just condemn; it dehumanizes. The “demon” turns strategy into pathology, making German policy sound like a compulsion rather than a calculation. It’s rhetorically convenient because it strips Germans of rational grievances while also absolving everyone else of misreading them. If war is demon-driven, then diplomats didn’t fail; reality did.

The subtext is anxiety from inside the Axis orbit. Ciano, Mussolini’s son-in-law and foreign minister, often recorded unease about Hitler’s acceleration toward conflict and Italy’s inability to control the tempo. This sentence reads like an attempt to translate fear into certainty: Germany isn’t merely ambitious; it is uncontainable. It’s a warning, but also a self-protective story Italy can tell itself as it drifts toward a war it didn’t fully choose and can’t fully stop.