Book Review: Autocracy, Inc: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World by Anne Applebaum
Anne Applebaum is the author of weighty historical tomes such as Gulag: A History and Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956, both of which I have read and deeply appreciated. Gulag, the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction in 2004, tells of conditions in the Soviet prison camps during the Cold War. In my review of it I wondered why someone would write about such traumas and why I was reading about them; the answers, of course, have to do with remembering and honoring the survivors and hopefully learning from the ordeals they went through. Iron Curtain deals with a different type of trauma dispensed by the Soviet Union: the subjugation and crushing of the peoples of Eastern Europe after World War II. The Cold War polarized the world into opposing camps. In Autocracy, Inc., Applebaum explains that the world is once again becoming increasingly polarized, but this time into democracies and autocracies, which she also refers to as kleptocracies. Those running autocratic governments are intent on holding onto their power and obtaining riches at any cost, and they use the authority of their positions coupled with the propaganda potential of social media to make this possible.
Applebaum is well qualified to offer this profound and well-researched warning. She has been studying the history of communism and worldwide politics for decades. She speaks several languages, including English, Polish, and Russian, and she resides in Poland, from which she often conducts research and interviews in the field.
Compared to some of her earlier tomes, Autocracy, Inc. is a small, fairly short book, an overview of present political realities and the historical circumstances that have led up to them. In short, it argues that the autocratic governments of the world such as Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, and others work together to destabilize the world’s democracies via propaganda and economic intrusion, and she explains in detail how this is accomplished through news networks, social media misinformation, surveillance technologies, corrupt corporations, and other means. Part of the danger, according to Applebaum, is indifference and lassitude in democratic countries, so that incursions by autocracies go unobserved and unchecked. In the end, she offers several possible means of combating global kleptocracy, but to be effective these involve the cooperation of democracies on a major scale. They include, for instance, complete transparency of international real estate transactions, the dismantling of large-scale money laundering operations, increased regulation of social media platforms, the reevaluation of global trade relationships, and a unified emphasis on freedom and the rule of law.
It is easy to become paranoid while reading this book, because it seems that those ruthlessly intent on exploiting the peoples, systems, and wealth of the world, due to their immorality and willingness to resort to any extremes to get their way, have the upper hand. Even in the United States there are powerful individuals and organizations intent upon imposing autocracy on the rest of us. However, there are solutions, as Applebaum points out, if only we care enough to implement them.
