Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World

by Anne Applebaum

Modern autocrats differ in many ways from their twentieth-century predecessors. But the heirs, successors, and imitators of these older leaders and thinkers, however varied their ideologies, do have a common enemy. That enemy is us. To be more precise, that enemy is the democratic world, “the West,” NATO, the European Union, their own, internal democratic opponents, and the liberal ideas that inspire all of them. These include the notion that the law is a neutral force, not subject to the whims of politics; that courts and judges should be independent; that political opposition is legitimate; that the rights to speech and assembly can be guaranteed; and that there can be independent journalists and writers and thinkers who are capable of being critical of the ruling party or leader while at the same time remaining loyal to the state.

Good summary

These acts were not collateral damage or accidental side effects of the war. They were part of a conscious plan to undermine the network of ideas, rules, and treaties that had been built into international law since 1945, to destroy the European order created after 1989, and, most important, to damage the influence and reputation of the United States and its democratic allies. “This is not about Ukraine at all, but the world order,”

Russian invasion of Ukraine

By the spring of 2023, Russian officials had become more ambitious. They began to discuss the creation of a Eurasian digital currency, perhaps based on blockchain technology, to replace the dollar and diminish American economic influence around the world.

Interesting

Richard Nixon always believed that the Soviet Union’s true purpose in trading and talking with Brandt and Bahr was, as Nixon put it, “to detach Germany from NATO.” Jimmy Carter, who wanted to prioritize the promotion of human rights over trade, disliked Ostpolitik so much that he imposed a boycott on the sale of some U.S. pipeline technology to Germany

“From the beginning, Putin and his circle sought to create an authoritarian regime ruled by a close-knit cabal…who used democracy for decoration rather than direction.”

In his first decade in office, he did the same, using the slogans of democracy, even as he built what eventually became a dictatorship.

The semblance of choice was carefully preserved through the emergence of regime-sanctioned opponents who never challenged the status quo. Meanwhile, genuine opponents of the Kremlin were beaten up

What is equally difficult for the residents of small English villages and ailing American factory towns to understand is that the new clients, new neighbors, or new landlords moving money into their communities might be doing so because of their connections to a state that practices repression and political violence. To stay in power, modern autocrats need to be able to take money and hide it without being bothered by political institutions that encourage transparency, accountability, or public debate. The money, in turn, helps them shore up the instruments of repression. That, along with his historical fever dreams, is why Putin so hated Ukrainian democracy activism, and why he was so enraged by the 2014 Ukrainian revolution: if a similar movement ever won power in Russia, he would be the first to go to jail.

Real estate to hide money

The globalization of finance, the plethora of hiding places, and the benign tolerance that democracies have shown for foreign graft now give autocrats opportunities that few could have imagined a couple of decades ago.

he made a different political calculation, one designed not to make his country prosperous but to keep himself permanently in power. He was betting that corrupt officials would prove more malleable than clean ones, and he was right.

Chavez using corrupt officials to keep him in power

In the years that followed, cronies of Chávez would support the president’s drive to eliminate all forms of accountability and transparency, both because doing so helped them stay in power and because it protected them from scrutiny. Like Putin, Chávez slowly broke democratic institutions in Venezuela—the press, the courts, the civil service, various ombudsmen—even while proclaiming his belief in democracy.

His supporters went along with that too. Over time, the state itself began to act like a criminal syndicate, a parasite stripping resources off its host. State employees, accomplices in this process, adopted a policy of omertà: say nothing about anything. S...

Learning from the example of Putin’s campaign to convince the world that he believed in democracy, Chávez persuaded people inside and outside the country that his Bolivarian revolution was good for ordinary people, and especially good for the poor.

distributing food rations to their supporters and punishing opponents by taking food rations away. Starvation and malnutrition, the Cubans had learned, could be political tools too.

Uighurs have been required to install “nanny apps” on their phones, which constantly search for “ideological viruses,” including Koranic verses and religious references as well as suspicious statements in all forms of correspondence. The apps can monitor purchases of digital books and track an individual’s location, sending the information back to police.

Fuck!

They can also pick up unusual behavior: anyone who downloads a virtual private network, anyone who stays off-line altogether, and anyone whose home uses too much electricity (which could be evidence of a secret houseguest) can arouse suspicion. Voice-recognition technology and even DNA swabs are used to monitor where Uighurs walk, drive, and shop.

Fuck fuck!

If people are naturally drawn to the image of human rights, to the language of democracy, to the dream of freedom, then those ideas have to be poisoned. That requires not just surveillance, and not merely a political system that defends against liberal ideas. It also requires an offensive plan, a narrative that damages the idea of democracy, wherever it is being used, anywhere in the world.

This explains partly why they want to subvert ddmocracies abroad.

A study of Russian television from 2014 to 2017 found that negative news about Europe appeared on the three main Russian channels, all state controlled, an average of eighteen times a day. Some of the stories were obviously invented (European governments are stealing children from straight families and giving them to gay couples!), but even true stories were cherry-picked to support the idea that daily life in Europe is frightening and chaotic, that Europeans are weak and immoral, and that the European Union is either dictatorial and interventionist or, alternatively, about to fall apart. The goal is clear: to prevent Russians from identifying with Europe, as Russians once did.

Fox News of Russia

having convinced some naive conservatives that Russia is a “white Christian state.” In reality, Russia has very low church attendance, legal abortion, and a multiethnic population containing millions of Muslim citizens. The autonomous region of Chechnya, which is part of the Russian Federation, is governed in part by elements of sharia law and has arrested and killed gay men in the name of Islamic purity. The Russian state harasses and represses many forms of religion outside the state-sanctioned Russian Orthodox Church, including evangelical Protestants.

Reality check for Russia fans in Republican America

This manipulation of the strong emotions about gay rights and feminism has been widely copied throughout the autocratic world. Yoweri Museveni, president of Uganda for more than three decades, also passed an “anti-homosexuality” bill in 2014, instituting a life sentence for gay couples who marry and criminalizing the “promotion” of a homosexual lifestyle.

Common to attack gays and feminists

Viktor Orbán, the prime minister of Hungary, an illiberal hybrid state, also ducks discussion of Hungarian corruption by hiding behind a culture war.

Other autocrats monopolize national conversations by accruing as much attention as possible for themselves.

Trump made use of social media, not television, to dominate the conversation. Both men also lied repeatedly, and blatantly, as do other modern dictators.

the Syrian regime tells lies so ludicrous that no one could possibly believe them, for example that Syria, at the height of the civil war, was an excellent tourist destination.

to demonstrate the power of the people who were spinning the stories. Sometimes the point isn’t to make people believe a lie;...

This tactic, the so-called “fire hose of falsehoods” produces not outrage but nihilism. Given so many explanations, how can you know what actually happened?

Originally perceived as benign cultural bodies, not unlike the Goethe Institute run by the German government or the Alliance Française, the Confucius Institutes were welcomed by many universities because they provided cheap or even free Chinese-language classes and professors. Over time, the institutes aroused suspicion by policing Chinese students at American universities, seeking to block public discussions of Tibet or Taiwan, and in some cases altering the teaching of Chinese history

Instead of money laundering, this is information laundering. The goal is to spread the same narratives that autocrats use at home, to connect democracy with degeneracy and chaos, to undermine democratic institutions, to smear not just activists who promote democracy but the system itself.

Propaganda

Reliable Russian News, later changed to Reliable Recent News. Created in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, RRN, part of a bigger information-laundering operation known to investigators as Doppelganger, is primarily a “typosquatter”: a company that registers domain names that look similar to real media domain names—Reuters.cfd instead of Reuters.com, for example—as well as websites with names that sound authentic (such as Notre Pays, or “Our Country”) but are created to deceive. RRN is prolific.

autocratic information operations exaggerate the divisions and anger that are normal in politics. They pay or promote the most extreme voices, hoping to make them more extreme, and perhaps more violent; they hope to encourage people to question the state, to doubt authority, and eventually to question democracy itself.

Sovereignty, in Putin’s definition, includes the right to abuse citizens at home and to invade others abroad.

win-win cooperation—by which they mean that everyone will benefit if each country maintains its own political system. They also want everyone to popularize mutual respect—by which they mean that no one should criticize anyone else.

multipolarity,

Over the course of the next several years, Russian, Syrian, and Iranian troops jointly went out of their way to break every possible norm, every element of international law that they possibly could.

But instead of protecting them, the Russians and Syrian pilots used the UN coordinates to guide missiles to the hospitals.

For the first time, one side in a conflict deliberately made international institutions and humanitarian aid workers a central focus of their war propaganda.

Undermining trust

Concerns about the numbers of migrants were amplified by far-right trolling operations and by Russian campaigns, as well as by several prominent terrorist attacks from groups with roots or financing in the autocratic world.

In March 2022, a Russian diplomat instructed the Central African Republic’s top court to alter the constitution so that the country’s pro-Russian president could stay in power beyond his two-term limit. When the court’s top judge objected, he was removed.

Term limits broken

franchise.

“regime survival package.”

anti-authoritarian tactics. These include speeches, letters, declarations, and mass petitions; protest songs and plays; skywriting and “methods of economic noncooperation”; and peasant and prisoners’ strikes, slowdown strikes, quick “lightning” strikes, “sick-ins,” and more than a dozen other kinds of strikes. Sharp also listed “physical interventions,” including sit-ins, stand-ins, ride-ins, wade-ins, pray-ins, and “nonviolent occupation” of public spaces “as well as ‘action by holders of financial resources,’ including the withdrawal of bank deposits, refusal to pay fees, refusal to pay debts or interest, and severance of funds and credit.” And so on.

The display of symbols—badges, flowers, logos, colors—to force people to take sides is only one of many tactics

But hasnt propaganda made too many people choose the wrong side?

Creating bonds between different classes and across different geographies is not just a matter of activism. It also requires an idea or a set of ideas large enough to overcome class and social divisions.

Funding a movement is easier when activists can transfer money to one another using bitcoin, avoiding both the banking system and the secret police.

smear campaigns

murdering dissenters,

Jamal Khashoggi,

Alexei Navalny,

Sun Lin,

targeted violence is often enough to keep ordinary people away from politics altogether, convincing them that it’s a contest they can never win.