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

by Anne Applebaum

Sharp believed that dictatorships survive not because of the unusual powers or personalities of dictators but because most people who live under their rule are apathetic or afraid.

Gene Sharp, author of From Dictatorship to Democracy, a so-called “iconic” pamphlet.

From Dictatorship to Democracy was originally published in Bangkok, in 1994, as a primer for Burmese democracy activists. But Sharp’s suggestions were applicable almost anywhere, and eventually they were reprinted almost everywhere, in many languages, legally and illegally. The most frequently copied part of the pamphlet was its appendix, which contains a list of 198 nonviolent, 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.

Author Gene Sharp.

The display of symbols—badges, flowers, logos, colors—to force people to take sides is only one of many tactics that spread from one democratic movement to another in the last decades of the twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-first

The deliberate creation of links between different social groups and social classes is another such tactic.

In 1997, when the British handed the territory back to China after 156 years of colonial rule, the Chinese leadership promised that the economic and political freedoms Hong Kong enjoyed would be preserved. The promise was encapsulated in the slogan “one country, two systems.” Over the next two decades, China increased its overt and subtle pressure on Hong Kong. In 2014, Beijing changed the Hong Kong electoral system to allow the Communist Party to screen candidates for the Hong Kong chief executive’s role in advance.

although they won battle after battle, they lost the war. As of this writing, all the Hong Kong protest leaders are in jail or in exile. Many of those who remain in Hong Kong are working in menial jobs. They did everything right. But they were defeated because the Chinese authorities had also been studying the kinds of tactics proposed by Sharp and Havel. They had thought hard about how to mock and undermine symbolic acts; how to smear and discredit charismatic leaders; how to use social media to spread false rumors and conspiracy theories; how to isolate and alienate people; how to break links between different social groups and social classes; how to eliminate influential exiles; and above all, how to turn the language of human rights, freedom, and democracy into evidence of treason and betrayal. The rest of Autocracy, Inc., learned these lessons too.

Zimbabwe’s leaders moved in a different direction. Instead of merely trumpeting propaganda about the greatness of the leader as a twentieth-century dictator might have done, the regime launched a campaign designed to undermine Mawarire himself: his authenticity, his spontaneity, and especially his patriotism—the very qualities that had galvanized Zimbabweans. To fight back against real emotions, the regime had to portray Mawarire as fake, inauthentic, manipulated by outsiders—not a patriot, but a traitor.

This is what Donald Trump and his cultists do to their enemies. They accuse them of attributes that aren’t true of their opponents, but are true of themselves. E.g, the “Biden crime family”, that Biden is a sexual abuser, that Biden is incompetent, etc.

Hugo Chávez repeatedly smeared his opponents as “right-wing” agents of American imperialism, even when those opponents were self-described socialists.

They kept asking him, “Who’s funding you, tell us where you’re getting the influence from, how did you get the whole country to strike, did you pay people?” Like the Russian journalists in Ukraine in 2013–14, they simply did not believe anyone could be so idealistic, or perhaps so naive, as to put themselves in danger for “democracy” or for “patriotism.” You will do it just because you love this country? Impossible.

Zimbabwe political activist and good guy Evan Mawarire.

After he left the country, Mawarire told me, he was “consumed by these negative comments. Something in me wanted to prove them wrong. Something in me wanted to say, ‘Listen, I’m not a coward.’ And secondly, I was genuine about this.” He went back to Zimbabwe again and was immediately arrested and strip-searched at the airport. Police took him to a maximum-security prison, where he was beaten again, tortured again, and kept in solitary confinement again. Eventually he was released, and he tried to renew his campaign. He worked to organize people; he set up another general strike, all the while suffering repeated attacks on his integrity, his finances, his intentions. Gradually, it became clear to him that his efforts were in vain. Instead of changing the system, #ThisFlag had alerted the regime to the growing level of discontent, which was adjusting its propaganda accordingly, in 2017 replacing Mugabe with Mnangagwa.

Evan Mawarire. The point here is that the good guys do not always win even they’re relentless. Evil can win and does in some cases.

Mawarire had discovered something that many other autocratic governments have now learned: smear campaigns work.

The Saudi monarchy, the Cuban security services, the Kremlin, and the Chinese police don’t have to kill every journalist in order to make all journalists in their countries afraid. Modern dictators have learned that the mass violence of the twentieth century is no longer necessary: targeted violence is often enough to keep ordinary people away from politics altogether, convincing them that it’s a contest they can never win.

The Russian regime was so desperate to avoid a public funeral for Navalny that they tried to blackmail his mother, threatening to let her son’s corpse rot unless she promised to bury him in secret; later they refused the family a hearse and restricted entrance to the cemetery. People came anyway, risking arrest, and left mountains of flowers. This is why modern autocrats usually prefer to avoid murder. A martyr can inspire a political movement, while a successful smear campaign can destroy one.

The more sophisticated autocracies now prepare the legal as well as the propaganda basis for these campaigns in advance, creating traps designed to catch democracy activists even before they gain credibility or popularity. Starting in the first decade of the twenty-first century, autocracies and some illiberal democracies began passing laws, often very similar to one another, designed to monitor and control civic organizations, including apolitical and charitable organizations, often by labeling them terrorist, extremist, or treasonous. So-called anti-extremism legislation in Russia has been used to block anyone who expressed political opposition.

Most of these measures serve as a false nod to the rule of law, helping justify what comes next, which is often not a political accusation but a false allegation of corruption. Regimes that are themselves profoundly corrupt reverse the charges, blurring the distinction between themselves and their opponents.

Autocrats dealing with NGOs.

Corruption accusations against dissidents also deflect attention away from the corruption of the ruling party.

corruption allegations also deepen the natural cynicism that autocracies cultivate in their citizens, reinforcing the public’s conviction that all politics is dirty, including opposition politics, and that all politicians, even dissident politicians, should be treated with suspicion.

The Saudi government has deployed thousands of real and fake Twitter accounts to attack its enemies. Known as the “army of flies,” these swarms include both government-run accounts and enthusiastic volunteers. Thanks to this public-private partnership, the Arabic hashtag “We all trust in Mohammed bin Salman” appeared more than 1.1 million times in the wake of the murder of Khashoggi.

Anyone subjected to a mass, online trolling campaign, especially one backed by the state, becomes toxic, even to family and close friends.

Both as president and afterward, Donald Trump has sought to stoke anger and even violence against people he dislikes, including federal judges. He and his followers harassed election workers across the country who refused to go along with his fraudulent accusations about a stolen election. He published the telephone number of the Michigan Senate majority leader, who subsequently received four thousand threatening text messages,

In 2023, Trump began talking about using the Department of Justice to arrest his enemies, not because they are guilty of something, but because, if he returns to the presidency, he wants “retribution.”

Democrats meet in a rambling hotel outside Vilnius, with dark corridors and windows overlooking a forest. In the autumn of 2022, that was the site of the first-ever meeting of the World Liberty Congress, a gathering of people who have fought autocracies all around the world.

I spoke with a pair of Russians who prefer to remain anonymous. They were running a stealth campaign against military mobilization, helping get lawyers and legal advice to Russians who want to avoid the draft. They had made the momentous decision not to leave Russia, because they thought that persuading people not to fight was the best thing they could do to help end the war against Ukraine.

Democrats meet in a rambling hotel outside Vilnius, with dark corridors and windows overlooking a forest. In the autumn of 2022, that was the site of the first-ever meeting of the World Liberty Congress, a gathering of people who have fought autocracies all around the world.

The autocracies keep track of one another’s defeats and victories, timing their own moves to create maximum chaos. In the autumn of 2023, both the European Union and the U.S. Congress found themselves unable to send aid to Ukraine because minorities with deep Russian ties, led respectively by Viktor Orbán in Hungary and by a handful of MAGA Republicans in Congress, many acting under the instructions of Donald Trump, blocked the majority and delayed the aid. A narrative promoting “Ukraine fatigue” spread across the internet, pushed by Russian proxies and Chinese media in multiple languages. At exactly that moment, Iranian-backed Hamas militants launched a brutal attack on Israel.

This multifaceted, interconnected, self-reinforcing polycrisis was not coordinated by a single mastermind, and it is not evidence of a secret conspiracy. Instead, these episodes, taken together, demonstrate how different autocracies have extended their influence across different political, economic, military, and informational spheres.

Read, once again, the statement of Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin on February 4, 2022, on the eve of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. They denounced “interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states under the pretext of protecting democracy and human rights.” They called upon the outside world “to respect cultural and civilizational diversity and the rights of peoples of different countries to self-determination.” And they warned, angrily, that any discussion of democratic standards, which they called “attempts at hegemony,” would “pose serious threats to global and regional peace and stability and undermine the stability of the world order.”

Many countries don’t fit comfortably into either category, democracy or autocracy. As I’ve written, some autocracies—the U.A.E., Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Vietnam—seek cooperation with the democratic world, don’t want to upend the UN Charter, and still see the advantages of international law. Some democracies—Turkey, Israel, Hungary, India, the Philippines—have elected leaders who are more inclined to break conventions on human rights than to uphold them. Because autocratic alliances are largely transactional, they can shift and change, and often do.

There are significant autocratic political movements and politicians in the United States as well as Germany, Poland, the Netherlands, Italy, and France.

the democracies of North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia, and Africa, together with the leaders of the democratic opposition in Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, Belarus, Zimbabwe, Myanmar, and other autocratic states, should think about the struggle for freedom not as a competition with specific autocratic states, and certainly not as “war with China,” but as a war against autocratic behaviors, wherever they are found:

Put an End to Transnational Kleptocracy A Russian, Angolan, or Chinese oligarch can own a house in London, an estate on the Mediterranean, a company in Delaware, and a trust in South Dakota without ever having to reveal ownership to tax authorities anywhere. American and European intermediaries—lawyers, bankers, accountants, real estate agents, and public relations and “reputation management” advisers—make these kinds of transactions possible. Their work is legal. We have made it so. We can just as easily make it illegal. All of it. We don’t need to tolerate a little bit of corruption. We can simply end the whole system.

We could close loopholes that allow anonymity in the private-equity and hedge-fund industries too. We could create effective enforcement teams and then help them operate across countries and continents. We could do all this in coordination with other partners around the world. There will be enormous resistance: if the dismantling of this system were easy, it would have happened already. Money-laundering mechanisms are hard to understand and even harder to police.

Navalny made a series of crowdfunded documentary films, posted on YouTube, that tied the leaders of Russia to far-reaching financial scams and broad networks of enablers. The videos succeeded because they were professionally made, because they included shocking details—the hookah bar and hockey rink inside Putin’s vulgar Black Sea residence, as well as the vineyard, the helicopter pad, and the oyster farm—and because they linked these stories to the poverty of Russian teachers, doctors, and civil servants. You have bad roads and bad health care, Navalny told Russians, because they have vineyards and oyster farms.

no one who studies autocratic propaganda believes that fact-checking or even swift reactions are sufficient. By the time the correction is made, the falsehood has already traveled around the world. Our old models never acknowledged the truth that many people desire disinformation.

The American far right has meanwhile shifted the legitimate political debate about online platform regulation into an argument about “bans” and “free speech,” attacking the academics and other researchers who seek to understand how the online world functions and to explore how it could be made more transparent.

Unlike their twentieth-century predecessors, today’s autocrats cannot impose censorship easily or effectively. Instead, they have focused on winning audiences, building support for their messages by channeling resentment, hatred, and the desire for superiority.

From the very beginning, the Russians intended Nord Stream 2 to have the opposite purpose: Russia hoped to promote kleptocracy in Germany and to set the stage for Russian domination of Ukraine. The pipeline was meant to transport gas directly from Russia to Germany, bypassing Poland and Ukraine, making it possible to cut those countries out of lucrative transit deals and perhaps to cut off Ukraine’s gas supplies altogether.