Autocracy, Inc. Quotes

“Sometimes the point isn’t to make people believe a lie; it’s to make people fear the liar.”
― Anne Applebaum, Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World

“But 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. They are attracted by conspiracy theories and will not necessarily seek out reliable news at all.”
― Anne Applebaum, Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World

“But many of the propagandists of Autocracy, Inc., have learned from the mistakes of the twentieth century. They don't offer their fellow citizens a vision of utopia, and they don't inspire them to build a better world. Instead, they teach people to be cynical and passive, because there is no better world to build. Their goal is to persuade people to mind their own business, stay out of politics, and never hope for a democratic alternative: Our state may be corrupt, but everyone else is corrupt too. You may not like our leader, but the others are worse. You may not like our society, but at least we are strong and the democratic world is weak, degenerate, divided, dying.”
― Anne Applebaum, Autocracy, Inc.

“Everyone assumed that in a more open, interconnected world, democracy and liberal ideas would spread to the autocratic states. Nobody imagined that autocracy and illiberalism would spread to the democratic world instead.”
― Anne Applebaum, Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World

“Like Maduro, Presidents Bashir al-Assad in Syria and Lukashenko in Belarus seem entirely comfortable ruling over collapsed economies and societies.”
― Anne Applebaum, Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World

“There is no liberal world order anymore, and the aspiration to create one no longer seems real. But there are liberal societies, open and free countries that offer a better chance for people to live useful lives than closed dictatorships do. They are hardly perfect. Those that exist have deep flaws, profound divisions, and terrible historical scars. But that’s all the more reason to defend and protect them. So few of them have existed across human history; so many have existed for a short time and then failed. They can be destroyed from the outside and from the inside, too, by division and demagogues. Or they can be saved. But only if those of us who live in them are willing to make the effort to save them.”
― Anne Applebaum, Autocracy, Inc.

“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.”
― Anne Applebaum, Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World

“Autocracy, Inc., offers its members not only money and security but also something less tangible: impunity.”
― Anne Applebaum, Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World

“A world in which autocracies work together to stay in power, work together to promote their system, and work together to damage democracies is not some distant dystopia. That world is the one we are living in right now.”
― Anne Applebaum, Autocracy, Inc.

“We may now be at an inflection point, a moment when we have to decide how to shape surveillance technology, artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, voice-or face-recognition systems, and other emerging technologies so that their inventors and their users remain accountable to democratic laws, as well as to principles of human rights and standards of transparency. We have already failed to regulate social media, with negative consequences for politics around the world. Failure to regulate AI before it distorts political conversations, just to take one obvious example, could have a catastrophic impact over time.”
― Anne Applebaum, Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World

“During the three decades that have passed since the end of the Cold War, the United States and its allies imagined that they had no need to compete in this sphere, because good information would somehow win the battle in the “marketplace of ideas.” But there isn’t a marketplace of ideas, or in any case not a free market of ideas. Instead, some ideas have been turbocharged by disinformation campaigns, by heavy spending by the social media companies whose algorithms promote emotional and divisive content,”
― Anne Applebaum, Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World

“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.”
― Anne Applebaum, Autocracy, Inc.

“...even in a state where surveillance seems total, the experience of tyranny and injustice can always radicalize people. Anger at arbitrary power will always lead someone to start thinking about some other system, some better way to run society.”
― Anne Applebaum, Autocracy, Inc.

“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 from the Philippines, South Korea, and Taiwan to the post-Soviet world to the Middle East—the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon, the Green Movement in Iran, the Arab Spring—and beyond. The deliberate creation of links between different social groups and social classes is another such tactic.”
― Anne Applebaum, Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World

“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? What if you can never know? If you can’t understand what is going on around you, then you are not going to join a great movement for democracy, or follow a truth-telling leader, or listen when anyone speaks about positive political change. Instead, you will avoid politics altogether. Autocrats have an enormous incentive to spread that hopelessness and cynicism, not only in their own countries, but around the world.”
― Anne Applebaum, Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World

“Here I would like to draw attention to an aspect of Putin’s origin story that is mentioned less frequently: the role of the legitimate Western institutions, companies, lawyers, and politicians who enabled his schemes, profited from them, or covered them up. The deputy mayor of St. Petersburg made his money thanks to the Western companies that bought the exports, the Western regulators who were unbothered by the bad contracts, and the Western banks that were strangely lacking in curiosity about the new streams of cash flowing into their accounts.”
― Anne Applebaum, Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World

“Their primary goal is to stay in power, and to do so, they are willing to destabilize their neighbors, destroy the lives of ordinary people, or—following in the footsteps of their predecessors—even send hundreds of thousands of their citizens to their deaths.”
― Anne Applebaum, Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World

“Nowadays, autocracies are run not by one bad guy but by sophisticated networks relying on kleptocratic financial structures, a complex of security services—military, paramilitary, police—and technological experts who provide surveillance, propaganda, and disinformation. The members of these networks are connected not only to one another within a given autocracy but also to networks in other autocratic countries, and sometimes in democracies too.”
― Anne Applebaum, Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World

“Autocracy is a political system, a way of structuring society, a means of organizing power. It is not a genetic trait. Particular cultures, languages, or religions do not necessarily produce it. No nation is condemned forever to autocracy, just as no nation is guaranteed democracy. Political systems do change.”
― Anne Applebaum, Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World

“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. In seeking to create chaos, these new propagandists, like their leaders, will reach for whatever ideology, whatever technology, and whatever emotions might be useful. The vehicles of disruption can be right-wing, left-wing, separatist, or nationalist, even taking the form of medical conspiracies or moral panic. Only the purpose never changes: Autocracy, Inc., hopes to rewrite the rules of the international system itself.”
― Anne Applebaum, Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World

“This is the core of the problem: the leaders of Autocracy, Inc., know that the language of transparency, accountability, justice, and democracy will always appeal to some of their own citizens. To stay in power they must undermine those ideas, wherever they are found.”
― Anne Applebaum, Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World

“Their enmity toward the democratic world is not merely some form of traditional geopolitical competition, as “realists” and so many international relations strategists still believe. Their opposition rather has its roots in the very nature of the democratic political system, in words like “accountability,” “transparency,” and “democracy.” They hear that language coming from the democratic world, they hear the same language coming from their own dissidents, and they seek to destroy them both.”
― Anne Applebaum, Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World

“Isolationism is an instinctive and even understandable reaction to the ugliness of the modern interconnected world. For some politicians in democracies, it will continue to offer a successful path to power. The campaign for Brexit succeeded by using the metaphor "take back control," and no wonder: everyone wants more control in a world where events on the other side of the planet can affect jobs and prices in our local towns and villages. But did the removal of Britain from the European Union give the British more power to shape the world? Did it prevent foreign money from shaping U.K. politics? Did it stop refugees from moving from the war zones of the Middle East to Britain? It did not.”
― Anne Applebaum, Autocracy, Inc.

“...I believe the citizens of the United States, and the citizens of the democracies of Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America, should begin thinking of themselves as linked to one another and to the people who share their values inside autocracies too. They need one another, now more than ever, because their democracies are not safe. Nobody's democracy is safe.

Americans, with our long history of imagining ourselves to be exceptional, would do well to remember that our domestic politics have always been connected to, and influenced by, a larger struggle for freedom and the rule of law around the world.”
― Anne Applebaum, Autocracy, Inc.

“Democracies should work, again in coalitions, to promote transparency, to create international standards, to ensure that autocracies don't set the rules and shape the products.

We are becoming aware of all these things very late. Around the world, democratic activists, from Moscow to Hong Kong to Caracas, have been warning us that our industries, our economic policies, and our research efforts are enabling the economic and even the military aggression of others, and they are right.”
― Anne Applebaum, Autocracy, Inc.

“No democratic government should ever assume that arguments for democracy or for the rule of law are somehow obvious or self-evident. Authoritarian narratives are designed to undermine the innate appeal of those ideas, to characterize dictatorship as stable and democracy as chaotic. Democratic media, civic organizations, and politicians need to argue back and make the case for transparency, accountability, and liberty--at home and around the world.”
― Anne Applebaum, Autocracy, Inc.

“But 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. They are attracted by conspiracy theories and will not necessarily seek out reliable news at all.”
― Anne Applebaum, Autocracy, Inc.

“These selective, occasional murders don't just eliminate difficult opponents; they are also a form of messaging. 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.”
― Anne Applebaum, Autocracy, Inc.

“In recent years various dictatorships--of both internal and external origin--have collapsed or stumbled when confronted by defiant, mobilized people."

Those are the opening words of From Dictatorship to Democracy, an iconic pamphlet composed by Gene Sharp, an American academic. Sharp emerged from the world of pacifism, civil rights, and antiwar activism in the 1950s to become, by the 1990s, an advocate of nonviolent revolution. A student of Gandhi, King, and Thoreau, 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. He believed that if they overcame their apathy and fear, and that if they refused to acquiesce to the dictator's demands, then the dictator would no longer be able to rule.”
― Anne Applebaum, Autocracy, Inc.

“In Putin's Russia, Assad's Syria, or Maduro's Venezuela, politicians and television personalities often play a different game. They lie constantly, blatantly, obviously. But when they are exposed, they don't bother to offer counterarguments. When Russian-controlled forces shot down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over Ukraine in 2014, the Russian government reacted not only with a denial but with multiple stories, plausible and implausible: they blamed the Ukrainian army, or the CIA, or a nefarious plot in which 298 dead people were placed on a plane in order to fake a crash and discredit Russia.

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? What if you can never know? If can't understand what is going on around you, then you are not going to join a great movement for democracy, or follow a truth-telling leader, or listen when anyone speaks about positive political change. Instead, you will avoid politics altogether. Autocrats have an enormous incentive to spread that hopelessness and cynicism, not only in their own countries, but around the world.”
― Anne Applebaum, Autocracy, Inc.