Peter
McMillan teaches English part-time and writes part-time.
Several books (fiction and non-fiction) published under
his name and a pen name (Adam Mac) are licensed under
the Creative Commons and available for free download as
PDF books.
In
its brevity (slightly over 200 pages), Anne Applebaum’s
Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World,
published in 2024, takes aim at the world of autocratic nation-states
for whom ideology is secondary and concentrated state power
is turned to the service of a kleptocratic elite. Applebaum,
who also wrote Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure
of Authoritarianism (a political memoir) in 2020, writes
in the tradition of Hannah Arendt, author of On the Origins
of Totalitarianism, and recently penned an introduction
to that work. However, while Arendt focused on the ideology-driven
totalitarian regimes in Germany and the U.S.S.R., Applebaum,
though a recognized journalist/historian on Soviet communism,
is in this book primarily concerned with those autocracies—be
they “communists, monarchists, nationalists, [or] theocrats—that
seek to undermine democracy and the world order and share “a
ruthless single-minded determination to preserve their personal
wealth and power.”
Russia,
China, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Angola, Myanmar,
Cuba, Syria, Zimbabwe, Mali, Belarus, Sudan, Azerbaijan, and
perhaps three dozen others share a determination to deprive
their citizens of any real influence or public voice, to push
back against all forms of transparency or accountability,
and to repress anyone, at home or abroad, who challenges them.
On
the other hand, according to Applebaum, the Saudi and Emirate
monarchies, the authoritarian communist regime in Vietnam and
the illiberal democracies of Turkey, Singapore, India, the Philippines,
and Hungary are not imminent threats to the international order.
Applebaum
views the nation-state as the locus of the international struggle
between democracies and autocracies. She recognizes the somewhat
fluid boundaries as nation-states are subject to change, either
from democracy to autocracy (Hungary) or from autocracy to democracy
(South Korea), though the latter has been less frequent of late.
She also acknowledges that within nation-states there are contrary
movements, as for example in the U.S. Since the book was published
in July, it was still uncertain who the next U.S. president
would be. However, Applebaum did make it a point to assert that
“If [Trump] ever succeeds in directing federal courts
and law enforcement at his enemies, in combination with a mass
trolling campaign, then the blending of the autocratic and democratic
worlds will be complete.” An ominous and odious outcome
for a former leader of the free world.
There
are three significant shortcomings in an otherwise excellent
overview of the state of the world’s autocracies. First,
the classification of states as democratic, autocratic or somewhere
in-between is oversimplified. Characterizing the countries of
the West as democratic is problematic given their plutocratic
and corporatist tendencies—tendencies that are inherently
anti-democratic. In addition, this categorization whitewashes
a lot of Western wrongs from the past, which is by no means
to say that there is a moral equivalence with the crimes of
Stalin, Hitler and Mao. Notwithstanding arguments from countries
like Russia and China, there is a great gulf between the degree
of freedom enjoyed in the U.S. vis-à-vis Russia or China.
Applebaum concedes as much yet concludes,
They
[liberal democracies] 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.
Yet,
it is unfortunate that Applebaum does not call out the anti-democratic
forces operating within the liberal democracies, e.g., the increasing
inequality of income and wealth, the deliberate disenfranchisement
of voters, the obvious connection between war and profits, etc.
Ukraine offers the best example of how fundamental economic
policy is to war. Post-war Ukraine promises to be an exemplar
of Schumpeterian creative-destruction, and many billions of
dollars in profit will be made rebuilding the country and, of
course, restocking the world’s arms supplies. Last year
at the two-year mark in the Russia-Ukraine War, the World Bank,
the United Nations and the European Commission estimated the
cost of reconstruction and recovery to be nearly half a trillion
dollars.
A second
shortcoming has to do with the conduct of war. Applebaum barely
mentions Israel's outrageous total war against all of Gaza in
retaliation for Hamas’ unpardonable October 7th massacre
of civilians in southern Israel. Equally ignored is the effectively
unconditional military and diplomatic support of the U.S. for
Israel’s prosecution of the war, the examples set by the
U.S. with its abysmal failures in nation-building in Iraq and
Afghanistan, and its record of war crimes against civilians
in Vietnam and World War II. (U.S. Air Force General Curtis
Lemay reportedly said about the fire-bombing of civilians in
Tokyo and other Japanese cities in 1945, “I suppose if
I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal.”
Lemay was the inspiration for the Air Force General in Stanley
Kubrick’s 1964 classic satire, "Dr. Strangelove or:
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb"). That
the U.S. remains preferable to Russia, Iran, North Korea or
China doesn't excuse America from submitting to the authority
of international jurisprudence if there is to be anything called
law among nations. As Antony Anghie writes in Imperialism,
Sovereignty and the Making of International Law, there
is a school of thought in international relations, traceable
back to John Austin, the early 19th century British jurist,
that maintains that "international law [is] not law properly
so called because it [does] not emanate from a single, global
sovereign." Instead, what one has is a code of international
morality. If the great powers and their close allies are essentially
lawgivers unto themselves in international affairs, then Austin
is correct.
A third
shortcoming is that the book does not address the worldwide
phenomenon of the ever expanding role of the government to meet
the ever increasing demands for public assistance, e.g. favourable
tax treatment, corporate subsidies, investment opportunities,
jobs, home ownership and the much-maligned welfare assistance
for the poor. Satisfying these demands gives rise to greater
concentrations of government authority, and this becomes problematic
when not all of those expectations can be realized. What has
happened in the U.S. is that the citizenry look to the president
to make things right and to do so quickly when Congress and
the courts disappoint. In foreign affairs and on the economy,
Americans are inclined to a strong CEO model, which invests
the presidency with enormous power through the vast bureaucracy
of the executive branch. It is that concentrated power that
different constituencies seek as the prize to be won, but it
is that power that is subject to extraordinary abuses, especially
when the legislature and the courts serve the president and
not the constitution, i.e., when they fail to check the exercise
of presidential power.
Despite
these criticisms, the book is recommended because Appleby is
doing her part to keep alive the spirit of resistance in an
age when the fear and anger of the public in many societies
has turned again to the strongman (a variation of der Übermensch).
This figure, unrestrained and unconstrained, is perfectly positioned
to disregard the accepted norms and legal guardrails in responding
to the voice of the people. And once in power, the objectives
are twofold: to stay in power and to profit from that power.
This is not the nightmare that Appleby envisions. It is the
reality that she describes.
Nevertheless,
Applebaum is optimistic enough to conclude with a challenge.
[T]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: in Russia, in China, in Europe, in the United States.
Toward this end, we need networks of lawyers and public officials
to fight corruption inside our own countries and around the
world, in cooperation with the democratic activists who understand
kleptocracy best. We need military and intelligence coalitions
that can anticipate and halt lawless violence. We need economic
warriors in multiple countries who can track the impact of
sanctions in real time, understand who is breaking them, and
take steps to stop them. We need people willing to organize
online and coordinate campaigns to identify and debunk dehumanizing
propaganda. The autocracies want to create a global system
that benefits thieves, criminals, dictators, and the perpetrators
of mass murder. We can stop them.
* * * * * * *
A worthwhile introduction to Anne Applebaum’s
views can be found in an interview with Ezra Klein on November
19, 2024. The audio and audio transcript are available at
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/19/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-anne-applebaum.html
under the title ‘Trump Kicks Down the Guardrails.’
At the end of the interview, Applebaum shares the following
three book recommendations for those interested in reading
more about “the secret world of money laundering and
kleptocracy:”
Moneyland:
The Inside Story of the Crooks and Kleptocrats Who Rule the
World (2019) by Oliver Bullough
American
Kleptocracy: How the U.S. Created the World's Greatest Money
Laundering Scheme in History (2021) by Casey Michel and
Offshore:
Stealth, Wealth and the New Colonialism (2024) by Brooke Harrington.