Autocracy Inc.

[kalm]

A book review of Anne Applebaum’s latest. It’s a solid primer on the worldwide fascism movement, driven by wealth this time versus ideology.

This is why labor’s win in the UK and victory by the left in France are important. Transparency, democracy, and courts matter.

Renowned Pulitzer-winning journalist Anne Applebaum has just published an important book, “Autocracy Inc. The Dictators Who Want to Run the World.” It is well-researched and erudite, but still an easy read and only 176 pages of text.

Applebaum emphasizes that autocracies have evolved. They are no longer run by one single bad guy, but have become sophisticated networks that rely on “kleptocratic financial structures, a complex of security services…and technological exports who provide surveillance, propaganda, and disinformation.”

For three decades, from 1974 global democracy evolved every year, but according to the authoritative Freedom House, it has declined for the last two decades. Applebaum tries to explain how this could happen. She deals with many countries – Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Angola, Myanmar, Cuba, Syria, Zimbabwe, Mali, Belarus, etc.

She argues that the rulers of all these countries “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.”

https://www.kyivpost.com/opinion/36612

[GannonFan]

Are libel and defamation lawsuits as prolific as the author claims? I honestly almost never hear of such lawsuits, and they are also notoriously difficult to win by the prosecution. That's not really holding the media back.

I'm not sure how much new ground this book tackles. Autocrats have rarely cared about ideology except if the ideology helped them stay in power. And autocrats have often been a collection of folks in power, oligarchies really, so that's not all that new either.

I think the one thing it does cover at least is the proliferation of the lie - just lie all the time and in large volume and it becomes very hard for people to pay attention to each argument and the rebuttal for it. Even sprinkle in a truth for every 100 or so lie and it makes it even more confusing to deal with. Our media, as it's shifted from print to online, has gotten less savvy and less intellectual, and has become more entertainment than journalistic - that doesn't help inspire confidence in what they report and it also weakens their arguments when they are correct. A weaker media, and one that is more reminiscent of the yellow-journalism period of a hundred years ago, isn't helpful in battling autocrats.

There are bad people in the world. Really have always been, and likely to be for the foreseeable future.