Title : “Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want To Run The World”

Author : Anne Applebaum, Staff Writer – The Atlantic & Senior Fellow – Johns Hopkins University

Publisher : Penguin Random House

July, 2024

Hardcover : $26.25 at Chapters, Canada

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Few contemporary writers can match the depth of understanding that Anne Applebaum has, of the recent wreck of democratic politics the world over. When you ask her who sent Britain into the unending Brexit crisis or inflicted the Trump administration on America, or turned Poland and Hungary into one-party states, she does not need to search press cuttings. Her friends did it, she replies. Or, rather, her former conservative friends on both sides of the pond. 

Applebaum recalls the 1999 New Year’s Eve house warming party she and her husband, Polish cabinet minister, Radoslaw Sikorski, had thrown. It was a stylish manor house in western Poland that they had rebuilt from ruins.

The guest list was brimming with intellectuals – Poles, Brits, Americans, even some Russians, all rejoicing. They had vanquished the Soviet empire and helped build a new world order that had no place for authoritarianism. They had stood up against a cruel and suffocating tyranny. They had fought for free markets, free elections and the rule of law. They had gleefully cheered when, instead of disbanding since there was no longer any threat, NATO had expanded. They were thrilled they had played a part in the strengthening of the EU. 

The glitterati at the party believed the world had turned a page. Now it would be easy for nations to help their people lead better lives.

News had just come in that Boris Yeltsin had stepped down as President of Russia that morning and named a successor, the country’s Prime Minister, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, an obscure fidgety ex-KGB agent with a voice so unsure that, when he spoke, he could hardly be heard.

At that point in time, it didn’t matter who came in at the helm in Russia, especially not the mealy mouthed Putin. The war against communism had been won. Now, all that was left was for “trickle-down” “shock” capitalism to take root, for ordinary Russians to display their entrepreneurial spirit and set the business world alight, for resourceful Russian tech experts to cash in on the World Wide Web and the dot com bubble.

It was now time to bring about spectacular economic prosperity to Russia and consequently the world.

In the midst of the party, a tipsy female Polish guest, pulled out a pistol and fired a few blanks into the air, momentarily stunning the crowd, only to be instantly buried under raucous laughter and cheering.

Midnight was nigh. A new year, a new dawn, new era awaited the excited, young, happy gathering.

It was the time for history’s winners to rejoice. 

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Anne Applebaum has been writing for years about the rise in authoritarianism and the erosion of democracy around the world.

Her latest book, “Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want To Run The World,” is a potent read on how today’s autocracies are not just ruled by one powerful leader, but are instead a sophisticated interconnected network. She reveals how they collaborate and support each other through financial systems, technology, and propaganda that spans well beyond their borders.

This loose network is not an alliance. It is a cabal. It’s members don’t share any political, spiritual or cultural ideology. But they do have one thing in common – they don’t like the word “democracy” and paradoxically, as the decades roll by the cabal is growing more and more powerful, adding more and more members.

Anne Applebaum is the author of several books, including “Gulag: A History,” which won the Pulitzer Prize, “Iron Curtain: The Crushing Of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956,” and the best-selling “Twilight Of Democracy: The Seductive Lure Of Authoritarianism.”

Applebaum is a columnist for the Atlantic and a senior fellow at Johns Hopkins University. She has passed thru first, Yale and then, Oxford and therefore I needn’t say any more about her state of enlightenment.

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In “The Twilight Of Democracy,” Applebaum was focused on those who make a tyrant possible. And in this book, she has turned her attention to those tyrants, more specifically, the cabal or in her words, Autocracy Inc. which, she says, operates like a semi-organized business corporation.

As I mentioned before, Autocracy Inc is not an alliance. The cabal doesn’t have a guiding principle. It’s not really an axis because that implies that they’re unified in some way. There isn’t any secret cavernous room with a scaled down model of some sinister new weapon of mass destruction on display in the middle of a table that will take out an entire metropolis at the blink of an eye, with the members seated round the table and a Blofeld-like guy with a shaved head, a cat on his lap and a silky voice, like in a James Bond movie.

It’s more a network of convenience. When there are issues on which they find they care about the same things, they cooperate. They have plenty of differences. They don’t share the same ideology – nationalist Russia, communist China, Bolivarian socialist Venezuela and theocratic Iran have different ways of legitimizing their regimes and different explanations of who they are. But they do share one common ethos – envy and hatred of the western democratic system.

In that sense, the cabal is like a big umbrella corporation, a holding company much like my own employers, Raytheon, that runs different companies with each company doing its own thing, but also cooperating with each other when it is convenient.

Sitting at the head as the Chairman of the Board at Autocracy Inc. is unquestionably Putin, the President of Russia. The other executive board members are….

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (Turkey) who holds the unique status of a diplomatic bridge between the west and the east and cooperates with the rest of the cabal off and on, when he feels it might help his image.

Victor Orbán (Hungary) who is technically a member of NATO and the EU but who also seeks to be close to Autocracy Inc.

Aleksandr Lukashenko (Belarus) and Basher Al Assad (Syria), who do not have the capability to survive on their own and have all but sold their souls and gifted their nations to Putin.

Nicolás Maduro (Venezuela), who has nothing in common with the others except the thirst for total power.

Kim Jong Un (North Korea), the murderous anti-aircraft gun killer who thinks he can thumb his nose at just about anyone, friend or foe, simply because he has nuclear weapons capability.

Ali Khamenei (Iran), a jaded cleric with a governing system that is so dysfunctional that Israel can pick off its generals, scientists and associates at will with abandon, from right under his nose.

Except for the Ayatollah, all of the others have a love of solid gold bidets and faucets.

And lastly, China’s Xi Jin Ping, President and CEO of Autocracy Inc. After Putin, Xi is perhaps the most pivotal, the most Machiavellian leader, ruling with an iron fist the world’s second most powerful nation as well as the second largest economy. Like Putin, who is nostalgic about the old Soviet bloc and wants not only the erstwhile satellite Soviet republics back but the whole of Europe, Xi thirsts for hegemony over China’s neighbours and the entire South-East Asia.

In their pursuit of hegemony, Xi and Putin occasionally step on each other’s toes (like in Africa), but they quickly come to understandings on who has which African nation. Xi has Ivory Coast, Niger, Congo and South Africa, while Putin has Egypt, Burkina Faso, Mali and Sudan.

Autocracy Inc has second-tier associate members too, fence sitters who play both sides, with a keen sense of the wind direction, such as Mohammad Bin Salman (Saudi), Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan (UAE), Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani (Qatar), Hamad bin Isa Al-Khalifa (Bahrain), Narendra Modi (India) and Daniel Ortega (Nicaragua).

The erstwhile Soviet Republics are strongly represented too. Besides Belarus, mentioned earlier, there is Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, all ruled by despots.

The continent with the most associate members is Africa. Besides the nations mentioned earlier, there are Cameroon, Eritrea, Equitorial Guinea, South Sudan, Djibouti, Rwanda and Uganda.

Then there are the bottom feeders, the generals of Burma, Hun Sen of Cambodia and the Sultan of Brunei.

Autocracy Inc has just gotten started.

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Applebaum calls the war in Ukraine the first full-scale kinetic battle in the struggle between Autocracy, Inc. and what might loosely be described as the Democratic world.

The brutality of this war, the construction of concentration camps in occupied territories, the torture of incarcerated Ukrainian citizens, the kidnapping of thousands of children, taking them to Russia and giving them new identities…. All these are clear evidence that Vladimir Putin wants to show the world that the old rules of international behavior no longer apply.

Putin does not care anymore about the world that was created in 1945. He doesn’t care about the UN charter. He doesn’t care about UN laws and organizations that use the language of human rights. He doesn’t give a flying fuck about the so-called unspoken or unwritten rules – that we don’t change borders by force. He didn’t get the lesson that we all learned from the Second World War – that all disputes should be resolved by negotiation and through UN’s institutions.

Applebaum says Putin is trying to establish a new world order where the above norms are no longer relevant, where every alliance, every relationship shall be transactional, just as it used to be upto the end of the 19th century.

Look at Ukraine. 50 countries got together and provided money, weapons and intelligence to Ukraine. But, while Putin might have underestimated the unity that then came from that invasion, democracies have underestimated the scale of the challenge from Autocracy Inc.

Yes, Putin grossly miscalculated the aftermath of his aggression. Recalling Crimea 2014, he assumed that there would be no response to his invasion. He didn’t expect NATO to organize itself. He didn’t expect the US and its allies to contribute to the defense of Ukraine. Most importantly, he didn’t expect the zeal with which the Ukrainians stood their ground and fought back. He didn’t expect the completely lack of morale in his troops. It was all a surprise for Putin. He had expected to annex Ukraine in a few weeks.

The west was surprised too, says Applebaum. It had assumed that sanctions and that the combined military aid effort would end the war. The west didn’t count on the Chinese continuing to sell, not so much weaponry, but the ingredients for weapons, the chips, the electronics and the materials for weapon building.

The west didn’t count on the many ways in which other countries would seek ways around the sanctions, whether it was smugglers going through Turkey and Georgia, or whether it was India continuing to buy Russian oil. The west assumed that its economic power was so awesome that it could shut down the Russian economy. That has not happened.

That sanctions alone don’t work was a revelation to the western alliance.

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With Autocracy Inc, Putin gave birth to a new form of totalitarianism, according to Applebaum. He had begun by stealing money. He stole from the coffers of the city of St. Petersburg. He was soon joined by his KGB cronies and together they took the plundered funds out of the country, laundered it through Western institutions – stock exchanges in Frankfurt, London and New York and the largest western banks and brought the money back in.

The kind of power that Putin enjoys is very different from the kind of power the leaders of the Soviet Union had. You won’t find the members of Autocracy Inc on the Forbes List of billionaires but they are very, very rich folks. They use their money to stay in power, buy friends and favors. Most of all, they use their billions to buy legitimacy. They are careful not to directly own anything but they acquire in the names of trusted cronies and relatives, property in exclusive neighbourhoods in rich western nations, they own flashy jaw-dropping villas, dachas, yachts and aircraft.

The money helped the members of Autocracy Inc get there and it helps them stay there. Putin was really the originator but now one can see modern dictators also beginning to learn about tax havens and all the different ways of stealing and hiding money.

In the early 1990s, the western world held a hope that communism’s demise and the resulting free economy and openness would lead to, if not democracy, at least more liberal thinking and better standards of living in the erstwhile dictatorships. For a short while it seemed, at least from the west, like that was happening. The west started feeling good about it.

What the west failed to recognize was the degree to which our own business leaders, especially in our financial sector, were in fact helping to enrich small groups of people in those communist states who then, once they had power, were reluctant to ever give it up.

Kleptocracy, ill-gotten gains, inevitably lead to autocracy because people who have stolen the money, who have used that money to retain power, don’t want to give it up. They hate phrases like “transparency” or “rule of law” or “anti-corruption drive” and immediately push back on them. Creation of a police state becomes imperative. Harassment and arrests become the norm. That is what happened in Russia. That is actually what was happening in Ukraine up until 2014, when the Ukrainians organized the “Maidan” movement, which was really an anti-corruption revolution. The wannabe Ukrainian dictator, Viktor Yanukovych, one of those gold bidet/faucet guys, fled to his protectors in Moscow.

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So, which are the go-to places where members of the cabal hide their wealth?

Surprise, surprise!! The most popular joints are in the US states of Delaware, Wyoming and South Dakota. Delaware is Democratic while Wyoming and South Dakota are Republican-governed. There is nothing ideological when it comes to hard cash. These are tax haven states where the nameless wealthy hide their billions,

The process is very simple. You grab hold of a lawyer and open an “LLC”, a Limited Liability Company whose real owners are allowed to remain anonymous through chains of holding companies and fully protected against lawsuits and creditors.

All you need to do is…

1. Name your LLC. … 
2. Choose your registered agent. … 
3. Prepare and file a Certification of Formation of a limited liability company. … 
4. Receive a certificate from the state. … 
5. Create an operating agreement. … 
6. Get an Employer Identification Number. … 
7. Create a maze of off-shore holding corporations connecting to the LLC
8. Pay a piddly alternative entity tax.
9. Inject your ill-gotten gains into the LLC. Do whatever the fuck you want with it thereafter.

1 to 7 are completed literally in a matter of minutes, by a lawyer. The paperwork won’t reveal your identity, so for investigators, this is where the trail vanishes.

While the lawyer submits the docs, you will be nursing your martini at the nearby country club. You are running an LLC by the time the waiter brings your second drink.

So now you are set. You can buy property, maybe a 15000 sq ft penthouse condo worth $250 million in Trump Tower, anonymously. Anonymous purchasers of Trump properties are legion.

Luxury property purchase is notoriously common in the UK – London, to be exact, where there is an enormous amount of foreign kleptocratic wealth and where lots of new buildings that maybe wouldn’t have been built otherwise are almost empty because they function like Swiss bank accounts, ie: they are simply another form of hidden money. Land space now is at a premium, prices have sky-rocketed and left legitimate buyers unable to acquire property.

Russian kleptocrats now dominate the high-end real estate business in the UK.

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Autocracy Inc takes the dissemination of ideas and information very seriously. Members invest in it heavily. The Chinese have bank-rolled a huge network of television, radio, news websites, newspapers and other forms of broadcasting in Africa, Latin America and Asia. They have content sharing agreements with different newspapers around the world. Their wire service, Xinhua, is very cheap and easy to get hold of, often cheaper than AP or Reuters.

The cabal also thinks of ways to get information to people in a way that they’ll accept. Very quickly they have learnt that you want the source of information to seem native, local. And so, rather than the news coming from a news channel in China, they have an African newspaper write something positive about China or something negative about America.

The Russians have enthusiastically run with the idea of ‘local’ news sources for some time now, though it is more remote-operated. They have begun to create fake websites, newspapers and other forms of media that look like they are Ecuadorian or Peruvian or French or Arabic, when they are actually being churned out by a group of 20-yr olds inside an obscure apartment block in Kaliningrad. They harp on the degeneracy and decline of the west and the superiority of autocracy.

The disinformation spread by Autocracy Inc sometimes has very specific goals – conspiracy theories. One that went viral at the beginning of the Ukraine invasion was about how the US had been building biological weapons laboratories in Ukraine. It was fact-checked, refuted and denied multiple times. Nevertheless, the Russians continued to push it. They pushed it on Chinese media too and the Chinese also repeated the same set of narratives. You could find them in Venezuelan media. You could find them in multiple places around the world.

The Russians also spread the falsehood about Syria being this awesome, loveable, welcoming tourist destination, when in fact it is a war torn hell hole.

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Autocracy Inc lives on lies. Remember how the wannabe autocrat, Donald Trump, began his presidency with the lie about the crowd size at his inauguration in the National Mall? It was a very stupid lie, easily fact-checkable. Trump knew it. But he believed quite rightly that if he repeated it a thousand times it would eventually stick.

I mean, who cares how many people were on the National Mall? But he wanted the U.S. Park Service to lie about it and he wanted his press spokesman, that asshole Sean Spicer, to lie about it.

What Trump was actually saying was – I am in control. I get to decide what the truth is.

Lies confuse people, turn them into cynics. “How do I know this is true” becomes a common refrain. Cynicism leads to a feeling of helplessness and hopelessness, disinterest and ultimately, apathy.

“Ah, politicians, they are all the same. Things will never ever improve.” How many times have you heard someone say these words? Probably a zillion?

Applebaum stresses that ultimately, public apathy leads to a disengagement from politics and that is exactly what Autocracy Inc wants – for it to be left to do its own thing, without interference.

Xi Jin Ping warns the powerful Chinese business community, the billionaires, to not interfere in Chinese politics, not be involved in or make any statements about the status of governance, however oblique that statement might be. Remember what happened to Ali Baba’s Jack Ma?

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This book doesn’t mention Donald Trump a lot but many of Applebaum’s descriptions of autocrats sound like him. We just saw how the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, praised the nomination of Senator J.D. Vance as Trump’s VP nominee, even though everybody knows Vance is a lousy prick. Lavrov recognizes an autocrat when he sees one and knows how much autocrats love praise.

The ultimate triumph of Autocracy Inc is when America will join its board of directors. That is not some far-fetched nightmare. All that it will need is for Trump to win. Given the most recent polling data, it is not an impossibility and could be likely, if some damning dirt implodes Senator Kamala Harris’ campaign somehow, between now and 5th November.

If Trump wins, what are challenges we will all face with the world’s three most powerful nations – Russia, China, and the United States – as autocracies? How do we in the west defend our democratic system and our freedoms?

Applebaum has a few answers, such as more folks getting into politics and taking charge of their narrative, but I will leave you to get the full load on her thought by reading the book to the end.