Naïveté abounded among rich-world leaders in the 1990s.
Free market capitalism and representative democracy seemed ascendant. Free-flowing information online seemed to inspire people to overthrow repressive governments.
In March 2000, then President Bill Clinton famously dismissed a new effort from the Chinese Communist Party to censor the internet: “That’s sort of like trying to nail Jello to the wall.” Likewise, German and other European leaders argued that doing business with Russian and Chinese companies would make them freer. Looking back, this all looks plainly wrong.
That’s a theme from the 2024 book from Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Anne Applebaum’s book Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World.
More free-flowing information does not necessarily mean more truth. Technologies have helped democratic movements no more than they’ve helped authoritarian ones, and turns out those Russian oil providers and Chinese electronic vehicle firms were at least in part government actors, so their motivations weren’t only aligned with a Western capitalistic view.
Today, at least half of all humans now live within states considered autocratic. The world has gotten less democratic in recent years, a backward trend that in the early 1990s seemed impossible. Applebaum’s book is a breezy and thoughtful overview of this emerging bloc she calls “Autocracy Inc.
Below I share my notes for future reference.
My notes below:
- Srdja Popovic’s “Maduro model” in which leaders like Assad and Lukashenko don’t mind leading failed states; they have no shame (where in past leaders hid their failure
- Brandt’s Ostpolitik invoked permanent gas pipelines between USSR and west Germany;
- Egon Bahr’s change through realproachment speech, post Cold War the German phase evolved into the rhyming Wandel durch Handel (change through trade)
- Many misread Fukuyama’s influential 1989 End of History to imply liberal democracy was the inevitable evolved destination of societies
- Author says the 2014 German-led 25th anniversary celebration of the fall of the Berlin Wall, featuring Angela Markel and Gorbachev, underplayed the important role of the American military, GWB and nuclear negotiation, because it was more convenient to imply it was people only
- This and letting China into WTO showed naive, (including Clinton’s jello line regarding information and China)
- “Everyone assumed that in a more open interconnected world, democracy and liberal ideas would spread in the autocratic states. Nobody imagined that autocracy and illiberalism would spread in the Democratic world instead.”
- Kleptopia and Moneyland books
- omertà policy: Chavez decided to turn Venezuelan kleptocratic too, which surprised his friend Urdeneta was surprised
- Exchange rate scams in Venezuela, which journalist Francisco Toro calls “democratization of kleptocracy”
- Autocracy Inc “ their group vusiness model is an ironic, inverse version of globalization.”
- Zimbabwe
- In 2012, Max Frankel review of this author’s book said so far internet was a tool against not for tyranny — criticizing the authors argument back then — but look at us now
- Chinese firewall: Started in 1998 with the launch of the “Golden Shield Project” by the Chinese Ministry of Public Security, it’s the start of the world’s most significant internet censorship
- Unlike 20th century Stalinist, Chinese and now north Korea’s idealized posters of their country and leaders, today’s Autocracy Inc doesn’t create false hope, they create false cynicism. As author writes: “our state may
- be corrrupt but everyone else is corrupt too. You may not like our leader 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.”
- “Sometimes the point isn’t to make people believe a lie; it’s to make people fear the liar.”
- Christopher Walker: China’s “sharp power”
- Chinese strategy: “borrowing boats to reach the sea”
- Russian Chinese and Iran media networks global
- Fake news story in 2018 of Chinese evacuating its residents but Taiwan not being able to from Japan — this was CCP propaganda
- “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.”
- 2017: Xi Jinping calls for new era of “great power diplomacy with Chinese characteristics”
- The UN Declaration of Human Right had many inputs (from different cultures) but was criticized as western biased — Critics today push rule by law, not rule of law, multi polarity and sovereignty above all
- Wagner “regime survival package”
- Gene Sharp’s 1993 Dictatorship to Democracy indirectly inspired Arab Spring, where successive movements learned from each other the tactic Sharp identfieid
- Vaclav Havel’s 1978 essay on powerlessness, using his greengrocer
- Zimbabwe ThisFlag campaign: thru discredited Mawarire
- Modern autocrats sometimes avoid murder because “a martyr can inspire a political movement, while a successful smear campaign can destroy one.”
- This is not a war with autocratic countries so much as with “autocratic behaviors” that are ascendant in many countries
- “Just as the democratic world once built an international anti-communist alliance, so can the United States and allies building an international anticorruption alliance, organized around the idea of transparency, accountability and fairness.”
- There’s a reason modern autocrats spend so much on information flows
- “During the three decades that have passed since the end of the Cold War, the United States and its allies imagine that they had no need to compete in this sphere, because good information would somehow win the battle in ‘the marketplace of ideas.”
- “Our old models never acknowledge the truth that many people desire disinformation. They are attracted by conspiracy theories and will not necessarily seek out reliable news at all.”
- U.S. state department global engagement center efforts to combat Russian disinformation: James Rubin calls this pre-bunking
- What Angela Markel and others got wrong about Russian and later Chinese companies: integration with them did not create bonds because they were still agents of the state not just private companies
- Rare minerals for electric cars from China
- Shell companies buying in Trump branded properties, could signal impropriety
- We may have to intervene on 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.” 173