Review Anne Applebaum: Autocracy Inc, the dictators who want to run the world

Anne Applebaum, 2024, Allen Lane.
Book review, Peter Tait, December 2024

“Nobody’s democracy is safe” (p174)

Applebaum sets out the situation, where over the past decades, a disorganised but cooperative cabal of opportunistic autocratic leaders have set out to undermine, discredit and destroy democratic values such as transparency and accountability, the rule of law and civil rights, trust in news and other information media, for the purpose of maintaining their own power and so wealth. As we have experienced, they are undermining truth, treaties, established conventions at national to international levels. They desire an apathetic, cynical population, who will comply. Their aim: a new world order of autocratic nations.

Core to this is their link to globalised finance. She names this the klepocracy.

Her point though is that this is enabled and supported by legal international institutions of finance, banking, real estate and trade. She doesn’t say this, but that is what an amoral, unregulated capitalist system permits.
The main points she wants us to take away are what can be done to resist this.

To begin, she points out that people have been resisting autocrats forever. There is a huge repertoire (198) of actions catalogued by Gene Sharpe in the appendix to his Dictatorship to Democracy. Some key principles also emerge: non-violent action, actively overcome the fear and apathy of citizens, systematically consolidate opposition to autocracy, persuade people to demonstrate opposition.

This parallels the idea Tim Hollo proposes in Living Democracy; the idea of withdrawing consent from the dominating system while building the alternative.

In response however, the autocrats have also learnt the lessons about these tactics and have developed and shared ways to counter them. Key is taking control of the narrative to promote the stories they want heard and to undermine the resistance leaders. Tarnished leaders are less messy and more powerful than corpses. Although, in reverse, two sides can play that game.

A second theme is that pro-democracy forces must link up and cooperate, internationally. Two focuses must be on revealing and resisting anti-democratic behaviour, rather than just blaming people or nations, and pushing for governments to cooperatively act at national and international levels to legislate against and regulate the methods that the international kleptocracy uses, especially in economics, finance and information.
Applebaum suggests we must undermine not fight dis/misinformation by pre-bunking possible narratives and using our own, ethical emotive messaging.

Pro-democracies must also de-risk their economic relationships with autocratic nations (think Russian gas into Germany) to permit independent action.

While this prescription of hers may be a tall order, not stepping up to resist will result in the demise of humanity. That will be the inevitable consequence of an international order of autocratic nations that ignore human rights, ecosystems, global warming and other crises while they inevitably fight among themselves for the dwindling habitable regions and planetary resources.

In brief, the klepocracy is organising opportunistically to run human affairs and for any hope of human survival pro-democracy activists must cooperate internationally to curb the power of the autocrats; people must push their governments to do this.

We must prepare to defend democracy.