Anne Applebaum has a 30 minute article, "The Bad Guys are Winning", that is worth the time to read. The short version is that autocrats are destroying democracy around the world, and in America as well - expertly. Some key quotes:
In Belarus, the vicious authoritarian, Lukashenko, was struggling to deal with an uprising of the people.... "At first, Lukashenko seemed to have no plan either. But his neighbors
did. On August 18, a plane belonging to the FSB, the Russian security
services, flew from Moscow to Minsk.
Soon after that, Lukashenko’s tactics underwent a dramatic change... to “more sophisticated, more controlled
ways to repress the population.” Belarus became a textbook example of
what the journalist William J. Dobson has called “the dictator’s
learning curve”: Techniques that had been used successfully in the past
to repress crowds in Russia were seamlessly transferred to Belarus,
along with personnel who understood how to deploy them. Russian
television journalists arrived to replace the Belarusian journalists
who had gone on strike, and immediately stepped up the campaign to
portray the demonstrations as the work of Americans and other foreign
“enemies.” Russian police appear to have supplemented their Belarusian colleagues,
or at least given them advice, and a policy of selective arrests began.
As Vladimir Putin figured out a long time ago, mass arrests are
unnecessary if you can jail, torture, or possibly murder just a few key
people. The rest will be frightened into staying home. Eventually they
will become apathetic, because they believe nothing can change...
Lukashenko began to act, in other words, as if he were untouchable, both
at home and abroad. He began breaking not only the laws and customs of
his own country, but also the laws and customs of other countries, and
of the international community...
All of us have
in our minds a cartoon image of what an autocratic state looks like.
There is a bad man at the top. He controls the police. The police
threaten the people with violence. There are evil collaborators, and
maybe some brave dissidents.
But
in the 21st century, that cartoon bears little resemblance to reality.
Nowadays, autocracies are run not by one bad guy, but by sophisticated
networks composed of kleptocratic financial structures, security
services (military, police, paramilitary groups, surveillance), and
professional propagandists. The members of these networks are connected
not only within a given country, but among many countries. The corrupt,
state-controlled companies in one dictatorship do business with corrupt,
state-controlled companies in another. The police in one country can
arm, equip, and train the police in another. The propagandists share
resources—the troll farms that promote one dictator’s propaganda can
also be used to promote the propaganda of another—and themes, pounding
home the same messages about the weakness of democracy and the evil of America...Nor does the new autocratic alliance have a unifying ideology. Among
modern autocrats are people who call themselves communists,
nationalists, and theocrats.
No one country leads this group...the members of this group don’t operate like a bloc, but rather like an
agglomeration of companies—call it Autocracy Inc. Their links are
cemented not by ideals but by deals...
"And how different are we? We Americans?
We Europeans? Are we so sure that our institutions, our political
parties, our media could never be manipulated in the same way?...in 2016..."Russian trolls operating from St. Petersburg sought to shift the outcome
of an American election in much the same way they had done in Central
Europe, using fake Facebook pages (sometimes impersonating
anti-immigration groups, sometimes impersonating Black activists), fake
Twitter accounts, and attempts to infiltrate groups like the National
Rifle Association, as well as weaponizing hacked material from the
Democratic National Committee.
Some Americans actively welcomed this
intervention, and even sought to take advantage of what they imagined
might be broader Russian technical capabilities. “If it’s what you say I
love it,” Donald Trump Jr. wrote
to an intermediary for a Russian lawyer who he believed had access to
damaging information about Hillary Clinton. In 2008, Trump Jr. had told a
business conference that “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate
cross section of a lot of our assets,” and in 2016, Russia’s long-term
investment in the Trump business empire paid off. In the Trump family,
the Kremlin had something better than spies: cynical, nihilistic,
indebted, long-term allies."...
We need, in other words, to make changes to our own system, and that may
require overcoming fierce domestic resistance from the business groups
that benefit from it. We need to shut down tax havens, enforce
money-laundering laws, stop selling security and surveillance technology
to autocracies, and divest from the most vicious regimes altogether.
“We” here will need to include Europe, especially the U.K., as well as
partners elsewhere—and that will require a lot of vigorous diplomacy. (Please note that Trump likely has a long history of laundering money for the Russians, Saudi Arabians too?)...
Autocracy, Inc. includes the countries such as Russia, Belarus, China, Venezuela, Myanmar, Syria, Turkey, Afghanistan, and the American MAGA Cult is ready and willing in the wings, plus of course multiple sources of greed, avarice, and violence.
It's not any political ideology. Thoughts that this is limited to Communist Autocracies or Fascist Autocracies are obsolete. It's just MONEY AND POWER, MONEY AND POWER, MONEY AND POWER. And democracy gets killed off, and people are deeply harmed as governments are stripped of any power to stop the autocrats.
Remember the most famous line from Reagan? "Government isn't the solution - government is the problem." I used to believe that, but not any longer. Democracy needs to win over autocracy. Fortunately we have a president who knows that. Unfortunately, we have a former president and his Cult that did and will fight to establish Autocratic rule in America. Why? Not for political purposes or political programs, but just MONEY AND POWER.
But we in America can win this essential battle. We can stop it here, and that victory can travel. We are not alone. We can't stop this domination and autocracy by pretending it doesn't exist. We need to shine a light, and see what is trying to happen, and stop it.
Goodness and Truth are alive in America and in the world, and those who can see the darkness can insist on the Light, and push the darkness back under fetid little rocks where it belongs - prisons, for example.
