Franz Kafka, a spiritual guide in these trying times, thought that there might be “a certain truth in a chorus (or choir)” of voices. For this choir, I propose vox populi and will draw counsel from readers of Anne Applebaum and listeners to Anne Applebaum who have written their reactions into the Web. After Applebaum spoke in London on “‘Putinism’: The Ideology,” one listener commented, quite simply, “Brilliant mind! Very articulate!” On another occasion, an admirer wrote, “Always, always great to hear Anne Applebaum speak. So deeply informed, humane and articulate.” I cite these voices because they speak to my own. True, another listener to her London talk complained about her very articulateness, since “being articulate like Ribbentrop or Beria (sic) is not a highly prized point of honor” (this is also what vox populi gets you); but readers of her latest book, Autocracy, Inc. aren’t likely to mind the clarity and force of her every word.
Here, she addresses the world’s curse of our time: the geopolitical spread of violence and corruption, the ongoing violation mostly abroad of what we might consider to be every decent political right—justice, freedom, safety, fair dealing. Oppressive government is conspicuously active in—let’s begin with only the major autocracies—China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, Myanmar, Belarus, Zimbabwe… and we can add some three dozen other countries, who—and here comes the jump—draw together in their nose-thumbing at Western Enlightenment thought and together carry on smugly with corruption as usual—concretely, by swallowing the state’s money, hiding accountability, enriching one another. Belarus was warned by the European Union that it may not fly its planes in European air space. Does that hurt Lukashenko’s prospects? No matter. There are always “augmented economic relations” with China—China’s massive investment of $1.34 billion—one can discover—in Belarusian “manufacturing, e-commerce, new materials, traditional Chinese medicine, artificial intelligence and 5G.” In exchange for Russian exports, Belarus gives Russian soldiers and weapons a foothold on its territory from which to launch attacks on Ukraine.
And moral sanctions? A telling contrast, as Applebaum relates: When, in 1960, Khrushchev slammed his shoe down on the table at the United Nations, angered by a critical comment, he was minding criticism from the outside. The special new badness of the contemporary autocrat is that he couldn’t care less about criticism coming from the West, itself vilified as a cluster of bed-sick, degenerate liberal democracies; or as one reader in our chorus puts it, given the West’s spectacular failures—read: Iraq, Afghanistan, for starters—“sick old lions in a cage.”
Most readers coming to Applebaum’s book can be counted on to have despised autocracy in individual countries. But learning about autocracy incorporated adds another sordid note: these regimes are in cahoots with one another—in profitable, mostly hidden collusion. As I read this book, I read in The New York Times (July 26, 2024), “US Chips in Russia Missiles: The Illicit Flow of Technology to Russia Goes Through This Hong Kong Address.” Herewith the second and a third shock. You read:
Defying sanctions, Russia has obtained nearly $4 billion in restricted chips since the war began in Ukraine. Many were shipped through a cluster of shell companies in Hong Kong. … Shell companies have acquired millions of restricted chips and sensors for military technology companies in Russia, many of which have been placed under sanctions by the U.S. government. … Yet the companies are a crucial link in a chain connecting U.S. research laboratories to Chinese factories, Russian arms makers, and the battlefields of Ukraine — and a sign that the U.S. government and tech giants cannot control where their technology goes.
The third shock registers something more than a lack of oversight. It comes with the awareness of how readily corporations in democracies have cooperated with Autocracy, Inc. Microsoft, Yahoo, Cisco sent hundreds of millions of dollars of technology to China to assist its crackdown on the free use of the internet—called by that illustrious regime “The Great Firewall.” But, as Applebaum writes, “As in so many other spheres, China absorbed the technology it needed and then eased the foreign companies out.” Sanctions are meant to ward off this sort of exchange, but that policy has failed spectacularly. The networks of clandestine trade between the autocracies and their willing or “innocent” enablers—Western corporations—are now too intricate for any watchdog agency to discover and block. The president of Zimbabwe, Emmerson Mnangagwa, concluded a deal with Putin and proclaimed, “The victims of sanctions must cooperate.”
Together with the material swindles that are the hallmark of autocracy there is its falsification of fact, truth, history. It once seemed that the internet would guarantee international harmony, as an easy flow of the truth would set all nations free. Max Frankel wrote in 2012, “So far this century, technology has become a welcome defense against tyranny.” In 2024, wrong! Instead, it has become an angry instrument of control, an opportunity to rewrite the past, deny the present, and lie about the future … not to mention survey, identify, and arrest potential enemies of the state. So much for “access to information.” Applebaum writes of the aftermath of the demonstration in Tiananmen Square:
to prevent the democratic wave then sweeping across western Europe from spreading to the east, China’s leaders set out to eliminate not just the people but the ideas that had motivated the protests: the rule of law, the separation of powers, the right to freedom of speech and assembly, and all the principles that they described as “spiritual pollution” coming from the democratic world.
This process was well underway before Xi Jinping assumed autocratic powers, helped by precisely the new information technologies that were supposed to produce one enlightened world. The abuse of technology as a tool of repression is, as well known, ubiquitous in China. It is especially grievous among the Muslim Uighurs, where “nanny apps,” installed in phones as required, are quick to detect “ideological viruses” that put the afflicted owner on the wrong side of the police. Applebaum quotes the journalist Ross Andersen: “Chinese algorithms will be able to string together data points from a broad range of sources—travel records, friends and associates, reading habits, purchases—to predict political resistance before it happens.” You will hear thoughtful Chinese say that “our” system, designed to abolish conflict and ensure safe zones—let alone, smooth traffic flow—satisfies “our” longing for security, for boundaries, unavailable to you in the West, where capital crimes occur with frightful regularity: it is the system of rule that we prefer, so look to your own city streets.” This tu quoque is not for Applebaum and her listeners a tenable conclusion. You find this sort of argument repulsed in a short text by one of our chorus—John Chastain—regarding that policy of strength through security generously gifted to its people by the CCP. China’s embrace of Putin’s war in the Ukraine pivots on ideological war with the West:
The CCP and its proxies are profiting from the blood and carnage in Ukraine and suggestions that the United States look to itself is just the deflection and denial of a corrupt authoritarian regime. The sad thing is that China is using Russia to harm its adversaries in Europe and the United States. Xi Jinping … is content to let Russia bleed its youth dry on the battlefields of Ukraine while distracting the West from his own agenda and ambitions.
Applebaum notes, “In September 2022, when the Russian president held a ceremony to mark his illegal annexation of southern and eastern Ukraine, he did not speak of the people he had tortured or held in concentration camps, but instead claimed he was protecting Russia from the “satanic” West and “perversions that lead to degradation and extinction.”
It will not do “to look to ourselves” (in order to be ashamed?) except to acknowledge and be glad of freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, a free press, and allowed revulsion to the lure of authoritarianism. These are rights, however threatened and however vitiated at its margins, we enjoy for now. Such crises and demands for individual rights are centuries old. The Brothers Karamazov’s Grand Inquisitor alerts us to the craving for personal nonentity. At some considerable distance, we have Trump telling his evangelical audience, “Christians, get out and vote, just this time. You won’t have to do it anymore.” In the late 1930s, Thomas Mann rode through America proclaiming, hopefully, “The Coming Victory of Democracy” over the fascist states. He prophesied correctly … must we say, till now? Paraphrasing Applebaum: We are beleaguered. We risk being governed by would-be autocrats—Xi-, Putin-, Orkan-sympathisants: her subtitle reads: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World, and there are Westerners who want to run with them.
I read this book in the library of Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, a dignified place—wide, light, elegant, with spacious corridors—full of the aura of dedicated study, the cases and stands flush with bulletins, magazines, proceedings, gazettes, and reports from societies devoted to every conceivable branch and sprig of knowledge, palpably quiet, suffused with the afflatus of countless minds once lost in thought … and could imagine a cordon of police arriving one day, putting a lock on the door, and making it clear that this place was henceforth out of bounds. On the way out, I read that Russian and Chinese planes now fly together in brotherly airspace, not too many miles from Alaska. On Applebaum’s admirable example, look on, beware, resist!