Conspiracy of thieves
Published by The Spectator (27th July, 2024)
Autocracy, Inc – The Dictators Who Want To Run The World (Allen Lane)
After staging a failed coup and going to prison, the Venezuelan army officer Hugo Chavez ran to be president in 1998, campaigning against corruption and offering revolutionary change. His nation was seen as a prosperous beacon of stability, built on its great oil wealth, envied by many people elsewhere in the region. He won by promising to tackle the inequality that scarred it so badly and take on the oligarchs enriching themselves through favours and nepotism. Western celebrities, journalists and politicians, from Sean Penn through to Jeremy Corbyn, started flocking to South America to hail their new progressive hero supposedly fighting for social justice.
One year after that election victory his police chief – who had planned that failed coup with him – came to warn his old friend that corruption was starting to corrode their new regime. Senior officials were taking kickbacks, he told the president, even on the printing of their proposed new constitution, while he had found evidence of a high-ranking military figure skimming cash from their flagship initiative to assist the poor. Chavez listened – then sacked his pal a few weeks later. Venezuela slid down the road to repression and ruin that led more than seven million of its citizens – one fifth of the population – to flee as the country fell apart.
As the historian and journalist Anne Applebaum writes in Autocracy, Inc, Chavez made a choice. No one forced him to turn Venezuela into a kleptocracy, stifle its freedoms or shatter its democratic institutions. Even his security chief, a long standing ally, was surprised. This decision to act like a parasitical mafia syndicate had nothing to do with culture or history, the standard excuses proffered by appeasers of dictatorship. His former finance minister estimated that $300 billion was looted before Chavez’s death. Yet he fooled many into believing that his Bolivarian revolution was battling for the poor. It was, said Corbyn, ‘inspiration to all of us fighting back against austerity and neo-liberal economics’ – despite the fact that his idol sacked thousands of oil workers who dared go on strike.
Today, even the most blinkered leftist can see the sickening reality of Venezuela’s collapse under Chavez’s thuggish successor Nicolas Maduro, despite the veneer of democracy. Last month I listened as the popular opposition leader Maria Corina Machado detailed some of the hurdles placed in her path in the forthcoming election. Not only has this fearless woman been prevented from standing herself, but any hotel accommodating her team, or roadside restaurant serving them food, gets instantly shut down. This raises the question at the heart of Applebaum’s book: how do such rogue regimes survive when ostracised, sanctioned and exclude from reputable financial systems?
It is an important issue as dictatorships bind together in the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, an attack that underlines the epochal struggle between autocracies and freer societies. Venezuela tried alternative sources of funding, such as gold-smuggling and drug-running. Then Russian oil firms replaced reputable companies scared away by risk and instability; Chinese funders supplied cash; and Cuban spies helped suppress dissent. Even an Islamic theocracy in Iran assisted a regime that proclaimed left-wing internationalism, helping to build drones and repair oil refineries, while Caracas helped launder money for Hezbollah terrorists.
This illustrates the author’s core argument: modern autocracies might have diverse ideologies, but they are linked increasingly by cash, corruption and their common cause of defeating democracy. They are driven by the desire to accumulate wealth and power. So they use the ‘instruments of repression’ to pulverise institutions which encourage accountability in their own lands while collaborating to topple freedom and a rules-based international order. Hence the title of this slender book, which suggests that repressive regimes are acting like a conglomerate in an attempted global takeover.
Applebaum correctly sees Beijing and Moscow as prime movers in the bid to alter international rules and discredit liberal ideals, rallying allies behind buzzwords such as ‘multipolarity’ – routinely used by our new Foreign Secretary David Lammy – to blunt attacks on their abuses. China’s egotistical dictator Xi Jinping has declared a new era of ‘great power diplomacy with Chinese characteristics’ that includes ‘reform of the global governance system’ while squeezing out slivers of space for civil society and crushing freedoms in Hong Kong. He seeks to replace the language of human rights with talk of mutual respect, intended to mute criticism of his repression, while selling surveillance equipment honed on his own citizens to other despotic regimes.
One group of Russian and Spanish oil traders reportedly set up a complex web of shell companies to send sanctioned Venezuelan oil to China, obscuring its origins. They then channelled the profits into buying high-tech components from American firms for Russian military contractors. These parts were used to build weapons designed to kill Ukrainians. ‘This particular scheme was uncovered. How many others have not been?’ asks Applebaum.
Like Chavez, Vladimir Putin made a deliberate choice to jettison democracy, loot his country and repress his people. He was aided by the now discredited concept of Wandel durch Handel (‘change through trade’), the idea that closer commercial ties inevitably lead to democracy, which was promoted by naive western politicians and suited the amoral world of international finance. This helped Putin assume that the West was too weak to resist his attempt to crush a fledging democracy on his doorstep. Yet efforts to throttle his regime through sanctions have been undermined by the same group of despotic regimes, aided by greedy scavengers in other countries.
She writes fluidly as she flits around the world, meeting dissidents such as the Pentecostal pastor Evan Mawarire in Zimbabwe, whose despairing lament for his brutalised land went viral and briefly united the nation against its thieving rulers before he was defamed, imprisoned, tortured and driven out of the country. ‘The same social media that built us up, took us down,’ he tells her.
Technology is a key weapon. The author details how Russia pioneered tricks to silence dissidents at home, spread divisions in democracies and extend its global influence. After the Kremlin’s full-scale attack on Ukraine, a ludicrous tale about secret US-funded bio-labs conducting experiments on bat viruses in the country spread fast, fanned by the far-right and conspiracy theorists in the West. China – which had good reason to sow confusion over bio-labs following its cover-up of a pandemic that erupted in Wuhan – claimed 26 such laboratories were engaged in military research. The conspiracy story bounced around the social media echo chamber, hindering Washington’s efforts to build support for Kyiv both abroad and at home. One poll found a quarter of Americans believed it to be true.
Alternatively, the propagandists spew out multiple stories, some plausible, some not, in a ‘firehose of falsehoods’ to foster fatalism and mistrust: ‘Given so many explanations, how can you know what actually happened? Autocrats have an enormous incentive to spread that hopelessness and cynicism, not only in their own countries but around the world.’
Similar tactics can be used for defensive purposes. After the journalist Jamal Khashoggi was murdered in a Saudi consulate, the Arabic hashtag ‘We all trust in Mohammed bin Salman’ appeared more than 1.1 million times, thanks to the prince’s ‘army of flies’ swarming on social media.
Yet surely it is a sign of weakness when Russia’s imperialist leader kowtows to a North Korean leader whose country has been impoverished over three generations of feudal dictatorship. These are marriages of convenience, familiar from history but with a modern twist. The big question is how democracy should respond – and here the author seems on less certain ground. I agree, for instance, on the urgent need for greater financial transparency and that this is an inflection point for control of new technologies. Yet, to give one example, how do you marry the desire of some western politicians to stop bitcoin being used by bad actors through regulation with its critical importance for dissidents – including the late Alexei Navalny’s group in Russia –who rely on it to evade state clampdowns on their activities and funding?
It would be good to have these parts fleshed out in a future edition. But Applebaum deserves credit for drawing attention to the alarming new alliances of dictatorships seeking to shackle freedom, undermine human rights and usurp our values – along with the complacency of democracies that have done so little to stop the flood of fake news that infects our nations and flows of dirty money that sustain our foes. ‘Nobody’s democracy is safe,’ Applebaum argues rightly.
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