Book review: Stark, shuddering story of polarised world should be a wake-up call

American journalist and historian Anne Applebaum says  we take our privileges and opportunities, our security and the newly-found tolerances that recognise human diversity, far too much for granted. File picture: Leonardo Cendamo/Getty Images

• Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want To Rule The World 
• Anne Applebaum 
• Allen Lane, hb €24 

Pulitzer Prize winner Anne Applebaum dedicates this short, powerful, wake-up-and-smell-the-napalm book to “the optimists”.

Over 150 or so pages she tells the story of today’s polarised world, one so stark that even the most optimistic democrat might pause for thought and, almost justifiably, immediately panic.

That may well be Applebaum’s intention as the sense of deepening threat and myriad charges of complicity and naivety levelled at liberal democracies likes ours are profoundly disturbing.

Her thesis is simple enough — we take our privileges and opportunities, our security and the newly-found tolerances that recognise human diversity, far too much for granted.

We imagine them, despite ever-growing evidence to the contrary, inviable and permanent. Some of us have come to distrust our politicians and political systems despite the absence of any plausible alternative. There are many reasons for this, some justified others not.

The mistrust inculcated by malign, unseen players is part of that hollowing out of national confidence everywhere. 

We have had to accept the growing feebleness of international institutions like the International Court of Justice whose July 19 judgment against Israel will be ignored with impunity. 

We imagine, if we think about it at all, that the rest of the world — Russia, China and their growing supporting cast of wannabe strongmen — share our aspirations, respect our institutions and sovereignty. Guffaw.

The great achievement of this 11th-hour warning, one that Applebaum has offered for over two decades, is that it leaves no room for indifference in proactive democracies and the quality-of-life versions that system still affords. 

It warns all too clearly where our half-hearted commitment to defending the hard-won principles that sustain our societies leads.

It warns all too clearly of the malign, kleptocratic states or individuals happy to exploit the misplaced optimism that makes us increasingly vulnerable. 

The idea of “use it or lose it” applies to participatory democracy and the gifts that delivers as sharply as it does in any other setting.

There are of course useful naysayers like Nigel Farage, Viktor Orban, or Donald Trump, who, whatever their motivation, dismiss the idea of an informal synergy uniting autocracies like Russia, China, India, Hungary, Cuba, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Venezuela, Iran, North Korea, Syria, Angola, Zimbabwe, Sudan, and many other states who work to deny their unfortunate citizens any real influence or public voice.

That some of these states work to stymie democracy in other countries, even in this tiny Republic, is all too evident. 

Some weeks ago, when Tánaiste Micheál Martin announced yet more plans to reform our defamation laws, he told of his ordeal trying to establish the source of fake online advertising linking him with cryptocurrencies. 

Though he, as he would concede, is hardly a pivotal player at the very top table of international geopolitics, someone in Russia or Belarus felt it worthwhile to link him with a process that would ultimately undermine him and discredit the political process he serves. 

Those same forces may be behind those utterly fake, yet widely believed and promoted, stories about the Biden regime supporting Ukraine because they had biolabs conducting chemical warfare experiments in that country. 

That propaganda, shared by Tucker Carson and other right-wing parrots, was intended to undermine America’s support for Ukraine’s independence.

It is of little or no comfort that China’s adventures in information management puts the rest of the world in the ha’penny place. 

The Chinese Communist Party controls the information available to its citizens with an iron grip.

At the turn of this century an idea called Measures for Managing Internet Comment Provision banned an “extraordinarily wide range of content, including anything that endangers national security, divulges state secrets, subverts the government, undermines national unification”. 

Anne Applebaum reserves a particular scorn for Russia and Vladimir Putin, the grey KGB agent turned absolute autocrat and possibly the world’s richest man. Picture: AP

A crushing catchall to silence opposition making a system or even regime change in Beijing all but impossible.

That China has brazenly set up “police stations” around the world to target exiled dissidents and manage their diaspora shows how utterly contemptuous Xi Jinping and his regime are of what we imagine are international norms and integrity. 

We are not immune to these intrusions.

Two years ago, a Chinese ‘police station’ in Dublin’s city centre was closed after pressure from a human rights group. 

The Fuzhou Police Service Overseas Station opened in Capel Street. China said it offered a service to Chinese citizens including renewing driving licences. 

Applebaum’s work makes it impossible to believe that “police station” has not been replicated elsewhere in Ireland already.

Yet, despite clear and sobering analysis of China’s growing role in undermining our way of life, Applebaum reserves a particular scorn for Russia and Vladimir Putin, the grey KGB agent turned absolute autocrat and possibly the world’s richest man. 

She details his brutality at home and abroad and how he, at an arm’s length of course, places mercenaries in impoverished African countries to sustain a local autocrat through a “regime survival package”.

The fee is usually tax-free access to a country’s natural resources that in a less corrupt world might help lift those blighted countries’ citizens out of primitive poverty.

She describes too the ruthlessness facing mercenaries who overreach their role, detailing the fate of Yevgeny Prigozhin, former Wagner leader, caterer turned oligarch and one-time confident of Putin who, like Icarus, fell from the sky. 

Applebaum describes almost with admiration the simple effectiveness of the leverage afforded Putin by Europe’s addiction to Russian gas or oil.

After the invasion of Ukraine, a cycle of energy inflation began. 

Soaring prices drove many German voters into the arms of the increasingly right-wing Alternative for Germany, a party happy to tug its forelock before Moscow while it opposes Muslim migration and is deeply Eurosceptic. A win-win for Vladimir.

Applebaum details too the atrocities of relatively minor despots — Syria’s Assad especially, Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman as well — in what at times can seem a relentless charge sheet — especially as those kleptocracies can, with some validity, argue that they are doing no more than European colonials did just over a century ago.

Be that as it may, we can do little enough to undo the greed and plundering of an Alfred Milner or East India Company, but we can come together to work to preserve the way of life that has sustained and enriched the West since 1945. 

Confronting corruption of money laundering

One of the ways we can do that, she suggests, is working together to confront money laundering, the indulgence that does so much to corrupt our world.

The closing paragraph of Autocracy, Inc. is worth quoting as it is as noble a rallying cry as you’ll hear today and probably tomorrow too: “There is no liberal world order anymore, and the aspiration to create one no longer seems real.

“But there are liberal societies, open and free countries that offer a better chance for people to live useful lives … They are hardly perfect … They can be destroyed from the outside and from the inside too, by division and demagogues. 

“Or they can be saved. But only if those of us who live in them are willing to make the effort to save them.”

On November 5, American voters will decide which side of that red line their superpower stands. 

If our societies are to break the world’s tightening garrotte, if we are to defy the brutal autocracies so vividly described by Anne Applebaum, they have but one option. 

Let’s hope they make the effort and that the optimists prevail.