It was a challenge to get past the dedication page.
“For the optimists,” it reads. If you’re at all familiar with the warmongering author heading in, you just might lose your breakfast. It’s a preview of what’s to come for the next 224 pages in what is a marked achievement in the sheer amount of BS from a book’s start to finish.
‘Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World’ is such tired and ridiculously transparent imperial garbage, it could be used as Exhibit A for why US plutocrats need an imperial rebrand. Indeed, Applebaum struggles to keep all her false arguments straight and ends up lost, shell shocked to find that countries like Belarus, Venezuela, Russia, etc. aren’t entirely isolated despite the US’ best efforts. It’s like the person in the following tweet then decided to write a book about their epiphany:
One day you’re just living life, existing in tranquility, and next thing you know, you find out that other countries have their own laws and institutions. A hard pill to swallow.
— Camila (@camilapress) August 31, 2024
And Applebaum is upset about this state of affairs. She reserves most of her venom in ‘Autocracy, Inc.’ for Russia, writing that it “plays a special role in the autocratic network, both as the inventor of the modern marriage of kleptocracy and dictatorship and as the country now most aggressively seeking to upend the status quo.”
That is unsurprising given Applebaum’s background and the fact that for more than a decade she has been one of the most vocal supporters of Project Ukraine, which has led to the deaths and suffering of millions and might eventually wipe Ukraine off the map. Applebaum apparently has no regrets about all that blood on her hands; not only was it worth the sacrifice in the struggle between “democracy” and “autocracy,” but the fight must go on.
Born into wealth in Washington DC, Applebaum says her great-grandparents immigrated to North America (possibly to avoid conscription) during the reign of Alexander III of Russia from what is now Belarus. At Yale she studied under Professor Wolfgang Leonhard, a German communist-turned-hardcore-capitalist.
Leonhard was either mesmerizing or his pupils were easily convinced. Another of his students was Bush the Younger who wrote that Leonhard’s “History of the Soviet Union” was his “introduction to the struggle between tyranny and freedom, a battle that has held my attention for the rest of my life.”
Leonhard held a similar sway over Applebaum judging by her Cold War warrior path.
Applebaum went on to report for The Economist and The Independent, covering the fall of the Berlin Wall. She has since written several books and been a member of The Washington Post editorial board, an adjunct fellow at the free market, interventionist American Enterprise Institute. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, on the board of the National Endowment for Democracy and the Renew Democracy Initiative. She was a Senior Adjunct Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis where she co-led a major initiative aimed at countering Russian “disinformation” in Central and Eastern Europe.
In every spot she has pushed anti-Russian positions. Along the way she married Polish politician Radosław Tomasz Sikorski who is currently the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Poland. He is probably best known for this tweet following the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines:
And despite the liberal democratic order collapsing all around her, Applebaum remains fully committed to the bit. The lazy propaganda in ‘Autocracy, Inc.’ can be boiled down to America and its allies are good and whoever opposes Washington is bad.
While this type of propaganda has been around for ages, there is something so shameless about Applebaum’s desperate sales pitch at a time the West is no longer even trying to hide its oligarchic police states. Applebaum’s reality is one in which the West is mostly freedom, democracy, and unicorns even though she was writing this book at the same time that the West was declining into open tyranny and illiberalism. At various points in the book, when Applebaum is on another tear denouncing the unjust system of an “undemocratic” country, one could be forgiven for thinking she’s writing about America. Let’s take a few examples.
Is the US an Autocracy?
It certainly seems so, according to Applebaum. Consider a few passages describing the evil countries out there:
…autocracies are run not by one bad guy but by sophisticated networks relying on kleptocratic financial structures, a complex of security services — military, paramilitary, police — and technological experts who provide surveillance, propaganda, and disinformation.
Here’s another:
…this group operates not like a bloc but rather like an agglomeration of companies, bound not by ideology but rather by a ruthless, single-minded determination to preserve their wealth and power.
And another:
…[they] share a determination to deprive their citizens of any real influence or public voice, to push back against all forms of transparency or accountability, and to repress anyone, at home or abroad, who challenges them.
How about one more?
Once upon a time the leaders of the Soviet Union, the most powerful autocracy in the second half of the twentieth century, cared deeply about how they were perceived around the world. They vigorously promoted the superiority of their political system, and they objected when it was criticized. They at least paid lip service to the aspirational system of norms set up after World War II, with its language about universal human rights, the laws of war, and the rule of law more generally…Even in the early part of this century, most dictatorships hid their true intentions behind elaborate, carefully manipulated performances of democracy.
And these are just from the introduction! Applebaum proceeds with such a severe case of projection for the entire slog of a book. Does she ever mention plutocratic control over US “democracy”? Nope. Does she mention how the Global War on Terror conformed to the “aspirational system of norms”? Nope. Does she mention the West’s descent into oligarchic police states? Of course not.
Instead we get treasures like this:
These kinds of regimes can be hard for the inhabitants of democracies to understand, because their primary goal is not to create prosperity or enhance the well-being of citizens. Their primary goal is to stay in power, and to do so, they are willing to destabilize their neighbors, destroy the lives of ordinary people, or—following in the footsteps of their predecessors—even send hundreds of thousands of their citizens to their deaths.
“These kind of regimes” are actually quite easy to understand, Anne, even for us inhabitants of “the greatest democracy the world has ever known.” That’s because it’s all around us — from wage slave jobs falling ever further behind to pandemics that whack millions of Americans, disable millions more and fall disproportionately on the working class.
When Applebaum does give a rare mention to a few wee cracks in the facade of the great American democracy, they are in astonishing fashion traced to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “historical fever dreams.”
Applebaum cites the case of a steel plant in Warren, Ohio, “a Rust Belt town that would later cast its votes twice for Donald Trump.” In the 2010s the plant suffered a series of accidents caused by cost-cutting and safety violations. It closed in 2016.
Applebaum is getting to Putin but there’s one other hurdle she must clear first. That’s because the plant was owned by Ukrainian oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky. To most rational observers this is a story of US corruption and lax American laws around shell companies and real-estate purchases that allow money-launderers and illicit financiers to hide their money while simultaneously helping land blows on the working class.
But to Applebaum it is evidence of Putin’s evil genius and the long shadow of the USSR. She blames the Warren steel plant’s demise on the assertion that Ukraine — and Kolomoisky — were at that time “following the Russian path toward dictatorship and kleptocracy.”
One can only conclude that Applebaum’s brain is irreparably broken. She soldiers on nonetheless sending us missives from autocratic lands populated by hearts of darkness, unaware that she is the Colonel Kurtz she warns of.
She criticizes China, North Korea, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, and others for resisting American unilateralism, and she ridicules their agreements to recognize one another’s “sovereignty” — a word she places in scare quotes— as signs of their autocratic nature.
Applebaum thinks she can pull the old “they hate us for our freedoms” trick, but how well does that work when in nearly every nation across the liberal, democratic West there has been one or more of the following in recent years?
Crackdowns on fundamental freedoms like freedom of speech, the delegitimization of democracy and elections. And most of all, the question I kept coming back to: how could someone be so far disconnected to write this as the free, human rights-loving, rules-based order backs a genocide in Palestine?
Applebaum, as a representative of “the center” occupied by polite thieves and war mongers, takes up the task with glee. Her book, coming now as the US slides into unchartered fusion between government, tech oligarchy, and the police state, represents a dying gasp to still maintain the lie of a free democratic West. Most in the halls of power have already moved on from this silly pretense deciding that maintaining this charade is really no longer worth the effort.
So who is this book for? My best guess would be that it’s for Applebaum and her ilk, absolving them of guilt of what’s currently going down and what’s sure to come. It’s a virtue signal until the bitter end with their liberal values schtick. They fein shock at Trump’s crassness while the billionaire Silicon Valley eugenicists lead us deeper into a dystopian abyss, ignoring the fact the liberal center helped bring us to this moment. Applebaum and company differ little from Trump on policy aside from prioritization of the empire’s many wars, and in the end, the center will do as their plutocrat paymasters say as that’s all they stand for. What Applebaum’s selective lay of the land makes clear is that she’d be fine with a Fourth Reich headquartered in Washington as long as the US wins the great global struggle, and she gets to remain among the nobility penning her screeds about the evil of whoever would dare oppose such a magnificent “democracy.”
