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.”
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Getting into the toughts of Anne Applebaum and her ilk is an intellectual equivalent of urban exploration of a huge faecesberg in the sewerage system of word production.
Thank you, Conor, and my sympathies for the pain of reading this so that we don’t have to.
Hear, hear! How you survived ingesting that coprolite is a mystery for the ages.
Russia was not invited to the 80 year commemoration of the liberation of Auschwitz. History is being rewritten.
The puppet masters (rolling in THEIR unlimited money), decide on a narrative. They then go to their stable of “respected academic authors” to craft a pulp nonfiction book. The book is sent for correction and review, and released with fanfare.
The author is given a huge advance.
This is how payoffs are laundered…….
………and history is made (crafted).
WWII history have been in the process of rewriting (crafting) for the past 80 years, with a big boost after 1991 (especially in Eastern Europe, and even more especially in the Balkans, Baltics, and Ukraine). For example, most of westerners haven’t even heard about Jasenovac (unlike Auschwitz, probably because of lack of interest from Hollywood).
I’m sure this book will soon be on the shelves of all the major bookshops in Cape Town, which I have to visit four times a year because there are no bookshops within easy reach of my home town.
It at least provides some insights into the kind of people who run the West and why the West isn’t working any more. But I’ve just been over at Caitlin Johnstone’s page, and as she points out, the weird thing is that all these people are completely out there, the conspiracy is completely open, everybody knows that a person like Applebaum is married to Sikorski and what they stand for, and yet the cities of the West are not in flames as mobs hunt down the leaders of political parties bearing spears and flaming tyres. Puzzling, isn’t it?
>But I’ve just been over at Caitlin Johnstone’s page, and as she points out, the weird thing is that all these people are completely out there, the conspiracy is completely open, everybody knows that a person like Applebaum is married to Sikorski and what they stand for, and yet the cities of the West are not in flames as mobs hunt down the leaders of political parties bearing spears and flaming tyres. Puzzling, isn’t it?
Not really in one aspect, I think that a fair amount of people are just trying to get through the day and have little mental energy or time to do much about it. And that is what TPTB want providing continuous distraction, division and diversion to the masses.
But I do think an uprising will be coming and the targets will be placed on Baghdad Annie and her ilk when they finally can’t explain away their failures or escapades which come at the expense of bettering our own country.
It’s not the people at the bottom who initiate revolts, it’s the people who see that if they don’t changes things they will keep sliding down until they and their kids reach the bottom as well.
Decent people have limits. That’s one of the key characteristics of decent people. The elites running down our societies are not decent people and have no limits. This is a very hard fact for decent people to grasp: that there are people of pure evil that happily immiserate and kill you without any qualms.
As for bookstores being an insight into what our overlords want us to think, that occurred to me recently when perusing my local B&N.
The diversity of views in their current events section was about as diverse as a CNN panel discussing Ukraine. I checked to see if they had Scott Horton’s “Provoked” available for pickup and B&N did not even acknowledge it existed when I searched for it on their website (Amazon does carry it).
I’m predicting my DC-area library will buy 5 copies and there will be many holds.
Good lord, I was too optimistic. 13 copies, 10 holds. Meanwhile, nary a copy of any of Richard Sakwa’s books.
Thanks, Dwight! You are so correct. I live in one of the wealthy exurbs of Washington, DC and home to tons of active and retired federal employees, also home to some Deep State agencies and their federal contractors. One would think our county library system would host a well stocked range of books on world politics.
Well, I just checked and our county library system has six different books by Anne Applebaum and none, not a single one, by Richard Sakwa. Sad, and shameful.
I”m betting I’ll see this on the new release shelf at my local library as well. My PMC friends read Applebaum and other Atlanticists approvingly in the appropriately named Atlantic. I’ve lost count of how many new releases my excellent public library has that are supportive of Project Ukraine in one fashion or other–it’s more than 10. There is no Richard Sakwa, no Geoff Roberts, or Glenn Diesen or Stephen Cohen to balance those. To voice support for, or even attempt to explain, why Russia is justified in having launched its SMO is, at best, to be regarded as having 2 heads.
In the west absolute, crippling poverty has been eradicated, as per Adam Smith’s priority. Inequality (in law, economics, power, etc.), which creates poverty is still there but it is harder to mobilize against when the stomach is not growling…
Any media outlet that promotes Anne Applebaum – per a cursory search for reviews of this book, NYT, NPR, Foreign Affairs (CFR) – is immediately suspect. Zero credibility for these liars for war. Utter corruption. I mean, Jeffrey Epstein was CFR. Look it up. It’s a corrupt organization populated by filth.
Well I for one think that Anne Applebaum provides a very valuable service. You look at who she associates with and there is your list of spooks, neocon institutions and other dodgy ventures. For example here is a good sample from her Wikipedia page-
The Economist
The Washington Post
The Pulitzer Prize
The Atlantic
Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies
London School of Economics
American Enterprise Institute
Foreign Policy magazine
Council on Foreign Relations
National Endowment for Democracy
Renew Democracy Initiative
And that is not all of them. Still, if Russia goes ahead and wins the war in the Ukraine, I would not be surprised to hear her and her husband having a mental breakdown. Remember when Trump getting elected back in 2016 broke a lot of people’s brains? This will be the same.
Good point.
I was thinking Soros and his brood of vipers.
Conor Gallagher: Risata a crepapelle.
Compliments on your first line:
It was a challenge to get past the dedication page.
Which is up there with The Stranger by Albert Camus:
Aujourd’hui, maman est morte. Ou peut-être hier, je ne sais pas.
She can’t even keep her facts in line, being so overwhelmed by the surety of her own opinions:
Even in the early part of this [1900s] century, most dictatorships hid their true intentions behind elaborate, carefully manipulated performances of democracy.
Come on. Has she ever heard of Franco, the Falange, and Spain? Or of most of the history of Paraguay, especially under Stroessner? I supposed that she’s a Pilsudski fangirl. And, wowsers, has the word “performance” been worn out. Enforced church-going. Suppression of minorities. Secret police. That’s a performance?
This is pure vulgarity, and Nina Turner had some severe words (check YTbe) for people who said the same about nearby East Palestine: “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.”
Who is the book for? It is for Hillary Clinton diehards and for the liberals who stood and cheered when Kamala Harris bleated out “premier lethal force”on cue as well as the immortal “I’m not speaking” (to demonstrators who included Arab-Americans whose families had been slaughtered in Palestine). As I have noted before, we are witnessing the rubble of U.S. feminism – and this is one of the members of the old-hens network crowing from the wreckage about how breaking the glass ceiling means that you, too, little Tiffany, can engage in genocide.
As you conclude: “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.”
Thank you for this piece, which nails the corruption of western mainstream media.
For my own amusement, I looked up how this book was reviewed in The Guardian, the pretend left of centre newspaper so beloved of liberals in Britain. The review was written by BBC heavyweight foreign correspondent John Simpson, never one to take a reflective step back from denouncing Putin.
Simpson’s review starts in the subhead by declaring “A masterful guide to the new age of authoritarianism” followed by a pull out quote “Applebaum offers a masterclass in the marriage of dodgy government to international criminality” before concluding:
“It’s a disturbing world we live in, but understanding its ways, keeping our own counsel, and knowing who to trust have never been so important. Anne Applebaum, who 30 years ago foresaw the way we were going, is one of those we can trust”.
The above sums up in the proverbial nutshell, how ridiculous propaganda organs the BBC and Guardian are these days, if indeed, they were ever anything else.
Putting trust in either, would be a fool’s errand.
Thank you, John.
Thank you for reading the Grauniad, so that we didn’t have to.
I’m glad that you mention Simpson and the Grauniad and the organisation that has replaced the Anglican church as the Tory party at prayer, the BBC.
Readers may not be aware of how western MSM and think tank hacks, including Simpson, try to ambush and harass people who they are opposed to at press conferences, festival discussions etc. The Grauniad, for example, makes a point of targeting the wonderful Francesca Albanese.
Simpson, Stephen Sackur and Tim Sebastian think the empire is still a going concern, judging by how they talk down to people from former colonies. It’s not working though as the uppity colonials no longer tolerate that attitude. Many were educated here and know how Blighty is corrupt, perfidious and heading for collapse.
The phrase “beached grandee” has been applied to the pompous Simpson.
This take down of Anne Applebaum is highly deserved. Her smugness and her utter lack of insight into the dark sides of her own society are typical for the Neocon world view. In short I can´t bear her. Where the authour though errs is in portraying Wolfgang Leonhardt as her inspiration. Leonhardt – a son of German communists who had to flee to the Sovietunion after Hitler – was not a cold war hawk and definately not an “arch capitalist”. He had tremendous knowledge of Marx and Hegel, Lenin and Stalin and tried to understand the Soviet Union from “within”. His criticism of political realities in the Soviet bloc should not be confused with the knee jerk Russia hatred of Applebaum. He would be ashamed of his former students Bush II and Anne Applebaum. Just consider the fact that he was welcome in the USSR from 1987 or any number of interviews where he criticized the way capitalism was introduced in Russia.
“her utter lack of insight”. You are generous here. It is more like “move on, nothing to see here…” or “Russian propaganda”.
Thank you, Conor.
Warmongering is profitable, though. When Sikorski was elected, he and his wife had to declare their earnings. Most of it was from the US war machine and its think tank proxies.
Their two sons followed the father to Oxford*, including the Bullingdon Club**. The boys were educated at Eton. The family has homes in Warsaw, London, the Cotswolds and NYC. This lifestyle doesn’t pay for itself.
*Radek S has his university fees, lodgings and even spending money paid for by the long suffering British taxpayer. This was the good old days before the Blair regime and introduction of university fees. At Oxford, he pretended to be a Mitteleuropa aristocrat and related to the WW2 Polish general.
**I often shop at the tailor’s which makes Bullingdon club clothing. Pre-covid, one (bespoke) suit cost £3k. Johnson and Sikorski celebrated a birthday together pre-Brexit, which caused some tension in their relationship. As the pair met, having arrived at the party separately, they screamed, “Buller, Buller, Buller.”
This book is typical of what is sold and displayed prominently at the likes of Daunt and Waterstones. Browsing at bookshops now feels like being assaulted by BS pandering to the PMC.
If US were a democracy Trump, Biden, Obama and Bushes would not be bombing and invading everywhere they wish with no input from the peoples’ house aka the congress.
This week marks 50 years since Saigon finally collapsed! The second undeclared war the first one the US lost, because we back our corrupt nationalists (not autocrats!)..
Pot calling the kettles…..
That week I was “working” at strategic war with the “Soviets”.
Conor: excellent review. Perhaps this book will be used to teach your points rather than hers. Please change “fein” to “feign.”
Many of the quotes you chose require almost no editing to make them describe the exorbitant power of Western oligarchs over our “democracies”. It’s as though Applebaum is in Jungian therapy and is talking about her shadow.
Reading through this string of comments on Applebaum underscores why I so love Naked Capitalism. Anne Applebaum is part of that geography that once visited is marked by ‘Here there be Dragons’…
lol. Applebaum isn’t angry at “autocracy”…..she’s angry that it’s the other team who is playing “rules-based order” instead of her team.
a plague on both their houses!
Get this book for someone you hate
Priceless
Conner, that tweet about “a hard pill to swallow” is the funniest thing I’ve read in ages. Thanks for having it handy.
One suspects that Applebaum and / or some of her minions will sneak a peek at this review.
It may be somewhat unsettling for them to see that their world view is not always embraced as fair, good and wise by all in the USA.
But this is the USA, where another “tough” female and one time USA Secretary of State can find it humorous to state about a foreign leader, “we came, we saw, he died” while channeling her inner Caesar.
Not really a fair comparison: Julius Caesar led his troops and was present during the conquests. These modern-day armchair sadists take pleasure in seeing children, paramedics, journalists, nurses etc. blown to bits in Palestine, live-streamed on the internet. All this while they have armed protection and the safety and comfort of their mansions.
These people need to be locked up in a psych ward for the good of humanity. .
You misjudge her so badly. Anne Applebum (oops) is all over Youtube talking to anybody who will talk to her about saving our beautiful, beautiful democracy along with Zelensky Land.
Autocracy, Inc.
This on Amazon’s profile for Applebaum’s book:
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: Economist, Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, The Times
Amazon: Editors’ Pick. Best Books of the Year
Goodreads: 4.2 (9,599)
The ideological divide is so deep that Conor’s takedown will be dismissed out-of-hand by those who talk-her-talk and walk-her-walk. It will be embraced by but a handful of the currently overrun but not subdued.
Democrats and EU socio-political imaginaries will be sure it’s a portrait of Trump or Putin but they daren’t look in a mirror.
Thanks Conor. We can take the piss all day long on this one.
Sheldon Wolin must be rolling in his grave. Applebaum (CIA asset?) tries to turn this on its head and apparently even rips off the title idea.
Democracy Inc.: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism. (2008).
It’s even worse now than when first published.
The sections quoted from Applebaum demonstrate to me the pernicious nature of cognitive bias. The cognitive sciences were never an area of study for me but I delved into it in the early days of the Jr Bush regime.
A study I read showed that people had an almost pathological inability to recognize their biases even when they could easily spot them in another person.
I’m sure we all have experiences that demonstrate its expression. When presented with contradictions in their perspective, the response is a combination of denial, rationalization, and entrenchment.
I have never seen any study that looks for the why behind the behavior but my sense is that an elevated ego combined with an elevated status is fertile ground for that behavior.
despite the liberal democratic order collapsing all around her, Applebaum remains fully committed to the bit
Why not, if it pays off? The woman must be one of the most decorated journalists in the universe. Relentlessly producing pro-imperialist propaganda worked out very well for her and her family.
Anyway, the world is filled with people for sale, just look at the 535 voting members of the Congress, so why not a second-hand journalist too? I feel very magnanimous right now.
The Wikipedia link also notes she holds Polish citizenship.
No possible conflict there as one can be certain that USA’s and Poland’s interests are always aligned.
Perhaps a synonym for “journalist” is now “propagandist”.
Thank you for this both excellent and entertaining review, Conor!
Thanks a million for this fine, critical review, Mr Gallagher !
Applebaum is of a piece with that other execrable hack, Timothy Snyder — he of Bloodlands infamy …🤢