The Tenacity of Tyranny: The Sources of 21st Century Despotism

By Gregory Larkin

The Tenacity of Tyranny: The Sources of 21st century Despotism poses this question: Given that democratic countries constitute 55% of humanity and that the material standard of living are generally considerably higher in many democracies than in almost all of the world’s dictatorships, what are the factors that allow for autocratic regimes to persist? Despotism should be an ever-shrinking phenomena but that is not the case. Using political classification data from Freedom House, the books posits that there are three distinct types of authoritarianism in practice. The first and most significant source of modern despotism is the legacy of communism: the majority of people who today live under despotic regimes (about one-quarter of humanity) are the direct consequence of the ability of Leninist state autocracies to maintain their political stranglehold on power. This is the subject of Chapter Two. While the “puppet” regimes of the Soviet Union collapsed at the end of the Cold War, there still are 13 countries, 12 of which are contiguous in Eurasia led by Russia and China, that constitute a continuation of the “Communist Bloc” of political systems based on ruthless tyranny, mostly due to the capacity of neo-communist elites to ensconce themselves in power by utilizing secret political police forces to crush most open dissent. The second major source of despotism in the modern world is the overriding influence of some particularly retrograde Islamic doctrines in many Muslim societies which is the focus of Chapter Three. There are eight Muslim-majority countries that are broadly democratic enough to be classified as “Free” accounting for about one-fourth of the total number of persons who live in all Muslim-majority countries. The broad social influence of Islam has been a potent source of traditional authoritarianism as there are 40 countries in the world today with a combined population of about 13% of humanity that are Muslim-majority dictatorships. While all religions such as Christianity, Hinduism and Buddhism have posed challenges to the emergence of democratic institutions since 1789, the recalcitrance of Islam has been particularly intense as there are several specific aspects of Islamic theology that lend far too much authority to this political outcome. Most Muslim countries have had a difficult time of separating mosque and state and thus in establishing secular government, promoting pluralism and women's rights which are necessary prerequisites for modern democracy. The third source of despotism in the modern world is poverty. There are 25 poor countries which account for about 8% of humanity and are ruled by dictators that try to keep themselves in power by deliberately keeping the vast majority of their subjects in abject poverty and thus relatively powerless. This is the subject of Chapter Four which focuses on the “stationary bandit” paradigm of the “kleptocratic” state. These dictatorships are profoundly and inherently weak governments and tend to be located in the tropical zones of Earth. The fifth chapter concerns the most dangerous threat of potential despotism: the rise of neo-fascist demagogues utilizing “populist” or “ethno-nationalism” dogmas. Ever since Classical Athens, demagogues have always been the Achilles heel of the singular greatest internal threat to the stability of democracy because demagogues stoke fear and rule by reckless emotion, particularly scapegoating hatred, rather than considered reason. If democracy is going to fail, it will not be due to external invasion by the world’s remaining autocracies, but rather by the ability of such internal demagogic and supremacist political movements to gain control of the state. Each chapter in the book concludes with a manifest lesson that needs to be learned and heeded so that democratization can be strengthened and extended around the globe which is the necessary political process if the common problems facing humanity are ever going to be resolved.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gregory Larkin
• Release date: Mar 17, 2020
• ISBN: 9780463683965

Gregory Larkin

Gregory Larkin is an American who lives in Pennsylvania. For questions and comments, please use: [e-mail].

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The Tenacity of Tyranny:

The Sources of 21st Century Despotism

By Gregory V. Larkin

(2020)

Chapter One

Delineating Democracy and Dictatorship in the Modern World

Ask just about any average person in any country in the world today. Democracy is a much better form of government to live under than any type or configuration of dictatorship. By all remotely objective measures, it is far better to live as a free citizen or even as an illegal alien in a democracy than it is for most people to live under the iron fist of a dictator, no matter how allegedly benevolent. That is true for the mythical average person in any given country in terms of the most basic indicator which is life expectancy. Yet, it is also true in many other common measures of standards of living in modern societies such as per capita income, educational opportunities and attainment, housing, and access to clean water. Moreover, democratic citizens also enjoy a variety of cherished personal liberties such as freedom of speech, of assembly, of religion and conscience, as well as the right to vote and to privacy from the extra-judicial minions of the ruling regime poking around in their lives. Those are just some of the basic human rights that are routinely violated in the world’s dictatorships which is the base and defining characteristic of autocratic rule. Additionally, the level of war aggression between democracies is so infinitesimal as to constitute a separate zone of peace among the world’s democracies: this is a reality that validates the critical ideas of the democratic peace theory proposed in Immanuel Kant’s seminal and prescient 1795 pamphlet Perpetual Peace. In stark contrast, war aggression and other forms of mass violence by the world’s autocratic regimes is obviously the main cause of all of the worst episodes of mass murder in recorded history, including the First and Second World Wars in which tens of millions of persons perished – See Gregory Larkin, Uncle Sam as GloboCop: Immanuel Kant, Comparative War Aggression, and the Travails of America’s Pax Democratica, Smashwords, (2016). Thus, in homage to the legendary chant of the newly liberated barnyard animals conjured up by George Orwell in Animal Farm (1945): For Democracy Good! To Dictatorship Baaaad!!! The essential question that must be suspected of all dictatorships is just how low in terms of persecution and oppression does any given despot go in his pursuit of greater power?

Given the obvious advantages and benefits for any theoretical average person living in a democracy, is it clear that most people in the world today should be trying to do just about anything to ensure that the form of government under which they live should be a democracy. There is, in point of fact, one leading indicator that such dynamics are front and center in international affairs: specifically, there are more pro-democracy demonstrations in the world in 2020 than ever before in human history. Since 1789 when the most nascent stirrings of democracy were unleashed in France and more definitively instituted in the United States, the sweep of history clearly points in a general trend towards the rise of democratic government but that development has been no straight line but rather exceedingly intermittent and erratic in scope. Initially, the number and stability of proto-democracies in the nineteenth century was very limited to a bare handful of countries such as the United States (in some, but not all, American states), the cantons of Switzerland, and perhaps parts of Great Britain (certainly not Ireland) and Canada. In the year 1900, there were only a handful of countries in the entire world that could be objectively classified as functioning representative democracies: the United States of America and the semi-independent British dominion of Canada in North America; Switzerland, Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Sweden in Europe; the British dominions of Australia and New Zealand in the Pacific. In the twentieth century, the pace of democratization certainly accelerated as the number of democratic countries and the extent of democratic rights within societies expanded quite significantly, albeit in quite imperfect fits and starts. After the First World War in which the great power democracies triumphed after the four-year stalemate of horrific trench warfare, many countries with democratic institutions extended the right to vote to women, particularly Britain and the United States. Moreover, some of the European countries that emerged in the aftermath of that brutal war, such as Germany and Czechoslovakia, adopted democratic institutions and practices.

The upsurge in democracy in the 1920s proved to be premature and short-lived, particularly given the rise to power of the totalitarian Nazi Party in Germany in 1933 that toppled the progressive democratic Weimar Republic. The Nazi Third Reich regime went an absolute rampage of territorial conquests in the late 1930s and early 1940s which initiated the Second World War and terminated democratic governments in almost all of continental Europe. The defeat of Fascist Italy (September 1943), Nazi Germany (May 1945), and Imperial Japan (August 1945) finally ended Second World War which provided an opening for the restoration of democracy in those parts of Europe which had been liberated by the armies of the democratic Western Allies of the United States, Britain and France. This process also included the political reorganization of Italy and West Germany in the late 1940s; those two Axis powers regained their political sovereignty as functioning democracies after American, British and French military occupation. The decolonization of India from the British Empire in the late 1940s also significantly expanded the number of persons living under a democratic form of government, despite the bloody Hindu-Muslim sectarian partition of the British Raj in August 1947. Other Asian countries that became democratic in the post-Second World War era were the Philippines and remarkably Japan under the auspices of American military occupation. As a result of these processes by the mid-1950s, about one-third of the world’s people lived in democracies which was due largely to the fact that India had (1) immense population and (2) retained its democratic political structures after independence. Yet, other Asian countries, including many of the territories of the British Empire that also achieved their independence in that era, did not sustain democratic institutions which was the case of Pakistan, Burma, Ceylon, Malaysia, and Iraq. All of those countries reverted into dictatorships in the first years of their political self-determination. Yet, democracy was in a far stronger position than those numbers might apparently indicate because the United States of America was the world’s democratic superpower and several other major countries were also democratic, especially Britain and France.

The number and population of democracies in the world stayed roughly at that same level of one-third throughout the 1960s and 1970s, even as most of the former African colonial territories of European empires became independent. Almost all of the leaders of the independence movements in those countries soon became dictators, squelching political dissent and rigging any subsequent elections, if held at all, to ensure their continued straggling grip on power. Moreover, numerous military coups d’état in Latin America in the twentieth century stifled and setback popular movements towards greater democracy in that region, often claiming that such repression was necessary to prevent communists from seizing power. The only really significant expansion of democracy in the 1970s was in Portugal and Spain on the Iberian Peninsula when those previously long-standing fascist dictatorships collapsed and democratic reforms were instituted which permitted almost all of Western Europe to become democratic and then to ally with one another militarily through NATO and economically through the European Economic Community.

The late 1980s and early 1990s proved to be an era of unprecedented political change, involving widespread democratization in almost every region of Earth. Most significantly, the collapse of the communist puppet states under Soviet domination in Eastern Europe paved the way for many of those formerly subjected countries to become democracies: Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Elsewhere, in Latin America, military juntas gave way to democratically elected governments in Brazil, Argentina, and Chile. In Asia, South Korea and Taiwan became democracies and the Philippines restored its democratic institutions in 1986 after over two decades of the Ferdinand Marcos dictatorship. In South Africa, the white-dominated Apartheid regime gave way in 1994 to the elected and multiracial government of President Nelson Mandela. Even Russia functioned as a nascent democracy with basically free and fair elections that brought Boris Yeltsin to the Russian presidency in July 1991 and that permitted the Russian Duma to function as a legitimate and representative national legislature after the Soviet Union officially disbanded in December 1991. The early 1990s thus was a truly heady time for proponents of democracy: one celebrated political analyst, Francis Fukuyama, declared that democracy and capitalism had so effectively triumphed over all other ideological competitors in terms of how to organize social relations that it constituted the end of history. Indeed, for the first time in recorded history, over half of the world’s population, an actual majority of humanity, lived in countries that were either fully democratic or substantially democratic in their political institutions. From this vantage point, it was not inconceivable to assert that the political process of democratization would soon result in much of the remaining countries rejecting and overthrowing their despotic regimes. Dictatorship seemed to be on the path to its own marginalization if not doomed to oblivion. However, the arguments about the arc of history leading to the presumed inevitable and imminent demise of authoritarianism proved to be greatly exaggerated.

On New Year’s Eve 2000, former Soviet KGB agent, Vladimir Putin, acting in consort with many of his former communist secret police associates, staged a coup d’état in Moscow, overthrowing the teetering government of the alcoholic Russian president, Boris Yeltsin. This newly installed President Putin most certainly did not get Francis Fukuyama’s memo about the ultimate triumph of democracy globally and that proved to be a gloomy harbinger of much of the first two decades of the twenty-first century. Only a very few countries since 2000 have made the transition from dictatorship into anything resembling a functioning democracy. In the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Towers and the Pentagon which was the single greatest loss of civilian life in American history, the United States unleashed its military prowess to overthrow profoundly retrograde dictatorships of the medieval Taliban in Afghanistan in 2002 and of Saddam Hussein in Iraq in 2003. Yet, the American attempt to reorganize and democratize Iraq and Afghanistan subsequently has proven to be only profoundly problematic as sectarian insurgencies continue to rage in both countries with no end in sight. In late 2010, the long-standing dictator of Tunisia was driven from power by popular street protests and a secular democratic government was then established. That initiated an era in the Middle East that became known as the Arab Spring, as other social protest movements, led largely by young people with social media savvy that challenged their despotic rulers. The results of those protests have in varying degrees lead to profound social sectarian conflict and violence instead of democratization. Extensive popular protests by young Egyptians in central Cairo did bring down the military dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak in 2011, but after the Muslim Brotherhood surprisingly won the Egyptian elections in 2012, the Egyptian military quickly toppled and overturned that electoral result in 2013. Egypt thus reverted to military dictatorship. Elsewhere in the Arab world, both Syria and Yemen have descended into incredibly brutal Hobbesian each-against-all civil wars that have resulted in untold suffering and has created millions of refugees. In short, the world’s remaining dictatorships in the twenty-first century have if anything become more entrenched in the past two decades despite the rise of the Internet and social media which some contended would lead to a world where there would less ability of governments to control access to information and thus more power in the hands of the people.

In the 2010s, the chances that any given person is living in a country that is a functioning democracy on one hand or a dictatorship or a Partly Free or hybrid regime on the other hand is just a little better than 50-50. According to the Freedom House annual survey, Freedom in the World, which rates all the world’s 190+ independent countries of a scale from 0 to 100 in terms of political and civil rights (the higher the score, the better the democratic conditions), there are 125 countries (with 4.04 billion people) where their aggregate score is 50 or better (thus may be described as more democratic than not) with amounts to 54.7% of the world’s total population of 7.4 billion people in 2018. This includes 87 countries with 45% of the world’s population who live in countries that are rated as Free with no qualifiers in terms of political and civil rights. Democracy thus remains simultaneously the dominant political system in the world today and yet seemingly stuck in place. There are 49 countries in the world today with 36% of the world’s population that are rated distinctly Not Free by Freedom House and thus remain the bastions of autocratic rule, also seemingly cemented in place. Moreover, this rough balance between democracy and dictatorship (the exact number of people and countries depends on how a hybrid regime is defined in practice) has resulted in conditions such that virtually all international migration in the contemporary world consists of people fleeing the despotism of their homelands in order to try to gain some foothold, if not legal status, in one of the world’s democracies. Democratic countries are thus clearly winning the voting with one’s feet contest with autocratic regimes. Yet, such migrations have in themselves created significant social tensions in the world’s democracies – some of which such as England are already quite densely populated – centered on how many refugees should be admitted and how they should be assimilated. That process in turn has provoked the reemergence of nationalist and neo-fascist political tendencies in many advanced democracies. This precarious condition of democracy versus dictatorship is the basis for the fundamental question of this book: given the promise and the fortitude of democracy as a political example and social influence, why and how is it that dictatorships persist so effectively in the contemporary era? What accounts for this adamant resilience of despotism? And ultimately, what are the necessary steps that must be taken to overcome despotism?

Three Arch-Types of Dictatorships in the Modern World

Perhaps the simplest explanation for how contemporary despots and their treacherous minions have maintained their tenacious grip on power is the sheer inertia of history. Almost all countries and societies prior to the American and French Revolutions of the late 1700s were profoundly authoritarian and exceedingly patriarchal. Since then and until very recently, most countries have continued to be politically despotic to a very significant degree. The notions that political leadership should be held accountable to the people over which they rule and that the people should have fundamental human rights to be respected by the state are a remarkably new phenomena in human affairs. The persistence of such entrenched retrograde social and political arrangements upon which traditional autocracy was based requires little more than the difficulty of social modernization in any of its varied manifestations. It is an argument that is little more than a t’was-always-thus perspective. While any such line of reasoning has an undeniable kernel of truth at its core as the weight of tradition in any society is always difficult to alter, it overlooks one critical fact. Modern dictatorships must compete in a variety of ways with extremely advanced and highly dynamic democratic countries. That competition cannot simply be ignored as the example of democratic rule is much more universally known due to the proliferation of modern communication devices such as the Internet and cell phones to just about every corner of the globe.

Modern dictatorships therefore must adapt to the myriad of political, social, cultural and economic challenges that democracies directly pose in ways that the dictatorships of the past never really had to confront. It is certainly not the case that democratic states are planning to militarily invade and overthrow the world’s remaining dictatorships and remake the world into democracies by force. That is simply exceedingly unlikely to happen; the most retrograde autocrats almost certainly need not to fear that outcome any time soon because that was one rather futile rationale for the American invasion of Iraq. The American occupation of Iraq has proved to be an incredibly expensive disaster in so many ways which makes further such military escapades by the United States or any other democratic great power all the more unlikely. It is instead the political example of democracy where liberty from the depravity of despotic rule is the most significant political influence and gravitational pull of democracy for most societies still subjected to autocratic repression. Moreover, it is a fact that virtually all dictatorships in the contemporary world are not the result of mere political inertia from the past retrograde autocratic organizations. Rather, almost all modern despotic regimes have been forged in the modern era by political actors that have used a variety of modern techniques to seize power in their countries including adept manipulation of mass media for the purposes of propaganda. The more pertinent question is: what are the basic means by which modern despots fend off their political challengers and social activists and popular demonstrators who advocate democratization and thus tenaciously maintain their rule and regimes?

There is no one answer to that question. Rather, this work posits that there are basically three types of despotic regimes in the modern world. This following typography is not meant to be the only or definitive means to analyze despotism, but rather a very useful tool to comprehend and illuminate the most basic and critical issues that account for the persistence of autocratic regimes. The largest single source of despotism in the world today is the legacy of the imposition of the archetypical communist, or more precisely, Bolshevik/Leninist secret police states that remain entrenched in power in some form in the truly unlucky thirteen countries with a combined population of about 1.759 billion people or 26.3% of the world’s population. This is the focus of Chapter Two. This category conspicuously includes the world’s most populous country: the People’s Republic of China. For just over half of the persons who are subjected to despotism in the modern world, it is largely due to the ramifications of the brazen and unlikely Bolshevik coup d’état in Russia in November 1917. All of the other states still enmeshed in some form of the communist model of autocracy critically flow from that fateful political outcome. History has shown that there are distinct limits to the popular appeal of the Leninist political system as the last state to go fully commie was Vietnam in 1975 when South Vietnam was militarily conquered by North Vietnamese Communist armed forces and allied South Vietnamese Viet Cong guerillas. While some of these states have abandoned their communist roots ideologically and instituted pro-capitalist economic policies since the 1980s, the basic reality for most of these countries is that their entrenched neo-communist ruling class maintains virtually absolute control over open political affairs via massive repression of any political challengers enforced by secret political police. That is the basis of the Bolshevik system that Vladimir Lenin and his ultra-loyal Cheka mass murdering assassins created in 1918. What is also notable about this group of countries is that 12 of them are geographic contiguous to one another in Eastern Europe, Central and Eastern Asia: Russia, Belarus, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, China, North Korea, Laos, and Vietnam. This is in no way an accidental outcome. The ability of Russia to export its Bolshevik revolution was due almost exclusively to geographic proximity – the closer a country was to Russia, the more likely that communists could succeed in grabbing absolute state power for themselves. Moreover, the capacity of each of these countries to maintain the present political structures of profound autocracy and repression is bolstered by the reality that most of their neighboring countries are similarly misruled. For instance, the People’s Republic of China is adamant in propping up dictatorships on its borders and profoundly hostile to any of its neighboring countries that are democratic. Cuba stands alone as the only communist country in the world today that is not connected directly with other communist countries. However, Cuba is an island in the Caribbean which permits the regime in Havana to effectively exercise far more control over its 11 million people than would be the case if there was a land border with any other country in the Americas.

The second most numerous source of despotism in the contemporary world is socially based: specifically, the retrograde effects of certain aspects Islamic influence over many social relations and thus political affairs in those countries where Islam is the prevailing religion for the majority of the population. This is the subject of Chapter Three. Unlike Communist Party domination of the state structure that was purposely designed to always be autocratic and remains to this day despotic everywhere still operable, it is not the case that every one of the 40 non-communist countries in the world where Muslims are a majority of the population are necessarily dictatorships. In point of fact, there are eight democracies that are also Muslim-majority societies according to Freedom House in 2018: Indonesia, Senegal, Tunisia, Sierra Leone, Albania, Burkina Faso, Kosovo, and the small island nation of the Comoros. In each of these countries, citizens are basically free to elect their political leaders and enjoy many civil liberties. Thus, Islamic culture is not necessarily completely incompatible with democratization in the modern world. Nonetheless, there are 32 Muslim countries that have a Freedom House score of below 50: 13 of these countries have overall democracy scores in the range of 35 to 49 and therefore have been put into the vague category of Partly Free. There are another 19 Muslim-majority countries that are Not Free dictatorships. The combined population of these countries amounts to about a little more than one billion people or about 13.5% of the world’s total population. Simply put, many aspects of Islamic religious dogma and practice are profoundly at odds with many of the essential tenets of modern democratic institutions and values such as secularism, freedom of speech and conscience, and the equal rights of women. In practice, this means that even when Muslim-majority countries conduct elections, the winners of these elections, once installed in power, often use their authority to persecute dissenters from Islamic religious traditions. Such practices are almost always unwarranted and a clear violation of many basic democratic rights. Some of these Muslim countries, such as Oman and Qatar and Kuwait and Brunei, are also quite wealthy in per capita terms but that is due almost exclusively to the export of oil and natural gas and not an extensive skilled and innovative workforce as is the case in the world’s most advanced democracies. Without the windfall of fossil fuel revenues flowing into the treasury of the state, almost all of the rest of these Islamic countries in the world are economically backward and quite impoverished to a very significant degree. It is furthermore evident that many Islamic traditions in these countries have had the effect, whether a deliberate objective or not of overweening Islamic clerical influence, of stunting social modernization and blocking political democratization.

There are another 25 countries in the world that are autocratic regimes but their despotism is not based upon the political legacy of either Communist Party apparatchik-organized domination or retrograde Islamic-influenced obstinacy. This main source of despotism for this third category of autocratic rule is endemic poverty that perpetuates conditions that permits dictators in this desperate lot of countries to maintain their iron grip of control over about 620 million people. These countries account for about 8% of the world’s population – a small number in percentage terms but not in absolute numbers for the many people(s) who are subjected to such persistent oppression. This is the focus of Chapter Four. This is a diverse number of countries and a rather eclectic lot but it is not just a catch-all-else category. The condition of widespread poverty in a society is a critical factor in determining whether a country can establish and sustain democratic institutions or not. The unfortunate self-reinforcing reality is that, the more poverty stricken a country is, the greater the political urgency is for the ruling elite to maintain their reign at virtually all costs. This is because any fall from power for this ilk of autocratic rulers and their most loyal henchmen will result in a massive personal diminution in their ability to prolong their lavish lifestyles and exalted status. These circumstances generate a terrible catch-22 poverty trap. Despotism thrives when society is enmeshed in often grinding poverty and in turn pervasive poverty means that the minions of almost all of these tyrannical regimes will go to extreme lengths in terms of persecution of any actual or perceived political challengers in order to maintain themselves in power.

What is evident from these three types of dictatorships is that there cannot be one definitive strategy to undermine despotism and foster democracy in the modern world. The expansion of literacy and education is obviously the most necessary condition for economic development and social empowerment but such changes do not in any way guarantee democratization as the persistence of the Leninist political model demonstrates in spades. Islam is the religious faith of over one billion people and will continue to be one of the world’s major religions for many generations to come; reforming Islamic religious doctrines and practices to adapt to modern democratic standards of human rights and secular political institutions, which is clearly necessary, is likely to be a very slow process and exceptionally difficult to achieve. The most similar example of religious sectarians vying for control over society and the state on the disruptive and divisive issues inherent in the modernization process is the Protestant Reformation in sixteenth century Europe which unleashed particularly intense social conflicts and exceptionally bloody political wars across most of Europe for several centuries thereafter. The modernization of Islam is likely to be just as turbulent and brutal as that fateful history. For instance, the contemporary sectarian civil wars in Syria and Yemen, which are obvious examples of such dynamics, have proven to galvanize incredible levels of violence and unremitting vengeance with no end in sight. Finally, poverty is not just an economic circumstance that fades away into insignificance with rising levels of incomes stemming from internal development as well free trade with other countries. Instead, poverty is always a relative status and a distribution of economic power within any given society and it is a condition that remains an endemic problem that can threaten the ability of even the most advanced democracies to

Reviews for The Tenacity of Tyranny

[Marcelino Decena · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A powerful book written by an renown expert in political matters. His topic on modern day facets of despotism can be explained in four observable phenomenon.