Vladimir Putin chose to jettison democracy, loot his country and repress his people.
Ian Birrell reviews Anne Applebaum’s eye-opening new book, “Autocracy Inc: Dictators Who Want to Run the World”.
Applebaum, we recall, is a figure of the Left, not at all on the Right. She looks at the gaggle of countries, Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela, with dictators making choices to attack democracy and democracies, in the service of accumulating their own individual power and wealth.
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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. Read on…
I remember the silliness of Penn and Corbyn at the time. I wondered, when it all fell to hell, were they going to admit they’d been wrong? Not a bit of it. Silence on Venezuela and Maduro, as on Russia, Iran and the rest of them… silence is their stern response.
Birrell’s review of Applebaum’s “Autocracy Inc” is in The Spectator as Conspiracy of Thieves.
