History Professor Answers Dictator Questions | Tech Support | WIRED

I'm Professor Ruth benot I study authoritarianism let's answer some questions from the internet this is tech support [Music] dictators at system Kumar 999 asks bro WTF is fascism fascism is a one-party state classically with an all powerful dictator at its head meaning no more separation of powers no independent judiciary muselin in the 1920s coined the term fascism he also said everything in the state nothing outside the state so the state reaches into areas that in democracies the state has no place there's no more trade unions except the state unions employers and employees were in the

same Union and that tells you what kind of Union it was fascism is also classically expansionist the conquest of territory imperialism is intrinsic to Fascism there is no sense of fascism without violence fascists truly believe whether it's Hitler or Francisco Franco in Spain or musolini that violence is the way you change the world they declare one category of person as an enemy could be a racial enemy as in Nazi Germany it could be a political enemy as it was in Italian Fascism and for Francisco Franco in Spain but that enemy must be exterminated so the

state organizes itself around the practice of violence and regular people are trained to become Vigilant and informers and use violence themselves so violence is at the very core of fascism malice Liddell asks why is Putin's shirtless in so many of his pictures Putin takes up where musolini left off in using his body as an emblem of strength musolini stripped off his shirt he was the first leader ever to do that on camera and that stood for Italy's strength and dynamism and modernity this idea of uh the dictator being the man everyone should look up to

is very old it goes back to the fascist years this is a period cartoon making fun of Hitler gerbal his propaganda Minister was depicting him as a kind of demigod dictators and authoritarians pose as the Macho men but they also create a climate in their countries of a kind of Lawless masculinity that says that a real man should be able to have anyone and anything he wants without asking for consent and so berkone created such an atmosphere in Italy of misogyny that the United Nations issued a special report after he had been in and out

of power for a decade saying that there was grave risk to Italy's women because of the rise in domestic violence and hate crimes against women the bang asks what defines a dictator it comes from the verb to dictate that gives us a clue so a dictator is somebody who wants to get his way doesn't care about public welfare often is very very corrupt steals from the people manipulates people through propaganda they don't agree with the separation of powers so the executive power becomes overwhelming in a dictatorship a dictator is a leader who wants absolute power

someone who does not want his authority to be checked by any institution and so he proceeds to take those institutions apart to void them of all people who are not loyalists to create his state in his own image and make everything be about him at Angel Uma 5 asks dictatorship authoritarianism autocracy are the three forms of governance really different authoritarianism is a political system that often is dictatorship you can have civilian dictatorships like the fascist dictatorships you can have military dictatorships nowadays some of the authoritarian leaders don't respond to the one party dictators of earlier

times like Mao or Hitler or Stalin autocracy is another name for the political system of authoritarianism we have democracies where you have voting rights and the will of the people translates into the leadership and autocracies where the leader does their best to stay in power no matter what the people think klosi from Reddit asks how do dictators maintain power when it seems that most of the country is against them them dictators use the authoritarian Playbook The Playbook is while you're running for office while you're building up your power you want to discredit journalists you want

to call them fake news or Vermin or Communists and authoritarians do this because if evidence of their corruption comes out or their violent acts they need the public to not believe the press to think the Press is lying so there is no other voice telling the truth truth the truth is gone the Nazi term was the lying Press today we talk about fake news many dictators use what today in Russia is called the fire hose of falsehood this is a high volume of Lies half-truths conspiracy theories because conspiracy theories are as old as propaganda the

fact the Jews were supposed to be controlling the globe that was a fascist conspiracy theory dictators also maintain power by creating an atmosphere of Terror a intimidation whether it's physical violence against enemies of the state or today they harass people with lawsuits with smear campaigns they try and ruin you because the goal is to get you to self-censor then you're doing the dictators work for him avj 164b from Reddit asks what are the differences between a fascist dictatorship and a Communist dictatorship they do many many things in common they have an all powerful leader with

a personality cult they use propaganda the difference is in who the target is so fascists go after leftist and although national socialism and Italian fascism took originally at their very Beginnings from the left as soon as they constituted into parties their main enemy was the left the most consistent targets of Nazism and fascism were Communists and socialists so fascist dictatorships are anti-communist obviously that's one huge difference from Communist dictatorship there the targets the enemies are counterrevolutionaries anyone who's going to put the march of the Revolution into Jeopardy and so Mao killed millions and millions of

people justifying it as getting rid of counterrevolutionaries Jay Anderson asks what are the most common personality traits tyrants and dictators possess they are narcissists meaning they care only about themselves dictators attract attention and agulation because they tend to be very charismatic so they're very good performers they're very good orators they will do anything to preserve their power for example Bonito musolini the first fascist dictator in 1924 he had his main political opponent killed and in order to escape an investigation he declared dictatorship dictators tend to be paranoid they construct something called the inner sanctum and

this is an inner circle of advisers and very common is that it includes family members there's a whole history of sons-in-law being given important positions from Bonito musolini the fascist who had his son-in-law as foreign minister Pinos used his son-in-laws and put them at the head of the privatization agency so they made a lot of money they also end up in this kind of cocoon where they start to believe their own propaganda and stop making good decisions Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine in 2022 without consulting his military or his economic specialist adequately and so the military

had huge losses at the beginning of the Ukraine conflict more generals died than since World War II at the beginning because Putin did not listen to criticism and objective feedback dictators don't have any moral code they will Ally with anyone think about Hitler the fascist allying temporarily with Stalin the Communist think about today Xi Jinping the Communist allying with Vladimir Putin the far right leader so that old makavelian saying the ends justifies the means perfectly sum up the dictator's personality at V pulle June asks why do dictators have statues and pictures of themselves all over

the countries they oppress dictators have giant egos but their secret is that they're very insecure the rules of personality Cults have not changed for hundred years you have to be the man of the people you speak in a plain language you connect with the people but you've also got to be the man above all other men the man who's Untouchable the man who's kind of like a god so they build statues of themselves to give a sense of this godliness of this omnipotence so the statues are their way of saying I'm going to be here

for a thousand years so dictators want to be omnipresent they have so many reminders of themsel in every way rituals statues books photographs and they become kind of inescapable take the H Hitler salute in Nazi Germany anytime you went into any social context you had to perform it you both used your hand to salute but you had to say out loud Hy Hitler this brought Hitler into the conversation into every conversation even though he was not physically present and what you were doing is saying you were submissive to him and wishing him good health this

corresponds to the desire of the dictator to be everywhere and people should not have social relations without the dictator being part of them and that's also why their populations get really sick of them Mr cornfield asks how do dictators come to power they can be appointed as the classic fascists were musolini was appointed by the king German Elites uh politicians brought in Hitler nowadays dictators can come to power initially through elections and then become dictators for example Vladimir Putin when he was put into place he was backed by the oligarchs at the beginning he was

not an all powerful dictator it takes people years to amass enough enough power to do that about 75% of authoritarian regimes in the 20th century were created through coups a group of soldiers and Generals they just take power these can be civilian Crews or military Crews but the point is that they impose themselves on power forcibly at George Forester 17 asks WTF is a quote self couat a self coup is a variety of coup when the leader is already in office perhaps you are the leader and you've lost an election well you just refuse to

leave that's what Nicholas Muro did in Venezuela that's what Donald Trump tried to do through the January 6 Insurrection but in that case it failed president Yun of South Korea declared martial law instead of having to be impeached in that case it was promptly dismantled and he is under detention the same thing happened in Peru in 2022 president Castillo was about to be impeached so he refused to leave he tried to have martial law it was again very swiftly taken care of and Justice was served the joke was that President Castillo started his day as

president and he ended it as a prisoner it's very important to find perpetrators of self crew accountable this next question is from Kai did y'all know Hitler tried to overthrow the government during the beer hall push in 1923 but failed and was jailed I did know and it's important for everybody to know this history now so Hitler tried to overthrow the government he was put in jail 1924 that's where he wrote mine comp when he came out he was ranting and raving with his racist diet tribes he was not taken seriously although several German states

did prevent him from speaking publicly because of his hate speech but then he promised to obey the Constitution to get those bans on his hate speech removed and he proceeded to build up the Nazi party over the 1920s and then the Depression hit and social unrest increased the left parties increased and so Germany leads in 1933 decided to appoint Hitler who by then was the leader of an increasingly popular party to get rid of the left for them so the German Elites who brought Hitler into Power thought they could control him and use him to

get rid of the left and then the rest was history where they were not able to contain him and he ended up controlling them Midwest mama says many dictatorships criminalize abortion China Russia several others say it's a women's duty to breed as many children as possible for the state that's correct and we can ask why that is throughout history dictatorships even in the case of china where they had a one child policy for many years have now started to reverse this and dictatorships in particular that have fantasies of national purity of Designing a perfect race

or of having more as Victor Orban says Hungarian babies to combat the number of immigrant babies all these different reasons are why many dictatorships and authoritarian States encourage the right kind of women to have have babies along with the political opposition journalists lgbtq people women have been the enemy of the strong men and every regime acts to take bodily autonomy away from women take their agency away and criminalizing abortion and rolling back or getting rid of Reproductive Rights is part of that this next question is from Karen sake do Americans want to live in a

dictatorship many Americans have no idea what dictatorship entails but have been convinced that democracy is failing them and have seen dictators held up as Superior Role Models they have been conditioned by the media by President Trump to feel that autocrats that dictators whether it's Xi Jinping whether it's Vladimir Putin are superior brands of leaders Studies have shown all over the world about 30% of the population holds authoritarian leanings that are often expressed in parent in Styles in how they think about Authority are you kind of a mini dictator at home or are you a collegial

collaborative type these people can get activated if a demagogue comes on the scene for almost 10 years now Donald Trump has appealed to certain groups who are more comfortable with authoritarian context he created a big tent for every kind of political extremist every kind of racist from people who were Southern racists to neo-nazis those people who already have authoritarian views on the world can be very seduced by a politician who comes and says I am a strong man I will decide things for you I will bring order into society and it becomes a natural meeting

of that kind of person with that kind of leader and so together all of this created an environment where many Americans felt that they could see themselves in some kind of political system that's not a democracy Shark Boy from reic asks how do dictators actually make their money the history of dictatorship and the history of corruption are completely entwined at their extreme you have something called kleptocracy that is when it's a state of Thieves an example was Gaddafi in Libya where the leader and his cronies were stealing from State agencies they were expropriating private citizens

factories they were taking over state agencies and funneling the money to Swiss bank accounts the same thing is true of Putin's Russia which is a fully formed kleptocracy where Putin and his cronies kind of plunder for example gazprom the state energy conglomerate they take profits out of state agencies so instead of working for the people the agency Works to fund the dictator and the money today goes less to Swiss bank accounts than to Offshore accounts for example Vladimir Putin after 20 years in power is now one of the very richest men in the world so

dictators make money in a illegitimate fashion which is why they use propaganda violence repression to make sure that none of their secrets come out Bas Mike Lee writes name a fascist dictator whose agenda entailed limiting the size cost and power of government well Senator Lee there is one a Pinos the bloody military dictator of Chile who came to power through a USB coup and made Chile a laboratory of neoliberal Economics privatizations deregulations cutting Social Services and at first this provided a boost to the economy mostly to Giant corporations including American corporations but within a few

years it caused bank failures massive hardship and people went into debt and so the Long View is that we can think think of dictators as always expanding the government and causing a lot of waste and bloat in the process actually but even when they cut the size of the government it doesn't end up well Johnson TOA says I don't understand why do people support dictators it can seem strange that people support dictators who take their rights away because what dictators want you to do is not only betray other people people in your communities you're going

to inform on them you're going to look the other way when your loved ones get taken away by the secret police they also want you to betray yourself they want you to lose your moral compass to self-censor dictators are very skilled at posing as saviors at creating crisises or exploiting crises and then posing themselves as the solution whether it's an economic crisis or the perception of social unrest one of the classic dictator narratives for a hundred years is that only the authoritarian is going to keep keep people safe against the threat of immigrants coming across

the border now there's a grain of truth always to this because immigrants too come over the Border but what dictators do is say that immigrants are coming over the border to rape our women to take our jobs to dilute our population because they're the wrong skin color and the wrong faith and so the same excuses for a hundred years are used to justify their National Purity campaign musolini used to talk about black brown and yellow people that's his words coming across the border and having too many babies these are old narratives and they work because

they make people fearful fearful for their security for their family and then the dictator is there to say I alone can fix it snowflake 100% pure masshole says why is he even having rallies he's referring to president Trump US presidents don't have rallies dictators have rallies Hitler had rallies authoritarian love agulation and they love opportunities to perform because rallies are an occasion where people come out in Mass numbers to show their loyalty and what dictators care about more than anything is people showing loyalty to them on camera and so that's one reason whether they're right

or left or anticolonial or imperialist they all have rallies early on Joseph gerbal who later became Hitler's propaganda chief he realized that Hitler was terrible in a studio he was wooden he needed the energy of crowds to come alive and that's why gerbal hit on this idea of having rallies Non-Stop and that has remained a feature of dictatorship think of mbutu SEO in the Congo constantly had rallies where he dressed up his thing was being the leopard he sat on a throne these are shows of power and omnipotence here's a question from the political discussion

subreddit does the internet improve democ ocracy or enhance the potential for dictatorship the internet is a double-edged tool it has allowed dissidents who are operating in repressive context to have new audiences they would never have had such as the protesters in 2019 in Moscow who live streamed on Twitter themselves getting arrested having millions and millions of views however the internet has allowed dictators to centralize and speed up the circulation of their propaganda now this goes back all the way to the beginning of authoritarianism smart dictators Savvy dictators have always known how to take the latest

media technology and use it to their advantage so musolini used news reels and he was a great performer Hitler had that crazy ranting voice so he was very effective of radio Modi of India when he first ran for office and he's the most followed leader on Instagram in the world right now he used Holograms so he could be in 100 different cities at the same time up through bolsonaro in Brazil and Trump who use social media very very effectively so the internet is a tool like other tools before it however the internet has the ability

to hugely increase the volume of propaganda and the circulation of propaganda at e Harding 2000 asks is orbon a fascist Victor Orban prime minister of Hungary has fascist qualities but today in the Century fascism looks different you have elections you keep them going but you manipulate the system by control of the media by control of the Judiciary and the election apparatus to make sure that the election goes out your way Orban has become a hero to the new right because he has perfected what we call electoral autocracy you keep elections going but you find ways

to get the results that you need so that's different from Old School fascism Orban has has gotten his cronies to buy important media properties so it's indirect control of the media and you control the electoral system you hollow out the institutions so that everybody's loyal to you so these are things that go back to Fascism but today they take place within a multi-party state one continuity of Orban with classic fascism is trying to grow the population but only some people are encouraged to have babies white Christians immigrants are are not encouraged to have babies indeed

he's trying to get rid of immigrants and have them deported another continuity is homophobia lgbtq people have been legislated bureaucratically out of existence and that goes back to Fascism anybody who does not fit those roles of what they call the natural family one man one woman both straight does not have a future in Hungary at anzi XS says P was evil but he made Chile what it is today benevolent dictator I study dictators I do not believe any dictator is benevolent because the definition of a dictator is someone who represses the popular will there's no

voting in a classic dictatorship there's no Free Press if you are an opponent of the regime you will be sent to jail or killed that's not to me the definition of benevolence at Tyler E Harris asks honest question but why do dictators even bother to hold elections they just going to rig anyway today dictators keep elections going and so we often call them authoritarians rather than dictators but they rig the system through colonizing the media so the opposition's message can't get there they'll put a a prominent opponent under house arrest that's what Vladimir Putin did

with Alexi noani who was extremely popular he sent him to jail so he couldn't be a candidate so the new system is called electoral autocracy you hold elections but you use all these tricks to make sure that they're not free and fair elections you can even once you feel you've amassed enough power hold an election and then just refuse to recognize the results if you have lost and we have several examples of that recently the biggest one in Venezuela still playing out today Maduro who lost an election to the opposition refused to leave office in

2023 we had bolsonaro trying to have a coup because he was claiming he actually won the election when he lost and in the United States Donald Trump claimed that he won the 20120 election when he did not epic Thundercat says at what point do we start calling what Elon Musk is doing inside our government a coup as a historian of coups I consider this to be a situation that merits the word coup so C happen when people inside State institutions go Rogue this is different this is unprecedented a private citizen the richest man in the

world has a group of 19 20y old coders who have come in as shock troops and are taking citizens data and closing down entire government agencies when we think of traditional coups often perpetrated by the military you have foot soldiers who do the work of closing off the buildings of making sure that the actual government the Old Government they're trying to overthrow can no longer get in what we have here is a kind of digital paramilitaries a group of people who have taken over and they've captured the data they've captured the government buildings they were

sleeping there 247 and elected officials could not come in when our own elected officials are not allowed to enter into government buildings because someone else is preventing them who has not been elected or officially in charge of any government agency that qualifies as a coup Pat Barry despondent American asks how do the oligarchs who help authoritarians come into power Fair after the dictator has what he wants does he ever turn on them oligarchs are immensely wealthy and Powerful individuals who can help to change the political environment by putting certain candidates in office this was the

case with Putin he was chosen to run for president in 2000 by olar S one of the pillars of authoritarianism is what's called authoritarian Bargains these are deals that leaders make with powerful people they could be oligarchs in the media area in finance in business they could also be Faith leaders some Faith leaders are so powerful to be almost like oligarchs and so these people team up the dictator needs these people to legitimate them to tell the rest of the population because they're so influential that this guy is actually okay he may be violent but

he's our guy the problem with this is inevitably when the dictator has seen that the oligarch has outlived his usefulness they will throw them under the bus early oligarchs who brought Putin to power he tried to then colonize or seize their assets and if they didn't agree to give him their assets he tried to jail them or they had to go into Exile there's been something called sudden Russian death syndrome where many many powerful Elites connected with the ener energy industry have fallen out of Windows or gone into the hospital and never emerged again because

Putin is cleaning house tanvir Hassan asks how can a dictator be good for a nation dictators certainly want to be seen as being good for the nation and many people become fans of dictators because dictators are into infrastructure they have huge egos they want to be identified with grandiose Public Works musolini built sports stadiums he built miles of railroads and the myth was that he made the trains run on time Hitler built the autoban the high-speed highways today in turkey eruan has very large construction projects such as the Istanbul canal and so there's a sense

of modernity and things happening the problem is when you don't have a free press nobody can be tracking with accurate statistics how these big Public Works are affecting the economy and what kind of corruption is happening behind the scenes so dictators can attract a lot of support by people who fall for the appearances look he's doing things other people are not doing things the dictator gets things done however it's only later that the economic and social outcome of those big projects comes to light Alex Gretch asks why do dictators love Trump we know that Trump

loves dictators he even has talked about exchanging love letters with the leader of North Korea not someone you would often think of as a particularly sentimental type do dictators love Trump that's unclear dictators are transactional they use each other if dictators are loving Trump at the moment it's because they think that he can be an ally that they can get something from him if we take as the example Vladimir Putin he and Trump have a good relationship and yet he allows Trump to be mocked on Russian television as a useful fool so this is an

example of them using each other which is what dictators know how to do beautifully at Eric E Warren asks why do dictators always blame media opposition foreign countries and Terror groups dictators are expert at creating a sense of existential dread so it's not just polarization we don't agree but we're in the same framework we agree to disagree they go for what I call survivalism it's me or you and only one of us is going to survive this is what the Nazis did with the Jews this is what racists everywhere do with non-white peoples they create

a sense of existential dread that this group must be attacked and sometimes in the case of genocide must be removed from the face of the Earth in order for our country to have peace and safety often the enemy is a foreign country and there's a long history of dictators saying that their countries have been victimized musolini talked about Italy as victimized by by more powerful countries democracies up to Xi Jinping who has a long history of talking about Chinese victimization by the west or Vladimir Putin Russia's victimization by the west and so these are very

powerful narratives that can justify foreign Invasion the dictator says we've been victimized it's time for us to protect ourselves by getting more territory here's a question from Magic is Xi Jinping a dictator not only is jingping a dictator the Communist system only permits dictators but Xi Jinping is becoming more of a dictator this is one way we can track how dictatorship expands is your personality cult becoming more prominent check XI jinping's cult is becoming more prominent are you trying to rehabilitate past dictators to kind of bolster your own Glory check Xi Jinping is talking a

lot about Mao and styling himself as the inher Ator of mouth here's a question from Peter Quint why do dictators and wannabe dictators always want more land that's kind of in the nature of being the dictator you always want more power you always want more control you also want more assets you want more natural resources to exploit if you're corrupt the same narratives get put forth over and over again narratives of national Purity so for example the Nazis it wasn't enough to have conquest of Germans you had to go into Austria because they are people

or you have these myths of national unification and that's being used right now by Xi Jinping a communist for Taiwan that Taiwan must be China because it needs to be reunified as though it was part of China to begin with the same with Putin and Ukraine that they called the conquest of Ukraine a reunification so these are imperialist justifying narratives and dictators use them over and over again so it's no surp R to find president Trump a man of authoritarian leanings having come back to Power and becoming an imperialist talking about Canada becoming the 51st

American state talking about taking control of Greenland so those are all the questions for today thank you for watching [Music]