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Hugo Chavez The Dictator
Crossing a border has always carried a special drama. Moments after my train crossed from Hungary to Romania in the 1980s -- from a country run by a liberal communist regime to one under the banana republic-style jackboot of Nicolae Ceausescu -- the Romanian customs officials tried to confiscate my typewriter. It was the reverse of my experience going from Iraq to Syria: The sense of fear left me as I departed Saddam Hussein's penitentiary state and entered a merely repressive dictatorship, where the worst thing that befell me was that news sources did not return my phone calls. More recently, when I crossed from the enfeebled democracy of Georgia to a province of southern Russia, overseen by the quasi-autocratic Vladimir Putin, the thuggery of the police suddenly intensified.
Borders may be eroding and stateless terrorist groups like al-Qaeda proliferating, but don't be fooled: The traditional state remains the most dangerous force on the international scene. Perhaps the greatest security threat we face today is from a paranoid and resentful state leader, armed with biological or nuclear weapons and willing to make strategic use of stateless terrorists.
These old-fashioned bad guys often have uncertain popular support, but that does not make them easy to dislodge. We don't live in a democratic world so much as in a world in the throes of a very messy democratic transition, so national elections combined with weak, easily politicized institutions produce a lethal mix -- dictators armed with pseudo-democratic legitimacy. And they come in many shapes and forms.
Of course, there are the traditional dictatorships like that of Iraq's Saddam Hussein and North Korea's Kim Jong Il, who have evoked the morbid, crushing tyrannies of antiquity, using personality cults to obliterate individual spirit and keep populations on a permanent war footing. Then there are warlord-cum-gangster states, including Slobodan Milosevic's Serbia and Charles Taylor's Liberia, where the face of the regime has been a thug in a ski mask or a child soldier bent on sadism. In these, the leader is surrounded by chaotic layers of criminal organizations that recall medieval chieftaincies and the beginnings of Nazi rule, before the brownshirts were eliminated in 1934 and Hitler consolidated power.
There are Hugo Chavez's Venezuela and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's Iran, built on economic anger and religious resentment, where oil and nuclear power have become symbolic fists raised against a perceived oppressor -- whether it be the gringos or the Great Satan. And there are the time-warp tyrannies, like that of dictator Alexander Lukashenko, who has turned Belarus into the political equivalent of a Brezhnev-era theme park, and the shadowy Burmese generals who have kept their country in a condition of sepia-toned, post-World War II poverty, even as the rest of Asia has undergone economic growth. There is the comic-opera, natural gas-rich regime of Saparmurad Niyazov in Turkmenistan, with his Disneyfied personality cult and slogans ("Halk, Watan, Turkmenbashi," ghastly echo of "Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fuhrer"), and the grim, unrelenting thuggery of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, where bitterness against former white rulers has become a pretext for grabbing wealth.
These categories are loose and overlapping. What they have in common is that the rulers can exploit the whole panoply of state power, without regard for the will of the people. The irony of Iran has been that, for years now, a significant portion of its population has been decidedly less anti-American than almost any other state in the Middle East, and yet the clerics and their lumpenproletariat revolutionary cohorts like Ahmadinejad have, through manipulated elections, been able to retain control of the security and foreign policy establishments. Chavez, Mugabe and Lukashenko are also hated by vital parts of their populations.
Because states are harder and more complex to rule now (the result of urbanization, rises in population and independent media), a strongman requires not only coercion but an energizing ideology to whip his supporters into a frenzy and keep opponents at bay.
Television also puts individual charisma at a premium. While advanced democracies in the West tend to produce bland, lowest-common-denominator leaders, less open electoral systems, in which a lot of muscle and thuggery is at work behind the scenes, have a greater likelihood of producing rabble-rousers.
Borders may be eroding and stateless terrorist groups like al-Qaeda proliferating, but don't be fooled: The traditional state remains the most dangerous force on the international scene. Perhaps the greatest security threat we face today is from a paranoid and resentful state leader, armed with biological or nuclear weapons and willing to make strategic use of stateless terrorists.
These old-fashioned bad guys often have uncertain popular support, but that does not make them easy to dislodge. We don't live in a democratic world so much as in a world in the throes of a very messy democratic transition, so national elections combined with weak, easily politicized institutions produce a lethal mix -- dictators armed with pseudo-democratic legitimacy. And they come in many shapes and forms.
Of course, there are the traditional dictatorships like that of Iraq's Saddam Hussein and North Korea's Kim Jong Il, who have evoked the morbid, crushing tyrannies of antiquity, using personality cults to obliterate individual spirit and keep populations on a permanent war footing. Then there are warlord-cum-gangster states, including Slobodan Milosevic's Serbia and Charles Taylor's Liberia, where the face of the regime has been a thug in a ski mask or a child soldier bent on sadism. In these, the leader is surrounded by chaotic layers of criminal organizations that recall medieval chieftaincies and the beginnings of Nazi rule, before the brownshirts were eliminated in 1934 and Hitler consolidated power.
There are Hugo Chavez's Venezuela and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's Iran, built on economic anger and religious resentment, where oil and nuclear power have become symbolic fists raised against a perceived oppressor -- whether it be the gringos or the Great Satan. And there are the time-warp tyrannies, like that of dictator Alexander Lukashenko, who has turned Belarus into the political equivalent of a Brezhnev-era theme park, and the shadowy Burmese generals who have kept their country in a condition of sepia-toned, post-World War II poverty, even as the rest of Asia has undergone economic growth. There is the comic-opera, natural gas-rich regime of Saparmurad Niyazov in Turkmenistan, with his Disneyfied personality cult and slogans ("Halk, Watan, Turkmenbashi," ghastly echo of "Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fuhrer"), and the grim, unrelenting thuggery of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, where bitterness against former white rulers has become a pretext for grabbing wealth.
These categories are loose and overlapping. What they have in common is that the rulers can exploit the whole panoply of state power, without regard for the will of the people. The irony of Iran has been that, for years now, a significant portion of its population has been decidedly less anti-American than almost any other state in the Middle East, and yet the clerics and their lumpenproletariat revolutionary cohorts like Ahmadinejad have, through manipulated elections, been able to retain control of the security and foreign policy establishments. Chavez, Mugabe and Lukashenko are also hated by vital parts of their populations.
Because states are harder and more complex to rule now (the result of urbanization, rises in population and independent media), a strongman requires not only coercion but an energizing ideology to whip his supporters into a frenzy and keep opponents at bay.
Television also puts individual charisma at a premium. While advanced democracies in the West tend to produce bland, lowest-common-denominator leaders, less open electoral systems, in which a lot of muscle and thuggery is at work behind the scenes, have a greater likelihood of producing rabble-rousers.
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