Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hilda. I'm Chelsea Daniels and this is the Front Page,
a daily podcast presented by the New Zealand Herald Adolf Hitler,
Joseph Stalin, Benito Mussolini, Poulpott, Saddam Hussein. Apart from being
some of the most famous dictators in human history, they
(00:26):
all have one thing in common. They all had dramatic, violent,
and disgraced downfalls, but in almost every case foreign powers
played a major role in shaping the post dictatorship future.
How Tyrants Fall and How Nations Survive by political scientist
Marcel Dursis delves into the vulnerabilities of these kinds of
(00:49):
regimes and explores strategies for their dismantling. Dursas was recently
in New Zealand for the Auckland Writers' Festival and joined
The Front Page while here to discuss tyrants and whether
we've learned anything at all from the world's darkest rulers. Marcelle.
(01:10):
The book opens with this line, the most powerful tyrants
on earth are condemned to live their life in fear.
Can you elaborate on this for me? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (01:20):
I think in our democracies there's this idea that these
leaders are all powerful, and that they can do whatever
they want whenever they want it, and that in some
ways it can be quite a fabulous existence, but reality
is far from that. So one of the big problems
that these leaders have is that when they lose power,
oftentimes they also lose their freedom or their life. So
when political scientists looked at the statistics for this, they
found that over two thirds of personalist dictators ended up imprisoned,
(01:44):
in forced exile, or dead after losing power.
Speaker 1 (01:47):
What are the key components of a dictator?
Speaker 2 (01:50):
Yeah, I mean so I deliberately talked about tyrants in
the book because I wanted to look at a broad
selection of leaders. So I wanted to look at your
military dictatorships, one party dictatorships, king's theocrats. And the way
that I think about it is the amount of people
that you need in order to maintain power. So in
a functioning democracy like New Zealand, where you are free elections,
you need millions of people because you need to win
(02:12):
those elections. But if you're somebody like Vladimir Putin or
you're Kim Jong un, you just need a tiny share
of the population to hold that power. And usually these
are your advisors. These are generals or intelligence officials. So
what I'm interested in are those types of political systems
where you just need a tiny share of the population
because that changes everything.
Speaker 1 (02:31):
And what are some of the personality traits of a tyrant?
I mean, you're probably got to have a pretty good
reckoning of yourself. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
These people are deeply, deeply weird, you know, and they
would do a terrible job if they had an ordinary
work to do, right, So if they set in an
office environment or in a cubicle, they'd be terrible added,
But they are in a way rational, and they're oftentimes
very good at what they do. So within the system
in which they operate, it's a good thing if you're
a narcissist. It's a good thing if you have no
empathy for others, because you need to horrific violence on
(03:01):
people all of the time. And perhaps you have a
normal conversation with them, smiling at them, and in the
evening you order their death. So these people are not
normal in any sense of the world, but they are
often quite suited for that particular role.
Speaker 1 (03:14):
Are there any warning signs that a populist politician is
becoming an authoritarian leader? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (03:21):
I mean the first thing is intent, so you know,
you're sort of boring, run of the middle. Politicians usually
don't want to be dictators. You know, I don't know
what it's like in New Zealand, but you know our
Chancellor is a boring centrist. I really don't think he
wants to be a dictator. So the first question is
do they want it? And then from there on out
it gets a little bit more difficult because there's really
not a one way in which people dismantle democracy. But
(03:43):
if I look at some of the struggling democracies right now,
you know there are things that are particularly alarming. So
one of them is the justice system, because if you
can ignore judges or you can replace them with your own,
democracy is going to struggle immediately. But even more importantly
is what happens to the security forces, because a court
judgment is no good if you can't implement it, and
(04:03):
whether a court judgment gets implemented or not ultimately depends
on the men and women with guns. So if you
can ignore them, or if you can find a way
to capture the military or the security services, then democracy
will almost inevitably die.
Speaker 1 (04:17):
Your book is a bit of a positive in some
ways because it shows that a lot of tyrants are
susceptible to a downfall. What makes them so prone to
this kind of failure.
Speaker 2 (04:28):
Yeah, So one of the things that dictators often struggle
with is something called a dictator's dilemma. So they don't
ever actually know who's genuinely loyal and who's just pretending
to be. Because if you advise that dictator and he says, listen,
I have a great idea, you're not going to say
it's a bad idea because you don't want to go
to a gulag or die, so you're going to lie.
And over time, what happens is that these leaders are
constantly being lied to every day for multiple years, and
(04:51):
gradually they just detach from reality and they no longer
understand what is happening in their own country, let alone
in a different one. And this is something that invites
catastrophic mistakes, and that's part of the reason why they're
so prone to falling right.
Speaker 1 (05:02):
And they're just encapsulated by that bubble of yes people.
Speaker 2 (05:05):
Yeah, and also, you know, the thing to remember is that,
I mean, some of these people have grown up in it.
So Kim Jong Lunn, for example, started carrying a pistol.
When he was a child, you know, he would where
the sort of make believe uniform, and when he saw
an actual general, that real general, an adult would salute him.
Speaker 1 (05:21):
You know.
Speaker 2 (05:21):
He liked to play with these little toy ships, and
if he had a problem with one of his toy
ships at night, he would summon a nautical engineer, and
that nautical engineer would have no choice but to go
and help him. Right, So it is no surprise that
people like that are totally broken and aren't able to
make good decisions.
Speaker 3 (05:41):
Do dictators love Trump? That's unclear. Dictators are transactional. They
use each other. If dictators are loving Trump at the
moment is 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 marked
(06:02):
on Russian television as a useful fool.
Speaker 1 (06:10):
How long do these leaders reign for usually, and how
do people go about toppling one of these regimes? Because
some of them are quite short, so a few years,
but some of them last for decades.
Speaker 2 (06:20):
Some of these people are extremely good at making the
kind of trade offs that they need to make in
order to maintain power. But one of the huge weaknesses
that these systems have is succession. So again, if you
take a functioning democracy like New Zealand or Germany or
the UK, you get one leader gets voted out and
then you know, a couple of days later, the next
one walks right back in. And if there's some sort
(06:40):
of dispute, we have institutions to deal with it. We
have courts, we have an electoral commission, we have independent
journalism toward people accountable. But in these systems, what the
dictators tend to do is to either destroy all of
those institutions or try to capture them. So when the
dictator is no longer around for some reason, the whole
thing often goes up in flames, because all of a sudden,
then that dispute turns from the shooting in the streets.
(07:02):
So the length can vary quite a lot. And when
it comes to the best ways to toppling these leaders,
you know, just as dictators are forced to make trade
offs in order to maintain power, we have to make
tradeoffs in trying to deal with them. And a large
question is, you know, how much risk are we actually
willing to assume, because of course, you know, when democratic
leaders go on TV, they say, oh, this is all
about democracy promotion. You know, we just want to you know,
(07:24):
bring our values into the world. But obviously that's not
how it actually works in reality. You know, states have
all kinds of interests. Some of them might be related
to democracy, but many are not.
Speaker 1 (07:33):
Are there any kind of common weaknesses or blind spots
between these regimes that other countries are able to take
advantage of in order to limit their impact on the
rest of the world.
Speaker 2 (07:44):
Yeah, I think one of the things that is comparatively
easy and comparatively low risk is looking at the ways
in which these regimes try to use our own system
against us. So you know, in Europe, for example, there's
barely a football club inside that isn't owned by some
oligarch or you know, royal family in one way or another.
You know, China is buying up ports. You know, there
(08:04):
are all kinds of critical infrastructure investments that these regimes
are making, and we let it go on in essence
because we're greedy. You know, We've got hordes of accountants
and bankers and lawyers that are making money of this,
and this is something that we could change if we
wanted to, and it would make life a lot more
difficult for these types of leaders.
Speaker 1 (08:23):
If there's huge power in something like nonviolent protest, for example,
in regimes where dissent is met with extreme violence, what
options do civilians realistically have.
Speaker 2 (08:37):
Yeah, So interestingly, nonviolent protests can be incredibly effective even
in regimes in which violence is used regularly, And in
a way, that's a fascinating topic because you know, you
look at these pensioners, you look at these teenagers, and
these just unarmed people marching in the streets, and oftentimes
they can bring down even entrenched dictatorships, and you think, well,
how is that possible? And the way that it works
(08:58):
is that if there are too many people in the streets,
dictators have to respond because they cannot afford to look weak,
so they use violence. But when you club down women
and children or pensioners, oftentimes the next day you have
even more people in the streets, and then you're forced
into something that in German we call a choice between
the plague and cholera. So there are no more good
options for the dictator, because if that dictator orders the
(09:20):
use of lethal force, somebody actually has to do the firing,
and oftentimes it is exactly at that moment when the
opposition looks the weakest and the regime looks the strongest,
that the security forces refuse because they don't want to
kill their neighbors, they don't want to kill their own people.
And when that happens, the dictators lose control, or alternatively,
palace leites might refuse to go along with it. So
(09:40):
if you can bring out enough people into the streets,
you can almost get these regimes to collapse under the
weight of their own repression.
Speaker 1 (09:55):
For the book, you interviewed everyone from diplomats to disidents.
Was there a conversation within all of the ones that
you had that had the greatest impact on your thinking
about the subject and why is that?
Speaker 2 (10:09):
Yeah, it was important to me to talk to people
that had actually been there, so to speak. You know,
I didn't want to make it too dry and too
too theoretic, So yeah, I mean, I talked to war criminals,
I talked to coup plotters, intelligence officials, and one conversation
is always going to stay with me, and it was
with a coup plotter who originally was a non violent activist,
so you know, he was half American off Gambian, and
(10:29):
he would raise money to weaken the dictatorship at home,
so to speak. But eventually things at home got so
bad because there were just more reports about people being tortured,
people being killed, that he had a decision to make.
You know, at what point would he give up the
non violent struggle and be willing to use violence or
to support violence in order to bring down this horrendous dictator.
(10:50):
And eventually he decided that nonviolence just wasn't enough.
Speaker 1 (10:54):
What was the point for him?
Speaker 2 (10:55):
I think the point was just that he saw that
there was no real hope in nonviolence in that particular case,
so he wanted to use nonviolence. You know, this is
who he was. He was a peaceful activist. You know,
he wasn't somebody who's going to pick up a gun
or support that in any way. But he just thought
it became increasingly futile, and you know, as people were
suffering so much. And what happened was eventually that he
became convinced that violence was the only solution, and this
(11:17):
peaceful activist turn into an international arms trafficker. So you
would buy guns and mass in the US and then
they would be shipped in oil drums across the Atlantic,
where then a team of fellow coup plotters would use
it back at home in West Africa. And you know,
I think this is something that I'm German, so given
(11:37):
our history, I often think, well, you know, what would
I have done? And you know this type of question, Okay,
when does violence become justified? I worry might be something
that all of us will have to think about more
in the future.
Speaker 1 (11:49):
And being German as well as and having that history,
how did that affect how you approached the subject, if
at all.
Speaker 2 (11:58):
You know, I think it's a topic that's difficult to
void if you're German, and for good reason. You know,
we think about it a lot our history and you
know what we can learn from it and what we
need to do in order to prevent anything like that
from ever happening again. So I think I've always been
interested in the topic in some way, purely because it's
difficult not to be. But I guess what really what
really got me onto the topic is after university I
(12:20):
decided to work in the Congo for a while, and
when I was working in a brewery in Lubumbashi, there
was a coup attempt in the capital in Kinchassa, and
even though I was quite far away, there was some
shooting in the vicinity and you know, an explosion nearby.
And that day also really stuck with me because when
it happened, I felt kind of helpless and in danger,
and I since then, I've always wanted to find out
(12:43):
what happened and why, you know, like how do you
get rid of these people? How do they stay in power?
How does a coup work? You know, when do people
get assassinated? So yeah, I think it's history, but it's
also just you know, live the experience in a way.
Speaker 1 (12:54):
So we often hear about you know, Stalin Hitler movies,
TV school history classes, But do you think there are
perhaps better examples out there we should be placing better
emphasis on when studying these kind of regimes.
Speaker 2 (13:10):
The book is an attempt to look at general mechanisms
to understand what these leaders might do, what their incentives are,
whether they're Stalin or Hitler or somebody from Paraguay or
you know, the Gambia. But I do think in some
ways we limit ourselves in our analysis by always looking
back to Hitler or to Stalin, so we see a
democratic politician who would like to turn into a dictator
(13:30):
or an authoritarian. And you know, it's always like, well,
this is like Hitler, this is like Hitler. But you know,
there are a lot of you know, non democratic leaders
in human history, and in fact, you know, I would
argue that tyranny is the default of human existence. You know,
usually we have been ruled by tyrants in one way
or another. So yeah, I mean, I think we would
(13:50):
do well to look at a wider range of these
leaders to understand what is happening in the world today.
Speaker 1 (13:54):
Are there any that you would suggest for a high
school history teacher who came up to you and I you,
what should my next term's topic be? What would you
tell them?
Speaker 2 (14:03):
You know, I think it's probably easiest to approach these
topics with people who haven't thought about it a lot
by making reference to the contemporary world. You know, my
experience is that it's maybe a little bit more difficult
to get people to be interested in seventeenth century Paraguay.
You know, then it would be to talk to them
maybe about Kim Jong un or to talk about Putin,
and to talk about contemporary leaders. So I think what
(14:23):
I would do is to look at contemporary leaders and
you know, see how they behave, see what they do,
what they don't do, and then maybe try to explain
their behavior by looking at people from the past.
Speaker 4 (14:38):
History made overnight. As Syrian dictator Bashal Assad is overthrown
in a lightning move by rebel fighters, they are this
morning inside the presidential Palace walking it's huge halls, celebrating
amid the abandoned luxury of the Assad regime. As outside,
jubilation spreads on the streets of the capitol. For a moment,
few saw coming rebels declaring victories, the state TV studios
(15:01):
saying the city of Damascus has been liberated. The tyrant
bashal Assad has been toppled, the rebels seizing Damascus almost
without a fight, as Assad's military appeared to evaporate.
Speaker 1 (15:15):
Is there ever a right way for a dictatorship to
fall or are they just all kind of doomed to
be quite messy, quite unpredictable and eventually dangerous.
Speaker 2 (15:25):
If it is possible, the best way to bring down
dictators is soon nonviolence. So you want to bring out
those people in the streets, and you want to bring
them down by not using force. And part of the
reason is again due to incentives. So if you know,
couplotters bring down a dictator, usually their comparative advantage is
violence because that's what they just used. So going forward,
they might not be particularly interested in democratizing the country.
(15:47):
But usually when you have masses of people in the streets,
they're already good at forming some sort of consensus on
some things. You know, they have to find a way
to solve their disputes without using force. So when they
are then in power, you know, they want to stick
to what they're good at, So they're much like, much
more likely to democratize than you know, rebels or coup plot.
Speaker 1 (16:05):
Of Are there any current leaders or regimes that, in
your view, are exhibiting signs of vulnerability?
Speaker 2 (16:12):
I think all of them, do you know. I think
this is one of the things that I think people
get wrong. So people look at these dictators staying in
powerful multiple decades, and they think that that necessarily translates
into stability.
Speaker 1 (16:22):
In the future.
Speaker 2 (16:22):
Well, look at b Alasade, you look at Basha a Lassade,
and you know, one of the reasons for that is
because in these regimes you cannot afford to lose just
a few people, you know, These are winner takes at
all systems, and they are based on the perception of inevitability.
So Bashallah started stayed in power because people thought that
there was no real alternatives. But the moment that his
own people and the people at large realized, you know what,
(16:45):
actually that could be an alternative, he could be toppled.
This could actually happened. He was toppled very quickly, and
in the Syrian capital of Damascus. What you saw is
that his own soldiers would just take over their uniforms
from to the side of the road and go home.
So even though these regimes may look stable, they are
much more fragile than they seem. And every dictator can
fall at any moment.
Speaker 1 (17:05):
And finally, what can countries like New Zealand, a rather
small player on the world stage, what can we do
to help communities under these kind of leaders.
Speaker 2 (17:15):
Usually the closer you are to power, the more influence
you have on the fall of a dictator. So you know,
the minister of Defense is going to have more influence
than a mid ranking civil servant, and that mid ranking
civil servant is going to have more influence than a
shopkeeper somewhere in the hinterlands. And when it comes to
foreign powers. Again, much of it is determined by their intent,
you know, what are they willing to risk, but also
(17:35):
by their capabilities, So what could they actually bring to
bear in terms of economic power or in terms of
military power. Smaller countries, I think, do have a role
to play, but it is at the lower end of
the risk spectrum. So you know, there are things like
supporting journalists. You know, you can go ahead with sanctions,
you can support independent NGOs, and all of these things
(17:55):
are good. They're not necessarily going to lead to the
fall of dictators immediately, but they will create the conditions
that you need for that moment when that crisis arrives.
You know, when there is that spark and you know
a revolution could happen. Countries like New Zealand can leave
the groundwork for that.
Speaker 1 (18:09):
Thanks for joining us, Marcel, Thank you very much.
Speaker 2 (18:12):
For having me.
Speaker 1 (18:16):
That's it for this episode of The Front Page. You
can read more about today's stories and extensive news coverage
at enzdherld dot co dot enz. The Front Page is
produced by Ethan Sills and Richard Martin, who is also
our sound engineer. I'm Chelsea Daniels. Subscribe to the Front
page on iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts, and
(18:39):
tune in tomorrow for another look behind the headlines.