Read It In Books:Autocracy, Inc:The Dictators Who Want To Run The World.

Putin, Xi, Trump, Orban, Modi, Mohammed bin Salman. There's a lot of terrifying, authoritarian dictators and would-be dictators out there and dictatorships, history tells us, tend to end very very badly. I sometimes wonder if we're now so far away from the horrors of World War II that we are in danger of making similar, if not exactly the same, mistakes by allowing these people to take over and ruin, or even destroy, the world.

Anne Applebaum seems to have the same concerns and in her new book, Autocracy, Inc:The Dictators Who Want To Run The World, she takes a look at some of these dictators and would-be dictators. But she doesn't look at them as a series of isolated cases. She looks at them, correctly I believe, as part of a large, interconnected, and global network of authoritarianism. A group, sometimes closely integrated, sometimes loosely affiliated, who are against democracy, against progress, and ultimately against freedom. Except for themselves and their associates.

Applebaum herself, critics could argue, belongs to the prevalent (still, just, for now) neoliberal ruling elite (she's a Pulitzer prize winning columnist for The Atlantic and a senior fellow at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, and there are even quotes on the book from Chris Patten, David Miliband, and, er, Garry Kasparov) but for all the faults of neoliberalism (and there are many), democracy is still a preferable system to autocratic role and what she has to say on that subject is both enlightening and trenchant. The introductory chapter alone is as fascinating as it is frightening.

She talks about how modern day autocracies aren't much like the old ones. How they're held together by "kleptocratic financial structures, a complex of security services - military, paramilitary, police - and technological experts who provide surveillance, propaganda, and disinformation". How the police in one country may arm and equip the police in another. How the troll farms and propagandists work together to spread a message that democracy is degenerate and that America is evil.

She names states and makes clear there are different ways, also, that they do autocracy. Russia (nationalism), China (communism), Venezuela (Bolivarian socialism), Iran (Shia radicalism), and whatever it is that North Korea seeks to promote. The promotion of Kim Jong Un and the Kim family it seems. These are by far the only countries under autocratic rule. A form of government which stretches from Azerbaijan to Nicaragua, from Belarus to Cuba, and from Zimbabwe to Syria.

All seek to deprive their citizens of any influence on their own lives, all seek to repress anyone who challenges them, and most of which channel all the wealth into the hands of an elite few. These nation states bond together not over ideals, but over deals. Sharing of resources is useful when facing sanctions and sharing surveillance is useful when crushing dissent. Alexander Lukashenko's Belarus has benefited enormously from Chinese investment, Russia and Iran invest in the oil industry of Nicolas Maduro's Venezuela, and Cuban troops have gone to fight alongside the Russians in Ukraine. The global autocratic network offers its leading lights money, security, and, best of all - for now at least, impunity.

Protest movements in these countries are crushed not by the armed forces of Lukashenko or Maduro but by the help of their more powerful 'friends' and they are crushed effectively and lethally. In Myanmar, the junta doesn't even bother to hide the fact that it has murdered hundreds of protestors, the Zimbabwean regime harasses political opponents in plain sight, and the Chinese government boasts about destroying the democracy movement in Hong Kong while at the same time placing thousands of Uighurs in concentration camps. Iran does nothing to conceal its violent repression of women while funding Hamas in Palestine. One reason you won't see me waving a Free Palestine flag anytime soon.

I wouldn't wave an Israeli one either - for very similar reasons. Applebaum goes back to the late sixties and early seventies when the western nations, particularly Germany, tried to change the Soviet Union, and to a lesser extent, China through rapprochement and trade (the Soviets allowed the Germans to buy their oil, the Germans stayed quiet on some of the more concerning elements of Soviet behaviour) and then on to how instead of democracy and liberalism spreading to autocratic states in the one way traffic many imagined, autocracy and illiberalism became more prevalent in democracies than ever before.

Money, too, flowed both ways. Money stolen from citizens and earned from narcotic operations and money that had almost certainly never been taxed. Western democracies, and city traders, invested in Russian businesses while money from Russia and other kleptocracies started finding its way into America and the West via shell companies in places like Cyprus, the Cayman Isalands, the British Virgin Islands, and even Jersey. With the money, of course, came influence. American real estate traders purchased huge swathes of American land on behalf of Russian oligarchs but still that wasn't enough. Western governments wilfully ignored for this for too long.

Applebaum sometimes jumps back in times to relate telling tales of, and quotes from, historical - and current - figures like Hitler, Stalin, Lenin, Trotsky, Mao, Mussolini, Khrushchev, Che Guevara, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Deng Xiaoping, Nixon, Carter, Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Biden, Eleanor Roosevelt, Nancy Pelosi, Aung San Suu Kyiv, Angela Merkel, Gerhard Schroder, Willy Brandt, Helmut Schmidt, Lech Walesa, Caspar Weinberger, Rudy Giuliano, Robert Mugabe, Morgan Tsvangirai, Alexei Navalny, Yevgeny Prigozhin, Viktor Yanukovych, Petro Poroshenko, Zelensky, Erdogan, Orban, Antonio Guterres, George Soros, Vaclav Havel, Jamal Khashoggi, Francis Fukuyama, Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones, Paul Kagame, Jeremy Corbyn, Edward Snowden, and Sayyid Qutb (as well as, more bizarrely, Naomi Campbell and Sean Penn). You wouldn't want to share a holiday camp with most of them. Events, also, are written about. From Russia's invasion of Ukraine (seen, almost, as a proxy war between autocracy and democracy) to the fall of the communist regimes in East Germany, Hungary, Romania, and Czechoslovakia and from the Tiananmen Square massacre to the Arab Spring.

Technological developments are also a factor. From the Internet of Things to Huawei and the Great Firewall of China and on to the unregulated world of social media and Elon Musk's unpunished trolling of entire nations. Applebaum makes the now well established case that the Internet hasn't been the great provider of democracy and stability many of us had hoped for and imagined. How, instead, bad actors have taken control of it and used it to spread hate, misinformation, and division. Ultimately, they have used it to crack down on freedom, not spread it. In one particularly telling sentence, the revelation that at the height of the Syrian civil war Assad's ruling regime claimed the country was an excellent tourist destination, Applebaum writes "the point isn't to make people believe the lie, it's to make people fear the liar".

And then there are the real world consequences. Venezuelan children, forced into poverty and starvation by the corruption and greed of Hugo Chavez, leaving school at midday to hunt for birds and iguanas to cook and eat for lunch, Emmerson Mnangagwa's Zimbabwean police firing guns at protestors in Harare, white nationalists marching in Charlottesville chanting "Russia is our friend", Chinese police beating insufficiently loyal journalists to death, and Russia shooting down a Malaysian plane and killing 298 people. An event that Russia both blamed on Ukraine and, incredibly, claimed was a hoax and that all of the dead people were dead before they got on the plane.

Autocrats seeks to spread cynicism, to make people avoid talking about politics, to make people think "they're all the same". I've  witnessed that here during the internationally shameful rule of Boris Johnson and his team of lickspittles and cronies. In America, we could be witnessing it again very soon. But Applebaum doesn't leave us without hope. She suggests strategies and methods for dealing with the rise of autocrats (from changes in international and national laws to global meetings of pro-democracy groups) but, in this excellent book, leaves us in no doubt about the scale of the challenge. Elon Musk became the richest person in the world by spreading lies and hatred and fostering division. He now gleefully relishes the idea of Britain sliding into a civil war. Let's not give him, or Putin, or Trump what they want. Like Anne Applebaum, Let's be better than that.