Name: 歴史学者だけど「独裁者」について質問ある？| Tech Support | WIRED Japan
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I'm Professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat. I study authoritarianism.

Let's answer some questions from the internet. This is Tech Support, Dictators.

Exceptions

Fascism is a one-party state, classically, with an all-powerful dictator at its head, meaning no more separation of powers, no independent judiciary. Mussolini, 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 Mussolini, 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 shirtless in so many of his pictures? Putin takes up where Mussolini left off in using his body as an emblem of strength. Mussolini 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 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. Goebbels, 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 Berlusconi 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 AngelUma5 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 correspond 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. Kozlowski from Reddit asks, how do dictators maintain power when it seems that most of the country is against 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. 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, of 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 dictator's work for him. avj164b 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 leftists.

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 adulation 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, Benito Mussolini, 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 advisors. And very common is that it includes family members. There's a whole history of sons-in-law being given important positions. From Benito Mussolini, the fascist, who had his son-in-law as foreign minister. Pinochet used his son-in-laws and put them at the head of the privatization agencies. 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 specialists 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 Machiavellian saying, the ends justify the means, perfectly sum up the dictator's personality. At Volpecule 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 100 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 themselves in every way, rituals, statues, books, photographs, and they become kind of inescapable. Take the

Heil 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, Heil 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. They can be appointed as the classic fascists were. Mussolini was appointed by the king. German elites, 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 power to do that. About 75 percent 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 coups or military coups, but the point is that they impose themselves on power forcibly. AtGeorgeForrester17 asks, WTF is a, quote, self-coup d'état. 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 Nicolas Maduro did in Venezuela. That's what Donald Trump tried to do through the January 6th 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-coups accountable.

This next question is from Kai. Did y'all know Hitler tried to overthrow the government during the Beer Hall Putsch 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 in 1924. That's where he wrote Mein Kampf. When he came out, he was ranting and raving with his racist diatribes. 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

German elites 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 woman'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 Viktor Orban says, Hungarian babies to combat the number of immigrant babies. All these different reasons are why many dictatorships in authoritarian states encourage the right kind of women to have babies. Along with the political opposition, journalists, LGBTQ people, women have been the enemy of the strongman, 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. For f**k's 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 parenting 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.

Sharkboy from Reddit 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 the 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 an illegitimate fashion, which is why they use propaganda, violence, repression to make sure that none of their secrets come out.

Based Mike Lee writes, name a fascist dictator whose agenda entailed limiting the size, cost, and power of government. Well, Senator Lee, there is one, Augusto Pinochet, the bloody military dictator of Chile who came to power through a US-backed 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 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 Tao 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 crises, 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 100 years is that only the authoritarian is going to 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 100 years are used to justify their national purity campaigns. Mussolini 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. U.S. presidents don't have rallies. Dictators have rallies. Hitler had rallies. Authoritarians love adulation 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 anti-colonial or imperialist, they all have rallies. Early on, Joseph Goebbels, 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 Goebbels hit on this idea of having rallies non-stop. And that has remained a feature of dictatorship. Think of Mobutu Sese Seko in the

Congo. Constantly had rallies where he dressed up. His thing was being the leper. 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 democracy or enhance the potential for dictatorship? The internet is a double-edged tool. It has allowed dissidents who are operating in repressive contexts 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 Mussolini used newsreels, and he was a great performer. Hitler had that crazy ranting voice, so he was very effective with 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 used 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 eharding2000 asks, is Orban a fascist? Viktor Orban, prime minister of Hungary, has fascist qualities. But today, in the 21st 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 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 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 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.

Atonzi XS says, Pinochet 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're 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 prominent opponent under house arrest. That's what Vladimir Putin did with Alexei Navalny, 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 2020 election when he did not. EpicThunderCat 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 coups 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, 20-year-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 24-7 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 Berry, 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 oligarchs. 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 energy industry have fallen out of windows or gone into the hospital and never emerged again, because

Putin is cleaning house. Tanvir Hasan 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. Mussolini built sports stadiums. He built miles of railroads, and the myth was that he made the trains run on time. Hitler built the autobahn, the high-speed highways.

Today in Turkey, Erdogan 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 Gretsch 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. 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. Mussolini talked about Italy as victimized 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 Xi Jinping 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 inheritor of

Mao. Here's a question from Peter Quince. 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 there 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 surprise 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.