MAGA Republicans are running against Democrats. Democrats are running against MAGA Republicans RUSSIA, CHINA, IRAN, N. KOREA, VENEZUELA, NICARAGUA, ANGOLA, MYANMAR, CUBA, SYRIA, BELARUS, SUDAN, AZERBAIJAN & MORE - Autocracy Inc

Anne Applebaum: Autocracy Is “Infecting U.S. Politics” | Amanpour and Company

Polymarket election betting is skewing polling results towards Trump. 

U.S. citizens can’t bet on Polymarket. Bets come from RUSSIA, CHINA, IRAN, N. KOREA, VENEZUELA, NICARAGUA, ANGOLA, MYANMAR, CUBA, SYRIA, BELARUS, SUDAN, AZERBAIJAN & MORE 

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 I attached a portion of the Epilogue in AUTOCRACY INC. 

I might have made some mistakes I didn't find. So read the book 

How to respond to the war on democratic governments is described in the Epilogue. 

 

Epilogue Autocracy Inc

Democrats United 

"VLADIMIR PUTIN'S BLACK Sea palace has a hockey rink and a hookah bar. Xi Jinping lives and works on the grounds of what used to be an imperial garden. Dictators around the world meet in drawing rooms with gilded chandeliers and marble fireplaces.

Democrats meet in a rambling hotel outside Vilnius, with dark corridors and windows overlooking a forest. In the autumn of 2022, that was the site of the first-ever meeting of the World Liberty Congress, a gathering of people who have fought autocracies all around the world.

Politicians and activists from Russia, Zimbabwe, Iran, South Sudan, North Korea, Nicaragua, Rwanda, Cuba, and China met in rooms with long tables and bad lighting, encountering colleagues from Venezuela, Syria, Cambodia, Belarus, and Uganda.

The modest surroundings masked a wealth of experience. I struck up a conversation with a young man in a tweed jacket. You probably think I am from Hong Kong" he said. He was wearing wire-rimmed spectacles and spoke the dipped English common in former British colonies. Yes, I told in did think he was from Hong Kong. "I'm from North Korea" he said.

This was Timothy Cho. Abandoned by his parents at nine, Cho grew up homeless, escaped from North Korea twice, was imprisoned four times, and, when I met him, was trying to become a Conservative Party parliamentary candidate in the U.K.

Earlier that day, Bobi Wine, a Ugandan musician and nearly successful presidential candidate or maybe, if the votes had been counted correctly, a genuinely successful one — spoke to the group.

He argued against the use of the word "opposition." No, he argued, we are not an opposition; we are an option, a better option: "We should adopt positive language. We are not victims." In the evening, I spoke with a pair of Russians who prefer to remain anonymous. They were running a stealth campaign against military mobilization, helping get lawyers and legal advice to Russians who want to avoid the draft. They had made the momentous decision not to leave Russia, because they thought that persuading people not to fight was the best thing they could do to help end the war against Ukraine.

Most of the participants were meeting one another for the first time. Even some from the same continent didn't know one another, except by name or reputation. In Africa, one of them told me, commerce and conversation with Europeans two thousand miles away can be easier than with fellow Africans on the other side of the border.

But when they do speak, they discover that they have similar experiences, have been exposed to similar smear campaigns, and have lived under similar regimes whose leaders launder money and talk about "multipolarity" in similar ways.

To them, Autocracy, Inc., isn't a book title: it's a reality that they grapple with every day. By sharing experiences, they learn to understand the pat-terns, to anticipate the tactics that will be used against them, and to prepare to resist them.

Nine months earlier, I had sat in the upstairs room of a New York restaurant while a smaller group of exiled politicians planned the Vilnius summit. López, the Venezuelan opposition leader, began by reminding everyone in the room that although autocrats work together to keep one another in power, there is "no alliance of those of us who are fighting for freedom." Garry Kasparov, the chess champion and advocate for political change in Russia, believed it was important to show that "we are united, we represent a mass movement, and we have support from the free world." Mash Alinejad, the Iranian activist whose social media campaign persuaded thousands of Iranian women to discard their veils, said she thought that "if we make them hear us and understand us," the combined forces of democracy activists could shape debate in Washington and Silicon Valley: "We are not just fighting for our own people. We are fighting for democracy everywhere, even in the West." All of them wanted to make an impact not only in their own countries but in the democratic world as well. Already, they understood that one nation's freedom can often depend on the strength of freedom in others.

Their language sounded almost like a global version of Gene Sharp's handbook. We are more numerous than they are. We, the proponents of freedom, can drown out the advocates of dictatorship. But they also understand that we no longer live in the era of Gene Sharp. There is no global public square where López, Kasparov, and Alinejad can protest alongside Evan Mawarire of Zimbabwe, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya of Belarus, and Rosa María Payá, the daughter of Oswaldo Payá, let alone organize nineteen different kinds of strikes and fourteen other forms of protest.

Instead, the translation of their words into something useful requires a different way of thinking about politics altogether. "First," said López, have to reframe the problem." And he is right.

Western and especially American students of foreign policy often look at the world as a series of separate issues eastern Europe, the Middle Fast, the South China Sea - each requiring a different cadre of experts or specialists. But that isn't how autocracies see the world. Putin backs far-right and extremist movements in Europe and provides thugs and weapons to support African dictatorships. He pursues victory in Ukraine by creating food shortages and raising energy prices around the world. Iran maintains proxies in Lebanon, Palestine, Yemen, and Iraq. Iranian agents have also bombed a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, carried out murders in Istanbul and Paris, plotted assassinations in the United States, and funded media throughout the Arab-speaking and Spanish-speaking worlds.

The Belarusian dictator tried to destabilize his neighbors by luring refugees from the Middle East and helping them cross illegally into Europe.

Cuban troops have gone to fight against Ukraine in Russia, while Cuban secret policemen help protect the Maduro regime in Venezuela, China, with deep economic and political interests across Africa and Latin America, has not thought of itself as an "Asian" power for many years. 

The autocracies keep track of one another’s defeats and victories, timing their own moves to create maximum chaos.  In the autumn of 2023 both the European Union and the U.S. Congress found themselves unable to send aid to Ukraine because minorities with deep Russian ties, led respectively by Viktor Orbán in Hungary and by a handful of MAGA Republicans in Congress, many acting under the instructions of Donald Trump, blocked the majority and delayed the aid. A narrative promoting "Ukraine fatigue" spread across the internet, pushed by Russian proxies and Chinese media in multiple languages.

At exactly that moment, Iranian-backed Hamas militants launched a brutal attack on Israel. In the weeks that followed, Iranian-backed Houthi militants began firing on tankers and cargo ships in the Red Sea, disrupting global trade and distracting the United States and Europe from the Ukraine war. The Azeri dictator, Ilham Aliyev, had already made use of the same moment of global distraction to capture the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh and expel 100,000 Armenians, the entire population, in a matter of days. By the spring of 2024, Chinese hackers were discovered to be burrowing deep into the computers and data storage of the British parliament and its members. In Brussels, Warsaw, and Prague, a multinational investigation revealed a broad Russian influence-buying campaign, including payments to members of tie European parliament and attempts to shape European elections.

Meanwhile, in the Western Hemisphere, President Maduro said he was contemplating the invasion and occupation of a province of neighboring Guyana. As he was announcing these plans, hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan citizens, impoverished by Maduro's policies, were trudging through Central America toward the U.S. border. Their unprecedented numbers were helping fuel a populist, xenophobic backlash in the United States and boost support for the MAGA wing of the Republican Party, which was openly backing Putin in his war to destroy Ukraine.

This multifaceted, interconnected, self-reinforcing polycrisis was not coordinated by a single master-mind, and it is not evidence of a secret conspiracy.

Instead, these episodes, taken together, demonstrate how different autocracies have extended their influence across different political, economic, military, and informational spheres. They also show how much damage they can do when they opportunistically work together toward their common goal: damaging democracies and democratic values, inside their own countries and around the world. Read, once again, the statement of Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin on February 4, 2022, on the eve of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

They denounced "interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states under the pretext of protecting democracy and human rights." called upon the outside world "to respect cultural and civilizational diversity and the rights of peoples of different countries to self-determination.:

And they warned, angrily, that any discussion of democratic standards, which they called "attempts at hegemony," would "pose serious threats to global and regional peace and stability and undermine the stability of the world order." Others have used even more brutal, more extreme language, openly calling for mass atrocities or war-language that no one in the democratic world has yet taken seriously or begun to counter. During a meeting with Putin in September 2023, the North Korean dictator, Kim Jong Un, offered his full and unconditional support for Russia's "sacred fight to punish the gathering of evil that claims hegemony." A few months later, in January 2024, Kim appeared to abandon his own past attempts at reconciliation, calling for a constitutional change that would identify democratic South Korea as North Korea's principal enemy, dismantling all the institutions that had promoted unification and cross-border exchange, warning of a war that would "destroy the entity called the Republic of Korea and terminate its existence." In the same week, Dmitry Medvedev, a former president and former prime minister of Russia, called Ukraine a "cancerous growth" and called for the destruction not just of the current Ukrainian government but of "any version of Ukraine whatsoever." Not long afterward, he produced a map of Russia that incorporated almost all of modern Ukraine and distributed most of the rest of Ukrainian territory to Poland and Hungary.

Still, I began with the idea that we are not living through a new Cold War, a "Cold War 2.0, and I want to underscore that statement again.

In no sense is the modern competition between autocratic and democratic ideas and practices a direct replica of what we faced in the twentieth century. There are no "blocs" to join and no Berlin Walls marking neat geographic divides. Many countries don't fit comfortably into either category, democracy or autocracy. As I've written, some autocracies—the U.A.E., Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Vietnam-seek cooperation with the democratic world, don't want to upend the UN Charter, and still see the advantages of international law. Some democracies-Turkey, Israel, Hungary, India, the Philippines-have elected leaders who are more inclined to break conventions on human rights than to uphold them. Because autocratic alliances are largely transactional, they can shift and change, and often do.

The divisions run inside countries, too. There are powerful and important democracy movements in Venezuela and Iran. There are significant autocratic political movements and politicians in the United States as well as Germany, Poland, the Netherlands, Italy, and France. At the same time, the world economy is far more complex than it was in the twentieth century, and it is pointless to pretend that there are no conflicts of interest. Global cooperation will be needed to mitigate climate change and other environmental challenges. The United States and Europe trade intensively with China, and it is neither easy nor desirable to end those trading links abruptly.

For all these reasons, the democracies of North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia, and Africa, together with the leaders of the democratic opposition in Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, Belarus, Zimbabwe, Myanmar, and other autocratic states, should think about the struggle for freedom not as a competition with specific autocratic states, and certainly not as "war with China," but as a war against autocratic behaviors, wherever they are found: in Russia, in China, in Europe, in the United States. Toward this end, we need networks of lawyers and public officials to fight corruption inside our own countries and around the world, in cooperation with the democratic activists who understand kleptocracy best.

We need military and intelligence coalitions thar can anticipate and halt lawless violence. We need economic warriors in multiple countries who can track the impact of sanctions in real time, understand who is breaking them, and take steps to stop them. We need people willing to organize online and coordinate campaigns to identify and debunk dehumanizing propaganda. The autocracies want to create a global system that benefits thieves, criminals, dictators, and the perpetrators of mass murder. We can stop them."

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