How to stop an autocrat

Vilnius, Lithuania: Bronze sculpture Aukojimas (The Sacrifice) created by sculptor Darius Braziunas and architect Arturas Asauskas. Memorial near the Vilnius TV tower to the thirteen people who lost their lives in 1991 when Soviet troops seized the tower during the Lithuanian struggle for independence from the Soviet Union.

The political philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) developed the theory that a state could best be governed by an absolute sovereign, in order to prevent the societal breakdown by interhuman conflicts. Such an absolute ruler would best represent the interests of the people. Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677), on the other hand, was rather an advocate of a democratic government system, in which the interests of the people were represented by democratically elected institutions. Although in the days of Hobbes and Spinoza nearly all countries were governed by authoritarian rulers, if not absolute sovereigns, from then on the number of more or less democratically governed countries increased, especially since the 19th century, till in the early 21st century most countries were democratic states. Democracy seemed to be a viable system that represented the interests of its subjects best. For although in Hobbes’s view absolute rulers should represent the interests of their subjects, in practice they served mainly their own interests and those of their cliques, to the detriment of the interests of the people they were supposed to look after. In view of this, it was to be expected that a democracy, once established, would be a stable political system. Nevertheless, the opposite turns out to be true. Since a few years, for all kinds of reasons (which I don’t want to discuss here, and which are, moreover, not always clear), there are tendencies to authoritarianism if not dictatorship in many countries; even to that extent that again most political systems are no longer democratic but autocratic. And as in the past, the new authoritarian leaders – whatever they say – do not represent the interests of their voters (for most new autocrats have been elected in democratic elections) but the interests of themselves and their cliques. Therefore, many who have elected these leaders feel themselves tricked, if not worse. For how many of those who have brought Putin to power wanted war with Ukraine? Also in the USA opposition to president Trump is growing, including among those who voted for him. And who in the USA really wants that the power of the judicial institutions, one of the pillars of democracy, is undermined? However, these are reactions afterwards, when it is or can be already too late. Nevertheless, the behaviour of autocrats, especially when initially democratically elected, seldom comes from nowhere. It could have been foreseen.
The Russian-America journalist Masha Gessen has experienced both a long ruling “old” autocrat (Putin), and the rise of a new autocrat in a democratic country (Trump). Already in 2016, just after Trump’s election as president of the USA, Gessen wrote the article “Autocracy: Rules for Survival”, with six rules how to foresee and to survive an authoritarian political system (adapted):

Rule #1: Believe the autocrat. He means what he says. Whenever you find yourself thinking, or hear others claiming, that he is exaggerating, this is our innate tendency to reach for a rationalization. Indeed, especially now during his second term, with a majority in Congress and having won the presidential election convincingly, Trump carries out exactly those autocratic measures he had already promised during his campaign. His radical position was not a posture. We have been warned. Therefore, it will be foolish to think that during the rest of his term as president Trump is not going to do what he has promised during his campaign.
Rule #2: Do not be taken in by small signs of normality. Sometimes an autocrat must give in to pressure or because the situation is against him, but it is always a matter of two steps forward, one step back, and then again two steps forward, etc.
Rule #3: Institutions will not save you. See, how the US Congress is paralysed by Trumps actions. See, how autocrats manipulate or manipulated the judicial institutes in Poland, Hungary and now also in the USA, not to speak of Russia. They are made the long arm of the autocrat. It is the same for the free press and the universities, institutes that have always been seen as representatives of freedom. The first thing an autocrat will do is to get a grip on them, and usually he succeeds.
Rule #4: Be outraged. In the face of the impulse to normalize, it is essential to maintain one’s capacity for shock. However, adherents of the autocrat or others who think that it will not be that bad will attack you, if you criticize the autocrat. Hasn’t he been elected democratically? Be prepared for such reactions.
Rule #5: Don’t make compromises. That’s just what the autocrat wants. Once you have compromised, new demands will follow. If you again give in a bit, again new demands will follow, etc., till finally you’ll be left with nothing and will have lost everything.
Rule #6: Remember the future. Nothing lasts forever. There is hope.

This blog is certainly not only about US president Trump, as it might seem, but about any new authoritarian leader. In Europe it applies to the Hungarian Prime Minster Victor Orbán, for instance, or to the Dutch political leader Geert Wilders, or the Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. Wilders and Meloni are still contained by the political systems in their countries, but will this remain so?
If you think all this is too vague to stop an autocrat, the American political scientist Gene Sharp (1928-2018) has conducted extensive research into the problem how to tackle repression in a nonviolent way, which resulted in a list of 198 methods (see also the main page of the website of the Albert Einstein Institute). Autocrats can be toppled by the will of the people, as history learns.

See also my
- “Non-violent resistance and repressive regimes” summary and full text
- “Nonviolence and power. A study about the importance of power relations for nonviolent action and resistance” summary and full text
- “Non-violent resistance and the properties of states. A preliminary study” summary and full text

Random quote
Never Throw Down Your Weapons.
When blind fold Hatred’s claws are shown:
And Falsehood swings come dark behind,
Stand to your arms, and lay not down:
The weapons of the Mind.

Alexander Graf von Hoyos (1876-1937)

Taking the perspective of the other

Sometimes it is helpful to view things from an unusual perspective.

What I often miss in the views of many politicians is a feeling how others, like their opponents (but not only their opponents), who are affected by their measures, judge these measures and the ideas behind them. Not few politicians think that what they do is superior and that others must adapt, and if they don’t that they must be punished. Only few politicians can place themselves in the shoes of their opponents and those affected by their decisions. They cannot take the perspective of the other, as it is called in psychology. It’s not that they must agree with these others, but having a feeling for their viewpoints, especially those viewpoints they don’t agree with, will make their decisions more sensible.
Taking the perspective of the other involves putting yourself in the position of the other and trying to imagine how this person sees the world from his perspective and especially how he sees you. It also involves understanding the feelings belonging to that position. So, if a small country is attacked by a big neighbour, and you want to mediate in the conflict, you must not only see it as a clash on a political chessboard that can be solved if both parties give in a bit, or take the stalemate on the battlefield as a starting point without taking the reasons and causes of the conflict into account. You need also take account of the different views of the warring parties. For instance, you as a mediator should understand that the big neighbour is a former superpower who wants to restore the position it once had and that it wants to “collect” a series of weak vassal states at its borders, while the small attacked country is desperately asking your support, in order to keep the freedom it acquired 30 years ago, when it became independent of the big neighbour that now tries to undo its liberty and independence.
Taking the perspective of the other makes that you get a better and multi-sided view on the problem at hand and on the consequences of the actions you want to perform. It helps avoid the mistake of seeing what others do only from your perspective, by thinking that your view on the world is the way everybody sees it. It makes you aware of what other people see and how they see it. So, it is not a matter of taking merely the place of another and look at the world from there with your ideas, but you must look around from that position with their ideas. In this way, you’ll not only have a better feeling for what others do and why, but you’ll also get more information, and you will be better able to interact with others. You’ll have a better understanding of those you interact with. As David W. Johnson writes in Psychology Today: “Once people can view the issue and situation both from their own perspective and the other persons’ perspectives, they can more easily find mutually beneficial solutions. Perspective-taking also communicates that one really understands their thoughts, feelings, and needs. It is usually easier to jointly solve a problem when the other people feel understood and respected.”
For politicians, taking the perspective of the other is not only a matter of the right attitude, but also a matter of being surrounded by the right persons, especially by the right advisors. By right advisors I don’t mean only advisors who basically agree with you but just also advisors that do not. It is important to have around you also advisors who are critical of your views and who can formulate alternative possibilities; possibilities you may not agree with initially. Such advisors help develop broad, multi-sided views. This is important since it helps make political decision makers aware 1) that everyone has a unique perspective; 2) that perspectives are dependent on a person’s experiences, expectations and goals; 3) that the same message can mean two entirely different things from two different perspectives; and 4) it helps avoid the misunderstanding that everybody sees things from the same perspective as you do, (see Psychology Today)
Generally, the effects of perspective taking are positive. 1) It improves communication and reduces misunderstandings and distortions. 2) It is essential for a realistic assessment of common and opposed interests and an accurate assessment of their validity and relative merits. Without a realistic view lasting agreements and solutions are hardly possible. 3) If you want to influence others, you need to have a feeling what they stand for and to feel the emotional force with which they believe in it. 4) Engaging in perspective-taking tends to improve the relationship with the other person. You are more liked and respected when the other sees that you know his perspective and takes it into consideration.
Some politicians do what you like and like what they do, without taking care what others and especially their opponents and victims think of it. At first, this egomania may be effective, but then those affected will look for countermeasures, or ways to ignore them and leave them alone. (see Psychology Today)

Random quote
How regrettable it is that many Great Man committed his almost superhuman acts like a dupe, like an insane one! With the initially perhaps noble inspiration, he gradually became a stormer and a robber chief.

Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803)

Johann Gottfried Herder, a forgotten philosopher

Some philosophers with a big impact on human thinking are almost forgotten. Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) is one of them. I guess that most of my readers will not have heard of this Prussian Enlightenment philosopher. Happily, I knew a little bit about him, so when I saw an anthology from his work with an introduction in a bookshop, I didn’t hesitate to buy it. For, although I knew his name and although I knew that he had been an important thinker, and that he had something to do with the idea of history, I had never read anything written by Herder. So, this was a good opportunity to correct that omission.
In short, and maybe a bit exaggerated, Herder’s contribution to human thinking has been threefold:
- He invented the idea of history.
- He invented the idea of cultural relativism.
- He stressed the importance of language as the bearer of our thinking and world views.
There is more, but already this made Herder one of the leading figures of the Enlightenment.
As for the last point, which I’ll further ignore, Herder was one of the first to state that language shapes our framework of thinking, without saying that it determines thinking. Languages are the reflections of cultures.
But let me go to the other points. Until the 18th century the European world views were static. In fact, there was no past and no future, but only present. I mean, people thought that past and future were more or less copies of the present. Only the variables were filled in differently during the ages. The persons changed and institutions may have been replaced by other institutions, but it was, so to speak, old wine in new bottles, so people thought. However, Herder made clear that history involved development. The present is not a repetition of the past, but the past is substantially different from the present. Human institutions and ideas are continuously changing and becoming qualitatively different. There is progress, or maybe decline, or at least there is change. New wines are being developed, so to speak; not only the bottles become new. After some time, old wines are no longer considered tasty.
Herder introduced also the idea of cultural relativism. This involves that each culture has a value of its own. Therefore, each culture must be measured by its own standards. There are no inferior or superior cultures. This was a direct attack on the reigning European culture and its self-arrogance towards non-European cultures: “Every nation must ... only be viewed from its own situation with everything it is and has. ... Our European culture cannot act as a measure of general human values.”
That this was something new, can be illustrated by mediaeval paintings. Mediaeval painters often painted biblical scenes, so scenes in the holy land or otherwise in Egypt, Babylonia, and the like. However, these depicted scenes were clearly Mediaeval-European. They didn’t take into account that the biblical stories took place thousands of years ago in a different, Middle-Eastern culture. Only by and after the Renaissance, people began to realize that there have been different worlds that were not only inhabited by different people, but that these worlds were fundamentally different from theirs. So biblical scenes had to be filled with Middle-Eastern landscapes and with people in Middle-Eastern cloths. Johann Gottfried Herder was the first or at least the most influential philosopher who worded and expressed such views.

Does this mean that we must accept everything that is happening in other cultures, because it is happening in a culture that is not our own? Supposing that we accept Herder’s ideas, the answer is yes and no. It is “yes”, because we cannot or must not apply our own standards to cultures that are alien to these standards. Cultures must be judged from within. But this makes that the answer is also “no”. Actually, in each culture there are dissidents and critics. No culture is a unity. Moreover, cultures don’t exist isolated, anyway not in the present world. Carriers of a culture look across the borders of their own worlds, and there are always also a few who physically leave their own world and travel around and get new ideas and see other standards. This can be a starting point for criticism and cultural change.
Does this mean that in the end all values, norms and standards are relative, since culture-bound? I think that the answer is clearly “no”. Although values, norms and standards are culture-bound, this doesn’t involve that they are bound only to one culture. Some values, norms and standards are general and apply to everybody. We call them universal human values. They have been formulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, for instance. Thanks to the Enlightenment philosophers we know that general standards should be general and not be one-sided and culture-bound. Herder was one of these philosophers and certainly not the most unimportant one.

Sources: Johann Gottfried Herder, Hoe worden we humaan? (esp. pp. 106-124; quote on p. 118, my translation) and Wikipedia.

Random quote
Human feeling becomes indignant when brutal and brute trade measures are taken against innocent nations, purely for their own gain, so that such nations are actually sacrificed.

Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) 

Fact and fake

Abstract portrait of Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis on a barn
somewhere in the North of the Netherlands

At the end of the First World War (1914-1918) there was a revolutionary mood in many European countries, also in countries that had been neutral in this war. I think that everybody knows about the Russian October Revolution, which actually took place in November 1917. It led to the establishment of the communist regime. In November 1918, uprisings broke out all over Germany. The result was the fall of the Empire and the establishment of the Weimar Republic. There were also revolutions and attempted revolutions in Hungary and Switzerland and other countries and, indeed, in the Netherlands (my own country) as well. Most Dutchmen will have heard of the failed bloodless coup by the Dutch social democratic leader Pieter Jelles Troelstra on 11 and 12 November, which actually was not more than a list of radical demands. Less known is the revolutionary atmosphere in Amsterdam on 13 November.
Although the Netherlands had nothing to do with the First World War and had stayed neutral, also this country had suffered a lot from the war because of a kind of blockade in disguise by the fighting countries, who tried to keep all food, industrial products etc. for themselves. The Netherlands was not only enclosed by the warring countries, but as a merchant country it was heavily dependent on the import of food and other products (including fertilizers) and it was unable to produce enough food for feeding its population. As a result, first food and other products had to be rationed and at the end of the war there was a beginning famine. Add to this the already existing poverty in rural and urban areas, and it was not surprising that there existed a pressure to change, if not to revolution. Under the influence of the events in Russia and Germany, also the Dutch leftist leaders made radical demands. On 12 November, the social democrats had brought them forward in meetings in Rotterdam and in the parliament in The Hague, and a day later also on a meeting in Amsterdam. On that 13th November, in the evening, communists, anarchists and other groups left of the social democrats organized a meeting elsewhere in Amsterdam. The great anarchistic leader Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis was also there. He was the most popular radical leader in the Netherlands in those days. He had done much for improving the miserable situation of the poor, especially for the rural poor, and therefore he was called “The Saviour”.
During this meeting of the radicals, it was decided to hold a march through Amsterdam. The mood was rebellious, and many participants thought that the revolution had now started. The route of the march passed two army barracks. When the front of the march with the leaders had already passed the first army barracks peacefully, a group of demonstrators in the middle of the parade decided to enter its grounds and to seize the weapons. Or at least, it’s what the guard may have thought. What exactly happened is not clear, but anyway, soldiers opened fire on the invaders, four demonstrators died and several were wounded. After this tragic event, some left the demonstration, others continued the march but the revolution never took place.

What did Domela Nieuwenhuis during the march? 25 years later, one of the demonstrators wrote: “I can still see this memorable demonstration in my mind … Domela Nieuwenhuis in a carriage in front of the march …”
However, Jan Meyers, the biographer of Domela Nieuwenhuis, wrote in 1993 that Domela went in a carriage at the backside of the march.
Domela was an old man, who hardly could walk anymore, so, if he had participated in the march, probably he would have done so in a carriage. However, a policy spy who had been present at the meeting before the march started reported that he was brought home, after having given a speech at the meeting. So, the march took place without Domela.

What happened really that evening in Amsterdam and especially what did Domela Nieuwenhuis? Most likely, the version of the police spy is true. Half a year later Domela was present at another march, and there he was present in a carriage. So, both marches may have been confused. Nevertheless, it is reasonable to suppose that the demonstrator, the biographer and the police spy were in good faith, when they told what Domela did on 13 November. What we see here are three different representations of the same “fact” that might have been true. Such things often happen. Often it is afterwards difficult to determine what is true and what is false, especially when we have only witness statements that describe an event and no objective evidence. Fake and fact are often difficult to disentangle, especially when what is fake has not been intentionally constructed. And look at yourself: How often aren’t you wrong, though you think to tell the truth?

Source: Wouter Linmans, Revolutiekoorts. Onrust en oproer in november 1918. Esp. pp. 139-141. See also my blog Personal identity and memory.

Random quote
From the time when man stole the fire from heaven and learned to work the iron, since he forcibly brought the animals and his fellow brothers together and also used the vegetable kingdom for the benefit of himself, he has in many ways contributed to the change of the climate. … So we can also imagine the human race as a troop of confident, but little giants, who have come down from the mountains in order to subdue there the earth and to change the climate with their weak fists. The future will tell to what extent they will succeed.

Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803)