Dictatorship

There are moments in history when evil stops being an abstraction and acquires a face, a pulse, a fixed address. Most of the time the malice that drives a war is genuinely distributed — across institutions, ideologies, bureaucracies, the cold inertia of millions of people doing their small assigned part. You cannot point at it. You cannot, in any literal sense, end it. But occasionally the architecture of a regime tightens around one man so completely that the distinction between the man and the machine collapses. When that happens, a question arises that polite society prefers not to ask aloud: if the war flows from a single living person, is killing that person a legitimate way to stop the war? I want to take that question seriously, because I think the honest answer is yes — and because the reasons we treat one such man as a candidate and another as untouchable have nothing to do with morality and everything to do with fear. ...

A dictator cannot shoot lasers from his eyes. He cannot personally pull every trigger, sign every death warrant, or stand over every soldier as the order is carried out. He is one aging man in one body, and yet at his word entire armies march, entire populations fall silent, and people who fear nothing in battle suddenly lose the will to resist. This is the puzzle that sits underneath every tyranny, and it deserves a serious answer rather than a lazy one. The lazy answer is that some nations are simply born servile, that obedience is written into their blood. I want to argue the opposite. Obedience is not a national trait. It is manufactured, deliberately and methodically, by a machine that any sufficiently ruthless regime can build — and that almost any nation, however cultured, can be made to feed. ...

Every few weeks a fresh wave of optimism washes over the commentary class. Sanctions are about to bite. The oil price is about to crack. The defence budget is about to run dry. Soon, we are told, the Kremlin simply will not be able to keep fighting, and the war will grind to a halt of its own accord, like a machine that has run out of fuel. I understand the appeal of this hope. I do not share it. The whole prediction rests on a hidden assumption: that the war is draining some finite resource which must, sooner or later, be exhausted. But the resource that actually sustains this war is not finite, and the men who run Russia have, by now, far stronger reasons to continue the slaughter than to end it. The uncomfortable truth is that peace has become more dangerous to the regime than war. Until we grasp that, we will keep mistaking our own wishes for forecasts. ...

We have a habit, and it is a comfortable one, of keeping the world’s wars in separate folders. Ukraine goes in one. The Middle East goes in another. North Korea’s perpetual menace gets a folder of its own, filed somewhere at the back where we hope it will stay quiet. Each folder has its own experts, its own history, its own list of grievances and borders and broken treaties. And because each looks so distinct on the surface, we treat them as distinct in their nature: this war is about territory, that one is about religion, that other one is about a paranoid dynasty and its missiles. We reach for a local explanation every time, and the local explanation is always available, because every war does have a local cause. ...

There is a picture of revolution that almost everyone carries around, and it is wrong. In it, oppression mounts until it becomes unbearable; the people, pushed past endurance, pour into the square in numbers too vast to suppress; the regime, faced with a sea of human bodies, loses its nerve and falls. It is a stirring image, and it flatters us, because it locates the decisive variable in something we can imagine summoning — courage, numbers, the willingness of ordinary people to finally stand up. If only enough of us were brave enough, the wall would come down. ...

We are used to reading repression as a display of power. The arrests, the prison terms, the raided institutes, the criminal cases against people who have already fled the country — all of this looks, at first glance, like a strong state flexing its muscles, reminding everyone who is in charge. I want to argue almost the opposite. The repression now grinding through Russia is not the regime demonstrating its strength; it is the regime wounding itself. It destroys the very minds and talents a country needs in order to live. It manufactures, with its own hands, the people who will one day come to settle accounts. And it always intensifies at a particular, telling moment — not when the regime is winning, but when it is failing abroad and has nowhere else to put its rage. Seen this way, the machinery of fear is not armor. It is a slow poison the state keeps administering to itself. ...