Dr. Marcel Dirsus
Appearances
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
Yeah, well, from the dictator's perspective, being completely cynical and just thinking in terms of cost benefit, the question is, is that worth it? Because obviously you can put down people and you can repress them to an extent. But if you retain some sort of plausible deniability... you will have to beat down fewer people. And beating people is a risky proposition oftentimes.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
So you want to avoid it if you can. And really, realistically to Putin, it doesn't make a difference. He's got his properties. He's got his money. He will never need more money again in his life. There's no point. It's just not worth taking the risk.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
I think, honestly, I mean, first of all, I would say that even in democratic societies, you have this phenomenon, right? Although not with political leaders necessarily. But I mean, I ask myself that about billionaires sometimes. It's like, come on, man, you have 50 billion. What more do you need? So I think part of it is not specific to dictatorships, but it's just about humans being humans.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
And then I think the other element of that is that a lot about these systems is about status and it's about perceived power and perceived potence almost. So not only do you want to be rich, you want to be the richest because you want to send a signal to the others that, you know, actually I'm the man. I am that guy and you are not.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
One of the big differences between democracies and dictatorships is the amount of people that you need to keep on your side in order to take power and maintain it. So if you imagine a democracy where you actually need to win free and fair elections, you need to convince a relatively large share of the population to support you.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
And there's going to be another election, and if you lose them, you're going to lose power. But the less democratic your system becomes, the fewer and fewer people you need to maintain on your side. So if you look at something like Kim Jong-un's North Korea, he might only need 200 families in order to maintain power.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
And in a way, again, this sounds great because you can ignore just about everybody else. And in many cases, they have. But the problem is the flip side of that, because democratic leaders can afford to lose a lot of people, but dictators cannot. So if Kim Jong-un loses 50 families, you might be done.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
So you are in this constant situation where the people closest to you are your biggest threat and losing even a few of them can become a massive issue. So that's why it's so important that you take money and you steal it from the masses, essentially, even if it might be indirect, and you give it to the people that keep you in power. So your oligarchs, your generals, your intelligence officers.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
And that's part of the reason why it can never stop. It has to keep moving.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
Also, no guarantees, I suppose. Yeah, I got really obsessed with the topic of succession because I think it's really one of the defining weaknesses of dictatorships or non-democratic systems of government in general, right? And we don't talk about it enough. And one of the things that I looked at was the European Middle Ages, around the year 1000.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
The way that succession worked is that you were the king, and if you lost power, it would go to your brother. And for many reasons, that was quite a bad system. And the primary weakness that is inherent to this system is that the age difference between the king and his brother tends to be quite small.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
So if the brother wants to be king, as a lot of them did want, they would have a massive incentive to kill that brother. the king. And they did. So a lot of those kings got killed. And one alternative that they thought about in the Middle Ages was to basically give money from the king to the youngest child of the king. Because if you do that, you maximize that age difference, right?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
If you have a five-year-old and you're 50, that five-year-old can afford to wait. There's no reason why the five-year-old or the 15-year-old would have to take you out. So they thought, okay, that might offer some degree of stability. But it doesn't.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
Because the problem with that is that when the successor is too young, that successor cannot credibly signal to the other regime elites, so the people at the court or nowadays the oligarchs or the generals and so forth, that they're going to keep the system itself stable. No. My son is five. I don't trust him with a pair of scissors. They're not going to do that. So they have no allies.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
They have no alliance. They can't make that promise credibly. And of course, the regime elites, they don't necessarily care about the king or they don't care about necessarily about the dictator. They care about the system as such because the system is what gives them money and what gives them power.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
So the sweet spot that they ultimately settled on was to take the eldest son because the eldest son still had a big age gap, but was more likely to be able to signal credibly that the system would be kept alive, let's say like a 20-year-old. And this massively increased the survival rate of monarchs that switched to the system of granting power to the eldest son. Massive, massive.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
They were twice as likely to survive in power. And now you say, okay, that's kings, queens, whatever. That's the Middle Ages. But that same mechanism is still at play. Regime elites still care about the continuation of the regime. So if you look at something like Syria... and you look at the way that succession worked with the Assads, you have the same mechanism at play, right?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
So you had Bashar al-Assad's father, who came to power many decades ago. And when he was no longer around, Syrian regime elites had to ask themselves, okay, what's next? And in the end, what they decided on was Bashar al-Assad.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
Not because Bashar al-Assad was seen as this great leader who was perfect for the job, but because they thought that if they agreed to him, they could avoid a costly sort of war between each other, like within the regime. And ultimately, that's what they wanted to avoid. They wanted to avoid a war within the regime. They just wanted the regime to keep surviving because that's how you get the money.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
That's how you get the power. So the same mechanism is still at play in the variants that it was. hundreds and hundreds of years ago.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
Like, why not try something like that? Yeah, it can work. And sometimes it has worked. And if it does, it reduces the chance that you're going to end up being killed or being imprisoned. But the problem is that none of these leaders have absolute power. So this idea that this is a decision that they could make themselves is absurd, right?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
So even though they might want to turn the country into a democracy... They might not be able to do so because, let's say, the generals might say, you know what, I would rather serve a dictatorship because this is what guarantees me money than turn the country into a democracy. A, they can't necessarily decide it themselves because they're relying on these other people.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
And a lot of these other people might want to make sure that the regime survives. And the other problem is that... If the country does actually turn into a democracy, how are voters going to feel about these leaders going unpunished? So if you have a dictatorship and they've been harassing people, they've been imprisoning people, they've been torturing people, and the dictator says, you know what?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
I'm done. I'm going to turn the country into a democracy. I just want to retire. Let me go to my home village. I'm going to just enjoy retirement. it's probably not going to fly. You can try, but it's an incredibly risky decision to make. So for that reason, they mostly try to stay in power for as long as they humanly can.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
The other thing is also how do you pick the right moment in time? Because to be in power in these types of systems, you have to believe that you are going to survive that crisis. You have to. You absolutely have to. Because if you don't, given that so much is based on the confidence of others and these perceptions of strength, you're definitely done.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
And in a way, it's not irrational either, right? Some of these people have lived completely unreal lives. They started out as peasants and then they built themselves these giant palaces and they became rulers of countries. So many of them have survived a great deal of crises before. They've almost gotten killed and they've always survived.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
In a way, it almost makes sense that they would assume that they will survive forever. the final crisis as well.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
Yeah. I think the mistake that he made is he was way too confident. And I think he lived one of those unreal lives. I don't know whether you've ever been to Bucharest, but they got a palace that he built himself. Yeah, it's nice. He was one of these leaders who thought that, you know what, I'm going to get through this. I've gone through stuff before. And he didn't have a good plan to get out.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
That's a good question. And it's one I have actually also asked myself. I think there's probably two elements to that. The first one is a lot of these people are deeply weird. So even at the moment where they take power, they are already extremely damaged. So if you take somebody like Kim Jong-un, generals were saluting him when he was a child. He started carrying a gun when he was a child.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
And eventually what happened is that the military changed sides. And when that happened, he was done, right? And he had nowhere to flee. He had no escape plan, nothing that he could do in terms of exile. And yeah, him and his wife were executed together unceremoniously, as you said, after a very brief show trial. So it grew to an end once again.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
Yeah, and that's the risk, right? So it's extremely difficult now to find the right place for exile. Because really, let's take somebody like Assad, right? Assad is still a comparatively young guy. So he doesn't just need safety now. He's going to need it potentially for multiple decades. And he needs to find a country that is strong enough, first of all, to physically protect him.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
Because Assad has probably made more enemies than just about anyone on earth. So now that he's left the country, his enemies didn't just disappear into thin air. There's still plenty of people that want him dead. So the first question is just physical protection. The second question is, you need to find a country that is strong enough to withstand pressure to give you up. Because like you say...
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
People will come and they will say, look, give us this guy and in return you get this or whatever. And the other thing is, like I said, you need it for an extended period of time. And I think this could be what ultimately might be the end of Assad. Because what you're betting on is that Russia is going to be stable for two decades, maybe three decades, depending on how long he has to live.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
Now, would I bet that, knowing what we know about Russian history, knowing what we know about the Russian political system? I'm not sure. Obviously, now it seems that Putin is firmly in power. He's not going to leave. The country is not going to turn into a democracy. There's not going to be some sort of civil conflict. But we don't know.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
So it could be that in five years Putin dies, the country turns into a democracy. It could be that in five years Putin dies and there's a conflict within the regime and the next person didn't make that promise. And they might prioritize the relationship to Damascus over this guy that really doesn't really hold any chips anymore. So it's always been super challenging.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
He could summon people to the palace when he had an issue with his toys, right? And like engineers would be forced to come during the middle of the night. So obviously that type of environment is not conducive to a healthy mind. And then the other problem is not only are these people deeply weird, but they have all this power.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
And the problem for dictators now is, is that democracies are much less likely to agree to exile. So during the Cold War, it used to be that if you were France's dictator, or if you were America's dictator, you'd be able to flee to Hawaii or the Mediterranean coast. But as you said, that's now much less likely. I think there are trade-offs everywhere, right?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
So just as dictators have to make trade-offs in order to stay in power, we have to make trade-offs in dealing with them. And one of these trade-offs is this question of exile. So obviously, you don't want somebody like Assad to go free. You want them to be held accountable for all the terrible things he's done.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
Absolutely a bad guy. And I can totally understand that impulse. The trade-off that you make here, though, is the more difficult you make it for these types of leaders to flee, the more of an incentive you give them to try to stay in power.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
Right? So if you go your back against the wall... And you think you have to torture, you have to kill, you drop those barrel bombs in order to maintain power. Because there's no way out, that is exactly what you will do. Honestly, it's difficult. You know, in German, we call this a choice between the plague and cholera. Right? You can only choose between something bad or something worse.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
First, the United States effectively helped him to stay in power. And then when his own people were trying to get rid of him, then America basically flew him out. And not only did they fly him out, but they also helped him to steal yet more. And we know about all of the things that he stole because of American customs.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
So you have to imagine this completely absurd scenario where the American Air Force is flying out this dictator that had done a lot of terrible things to Hawaii. And he would arrive with, you know, sort of diamond cufflinks or a golden statue of Jesus. You know, millions and millions in cash. Completely, completely, completely insane. And we know about it. It's not a secret.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
And when you look at dictators, you can clearly see that it's not a good idea to give one person, in most cases one man, this much power because they're going to act on their weirdest ideas and things are going to go tragically wrong and things are going to get very weird.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
And then he just lived on Hawaii. And that was it.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
Yeah, I talk about it a little bit in the book. So this is Bongbong Marcos. And when he was taking power, he told people that he essentially wants them to focus not on the past, but on the future. Isn't that convenient?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
Yeah, I think the case of Kim Jong-un in particular is super difficult. Generally speaking, the question is really, what do you want to achieve? Because most of the time, people don't just want to get rid of dictators. They also want some sort of sustainable outcome, right?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
Usually a democracy, because oftentimes, what good is it toppling one dictator if that dictator is then replaced by another one? So we know that your best chance of a good outcome happens when you top people through nonviolent protests. So if you can topple these types of tyrants through nonviolent protest, then that tends to work out very well. But there's two problems with that.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
The first one is, A, the type of leaders that can be toppled through nonviolent protest don't tend to be the worst of the worst. So somebody like Kim Jong-un is not going to be brought down by peaceful protesters because peaceful protest is essentially impossible in North Korea. There's no free media. You can't access the internet, really.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
There's punishments across generations for people that oppose the regime. And the regime can just use brute force in order to suppress protests. So that's the first problem. So we're stuck in a situation, essentially, where the people closest to power tend to have most of an influence on these leaders, as we discussed.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
So if you were looking for somebody to bring down Kim Jong-un, that person would probably not sit in the White House and also wouldn't be on the streets of Pyongyang, but it'd be one of his generals. It would be a sister or it would be a child. And clearly... that is not the most desirable scenario that we might want.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
So I think when it comes to the most difficult cases, like Kim Jong-un, where something like nonviolent protests are unlikely to work, sanctions are unlikely to work, outsiders are really forced into making some very difficult decisions because oftentimes there are things that we could do, but they are much more risky and they would exact a much larger price, both in terms of blood and in treasure.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
And even if outsiders decide to use these means, the outcome is often terrible. So the track record of foreign and post regime change, for example, is abysmal. It's not just Iraq. The overall track record is absolutely tragic.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
No, there's other examples. So when researchers looked at this, they looked at dozens and dozens of American regime change operations. They found that just above one in 10 of them led to the creation of a democracy. Japan, Germany, there are a couple of others. So it's not like it never works, but it rarely works. And there's a bit of a paradox here.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
All things equal, it is easiest, quote unquote, easiest to bring democracies to countries that are functioning institutions and that have a history of democracy. And conversely, it is most difficult to bring democracy to countries that don't have that history and that don't have functioning institutions.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
Depending on the way you look at it, you've had some tyrants, right? There have been queens that have been exceedingly cruel to their own people and to others. So in the book, for example, I write about a queen from Madagascar, right, who is known for forcing her people into an ordeal, as part of which it would be revealed whether they are guilty of something or not.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
But if you are, let's say, an American president and you make that decision on whether you go to war or not, the problem is that those same institutions that make democratization more likely also generate military effectiveness. So if you're Germany during World War II, for example, part of the reasons why the German military was so powerful is because Germany functioned.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
obviously did absolutely terrible things.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
If you are an outsider in this situation, you can either invade a strong country that might actually turn into a democracy, or you can invade a weak country that is unlikely to really turn into a democracy. And given that these sort of strong countries can lead to hundreds of thousands of deaths, you're probably not going to do it unless national security is at stake.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
Even though presidents say, yeah, we're doing this for democracy, we're doing this for the good of humanity or whatever, they rarely do because it's usually not worth it.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
I think both countries were initially occupied, right? So they couldn't really decide much because in the case of Germany, the other allies were in charge. Even in that case, right? So even once you've beaten these adversaries, it's really difficult to actually go through then creating a democracy. So let me give you one example and one difficulty that is universal to all of this.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
So let's say you go in militarily for whatever reason and you get rid of that old regime. Now you have to make a decision what you're going to do with the remnants of that regime, right? Are you going to purge them? Are you going to get rid of them, or are you going to say, maybe, okay, we'll purge people at the top, but everybody else we're going to keep?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
It's a little bit separate, right? Okay. So let's take Iraq, right? So the Americans, when they went into Iraq, they had the same decision to make, right? They could either prioritize the functioning of Iraqi society. And if they were going to do that, they would purge very few people. Because again, if you purge tens of thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of people,
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
society is going to cease functioning effectively, or you're going to do the opposite. And again, there's a trade-off here, right? And this is also what they saw in Germany. So in Germany, they decided to let a lot of Nazis just keep working. So Germany still had judges, policemen, teachers that were Nazis.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
And the Allies did that because they cared more about a functioning Germany than they cared about getting rid of all the Nazis. And in Iraq, they almost went the opposite approach where they purged a lot of people But that ultimately led to a situation where the country was just not able to function. Some guy who worked at an electricity station was previously affiliated with the regime.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
And the ordeal was essentially eating something that had a very high likelihood of killing you. So either you took it and you died, in which case you were guilty, or if you didn't happen to die, then it's like, okay, you're innocent, right? So she was super, super cruel, but she was a queen. So right now, no, no female dictators.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
So now he was jobless. The military was disbanded. So all of a sudden you have hundreds of thousands of people with military training who no longer have a job. And these decisions are incredibly difficult. And once again, there's not really a good choice here. And you're always going to be forced into this.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
Yeah, I think over the last couple of decades, we've had a big push for international justice and holding these types of leaders accountable. And that's a great thing because it can be deterrent. So if you haven't yet committed the worst of the worst, if you haven't yet committed these types of atrocities,
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
using child soldiers or committing crimes against humanity, then you might think twice about doing it because you know that you may not just have to deal with people in your own country, but you might be looking at an extended trip to The Hague or the UK or whatever.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
Yeah, so two sides to this. On the one hand, it can be a deterrent, right? Not just the ICC, but all of the other systems of international justice as well. And that may make it less likely that dictators or other leaders commit atrocities. But the flip side of that is that once you have committed those atrocities, you now have an even stronger incentive to try to maintain power.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
Yeah, it's almost a caricature of what you would tell people if you told them about a dictator. The whole thing is completely crazy. He wrote this philosophical treatise that then everybody had to study. There were regular study sessions at the ministries. He renamed the days of the week. He put up a statue that rotated with the sun, right? So clever. Just completely not.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
And once again, the reason that he could is because it was a dictatorship. And who's going to resist if resisting means imprisonment or death?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
Although, of course, that could change depending on the way that succession goes in North Korea.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
It's like running an entire country on the personal whims of a five-year-old on any given day. It's like, okay, I'm not allowed to do this anymore. Nobody is allowed to do this. So for example, there are stories about him not being allowed to smoke anymore because of some health issue. And then he moved to ban smoking for everybody. So it's completely insane.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
And I mean, he's not alone in this, right? I mean, there are a bunch of dictatorships that seem crazy. Although what I would say, and I think this is an important point to make, even though a lot of these people might seem crazy, ultimately then my argument is that they're not. Because if they actually were crazy, they would lose power pretty quickly.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
So in the book, I looked at a dictator that actually lost his mind, like fully lost his mind and became completely delusional. And what happened is, so this was in Equatorial Guinea during the Cold War. He would walk around his compound crying out the names of the people that he had killed. And in one episode, he would ask his servants to lay the table for eight guests.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
And when those guests didn't arrive, he just talked to them as if they were there.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
Yeah, and the problem was that even if he had wanted to get it treated, he couldn't because literally every single psychiatrist in the country had either fled or been killed. So you had a situation where the guy in charge with all this power had completely lost his mind and all connection to reality.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
And as a result, he lost power very quickly because the people around him decided, look, if we could get killed, whether we oppose this guy or not, We might as well start opposing him because there's no advantage to staying in line. And he was just killing at random. So you need the capacity for rational thought and for weighing risks in order to stay in power.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
And if you lose that, you will inevitably lose power.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
No, you're right. Natural resources are really great for dictators. And the reason for that is that you can generate a lot of money without being reliant on a lot of people and without necessarily being reliant on competence. So if you go back to Gaddafi, for example, Gaddafi was extremely worried about universities because he thought that as people become more educated...
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
These universities could become a hotbed for opposing the regime. So he was critical of education as such. And if you have, let's say, oil, or if you have, let's say, diamonds, you don't need to educate people, which in the mind of these dictators is either a waste of money, because that money could also go to their cronies, or is actively dangerous.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
And the other good thing about it is that you don't need a lot of competent people. As a dictator, you want to promote for loyalty. If you're choosing your ministers, you don't want to pick people that are actually good at their job at creating good outcomes for the population.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
You want to pick people that are fiercely loyal to you, or at least pretending to be, and you want to pick people that are not a threat to you. But obviously, if you do that over and over again, if you don't want to educate your people, and if you don't want to promote competent people, things go bad. But that doesn't really matter if you have oil or if you have diamonds.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
So that's part of the reason why a lot of these dictatorships have natural resources.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
Yeah, I think that's part of the trouble of studying these regimes, right? Comparatively speaking, democracies tend to be quite open. So obviously there's backroom deals. A lot of it is about power and so forth. But in dictatorships, it's really to the extreme.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
I think all of these dictators are mentally ill in a way, right? Because these are people who do absolutely terrible things regularly. One day you'd be looking at somebody, you'd be talking to them totally normally. And as they walk out of the office, you would order their death. You have families thrown into jail. You have masses of people killed.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
If you're somebody like Vladimir Putin, for example, you would agree to help a regime in Syria that was literally barrel bombing hospitals. So if you do this, and if you can still sleep somehow, you are obviously abnormal. And if you can maintain power in these systems, you need to be paranoid.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
You cannot be a quote-unquote normal person who just goes about their day relatively carelessly because if you were, you would die. So you need that paranoia and you need that ability to make all of these horrible decisions and basically go on with your life. So if you don't have it, you are not suitable for this job. What about the military?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
You don't, which is why coup d'etat are a major problem for just about every dictator. So if you're a dictator, you usually don't want a military that is actually good at doing the job of a military, which is to fight an external enemy, to protect the country, maybe even fight rebels. But what you do want is a military that is not going to topple you.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
So usually dictators do something that is often called crew-proofing. There are multiple elements to this. You want to promote for loyalty. You want to make sure that generals are not too competent and so forth. But the other thing that you want to do is look at the structure of your security services. Democracies often have a unified chain of command.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
And once you arrive at a place like North Korea, it's incredibly difficult to tell what is going on, how stable the regime is, and it's really like winning tea leaves.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
They have one military, and that military is designed to fight wars. In dictatorships, what you want to do is you want to split those security services into multiple smaller parts. So you don't just want to have your regular military, but you also want to have some sort of parallel military. Perhaps you also have a militarized palace guard. Perhaps you have a large militia as well.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
And the reason why you want to do this is because you want to make it impossible for that one general that you just mentioned to decide that he should rather be in charge. You want that general to think, if I try, I'm going to have to go through this parallel militia organization. I'm going to have to go through these militias.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
And you're hoping that this makes it less likely that they will actually try. over and over again. Let's take, for example, Russia. In the case of Russia, when Prigozhin was marching the wrong way towards Moscow, this is an example of that. So in the Russian system, you had these mercenaries because they were a counterweight to the regular military.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
But it also shows the trade-off because as you structure your security forces this way, they become less effective at actually fighting war, which is their core job. And you may also create a monster that can come back to bite you. And in the case of Russia, you know, both have happened. They've been less effective than they could have been. And Putin could have easily lost power.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
Yeah, and I think Sudan actually shows perfectly the sort of succession problem that we were talking about earlier. People thought that when the last dictator was toppled, okay, now the way is clear, the country is going to transition towards a democracy.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
But the problem that you had is that now there wasn't one man that was a problem, but now you had multiple men in camouflage wanting to become the leader. And this type of fighting has escalated to such a degree that you're now looking at a civil war where millions and millions of people have fled.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
This stands in contrast, obviously a lot of things have gone wrong in Sudan, but this stands in contrast to democracies, right? When somebody like Keir Starmer loses power in the UK or when Angela Merkel stepped down in Germany, there's a process. There are institutions, there are courts, there are ways to go about things. But in a personalized dictatorship, you don't have any of this.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
So every time a leader is changed, you have this massive risk of things going completely up in flames.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
We say a lot of things wrong. We say Volkswagen instead of Volkswagen. Oh, that's weird.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
You basically have to think about how you're going to make sure that your security forces are going to stay loyal. And there's a bunch of ways that you can do that. So most obviously you can give them opportunities for corruption or you can give them toys, right? Like new weapons, new kit, that sort of thing.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
But one of the ways that you can also do it is to make any potential for change less attractive. So a lot of dictators in the past have done that by promoting a certain ethnicity, either their own ethnicity or some ethnicity that is somewhat allied to them, and basically made sure that they are in all the key positions in the military, in the police, in the intelligence services.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
And what that meant was, is that Those people then had a massive incentive to defend the status quo, because if the regime were to fall, they would probably also lose their livelihood and they would also lose their positions.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
So weirdly enough, these family dynamics are really important in a lot of these dictatorships. Partly that's because dictatorships tend to be very bad at organizing succession.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
And this was particularly prominent after the end of colonization in Africa, where a lot of African leaders, a lot of African independence leaders, had no idea what to really do with their militaries, because the colonial powers had deliberately set up the security forces of these territories and in a way that meant that they were not loyal to these new independence leaders.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
So it was very widespread. But the problem with this is that you have to get there. So once you have this politicized military in which certain ethnicities allied with you are in these powerful positions, okay, it can work out very well. But as you try to get there, as you keep promoting people from a certain ethnicity, you are inevitably going to run into opposition.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
And that's a problem with all of these measures of coup-proofing. And I think during my research, I think the most depressing thing that I came across was an alternative to this, whereby a dictator was trying to make change less appealing by having his security forces deliberately commit human rights abuses.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
So this was Saddam Hussein, and essentially what he would do is use his security forces in order to commit horrible atrocities against the people of Iraq. And the reason for that was that once they had done all these terrible things, they knew that they effectively had to defend the regime to the death because they were hated. So if Saddam was going to lose power, they were going to be toast.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
So there are all kinds of horrible things that you can do if you don't want to go down this path for the next second.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
So if you have a political system in which so much power is concentrated in the hands of just one man or a very small group at the top, when that man is no longer around because he's been killed or because he died in his sleep, things tend to go very wrong very quickly. So you can risk up ending up in like a civil war or something like that.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
It's not even just dictators. In some of the civil wars, what groups would do is, when they were struggling to recruit fighters to join the rebellion, effectively what they would do is kidnap children and then force those children to commit atrocities near their home villages, which meant that they were locked into the rebellion.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
When you look at this world, when you look at the way that some of these regimes function, some of these mechanisms at play, it can be quite depressing.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
Yeah, I mean, I think there's a misconception that a lot of people have that dictators are particularly good at waging war. And there are some reasons why one could suspect that. So one of the things that dictatorships are very good at is taking casualties, for example. So when the caskets come home or when injured people come home...
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
and they land back in the U.S., the American president is going to have a massive issue. And he's going to have that issue because people that come home dead or the people that come home injured are directly a part of the constituency that keeps him in power because he needs to win elections. And the soldiers coming home, their families and their friends and all of these people can vote.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
If you have Vladimir Putin, you don't really have to be concerned about people from some Siberian village dying, because people in that Siberian village have zero influence on you staying in power or not. So that's one of the things that dictatorships tend to be much better at. But there are a lot of flip sides.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
So first of all, what we just talked about in terms of coup-proofing is a massive issue for a lot of these militaries, because once again, they are not building militaries in order to actually fight wars. So when they're forced into fighting wars, they're in trouble. So one of the examples that I give in the book is a war between Iraq and Iran.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
And essentially what happened is Saddam Hussein was a lot more worried about his own people and about his own security services than the Iranian soldiers. So what he did was he used almost the entire intelligence apparatus that he could in order to spy on his own people and on his own soldiers.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
And as a result, you had, I think, three people in the entire Iraqi intelligence apparatus looking at Iran. And two of them spoke Farsi, the language that you need to understand to actually understand what's happening in Iran. So obviously, this type of machine is not good at then going to fight against Iran.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
But what he gradually realized is that, OK, the Iranians coming closer, they're not quite within range of my palace yet. But now Iranian soldiers are starting to become a bigger issue than Iraqi soldiers. And in the case of Saddam Hussein, he could still pivot because Iraq is a comparatively powerful country, but has resources that it can trade.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
So oftentimes the power of least resistance for the regime insiders that want to keep the system as such alive is to pick a family member. So oftentimes they agree to people, even though that might not be ideal, but they think that's the best option that's on offer.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
So gradually what he did is he loosened the grip that he had on his own generals. He redirected the intelligence apparatus towards Iran, and he did less micromanaging because he came to realize that actually, okay, I'm not the person that should be determining how wide the trenches should be. I'm going to let the professional... I mean, that's real. He actually did that.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
That's, yeah, ridiculous. Yeah. I'm going to give a little bit longer leash to my generals because now I'm more worried about the Iranians than I am about my own people. And it allowed them to maintain power. But not all countries can do that. So a lot of them essentially look for external protection.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
If they cannot protect themselves, if they cannot go back on this coup-proofing, they need somebody else to protect them, essentially.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
Yeah, chances are high. You can survive in power even if you lose a war. But chances are quite high that you do end up losing power. But I think this is quite interesting when it comes to Russia, for example, because we talked about the influence that outsiders have on the survival of some of these regimes and of some of these dictators.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
And I think when it comes to Putin, outsiders actually have much more influence than they often have, but they are less willing to use it. Unlike with a lot of these other dictatorships, we can have a massive influence on whether Vladimir Putin stays in power or not, because we can have an influence on the way that the war goes in Ukraine.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
The more likely it is that Putin loses that war, the more likely it is that he also loses power. But I think we're less willing to use it because the consideration is, of course, also, OK, if Putin feels that he has his back towards the wall and that he might actually lose this war, what is he going to do?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
And I think in European capitals like Berlin, but also in D.C., for example, the thinking is, OK, if we empower the Ukrainians too much and Vladimir Putin thinks he might lose the war and subsequently might lose power, he may use nuclear weapons. So I think we've got a bit of a paradox when it comes to Russia currently.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
Yeah, I think a lot of the time we can, particularly with cases that are not quite as bad. So like I said, somebody like Kim Jong-un, somebody like Assad, it's very difficult. And I think outsiders can have an influence, but it's going to cost a lot. It might lead to dead soldiers. It's going to be very costly. It's going to be very bloody.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
So that is something that policymakers have to think about long and hard. But when it comes to some regimes that are more in the middle, right? So they're not the worst of the worst. Maybe they haven't existed for multiple decades. Maybe they're not quite as powerful. There are things that we can do. And the way that I look at this is essentially three parts. So you want to weaken the incumbent.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
You want to strengthen alternative elites. And you want to empower the masses. Because if you do not empower the masses, and there are a variety of ways to do it, you risk a scenario where basically one dictator walks out the front gate and another walks in on the other side of the palace. And that can mean sanctions to make it more difficult for the regime to redistribute gains.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
It can mean running workshops. It can mean making sure their communication networks stay open. It can mean training people in strategy. There's a bunch of things that you can do. that are very cheap and where the outcome is unlikely to be catastrophic. If you run a workshop for independent journalists somewhere in Central Asia, it is unlikely to lead to a million deaths.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
Maybe it happens, but it's highly unlikely.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
Yeah, so the thing about dictators is that a lot of their power rests on this idea of them having power, right? So it's a perception of strength rather than an actual brute strength that they personally have. When you look at Gaddafi, he took this to an extreme. He had these palaces, he had all these extravagances that you were talking about, right?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
When it comes to some of these more drastic measures, right, when it comes to things like, do you support assassinations? Do you provide weapons to regime opponents? Do you encourage sabotage? Do you perhaps go to war? I'm extremely skeptical because I know that historically speaking, a lot of the time it has gone wrong.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
But at the same time, I only grew up in freedom in Germany because somebody else went to war to beat the Nazis. So I am not going to sit here and argue that force is never justified. There is some sort of line at which these leaders are so destructive and so damaging that it is worth taking that risk and that it is worth going to war. But where that line is, is difficult to say in general.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
I think it's a case by case decision.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
It's a really fascinating case. And what it really demonstrates is how popular protest works and when it doesn't. And it's a curious question, right? Because you've got some of these entrenched dictatorships being brought down by like school teachers or by pensioners just marching in the street. And the mechanism through which that works is by splitting the regime.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
So you're a dictator, you want to project strength, and you want to project inevitability. You want to make sure that people think there's no other option. So you cannot tolerate people in the streets because that's a direct challenge. But when they're there, you use violence against them, you try to club them down.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
You might have more people in the streets because you have this backlash as people are upset. So you have more and more people, and eventually you're forced into a situation where you might have to give an order to shoot. But the problem is that even when you give that order to shoot, somebody actually has to follow it.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
And oftentimes at that very moment, the security services refuse and the regime crumbles under the weight of its own repression. Because even though the dictator might want to shoot these innocent civilians, others in the regime do not. And as a result, these regimes can blow up.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
But then in Belarus, what you saw is that dictators can maximize their chances of survival by bringing in security forces from elsewhere. Because, of course, you are going to be much more likely to shoot somebody from a foreign country than you would be your neighbors or maybe somebody from your family. So what you saw in Minsk is essentially a form of dictatorial solidarity there.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
He would travel to faraway lands, you know, set up his Bedouin tents, and it was completely nuts. And one of the things that he had was a golden gun, right? So that the gun itself was made of gold and was intricately engraved and all the rest of it. And really it was a symbol of his power because who has that? It's a deeply weird thing to have.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
where the dictatorship was able to count on these Russians, and these Russians not only made it less likely that the regime would crumble under the weight of its own repression, but it also reassured regime elites, like the generals and so forth, that the regime would continue to survive.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
And given that they then thought the regime would continue to survive, it became irrational to defect, which otherwise they would have potentially done.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
In dictatorships, there's a very small line between apparent stability and complete chaos. And the reason for that is that so much of these regimes is built on strength and about these perceptions of inevitability. So as soon as people come to think that the leader could actually fall...
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
or will actually fall, they can switch sides just like that, because there's no bigger ideological project, there's no legitimacy, it's just about maximizing your own interests, staying out of prison, and staying alive. And that's why you saw, for example, in the case of Assad, once his soldiers came to realize that he might actually lose, they just took off their uniforms, and off they went.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
So authoritarian stability is often a mirage. The other thing that I would say, though, is we often tell ourselves that conflicts can only be won if we win hearts and minds. That's a lie. For these regimes, that's a lie. For us, to an extent, it's possible because we have legal and ethical constraints that we cannot simply bomb civilians into submission.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
But if you're a Putin or if you're Assad or if you're Lukashenko, you absolutely can. If you are able to use brutal violence for an extended period of time, you can stay in power even if the vast majority of your own people hate you. as depressing as that is.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
There's no Western leader that I would call a tyrant or that I would call a dictator, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they don't want to be one. And democracy is not God-given. So it could be that in the future, we see a European country or a North American country turning into a dictatorship. I try to end the book sort of on a positive note, but I do actually also think it's true.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
Obviously, all of us are bad with uncertainty. And obviously, sometimes things can look terribly. But oftentimes, I think that doesn't necessarily mean that they actually are bad. If you think about revolutions in the past, oftentimes they were atrocious, right? I mean, you had civil wars, people getting killed, executed guillotine and all that. And now we look back and we think, oh, you know what?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
But at the moment when he would have actually needed it, which is when rebels caught him, that gun couldn't save him because that perception of his power was gone. And in the end, the rebels took the gun off him and he had a horrible end. Last footage that we have of him alive is him basically being beaten. He was sodomized. He's begging for mercy, his head bloody. So it was a really terrible end.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
That was a key moment on the path towards French democracy, for example. And I think we might also look at the Arab Spring in 50 years or look at Assad in 50 years and say, yeah, that was absolutely awful. But actually, that was a key on the path towards this Syrian democracy or Tunisian democracy or whatever, right? So I don't know.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
I mean, I try to stay positive, but yeah, sometimes it's not the most cheerful of topics. Let me put it that way.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
No, I mean, I have no sympathy for Gaddafi, obviously. But I think when these kinds of things happen, they also shift the perception of a lot of these other rulers, right? Because they see Gaddafi's end and it makes them scared that something like that could happen to them. And that influences their calculus.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
Yeah, so they put him basically in a freezer in a shopping mall. The sort of custom would have been to bury him pretty quickly in that part of the world, but that's not what they did. So they put him up for all to see. And when a local was asked about it, right, about this sort of undignified fate, he basically said if he had been a better man, this wouldn't have happened to him.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
And of course, it probably wouldn't have.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
Yeah, that's true.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
Yeah, the statistics are really stark on this, right? So the vast majority of democratic leaders are perfectly fine, like you say, after they lose office, right? Like somebody like Merkel or whatever, right? They're going to enjoy tranquil retirement. They're going to write some books, give some speeches, enjoy time with their family, right?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
When you look at personalist dictators, 69% of them are imprisoned, forced into exile, or killed. And obviously, these people might not read the papers, so they're not going to know the statistics, but they know that losing power can mean losing their freedom or losing their life. So they are forced to spend much of their day basically thinking about how do they not lose power?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
And stepping down voluntarily is extremely difficult too. So I call this the dictator's treadmill. So at the moment that you assume power, you risk getting stuck because in order to be in power as a dictator, you have to do horrible things regularly, right? You have to harass people. You put them in prison. You might have people killed. You steal from your people and so forth.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
And at the moment where you want to step down, there's a massive risk of that catching up with you. Doing so is inevitably a risk. And part of the problem is that you would have to find somebody to replace you who would be powerful enough to protect you, but not so powerful that they can get rid of you.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
Yeah, you're absolutely right. You're looking at a guy who has reportedly had somebody blown up with an anti-aircraft gun for falling asleep in a meeting. This is the type of regime that we're talking about. And as you say, this type of transparency, at first it sounds good from the perspective of the dictator because like, well, nobody can criticize you really.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
And if they do, you can put them in a gulag or you can have them killed or whatever. But ultimately, a lot of these dictators fall into a trap because the system is set up this way. So as they promote for loyalty and not for competence, and people who speak the truth get purged over and over again, you do end up with these yes men.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
Obviously, if everybody constantly agrees with you because they don't want to be sent to a gulag, that's not conducive to good policymaking. And again, it's not great for a healthy mind, right? We've seen a lot of the times in history that this leads dictators to basically detach from reality. Like they don't really know what's going on anymore.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
And as a result, they can make mistakes because they become overly confident.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
Yeah, I think Putin is a really interesting case. I talked to a lot of Russia experts while writing this, right? And what some of them argued is that essentially as Putin came in, he would listen to a lot of people that were technocrats. So these might have been people that previously ran a bank or they were like managers. They cared a lot about the economy. They wanted things to work, right?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
If only because they wanted to make sure that the people who were at the top got more money. But as time went on, Putin started listening more and more to people that were more like him, intelligence officers in particular, but also people from the military. And obviously, these people have a certain mindset, right?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
I mean, if you spent three decades in the KGB and you constantly see threats lurking everywhere, you have a certain way of looking at the world and you transfer that to the people that you're advising, in a sense. When he was making decisions, for example, with regard to Ukraine... These were the people that he was listening to. And they were telling him, no luck. The Americans are aggressive.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
They're encroaching on our territory. We have to do something now. And then he would. And over time, he would become more and more belligerent. And then there would be a Western reaction. And then that Western reaction would seemingly confirm what the hawks from the intelligence service had been telling him. So they got even more powerful. So gradually you just detach. I see.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
What are those people called again? Like Siloviki or something? You know what I'm talking about?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
So men at arms almost. The intelligence services, basically, right? The people sort of working in the shadows.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
So first of all, a lot of the people that take power are not in countries like the US or in modern Germany, right? So oftentimes you're looking at poorer countries where there might not be a lot of opportunity. or where the political system might already be disastrous. So it's not as if you are coming into power and creating a dictatorship, but there's already some sort of dictator.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
And if there's already somebody like that, it might as well be you. But also the opportunities for enrichment are absolutely endless. Some of these people are literally embezzling billions, right? Money doesn't even go into the state budget. You don't even have to steal from the budget. You just divert it to your Swiss bank account straight away.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
You can do all kinds of things, right? The easiest thing to imagine is something that is state-owned, right? Let's say you're coming out of an economic system where the state basically almost owned everything, and then you sell that off. Maybe there's some sort of kickback because you sell it to them at a much lower price than its real value.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
Or perhaps somebody has an issue with the tax authorities and they want to make it go away. So they pay a little fee, but that fee is 200 million. So there are all types of ways. And then obviously you don't take the money yourself, but make sure it's a friend or it's a relative or it's in a bank account that can't be found and all the rest of it. And the best of these people...
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive
I don't want to sound as if I'm admiring them, right? Let's say the most effective, that they're sort of, quote unquote, out of dictatorship. They don't have to explicitly tell people what to do because they do it out of their own accord because they want to please the leader or they want to avoid something bad happening to them. So things run on autopilot almost at some point.