Autocracy today: More sophisticated, just as hateful

YIVO is turning 100.

It’s fair to say that it’s been a hard 100 years for the Western world; a century ago World War I and the Spanish flu pandemic had ended, but the Great Depression, World War II, and the Holocaust loomed.

The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research was born in that time and place — in Vilna, in 1925 — and it moved to Manhattan in 1940. It documents lost Jewish history, culture, and life, not only the devastation but the joy of what once was and what continues to be.

As history changes around us — as the postwar world order, so secure for so many years, seems to reorder itself as we watch, or maybe as we are distracted and fail to see — YIVO is marking its centennial both with celebrations and with explorations of the world as it has been, is now, and perhaps will be.

This year, the YIVO-Bard Winter Program on Ashkenazi Civilization will mark the centennial with talks by notable historians and writers. The series will feature a Zoom conversation on January 22 between YIVO’s executive director, the historian and publisher Jonathan Brent, and historian and writer Anne Applebaum.

They’ll talk about autocracies in the 21st century.

Both Dr. Brent and Ms. Applebaum know a great deal about Eastern Europe. Ms. Applebaum’s understanding of it is particularly personal; she’s not only a scholar, a journalist — now she writes for the Atlantic — who’s won a Pulitzer for “Gulag: A History,” she’s also a citizen of both the United States, where she was born, and Poland. Her husband, who’s held many political posts in Poland, now is its minister of foreign affairs.

Ms. Applebaum also is Jewish, a fact that generally does not feature prominently in her writing but arguably has influenced it.

She and Dr. Brent will talk about how autocracy is on the rise around the world — something she’s written about for a few years now, and that she addresses at great length in her new book, “Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World.”

Modern autocracies don’t necessarily look the way they once did — changes in technology allow for less obvious means of control than jackbooted armies, at least at first — but that the need for power and unspendably massive wealth hasn’t changed, she said. History has much to teach us about that.

And as always, “states that do not use the rule of law, that favor or use rhetoric that is designed to promote nationalism, or ethnic nationalism, have been profoundly bad for the Jews.”

That’s true in the United States, as it has been in other countries, she said, and white supremacism and nationalism are on the rise in parts of this country although it might not feel particularly relevant to those of us who live in the New York metropolitan area. North Jersey doesn’t feel particularly dangerous for Jews now, but “minorities do very, very badly when the courts are politicized and information is controlled, when there are no checks and balances in the political system, when there is rising intolerance,” Ms. Applebaum said.

She talked in general about the threats posed by autocrats, who are on the rise across the world — think Victor Orban in Hungary, for one obvious example.

“The rise of Russia and China and Iran and North Korea and Belarus” — countries from very different regions of the world, and that are otherwise dissimilar — “now increasingly act together, and they don’t have the interests of anyone but themselves at heart,” Ms. Applebaum said. That’s also not good for the Jews. “Maybe they could do a transactional deal with Netanyahu, but they have no particular interest in the survival of Israel, or the well-being of Jews. They could turn against Jews at the drop of a hat.”

They’ve not been good for Israel.

“I want to draw people’s attention to the links between Russia and Iran,” she continued. “The relationship isn’t just verbal. The Iranians have sent thousands of drones to Russia. The Russians have upgraded those drones, they use them in many different ways, and now there is some evidence that they’re sending them back to Iran.” That way, the Iranians can incorporate the improvements for new models that will go, among other places, to Russia.

Those drones return with upgraded technology, Ms. Applebaum said. “Something that almost nobody is paying attention to is that drone technology is moving forward rapidly.” Drones figure prominently in the war that Russia began when it invaded Ukraine almost three years ago, and both the Russians and the Ukrainians are working on them.

“These are really technological kinds of battles. There are people on both sides figuring out how to improve drones, how to use them, how to use them in swarms, and how to use them to take out or to fool air defense systems.

“And there’s no reason to the think that the Russians won’t share this drone warfare technology with the Iranians.

“There’s also some evidence that the Russians are sharing other kinds of technology with Iran, perhaps including nuclear technology.”

It’s not at all news that Iran has nuclear technology, she clarified. Its development of that technology, and the possibility of using it against Israel, has been a threat leveled against the Jewish state for years, since at least the Obama administration.

“Iran supposedly has been pretty close to being able to make a bomb for a long time, and one of the countries that could help them do that is Russia,” she said. “And as the Russians grow increasingly desperate” because of the stalemate of its war with Ukraine and the hundreds of thousands of North Korean soldiers they feed into it, along with their own, only to have them turned into ground meat — “they’re looking for help in all kinds of places. And so, both from the perspective of American Jews living in a law-abiding society, and from the perspective of people who are pro-Israel and are worried about the rise of Iran, you would do very well to pay attention to the growth of autocratic powers.”

Antisemitism in the United States is real, she said; that’s something she knows firsthand. She has basically given up on Twitter, because although she does not identify herself as Jewish on that platform, “because I finally had enough of the massive antisemitism that I found there.”

She quoted some of the tweets she’s gotten; they’re crude, violent, simple-minded and vile. “I get that almost every time I post on Twitter,” she said. “I report it all the time, but it is never taken down. That’s been facilitated by Elon Musk, who refuses to take it down.

“Anybody who knows anything about the history of the Jews, or any history of Israel, would do well to be very, very concerned about two things,” Ms. Applebaum said. “One is about the interaction between autocratic powers who increasingly exchange technology. They participate in the same kinds of kleptocratic practices, and increasingly they are fighting wars together. Jews would do well to be concerned about that.

“And secondly, they should be concerned about the far right that has been encouraged and enabled and has grown so rapidly, thanks to Musk.”

An example of that second fear in action: “Both Musk and Vance,” the vice president-elect, “have now endorsed the AfD, a German political party whose leaders keep trying to soften memories of the Nazis,” she said.

Ms. Applebaum talked about a five-episode podcast she cohosted with the Russian-British journalist Peter Pomerantsev, who also is Jewish; the podcast, for the Atlantic, is called “Autocracy in America.”

The first episode featured interviews with Adam Kinzinger, the former Republican member of Congress from Illinois who has become a fierce antagonist of Donald Trump and sat on the committee investigating the insurrection of January 6, 2021, and with Steven Richer, the Republican who is the soon-to-be-former recorder of Maricopa County. That county is the largest in Arizona, and the recorder oversees elections there. Mr. Richler defended the integrity of the results of the 2020 presidential election there and became the target of enraged fellow Republicans who insisted that he was lying.

Mr. Richer also is Jewish, and much of the vitriol spewed at him was specifically antisemitic.

“He knew what was the truth and he insisted on telling it,” Ms. Applebaum said. “It was important to him not to lie, and he paid a high price for it. He was harassed. His family was harassed. He lost the election. Even in America, in some places the price for telling the truth about the election was very high.

“He was threatened with lynching. I even wonder if being Jewish is part of what made him be so brave.

“Anyone who knows any Jewish history knows that a political system that is based on lies and conspiracy theories is not good for the Jews. “Look at QAnon.” The conspiracy theory that first surfaced around 2017, peaked around 2020, and is still around now, but in an enfeebled state, asserted, among other things, that a Deep State informant, Q, was posting messages promising its followers eventual victory over forces so evil that they killed babies to use their faces to rejuvenate themselves. “At its root you see the idea that there is a secret cabal controlling the world that harms children.

“Does that sound familiar? It’s a version of the blood libel.

“When you look at the great replacement theory — the idea that there is a secret Jewish plot to replace white people with brown people — you hear echoes of it as well.

“I don’t think that people in other parts of the country are aware yet of how ugly other parts of the country have become, how high the price is for being dissident, and why there are so few of them.

“I am not saying that America is East Germany. We are not there. But we are closer than we were 10 years ago.”

That does not mean that we should feel despair, Ms. Applebaum said. Not for the world, and not for this country. History provides no template for the United States. “We are such a strange mix of things,” she said. “No country is similar to ours.” There is no model for us.

And also, “nothing is inevitable.” Not here, not in Europe, not in Israel, not anyplace in the world. “What happens tomorrow depends on what we do today. We don’t know what will happen tomorrow.”

Who: Anne Applebaum and Jonathan Brent

What: Will have a Zoom conversation on “Autocracies in the 21st Century”

When: On Wednesday, January 22, at 1 p.m.

For whom: The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research

Why: As part of the 2025 YIVO-Bard Winter Program on Ashkenazi Civilization, to celebate YIVO’s centenntial

To learn more: Go to yivo.org