Even in stable democratic countries, it’s surprising how often the autocratic leaders of some countries can be discussed with real respect.
Often there’s a surprising degree of admiration and respect shown to “strong leaders” who single-handedly take ownership of a complete country, seemingly immune to any challenge.
I guess we shouldn’t be surprised that politicians in a democratic country would look on a little jealous of their situation. Imagine the ability to get things done if you didn’t have to worry about taking anyone else’s ideas and opinions into consideration.
You just think what you want to do, decide it is the best approach and bish, bash, bosh, a new policy is already in action.
Yeah, that’s how government should work.
Except, no, it shouldn’t.
Ever seen the animated film, Hopping Mad?
It was like a cross between The Blue Lagoon (what served for porn back in the day before we had the internet to teach us that there are few things in life that a woman enjoys quite as much as being repeatedly slapped across the cheeks with a semi-erect penis1) and Watership Down.
As a valley full of bunny rabbits is threatened with flooding, they all race to evacuate, but a rock fall traps Fluffybun, voiced by Phoebe Cates, and Nerdle, Arnold Schwarznegger’s first animated role, alone in The Valley. Obviously, they overcome blah blah blah adversity and 82 minutes later the audience is rewarded with the delightful sight of a new family of bunnies injecting fresh life into the recovering valley.
Had it ended there, the critics would almost certainly have seen it as a triumph of the cinematic art form. However, that’s when it turns into a scathing commentary on global over-population and just over two hours later, the end credits roll to the sight of a valley overrun by hopping morons, the result of the limited gene pool that had been available to establish the valley’s new society.
Actually, can I say moron now? Is that politically incorrect?
I know our vet said it once. We had a dog diagnosed with hydrocephalus and she described him as a moron. Of course, while her English was very good, it wasn’t perfect.
Every time we took an animal in with a cough or breathing problem, she would invariably motion to her chest and start talking about their lumps and I would invariably start faking a coughing attack so I could leave the room to compose myself.
Of course, now I think why didn’t I just say something? “Um, I’m sorry to interrupt, but I think you may mean lungs, not lumps.” But by the time you’ve been through that situation for the third time, that ship has well and truly sailed, so every time a cat starts coughing, you just accept that shortly you’ll be having an involved conversation with a highly trained veterinary professional about lumps, while she wafts her hands around her boobies.
I suppose there are worse things in life to look forward to.
Anyway, how did we get here? I was making a point…about…strong leaders leading to weak ideas.
Right, so in a similar way to how a limited gene pool breeds weak and slow-witted offspring in Hopping Mad, a limited pool of ideas leads to weak and limited decision-making.
A strong leader isn’t challenged on their thinking. They live in an echo chamber of people telling them how great their ideas are. No-one wants to annoy an all-powerful autocratic leader, so they just keep telling them what they think they want to hear.
Add that to a society built on corruption with the ruling class constantly skimming off money for themselves, which should have gone to supporting the people or paying for military equipment, and it’s the perfect recipe for dumb as sheep decision-making.
Look at Russia and Ukraine. Maybe the Russian military leaders really didn’t understand how weakened their forces had become, but surely they must have had some gnawing feeling of concern. Admit that to Vlad though? He’s not going to be happy, is he?
So they probably glossed over the ugly bits, smoothed off a few rough corners and convinced themselves the Ukranians would roll over for a tummy rub as soon massed tanks headed down the main highway to Kiev.
Buoyed up by that resounding confidence, poor old Putin embarks on a war that he genuinely thought would be a two-day rout that’s turned into a more than two-year stalemate that’s not only highlighted just how weak Russia’s conventional forces were to start with, it’s also made them even weaker.
A democracy doesn’t allow that kind of echo chamber to develop. Well, it doesn’t allow it to sustain for any meaningful period anyway. Ideas are challenged and not only by opposition parties. Often, internal debate within parties will see ideas kicked around to the point where they either curl up and die or develop into something stronger.
The gene pool of ideas isn’t limited and, while it may take time, new ideas that can lead to better solutions do find their way to the surface.
Strong leaders project the idea that their self-confidence is their strength, but the reality is that their lack of self-confidence is their weakness.
If they were truly self-confident, they’d be happy to hear alternative and possibly conflicting ideas from those around them. However, that fills them with dread as it could undermine their authority and make them look vulnerable.
To a strong leader, vulnerability is a sign of weakness.
I don’t count myself as a Tony Blair fan, but I don’t see a problem with the younger pre-Prime Minister version Blair tearing up in front of the news cameras in the aftermath of the Dunblane school shooting.
Two-term US President Barack Obama was no stranger to his weepier side on camera either. I can imagine Osama Bin Laden giggling like a schoolboy in his Pakistan hidey-hole, but we know who got the last laugh in that relationship.
And during Donald Trump’s presidency, while he could often seem aloof, in his Fred Scuttle2 moment saluting to the camera after surviving COVID 19, even he let us see a more vulnerable and human side.
It takes courage and strength to reveal human vulnerability like that. Strong leaders though are scared of not being seen as the hero. That’s not unusual, we all want to be seen as the hero, don’t we?
Surely I can’t be the only one here who can’t watch a Die Hard or Lara Croft movie, without my mind’s eye drifting to picture me in a grubby white vest with a trickle of blood running down from a cut above my eye or dressed in a dusty skin-tight outfit with a pistol on each hip and rocking a pair of breasticles that look like a dead heat in a Zepellin race.
Real leaders are above that and when the alternative is Rishi Sunak stripped to the waist astride a donkey on Margate sands or Joe Biden dressed as Rambo, wrestling a Grizzly bear, I’ll take the tears and salutes.
Real strong leaders are those who achieve real change while operating within a democratic system and acting within the accepted constraints of such societies. It’s easy for an autocrat to achieve anything as they have complete power.
And while there may be one person leading, that strong democratic leadership comes from many minds working together and even against each other, free to speak openly without fear of retribution.
Corruption Doubles Down On Weakness
So strong leaders result in weak decision-making, but the situation is made worse by corruption.
Corruption and autocratic regimes go together like baked beans and bottom burps. They’re inseparable.
When you’re the autocratic leader of a country, you can’t do everything. You have to rely on others to keep you in power. But how do you ensure they really are on your side? By paying them. Either directly or turning a blind eye to them siphoning off government money. Well you can hardly make a fuss about someone taking government money for themself when you’re doing the exact same thing at the same time, can you?
It doesn’t end there though. The leadership set the tone and if they’re taking money for themselves, why shouldn’t those immediately below them help themselves to a bit of the pie too? Of course, this pattern repeats over and over as we move down the many tiers of government. Blind eyes are turned as no-one wants to rock the boat and risk killing the cash cow.
And with no free press to hold those in power to account, massive corruption becomes a locked-in facet of government, making countries much poorer than the figures say they should be.
Even if the autocracy revolves around a cult of leadership, like in North Korea, it still relies on corruption to grease the machine that keeps the leadership in power. Adoration of a great leader only gets you so far.
It can impact all aspects of society, though some are more vulnerable than others. If you’re in charge of the budget for maintaining the roads in Moscow, if you skim off too much it will soon become apparent as the president’s motorcade bangs from pothole to pothole on every trip. Similarly, if you control the health budget, it will soon become apparent if everybody that visits a hospital is carried out in a coffin.
With military spending, it’s easier to hide any deficiencies. You can show off your latest aircraft and tanks and missiles and announce that they’re world-beating. It’s a foolproof plan. At least it is as long as you don’t go to war.
That’s how Putin finds himself in a war that’s taking years, not days, while his most modern warplanes can’t fly too close to the war because they’re too vulnerable and big chunks of his Black Sea fleet keep sinking.
Ultimately Russia may achieve victory in Ukraine, though perhaps not the planned total victory, purely through an advantage of numbers. With a population almost four times larger than Ukraine’s, a much larger military and total control over the media to minimise dissent, Russia can sustain more human and equipment losses.
Strong leaders may be strong domestically and they can posture and pretend to be strong internationally, but Russia’s aggression in Ukraine shows that strength is just an illusion. That’s why Putin keeps raising the subject of nuclear weapons, but with them guaranteeing his own destruction too, they’re little more than a sock stuffed in the front of his Speedos.
Yet Some Westerners Still Love An Autocrat
Despite the pathetic impotence of autocratic leaders beyond their own borders, there are still a surprising number of people in the West who love an autocratic leader. Well, Putin anyway, the Chinese leader Xi Jinping doesn’t seem to evoke the same kind of tongue-out, dribbling lust. Maybe it’s because of the way he looks. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting that Western Putin lovers are racist, just that it may not be as easy to get excited about a very oversized Winnie-the-Pooh wearing a business suit.
And if we really need another example of just how pathetic strong leaders are, look no further than the fact that Winnie-the-Pooh is banned in China, apparently because Xi is a bit touchy about it.3 The Chinese government have literally banned a yellow honey-eating cartoon bear? Beavers rice, you couldn’t make it up.
Anyway, we’re meant to be considering how a surprising number of people in the West get all fappy about Vladimir Putin.
So, in his book from 2000, The America We Deserve, Donald Trump condemns the potential presidential candidate of the time Pat Buchanan for having shared positive views of Adolf Hitler.
However, Buchanan isn’t our focus now for apparent admiration of the strong German leader. No, let’s consider Trump’s conversion as by 2022, he’d been publicly sharing his own surprisingly respectful views of Vladimir Putin for several years, despite Putin arguably being the greatest individual threat to freedom in Europe since Hitler.
Shortly before launching his invasion of Ukraine, Putin announced that Russia diplomatically recognised the Ukrainian regions of Donetsk and Luhansk as independent republics.
In an interview the following day, referring to Putin’s statement, Trump said “This is genius” and “Oh, that’s wonderful. So, Putin is now saying, ‘It’s independent,’ a large section of Ukraine. I said, ‘How smart is that?’”4
Trump also said “He used the word ‘independent’ and ‘we’re gonna go out and we’re gonna go in and we’re gonna help keep peace.’ You gotta say that’s pretty savvy.”
There are two things to unpack from that.
Firstly, Trump’s apparent admiration for Putin’s actions seems drastically at odds with his condemnation of Buchanan more than two decades earlier. Putin, like Hitler, is an autocratic leader who demonstrates little concern for the basic human rights of others.
Perhaps the one obvious difference between them is that Hitler was a loser, while Putin, even when taking missteps, continues to be, by and large, a serial winner.
Secondly, Trump seems to present himself as in awe of Putin’s brilliant thinking.
That is nothing short of bizarre.
We have a cat tree in the blue room off our main living room. The cats’ food is in a bowl at the top of the tree. Our other dogs can’t reach it, but Princess, if she props herself up with her front legs, can just about stretch a tongue to slurp some of the food from the edge of the bowl.
Sometimes, when I’m working, I’ll see her pop into the blue room and then poke her head back into the living room to check that I’m still sat in my chair.
That’s her tell.
So I always ask her, “are you planning to steal some cat food?”
“No,” she says adamantly with her slightly outraged and oh so innocent-looking eyes.
Then she pops back into the blue room.
“Gosh,” I think to myself, “what could she possibly be doing there in the blue room?”
So I naturally have to get up to see what she’s doing.
Could you possibly guess what she’s doing in the blue room? Any thoughts?
No, actually no, as good a guess as that is, she isn’t juggling five flaming clubs while standing to attention and singing El gran Carlemany, the national anthem of the principality of Andorra. You’re getting confused with our cat Dave.
No, it turns out that despite her assurances that she wasn’t going to try to steal the cat food, I find that she is indeed trying to steal the cat food.
“This is genius,” I say to myself.
I mean honestly, who on earth could possibly have seen that coming?
“How smart is that?” I now say to myself, “I asked her if she was going to steal the cat food, and she said no, before immediately trying to steal the cat food.”
“You gotta say that’s pretty savvy,” I next say to myself, before shouting in her ear and making her jump out of her skin.
If Princess was the autocratic leader of the Russian Federation, I think she’d probably take a similar approach to Ukraine as Putin. Her thought processes are generally pretty transparent, so massing tens of thousands of troops on the border with Ukraine, before declaring the regions of Donbas and Luhansk independent feels very closely aligned with her simplistically obvious approach to getting things done.
So what’s the story behind Trump’s apparent change in views on autocratic leaders? In his 2011 book, Time To Get Tough, he shares the valuable insight that “Smart people learn things, so they change their minds. Only stupid people never change their minds.”
What could Trump have possibly learned that made him fawn so much over an autocratic leader who treats the people he rules as assets for him to use and sacrifice as he wants?
And has he shared it with his chum Nigel Farage, the leader of the UK’s Reform Party?
In the run-up to the UK’s 2024 general election, Farage insisted that the West bears blame for the Ukrainian war because they provoked Putin. So he has zero regard for the democratic right to self-determination of the 40 million or so Ukrainian citizens.
Farage appears to think they should just accept that Putin believes that they’re part of Russia and the West should look away and ignore any attempts by the Ukrainian people to exercise their right to self-determination if that means them moving towards a more European future.
To me, it looks like Farage thinks that we in the West and the Ukrainian people should all drop our pants, bend over and let Putin do whatever turns him on.
Here’s a quick explanation of Farage’s views on Putin in his own words, “I said I disliked him as a person, but I admired him as a political operator because he’s managed to take control of running Russia.”5
Stop and think about that for a moment, because that is the statement of someone who has ambitions to run the UK and is now a Member of Parliament.
He admires the way Putin runs Russia, which he’s reportedly done by destroying the free and independent media in Russia, poisoning political opponents inside and outside of Russia, having political opponents and journalists murdered, choosing who can and cannot run for election and rigging elections to ensure he wins every time.
Farage admires a man who is widely believed to have stolen the democratic rights of 144 million people. So does Farage think that this same approach should be used to govern the British people too?
And he’s not alone in his party with his crazed views of Putin. The Reform Party candidate in Salisbury, a town where three people were poisoned by Russian agents, one of whom died, said “I have actually met Putin and had a 10-minute chat with him and he seemed very good. He is not the Austrian gentleman with a moustache come alive again.”6
What a pathetic comment from a pathetic man (clearly just my own opinion, he’s a barrister after all). He sounds like a teenager who met Taylor Swift once. Only the the teenager wouldn’t feel so awkward about using her name that they had to refer to her as the Pennsylvanian woman with a guitar.
In the 1930s and even into the start of the 1940s, much of the world didn’t realise who the real Adolf Hitler really was, which proved an expensive mistake for the whole world and the Jewish and Roma people in particular. Yet here’s a buffoon (again just my opinion rather than a categorical and undeniable statement of fact) happy to ignore the lessons of history on the basis of a 10-minute chat with an autocratic leader who didn’t poison his cup of tea, so he must be a very good chap.
I’d imagine that fella and Farage, inside their own minds, would see themselves as modern day Winston Churchills. The World War 2 Prime Minister who led the UK through some its darkest days. And while they may be considered by some to share some of Churchill’s less distinguished qualities, the reality is that their language suggests they have more in common with the appeasers of the 1930s who believed Britain should give in to Hitler’s demands in return for peace. They’d have made Churchill sick.
Sometimes I wonder if there’s some kind of how to be an autocratic leader YouTube channel that teaches aspiring megalomaniacs to play down any sense of competence or outward signs of strength.
I mean, Hitler literally looked so much like the comedian Charlie Chaplin, Chaplin effectively played him in The Great Dictator by just putting on a uniform instead of a tramp’s suit.
We’ve already seen that China’s President is a Winnie-the-Pooh doppleganger and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un looks like a cartoon living in the real world like a character from Who Framed Roger Rabbit7.
And I can’t be the only one who can’t stop thinking of the head-shooting scene from the original Men In Black film every time I see a pic of Nigel Farage.8
Because they look a bit funny, they clearly can’t be much of a threat, can they?
- “So Irving, what’s my motivation?” “Motivation? We’re paying you 200 bucks and you’re getting laid. How much motivation do you need?” “But why am I slapping her in the face with my schlong?” “It’s a 20 minute scene, we need some variety.” “But schlong slapping her in the face. Why would I do that to the woman I love? It literally makes no sense.” “Okay, one big thing to unpack there, narf, narf. Firstly, you’re playing Ricky, the new pool boy. Ricky has literally never met Fifi before, so perhaps it’s a little premat…er…early to be talking about the grand old dream of love. However, I can see some validity to your point. So…er…well…um…ah…yeah, how ’bout this? Ricky’s German step-father used to humiliate Ricky in front of his friends by slapping him in the face with a sloppy raw bratwurst and now, in his moments of greatest vulnerability and release, Ricky, without realising it on a conscious level and effectively in a trance state, finds himself inhabiting the virtual body of his late step-father and projecting that same domineering power in a subconscious attempt to subvert his own feelings of worthlessness, the whole time bereft of any sense of irony at how he’s just passing on his own feelings of humiliation to another human being who is just looking for love. That enough to motivate you?” “Oh that’s great Irving, thank you, I know I can work with that, everyone tells me I do a great blank, trance-like face.” “I’m delighted to hear that Jeremy.” “Ah, just one last thing Irving, would you mind calling me Roger. It’s my manager’s idea, he thinks Roger More would make a great pornstar name for me.” “Sure…errr…I think that one’s already gone, but yeah, sure Roger, whatever makes you happy.” ↩︎
- https://benny-hill.fandom.com/wiki/Fred_Scuttle ↩︎
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_Winnie-the-Pooh_in_China ↩︎
- https://www.politico.com/news/2022/02/23/trump-putin-ukraine-invasion-00010923 ↩︎
- https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/nigel-farage-vladmir-putin-bbc-nick-robinson-panorama-b2566830.html ↩︎
- https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13566723/Reform-UK-election-candidate-Salisbury-Russian-spies-deployed-deadly-nerve-agent-booed-tells-local-hustings-Vladimir-Putin-good.html ↩︎
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEIJpS26aAw ↩︎
- Because someone’s bound to insist that I’m advocating shooting Farage in the head, I find myself taking a moment to clarify that I really am not advocating that (even though the bullet would probably miss his brain by about three feet), I’m taking the pigs because his head looks a bit rubbery to me and slightly too small for his body, like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FkVXCCfg2A ↩︎