We often discuss how strongmen rise to power. In "How Tyrants Fall", Marcel Dirsus looks at the other side of the story
How Tyrants Fall: And How Nations Survive (John Murray) by Marcel Dirsus
As late as November 1989, Nicolae Ceausescu probably thought things were motoring along pretty nicely. He was 71 years old, and had been the uncontested overlord of Romania since 1967. The 14th Congress of the Romanian Communist Party had just awarded him another five-year term. Construction of his ghastly 3,000-room palace in the heart of Bucharest was proceeding. Granted there was some counter-revolutionary nonsense afoot in Berlin, and talk of restless comrades elsewhere across the Warsaw Pact … but it couldn’t happen here.
But it did. Protests began in Romania’s west and began to spread. On 21 December, Ceausescu resolved to put a stop to it. He mounted the balcony of the Central Committee building to address a large – if forcibly wrangled and therefore somewhat sullen – crowd, with the intention of reminding them, and the viewers of a live telecast, who was in charge. This went badly. The dictator and his wife fled by helicopter, but found no sanctuary. On Christmas Day, Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu were hustled through a show trial in an army barracks, then put up against a wall and shot by soldiers they believed they still commanded.
As How Tyrants Fall demonstrates, when it goes wrong for these leaders, it tends to go wrong two ways – really badly, and really quickly. For those dictators who do not end up dying in office, the options are unappealing: a choice, sometimes a combination, of exile, imprisonment and execution. Marcel Dirsus, a German political scientist, has run the numbers in his fine book, and calculates that fully 69 per cent of unemployed despots are damned to such fates.
Dirsus introduces us to what he calls the golden gun paradox – a reference to one of the ludicrous weapons brandished by Muammar al-Gaddafi, whose 42 years terrorising Libya ended with him being beaten and bayoneted to death in a sewerage pipe. “Tyrants,” writes Dirsus, “can have all the trappings of power, even a gun made of gold, but at the point where they need to use their power to save themselves, it is already too late … for Gaddafi, holding the gun only imbued power as long as people believed it did.”
As Dirsus tells it, his curiosity was piqued by being on hand for an unsuccessful putsch. In 2013, he was working in the Democratic Republic of Congo when a coup d’etat was attempted against President Joseph Kabila. The reasons for its failure were not difficult to diagnose – it was led by an eccentric televangelist – but it got Dirsus thinking about why some tyrants tumble and others don’t. The book is his extended – and hugely entertaining – effort to figure that out, assisted in part by the input of some who have participated in various overthrows.
Each chapter addresses one of the hazards which could, if managed unwisely, see the unfortunate autocrat swinging by his ankles. Certainly unintentionally, but probably unavoidably, the book almost ends up reading as a how-to manual for the maintenance of a dictatorship: one can imagine Kim Jong-Un or Alexander Lukashenko dutifully inscribing notes in the margins, even if some of the subtler jokes may be lost on them.
Dirsus’s key metaphor is the treadmill. “Tyrants can run and run,” he writes, “but the best they’ll ever do is stay upright. If they get distracted for even an instant, their legs may shoot out from under them, and they’ll get hurt.” There are those who grow tired of the incessant schlep, and attempt to step off, but this is a risky endeavour. You can try to embrace democracy, but asking people you’ve oppressed to vote for you rarely prompts a positive response.
Or you can hand over to a carefully chosen successor, but they’re unlikely to want to keep you around. Or you can run for it – but choose your destination carefully. Liberian president Charles Taylor, Dirsus notes, did not. When his dreadful regime collapsed amid civil war in 2003, he bolted for Nigeria, which handed him over to the court prosecuting war crimes in Sierra Leone, a country in which Taylor had also meddled. He is now serving the rest of his natural life at HMP Frankland in County Durham.
On balance, the tyrant is best off keeping the treadmill turning – yet this requires not just inexhaustible stamina but delicate judgement. You cannot let your military become too weak, lest they render you impotent, or too strong, lest they start wondering whether they could run the place themselves. You have to give your subjects the impression that you are capable of monstrous violence against them, but you probably can’t actually order your troops to open fire on such protestors (one chapter is entitled “You Shoot, You Lose”).
Dirsus correctly notes that while vanquishing a tyrant may well be virtuous in and of itself, it offers little guarantee of improvement. His concluding chapter sums up what causes tyrants to totter, and wonders how – and if – those contributing factors should be encouraged. None of this is straightforward. The early 21st century – from Afghanistan to Iraq to the Arab Spring – was a bracing series of lessons that unloading a tyranny, from without or from within, does not guarantee the dawning of liberal democracy.
Yet this decade has reminded us grimly of the dangers of indulging autocracies – as the post-Cold War wait for Russia to become an affable, collegiate European country was brutally demonstrated to have been in vain. Acting against authoritarians is worth doing, when doable. While the short-term costs may be considerable, the longer-term benefits can be incalculable. “As a German who enjoyed freedom from the moment he was born,” Dirsus writes, “I am not going to argue that force should never be used to topple tyrants.”
