149 - "Power Tends to Corrupt and Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely:" Putin's Warmongering Era
Let us celebrate President’s Day and especially salute Washington, Lincoln, FDR, and Truman. They kept us free.
Lord Acton’s well-known aphorism still describes today’s twenty-first century political horrors. Since his words were enunciated in the late nineteenth-century, the same human tendencies that worried him still bedevil even a world filled with hypersonic missiles, jet aircraft, electric power, television, the Internet, chatbots, TikTok, and 12-mile-high spy balloons. Human greed and human despotism are with us still. So, as Lord Acton said, “Liberty consists in the division of power. Absolutism, in concentration of power.”
The 1st Baron Acton also saw that “Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority; still more when you superadd the tendency of the certainty of corruption by authority.” Furthermore, “Despotic power is always accompanied by corruption of morality.” And, for too many, ends justify means. Did Acton well describe Putin – and so many others? Absolute power has corrupted so many of today’s heads of state.
Consider that a one-time revolutionary who helped fellow Sandinistas overthrow the first Anastasio Somoza and his heirs, Nicaragua’s family of dictators from 1937 to 1979, has now created his own dictatorial despotism within the tight borders of Central America’s once free country. By fiat, President Daniel Ortega has imprisoned or exiled his rivals, deported dozens, and last week took citizenship away from 312 of his mostly fearless critics. The independent legislature and judiciary that he and others fought so hard to establish in the 1970s is no more. Ever since Ortega won a succession of electoral victories in 2006, he and his wife (Nicaragua’s installed vice-president) have dismantled anything in Nicaragua that is left of its democracy.
Also consider Belarus, Cambodia, Cuba, El Salvador, Egypt, Eritrea, Eswatini, Ethiopia, Guinea, Hungary, Iran, Laos, Mali, Myanmar, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, Thailand, Turkey, Venezuela, and Vietnam – all nations run by absolutists. China and Russia are other obvious embodiments of what we might call Acton’s first law of political leadership.
Cambodia just shut down its only independent media outlet ostensibly because a reporter accurately quoted a pronouncement of the ruler Hun Sen’s son about earthquake aid to Turkey. But the son, acting in his capacity as deputy army chief, supposedly had no authority to make such a declaration. Only his father did. Hun Sen then arbitrarily closed down the optimistically titled Voice of Democracy, leaving his son untouched. There are no freedoms left in Cambodia, decades after Hun Sen and many others helped to release Cambodia from the merciless, death-dealing control of the Khmer Rouge.
Belarus, a fake state created to give Stalin a second seat in the founding UN and now a client of Putin’s Russia, imprisons brave opponents of Alexander Lukashenko, its dictator. A few dissidents are in prison, Others who contested the last election and were cheated out of victory try to keep the flames of democratic opposition alive from exile in nearby Baltic states.
El Salvador’s still popular elected president has reduced gang violence, possibly by cutting deals with their leaders in the globe’s most (literally) murderous country, per capita and absolutely. Nayib Bukele has muzzled the press, restricted free expression, and harnessed gang violence for his regime. Caught between Bukele’s absolutism and the gangs, civilians are only free to obey.
Egypt’s General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi engineered a coup in 2014 and has since clamped fully down on the media and all forms of free expression. His soldiers torture and assassinate those from civil society who courageously complain about the loss of rights just as in nearby Tunisia a former constitutional lawyer has turned his presidency into one long slide away from democracy and free political expression.
Eritrea has been a closed society since Isaias Afwerki in 1991 helped Ethiopians rid themselves of a claptrap Marxist regime that had overthrown a cenuries’ old monarchical dynasty in 1974. Not only are free expression and free assembly banned, with many political prisoners, but Eritrea enforces compulsory conscription. Innumerable Eritreans are compelled to serve the army effectively for life. Thousands of these reluctant but disciplined soldiers have been causing mayhem in the nearby Tigray region of Ethiopia, raping and killing despite a truce brokered in early January.
Eswatini is a monarchy, so absolute power is inbuilt. King Sobhuza II ruled from 1921 until his death in 1982. Savvy politically, he gave his subjects a sense of participation, albeit limited, in their tiny nation’s Swazi destiny. But Mswati III, the current youthful and sybaritic monarch, has no such feeling for the public interest. One of his key younger critics was mysteriously murdered last month. An independent media presence is long gone.
I have written recently about Mali and Myanmar, where freedoms are non-existent and military juntas impose themselves in heavy handed manners. I have commented on Turkey. I have also devoted much of this newsletter since March to the depredations of Putin’s Russia, remarked mostly in passing about the obvious gathering of absolute power in China by Xi Jinping, who fancies himself another totalitarian Mao Zedong. In Venezuela, President Nicolas Maduro tries with little ability to complete the Marxist power-grabbing maneuvers of Hugo Chavez, his flamboyant dictatorial predecessor.
Acton observed Russia’s absolutist excesses in Moscow during the reign of Emperor Alexander II; was a great admirer of the United States, especially its decision to limit overweening power was a liberal Roman Catholic who fought the notion of papal infallibility; admired and was close to Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone; served briefly in Parliament from Shropshire, and helped to found the English Historical Review. For it he wrote learned articles on antiquity as well as early Europe. As a phrasemaker, he had few equals. His observations about absolute power came in an 1887 letter to the reigning Anglican archbishop .
Lord Acton reminds us that persons in power must be constrained and curtailed by well-maintained and tightly enforced rules of law. Otherwise, mere elections need not necessarily empower or continue democracy. As in today’s Hungary, Nicaragua, Tunisia, and Turkey, but especially in a place like Zimbabwe, wannabe despots may too easily employ democratic trappings to mask the erosion of democracy until only a façade is left. Victor Orban in Hungary is a master of such manipulation. So was President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe; Emmerson Mnangagwa, his successor, may try to continue in the same vein after a token national election in July or August.
Even in the United States the seeds of potential absolutism have been sown. Trump was obviously corrupted by power. Fortunately, our robust rule of law hindered the conquest of democracy by a would-be tyrant. But such threats remain still. Democracies are inherently fragile, as Orban shows, and as Prime Minister Narendra Modi is proving daily in India.
The corruption of absolute power is to be feared everywhere, as Putin’s invasion of Ukraine demonstrates daily. For freedom to prevail in the world, every attempted expression of corrupt absolute power must be resisted relentlessly.
Brilliant, of course!
I am also deeply concerned about South Africa, for so long a clear western anchor in an uncertain continent. Now, however, perhaps not so certain! On Friday, the South African navy began 10 days of joint exercises with warships from Russia and China. And its foreign minister, Naledi Pandor, told the EU's foreign minister that the West had no lessons that South Africa would countenance since they never gave weapons to forces fighting for freedom from white rule. Not a good sign ...
And Saturday, Nigerians will go to the polls to elect a new president. As you observed, professor, an epiphanal moment (that we'll be following on SubStack: Andelman Unleashed !!)
All the best and keep up your vigilance and your indispensable commentary!