Central to any discussion of modern totalitarianism.
The noted journalist and student of tyranny turns her attention to Trump, Putin, and numerous other modern authoritarians.
“A world in which autocracies work together to stay in power, work together to promote their system, and work together to damage democracies is not some distant dystopia,” writes Applebaum. “That world is the one we are living in right now.” In the meantime, she notes, democracies, as if paralyzed, accommodate both the lawlessness of the autocrats and the violence they incite: Witness, for instance, the growing myth that Jan. 6, 2021, was acceptable political expression. Whereas autocrats once worked singly, today they’re shored up by an international kleptocracy and shared understandings—don’t criticize my oppressiveness, and I won’t criticize yours—that make allies of disparate rulers from Washington to Budapest to Harare. These rulers are shameless, Applebaum notes. They no longer bother to disguise their acts of aggression and brutality, as with Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, a declaration that old rules no longer applied. Autocrats differ in style, but they share a hatred for an independent judiciary, representative government, and the free press—i.e., all the hallmarks of democracy. Against this, Applebaum suggests, it behooves the democratic nations of the world to band together in mutual support precisely because “their democracies are not safe.” One means of support would be to reject news that comes from the likes of Russia Today and Xinhua, which inform so much antidemocratic dissension in the “free world,” and instead insist on reliable information. Exactly how this is to be achieved isn’t quite clear, but it’s a worthy idea, as is the suggestion that increased policing of kleptocratic antics and their enablers—not least “the bankers in Sioux Falls happy to accept mystery deposits from mystery clients”—is needed.
Central to any discussion of modern totalitarianism.Pub Date: July 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780385549936
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 10, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2024
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
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