Today's autocrats claim foreign agents are trying to overthrow them. But the real scandal is the way they're stifling civil society.
By Moisés Naím
The Atlantic - Mar 14 2014
Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Venezuela's Nicolás Maduro agree:
There is a vast international conspiracy underway to destabilize their
governments and eventually oust them from power.
They are convinced that the protesters storming the streets of
Istanbul and Caracas are nothing more than mercenaries serving foreign
powers or “useful idiots” unwittingly aiding the shadowy interests
working to overthrow their governments. Vladimir Putin shares this view.
He has said that the revolts in Kiev and other Ukrainian cities, which
forced his ally, former President Viktor Yanukovych, to flee to Russia,
were also instigated by foreigners. And who, according to these
autocrats, is behind this dark global conspiracy?
Western Democracies, of course.
Putin, Erdoğan, Maduro, and other leaders who share their fears
(Bashar al-Assad, Robert Mugabe, etc.) assume that foreign intelligence
services and other secret agencies are the main instigators, organizers,
and funders of the protests against their governments. Their fears are
not entirely unfounded. After all, the CIA does have a history of
helping overthrow leaders that the U.S. government didn’t like at the
time: Iran’s Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953, Guatemala’s Jacobo Árbenz in
1954, Chile’s Salvador Allende in 1973. But today’s dictators and their
semi-authoritarian colleagues seem to feel equally threatened by private
philanthropic organizations that operate openly in support of democracy
and human rights.
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