Dr. Marcel Dirsus

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177 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jan 2025 last heard Jan 2025

Dr. Marcel Dirsus’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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The Jordan Harbinger Show · 1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive · 14 Jan 2025 podcast

I'm done. I'm going to turn the country into a democracy. I just want to retire. Let me go to my home village. I'm going to just enjoy retirement. it's probably not going to fly. You can try, but it's an incredibly risky decision to make. So for that reason, they mostly try to stay in power for as long as they humanly can.

The other thing is also how do you pick the right moment in time? Because to be in power in these types of systems, you have to believe that you are going to survive that crisis. You have to. You absolutely have to. Because if you don't, given that so much is based on the confidence of others and these perceptions of strength, you're definitely done.

And in a way, it's not irrational either, right? Some of these people have lived completely unreal lives. They started out as peasants and then they built themselves these giant palaces and they became rulers of countries. So many of them have survived a great deal of crises before. They've almost gotten killed and they've always survived.

In a way, it almost makes sense that they would assume that they will survive forever. the final crisis as well.

Yeah. I think the mistake that he made is he was way too confident. And I think he lived one of those unreal lives. I don't know whether you've ever been to Bucharest, but they got a palace that he built himself. Yeah, it's nice. He was one of these leaders who thought that, you know what, I'm going to get through this. I've gone through stuff before. And he didn't have a good plan to get out.

And eventually what happened is that the military changed sides. And when that happened, he was done, right? And he had nowhere to flee. He had no escape plan, nothing that he could do in terms of exile. And yeah, him and his wife were executed together unceremoniously, as you said, after a very brief show trial. So it grew to an end once again.

Yeah, and that's the risk, right? So it's extremely difficult now to find the right place for exile. Because really, let's take somebody like Assad, right? Assad is still a comparatively young guy. So he doesn't just need safety now. He's going to need it potentially for multiple decades. And he needs to find a country that is strong enough, first of all, to physically protect him.

Because Assad has probably made more enemies than just about anyone on earth. So now that he's left the country, his enemies didn't just disappear into thin air. There's still plenty of people that want him dead. So the first question is just physical protection. The second question is, you need to find a country that is strong enough to withstand pressure to give you up. Because like you say...

People will come and they will say, look, give us this guy and in return you get this or whatever. And the other thing is, like I said, you need it for an extended period of time. And I think this could be what ultimately might be the end of Assad. Because what you're betting on is that Russia is going to be stable for two decades, maybe three decades, depending on how long he has to live.

Now, would I bet that, knowing what we know about Russian history, knowing what we know about the Russian political system? I'm not sure. Obviously, now it seems that Putin is firmly in power. He's not going to leave. The country is not going to turn into a democracy. There's not going to be some sort of civil conflict. But we don't know.

So it could be that in five years Putin dies, the country turns into a democracy. It could be that in five years Putin dies and there's a conflict within the regime and the next person didn't make that promise. And they might prioritize the relationship to Damascus over this guy that really doesn't really hold any chips anymore. So it's always been super challenging.

And the problem for dictators now is, is that democracies are much less likely to agree to exile. So during the Cold War, it used to be that if you were France's dictator, or if you were America's dictator, you'd be able to flee to Hawaii or the Mediterranean coast. But as you said, that's now much less likely. I think there are trade-offs everywhere, right?

So just as dictators have to make trade-offs in order to stay in power, we have to make trade-offs in dealing with them. And one of these trade-offs is this question of exile. So obviously, you don't want somebody like Assad to go free. You want them to be held accountable for all the terrible things he's done.

Absolutely a bad guy. And I can totally understand that impulse. The trade-off that you make here, though, is the more difficult you make it for these types of leaders to flee, the more of an incentive you give them to try to stay in power.

Right? So if you go your back against the wall... And you think you have to torture, you have to kill, you drop those barrel bombs in order to maintain power. Because there's no way out, that is exactly what you will do. Honestly, it's difficult. You know, in German, we call this a choice between the plague and cholera. Right? You can only choose between something bad or something worse.

Yeah.

First, the United States effectively helped him to stay in power. And then when his own people were trying to get rid of him, then America basically flew him out. And not only did they fly him out, but they also helped him to steal yet more. And we know about all of the things that he stole because of American customs.

So you have to imagine this completely absurd scenario where the American Air Force is flying out this dictator that had done a lot of terrible things to Hawaii. And he would arrive with, you know, sort of diamond cufflinks or a golden statue of Jesus. You know, millions and millions in cash. Completely, completely, completely insane. And we know about it. It's not a secret.

And then he just lived on Hawaii. And that was it.

Yeah, I talk about it a little bit in the book. So this is Bongbong Marcos. And when he was taking power, he told people that he essentially wants them to focus not on the past, but on the future. Isn't that convenient?

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