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

So usually dictators do something that is often called crew-proofing. There are multiple elements to this. You want to promote for loyalty. You want to make sure that generals are not too competent and so forth. But the other thing that you want to do is look at the structure of your security services. Democracies often have a unified chain of command.

They have one military, and that military is designed to fight wars. In dictatorships, what you want to do is you want to split those security services into multiple smaller parts. So you don't just want to have your regular military, but you also want to have some sort of parallel military. Perhaps you also have a militarized palace guard. Perhaps you have a large militia as well.

And the reason why you want to do this is because you want to make it impossible for that one general that you just mentioned to decide that he should rather be in charge. You want that general to think, if I try, I'm going to have to go through this parallel militia organization. I'm going to have to go through these militias.

And you're hoping that this makes it less likely that they will actually try. over and over again. Let's take, for example, Russia. In the case of Russia, when Prigozhin was marching the wrong way towards Moscow, this is an example of that. So in the Russian system, you had these mercenaries because they were a counterweight to the regular military.

But it also shows the trade-off because as you structure your security forces this way, they become less effective at actually fighting war, which is their core job. And you may also create a monster that can come back to bite you. And in the case of Russia, you know, both have happened. They've been less effective than they could have been. And Putin could have easily lost power.

Yeah, and I think Sudan actually shows perfectly the sort of succession problem that we were talking about earlier. People thought that when the last dictator was toppled, okay, now the way is clear, the country is going to transition towards a democracy.

But the problem that you had is that now there wasn't one man that was a problem, but now you had multiple men in camouflage wanting to become the leader. And this type of fighting has escalated to such a degree that you're now looking at a civil war where millions and millions of people have fled.

This stands in contrast, obviously a lot of things have gone wrong in Sudan, but this stands in contrast to democracies, right? When somebody like Keir Starmer loses power in the UK or when Angela Merkel stepped down in Germany, there's a process. There are institutions, there are courts, there are ways to go about things. But in a personalized dictatorship, you don't have any of this.

So every time a leader is changed, you have this massive risk of things going completely up in flames.

We say a lot of things wrong. We say Volkswagen instead of Volkswagen. Oh, that's weird.

You basically have to think about how you're going to make sure that your security forces are going to stay loyal. And there's a bunch of ways that you can do that. So most obviously you can give them opportunities for corruption or you can give them toys, right? Like new weapons, new kit, that sort of thing.

But one of the ways that you can also do it is to make any potential for change less attractive. So a lot of dictators in the past have done that by promoting a certain ethnicity, either their own ethnicity or some ethnicity that is somewhat allied to them, and basically made sure that they are in all the key positions in the military, in the police, in the intelligence services.

And what that meant was, is that Those people then had a massive incentive to defend the status quo, because if the regime were to fall, they would probably also lose their livelihood and they would also lose their positions.

And this was particularly prominent after the end of colonization in Africa, where a lot of African leaders, a lot of African independence leaders, had no idea what to really do with their militaries, because the colonial powers had deliberately set up the security forces of these territories and in a way that meant that they were not loyal to these new independence leaders.

So it was very widespread. But the problem with this is that you have to get there. So once you have this politicized military in which certain ethnicities allied with you are in these powerful positions, okay, it can work out very well. But as you try to get there, as you keep promoting people from a certain ethnicity, you are inevitably going to run into opposition.

And that's a problem with all of these measures of coup-proofing. And I think during my research, I think the most depressing thing that I came across was an alternative to this, whereby a dictator was trying to make change less appealing by having his security forces deliberately commit human rights abuses.

So this was Saddam Hussein, and essentially what he would do is use his security forces in order to commit horrible atrocities against the people of Iraq. And the reason for that was that once they had done all these terrible things, they knew that they effectively had to defend the regime to the death because they were hated. So if Saddam was going to lose power, they were going to be toast.

So there are all kinds of horrible things that you can do if you don't want to go down this path for the next second.

It's not even just dictators. In some of the civil wars, what groups would do is, when they were struggling to recruit fighters to join the rebellion, effectively what they would do is kidnap children and then force those children to commit atrocities near their home villages, which meant that they were locked into the rebellion.

When you look at this world, when you look at the way that some of these regimes function, some of these mechanisms at play, it can be quite depressing.

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