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

But at the same time, I only grew up in freedom in Germany because somebody else went to war to beat the Nazis. So I am not going to sit here and argue that force is never justified. There is some sort of line at which these leaders are so destructive and so damaging that it is worth taking that risk and that it is worth going to war. But where that line is, is difficult to say in general.

I think it's a case by case decision.

It's a really fascinating case. And what it really demonstrates is how popular protest works and when it doesn't. And it's a curious question, right? Because you've got some of these entrenched dictatorships being brought down by like school teachers or by pensioners just marching in the street. And the mechanism through which that works is by splitting the regime.

So you're a dictator, you want to project strength, and you want to project inevitability. You want to make sure that people think there's no other option. So you cannot tolerate people in the streets because that's a direct challenge. But when they're there, you use violence against them, you try to club them down.

You might have more people in the streets because you have this backlash as people are upset. So you have more and more people, and eventually you're forced into a situation where you might have to give an order to shoot. But the problem is that even when you give that order to shoot, somebody actually has to follow it.

And oftentimes at that very moment, the security services refuse and the regime crumbles under the weight of its own repression. Because even though the dictator might want to shoot these innocent civilians, others in the regime do not. And as a result, these regimes can blow up.

But then in Belarus, what you saw is that dictators can maximize their chances of survival by bringing in security forces from elsewhere. Because, of course, you are going to be much more likely to shoot somebody from a foreign country than you would be your neighbors or maybe somebody from your family. So what you saw in Minsk is essentially a form of dictatorial solidarity there.

where the dictatorship was able to count on these Russians, and these Russians not only made it less likely that the regime would crumble under the weight of its own repression, but it also reassured regime elites, like the generals and so forth, that the regime would continue to survive.

And given that they then thought the regime would continue to survive, it became irrational to defect, which otherwise they would have potentially done.

In dictatorships, there's a very small line between apparent stability and complete chaos. And the reason for that is that so much of these regimes is built on strength and about these perceptions of inevitability. So as soon as people come to think that the leader could actually fall...

or will actually fall, they can switch sides just like that, because there's no bigger ideological project, there's no legitimacy, it's just about maximizing your own interests, staying out of prison, and staying alive. And that's why you saw, for example, in the case of Assad, once his soldiers came to realize that he might actually lose, they just took off their uniforms, and off they went.

So authoritarian stability is often a mirage. The other thing that I would say, though, is we often tell ourselves that conflicts can only be won if we win hearts and minds. That's a lie. For these regimes, that's a lie. For us, to an extent, it's possible because we have legal and ethical constraints that we cannot simply bomb civilians into submission.

But if you're a Putin or if you're Assad or if you're Lukashenko, you absolutely can. If you are able to use brutal violence for an extended period of time, you can stay in power even if the vast majority of your own people hate you. as depressing as that is.

There's no Western leader that I would call a tyrant or that I would call a dictator, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they don't want to be one. And democracy is not God-given. So it could be that in the future, we see a European country or a North American country turning into a dictatorship. I try to end the book sort of on a positive note, but I do actually also think it's true.

Obviously, all of us are bad with uncertainty. And obviously, sometimes things can look terribly. But oftentimes, I think that doesn't necessarily mean that they actually are bad. If you think about revolutions in the past, oftentimes they were atrocious, right? I mean, you had civil wars, people getting killed, executed guillotine and all that. And now we look back and we think, oh, you know what?

That was a key moment on the path towards French democracy, for example. And I think we might also look at the Arab Spring in 50 years or look at Assad in 50 years and say, yeah, that was absolutely awful. But actually, that was a key on the path towards this Syrian democracy or Tunisian democracy or whatever, right? So I don't know.

I mean, I try to stay positive, but yeah, sometimes it's not the most cheerful of topics. Let me put it that way.

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