A Description of Harms - Bad Kings

Conflict, especially the kind of protracted violence that afflicts the countries from the last post suffer, is likely the most destructive experience a society can undergo. However, systematic, brutalized oppression can be just as bad, indeed it can be thought of as a type of conflict, just one less visible, moving at a different rate. The end of Communism was thought to represent the beginning of an age of democratic expansion and consolidation, and the Arab Spring suggests that progress in that direction is possible. But authoritarian systems have strengthened themselves in some places, and reemerged in others, and now we can reckon the number of human lives lived under oppression in the billions, and the worst offenders include some of the greatest powers.

1. North Korea

George Orwell's 1984 gets invoked by everyone against anyone else they don't like. Republicans refer to Democrats as Big Brother, Apple users call Microsoft Big Brother, spoiled teenagers call their parents Big Brother, and each hyperbole reduces what should be a deadly serious accusation to a mere cliche. This is a pity, because there actually exists a place that bears comparison to the dystopian nightmare of 1984, North Korea, where reality may have even surpassed fiction. The cult of personality around Kim Jong Il - a pompadoured gnome with a flair for jumpsuits and designer sunglasses - has no rival. Not Big Brother, he's the Dear Leader of the North Koreans, who name flowers in his honor. The concentration camp system is extensive enough to have captured between 150,000 and 200,000 political prisoners. The regime is paranoid enough to have created a North Korean-only internet and to restrict ownership of bicycles, and repressive enough to banish the sick and elderly from Pyongyang (so as not to mar the perfection of the capital). The economic system of juche (self-reliance) is dysfunctional enough to create perpetual food shortages and famine on a large enough scale that US intelligence agencies measure the dead through smoke emissions from crematoria. There are only two things in abundant supply in North Korea - propaganda, creating a nation brainwashed to the point of delusion, and cheap alcohol, turning that nation into alcoholics. The existence of North Korea alone challenges faith in the existence of a benevolent god.

2. Zimbabwe

Among historians, political scientists and other academics, the ability for individuals - even political leaders - to meaningful alter great events is a perennial topic of debate, with much greater importance given to structural forces or the balance of power than the will of even strong leaders. Zimbabwe is perhaps the great case for the influence of leaders - it's far from certain that with any other leader Zimbabwe would achieve prosperity, development and democracy, but it can be safely reasoned that without Mugabe it would not have degenerated into the inflation-wracked backwater it is today. With fertile soil, abundant water and a wealth of natural resources, Zimbabwe has boundless economic potential, but through an economic policy best described as "scare whitey and print money" Mugabe's regime has driven tens of thousands into economic exile (first expropriated whites by plane, then desperate blacks on foot) and destroyed the savings of the citizenry through hyper-inflation. Not content to wreck the economy, Mugabe clings to power through naked political repression and the silencing of the press. Strangely, the economic situation has gotten bad enough so that it is now impossible to calculate how bad it is - Zimbabwe's chief statistician has given up calculating the inflation rate, citing a shortage of goods to price and a shortage of digits on government computers.

3. Burma

The regimes in North Korea and Zimbabwe both claim some sort of ideological justifications for their oppression and incompetence, Korean Stalinism in one case and anti-colonialism in the other. The junta ruling Burma has the odd distinction of approaching frankness in the utter venality and moral bankruptcy of their rule - they are in it for themselves, and can't be bothered to pretend otherwise. This does not, of course, change the fact of grinding oppression in the country, but maybe it shapes its character - consider the 800,000 Burmese believed to be put to forced labor for the benefit of the regime, or the creepy advertising campaigns pimping out the country's women and girls in order to bring in tourist dollars. Add to this routine violence between the central government and ethnic militias in the interior and the prospects for the country's future become even bleaker.

4. Russia

The first three entries in my list, though downright hellish in the oppression, injustice and material misery they impose on their people, are all distant, relatively small, and remote. It's easy to dismiss them as pockets of dysfunction in a world otherwise tending towards more open and accountable government, throwbacks limited in their influence on global affairs, certainly incapable of shaping future events. This is reassuring, perhaps it is even true. Russia, however, is a big fish, a former superpower and certainly still a great power, which makes up for its relative oppression deficit vis-a-vis the top three with global reach and world-historical significance. Though the old totalitarian system is truly gone, the new system overseen by Vladimir Putin, the wildly popular Prime Minister/Dictator and his handpicked President/Sidekick Dmitry Medvedev is a harsh and repressive one. Democratic reforms from the immediate post-Soviet period have been rolled back, and a new apparatus of repression and control - mostly informal rather than governmental - has been put in its place. Power has been centralized into the President's office (he appoints regional officials directly who were formerly elected locally and enjoys almost unlimited legislative power through a docile, rubber-stamp Duma), with the security services deploying covert force in pursuit of the elite's economic goals. The political opposition has been harassed and ridiculed into irrelevance, while journalists who criticize the regime are routinely assassinated. The most terrifying aspect of Russian authoritarianism is not its repressiveness - compared to Burma, let alone North Korea, it comes off as downright benign - but its dynamism. The economy has been buoyant, the regime genuinely popular and the government decently effective in coping with crises and emergencies. While dissidents have used the internet to evade censorship, authorities have likewise taken advantage of new technologies to expand propaganda and surveillance. Dictatorship in Russia is no throwback - it's built for the future.

5. The People's Republic of China

In short, this is Russia but much worse. The spectacular growth of the Chinese economy has propelled the nation from a Maoist backwater at the edge of subsistence to everyone's favorite for top dog in the New World Order. Growth was supposed to spur the creation of a middle class, which was then supposed to pressure the regime into democratic reform, and thus take care of the political discomfort of having the new global boss be a nominally Communist police state. That didn't happen, and now the new global boss is a nominally Communist police state which infiltrates and censors the internet (when it isn't trying to build a China-only version it can control), holds democracy activists in house arrest and prevents them for picking up their Nobel peace prizes, exploits prison labor on a massive scale and aggressively colonizes Tibet and Xinjiang with ethnic Han Chinese. As in Russia, this is a dynamic, modern authoritarianism adept at both delivering improving economic conditions to keep the mass of its populace satisfied while ruthlessly suppressing any dissent against its self-serving rule.

6. Saudi Arabia

I was originally going to reserve Saudi Arabia for my list of honorable mentions, but their willingness - their insistence, in fact - on sending troops into Bahrain to quash the democratic protests there reminded me how much there was to hate about Saudi. The monarchy - obscenely wealthy, parasitically unproductive, lavishly luxurious and economically predatory - manages to combine a public commitment to a neo-medieval version of Islam with private debaucheries straight out of celebrity rehab. They have used their country's wealth to purchase and import a consumer economy modeled on the strip malls and gated communities of white Texas, and the juxtaposition of that with the coercive application of their brand of religion creates a cross between an Islamic version of Medieval Times and the most depressing shopping mall in your suburb, only with public executions. The level of sexual repression created by the strictly enforced segregation of the sexes (at least outside of the pleasure palaces of the Saudi family) has warped the sensibilities of the younger generation, leading to sister-swapping and desperation homosexuality (which is, of course, punishable by death). Not content with psychologically destroying their own people, the Saudis meddle internationally wherever Muslims can be found, sponsoring violence in the Caucasus, the Horn of Africa and the Sahel, not to mention using their wealth and clout as the holders of Mecca and Medina to twist global Islam in the direction of their perverse Wahhabi sect. Given the internal freedom bought them by their great wealth and security provided by their chummy relationship with the US, the Saudis could have chosen any social and economic model for their country. That they have ended up with this makes it clear that while they might not be the most repressive regime on this list, nor perhaps the most dangerous, they are the most gratuitous in their evil.

Honorable Mentions:

Iran, Syria and Algeria could all qualify with their mixture of nationalist paranoia and militarism. Similarly Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, the U.A.E. and Oman all represent vile combinations of the excesses of royal dictatorship with petro-capitalism. Likewise, virtually any Central Asian republic - all of the 'stans - are dismal dictatorships run by egomaniacal crooks. Ditto Belarus and Moldova, which seems to be some kind of gangster co-op. And certainly Africa has more dictators than I care to dwell on , including the warscape of Sudan.