Anne Applebaum with Peter Pomerantsev - Autocracy, Inc: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World

On Wednesday, July 24th, the Midtown Scholar Bookstore was honored to welcome Pulitzer Prize-winning author Anne Applebaum to Harrisburg for a conversation and signing on her new book, 'Autocracy, Inc: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World.' Applebaum was in conversation with journalist Peter Pomerantsev (How to Win an Information War: The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler).

Copies of this book are available from the Midtown Scholar Bookstore while supplies last, at https://www.midtownscholar.com/signed...

About the Book: An alarming account of how autocracies work together to undermine the democratic world, and how we should organize to defeat them.

We think we know what an autocratic state looks like: There is an all-powerful leader at the top. He controls the police. The police threaten the people with violence. There are evil collaborators, and maybe some brave dissidents.

But in the 21st century, that bears little resemblance to reality. Nowadays, autocracies are underpinned not by one dictator, but by sophisticated networks composed of kleptocratic financial structures, surveillance technologies, and professional propagandists, all of which operate across multiple regimes, from China to Russia to Iran. Corrupt companies in one country do business with corrupt companies in another. The police in one country can arm and train the police in another, and propagandists share resources and themes, pounding home the same messages about the weakness of democracy and the evil of America.

International condemnation and economic sanctions cannot move the autocrats. Even popular opposition movements, from Venezuela to Hong Kong to Moscow, don’t stand a chance. The members of Autocracy, Inc, aren’t linked by a unifying ideology, like communism, but rather a common desire for power, wealth, and impunity. In this urgent treatise, which evokes George Kennan’s essay calling for “containment” of the Soviet Union, Anne Applebaum calls for the democracies to fundamentally reorient their policies to fight a new kind of threat.

About the Speakers:

ANNE APPLEBAUM is a staff writer for The Atlantic and a Senior Fellow of the Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University. Her previous books include Iron Curtain, winner of the Cundill Prize and a finalist for the National Book Award, and Gulag, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction and a finalist for three other major prizes. She lives in Poland with her husband, Radek Sikorski, a Polish politician, and their two children.

PETER POMERANTSEV is a senior fellow at Johns Hopkins University, where he co-directs the Arena Initiative. He is the author of Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia, which won the 2016 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, This is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality, and How to Win an Information War: The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler.

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