By Robby LaBurne
Authoritarian regimes stay in power because it is in the interests of the imperialists who dominate monopoly capital. Since the dawn of the 20th century, having a small class of multinational capitalists own the products of 8 billion people’s labor has been neither logical nor natural. It does not force itself upon us, rather it must be upheld through conscious human effort. It requires the state’s suppression of organized labor, repression of anti-capitalist dissent, and constant expansion of production and markets. When democracy fails to fulfill these goals of big capital, tyranny provides it a glimmer of hope.
This principle illustrates itself in the most remembered case of authoritarianism in history, Nazi Germany.
Surprisingly, the Nazi Party in Germany wasn’t always as ironclad as it was during the war. Until the rich industrialists needed it to suppress the workers, it wasn’t much more than a racist street gang. Without monopoly support, it’s unlikely that the Weimar Republic ever would have come to be known as the Third Reich.
It’s a largely forgotten piece of history, but in 1932 the German Nazi Party was facing financial ruin. How did the Nazis move from being broke to being in control of the German government just a year later? The Nazi Party was bailed out by German industrialists in early 1933.
The industrialists who led the way were two huge German firms, IG Farben and Krupp. Leaders of both of companies were among the few civilians who were later charged with war crimes at the Nuremberg Tribunals after World War II. These trials placed the story of their financial and moral support of the Nazis into the historical record. Krupp was a huge arms manufacturer. I.G. Farben was a vast chemical company that made everything from Bayer aspirin to Zyklon B, the poison used in the gas chambers.
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Once the Nazi regime was in power, communists were among the first to be placed in the early concentration camps. Trade unionists followed soon thereafter. Not only did these camps provide capitalists an easy way to deal with opposition, but the slave labor of inmates lined the pockets of Deutsche Bank, BMW, and Porsche, among others. [Source] At Nuremberg, many of these Nazi industrialists were tried for war crimes, yet most were rehabilitated by the West soon thereafter.
Most Americans can’t point out where Indonesia is on a map. Unfortunately, that didn’t stop them from conducting a genocide there. During the Cold War, the country of 100 million was ruled by the Western puppet regime of Suharto. After seizing power from a democratically elected government, he then went on to put dissenters in cages and often executed them without trial.
In 1965, when General Suharto blamed the military purge on a PKI coup plot, the CIA supplied communications equipment to help him spread his false reports before moving into power and overseeing the industrial-scale slaughter, as previously released government documents showed. Several of the documents released this week indicate that the U.S. embassy had reliable information that placed blame on rank-and-file PKI members—information that was entirely inaccurate, but nevertheless had encouraged the army to exploit this narrative.
It has long been known that the United States provided Suharto with active support: In 1990, a U.S. embassy staff member admitted he handed over a list of communists to the Indonesian military as the terror was underway. “It really was a big help to the army,” Robert J. Martens, a former member of the embassy’s political section, told Washington Post. “They probably killed a lot of people, and I probably have a lot of blood on my hands, but that’s not all bad.”
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The CIA wouldn’t support such a massacre without knowing what it would entail. To their credit, it was a great “investment” in the most morbid of terms. Costing only some weapons and a million lives, it entailed billions of dollars in natural resources, labor, and new commodity markets.
And he made the Indonesian economy one of the most open to foreign investment, winning friends at the World Bank and at the International Monetary Fund.
At the same time, Mr. Suharto and his children built up assets that the Central Intelligence Agency estimated at $30 billion in 1989.
But after the rapid rise of world oil prices in the mid-1970’s, Mr. Suharto’s Western-educated economic advisers — known as the Berkeley mafia, since many of them attended school there — urged diversification and a further opening to Western investments.
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As long as he protected their unlimited access to Indonesia’s resources, the West was happy to give Suharto the assistance he needed to ruthlessly suppress his own people.
To this day, the Saudi Arabian regime poses as modernizing yet has still not veered from its strict enforcement of Wahhabi moral codes. In some cases, religion leads people to do insane things. In Saudi Arabia, however, it seems that religion is not the primary culprit. Wahhabism, after all, was founded in 1744 to provide political legitimacy and regular tithes to the al-Saud family. [Source] In the 1920s, Abdulaziz Ibn Saud used it as a means to unite the various tribes and form the modern nation of Saudi Arabia. [Source] It is certainly a tool of the political elite, not the other way around.
Cato Institute, a conservative yet isolationist think tank, was the first to call it out.
unlawful killings; executions for nonviolent offenses; forced disappearances; torture of prisoners and detainees by government agents; arbitrary arrest and detention; political prisoners; arbitrary interference with privacy; criminalization of libel, censorship, and site blocking; restrictions on freedoms of peaceful assembly, association, and movement; severe restrictions of religious freedom; citizens’ lack of ability and legal means to choose their government through free and fair elections; trafficking in persons; violence and official discrimination against women, although new women’s rights initiatives were implemented; criminalization of consensual same-sex sexual activity; and prohibition of trade unions.
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Finding out who benefits from their rule is as easy as finding hay in a haystack. Their ruling family is the richest in the world, with their 1.4 trillion, more than Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg combined. [Source] When human rights organizations question why there is no peace in that region, they find their answer in the $80 billion a year Saudi Arabia contributes to U.S. weapons manufacturers in their unjust invasion of Yemen. [Source]
Whether eighty years ago or today, in Europe or the Middle East, atheistic or fundamentalist, authoritarian repressions share in common their monopolist class character. State power, ideological suppression, and extremist religion are but means to extract wealth in the mechanistic paradigm of capitalist society. As class contradictions become more acute with the development of imperialism, we will inevitably see more violence, repression, and genocide come with it. Israel and Sudan are but examples of this. Conversely, to end world tyranny, we must look no further than ending the economic power structures that form the basis of it.