Destroying Tyrants

I had always been dissatisfied with Nabokov's suggestion in "Tyrants Destroyed" that laughter and ridicule are the way to destroy tyrants. So I was very interested to read a story today (May 21, 2025) in the New York Times by Nicholas Kristof, noting the impact of political scientist Gene Sharp on helping destroy tyrants in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and across Asia. The first of the three means Sharp and Kristof suggests is humor, echoing Nabokov in Tyrants Destroyed. Nabokov uses this in Bend Sinister, too, and the other two main means: emphasising corruption and mismanagement, and focusing on the case of the individual rather than oppressed groups: in this case, Krug and David.

Here is the url, if you can access it without a subscription:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/21/opinion/authoritarianism-democracy-protest.html

And here is the beginning of Kristof's article, Three Well-Tested Ways to Undermine an Autocrat:

The question I get most often is: What can we do to take our country back?

So let me try to answer, drawing on lessons from other countries that have faced authoritarian challenges.

The funny thing is that there’s a playbook for overturning autocrats. It was written here in America, by a rumpled political scientist I knew named Gene Sharp. While little known in the United States before his death in 2018, he was celebrated abroad, and his tool kit was used by activists in Eastern Europe, in the Middle East and across Asia. His books, emphasizing nonviolent protests that become contagious, have been translated into at least 34 languages.

“I would rather have this book than the nuclear bomb,” a former Lithuanian defense minister once said of Sharp’s writing.

A soft-spoken scholar working from his Boston apartment, Sharp recommended 198 actions that were often performative, ranging from hunger strikes to sex boycotts to mock funerals.

“Dictators are never as strong as they tell you they are,” he once said, “and people are never as weak as they think they are.”

The Democrats’ message last year revolved in part around earnest appeals to democratic values, but one of the lessons from anti-authoritarian movements around the world is that such abstract arguments aren’t terribly effective. Rather, three other approaches, drawing on Sharp’s work, seem to work better.

The first is mockery and humor — preferably salacious.

Wang Dan, a leader of China’s 1989 Tiananmen Square democracy demonstrations, told me that in China, puns often “resonate more than solemn political slogans.”

The Chinese internet for a time delighted in grass-mud horses — which may puzzle future zoologists exploring Chinese archives, for there is no such animal. It’s all a bawdy joke: In Chinese, “grass-mud horse” sounds very much like a curse, one so vulgar it would make your screen blush. But on its face it is an innocent homonym about an animal and thus is used to mock China’s censors.

Shops in China peddled dolls of grass-mud horses (resembling alpacas), and a faux nature documentary described their habits. One Chinese song recounted the epic conflict between grass-mud horses and river crabs — because “river crab” is a play on the Chinese term for censorship. It optimistically declared the horses triumphant.

“They defeated the river crabs in order to protect their grassland,” it declared. “River crabs forever disappeared.”

Humor puts autocrats in a difficult position. They look ridiculous if they crack down on jokes but look weak if they ignore them. What’s a dictator to do?

Take President Xi Jinping of China, who is sometimes mocked for resembling Winnie-the-Pooh. So China bans Pooh bear images and movies — giving people more reason to laugh at him.

Neither Winnie-the-Pooh nor a cavalry of grass-mud horses will topple Xi, but wit did help overthrow the Serbian despot Slobodan Milosevic in 2000. A dissident group called Otpor was so modest in size that protests by it wouldn’t have been noticed. But Otpor, relying heavily on Sharp’s work, engaged in street theater that got people buzzing: In Belgrade it put Milosevic’s image on a barrel and encouraged passers-by to whack it with a bat.

“Seeing a group of devil-may-care young people ridiculing Milosevic made onlookers smile,” Tina Rosenberg writes in her book “Join the Club,” “and encouraged them to think about the regime, and their own role, in a different light.”

Rosenberg quoted one Otpor leader as saying, “It was a great party all the time.” This made the protests trendy and cool, the ridicule grew contagious, and eventually the opposition became a mass movement that forced Milosevic to resign.

A second approach that has often succeeded is emphasizing not democracy as such but rather highlighting the leaders’ corruption, hypocrisy and economic mismanagement. . . . 

The third approach that has often succeeded is focusing on the power of one — an individual tragedy rather than a sea of oppression. . . . 

Brian Boyd