The last decade looked like a good one for authoritarian regimes and a challenging one for democratic ones. Cybertools, drones, facial recognition technology and social networks seemed to make efficient authoritarians even more efficient and democracies increasingly ungovernable.

The West lost self-confidence — and both Russian and Chinese leaders rubbed it in, putting out the word that these chaotic democratic systems were a spent force.

And then a totally unexpected thing happened: Russia and China each overreached.

Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine and, to his surprise, invited an indirect war with NATO and the West. China insisted that it was smart enough to have its own local solution to a pandemic, leaving millions of Chinese under-protected or unprotected and, in effect, inviting war with one of Mother Nature’s most contagious viruses — the omicron mutation of SARS-CoV-2. It has now led China to lock down all of Shanghai and parts of 44 other cities — some 370 million people.

In short, both Moscow and Beijing find themselves suddenly contending with much more powerful and relentless forces and systems than they ever anticipated. And the battles are exposing — to the whole world and to their own people — the weaknesses of their own systems. So much so that the world now has to worry about instability in both countries.

Be afraid.

Russia is a key supplier of wheat, fertilizer, oil and natural gas for the world. And China is the origin of, or a crucial link in, thousands of global manufacturing supply chains. If Russia is locked out and China is locked down for a prolonged period, every corner of the planet will be affected. And that is no longer a remote possibility.

Let’s start with Putin. He lulled himself into thinking that because his army had smashed a bunch of ragtag military opponents in Syria, Georgia, Crimea and Chechnya, it could quickly devour a country of 44 million people — Ukraine — that over the last decade had been moving to join the West and was tacitly being armed and trained by NATO.

It’s been a military and economic debacle for Russia so far. But just as important, it has exposed precisely how much Putin’s “system” is built on both lying upward — everyone telling superiors what they want to hear, all the way up to Putin — and drilling downward, tapping Russia’s natural resources, enriching a few Russians, rather than unleashing the country’s human resources and empowering the many.

Putin’s Russia is basically built on oil, lies and corruption, and that is not a resilient system.

You could see it right from the eve of the war when Putin conducted a nationally televised meeting of his top national security advisers, and none other than Sergei Naryshkin, chief of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, appeared confused over which lie Putin wanted to be told.

Putin said the eastern Ukrainian provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk should be allowed to become independent states, and then he polled these advisers for confirmation. But Naryshkin seemed to think Putin wanted to be told that the two provinces should be annexed to Russia. As Naryshkin stammered over the wrong answer, Putin, without a hint of irony, twice snapped at him to “speak directly” — as if that were possible anymore in Putin’s Russia. Only after Naryshkin gave Putin the lie he obviously wanted to be told did Putin snarl, “You can sit down now.”

How many Russian military officers watching that humiliation were ready to tell Putin the truth about Ukraine once the war started going badly? When the Russian military was up against foes in Georgia, Syria, Crimea and Chechnya, Russia could just indiscriminately bomb its way out of any problem. But now that Putin’s military has found itself in a war with Ukraine’s highly motivated army and its homegrown weapons industry, backed with some of NATO’s best precision weapons and training, the rot has really started to show. Russia’s tank and logistic forces were mauled into multiple junkyards of burning hulks in western Ukraine.

And it is impossible to exaggerate how incompetent the Russian navy had to be to allow the command warship of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, the Moskva missile cruiser, to be so badly damaged, reportedly by two Ukrainian-made anti-ship cruise missiles, called Neptunes, that the Moskva sank into the sea off Ukraine last week — the biggest loss of a naval ship in battle in 40 years.

For the Russian flagship in charge of coordinating all of the air defences for the flotilla, and itself carrying 64 S-300F Rif air defence missiles, to be taken out by enemy anti-ship missiles had to have been the result of a cascade of systems failures in detection and response to an attack.

Moreover, Neptune missiles are not necessarily “ship killers.” They were more likely designed to be “mission killers” — to disable the radar and electronics of sophisticated ships like the Moskva — not specifically sink them.

So I pity the commander who had to tell Putin that Russia’s meanest, monstrous warship in the Black Sea, rumored to have been his favourite, had been sunk by a Ukrainian missile fired in war for the first time.

China is a much more serious country than Russia: It is not built on oil, lies and corruption (though it has plenty of the latter), but on the hard work and manufacturing talents of its people, directed by a top-down, iron-fisted but eager-to-learn-from-abroad Chinese Communist Party. At least, eager in the past to learn, but less so lately.

China’s economic success, and the sense of pride it has generated, seems to have lulled its leadership into thinking it could basically go it alone against a pandemic. By producing its own vaccines, rather than importing better ones from the West, and by repurposing its highly efficient system of authoritarian surveillance and control to curb travel, do mass testing and quarantine any individuals or neighborhoods where COVID-19 appeared, China bet on a “zero COVID” policy. If it could get through the pandemic with fewer deaths and a more open economy, it would be another signal to the world — a big signal — that Chinese communism was superior to American democracy.

But Beijing, while scoffing at the West, became shockingly negligent about vaccinating its own elderly. That did not matter as much when China was able to stem the spread of earlier variants of the coronavirus with tight population controls. But now it matters, because China’s Sinopharm and Sinovac vaccines appear not nearly as effective against omicron as the mRNA vaccines made in the West, although they still are effective at reducing hospitalization and death. In China today, more than 130 million people “aged 60 and above are either unvaccinated or have received fewer than three doses,” putting them “in greater danger of developing severe COVID symptoms or dying if they contract the virus,” The Financial Times recently reported, citing a University of Hong Kong study.

This has led Beijing to opt for that total lockdown of Shanghai, which has been so poorly managed that residents have reportedly had to scramble for food.

Dr. David L. Katz, a U.S. public health and preventive medicine expert who wrote one of the most prescient early guest essays in this newspaper about managing COVID at the onset, explained to me that the problem with having the kind of draconian lockdown policy that China maintained is that you are guaranteeing that your population develops little native immunity from having acquired and survived the virus. So, Katz said, if the virus mutates globally, as it did with omicron, and you have “a less than effective vaccine, virtually no natural immunity in the population, and millions of elderly unvaccinated, you’re in a bad place and there is no easy way out.”

You can’t fool around with or propagandize away Mother Nature; she’s merciless.

The moral of this story? High-coercion authoritarian systems are low-information systems — so they often drive blind more than they realize. And even when the truth filters up, or reality in the form of a more powerful foe or Mother Nature slams them in the face so hard it can’t be ignored, their leaders find it hard to change course because their claims to the right to be presidents-for-life rest on their claims to infallibility. And that is why Russia and China are both now struggling.

I am worried sick about our own democratic system. But as long as we can still vote out incompetent leaders and maintain information ecosystems that will expose systemic lying and defy censorship, we can adapt in an age of rapid change — and that is the single most important competitive advantage a country can have today.

The last decade looked like a good one for authoritarian regimes and a challenging one for democratic ones. Cybertools, drones, facial recognition technology and social networks seemed to make efficient authoritarians even more efficient and democracies increasingly ungovernable.

The last decade looked like a good one for authoritarian regimes and a challenging one for democratic ones. Cybertools, drones, facial recognition technology and social networks seemed to make efficient authoritarians even more efficient and democracies increasingly ungovernable. The West lost self-confidence — and both Russian and Chinese leaders rubbed it in, putting out the word that these chaotic democratic systems were a spent force. And then a totally unexpected thing happened: Russia and China each overreached. Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine and, to his surprise, invited an indirect war with NATO and the West. China insisted that it was smart enough to have its own local solution to a pandemic, leaving millions of Chinese under-protected or unprotected and, in effect, inviting war with one of Mother Nature’s most contagious viruses — the omicron mutation of SARS-CoV-2. It has now led China to lock down all of Shanghai and parts of 44 other cities — some 370 million people. In short, both Moscow and Beijing find themselves suddenly contending with much more powerful and relentless forces and systems than they ever anticipated. And the battles are exposing — to the whole world and to their own people — the weaknesses of their own systems. So much so that the world now has to worry about instability in both countries. Be afraid. Russia is a key supplier of wheat, fertilizer, oil and natural gas for the world. And China is the origin of, or a crucial link in, thousands of global manufacturing supply chains. If Russia is locked out and China is locked down for a prolonged period, every corner of the planet will be affected. And that is no longer a remote possibility. Let’s start with Putin. He lulled himself into thinking that because his army had smashed a bunch of ragtag military opponents in Syria, Georgia, Crimea and Chechnya, it could quickly devour a country of 44 million people — Ukraine — that over the last decade had been moving to join the West and was tacitly being armed and trained by NATO. It’s been a military and economic debacle for Russia so far. But just as important, it has exposed precisely how much Putin’s “system” is built on both lying upward — everyone telling superiors what they want to hear, all the way up to Putin — and drilling downward, tapping Russia’s natural resources, enriching a few Russians, rather than unleashing the country’s human resources and empowering the many. Putin’s Russia is basically built on oil, lies and corruption, and that is not a resilient system. You could see it right from the eve of the war when Putin conducted a nationally televised meeting of his top national security advisers, and none other than Sergei Naryshkin, chief of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, appeared confused over which lie Putin wanted to be told. Putin said the eastern Ukrainian provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk should be allowed to become independent states, and then he polled these advisers for confirmation. But Naryshkin seemed to think Putin wanted to be told that the two provinces should be annexed to Russia. As Naryshkin stammered over the wrong answer, Putin, without a hint of irony, twice snapped at him to “speak directly” — as if that were possible anymore in Putin’s Russia. Only after Naryshkin gave Putin the lie he obviously wanted to be told did Putin snarl, “You can sit down now.” How many Russian military officers watching that humiliation were ready to tell Putin the truth about Ukraine once the war started going badly? When the Russian military was up against foes in Georgia, Syria, Crimea and Chechnya, Russia could just indiscriminately bomb its way out of any problem. But now that Putin’s military has found itself in a war with Ukraine’s highly motivated army and its homegrown weapons industry, backed with some of NATO’s best precision weapons and training, the rot has really started to show. Russia’s tank and logistic forces were mauled into multiple junkyards of burning hulks in western Ukraine. And it is impossible to exaggerate how incompetent the Russian navy had to be to allow the command warship of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, the Moskva missile cruiser, to be so badly damaged, reportedly by two Ukrainian-made anti-ship cruise missiles, called Neptunes, that the Moskva sank into the sea off Ukraine last week — the biggest loss of a naval ship in battle in 40 years. For the Russian flagship in charge of coordinating all of the air defences for the flotilla, and itself carrying 64 S-300F Rif air defence missiles, to be taken out by enemy anti-ship missiles had to have been the result of a cascade of systems failures in detection and response to an attack. Moreover, Neptune missiles are not necessarily “ship killers.” They were more likely designed to be “mission killers” — to disable the radar and electronics of sophisticated ships like the Moskva — not specifically sink them. So I pity the commander who had to tell Putin that Russia’s meanest, monstrous warship in the Black Sea, rumored to have been his favourite, had been sunk by a Ukrainian missile fired in war for the first time. China is a much more serious country than Russia: It is not built on oil, lies and corruption (though it has plenty of the latter), but on the hard work and manufacturing talents of its people, directed by a top-down, iron-fisted but eager-to-learn-from-abroad Chinese Communist Party. At least, eager in the past to learn, but less so lately. China’s economic success, and the sense of pride it has generated, seems to have lulled its leadership into thinking it could basically go it alone against a pandemic. By producing its own vaccines, rather than importing better ones from the West, and by repurposing its highly efficient system of authoritarian surveillance and control to curb travel, do mass testing and quarantine any individuals or neighborhoods where COVID-19 appeared, China bet on a “zero COVID” policy. If it could get through the pandemic with fewer deaths and a more open economy, it would be another signal to the world — a big signal — that Chinese communism was superior to American democracy. But Beijing, while scoffing at the West, became shockingly negligent about vaccinating its own elderly. That did not matter as much when China was able to stem the spread of earlier variants of the coronavirus with tight population controls. But now it matters, because China’s Sinopharm and Sinovac vaccines appear not nearly as effective against omicron as the mRNA vaccines made in the West, although they still are effective at reducing hospitalization and death. In China today, more than 130 million people “aged 60 and above are either unvaccinated or have received fewer than three doses,” putting them “in greater danger of developing severe COVID symptoms or dying if they contract the virus,” The Financial Times recently reported, citing a University of Hong Kong study. This has led Beijing to opt for that total lockdown of Shanghai, which has been so poorly managed that residents have reportedly had to scramble for food. Dr. David L. Katz, a U.S. public health and preventive medicine expert who wrote one of the most prescient early guest essays in this newspaper about managing COVID at the onset, explained to me that the problem with having the kind of draconian lockdown policy that China maintained is that you are guaranteeing that your population develops little native immunity from having acquired and survived the virus. So, Katz said, if the virus mutates globally, as it did with omicron, and you have “a less than effective vaccine, virtually no natural immunity in the population, and millions of elderly unvaccinated, you’re in a bad place and there is no easy way out.” You can’t fool around with or propagandize away Mother Nature; she’s merciless. The moral of this story? High-coercion authoritarian systems are low-information systems — so they often drive blind more than they realize. And even when the truth filters up, or reality in the form of a more powerful foe or Mother Nature slams them in the face so hard it can’t be ignored, their leaders find it hard to change course because their claims to the right to be presidents-for-life rest on their claims to infallibility. And that is why Russia and China are both now struggling. I am worried sick about our own democratic system. But as long as we can still vote out incompetent leaders and maintain information ecosystems that will expose systemic lying and defy censorship, we can adapt in an age of rapid change — and that is the single most important competitive advantage a country can have today.

China and Russia are giving authoritarianism a bad name

A judge in Cambodia has shut the investigation against opposition leader Kem Sokha for treason. According to his daughter, this implies that he could now be brought to trial or have the charges dropped.

Cambodia has recently faced pressure over human rights amid the European Union threatening trade benefits. Kem Sokha was freed from house arrest last weekend and authoritarian leader Hun Sen ordered the release of more than <a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/cambodian-prime-minister-orders-to-free-more-than-70-opposition-activists-on-bail-262041">70 opposition activists</a> on Thursday.

Investigating judge Ky Rithy's lawyer on Friday said in a letter, "we decide to close the investigation from this time onward".

Kem Sokha's daughter Monovithya Kem said on Twitter: "Next step is either the prosecutor drops the charges or takes the case to trial. We demand that all charges be dropped."

A spokesman for the court said he was not aware of the decision to close the investigation so could not comment.

Kem Sokha faced arrest in 2017, with this Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP) facing a ban in the run-up to an election last year. The election was swept by the ruling party and was referred by Western countries as a farce.

Kem Sokha has dismissed the charges against him as ''nonsense''.

On Tuesday, the European Union gave the government a one-month deadline to respond to a preliminary report on the suspension of trade preferences over the crackdown on the opposition, non-governmental groups and the media.

Prime Minister Hun Sen, a former Khmer Rouge commander, has ruled the country of 16 million for more than 34 years.

(With inputs from Reuters)

A judge in Cambodia has shut the investigation against opposition leader Kem Sokha for treason. According to his daughter, this implies that he could now be brought to trial or have the charges dropped.

A judge in Cambodia has shut the investigation against opposition leader Kem Sokha for treason. According to his daughter, this implies that he could now be brought to trial or have the charges dropped. Cambodia has recently faced pressure over human rights amid the European Union threatening trade benefits. Kem Sokha was freed from house arrest last weekend and authoritarian leader Hun Sen ordered the release of more than 70 opposition activists on Thursday. Investigating judge Ky Rithy's lawyer on Friday said in a letter, "we decide to close the investigation from this time onward". Kem Sokha's daughter Monovithya Kem said on Twitter: "Next step is either the prosecutor drops the charges or takes the case to trial. We demand that all charges be dropped." A spokesman for the court said he was not aware of the decision to close the investigation so could not comment. Kem Sokha faced arrest in 2017, with this Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP) facing a ban in the run-up to an election last year. The election was swept by the ruling party and was referred by Western countries as a farce. Kem Sokha has dismissed the charges against him as ''nonsense''. On Tuesday, the European Union gave the government a one-month deadline to respond to a preliminary report on the suspension of trade preferences over the crackdown on the opposition, non-governmental groups and the media. Prime Minister Hun Sen, a former Khmer Rouge commander, has ruled the country of 16 million for more than 34 years. (With inputs from Reuters)

Cambodian opposition leader Kem Sokha could be brought to trial as judge ends investigation

&ldquo;Interesting question, and you might be surprised about the answer that you will receive here. I had no sympathy for Saddam Hussein, but I can&rsquo;t really say I am doing good now that he is gone. At least, when he was there, there was only one Saddam. Now every city has its own Saddam who wants to rule,&rdquo;&nbsp;Belan Shnanie tells me during a flight.

He worked in the UK for many years for a major oil company, and then decided to return&nbsp;to his hometown Erbil, capital city of Iraq&rsquo;s Kurdistan, to start his&nbsp;own business. &ldquo;Things are pretty slow now,&rdquo; he says.

&ldquo;Are we speaking about the same Saddam who persecuted all opponents on the sole base of their political and ethnical belonging for years, using torture, murder and random imprisonment?&rdquo; I ask. 
&nbsp;&nbsp; 
&ldquo;Yes, we are. Look, I am Kurd and my father died because of Saddam, but I would not be honest if I say that things are better now. We have the same problems, the same inter-ethnic tensions, but less money and no one truly entitled to rule.&rdquo; &nbsp;

This was just the first expression of&nbsp;an idea that I found,&nbsp;not without a certain surprise,&nbsp;to be extremely common in Iraqi Kurdistan, a region known for its historical struggle for independence from the Iraqi state.

Kurds were&nbsp;heavily persecuted by Saddam&rsquo;s paramilitary forces during his regime, and many can&#39;t forget the massacre of Halabja in 1988, when chemical weapons&nbsp;killed more than 4,000 people. Nevertheless, an uncertain future and an unstable present risk to overcome historical memory.

One casual answer is never representative, so&nbsp;I decided to ask&nbsp;this very question to every&nbsp;local citizen&nbsp;I met.&nbsp;&ldquo;Do you think Saddam Hussain was a better option than the present situation?&rdquo;

&ldquo;Yes, of course,&rdquo; says Mahmud while driving his taxi. &ldquo;I am a school teacher. Now you tell me in which country a school teacher drives a taxi? I have to drive this car because the government did not pay my salary as a teacher for the last four months, and I have a family to feed. I eat only at dinner to save money for them.&rdquo; Mahmud&rsquo;s situation is not unique;&nbsp;he took part in&nbsp;a protest held&nbsp;on September 26 across&nbsp;Iraqi Kurdistan, where&nbsp;thousands of teachers and government employees took to the streets to claim their unpaid salaries.&nbsp;

&ldquo;Mahmud you look around fifty years old. You lived during Saddam Hussain as a Kurd, as a repressed minority, and still you think he was better?&rdquo;

&ldquo;Yes, at least he paid my salary.&rdquo;

As a journalist, I must specify that&nbsp;any&nbsp;number of street interactions still amounts to anecdotal evidence, and so&nbsp;cannot claim to represent the&nbsp;people&#39;s consensus.&nbsp;Entire sections of the Iraqi population&nbsp;actively fight&nbsp;for a democratic state and have no intention of going&nbsp;back to the&nbsp;previous form of government. The current president, Masoud Barzani, has been regularly voted and elected. Kurds are actively fighting the Islamic State, and its sectarian,&nbsp;violent ideals in Syria&rsquo;s Rojava and in all the countries where they have a foothold.

I must say though, again as a journalist, that among the great majority of the people I have been speaking to along the streets of Erbil, the most common answer has been: &ldquo;Yes, Saddam was a dictator and did bad things, but at least the economy was good and we did not have to worry about our salary.&rdquo;

The surprising part is that I received such an answer both by Arabs and Kurds.

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<h5>I don&rsquo;t really care about democracy and freedom, I care about food for my children and a salary in my bank.</h5>
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&nbsp;

It reminds of&nbsp;the many neo-fascists groups active in Europe, and the increasing appeal they have on a society suffering the&nbsp;long-term&nbsp;effects from&nbsp;the&nbsp;economic crisis.

A society who does not trust&nbsp;its political class&nbsp;expresses&nbsp;frustrations on the&nbsp;many Facebook pages, singing the praises of the repressive and fascist Italian dictator Benito Mussolini for being&nbsp;an honest man who knew how to rule a country.

&ldquo;You have to understand that for a big part of the young Iraqi generations who have not lived under Saddam, memory does not play a role,&rdquo; says&nbsp;a young educated man&nbsp;in his twenties who asked to&nbsp;remain anonymous. &ldquo;We only know that now we have problems and we think that before there were no problems. This is true for many young Arabs, like me, who perceive&nbsp;Saddam&rsquo;s past as a period of grandeur, and his toppling only as another move made by the West to destabilise the area. Many of us think that war is not the problem, but politics is, and the politicians are all corrupt.&rdquo;

This is another leitmotif among the answers: politicians are all corrupt, a belief which generates a significant mistrust toward the political class. &nbsp;&nbsp;

It is frightening where the lack of&nbsp;stability and&nbsp;secure livelihoods can lead. This nostalgia of an authoritarian, repressive and criminal regime is mainly connected to that, to the idealisation of a past which seems much better than a turbulent present. A human and totally understandable necessity of a salary, a house, food on the table directly affects&nbsp;people&#39;s political&nbsp;perception. In harsh situations - be it war, natural catastrophes or monetary crisis - liberty, freedom of thought, religion and press become secondary options which many are ready to drop in favour of&nbsp;economic stability.&nbsp;

This paves the way to whatever political group becomes able to provide an acceptable livelihood, to guarantee a salary and some food on your table. This is one of the aspects that make the Islamic State an acceptable form of government for entire sections of a society, a dynamic which IS knows well and uses it in its favour. 
&nbsp; 
Frustration, economic difficulties, mistrust towards elected politicians and corruption have been constant elements used to achieve power by almost all the totalitarian regimes of the 20th&nbsp;century.&nbsp;

All together, they generate dangerous and reactionary attitudes which glorify the idea of a &ldquo;perfect past&rdquo; that in reality never existed, thus fuelling authoritarian temptations. An attitude clearly summed up by a banal and, for this&nbsp;democratic European&nbsp;writer, scary sentence, which Mahmud told me before shaking my hand outside the taxi.&nbsp;

&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t really care about democracy and freedom, I care about food for my children and a salary in my bank.&rdquo;

(WION)

In the streets of Erbil, Iraqi Kurdistan's capital, many consider Saddam Hussein's reign preferable to the uncertainty of today

“Interesting question, and you might be surprised about the answer that you will receive here. I had no sympathy for Saddam Hussein, but I can’t really say I am doing good now that he is gone. At least, when he was there, there was only one Saddam. Now every city has its own Saddam who wants to rule,” Belan Shnanie tells me during a flight. He worked in the UK for many years for a major oil company, and then decided to return to his hometown Erbil, capital city of Iraq’s Kurdistan, to start his own business. “Things are pretty slow now,” he says. “Are we speaking about the same Saddam who persecuted all opponents on the sole base of their political and ethnical belonging for years, using torture, murder and random imprisonment?” I ask. “Yes, we are. Look, I am Kurd and my father died because of Saddam, but I would not be honest if I say that things are better now. We have the same problems, the same inter-ethnic tensions, but less money and no one truly entitled to rule.” This was just the first expression of an idea that I found, not without a certain surprise, to be extremely common in Iraqi Kurdistan, a region known for its historical struggle for independence from the Iraqi state. Kurds were heavily persecuted by Saddam’s paramilitary forces during his regime, and many can't forget the massacre of Halabja in 1988, when chemical weapons killed more than 4,000 people. Nevertheless, an uncertain future and an unstable present risk to overcome historical memory. One casual answer is never representative, so I decided to ask this very question to every local citizen I met. “Do you think Saddam Hussain was a better option than the present situation?” “Yes, of course,” says Mahmud while driving his taxi. “I am a school teacher. Now you tell me in which country a school teacher drives a taxi? I have to drive this car because the government did not pay my salary as a teacher for the last four months, and I have a family to feed. I eat only at dinner to save money for them.” Mahmud’s situation is not unique; he took part in a protest held on September 26 across Iraqi Kurdistan, where thousands of teachers and government employees took to the streets to claim their unpaid salaries. “Mahmud you look around fifty years old. You lived during Saddam Hussain as a Kurd, as a repressed minority, and still you think he was better?” “Yes, at least he paid my salary.” As a journalist, I must specify that any number of street interactions still amounts to anecdotal evidence, and so cannot claim to represent the people's consensus. Entire sections of the Iraqi population actively fight for a democratic state and have no intention of going back to the previous form of government. The current president, Masoud Barzani, has been regularly voted and elected. Kurds are actively fighting the Islamic State, and its sectarian, violent ideals in Syria’s Rojava and in all the countries where they have a foothold. I must say though, again as a journalist, that among the great majority of the people I have been speaking to along the streets of Erbil, the most common answer has been: “Yes, Saddam was a dictator and did bad things, but at least the economy was good and we did not have to worry about our salary.” The surprising part is that I received such an answer both by Arabs and Kurds. I don’t really care about democracy and freedom, I care about food for my children and a salary in my bank. × It reminds of the many neo-fascists groups active in Europe, and the increasing appeal they have on a society suffering the long-term effects from the economic crisis. A society who does not trust its political class expresses frustrations on the many Facebook pages, singing the praises of the repressive and fascist Italian dictator Benito Mussolini for being an honest man who knew how to rule a country. “You have to understand that for a big part of the young Iraqi generations who have not lived under Saddam, memory does not play a role,” says a young educated man in his twenties who asked to remain anonymous. “We only know that now we have problems and we think that before there were no problems. This is true for many young Arabs, like me, who perceive Saddam’s past as a period of grandeur, and his toppling only as another move made by the West to destabilise the area. Many of us think that war is not the problem, but politics is, and the politicians are all corrupt.” This is another leitmotif among the answers: politicians are all corrupt, a belief which generates a significant mistrust toward the political class. It is frightening where the lack of stability and secure livelihoods can lead. This nostalgia of an authoritarian, repressive and criminal regime is mainly connected to that, to the idealisation of a past which seems much better than a turbulent present. A human and totally understandable necessity of a salary, a house, food on the table directly affects people's political perception. In harsh situations - be it war, natural catastrophes or monetary crisis - liberty, freedom of thought, religion and press become secondary options which many are ready to drop in favour of economic stability. This paves the way to whatever political group becomes able to provide an acceptable livelihood, to guarantee a salary and some food on your table. This is one of the aspects that make the Islamic State an acceptable form of government for entire sections of a society, a dynamic which IS knows well and uses it in its favour. Frustration, economic difficulties, mistrust towards elected politicians and corruption have been constant elements used to achieve power by almost all the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century. All together, they generate dangerous and reactionary attitudes which glorify the idea of a “perfect past” that in reality never existed, thus fuelling authoritarian temptations. An attitude clearly summed up by a banal and, for this democratic European writer, scary sentence, which Mahmud told me before shaking my hand outside the taxi. “I don’t really care about democracy and freedom, I care about food for my children and a salary in my bank.” (WION)

In today's Iraq, an authoritarian leader is tempting