WORLD UNDER MORE AUTOCRATIC RULERS

Today more of the global population, 54 percent, is under autocratic rule than democracy. From Russia to China, the Phillippines, Turkey, Belarus to Venezuela, Cuba and many more in all the continents are under autocratic regimes.

Then there are pseudo democracies like India where the tactics and strategies are not only repressive but corrupted at every level of bureaucratic and institutional setups.

There was a time when autocratic rulers used only brutal practices and jailed dissidents for long periods of imprisonment, like that of Nelson Mandella in South Africa. But now the contemporary autocratic rulers have more tools to silence the opposition and kill the uprisings.

Mass propaganda machinery thru the internet and social media is mobilized to create a mindset of views in the public that things are alright.

Elections are held periodically, but the results are pre-determined with preprogrammed electronic voting machines.

The democratic world can impose sanctions, but that never worked against the autocratic rulers. Only the people suffer from economic sanctions. Every democratic country in the world including its free media is so occupied with their own problems and issues that what is going on in the rest of the nations ruled by autocratic regimes does not make much news.

Moreover, the support for democratic movements by one group of countries gets balanced out by other regimes backing the autocratic rulers. There is nexus of the Western bloc headed by the USA and then there is the China-Russia front.

Meanwhile, the United Nations remains, as always, a helpless spectator.

It is only through mass public protests aka peoples’ power, within these countries facing ruthless and brutal autocratic governments that we can expect regime changes for just and democratic governments.

Humanity suffers while we have dreams of living in one global village.

-Promod Puri