Opinion – Candido Bracher: The Emperor

“It was a small dog, of a Japanese breed. His name was Lulu and he slept in the emperor’s bed. In several ceremonies, he escaped the imperial knees and went to urinate on the shoes of the dignitaries. They were forbidden to move, to make a gesture that it was, when their feet felt wet. My job was to walk among the dignitaries, drying their shoes. For that I used a little satin cloth. That was my occupation for ten years.”

This is the opening paragraph of the book “The Emperor”, by Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski, which describes the 44-year reign of Haile Selassie, “God’s Chosen”, in Ethiopia. I won more than
30 Years, a friend’s book, which he remarked was the most impressive account of sheer power he had ever read.

In a few pages, almost exclusively through the testimonies of former subordinate employees of the palace, collected shortly after the end of the reign, in 1974, we are introduced to a country of profound contrasts, between a palatial court, for whose celebrations planes were made to fly with delicacies from Europe, and the miserable people subjected to hunger that came to decimate entire populations in regions further away from Addis Ababa, the capital. Meanwhile, the Emperor, an affable man and a good speaker, traveled the world seeking — and often succeeding — to spread an image of a modernizing leader.

The invasion of Ukraine by Russia and the omnipotent figure of Putin made me return to the book, now in the version translated into Portuguese, with the excellent afterword by Mario Sergio Conti, who notes that the account can be seen not only as a metaphor of Stalinist Poland lived by Kapuscinski but also as an allegory of absolute subordination to personal power in any situation.

Impressed by the fact that a single man decided to carry out the first invasion of European territory since World War II, ignoring the protests of most countries, subjecting their population to the serious economic consequences of international sanctions and spreading death and terror in the neighboring country, I returned to the example of Haile Selassie, seeking to understand the mechanisms of absolute power.

Kapuscinski describes a power structure based exclusively on proximity to the Emperor, from which a series of concentric circles composed of dignitaries established the degree of prestige —and access to the kingdom’s resources—of each. The number of audiences with the Emperor, the participation in his retinues on trips abroad, the distance at which they sat from him on solemn occasions, all these symbols of power were eagerly disputed by the members of the court.

The Emperor took care that the position of people in the circles was changed periodically and randomly, in order to generate maximum dependence and insecurity in those around him. Another essential concern was the control of information, or, better still, its simple suppression. In
a kingdom of 30 million subjects, only 25,000 copies of newspapers were printed daily.

New times, new technologies and an infinitely richer nation demand more elaborate methods from Putin, albeit based on the same principles. His circle of power — the “sloviki” (strong men) is very narrow and largely made up of loyal comrades from the country’s security forces. Loyalty is an essential element and, naturally, must be understood as personal loyalty to the leader, not to common principles or goals.

Despite the small number of advisers, Putin maintains his distance and formalism, through the usual external symbols of power, such as the chair that most resembles a throne, in which he usually sits in meetings, partially broadcast on television. He occasionally subjects a member of the circle to public rebuke, as the director of the SVR, the international intelligence service, recently did.

Even more admirable was the dictator’s ability to keep a population of nearly 150 million in ignorance of the facts of the war for several weeks, to the point of refusing to believe
in the accounts of their own children, made from bombed cities in Ukraine.

But even the harshest dictatorships find limits to their power of censorship. The triggering element of the Ethiopian Empire’s downfall was the film “The Hidden Hunger”, shown in mid-1973 on English television, alternating scenes of Selassie at banquets with his courtiers with images of roads full of skeletons of people who had died of starvation.

A year later, the emperor was deposed. We do not know how Putin’s dictatorship in Russia will evolve, but it is certain that totalitarian regimes, despite their apparent strength, are more unstable than democracies, because
they do not have mechanisms to accommodate the challenge.

The failure to recognize this instability has recently caused huge losses to investors in international funds, as Robin Brooks, economist at the IIF, reports in a March 27 tweet: “The real has appreciated 18% this year, while the ruble has fallen by 27%. The irony is that many money managers had moved their investments from Brazil to Russia, as they considered Brazilian politics to be too messy. Any democracy, no matter how messy, is better than a ‘tidy’ authoritarian regime.”

Oblivious to this fact, our president seems to have an unrestrained admiration for authoritarian leaders. His recent visit to Putin, on the eve of the invasion of Ukraine, causes additional discomfort, given Russia’s evident penchant for interfering in international election disputes through the manipulation of social media.

Added to this is the invitation to the heir to the Saudi throne, Mohammed bin Salman, to visit our country in May. MBS, as it is known, carefully reproduces Haile Selassie’s primer.

First, it cultivates a modernizing image by promoting the diversification of the economy and the relative liberalization of customs, such as allowing women to drive. He also terrifies those around him, having held hundreds of members of the royal family, billionaires and government officials prisoner in a luxury hotel, accused of corruption, subjected to various types of pressure, passing on to the entire Saudi elite the message that their wealth and privileges depend solely on the will of the crown prince.

Finally, MBS is pointed out in a CIA report as having approved of the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, a journalist for the Washington Post, in an extreme demonstration of his willingness to control the press.

Democracy is our great achievement. It will be tested in the electoral process and it must be defended.