Episode 69: How Modern Autocrats Keep Each Other in Power
Journalist and historian Anne Applebaum has been observing and writing about the rise of authoritarianism for years. And she’s sounding the alarm about a growing trend: how strongmen from Russia to Venezuela are collaborating with one another in an effort to maintain their power and undermine the influence of democratic countries like the United States. So, is there anything democratic nations can do about it?
Please note: Our show is produced for the ear and made to be heard. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the audio before quoting in print.
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Anne Applebaum: My favorite story is the story of the so-called biolabs.
ARCHIVAL Indian Newscaster: Russia claims it has uncovered 30 biolabs in Ukraine. They claim America was developing bio weapons in Ukraine.
ARCHIVAL American Newscaster: [SOUNDS OF KLAXONS] Biohazard warnings… This Russian state media footage claims to show America running facilities in Ukraine and Georgia that caused deadly outbreaks of disease and killed local livestock.
Anne Applebaum: At the beginning of the war the Russians accused the Americans of building biological weapons in Ukraine, which there was no proof of.
Journalist Anne Applebaum says in February 2022, this biolabs story — that the U.S. was creating biological weapons inside facilities in Ukraine, experimenting with things like bat viruses — was furiously making its way across the internet, just as Russian forces invaded Ukraine.
Anne Applebaum: And you can trace it. I picked it up all over the internet and others followed it as well.
ARCHIVAL American Newscaster: This story is false, but that has not stopped it continuing to circulate, and becoming a key part of Russia's disinformation campaign justifying the invasion of Ukraine.
ARCHIVAL John Kirby: The Russian accusations, uh, uh, are absurd. They're laughable. There's nothing to it. It's classic Russian propaganda.
ARCHIVAL Reporter: Has there been any relationship between the-
ARCHIVAL John Kirby: We are not — not — developing biological or chemical weapons inside Ukraine.
Anne Applebaum: Nevertheless, not just the Russians, but also the Chinese,
ARCHIVAL Chinese Defense Ministry Spokesman: …染病. 引发多国抗议和质疑...
Anne Applebaum: And also the Iranians and also the Venezuelans.
ARCHIVAL Venezuelan State TV on biolabs_VTV_220318: …el trabajo del operación especial militar sur Ucrania para revelar…
Anne Applebaum: And also many others…
ARCHIVAL African Newscaster: Russia yesterday made claims that it has uncovered U.S. linked bioweapon facilities in Ukraine
Anne Applebaum: …put out the same false story. You know, American biolabs in Ukraine.
The story was totally false. Many news organizations debunked the story as a conspiracy theory. The United Nations said there was no evidence it was true. And even a group of independent Russian scientists said it wasn’t true. Despite all that, Applebaum says it continued to spread, including within the QAnon conspiracy network. The hashtag #biolab was trending on Twitter and millions of people latched onto the story, like former Fox News host Tucker Carlson…
ARCHIVAL Tucker Carlson: We have these biolabs in Ukraine.
…and then-presidential candidate RFK Jr.
ARCHIVAL RFK Jr.: Yeah.
ARCHIVAL Tucker Carlson: And that was, like, kind of ignored and the people who covered it got attacked for covering it. But the fact remains there are U.S. biolabs in Ukraine. Why would we have biolabs in Ukraine?
ARCHIVAL RFK Jr.: Um, we have biolabs in Ukraine because we're developing bio weapons.
Applebaum says the Russians were very successful in pushing out this false story, which was essentially propaganda meant to drum up support for Putin's invasion of Ukraine.
Russia was also successful in getting other autocratic regimes to amplify the story. So the story was coming from so many different sources there was a sense that it must be true. And Applebaum says the way that China, Iran, Venezuela and others helped to create a kind of international echo chamber to cast doubt on what was really happening inside Ukraine was successful in ultimately helping to undermine support for Ukraine. And for anyone who needed a reason to support the Russian invasion, no matter how flimsy, the biolabs story provided that.
Anne Applebaum: People are looking for things that support their worldview. If your worldview before the invasion was that the United States is bad, and Russia is good or Russia supports your country then you're looking for something that fits that narrative.
She notes there was a poll in which 25% of Americans believed the biolabs conspiracy was true. The biolabs story is also a good example of how these autocratic regimes cooperate with one another to help prop each other up while also trying to diminish the power of liberal democracies like the United States. They don't have any sort of official way that they actually work together.
Anne Applebaum: There isn't some kind of secret room where they all meet and they make decisions and they have joint policy. They simply have some interests in common, and where they have interests in common, they act.
This is an idea that Applebaum explores in her latest book — her 7th by the way — Autocracy, Inc.
Anne Applebaum: Autocracy, Inc. seemed to me like the word that best described what it is and what they do and also what their interests are, which are primarily to do with power and money. The rise of autocracy in the modern world very often happens not because of a coup d'état and not because of some street violence, but because an elected politician — legitimately elected — comes to power and begins to dismantle the institutions of democracy.
Applebaum has been observing and writing about the rise of authoritarianism for many years now. She’s a Pulitzer Prize winning historian who also co-directs a program on disinformation and 21st century propaganda at Johns Hopkins University.
Anne Applebaum: The victory of democracy in one generation doesn't mean that you get to hold it for the next generation. You may have to continue fighting for it. It's an ongoing struggle.
Up next, I speak with Applebaum about how Autocracy, Inc. actually works, whether the U.S. is at risk of becoming a part of it, and what democratic nations need to be doing to stop it.
I'm Peter Bergen. This is In the Room.
[THEME MUSIC SURGES, THEN FADES]
If you want to reflect on the rise of authoritarian regimes and their threat to global democracy, there's nobody better to talk to than Anne Applebaum. Not only has she written extensively about authoritarianism including in her books, Twilight of Democracy and Gulag: A History.
Her writing on the subject has even gotten her banned from entering one of the authoritarian countries that she often writes about: Russia. In 2022, Applebaum was one of 200 U.S. citizens banned from entering Russia for, quote, “promotion of the Russophobic campaign and support for the regime in Kyiv.” And she's been tracking the state of global democracy since one of its most pivotal moments, the fall of the Berlin Wall.
[ARCHIVAL SOUNDS OF CELEBRATIONS AT THE BERLIN WALL]
ARCHIVAL ‘80s Newscaster: Just a short while ago: astonishing news from East Germany, where the East German authorities have said, in essence, that the Berlin Wall doesn't mean anything anymore. The wall that the East Germans put up in 1961 to keep its people in will now be breached by anybody who wants to leave.
In fact, Applebaum traveled to Berlin to be a part of that important moment in history, when the whole world's eyes were on a hundred-mile-long, heavily-guarded wall that had been both a deadly dividing line and a symbol of liberal democracy vs. authoritarian communism. On November 9th, 1989 Applebaum was in Warsaw, Poland working as a freelance journalist for The Economist and The Independent. She was covering a state visit by the West German chancellor Helmut Kohl, when the news first broke.
ARCHIVAL East German Spokesman: …hat der Ministerrat beschlossen, dass bis zum…
Anne Applebaum: And we all realized that nobody was interested in anything that was happening in Warsaw. Everything that was interesting was going on in Berlin. And so me and two colleagues — to one of whom I'm now married — decided to drive to Berlin. And so we drove to Berlin, which was then a big production. [PETER LAUGHS] There was a kind of two lane road that went from Warsaw to Berlin, and it was very hard to buy petrol. Um, you had to have ration cards basically to do it. We finally got to Berlin. It was a very long drive.
[SOUNDS OF DRIVING]
It was the middle of the night. And they arrived at Checkpoint Charlie, the most famous of the crossing points between East Berlin and West Berlin.
Anne Applebaum: And we were stopped by a guard who said ‘you can't cross here,’ because Checkpoint Charlie was a military crossing, ‘you have to go somewhere else.’ And we shouted at him, we said, ‘No, no, the wall is down, you know,’ and he said, ‘Okay.’ And so we drove through. And Checkpoint Charlie is right in the middle of the city. We drove our car right to the, where the Brandenburg Gate was, right where the wall was.
[ARCHIVAL SOUNDS OF CELEBRATIONS AT THE BERLIN WALL]
Anne Applebaum: At that point it was about three o'clock in the morning and it was the second night and people were sitting on the wall. And we climbed up on the wall, and there were thousands of people still there all night long.
[ARCHIVAL SOUNDS OF CELEBRATIONS AT THE BERLIN WALL, PEOPLE CHEERING, THE CLINKING OF TOOLS CHIPPING AWAY AT THE WALL]
Anne Applebaum: People were beginning to chip at the wall and I have it in a desk drawer, I have some little chips of the Berlin Wall that I failed to frame or do anything with, but they're around somewhere.
Applebaum remembers everything stayed open all night long. People were even sleeping on the floors of shopping malls. And, she says, nobody knew what was going to happen next.
Anne Applebaum: You felt the tectonic plates shifting. And it was also a lot more anxious, I think, in retrospect, than people remember now. And years later, I met a German historian who had looked at the conversations that the East German Communist Party was having that night, the night that I was there. And they were talking about all the thousands of people gathered around the Brandenburg Gate, and there was a conversation about should we shoot them or should we stop them or should we disperse them? And of course they didn't. But history would've been very different if they had.
Peter Bergen: Yeah, it might have been effective even.
Anne Applebaum: Yup, things might have gone the other way.
Things in Germany didn't go the other way. The East and West united and Germany has been a democracy ever since. But that's not been the case in some of the countries that Applebaum writes about in Autocracy, Inc. This network of autocratic states who are collaborating with one another — countries like Russia, Venezuela, China…
Anne Applebaum: Plus a whole constellation of smaller autocratic states who depend on them and who also interact with one another. It functions more like a big international corporation functions. In other words, there are lots of different companies and they have some relationship to one another and they have some common interests and they, they exchange things, but they're not necessarily all aligned on every issue.
Peter Bergen: And you're friendly with David Frum, who of course wrote the famous line, the “Axis of Evil,” describing the supposed relationship between Iraq, North Korea and Iran, after 9/11. This is not the axis of evil? Or is it the axis of evil?
Anne Applebaum: I just don't like the word axis because it implies something that's deliberately organized. I don't think it's a coordinated group.
Peter Bergen: And what are some of the examples of the cooperation between these authoritarian states?
Anne Applebaum: So, there is military cooperation and the most visible one is the Iranians giving drones to Russia to destroy Ukraine, the North Koreans giving ammunition to Russia, the Chinese also probably facilitating the Russian defense industry through trade in chips and other materials. There's cooperation in the world of propaganda and narratives and communication. So the Chinese, for example, have purchased enormous influences. Just take Africa alone. They own television stations and radio stations, and they have content sharing agreements with lots of African media, and they use this enormous network both to promote China, of course, but also sometimes to promote Russian narratives, for example, about the war in Ukraine.
Like the story about the biolabs. As Applebaum writes in Autocracy, Inc., the Chinese had a clear motivation for spreading that story. It helped muddy the waters and helped get them off the hook to investigate their own biolabs, like the one in Wuhan that's been accused of being the source of the COVID pandemic.
Anne Applebaum: I didn't think somebody sits in a room and coordinates this activity but there is a common interest in undermining the United States, in also undermining more broadly the ideas and ideals of liberalism and of democracy, of the rule of law. You know, all of them have a common interest in that and mostly because that's the language of their own internal opposition, whether it's the Navalny movement in Russia or whether it's the Hong Kong democracy movement or whether it's the women's movement in Iran. Those movements talk about openness, they talk about fairness, they talk about justice. And all of these regimes feel the need to cut back on that language, to undermine it, and increasingly to undermine its source, which they perceive — rightly or wrongly — to be the United States and Europe, mostly, but also the rest of the democratic world.
Peter Bergen: You have a fascinating idea, the manipulation of kind of bland words like multi-polarity, which is sort of like, you know, academic jargon, but is really code for saying, we want to diminish the role of the U.S.
Anne Applebaum: So yes, multipolarity is a word, particularly, the Russians use it a lot. And it sounds neutral, I mean,
Peter Bergen: Bland. [PETER LAUGHS]
Anne Applebaum: Well also, it just, what does it mean? It means that there are many countries in the world that have power, and that's, objectively speaking, true. I mean, Russia and China and India. These are all countries that have power. We don't live in a unipolar world where only one country dominates. That's just true. But they use it as a way of arguing that they now are part of an alternative vision of global politics, that all this old stuff about the UN and you know, the rights of small countries not to be invaded by big countries and human rights, the language of international law, that all of that is gone. It's some Western idea that we're leaving behind and we're moving into a new era in which, essentially — and they don't put it this way — instead they talk about multipolarity, but in which might makes right, and strong countries get to do whatever they want.
Anne Applebaum: The Chinese, their version of this word is the word sovereignty, which is a word that means a lot of things, but when the Chinese use it, they mean our right to do whatever we want, and for no one to talk about it, and whether we want to create concentration camps for the Uyghurs, or whether we want to arrest and kill the Hong Kong democrats, that's our business. They can do whatever they want, including invading their neighbors.
And there's another really important way all these regimes operate. That's the way they use the international financial system to steal and hide money in order to remain in power. Applebaum says Putin took advantage of that system to come to power in Russia.
Anne Applebaum: He stole money from the city of St. Petersburg, he took it out of the country, he laundered it back in, he enriched a whole group of people around him. And on the back of that money, they slowly carried out their plan, which was essentially to take over Russia, to take it back for the former KGB. And they did all of this really in conjunction with Western lawyers, with Western bankers, with Western accountants, with Western partners, who enabled this whole process. Other autocrats elsewhere saw how this had changed, they saw how the world of international money laundering could help them as well, and they began to make use of it. And their interest in money is also what compels them to lock up dissidents, to shut down transparency and to preserve their control of judiciaries because they need to protect their wealth.
And the autocrats leading Autocracy, Inc. sometimes look very different from the autocrats of the past. They resemble people like Hungary's Viktor Orbán much more than say Adolf Hitler or Benito Mussolini.
Anne Applebaum: I don't like to use the word fascist because it immediately makes people think of Nazis. And I don't think that what we're threatened with in modern democracies is Nazis. That's not what an authoritarian shift in America is going to look like. You won't see stormtroopers on the street and there isn't going to be mass violence. I mean, I hope not anyway. The rise of autocracy in the modern world very often happens not because of a coup d'état and not because of some street violence, but because an elected politician — you know, legitimately elected — comes to power and begins to dismantle the institutions of democracy.
Anne Applebaum: And that's what happened in Hungary. It wasn't that Orbán beat people up or, or used violence, in fact he, he goes out of his way to avoid violence at all times. But what he managed to do was take over the institutions of the state. He took over one by one Hungarian media. He captured the state, putting his people inside, whether it's judiciary or whether it's bureaucracy. Through this process, he was able to constantly change the Constitution to be more convenient for him. He sets the rules about elections, so Hungary has elections, and some opposition figures do sometimes do okay, and there's an opposition mayor of Budapest. But he maintains enough control so that he never loses, and I don't think it's possible for him to lose. The rules are set in such a way that he can't. That's what modern authoritarianism often looks like.
And it doesn't just work that way on the right of the political spectrum. It's also the same on the left.
Anne Applebaum: If you look at Venezuela, which is a ostensibly left wing government, ruled by people who use the language of the left and originally founded by Hugo Chávez, who had a lot of admirers on the left around the world, this takeover of the state looked very similar. It was the weakening of the media. It was the takeover of state institutions, and so on and so on. And Chávez and then his successor Maduro, have also managed to keep in control of Venezuela, despite being extraordinarily unpopular, despite destroying their country's economy. One additional element: which is that these kinds of modern dictators have the assistance of other dictators. So what does Maduro have? Maduro is a weak and widely disliked person, you know he would lose in a free election.
In fact, he did appear to lose in Venezuela’s most recent election according to pretty much everyone.
ARCHIVAL Newscaster 1: Thousands take to the streets in Venezuela, demanding President Maduro step aside. A week after an election the U.S. and others say Maduro lost.
ARCHIVAL Newscaster 2: A State Department review of the ballots and an analysis by the Washington Post found that Maduro lost, by a lot.
ARCHIVAL Newscaster 3: Some Latin American countries, including Colombia, which has friendly ties to Maduro, also expressed skepticism of the results, as did Spain, Italy, and other European nations.
ARCHIVAL Newscaster 2: But Maduro is clinging to power and control anyway
Although Maduro declared himself the winner and Venezuela’s highest court did as well, the opposition claimed that they had won.
ARCHIVAL María Corina Machado: [SPEAKING SPANISH UNDER AN ENGLISH VOICEOVER:] We want to tell all of Venezuela and the world that Venezuela has a new president elect and it's Edmundo González Urrutia. Everybody knows it.
Anne Applebaum: However, he has weapons that have been sold to him by Russia. He has investment from China and the investment happens in such a way that government officials get kickbacks through the investment. He has surveillance equipment from China. He has help from the Cubans in organizing his secret police. He even has — and this is if you think about it, rather extraordinary — he has a very intense relationship with Iran. Now, what do Iran and Venezuela have to do with one another culturally or historically or geographically or anything else? I mean, nothing except that they're both under sanctions and they both produce oil and the Iranians have gone out of their way to help the Venezuelans get around sanctions, to provide them with equipment. And the Venezuelans have reciprocated. They are believed to provide passports for some Hezbollah operatives, for example, and help, to help them move around South America and Europe.
[MUSIC SHIFTS]
Peter Bergen: In one of your other books, Twilight of Democracy, you write about an “authoritarian predisposition” which is an interesting concept. What does that mean?
Anne Applebaum: So I think that there's a portion of humanity, and this is true in every country across all cultures, who dislike the cacophony and division that are normal in democracies and would prefer a single unified narrative or story about their countries. And they would like to hear that we are all united under one figure. And that is, doesn't necessarily mean that all these people are autocrats or they support dictatorships, but particularly in times of strife, when there's a lot of division, some people find all of that frustrating. It creates anger and distrust and unhappiness and they revert to preferring a single narrative or a single strong man to lead them. And a lot of authoritarians understand this very well. And so, you know, it's not an accident that in order to promote his vision of the world, in order to keep himself in power, Putin puts out images of violence and disarray and destruction, especially associated with the democratic world, because that then gives him the opportunity to say, ‘If you stick with me, you'll have stability and security and safety.’ And that's a trick that has been learned by Western politicians as well, that images of violence and chaos make some people think we need one strong person in control.
And given all of that, I thought it was really interesting that Applebaum rarely mentioned former President Trump in her book.
Anne Applebaum: I didn't want the book to be about Trump. Because it's, uh, you know, it's not directly connected to Trump. It's a description of, of the world, and then I want readers to think about what the position of the United States is in that world.
[MUSIC SHIFTS]
Peter Bergen: You have some ideas at the end of the book about how, uh, the situation might be ameliorated. What are some of those ideas?
Anne Applebaum: We could start with kleptocracy, we could start with changing our own financial systems and our own company laws. And this is, by us I mean the U.S., but I also mean Europe. The problem is the system itself. Why should there be any anonymous companies, anywhere? Why should there be any anonymously owned houses in London? There's no need for it. And bringing that system to an end, so that at the very least we are not helping the world's autocracies, launder their money, and we're not helping them escape their own political systems to live in London or the south of France or Miami. So that, that's, that's one, that's one element of the argument. I mean, the other element of the argument is to take the issue of authoritarian narrative seriously and to begin to invest in counter arguments and counter narratives. You know, it is possible to regulate social media. And it's possible to do it without it being censorship. You could regulate algorithms. You could have transparency into how algorithms work. You could give people choices about how they want their own algorithms to work. I mean, there are a lot of things that are technically possible.
And there's something else that democracies can do to make sure democracy sticks around.
Anne Applebaum: The most important solution involves the United States and Europe and Australia and Japan understanding that they need to work together as a group and understanding that they have allies in a lot of places, you know, whether it's the Venezuelan opposition or the Russian opposition, who often understand those regimes better than they do. I mean, almost everything I know about Autocracy, Inc., especially the kleptocratic part of it, comes from the Russian opposition. Almost everything I know about how Venezuela works comes from the Venezuelan opposition. And so the, you know, the need to create new coalitions, whether it's around kleptocracy, or whether it's around finding ways to help those resistance movements, or whether it's around finding ways to fight autocratic narratives. It simply needs to be more central to our foreign policies.
There are some countries that have had some success in pushing back against this tide of autocracy. Poland is a case in point. At one point, it looked like Poland was going to go the way of Viktor Orbán’s Hungary. Back in 2015, the populist Law and Justice Party came to power in Poland and they began to take over the institutions like state media, and the judiciary. But after eight years in power, the Law and Justice Party lost in the country's most recent elections.
ARCHIVAL Newscaster: A country that had been flirting with the prospect of maybe giving up their democracy, maybe heading toward a more authoritarian form of government, something more like Hungary or even Russia, has decided not to go that way. The Polish people turned out in huge, huge numbers, over 74 percent voter turnout in…
ARCHIVAL Donald Tusk: [SPEAKING POLISH UNDER AN ENGLISH VOICEOVER:] We had a really tough battle. We will form a government as soon as possible, a good democratic government with our partners. Poland has won. You have won. The men and women of Poland have won.
Peter Bergen: You live in Poland a part of the time, and your husband's a Polish politician. Poland seems to be something of a success story, compared to so many of the trends that you've documented over many years in terms of the Law and Justice party, the authoritarian party, has lost. What replaced it? How did it lose and, and what does it mean?
Anne Applebaum: Their most famous assault on institutions was a judicial, so called judicial reform, which involved replacing a lot of judges with party hacks. They assumed that that system would protect them. But they became very greedy. They wound up stealing a lot of money or legally somehow taking possession of taxpayers money and using it for their own election campaigns and so on. And they became more unpopular. But there was also an opposition to them that really was a coalition. There are three political groups, kind of center liberal party, a center left party, and a center right party, and they worked together both during the election campaign and afterwards to create a government that was capable of opposing Law and Justice. So it was partly creating a coalition. It was partly finding a way to reach people who weren't hearing messages.
Anne Applebaum: So in Poland, the Law and Justice Party had taken over state media, which is the media that about a third of the country, it's the only television that they have, and they'd made it into really a very extreme form of far right broadcasting with very ugly language, very ugly campaigns. They portrayed the leader of Poland's centrist, largest opposition party, Donald Tusk — he's now the prime minister — as a German agent. And so to, to get around that, Tusk campaigned for six months, he went round and round the country, and he went to small towns, and he went to villages, and he went to cities, and he tried to reach people through local media, and through local word of mouth. And I think finally the Polish public, you know, originally some of these assaults on institutions didn't bother people. The idea of judicial independence isn't something that your average young person wants to go out and protest on the street about. But when the captured judiciary began to make some controversial decisions, including one about abortion…
ARCHIVAL Newscaster: Poland's top court ruled on Thursday that abortion due to fetal defects was unconstitutional, amounting to an almost total ban on the procedure. The procedure will now only be permissible in the case of rape, incest or a threat to the mother's life.
Anne Applebaum: It meant that doctors began to refuse abortions to women even when they were dying, and women did die. People began to understand, oh, there is this connection between judicial independence and my life.And you had a huge movement of mostly very young women who began protesting…
[ARCHIVAL SOUNDS OF PROTESTS]
ARCHIVAL Newscaster: Tens of thousands of women took to the streets of Poland on Friday after the death of a pregnant woman. They consider the woman to be the first victim of the country's new ultra restrictive abortion law.
Anne Applebaum: …and who then participated in last year’s election in huge numbers. We had just an enormous turnout. It was, I think, 74 percent turnout and in the cities it was 85 percent. And a friend of mine lives in a neighborhood in Warsaw where it was 91 percent. So people really, really wanted them out.
Peter Bergen: Is the pendulum sort of swinging back a bit? I mean, Modi, the biggest election in human history was, uh, just took place in India. Modi was at one point, uh, deemed to possibly even get a super majority. He's a Hindu nationalist. And yet he actually lost seats. And now he's actually forced into a coalition with people who are not going to go along with a sort of Hindu first, Hindu nationalist India, which is his program. And then Marine Le Pen, the far right candidate in France, was supposed to win the election, and now she didn't. Does that make a trend in the opposite direction, or these are very specific to each of these countries, or what does it mean?
Anne Applebaum: I don't think that this battle is over. I mean, it will be, I think it's, you know, for the rest of my life, I expect this to be the main political argument. You know, what is the nature of the state that you want to live in? And do you want to live in a liberal state or an illiberal state?
[MUSIC SHIFTS]
Anne Applebaum: I don't believe that there are any historical rules or that any nation is condemned to any particular future by its culture or by anything else. And so the optimism lies in the fact that there's always, the possibility of recreation is always there. And the possibility that young people will come up with new political projects and will change the situation again is also always there… I don't think anybody has the right to say everything's over and there's nothing we can do, because that's never true.
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If you want to learn more about the topics we covered in today’s episode we recommend Autocracy, Inc. by Anne Applebaum. It’s available on Audible and it’s read by the author.
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