Misha Glenny

This sobering and sometimes shocking survey of the new world disorder takes as its starting point the fall of the USSR and the subsequent orgiastic looting of Russia's money and resources, the rise of the mind-bogglingly wealthy oligarchs and the Russian mafia. Guns, drugs cars and human beings are all grist to the mill of these hyper-capitalists who cross international borders, subvent laws, rule by violence and yet, oddly enough, provide a modicum of order and stability in destabilised show more regions even as they spread misery and make billions. And that's just the starting point. South Africa, Brazil, Canada, Japan and China are all linked in an ever-expanding shadow economy that mirrors and outpaces the legitimate trade network. Crime has gone global. Crime prevention has not.
There are many horrible things between the covers of this book, but it's the sad and terrible plight of the victims of sex-trafficking that make you want to weep. Deceived, used, abused, every night a long string of rapes under threat of violence, escape usually means deportation and the risk of recapture. It makes you want to hit something, but, of course, hitting things is their game.
The globalisation of crime is a huge theme. Each area examined in this books deserves a book of its own. Nevertheless, Glenny's concise, impassioned account of the web of illegality wrapped around our world gives a proper sense of what's going on and where it might be going. show less

I came to this book interested in the favela-born criminal underworld of Rio. However, the scope is much more accurate to the subtitle (“One World”) than I had been looking for. This is an affecting tale of one man’s choice to leave the legitimate economy for the drug economy driven by the high cost of his daughter’s health care for a rare disorder.

This is the story of an ordinary man who became the king of the largest slum in Rio, the head of a drug cartel, and perhaps Brazil's most show more wanted criminal. He seemed to bring welfare and justice to a playground of gang and ended up, apparently, insufficiently integrated with the web of corruption between gangs and government leading to Brazil's top security jail (where interviews were conducted for this book) instead of a graceful exit. show less

I was initially wary of this account of contemporary organised crime. Misha Glenny's 'Fall of Yugoslavia' had frustrated me as good narrative but weak analysis. I need not have been so concerned.

Yes, Glenny still does not quite 'get' that he is being fed a line sometimes by people who have an interest in extending their own power. And, yes, he still trots out liberal-imperial cliches in the short epilogue. However, the vast bulk of the book rises above the ‘given’ ideology.

It provides show more an excellent account, travelling from the Balkans through every theatre of criminal enterprise and ending up in China, not merely as a narrative of crime, the supplier of illegitimate needs and desires in a globalised world, but as an account of how the state system is beginning to crumble under the pressures of these trades.

There are sub-texts here that are immensely valuable for students of international affairs – above all, that imperial exploitation has left a culture of resentment in which non-Western criminality can not only thrive but develop an alternative moral compass that cannot easily be dismissed.

This will pass but the thieving of the British Empire in Africa, India and from China in the Opium Wars may be forgotten at home but it is not forgotten where the thievery actually took place. Victorian Britain was once a drugs dealer using violence in ways little different from the cartels of Medellin.

The bottom line is that once trading barriers were eliminated by globalization and massive demands unleashed – including demands for drugs, risk-taking and sexual pleasure as well as jobs and cheaper versions of expensive consumer goods – no police or security force was resourced or skilled enough to counter the operation of the laws of supply and demand on a global scale.

The perfect idiocy of the West was not merely to drop all trade barriers without adequate planning for the consequences – including mass migration – but to think that destroying rival state structures such as the Soviet Union would not bring the organizational muscle of a degraded security apparatus into alignment with criminal gangs whose main motivation would be purely economic.

The starting point for all criminality, across the world, is for state structures to try to ban rather than manage some human requirement (mind-altering substances, pleasures, status-driven wants or simply the need to cross a border to earn a living). These are the fools who think that an ‘ought’ is an ‘is’ and that the law, being self-evidently representative of the ‘good’, works without immense costs when it works against human instincts and needs.

There is a difference between law as protector of persons and property from other persons and law as code of conduct to meet pre-set cultural or religious standards. While those standards subsist, everything is secretive but it is still happening. Once those standards cease to hold for great tracts of the population, a market opens up where state terror is no longer sufficient to counter the demands of desire or need.

Economic interests then emerge to exploit these needs and desires and these interests are not always the bad guys. Sometimes, they resort to violence simply because they cannot rely on the state to regulate their markets, while those markets are often the only way economic forward for depressed populations.

Even if a Western State ‘takes out’ a gang boss or gang, the system simply re-assembles and re-connects, much like the nuclear-proof internet, albeit with short term violence and the lacuna actually results in improved production methods and increased supply. Warlord gangsters with a monopoly have an interest in keeping prices high and restricting supply. Break the monopoly and everyone is driving down price and increasing supply.

But what makes the situation so much worse is that the ideological basis for state attempts to deny the population what they want ‘in their own interest’, which might under normal circumstances motivate public servants and public to contain criminality, collapses under post-modernity.

It is the wider public that wants what the gangs provide and, in a way, why shouldn’t they? By what right do states dictate our pleasures, certainly not by divine right? Glenny seems to think that we are naughty for wanting these things (the message clearly purveyed to him by the 'authorities'), but we might as easily say that the bureaucrats are very naughty indeed for not allowing us these things on fair and safe terms.

On the one hand, in the US in particular, we see the emergence since the 1920s of special interests who rely on public cash (as taxes) being voted them year in year out, in increasing amounts, to deal with threats that they themselves define and popularise. They extend their remit internationally because, like all imperial markets, they must otherwise expand or die.

Glenny tells the story of the ultimate in bureaucratic stupidity where US Homeland Security's container monitoring took place in China at source to check nuclear smuggling but under conditions where none of the Americans spoke Chinese and the cops were, shall we say, not always exactly not corrupt – what was being signed off was a steady flow of cheap production from North Korea stamped ‘made in china’.

On the other hand, when a State is finally degraded by its own economic failures, the pauperized security apparat finds that it has the sudden need and means to engage in the market itself, either directly or in alliance with criminal gangs. By the time we reach China we have a working Political Criminal Nexus.

What is the common denominator here? Why, the State, of course, and its self interest and failures. The gangsters, though barbarous and cruel, are merely taking things from one place where people are very poor and giving them to people who are much richer in return for cash. Clearly the States do not seem to be doing much about helping the very poor people and Glenny's account of how FARC in Colombia got into coca productions ends up making one see FARC in a new and positive light and the Colombian state thugs (backed by the US) in a rather less positive one.

The poor coca or opium producer, the Fukien peasant or the educated but dirt-poor Nigerian, the beautiful East Asian village girl or the Balkans youngster get the cash they desperately need to survive, albeit smaller than the worth to the gangsters further down the line. At the other end, the Westerners get what they want.

The Westerners get doubly taxed – high prices for their illicit pleasures and high ‘legitimate’ taxes to keep thousands of security men and bureaucrats slaving away to keep those prices high by disrupting the supply lines. Meanwhile, the lack of legitimacy means that the poor do not get full value (‘fair trade’) and there is no regulation of the health and safety aspects of what is supplied. Liberal and faith-based moralists are almost certainly central to the rotten core of the politics involved here.

Similarly, without legal protection, there is no recourse but to the gun and corruption so that the whole security apparat gets suborned by people whose capital accumulation is substantial and who are always one step ahead of any attempt by over-paid bureaucrats to deny then access to their loot. Losses are budgeted into the game, driving down benefits for the poor and prices up for the rich.

It is a mess but no one wants to face the fact that you cannot buck the market except within a tough authoritarian state (which means a sclerotic economy) and that world government is just not going to happen (and that it would simply be a sclerotic authoritarian state writ large if it did).

And so it goes on – thuggish stupid state security systems claiming the moral high ground but building huge prison systems like gulags and destroying the freedoms and wealth of their own peoples in their drive to control the market and thuggish entrepreneurs who claim the same market ideology as their opponents and never have to give true value to the two ends of the supply chain.

Glenny follows the Western liberal party line at the end about more global governance but it is not convincing. It is just a job creation scheme for increasingly inept administrators and some very brave but misused grunts on the ground. Imagine the tax take for Governments if those grunts were administering the trade themselves!

Glenny gets to the nub of the issue at one point: the stupidity of the war on drugs. One solution would be the legalization of human pleasures regardless of the priests and ideologues in order to give fair value to the peasants and young women who provide the services. From this point on, regulation could improve health and safety and punish not the small user but exploitative bosses in between.

But, regardless of all this, the reality is that globalization has, in around 30 years, broken the back of one Empire (the Soviet) and is placing two others (the Atlantic and the Chinese) under severe strain. The ‘alternative economic system’, now operating as both gangsterdom and increasingly anarcho-capitalist trading across the internet, is simply no longer something that can be beaten like Hitler or Mussolini. It has to be adapted to. It has to be out-thought.

Why? Because it is not a perversion of humanity but the very essence of humanity – the seeking of trading advantage and arbitrage opportunities between sets of desire and want. It is the sclerotic state systems that originally unleashed this chaos by going for economic growth over social cohesion that are the perversion of humanity, still trying to contain and control what is essentially human for the sake of bureaucratic order.

It may not be an exaggeration to say that what we are seeing compressed (alongside the insurgencies that grow year on year, the collapse of small nation states such as Afghanistan and Syria under Western pressure, and the internal resentments and institutional cynicism within the West) into a relatively few years is a systemic breakdown like that of the late Roman Empire.

Once empires stop expanding, they freeze up and then they crumble. Mexican gangsters are now at the very gates of the American South West, insurgencies with criminal aspects spread from Mali to Central Asia, from Somalia to Southern Italy, and the Chinese Communist Party’s 18th Congress is faced with direct challenges to its authority from PCN elements. We are only a few steps from warlordism.

So, despite the failures of analysis (or perhaps the lack of courage or interest in critiquing the analyses of his establishment sources), this book is an invaluable primer in how the world really works. And if the world does work like this (and we think it does), it merely confirms that we have been ruled by idiots for far longer than we all deserve. The gangsters are only half the problem – the other half is our less than competent political class. show less

In his very reader-friendly manner Misha Glenny ( of McMafia and Brazilian underworld fame to name the few books by the same author) guides us through Internet underworld and introduces creators of sites for enticing and (this is something I found very interesting) support and mediation for various criminal activities.

Along the way we also meet law enforcement agencies who are chasing down criminals but don't cooperate, intelligence agencies utilizing same criminals for their own purposes, show more police officers blocked by bureaucracy and forced to act on their own [as they say in some cases it is better to ask forgiveness than permission] and security people that get chased down by their own agencies because you cannot trust anyone on the net and rumor can put the person in prison in no time.

Very interesting chapters linked to Turkey were a little bit down-played by the author. Considering entire schizophrenia and complete paranoia that rules the Internet [and especially shady parts of network] it is sometimes very difficult to discern lies and outright fantasies from the actual facts. And then I guess it is better to keep tone down.

Some readers said that writing style was condescending and/or long-winded. I did not have that experience. Everything presented is not given from the expert point of view. Misha Glenny is investigative journalist and it shows [in a good way], he knows a lot about a lot of things but does not use buzz words to let everyone know how smart he is. He lets experts speak through interviews and builds his story from there while making materiel understandable and available to everyone.

Highly recommended to all interested in current politics, crime-fighting and in general how technology changes our lives in not always good ways. show less