Layers Upon Layers

by CKR

James made a nice observation about American exceptionalism last week that I expanded on at Washington Monthly.

What I didn’t say in the detail I was thinking it was that our American blinders eliminate far too much of what’s going on in the world. That goes for liberals as well as conservatives, Obama or Clinton supporters.

Here’s an example that bothers me every time it comes up in Doonesbury: Central Asia.

Central Asia is probably as far away from us as it’s possible to get, maybe with the exception of some of northern Siberia. That’s not just in miles, but culture as well. It’s further than Africa because Europe colonized Africa and layered onto it governmental and social practices we can recognize. It’s further than Antarctica because environmental organizations don’t sponsor luxury cruises there.

So Duke and company supervise a radio interview of Trff Bmzklfrpz, dictator of Berzerkistan, anti-semite and genocidaire.

Yes, I know, Doonesbury is satire. And there are indeed both corruption and despotism in Central Asia. But I wonder how much good this is doing for our understanding of what’s happening there. (And isn’t this a repeat? I think I read somewhere that Garry Trudeau is taking a leave of absence?)

Start with the dictator’s name. Yes, I know that Central Asian names are not usually Smith or Jones. But getting names right is a fundamental mark of respect. And then there’s the name of his country, which implies that its citizens share his, er, issues.

Turkmenistan is most likely Garry Trudeau’s model for Bezerkistan. Its former leader, Saparmurat Niyazov, insitituted a cult of personality that makes Stalin look like a small-town sheriff. Gold statues of himself, renaming the months and days for his family, all that. But he died in 2006 and was succeeded by Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov. (C’mon, you can sound that out!) It was hard to know how Berdymukhammedov would rule; what a person does when working for someone like Niyazov does not reveal his opinions and preferences.

The United States and Europe have been courting Berdymukhammedov, and it seems to be paying off in natural gas and NATO bases.

Some other people have an interest in Central Asia too.

Many of the Central Asian languages are of the Turkic family. If you speak Kazakh, it’s not too hard to learn Turkish, and some Kazakhs are going to Turkey for jobs. Turkey has had an idea of a pan-Turkic union, but they haven’t been able to make it happen.

And, not to forget, the countries of Central Asia were once part of the Soviet Union. There’s a long history there of Russia subduing the natives, not unlike the American story, although the Central Asian history goes back further, to the invasion of Russia by the Mongol Hordes. As part of the Soviet Union’s Russification of everywhere they held sway, many ethnic Russians now live in Central Asia and are citizens of those countries.

Turkmenistan’s American and European connections are very likely an attempt to distance Turkmenistan from the Russian bear’s too-close hug. To the extent these connections are motivated by a desire to make Turkmenistan more independent, we can expect to see movement toward and away from America and Europe. Kazakhstan has been flirting with outsiders in this way. Uzbekistan is saddled with a strongman dictator, and weak Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan have been having internal difficulties that have prevented them from more of this sort of triangulation.

Turkey is a member of NATO and has been considered essential to that alliance, as the member furthest east and closest to Russia. That position has been diluted slightly by the new NATO members in Europe, but Turkey still lies closest to the Middle East.

Russia is making friends with Turkey, and pan-Turkism can intersect with Russian Eurasianism. There is that history of invasions on both sides to be overcome, and differences about Cyrillic and Roman alphabets, not to mention an uneasy relationship with Islam on the Russian side. But there are common interests, too.

So the Central Asian states are being courted by the United States, Europe, Russia, and Turkey, not to mention China, whose Zinjiang province looks much more like Central Asia than it does like Beijing.

A comic strip can’t convey all this. But Trff Bmzklfrpz as an ill-controlled client of Duke’s does it real violence.

(h/t to ZenPundit for the Jamestown Foundation Report.)

Comments

[zenpundit]

Hi Cheryl,

Thank you for the link and congrats on posting on the bigtime (or at least bigger time) platform of Washington Monthly.

My linguist friends tell me knowing Turkish is a pretty good starting point for learning a large swath of Indo-European languages

[patricia kushlis]

Mark: For the record, Turkish is not an Indo-European language. It does help, however, with learning certain Central Asian based Turkic languages. Persian, however, is Indo-European - perhaps that's the language your friends were talking about?

[Courtenay Barnett]

You will find your reference to Central Asia explained in political terms by the real life “Doonebury” experiences of Craig Murray, the former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan. In 2002 he complained to his bosses back in London that the Karimov government was using torture. For being a whistle blower who did not tow the official line of silence and denial, he was punished by losing his Ambassadorial job in 2004. While one can mock the strange ways of those Central Asiatic peoples, what cannot be denied is the common link that Murray’s experiences has with the Bush administration’s use of “torture” – that odd practice that civilized Westerners renounce and rebuke. Speaking of which, an English international law college professor, Phillipe Sands, has just blown the whistle on GWB that pressure was put on Guantanamo officials to devise new “torture” techniques ( his book: ‘Torture Team’). What all well intentioned, humane and law abiding persons should really be focused on is not the “Doonesbury” distance of Central Asia, but the distance from the Rule of Law, that the Bush administration has ensured, by employing torture, giving justifications to certain regimes to argue that since the US, as world leader, employs torture against “terrorists” they too are well within their regimes rights to abuse opponents, termed “terrorists”. Just think of it, since 1863 the US military renounced torture, to have GWB reintroduce it post-2000. My, my, how civilized we are. Well “American exceptionalism” I suppose – yeah! – why should America live by the rules? A question for you is whether the pull of oil interests and geo-political considerations for the US to Central Asia, really can accommodate the kinds of considerations (i.e. abidance by the rule of law and human rights) that Ambassador Murray was quite clearly, genuinely concerned about? Yet if US foreign policy is to distinguish itself by something – can it afford not to abide human rights rules in its dealings with Central Asia?

[CKR]

Mark: Thanks for your good wishes and for finding that report.

Courtenay: There is no doubt that there are human rights violations in Central Asia. But oversimplification a la Doonesbury misses the point that this is an area of intense great-power politics and trivializes the human rights violations as well. It might make more sense to link Trff Bmzklfrpz up with the various manifestations of our president that appear in Doonesbury.

[zenpundit]

Hi Patricia,

As I understood his explanation, it had something to do with the structure of Turkish being ideal ( in a neurolinguistic sense) as a bridge language to learning others. I'm probably butchering his point -my friend studied and taught both languages ( spoke 6 or 7)as well as "language" in terms of linguistic theory, auditory etc.