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.)