{"id":553,"date":"2014-01-25T01:58:12","date_gmt":"2014-01-25T09:58:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/?p=553"},"modified":"2014-01-25T01:58:12","modified_gmt":"2014-01-25T09:58:12","slug":"friday-messiah-turkmenbashi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/2014\/01\/25\/friday-messiah-turkmenbashi\/","title":{"rendered":"Friday Messiah: Turkmenbashi"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Saparmurat_Niyazov\"<\/a>So what is the difference between a personality cult and a messianic cult?\u00a0 This is not a riddle, it’s a serious question \u2013 and the correct answer is, as far as I can see, structurally they are pretty much the same thing.\u00a0 Today I want to check off the messianic characteristics of one of the most bizarre personality cults of recent times: the cult of the late Saparmurat Niyazov, glorious leader of Turkmenistan from 1985 until his death in 2006.<\/p>\n

Turkmenistan was one of the last Soviet republics to secede from the USSR, in 1991.\u00a0 The majority of the population of just over five million is religiously Muslim and ethnically Turkman, with small Uzbek, Persian and Khazakh minorities.\u00a0 Niyazov was the Soviet party boss who had taken control in 1985 and retained it in 1991, and if anything the transition made him more<\/i><\/b> powerful.<\/p>\n

In 1992, he gave himself the title of Turkmenbashi, meaning the leader (or father) of all Turkmen.\u00a0 In 1999, through a decree of his hand-picked puppet parliament, he became president for life\u2014a common move for dictators wishing to preserve a fiction of democracy.\u00a0 His cemented his hold by making himself the centre of a personality cult of the sort that often develops in totalitarian states, aided by iron control of the media, the borders, and the police.\u00a0 But this one went even farther than most.\"arch2\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Niyazov plastered the nation with self-portraits\u2014again, not an unusual activity for totalitarian dictators.\u00a0 But Niyazov’s portraits\u00a0leaned towards gold-plated larger-than-life heroic statuary, like the one crowning his grandiose \u201cNeutrality Arch\u201d \u2013 a massive 40-foot gold-plated figure, winged and waving, and motorized to turn slowly through the day, so as always to face into the sun.\u00a0 There were so many of these overgrown Oscars, and so many posters and billboards of the leader\u2019s face, that one visitor said being in Turkmenistan was like living inside Niyazov\u2019s personal photograph album.\u00a0 In fairness, though, it should be pointed out that not all the statues were of himself\u2014a few were of his mother.\u00a0\u00a0 Anyway, on a notional cult checklist, we can certainly check off narcissism.<\/p>\n

The grandiose architecture is another tipoff.\u00a0 Like Hitler, who spent many happy hours playing with Speer’s models of a fabulous new Berlin, Niyazov made a hobby of commissioning astonishing buildings and ambitious boulevards, lavishly supplied with fountains and artificial lakes although Asgabat is in the middle of the desert.\u00a0 And how was this funded?\u00a0 The same way that Dubai, for example, funds its architectural follies.<\/p>\n

Turkmenistan sits on huge energy reserves.\u00a0 That means huge revenues on the one hand; and kid-glove treatment of whoever happens to be in charge, by oil companies and foreign governments who want in.\u00a0 As usual, those revenues were treated more or less as private income by Niyazov and his ex-KGB inner circle.\u00a0 Meantime, public spending was mostly on Niyazov\u2019s pet projects and monuments to himself, while the people slid into poverty, the infrastructure crumbled, and public services were cut back.\u00a0 For example, most hospitals were closed, pensions cut, medical personnel fired by the thousands, the state education system eviscerated, and all libraries outside Asgabat were closed on the grounds that the people were illiterate anyway, or soon would be.\u00a0 Thus, the next item we can check off on the list is the unequal distribution of resources, with the cream rising straight to the top, and a good bit being lavished on showy public white elephants.<\/p>\n

\"Ashgabatj\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Next on the list: isolation from outside influences.\u00a0 Control of the media is pretty much a given for a personality cult, since the media make up the toolkit used to build such a cult, and this case is no exception.\u00a0 Niyazov did his very best, and with considerable success, to cut Turkmenistan off from the rest of the world.\u00a0 He banned internet cafes and drastically limited private access to both internet and satellite communications.\u00a0 At the same time, he exercised extraordinary control over the public media, estimated by human-rights watchdog organizations as being the third most restrictive in the world, after North Korea and Burma.\u00a0\u00a0 Television and radio boiled down to extended versions of the Turkmenbashi Show, with his little icon ever present in the corner.\u00a0 All foreign print media were banned.\u00a0 The internal print media were viciously monitored.\u00a0 The slightest departure from Turkmenbashi worship was treason, and the offender might well disappear into prison and torture, fatally in at least one famous case<\/p>\n

\"215374934\"<\/a>Was there a millenarian subtext?\u00a0 I think so.\u00a0 Turkmenbashi\u2019s stated agenda was to revitalize Turkmen culture and create a new, better, more unified and shining world within the borders of Turkmenistan\u2014after first, of course, getting rid of all tawdry vestiges of the old world.\u00a0 And like millenarian movements in general, it was divisive and demonizing: all external influences, for example any foreigners who were not there with checkbook in hand to do business, were evil<\/i><\/b>.\u00a0 All internal dissent was not just treasonable, but evil<\/i><\/b>.\u00a0 Turkmenistan had not only to be purged of those, but purged of leftovers and reminders of past foreign influence.\u00a0 Only thus, and with properly retrained minds, could the nation follow its visionary leader into a glorious Turkmen future.\u00a0 It is particularly in situations like these that nationalist and religious agendas are shown to be much the same thing.<\/p>\n

Another item on our checklist is a stream of increasingly bizarre and idiosyncratic commandments, with penalties: check<\/i>.\u00a0 Niyazov issued a stream of laws and proscriptions based on his somewhat eccentric opinions, essentially enshrining his pet peeves in law.\u00a0 A few examples:<\/p>\n