I knew things were bad with EurasiaNet caving to Registan_net -- I see Joshua Foust is even going to appear on a radio show with Eurasianet editor Justin Burke to discuss human rights in Uzbekistan (!)-- although Foust of course has trashed EurasiaNet writers up and down and forced me to leave, but perhaps those were the sacrifices made that could lead to this "reconciliation" lol.
And I knew that Faust and Registan put a LOT of pressure on EurasiaNet writers by critiquing their every blog post critical of the Central Asian regimes in detail on Registan, where they can only selectively fight back (they risk being banned like me or deleted on Registan, like those who came to my defense -- or worse, they risk being muzzled by management at EurasiaNet as I was).
But I didn't know that it was this bad, where Foust would take offense at a remark that seemed just too anti-Uzbek regime, would loudly denounce it on Twitter, and soon the offending lines would be removed (!).
"After a good post, a really obnoxious final paragraph that basically ruins everything for all time," tweeted @joshuafoust yesterday.
Fortunately, we have Registan itself unwittingly revealing all this by the fact that Nathan Hamm, in trouncing and berating a post by EurasiaNet Central Asia editor David Trilling (the Twitter denunciation by Foust wasn't enough!), they quote from the entire paragraph, as follows:
So what’s with the assault on Valentine’s Day? Yes, it’s nominally a Christian holiday in a predominantly Muslim region, but the elites who call the shots are secular. Could it be that menace of the heart, jealousy, gripping Central Asia’s leaders? Could it be, since governments around the region already maintain a monopoly on people’s voices, they also expect control over their hearts? Without more than empty “national values” on offer, they’re unlikely to succeed.
Following the link back to EurasiaNet, however, we see the last two lines have simply been deleted. (and replaced with a different point that pokes fun at some local TV station's lack of knowledge of Uzbek culture.)
The notion expressed in the now-deleted lines is a common cliche in fact for this region. It's believed that Soviet ideology "left a vacuum" and that dictators struggle to fill it with concocted belief systems, whether Ruhnama, Saparmurat Niyazov's cult book in Turkmenistan, or anti-Russian ersatz spiritualized Uzbek nationalism, a la Islam Karimov in Uzbekistan.
The story is more complicated, however, because the Soviet ideology was already corrupted and crumbling years -- decades -- ago. Aleksandr Podrabinek had a post on Facebook yesterday about how his samizdat information from the 1960s was already talking about the disintegration and faction-fighting and corruption in the various power ministries including in the KGB. The state ideology shifted -- remember how Stalin got everybody to get religion (Russian Orthodoxy) when he needed to fight World War II?
And the nationalism that the stans devise in response to their broken Soviet past and Russian hegemony isn't always the worst thing. That is, just because they fashion their national idea in rather dysfunctional circumstances doesn't mean they have to be secular worlders that ditch every vestige of sovereignty and tradition in the name of "the consent of the networked".
Authoritarian governments are really evil and oppressive and intrusive, but do they really mean to get into people's private romantic lives by dissing Valentine's Day? I think that's probably a silly exaggeration, and that the hate is more about the entire anti-Western and anti-individualist doctrines that these regimes purvey. But if you write something on a blog, you should let it stay. It's not like a factual mistake. It's food for discussion, because ultimately you do have to ask whether Karimov means to get inside of people's actual relationships, if they enjoyed buying chocolates and flowers and having Valentine's Day celebrations in a light-hearted manner, without having the entire weight of Emperor Babur now to replace it.
So there we have it -- the Emperor Claudius contrived to pave over pagan practices of their un-Christian activities by installing St. Valentine's Day over the pagan holiday; Karimov tries to undo St. Valentine's Day by invoking Babur, whose birthday was also Feb. 14 -- and Registan can tell EurasiaNet what they can say and can't say. Nice!
