Have you seen the perfectly dreadful new video by the Uzbek dictator's daughter Gulnara Karimova?
It's called "How Dare" -- and what a bizarre and creepy message of...fomenting state-controlled dissent...it purveys.
The one before this, Round Run, was at least pretty -- shot in ancient Bukhara -- and vaguely dramatic -- there was an assassin-like guy with a red scarf belt leaping from building to building and disappearing down stairways and into hidden courtyards. In that video, Gulnara was really a footnote -- and sort of in the way, as really too obviously old for the guy leaping around, if the point was that she was having some sort of secret assignation with him in the tower. What was she, his mother? Even so, the video was still somehow "within the norm" of droony post-Soviet pop.
But the newest one is AWFUL. It shows this sly, modestly-dressed Uzbek woman -- I suppose she is supposed to be the quintessential Tashkent hip but Muslim female -- walked around town with a strange almost psychotic smile on her face. Who knows what evil thoughts could lurk in her mind -- on which she has "a hundred things" as the song's jerky lyrics tell us?
This Muslim Mona Lisa meets up with her boyfriend, who is dressed in a raggedy shirt in deliberate tatters something like a gangster hipster, who is shown in various atrociously edited scenes in a chair turning into the Devil -- like scenes left on the cutting-room floor of "Jeremy's Spoken". Hideous!
So this devil-pair go walking around, and what does the young thug do but smash a store window (!), steal a TV set, and then smash it on the sidewalk! All the while that the sultry-smiling long-dressed gal gazes enigmatically but approvingly, then looks up at the dark sky as red rose petals shower over her.
Now what the HELL is that message all about? Smash Western symbols? Smash media, which is poisoning young minds? Or just smash anything, so it might seem cool to youth? Is it face state-controlled iconoclasm? The lyrics, in bad English, and awkwardly fit to the tune:
You look fine but what's going on in your mind
how dare how dare how dare you can be so different
how dare how dare you can do it
how dare you can break the wall
Uzbekistan is the kind of place where the government strategically places controlled imams in the state newspapers periodically to rail against the evils of Western pop culture and how it is destroying young Uzbek minds.
What are they to make of this video promoting youth destruction?! There's a department in the government responsible for clearance of music videos in Uzbekistan -- hip-hop bands which are very popular on Youtube there, singing Western-style urban black hip-hop type songs -- only in Uzbek with local themes -- and they are even told they have to scrub their lyrics through the government's censor. So how did GooGoosha get past the censors, with her nihilistic story of smashing stores and TVs, which are state-controlled in Uzbekistan, and therefore not to be smashed?
I'm puzzled by this cultural, um, mash-up.
It has about 150,000 views. It was directed by Avi Cohen.
But you know, what's also puzzling is all the dust-up and Twit-fights around Gulnara this week, as Ashton has been going around Central Asia and not mentioning real problems in these countries, and mumbling about "women's empowerment" -- which is a kind of placebo for real women's rights that Clinton has thought up for these countries, to enable her to pose with benign government-approved small business leaders when she tours these countries. I guess this video of a woman in the modest national attire smashing TVs is all about empowerment!
All the major human rights leaders who work on Uzbekistan -- this is a tiny group of people, because most crusaders aren't dedicated enough, patient enough, and long-suffering enough to work on this sick fuck of a place -- have been tangling with and retweeting @realgoogoosha this week.
Now why is that? They always taunt her, and some of them have been making fake spoof Twitter addresses, prompting her to make @realgoogoosha.
This week with the 20th anniversary of the Uzbek Constitution and independence, everyone is hoping (and probably in vain) for a release of political prisoners, and are making calls to this effect.
But despite all the "engagement" with GooGoosha, she hasn't condemned torture, reports uznews.net.
Andrew Stroehlein, media programme director at the International Crisis Group and a long-time severe critic of Uzbekistan's atrocious practices of torture, has been trying to talk up the dictator's daughter on Twitter. For years, she never answered. Now she did. He tried to get her to focus on widespread, systematic torture. And she answered -- or rather, the intern they have at the Twitter account obviously:
“hellloooo!I just asked if I can have a firm report with only precise cases where could be the work done!!!!you missed my twi??”
Of course, there are ample numbers of reports with numerous details put out by all kinds of local and international human rights group like Human Rights Watch and the Central Asian Human Rights Association.
Stroehlein continued bravely trying to get some sort of validation out of Gulnara, and of course didn't. Here's my critique of this approach, for what it's worth: NGOs are too wrapped up in linguistic magic, in totemic symbols. They think if they can get a country to admit they have child labour or torture, they are making progress. Like they're in step one of a 12-step program for dictators, or something. Or if they can just get a company to sign a pledge they won't use cotton produced by forced labour in their garments, they are making progress.
But these are empty, rhetorical gestures, and don't serve that automagical goal of trying to induce Platonic virtue by Platonic articulations. It's much better, in my view, to focus on very specific cases with them. Free *this* journalist. Repeal *this* law. *Accredit these* journalists. And so on. Very, very specific. They will answer with word salad often, but you keep battering, and eventually you do get concessions. You will never get that face-losing totemic magic, however, and it's silly to think you've achieved something by demanding it. Even so, if that's the approach some groups want to take, I don't knock them, as Foust does; let them fight any way they please to address these chronic evils.
So, "dictator's daughter" is a phrase we can all use now ever since a brave journalist faced down Gulnara's sister, who tried to sue a French journalist for using the phrase about her in a French court -- and lost. So I'm going to use it for that reason, and also because while I was at EurasiaNet, my editor told me to stop using it. I guess he found it repetitive. There is the strange mystery of why EurasiaNet first got all over Karimova constantly, incessantly, in ways that in fact were even embarrassing -- I guess because it made good copy and could interest other hipster publications like Jezebel to write about the evil amazonka. Then they stopped.
Then Registan, which was infamously involved in harassing all the major human rights advocates on Uzbekistan -- including me -- for criticizing Karimova -- suddenly switched 180 degrees as well. There was a time when Joshua Foust, the chief Registani twitterer, was brutally harassing human rights activist who criticized Uzbekistan and singled out Karimova. He was having apoplectic fits over the way the human rights and labour rights crowd were picketing Karimova during New York's Fashion Week as she had a show planned (which she was forced to cancel). They were doing it "all wrong". This sort of strange protectiveness of Karimova back then prompted some to speculate that Registan was funded by Karimova in some fashion. That was strenuously denied by Foust and others, and of course was silly -- the Uzbek Soviet royalty might be stupid, but not that stupid as to fund some Western news and discussion site.
What I think was much more likely was that Registan was funded by some US military front group or defense contractor or thing like that which somehow was related, perhaps only tenuously for a time, to Karimova as Number One Daughter. And they needed her in some sort of business or contract capacity at least for a time -- until the fix just didn't stay in, and they fell out with her. So while they were trying to court her, they tried to deflect criticism of her, and when they fell out with her, they sicced the mob back on her. Of course, this is just a hypothetical hunch, and I have no way of proving it and therefore cite it only as a possible hypothesis.
What also seems clear to me is that MTS, after it started losing its fix in Uzbekistan and falling out with Karimova, also began whipsawing all the social media networks and media it could and eventually these reached some of the tails that wag the dogs in Washington, and it was open season on Karimova for that reason, too.
Nathan Hamm at Registan turns in a strangely incoherent piece touching on all the latest iconic moments in Karimova's career lately but never really explaining why a) his site was so protective of her and Uzbekistan for so long and banned critics like me, while engaging in sophistic pseudo-criticism that was hardly persuasive; b) the switched to batting at her harder; c) yet still in fact writes incoherent pseudo-criticism to blunt the edge of what is justifiably criticized.
So Hamm writes this nonsense about Karimova appearing in a photo next to a man with a beard:
Maybe this is not such a big deal anymore though. Maybe the government has lightened up a bit. Really, it is not that bad when you think about it. It certainly is far worse to hang out with Muslim men who wear impressively full beards.
Speaking of which… As that photo above shows, Gulnora does that too. In fact, this gentleman not only has a suspiciously radical beard, but he also is a Turk. And while every flavor of foreigner is suspect, Turks are especially so given their interests in strong, direct cultural ties with other Turkic peoples, funding education in other Turkic states, and allowing the spread of Turkish Islamic through.
Sure, the Uzbek government cracked down on *some* Turks whom they believed were using their businesses to disseminate radical religious literature, and unceremoniously kicked out dozens of businesses.
But formally, they maintain ties with Turkey, do business with Turkey, and Turkey is part of their "international" world. So when Gulnara has an international culture week, it's not surprising that Turks will be there on the VIP list. It doesn't mean that suddenly, the government is more "relaxed" about the religious believers -- they are still going to jail as strategically needed.
You don't have to get too academic to understand Gulnara's message in the video -- the message of the Uzbek state these days. The message is: Dress modestly, you will be seen as pretty and strong by Uzbek men; look inscrutable; smash TVs, they are symbols of Western culture and commerce, although of course, we sell them and control them anyway.
