Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow: Man of the People
The progressive dictator has captured the minds and spirits of his subjects, official reports state
Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow stepped down as the President of Turkmenistan over the weekend, ceding power to his son, Serdar.
I hadn’t heard of him until recently and suspect very few westerners have either, which is concerning because he is acknowledged to be arguably the most brutal dictator on the planet.
It’s interesting how our news is curated, and that there are six million people living in Turkmenistan at this very moment, walking around and talking and doing everyday things, completely walled off from the rest of the world.
Well maybe they’re not walled off, but they’re literally not allowed to leave the country, as residents of Turkmenistan are not permitted to board airplanes, except in rare circumstances.
Why has nobody on the news told me I’m supposed to care about this situation?
Prior to giving the presidency to his son, who officially won one hundred percent of the vote, Gurbany ordered the military to destroy any visible satellite dish in the country, so as to limit outside influence.
Gurbanguly, also goes by the name Arkadag, which means “protector” in the Turkmen language. Arkadag does not sound like an especially cool nickname to my western ears, certainly it’s cooler than Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow.
I think he should go by G-Birdy, The Banguly Tiger.
He reportedly enjoys writing books, one of which is a page turning work about his grandfather, who was a high-ranking military official, as you would assume, and is titled Good Name Imperishable. Some critics say that G-Birdy’s work is not especially “layered.”
Prior to becoming the president, he was a dentist. It remains unclear if he was a good dentist, or not.
He’s also a DJ. In the video above he is shown firing up a tasty set of circulating cumbus music that really gets the crowd hyped, although it’s likely if you don’t clap along you will be shot in the back.
Sometimes to get a party started you need to light a fire under people’s asses, and the threat of execution is one tried and true method of making a party totally lit.
He has a Russian mistress, as you’d imagine, and his children attend boarding school in Switzerland, as you’d imagine.
The thing that I find hilarious about Gurbanguly is that he is actually, by Turkmenistan standards, a progressive. The guy he staged a coup on was worse.
Of his many humanitarian efforts, he reversed a previous decision that banned the teaching of any foreign language, or the arts, in schools.
He eschewed the policy of a sycophantic “Sacred Oath” that was required to be recited to the president every time he entered a room and limited its use to special occasions.
He also restored the names of the months and years of the calendar - as the previous president had changed the names of the months to be named after himself, and his mother.
I am not making this up.
Gurbanguly is known to embrace the color white, likely a patriotic nod to Turkmenistan’s capital city of Ashgabat, which is known as The City of White Marble.
It is called this because it has a lot of white marble in it.
He often wears white, his palace is white, and he exclusively travels in white limousines.
He shares such affection for the color white that he had every non-white vehicle in Ashgabat towed and impounded at the expense of the owners and stipulated that they could not reclaim their vehicles until they painted them white.
He has honorary doctorates from several universities, including one in Japan, which I’d like to have a word with them about.
He’s also appeared in a music video where he raps in a Turkmen-English patwa about the virtues of his homeland, poetically stating in really bad broken English that “Life is so beautiful in mother land,” before repeating “Turkmenistan” ad nauseum.
And he’s dressed like Too Short.
Gurbanguly main priority is personally enriching himself through exploiting Turkmenistan’s natural gas and oil resources, as you’d imagine.
So, yeah, the world is a strange place. So strange that there are existing countries out there, entire countries, that you have probably never even heard of.
How weird is that?
Often times, some conservative American politician who is actually anti-civil rights will brag about the freedoms that America offers, and say something like “Do you know how lucky you are? Take a look at what goes on in Turkmenistan.”
I don’t think that makes me lucky, as opposed to the people of Turkmenistan being decidedly unlucky, but nonetheless I’d like to point out that Gurbanguly is a liberal, as evidenced by changing the names of the months back to their Gregorian roots, and the previous president was a lot harder on the people there.
Thinks are really looking up in Turkmenistan.