TURKMENISTAN DECLARES WAR ON DISCORDIA!

[Cain]

Unlulzy "factual" post, hilarious declarations of war to come later.

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Nearly everybody hates cockroaches. But apparently none more so than Turkmenistan's post-Turkmenbashi (Saparmurat Niyazov) president, Kurbanguly Berdymukhamedov. The Guardian reports:

   

For the viewers of Turkmenistan's popular nightly news programme, Vatan, it was another routine bulletin. But as the newsreader began the 9pm broadcast, viewers across the central Asian country spotted something unusual crawling across the studio table: a large brown cockroach.

    The cockroach managed to complete a whole lap of the desk, apparently undetected, before disappearing. The programme, complete with cockroach, was repeated at 11pm that night. ...

    [T]he consequences of this particular cockroach's impromptu five minutes of fame were immediate and severe.

    The country's president, Kurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, took news of the insect so badly that he responded by firing no fewer than 30 workers from the main state TV channel, the news website Kronika Turkmenistan reported yesterday.

Those fired included journalists, directors, camera operators, and technical staff.

President Berdymukhamedov has been praised for his efforts at ending Turkmenistan's isolation from the international community, and for reversing a number of Turkmenbashi's quirky laws, which include banning opera performances and disallowing foreign languages in school curriculum.

But cockroaches, it seems, warrant special measures. "Berdymukhamedov's apparent dislike of cockroaches may have something to do with his previous career as a dentist," the Guardian's Luke Harding speculates. Even so, Berdymukhamedov's extreme reaction suggests that Turkmenistan's days of mercurial leadership may not be over just yet.

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Yes, that is Luke Harding of "copying articles directly from The eXile" infamy.

As we all know, Turkmenistan's last ruler was a Discordian Saint in the truest sense of the word.  Saparmurat Niyazov named towns, libraries, schools, the days of the week and month and even a meteorite after himself or members of his family, banned ballet and opera, tried to build an ice palace, banned dogs from the capital, required all drivers to pass morality tests and made his biography part of the national cirriculum.  Among many other things.

However, his successor is clearly not blessed by Eris, so she dispatched her Loyal Servant and Messenger, St Gulik, to rectify the situation.  His reaction is clearly blasphemous, refusing the blessings of Eris Discordia, and so he must punished.

[hooplala]

Isn't it sort of Discordia declaring war on Turkmenistan?

[Triple Zero]

"Berdymukhamedov's apparent dislike of cockroaches may have something to do with his previous career as a dentist,"

i just wanted to point out that this sentence is one of those rare gems that make less and less sense, the more you think about it.

[LMNO]

Saparmurat Niyazov was so fucking awesome, it hurts just to think about him.

[Cain]

Isn't it sort of Discordia declaring war on Turkmenistan?

A defensive Jihad.

President Berdymukhamedov will laugh at our five jokes, or he will die.

i just wanted to point out that this sentence is one of those rare gems that make less and less sense, the more you think about it.

Harding probably incorrectly copied it from somewhere.  But yes, it is fairly impressive.

[East Coast Hustle]

Turkmenbashi is gone?

I missed the memo.

[Cain]

He had a 'heart attack', IIRC.  Somewhere at the end of 2006, though the actual date is unsure, hence the ''.

Anyway, I just want to provoke senseless religious violence in a state in central Asia.  Especially one with lots of gas that isn't being put to the best use it could be.

[Reginald Ret]

heh we should try to get the animal lovers into this too, just don't tell them its about a roach.

[Frontside Back]

Well... who won?

[Tinfoilment]

about Turkmenistan


Firstly, Turkmenistan is dictatorship, with an extra level of being shut off from the world.  It seems like the sort of place that doesn't want random visitors.  Sometimes there are youtube videos of people just driving into Turkmenistan to see what would happen.  I think Turkmenistan is trying to form an internal world without outside influence.  (maybe the visitors are just laughing people, or maybe they are fundamentalist christian missionaries pretending to be laughing people)

Turkmenistan is a post-Soviet place.  I think some of the things that are called weird are being called this by the sort of western people that Discordians consider boring.  The Soviet advance took traditional monarchist and Islamic structures, smashed them, and replaced them with a new atheist style.  Turkmenistan kept the idea of a Soviet Cult of Personality and elaborated on the idea. 

The Niyazov administration was building a new Turkmen nationalism.  The book Ruhnama can be downloaded from the internet.  The individual Discordian can decide whether or not Turkmenbashi was as weird as is claimed.

At that time, Turkmenistan's next-door neighbor was Afghanistan under the first Taliban administration.  Some of Turkmenistan's Soviet behaviors were aggressive towards Islam, for example placing Ruhnama above the Qur'an in mosques.  This was part of the Soviet empire's goal of erasing Islam from this world.  In this sense, Turkmenistan can be seen as the southern boundry of the former Soviet Union.

In this era, militant Islam is much more powerful.  Post-communist entities such as Turkmenistan are weaker and seem like remnants of the past.  Atheism is default, and something eternal that will return, eventually.

Turkmenistan has like 4 million people, consists of desert and cities.  Playing as the Turkmen faction in real life is equal to selecting the very hard difficulty in the game.  If the new Taliban regime begins to expand, Turkmenistan is the obvious weakest neighboring country. 

In this era, there are videos of the Turkmen personality cult on the internet.  A person can watch a book being dictated by a dictator to a crowd of syncophantic ghost writers.  These books are also the only books legal in Turkmenistan.  This is similar to the Chinese Maoist 8 Noble Works, being the only tv shows permissable in China for a decade.  The difference being 4 million people or 1 billion people. 

I think a Discordian can consume Soviet personality cults.  This stuff is designed to disrupt Christian and Islamic social structures.