196 Books: Kazakhstan

 Dark Shadows by Joanna Lillis

Aaaaand we're back! Here's Kazakhstan:

 Here's the summary:

Dark Shadows is a compelling portrait of Kazakhstan, a country that is little known in the West. Strategically located in the heart of Central Asia, sandwiched between Vladimir Putin's Russia, its former colonial ruler, and Xi Jinping's China, this vast oil-rich state is carving out its place in the world as it contends with its own complex past and present. Journalist Joanna Lillis paints a vibrant picture of this emerging nation through vivid reportage based on 13 years of on-the-ground coverage, and travels across the length and breadth of this enigmatic country that lies along the ancient Silk Road and at the geopolitical and cultural crossroads where East meets West.
Featuring tales of murder and abduction, intrigue and betrayal, extortion and corruption, this book explores how a president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, transformed himself into a potentate and the economically-struggling state he inherited at the fall of the USSR into a swaggering 21st-century monocracy. A colourful cast of characters brings the politics to life: from strutting oligarch to sleeping villagers, from principled politicians to striking oilmen, from crusading journalists to courageous campaigners.
Traversing dust-blown deserts and majestic mountains, taking in glitzy cities and dystopian landscapes, Dark Shadows conjures up Kazakhstan as a living, breathing place, full of extraordinary people living extraordinary lives.

 

 "Journalists appeared to consider it the least sexy of the 'Stans', the five countries of post-Soviet Central Asia: less eccentric than Turkmenistan, less dictatorial than Uzbekistan, less exotic than Tajikistan, less turbulent than Kyrgyzstan." 

I mean, what a line! I'm also pretty proud that I *almost* spelled them all correctly on my own. But this was kind of a wild ride, and it seemed different than the stories where a country is overthrown. "'We found ourselves in unique conditions: a single body of the Soviet economy burst open and we ended up like a shard of a broken plate.'" So here they are, they've been part of the USSR for decades, and it's suddenly gone. And then you get some egotistical asshole that comes in saying they have all the answers while lining their own pockets and leaving the citizens in the cold. I swear, I'm so sick of governments. We need to bring back matriarchal societies. 

 

Okay sorry. So you get some asshole in who promises the world and then the cracks start to show. "With its quirky constructions in resplendent gold and lustrous glass, Nazarbayev's [President of Kazakhstan 1991-2019] capital is a love-it-or-hate-it kind of place: fun and flamboyant to fans, a statement of bold modernity; tawdry and tasteless to critics, the epitome of 'dictator chic'." Now doesn't this sound familiar. And then it gets darker: "But it has always had another countenance that it shows to critics who step out of line at home: a dictatorial state where dissenting views are crushed, the media is muzzled, peaceful protesters are arrested or gunned down, and political foes can end up at best in jail or exile, at worst dead." Next you get the classics: banning books and music, shooting unarmed protesters, banning entire ethnicities from the country, or sending them to concentration camps. 

And Russia. Freaking Russia just can't stay in its lane. "History is written by the victors, and the idea that the Kazakhs invited the Russians in for protection is one that suited-and still suits-the Kremlin nicely, tying in neatly with a world view still prevalent in Russia of the Russians as benevolent big brother rather than expansionist coloniser." Oh hey, Ukraine. But of course it's more complicated than that; you had a certain population that missed the USSR and still saw (sees?) the West as everything that is evil. "She bears no grudge against the Soviet system, and still professes admiration for Stalin, the tyrant who branded her a traitor at three months old and banished her form her homeland. 'Stalin was a good man, of course he was! He never offended anyone.'"

 

And, man, it just gets worse. Babies were infected with HIV through infected blood, even when they didn't need transfusions. The freshwater became polluted and dried up into a desert. They tested atomic bombs next to a small town, then moved the testing underground. Then they just monitored the people. "The polygon went on to detonate 456 atomic explosions over the next 40 years, releasing energy 2,500 times that of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima." I just...what the hell. Well now I'm real bummed out. 

Okay but it did end on a positive note: Kazakhstan is working on growing a wine industry! I will be looking for a bottle.  

And this was my favorite line: "It all comes down to politics, whichever way you look at it, because it's all about our lives." Because it really, really is.  

196 Books: Jordan

 This Arab Life by Amal Ghandour

We're on Jordan:

 Summary:

This Arab Life is an intimate and honest exploration of a rising Arab generation’s descent into silence. Personal and panoramic, granular and sweeping, the book offers a raw account of the unremitting mire that anticipates the region’s present-day chaos.

In an unusual twist, the author, a daughter of the Levant who claims Jordan and Lebanon as her homes, locates her own privileged class in this painful history and holds a mirror to herself and her fellow travelers. In doing so, she threads a generational tale with grit, color, and nuance.

This Arab Life begins in Amman in the Summer of 1973 and concludes in Beirut in December 2021. But the narrative encompass a world by turns distant and faded, near and vital.

 

 

More and more of these books I'm reading are just history repeating itself. Can we freaking learn something at some point? And MUST they always equate it with religion? Lucky for my two readers, I'm freaking tired of bitching about the same shit. Here's the gist: country becomes progressive and the younguns look forward to the future. Religion freaks out and takes over. Bye bye rights. Let's look at the (jaded) highlights.

 

"At a lecture, Cairo university student Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood who passed away in 1949: 'What is acceptable art in Islam?' Hassan al-Banna: 'Acceptable art is acceptable; and forbidden art is forbidden.'" Classic. We decide what's okay, but we're not giving you any parameters and the goalposts mysteriously keep moving. What's forbidden is what they don't like at that particular moment. 

 

"When we click away at emojis, it is not the appalling mutilations that we bemoan, but the ubiquitous ruptures in society, politics, and culture that have made such mauling exceptional." Another school shooting? Sad. Trans healthcare being taken away? Bummer. Women being "incentivized" to have more babies? Ick. Gut the Department of Education? Put reality stars and conspiracy theorists in charge of everything? Ship your citizens off to El Salvador? Break out the party crackers. We can't even process all this shit anymore. 

 

"For Islamists, it was really a straightforward affair. They just massaged lore into doctrine. None of it was truly alien or foreign, much of it was helpfully accompanied by social services for the neglected and forgotten, and all of it was grimly cast as the immutable word and will of God, the better to induce the hush of the graveyard. Slowly (bit by bit, not all of a sudden, not out of the blue, not overnight), veiling, once a gesture of female modesty, turns into a duty, and a handshake between a man and a woman, long an unfussy business, becomes a sin." Here's the one part that differs from today, and I find it very interesting.  This side of religion helped out the poor, built them up until they had everyone under their thumb. Somehow the 'Christians' of today have made helping the poor into a bad thing, and they still managed to get them under their thumb. 

 

Ghandour laid out 4 revelations about a regime change:

1. Be Careful What You Wish For

2. Know Your Regime

3. The Emperor Has No Clothes, and Neither Do We

4. Are These Rebels Revolutionaries or Refolutionaries?

The overall of the whole thing is: we're fucked. We're all fucked.  

 I guess I found more to bitch about. But, I believe there's hope in the next generation...if they can make it through this one. As Ghandour semi-hopefully said, "And theirs, of course is the burden of enticing the future in a direction that may yet redeem this region. And how wonderful the opportunity, because they start with practically everything in pieces."