Berdymukhamedov is, first of all, a great word that is fun to try to pronounce several times fast. But it’s the surname of a terrible guy. The surreal, personality cult dictatorship he runs as self-titled “Father Protector” of Turkmenistan is not doing much in the way of public health measures to battle the coronavirus. But it is battling “coronavirus.” According to NPR, “If you happen to utter the word ‘coronavirus’ while waiting, say, for the bus in the white-marbled capital Ashgabat, there’s a good chance you’ll be arrested. That’s because the Turkmen government, run since 2006 by the flamboyant dentist-rapper strongman Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, has reportedly banned the word.”
“It’s as if it had never existed,” Reporters Without Borders says of the insane unreality people are having to pretend to live in. But, of course, it does exist. And something tells me there is going to be an odd spike in officially unattributable pneumonial deaths in Ashgabat in the next while.
There’s something very familiar about the theory behind this doomed strategy of enforced denialism the totalitarian state is employing, where if you ban the words that allow us to name something, you stop its spread. The idea is that you can censor the real thing out of existence along with the word that refers to it.
It reminds me of a 2007 incident in which then-President of Iran Mahmoud Ahmedinejad spoke at Columbia University and said that “in Iran, we don’t have homosexuals like in your country. In Iran, we don’t have this phenomenon.” (Homosexuality is punishable by death in Iran.) As if simply denying the phenomenon makes it go away.
But it’s not uncommon for authoritarian dictatorships to think they can dictate to reality, to expect the world itself to be as obedient as a frightened subject. In the late Soviet Union, officials held that many types of criminality and psychological defects were the sole product of bourgeois Western society, which led them to declare that serial killers did not exist in that country. This made it a bureaucratic nightmare to hunt down the actual Soviet serial killers who did, in fact, exist, as Robert Cullen chronicles in his book about the hunt for Russian murderer Andrei Chikatilo, The Killer Department. They should have already learned that you can’t censor reality away.
The Turkmen strongman’s instinct about language is the same one that is demonstrated by virtually the entire span of left-wing magazine, opinion, and academic publishing right now. Woke language policing is the product of a shockingly prevalent view that using hateful words is all that hate is. So, if you want to fight bigotry, you must do it by banning or socially sanctioning bigoted words. In a recent prominent example covered here, this is why there was a premonitory push against “stigmatizing” terms for the coronavirus tied to a place or animal, such as “Wuhan flu” or “bat virus.” People who were going to react to a pandemic that originated in Chinese bats with xenophobic harassment against Chinese Americans probably didn’t need one name or another for their irrational hate. Most “problematic” beliefs are not created because we used the wrong words. And so, like Turkmen coronavirus and Soviet serial killers, our prejudices can’t be addressed merely by taking offending terms out of the vocabulary. If we want to combat real problems, we should argue against ideas more and against words less.
