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This confession wrongly accompanied the threat by Radek Sikorski, the then Polish Deputy Foreign Minister, to cancel a large promotional supplement planned for Time magazine, which belonged to the Turner Empire.
This is one of the reasons why Borat, an Eastern European stereotype played by British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, is not Polish. It is much safer to portray it in Kazakh. Kazakhstan cannot harm anyone. Its population is half that of Poland; it is far from the EU and NATO. The Kazakh community in North America is small. Nobody cares about the boycott of Kazakhstan.
Borat humor seems funny if you are rich, powerful and ingrained in your national, linguistic and cultural identity. It’s a lot less funny if you’re from a country that most foreigners can’t find on a map, or from a region that is still struggling to escape decades of enforced isolation.
Borat humor seems funny if you are rich, powerful and ingrained in your national, linguistic and cultural identity.
Vesna Goldsworthy, a Serbian living in Britain, points out that Borat Kazakhstan is a “flag of convenience” embodying a “chain of stereotypes about Eastern Europe.” According to her, the region is “the last refuge for a feeling of superiority that cannot be applied anywhere else.” She laid out these ideas in her 1998 book, Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination. Former Estonian President Toomas Hendrick Ilves describes Western racism against Eastern Europeans even more directly: “We were often treated like blacks.”
Complaining, on the other hand, is difficult. When the Kazakh government complained about the offensive depiction of the country and its people in the first film about Borat, made in 2006, there was only more harassment. The no less offensive sequel to the film did not provoke protests from the authorities, but received comments from angry Kazakh activists abroad.
The western ignorance of Kazakhstan is staggering. Twenty years ago, I had dinner in Moscow with a visiting scholar who later held a very high-ranking post in the Bush administration. For some reason, he had a firm but false belief that Kazakhstan was not a Muslim country because, as its name suggests, “Cossacks live there.” Now the understanding is a little more precise, but not much.
It’s easy to be offended, but it provides little comfort. Some image management consultant would advise Kazakhs to stop complaining and to launch a campaign to take advantage of the unwanted notoriety about Borat. The Mormon Church did so in response to the popular Book of Mormon, which was redeemed by advertisements urging theatergoers to learn about faith. But now the feelings are too overwhelmed to bear.
The western ignorance of Kazakhstan is staggering.
Once upon a time, foreign satire was so much better. I was delighted to see the recent Cold War classic, Marco Polonsky and Russell Taylor’s book, The USSR: From the Original Idea of Karl Marx. Malcolm Bradbury’s novel The Exchange Course and satirical guide to traveling around his fictional country “Why visit Slak?” They are funny and accurate parodies of life behind the Iron Curtain. The BBC’s series on disasters in the fictional British Central Asian country, Tazbekistan, ridicules unscrupulous Westerners as well as a brutal local regime based on bribery.
Such efforts would be expected by the nearby soils. Baron Cohen could direct his talent to poke fun at the pomp and vulgarity of Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin or at the brutal praise of the Aliaksandr Lukashenko regime, which is collapsing in Belarus. It could pose an even bolder challenge by poking fun at the Chinese Communist Party. And that would be beneficial, since Hollywood hasn’t made a single movie criticizing China since 1997.
Edward Lucas is vice president of the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA).
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