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rfmcdonaldReporters Sans Frontières is quite right to note that the decision of the Kazakhstani government to close down the official website of Sacha Baron Cohen's character Borat Sagdiyev, a bigoted and stupid Kazakstani journalist, is unjustified according to the accepted rules of the Internet.
That said, were I a Kazakhstani I'd be offended by a comedian who said things like this about my country:
I'd have a right to be upset, especially because the character seems to be influencing the way that Kazakhstan is seen by the outside world, as the Mail and Guardian noted.
I'm on the record in thinking Cohen's Borat Sagdiyev routine to be a rather crude sort of humour. Anything that derives its humour from outlandish recountings of the mores of a particular group, depending on its effect on the audience's complete ignorance of the group in question, strikes me not only as terribly rude but childish. A thought experiment: Let's say that Cohen's routine rested not upon his audience's ignorance of Kazakhs and Kazakhstan, but, say, of African-Americans, or Jews, or gays. Would he be thought funny? Closing down his official website isn't an effective way to deal with this sort of humour since Cohen can presumably quickly restore his site at a different URL, especially when it's an act performed by a government that's shown itself quite willing to engage in press censorship generally. Exposing the soft bigotry that works through the Borat Sagdiyev character is a much better way.
"The role of bodies that manage the country code top-level domain names (ccTLDs) is above all technical. They are not qualified to censor the contents of sites", Reporters Without Borders said in its letter to Frank Fowlie. „We find however that the Kazakh government sees to it that websites that mock or criticise it are rejected."
"In this way, it infringes the principles set out by ICANN, which requires that the management of the ccTLDs should be fair and non discriminatory‚. We think that an intervention by your organisation would show that it was capable of defending free expression on the Internet, a key issue when you consider the stormy debates on the governance of the Internet that marked the recent World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS)", the letter to the ombudsman said.
That said, were I a Kazakhstani I'd be offended by a comedian who said things like this about my country:
I like to state I have no connection with Mr. Cohen and fully support my government's decision to sue this Jew. Since the 2003 reforms, Kazakhstan is as civilized as any other country in the world. Women can now travel on inside of bus, homosexuals no longer have to wear blue hats and age of consent has been raised to 8 years old. Please, I invite you to come to Kazakhstan, where we have incredible natural resources, hard-working labor and some of the cleanest prostitutes in all of central Asia. Goodbye.
I'd have a right to be upset, especially because the character seems to be influencing the way that Kazakhstan is seen by the outside world, as the Mail and Guardian noted.
The great and good of Kazakhstan are getting tired of having to clear up wild misconceptions about their republic. They are tired of having to insist that shooting a dog and then having a party is not a favourite national pastime and of denying that their wine is made of fermented horse urine and that women are kept in cages.
They are so frustrated at the bad image that they believe the comedian behind such fictitious claims, Sacha Baron Cohen (aka Ali G), is making through his spoof Kazakh television presenter Borat that they are threatening legal action.
A Kazakh foreign ministry spokesperson, Yerzhan Ashykbayev, said on Monday: "We do not rule out that Mr Cohen is serving someone's political order designed to present Kazakhstan and its people in a derogatory way."
Borat, who touts himself as the second-best-known television presenter in the former Soviet republic, has been making jokes at the expense of the citizens of Kazakhstan for five years. In the United States, he persuaded officials to observe a 10-minute silence in memory of a massacre that never happened and caused controversy when he got regulars at a bar to join in a spoof anti-Semitic Kazakh folk song.
I'm on the record in thinking Cohen's Borat Sagdiyev routine to be a rather crude sort of humour. Anything that derives its humour from outlandish recountings of the mores of a particular group, depending on its effect on the audience's complete ignorance of the group in question, strikes me not only as terribly rude but childish. A thought experiment: Let's say that Cohen's routine rested not upon his audience's ignorance of Kazakhs and Kazakhstan, but, say, of African-Americans, or Jews, or gays. Would he be thought funny? Closing down his official website isn't an effective way to deal with this sort of humour since Cohen can presumably quickly restore his site at a different URL, especially when it's an act performed by a government that's shown itself quite willing to engage in press censorship generally. Exposing the soft bigotry that works through the Borat Sagdiyev character is a much better way.
