Of course, the MSM isn’t covering this story, but when I heard of the death of the Turkmenistan dictator, Niyazov, I wondered how long it will take us to stick our nose. My guess is it won’t be long. Turkmenistan holds the world’s largest natural gas fields. Nuff said…….

“The narcissism of the man is really beyond description,” said Professor Gerald Post, director of the Political Psychology Program at George Washington University. “He has essentially turned himself into a living god.” But now the god is dead.

Saparmurat Niyazov, supreme ruler of Turkmenistan for the past 21 years, was a Communist dictator who made North Korea’s father-and’son act, Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il, look like shrinking violets. Post-Communist, actually, since he dropped the ideology once the Soviet Union broke up in 1991, but in all practical respects Niyazov was a Stalinist until the day he died a week ago.

The biggest of the thousands of statues of Niyazov that litter Turkmenistan sits atop a 310-foot arch in the center of the capital, Ashgabat, and rotates to face the sun. Covered in gold leaf and wearing a flowing cloak, the statue makes Niyazov look like a pudgy Superman, but he always insisted that it was nothing to do with him. “I’m personally against seeing my pictures and statues in the street, but it’s what people want,” he said modestly. He probably half-believed that he was immortal, for he made no provision whatever for his succession. And now, suddenly, he is gone.

Read more here and here