Borat Disarms Entire Nation

To prove that all it takes is one lunatic to turn a country upside down, we need go no further than "journalist"  Borat and his impact on beleaguered Kazakhstan. Borat! Meet Kazakhstan's real-life roving TV reporter. And he's not happy:

Suddenly, the war between one comedian and an entire nation-state is getting personal.

Sacha Baron Cohen's creation of Borat, a Jew-baiting, sister-snogging, horse-urine-drinking Kazakh television reporter, has so angered the former Soviet republic that it is fighting back with every means at its disposal - including a local celebrity who calls himself Borat's brother.

So, as Baron Cohen's mockumentary, Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, opens in the US and heads to the UK in November, perhaps the strangest feud in the history of light entertainment grows ever more bizarre.

To date, Borat - famous, among other indelicacies, for singing "Throw the Jew Down the Well" at a US country and western bar, and arriving at a film premiere on a wagon pulled by four peasant women - has provoked the Kazakh authorities to ban his website, threaten legal action, make formal protests (though they deny that they will raise the matter with President George Bush) and buy airtime on US television to correct the portrayal of their countrymen as primitives.

Sacha Baron Cohen, Borat's alter ego, (alias Ali G and Jean Girard, Talladega Nights) has managed to ridicule goats, peasants, women, drinking horse urine, a national sport involving chasing a goat's head and just about everything else profound in Kazakhstan.

Now that he has throughly befuddled and confused the Kazakh government, one can only conclude that there is an important moral or lesson here from which both the British and US governments can learn something.

Perhaps the US, Britain and Kazakhstan should recall the old Chinese proverb:

Know your enemy as you know yourself and you can fight a hundred battles with no danger of defeat.