The Motherland Needs ... Clones of Me!

Remember Vladimir Zhirinovsky? In the early 1990s, he was viewed with alarm as an ultra-nationalist Russian who might become President. His view of the West, and the U.S. in particular, was: "It was all the same to them who ruled Russia, czars or Communists. Their goal was to destroy Russia." Guests at the 1994 Congress of his Liberal Democratic Party (a spectacularly mis-named organization) included, according to the New York Times, "a German neo-fascist, a delegation sent by President Saddam Hussein of Iraq and a Russian general recently freed from prison for his role in the uprising against President Boris N. Yeltsin in October." He was unapologetically racist and on American TV called for "the preservation of the white race" and urged his hosts not to turn the country over to blacks and Hispanics.

President Clinton refused to meet with Zhirinovsky, on the grounds that he was "beyond the pale." In 1996, Pat Buchanan rejected Zhirinovsky's endorsement, which provoked an obscenity-filled response from the Russian, the politest part of which was: "Who are you afraid of? Zionists?" Even the Russian Duma (parliament) eventually suspended him briefly for spitting at another member and provoking an all-out brawl that involved at least 20 people.

Zhirinovsky has never gone away, but his schemes have become, if anything, nuttier. He has supported polygamy ("because we have 10 million unmarried women") and proposed arming the entire population to shoot migrant birds and thus avoid bird flu. And now he's advocating cloning:

"We should clone clever, talented people, a list of people to be cloned should be created. We should have new Einsteins, Kurchatovs, Tsiolkovskys, Yesenins, Pushkins."

Yes, he also wants to clone himself. "This would be good, this would be a benefit for the nation," he explained.

Fortunately, in Russia as in the U.S., most people disagree. The Duma just extended a moratorium on reproductive human cloning.

Previously on Biopolitical Times:

• Transhumanist libertarian: Still against democracy
• Michael Jackson, cloning, and assisted reproduction: The trivial and the troubling
• Pay no attention to the cloning clown
• Bizarre Cloners and Serious Questions