The New Statesman leads this week with an article on America’s gulag. It turns out that it’s based in Syria and Egypt: to be honest not places that immediately come to mind as locations for vast US prison camps, but it just goes to show how cunning the bastards are. Next week, those American concentration camps in North Korea.
It’s not all serious though. Terry Eagleton brings a light touch to his diary (they’ll only let you view one article without a subscription):
Two days into a lecture tour of Turkey, and I crack the problem of the missing WMDs. Where best to hide something but brazenly out in the open? There are a few of these elusive weapons stationed outside every mosque, slim, deadly missiles cunningly disguised as minarets. But the US neo-cons don’t know the meaning of such fancy foreign words, so the Muslim world has got clean away with it. Get ready to put your foot down as you drive past a mosque, in case the things slowly start to take off.
I confide my theory to a Turkish friend well practised in English whimsy, who informs me that the words “minaret” and “weapon” aren’t all that unrelated. So there we are. Yet more testimony to fiendish Oriental ingenuity. And religion is indeed the most powerful Muslim armoury against western materialism. You may conquer a country in which millions of ordinary men and women fervently practise a faith at odds with your own, but you can never defeat it.
Just when you’ve finished chuckling at this, Eagleton’s wit hits you again:
In the oil refinery town of Batman (I couldn’t resist asking them if they had one called Robin as well)…
Hey, first time they’ve heard that one, for sure! Who said the left has no sense of humour?
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