Close Guantánamo

by Bryan

4 comments

1 hipparchia { 01.11.08 at 7:43 pm }

i didn’t realize that gulag was an acronym until i followed your link. i tried to read that book when it first became available here in the west, but that didn’t last long. i feel like i should try it again. [not until after i finish the latest cat who…]

the area under the curve suggests we’ve held more prisoners for a longer time at guantanamo, but it looks like we’re ramping up to make afghanistan the main island next.

if for some ungodly reason we do get stuck with a president who wants to keep us in iraq for the next 50 or 100 years, then we’ll probably have to invade russia just to have enough room for all our political prisoners. otoh, if we invade do russia, that’d be that much more oil we could keep out of the hands of the chinese.

2 Bryan { 01.11.08 at 10:23 pm }

Like much of bureaucratic Russian, Lager is borrowed from German.

I don’t know what the book reads like in English, I’ve only read it in Russian, but it is brutally honest about the system. It didn’t flow like his fiction, but you can’t expect it to, and he wasn’t trying to avoid the censors when he completed it.

They will continue to look for a place to hide the reality. They don’t want people to understand what they have done.

[edited for clarity]

3 hipparchia { 01.11.08 at 11:13 pm }

even i don’t want to understand what they have done. when it’s not depressing, it’s just plain scary.

4 Bryan { 01.11.08 at 11:51 pm }

It’s interesting to think of the possibilities if the US were to sign the International Criminal Court treaty 😈