Literature
Englishman: In my country women are never locked up.
Central Asian: What a marvel. And how can you trust them with so much temptation? They are poor creatures and easily led. But if one of them is unfaithful to her husband, what does he do?
Englishman: He goes to our Mullah whom we call a judge and obtains a divorce and marries someone else.
Central Asian: What! You mean he does not cut the woman's throat?
Englishman: No; he would be hanged himself if he did.
Central Asian: What a country! We manage things better in Khiva.
Central Asian: What a marvel. And how can you trust them with so much temptation? They are poor creatures and easily led. But if one of them is unfaithful to her husband, what does he do?
Englishman: He goes to our Mullah whom we call a judge and obtains a divorce and marries someone else.
Central Asian: What! You mean he does not cut the woman's throat?
Englishman: No; he would be hanged himself if he did.
Central Asian: What a country! We manage things better in Khiva.
—Frederick Burnaby, A ride to Khiva.
And then, one fateful day (Oct. 8), a runaway asteroid, believed by scientists to be nearly twice the diameter of the late Orson Welles, slammed into the Earth and killed the dinosaurs, who by sheer bad luck all happened to be standing right where it landed. The massive impact turned the dinosaurs, via a process called photosynthesis, into oil; this oil was then gradually covered with a layer of sand, which in turn was gradually covered by a layer of people who hate each other, and thus the Middle East was formed.
— Dave Barry, "We're Just a Few Dinosaurs Short of a Full Tank"
Music
We choose a foreigner to hate
The new Iraq gets more irate
We really know nothing about them and no-one cares
The new Iraq gets more irate
We really know nothing about them and no-one cares
—Barenaked Ladies, Sell, Sell, Sell
Newspapers
True, at the present moment most of America's enemies in the world are Arab. But at one time or another, this country has been at war with the home nations of most of the major ethnic groups in America.
—Roger Ebert on The Siege
Web Animation
"The plot deals with a conflict in a Middle East country that tactfully goes unnamed, undoubtedly because the state of that region fluctuates so much that it could be a waterslide park by the time this comes out."
—Zero Punctuation on Call of Duty 4
"You know when a shithead wins the lottery, and immediately buys a frozen champagne sculpture of his own scrotum and a pack of Filipino slave boys to hold up his home shelving units? Well, if that person was a city, it would be Dubai."
— Zero Punctuation on Spec Ops: The Line
Web Original
Sandy, hot, full of hate, few (if any) exploitable natural resources, massive election fraud, genocides, outbreaks of diseases you thought were eliminated through massive vaccination projects of the 1950s, and a general complete lack of any semblance of an infrastructure, dictatorships, peoples democratic republic of (insert name here). A nation does not have to begin in the third world, but it will usually stay there.
In case you didn't notice, Carbombya is a (very) thinly veiled dig at the real-world nation of Libya, whose militants were the Terrorist Boogeymen du jour in the 1980s. It's about as creative as naming a fictional country "Attackistan" or "Terrorahn" would be these days.
I'm interested by the name "Turmezistan" too. Phil called it "Generistan". I think the reason we feel comfortable making up all these generic istans is because we think of those places as generic. Roughly outlined, notional, semi-fictional spaces we see on the news, out There somewhere, populated by Them. Places where bad stuff happens as a matter of course, because that’s the proper place for it. Of course, our culture industries seem happy to pontificate on these generic istans without worrying too much about the fact that we’ve been waging war on one of them for more than a decade.
—Jack Graham
on Doctor Who, "The Zygon Invasion"
on Doctor Who, "The Zygon Invasion"Real Life
With some irritation, I told him that I had no intention of repeating the various horror stories told told me by those who had been ruined by his government, their businesses seized, their livelihoods ended... An owner would come into work one morning to find an army officer sitting at his desk, directing what had been his business the day before.
Heikal was scornful. 'So we take their money. So they are not happy. So what? At least they are still alive! That's something!' He felt this showed great restraint on the part of the government and perhaps he was right.
Heikal was scornful. 'So we take their money. So they are not happy. So what? At least they are still alive! That's something!' He felt this showed great restraint on the part of the government and perhaps he was right.
— Gore Vidal, "Nasser's Egypt"
"Their conception of the way politics works is that it's arranged by rich guys sitting in back rooms who work out deals together, and the population's irrelevant. They haven't the slightest conception or the way a democratic system functions... So they have a huge security force—nobody really knows how big it is, because it's a secret, but they may have thirty or forty thousand men enlisted. They surely have one of the highest densities of police per capita in the world, if not the highest. They work very closely with the Israeli secret service and the Israeli army. They're very brutal. And they're making a ton of money."
— Noam Chomsky on Yassar Arafat, Understanding Power
The images of Saddam Hussein endlessly repeated on our screens before the war (Saddam firing a rifle into the air) made him into some kind of Iraqi Charlton Heston — the president not only of Iraq, but also of the Iraqi Rifle Association.
—Slavoj Žižek
