ISIS Hilary Term 2014

ISIS

HI L A RY T E R M 2 014

Cover

THE WALKING PEOPLE

TENZIN TSUNDUE

HART ISLAND

SEXKÖPSLAGEN ISIS HT14 // 1

ISIS

F

or a brief moment at the beginning of term, there was a flurry of excitement on the ISIS editorial Facebook group. No less a person than Afrika Bambaataa had reached out to us about the possibility of speaking at one of our events. We excitedly replied that we’d love to have him. We couldn’t believe our luck. This, it turned out, was wise: Bambaataa wanted $15,000 to speak, as well as the cost of his travel from the US. We considered offering him free entry to all of our club nights as a midway compromise, but eventually let it slide.

Whatever our biases, ISIS is never cynical. Working on a limited budget and with limited time requires relationships to be based on mutual faith and a great deal of patience. Editing or writing for a student magazine is about defying expectations, making the best of scarce resources, and snatching hours between essays.

We are presenting Oxford with a magazine designed to challenge the notion that our generation is defined by its political disinterest and apathy.

We think there is a charge to answer in this respect: whenever the golden period of political action and protest was, ours is not it. But things might be changing. Groups like Anonymous have given a profoundly modern and unsettlingly ambiguous face to discontent. Radical left sentiment has long been missing a voice as popular and charismatic as Russell Brand’s.

And students are tentatively re-learning how to stretch their muscles, with protests occurring in universities across the country since we began our degrees.

We wave no particular political flag. ISIS stands true to its tradition of publishing strong and diverse opinions. We bring you writing determined to change your perception of certain ideas and to displace comfortable assumptions. Inside, we take you to an Oxfordshire Traveller camp, meet the Tibetan dissident poet Tenzin Tsundue and interrogate Sweden’s ‘progressive’ prostitution laws.

Every ISIS Magazine takes the shape given to it by its contributors.

Attempts to impose thematic unity, while one of the most interesting challenges of editing the magazine, are always unsatisfactory. In this issue, we’ve opted to use three sections, ‘Past’, ‘Present’ and ‘Future’. The catch is that we aren’t telling you where one ends and the next begins. You can safely assume that ‘Past’ begins on the first page, and ‘Future’ ends on the last, but that’s all. Hopefully, this gives you the ability to judge the significances of each article for yourself. The power to decide, as always, is in your hands.

Aaron and Charlotte

ISIS HT14 // 3

contents 3

Letter from the Editors / Aaron Payne & Charlotte Sykes

6 9 12 15 18

London Calling: the backstory of British radio / Sadie Levy Gale Moscow State Subverted: the sly art of the Polish Circus Poster / Karolina Kalinowska Witnessing World War One: digging through the national archives / Peter Endicott Marek Edelman: remembering a hero of the Warsaw resistance / Matt Myers Dead, Not Buried: the continuing legacy of Hugo Chavez / Edward Sparrow & Pascal Crowe

22 26 28 29 30 32 34

Utopia (Un)Constructed: Le Corbusier and the banlieues / Daniella Shreir ISIS EYE: Cambodia / Kennet Werner Listen up, Reader / Nathan Ellis Difficult to Stomach: an interview with an extreme vegan / Matt Broomfield The Right to a Roof: making room for Britain’s squatters / Chloe Insergent ISIS EYE: Afghanistan / Alex Sun Training with the Shaolin: the warrior monks of Henzan province / Henry van Oosterom

37 40 43

Hart Island: the resting place of New York’s unclaimed dead / Tilly Munro Boundless Plains: Australia’s closed borders & the plight of the boat people / Sophie MacManus Against Sexköpslagen: re-evaluating the Swedish model for sex workers / Edward Siddons

47 50 52 55 57

The Walking People: Oxfordshire’s travelers and the cuts / Matt Broomfield Running to Stand Still: Rwanda’s development and human rights / Nichola Finch I am a Terrorist: an interview with Tenzin Tsundue / Miranda Hall The Coders’ Canvas: viewing video games as art / Robert Macquarie and Timna Fibert Leeds’ Tetley Gallery: making art out of decline / Penny Cartwright

4 // ISIS HT14

ISIS

ISIS HT14 // 5

By sadie levy gale

‘IF

you’re making money, the government will come.’ Dr Aboo Rahtata, a member of the management team at pirate radio station Galaxy FM, is under no illusions about the nature of his operation. Pirate radio has existed on the borders of legal society from its genesis in the 1960s to the present day.

The most popular conception of pirate radio today is Richard Curtis’ romanticized vision in The Boat That Rocked, which depicts a golden age of legal offshore broadcasting stations managed by an eclectic crew of hedonistic DJs. Yet by 1967, the Marine Broadcasting Offences Act closed the legal loopholes which allowed broadcasting in international waters and effectively obliterated these stations overnight. As a result, unlicensed radio migrated from the sea to urban areas around the UK. This coincided with the emergence of cheap radio transmitters in the 1980s, which led to a huge upsurge in the number of pirate radio stations. All 6 // ISIS HT14

that was needed to start a station was a cassette recorder, a transmitter and a high roof: the top of apartment blocks were an ideal broadcasting location.

By 1989, 600 pirate radio stations were broadcasting on UK airwaves.

At a time when many ethnic communities were marginalised by the refusal of the government to acknowledge their grievances, pirate radio was an ideal platform for the expression of cultural identity, politically subversive ideology and defiance of the status quo. Genres popular with black communities (reggae, hip hop, ska, calypso and jazz) were given more airtime than they ever had on legal radio stations.

In 1981, DJ Lepke founded the first music station owned by black people, the West London ‘Dread Broadcasting Corporation’. Its name (DBC) was a deliberate poke at the BBC. The station was run by the black community for the black community, playing reggae, dub and soca records, but it soon attracted a mixed

audience. By 1983, DBC had as many as 100,000 listeners. The following year the station disappeared off the airwaves after being shut down by police, although not before one final act of defiance: a live broadcast from a public park in Harlesdon and an appearance at Notting Hill Carnival.

Some pirate radio stations gained mainstream acceptance. Radio Jackie, a station in South West London, had a recording of its programme played at the House of Commons as an example of what local radio could sound like and even had its own entry in a public phone book. However, other stations capitalised on their illegality; Fantasy FM, a legendary pirate station that specialised in acid house and hardcore, held rave nights in Charing Cross which continued after the station closed down in 1991.

DJ Hype, who played on Fantasy FM, recalls the criminal adrenaline rush of pirate radio: “Pirates are the domains of kids with passion. Who else is going to hang off a tower block at 3am fixing an aerial? At 16 I was

heading for jail or death. Pirate radio saved me.”

For disillusioned youth, pirate radio was an outlet to hear the music they wanted played and the topics they wanted discussed. It is testament to the power of pirate stations that their content was closely monitored by the authorities. DJ Lepke recalled that if he advertised anything left-wing in nature on DBC, the station would immediately be raided by the police.

If they stuck to music, they were left alone. It would seem that while the risk of penalisation was high for any pirate, the politically subversive stations were more vulnerable.

Pirate radio was more than just alternative entertainment, serving to help and educate the community.

Genesis FM called themselves the ‘Black Power’ station, while Galaxy FM also advocated black empowerment. To this day it calls itself “the only DEbrainwashing station”, Dr Rahtata has made clear his view of their role in society: “It is

more than just a pirate radio station, we are a community station. We want to empower people and give them a sense of direction. Help them achieve a goal.”

When not managing Galaxy, Rahtata helps rehabilitate young offenders back into the community. He insists that Galaxy is first and foremost

Pirates are the domains of kids with Passion. who else is going to hang off a tower block at 3am fixing an aerial? about “education”. This is why the station has chosen not to advertise, which is the main source of revenue for most pirate stations. Rahtata believes that advertising to young people is immoral: “If you take money from not fully educated people you’ll

mess them up.” Galaxy also refuses to play music that in Rahtata’s words, “Makes women look like bitches.” He does not listen to much pirate radio, because he believes that the bulk of the stations that exist today do not aim to educate their audience.

The desire to impart history is top of Galaxy’s agenda. ‘“If we know our history, we will act in a more reasonable way.” Thus the black power ideologies of Malcolm X and Marcus Garvey are often broadcast. Like DBC, Galaxy has been subjected to raids, and Rahtata tells me he was arrested two years ago with all charges eventually dropped.

Rahtata continues to risk arrest by broadcasting illegally despite the relative ease of securing a license since the 1990 Broadcasting Act came into force. His reasons for doing relate to freedom of speech. Rahtata will not work on commercial radio because of “legal restrictions that tie up your hands”. He does not want the establishment to monitor what he ISIS HT14 // 7

London Calling

says about the issues that affect his listeners, arguing that, “A country that is not edifying your people politically is manipulating the people.”

needed by the community. These crooks broadcast at enormous power and obliterate legal radio stations.”

While this is easy to dismiss as radical propaganda, Galaxy and similar stations have had verifiably positive effects on the community. In 2002, Galaxy, PowerJam and Genesis radio stations made headlines when they managed to raise thousands in donations from the black community for Sanjae Lewis, a three year old girl with a rare lung tissue-disease who needed £50,000 to be operated on in a hospital in St Louis.

Only 150 pirates still broadcast in the UK today. The authorities are devoted to shutting pirate radio down, stating that interference with safetyof-life networks—such as those used by the fire services—is caused due to illegal broadcasting. In 2007, an Ofcom report found that 14 per cent of interference on the radio is due to pirates. Yet the same Ofcom report found that 16 per cent of adults in Greater London still listen to pirate radio.

The Commercial Radio Companies’ Association is not convinced. Paul Brown, chief executive, told the Evening Standard at the time that, “It’s absolute bilge about pirates being

While commercial and online radio now play every imaginable genre of music, political content is still closely monitored, which might help to explain these figures. Interference

8 // ISIS HT14

FM, an anti-capitalist, anarchic pirate station which urges listeners to ‘Vote for Nobody’ come Election Day, continues to broadcast intermittently on the waves.

Only pirate radio stations dedicated to serving their communities, like Galaxy, or others which make money from broadcasting club nights, have the perseverance to continue with their illegal efforts. But in any case, many of the pirates of 2013, Dr Rahtata amongst them, would question the illicit characterisation of their operations. For them, the biggest crime is the propagation of lies by the neo-liberal media, whom, at least for now, they continue to subvert from their tower block broadcasting rooms.

MOScOw State Subverted THE SLY ART OF THE POLISH CIRCUS POSTER

By KaroliNa KaliNoWsKa

POLISh 1960

circus posters produced between and 1981 abound with brilliant colour and fantastical imagery. Waldemar Świerzy’s blue woman with a beard, Hubert Hilscher’s kaleidoscopic lion in a handstand or Andrjez Pągowski’s elephant with butterfly wings for ears are amongst the best of the hundreds produced. The posters are works of art and must be appreciated for their aesthetic value, but they also serve as specific artefacts of their time, offering a view into a Poland under Communist rule.

Immediately after the Second World War, Poland fell under Soviet rule, remaining there until 1989. The war left the new ‘People’s Republic of Poland’ destitute, its buildings levelled. It remained a construction project for years. The wooden fences that closed off building sites throughout the country served as display boards for the new, painterly posters. “The street was the poster gallery”, recalls Henryk Tomaszewski, one of the greats of the Polish Poster School.

The poster’s golden age lasted through the 60s and 70s, between the cultural thaw of 1956 and the decree of martial law in 1981. These decades were a time of relative artistic freedom: freedom from the shackles of the SocRealist Doctrine which condemned art to be socialist in content and realistic in form.

This “partial decommunisation of the public space” as Polish poster expert Florian Zieliński calls it, meant that poster design and production flourished. The circus poster was a relative latecomer in the production explosion that spanned all social and cultural genres; emerging at the zenith of the movement. The modernisation of the circus’ repertoire and consequently, advertisements, led to the birth of the contemporised, colourful, witty and artistic cyrk (‘circus’) poster. Posters bordered on the absurd, depicting impossible situations, and emblazoning grey Communist streets with the fantastical and eclectic circus spirit.

ISIS HT14 // 9

Moscow State Subverted

under capitalism. They enjoyed These posters tread the line the circus Poster was the liberty of working in an between applied and fine art the ideal canvas for unusual “third system” without with flair. An (in)famous poster the typical propagandist

by Maciej Urbaniec from 1978 (concealed) Political expectations of Communism shows Mona Lisa pretending to satire or the commercial expectations be a contortionist, poking fun of capitalism. at this imaginary divide. “The more strange, the more surreal and the freer the thought of the artist used in the poster, the more interesting and Thus due to the relative liberty granted to their medium, provoking it would be,” remarks Maria Kurpik, director poster artists were able to respond to the turbulent of the Warsaw Poster Museum. These posters are filled political times through their work. As a means of mass with romanticism, humour, and irony. They draw upon a communication, displayed in the street and not hidden in plethora of artistic styles and influences: Op Art, Pop Art, a gallery, the poster was the ideal canvas for (concealed) kinetic art and Art Nouveau are combined to recreate the political satire. circus spectacle on a wooden fence.

The 60s and 70s saw a burst of unrestrained creativity in As both a sponsor and controller of the arts, the State circus posters, and their perceived innocuousness allowing granted recognition and approval to posters as an art form. them to largely evade censorship. Yet the mockery is not This meant poster artists enjoyed a freedom of design far hard to see. Metaphor, allusion and instantly recognisable greater than did those working in other genres, even if they symbols ridicule the system and the regime. In numerous were still subjected to the approval of state censors. The posters, the big brown bear of Soviet Russia, for instance, is authorities saw poster art as a useful propaganda tool for degraded to an absurd trained circus animal. the regime abroad: the success of the art form was proof “In those times there definitely was a great deal of of the nation’s talent and the authorities’ cultivation and patronage of culture. In fact, some artists note that they manoeuvrings with the censorship or with the system in had more freedom under Communism than they now have general,” said Andrzej Pągowski, a prominent artist of 10 // ISIS HT14

Karolina Kalinowska

the third generation of the Poster School. But the censorship began to sense the subversion: after all, “the regime itself was a circus.”

the Posters were destroyed before PeoPle saw the double meaning

In the early 60s, Rosław Szaybo designed a poster for the 20th anniversary of the Polish circus, yet after it was printed the censors realised that the anniversary coincided with the 20th anniversary of the Polish People’s Republic. The prints were destroyed before a double meaning could be recognised—their reality was a big circus act of political smoke and mirrors and social acrobatics. A new version was then printed replacing ‘circus’ with the more politically neutral ‘arena’.

Jan Sawka, who also belongs to the third generation, openly admitted that the sole motivation for him in designing circus posters was to criticise the government.

“I loved to play tricks on the best system on Earth with my works,” Sawka said mockingly of the regime. Inspired by the political “circus that was around him”, he created a poster depicting three clowns in bowler hats (government officials) pedalling to their downfall. Another poster went a step further, depicting a pyramid of identical red clowns in bowler hats once again, in which the fourth row

spelled out ‘CYRK’ from the letters on their clothes. “And it got approved again! I think someone in the censorship knew what was going on but was having a laugh,” he adds.

By the 1980s, the heyday of the Polish circus poster was over. Under martial law, without a staterun circus, there was nothing to advertise. Nevertheless, just as in their golden age, the posters remain as objects of national pride. They no longer cover public fences, instead hanging in galleries or private collections, giving testament to a curious time for the medium and the artists themselves.

“The poster always mirrors what is currently happening.

[It] isn’t uniformly smiley—even in the circus poster our difficult reality was somehow present,” says Kurpik. “But we managed to emerge from that sad circus.”

ISIS HT14 // 11

DIGGING THROUGH By peter eNdiCott

IN

1915, William Barnes Wollen painted a picture.

It depicts a November morning in Belgium’s Nonne Bosschen forest. A small, green-grassed clearing makes up the foreground, while a beige-blue morning sky and autumnal trees, for the most part stripped of their leaves, form a backdrop to the scene. A crest of British soldiers of the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry enter as their German counterparts of the Prussian guard form a second, fleeing peak. In the glade rests the trough, where fallen figures lie beneath the second meeting of blue and beige—British and Germans fighting with bayonets.

This work presents one moment from the Battle of Nonne Bosschen.

The events took place on one day, November 11 1914, as part of the First Battle of Ypres. The representation 12 // ISIS HT14

created by W.B. Wollen is in many ways typical of depictions of combat that are transmitted to the public.

Whether painted for a gallery, or filmed for Hollywood, the strongest connections they form with the horrors of war are forged by those who were not subject to the events themselves.

Glamorisation and glorification can seep through the divide between creator and subject However, the approaching First World War Centenary has brought with it the opportunity of experiencing

i began to feel sick, and then the trees went uP into the sky and the sky came down to the earth

scenes—previously depicted through one, or multiple, removes—first hand.

For the first time, hundreds of soldiers’ accounts are being placed online by the National Archives.

These accounts, while not personal diaries, contain reports on operations, and intelligence summaries, as well as lists of those killed or wounded. These war diaries are fascinating both as pieces of literature and pieces of our shared past.

Dr Stuart Lee, whose research interests include First World War literature, points to William Barnes Wollen’s work as “very different from the paintings we normally associate with the War by Nash or Nevinson.”

These two artists experienced trench warfare firsthand and a comparison of their work to Barnes Wollen’s asks interesting questions of the

Peter Endicott

importance of first-hand experience in conveying the past to modern audiences.

Dr Anna Johnson has focused her research on comparing the literary and visual art produced during the War and in the thirty years after.

She points to issues that exist even in apparently objective depictions: “The War Propaganda Bureau, under which Paul Nash and many others were commissioned, restricted what could be shown in the art of the conflict. The broken trees of Nash’s work are famous—but we don’t see the broken bodies.”

Scanned pages of spidery cursive paint a different picture from the hues described by Barnes Wollen.

Lieutenant Colonel Henry Davies tells of how before the action, confusion reigned: “A message came from the 5th Brigade that I was to clear the Nonne Bosschen of Germans… Almost at exactly the same moment an order came from the G.O.C. 1st Brigade that I was to bring the regiment round to the south-east corner of the wood south of Nonne Bosschen… in an attack on captured trenches.” Davies took the

first option, and in doing so initiated the most famous action of the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry during World War One. His brief chronicle of events within the wood recount how he “sent A and B companies to clear the Nonne Bosschen… [which] they did most successfully, driving the Germans before them and killing and capturing a good many.”

The details within this account coincide with the depiction of the action created by Barnes Wollen. Dr Stuart Lee describes this painting, noting that “the Germans are either fleeing, dying, or putting up futile resistance. The Officer on the floor [in the centre of the painting] almost seems on the point of realising the war is over, how can they possibly hold back these gallant, courageous, British soldiers?’’

While the artists who produce these pictures of battle are free to exit once their tale is told, Lieutenant Colonel Henry Davies and the men of the Light Infantry were trapped in their present. Davies goes on to describe further confusion once the wood had been taken and in doing so he

illuminates the confines second-hand paintings, novels and films are often constricted to through the nature of their respective media. “There was still another trench held by the Germans in front and there is no doubt that this would have been taken too, but unfortunately the French artillery, not realising that our attack had progressed so quickly, began firing shrapnel into our front lines, so that the attack could not get on. It took some time to get the French artillery stopped and by that time it was dark.’’

these war diaries are fascinating both as Pieces of literature and Pieces of our shared Past Further firsthand accounts exist from the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, which demonstrate the importance of personal accounts alongside the Army’s war diaries.

Written eighteen years following the ISIS HT14 // 13

World War One

these diaries alloW a CoNNeCtioN that should Not Be uNderestimated

action of November 1914, Major Cuthbert ‘Bingo’ Baines is able to expand on the Henry Davies’ account of what took place amongst the trees.

His words describe the difficulties, rather than the triumphs, of Nonne Bosschen: “We strung out into a very thin line… Many of the trees had had their branches knocked off by shells, which together with thick undergrowth made progress difficult…” This fails to align with the triumphant charge of Barnes Wollen’s tan-clad men. Major Baines does recount the disarray of German troops, but in a much different regard: “We kept on coming on bunches of Germans. Some loosed off their rifles without bothering to take careful aim… Others surrendered without more ado. I took pot shots as I ran.”

The discrepancies between painting and diary do not negate the former as a piece of art, or even as one form of documentation. However it is with these diaries that the true experiences of the soldier as an individual can be drawn out. While Cuthbert Baines may sound flippant with his account of ‘pot shots’, he goes on to describe in powerful terms the horrors he witnessed on the November 11. “I heard a ghastly noise coming from the right and taking a plunge into the undergrowth I came across a little man in khaki… making the most agonising noises. [He had been] so frightened that he shoved his bayonet right into a bony part of the Boche and then got still more frightened

14 // ISIS HT14

when he found he could not get his bayonet out again.”

If it appears that painting provides an aesthetic approach to counter the realism of the war diaries, or even personal accounts such as these, this is not always the case. Baines himself is able to describe with haunting beauty how, “There seemed to be a lot of bullets flying about and the shells were terrifying. I began to feel sick, and then the trees went up into the sky and the sky came down to the earth.”

The last surviving soldier to have fought in the trenches was the British soldier Harry Patch. Before he died in 2009 at the age of 111, Patch frequently delighted and fascinated audiences with his powerful accounts of the War. Time has now taken our ability to speak with veterans.

But these diaries allow a connection that should not be underestimated.

Dr Anna Johnson explains their importance, noting the project by the crowd-sourcing website Zooniverse to transcribe and tag the material: “My gut reaction is that these newly published diaries will have an influence on modern tellings of the story of the First World War and that they will generate a lot of interest and excitement. I expect that their release isn’t just a ceremonial gesture—the crowdsourcing element of it suggests a real educative impulse.”

Whether the form is painting, written word, or moving image the remembrance of events now a century past remains vital. All Quiet On The Western Front by Erich Remarque and Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks are both equally, and cripplingly, successful in their ability to portray human experience during the War, despite the fact that Remarque directly experienced the Western Front, while Faulks was born in 1953. The war diaries contain accounts that aimed to objectively chronicle the actions of British soldiers on the Western front—Lieutenant Colonel Harry Davies’ writing is characterised by its blunt and informative style. However, reading his diary alongside that of one of his subordinates, Richard Crosse produces a fresh picture of the man, just as combining diary, painting, novel, poetry and film have shed new light on soldiers’ experiences.

“We had been warned that some of our accommodation might have to be given up… A very important field officer [arrived]… to see the adjutant of the 52nd and get some accommodation from us. I did all I could to persuade him we had none to spare, but he continued to press his demand. Colonel Davies said very quietly: ‘Have your men got lice?’

‘No sir: certainly not: they are all newly from Base.’ ‘My men are from beyond Ypres, and they have all got lice.’ Not another word was spoken, and the major vanished. We kept our billets.’’

MAREK EDELMAN REMEMBERING A HERO OF THE WARSAW RESISTANCE By matt myers

“If I am not for myself, who will be for me?

And if I am only for myself, then what am ‘I’?

And if not now, when?”

OLD RABBINICAL SAYING

“W

e knew perfectly well that we had no chance of winning. We fought simply not to allow the Germans to pick the time and place of our deaths. We knew we were going to die. Just like all the others who were sent to Treblinka.” Marek Edelman, who spoke these words, was, until his death in 2009, the last remaining survivor of the five-person command team that led the Warsaw Ghetto resistance against the Holocaust in the Spring of 1943.

The resistance of Edelman and his comrades did not start in 1940 when the Ghetto was formed, or even in 1942 after the Ghetto realised it was to be exterminated. 200-300,000 people, or around a third of the Ghetto’s population, were

transported to Treblinka before resistance began. Active resistance and self-preservation were far from synonymous for most of the Ghetto. The inevitability of death and persecution did not automatically mean rebellion.

Many Jews exhibited an almost complete lack of resistance.

‘Provocations’ were avoided, most abiding by the various Nazi decrees and orders, hoping somehow that by obliging they would save themselves and their families. Judenrats ( Jewish councils that governed the Ghetto) and the Jewish police collaborated in deportations ordered by the Nazis, and were accorded certain privileges.

ISIS HT14 // 15

Marek Edelman

Raul Hilberg, the Jewish Holocaust scholar, explained this passivity in terms of the history of the Jews in Europe. It was the product of their inherited resignation to the inevitability of persecution.

Adam Czerniakow, the head of the Jewish council in the Warsaw Ghetto, committed suicide when the deportations began. He was not willing to aid the Nazis, but also not willing to call on the Ghetto to fight back.

Edelman believed that Czerniakow had no right to act in the way he did.

He continued to insist that he “should be reproached for making his death his own private business”. Instead, men “should die only having called the people into struggle.”

Yitzhak ‘Antek’ Zukerman, part of the command group with Edelman, claimed that Czerniakow thought he was “going back to the age-old Jewish tradition of supplication when this idea had become obsolete… I can’t accuse him of anything; he was a man 16 // ISIS HT14

with clean hands. But he wasn’t the right man for his times.”

For Edelman, Zukerman, and the large network of Jews in the socialist-Zionist youth—the Bund—redemption through passive supplication was not an option: they chose resistance. For Edelman, ‘‘to overcome our own terrifying apathy, to fight against our own acceptance of the generally prevailing feeling of panic… required truly gigantic efforts on our part.”

‘marek edelman has always been a major Problem for the self-image of the israeli state’ The shift from passivity to rebellion meant not only a shift of consciousness among participants, but also a clean break from traditional

Jewish organisations. The socialistZionist Emanuel Ringelblum—a leading figure in the Ghetto rising— called the Nazi-collaborating Jewish councils the “beastly face of the bourgeoisie”. “If there was a God,” he writes, “he would destroy this nest of wickedness, hypocrisy and exploitation.”

Eventually it was Edelman’s JewishSocialist Bund, the socialist-Zionist youth and the Communists who came together to form the ‘Jewish Fighting Organization’ (or ZOB, the Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa).

The fighting that erupted on April 13th 1943 involved thousands. Jurek Blones single-handedly held off two German SS divisions in fighting that took place around the Ghetto’s brush factories, and saved hundreds of lives.

Tobcia Dawidowicz, though seriously wounded in the leg, successfully led her group to the sewers to help them escape. Not wanting to be a burden she stayed to defend their route out, incurring certain death. On the Germans finding a Jewish hideout,

Matt Myers

David Hochberg barricaded himself against the door, holding them up for 15 minutes to allow his comrades to escape.

This was done with only a limited number of smuggled light weapons: handguns, homemade grenades and looted German rifles. Over 1200 German, Ukrainian and Latvian soldiers were killed, and much vital infrastructure was destroyed. But only a few of the fighters managed to make their escape through the sewers and tunnels. The rest were killed in action or captured and executed.

Edelman, Antek, and a number of Jews, having escaped though the sewers in the last days of the Ghetto rising, also fought in 1944 as part of the the Warsaw citywide rising against the Nazis. The fight of the Poles and the Jews against the Nazis was part of the same struggle. After its defeat by the Wehrmacht, and Stalin’s cynical order to hold the Red army on the right-bank, Edelman had to hide in the ruins of Warsaw for months, living off scraps.

Marek Edelman has always been a major problem for the self-image of the Israeli state. From the start, Edelman was critical of Israel and the threat the state posed to the Palestinians. In 2002 he sent an open letter to the Palestinian resistance leaders. Although he condemned the Palestinian use of suicide attacks,

‘edelman did not see anti-semitism in euroPe as inevitable’ Edelman angered the Israeli state and press in the process by drawing comparisons between Jewish resistance in World War Two, and Palestinian resistance in the present day. Receiving the highest honor in Poland and the Legion d’honneur from France, Edelman received no recognition from Israel.

To Edelman, Zionism was fatalism.

He did not see the native Polish population as inherently hostile to the Jews—as a socialist and antiZionist, Edelman did not see antiSemitism in Europe as inevitable.

Instead of avoiding the fight against anti-Semitism by returning to a new state of Israel, Edelman advocated continuing the struggle in Europe.

“And if I am only for myself, what am I?” the rabbinical saying runs.

The intellectual case for Zionism sometimes argues that those who oppose Israel are anti-Semitic. But Edelman, a proud Jew, affirmed human dignity and freedom over prejudice and sectarianism throughout his life, and fought the injustices of the Israeli state just as he fought Nazi anti-Semitism many years before.

Edelman chose to stay in Poland after the war rather than flee to Israel or the US. He believed that what he and his comrades had fought for was a free and socialist Poland, not Zionism. He became one of Poland’s leading cardiologists, helping save thousands more lives.

Even after most of his family had left the country, Edelman kept fighting as part of the pro-democracy movement in Poland in the 1970s. He was a member of Solidarnosc [Solidarity], the first trade union in a Warsaw Pact country that was independent of the party, and was interned during General Jarulzelski’s military coup in 1981.

ISIS HT14 // 17

18 // ISIS HT14

By edWard sparroW & pasCal CroWe

H

ugo Chávez the man may have passed away in March last year, but his myth and cult still dominate the political landscape. During his fourteen years in power in Venezuela, he cast himself as a latter day Simon Bolivar and created a populist political vision for an independent, socialist Venezuela.

So righteous was his political vision that he labelled opponents ‘Pontius Pilates’, and those who defected from his movement as ‘Judases’. He gained power in a country plagued by poverty and inequality, but vastly rich in oil and with a long history of political extremes. By the time he died, he had entrenched himself so deeply in the psyche of the Venezuelan people that shrines to ‘Saint Hugo Chávez’ sprung up across the country, from the slums of Caracas to the remote fishing village of Chuao.

The man handpicked to succeed Chávez and to continue his ‘Bolivarian Revolution’ is ex-bus driver Nicholas Maduro. Anointed by Chávez on state television in one of his final public appearances, Maduro has worked hard ever since to channel Chávez’s ideology and the political capital it confers. In August he even claimed to have spent nights sleeping in the mausoleum of the late leader.

Chávez’s cult proved instrumental in Maduro’s victory over a broad opposition. In local elections on 8th December 2013, a day that the United

Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) had, quite by chance, decreed “Day of Loyalty and Love to Chávez and the Homeland”, the PSUV won 49 per cent of the vote. Considering the share of the vote taken by Henrique Carpriles Radonski of the main opposition party decreased by six per cent from the Presidential elections in April 2013, this was a significant victory.

so Potent is the blend of PoPulist, nationalist and socialist fervour that the cult retains genuine and heartfelt suPPort from the rural Poor.

During those presidential elections, Maduro could simply rest on the blessing of Chávez. It seemed that his bizarre claim that Chávez came to him in the form of a little bird and flew around his head, as part of his wider invocation of Chávez’s political legacy, was enough to secure a tentative victory.

Just a few weeks before the local elections in December, Maduro was trailing the opposition in the polls. At this point he made the key decision of his short tenure, forcing electrical stores to dramatically slash their prices in the face of rampant inflation. This populist yet economically questionable move was the decisive moment of this election campaign. Steve Ellner, a historian at Venezuela’s University of the East, was recently quoted as saying “in the past couple of months, despite still acknowledging Chávez is the icon, [Maduro] has made an effort to do things differently.” It was a calculated proactive appeal to the populist economic manner of Chávez and an advancement of his anti-imperialist ‘revolution.’

Chávez’s economic vision is largely considered to have failed, even by the admission of Finance Minister Nelson Merentes. In September 2013, acknowledging the structural problems in the economy, he told the Venezuelan national television network Televen that “this is a government that has won 18 elections, that has had social achievements.

But it still has to be successful on the economy.” This public expression of doubt did not sit well with his superiors and he was summarily removed from his post in January 2014.

The PSUV’s economic policy ranges from the mildly successful, in the ISIS HT14 // 19

Dead Not Buried

maduro claimed to have sPent nights sleePing in the mausoleum of the late leader case of social policy, to the farcical, in the case of currency exchange. In an infantile nationalistic move, the government insisted on setting the unrealistically optimistic exchange of 6.3 Bolivars to the US dollar.

Black market exchange rates, which are widely and openly available, can reach up to twelve times this. In an act of stubbornness, the government in January further tightened controls on currency exchange in an attempt to tackle raging and incessant inflation, which has reached 56 per cent in 2014. Economists suggest that this is likely to further fuel the booming black market.

Such obtuse economic management has also helped to produce a new class of wealthy government officials, referred to as ‘Chavistas’. The visibility of their wealth and blatant corruption sits badly with the urban populace.

Carlos Paredes, an engineering student and resident of Caracas, reports that “when travelling in their expensive cars in the highways, their agents stop the traffic, so Venezuelans

20 // ISIS HT14

get angry and hurl abuse at them.”

Bizarrely, despite the vast economic mismanagement and corruption of his political acolytes, the cult of Chávez himself does not appear tarnished.

So potent is the blend of populist, nationalist and socialist fervour that the cult retains genuine and heartfelt support from the rural poor, who make up the majority of the PSUV’s following. So long as oil revenue and political rhetoric continue to be channelled to this previously underrepresented block of the electorate, it is difficult to see the opposition gaining traction at the ballot box. Capriles, having thrown “everything humanly possible” at the recent local elections, now recognises the need for dialogue with the incumbent majority. This is a major concession considering his previous defiance.

Similarly, US Secretary of State John Kerry reached out to Maduro’s government after the local elections, saying he is “ready and willing” to improve bilateral ties. Both internally

and externally, the cult of Chávez and his style of government appear secure, at least in the short run.

According to Malcolm Daes, Emeritus Professor of Latin American politics and Fellow of All Souls, failing to take action on Venezuela’s continued economic problems could harm Maduro’s electoral credibility, since “Bolivarian economic policy has been manifestly disastrous and is certainly unviable in the long run.” This year, for example, he is faced with the frightening prospect of having to raise the domestic price of oil. Inflation, scarcities and corruption could lead to an ever-increasing polarisation of the electorate.

For now at least, Maduro’s claim that “the Venezuelan people have said to the world that the Bolivarian revolution continues stronger than ever” appears justified. He must hope that the Venezuelan people will continue to believe in the legacy of Chávez and the little bird flying round his head.

despite the vast eCoNomiC mismaNagemeNt aNd CorruptioN of his politiCal aColytes, the Cult of Chavez himself does Not appear tarNished.

ISIS

ISIS HT14 // 21

By daNiella shreir

22 // ISIS HT14

Daniella Shreir

the Fondation Le Corbusier, brigades of tourists take pictures of empty corners as they shuffle through unfurnished rooms, with blue plastic bags covering their shoes so as not to scratch the floor.

Nestled within the heart of the 16th arrondissement in Paris, one of the city’s safest and most affluent neighbourhoods, the foundation honours the legacy of the Swiss architect Le Corbusier, nicknamed “apostle of reinforced concrete”: a legacy at once celebrated and reviled.

At the foundation, you can look, but are forbidden from touching, and the whitewashed walls are notably free from information plaques.

The innovator of the movement of Modernity, with his love of order, rhetoric of hygiene and contempt for complexity, would surely have been proud.

Le Corbusier’s most ambitious conceptions may never fully have been realised, but his very specific vision of utopia has nevertheless been hugely influential. In his Ville Contemporaine (Contemporary City—1922) and Ville Radieuse (Radiant City—1924) he envisaged the creation of a city whose constructs and organisation would provide all the prerequisites for complete fulfilment and happiness.

He conceived of the ideal community as a “machine for living”—for 3 million people—and was convinced that it would be created by designs that placed people in maximally close proximity. Rooms should be openplan; dwellings should be piled on top of one another in tall towers; and towers should be aggregated to form vertical cities.

The focal point would be a group of six multi-storey skyscrapers built on steel frames. These would be placed evenly between small gardens: “the tower block glittering above the greenery”.

A multi-level traffic interchange would ferry people in and out of this centre.

In this city, all elements conducive to a chance encounter with a neighbour would be eliminated and there would be no such thing as ‘next-door’ or ‘across-the-road’. Theatres, churches and civic monuments would exist, but all signifiers would be removed; they would be swallowed within the same homogenous towers as businesses and apartments.

Most strikingly, the proletariat would be placed firmly outside this city, far away from the urban elite: the two areas demarcated by a belt of greenery. The affluent majority would therefore have no need to set foot outside their self-sufficient bubble, while the proletariat would enter only to work. Eight hours in a factory as a contribution to society, so Le Corbusier envisaged.

Despite the fact that these plans were never fully realised, Le Corbusier’s vision was so developed that his critics had reason to be scared.

Pierre Francastel, a renowned French historian, warned that it would become the universe of a concentration camp. Le Corbusier must have known what his polemic implied. At the end of an interview

1935 book on his Radiant City “To Authority”.

To facilitate the birth of these utopias, Corbusian ideology demanded the total demolition of traditional neighbourhoods, complete with everything that might root people in their history, reflect their culture and heritage and give them a sense of belonging to something which transcended their own fleeting existence. Within the plans for his Contemporary City lies a map of Paris. The Marais district—Paris’s diverse cultural centre—is frantically scrawled over, obliterated by a black marker pen. For this was the area that he had designated the ideal site for the adoption of his master plan.

But ironically, it was outside Paris’ Périphérique that town planners, inspired by his vision, sought the embodiment of his dream. The so-called ‘Trente Glorieuses’ (The Glorious Thirty, 1945-75) witnessed the rapid growth of the banlieue, a word that barely needs translation, as its connotations speak far louder than the word itself.

Le Corbusier’s magic number of three million was invoked, but instead of

at the foundation, you can look, but are forbidden from touching with the Communist newspaper L’Humanité, he asked them to include a disclaimer that he was not, in fact, a supporter of the French fascist party Action Française.

Yet flicking through photographs of these models, we can imagine prospective citizens under Le Corbusier’s looming hand, becoming insignificant and subservient to his architectural hegemony; to his delusions of an all-pervasive godlike power. This isn’t far from Le Corbusier’s own fantasies. He believed that only a dictatorial government was equipped to “inaugurate the age of harmony”, and so dedicated the

compact cities, it was 3 million council properties that were built between 1955 and 1975 to help meet France’s desperate need for social housing.

Paradise it was not, and, little by little, those who could find work elsewhere moved out. These areas became zones of relegation, with an unemployment rate 1.5 times higher than that of Paris, and with a predominantly immigrant population.

That which was supposed to be ‘contemporary’ and ‘radiant’ rapidly developed into a ghetto.

In September 2005, riots broke out all over France. Ten days of burning and ISIS HT14 // 23

Utopia (Un)Constructed

looting were sparked by an incident in Clichy-sous-Bois, in which two teenagers, sons of working-class immigrants, were electrocuted at a power sub-station while trying to run away from the police. On certain nights of subsequent rioting, as many as 1500 cars were set on fire.

Reports in the New York Times and the Washington Post both made the connection with social housing in their commentary on events: “With unrest expanding through the northern suburbs of high-rise apartments that house some of France’s poorest immigrant populations, senior government officials were debating how to curb the violence,” and “In life, they were uncelebrated. In death,

Ziad Benna, 17, and Bouna Traoré 15, have inspired more than ten days of riots that have spread from housing projects in the suburbs of Paris to cities and towns across France.”

In every suburb subject to unrest, the architectural typology was the same. Police refused to patrol.

Instead, helicopters hovered in broad daylight. Reporters were threatened by gangs. Nicolas Sarkozy, famously, as President, wouldn’t dare set foot in these areas.

The deleterious effects of life in a high rise and on housing estates have been well-documented by the architectural establishment, and by politicians and social commentators in France, as well

the marais district - Paris’s diverse, cultural centre - is frantically scrawled over, obliterated by a black marker Pen 24 // ISIS HT14

as elsewhere. In 1997, years before the riots, Pieter Uittenhove condemned the ‘Modern’ architecture in the banlieue as a “space of exclusion.”

In the 2007 Architectural Record, Sam Lubell denounced these slablike apartment buildings, calling them “tinderboxes for trouble,” and advocating intervention to “stave off a sense of alienation and resentment”.

And, in a 2007 article in Volume, Steven Wassenaar called for “livable, spatial architecture”.

All three of these commentators rejected the Modernist idealism that had “set itself up as a sort of Noah’s Ark to save civilisation from ruin”. They condemned the exclusive reliance on reinforced concrete, the uniformity of housing units, and the abundance of “towering blank walls framing empty courtyards”. In other words, they identified ways in which this architecture had failed to provide comfortable shelter for the working

Daniella Shreir

class in order to “diffuse revolutionary tendencies”. Once regarded as prototypes for housing around the world, these towers now seem to herald violence everywhere, not only in France.

There are reasons why the classical architects built as they did; why their buildings are embellished with cornicing and coving; why we are attracted to capitals and corbels; pillars and pediments, tracery and turrets. They are an expression of, and appeal to, what makes us essentially human—that we strive to enhance our world; to elevate what is functional above the function that it serves.

The rounded forms of domes and pillars reflect the curves of the human body and the forms of the natural world on which life depends. These buildings, with their soft lines and understanding of the horizontal as well as the vertical, draw the eye

that which was suPPosed to be ‘contemPorary’ and ‘radiant’, instead, raPidly develoPed into a ghetto; a dustbin for the dregs of society to marvel at their intricacy and are in harmony with the environment in which they stand; they embrace those who survey them, rather than standing over and in opposition to them, rather than intimidating and repelling.

Residents are already hugely disadvantaged and consigned to the periphery of society, but it seems impossible to deny that the sterility of their living conditions reinforce and entrench their estrangement, rather than providing any form of comfort and consolation; anything which might elevate the spirit.

Corbusier’s dream—his dedication to the high-rise block, and, particularly, to the rigorous separation of affluent and impoverished—has spawned a pernicious apartheid, largely unseen by tourists and visitors to the Fondation Le Corbusier. This separation lurks in and around that city of dreams, the city where he lived and worked: Paris.

It is difficult—perhaps impossible— to disentangle cause and effect. To what extent is the environment in which the inhabitants of the banlieue live responsible for their alienation?

ISIS HT14 // 25

26 // ISIS EYE

NAT H A N EL L IS

ATTENTION PLEASE, READERS YOU ARE READING THIS IN A FONT CALLED GILL SANS. IT IS ONE OF THE MOST FAMOUS FONTS IN THE WORLD, POPULAR FOR ITS CLEAN, ORDERED STYLE AND BOLD, ROUND LETTERING. IT LOOKS NICE, DOESN’T IT? IT IS THE OFFICIAL TYPEFACE FOR THE BBC, THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT’S WWII PROPAGANDA, THE COVERS OF PENGUIN PAPERBACKS, AND THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. THE TYPOGRAPHER WHO DESIGNED IT WAS CALLED ERIC GILL. GILL, AS WELL AS ENJOYING SCULPTURE AND TYPOGRAPHY, ENGAGED IN SEXUAL CONGRESS WITH HIS SISTER, DAUGHTER, AND DOG. NEXT TIME YOU SEE GILL’S TYPEFACE, KEEP CALM AND IGNORE THE INCEST. HAPPY TYPING.

Difficult to Stomach:

an interv iew w ith an ex treme vegan By matt Broomfield

“I

consume all my urine,” Brian Nexus tells me. “It’s the third most powerful thing in my lifestyle [after] sungazing and meditation.”

This is far from the most unusual aspect of his diet—an extreme form of raw veganism known as ‘sproutarianism’.

Raw vegans eschew all animal products and any foodstuff heated above 48˚C. Fruitarians limit themselves even further: many will not even pluck an apple from a tree, instead eating only fruit and nuts which have fallen naturally to the ground.

As a sproutarian, Brian has overtaken even hard-line fruitarians, pushing as far down the path of raw veganism as is humanly possible. The foodstuffs on which his diet is almost entirely based are not Brussells sprouts, but the fresh sprouts of plants such as “sunflower, ryegrass, alfalfa, fenugreek, [and] broccoli”.

Brian and his fellow sproutarians believe that fruit and vegetables lose their nutritional value when picked, blended or prepared in any way. “Raw sprouted foods are so far superior to any other foods on the planet,” he argues. “Isn’t it best to eat food that is still growing until you take your first bite?”

Brian’s daily routine is ascetic in the extreme. Urine aside, he subsists on an unbelievably frugal selection of

vegetation: “about 90 per cent of my diet is sprout based, and the other ten per cent is comprised of algae, weeds [and] sea vegetables.” For example, his lunch consists of “green algae chlorella, a sea weed (often dulse

urine aside, brian subsists on an unbelievably frugal selection of vegetation. or kelp), a soil based bacterial B12 supplement and… a sprouted seed of sunflower, chia, sesame or occasionally some flax sprouts.” Once a week, he treats himself to some “sprouted fermented nuts”. His evening meal is a similar blend of algae and legume sprouts, washed down with another glass of urine. After tending to his sprout farm and “meditat[ing] for at least 2.5 hours on cosmic sound and light” Brian goes to bed.

Our conversation descends at times into the realms of esoteric pseudoscience and spiritual psychobabble. “It is our birth right to reach perfection because we are all created perfect in the image of our creator as a vibrational energy. We are all connected, can read minds, can travel the cosmos as energy… we can do everything,” Brian earnestly assures me.

Comments like this do Brian’s campaign no favours. His claim that “l am no guru, and l come across like

an ordinary man to anyone on the street” rings somewhat hollow when considered alongside his belief that “l am constantly tapping into and guided by the unlimited intelligence of the divine cosmic powers.”

The justifications Brian offers for his diet range from the reasonable (the rich concentration of various nutrients in fresh plant sprouts) to the absurd (an apparently pressing need to preserve the chi or electrical life-force of vegetable matter). The nutritional community remains divided as to the dangers and benefits of a properly supplemented raw vegan diet.

But to Brian, sproutarianism is a lifestyle rather than merely a diet.

Maintaining and harvesting a sprout farm is an immensely timeconsuming occupation, and Brian has chosen to build his whole existence around diet and meditation. “I am doing what our ancestors always did,” he tells me. “I live a simple life and grow my food and avoid TV, media and all those distractions.”

You do not have to believe as Brian does that we live under “a dark cloud of illusion set up by The System” to appreciate the tranquillity he gains from his diet of mung beans and alfalfa shoots. “I am living the dream,” he tells me. And he honestly seems to believe it.

Brian Nexus runs and moderates www. thesproutarian.com, and is the world’s foremost advocate of the sproutarian lifestyle. Visit his website for more information.

ISIS HT14 // 29

The right M a king S

warms of Hell’s Angels swamp people’s homes while they are on holiday, changing their locks and inviting the local drug lord round for tea. So goes the powerful and cruel myth of squatting.

Housing supply has not kept pace with demand for many decades in the UK. In total, almost 125,000 new houses were supplied between 2012 and 2013, well below the estimated 232,000 required. In the meantime, over 700,000 homes in England are empty, and around 270,000 of those have been empty for over six months.

Putting two and two together has been the last ditch attempt of many vulnerable people to keep a roof over their head. They squat in buildings that stand empty as they await development, repair or demolition.

But despite the protection of four walls, squatters are only ever an eviction notice away from the streets.

This instability is due in part to the media reactions of the ’60s and ’70s, when the last major wave of squatting movements took place. Prior to this, people were tolerant: “The bad things about it were very much exaggerated by some of the local press, not all local press: it was mixed, because squatting was ambivalent then,” remembers ‘Weed’, a well known contemporary squatting activist, in the University of Oxford-led Around 1968 oral history project. But in 1969, the media went on the attack ex nihilo. In one example, an attempted squat in 144 Piccadilly was keenly scrutinised.

Sub≠sequent demonising coverage fuelled a panic among home owners.

The paranoia produced is still reflected in the vindictive anti-squatting laws of today.

30 // ISIS HT14

room

The occupiers of this empty mansion were the London Street Commune, a loosely organised group of mainly younger, single people who were excluded from the normal routes to social housing by their marital status.

They lived peacefully until a skinhead gang attacked the home with a barrage of stones. The occupiers used water filled containers in relatively harmless retaliation.

these ‘hiPPie thugs’, screamed the daily telegraPh, were a threat to society.

The police force cleared the building soon afterwards. One policeman made a beeline for the roof where he waved his truncheon in triumph, riding on the hostility generated by an equally gleeful press. “It offended all their sense of propriety regarding everything,” remarks Weed. These “hippie thugs”, screamed the Daily Telegraph, were a threat to society.

Whose society? The homeless, it seemed, could not claim the privilege of being part of it.

Journalists described a decadence that simply did not exist. Weed alludes to the poverty that squatters at Grosvenor Square had been left to flounder in: “There weren’t a lot of meals, there wasn’t a lot of food around, it was basically sort of living off […] scraps.” Nor were they seeking to abscond from justice for the thrill of it— squats were an unstable last resort for people who had no choice. The squatting inhabitants of Eel Pie Island Hotel wished

for

to legitimise their claim on the derelict building, but Weed laments “It would have been impossible to get people to put the money up to buy it, it would also be impossible once it was bought to keep it together.”

Those who did match the prescribed criteria of the respectable nuclear family were tarnished too. The London Squatters Campaign was set up in November 1968 at activist Ron Bailey’s house, aiming for “the rehousing of families from hostels or slums by means of squatting”. Participants took possession of homes in Ilford that the Redbridge Council had planned to leave empty for ten years pending a redevelopment project.

to a rooF Britain’s squatterS The government’s response was ugly: in lieu of a court order, bailiffs forcibly removed three families from their peacefully acquired homes, breaking one occupant’s jawbone in the process.

“I don’t think we, in our wildest dreams, expected the extremity of the actions of Redbridge Council, applying the armed thugs to get us out,” Bailey recalls in Around 1968.

Today, squatters might be more pessimistic. They squat in the long shadow cast by the ‘hippie thugs’ of the ’60s and ’70s, old effigies which more often than not were carved by a prejudiced media and proliferated as the stuff of home owners’ nightmares.

bailiffs were used to forcibly remove three families from their Peacefully acquired homes, breaking one occuPant’s jawbone.

September 2012 saw the reification of this fear in an amendment to the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill.

Squatting in a residential building was criminalised under Section 144—the same number as that ill-fated squat in Piccadilly. This coincidence seems smugly deliberate in light of housing minister Grant Shapps’ explanation: “No longer will there be so-called ‘squatters rights.’”

Bailey describes a frustrating dialogue with squatting cynics: “‘What about squatters who smash up the place?’

To which I say, yeah, some squatters behave anti-socially. So do some politicians, actually. Squatters in the main just are like anybody else, they want somewhere to live, and they behave in a perfectly decent way, almost all of them.”

Proof for Bailey’s assertion abounds.

In many residential neighbourhoods squatters have been welcomed with arms outstretched as they reanimate rotting structural corpses with homely repairs.

Weed lists the extensive home made regeneration projects undertaken by Grosvenor Square squatters in the ’70s: “… a cafe and shop and warehouse,

By Chloe iNsergeNt and we got for a limited time the arts centre going.” Today, ‘Transition Heathrow’ is a community activist group that recently cleared tonnes of rubbish from an abandoned market garden site in Sipson. The site now plays host to a greenhouse converted into eco-friendly homes and an organic fruit and vegetable garden.

These occupants are looking for the chance to be participants of society, rather than left in the cold as thugs.

Catherine Brogan of Squash, a campaign group which opposed Section 144, says “It’s the wrong time to be criminalising homeless people.

Rents keep going up. Vulnerable people are being demonised. This will benefit landlords who leave their premises empty.” The epicentre of the squatting conflict rises from the clash of two opposing ideals. The right to shelter and the right to absolute property ownership are in constant conflict. It is difficult to reconcile the obligation of the community to protect the homeless with an individual’s claim on their personal possessions.

The most poignant portrait of the squatting debacle might be found in the case of David Gauntlet.

Homeless after the disintegration of a long-term relationship, he was warned in February 2013 by Kent police not to seek shelter in a boarded up empty bungalow that was due for demolition. Days later he was found on its doorstep, dead from hypothermia. The distance between Gauntlet’s reality and the fiction of the delinquent squatter is obvious.

But Section 144 caters to the myth of the Hell’s Angels; it seeks to close the gap by fashioning people like Gauntlet into criminals.

ISIS HT14 // 31

32 // ISIS EYE

TRAINING WITH THE SHAOLIN: The Warrior Monks of Henzan province By heNry vaN oosterom

If

you stand at the foot of the imposingly vertical Mount Song in China’s Henan Province at four o’clock in the morning, you are treated to a curious sight. Dozens of tiny figures crawl down the mountain’s winding steps on their hands and feet, wearing nothing but thin cotton tunics to protect against the sub-zero temperature. The specific muscle groups developed through this arduous task produce immensely powerful shoulders and haunches: each little warrior’s physicality closely resembles the stalking action of a big cat.

There has been a Buddhist monastery on the craggy north face of Mount Song since the 5th century A.D., when it was founded as a retreat for those wishing to practise Mahayana Buddhism. Some maintain the monks learned to fight to discourage the rapacious Japanese pirates who marauded up and down China’s east coast, while others claim they took up arms to defend the monastery’s riches from opportunistic bandits.

Regardless of specific historical cause, Shaolin kung fu has been taught nonstop at the monastery since at least the 7th century.

Potential candidates are scouted from China’s innumerable wushu (martial 34 // ISIS HT14

arts) academies from as young as two years old, and may join the monastery just three years later. Only those young boys with the most aptitude for and dedication to kung fu are considered for selection. Master Zhang Qiang, having left the monastery after fifteen years, recalls with some pride that he had mastered his wubuquan—the five basic movements of kung fu—long before he could read or write his own name.

With the exception of one or two annual visits back to their family, all parenting is assumed by a stern Shifu (Master), who will supervise their

kung-fu is disciPline that reveals the Potential of the self and the Power of the will physical and spiritual development for anything up to the next thirty years. Upon arrival at the monastery, the head of the child is shaved. This serves two specific purposes. First, it encourages humility and reduces the ego—essential concepts in Buddhist spiritual development. Secondly, it homogenises, bringing all the

disciples down to the same level, from which they can only distinguish themselves through martial prowess.

From this point, the trainees are subjected to a punishing and uncompromising physical regimen.

The bulk of the students’ time is spent endlessly repeating the fighting movements their masters impart to them, up to nine hours a day, to the point that they become instinctive.

I saw one Western kung fu student end up in hospital having playfully leapt on the back of his teacher, a former monk. The monk threw him off and cracked his spine—not out of deliberate anger but because of the instincts that had been drilled into him through years of repetition as a child.

Through ‘kang ji da’, a process euphemistically translated as ‘conditioning’, the small boys spend hours at a time being punched and kicked by their peers in order to harden the body and massively increase their tolerance to pain. Facial expressions of discomfort are strongly frowned upon; vocal ones meet with a sharp kick or slap from the supervising Master. At this very early point in their physical development, the boys perform drastic flexibility exercises, causing their skeletons to ‘set’ in a

Henry van Oosterom

profoundly different way to other children’s. As a result, the 65 year-old Master Wu explained to me shortly after dropping into perfect splits, the body can perform extraordinarily lithe acts well into old age.

the first time, spent three consecutive hours playing Angry Birds—he recalls that his entire attention was totally focused on the mesmerising and novel movements and shapes in the game.

During the entire training process the boys are kept in a permanent state of slight hunger, fed just enough simple, vegetarian fare to keep them sufficiently physically maintained.

The hunger has two main effects—it encourages aggression in their martial training and it serves as a constant reminder that, fundamentally, the monk’s life is one of asceticism.

If you ask a former monk whether they missed their parents during their time in the monastery, or the chance to form casual friendships at school, or any of the myriad ‘normal’ experiences on which they missed out, they often become reticent, shy or bashful. I found during my time with them that the monks are clearly uncomfortable talking openly about emotional or

These young boys belong to a Chan Buddhist order that upholds upekkha (equanimity) and metta (lovingkindness) as central tenets, and yet they devote decades, sometimes even entire lifetimes, fine-tuning themselves to inflict physical injury and even death.

To an outside observer, there is an obvious incongruity. However, as Master Zhang explains, the disciple does not dedicate themselves to learning kung fu in the hope that they will ever get to implement it— rather, it is a discipline that reveals the potential of the self and the power of the will, permitting a more profound comprehension of Mahayana Buddhist spiritualism.

intimacy in monks’ eyes is not the sharing of secrets

Not all those who enter the famous Thirty Five Chambers of Shaolin spend their whole lives there. Many choose to leave, and for a variety of reasons. Some simply wish to experience normal modern day life, or to perform in martial arts competitions or displays, or to teach what they know to millions of kung fu enthusiasts world-wide.

Their years of isolation, however, leave an inedible mark on these individuals. They emerge into the outside world, often insatiably curious about things that appear mundane to us. Master Zhang, on encountering an iPad for

personal issues—things that perhaps come more easily to a post-Freudian West. “The Chinese, on the whole, are not good at introspection—their culture hasn’t had a Freud or a Jung,” a relative from Taiwan commented. “[Given their] legacy of Communism, they are more inclined to think about the individual as a member of a greater whole, rather than [to] introspect and self-analyse.” Culturally, less of a premium is placed on the exploration of emotions and the sharing of feelings.

monk, even if you have spent a great deal of time together. Their way of displaying intimacy and closeness with others can seem rather bizarre and unexpected to the uninitiated— the closer you become to them as a student, the more willing they are to reprimand you, shout at you, and physically punish you. Intimacy in their eyes is not the sharing of secrets, or the admission of an insecurity or fear. Rather, it is the capacity to shout at you if you aren’t trying hard enough, or to give you a slap on the back of the head for losing concentration.

One evening, after five months spent training with the monks, my Master caught me smoking a covert cigarette behind the accommodation. He delivered a short, sharp kick to my upper back, knocking the wind out of me, followed by a clipped command in broken English: “Don’t do again.”

Looking back on it, I realise this was the moment I was assured of the strength of our relationship.

These observations, coupled with the understandable stoicism encouraged by the harsh life of the monastery, mean it is difficult to attain Westernstyle verbal intimacy with a Shaolin

ISIS HT14 // 35

ISIS

36 // ISIS HT14

the restiNg plaCe of NeW yorK’s uNClaimed dead

N

ot far off the Eastern coast of the New York Bronx, a small island lies in the confined waters of the Long Island Sound. It is a Potter’s Field, a term that originates in the New Testament and describes a common grave. This is Hart Island, the largest tax-funded cemetery on Earth. The acre of land which makes up the island affords the only burial ground for the unclaimed, indigent and destitute dead of New York City; those who have died without money and without family to take care of their bodies.

The dead are taken outside the walls of the city, to be buried in the collective grave, uncommemorated and unmourned. In death these people are administered out of the City at the

hands of the City itself, without the normal ceremonies of resolution.

The island is used as a depository by New York City Health & Hospitals Corporation, and is maintained by the labour of convicted criminals, overseen by the New York Department of Corrections (NYCD).

The island is open for public visitation just once a month. Only two other people accompanied me on my visit.

on the back of the shirts is Printed: “when no-one else wants you, we’ll take you”.

By tilly muNro

Captain Ortega, Department of Corrections Public Information Officer, met us at the gates. Holding a handgun in her holster and with aviator sunglasses on her head, she unlocked the tall barbed wire gates at the end of the road to lead us up the pier to the ferry. Tim Vetter, a selfconfessed New York island hopper, was visiting because he maintains “a drumbeat interest in making the island more publicly accessible”. He said that he felt like “the department of corrections are a bit at shame about how poorly managed the island has been”, citing this as a possible reason for the restrictions on visits.

The men who run the ferry all wear t-shirts with ‘Hart Island Ferry’ printed on the front. On the back ISIS HT14 // 37

Hart Island

of the shirts is printed: ‘when noone else wants you, we’ll take you.’

Luciano, one of the ferry operators, told me that once in a while people come to claim their dead, exhuming the bodies from their resting place on the island to bring them back to the city for burial. One family disinterred a man who had been buried on the island for 19 years. Luciano said he still remembered how the coffin stank, and the long processes involved in finding the right body amongst the mass graves. He continued, “… after you deal with all that you gotta deal with the City. That’s the other politics.”

Upon arrival on the island, Captain Thompson of the NYCD met us. He led us through the island. “Most New Yorkers don’t even know it’s here….

I’ve been to City Island hundreds of times and never knew. When I was assigned here I thought it was somewhere down near Ellis Island or Liberty Island.” Dilapidated buildings serve as reminders of the island’s different uses since its purchase from

Native Americans in 1654. Still standing is the skeleton of what was once an administrative building, which has since served as a lunatic asylum, tuberculosis sanatorium and boy’s reformatory.

Captain Ortega continued to talk as we walked, explaining how “[the building is] falling apart, like everything else on this island.” The island is a bird sanctuary, silent except for the cacophony of avian noises.

There are no individual tombstones here, and the NYCD does not facilitate access to the individual graves. There is instead a ‘reflection gazebo’ surrounded by a white picket fence, like a country church. Inside are three pews and a lectern, serving as a place for sermons and prayer. Next to it, surrounded by a circle of stones, is a single headstone to commemorate all who are buried on the island.

The late Gillian Rose was a writer of Philosophy and a Professor at the Universities of Sussex and Warwick

consecutively. In her posthumously published Mourning Becomes the Law (1995) she writes of Hart Island and the questions it raises in regards to the work of mourning: “New York City, 16 May 1992; the body of my love has been taken to Potter’s Field.”

Her lover and friend had been dumped into the city’s receptacle for the dead. She uses the story of Phocion’s wife, as represented in the 1648 painting by Nicholas Poussin, The Ashes of Phocion Collected by his Widow, to deal with this aberrant mourning.

Phocion was a virtuous Athenian general and statesman, who, like Socrates, was condemned to die by hemlock and denied burial inside the city walls of Athens. His widowed wife stole out of the city, accompanied by her woman servant, to gather his ashes. Once recovered, she ingested them to give her husband a resting place within herself, and thus to achieve a burial place within the city walls.

SURROUndEd bY A CIRCLE OF STOnES IS A SIngLE HEAdSTOnE TO COmmEmORATE ALL wHO ARE bURIEd On THE ISLAnd.

38 // ISIS HT14

Tilly Munro

‘‘To incorporate the dead into one’s own body and soul is to refuse the work of mourning, to refuse, in melancholy, to let go.” In Poussin’s painting, the framing places Phocion’s wife, with her arms thrown in an embrace towards the ground, within the view and enclosure of the city walls behind her. The city and her soul are inseparable: her consumption of Phocion’s ashes denies her lover’s banishment. Therefore the opposition Phocion’s widow enacts in consuming the ashes is the opposition of the individual to the worldly injustice of the city.

Talitha James’ father passed away in a New York City hospital twelve years ago, when she was fourteen.

Her parents separated when she was a small child and she had not seen her father in five years when her mother told her he had died. He was buried on Hart Island because he had told the hospital that he had no relatives.

He left two ex-wives, a sister, and four children.

Talitha said she was “missing a connection” and had come to the island with the intent to bring about his removal from the island and reburial within the city walls. The attempt mirrors that of Phocion’s wife—to both reclaim and refuse the expulsion of family. The act itself, of going out of the city walls, attests to the symbolic power of the city. She told me “He was a veteran. He was loved. He shouldn’t be here.” When we reached the gazebo, Talitha prostrated herself in front of the single headstone and wept.

From the gazebo, we could see the Manhattan skyline. We were less than a kilometre away from the pier at City Island and the NYPD shooting range.

Coming over the water was the dull patter of bullets.

ISIS HT14 // 39

BOUNDLESS PLAINS: AUSTRALIA’S CLOSED BORDERS AND THE PLIGHT OF THE BOAT PEOPLE By sophie maCmaNus

E

very year, thousands of people make a long and perilous journey to Australia by sea. These are the ‘boat people’, those hoping for a better life in this supposedly welcoming and wealthy country. They pay people smugglers what little they can scrape together for a space on a hugely overcrowded and unsafe boat—often they sink, or are intercepted by the Navy once in Australian waters. The 40 // ISIS HT14

boats are then towed to Indonesia, Papua New Guinea or Christmas Island, where the passengers are left to be slowly processed in detention centres. Often they are sent back to their native land, and the horrors they were attempting to flee.

In September 2013 the centre-right Liberal Party, led by Tony Abbott, defeated the incumbent Labor party

in federal elections. Zealous ministers promised that these illegal maritime arrivals, or ‘illegals’, would be dealt with more efficiently. However, whether these people have even broken the law is a topic of debate. The Australian Refugee Council argues that genuine refugees are not breaking the law by bypassing conventional visa applications, as their desperate situation justifies their attempt to

Sophie MacManus

reach safety. Guy Goodwin-Gill is Professor of International Refugee Law at All Souls. He explains that “in international law, everyone has the right to seek asylum from persecution, and there is no such person as an ‘illegal asylum seeker’. Whether an asylum seeker is allowed to enter any particular country is another matter, however. States are obliged to protect the rights of those outside their own country and in fear of persecution and, indeed, of those rescued at sea or intercepted, regardless of their status under municipal law.’’

after it was found that men housed there were denied water, and referred to by their boat number rather than their name. An Iraqi man interviewed

by Amnesty said he would rather have died at sea than have come to the camp.

“There is no point getting on a boat anymore.” Helpfully translated into several languages, this was a failed $2.1million government ploy to win back votes for Labor, trying to out do Abbott’s Liberal effort in promising further migrant restrictions.

This grim existence, combined with severe trauma experienced in countries of origin, inevitably takes its toll. Studies indicate that the suicide rate is ten times that of the general population, as inmates are systematically ‘mentally broken’.

The adverts were parodied in the street, with leaflets stuck to lampposts picturing a well-to-do Asian couple cooing sadly over their copy of the Sydney Morning Herald: “It says they simply won’t let us in if we come by boat!… Darling, we shall simply have to take the children elsewhere.”

The ludicrous nature of the anti-boat adverts may have been parodied in the streets, but the government line has proven unwavering. The tough new policies are naturally intended as a deterrent to people-smugglers, but those desperate to flee their home countries are often unaware of the situation that awaits them.

an iraqi man interviewed by amnesty said he would rather have died at sea than have come to the camP. Nevertheless, a prevailing attitude exists that it is for the good of Australian people, not least the country’s job market, to ‘keep ‘em out’. A stance out of sync with the country’s warm, open-armed image, cheerfully sold in countless adverts.

Australia pulls in six million tourists a year, but humanitarian migration is capped to around 13,000 people a year under notoriously strict criteria.

In 2012, a total of 27,410 asylum applications were submitted in the UK, with 54,940 submitted in France.

This compares to 15,790 submitted in Australia. But the 23 million strong population doesn’t want to be swamped.

To tackle the scale of the ‘boat people problem’ regional processing was introduced. Detention centres exist across Australia, as well as in small nations like Christmas Island and the minuscule Nauru, which has no actual sign for the centre. Visitors can find it by the rubbish dump.

Conditions in detention centres are cramped, disease spreads fast, and it is not uncommon for families to be split. Manus Island, a processing stronghold, is mosquito infested, and has been termed “inhuman and degrading” by Amnesty International

Furthermore, recent changes to clinical criteria have meant that childbirth and incidents of depression are not required to be recorded in detention—they are simply not noteworthy enough.

Professor Goodwin-Gill describes how ‘‘detention of this duration (and in the sorts of conditions which have been reported in the past) is arbitrary and unlawful when considered against applicable human rights standards.’’

The majority of boat people come from Afghanistan, Iran and Sri Lanka, seeking escape from political and social unrest. In September 2013, a boat carrying 120 people from Lebanon, Jordan and Yemen towards Australian waters sank in Indonesian territory. 22 children were found drowned and up to 75 other people were reported as missing. A Lebanese man lost his seven children and pregnant wife; all were later found dead in the water. The same day, in the midst of criticism of his government’s tough new policy, Tony Abbott skirted questions about the tragedy and was jeeringly reported to have run away from journalists.

Australian newspapers ran adverts before the federal election that bluntly explained to bemused commuters

In 2000, approximately 3,000 people arrived on Australian shores, predominantly from Afghanistan, whereas Iran and Pakistan each had over one million Afghans seeking refuge. The task of assisting the world’s asylum-seekers falls largely to poorer nations. Australia is rich and big, but the assumption that the country will be inundated persists.

America receives around 500,000 illegal arrivals every year; in 2011, Britain had 100,000. In the same year there were 23,000 refugees arriving in Australia. Polls suggest that the majority of Australians respond positively towards refugees arriving under Australia’s official Humanitarian Program, but those who come illegally by sea are met with

refugees who come illegally by sea are met with hostility, desPite the fact that these arrivals are often most vulnerable ISIS HT14 // 41

Boundless Plains

hostility, despite the fact that these arrivals are often the most vulnerable Upon election, the government released 16,000 asylum seekers already in the system into the community while their claims approached completion. They are awarded an allowance of $220 a week, which barely covers rent and food.

These people are on bridging visas, so cannot work or study. Refugee aid groups say that that barring migrants

from the Australian workforce could create a new underclass. The people on bridging visas are also now given the inanely named “code of conduct” to sign, which stipulates that these new arrivals must not “bully” others, must obey road rules, and must not commit crime. Anyone who breaches their code risks being sent back to detention, as well as being transferred to offshore centres on Manus Island and Nauru, regardless of when or where they first arrived.

In January, the UN stepped in.

Canberra has been accused of breaking international law in its treatment of asylum seekers. A spokesman stated that the UN Refugee Agency is “concerned by any policy or practice that involved pushing asylum-seeker boats back at sea without… proper consideration of individual needs for protection.” However the ability of the UN to bring about direct change through action may be limited.

Professor Goodwin-Gill describes how ‘‘Its role also includes a watching brief over states’ compliance with their international obligations towards refugees, for example, under treaty or customary international law. It cannot 42 // ISIS HT14

‘sanction’ any state, but it can and does protest when States fail to fulfil their obligations.’’ Apart from the pushback operations themselves, recent allegations of naval maltreatment of African refugees have surfaced; asylum seekers reported being kicked and forced onto hot parts of their boat’s engine by naval officials. The federal government has rubbished the claims, but an enquiry opened nonetheless.

Professor Goodwin-Gill continues by noting the need for a shift in Australia’s perception of these problems: ‘‘The ‘illegality’ of entering Australian waters, from the perspective of international law, is simply a formal matter—a consequence of Australian law, not of international law. Australia seems to be terrified by an issue which many other States are able to take in their stride, and to prefer unilateral action when what is required, if lasting results are to be achieved, is international and regional cooperation which these sorts of international humanitarian problems require.’’

“I want to make it absolutely crystal clear today that this government will never allow people who come here illegally by boat to gain permanent residency in Australia,” are the words of Tony Abbott, echoing those of ex-PM Kevin Rudd. The boats are dangerous, and the reasoning behind ‘sending em’ back’ is that without encouragement, the people-smuggling industry will roll over and die. In this rosy government vision, refugees will come into the country in a more ‘orderly’ fashion, neatly filling in the requisite paperwork amidst the horror they hope to escape. Whilst this pipe dream persists, people continue to die, whether in the water or in detention centres. For the latter, who are trying to cope with the prospect of being sent home to torture or death, the truly cruel irony of their situation is perhaps summed up by the Australian national anthem: “For those who’ve come across the seas, we’ve boundless plains to share.”

AustrAliA seems to be terrified by An issue which mAny other stAtes Are Able to tAke in their stride

AGAINST SEXKÖPSLAGEN RE-EVALUATING THE SWEDISH MODEL FOR SEX WORKERS By edWard siddoNs

T

he Rose Alliance, a Swedish union of sex workers, posted the following message on July 12 2013: Our board member, fierce activist and friend Petite Jasmine got brutally murdered yesterday. Several years ago she lost custody of her children as she was considered to be an unfit parent due to being a sex worker. The children were placed with their father regardless of him being abusive towards Jasmine. They told her she didn’t know what was good for her and that she was “romanticising” prostitution, they said she lacked insight and didn’t realise sex work was a form of self-harm. He threatened and stalked her on numerous occasions; she was never offered any protection. She fought the system through four trials and had finally started seeing her children again.

Yesterday the father of her children killed her.

Twelve years beforehand, Sweden introduced the Sex Purchase Act, a pioneering approach to sex work that placed criminal blame on the purchaser, not the provider of sex; on the client, not the prostitute. While prostitution was legalised, any form of coercion or commercial exploitation remained illegal.

the Swedish model was the culmination of radical feminist thought. Susanne Dodillet and Petra Östergren provide the following clarification in their paper The Swedish Sex Purchase Act: Claimed Success and Documented Effects (2011): “The Sex Purchase Act was introduced by feminist policymakers who argued that prostitution is a form of male violence against women… [and] that there are no women who sell sex voluntarily. Furthermore, it was claimed that if one wants to achieve a gender-equal society, then prostitution must cease to exist… because all women in society are harmed as long as men think they can ‘buy women’s bodies.’”

Norway and Iceland have both introduced the Swedish model in full.

France has just passed a similar bill at its first vote. Mary Honeyball, MEP for London, is pressing for the same system in the UK. Sweden has hailed the model a success.

A 2011 report by Anna Skarhed, the Swedish Chancellor of Justice, drew the following conclusions: “1) For the period 1998-2008, levels of street prostitution in Sweden have fallen

by half; 2) Surveys show that there is both increased public support for a ban and a declining number of men who admit to having purchased sex.”

At a grassroots level, Simon Haggstrom, an officer in the prostitution unit of Stockholm police, told the Guardian: “The number of prostitutes has dramatically decreased since the law was introduced, from 2,500 across Sweden in 1998 to about 1,000 today.”

Global equality movements also celebrate the success of the Swedish model. Equality Now’s pamphlet “What is the ‘Nordic’ Model?” is clear in its support: “Sweden has become an undesirable destination for sex traffickers. In addition, the new law has influenced attitudes regarding the purchase of sex: from 1996 (before the law) until 2008, the number of male sex buyers decreased from 13.6 per cent to 7.9 per cent [of the population].”

Official governmental reports, the police force, and global equality movements are unequivocal: the Swedish model is a success. However, the picture painted above is one that ISIS HT14 // 43

Against Sexkopslagen

only coheres from a distance, under the coercion of a phenomenal propaganda machine. Upon examination, cracks appear, and serious methodological and ideological problems present themselves.

The figures so keenly proffered by radical feminists, the police and Equality Now are drawn from reports that academics, sex work organisations and policy groups have taken serious issue with. The figures cited above regarding the reduction in prostitution too rarely admit the limitations of focussing on street prostitution. They provide almost no information about the estimated 50 per cent of sex workers working ‘indoors’, or the revolution in self-advertised sex work and client procurement engendered by mobile technology and the Internet. Nor do they provide information about what line of work these “saved” women have gone into.

Furthermore, their exclusive focus on cis-female prostitutes ignore the existence of trans* and cismale sex workers in Sweden and across the world. Both groups are disproportionately affected by sexually transmitted infections, particularly HIV, and both groups face community-specific issues.

Questions of gender disclosure and resulting violence plague the trans* community, just as invisibility and a dearth of social services and rehabilitation programmes for men fail the latter.

The Rose Alliance argues, from its members’ own experiences, that sex workers are harassed by the police, alienated by the state, and impeded from access to social services under the Swedish model. As Pye Jakobsson, co-founder of the Rose Alliance, told the Guardian, “You can’t talk about protecting sex workers as well as saying the law is good, because it’s driving prostitution and trafficking underground, which reduces social services’ access to victims.”

44 // ISIS HT14

These issues are further complicated by clear political bias in many surveys. The Skarhed report never sought to interrogate the Swedish model beyondself-consolidating half-appraisal. It admits that, “One starting point of our work has been that the purchase of sexual services is to remain criminalized.” Jonas Trolle, a police officer, proudly claims, “It is impossible to run a brothel in Sweden.” And yet the number of massage parlours in Stockholm (the majority of which are considered to be selling sex) has trebled in recent years.

sex workers feel harassed by the Police, alienated by the state, and imPeded from access to social services under the swedish model And in the English summary of the Kuosmanen report, often cited as a key source showing that public opinion amongst men has become less favourable to the idea of buying sex, the author’s immediate reservations over the validity of the conclusion (due to an abysmally low response rate) are absent, untranslated and deceitfully omitted.

May-Len Skilbrei and Charlotta Holmström note that while this report “indicate[s] great support for the law, the same material also shows a rather strong support for a criminalisation of sex sellers.” In fact, a majority of Swedes still support this traditional abolitionist legislature.

Imperfect methodologies, ambiguous statistics and political bias effectively nullify much of what is depicted as factual evidence of the Swedish model’s success.

Beyond statistical ambiguity and incoherence, the nominally left wing and ‘radical’ feminist philosophy behind the law is equally problematic, as is the use of legislation to approach complex social issues.

Morgane Merteuil, general secretary of the Sex Worker’s Union (STRASS), notes an interesting phenomenon in the feminist Left’s approach to the sex work debate. She argues that with all other trades the Left “[tries] to speak WITH them not FOR them”, continuing, “You do not pretend to know better than them what is best for them: you support their demands.”

Evidently, the thinking behind the Swedish model is the clear exception to this rule.

The Department for Social Work at the University of Gothenberg highlights a similar issue: “[assumed victimhood] is not consistent with the ambition of empowerment that contemporary social work perceives as an important platform for its work.

To unilaterally proclaim someone as an exploited victim or needy belongs to the so called paternalistic tradition where the experts have power to define the clients.”

Merteuil goes further, arguing that sex work is no worse than any other profession in capitalist systems which inevitably rely on exploitation: “We choose to exploit ourselves, to only use our OWN body to work. Because it is our own body that we exploit, its exploitation is not necessarily worse, but more visible than in other industries where a whole decor is there to make us forget that, in the end, it is always our bodies that are exploited—or even, I would add, the bodies of multiple others.”

In fact, any criminalising legislation is problematic. Sex work is phenomenally heterogeneous: a blunt instrument such as criminalisation (of consumers or suppliers) will never be nuanced enough to satisfy the demands of those affected; it will

Edward Siddons

sex work is Phenomenally heterogeneous: a blunt instrument such as criminalisation will never be nuanced enough to satisfy the demands of those affected never be complex enough to respond to such a complex phenomenon.

While sex workers cannot be directly hounded by the legislative specifics of the Swedish model, they are still targeted by a range of other Swedish laws. If a sex worker in Sweden is foreign, the police can use the Aliens Act of 2005 to take them into custody and file for their deportation. If under 18, they can use the Care of the Young Persons Act of 1990 to discipline those in the trade. And under the Public Order Act of 1993, which outlaws sex between strippers and customers in “sex clubs”, the police can, in fact, imprison sex workers in specific spaces and contexts.

The sex worker is still harassed and alienated. The money that has been

pumped into social services—the best method of helping those who do not wish to work in the profession—is therefore being inefficiently spent.

Their access to these services is still restricted because criminality, even if displaced, still makes them the enemy, the victim of the state, not simply the client.

The Swedish model is ridden with questionable ideology, dubious aims, and unsound methods. The situation it creates for sex workers differs little from traditional abolitionism.

know where traffickers are active.

They understand the abuses present in their profession. Maybe then oldest profession in the world will, at last, no longer necessarily mean physical danger for those involved.

Petite Jasmine’s mother will have the final word: “I know who held the knife, but [the state] might as well have put it in his hands.”

Complete legalisation presents its own problems, but only by according sex workers the autonomy they campaign for can these issues can be dealt with by those best placed to do so. They know their rights. They

ISIS HT14 // 45

ISIS

46 // ISIS HT14

THE WALKING PEOPLE oxfordshire’s travellers and the cuts By matt Broomfield

“T

he government thinks that everybody’s millionaires, like the people over there,” Sarah tells me. She gestures out of her caravan window in the direction of the Prime Minister’s home constituency, Witney. “David Cameron is living on a high stool just down there. He’s saying he’s helping the poor. But it’s the poor that’s suffering.”

There are 40 Irish Traveller plots in Oxfordshire, and every single one currently receives housing benefit, along with 40 out of the 47 plots occupied by English Gypsies in the county. And these are the lucky ones.

Many Travellers become trapped in a cycle of eviction, raising their children next to an unending succession of sewage works and motorways. In Gaelic, the Travellers call themselves Lucht Siúil, ‘the walking people’:

these days, they are driven from plot to plot by the threat of violence from private bailiffs.

they are driven from Plot to Plot by the threat of violence from Private bailiffs It is difficult to know where to begin when discussing the hundreds of examples of institutional, economic and personal prejudice the Travellers face. In almost every area, they are immensely at risk. They are 20 times more likely to be depressed than the general population. 61 per cent of married English Gypsy women

and 81 per cent of married Irish Traveller women report experiencing direct domestic abuse. ten per cent of Traveller children die before their second birthday, and 80 per cent before retirement age. “We should get a social worker on here, and we have none” Sarah observes. It is hard to understand this glaring absence of state provision.

Yet this support is nowhere to be found, and Sarah blames the government “for everything”. Before I visited the Irish Traveller site at Wheatley in East Oxfordshire where our interview took place, I spoke with Jeff Astbury from the Gypsy & Traveller Service, who made clear the disproportionate impact recent cuts have had on the communities he works with. “The main thing they are finding difficult at the moment is ISIS HT14 // 47

The Walking People

the housing benefit freeze, especially with the rise in electric, water and rent bills. We’re trying to put them in touch with people that can help… but it’s really starting to hurt them.”

one in ten traveller children die before their second birthday Cuts to the Energy Company Obligation threaten to leave fuelpoor Travellers without the protection they need, in a move described by Derek Lickorish, the chair of the government’s own Fuel Poverty Advisory Group, as “completely inequitable”. They already struggle with these bills: “sometimes you might go short, you might not have the price of gas” Sarah tells me.

Travellers who rely on the legitimate scrap trade have also been badly affected following the 2013 Scrap Metal Dealers’ Act, which was ostensibly passed to clamp down on metal thieves. “It’s gone really bad. Travellers can’t even get scrap nowadays, because you have to ask, you can’t just take it. And people don’t want to give it to you. You have to go away.”

This reluctance to trust Gypsies and Travellers is deeply entrenched within our society. “They are scum,” Conservative MP Andrew MacKay said of Travellers in his Bracknell constituency in 2002. “People who do what these people have done do not deserve the same human rights as my decent constituents going about their ordinary lives.”

MacNay’s words reflect wider misgivings held about Travellers. In 2008, 34 per cent of UK residents said they were prejudiced against Gypsies, Travellers and Eastern European Romani, in an open admission of bigotry that would be unthinkable with regards to any other ethnic minority. ‘“It’s not everybody that lets 48 // ISIS HT14

this reluctance to trust gyPsies and travellers is deePly entrenched within our society you into their house, being honest, when you’re a Traveller. People don’t trust you,” states Sarah.

Nor is this an issue of purely personal intolerance. 90 per cent of planning applications filed by Gypsies and Travellers are rejected by local councils, compared to 20 per cent of those submitted by the general public. The best the Travellers can hope for seems to be indifference.

Local councillors in Oxfordshire have recently put off a proposed visit to the Traveller sites. “Nobody seems to want to come and have a look,” according to Jeff Astbury.

Sarah traces much of this discrimination to the way the media vilifies her people. “That’s a load of bullshit”, she says with reference to Channel 4 documentary Big Fat Gypsy Weddings. The Irish Traveller Movement in Britain

filed a case against this crude and misrepresentative series. Their report stated that the harm caused “is on a number of levels, including physical and sexual assault, racist abuse and bullying… the Big Fat Gypsy Weddings programs have significantly contributed to racist bullying and abuse of Gypsy, Roma and Traveller children in schools.”

Since 1991, 600 complaints have been made to the Press Complaints Commission about the portrayal of Gypsies and Travellers. Not one has been upheld. This is mirrored by the experience of Sarah and her children: “People think we’re all the same… [the show] didn’t give the Travellers justice.” She tells me her children and grandchildren get called ‘Gypsy’ and physically assaulted at school, and that the Channel 4 program has directly contributed to this culture of abuse.

Matt Broomfield

This bullying contributes to possibly the greatest challenge facing Travellers today: gaining an adequate education. “We used to have teachers coming here, and they stopped them completely because of all the cutbacks” Sarah tells me. With this service gone, and her children often ostracised at school, there seems little prospect of breaking the cycle of poverty through gaining qualifications.

Statistics are hard to come by, but around 75,000 of the 300,000 adult Gypsies and Travellers in the UK are functionally illiterate—when I arrive at Wheatley, it takes some time for me to convince the Travellers that I am not there to force them into signing any paperwork. This translates to widespread unemployment. “I’m not qualified. I can’t do computers,” says Sarah. Her son “used to work stacking boxes. It wasn’t much but it was money. It was independence.”

Now, there is nothing.

Jeff thinks the situation is worsened by a suspicion of education amongst the Travellers. “A lot of the parents pull [their children] out of school early, especially the females. I think a lot of support has been withdrawn. They need a lot of educational support, and they need to be encouraged to stay in school and to see outside their community the opportunities they are missing. There are quite a few young women with children [five young, single mothers live on the twelve plots at the Wheatley site], and unfortunately there’s no career path for them or anything like that. They’re stuck on the site most of the day.”

Average school leaving age amongst Travellers is just 12.6 years.

these are some of the bestProtected travellers across the whole of euroPe, and they still exPerience dePrivation and discrimination on a scale unthinkable for any other ethnic grouP in the uk today Yet Gypsies and Travellers in the British Isles still lead easier lives than many continental Romani. Between 500,000 and 1.5 million Roma lost their lives in the Holocaust. Across Europe, 10 million Romani, Gypsies and Travellers are being dehumanised, assaulted and even murdered every day. The European Commissioner for Human Rights stated in 2008 that “today’s rhetoric against the Roma is very similar to the one used by Nazis and fascists before the mass killings started in the thirties and forties.”

Sarah also makes it clear that “it’s not just Travellers [who are suffering], they’re doing it to everyone.’” When homeless people came to her door this Christmas, she gave them “food and a quilt… they were cold. It’s a terrible thing to be cold.” I sense she is speaking from personal experience.

These are some of the best-protected Travellers across the whole of Europe, and they still experience deprivation and discrimination on a scale unthinkable for any other ethnic group in the UK today.

To their credit, Oxfordshire Council have an excellent record in working alongside the Gypsy and Traveller communities, to the extent that they have now taken over campsites in Buckinghamshire and North London as well. Jeff tells me that “our relationship with the Travellers has got better over the years,” since the council bought the Oxfordshire sites from private landlords in 2004, as “they can now see that I have a responsibility to them and I have a responsibility to the council.” Sarah agrees: “I get on fine with Jeff, I can trust Jeff… if I ask him to do something, he does it. It’s not the council’s fault. It’s the government.”

“This is our home,” she says. “We have nowhere else.” Gypsies and Travellers are accused of insularity when in fact they are ghettoised by poverty and institutionalised bigotry. Not only are they trapped in tiny campsites with poor facilities; they are kept at the very margins of society by poverty, illiteracy and prejudice. The ‘walking people’, the Lucht Siúil, have no one to turn to, and nowhere to go.

ISIS HT14 // 49

RUNNING TO STAND STILL RWANDA : DEV EL OP M E N T A ND H U M AN R IGHTS

By NiChola fiNCh

W

hen crossing the border from Tanzania into Rwanda, the sense of the country’s upward trajectory is overwhelming—the roads are smooth, motorcyclists wear helmets and drivers obey the traffic lights. Rwanda’s roads are its lifeline, coursing through the ‘thousand hills’ that are the s unique selling point of the landscape. Amongst the streetfood vendors and playing children, another group can occasionally be seen in the gutters of Rwanda’s roads. Wielding pickaxes, they earn a pound a day to help lay 3,000 kilometres of fibreoptic broadband cables. Rwanda is coming online.

In a country constantly associated in the Western mind with genocide, Rwanda’s president Paul Kagame has self fashioned himself as a digital visionary; he has big plans to turn Rwanda into the technology hub of Africa. The advances have been astonishing. Weak in natural resources, Rwanda’s economy relies upon its agriculture but has been crippled by a lack of technological

50 // ISIS HT14

advancements. Clare Akamanzi, the chief operating officer of the Rwanda Development Board, talks about how the Board has worked to address this.

Farmers can now use their mobiles to access market information and price ranges for their produce using Rwanda’s online exchange platform e-Soko, which according to Akamanzi “connects the farmer to the market, eliminates the middleman and offers the farmer a fair deal.”

She talks proudly about numerous health initiatives supported by broadband, such as ‘Telemedicine’, which she calls “essentially diagnosis by videoconference”, connecting district based hospitals to specialists in the capital, Kigali.

The future also looks bright for the ‘One Laptop Per Child’ initiative, which has now equipped 210,000 primary school children with their own laptops. All of this positions Rwanda, a country roughly the size of Wales, as one of Africa’s fastest growing and most computer competent countries. At 8.07Mbps, Rwanda has broadband that

is faster than that of South Africa Croatia and even Italy. Despite this, at the 2013 Transform Africa summit in Kigali, Kagame said that Rwanda’s progress was “modest”. If this is the case, it seems as though big things can be expected.

But it is easy for the West to look on contentedly at these developments.

Blinded by the guilt of 1994, we are happily hoodwinked by Kagame’s improvements while the government’s darker elements still stir below the surface. Kagame’s myriad international awards and a fortune being given to Rwanda in financial aid only contribute to this illusion. When delving deeper into Rwanda’s affairs, shadows begin to appear behind this smokescreen.

In the 2010 presidential election, Kagame’s incumbent Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) won by an unsettling 93 per cent of the vote.

Despite hopes to fracture Kagame’s stronghold amongst the viable opposition candidates, the months before the election

Nichola Finch

“IT CERTAInLY mAkES FOR An ImmEdIATE LOvE STORY, bUT THERE ARE dARkER nARRATIvES THAT ARE HIddEn AwAY FROm THE PUbLIC SPACE.” saw one candidate confined to prison, another put under house arrest and the third with his party’s vice president found decapitated by a river bank.

Out of the nine opposition parties, four are in open coalition with the RPF while the rest are mostly led by loyal members of Kagame’s cabinet.

Opposing his regime is a dangerous game. The recent death of Patrick Karegeya, found dead on 1 January in a Johannesburg hotel room, is just one example of the short lifespans of those who criticise the state.

The RPF deny persecuting its opponents. After Karegeya’s death the president coldly stated that, “There are consequences for betraying your country.”

Improvements in technology serve only to mask and legitimise Kagame’s regime to fat-walleted foreign investors and aid-giving governments. ‘Nkunda Rwanda’ is the Twitter account of a human rights activist who left his

homeland to pursue studies in the US. Tweeting and blogging under this pseudonym to protect his safety and the safety of his family in Rwanda, he tweeted, “In #Rwanda, we’ve become a PR nation. Hidden behind ‘Vision 2020’, a master plan of Kigali. A Singapore wannabe.

Reality obscured!” He could not publish these sentiments in Rwanda.

He describes how, “the level of fear is acute.” Far from the idyllic picture of Rwanda as the poster boy for African development which “certainly makes for an immediate love story”, there are darker narratives that “are hidden away from the public space.”

Kagame has undeniably lifted Rwanda out of its post-genocide abyss and led it bravely into the 21st century, but what has become clear is his intent on selling apositive narrative to the watching world in order to maintain his slick public image. Much is hidden; the more you look at Rwanda, the more the picture darkens.

The foreseeable future for the de facto one party state seems irrevocably forged alongside Kagame’s name.

Given his Soviet-style popularity in Rwanda, the prospect of power changing hands seems highly unlikely. There is a general consensus that the leaders of the 1994 genocide lie dormant in exile across the border in Burundi and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, waiting to capitalise on any flicker of weakness.

Such threats add to Kagame’s stability.

With a population that is wired in and switched on, there is hope for Rwandans like Nkunda that a connected people will be able to hold Kagame to account and push for a truly contested election in 2017.

Although Kagame appears as if he is here to stay, I ask Nkunda if new technologies will empower Rwandans to criticise and pressurise the president. His response is clear: “Everything is possible in the future.”

ISIS HT14 // 51

I AM A TERRORIST INTERVIEW WITH TENZIN TSUNDUE, TIBET’S OUTSIDER-POET AND POLITICAL ACTIVIST By miraNda hall

I h av e ho r ns , tw o fan gs a nd a d r a gon f ly ta I l .

I a m th e h u m I lI at I on y o u gu l pe d d o wn w I th f l at t e n ed no s e .

I a m a t e rro r I s t. s h o o t m e d ow n.

52 // ISIS HT14

T

Miranda Hall

I

t is considered bad luck among Tibetans to discuss what will happen when the Dalai Lama dies.

Tenzin Tsundue, however, is not afraid of taboos. “If His Holiness passes away before the situation is resolved, I think the Tibetan people will take matters into their own hands. Once the centre disappears, the periphery will be thrown into tumult.

Violence cannot be ruled out. China’s greatest fear, chaos, may then truly be unleashed.” Based in Dharamshala, India, home of the Tibetan Exile Community since the 1959 Tibetan Uprising, Tsundue is instantly recognisable for the red bandanna around his head: “A personal symbol of my pledge to work for Tibet every day of my life and never to take it off until Tibet is free.”

Tsundue’s vocal criticism of the long tradition of Buddhist passivity and non-violent political engagement has struck a chord among a new generation of restless Tibetan militants. “The stereotyping of Tibet as Shangri-la, a land of floating Buddhas, is hugely damaging since it does not recognise Tibetans as real human beings engaged in a political struggle.” For the Tibetan independence movement to progress, he argues, we must kill the clichés associating ‘Free Tibet’ with an obsolete generation of ‘spiritual’, flower-child hippies. “But we too have stereotypical notions of the white west as ‘Inji goser’ (yellowhead Westerner) and the Chinese as ‘cowardly worm eaters’,” he adds with a razor edged grin.

Tsundue first attracted international media attention in 2002 when he staged a one man protest, climbing the scaffolding outside the hotel where Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji was staying in Mumbai with a banner emblazoned with the words “Free Tibet: China, Get Out.” The act was a protest against the Chinese occupation of Tibet since 1950, under which an estimated one million Tibetans have been killed and 99 per cent of Tibetan monasteries destroyed. Despite being imprisoned and given a travel ban, Tsundue repeated the same stunt in 2005 when Premier Wen Jiabao

visited Bangalore. “When I climbed towers in India to protest against visiting Chinese Prime Ministers, journalists always asked me if I was planning to jump to my death. I have lived in prison in Tibet and I know the sense of helplessness, weighed down beneath unimaginable layers of control and power. If I were in Tibet, I would have burned down Chinese infrastructure before burning myself.”

For Tibetan activists, the idea of burning oneself alive is not just rhetoric but reality. In the past three years, 125 Tibetans have selfimmolated as a means of political protest. Some of this number were monks and nuns, but many were ordinary people: fathers and mothers, teenagers as young as 16. “Tibet has been isolated from journalists

born in a roadside tent, and there is no record of his date of birth. He describes going to refugee school and realising the scale of the problem when he encountered hundreds of other children who had escaped from Tibet, leaving behind their parents and entire families. “From then on I pledged to be a freedom fighter.”

In Dharamshala, Tsundue was able to feel at home because he was not discriminated against as a ‘Chinky’ but, for him, as for all Tibetans, it is only a temporary home. “It is such a tragedy that the first thing you learned as a child was that you do not belong here and you cannot own anything here.” When he was young, he tells me, their tin roof would leak horribly every rainy season, flooding the house. His father always refused

tsundue first attracted international media attention in 2002 when he staged a one-man Protest, climbing the scaffolding outside the hotel where chinese Premier Zhu rongji was staying in mumbai. since 2008 and tourists are hugely restricted,” Tsundue explains, “so Tibetans inside Tibet see their world collapsing in silence. To highlight their suffering—having failed with all other methods of protest— self-immolation is a desperate last resort.” Such acts of desperation are the only way of getting one’s voice heard from within Tibet, with its draconian restrictions on the usual platforms for democratic dissent such as the internet. 53 per cent of posts generated in Tibet are deleted, and keyword blocks prevent anyone from searching for the likes of ‘freedom’ or ‘Dalai Lama.’

As we move on to talk about his background, Tsundue is clear about what most shaped his beliefs: “Poverty. It all started with poverty.”

Along with thousands of other Tibetan refugees who escaped Tibet in 1959, his parents were highway construction workers. Tsundue was

to fix it with asbestos sheets, saying every time: “When we return to Tibet we will have our own house.”

He never returned, dying in exile in Kerala. Tsundue is realistic about the risk of this fate for all refugees: “To be in exile is to live in a state of perpetual uncertainty, dreaming against all reason of return to an unseen homeland.” This is a homeland that in the official, diplomatic world, does not exist.

At the age of 21, “dreaming of revolution and tired of fighting for a country I had never seen”, Tsundue decided to return to his Tibet and crossed the Himalayas alone, covering over 400 kilometres by foot. However, he was arrested on arrival at the Tibetan border by Chinese soldiers who promptly blindfolded him and threw him into prison. “I was tortured, interrogated, humiliated and starved…the six foot cell was like a freezer. I learnt to use my shoes as a ISIS HT14 // 53

Tenzin Tsundue

pillow on the concrete floor.” Since then he has been imprisoned fourteen times. “A great learning curve.” he comments with sarcasm. “I highly recommend jail time for all young people.”

Although he describes himself as first and foremost an activist, Tsundue is also a writer, citing Khalil Gibran

These are our celebrated heroes. That’s why China targets these public figures.

Because art has a compulsive habit of policing liars. That is why Liu Xiabo is in jail in China and Chinese dictators are infuriated by the antics of artists such as Ai Wei Wei or bloggers such as Woeser.”

So what exactly does freedom mean

“if i were in tibet, i would have burned down chinese infrastructure before burning myself.” and T.S. Eliot among his most important influences. He won the Outlook-Picador non-fiction prize and his collection of poetry, ‘Kora’, has sold over 20,000 copies. “In Tibet, in the clear absence of any Tibetan political leadership, people follow the writers, poets, intellectuals, stand-up comedians, bloggers and musicians.

to Tsundue? “I have realised that freedom is not an end result but a process, and that even as we fight for freedom I must ask: ‘Am I free from my personal ambitions? From my desires and ego?’ My conviction in Tibet’s freedom is based on the Tibetan people’s belief that our practice of love and compassion

I am tIb etan. b ut I a m not f rom tIbet. n ever b een th er e. yet I d re am of dyIn g there.

54 // ISIS HT14

is more powerful than Chinese arrogance with its money and brute force. No amount of wealth can buy us out nor any amount of threat silence us in fear. We are already free.

We only need to send the Chinese home.”

While Tibet burns, however, the international community seems to be turning a blind eye. On his recent visit to China, Cameron actively distanced himself from the Dalai Lama and reaffirmed the UK’s support of the ‘One China Policy’ (which asserts that Tibet is an ‘inalienable part of China’). For as long as the West continues to play salesman rather than statesman, placing commercial opportunity above moral rectitude, Tsundue faces a solitary mission. The prospect of him ever taking off his red bandana seems disturbingly remote.

TH E C O D ER' S C AV A S : V I EW I N G V I D EO G A M ES A S .

ART “A

nd the Prophet shall lead the people to the new Eden.”

Choral music echoes around the chamber and golden light seeps through the stained glass. The entire floor is covered by gently undulating water, reflecting a hundred candles.

A vast statue stands with his arms open wide, rising out of the pool. In the corner, head bowed, stands a man dressed all in white.

“Excuse me! Where am I?” “Heaven, friend. Or as close as we’ll see ’til Judgement Day.” BioShock Infinite is an undeniably beautiful game. The moving images and rich soundscape hold so much aesthetic and sensory value that it would not be unreasonable to present stills from the game as art in themselves. Yet on top of this, it creates a layered, thrilling narrative, exploring troubling and perplexing themes: personal identity and morality; American nationalism; and the limits and quirks of objective reality and truth.

The Guardian’s Nick Cowen, while saying that Bioshock has “an unshakable claim to be challenging what we think games are capable of ”, proceeds to undermine these artistic observations by saying that “Whether or not you take anything

away from BioShock Infinite beyond its story doesn’t matter. If you buy a copy of this game, you will have fun, and really, that’s the only recommendation that is required when discussing this medium.”

Computer games exist on the periphery of cultural discourse, receiving little attention from nongamers. Even when the industry does receive external hype, much of it is negative. Grand Theft Auto V sold over 29 million copies over the six weeks following its release, and was heavily criticised for normalising violence, sexism and racism, as were its predecessors in the Grand Theft Auto series. Unfortunately, there is a tendency to extend these problems to the industry as a whole, the sins of a few well publicised games relegating the entire medium to the cultural gutter.

However, games have long acted as metaphors, holding up the pillars of serious discourse on the nature of communication: HansGeorg Gadamer’s ‘primacy of play’, Wittgenstein’s language-games, Derrida’s ‘freeplay’. Each places the concept of the game at the heart of humanity’s ability to understand, to read and interpret the world around us. Evolutionarily speaking, play is the ancestor of Art.

By roBert maCquarie & timNa fiBert Gadamer writes, “Spectatorial participation… demands immersion in that which cannot be fully anticipated or controlled by individual consciousness. The game and the artwork are both forms of self-movement that require that the spectator play along with what they bring into being.” For Gadamer, there is no fundamental difference between the video game and other forms of art—all involve a role for agency as well as interaction with a pre-created

Play is the ancestor of art universe. When reading a novel, the imagination must work in tandem with the words on the page; games engage us in the same process, with actions taken as part of gameplay interacting with the video game’s set structure.

And yet detractors claim that video games cannot aspire to the seriousness of a great novel or film. The film critic Roger Ebert wrote a polemic against video games in 2010, asserting that objects of art “are things you cannot win; you can only experience them”.

Gameplay, the argument runs, places one in a position of action rather than contemplation. A gamer’s mind is preoccupied with a competitive instinct. The desire for victory ISIS HT14 // 55

society is enriched by critical engagement with its antitheses. undermines the desire to think seriously about issues posed by the game.

But the idea of identification enhanced through competition is fundamental to the experience of interpretation. George Eliot’s theory of fiction was founded upon the production of sympathy by the exercise of imagination; Gadamer wrote of a “fusion of horizons”.

Communication and empathy seem dependent upon our ability to displace our consciousness, transcending superficial differences between people. Video games, and their unique ability to create especially personal identification between subject and avatar, are perhaps the most potent means yet invented to facilitate this imaginative leap.

A study conducted at the University of Barcelona has shown that a mere 10 minutes spent in a virtual body of a different ethnicity can reduce implicit racial bias. The firstperson shooter Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 features, as it nears its finale, a moment where the player character—their avatar throughout 56 // ISIS HT14

the game—is betrayed and murdered, still from a first-person perspective.

The emotional impact of this scene is increased dramatically by the assumption of the character’s point of view and intentions throughout the rest of the game.

One problem with this, which critics hasten to point out, is that the characters and situations in which video games immerse us are often less than savoury. Violence and murder are very much the industry norm. In the same section of Modern Warfare 2, the character with whom we empathise so strongly has caused the deaths of hundreds of other characters in pursuit of his goal. At this point, one might argue with Oscar Wilde: “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.” Society is enriched by critical engagement with its antitheses. This argument is based on trust, and the belief that individuals, generally, can engage that critical faculty themselves.

There is one unfortunate caveat.

In the potency of video games lies their greatest flaw, for the empathy they create is so strong that it stunts

this ability to criticise. It is here that video games face their greatest challenge, for it is always an uphill battle to step away from a character for whose actions you are responsible.

Whilst there is a space for reflection in the meeting of horizons in a novel or a film, the gap between persona and person is narrowed by physical proximity. So our ability to evaluate the horrific body count that piles up in any typical shooter game is drastically limited.

Like all artists, game developers need to realise the weight of ethical responsibility that the format places upon them. This does not alter the fact that the immersive interaction inherent in video games can help us explore themes and narratives in a way unprecedented in the cultural sphere. It is the job of definitions to describe, not prescribe. When our conception of what ‘art’ is begins to curb the exploration of new creative frontiers, it is time to change that definition, not to stop exploring.

MAKING ART OUT OF DECLINE

IN LE ED S ’ TET LE Y GA LL E RY By peNNy CartWright

the main hall of the new Tetley art gallery in Leeds stands a large black platform. At one end is a pulpit, at the other a set of stairs for a small audience, perhaps just fewer than twenty people, to sit. The performers’ end of the platform is flanked by a wooden wall, like the headboard of a bed; its edges are carved in a shape reminiscent of cowboy saloon doors.

All over this wall, on the steps and even crammed onto the pulpit itself are carefully painted slogans: “I have it all”, and “the deserving and the undeserving poor”.

With its Old West aesthetic, the platform (entitled Fear of the Surplus) is evocative of the meeting hall churches of Midwestern evangelists, while its steps could be anywhere that teenagers gather and chatter. It is a nostalgia piece: nostalgic for an idea of past community, for a society less divided along economic lines, and

where poverty and unemployment are regarded with sympathy, not contempt. This preoccupation with employment and the stigmatisation of the poor is a dominant theme at the gallery, whose main entrance wall is also inscribed with a list of words; “scapegoat”, “freeloader” and so on. Such messages seem to make it impossible not to ask: will the designated ‘have-nots’ really ever see this gallery?

This question is made all the more pressing due to of the gallery’s unique location: the Tetley is named after the Tetley brewery, which closed in 2011 after it was sold to Carlsberg, ending 189 years of major beer manufacturing in Leeds. Tetley became simply another part of the Danish-owned behemoth, and the brewery was converted into an art gallery in 2013.

It is hard not to wonder whether the gallery, a commercial initiative on ISIS HT14 // 57

Leeds’ Tetley Gallery

Will the desigNated ‘HAvE-nOTS’ really ever see this gallery?

a former manufacturing site, partly represents a trend taking place across Britain; one that is producing the very ‘have-nots’ that are now exhibition subjects.

When asked whether any of the speakers invited to lecture on their stage were actually themselves unemployed, Rushton & Tyman, the artistic partnership behind Fear of the Surplus, admitted not, though they described some of the participants as being in “precarious employment”.

This, then, is the risk such art runs.

What begins as an attempt to draw attention to the experiences of some of the poorest socio-economic groups becomes an act of objectification, which though entertaining or stimulating for an audience, does nothing to reduce the marginalisation of those it depicts.

Of course, there are numerous examples of more participatory explorations of social disadvantage, some in the Tetley gallery itself. Tyne

58 // ISIS HT14

and Wear’s celebrated exposition, Culture Shock, is a project recording the stories of hundreds of people from various walks of life. It has been seen as a particularly successful example of the outreach possibilities of art. It gave people a rare chance to make their voices heard, promoting art’s relevance to ‘ordinary’ life and providing a therapeutic outlet for people’s experiences.

Moreover, Rushton & Tyman were quick to point out that Fear of the Surplus was specifically intended to challenge such binary approaches to thinking about work as ‘the employed’ and ‘the unemployed’. Instead, the piece aims to raise a number of more nuanced and imaginative questions, from whether or not domestic work ought to be paid, to what society would be like if we all worked more or less.

However, outside of Rushton & Tyman’s art, there is obviously an economic necessity to make these

distinctions between employed and unemployed, taxpayers and nontaxpayers. Similarly, whatever the successes of individual projects, some of which have been considerable, there remain valid concerns as to the broader social impacts of an arts and culture economy. The Tetley gallery is a case in point.

Pippa Hale, the gallery’s co-founder and director, counts 30 in-house staff and roughly another 30 jobs provided indirectly from contracting.

In its heyday in the 1960s, the brewery employed 1000 workers. Of course, improvements in technology served to reduce this number of staff throughout the years, although 179 people still lost their jobs with the brewery’s closure. But the brewery’s economic importance lay not only in the employment it provided for Leeds, but in the revenues it generated as a significant exporter, which found their way back into the UK economy.

Though Carlsberg transferred some of the manufacture to sites in Tadcaster,

Penny Cartwright

what begins as an attemPt to draw attention to the exPeriences of some of the Poorest socioeconomic grouPs becomes an act of objectification

Hartlepool and Wolverhampton, thus keeping jobs and skills within the UK, the profits from Yorkshire’s bitter are still being channelled to Copenhagen.

What economic benefits, then, will the gallery bring to compensate the loss of the brewery? Arts Council England cites a number of possibilities.

According to ACE’s May 2013 report, areas with arts and cultural facilities see an increase in property values and resident spending, and the attraction of a skilled workforce. Moreover, increases in tourism can become an important source of outside income.

But much of this runs the risk of further marginalising the unskilled poor, who are unable to participate in the spending or employment benefits and pushed out of gentrified neighbourhoods.

the vast proportion of arts revenue dependent on the UK’s monied classes. An extensively arts-based economy, rather than bringing new wealth into the country, risks further privileging the rich and marginalising the deprived.

As for the advantage of tourism, figures taken from ACE’s press releases put tourist spending at 19.5 per cent of total consumer expenditure on the arts industry. This is far from negligible, but still leaves

A small TV in a side room just off the hall where Fear is exhibited plays a looping video of computer-animated heads. They are voiced by real people expressing their worries over benefits cuts and pension allowances, even

homelessness. The sad thought is that this screen may be the closest that many of the people in the video ever come to entering the Tetley gallery, with its slick kitchen bar offering platter meals at £16 a pop. This is not to belittle the efforts of renovators such as Pippa Hale. Theirs is a worthy project and their artistic programme is commendable for its effort to engage with the history of the brewery. The Tetley gallery says it wants to honour industry. Maybe it is time the UK did too.

ISIS HT14 // 59

60 // ISIS HT14

ISIS HT14 // 61

artistic credit 4

Photography by Eric Schneider; graphic by Isobel Staton

6 9

12 15 18

Toby Mann Abi Karas; Circus Elephant Poster used with permission from Andrzej PÄ…gowski Monkey on Bike/Curious George; Wiktor Gorka (1968) Two Horse Heads with Plumes; Lech Majewski (1975) Contortionist; Jerzy Czerniawski (1975) Horsehead; Romauld Socha (1974) from Contemporary Posters, New York (www.contemporaryposters.com) Bonnie Wong Sage Goodwin Sage Goodwin

22 26 28 29 30 32 34

Chloe Schneider; photography by Daniella Shreir Photography by Kennet Werner Abi Karas Toby Mann Sylvia Hong Photography by Alex Sun Sylvia Hong

37 40 43

Bonnie Wong Bonnie Wong Sylvia Hong

47 50 52 55 57

Abi Karas; photography by Miranda Hall and Abi Karas Bonnie Wong; graphic by Samuel Galler Chloe Schneider; photography by Claudio Raschella for the Tibet Project Chloe Schneider Bonnie Wong; photography by David Lindsay; graphic by Kyle Rawding Divider photography by Eric Schneider; graphics by Sylvia Hong Cover photography from National Aeronautics and Space Administration (mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mro/)

62 // ISIS HT14

H IL A RY T ERM 2 014

Editors Aaron Payne and Charlotte Sykes PRINT Deputy Editors Matt Broomfield Nathan Ellis Peter Endicott Love Hedman Sadie Levy Gale

Online Editor Livvi Yallop Online Sub Editor Josh Dolphin Social Media & Marketing Rushabh Haria

Creative Directors Bonnie Wong Sylvia Hong Creatives Team Sage Goodwin Abi Karas Chloe Schneider Special thanks to Toby Mann Broadcasting: Emma Hewitt Beth Timmins

Sub Editors Jazz Adamson Lucy Diver Miranda Hall Henry van Oosterom Julie Yue

Events Director Leo Jennings Events Team Olivia Aylmer Asta Diabaté Nichola Finch Isabelle Gerretson Charlie Silver

Business Director Alice Sandelson Tiffany Liu Eliza Chubb Elizabeth Renard Adam Dayan Published by Oxford Student Publications Limited © 2014

OSPL Chairman: Jonny Adams Managing Director: Kalila Bolton Finance Director: Jai Juneja Company Secretary: Hugh Lindsey Directors: Max Bossino, Rebecca Choong Wilkins, Anthony Collins, Polina Ivanova, Christina Maddock, Stephanie Smith

ISIS HT14 // 63

BaCK Cover

64 // ISIS HT14