ISIS Magazine, Trinity Term 2013 by The Isis

isis

Cover: Students in a chain passing cobble stones for the barricades, Gay Lussac Street, Paris, May 10th 1968. Photographed by Bruno Barbey, Magnum photos.

Editorial In 1892 the last words of one of the first ISIS issues read: “contributions should be written on one side of the paper only, and should be sent to the editor… as should all correspondence, criticisms, suggestions, complaints, presents, Christmas cards, and challenges.” By 1965, Andrew Lawson had decided to “sod the general reader”, claiming any “attempt to court the whole undergraduate population would involve us in a futile struggle with Oxford’s extremes of cynicism and apathy.” We’d like ISIS to be the “soap box on which committed people can stand up and YELL” as Lawson states, but we also want to provide for interchange. We set out to make ISIS more politically charged but not distanced from its readers. This term we received 97 article pitches, commissioned 54 and published 23. We don’t believe in an Oxford resigned to apathy. Noam Chomsky described to us an “unfortunate gap between what is and what should be”. No form of government redistributes its resources properly, our economic systems are failing and climate change is irreparably damaging the world. A panel of ex-prisoners and prison employees at an ISIS event suggested the prison system is unethical. We heard at our discussion of radical journalism that the Left is flagging. In selecting articles we sought to redress the gap of which Chomsky complained. Inside this issue we have considered some ideas, problems and outcomes: Nick Cohen and Noam Chomsky argue about the warring left and the EDL violently defend the legitimacy of their LGBT division. Writers have argued over the anti-bourgeois renovation of Hollywood movies in Dogme 95 and examined the politics and gender implications of handholding. Cultural norms are examined in Iran’s attitude towards transgender identities. From debates over systems of governance to the benefits of an Anarcho-capitalist state, ISIS has set out to start conversations about things that matter. This issue cost your JCR 30p but it cost 80p to print. Through the printed magazine, and our new online publication – the Weekly Window, we aim to return to the dialogue that founded ISIS. Send your letters, criticism and Christmas cards to our offices, email or Facebook. We think there are ideas waiting to be found. Good luck.

Rebecca & Philip

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Agenda 6 How-to guide

Anarcho-capitalism Isaac Greenwood

28 Dogme 95

Dylan Holmes Williams

Losing Ground Caroline Taylor

Changing the System

19 A.D. Harvey

Violet Brand & Philip Bell

12 Lives in three lines Dominic Stanford

Hypnotic Language Max Hughes

Notes Towards the End of the World Adam GethinJones

Poetry Various

42 Book Piracy Amber Husain

44 Hold Your Hand Nathan Ellis

Happiness Realisation

James Gillespie

Violence

Michael Livesey

36 The Dark Side of the Rainbow Matt Broomfield

46 Shit

Charlotte Goodman

ideas

49 Acid House Evy Cavalla

Cargo Cults Beth Timmins

55 Correspondance

63 The Forgotten Revolution

Yara Rodrigues Fowler

59 Memories from Magdalena Daisy Thomson

66 Laughter in the Dark

New Bodies, Old Norms Thea Slotover

ISIS Through the Ages

Alexander Woolley

ideas

problems

outcomes

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How To Demonstrate In 1968 Paris

How To Climb The New College Wall

ou must not do this because it’s strictly forbidden in the New College handbook and the handbook is the law of the land, from which only fools would dare to stray. But if you must, then climbing New College wall by darkness is a worthy pursuit. At the southeast corner of the wall you may find an

upright crate and a kindly tree, useful to leap from low to high. From here, walk the length of the wall, hesitating only to avoid patrolling porters or menacing moss. To the potential climber ISIS offers this warning: should the forces of college catch you, expulsion from the within the bounds of said wall will be inescapable. So if you must, take to the wall when the clock strikes two or three, disguised by dark hood and hardened by courage.

Anonymous

eceived recently from an Oxford student just back from the Paris cobblestones a hurriedly duplicated handout: “Wear goggles. Have half a lemon in your mouth. Have a piece of linen over your nose and mouth. Do not inhale gas from the exploding grenades. For your eyes: hydrocortisone eyewash.” So run the instructions of the obscurely named “Mouvement de 22 Mars”. There are, of course, preventative measures issued to the doughty defenders of the

Sorbonne. As the instructions make clear, the gas used by the CRS (French riot police) was potentially dangerous and grenades added to the display of force. All sorts of gruesome consequences arise. “In the case of serious attack, the patient risks dry pulmonary lesions, bronchitis, and spitting of blood. In addition the pulmonary lesions cause saturation of the lungs leading to death.” Besides all this followers of Dany le Rouge are told not to wear nylon fabric (inflammable) and to guard against projectiles and bludgeoning with workmen’s helmets. As a seemingly wise afterthought, the handout adds: “If a grenade lands near you, do not pick it up. It might explode.” Aux armes, citoyens – indeed!

ISIS Archives, 1968

ideas How To Become A Compagnon Du Devoir

he Compagnons are said to have built the Egyptian pyramids. Fifteen-year-olds join this French institution, which is similar to the now extinct English guilds, to become carpenters, joiners, plumbers, leathersmiths, chefs and other kinds of tradesmen. Arnold Luthers is a half-Belgian half-Irish Compagnon joiner living in Bordeaux. It usually takes ten years to go through the levels and become a Compagnon, he tells me. After an apprenticeship of two years and a year’s break in between, he became an “aspirant”. “This is when you accumulate most of the knowledge and experience on your trade—and life in general.” As part of the ‘aspirant’ stage he went on a ‘Tour de France’. This takes up to seven years and Luthers changed town every six months, earning his living in a workshop and living in Compagnon houses. The Tour is an ancient tradition, stemming back at least to the 15th century journeyman. What you learn is “not just the physical and technical”, but you learn to meet

different types of people; a crucial part of becoming a Compagnon. Luthers was then inducted as a Compagnon. He was ceremonially awarded a cloak and stick, as well as a chain and scarf with ancient symbols imprinted. The pyramids symbolise where the compagnons “started off” and the tower of Babel shows that “You’re better off doing what you know than being prétentieux.” When a compass, a square or one of the three founding fathers are printed on walls of the Compagnon houses they are there to “remind you why you have taken that path, and let you think whether you’re still on that path.” The Compagnons maintain an ancient moral code which “helps people to fit into society better”, to make them more “solidaire”. Luthers, although he was inducted into the Compagnons ten years ago, is still actively involved. “If you accept to be a Compagnon you accept to give back what you’ve been given. You go to see the young people at your house, give them a course or two … it’s not just about work. It’s for life.” He adds cheerfully “I don’t mean you can’t get out of it.”

How To Get Into The Gaza Strip

ne: Find a good reason to go - the risk is serious. Run a children’s bookwriting competition for charitable

ends. Two: You need a Hamas permit - talk to the appropriate institute there and explain what

you can do for the Gaza Strip. Three: Fly to Egypt and beg, borrow or steal a permit to leave via the Gaza border - you cannot go via Israel if you are doing charity work for Gaza. Four: Get a double passport - it is illegal to have two passports, unless you have a good reason. There are countries you cannot enter once you’ve visited Palestine. The USA is one example. Five: Get a refundable plane ticket - you won’t know till the very same day if it will be safe to go.

Løve Hedman

Philip Bell 7

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Changing the System

Seven opinions on how to change the world

Description of political governance debators Cornelius Christian – Economics PhD student at Oxford and blogger Peter Ghosh – Oxford Tutor, Historian of British politics and of political ideas Henry Tonks– 2nd year, Corpus Christi Courtney Youssef – 3rd year, St Catherine’s Noam Chomsky – Father of modern linguistics and Professor at MIT. Satish Kumar – Former Jain monk, anti-nuclear activist and editor of Resurgence Magazine

Do you think the current form of capitalism adopted in the West is sustainable? CC: It depends what one means by “sustainable”; but I believe that economic growth cannot continue indefinitely. Mainstream economists believe that it can, as long as technological innovation continues. This assumption, that new scientific discoveries will forever drive growth, is dubious. Northwest-

ern University economist Robert J. Gordon recently found that the innovations required to sustain long-term growth are rare; prior to 1750, there was virtually no growth, and our current run of good fortune is unique in human history. The 1990s Information Revolution had a fraction of the impact that the Industrial Revolution did. This rubs mud on mainstream economic theory.

ideas PG: “Current form” implies something rather static. I think what we see at present are two dynamic trends: (a) continually increasing regulation on both technical grounds and the simple decrease of planetary and national space, alongside (b) a startling regression in the distribution of wealth back towards a Victorian model. The mass of the population almost certainly dislikes (b), but our political system gives no redress. (See answer to Q4). So, perhaps the most obvious threat to these trends continuing is as yet remote: the point at which environmental catastrophe threatens the rich in rich countries and not merely the poor countries. So far environmental concern has simply increased industrial and technical efficiency; it has led to no diminution in the unsustainable consumption of resources, and when this polarity is recognised, it will be fought tooth-and-nail. Rogue nuclear proliferation is another possible threat, though much less predictable and with much more uncertain consequences. HT: No political-economic structure is ever indefinitely sustainable – even one as longlasting as feudalism was in a constant state of evolutionary flux. The great issue with twenty-first century capitalism is that Western governments treat it schizophrenically: most do not question the myth that the market itself has rights and treat corporations as if they were entitled to the same freedom as individuals, whilst simultaneously they buy into a social democratic philosophy that sacralises equality of station. Political governance is being pulled apart by the demands of these two polarities, since a free market will always encourage inequality. Pragmatically we also have to recognise that both polarities are themselves invalid. SK: No, the current form of capitalism is not sustainable. Capitalism was established at a time when it was thought that the natural resources were abundant and human labour scarce in the West. Therefore we thought we

could convert natural resources into financial capital without any limit and spend on human labour as little as possible. But now we are realising that the population has grown three to four-fold and human labour has become abundant whereas natural resources are depleting fast. Now we need a new system, something like naturalism, where we can serve and preserve the natural wealth and natural resources and make them available to all members of the human community on a just and equitable level. In the philosophy of capitalism conservation of nature has a very low priority and maximisation of profit a high priority. In the context of rising population and depleting resources we need to change this priority. NC: I just gave a talk a few days ago in Dublin discussing why civilization is unlikely to survive “really existing” capitalist democracy. Q. What is the next big political idea? CC: I certainly hope it won’t resemble fascism or communism. The rise of China, coupled with the global economic crisis, worries me in this regard. The Washington Consensus has led to horrible evils, like Pinochet in Chile, but the Beijing Consensus may turn out to be worse – it has already produced dictators like Rajapaksa in Sri Lanka. Hopefully the next big political idea will involve civil society reining in the powers of a bloated state and rogue market in compelling but nonviolent movements for change. This is already happening through organisations like Citizens UK, which campaigns for a Living Wage. PG: I don’t wish to foreclose on the future, but rational prediction does not suggest that there is one on the horizon. It’s not clear that 20th century political theory saw any ideas so new that they obviously stand apart from past tradition. This is in contrast to the 19th century which in secular liberalism, socialism and political economy laid the foundations for

isis tt13 the analysis of an affluent world dominated by material and secular concerns, rather than those of religion or political violence. SK: The old big political idea was ‘Big is Better’. We thought that social services must be provided by the centralised state. This old paradigm is becoming unfashionable and unmanageable. There is a tremendous amount of waste and corruption in this centralised system. HT: Hopefully we can agree that the future of governance does not lie in revolutionary movements, at least not in the west. The next big political idea should be a recommitment to civic responsibility and robust public morality. We seem to have forgotten that those with resources have a duty to serve those without. CY: We will see the emergence of ‘macronationalism.’ How else can a state expect to protect its autonomy against the growing markets, military capacities and cultural hegemonies of the US and the BRICs? The EU is currently leading the way and the difficulties it is currently facing are simply teething problems before the inevitable next step; an even tighter union. NC: Great new ideas, if they are waiting out there to be discovered, are unpredictable. Q. Is Marxism finished? Why? CC: I remember reading what Karl Marx himself wrote: “I am not a Marxist!” Regardless, Marx’s ideas continue to evolve as scholars and activists update them. In the process, his ideas have influenced the following movements to greater or lesser degrees – South American Catholicism (liberation theology), Soviet totalitarianism, and the Feminist struggle. Popular movements nowadays talk about the bourgeoisie as The One Percent. So, no, Marxism is not finished, but the gigantic economic experiment that was the Soviet Union did end, as we all know, in colossal failure.

PG: If by ‘Marxism’ we mean a form of analysis – analysis of the material foundations of all human behaviour, including (for example) social class and intellectual production, without however claiming that such an approach is exclusive and compre¬hensive – then ‘Marxism’ (or whatever we choose to call it) is alive and well and in principle indestructible. We currently live in one of the most materialist cultures that has ever existed, and the neocon free marketeer and K. Marx have a great deal in common. The degree to which the academy sees fit – or finds it profitable – to dwell on such unpalatable truths is a separate question. The developing hierarch¬ical regulation of academic output in the UK is one of the more remarkable signs that (non-violent) Stalinism is also alive and well. NC: What is valuable in Marx, and there is a lot, should survive SK: As with capitalism, Marxism is out of date. Marxism also has very little concern for the conservation of nature. Marxism with Leninism favours strong and centralised state even more so than capitalism. People want to participate rather than obey the dictates of the elite. Marxism with strong centralised bureaucracy does not trust people therefore it has no future. HT: It would be unfortunate if Marxian ideology does disappear, because politics requires oppositions such as that between political capitalism and Marxism to work properly. Marxist challenges keep the rest of us awake. In my opinion, Marxism will never succeed simply because capitalism, the exchange of private resources and products based on supply and demand, is the natural condition of human economic life. CY: As long as people believe that the political and economic system itself has been designed to perpetuate a particular class structure, Marxism will continue to live. The persistent

ideas influence can be seen more clearly outside of the West, where many poorer countries voice their opposition to the hidden agency behind the supposedly neutral rules of the global economy. Q. Why aren’t students interested in politics? CC: I disagree with that premise. Students are active in politics today, leading causes like Occupy Wall Street and the Egyptian liberation movement. While young people may not strongly associate with political parties, they are active in more meaningful ways: through local environmental groups, anti-war lobbies, and charities, for example. PG: For obvious reasons. Current UK politics, aka “democracy”, amounts to an extraordinary specialization in one technique above all else: that of mastery of the processes of voter attraction and accumulation within a framework laid down by law and media technology. Serious thought about real problems or even telling the truth in public may go on, but if it does, it is most obviously in those parts of the society and polity that lack media access and which politicians mistrust in principle (the civil service, quangos, academics). It follows that politics are perceived as trivial, morally debased, and uninteresting. They’re not unimportant in principle, but the evacuation of real content seems to be the normal state of affairs. Certainly student career choices reflect this. The one career he or she does not queue up for is politics. (On the other hand, they do queue up to be journalists, so they are implicated.)

for its own sake. They make promises to gain power but once in power they forget their promises and merely want to stay in power. As people in general the students particularly want to be active participants in the process of politics. Students, being young, are generally idealists and when they see politicians having no idealism and practising hypocrisy and practising exactly the opposite of what they are preaching they get disgusted. This is why they are losing interest in politics. HT: Students are interested in politics. What students aren’t interested in is student politics , and it is easy to see why: student politics tends to be dominated by pettiness, meaningless internal electioneering and obscure rules. Hopefully most such student politicians will become civil servants rather than policymakers. The real stuff of politics is free debate, grand visions, ideology versus doctrine, an intelligent and curious citizenry – all of this interests students. CY: With the Conservatives leading the movement towards marriage for same-sex couples it seems as if Britain’s political parties are moving ever closer to a broad consensus on many of the more emotive conscience issues that can pull people into politics. On the other hand, issues like the economy can appear so complicated, and the dominant party positions so nuanced, that it’s not surprising that many students do not feel confident nailing their colours to the mast.

NC: On why too many people – not just students – are not interested in politics, we may speculate, but much more important is to act and to try to overcome the unfortunate gap between what is and what should be. SK: The reason students are not interested in politics is because politicians want power

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Lives in Three Lines The artistic form of tweets and the revelation of realities

“

Two heads are better than one, reckoned Ndako, of Bosso. His nosy neighbors, who made him open the dripping bag, objected.” Over the past two years, novelist and art historian Teju Cole has tweeted hundreds of the curious, violent, often tragic stories found in the crime and metro sections of local newspapers in Lagos. He calls it his ‘Small Fates

Image: 12 Emily Coghlan

Project’: “These pieces are generally not events of the kind that alter a nation’s course. They are not about movie stars or, with exceptions, famous politicians. They are about the small fates of ordinary people.” Such stories go unnoticed in cities around the world, everyday. “Because his six co-workers were highly unreasonable, Mr Ayogu, in Amuwo Odofin, set

ideas them on fire. Two, at least, won’t argue again.” Cole’s coverage of bizarre aspects of life in the Nigerian capital shows both the differences and the similarities between life in Lagos and the American life familiar to him and most of his followers: “The idea is not to show that Lagos, or Abuja, or Owerri, are worse than New York, or worse than Paris. Rather, it’s a modest goal: to show that what happens in the rest of the world happens in Nigeria too, with a little craziness all our own mixed in.” ‘Small Fates’ are not just stories lifted from newspapers. Rather, each incident is given a concrete form in 140 characters or less, each tweet carefully composed with a Haiku-esque grace and a keen ear for irony: “Joining the fight against AIDS, armed men in Edo carted away a shipment of anti-retroviral drugs.” Cole comments: “It is beautifully absurd, charged with a nice and meaningless symmetry. A news report collapses into syllogism.” Although many ‘Small Fates’ tell the story of a crime, Cole is eager to highlight the ironies hidden just below the surface of an incident: “Knowledge is power. He graduated in business administration in Calabar, and Charles Okon has since administered sixteen armed robberies.” The title of the project is a variant on French faits divers columns, which feature similarly various and unusual news stories in a few sentences, and have appeared in French newspapers since the nineteenth century. ‘Fates’ consciously echoes the French faits, meaning ‘facts’: “I think what all of these have in common, whether they are funny or not, is the closed circle of the story. Each small fate is complete in itself. It needs neither elaboration nor sequel.” The unchallenged master of these examples of “Nouvelles en trois lignes” was Félix Fénéon (“nouvelles” in French means both the news and novellas: the translation therefore is ‘News / novellas in three lines’). Fénéon’s work appeared in Le Matin newspaper between 1901 and 1906. An enigmatic and influential figure in fin-de-siècle Paris, Fénéon was the first to publish James Joyce in France, is thought to have been responsible for the bombing of a fashionable Parisian café, and was arrested for his anarchist affiliations. Fénéon’s faits divers were published anonymously; he composed them nocturnally whilst working at Le Matin to support himself. In Fénéon’s stories of nineteenth century France, there is the same spectrum of love, loss, violence and death as in Cole’s tales from modern day Africa; all are treated with a simi-

larly arch tone: “Raoul G, of Ivry, an untactful husband, came home unexpectedly and stuck his blade in his wife, who was frolicking in the arms of a friend.” Faits divers have good standing in francophone literature: Flaubert’s Madame Bovary was inspired by one curious news story of an unhappy provincial wife taking her own life by poison after the ruin of her husband; Roland Barthes wrote at length on their structure. Inspired by this association with literary tradition, Cole’s final instalment of the ‘Small Fates’ project used the familiar rhythm of some of the most famous openings of Western literature to stress the horror of the United States’ drone attacks around the world. The great physical distances between military personnel and the targets of drone attacks often creates an emotional distance in newspaper coverage of the incidents. Yet these “Seven Short Stories About Drones” attempt to close what Cole refers to as the “empathy gap” placing drone attacks somehow apart from traditional conceptions of warfare and its conventions. “Someone must have slandered Josef K, for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was killed by a Predator drone.” The realities of drone attacks are alien to many, despite their growing use under the Obama administration, and the current controversy over their potential use against American citizens. Here the ‘Small Fates’ form becomes more poignant. Lives are cut short without any warning, just as the altered ‘novellas’ never progress past their first sentence. The dark comedy implicit in many ‘Small Fates’ becomes even more affecting; lives are reduced to three lines, a bad joke, ending with silence and absence. The brevity of Cole’s pieces leaves the reader slightly spinning. One is left with a sense of loss, with a desire to pursue that which is both fully contained and only hinted at within 140 characters. The form becomes open-ended and provocative. Following Fénéon’s example in turning the faits divers column of Le Matin into a series of provocative short stories, Cole has rendered the limited form of Twitter a commanding platform for the coverage of stories that are not given a prominent place by other media outlets. 140 characters have never been used more powerfully. “On a condolence visit to Alhaji Maigari, of Gombe, whose daughter had died, Senator Goje’s speeding convoy knocked the man’s son dead.”

Dominic Stanford

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HAPPINESS R E A L I S AT I O N Japan’s suit wearing cult

appiness Realization is dangerous. The political wing of the Happy Science religion, ‘The Happiness Realization Party’, fielded candidates in 99% of Japanese parliamentary constituencies and succeeded in getting a member elected to the House of Councillors, the upper house of Japan’s legislature. It believes in creating an ‘ideal nation’ by, among other things, doubling the already crowded population to 300 million and amending the country’s constitution to allow pre-emptive military strikes. Ryuho Okawa, the movement’s founder, is a University of Tokyo graduate who used to work in finance. His education and professional background are unexceptional for a politician but seem out of place for the leader of what some consider a cult. Okawa founded the Happy Science religious movement in 1986, and its political counterpart in 2009. The religion is one of Japan’s shinshūkyō, faiths that were founded in the modern era, and which are regarded with suspicion by many Japanese. Aum Shinrikyo, the sect behind the Tokyo ricin attacks, is one such group. The aim of Happy Science is to unite the teachings of the world’s major religions – which Okawa believes are complementary – in order to secure “happiness realization”. Okawa says that North Korea is hellbent on enslaving the Japanese people, with China’s help, after attacking Tokyo with a nuclear missile. The source of this worrying piece of intelligence is Kim Jong 14

Il’s guardian angel, who visited the party leader in a meditative vision to warn him of the impending invasion. Okawa also argues that the Nanking Massacre – a World War Two atrocity committed by Japanese troops – is a myth, a position worryingly similar to that taken by some seekmainstream politicians in Japan. The ‘Happies’ are difficult to pigeonhole, a group of eccentrics with the slick presentational skills of mainstream politicians. Thought to be more a cult than a political movement, their party presents itself like any other, sending grey-suited candidates to knock on homeowners’ doors in the suburbs at election time. When the Happies promise to grow Japan’s population in order to make theirs the world’s biggest economy by GDP - a target notably assessed in terms of competition with other nations, especially China - they voice an anxiety about Japan’s future. Having suffered a ‘lost decade’ of economic growth after the stock market crash of the 1990s, before which Japan was seen as a rising economic power, to many in Japan the future seems in-

The aim of Happy Science is to unite the teachings of the world’s major religions—which Okawa believes are complementary—in order to secure ‘happiness realization’.

ideas

secure. Of course, the idea that WMD-possessing Pyongyang is planning a military attack is by no means extreme. Equally concerning is the Chinese government’s willingness to resort to anti-Japanese rhetoric in order to soothe domestic political concerns. Last year, Japanese businesses were attacked by rioters on the Chinese mainland after Beijing modified – temporarily – its usually strict control of public protests. With a membership made up of relatively well-educated people the shinshūkyō offer a simple proposition: life’s uncertainties and difficulties can be solved, and personal harmony attained, through the faith. Okawa promises happiness to those who follow his Fourfold Path, in which spiritual enlightenment is offered like the latest diet regimen to those who “seek the

way”. Through their religion, reassurance is given to disaffected adults that the universe makes sense; through their politics, the anxieties of a nation – about its economic future, its national security – are to be solved by their messianic leader and his four point plan. It’s not a recipe for electoral or spiritual success, but Okawa will continue to stir controversy as long as his party retain their ubiquitous presence in Japanese elections.

James Gillespie

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n March 1976 Swedish tabloid newspaper, Expressen, began publishing a story entitled ‘Pomperipossa in Monismania’ by the prominent author Astrid Lindgren. The story, a satirical allegory about a writer of children’s books in a distant country, was a response to the 102% marginal tax rate that the author incurred as a result of Sweden’s then burdensome tax legislation. It soon provoked widespread debate about the tax system and the size of the Swedish state. The impact of the story has even been cited as a factor in the defeat of the Swedish Social Democratic Party, for the first time in 40 years, in elections later that year. After a debt crisis at the beginning of the 1990s, the Nordic state is now far smaller. In Sweden, public spending as a proportion of GDP has dropped from 67% in 1993 to 49% in 2013 and, in that same time period, public debt as a proportion of GDP has fallen from 70% to 37.6%. Reform of the Nordic state has been characterised, above all, by extensive privatisation and reform of the tax system. In both Denmark and Norway, private firms are allowed to run public hospitals; in Sweden and Denmark, a universal system of school vouchers and free schools has created one of the most pervasive atmospheres of equality of opportunity in the world. In Denmark, 72% of women are in work, strikingly close to the figure of 79% for men. The state has even refrained from coming to the aid of some of the region’s biggest companies, with Sweden letting Saab go bankrupt and allowing Volvo to be subsumed under one of China’s largest car manufacturers, Geely. Of course, reducing the role of the state has adverse effects also. The privatisation of hospitals may make them less accountable and letting companies go bankrupt causes people to lose their jobs. But the Nordic countries seem to have avoided the inequality that tends to accompany economic growth. The Gini coefficient, an economic index of income inequality in which 1 represents complete inequality, stands at 0.24 for Sweden, compared with an OECD average of 0.31, 0.34 for the United Kingdom and 0.38 for the United States. In South Africa it is 0.60. Equality no longer seems irreconcilable

ANARCHO-

ideas with the economic prowess and stability that is generally a priority for modern societies. This trend towards a leaner Leviathan for the Nordic states has been watched with increasing interest by anarcho-capitalists. The end result envisioned by anarcho-capitalists is one in which all the states functions are carried out by private enterprise and the state is thus rendered redundant. The ongoing transfer of state services into the private sector and the conflation of equality and economic success in Scandinavia has therefore been seen as a possible stage in the development of an anarcho-capitalist society. Professor David Friedman – son of the prominent economist Milton Friedman – is one of the main anarcho-capitalist thinkers

-CAPITALISM New thought on the shrinking state

This trend towards a leaner Leviathan for the Nordic states has been watched with increasing interest by anarch-capitalists. and authors. For him, the most plausible scenario for realising an anarcho-capitalist society relies upon the gradual transfer of the state’s services into the private sphere, until there is no state left to speak of. In the Nordic countries, at least, one might see the beginnings of such a trend. Of course, the role of the state is still huge in Scandinavian counties. It is the success with which the transition to a smaller state is being made that excites anarcho-capitalists. As many anarcho-capitalists themselves concede, the most significant problems that the shift to an anarcho-capitalist society is likely to face involve finding a private solution to the legal system and to the thorny issue of national defence. Although private legal systems have been observed in the past, the most pertinent example, because of its Nordic nature, being the Goðorð system of the Icelandic commonwealth which ended in 1262, there are no modern examples. A book by Robert Ellickson, of Harvard University, explores the existence of legal systems in American communities that do not rely on a state presence, but this is a far cry from the widespread legal framework

isis tt13 envisaged by anarcho-capitalists. Similarly, while private security contractors abound, the problem of national defence has yet to be undertaken by a private firm. This may be about to change. The British government is planning to announce its decision to assess whether Britain should continue with its current provider of military equipment, a government outfit called Defence and Equipment Support, or outsource its functions to a new organisation that would be owned by the government but operated by a private contractor. This could represent a step on the path to military privatisation. The model of the Nordic countries has evidently begun to acquire influence outside of Scandinavia. Given their enviable avoidance of southern Europe’s economic sclerosis and America’s unhealthy inequality, it is unsurprising that many in the traditional leaders of the West are beginning to turn to Scandinavia for ideas. In February 2013, the Economist published an article titled ‘The Nordic Countries: The Next Supermodel’ which stressed the subtle mimicry of the Nordic economic system taking place in countries across the world. For examples, one might look at Britain’s recent overhaul of the education system to allow the establishment of free schools, or France’s attempts to replicate the slimmer Nordic welfare system through its pension reforms. Indeed, Lant Prchett and Michael Woolcock of the World Bank have coined the phrase “getting to Denmark” to describe successful modernisation. But the most telling evidence that the Nordic countries are trendsetters can be found in the world’s emerging economies, especially China and India. It is undeniable that in both countries the state remains extremely powerful in both the social and economic spheres. However, there are signs that state power there is on the wane. In China, the number of companies under state supervision has dropped from 198 in 2003 to 121 today. In India, the dominant figure in the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party and the man most likely to lead them in next year’s general election, Narendra Modi, has long been recognised as a champion of small,

effective government. Just as the flaws of the state-capitalist economic models of China, India and Russia are being revealed, through growing inequality and a generally disgruntled population, the perceived advantages of Nordic deregulation are becoming more obvious; this trend seems set to continue. Anarcho-capitalists have welcomed globalisation and the rapid rate of technological advancement, as aiding their cause. Both factors have reduced the effectiveness of state-dominated systems; meanwhile, the increased vocalisation of the masses, primarily through the growth of social media, has allowed for criticism of government and the state on a much larger scale. One product of this has been the extension of civil liberties and a corresponding decline of state authority on a personal level, although this has, by no means, been universal. In interview, David Friedman identified two further trends that anarcho-capitalists should embrace. The first of these is the growth of support, especially within the academic community, for anarcho-capitalism. He conceded: “It is still very much a minority position, but it is now just inside what academic economists and philosophers consider the range of legitimate positions instead of well outside it.” Secondly, he noted: “The internet has increased the general accessibility of minority intellectual positions, including anarcho-capitalism, so that there are a lot of non-academics who consider themselves anarcho-capitalists. Many of them haven’t thought through the ideas or arguments very carefully - but some have.” The advantages and disadvantages of a shrunken state are probably unknown to a certain degree, and will undoubtedly be debated fervently in the future. Anarchocapitalists will watch the trends unfold with interest, hoping that one day, any marginal tax rate at all will be worthy of complaint.

Isaac Greenwood

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A Novel Historian

ISIS interviews A.D. Harvey, the man of many names

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What’s wrong with being an icon?” A.D. Harvey asks as we leave his flat in Stoke Newington, North London. He is a sixtyfive year old historian, novelist, and poet who publishes twenty academic articles per year, but has only held short posts at universities in Leipzig, Germany and Salerno, Italy. Harvey was relatively unknown outside academic circles until last month, when Eric Naiman wrote an article for the Times Literary Supplement exposing him as the man behind multiple articles and books written under six pseudonyms. So, when he sent a submission to ISIS titled “My Poetry” commenting: “If I’m famous this month, Isis readers might like

to read the attached,” we were curious. More striking than his writing under pseudonyms is that some of the information was deliberately erroneous. In an article by ‘Stephanie Harvey’, A.D. Harvey implied that Dostoyevsky had met Charles Dickens, and cited an obscure Dostoyevsky letter in a Russian archive. This went unchallenged, then was cited by others – eventually ending up in a prominent Claire Tomalin biography of Dickens and monographs by Malcolm Andrews and Michael Slater. Michiko Kakutani in her New York Times review of Tomalin’s biography described the account of the meeting as “remarkable”.

isis tt13 Tomalin retracted her statements and apologised, saying that she was the victim of a scam. Excited Dickens scholars everywhere were disappointed and some, embarrassed. This wasn’t the first time Harvey had written under a pseudonym. By 1985 he had published numerous articles, historical monographs and a novel, but felt that he was being rejected from some academic journals on name and reputation, rather than by the quality of his articles: “History [the academic journal of The Historical Association]… was turning down my stuff – not because there was anything wrong with it, but because it was by me!” Why would History want to reject him? Harvey speculates: “I’d never met Speck [the then editor]. It’s only a possibility, but it seems the only explanation, that he and certain other people had been annoyed by letters I’d been writing to the Times Higher [Educational Supplement], complaining about appointment systems and the way universities were clogging up.” So in 1985 he sent an article to the aca-

Combine a novelist and an historian and you get A.D., Stephen and Stephanie Harvey and Dostoyevsky meeting Dickens. demic journal History under the name ‘Stephen Harvey’. It survived peer review to be published in the next issue, with the title: ‘The Italian War Effort and the Strategic Bombing of Italy’. Having in his own head confirmed the idea that the rejection of ‘A.D. Harvey’ articles was unwarranted, he delivered the coup de grâce: he sent a 14-page chapter from one of his published books, altered to look like an article, under the name ‘Trevor McGovern’. This too survived peer review, by “two other experts teaching the period, none of them recognising, in spite of the fact that I write better English than they do” that it came from a published book. When it was revealed that the Trevor McGovern article was an act of gross plagiarism, Speck, “being hysterical on the subject, actually organised that the

Trevor McGovern should be torn out and he provided a replacement [article] to be glued in”. The episode exposed History as “professionally incompetent” for reprinting a chapter from a book that, in Harvey’s view, all the referees should have known about. Harvey seems to revel in the opportunity to tell us his story, and in the sudden blast of TLS-induced fame: “At the last count, [the article] features on 44 blogs and internet discussion groups,” he says eagerly. The TLS piece has been something like validation, for a “failed academic” (his words) tucked away in a flat in North London, publishing, writing, reading and researching in local libraries – but without, until this point, public recognition. It doesn’t seem to trouble Harvey that the recognition is for academic fraud. He does take issue with the way the article was written: “I think Naiman actually hijacked someone else’s story, made himself the star of someone else’s story – mine, not his,” he says, before interrogating us on whether we feel “warm or cold” towards the A.D. Harvey presented in the article. Nevertheless, he thinks the piece can be read “both ways” – in favour of Harvey as well as against. Harvey is intrinsically anti-establishment: anti the established journals, the established academics, and established institutions – which he regards as closed to outsiders, complacent and self-regarding. But this attitude is tinged with fondness for places like Oxford and Cambridge: “I was from a smaller town and a poor background and Oxford was sort of the dream for me.” He seems to revel in the opportunity to reminisce about Oxford in particular. His opening line, as we sit down in a dusty room piled high with books and antiques, is halfnostalgic: “For me every stone of Oxford is dulled by a failed hope, and, looking back, the only time that I actually really got off on the place was coming up for the interviews.” In his final year studying History at St John’s College, Oxford, a literary agent expressed interest in a novel Harvey had been writing in his spare time; Harvey decided to be a writer. The obvious way of funding this career was by doing a PhD, in order to have

ideas three years’ income – in those days, academic grants were generous. “I didn’t become established as a novelist, but I fell in love with doing historical research.” He did his PhD at Cambridge, and began to apply for academic jobs: none were forthcoming. Eventually “after 11 years of Oxford and Cambridge, I decided it just wasn’t happening”. He “ran away to become a hippy, and lived in a squat and was an antique dealer for a couple of years”. But he kept on publishing. In conversation, he keeps returning to a few core themes. One is that “academics don’t read” – evidenced by his repeated successes with pseudonyms, planting false information, plagiarising his own work, and publishing a comparative essay in which one of the texts compared did not in fact exist. The other is that his own productivity (and, not-so-softly implied, brilliance) hindered his chances of getting an academic post. Another, again, is that the academic appointments system is closed, biased and filled with people interested primarily in promoting their careers.

He is anti the established journals, the established academics, and established institutions – which he regards as closed to outsiders, complacent and self-regarding. These grievances, justified or not, are what underlie Harvey’s attempts at academic sabotage. Not all the pseudonyms had serious intent, he claims: Stephen Harvey and Trevor McGovern were invented to prove a point (first, to himself, then, to the academic establishment represented by Speck). But Stephanie Harvey and the Dostoyevsky-Dickens encounter was merely playful – an act of “jeu d’esprit”, he says. “Isn’t one allowed to have fun in life?” And the other Stephanie Harvey article, a comparison between work by Doris Lessing and Leo Bellingham (i.e. A.D. Harvey) – where the Bellingham short story didn’t exist, except in the footnotes of the comparative article – was an attempt to play with literary form. John Schellenberger, a pseudonym used “to puff my work” on his-

torical approaches to literature, he justifies as, partly, “a debate with myself”. We ask where the (rather odd, or oddly diverse) names come from. “I’m creative, I write novels, I wanted to be a novelist.” Trevor McGovern “For a southern Englishman… suggests some polytechnic lecturer in a donkey-jacket, which was part of the point” while John Schellenberger recalls “an American girl I had a fling with at Cambridge a long time ago, called Jane Schellenberger… the name was in my head”. Ultimately, “These names, these stylish mannerisms, are actually part of being a writer.” In the TLS article Naiman slowly peels back the layers of different but linked identities to reveal the shadowy figure of Harvey behind them, who is criticised for damaging the reputation of independent academics. The acts of sabotage, Naiman thinks, will only make journals more closed to independent historians like Harvey. Harvey is keen to reject this: “That’s just a complete canard. When you make contact, they [the editors] can pursue the question of your existence.” What Harvey doesn’t seem to want to acknowledge is that an author’s existence is taken partly on trust: journal editors don’t have time to ferret out authorial identities. When pushed on the subject, he concedes, “Yes I have to confess it [the hoaxing] suggests a certain style of maliciousness – and carelessness – for other people’s sense of right and wrong. But then what about their sense of right and wrong? I’ve got 40 years of unemployment to complain about,” he laughs. He revels in the title of academic terrorist. “Terrorism isn’t just bombs, it’s knowing where to put the bomb, how the system works and you undermine the system by poking it in certain places. This is partly an exercise in figuring out where to poke and how to poke and how the poking really works.” Later, describing the hoaxing of the Dickensian, he returns to this analogy: “You get a taste for these things… what I really wanted to do [was work out] can you make two tons of explosive out of stuff from the garden centre?” It’s

isis tt13 unclear whether, when digressing further into bomb-making, he’s intentionally extending the parallel or simply expressing enthusiasm for the subject. Either way, his conclusion is telling: “The more bombs you make, the more likely you are to blow yourself up, so that actual arithmetical possibility of making a ton of explosive and everything going wrong…” Does Harvey have a point? He has certainly published a lot, despite (some academics might say, because of) his non-affiliation to a university. Some of his books have been genuinely well-reviewed. Collision of Empires: Britain in Three World Wars, published in 1993, received good write-ups in the Telegraph, the Guardian, the TLS, and several academic journals. And yet, Harvey says, he received no mention in the Annual Bulletin of Historical Literature (a Historical Association publication) between 1992 and 1995, despite two successful books coming out. “Retrospectively, if I’d ever needed a justification for what I’ve done, this would be it. These aren’t straight, honest, fair-dealing people.” He views it all as a conspiracy to suppress his name. And perhaps there is a closed-ness to the academic history establishment, an unwillingness to recognise the merits of work by someone who’s not ‘one of us’ – an unwillingness to appoint people who’ve come in late, who aren’t of the right generation. But Harvey is perhaps a little guilty of overthinking: he thinks the conspiracy of silence extends even to the TLS. “The week after [the article] came out, it was like the interviews at Oxford, I was on air, because I thought the whole letters page for the following week was going to be full of people writing in – mostly negative – but provided there was an opportunity to shit on everyone…” But there wasn’t. The only letter referencing the Harvey article was a short one, picking Naiman up on describing the spires of Oxford colleges (the spires in fact belong to the churches). Harvey suggests: “It’s possible that someone leaned on the TLS not to publish any more to do with it.” If this strains credulity, it also speaks of a man who’s had lots of time – perhaps too much time – to mull over the obstacles, real and perceived, in his own career.

Perhaps Harvey’s problem as an academic is that he has tried to cover too much. The interdisciplinary scope of his work is remarkable: a poet, a wide-ranging historian, a literary critic and a novelist. He describes himself, perhaps slightly tongue in cheek, as a “simultaneous genius”, but simultaneity may have been his downfall. His consensus-breaking attitude and his generalist approach merge so that his fictional and historical writing are not altogether separate. Combine a novelist and an historian and you get A.D., Stephen and Stephanie Harvey, and Dostoyevsky meeting Dickens. But, while Harvey may have dreamed of becoming the historian or novelist on everyone’s lips, what drives him still is a passion for literature and history. When we meet him, he is clutching a thick volume of Dickens; judging from his book collection, he reads what he wants. He used to keep notes with article titles under his pillow, but now he has a small red notebook with three columns of article lists: “accepted”, “looking” and “cooking” to denote their stages in the publishing process. Once the articles have been accepted he glues the pages down. “The basic thing is I write what I want to write,” he says. He claims he has no longer has any reason to publish under pseudonyms, although he might still publish “some minor poetry or something” under a fake name. A line from the “My Poetry” piece he sent into ISIS in April perhaps sums up how he thinks: “I suppose my non-fiction work has an adopted voice… A.D. Harvey trying a bit too hard to sound like a scholar or a critic or a theorist… I have published non-fiction under [several] pseudonyms, each presumably with a different voice, though I confess they all sound to me like A.D. Harvey.” For the full story of how A.D Harvey’s identity came to be uncovered, refer to the article ‘When Dickens met Dostoevsky’ by Eric Naiman, available on the TLS website. For an example of A.D. Harvey’s writing, see his submission to ISIS on the ISIS website.

Violet Brand & Philip Bell

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Hypnotic Language It’s the way you tell ‘em

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ypnosis is everywhere, they say. Advertisers use it to manipulate our desires, politicians employ verbal tricks to blind us to their real purpose, others use it to try to seduce us into their way of thinking. And yet for many, hypnosis remains the stuff of quackery and stagecraft, bringing to mind images of slowly-swinging watches and patients mesmerised as they sink into deep leather couches; of the hypnotised as hapless victims, or humiliated for the entertainment of others. Hypnosis is both less and more dramatic than our fantasies about it. Many of the current stereotypes derive from a different era. When Freud was practising in Vienna in the early twentieth century, the hypnotherapist had a mystique that now seems alien to us. ‘Direct trance induction’ relied on the (usually) female patient surrendering her will to that of the (usually) male therapist. A hypnotherapist would tell the patient what to feel, how to feel it and when to feel it. Props such as spinning watches were de rigeur but times have changed radically since then. In the 1970s, an approach known as NeuroLinguistic Programming (NLP) began to transform the field of hypnotherapy. NLP came at a time of deep scepticism about the authority therapists held and its potential misuse. Many of those working as therapists before the advent of NLP seemed more like the disciples of some obscure pseudo religion or cult, than people whose professional lives

“Commentators have identified hypnosis as a key reason why Tony Blair’s speeches were so powerful” were dedicated to helping their clients. They belonged to various groups with frighteningsounding titles and bewilderingly complex ideas: the Kleinians, the Analysts, the NeoFreudians and so on. Some used hypnosis, others did not. NLP adopted a simpler model, concentrating on results in real people rather than elaborate theorising. It had no time for Oedipus and Electra conflicts. Richard Bandler and John Grinder, the two psychologists who created

NLP, sought to emulate the techniques of those therapists whose work with clients produced the most dramatic and long lasting changes. It was an era when the Human Potential Movement was advocating that humans possess extraordinary abilities of which they are largely unaware. The movement emphasised unreached potential rather than faulty psychological processes. Hypnosis was regarded as one key to unlocking such potential. Within the area of hypnosis there was one particular therapist whose brilliance shone out amongst his contemporaries. His name was Milton Erickson. Erickson was an American psychiatrist whose patients had often been through many other therapists before they reached him. His unconventional approach to treatment and hypnosis baffled many of his contemporaries, as did his apparently miraculous success in treating ‘untreatable’ clients. Bandler and Grinder took the approach that, by systematically reproducing Erickson’s procedures in the appropriate circumstances, similar or identical results might be obtained. This became a cornerstone of NLP’s development. NLP is about the discovery and releasing of individuals’ potential, rather than working out why it was buried in the first place. Bandler and Grinder developed what they called a “toolbox” of techniques to do so, among them hypnotic language techniques. Nowadays, mention of NLP or Milton Erickson amongst psychologists is a surefire way to provoke instant controversy. The language of NLP has been criticised as pseudoscientific, hiding the unprovable assertion that individual potential exists behind a barrage of jargon implying scientific rigour. Erickson’s case notes have been criticised as inaccurate and even fantastical. But outside mainstream psychology there has been an explosion of interest in the techniques of NLP amongst all kinds of individuals, including big business employers and politicians. Particularly interesting to non-psychologists is the secret language of persuasion. When Erickson’s approaches were analysed by Bandler and Grinder, they noted that

ideas he used, probably unconsciously, certain patterns of language which put his clients into a trance-like state. They termed these language patterns, ‘conversational hypnosis’ or ‘hypnotic language’. ‘Pacing’ is one of many techniques. It is designed to put someone in the mindset of agreement. You start off by stating noncontroversial truths, building a climate of agreement between you and the listener. By the time you reach your more contentious conclusion, the listener is in a mind-set of agreeing with you, and, more often than not, does. This is common. We build up to our conclusions through non-controversial statements. “Given that the situation has been so frantic recently, that the workload keeps on increasing and increasing, and that there is no way to prevent this happening, it would be a good idea to arrange an extra break during the day, don’t you think?” What is surprising about the pacing technique is that there need be no logical connection between the pacing statements and the controversial conclusion. The persuader alters the mindset of the listener, rather than relying on the logic of their argument. Someone employing the technique might say, “You have come here today to hear me speak, you are wondering what I will say, it is a difficult topic, and now we can really reach agreement at last”. When this technique is skilfully embedded in a discourse it can prove difficult to work out exactly when the switch has occurred between agreement based on logical flow and agreement based on, well, agreement. The same goes for that little tag question “don’t you think?” A series of tags woven carefully into a discourse increases the persuader’s chances of getting agreement, particularly when they occur in rapid succession. Obvious really, isn’t it? Then there is the word, “because”. Simply by saying “because”, the speaker persuades. It seems that our subconscious accepts a reason as a point in favour of a proposal even if, in the cold light of day, that reason lacks cogency. You can increase your chances of getting a discount in a shop if you say, “I would like a

discount because it’s important to me” rather than just, “I would like a discount”. We are taught in our formal education to seek clarity and precision. But precision actually makes people less likely to agree with us: it is better to retain ambiguity in argument, since people appear to automatically attach their own meaning and adjust the sense to fit their own views. “We must move forward, even those who disagree on the details are with us on that one”, suggests that there is agreement that change must occur, even if in fact there is none. There is no lack of anecdotal evidence on conversational hypnosis. There are numerous claims that hypnotic language techniques have resulted in vast increases in sales. Many businesses employ coaches to teach their salespeople and many individuals part with substantial sums to learn the techniques. There are plenty of satisfied customers prepared to write testimonials. Commentators have identified hypnotic language as a key reason why Tony Blair’s speeches were so powerful. In Italy in 2008, the police issued a video which purported to show a criminal using conversational hypnosis alone to persuade a bank clerk and several sales assistants to hand over hundreds of Euros to him before making his escape. But scientifically validated trials are much harder to find. There is little research on exactly how hypnotic language might compare with conventional ways to improve the ability to persuade, such as rhetoric. There is no universally agreed definition of hypnosis. One way to conceptualise it is as a state of mind where the unconscious takes over some of the responsibilities of the conscious mind. Though the slowly swinging watch and mesmerising music may no longer be in vogue, that it can be accessed simply through language patterns reminds us that even stripped down, hypnosis is still a force to be reckoned with.

Dr Hughes’ new book on persuasion will be available this summer.

Max Hughes

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VIOLENCE The creative potential of violence re-examined

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he 20th century was the century of violence par excellence. People were killed on a larger scale between 1914 and 1990 than ever before. Treblinka and Kigali, Stalingrad and Sarajevo: the sites of these atrocities retain a dark and ominous prominence. Isaiah Berlin was moved to write: “I remember it only as the most terrible century in history.” Yet it is important to try to demythologise violence. Violent protest did not always carry the stigma of menace and insecurity that it does today, a stigma evident in the widespread condemnation of student protesters at the Millbank Tower in November 2010 as selfish and unjustifiable. Many student radicals of the 1960s thought of violence as a means of achieving liberation, a means of questioning what the New Left intellectual Herbert Marcuse termed the ‘containment of social change’. It was the Algerian War of Independence that best exhibited the power of violence when used by the oppressed to achieve liberation. As Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in his Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960), ‘in certain circumstances, a group emerges à chaud and acts where previously there were only gatherings’. Certainly, in places like Algeria and Vietnam there was this community à chaud. These revolutionary communities used violence to reestablish their

“In certain circumstances, a group emerges à chaud and acts where previously there were only gatherings” liberty. More than that, they were using violence to bring about their recreation. Frantz Fanon, a FrenchAlgerian psychiatrist and philosopher, who worked in the hospitals of Algeria, “At the level of individuals, violence is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his selfrespect.” Sartre echoed this sentiment in his preface to Fanon’s Les Damnés de la Terre, a psychiatric analysis of the effects of colonisation, writing: “This irrepressible violence is neither sound and fury, nor the resurrection of savage instincts, nor even the effect of resentment: it is man recreating himself.” Student leaders drew inspiration from the kind of activity ongoing in the Third World. Parisian law student Tiennot Grumbach recalled how between 1962 and 1965 he “organised a [youth] camp at Sidi Ferruch [near Algiers] through which all the young people who made ‘May ’68’ passed”. Anticolonial violence in the Third World was beginning to

inform the activities of First World student protest. The Third World could no longer be purely limited to a geographical constituency. It came to be a byword for combating oppression. And that oppression existed even in the most privileged of societies. In 1964, Malcolm X stated, “I am for violence if non-violence means we continue postponing a solution to the American black man’s problem just to avoid violence.” In 1966, the Black Panther Party was formed. This was a demonstration of the ways in which violence could be employed on behalf of the ‘internal colonies’ of the First World. Violent political change was internationalised. Violence was also re-interpreted as a powerful phenomenon in the European past. Numerous allusions to the creative violence of the French Revolution were made in the wake of the Algerian Revolution. Ferhat Abbas, the Algerian independence leader, warned the French authorities that “the world, as in 1789, is experiencing a revolutionary epoch.” The term ‘Third World’ was first coined as an allusion to Abbé Sieyès’ 1789 tract ‘What is the Third Estate?’ Compare Sartre’s “group à chaud” to nineteenth century theorist Alexis de Tocqueville’s description of the 1789 revolutionaries – people who “followed [their] own convictions boldly, passionately… a time of inexperience doubtless, but of generosity, of enthusiasm, of virility, and of greatness, a time of immortal memory”. Violence must not be exalted, nor celebrated as an end in itself. But the modern distrust of violence is dangerous. In his 1952 work, Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon argued that “man is a yes; I will never stop reiterating that. Yes to life. Yes to love.” Fanon’s violence was driven not by hatred, but by a compassion and sense of justice. That compassion promoted freedom and equality and fraternity. Violence demythologised was merely a means of expressing a lack of these: for “man is also a no. No to scorn of man. No to degradation of man. No to exploitation of man. No to the butchery of what is most human in man: freedom.” Perhaps the time has come to reconceptualise violence: its power as a force for social change, its potential for expressing compassion as well as hatred, and most importantly, its use as a means of venting profound opposition to oppression.

Michael Livesey

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When film becomes a manifesto; von Trier and Vinterberg’s attempt to bring back cinema to the real. n 1995, Batman Forever’s production costs had got lost in gimmicks and the ludicrous, they artotalled $100 million. This for a film about a gued; Dogme 95, which they described as a “Vow crazed computer genius named The Riddler of Chastity”, would bring about the purification of whose evil brain draining device is foiled by an unthe medium. dercover hero who likes to dress as a bat. In the The manifesto was indeed very chaste: notable same year – and as a response to Hollywood’s apwere the ‘rules’ that “the camera must be a handparent fixation with absurdly fantastical narratives held camera”, “the sound must never be produced created using absurdly fantastical budgets – Lars apart from the images” and that “the film must von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg co-authored the not contain superficial action (murders, weapons, Dogme 95 manifesto, a ten-point plan for the reinetc. must not occur).” While Hollywood’s highly vention of cinema. contrived aesthetic sought the construction of In the manifesto, the pair chastised farfetched an impenetrable narrative universe for the total storylines, spectacular special effects, elaborately suspension of the viewer’s disbelief, von Trier and staged camera movements and post-production Vinterberg pursued authenticity in realism through modifications. “99% of the films that are produced self-consciousness. in the world today [are] pure nonsense” lamented This metaphorical middle-finger to the indusvon Trier, “because [they’re] films that nobody try found physical expression in a speech that von wants to direct, [they’re] films that are made only Trier made at an event commemorating the 100th for the market and for the money in it.” Cinema anniversary of motion pictures in Paris. After bra-

ideas zenly proclaiming the birth of Dogme 95, von Trier showered a bemused audience of cinematic bigwigs with red leaflets and left the stage. Hollywood was dumbstruck. To this day, von Trier is arguably more persistent in his adherence to Dogme values and PR stunts.

Dogme 95 was a barbed but humorous attack on bourgeois spectatorship. “Il est merde!” shouted Mark Kermode from the back of a Cannes auditorium at the screening of von Trier’s first Dogme effort, Idioterne (1998). Portraying a quasi-cult of disillusioned middle-class thirty-somethings who pursue their ‘inner idiot’ by ‘spazzing’ – that is, imitating the mentally disabled – the film is nothing if not polemical. But the disruption of the moral and intellectual composure of the viewer is precisely Dogme’s aim. Just as the saccharine conventions of the Hollywood aesthetic are eschewed, Dogme films are unabashed in their exploration of the highly sensitive, the final edict of the manifesto emphatic in its assertion that the “supreme goal is to force the truth out of my characters and settings”. And it’s all played out in a world we can recognise. The camera isn’t disguised but emphasised – at one stage in The Idiots it is even shown onscreen – and thus we are forced to engage with the truth that what is portrayed is not the exaggerated melodrama of some abstract fictional universe, but a realistic human narrative. Many of the Cannes spectators were not as dumbfounded by the realism as Kermode, as Christian Monggaard explained to The Guardian. “This is what it must have been like to sit in Paris in the early 60s and watch the first films by Godard and Truffaut,” he wrote. “Finally, films are talking to me about the kind of experiences that happen in my life.” Von Trier and Vinterberg had provided hope. It could be seen as disheartening then, that both von Trier and Vinterberg have reverted to more traditional cinematic methods in the years since the advent of Dogme 95. Monggaard’s comparison to the French New Wave is apt, given the filmmakers’ own very palpable veneration and reference of the movement in the Dogme side-notes, but it is ironic that von Trier’s and Vinterberg’s apparent absence of conviction is precisely the flaw which they so decried in their French predecessors. “The goal was correct but the means were not!” wrote von Trier. “The new wave proved to be a ripple that washed ashore and turned to muck.”

Arguably the same plight has afflicted Dogme. Since 1995 the cinematic tide has very much risen in Hollywood’s favour and today a classical style predominates in the mainstream at least. Indeed, it is telling that Dogme 95 is now lovingly recalled by film critics and the mainstream media. Much like countless ‘subversive’ cultural movements before it– Dadaism in the early 20th century, radical feminist art in the 1970s –Dogme 95 is now considered innocuous enough to assume its place in the cultural canon as a cute anomalous moment. But does this render von Trier’s and Vinterberg’s efforts obsolete, indicting them as soulless mediasavvy opportunists rather than principled philosophers of the silver screen? Cynics point towards von Trier’s track record of extravagant (and arguably misguided) PR stunts; this is the director who was famously announced a persona non grata at the Cannes Festival after a 2011 press conference in which he stated that he was a ‘Nazi’ who ‘sympathised with Hitler’ in a miscalculated joke. An alternative interpretation is that Dogme 95 – and its fleeting nature – is just a further example of what Caroline Bainbridge has described as the ‘postmodern provocation’ which defines his career. Dogme 95 was never intended to be a serious practical long-term alternative to Hollywood, but was instead an end in itself, a barbed but humorous attack on bourgeois spectatorship. The conspicuous vocabulary of the French New Wave – von Trier writes of “certain tendencies” in the cinema, reminiscent of François Truffaut’s 1954 essay ‘Une Certaine Tendance du cinema Francais’, which kick-started the movement – and of Catholicism – the manifesto’s ten points jokingly mimic the Ten Commandments – suggest a referential, postmodern and ultimately humorous perspective. The essentially arbitrary nature of the manifesto’s restrictions (which von Trier has jokingly referred to as ‘these fucking Dogme rules’) only heightens this sense; Dogme 95 is the ridiculous taken to excess. The purpose? Provoking outrage. “It’s a joke with some meaning in it” says von Trier. What he wants is a reaction. In von Trier’s Antichrist (2009) and Melancholia (2011), this propensity towards provocation is revisited. Antichrist included scenes of genital mutilation, sparking accusations of misogyny from feminist groups, while Melancholia is shocking in its uncompromising exploration of clinical depression and the dystopia imparted by an impending Armageddon. It is clear that when von Trier offends, he likes to offend big. And we are all worthy bait for provocation.

Dylan Holmes Williams 29

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Notes Toward the End of the World Decrypting the language of conspiracy

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Who knows1 how long2 it will be before the international cabal fulfil their secret agenda,3 before we are mere cogs in a market-machine?4 The revolution will be no re-run brothers.”5 -Anon 1.“Who knows” Conspiracy theorists seem to be afflicted with an inalterable certainty. Without fear of doubt they predict that the world will soon end in orchestrated spectacle. If it does, we might well wonder whether it will be the aftermath of World War III? The inevitable depletion of thermonuclear energy? Or fallout from the shock-waves of a crypto-fascist boogie rhythm? Our ultimate and unavoidable demise is, for most, just a morbid matter of fact. Yet for those who claim to have insight into a paradoxically obvious and hidden truth; pending apocalypse is a pathway to uncovering global corruption, mass deception and securing Lee Harvey Oswald’s long awaited alibi. The modern conspiracy theorist is mostly representative of a body of minority extreme, left wing researchers with a predominantly anonymous and virtual presence. Sadly, Hollywood’s loveable caricature of the tinfoil-touting pothead is dead. The 21st century theorist pretends to the authority of accredited news sites: their tweets, video blogs and forums demarcate a disconcerting cyberspace where anti-establishment angst proliferates. What are the inherent dangers lurking behind this minority culture that beckons apocalypse? These notes take a closer look at convoluted grammars of apocalyptic fantasy and explore the unsettling rhetoric of recent conspiracies. 2. “how long” 2012 was the new 1969. Dugouts were hastily constructed and supplies of potato chips, CocaCola and hypodermic needles amassed. The hysteria surrounding the coming apocalypse stemmed from a gross misinterpretation of the end of the Mayan Long Calendar, which simply marked a transition into new numerical

Images: Andrea Willa

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of the magnetic fields are based on a terrible understanding of the way geology, geophysics and astrophysics work.” While Jeffs lost his battle to preserve any integrity that wasn’t already damaged by charges of paedophilic polygamy by the US Government, those he had convinced were still searching for the signs of apocalypse. Every meteorological variation, financial turbulence or controversy over American gun law became part of an alarming narrative of inevitable destruction. As media figures around the world sarcastically entertained the potential cataclysm, a popular cultural interest was stimulated. It was in this climate of moderate peril that Roland Emmerich’s run-of-the-mill disastermove, 2012, generated a whopping $769 679 473 at the box office. Emmerich’s 158 minutes of panoramic cataclysm proved that such conspiracy rhetoric still sells. M. Night Shyamalan’s After Earth was due to be released May 2013.

territory for this ancient culture. Warren Jeffs, leader of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, was so certain the world would end that he narrowed it down to 21 December 2012. As this day passed, Warren revised his prediction to the 31 December. In this case the suspect individual holding a scraggy “end is nigh” placard was given a pedestal and access to billions of people. A coagulation of confusion clotted the vessels of the web. Theorists just weren’t persuaded by the protest of anthropologists like Dr Anthony Aveni, who insisted that “these so called facts about the destruction of the world based on tides and the reversal

3. “it will be before the International Cabal fulfil their secret agenda” “The city fathers they’re trying to endorse the reincarnation of Paul Revere’s horse…” Every great comic has a Promethean villain. David Icke’s Doctor Octopus is the New World Order. Turning from a political career as a Green Party member, Icke weekly harasses these elite ‘puppet masters’ plotting in secret Wall St Bunkers. Nothing is too sensitive for this relentless conspiracy theorist. He believes that multinational corporations, international governments and intelligence services are working in collusion to spread fear of terror, mindless, indiscriminate harm to initiate atrocities more horrific than the Third Reich’s worst nightmare. He markets himself as a totem of free speech, working under the motto “exposing the dream world we believe to be real.” Indeed, the day after the death of the first female British Prime Minister, Icke published an article with the headline: “Margaret Thatcher and her paedophiles in government.” Icke’s supra-hegemony of evil is like nothing Marvell and DC comics ever dared to print. It seems conspiracy theorists of all persuasions have come together to raise awareness of the patriarchal designs slowly unfolding in a confused frenzy of Masonic ritualism, corporate mergers and sacred architecture. Icke’s pursuit of truth has created an enemy that is so expansive in its malignity that it can

isis tt13 be the object of hatred for almost any individual. Yet, this false villain only presents a target for anti-establishment anxiety and advocates the rejection of authority. It does little to promote change and as a result becomes a rotten cycle of self-perpetuating usury, soiling the name of true investigative journalism. In a world where the dubious dealings of corporate companies are no secret, where stories of slave labour, devastating pollution, and tax avoidance lurk behind the ‘high-street bargain,’ the sane critical platform of investigative journalism is needed to interrogate the specifics of corporate mismanagement. Sadly the belief in an underlying design works to bastardise diverse and very real problems concerning transparency and accountability. These daemons are far more difficult to defeat. 4. “before we are mere cogs in a market machine” After the ‘international cabal’ become the ‘international scapegoat’ what place is left for the individual and in what kind of society? Conspiracy theorists have a whole lexicon to describe western political systems: ‘democracy with the illusion of choice’ and ‘un-Free market capitalism.’ The most common and most derogatory is ‘Fascism.’ In their conception of the UK and USA individual identity is non-existent and each member of society has no choice, no agency and therefore no responsibility. At the same time, theorists paradoxically claim to be the voice of the little man in a despotic system. The social reality to which theorists like Icke subscribe holds that everyone is part of a dead metaphor: a mere cog in a market machine, or pawns in a game between inhuman taskmasters and the ignorant populace. Their realism seems to stem from a grave misinterpretation of New Left thought. When Herbert Marcuse worried that the individual in a capitalist society might become part of a “culture-machine which remakes [its] content” he was not suggesting that free market economic systems were the guise for a new fascism, but recognised the potential for dehumanization at the dawn of modern capitalism. This question of dehumanization is at the core of conspiracy theories. It becomes the haze that inhibits their clarity of argument: lost in the fog the subjugated individual’s self-pity prevents them from seeing through ad hoc illogic. The conspiracy theorist’s corrupted reasoning equates the possibility of not knowing the truth with a definite lack thereof as proof for their hypothesis. Thus, in a

vexed metamorphosis, the unknown becomes the known. 5. “the revolution will be no re-run brothers” When Gil-Scot Heron recorded The Revolution Will Not Be Televised he was tapping into the desperate need for liberation in a modernising America. He was showing that change is not promoted in a couch-potato culture, rather that revolution is brought about unexpectedly by active forces that antagonise the dominant social ideology. Conspiracy theorists are also challenging dominant social ideologies. However, they stand apart from Heron in that their awareness of contemporary political issues is not so acute, their methods of instigating change are damaging and most of all they expect to measure the rate of change in an unfolding psychodrama of daily headlines with commercial breaks: their revolution must be televised. Without the stills of Barak Obama’s affectionate handshakes, the three seconds of silence that shows BskyB censoring Julian Assange or the carefully calculated architecture of the Champs-Elysées there would be no conspiracy. If you want to know what the next big conspiracy theory will be you just have to follow a simple formula: Conspiracy = (aAdam Gethin Jones + b)C x d a= First headline b= Second headline c= ad hoc argument d= immanent time

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Poetry Joseph Allan I Wrote This Poem For You So that you would understand What I mean. I don’t like it now. It hurts. Don’t leave notes on the fridge anymore.

A Lover’s Complaint You tried to kill me in your sleep again. To dry the heaves that burst an open gut To twist and spit and clamp the faucet shut And box the ears and palsy out the brain. That’s ripping! she cried, Hooray for ball and chain! So long to all the cockatoo and smut, Farewell the easy-pig the easy-cut, Adieu my Hugh, on you the mark of Cain! The bird-girl and the fish-wife, he and me, To every eyeball else I was Odette, Was cancelled, rankled, rang the ding-dong bell. And all the dumb discourse, long time, no see A kitchenette and this and that vignette, O fucking, fucking, fucking, fucking hell.

Image: Eli Craven (elicraven.com)

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For Those Swept By Achilles These are the shores of ancient Troy Where Aegean blues wash white-hot sand And Achilles once gleamed before the sons of Priam For glory. But glory the greater for his dribbling spear Fixed in the mirror of your eye As if you saw some magnificent crane With wings spread long, streaming under sun. But then â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Arrowâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s whistling point arrests the slender neck And all the vertical meaning rushes past and away Until the bird lies there, crumpled and still.

J. Nickerson

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The K. of F. The routine was simple. We board the train and the King of France gives the speech I’ve heard a hundred times: “Excuse me ladies and gentlemen I am a single father with two children / my son was hit by a drunk driver / he is in a wheelchair / I have no insurance / does anybody mind if I play a song?” He can say it so fast he’s practically already singing by the end. And if no one objects, he says “thank you God bless” and we perform “We Can Work It Out.” The King of France plays guitar and sings and I drum on a paint bucket doing the harmonies. Then I walk around with a shopping bag and people put coins in. We do this every night. One time a man in a bowler cap asked me the name of my brother, the crippled one. I paused maybe too long and then said “Alex” because if I had a crippled brother I’d want him to be named Alex. “The sins of the father,” the man sighed, and then he turned to look out the window. The King of France came over and gave him a hard time after that. The next week, the funniest thing happened. I couldn’t get out of bed. I don’t mean I was tired or depressed or anything, I just couldn’t really move so much. The King of France went to work that night anyway, and this time he said “Excuse me ladies and gentlemen I am a single father / my son is inexplicably paralyzed and can’t get out of bed / I have no insurance / does anybody mind if I play a song?” He played a solo version of “Shout” from the eighties. But no one believed that someone’s kid would just wake up frozen one day. The King came home that night defeated, and sat on the edge of my bed like I wasn’t even there. He took off his jacket, and then his shirt, and I don’t know why this surprised me but underneath the chain-mail armor that all kings wear was his back which was made of skin, human skin.

Andrew Ridker

Images: Aikaterini Chatzikidi

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The Dark Side of the Rainbow

Why the English Far Right have taken up gay rights

problems

ostly male, shaven-headed and white, they can be found in almost any of Britain’s urban centres- a jostling crowd beneath a thicket of placards and Crosses of St. George. Whether a dozen people standing in the drizzle in a provincial town, or a baying crowd of thousands flooding through a city centre, the chants and the message are the same: they are the English Defence League, and they want Muslims out of the UK.

Sometimes the songs grow louder, the police lines break and the photographers scatter as the march explodes into violence past shuttered shops and cowering tourists. Sometimes windows are smashed, cameramen punched and a handful of arrests made. For the most part, they peter out into nothing, banners hanging limp as the protestors trudge home. Occasionally, though, unexpected flags can be seen amongst the ranks of red crosses. Some have a rainbow imposed in the corner, some are Union Jacks with the blue replaced with pink, and it is even possible to spot an occasional Gay Pride flag, emblazoned with the legend, “DEFEND FREEDOM: UNITE AGAINST ISLAMIC MENACE.” The contradiction seems incontestable: the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transsexual and Queer movement preaches tolerance and inclusion, while the English Defence League is a reactionary, Islamophobic organisation which relies on flag-burning, death threats and violence to communicate its message. At best, the existence of an LGBT division of the EDL seems a bizarre publicity stunt, at worst an underhand attempt to provide legitimacy to a fundamentally racist, homophobic and intolerant organisation. But behind the intimidating frontline of brute aggression, there exists a suitwearing wing of the EDL which engages in a pseudo-intellectual campaign of indoctrination. The senior leadership of the League seizes any opportunity to prove its dubious credentials as a moderate, non-Fascist movement. It continues a long tradition of the far right in playing on the fears of the public to gain legitimacy. They argue, for example, that the ‘Islamification’ of the UK is allowing “Muslim paedophile rings” to prey on vulnerable children, manipulating the

isis tt13 current climate of anger to suit their own anti-Islam agenda. Likewise, they use the widespread, though unfounded, public fear of Sharia law being established in the UK to portray themselves as defenders of gay rights. It is easy to see how having a publicly visible LGBT section benefits the EDL as they seek to defend themselves from accusations of homophobia, regardless of whether or not the organisation genuinely wants to protect the LGBT population of the UK. On the old EDL forum, a post by a gay supporter of the League described how he was turned on and viciously beaten by his supposed comrades, leaving him with “blood pouring out of 2 bad cuts” and a smashed up car. This is the background of explicit, violent hatred against which the LGBT division operates, and against which they justify their support for the League. The leader of the division is a man who goes by the name of Tommy English, a pseudonym possibly taken from the name of a Loyalist paramilitary who committed violent acts against Catholics and

fighting against, he stated that “the spread of [Islam] will increase homophobia and homophobic attacks” in the UK. Official EDL press statements likewise make the claim that “gay people in Britain have far more to fear from Islam than they do from the EDL”. The stance of English and his comrades is that Sharia law is undermining Western democracy and legal systems, and thus threatening the rights of gay people to exercise their sexuality as they please. All other threats to the gay rights movement are seemingly irrelevant before a perceived Islamic menace. When asked about any antagonism between his division and other sections of the EDL, like that which clashed with the Bristol Pride LGBT event in July 2012, he made his own views extremely clear. To English, “there are NO tensions between straight members and LGBT members. At the end of the day we all have the same goal, sexuality doesn’t come into it.” Looking at news coverage of EDL protests, it is not difficult to hear homophobic insults being thrown around- attacks that are even more in evidence when browsing their forums, message boards and web pages. Avowed homosexual-hater Terry Jones, the Qur’an burning pastor, has been invited to speak in the UK by the organisation Tommy English represents. Closer to home, drunken EDL members have allegedly violently assaulted gay men on multiple occasions, such as during the Bristol Pride demonstration, despite their claims to solidarity with the LGBT movement. The evidence appears simple and damning. To English, though, it is only an ignorant minority at the fringes of the organisation which articulates homophobic views; any implication that homophobia is a prejudice at the very heart of the organisation is evidence that the media does not want to face the truth.

When the media record our marches, when our rainbow flags are approaching, they cut it out. Republicans before being murdered himself in 2000. When I spoke to English, I heard repeated many of the same lines I had already read on the anonymous official statements he presumably helped to create. However, when not repeating this rhetoric, he provided an insight into what could possibly motivate an openly gay man- and his boyfriend- to devote himself to an organisation that has proven itself to be homophobic time and again. Tommy English describes himself as the leader and most active member of a division “about 30 strong”, largely based in London. When I asked him what he was personally

problems “I’ll tell you something”, he says. “When the media record our marches, when our rainbow flags are approaching, they cut it out and when pictures make the paper they cut out our rainbow flags.” He then went on to tell me about filming an interview with his boyfriend at an EDL march that was never made public, and to state that the “far left” media are responsible for portraying the EDL as homophobic. Tommy English told me that to him, the only real “Nazis” are the media who he believes misrepresent his cause. Perhaps questions should be asked about the danger of extremist Islam in the UK, and of the role of men like Anjem Choudary, the former spokesman for Islam4UK, a figure who English specifically cites. But surely these questions should not be asked by people who propagate hatred and discrimination themselves. To understand the appeal of the EDL to Tommy English and his comrades, we need only to look at their name. This is not an organisation which seeks status as a political party. Certainly, they have endorsed parties such as the BNP, but first and foremost this is a “defence league”. Is there a “conspiracy of silence” around crimes committed by Muslims, as the EDL’s press statements claim? Is labelling the EDL dangerous, violent and hateful simply “fearmongering and mis-reporting [by] sensationalist journalists?” Thousands of people have bought into this, believing they are fighting prejudice. When ISIS approached the LGBT division alleging the darker political motivations of the EDL, a spokesman assuredly responded that “we’ve long ago given up worrying about the media lies from far bigger publications than some silly student magazine.” Indeed, their citation of a Gallup poll as evidence for the wholesale branding of all “Muslims in Britain [as] universally hostile to homosexuality” is not inaccurate, but after all, the 500 British Muslims who found homosexuality unacceptable in 2009 remain an inadequate sample. It is easy to write the EDL off as mindless

thugs, but to do so is to underestimate them. The intellectual wing of the organisation know they can legitimise their cause by recruiting from minority groups like the LGBT movement, while playing on the desires of young men to fight even when there seems to be no real enemy. The LGBT division may in part exist as a political device to cover the EDL from accusations of homophobia, but the fact cannot be ignored that there are gay members of the League who are genuinely and actively committed to its cause. Perhaps some of the LGBT division members have been victims of homophobia themselves and are drawn to the EDL as an outlet for a tangible response involving physical violence. Perhaps it is the sense of comradeship provided to young men who are isolated from their own communities. The double standards at play here are obvious to many, but Tommy English and his comrades are disturbingly convinced of the righteousness of their cause and the evils of Islam. This is no mere publicity stunt; Tommy English is real, the EDL LGBT division is real, and their hatred is real too.

Matthew Broomfield

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LOSING GROUND

Sinkholes and China’s reactive middle classes

t 5.16pm on Tuesday 26th March, Yan Xibing, a security guard on duty in Shenzhen, fell into a sinkhole which had opened beneath his feet. Although passersby soon pulled him out, he died later that day in hospital, from injuries sustained as he was buried beneath the sinkhole’s rubble. This freak occurrence is part of a growing phenomenon across China, as one Oxford student found out for himself on his trip to Beijing this Easter, when a five metre hole appeared on the city’s busiest motorway right in front of his hotel. There are hundreds of reports every day of newly formed sinkholes and several videos of the ground swallowing children, cars and entire buildings. Sinkholes are a global phenomenon. They are typically formed in karst rock landscapes where the ground is made of a soluble rock such as limestone or gypsum. California is inotorious for sinkhole formations: most of the state lies on a bedrock of limestone. Soluble rock is gradually eroded by acidic water, creating cavities below the surface layer of topsoil and sinkholes form when the top level of soil collapses into the eroded cavity. Chongqing in Central China has long been famed for having the deepest sinkhole in the world,

Xiaozhai Tiankeng, delving to 622m, whilst Guilin County in south-central China is likewise famous for the unearthly beauty of the ancient craggy karst rock hills found there, which rise up with improbable steepness from a watery lagoon. Sinkholes are closely associated with human activity, such as extensive construction or mining activities. The fields of Fukou County, Hunan, are littered with more than 20 holes, formed recently due to the collapse of underground water systems, weakened by years of mining. Even in China’s largest cities, sinkholes are making their presence felt. Jingyi Wang, a resident of the coastal city of Tianjin, said: “People used to rely on underground water but now the ground has sunk [by] around two metres and sinkholes occur very frequently. It brings a lot of trouble to the city, as seawater comes in and pollutes the fresh water… it disturbs construction projects, such as the new subway.” Temporary measures, such as “borrowing river water” from neighbouring provinces, have been introduced by the government but the issue continues to plague the city on its path of rapid economic development.

problems visit to Changsha, Hunan province, Professor Judith Shapiro, author of a book on the environmental challenges facing China, observed the new phenomenon of ‘balcony farming’: “In cities, people have so little confidence in their air, water and food that many of them are turning to balcony farming and to growing food on little plots outside their apartment complexes.” This practice has emerged not only amongst the ubiquitous apartment blocks of Changsha, but in several cities across China, reaching as far north as Beijing’s Shunyi district. Given that the country’s carbon emissions per head are less than a quarter of America’s emissions, it seems unfeasible that China will successfully limit the environmental damage in its industrial game to catch up with the more established powers. As the environment loses ground in this battle, China loses time. Hope lies in the changing relationship of the urban classes with their surroundings, which may bring about the action needed to tackle the overwhelming issues they face. In the meantime, while China’s countryside is urbanising its cities are ruralising.

GDP

Caroline Taylor Western Europe

Municipal Water

Floor Space

China

Population

Sinkholes are only one symptom of the wider issue of environmental degradation and damage. China’s approach to industrialisation and rapid urbanisation has greatly improved its economic statistics. But the country is increasingly criticised for its environmental practice: increased rates of desertification, dangerous levels of pollution and the occurrence of these sinkholes. It is hard, perhaps impossible now, to ignore the various impacts of human enterprise on the environment in China, of which the infamous countrywide smog, is perhaps the best-known example. At the beginning of this year the smog covered a total area of 1.3 million square kilometres– an area twice the size of France– stretching its clouded tentacles from Beijing in the north to Hong Kong in the south. Its presence has highlighted the urgency of the need to tackle environmental issues, both for health reasons and economic consequences. Flights are grounded, workers forced indoors and the whiff of this foul cloud can be smelt over 500 miles across the sea, in Japan. With the ground literally falling away from their feet, and the air around slowly poisoning their lungs, it seems inevitable that Chinese citizens should feel the need for change. In Hangzhou, a city near Shanghai, the government has rolled out a public bike hire scheme - as ever, in China, on an impressive scale. With more than 61 000 bicycles covering 2400 stations, it is the largest bicycle sharing system in the world. The targeted return of bicycles to China’s cities seems ironic given the pervasive the sound of tinkling bicycle bells before the effects of modernity and mass urban development caused bicycles to disappear. Awareness of environmental issues is patchy, and relates to class as well as geography. The growing urban middle class are driving demands to tackle environmental issues. When they can no longer trust the food they eat, the water they drink or even the air they breathe, they have turned to creative solutions. On a

Western Europe China

% Contribution to global urban growth 2010-2025 McKinsey global institute cityscope 2.0

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Book Piracy: Pakistan’s Illicit Trade in Print

uthorship may be an abstraction: Roland Barthes argued as much in his 1967 essay The Death of the Author. Ownership, is generally not considered in the same light. In even the most idealised of cultural commons, in which reader and author were fused in open creative discourse, authors would still expect to be recognized as claimants of praise or reward. In Pakistan, this is complicated by cold, brute economics. For readers in a developing country, even those of middle-income groups, the prohibitive prices of legitimately published books can render the virtue of protecting copyrights an utter irrelevance. As each instalment of the Harry Potter series was released, the leap from 250 rupees (£1.68) to 2400 (£15.91) was, for many, a leap to unjustifiable indulgence. The same is true of educational material. Students, particularly of engineering, medicine, and business, even large businesses themselves, are liable to find pirated products their only viable choice of purchase. Since the invention of the photocopier, piracy of books in Pakistan has grown to a

scale unparalleled anywhere on the globe. Trade bestsellers are pirated in vast quantities and are available at every corner of Islamabad, Lahore, Karachi, Peshawar and Quetta. While governmental failure to protect copyrights is one major cause of piracy, a chunk of the blame must be apportioned to the crippling costs of specifically foreign titles, which incorporate considerable importation costs. Meanwhile, authors and publishers suffer the financial fallout, and the Pakistani government itself loses an estimated 20 billion rupees (roughly £133 000) in sales tax per year to piracy in its various forms. In such a context, the tangle of cultural property’s ethical contentions is eclipsed by an economic tug of war. The Oxford University Press in Pakistan confiscates hundreds of thousands of illegally printed books in raids conducted in collaboration with the Intellectual Property Organization. Ameena Saiyid, Managing Director of OUP Pakistan takes a long-term view. Maintaining a belief in the efficacy of raids and enforcement of penalties as deterrents,

problems she sees, as the most important measure, ‘the mindset of the public’. “At present”, she says, “there is a well-entrenched myth that pirates are kind of Robin Hoods who are stealing from the rich and giving to the poor.” Questioned on the focus of the pro-piracy lobby on the price of imported books, she

The word Olympic, for instance, ‘belongs’ to the US Olympic committee, and The Dutch ABN Amro Bank holds exclusive rights to the combination of words ‘The’ and ‘Bank’.

the walls that surround it, and has historically required a beating of bounds. In the preenclosure land commons of the middle ages, it meant merry ritual destruction of the private encroachments that attempted to enclose what was meant to be open. While piracy may be superficially similar, it nevertheless competes with the ideal of a cultural commons that is, by necessity, voluntary. The point is muted in a country with no network of libraries – where every book read must be bought, and where the very idea of doing so at full price is, for most, an absurdity.

Amber Husain

contends: “They fail to mention Pakistani authors’ books are pirated freely, and locally published books, which are priced at local competitive prices and are affordable, are pirated. Pirates don’t distinguish between local and foreign writers and have no qualms or hesitation in pirating local writers’ books, however inexpensive they may be.” The solution, then, cannot be as simple as locally establishing branches of international publishing houses. Eliminate importation costs from the equation, and the problem persists. Ms. Saiyid, however, is optimistic that for piracy’s eradication, the growth of Pakistan’s publishing industry can only be a good thing: “The more stakeholders there are, the better, as this will strengthen the lobby against book piracy.” Maintaining access to shared property, intellectual or otherwise, means penetrating

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alk down the street. As long as it’s a street with a few people in it, there are probably some who insist upon being in relationships. You might feel pleased for them or you might feel bitter that they have what you so desperately crave. Either way, you may not think to pay much attention to their hands. In their intoxicated states, they headily grab on to each other’s palms and cling, blindly guiding each other and signalling to the hordes of guideless loners that they are in a deep state of temporary proclivity towards each other. These directionless individuals weave through the throng, lifting their arms above people’s heads and stepping into moving traffic in order to avoid separation. Others are expected to grasp hopefully at the amorphous air for support and whimper as they find only solitude. In 2005, George Bush held hands with King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia as they walked through a garden of flowers, talking about their hopes, their dreams and the future. This delightful image captured the imagination of millions of Americans and the media

ing hugged enough as a child or being hugged too much as a teenager, but the semiology of hand-holding is baffling. The response of those in the West to the clasped palms of Bush and King Abdullah was shock, at the sacrilege of two men holding hands. They had broken the rules: a social contract on hand-holding. In Western cultures, these are the rules of hand-holding: adult men do not hold hands with other adult men (unless they are in a re-

I (Don’t) Want to

The semiology of hand-holding is baffling. around the world. One New Yorker charmingly commented, “I don’t like it.” The New Yorker’s comment perhaps suggests a degree of underlying homophobia but there are several good reasons not to like hand-holding. For example, the lack of an end point at which people cordially agree that hand-holding’s purpose has been served, and unclasp – as after an arm wrestle, or having helped a blind person cross the road. Most hand-holding could go on forever, a lingering symbol of a two person coterie. This writer hates hand-holding for reasons that are probably linked to not be-

lationship); adult women hold hands with adult men with whom they are in a relationship but not with adult men with whom they are not (unless they are close friends not having sex, when it is perhaps allowed); adult women do not hold hands with other adult women (unless they are in a relationship or very close friends – note that the same caveat does not apply to adult men) but do link arms; mothers may hold their children’s hands (though at some

problems

Hand-holding has a recondite politics behind it. point this won’t be allowed either); fathers may also hold their children’s hands (this is disallowed earlier than with mothers); all children may hold hands with all other children. Hand-holding has a recondite politics behind it. People hold hands ostensibly in order

ful gesture that can happen anywhere, at any time,” it “has the power to change the hearts and minds of people in their local community quietly, subtly, by simply… owning their space”. Hand-holding – rather than kissing, hugging, or any other sort of physical contact – has been chosen to make this statement. It speaks of the innocuous place that hand-holding has in society: a gesture polite enough not to cause a fuss, but political enough to make a statement. This is misguided. Research suggests that hand-holding can communicate the power imbalance in a relationship. In the way of handshakes (which, as a side note, becomes a handhold only if you are doing it very badly) there is an upper and a lower hand, a dominant and a nondominant. A study at Temple University in 1998, observing over a thousand hand-holding couples, showed that men in heterosexual couples were substantially more likely to have the literal upper hand in a relationship, whether taller or shorter than their partners. This was observed even when the partners were of equal height. People like touching and that’s nice for them. I like lots of other forms of tactility too. Who doesn’t? A nice kiss on the face is pretty great, really. But my problem is that the action of holding hands is more a self-conscious symbol than a nice way to pass the time. Therefore, I despair at the fact that more than 30, 000 people have liked the quote: “The spaces between my fingers were created so that yours could fill them in,” on Facebook. More than just cloying, this is, in terms of basic evolutionary biology, egregious. Ultimately, do what you want with your fingers, just don’t stick them in between someone else’s and expect me to be impressed. It’s weird.

Hold Your Hand to communicate amorousness or close affiliation with one another, but it actually communicates more to those around them, because those partaking in the activity do, presumably, know the nature of their affiliation already. A campaign started in 2009 to encourage acceptance of LGBT people asked those in same-sex relationships to openly hold hands in public. The founder of ‘A Day in Hand’ affirms that, since “hand-holding is a simple, power-

Nathan Ellis

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Shit.

How the poo taboo has silenced conversation on one of the world’s biggest killers

et’s chat shit. Human excretion is perhaps the last taboo in our society. It’s funny, embarrassing, the subject of jokes and disapproval; it raises a stink. It is only spoken about in euphemisms: you ‘drop the kids off’, ‘take a dump’, ‘lay a log’, do a ‘number two’. For officials, shit is made

sterile: it is sanitation, waste matter. We hide it behind privy doors, in rooms we talk about in terms of cleanliness rather than the dirty business they deal with: a ‘water closet’, a ‘bathroom’, a ‘powder room’. Shit is distasteful. At best, it’s a giggle. It is also one of the biggest and least challenged causes of death worldwide.

problems Poo. Poop. Shit. Bog. Crapper. Faeces. Squat, squeeze, plop. Disgusted yet? Good. You should be—your body recoiling is what saves you from disease. But we must ask: is the level of our distaste only natural, or have we artificially raised it, we who are affluent enough to ignore its consequences? What does it mean, when we are so unwilling to talk about our poo that we cannot see its effect on the rest of the world? For Rose George, author of The Big Necessity, our discursive burial of shit and its effects began in the eighteenth century. She has spent years researching shit—and shit is what she calls it—and I can see why. The more you look into shit, the more your curiosity develops about what she calls our ‘social straitjacket of denial’. Why do we do this to ourselves? Because of the flush toilet, she says, and the beginnings of private toileting. “That factor of putting it behind a door so that toileting became a private activity, I think that just kind of shoved it out of sight. Literally shoved it out of sight. And at the same time shoved it out of discourse.” It’s curious, though: we all shower in private too, but we talk about it. Was it an aspiration, something that the rich could afford—so those without the luxury kept quiet? “Having a private

From all of this one thing is clear: we need to start chatting shit. Now. toilet in your house? I don’t think it was a deliberate causal thing. I think it just

happens.” So if this was British history, does the taboo against shit take a different form in other cultures? “Not every culture has a taboo. I think China is the most shit-friendly culture in the world, [but] everyone thinks it’s a bit unspeakable.” In Japan, they have really advanced flush toilets, unlike here, where we haven’t modernised since the Victorian era. Doesn’t that show something different about the place toileting holds in their minds? In her book George observes that in the West we consider our toilets what marketers call a ‘distress purchase’, something only replaced when necessary. Not in Japan. They have some serious lavatory luxuries. It’s a competitive industry. “No, they don’t really talk about it. It’s seen as incorrect to talk about it. They talk about it through humour.” George is concerned with the effect this attitude is having on the developing world. If we don’t want to think about shit, then we won’t think about its effects on the people who don’t have the luxury of our sanitation systems. The figures are astounding. 2.5 billion people, almost two fifths of the world’s population, have no access to any sanitation. That doesn’t mean they might have to queue for a public latrine, or use a bucket in the yard. It means they have nothing. They shit in fields and by the sides of roads. If they’re girls, they get up before dawn and go into the woods, to reduce the risk of violent assault or rape. Four in ten people live surrounded by human faecal matter. It is in their hair, their clothes, their food. If they can’t dispose of their waste, they live in their waste, and the waste gets into their water, 47

isis tt13 and then they catch terrible diseases. Why don’t we talk about this? UNICEF says the largest hurdle for a small child in a developing country is diarrhoea. Larger than AIDS, measles and malaria combined. The current death toll, says a 2002 campaign, is the equivalent of two jumbo jets of children crashing into a wall every four hours. In The Big Necessity, George highlights one problem: there are not enough champions of toilets. Bob Geldof and Angelina Jolie will get passionate about clean water; celebrities will pose for a picture at photogenic gushing water pumps, and many do worthy work for water charities. But none of them will mention how the water is dirtied, and none of them would pose for a photo on a toilet. It doesn’t look as good. There are some things celebrities and politicians just don’t really like to talk about—and sanitation is one of them. So, because of squeamishness, decent sanitation is never demanded by those who need it most, and governments continue to spend more money on other social issues, and on clean water which according to the British Medical Journal reduces diarrhoea by 16-20% compared to sanitation’s 40%. But all this is looking up. In 2010, the United Nations General Assembly declared sanitation a human right and George sees cause for optimism. “I think that when Bill and Melinda Gates started talking about sanitation that was a huge deal, they really helped to legitimise the topic. Matt Damon is now talking about toilets – for ages he was just talking about water but now he talks about toilets.” Isn’t it nice to know that Matt Damon isn’t afraid to get his figurative hands 48

figuratively dirty? The negative outcomes of taboo apply to us too, here in the West with our shiny white plastic seats. Take the London sewerage system. Conceived during ‘the Great Stink’ of 1858, at a time when London was undergoing a cholera epidemic, it is so huge no one knows how big it is. At its construction in the 19th century, it was an astounding feat, and is estimated to have saved more lives than any other public works. But since then, it has scarcely been renovated; a system built for three million people now groans under the weight of thirteen million. This means flood. On average, the system overflows once a week, and untreated shit is pumped into the Thames. But that doesn’t sound so great, so people call it sewage. From all of this one thing is clear: we need to start chatting shit. Now.

Charlotte Goodman

problems

Acid House Competition and freedom in the Bolshoi ballet

Image: Tamara Noland

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ntil recently, Pavel Dmitrichenko was a top dancer in the Bolshoi ballet, Moscow’s most prestigious company. He has now confessed to ordering a man to throw sulphuric acid in the face of the ballet’s artistic director, Sergei Filin, in January 2013. Even more shockingly, 35% of Russians polled in a Levada Centre survey thought the attack was only slightly more extreme than the Bolshoi’s usual escapades. When the judge asked Dmitrichenko whether he would like to apologise to the victim of the attack, he replied, “For what?” The dancer insisted in court that Filin had been giving out roles and funding unfairly to members of the troupe. The idea of ballerina infighting is a bizarre combination of two favourite pastiches of Russia—the macho, rent-a-henchman Mafia culture colliding with the artistry of ballet. The attack was brazen and high profile, and the man who has confessed seems unrepentant. Tatiana Soloviova, a Russian language teacher who combined Russian musical training with her Moscow State University education, remembers a youth saturated with ballet: “[It] was always on television, so I was constantly exposed to it.” She cites state support as a key factor in keeping Russia’s cultural endeavours strong and competitive in the past, yet despite the recent cuts to arts funding, the number of hopefuls who train and audition for the great ballets has not diminished. The requirements for being a ballerina are stringent: the right body shape, as well as the right neck length and facial proportions. “Genetically,” says Soloviova, “there is only a one in a thousand chance that you are suited to being a dancer.” The fact that Russia is so strong in ballet can be put down to genetic proclivity, funding and history. When classical European ballet was first introduced in Imperial Russia, the country was still a feudal state. Ballerinas were then recruited from amongst the serfs, for whom dancing was just another kind of hard labour,

and the only chance to break from dependency they would fight for. Following the Bolshevik revolution, Diaghilev Ballet Company was the destination for dancers fleeing famine and unrest. Competition has always been fierce. In Soviet times, repertoire was mainstream and choreographers were not allowed to experiment with ‘freaky styles’, yet state funded training compensated for the lack of artistic freedom. The same cannot be said in the UK: “Ballet training is restricted in this country to people who can pay for it,” says Soloviov, “There is not the same talent because there is not the same hunger to succeed.” It is this hunger that fuels the tensions of the Bolshoi: ballerinas put broken glass in each other’s pointe shoes, have used online gay porn to smear the name of a previous manager and, in the case of Filin, make savage and symbolic attacks. The Bolshoi has always been politically charged, but now its dancers and managers are intimidated by privately hired thugs instead of the Soviet regime. The Bolshoi’s influence was tied tightly to the rise of the Soviet Union. It grew up in the shadow of Petersburg’s Kirov Ballet and only when Lenin moved the capital to Moscow was the Bolshoi able to forge its own identity. Stalin had a penchant for ballet: he could whistle Tchaikovsky’s opera Pikovaya Dama from start to finish, had his own private box in the Bolshoi Theatre and moved dancers from one troupe to another as he saw fit. Yet he was conservative in his tastes and stifled the innovation that had begun at the end of the Tsarist period – when Michel Fokine took ballerinas out of pointe shoes and experimented with less classical movements of the arms and torso. This restriction continued until the 1960s under Khrushchev: only in the 1990s was Russian ballet able to step away from classical technique and take more stylised and varied directions. Ballet performances abroad were portable Potemkin villages, displays of the USSR’s cultural strength. The Soviet authorities want-

problems ed ballet to address simple moral themes; Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker was performed throughout because of its apolitical nature while new ballets were written to embody the new artistic style of Socialist Realism. In 1958, Aram Khachaturian wrote Spartacus, which twisted the story of the Roman Servile uprising into a Communist orgy. The music is still performed and was used in the soundtrack for Ice Age 2, but the ballet is now described by the New Yorker’s editor David Remnick as an “agitprop warhorse”. Yet ballet was a path to Soviet success and dancers did not have to compromise their art for fear of being driven underground to the extent that writers did. They were respected public figures and were granted the rare privilege of travel. The reputations of dancers who performed in the USSR’s theatres provide a stark contrast to the repression of great writers of the Soviet era. Pasternak, Bulgakov and Solzhenitsyn were unable to publish their works. Even so, the artistic directors who preceded Filin were expected, like writers, to create works in line with Soviet ideology. Yuri Grigorovich was hired as artistic director by the Bolshoi in 1964 and stayed there until 1995, winning the Stalin and Lenin Prizes in that time. He was accused of cosying up to the authorities and firing anyone that didn’t agree with him to minimise squabbling within the Bolshoi. His reign was despotic and continued to be so after the death of Russia’s greatest despot and the fall of the Soviet Union. In the last act of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, the prince and his part-swan, part-woman lover Odette tragically drown themselves so that they can be united in death. In a relatively sacrilegious move, and on the orders of the Minister for Culture, Grigorovich gave Swan Lake a happy ending in 1984. It was performed this way until 2001. A remnant of Soviet life is evident in the tight control the Bolshoi exerts over its troupe. One off-shoot of Filin’s attack has been the decision of Nikolai Tsiskaridze, one

of the Bolshoi’s star dancers, to challenge the Bolshoi’s Charter which all of its employees are expected to abide by. Mr Tsiskaridze argues that the fact the Bolshoi has officially reprimanded him for giving interviews about the acid attack goes against the Russian constitution and compromises his right to freedom of expression. Yet many aspects of the Russian arts remain restricted. A recent update of Swan Lake choreographed by Matthew Bourne uses an allmale cast and explores a love story between two men. Soloviova describes it as ”beautiful and very moving but something you wouldn’t do in Russia for the time being”. Russian ballet has survived upheaval for centuries, demonstrating discipline and versatility. The three way balance between political, personal and artistic expression remains to be found: the Bolshoi acid attack and Putin’s tightening grip on culture only emphasise the fragility of this equilibrium.

Evy Cavalla

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The dying lying left?

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ISIS interviews Nick Cohen

This division of a left represented by Yasmin Alibhai-Brown and a right represented by Peter Hitchens: no one is like that in British society. It is a media creation. They’re equally contemptible, predictable, immune to evidence, what’s the point?” Nick Cohen is a journalist whose political journey has been similar to that of Christopher Hitchens, Salman Rushdie and Martin Amis. Like them, he began his career as an avowed left-winger, but his support for the Iraq war set him at odds with the majority of the left wing. His ideology has, over the last decade, been defined by his opposition to what he feels to be the decline of the Western left: where before it espoused solidarity, now it is relativist and anti-internationalist. Over drinks in the Guardian bar in Islington, he justifies his political philosophy. The left, he says, is guilty of “a certain kind of thinking which suggests that the only enemy is the West. You can stand on the border of the Golan heights and say “you’re not allowed to think about that”, and then look the other way and say “you’re allowed to think about that.” I am a believer in what were the best leftwing values in solidarity, women’s rights,

secularisation, opposition to religion, opposition to the hereditary principle. At the moment that is not the dominant view in the rich world. People can call themselves left wing, be consumerist, inert and even racist. The left needs to be universal in its principles. The right can’t do this stuff, the right doesn’t know how to be feminists. I talk to lots of left wing Muslims and they keep being invited to conservative dos and they just say ‘this is all wrong, it doesn’t work out’. There’s a big hole where the left should be.” Cohen is clear about what issues the left should address. “I’m a feminist. Women’s emancipation remains the most important cause in the 20th century. I am genuinely shocked at how little women have advanced. The tolerance of sexism, particularly of religiously-imposed sexism, is scandalous.” He is equally clear about where the left is failing. “The SWP should have been buried years ago. The far left are the far right: they’re allied with radical Islam. If you are a British Bangladeshi woman at Oxford and want to fight for women’s rights, the last people you can turn to are the far left. Now to find them

problems allying with Kumati Islam and the Muslim Brotherhood, it is kind of a final disgrace.” Citing the SWP as the left, however, seems to exaggerate their importance. The Labour Party has the highest number of Muslim MPs of any political party, and the shadow justice secretary, Sadiq Khan, is a practicing Muslim. Cohen is a journalist who wants to change things, rather than just comment on them. Why, then, does he not join the labour party? “I’m not a joiner. I don’t join political parties. I was hugely tempted when Cameron went into Downing Street. I had the web page up and my credit card out, then Peter Preston walked past. Peter said ‘No! No! You’re a journalist!’

Chomsky is a Stalinist without Stalin, a leftist without a left. He was editor in the 80s: half his staff were Labour, half SDP. He said ‘I used to fucking hate it.’ I said ‘right Peter.’ I pressed the delete button. It was just seeing all these Etonians, I just thought ‘What the fuck!’” But he wrote Waiting for the Etonians in 2008, I say, he anticipated it. “It’s one thing waiting for the Etonians; it’s a different thing seeing them come into your house and start ordering you around. With Thatcher, what made you really hate her was that she was establishing a society which worked well enough for enough people. I just find this government ridiculous. It’s a nonsense government. A footnote in history. But your generation has never experienced a Tory government. If you are 20 years old, on the dole, and your benefits are being cut and you don’t get the educational maintenance allowance, you don’t think like me at all, and it’s wrong to ask you to.” But has the left ever been as committed to solidarity as he suggests? Eric Hobsbawm remained an avowed communist even after the Hunagarian repression of 1956. Even in the

mainstream British left, Attlee was less than enthusiastic to give India independence. And what is his verdict on Tony Blair? He was a strong supporter of Blair’s, at least on foreign policy, yet recently he wrote that Blair’s “moral decline and fall is now complete”. “The best side of Blair was that he intervened in Sierra Leone, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq, some of the most barbarous regimes in the world. Now he’s taking millions of money from Kazakhstan, which doesn’t respect human rights. It’s not me that’s diverged. I am a true Blairite in this argument. I never thought I’d say that.” Cohen is especially animated when describing his fellow left-wingers: Noam Chomsky, Robert Fisk, John Pilger and others, who he has decried in the press for over a decade. “With Chomsky, it’s mainly Bosnia: he supported the modern equivalent of holocaust deniers, denying the massacres at Srebrenica, denying the existence of camps where Muslims were rounded up, and did it in the sly way of the practiced liar. Very cleverly done, not quite saying this massacre isn’t happening, but massively pumping up people who did. Chomsky can’t call himself a Marxist, because if he did he’d have to stick to a programme. He’d have to say ‘I’m criticising you on this and that. I believe this’. As soon as you say ‘I believe this’ you’re committed and you’re open to criticism. Chomsky is a Stalinist without Stalin, a leftist without a left, a Manichean.” Chomsky’s reply to this allegation was similarly disparaging: “The people he is presumably alluding to never denied the massacres at Srebrenica and in the case of the camps he has in mind, paid attention to the original eye-witness report of his hero Ed Vulliamy (never revised on the basis of any evidence) and the final conclusions of the UK’s most prestigious photo-journalist, Philip Knightley. All this apart from the remarkable spectacle of a leading and vulgar apologist for atrocities having the gall to slander others with false charges about crimes that do not come close to those in which he happily participates (as a taxpayer, and apologist).”

isis tt13 Cohen goes on: “Fisk lies all the time. I mean real lying: he just makes it up. Fisk writes these heart-rending scenes of massacre and despair. But the picture editor phones up the photographer and says ‘where are the pictures?’ The photographer says, ‘he’s been in the hotel all day. The only time I wasn’t with Bob Fisk was when he went to the loo. Perhaps that massacre happened then.’ He’s telling readers what they want to hear. The Independent, to its shame, knows perfectly well he makes it up. Has known for years. Won’t do anything about it. Pilger’s been writing the same article since 1970. I read him once a long time ago and he told me all he had to say. He is particularly disparaging about the left’s appropriation of foreign politics. “In Chile and Brazil you’ve had sensible centreleft government, trying to build productive economies with strong welfare states. Who do the left fucking go after? Chavez. An oil-rich autocracy with massive corruption, massive crime, political cronies making a fortune out of the oil industry. It’s the political equivalent of sex tourism. Alienated leftists who have lost all concept of their own society, tour the world looking for political thrills, just like sex tourists tour the world looking for girls or boys to screw. Chavez and Venezuela is as much of a fantasy for the left as Thailand is a fantasy for the fat middle aged man who thinks these girls really find him attractive.” When I suggest that the Guardian has proved it can listen to the other side of the argument, in hiring Simon Jenkins as a columnist, Cohen replies: “Typical Guardian: instead of having a serious debate on the left they hire a rightwinger. The left think ‘Oh you’re right wing. Ha ha ha ha.’ They can’t admit there’s anything wrong from a left wing perspective.” Yet perhaps Cohen’s exchange with Chomsky shows a commitment within the left to critical re-evaluation. It is hard to imagine Simon Heffer having a similarly open and quite brutal dispute with someone else on the right, Fraser Nelson, say, or Melanie Phillips. Cohen and Chomsky seem to be demonstrating an

age-old problem with the left: the ability, even the will, to destroy itself through infighting. Where the right in Britain through most of the 20th century has been ruthlessly united due to its thirst for power, the Labour party has seen infighting: Bevanites against the Gaitskellites and the Bennites against the Owenites. Cohen is controversial and outspoken. What influenced him to become a journalist? “I was brought up in the North of England in the 70s. I was hugely prejudiced against homosexuality. Gore Vidal is one of the few writers who changed my life. I sat down and read Gore’s essay on ‘The Neo-Cons and the Gays’ and I thought ‘fucking hell. Right. Never again will I be prejudiced against anything gay, ever.’” Cohen seems also to have been influenced by his old comrade Christopher Hitchens, a man who went through a similar political journey. “Christopher had no interest in economics, which is unusual for a Marxist. Mind you if you knew anything about economics you wouldn’t be a Marxist. I dedicated my book to him because he was ill and it was terrible. But also because Christopher was one of the most intellectually generous people I’ve ever met. With Christopher, if you had a book to write, you’d take him to a restaurant, a pub, he’d say ‘have you read this, have you looked at this?’ It was like having the best tutorial ever. Admittedly by the end you were so howling drunk you’d be in danger of forgetting everything he said, and he, bastard, would be absolutely fine, slightly pink.” Some of this may have rubbed off on him more than he thinks. By the time I left him, he’d had four pints. He didn’t seem in the least affected. In fact, he went back upstairs to his office to write his weekly article, as polemical as ever. I returned to Oxford, not entirely convinced that the left has changed to the degree he argues, and with a significant headache.

Peter Huhne Illustration: Sage Goodwin

problems Editor-in-chief of VICE magazine stipulates his requirements as a speaker for ISIS. From: Alex Miller Sent: 18 May 2013 23:20 To: Olivia Arigho Stiles Subject: Re: ISIS Panel Cool. This is my rider: 2 x bottles of grey goose. Beef Wellington (medium rare). 3 cartons of cigarettes (American). 4 packs of white socks (American apparel or best alternative). 1 x pair of Reebok Workouts (white). Map of the world (communist nations circled). Choice of hairdressers. 1 x copy of radio times. Sent from my iPhone

Noam Chomsky declines his right of reply. From: Peter Huhne Sent: Tuesday, May 21, 2013 1:42 PM To: Noam Chomsky Subject: ISIS Magazine, Oxford University Dear Professor Chomsky, In this term’s forthcoming edition of ISIS, Oxford’s student-run magazine, we are featuring an interview with Nick Cohen in which he claims that you supported people who denied the existence of concentration camps in Bosnia, and I wanted to give you right of reply. Yours faithfully, Peter Huhne

Correspondence Artist Mark Leckey declines to speak at ISIS event in favour of Grayson Perry. From: Mark Leckey Sent: 12 November 2012 11:05 To: Rebecca Choong Wilkins Subject: RE: Art Panel at Oxford University Hello Rebecca Thanks for the invite. I’m afraid I won’t attend as A. Art and Politics is really not my bag at all and B. Last time I was at the Oxford Uni I made a total tit of myself and swore I’d never do it again. And thinking about it a bit more, C. Grayson Perry would render me pale and uninteresting in comparison. Hope it goes well, and thanks again for asking. Cheers Mark

Terry Eagleton takes time to turn down questions on political governence.

From: Noam Chomsky Date: 22 May 2013 13:58:23 BST To: Peter Huhne Subject: RE: ISIS Magazine, Oxford University Thanks for the offer. Not knowing what he said, can’t really answer. However, I have seen many examples of his extreme deceit and slanders in print, and haven’t bothered to comment. And in general, tend to ignore the ranting of the more vulgar apologists of state crimes, someone who in this case even refused to join those of us who sought to dispatch Saddam Hussein to the fate of a long series of other tyrants and consciously lied about it, among his other little exploits. Noam Chomsky

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New Bodies, Old Norms Transsexuals in Iran

outcomes

Male-to-female (MTF) transsexuals must conform to the same strict dresscodes and legal regulations as those born women. These include not being able to work or get a passport without their father’s or husband’s approval.

n the Islamic Republic of Iran, ‘male’ and ‘female’ are clearly defined oppositional concepts. Yet the country is also the world’s second most prolific practitioner of sex-reassignment surgeries. In 1985 Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa stating that transsexuals should be permitted to change their sex, with radical surgery offered as a ‘cure’ for those suffering from gender dysphoria. Today, the government provides half the cost of sex-reassignment, as well as social support services for those looking to undergo the operation. Iran is particularly unique in allowing post-op transsexuals to change their name and sex on their birth certificate and identity cards, providing them with a ‘clean slate’. This seemingly progressive attitude is not echoed by all tiers of society. Though it was sanctioned by Khomeini, the socially conservative majority in Iran still find sexreassignment very difficult to accept, with many transsexuals reporting complete rejection from their families following their operations. The subject, little discussed before the millennium, is being given increasing coverage by the state-sponsored media, coverage that aims both to titillate and to present surgery as an Islamic solution to ‘deviant’ behavior. It is usually through radio, television programmes and articles in the ‘yellow papers’ that Iranians become aware of transsexualism and decide to seek consultation, particularly those from provincial areas who must travel to Tehran in order to have the operation. Iran’s official stance might be viewed as incredibly progressive, but toleration of sexreassignment surgery is tied to a rigidly binary attitude to gender. Individuals’ freedom to decide their identities is limited to choosing between one set of stereotypical gender

expectations or another. Male-to-female (MTF) transsexuals must conform to the same strict dress codes and legal regulations as those born women. That includes not being able to work or get a passport without their father’s or husband’s approval. Of course, there is the straightforward satisfaction to be gained from finally feeling comfortable in one’s own body. An interviewee from a 2005 study stated his reasons in simple terms: “I am a woman. I’d like to change sex because I think society will accept me as a woman.” Post-op transsexuals commonly use the phrase ‘born again’ and ‘belonging’ to describe the sensation of inhabiting their new bodies. Practical concerns are also a significant factor driving MTF transsexuals to undergo the painful and dangerous operation. In a 2008 documentary, Be Like Others, the filmmaker Tanaz Eshaghian interviews preand post-op transsexuals in the surgery of Dr. Mir Jalali, Iran’s leading sex reassignment surgery specialist. Ali Asghar, a pre-op patient, spoke of constant harassment and sexual abuse dating from childhood to the present, both at school and at work, and of abuse by the morality police and revolutionary guard, all as a result of his effeminate dress and behaviour. “When I try and work with men, they sexually harass me. And I cannot work with women because I am not a woman.” He hoped that if he altered his sex, he would find social acceptance. The abuse suffered by pre-op transgender Iranians hints at the darker side of the government’s positive attitude towards sex-reassignment. Instead of a libertarian attitude towards self-definition, it implies a social climate where marginal behaviour is not tolerated. If transsexualism is regarded as an illness, it is easy for the government

isis tt13 to acknowledge the ‘problem’ and present a ‘solution’. Other elements of the LGBT spectrum are not tolerated. As Ahmadinejad noted on a visit to the US: “In Iran, we don’t have homosexuals like in your country.” Those who wish to maintain their birth-sex but identify as the opposite gender are at an even greater risk of social exclusion. The night before his operation, Eshaghian asks Ali Asghar if he would have the surgery were he not in Iran. His response is “No”. Though Iran’s medical authorities distinguish strongly between transsexualism and homosexuality (the latter is a capital offence), the level of social acceptance accorded to transsexuals has led many gay Iranians to choose the label ‘transsexual’ for public use. During research in several Iranian cities between 2006 and 2007, Afsaneh Najmabadi − a professor of gender studies at Harvard − noted that many operatees identified the impossibility of living with their chosen partner, coupled with the intense social pressure to marry and settle down, as influences on their decision to change sex. In Eshaghian’s film, the boyfriend of pre-op transsexual Anoush says: “I was kind of mean to him when he was in men’s clothes. If I can persuade myself that he is a woman it makes the relationship better… but only because of the way people treated us [before].” After Anoush’s operation, the boyfriend becomes cold and distant, and is reluctant to go ahead with their planned marriage. Sadly, these developments are far from unique: many of those who change sex in order to marry are left by their long-term partners, who cite lack of attraction to their partner’s new body as their reason. In order to dissuade homosexuals and lesbians from sex reassignment surgery, the government carries out a four to six month programme of psychotherapy and chromosomal tests to ascertain whether candidates are ‘true’ transsexuals. Colloquially referred to as ‘filtering’ this process has ironically created social spaces in which homosexuals and transsexuals, grouped together, are able to meet and compare experiences, as people living outside of social norms. Najmabadi describes meeting

men who identified as homosexual when they spoke to her in private, but claimed to be unsure whether they were “gay or transsexual” in group meetings. She observed an emergent sense of solidarity between some MTF transsexuals and homosexuals, with transsexual support groups opening up weekly (non-governmental) meetings to gay men. But Iranian society’s utter vilification of homosexuals has prevented a truly open discourse with transsexuals, many of whom speak with disdain for those who are ‘kunis’(‘anal’). Vida, a MTF transsexual who appears in Be Like Others says: “I know homosexuals, and I speak to them, but I am not friends with them. I don’t approve of their behaviour; it is un-Islamic.” Having experienced life on the margins, transsexuals are more accepting than most Iranians but not wholly so. The benefits of Iran’s policy towards sexreassignment should not be dismissed; any measure that helps transgender people struggling with their identity to carve a comfortable position for themselves is laudable. But the Islamic republic’s blanket denial of alternative views of gender and sexuality has led to cases where excruciating, disfiguring, and highly risky surgery is undergone by persons not fully committed to changing their sex. For these people, the eventual results are rarely positive. Their new physicality offers scant opportunity for sexual fulfillment, and –particularly for those who switch MTF –it is often difficult to find new employment. Following surgery, Ali Asghar (now Negar), disowned by her family, has been forced to work as a prostitute, and lives with three other MTF transsexuals from the same clinic, in the same line of work. The only hope for a truly progressive and accepting attitude towards sex and gender can be found in the discourses opened by the policy. They have exposed a chink in the solid barrier between masculine and feminine through which future generations of Iranians may be able to transcend ‘solid’ ideas of gender.

Thea Slotover

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Memories from Magdalena An interview with the travel writer Michael Jacobs

he River Magdalena first caught the attention of travel writer Michael Jacobs when he learnt that locals believe it has the power to swallow their memories. In a way they are right: a third of the victims of the recent Colombian violence have silently disappeared into its waters. The village of Angostura, which lies near the river, also has the highest rate of Alzheimer’s disease in world. The strange combination of magic and fear surrounding the river prompted Jacobs to use it as the basis for his most recent book, Robber of Memories, which shares the same fascination for the past as his earlier book Ghost Train, which follows his grandparents’ footsteps along a Chilean railway line. In recent years, the loss of his father to Alzheimer’s and his mother to gradually worsening Image: Charlie Northcott

dementia have forced Jacobs to reflect still more upon the importance of memories, both personal and national. In Robber of Memories he turns to the River Magdalena to explore these thoughts through his attempt to reach the river’s source. The Magdalena is a 900-mile long stretch of water that snakes deep into one of the most hostile forests in the planet. It went unnoticed until 1536, when the Spanish lawyer Jimenez de Quesada led a groundbreaking expedition into the disappointingly mosquito-ridden ‘New Granada’. He hoped to find treasure hidden amongst the region’s impenetrable vegetation, but faced conditions so harsh that only 150 of his 900 men survived. Yet against all odds his quest for El Dorado was fulfilled, when he chanced upon gold in the foothills surrounding the river.

isis tt13 Today Quesada is celebrated as the founder of Colombia’s capital, Bogotá. Even the ‘father’ of colonised Colombia, however, failed to reach the source of the Magdalena. Indeed it remained unconquered by the invention of the steamboat and later by Christopher Isherwood when he tried to take an expedition there in the 1940s. By the end of the decade, the Magdalena’s magical lure had been eclipsed by the commercial potential of the city of Barranquilla which had begun to flourish as a port. Originally nicknamed ‘mouth of ashes’ owing to the tenebrous waters gushing from the river, the city is the childhood home of Gabriel Garcia Márquez, the Nobel Prize winning author who would become Jacobs’s idol. The ensuing century was notoriously turbulent for Colombia, and by the 1990s Barranquilla and the surrounding region were listed as among the most dangerous in the world. However, Jacobs claims that today Colombia is one of the safest places on the planet; the country seems to have forgotten its turbulent history. But Jacobs hasn’t, nor has he forgotten the history of his mother’s illness, which he occasionally recalls during our conversation. He tells me how her carers would contact him in the depths of the jungle to report that she was hardly eating or drinking, that she’d “made a conscious decision to give up living”. She was waiting for her life to be swallowed up into memories, where it would flow in the collective memory of the living, like the swallowed memories of the Angostura locals flowing in the River Magdalena. As he talks, certain moments of his journey up the Magdalena stand out: his card game with Colombian soldiers on board the tugboat, the “magical” first sighting of the Andes, the bitterly humorous place names, “Así es la vida” (That’s life) and “El último recurso” (The Last Resort). Yet beneath his vague and humorous anecdotes are signs of a darker side to Colombia – “as the River Magdalena shrunk, the danger increased.” Jacobs describes how he began to sense a growing tension amongst the sailors. Small wooden crosses appeared along the banks, barely visible, and the men muttered prayers. FARC guerrilla forces had been active in the area surrounding the river and for years men’s corpses had been silently disappearing amongst the undergrowth lining the river – “like our memories” remarks Jacobs, unfazed by the danger he was in. The pivotal encounter of Jacobs’s journey happened when he was sitting on a crooked bar stool in Cartagena. He met the man who had been

his hero for “as long as I can remember”, Gabriel Garcia Márquez. Meeting the author was an unforgettable experience. It is rare to catch sight of him in the flesh as he determinedly avoids media contact. But the meeting was most remarkable for the fact that, unbeknownst to the rest of the world

“Much of what I saw on that journey could have come straight out of one of Márquez’s novels” Márquez was in the final stages of losing his memory. “I could tell that he still retained fragments from the way his eyes lit up at the mention of the Magdalena.” Márquez did, however, look a “little lost”. “Like the colonel to whom no one writes?” I prompt, only half-joking. Jacobs laughs, but on reflection replies, “I suppose much of what I saw on that journey could have come straight out of one of Márquez’s novels.” Is he referring to the high rate of Alzheimer’s amongst the residents of Angostura, or the apparent fluidity of time whilst the village of Mompox awaits a hearse? Or, more broadly, to the country’s slow biological and economical degradation which is so reminiscent of Macondo, a fictional town in Márquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude? Perhaps there is no answer to these questions; Jacobs approaches travel writing with the ethos that it is “not an academic argument, and therefore has no neat conclusion”. The same can be said of Márquez and Jacobs’s mothers, who, robbed of their memories, slowly lost themselves. Aptly, Jacobs admits that there was no final epiphany upon reaching the source of the Magdalena but “incredible emotion and excitement—there was a complete catharsis in a river that has seen so much tragedy.” There is something poignantly anticlimactic about the idea of losing one’s memory, of leaving life as ignorant as we entered into it. In this way A Robber of Memories is essentially a testament to ageing, a tentative exploration of mortality. For Jacobs, travelling creates memory, and it is ironically these memories which keep us alive and moving forward. As Jacobs suggests, “It is our memories that sustain us in later life.”

Daisy Thomson

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Cargo Cults

were intended for them as a sign from their gods. The actions of the Western “holders of the wealth” were imitated in the hope of reaping the same material rewards. Tribe elders replicated numerous aspects of Western material culture, wearing air traffic controller costumes, building bamboo planes, carving coconut radios and rifles. 15 February marks the annual celebrations of the Jon Frum cult in Vanuatu. Chief Kahuwya of Yakel village told a Smithsonian Magazine journalist, Paul Raffaele, that Jon Frum was a white American who appeared in order to save locals from the missionaries. Local leaders first saw this messiah in the 1930s, dressed in white after a night of drinking kava, a narcotic sedative drink in Polynesia. In the 1960 BBC documentary Quest in Paradise, David Attenborough asked a prophet called Thomas Nampas why the memory of Jon Frum endures; Nampas answered that people believe Jon Frum will “bring everything for every man, everything American”. Refrigerators, resembling the white cargo planes that first arrived on the island, are often included on the list of things he will bring. During the February celebrations, hundreds flock to the village of Lamakara to dance with ‘USA’ painted on their backs, carrying handmade wooden chainsaws and singing: “We’ve come from America to cut the trees, so we can build factories.” Worship of Jon Frum co-exists happily with Christianity, which arrived on the island 30 years before Frum; Daniel Yamyam, a former member of Vanuatu’s parliament, says that he is “a Christian, but like most people on Tanna, I still have John Frum in my heart… if we keep praying to John, he’ll come back with plenty of cargo”. The resources brought by the Americans are treated as “inalienable possessions” imbued with

From rubbish to relics: religious practice in Polynesia

hen American soldiers in the Second World War flew their planes and steered their shipments to island paradises stretching from Fiji to Papua New Guinea, locals would invent elaborate explanations for the sudden influx of precious resources. At the end of the war, when soldiers left their posts in these remote communities, cargo cults were born. The cults are a kind of millenarian movement, occurring the wake of contact with the commercial network of colonisers. Kirk Huffman, an anthropologist who spent over 17 years living in Vanuatu, argues that the cargo cult is the result of “profound philosophical enquiry” embedded in a long tradition of messianic belief systems. Indigenous people believed that cargo shipments

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The resources brought by the Americans are treated as “inalienable possessions” imbued with the spirit of the giver, and tied to the goodwill of people’s ancestors

the spirit of the giver, and tied to the goodwill of people’s ancestors. People imitate the behaviours of the Americans in a form of sympathetic magic, even building airstrips in the highlands where cargo shipments would be impractical. Anthropologist Lamont Lindstrom calls the cults “parables about desire” and also, about the gifts that were believed to be misappropriated by the white men. Followers of the Wislin Cult of the Torres Straits (circa 1913) would see white “markai” (spirits of the dead) who would come in ships loaded with cargo and kill all local whites, believing them to be illegitimate interceptors of wealth from the gods. Peter Ryan, an Australian newspaper columnist who worked in intelligence in New Guinea during WW2, characterises the cargo cult as a part of the “revolution of rising expectations” occurring throughout the world. In the Smithsonian Magazine interview, Chief Issac, asked what he would most like Jon Frum to bring, replies: “A 25-horsepower outboard motor for the village boat. Then we can catch much fish and sell them in the market so

that my people can have a better life.” In Papua New Guinea, there is a recurring belief that its people’s ancestors are reincarnated as Westerners. The Australian authorities collected interviews at the time from people in the Vailale Madness, the first well-documented cargo cult, in which people recounted that grandparents and ancestral spirits would soon return in the body of the white man. The Vailale Madness started in the Papuan Gulf in 1919 and lasted until 1923, and the cult gained notoriety for the shaking fits its followers would display, replacing the bull-roaring ceremonies that were common before. Traditions were being reworked by the influx of the white man’s oddities and wealth. There was a dangerous aspect to this sudden meeting of alien cultures. On Karkar Island, the indigenous people believed that as the new white man had control and resources, the whole island would be turned upside down and all the survivors would have white skin. A local administrator on Tanna Island, Alexander Rentoul, said in 1949 that that the object of the cult “was to sweep (or broom- also meaning Frum in Tannese) the white people off the island of Tanna”. The Cult of Espiritu Santo (1944-48) was explicitly a rebellion against local authorities. Followers went naked, and lived in two communal houses; all property given by the Europeans was to be destroyed. The people would no longer work for Europeans, but wait instead for the Americans, who would give them immortality. The anthropologist Jean Guiart attributes the cargo cult phenomenon to a rising sense of Melanesian nationalism. This is the underlying idea in the Garia prayer, which bemoans the country’s lack of heavy vehicles “O Father… We have nothing—no aircraft, no ships, no jeeps… The Europeans steal it from us. You will be sorry for us and send us something.” The precise meaning and purpose of cargo cults is still contested. Regardless, whether as ritualistic religions, cultural tourism earners, or displays of materialist aspiration, the cargo cults endure, as people in these remote villages await and anticipate the extraordinary.

Beth Timmins

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THE FORGOTTEN REVOLUTION

The turbulent creation of a stable Brazil

n January 2011, Dilma Rousseff became Brazil’s first female president. During her inauguration she walked to the podium flanked by four women who had been political prisoners with her, when, between the years 1971 and 1973, she was jailed for resistance to the military dictatorship which then ruled the country. Some of her characteristics are consistent with our European conception of a female leader: she is an economist, a divorcee and an advocate for the greater inclusion of women in cabinet. But some characteristics of hers are not so familiar: her approval ratings of 79 percent this March, for example; but most of all, her progression from clandestine guerrilheira in the early 70s to head of state in 2011. The military dictatorship which ruled Brazil from 1964 until 1985 does not feature heavily on the UK consciousness. Wikipedia lists pages in English titled “Brazilian Military Government” and “1964 Brazilian Coup d’Etat”, but nothing with “dictatorship” in the title. In 1964 Brazil’s democratically-elected, leftleaning leader, João Goulart, was deposed in a

military coup supported by the USA. Over the next twenty years the country was ruled by a succession of military presidents indirectly elected from two pre-determined, pro-dictatorship parties. During these years Dilma (presidents, like footballers, are always referred to by their first name, or a nickname, in Brazil) was active in the resistance movement which sought to reinstate democracy. Her wing of the resistance carried out activities that were clandestine, highly illegal and sometimes violent. The actions of the more radical resistance groups include the robbery of banks for funding and, in 1969, the infamous kidnapping of the American ambassador Charles Burke Elbrick, who they released unharmed 78 hours later in return for political prisoners. The extent of Dilma’s involvement in these crimes, or indeed any violence, is unclear - she was an advocate of the abandonment of violent tactics by the resistance movement - but in 1970 she was caught armed by the police and tortured. She was then twenty-two, an economics undergraduate at the University of Minas Gerais. She was sentenced to six years, although in 1973 she was released.

isis tt13 Interviews with several professionals of Dilma’s generation, who, like Dilma, were at university in Brazil during the dictatorship, were active in the resistance movement, and, like her, are now part of the Brazilian “establishment”, shed light on this turbulent period in Brazil’s past. Many of them now teach at the universities at which they studied during the dictatorship; the country’s transformation is therefore something they re-witness every day. Tereza, who is an academic from Pernambuco, remembers the atmosphere at university in Recife: “Intolerance was the rule, whoever wasn’t in favour of the dictatorship was against. You were a communist and not a patriot.” Many of her peers left university to join the armed struggle; most of those who stayed forged partisan affiliations, with secret and underground left-leaning groups. Tereza herself was part of the reopening of the Student Union of her medical school. She remembers working on the Union’s newspaper, which, despite the University’s heavy censorship was still central for political communication and expression. “The censored texts were substituted for poems, recipes, etc., to demarcate the censorship... today I can see how truly ingenious it was.” Of Tereza’s close group at university, eight were jailed. “They were taken by the police”, she says. Of her wider circle many more were imprisoned, and some tortured. Lisa, who is now an academic living in London, was, like Tereza, involved in student politics, but in São Paulo. “The political police had a guy, he had red hair - I will never forget his face - who was always in the Student Union, and went to all the meetings. I don’t think he ever introduced himself, but he made a point of calling people by their names, ‘Hi Lisa,’ he would say.” Her fear extended beyond institutions and formal meetings, “people were afraid of what they said in bars, hamburger places, in the streets, even in social situations where there was someone at the table you didn’t know.” Marina, who now works in the Brazilian Ministry of Health uses the Portuguese word “temor” to describe this fear, which has the joint meaning of “terror” and “tremor”. Lisa joined the resistance movement after there was a shift from violence to more educative, consciousness-raising projects to engender an empowered political autonomy in the working classes of Brazil. (It is worth noting, in relation to this, that voting was rendered mandatory in Brazil from the ages of eighteen to sixty-nine and optional from sixteen in the newly-written constitution of 1988; the franchise is taken, constitutionally at least, very seriously.) Lisa worked with a left-wing movement (which she would prefer not to name) which collaborated with the Catholic Church to

educate the most disenfranchised Brazilians about healthcare. “There must have been maybe twenty of us from my medical school going to different churches and neighbourhoods every Sunday. We would talk about health and living conditions, about how they didn’t have clean water. I remember how in a meeting we put a glass of water from the well on the table, it was brown and dirty - and how the group learned to write leaflets and hire a bus and collect money to talk to the mayor.” Lisa helped friends to secretly use the university photocopier to make copies of Lenin’s State and Revolution; they would bind them and they would be distributed to reading groups. “I hid the forbidden books and texts inside a big cushion in my flat.” Lisa would eventually detach herself from the organisation, due to its exclusion of homosexuals, who were “fine as intellectuals, journalists, etc.,” but not allowed on the front line. Some experiences were bloodier. Marcela was also a student at University of São Paulo only a few years earlier than Lisa and she now teaches there. She was active with another resistance movement, called Ação Popular (AP), which translates as “Popular Action”. She describes the mood on campus as “at boiling point”, she tells me how in following the passage of AI-5 the repression of social movements became violent. “The campus was invaded by the police, it was closed and many were arrested”. In 1968 Marcela discovered she was pregnant, and her AP unit decided she should have an abortion. She and her husband refused, and were subsequently excluded from the unit’s inner circle. When their child was born, they were invited to run a pharmacy in Pará, but they refused this invitation for fear for their son’s health. “Some time later,” Marcela says, “we found out that the intended location of the pharmacy was a strategic base of the resistance movement. Many of my friends and companions were killed there.” In São Paulo, she remembers how police barriers were erected on the streets and rebels would be searched for. “It was then,” she remembers, “that the lists began, the names of the suspected dead were passed from mouth to mouth, telling of their torture”. In 1973, after the resistance’s decision to abandon violence, Marcela’s husband received a PhD offer from Cornell University in the USA. “I felt very divided between going to the US and staying in Brasil. One month after we arrived I heard of the imprisonment of my best friends and a great number of companions from AP. All were very heavily tortured and some died in prison.” Tereza and Raphael also left Brazil with their

outcomes young family. Tereza describes to me how this changed her understanding of herself, and of Brazil: “It was only when I went to study in London years later that I discovered that I had lived many years with fear, even after the redemocratisation of Brazil. The fear had become a part of me.” Gabriela, an academic in Salvador, had, like Raphael, grown up in a political family - but of a very different kind. She remembers, after the coup, her older brothers and their friends gathering around the kitchen tables discussing how they would fight back even with rocks and sticks and bangers. A few years later, when she joined the University of Bahia in Salvador, she was recruited by the POC (Operative Communist Party); “I passed a year participating under the guidance of an older

People were afraid of what they said in bars, hamburger places, in the streets, even in social situations where there was someone at the table you didn’t know. militante - but not much older, he couldn’t have been more than twenty.” It was in this time that she met her partner, a militante of the POC, who in December of 1970, together in with her brother, advised her to delay joining the armed struggle. Gabriela took their advice. “In April 1971 my guide from the POC and many others I knew were jailed and barbarously tortured. One died in the basements of the Dictatorship buildings and others were released in the amnesty of 1979.” (The word she uses for “basements” has a wider metaphorical meaning indicating obscurity - something more like “dungeons”.) In 1975 her partner, who had by then become a committee member of the state branch of the Communist Party, was taken by the police, with no public acknowledgment of their action. “He remained, unable to be contacted, for twenty days before he was released and was sentenced to two years imprisonment. From a personal point of view, they were dramatic moments of indescribable suffering. I didn’t know whether he would return alive, where he was.” Gabriela’s partner was one of fourteen taken prisoner at the time in Salvador, and she emphasises to me the need to create uproar - families petitioned government, religious and military officials, putting themselves at risk: “I was advised by a lawyer not to sleep at home and find someone from the resistance

to put me up.” Gabriela eventually managed to get the list of names of those imprisoned published, by a provincial newspaper in another state prepared to defy the censorship rules. Gabriela explains that circulating this list was of paramount importance: “This was a victory because then they could not kill them.” Gabriela would see her partner again for a short period before he was imprisoned. “I discovered I was pregnant when my partner was first released. When he was imprisoned our son was sixteen days old.” Lisa recalls hearing a joke that everyone involved in the resistance either had a PhD or had barely finished primary school. This reflects the double victory of the resistance: every single person I spoke to knew people who had been killed or tortured, but when asked what Dilma’s election meant to them, every single one of them mentioned how her democratically-elected government has decreased inequality and poverty, and enfranchised the working class. Unprecedented capitalist growth was after all the alibi of the military regime who described the 70s as the “miracle” years because of the success of the Brazilian economy. Daniella,an academic from Salvador, remembers reading photocopied Mao and Lenin in the seventies. How has Brazil changed since Dilma’s election? “This is incredible for me; before it was the factory worker [Lula] from the North-East, and now the woman who was a guerrilheira. It has been a privilege to witness this first twelve years of the twenty-first century, and of being in this - my unified country - teaching at a university where the youth live in freedom.” It is widely known that Dilma inherited a legacy of growth. But it was a socialist one, wrought by her predecessor Lula, an ex-factory worker and the first president of Brazil from the Partido Trabalhador (PT) - the “Worker’s Party” - formed in the wake of the dictatorship by working class and educated resistance alike. Dilma’s election was not just a victory for the socialists who fought and were tortured; it was a victory for the enfranchising socialism they practised in the one-roomed churches of the Brazilian suburbs. *All names have been changed to protect the identities of the interviewees, at their request.

Yara Rodrigues Fowler

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Laughter in the Dark How Philip French found film

“

outcomes

I discovered almost everything through the cinema rather than, as it were, communing directly with nature and the society around me,” says Philip French, the Observer’s longstanding film critic, and former ISIS editor, as he reminisces about how his love of films began. “It was a way to escape from life and at the same time to discover life in a more objective way.” It was fifty years ago that French, who retires this August, had his first column published in the Observer. In it he slammed a crime film called The Small World of Sammy Lee – and the unrealistic portrayal of the criminal underworld in British films: “fings are still unfortunately what they used to be in the British cinema,” he concluded – before moving on to Come Fly with Me, the story of three air hostesses looking for romance and excitement, which he gave a more mixed review. He quoted from an article on Lolita by Lionel Trilling, who asks, seeing the way Lolita is taught to appreciate the “fragrance of her hair” and the “shape of her body” from a very early age, “Why, what other end than that she shall someday be a really competent air-line hostess?” Come Fly with Me has long been superseded by much better highaltitude comedies, but nonetheless for French it was “rich in sociological and iconographic material”, and he suggested that Trilling’s quote could be the film’s epigraph. If his writing comes off as surprisingly generous to films of little quality, it is perhaps because, as he puts it, “I’ve always regarded myself as a critic rather than a reviewer.” French draws the distinction so: “A critic is writing for someone who has read the book or heard the bit of music or whatever you’re doing, whatever you’re concerned with.” He talks of Henry James, who dismissed reviewing, but for whom “criticism was a great demanding art, and very serious discipline, something which I also consider it to be”. He continues, “A reviewer is somebody who has… a very important job; in a sense the canon begins with the first reviews. But reviewing has not tradi-

tionally been taken that seriously, particularly the reviewing of film, by either the national press or magazines. Indeed often it’s been considered a job to give to the ignorant or the flippant.” When French first joined the Observer, his role was more that of a reviewer than critic. But then, after four years at the paper, the editors came to a decision, “that I was too interested in cinema for reviewing – it flags of an obsession, as they thought. And I suppose they also wanted someone with a bigger name – what they got was John Mortimer’s wife, the novelist Penelope Mortimer.” Since that first Observer column, French has had a distinguished career, receiving an OBE for services to film at the start of this year. He lives in an elegant Victorian house where framed awards are hung unostentatiously, but thickly, around the rooms. A door, slightly ajar, reveals a wall lined with books from floor to ceiling. But French’s childhood was humbler; he grew up “in the provinces, with little access to theatre, surrounded by people who had no interest at all in books and music or anything else except social drinking and gossip”. His father, an insurance salesman, began life as a dockworker in Liverpool. French saw his first film when he was four years old; it was the start of a love affair: “I realised there was nothing that I liked more than being left on my own in a dark room. It was probably not wholly unaffected by the fact that I had a speech impediment which made me rather be on my own looking at a giant screen that didn’t answer back or interrogate me than actually be among other people.” His long career has taken in newspapers across the country, and included a considerable stint on BBC radio; perhaps astonishingly, French has only twice been threatened with legal action. The first instance was at Oxford, due to “some extreme thing I said about someone in ISIS. There were threats but they were then dropped and there was a mild apology made.” The second was brought by “the late, unlamented Michael Winner”. Winner “signed a cheque in Egypt for a bill in order to save forking out some money for lunch. He signed my name to the bill.” French was a juror at a film festival at the time, and Winner happened to be eating at the hotel where French was staying. “He was a tight one. He thought the festival people would pay for it… it was a very strange thing to do when you’re a multimillionaire.” French then included this in a joint column in the Observer: “I didn’t initially want to write about it, but I was encouraged to do so, because he was writing about how to save money at a thousandpound-a-night hotel... I said – it was reported in the third person – that I never expected so soon after having seen the Egyptian sphinx to meet the English sphincter, which I don’t think he liked.”

isis tt13 Winner threatened to sue French personally, but French still had a copy of the bill from the hotel and, as witness, a Turkish actress who was having lunch with him and his wife at the time. Film criticism was not the only path French’s career could have taken: “For a brief while I think I was more passionate about theatre.” But trying his hand at theatre criticism, he found the live nature of drama problematic: “I was writing so many negative reviews [and] I was also thinking, ‘Good God, these poor buggers are going to have to go on night after night’. Nor was it impossible that French might have pursued a very different career. During his time in Oxford in the 50s, “I was approached by the head of the University Liberal Club, though I wasn’t a member of the Liberal Party. ‘But would I be interested in joining to run as a Liberal candidate?’ This was at a time when the Liberal Party was down to holding their national conferences in telephone boxes.” French dabbled in film-making, too, while he was at Oxford. He co-scripted a film called Folly Bridge; when I mention it, he does not immediately recognise the title. Then, chuckling, he says: “That helped to get me into films; it was one of those things that you build up a CV [with].” Originally intended as a silent film, Folly Bridge was a satire of Oxford life, featuring two contrasting characters, one a young provincial innocent who wants to get on, the other a sleek careerist who gets whatever he wants (including women) with seeming ease. French recalls the final scene in which the provincial innocent is reduced to hiring out punts by Folly Bridge, while the careerist gets the girl. As the former is about to be tipped, the latter calls out, “Half a crown? A shilling is plenty for him.” Folly Bridge also saw French in a speaking role. The main actor was American and had to return home before the film could be remade in sound: “Weirdly, having the worst speech defect of anybody in the university at the time, I then dubbed the central character,” French explains, still surprised.

But for all the success of Folly Bridge – numerous people involved in the film later won prestigious scholarships – French opted for the life of a critic. “I was torn in the summer of ’55. I wanted to become involved in film or write about film... I eventually decided I’d rather review five films a week than make one film every five years.” The friend with whom French wrote the script for Folly Bridge was a man called Jeremy Wolfenden, who drank himself to death at the age of 31. “What others see as the proper subject for a book or play, he made the improper subject of a life,” French has previously written of Wolfenden. Does he regret not having led a life like Wolfenden’s? “Well, yes,” he replies, “I’ve had generally an easy pass through life. The longer I’ve lived I’ve become – I’ve looked to avoid conflict.” At one point Wolfenden attempted to push French into leading a life more like Wolfenden’s own: “He came to me with a job working in the Middle East and it was fairly clear, if not made explicit, that I’d be working for a news intelligence organisation that was connected with MI6… this was what he wanted to propel me into doing. I eventually decided against it. He was faintly annoyed as he thought that he was pushing me in the direction I ought to be.” He pauses. “But then I say, look at what happened to him.” When I ask whether he wants to say anything to the readers of ISIS that we have not already touched on, he refers me to Max Beerbohm’s poem written for the 50th anniversary of this publication.

To the Editor of The Isis Believe me, Sir, your undersigned Servant would gladly turn his mind From the Universal Crisis By writing something for THE ISISSomething of a sprightly kind Worthy of the dear old ISIS (England’s best-edited weekly paper); But things have come to such a pass Of awful Chaos that, alas, I cannot cut a single caperNor even find a rhyme to Beerbohm. Yours obediently, Max Beerbohm.

Alexander Woolley

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isis THROUGH THE AGES 1892: Mostyn Turtle Piggott: “We have no politics and fewer principles, and should we last until the General Election we shall use our influence for neither side.” 1957 - Robert Symmons: “If we choose socialist democracy, are we doing so because we can refer everything to a moral system? If we do, are we appealing to humanist values, to a belief that good of all society will result from such a choice? Do we suppose that the good is to choose what will make as many people happy as possible? These are questions. The answers are for you to work out.” 1967 - Peter Adamson: “Ignorance isn’t the worst evil of the academic life it also twists values and priorities until they are unrecognisably silly. Sincerity, kindness, unselfishness, friendship are words rarely heard because they are considered naïve concepts attached only to the ‘Thicks’.” 1992 – George Osborne, Robert Norton, Christopher Coleridge - Front cover: “Government health warning: Part of this magazine has been printed on Cannabis paper. Do not attempt to smoke it.” Editorial: “It is important for the ISIS to take a stand on the issues that involve us all … By deciding to print on hemp paper and run an article about the plant, we have, in our own small way entered the green debate.” (Sadly, Osborne has not continued his political career in this vein.) 2008 – Oskar Cox Jensen: “We find ourselves in an uncertain world. A global financial farce has given lie our conventions, exposed the questionable foundations of our entire capitalist system… so the economy and our cushy graduate future – may have gone up the spout. Let the ISIS take you to that positive place. Take one step left. It is about lifting your foot out of a rut and placing it down somewhere different. It’s about giving a damn.” To celebrate our past, present and future there will be an ISIS Retrospective taking place in the MOLT at St Anne’s College in eighth week. The exhibition will gather together historical articles and artwork from over 120 years of publication.

ISIS INTERNATIONAL

A map showing ISIS readers around the globe since publishing the magazine online in 2010. Top 5: UK, France, Sweden, USA, Italy 70

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STAFF EDITORS: Philip Bell (Exeter) & Rebecca Choong Wilkins (St Anneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s) DEPUTY EDITORS: Violet Brand, Daisy Fletcher, Elizabeth Culliford, Aaron Payne SUB-EDITORS: Peter Huhne, Charlotte Sykes, Nathan Ellis, Alexander Rankine, Yulia Taranova, Dylan Holmes Williams CREATIVE DIRECTORS: Daniella Shreir & Alexandra Talbott CREATIVES: Toby Mann & Christy Davis PHOTO EDITOR: Abigail Tyer ILLUSTRATORS: Sage Goodwin & Ksenia Levina ONLINE EDITOR: Andrew Ridker ONLINE SUB-EDITORS: Henry Baker & Helen Reid BUSINESS & EVENTS DIRECTORS: Bithia Large & Tanya Lacey-Solymar BUSINESS TEAM: Davina Pearce, Anna Broadley & Tiffany Liu EVENTS TEAM: Love Hedman, Olivia Arigho Styles, Sarah Poulten & Betty Makharinsky DIGITAL MARKETING: Cara Battle OSPL: CHAIRMAN: Max Bossino MANAGING DIRECTOR: Stephanie Smith FINANCE DIRECTOR: Jai Juneja COMPANY SECRETARY: Hugh Lindsey DIRECTORS: Barbara Speed, Polina Ivanova, Anthony Collins Sign up to our new online publication, the Weekly Window, at isismagazine.org.uk/subscribe. Send articles, advice and complaints to isiseditor@gmail.com

“Some silly student magazine” English Defence League, LGBT section