The Outskirts Issue - Trinity 2011

THE ISIS

THE OUTSKIRTS ISSUE

TRINITY 2011

Contents Trinity 2011 2 Editorial

Cover image: photography by Leo Simonsmith, Design by Felix Macpherson and Simon Kempner

CHAPTER 1: STARTERS 4 Anglish 5 Icon 6 Venus 7 McWeddings 8 Smoking 13 Doomsday 14 Elizabeth Taylor

CHAPTER 2: CULTURE 16 Hentai 20 The Shaggs 23 FC St Pauli 24 Sam Harris 28 Vidocq 30 Fashion

CHAPTER 3: POLITICS 38 Blackbird Leys 43 Chinese Censorship 46 Marine Le Pen 48 Robert King 52 Dictators 54 Sectarianism 57 Niall Ferguson 60 Palestine 64 End Credits

Want to get involved with the ISIS in Michaelmas 2011?

Email: isiseditor@ospl.org

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Editorial In Trinity term 1992, George Osborne was the editor of ISIS. On the front cover of his edition were two large cannabis leaves. Between these in huge block capitals lay the word ‘HEMP’, and underneath was the tagline, ‘Read it and Reap’.

In his editorial, Osborne talks of the increasing relevance of ‘green issues’ and boasts that as a show of solidarity, “for the first time in the history of the magazine, ISIS has been printed on hemp paper.” But a quick flick through the issue reveals that it is only the middle two pages that are printed on hemp. It will also reveal that the article printed on these ‘green’ pages is not an impassioned appeal for environmental concern, or a bold polemic demanding the legalisation of cannabis.

This article – the centrepiece of the magazine – is ‘Read it and Reap: Richard Norton on the history of hemp in society and its role for the future’. Sounds riveting.

For all the ballsiness of the front cover and the grand claims of the editorial, scratch the surface and what you find is glib and insincere. In this sense, the ISIS of Trinity 1992 was prescient. Empty high-impact stunts are a staple of the political world that George Osborne would one day dominate. It brings to mind David Cameron riding a bicycle to work, two chauffeur driven cars in tow, and the legend of Peter Mandelson walking into a northern chippy, pointing at some mushy peas and asking for a tub of guacamole.

So ISIS can be something of a crystal ball. A scary thought perhaps, given the contents of this issue. We’ve got articles on depraved animated porn, the coming apocalypse and weddings that take place in McDonald’s. But here in Oxford, it is important to remember that the future doesn’t belong exclusively to us.

With this in mind, for Trinity 2011 we decided to venture out. Our work on the magazine led us 6 miles down the Cowley Road to the Blackbird Leys estate and to Mick’s Café in Botley. Other articles took us to the fringes in a different way: hothoused 60s girl groups and sexually enlightened football teams lie somewhere on the edge of normality, while in France Marine Le Pen is galvanising the political far Right. In China we examine moral – rather than political – oppression, and our article on sectarian clashes between Protestants and Catholics looks beyond Northern Ireland to Glasgow and Liverpool. This edition of ISIS will take you to The Outskirts. We hope you enjoy the ride.

The Isis Magazine — Trinity Term 2011 Editors Alex Dymoke (Jesus) & Felix Macpherson (Wadham) Deputy Editors Alex Dudok de Wit, Jane Saldanha Creative Director Simon Kempner Section Editors James Gillespie, William Granger, Olivia Hanson, Brendan James Creative Team Lauren Crichton, William Granger, James Horton, Emma Milner, Sarah Moore, Leo Simonsmith Fashion Alexandra MacEwan, Holly Tabor Photographer Harriet Baker Published by Oxford Student Publications Limited Chairman Rob Morris (Oriel) Directors Isabelle Fraser, Alistair Smout, Nicola Davis, Victoria Morrison, Harry Thompson Managing Director Mark Brakel Business Executives Katie Chung, Tom Collins, Abbas Kazmi, Abigail Cunlisse-Hall, Genevieve Marciniak, Fleur Ma Technology Consultants Adam Hadley, Andrew Lavelle

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Mick’s Café is based in a tiny shed-like building just beyond the Oxford railway station, in Botley. Its diminutive size is part of its character: once inside you are immediately within whispering distance of every other diner. Originally built as a soup kitchen by the Church of England in the 1920s, serving those who arrived in the city in search of work, for the last 24 years it has taken on the guise of a greasy spoon.

Mick Harris lends his name to the café, and is our

Isis Icon for this issue. A drummer in a rock and roll band in his spare time, he professes never to have had a day off work since the year of the Coronation.

Mick’s is a well-loved business: the walls are painted with cheerful murals depicting the staff, who cook a mean fried breakfast of gargantuan proportions. The café draws a mix of builders, businessmen and the occasional intrepid student who manages to escape the Central Oxford bubble. We suggest you make the trip.

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“A mass of Latin words,” observed George Orwell, “falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details.” Always fighting in the interest of clear, robust English, he thought that the import of words and phrases from Greek, Latin and French too often obscures and suffocates prose. Chacun son goût. But to Orwell’s linguistic conservatism there exists a Tea Party movement—an English Defence League—and its answer to this problem is not mere restraint. It is Anglish: a variant of English purged of any words not of Anglo-Saxon or Germanic descent.

It is an age-old project that now sees renewed interest and applicability through the Internet. Unsurprisingly Anglish is chiefly of interest to Brits, particularly those who rue the day the Duke of Normandy rolled into town and sprinkled the elites’ French and the Church’s Latin into the vernacular.

How it works: when composing a sentence, simply scrap the words of foreign origin, replacing them with Germanic sources. Or shall I say: when writing

a wordset, fordo the words of outlandish wellspring, steadsetting them with Thedish roots. This leaves everything tonguely cleansed. It renders The Spanish Tragedy as The Spanish Woehap, and more jarringly, The Origin of the Species becomes The Wellspring of Breedstocks. Rest assured: the Anglish editions of these texts can be found at websites such as The Anglish Moot and PainInTheEnglish.com.

The fine people at Anglish Moot have been accused of xenophobia. This is unfair. But it is difficult to ignore the amount of times the word “homey” crops up in their conversations, or that a common Anglish translation of “existent” is “ourlandish.” One thing that seems glorious about the English language is precisely the richness of its vocabulary, achieved only through the annexation of other languages and the attitude of many Anglish speakers is isolationist, to say the least. Efforts to do away with our pluralistic lingo strike me as a waste of time and frankly—to employ one sturdy Anglo-Saxon phrase—a load of shit.

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!"#$%&'%"$%('$)* !+,-)'%./'*,"%#*%+%0123'+/%"45%6#78%+%/+5#,+4%#5'+%."/%78'% .)7)/'% Jacque Fresco has a plan for a brand new economy. A vision of a new world order without money and where all resources are shared by everybody, based on the assumption that there is enough on the planet to provide everyone with everything they could want. You want an office, a big TV, a new car? You get given one, instantly.

A quick Google reveals serious concern over the world’s capacity to deal with the current rate of population growth; but Fresco, founder of The Venus Project, insists that what he proposes is achievable.

An engineer and veteran of the Second World War, Fresco believes that science can bring about a future of collectivism. He scorns the role of “values, opinions and superstitions” in history.

“Most politicians are totally incompetent,” he

says. “Everything that you have today, your airplanes, transportation, housing - it’s all technical, there’s nothing political.” Perhaps there is truth in that, but what of the moral aspect of politics? What of it indeed; our ideas on morality can be consigned to history, Fresco believes, once everyone gets given what they need.

Based in Florida and boasting millions of followers, The Venus Project takes an eccentric perspective on the world’s problems. Fresco believes, perhaps questionably, that “when people have access to the necessities of life, they do not steal.” But as he puts it, “it’s not enough to criticise your country without offering an alternative”; and in a very radical way he’s done just that.

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ccording to Chinese matrimonial custom, the groom presents his bride’s family with a whole celebratory suckling pig. This pork-gift, roasted until crispy and golden brown, is a culinary symbol of the girl’s virginity. Lucky, then, that the Hong Kong McDonald’s Wedding caters for the modern couple by providing a beef option.

Since 1 January this year, one branch of the fast food chain has been offering wives, as well as fries, with meals. The McWedding has been made available after considerable demand from Hong Kong locals. “People said they’d dated here, or met here, and wanted to get married here. We see this as a business opportunity,” says Helen Cheung, the Hong Kong director of McDonald’s corporate communications.

Established in Hong Kong in 1975, McDonald’s doesn’t carry the social stigma there that it does in the west. “In the U.S. and other places, middle-class or upper-middle-class people look down on McDonald’s,” said Gordon Matthews, an anthropologist at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. “But Hong Kong is different. A McDonald’s wedding wouldn’t be seen as tacky here… The generation getting married today grew up doing their studying at McDonald’s.

That was one of the chain’s prominent roles in the 1980s and 1990s — as a safe haven where students could study and stay off the streets.”

And the weddings are available on a student budget too. The basic Warm and Sweet Wedding Package for 50 guests goes for under HK$1,300 (£100). For another $165, the bride can rent a gown of pearly-white balloons. Since an ordinary Hong Kong wedding costs around $29,000, and the average household monthly income is only about $2,250, the McWedding is unsurprisingly an attractive option for many.

And whilst a wedding under the golden arches can’t compete with the banqueting, outfits and dowry exchange of a regular wedding, McDonald’s really do try. You can have a wedding cake (if you count stacked boxes of hot apple pies as a cake). The employees even dress in black suits to serve you. They greet guests at the entrance, usher them to the signature book and deliver the Big Macs and fries with panache. Only thing is, you’ll be sharing the restaurant with the general public. If the McDonald’s in Hong Kong bears any resemblance to the Cornmarket Street branch, then in the interests of safety a Saturday evening reception is definitely off the cards.

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t stinks, it stains your teeth, it decreases your ability to engage in physical exercise, it’s expensive, it’s unhealthy and it doesn’t even get you high.

Why do people smoke cigarettes? Many smokers find this an uncomfortable question. This may be because deep down they feel that although it certainly won’t get you high, there is a slight chance it could get you laid.

But for most of the west, smoking is losing its sex appeal. Strict regulation, high taxation and the

success of anti-smoking campaigns continue to shrink the revenues of major tobacco companies.

New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg has just banned smoking in all parks and beaches and further bans in Europe look likely.

Here in Oxford, though, many smokers continue to puff away. In order to find out why, the ISIS went to visit some notable smokers and some notable smoking hotspots. Here is what we found…

Michael Inwood is a tutor and world authority on Hegel. He has been smoking a pipe since his early teens. Is he worried that it will eventually kill him? He smiles. “So far, so good.” Michael has eleven smoking – related anecdotes. This is one of them: “When I was fifteen my mother found my pipe in my jacket pocket. She said that the fact that I smoked meant that I was weak willed. I told her ‘No, I am strong willed because I resist you.’” You tell ‘er Mike!

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Tobacconist John Foot generally favours his pipe but also enjoys a cigar when he’s “got time to do it justice”.

A legal loophole allowing tobacconists to sample stock means that he can puff away to his heart’s content all day in his shop. He thinks that “the health risks are over-hyped”. Not that he’s biased or anything. “If there’s one thing wrong with smoking it’s how highly it’s taxed,” he claims.

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According to Cherwell, Barnaby Fry is “Oxford’s answer to Louis Theroux”. Seen here in flagrant defiance of a no smoking sign, we see that Barnaby shares the intrepid broadcaster’s willingness to put himself on the line for the sake of what he loves. He looks insulted when asked why he smokes. “Because it fucking rocks.” We didn’t bother asking him about the health risks.

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Because of its central location, the steps opposite the Rad Cam is actually the place where you can be seen smoking by the highest number of people. Amy Blakemore isn’t aware of this as she puffs away on her Camel Blue. Does she think it’s cool? “It looks cool in photos and films. But that’s before your fingers get stinky and you hit the bottom of your overdraft.” Does her addiction concern her? “It doesn’t really matter because basically everything kills you,” she says wisely. “I will stop though when/if I get pregnant.”

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He models for ISIS, DJs minimal techno, studies philosophy and used to live in Berlin. It was pretty much inevitable that Michael Brooks would smoke. “We all need our vices right?”, he says after a lengthy exhale. Outside the Jericho Tavern, he is less concerned about his blackening lungs than the effect cigarettes could have on his crystal–clear complexion. “I’ll stop when I’m 25 because after that it gives you wrinkles.” Yes Michael, and kills you.

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! " #$%&&'( ) )* E vangelized radio host Harold Camping told us that the Rapture would take place on 21 May 2011. On this date at precisely six o’clock in every time zone, huge earthquakes would tear through the world and approxi-

mately 3% of all humans would be called to heaven.

In the end, as the clock turned six without a hint of a rumble the date was met only with the rapturous laughter of the smugly enlightened. But Harold, don’t be

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Self-proclaimed “contactee” Nancy Lieder claimed that inhabitants of the Zeta Reticuli star system had told her that a pole shift on Earth would destroy the majority of human beings. Her prediction inspired the ‘Pana Wave Laboratory’ Japanese cult who tried to steal an Artic seal and return it to the wild, in the belief that this would avert doomsday.

According to Dorothy Martin, aliens from the planet Clarion sent her messages in the form of automatic writing, which revealed the existence of a coming great flood. On 20 December, as instructed, Martin and her followers ripped the zippers and bra straps from their clothes and waited for the flying saucer that would carry them to safety. It did not come.

8%9*&-:(&9)-,.* !1;6 Over the years, this American televangelist has relayed multiple messages from God including the guarantee that by the end of 1982 judgment would have come. Years later, in reference to his less than perfect history of predictions, Robertson said “I have a relatively good track record. Sometimes I miss.”

%*$(,. !;72*<$-%=> In the 19th century, a Leeds hen laid eggs inscribed with the phrase “Christ is coming.” Panic ensued.

#$%&'()*+%,)-,.* )/++(&*-0*!121 The ever trustworthy Charles Manson predicted the coming of a world-ending race war. Believing himself to be not just a seer of the apocalypse, but its actual creator, Manson and his followers set about triggering doomsday by recording a Beatles-inspired album full of subliminal incitements to murder.

too embarrassed; you may have failed, but it’s not the end of the world. Your Rapture is the latest in a long line of failed apocalyptic predictions. Take a look at these and you’ll see that you’re in good company:

4)%%#*,(?9-,.* 6727 Like Camping, Newton used the bible to predict that around the year 2060, man would cease to be.

It’ll be another 50 years before we find out whether Britain’s greatest ever scientist was – on this occasion – profoundly mistaken.

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n a long life that ended in heart failure last March, Elizabeth Taylor devoted her time and money to many worthy causes. Her contributions to AIDS research, the victims of Hurricane Katrina and countless charities made up for the sharp decline of her acting career. But we at ISIS want to thank her for one gesture in particular. When in 1972 the magazine was presented with a printing bill for £1,000 (£8,760 in today’s terms) that it couldn’t afford to pay, the game seemed to be up. But then help arrived in the form of an unlikely telegram: “Read of your financial troubles in the Times

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STOP One thousand pounds will be en route as soon as you cable the name and address of your printers to us at the Granotel, Rome – Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton” Maybe it was a case of the one-time Cleopatra making an offering to the goddess she claimed to embody. Maybe it was repayment for ISIS’s eulogistic coverage of the two actors’ careers.

Either way, we wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for our most famous patron. Thanks, Liz.

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hen I was at university in Japan, I used to commute every day in a train packed with businessmen. The first time I looked over at the magazine that the suit sat next to me was reading, I was surprised to see a cartoon octopus penetrating a schoolgirl in every available orifice. By the second time I was used to it.

It’s wrong to assume that hentai porn - sexually explicit manga (comics), animation or videogames from Japan – only appeals to bedroom geeks and knife-wielding psychopaths. My fellow commuter was clearly not ashamed of reading it openly on the train, and with good reason: in Japan I’ve seen hentai on tables in cafés, shelves in HMVs, bookcases in hostels. In a country where manga accounts for a third of all published material, its pornographic subgenre is no dirty secret.

Most westerners would hold this up as sordid proof of Japan’s weirdness, but they’d be ignoring the genre’s increasing popularity here as well as at home. A Google search of the term ‘hentai’ (which, confusingly, isn’t even used in this sense by the Japanese themselves) turns up 178 million hits (twice as many as for ‘sushi’ or ‘samurai’). And there’s an expanding literature in which western scholars de-

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At the same time, hentai’s reputation is at an all-time low: its association with recent highprofile murders in Japan, and the controversy whipped up by

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Hentai is characterised by its depiction of all manner of bizarre, grotesque sexual practices - the kind alluded to in the quote that opens this article (from American website Lil Miss Hentai). Those who like to think of premodern Japan as a rarified land of samurai and geisha may therefore be surprised to learn that most of hentai’s sexual deviances and fetishes can be seen in shunga, erotic prints that were popular in the 18th and early 19th centuries. The most famous shunga print, The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife by Hokusai (of Great Wave fame), is printed overleaf.

Shunga themselves are steeped in the traditions of Japan’s indigenous Shinto religion, for whose animist spirits sexuality is an innate part of life. Far from the models of chastity that a westerner might expect of

deities, these spirits often use their supernatural powers to accomplish incredible sexual feats.

I’m not suggesting that shunga and hentai are explicitly religious, but it seems that Shinto mythology - by sanctioning the treatment of sexuality in art and literature, and tying it to the supernatural – set a precedent for the situations depicted in these kinds of porn.

As Japanese society sought to modernise – read ‘westernise’ – from the mid-19th century onwards, pornographic novels and pictures came to be seen as ‘low’ arts and shunga production was curtailed. At the same time, Freud and the western sexologists began to be translated into Japanese, and it was in this context that the psychological term ‘hentai’ (meaning ‘perverse, warped’) was coined.

By the 20th century, the name ‘hentai’ was being applied to the lowbrow pornographic literature that was being churned out on the back of increasing literacy and an expanding press.

Fuelled by the sexual revolution, in the postwar years Japanese erotica branched out into the nikutai bungaku (‘literature of the flesh’) novels, ‘pink films’ such as the infamous In the Realm of

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#$% & '('( the Senses (if you’ve ever wanted to see a Japanese woman lay an egg, this film is your chance), and the first pornographic manga. In Japan, the word ‘hentai’ is still used to mean deviant sexual practices, but the Japanese don’t use it to refer to the genre as a whole, preferring the terms ero (‘erotic’), etchi (‘H’, which may well stand for ‘hentai’) or seijin manga (‘adult comics’). Those 178 million hits must mostly be our fault.

Hentai today is a mixed bag of art sophisticated and cheap, hardcore and softcore, in places

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It’s tempting to wonder what it is about hentai that its audience finds arousing. If the appeal of porn lies in its voyeuristic character, the way it presents viewers with a real sexual situation onto which they can easily project themselves, then what’s the point of porn that denies us this realism? This is where the academic studies come in, and opinions are varied, although there appears to be a vague consensus that “arousal is reached through a kind of sceptical suspension of

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disbelief ”, in the words of Mariana Ortega-Brena. Anne Allison and many others have pointed out that the Japanese sex industry focuses on transporting the participants into an imaginary space free from the stress imposed by professional and familial responsibilities (which in Japan are severe) – hence the argument that the magical bathhouse in Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away is a thinly veiled brothel. Hentai ties into this nicely.

One can argue the ethical advantages of hentai. It’s a safe outlet in which to give free rein to your more extreme fetishes.

Real women (and men) aren’t compromised. If sexual information substitutes for sexual activity, the popularity of hentai may account for the late sexual maturation of Japanese adolescents (teen pregnancies are rare in Japan). Unfortunately these claims are undermined every time hentai features in a highprofile criminal case, which happens often. In the late 80s, for example, serial killer Tsutomu Miyazaki murdered four little girls, one of whose blood he drank and hand he ate. A search of his bungalow turned up 5,763 videos, many of them hentai. Even more disturbingly, the relationship between hentai and murders sometimes goes the other way: when in 2004 an 11-year-old Japanese girl was murdered in her classroom by a schoolmate, it wasn’t long before hentai artists began incorporating the incident into their narratives.

Unsurprisingly, it’s these stories that get picked up by the western media, and so we end up expecting all hentai to glorify violence and rape. While there’s no denying that some hentai is nasty, the generalisation is again unfair. Unlike western porn, hentai draws on old traditions that unify sex with human

life elegantly and enjoyably, and this approach is reflected in the medium’s treatment of sex. Timothy Perper and Martha Cornog note that far from condoning rape, hentai generally portrays it as a crime that “receives profound and often bloody retaliation and revenge…

[Female sexuality] does not degrade a woman, but is connected instead to independence and autonomy.” We can again spot a precedent in Shinto, which features many strong-willed female deities, and appoints women to some of the most important priesthoods in the country.

Our mistake is to use our own western comics as a frame of reference when dealing with manga. Manga’s immediate ancestor is the ukiyo-e (woodblock) print; in 18th-century Tokyo these prints were mass-produced and considered lowbrow, but they’re

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While a lot of it is instantly forgettable, the best manga (and so the best hentai) is artistically brilliant, and must be seen as part of a tradition of narrative picture art that stretches back beyond ukiyo-e to the 12th century.

By contrast, western comics are a fairly recent invention; they’re aimed almost exclusively at kids, they’re in many places regulated by draconian censorship laws and they’re rarely taken seriously as art.

So if we simply take manga as the Japanese equivalent of our own comics, it’s no won-

der we’re appalled by the sexual content of hentai.

I think the fact of Japan’s exoticism clouds our judgment here.

We in the west only get wind of the most excessive hentai, just as we so often hear of the latest extreme trend in Japanese fashion, or of yet another nerd collapsing in a Tokyo cybercafé after an 80-hour videogaming session. It’s too easy simply to see hentai as another piece in the puzzle, while turning a blind eye to the sexual issues

at the heart of western societies, which to us are less strange and so more invisible. But the internet is giving us access to an ever-wider range of hentai, and the body of academic texts on the matter suggests that our bias is weakening. How long will it be before the guy next to you on the Oxford Tube is getting stuck into the latest issue of Squid Fetish?

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or the members of our generation it can be hard to grasp the concept of a truly sheltered upbringing.

Having been surrounded by so many means of communication with the wider world, most of us will have had at least some exposure to modern pop culture.

This was not the case for Dot, Betty, Helen and Rachel Wiggin, four sisters who spent the majority of their 1960s childhood confined to their house in rural New England. In this

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house, popular music was banned. But not only music: the Wiggin sisters were prohibited from going to concerts, dances, from socializing. They were home-schooled by their father for years. Having been deprived of the thrills of adolescence, not to mention any sort of musical education, the fact that the Wiggin sisters went on to form a rock band named The Shaggs seems implausible.

As a yardstick by which to measure the extent of the Wig-

ginsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; cultural isolation, Fremont, New Hampshire, had but one story to tell before the birth of The Shaggs: it was the first place where a B-52 bomber aircraft had crashed without any fatalities. This is small-town America without the romanticism, reliant on a

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Yet Austin Wiggin did exactly that. Although the Wiggin sisters were not exactly held captive – they went to elementary school with the other Fremont children, and were allowed to play outside among the livestock the family kept – they were kept separate from the rest of society. He came from humble stock, but Austin Wiggin was immensely proud of his roots, and was paranoid about his nubile daughters mixing with their peers.

While the Wiggin girls slowly stagnated in their family home, their father harboured a secret plan. His hard-headed approach to parenting belied the fact that in private, Austin Wiggin was a deeply superstitious man. His mother had been a keen amateur fortuneteller, and, when Austin was a child, she had read his palm.

He would marry a woman with strawberry blonde hair.

He would have two sons who would be born after his mother had died. The third prediction was more ambitious: his daughters would form a successful girl group.

Either by chance or through Austin’s determination to live up to his mother’s expectations, the first two prophecies eventually came true. Austin married Annie, a strawberry blonde, but his mother never lived to meet their two sons.

When Annie eventually gave birth to four daughters over the course of their marriage, there must have been no doubt as to his mother’s abilities.

The forecasts of Austin’s mother go some way to explaining his behaviour to-

wards them in their youth. His daughters were too precious to be allowed outside where they might learn to defy him, or heaven forbid, escape. When Jon Ronson, in a recent Radio 4 interview, asked Dot and Betty whether their father had ever asked them if they wanted to become musicians, after a moment of hesitation Dot replied “I don’t think I remember him

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The Wiggins were not quite the Von Trapps. Their mother preferred television to music, and their father only played the Jew’s harp, an ancient metal instrument which is inserted into the mouth, historically used in shamanic rituals and unheard of in popular music. Yet Austin was convinced of their latent brilliance, and forced them to practise incessantly. “We practised until it was the way he liked it. If he didn’t like it, we’d do one song over and over and over”. After a year or so of hard graft – in addition to practising, they were given a strict exercise regime to maintain svelte popstar figures – Austin told his daughters that they were ready to record an album. The girls disagreed, but soon they found

themselves at Fleetwood Studios near Boston. “I was expecting spandex and rock stars”, recalls their sound engineer. A peculiar surprise it must have been to be met by the Wiggin family, miserable and taciturn.

After several painful recording sessions, Philosophy of the World was finished, and finally released in 1969.

The album bombed. And it isn’t hard to see why: 1969 saw hit singles from The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and Elvis, and is remembered as a vintage year for pop music.

The four girls from Fremont with little concept of conventional rhythm and structure would have had to compete with some of music’s all-time biggest names to make the big time. While modern audiences tend to be more sympathetic towards The Shaggs’ off-kilter style, in the late 60s they mostly just heckled. The Shaggs achieved popularity in their local area, playing frequent shows at the Fremont town hall, but on a national scale Philosophy of the World was at best met with raised eyebrows and in 1975, after the death of their father, the group was disbanded.

The Shaggs’ sound evades genre classification. To assign them a genre would be to imply that they knew what they were doing. The sisters’ nasal vocals at times sound a great deal like Nico without the German twang, but the instrumentation is far more unusual: the drums change tempo at will and the melodies follow no discernable pattern. The two vocalists sing in unison but never in harmony and the guitar follows exactly the same tune as the vocals. Their songs are simple ditties, characterized by childlike repetition, yet the subject matter is often naively

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profound.

There are strong comparisons to be drawn between The Shaggs’ music and the whimsically ‘difficult’ and atonal music of 90s noise rock bands like Lightning Bolt and Hella, although critics rightly defend that this is merely due to the band’s lack of musical knowledge rather than some prescient vision of how music might sound in the future. In any case, The Shaggs have evidently amassed a loyal fan base in the noise rock world: the Californian band Deerhoof released a cover of ‘My Pal Foot Foot’ as a 7” single in 2002.

In response to the band’s recent surge in popularity as well

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as renewed interest in outsider music in general, one internet user commented “I’m surprised they’ve not been asked to ‘reform’ & play ATP festival.” The Shaggs would indeed fit well on the bill, were it not for the fact that they never wanted to be a band in the first place.

They could barely be persuaded to re-release Philosophy of the World, having attracted so much derision the first time round.

But when they did, Kurt Cobain named it his favourite album of all time and Frank Zappa called them ‘better than the Beatles’. Some critics praised the band’s uncorrupted beauty and creative freedom. Yet the

acclaim was far from universal. Many hated them: “Shock therapy and all the Prozac in the world would never stop the haunting sounds of these banshees”, snapped one online reviewer. Those in the hate camp dismiss the recent applause as the words of poseurs looking for meaning where there is none. Others retort that The Shaggs were the first truly original band in decades.

Either way, Philosophy of the World certainly serves as a curious museum piece, defining the limits of musical potential.

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time in their history, relegation in 1991 stretched their finances to the limit. Darting in between the leagues, relegation from the Bundesliga in 2002 almost led to bankruptcy.

In the current season, the team still faces funding issues and an internal dispute between the aptly named ‘Sozialromantiker’ fan group and the executives. Capitalising on the local industry, one of the Millerntor boxes was sold to a local strip club, who in turn brought more than their owners to the games. Within the box, goals were celebrated with victorious stripping.

This year St Pauli were relegated from the Bundesliga again. This will once again test the club’s morale and finances. Although struggling, FC St Pauli is active politically on both a local and an international scale. The team has brought local asylum seekers to games, provided water dispensers for Cuban schools and the Millerntor hosted the FIFI World Cup for countries not recognised by football’s governing body. As Greenland, Tibet, Northern Cyprus, Gibraltar and Zanzibar took to the competitive field for the first time, St Pauli’s origins were reprised on a worldwide scale; here they were, once again, representing the unrepresented.

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olly Rogers, punks, prostitutes and football.

This is FC St Pauli, the most radical club in football. The team’s Millerntor stadium is situated in Hamburg’s red light district. Here, AC/DC blares from stereos and moshpit celebrations rage, all in support of this distinctively brown-clad team; pre-match gatherings, from parties to protests, are intrinsically woven into matchdays that wind down long after the final whistle has blown.

With many empty shelves in their trophy cabinet, the team can’t attribute their sudden leap from obscurity to infamy to their football skills alone. It is their off-pitch antics that have captivated Europe’s attention. The passionately leftist agenda of the team’s supporters (millions of whom live far from Hamburg) is both a unifying and volatile force in German football. The most incendiary period in FC St Pauli’s colourful history was probably the 1980s, when European football made news for its associations with hooliganism and the far right. Against this backdrop, the St Pauli area was catapulted to the forefront of radicalism. Formerly a small quarter known only to sailors as a hot spot for hot rock’n’roll, tattoos and sex, the district began to attract artists, students and politically minded individuals. In the middle of the decade, one fan attached a pirate flag to a broomstick and waved it in the Millerntor; this image came to symbolise the club’s identity.

The change was apparent not only from the pitch side but also in the St Pauli quarter itself. As the AIDS crisis wreaked havoc in the community’s prostitution industry, the area became depopulated; suddenly cheap spaces were available to rent and the area’s ‘alternative’ scene flourished. Low prices resulted in an influx of creative people, which then began to attract wealthier residents as the area underwent a process of gentrification.

Few new residents of St Pauli had as visible an effect on the team as Corny Littmann, who simultaneously served as President of the football club and owner of the Schmidt Theatre. Instead of a stuffy hard-nosed executive, FC St Pauli had an openly gay theatre impresario as its chairman. Corny Littmann epitomized the FC St Pauli way of life, but throughout his tenure the club suffered severe financial difficulties. After they gained promotion to Germany’s top tier (Bundesliga) in 1988 for only the second

03

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azi. Eugenicist. Communist. Sam Harris has been called a lot of things, so it’s a little difficult to know where to start. As the author of two enormously successful anti-God tracts, The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation, he has been on the receiving end of bile from liberals and conservatives alike. His attacks on religion are striking in their tones of certainty and hostility, yet he appears to rejoice in such confrontation: in recent years, he has joined together with Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins in an informal group of like-minded atheists called the Four Horsemen. For many, he is a clear-thinking, indispensable advocate of nonbelief, but, for a far greater number, he is a blasphemous and dangerous enemy.

His new book, The Moral Landscape, is no less provocative. Its central proposition is that, with the aid of neuroscience, Harris’s specialism, we can now begin pursuing a science of morality. The “landscape” is one of peaks

of “well-being” and valleys of miser y, and he argues that science might increasingly help us navigate this unsteady ter-

+,$(-(+-$(.$/-#/$( &012/$3(4/(%5(-( 26-574/1,05(-&8( 8-&./$,05(/&/1' rain. It’s a novel idea, going against the received opinion that science cannot comment on moral issues, yet he argues it with implacable certainty.

Harris is self-assured and utterly confident in print, and his recent appearance on Newsnight (defending France’s banning of the niqab and burqa) was equally fier y. Given this, I’m surprised when we sit down for a chat to be confronted with a remarkably mild-mannered individual. After being ushered into an anonymous white dressing room in the dusty bowels of the Sheldonian, I find Harris deep in conversation with Richard Dawkins (who is due to share the stage

with him this evening), apparently about what kind of Thai food he would prefer for their meal later. I feel like a bit of an intruder, but Dawkins soon strolls away, and we’re left alone. Harris greets me politely with a quiet, considered air, and I’m struck by the contrast between his hesitant demeanour and his more vociferous style of his writing.

The Moral Landscape contains much of this urgency and indignation, and I’m curious to find out how the reception has been so far. He pauses.

“It’s been… somewhat contentious.” Does this surprise him? The book’s argument is, after all, fairly radical. “It doesn’t seem radical at all to me because I can’t actually see an alternative. I just can’t see truth claims about the nature of human experience kept within a walled garden away from a maturing, scientific understanding of the human mind.” He smiles, and notes that some of the fiercest criticism he has faced has been “from academic philosophers who feel that I’m giving their discipline some short shrift”.

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#5' $ "("( I suggest that this isn’t exactly unsurprising – any scientist who achieves some degree of mainstream popularity is invariably dismissed by certain less successful peers. Harris nods at this. “It’s quite amazing. On one level it’s explained by envy, but you then have all these detractors within the ivor y tower basically saying, ‘ You’ve sold out,’ and not offering any valid criticism of your book. I didn’t really have that luxur y, or problem, because I was a graduate student when I wrote my first book, so

!"#$%&'()*#$(''+$ ,-%".-/$-#$-//$#&$ +'$0'.-1('$"$.-)*#$ -.#1-//2$(''$-)$ -/#',)-#"3'4 I sold out instantly.”

Harris acknowledges that the gap between academic and public discourse is, to an extent, unbridgeable: “ The problem when you’re writing a book like this is tr ying to communicate a serious argument, but in such a way that people’s eyes don’t glaze over with boredom.” This isn’t to say that his is a book of pseudo-science; rather, it is extensively researched (being based in part upon his PhD thesis), and its dense central section is filled with studies and experiments that demonstrate our understanding of how the brain registers “well-being”.

His argument genuinely appears to have developed as a direct result of his research.

Regardless of its academic validity, there’s clearly something about his argument that unsettles people.

He has stated elsewhere that “some people are unable to want what they should, in fact, want; some people are cognitively and emotionally

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closed to ways of living that would make them happier...”

Would he force them to act in a certain way if science proves it will increase well-being? “ Well, I do view the analog y to health as pretty instructive.

We’re not forced by medical doctors to avoid all of the risks they point out to us. So if you want to smoke and get lung cancer, you’re free to do it, but medicine is in a position to say, ‘Listen, this is not good for your health.’ It’s not an Orwellian intrusion into your freedom, it’s just information which we now think we have well in hand. Now clearly when the information’s clear enough and the liability ’s grave enough, then we can be somewhat coercive in our expectations of people.”

For Harris, moral certainties have for too long been the exclusive domain of the religious Right, and he’s had enough of the liberal tendency to shrug when confronted with questions of right and wrong, particularly in relation to Islamism and its treatment of women. “ There’s this idea that it’s presumptuous to ever claim to know what’s right in moral terms. We certainly claim to know what is right in terms of global health, or how best to respond to a nuclear disaster… We’re not agnostic about the truths of engineering or physics or economics. We’re humbled by how complex various systems are and how bad we are at knowing what the right answer is, but we’re not agnostic as to

whether or not there is a right answer or a set of right answers... I don’t think we should get agnostic about human well-being. And there are some clearly wrong answers that we can criticise without hedging our bets and saying, ‘ Well maybe we’re mistaken on whether it’s good to force girls to remain illiterate for their entire lives.’” Though jet-lagged, Harris is now leaning further forward, and appears increasingly energised as he argues his case.

However, I am sceptical as to whether this liberal apathy really is a danger today; isn’t the moral equivalence of modern liberals a hypothetical enemy, there to give him something to oppose? “It’s certainly not hypothetical.

! " $ % & ) * # $ #5") 6$ 7 ' $ (5 & 1/%$ 8'# $ -8) &(#".$ -0 & 1# $ 51+ -)$ 7 '// 9 0 '") 8 4 I’m consistently encountering these people in real life and in comment threads and in emails.” But even if this is the case, is it such a danger? Harris is adamant that it is. “ To think that there’s no moral truth, to think that it’s purely a matter of preference that is not grounded in anything

)' &#&) ( $ * +,, other than accidents in biolog y or accidents of culture or personal whim, you get people just not committed to changing the world. They ’re committed to the status quo. [It shows] a total lack of moral energ y and courage”. He regards radical Islam as the world’s most potent threat today, and believes the liberal reaction to this is to be dangerously spineless.

With this argument, Harris has succeeded in alienating large swathes of left-leaning liberals who might otherwise be his most natural allies. Are their criticisms as fierce as those of his religious opponents? He smiles. “ Well, there are so many different f lavours of anger directed at me that it’s hard to know how to summarise it.” The smile then quickly evaporates, and for

the first time, he seems lost for words. He fixes his eyes on the f loor, before eventually looking up. “I think it’s largely a liberal criticism of me that’s the most vehement at this point. Obviously my criticism of religion annoys the Right, there’s all that as well. But that criticism is less annoying, somehow… Strangely, I find there’s more self-deception and shoddier reasoning in the other [liberal] camps than when you’re in the presence of just a Bible-thumper who thinks that the universe is six thousand years old.”

I’m bewildered by this and surprised to see Harris attack what he regards as the delusions of the Left with so much passion. Doesn’t this leave him united with some unfortunate allies? “ That’s what I’m worried about. The people

who make reasonable noises about Islam in Europe, as far as I can tell, are fascists and anti-Semites and racists, and people who you just think are not good bedfellows at all...

But they are right about Islam and they are speaking in a vacuum of honest commentar y from liberals.” However, even if Harris believes himself to be that voice, he makes no attempt to embrace moderation and placate his critics.

Instead, in his quietly polite manner, he is attempting to fill society ’s “vacuum of honest commentar y ” as loudly as he possibly can.

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uisine & Crime-Solving’ - a concoction that isn’t easy on the digestive system. But this is how the Vidocq Society works: every month, 82 detectives and forensic experts gather over a sumptuous threecourse lunch. They chat about this and that; they bring guests and associates. And they set about try-

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ing to solve the 100,000 cold-case murders that haunt America’s justice system today.

The Society was established in 1990, initially serving as little more than a glorified dining club. It was only after a member attended a conference organised by the parents of murdered children, and was moved to give the Society a stron-

ger purpose, that today’s Vidocq Society and its motto ‘Veritas Veritatum’ (‘The Truth of Truths’) were born. As founding member William Fleisher recalls, “[That member] said we must dedicate ourselves to solving cases for people who are hurting, not just having a good time… Our mission today is to act as a catalyst for all the people touched by mur-

# $ %& %# ' ( ! )** der.” The Society solved its first case – in which it helped acquit an innocent man of homicide -–in 1991.

The three founding members boast an impressive collective CV. Frank Bender is a sometime professional sculptor with a remarkable talent for reconstructing faces from whole or partial skulls. While visiting a morgue in 1975, he saw the corpse of a woman who had been disfigured by a bullet through her skull, and told the staff that he “could tell what she looked like”. He made a sculpture of her face, and five months later she was identified; twenty years later, her killer was convicted.

Bender has since enabled the FBI to catch seven of their most wanted fugitives. Richard Walter, whose retiring personality has earned him the nickname ‘the Englishman’, is one of the world’s leading forensic psychologists and a prolific crime-scene profiler. Fleisher is a former FBI special agent and the current principal of the Keystone Intelligence Network, which specialises in the use of lie detectors. The Society’s name was his idea.

It is taken from the 19th-century French criminal-turned-detective, Eugène Francois Vidocq. By the age of 19, Vidocq had already stolen tons of valuables (mostly from his parents), pretended to be a Caribbean Cannibal with a travelling fair, initiated fifteen duels, joined and deserted the army, and escaped from prison several times. After four years spent on the run from the law, he turned informant for the police.

He went on to lead a successful life as a maverick detective, and is credited with inventing some of the profession’s most enduring techniques: indelible ink, plaster casts of footprints, and a form of anthropometrics that is still used by the French police.

Yet Vidocq was also a philanthropist: he claimed that he never arrested the needy, and during a brief stint as a factory owner he employed only ex-convicts. This attitude remains key to the Society’s creed: all of its work is pro bono. The directors invite detectives and police to talk

about a cold case in which they are involved, following which the floor is opened to the members: a network of public prosecutors, FBI profilers, murder detectives, forensic scientists and artists, psychologists, anthropologists, security consultants and coroners. The Society allows them to share their specialised knowledge, making for an interdisciplinary approach to crime-solving that’s scarcely possible in everyday bureaucratic policing.

A striking example of the benefits of this arrangement is the case of the dead woman who was brought into the morgue covered in blowfly maggots. Police initially suspected the woman’s husband, but concluded that the murder was the work of a stranger, and the case remained dormant until it was presented to the Vidocq members. One of them, a forensic entomologist, analysed the blowfly’s hatching cycle, and his findings put the time of death back by 18 hours – thus blowing apart the husband’s alibi. He is now awaiting trial.

#+,(-./%,#'(,-#%01#,-( #+1#(%#(+,23-(-.24,( 1$.5&6(")7(.8(#+,( /1-,-(%#(+,1$For a case to be presented to the Society, it must fulfil three criteria: that it is presented by the appropriate law enforcement agency; that it has remained unsolved for at least two years; and that the victim was not involved in criminal or illicit activity of any kind. This still leaves room for a wide menu of assorted crimes and misdemeanours, the most memorable of which are related below.

One of the first cases solved by the Society was that of Scott Dunn, a young man who went missing in Texas in 1991. He was filed as a missing person and forgotten about.

But Walter was unconvinced; using his profiling skills to examine Dunn’s erstwhile girlfriend, Leisha Hamilton, he found her to be a murderous psychopath. New forensic

work revealed bloodstains on the walls of Dunn’s apartment. A forensic pathologist concluded that Dunn died from being struck at least four times, and Hamilton was convicted.

An ongoing case concerning a toddler who in 1957 was found dead in a cardboard box in Philadelphia is especially close to Fleisher’s heart.

He was a teenager at the time and he remembers it well: “It was my first exposure to the shocking reality of the world, seeing a poster with that boy’s photo on it. I remember thinking here’s a dead child who was murdered not far from where I lived.

That always stuck in my mind.” The Society has kept the case alive, and they are currently pursuing new leads.

Other cases are less than urgent.

In 2010, Society members reopened the case of Laura Lanza, Baroness of Carini (a small Italian town near Palermo), who was murdered in 1563.

Lanza and her illicit lover were killed in her castle, apparently leaving just one bloody handprint on the wall as evidence. Fingers pointed towards Laura’s husband and father, but due to their wealth and status, and the legality of honour killings, they were acquitted. Now the bodies have been exhumed and the investigators are using contemporaneous documents, computerised reconstructions of the castle and DNA tests in their investigation.

Lunch comes to an end, and the detectives who brought in the day’s cases leave much the wiser. Their actual hunger satiated, their righteous appetite for the passage of justice is now rumbling, and with the Vidocq members’ input they’re one step closer to serving the criminals their just desserts. The Society estimates that it helps solve around 90% of the cases it hears, an impressive stat even when you consider Fleisher’s distinction between ‘solve’ and ‘prove’. And as local police departments continue to suffer in today’s straitened economic climate, Vidocq’s role as an independent intelligence network will only increase in importance. Now there’s food for thought.

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POLITICS POLITICS POLITICS POLITICS POLITICS POLITICS POLITICS POLITICS

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WELCOME TO

BLACKBIRD

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wenty years ago, Blackbird Leys made news around the world. In the summer of 1990, young men from the estate began giving nightly performances of stunts with stolen cars in front of crowds of onlookers. Following complaints from residents, the police upped their presence in the area and the problem was dealt with. But with the police gone the joyriding started once more, and when they returned in August 1991 the crowds greeted them with stones and glass bottles.

Having lost control of the situation, the police decided to don riot gear and storm the estate. Bottles, pint glasses and petrol bombs were thrown in the ensuing clashes. The media caught wind, and “Riots in University Town” adorned newspapers from Australia to the USA. The events of that week in 1991 planted Blackbird Leys firmly in the public consciousness. As heav-

ily tattooed parish councilor and life-long resident Brian Lester tells me, it’s now “one of the most famous housing estates in the world”.

Wandering around the place today, it’s strange to think that this shabby outpost of post-industrial working class Britain has received so much attention. Two fifteenstory tower blocks overshadow row after roughly scattered row of grey pebble-dashed houses, each one indistinguishable from the next save for the odd St George’s flag in a window.

The residents of the estate are acutely aware of Blackbird Leys’s reputation. The phrase “I’ve never had any trouble” crops up again and again as I ask residents about life on the estate. Lester is exasperated by its public image: “Just look at the Oxford Mail website.

All the vicious comments left by morons… Yes we have problems.

But so does Eynsham, so does Wolvercote, so does Kidlington, and all the other places that surround Oxford.”

Like many people on the estate, Lester blames the events of 1991 on the press. “There was a bit of joyriding and it was reported in the media. Next thing you know you’ve got boys coming down from Birmingham and Bristol to the estate causing trouble.” He also asserts, as others have done before, that journalists were going up to young men in The Blackbird pub and bribing them to steal cars and do stunts. This is fairly typical: many residents I speak to blame past difficulties on the influence of outsiders.

Look at a map and you’ll see Blackbird Leys neatly bordered on all sides by roads. There is no sprawl blurring the boundary between the estate and the outside world, and this is reflected in the

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‘us and them’ mentality possessed by many of my interviewees. This mentality seems to have had both a positive and negative effect on the estate. On the one hand, it is unifying. Ben Thomson, a teaching assistant in the local school, praises the “strong community feel” and assures me that “every time something bad happens there is always a collective feeling against it.” But it can be less constructive.

I frequently encounter adversarial attitudes toward the outside world that are expressed as a general mistrust of journalists and the police.

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“I was on telly fighting a copper!” says Mark. He is the only person I manage to speak to who was actually involved in the events of 1991.

Solemnly he tells me that “the police don’t like us around here. They think we’re all the same but we’re not.” I ask how the clashes were finally resolved. “It stopped because they realised that if they went away we’d go away. They realised that if they’re going to come down with their riot gear, we’ll come with petrol bombs.” He implies that the clashes with police took place not because the estate was economically deprived - though

it was - and not because the kids were bored - though they were but because an external authority had come and imposed itself on the running of the estate.

It is an unfortunate irony that Blackbird Leys is so proudly selfdetermined when it is also in severe need of support. Despite its particularly bad reputation, the estate’s experience is common to most post-industrial working class communities.

Unemployment, debt, obesity and many other measures of deprivation are all higher here than the national average.

Government statistics show that

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31% of people living in Blackbird Leys are income-deprived and the proportion of children living in poverty hovers at around 35%.

For all this, progress has been made since 1991. When I ask Paula Williams of the Community Centre whether people began rioting because there was nothing for young people to do, she informs me that “the exact opposite is the case now. Compared to other estates like Rosehill and Barton we have a wealth of things available to us.”

The Oxford Academy, the main secondary school for children living on the estate, was last year praised

by Ofsted for its “rapid improvement”, and the newly refurbished leisure has been a good source of new jobs. The Blackbird Leys Choir was the subject of a five-part television documentary, and the increasingly active church does a lot for disadvantaged members of the community.

Other residents occupy themselves with voluntary work. Laura Court, a single mother of two, helps out at the Advice Centre two days a week. She is currently on benefits and hopes that her experience at the centre will help her back into employment when her

children reach school age. “When you write it all down and you work out what you gain and what you lose from staying on or coming off benefits you realise that coming off isn’t viable.”

Through its advice service and its provision of volunteer posts to jobless residents, the centre offers a lifebelt to many trapped in the cycle of generational unemployment.

But with the impending spending cuts it faces an uncertain future.

Stephen Knight, coordinator at the Agnes Smith Advice Centre, is concerned. “As the government makes cutbacks more people get into

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#$% & '('( problems. Then the need for the centre becomes greater… but the cuts could finish our service too, and what will the people do then?”

The straitened economic climate is also making itself felt elsewhere.

With the library already gone, Williams talks anxiously about the future of youth services. It’s already been confirmed that the Oxford Healthy Living Partnership will be sacrificed, despite the fact that obesity is one of the main problems faced by the estate. I ask her if spending cuts will affect levels of crime. “I think they could do.

People are becoming disillusioned.

It’s harder to find work and more people will drop out of education.”

Yet a high proportion of people do not seem aware of the cuts that are affecting their community, or at least they do not feel qualified to comment on them. Most of the people I speak to display a strong neighbourly concern but this only sometimes does this constitute part of a general political perspective. There is the sense that that many residents do not view themselves as functioning members of a wider political system that represents and listens to them.

Paula Williams tells me that ethnic minorities are particularly disengaged. Despite being a prom-

inent black member of the local community herself, she admits that “the Parish Council has had an image of not being for young people and maybe not even for black people.” Why? “The problem is that it has always been made up of white middle-aged men.”

Much is made of unity on the estate, but race remains a thorny issue. Many openly express concerns about immigration, and those who do not are often suspiciously eager to downplay race as an issue. Before I even mention it to Brian Lester he volunteers that there are “no race issues up here” before later admitting that he did at one point consider voting for the BNP. The number of St George’s crosses – fluttering from car aerials, pinned to windows, sometimes even fastened to lamp-posts – tells of the paranoid protectiveness over ‘Britain’ often felt by white working class communities threatened with poverty and unemployment. I approach an elderly woman as she emerges from a house clad with Union Jack bunting left over from the royal wedding to ask her for directions to the entrance of one of the tower blocks. “Over there,” she says, “but it’s full of foreigners now.”

Race is not the only potential source of conflict. Many of the elderly retirees in The Blackbird pub are exasperated with the current generation of young people.

Ex-RAF worker and self-professed “legend of the community” Tony Sutherland is one of them. With a grin, he tells me that all the young women need is “cock and the council”. I look bemused.

“They get pregnant, the council gives them a flat. There are too many handouts.” It seems that the deprivation that often unites the residents is also at the root of many of the divisions.

Over the past twenty years, support from the government and the efforts of residents themselves have improved life on the estate.

Lester notes that the next twenty years look less certain. “Who knows what’s going to happen with cuts being made left, right and centre? This is the tenth biggest socially deprived area in the country and they’re taking away our library? Take these things away and it’s asking for trouble.”

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O

ne night in 2005, the Nanjing police arrived at a gathering at the house of an academic; they came by night, their purpose unstated but obvious. It’s unclear for how long his activities had been known to the authorities, but the academic no doubt crossed a line when he publicly solicited the cooperation of others. All in all, 22 individuals were led away, to reappear at the whim of the state.

So far, so depressingly familiar.

Yet Ma Yaochun was not a dissident accused of some kind of political

subversion, but the organiser of a huge orgy, later convicted under the quite precise terms of a law prohibiting sex between “three or more people”. Ma wound up with a three-and-a-half-year jail sentence and a good dousing of public humiliation; this is a mere slap on the wrist as far as China’s judges are concerned, but the simple fact of the conviction must give us pause. China is not a theocracy, and has no tradition of sexual moralism (polygamy was common, and homosexuality tolerated, before the importation of ‘western’ – read Christian – values in the early 20th century). Rarely do such outbursts of conservative rage make it into western headlines, which are more preoccupied with the issue of political oppression.

Ma isn’t alone in his fate. That particular law is applied only intermittently, but is firmly embedded in the statute books; calls by a few brave liberals for its repeal fail to

elicit even a reply from the Party. It forms part of the wider saohuang campaigns (sao meaning ‘sweep away’, huang ‘yellow’, or ‘sexually deviant’). The term appears most often in gleeful news reports detailing successful raids on brothels, which are often spiced up with snapshots of prostitutes cowering before the police or videos of their half-dressed clients fleeing the building.

These exposés are an uneasy blend of prudish hate and voyeuristic fascination. Writers let their moral outrage run wild, calling grandly for “the evil tumour of perversion to be wiped out”, to quote just one. Yet prostitutes are often deliberately put on display and humiliated, their faces shoved into the cameras of the waiting press with evident glee. Granted, neither the press nor the censors speak for all Chinese, and the cruel treatment meted out to hapless hookers is met with disgust and pity by a fair

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proportion of Chinese on the internet (which, though ever more regulated, remains the main forum for free debate). But prostitutes aren’t the only targets.

The past few years in China have seen the saohuang campaigns expand rapidly. Ever since officials ordered the removal of ‘lewd’ content from private communication, chatroom posts, blogs and even text messages must now be written without a trace of profanity, sex or anything else deemed unhealthy.

Stop and think about that for a second. The Chinese live under the yoke of one of the world’s most oppressive regimes, in which the individual has no rights beyond those granted by the state. But even with-

!"#$%&'!$!"&!$()*$ '&+,!$-&($!"#$.)/0$ 1-#2,$!)$&$'3)-#$ %/4#+0$!"/)*5"$&$ 6/47&!#$'"&++#3$4-$ &8-*/0 in such a system, the fact that you can’t say the word ‘sex’ to a close friend, through a private channel, is absurd. Inappropriate messages are returned unsent, and the incriminating phones or email accounts are blocked. In 2009 the Party even proposed installing on every Chinese computer a program named Green Dam, which would have blocked anything violent, profane, homosexual or otherwise illicit.

Green Dam, probably the largest censorship programme in human history, got a fair amount of coverage in the west. And in China it sparked one of the fiercest public debates in recent years. Polls and online debates revealed general contempt for the programme, and even the supine media laid into it. Users commented on one news website that it was unconstitutional, broke competition laws, was worse than feudalism and “castrated” Chinese men. Dozens sim-

99

ply wrote “fuck off”. In the end, the Party actually backed down, at first claiming that the programme needed further modification (undoubtedly true: it included images of pigs in its definition of porn), and eventually scrapping it altogether.

The point is that the enforcement of social norms is an issue in its own right for the government and not just a covert way of consolidating political power, and it’s probably of more immediate concern to the Chinese public than political rights. Many Chinese will smilingly

explain away political repression with well-worn narratives about how China is much freer than it was twenty, thirty or forty years ago, always mentioning the feudalism that the country would supposedly collapse back into were the firm hand of the Party removed. It is after all easier to come to terms with oppression than resist it. But the idea that private life should be censored was a step too far – unlike imprisoning dissidents, it was impossible to justify as an evil necessary for maintaining the state’s

this should actually be done. Officials aren’t clear on what it is they profess to be stamping out.

This weird combination of fervour and vagueness is best explained by the fact that China’s government

)*+,"-%.*/("0#1% 2'*)*03)%"%2*'4*#3% 5225'3,0(31%45'% 3&*%*"6*' 7,'*",#'"3 is less a totalitarian dictatorship than a bureaucracy. Power is spread among thousands of individuals competing for promotion, and careers are built in the office rather than on the battlefield. Thus successful officials must not only preserve stability, but also be seen to be actually doing something new. A liberal, hands-off approach would only create an opportunity for a more calculating bureaucrat to step in. Sexual deviancy, in this climate, presents a perfect opportunity for the eager bureaucrat – few powerful parties have vested interests in whores and porn, and so a good saohuang campaign in one’s region is an easy way to make a name.

stability.

Over the past two years China’s streets have seen the revival of another token of the dark Mao years: the neighbourhood watch committee, which in the past served to eavesdrop on gossiping locals and root out dissent, and whose denunciations were tantamount to a court sentence. Now, marked by red armbands, the committee members shuffle through the streets (most look old enough to have been on the original committees back in the 60s), looking with bleary eyes for

‘trouble’, though nobody I’ve asked has any idea what they’d do if they found any.

The volunteers are an odd sight; living in Beijing, I pass two or three groups a day. Despite their menacing reputation, most are harmless, and they tend to while the days away chatting on street corners, like any other groups of Chinese who are old enough to have pensions. As with Green Dam, the Party has at once invested great effort in ‘cleaning up’ society, and given surprisingly little thought to how

The excesses of the campaigns – the omnipresent censorship, the heavy penalties – stem from the perverse double requirement to stand out as a bureaucrat and not to buck the political trend. The bureaucrat must become the epitome of the prudish norm, exceptional only in the scale of the controls he proposes, the severity of his punishments, and the renewed vigour that he injects into old campaigns.

It’s impossible to say whether proud liberalism will ever develop, let alone succeed, under such conditions. But don’t hold your breath.

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89

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M

arine Le Pen has a boxer’s shoulders, a wet handshake and a raspy smoker’s voice. She is the leader of the National Front in France, from a dynasty of Frontists. Her father Jean-Marie Le Pen was leader until early this year, her ex-husbands are both party functionaries, and her sisters are equally immersed in party life. The party’s emblem is Joan of Arc, who saved France from the foreigners; she acts as her rather less glamorous standin. Known to the French simply as Marine, she wants to take the party into the mainstream, and – crucially – make it electable.

I called a relative of mine who lives in a forgotten part of France that is famous for cow breeding, and who has recently retired after running a dog kennel. “I didn’t like Jean-Marie,” she said. “But you have to understand how different Marine

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is. When she speaks, people listen. And you can’t say that in relation to other politicians in France. They seem only to be talking to each other.”

The National Front was created in 1972 to satisfy the dreams of its wayward buffoonish supporters. Its origins are tangled up with the shame of the Nazi occupation and the horrors of the Algerian war. Frontists shared a view that their country had been stolen from them by the French elite, whom they hated almost as much as the waves of immigrants, who had in their view diluted Frenchness.

The eccentricity of the French election system has been designed to keep out parties from the extreme Left and Right. In his long reign, however, Le Pen père was surprisingly successful. He became adept at flirting

with France’s laws that prohibit holocaust denial and forbid racial abuse. In 2002 he surprised bourgeois France by knocking the feeble socialist presidential candidate out in the first

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Marine worked as warm-up act on her father’s behalf for

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many years. She was brought on to soften the image of the Front, and her commitment to family values was brought to the fore, despite the fact that she was a divorcée. But she had to wait for many years to assume her father’s mantle.

Cleverly she started by disassociating herself from the more extreme elements of the Frontists. She is explicitly not a holocaust denier. And she has also repeatedly told audiences that she is not opposed to Islam.

But this apparent softening of the Frontist ideology should be viewed with suspicion. Marine believes that France should leave the euro and the European Union. The Front is still committed to sending immigrants home, with the vague qualification that this will only be done if they really want to go.

You could say that she echoes Richard Nixon’s appeals to the ‘silent majority’ in 60s Ameri-

ca. A lot of French people, my relative included, are xenophobic; and it begs the question – just how racist are the French?

Marine could never win the presidential election, but she could come close. Polls suggest that she could beat Sarkozy in the first round, leaving a runoff vote against a feeble Socialist candidate. And it’s this politically astute, Nixon-esque cloaking of French racism in the red, white and blue that has made her and her extreme politics so palatable.

Marine’s apparent softness is in line with the position taken by far-right parties throughout Europe. Europeans will only vote for people whom they do not find frightening. So Marine, along with the True Finn party in Finland, the People’s Party in Denmark and the Sweden Democrats, have all set their minds on rendering themselves less unlovely. But they will be around for a long time.

They poison the rest of politics by forcing cowardly politicians from the centre to accommodate their prejudices as a form of appeasement.

Marine will probably do better than the rest of these groups because she embodies a deeply normal anti-establishment chic in France. If you live in a rubbish part of France, don’t get invited to the sort of parties frequented by the Strauss-Kahns, and are unnerved by the ethnic minorityfilled cités clustered around the town in which you live, Marine is the woman for you. Not only does she look like someone you might see working in the local supermarket, she shares the views of ordinary, neglected French people. And that’s why she will be so much more successful than her father.

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I

mprisoned for a crime he did not commit, Robert Hillary King bears surprisingly few grudges. Nonetheless, he’s determined to use his twilight years of newly gained liberty for the benefit of his fellow prisoners and Black Panthers.

For nearly three decades Robert Hillary King lived alone in a six-by-nine foot room. With a bed in one corner and a toilet in the other, the man who now sits before me spent 29 years in ‘closed cell restriction’, more commonly known as solitary confinement.

The story of his lengthy internment begins in the Louisiana State Penitentiary, also known as Angola, the largest maximum security prison in the United States. On 17 April 1972, a young, recently married prison guard named Brent Miller was held down by prisoners and stabbed 32 times. Following his death, inmates Albert Woodfox, Herman Wallace and Robert Hillary King were interned in solitary confinement. Woodfox and Wallace are still in prison, but King has been released for just

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over ten years and of the three convicted, King’s links to the crime are the most tenuous. He explains it simply: “I never met the man, never saw him in my life before.” As alibis go, King’s is fairly well-supported. Maximum security prisons like Angola keep close records of their prisoners’ whereabouts, and of the thousands of men that could have attacked Brent Miller, King was not one of them. It is a matter of fact that on 17 April 1972 Robert Hillary King was not in Angola Penitentiary.

The laidback rhythm of his voice betrays a childhood spent in post-segregation New Orleans. But when I use the term ‘post-segregation’, King is quick to clarify: “I went to a segregated school, I lived in a segregated community, I lived in a segregated society.” As a young man he was arrested for armed robbery, another crime that he maintains he did not commit.

his stories quite calmly, smiling at the absurdities and injustice.

After all, these things are quite ‘normal’. Even after his initial experience of the justice system, it wasn’t until later in life that King’s attitude began to change: “Early on I did everything that I needed to do in order to conform to the system, but...my conformity wasn’t enough.” Just as King’s perception of his surroundings and opportunities began to mature, so too did his interest in the Black Panther Party.

In 1972 he cofounded the Angola chapter with Woodfox and Wallace; the trio that would soon earn the title ‘The Angola 3’.

Though today he wears the black beret of affiliation, the Panthers’ militancy and provocative rhetoric were never the main attractions for King. Addressing the public perception of the group as fanatical, he calls attempts to equate them with the Ku Klux Klan “crazy and ridicu-

ing, education, clothing, justice and peace.’ We want an immediate end to police brutality in the black community. These are things that the US constitution teaches that we should have.”

Not everyone in America has

“It was a crime that two people had committed, but they forced four people to plead guilty. That was normal. I ended up getting ten years in prison.” King tells

lous”. According to King, their aims have always been simple and humane. He quotes the party’s ten-point programme: “We’d say we want ‘land, bread, hous-

system in the 1970s. The murder case against the three Panthers is steeped in controversy and King sees their imprisonment as inextricably linked to their

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activist roots: “The state wanted to ‘solve’ the crime. They wanted to charge people who were ‘militants.’” King goes on to explain that the only piece of forensic evidence in the case was a bloody handprint at the scene of the crime, a print that did not match any of those charged with the murder. There were thousands of potential suspects confined within the grounds of Angola at the time, all available for forensic testing, yet the state decided against further investigation.

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What does CCR actually mean?

“They place you in a cell and isolate you from the rest of the prisoners physically and psychologically. You’re in a six by nine box. You’re kept there for 23,

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sometimes 24, hours a day. Everywhere you go you have to be handcuffed and shackled. Even though they say you can communicate with someone next to you, you can get written up for disruption.” Considering the status of prisoners, what privileges does one have? “You don’t have privileges. If you want to go to church, you can’t go to church.

You’ve got one hour in the yard for any kind of recreation. There was a lot of stuff they did to us or wanted to do to us that they did not do to other prisoners— we had to fight against this.”

King would have spent the rest of his life in jail if not for the intervention of the courts. After 29 years of solitary confinement, his release was a complicated process. He tells me about Geronimo ji-Jaga, another Black Panther who was paid compensation for false imprisonment.

“But there’s no compensation when they take your life away from you.” This is another one of King’s calm asides. It is not a loaded sentence, nor is it said with anger, it is just a statement of the situation.

To King, ji-Jaga’s story provides important context for the circumstances of his own release.

“They didn’t want to replicate

his compensation. Since they had reversed my sentence, they needed conviction.” King was asked to agree to a plea bargain, his release in return for an admission of guilt. Initially he was asked to plead guilty to accessory-after-the-fact, but this offer was withdrawn and changed to the much greater charge of manslaughter. King said no. He wanted to get out of prison, but after three decades in prison he wasn’t interested in assenting to a charge of culpability. Eventually a compromise was reached and King pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit murder. It was still a difficult decision, but he was driven to “get out and work on Herman and Albert’s behalf.”

For the past ten years, King has done just that. Since his release he has travelled across the world to speak about the Angola 3.

Woodfox and Wallace have now been in prison for 39 years each, mostly spent in CCR or similar conditions. How does King measure his acceptance of the plea bargain against his ability to further their cause? “I haven’t achieved what I would really want to achieve and I feel that until that happens, I won’t feel that I made a right and proper decision.” It is when he speaks

about his two “friends and comrades” that the full force of King’s resolve becomes apparent.

For all of the issues linked to the case of the Angola 3—the lack of forensic evidence; what Amnesty International calls “the cruel and inhuman conditions” of their imprisonment; the flaws of the trials—King’s primary concern is clear. “Our objective is to show that there was a miscarriage of justice. They are innocent people who have been convicted for a crime that the state has known they did not commit and for this reason we want them released.”

Looking forward, King’s aims reach beyond that of the release of the Angola 3. He still

sees the need to continue the struggles of the Black Panther Party, “because better housing, better education and the uplifting of dispossessed people are all

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He recognises problems with the American judicial system at large, which he says “has taken the place of chattel slavery.” He seeks to focus unerringly on the injustices this system can inflict, calling it his self-appointed voli-

tion.

I finally ask King a question that he, more than most, is well-positioned to answer: how did it feel to be set free? “It was unrealistic, it was surrealistic... people feel that I somehow became maladjusted.” He smiles.

“On the contrary, I wasn’t ever maladjusted; I think the system was maladjusted in sending me to prison.” Now, at sixty-nine years of age, King shows no sign of relenting: “The fact I got out of Angola doesn’t mean a thing; the fact that I reached that light at the end of that particular tunnel doesn’t mean a thing. I see the struggle as unending.”

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Macabre painter Francis Bacon once remarked that, given the chance, he would “fuck the pants off Colonel Gaddafi”. In his younger days the Brother Leader definitely cut a dark, svelte figure. Lately however he’s resorted to hair plugs and Botox to retain his radical chic. It’s rumoured that his Amazon guards have walked out on him after he remarked that their breath “smelled like catfish”.

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#$%&#'()*+,%& The courageous leader of a guerrilla army in the 1970s, Robert Mugabe has since fallen out of step and out of shape. Now that he’s up in his years, his wife Grace insists that he exercise more to keep the blood flowing. “I am not old,” says Mugabe, insisting that his personal workout regime will allow him to sustain his degenerate rule. Reportedly still jealous of Mandela.

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But life in the shadow of his predecessor Imam Khomeini, combined with recent chants of “Death to the dictator!”, has turned what was left of Ali’s dark locks stark white.

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The king of populism set the pace for a new era of charismatic authoritarianism, juxtaposing dreary Soviet communism with the promise of a vibrant, daiquiri-flavored socialist paradise. But years later in a noticeably drearier communist Cuba, the cigar-chomping sexpot has handed the business over to his brother, Raúl, ditching the fatigues for a track suit.

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raped in purple and orange finery, men in bowler hats solemnly follow the Union Jack to the sound of flutes, penny whistles and drums. It is 12 July and the Irish nationalists of the Orange Order are marching in commemoration of William III’s victory over James II at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. Beside the men march the youth brigade, dressed in royal blue paramilitary outfits. These uniforms have long ceased to be an effective PR campaign for nationalists, and watching them float through Liverpool city centre is fucking weird.

The Orangemen, the King Billys, the Proddies, the Huns. Whatever you choose to call them, these marchers are the relics of an ancient conflict - the bitter and bloody antagonism between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland. To this day the 17th-century massacres of Protestant Scots and English in Catholic Ulster has entrenched the two sects’ descendants in a miserable conflict. The shadow of this dark period of British and Irish history is cast beyond Ulster, over the centres of Irish immigration on mainland Britain.

In Liverpool and Glasgow, just as in the Irish region, religion and politics have become inextricable, as Catholic ‘republicans’ support, and Protestant ‘unionists’ swear against, the reunification of Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic.

Growing up in Liverpool I saw the dominance of faith schools that gave the Catholic and Protestant churches an unnerving hold on the minds of children. My own mixed heritage condemned me to straddle the sectarian rift - embracing atheism was the only sensible choice. For me, all that these institutions offered were strange and incomprehensible rituals where one took equally strange and incomprehensible oaths. And the truth is, I may not have been alone in feeling that way. Nowadays in Liverpool such traditions are really nothing more than the

husk of the once vicious sectarian strife. Marches like the one above are still relatively commonplace, but they represent nothing more than dutiful maintenance of tradition: the old hatred and spitting vitriol is dead. While the visual spectacle of something like an Orange Order parade is powerful, its ability to dominate the thoughts and identities of young men has long faded away.

Billy Owens, the grand master of

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Jake Roney, director of the Liverpool Irish Festival, was an eyewitness to this transformation. “I

remember seeing Orange marches all over the city in the 1970s.

That’s pretty well faded away. I think the main thing is that the traditional communities were broken up in the slum clearances. Just as the Catholics of the Scotland Road area poured into Kirkby and places like that, the same thing happened to the hard-line Protestants. People have just been scattered to the wind.” Scotland Road once consisted of row upon row of packed slums squeezed tightly between the hills and the docks.

This area had the highest density of pubs in the country, and elected an Irish nationalist MP for over 40 years. Today, it resembles any other post-industrial wasteland.

All but one of the 200 pubs have gone and the rows of crumbling houses have been demolished to make way for empty fields of rubble and glass. Of course, the slums had to go. But the wrecking ball tore apart communities along with the rotting bricks and mortar.

Was this a ruthless solution to a difficult problem? Roney doesn’t seem to think so. “We weren’t trying to orchestrate this, but it’s just the way it worked out. There are still residual communities - Anfield Road still sees marches every now and again. It’s just narrowed down to the football rivalry and not much more.” Despite these mass movements of inner-city communities following the slum clearances, most spectators would probably agree that Liverpool is a better place for its loss of the old sectarian feuds.

Glasgow, on the other hand, continues to produce a grim spectacle of religious hatred. Tensions still run high here and the violence remains an uncomfortable blot upon Scottish identity and culture.

Specifically, the sporting rivalry between Rangers and Celtic has become wrapped up in the ethnoreligious conflict, to the extent that each clash between the two is treated as a re-enactment of the Battle of the Boyne. Rangers fans clad in royal blue brandish Union

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!"# $ %&%& Jacks and St Andrew’s Crosses, separated from their ancestral enemy by a line of police. Amongst the Celtic crowd there is no sight of the Union Jack – the so-called ‘butcher’s apron’ - but instead the Irish tricolour, rising above a sea of green and white. The rows of policemen are a trembling bulwark against half a millennium of religious hatred. Words dismissing this as a souped-up football rivalry ring hollow amid the recent mailing of a parcel bomb to Celtic manager Neil Lennon and the Glasgow-based Irish republican group Cairde na hÉireann. ‘Ninety-minute bigots’ do undoubtedly exist here, but it is certain that the violence that accompanies the Old Firm rivalry is far more than political theatre. Sectarianism in Scotland is something very real and very divisive, particularly where football is involved.

The anti-sectarian charity Nil

By Mouth was set up following the murder of young Celtic fan Mark Scott in 1995. The charity is committed to exorcising the spectre of sectarianism that still haunts Glasgow football. Ryan Taylor, a spokesperson for Nil By Mouth, stresses the abnormality of Glasgow’s football violence:

“While most cities have rivalries between local teams that spill into violence, the intensity between Rangers and Celtic sets Glasgow apart. Rather than violent behaviour cropping up from spontaneous exchange, incidents are very often the result of deep-rooted religious and associated tribal tensions mixed with excessive alcohol consumption.”

As vicious as the hooliganism is, the strife in Glasgow is not all that pervasive. For all the violence between Celtic and Rangers, there have been no tragedies on the scale of Northern Ireland’s Omagh bombings. Aberdeen University academic Steve Bruce asserts that the sectarian rift in Glasgow is nothing near the same magnitude as it is Northern Ireland, where the highly ghettoised housing areas create a physical divide between working-class Catholics and Protestants. A 2001 survey conducted for the Glasgow City Council found that over half of married Catholics were married to non-Catholics. He compares this to the figure of just 6% for Northern Ireland.

The toughest problem facing the police and sectarian charities such as Nil By Mouth is determining to what extent cultural expres-

sion is legitimate. Can the singing of chants like ‘The Famine Song’, with its chorus “the famine is over / why don’t you go home?”, really be justified as a piece of heritage?

The answer is shaping up to an unequivocal no, and Celtic and Rangers have sought to distance themselves from such songs. But how far can this curtailing of culture go? No one would strip the Hibernian green from Celtic, nor the Royal blue from Rangers. Nonetheless, it is certainly this poisonous marriage of the Old Firm clubs with the politics of Northern Ireland that exacerbates and perpetuates the problem of sectarianism in the mainland. The ugly truth is that the most powerful way to suppress violent sectarianism is the destruction of communities, such as the Liverpool slum clearances.

Right now that’s how the old tribes and the old violence are removed.

One hopes for a more humane answer.

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iall Ferguson is not a typical academic. A TV historian and doyen of the political Right, the Oxford and Harvard professor has courted controversy and accolades in equal measure. His supporters call him “the best British historian of his generation”; his detractors say he is a “nostalgist for empire”. But what does this

Magdalen man really make of his image, Oxford versus Harvard, and the Arab Spring?

I meet Niall Ferguson in a smart but secluded pub just off the King’s Road. Instantly more affable and charming than his public persona sometimes suggests, he buys me a beer, insisting that he can’t have students paying for his drinks, and

asks how I am finding Oxford.

Dressed in chinos and a crisp white shirt (collar undone), he seems closer to a Cameronite politician than a history don.

As he reflects on his own formative years in Oxford, politics quickly comes to the fore. “It was a time of vitriol,” he recalls of the early years of Margaret Thatcher’s government.

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Twenty-five years on, Ferguson is confident of his side’s victory in the battle of ideas.

“On every major issue, the Right won. It must have hurt to be wrong on the Left,” he says with characteristic ardour. Today, he sees “a cognitive dissonance” amongst self-proclaimed socialists who defend the essentially Thatcherite policies of New Labour. This is quintessential Ferguson: a provocative opinion delivered with intellectual weight.

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“Someone in the Guardian argued that Virtual History [a book on counterfactuals which Ferguson edited] was right-wing. But you can have left-wing counterfactuals as well as rightwing counterfactuals.”

Ultimately, he feels, “it is easier [for reviewers] to write about politics,

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rather than engage with the actual work.”

What really made his reputation as a historian on politics of the Right was Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World, a book and TV series in which he defended aspects of British imperialism. It was decried by the Left as a defence of the indefensible, a criticism which Ferguson feels is exaggerated.

“I’m not sure how many reviewers read the book properly,” he says. “I spent many pages on the misdeeds of the Empire. They aren’t hidden.”

Ferguson is best known, aside from his historical work, for his commentaries on contemporary politics. His 2003 bestseller Colossus argued for American interventionism to spread democracy and capitalism around the world. More recently, he has expressed scepticism about the prospects of the Arab Spring.

Shortly after he finished writing Civilization, a wave of prodemocracy revolutions spread across the Middle East. The West was caught off-guard, with the US government unsure of how to respond to such a seismic shift in the region’s politics. Ferguson has urged caution rather than optimism. With a historian’s eye, he draws unflattering parallels with revolutions of the past: “It’s a little less 1848, more 1917,” he says. “The economic conditions that led to the uprisings are unlikely to be resolved,” causing the moderate democratic forces to become vulnerable to protests and strikes by workers.

Their less

peaceable rivals in the Muslim Brotherhood, who Ferguson believes are more organised and better financed, are the most likely to benefit. Again drawing a historical parallel, he sees a strategic failure by the United

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From a historian who has spent much of his career researching the relationship between power and economics, it is a worrying prognosis.

Ferguson does, however, see good prospects for another country once part of the British Empire. India, he thinks, is the most promising rising power of the 21st century. Adopting his analysis from Civilization, he gives India high marks in his “killer apps” test: it has a strong work ethic, a competition-driven economy, democracy, property rights, science and advanced medicine. By contrast, Russia and China lack the rule of law or an adequate system of property rights. Politically at odds with these liberal concepts, the two authoritarian BRICs are, according to Ferguson, undermined by their ideologies. The idea that the 21st century would see the unstoppable rise of China is another orthodoxy challenged

by Ferguson, and it’s an economic analysis that’s increasingly gaining favour: predictions sug-

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gest that India’s GDP growth will soon outpace China’s.

Ferguson admits that, for the most part, he was not a productive undergraduate. He spent much of his first two years in Oxford on non-academic pursuits: “I did pretty much every extra-curricular activity you could think of,” ranging from “student drama to playing in a jazz band”. Only in his final year did he knuckle down, taking a First and committing to postgraduate study.

It was an experience that has influenced his approach to history teaching. “Tutorials were wasted on me for the first two years”, he says. As a tutor himself, Ferguson saw distracted 18-year-olds not doing the set reading, and began to see the tutorial system as problematic as well as unique. “I only really enjoyed about one out of ten tutorials I gave... the tutorial system can be like giving the keys to a Rolls-Royce to a hungover

teenager.” He would not abolish tutorials, just ration them to finalists (as is done in Harvard), and provide classes for the earlier years.

Ferguson doesn’t simply blame errant undergraduates for their ways, though: he feels that students lose something from not competing with their peers. At Harvard, where classes are the primary method of teaching, “students get to see how much reading their classmates are doing and want to keep up.” Whenever he marks a good essay, he will put it on the faculty website – minus the name of whoever wrote it – so that his other students can see what they should be aiming for. “Competition is key,” he says, returning to a theme familiar to the financial historian. “Ultimately, you cannot isolate people from it.” However, he holds out little hope of reform: “There are too many vested interests who are too busy competing with Oxford’s

past, rather than with Princeton and Harvard.”

On this, Ferguson has to leave.

He is late for dinner with his partner – Dutch politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali – and has a late-night Eurostar to catch. Like many of those who have featured in his historical works, Ferguson leads a peripatetic life, dividing his time between America, Britain and wherever his historical research takes him. He is currently researching an authorised biography of former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger – something unlikely to mollify his leftwing critics. Not that Ferguson will let that bother him.

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n the early morning of 15 March 2011, only a few hours before Hamas unleashed its plainclothes thugs into the streets of Gaza City, hundreds of young Palestinians lay sleeping in the city square. For weeks these Gazans and their West Bank counterparts had been quietly coordinating a movement to end the seven-year feud between the two blocs of Palestinian leadership, Hamas and Fatah. When they awoke on that March day, the youth of Palestine would make their stand, end the divide and call for national unity.

By sunset the powers that be had silenced that call. In Gaza City, despite a turnout in the thousands, Hamas security forces stormed the rally. They set the demonstration tents aflame and chased the protest-

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ers through the streets, flogging them with metal rods and batons. In the West Bank the ruling party of the Palestinian Authority (PA), Fatah, responded to protests in Ramallah, Hebron and Bethlehem with similar, if less dramatic, suppression.

But the management had received the memo. Two days later, Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh invited PA President Mahmoud Abbas to Gaza City to talk about reconciliation. By May, a unity deal was signed in Cairo.

I arrived in the West Bank just as the protests broke out. Both locals and internationals were already speaking of the unity movement as the Palestinian face of the “Arab Spring”—the wave of popular revolts sweep-

ing the Middle East and North Africa. Throughout the territories a revolutionary zeal became impossible to ignore, especially when ‘unity tents’ began to crop up in every city.

Still, hidden behind this exhilaration were traces of serious desperation and anxiety. Few Palestinians I spoke to seemed confident that the two parties could be reconciled. For almost a decade there has been no love lost between Fatah, a secular party supported by the international community, and Hamas, a volatile yet sophisticated Islamist organisation clinging onto mortars and missiles.

Yet the younger generation knows that without a unified leadership, a Palestinian state is a hopeless dream. Unlike the

! "# $ % & ' ( )** protesters in Egypt and Tunisia, the March 15 movement was aiming for reconciliation rather than regicide, a much more complex objective. “We do not have a Mubarak to overthrow,” says one protester. “We must overthrow history - our own history of division.”

Things turned ugly in 2006, when Hamas leaders traded their robes for blue jeans, entered politics and won Palestine’s first free parliamentary elections. Fatah, Israel and the Bush Administration were left stupefied. So they acted stupidly, hatching a scheme to fund a Fatah coup led by the PA’s corrupt security chief Mohammed Dahlan.

Within weeks of the coup’s conception Palestine’s civil war was in full swing, as gang fighting and guerilla combat intensified daily across Gaza and the West Bank. In June 2007, after a grisly 18 months, Hamas thrust Fatah out of the Gaza Strip and took full control, thus earning the territory an Israeli blockade. A split Palestinian territory has been the status

quo ever since: Fatah controls the West Bank PA whilst Hamas, with the help of Iran and Syria, controls Gaza. “Since the Gaza coup, the fight goes on behind closed doors,” says Munir, a shopkeeper in Hebron in the West Bank. “It is not fought much with guns now, but with politics.”

+",!-.,' $' ./"0"12' #1$21%3!"45' $' 4$#13,"/6 "$/' 3,$,1' "3' $' !-416 #133'2%1$78 The “Palestine Papers”, published by Al-Jazeera earlier this year, revealed that from 2007 onward dismantling ‘Hamasistan’ was Fatah’s chief priority. They sabotaged a prisoner swap between Hamas and Israel which would have released thousands of Palestinian detainees for one Israeli prisoner of war and cracked down on everything Hamas-affiliated, from militant cells to social welfare programmes.

Meanwhile Hamas, unwilling

to integrate its security apparatus with the PA, torpedoed a unity deal brokered by Egypt in 2009. As this cold war dragged on, punctuated by militant clashes, Benjamin Netanyahu’s government in Tel Aviv continued its illegal settlement building in the West Bank, as well as its devastating blockade of Gaza. Far from viewing the divided territories as a threat, the Israeli government has taken advantage of the split to intensify its occupation and further discredit the idea of a Palestinian nation.

The achievements of the unity movement might have finally salvaged the foundering chances of statehood. The protesters’ effort to keep their message non-partisan was essential and largely successful. Reactions to the protests, however, were immersed in political posturing. For his part, President Abbas of Fatah set the diplomatic gears in motion by sending officials to Egypt in the hopes of sponsoring a fresh unity deal.

Whether his eagerness was cynical or genuine Fatah effec-

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Hamas, on the other hand, was visibly fearful of the grassroots movement. A few days after crushing the March 15 demonstrators they tried to destroy the evidence of their offences by ransacking international news bureaus based in Gaza, nearly hurling a Reuters reporter out of a window in the process.

Addressing the youth protesters, one Hamas spokesman appeared to sympathise with their discontent before issuing a warning: “The way to end the situation is not by demonstrating. If they want to have the same thing that happened in Cairo, we cannot allow it.” Yet within a few weeks, on May 4, delegates from both parties found themselves in Cairo and signed on the dotted line.

Within hours of the deal’s announcement one could see the Palestinian colours fluttering

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in every major city in the West Bank and Gaza. For the first time in years journalists were able to conduct interviews in the streets of Gaza City, where officials from both parties appeared in joint broadcasts. The people were celebrating not only the first crucial step toward a viable nation but also the oncoming elections in Sep-

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In the shade of a unity tent in Ramallah’s central square, a protester named Raed discussed the promise of the bal-

lot box. “The civil war, and the crackdowns after, this was not the way to deal with Hamas.” In between sentences he turned away to join others in hollering the lines of national poet Mahmoud Darwish. Before running off, he looked me in the eye and insisted, “Someone like me, with my political orientation, obviously I don’t want Hamas in power. But I want to defeat them politically, publicly, in elections.”

Even the Hamas supporters I met were disheartened by the party’s time in power, its suppression of the unity rallies and its stubborn rejection of a united state. People here have been waiting for a breakthrough in negotiations, security, press freedom – anything. “That is why we elected them in the first place,” says Sami, in a damp restaurant outside the Church of the Nativity. “We said, put down the guns, put down the

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rockets and deal with this.” But Hamas never delivered. Now they have no choice. The unity deal, though portrayed in the West as an advantage to the Islamists, prevents Hamas from indefinitely postponing elections: they must shape up or ship out.

During his address to the Arab world this May, President Obama presented the Arab Spring and Palestinian liberation as two separate narratives.

He wishes things could be that simple. There would never have been a new unity deal if Mubarak were still hunched over his throne in Cairo: now, without him, the Egyptian army has relaxed its blockade of Gaza.

Syria’s regime, a major sponsor of Hamas, is rapidly withering.

Most significantly, the motivations of the March 15 protesters were exactly the same as those of their counterparts throughout the Arab world: the young generation wants the dignity, the responsibility and the liberty that previous generations never knew.

Within the past few weeks the protesters have begun to exercise some of that responsibility.

They’ve formed the Coalition for the Protection of the Reconciliation in order to monitor any violations of the agreement’s terms. ‘Cautious optimism’ is their line, and given the collapsing scenery of the Middle East,

one can hardly blame them.

During my last few days in Palestine, as I waited for a friend to emerge from Arafat’s postmodern tomb, I saw a faded portrait of President Abbas eyeing me from behind the entrance gate of the PA headquarters. Meeting its washed-out gaze I realised how lifeless the place felt compared to Ramallah’s central square a few miles away. In a crucial moment for Palestine’s future, this compound full of statesmen dead and alive was simply the wrong place to be. As in Tunis, Cairo, Benghazi and Daraa, history was being made in the square.

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hose looking to enter the notoriously competitive film industry could do worse than brush up on their wrangling skills. Judging from movie credits, on-set wrangling is a swiftly expanding discipline.

Ever since westerns began crediting their horse wranglers, the term – which basically describes anyone who handles animals professionally – has been used more and more diversely. James and the Giant Peach acknowledges a ‘spider wrangler’, Ghostbusters II a ‘bathtub wrangler’, Pinocchio’s Revenge a ‘Pinocchio wrangler’, and Pi no less than three ‘ant wranglers’.

The running wrangler gag is only one of many quirks that highlight a trend in movie credits: as they become longer and more comprehensive, there’s more scope for hiding in-jokes and idiosyncrasies in the list. It wasn’t always like this: in the early 20th century, producers – wary of recreating the star system of Broadway, and the massive salaries that it entailed – didn’t credit actors at all.

The opening credits were instead

reserved for important members of the crew. But as cast and crew began to run into the hundreds, it became conventional to leave full credits for the end and keep the opening sequence to a minimum (or cut it altogether). Today, end credits are absurdly thorough – can you imagine an art exhibition catalogue acknowledging every last security guard? – and in-jokes may be the crew’s way of ridiculing this.

Some job titles are tongue-incheek: King Vidor’s Solomon and Sheba boasts an ‘orgy sequence advisor’. Others are self-referential: French ursine saga The Bear includes a credit for ‘credits’, or enjoyably meta: Bullseye! has John Cleese down as ‘man on the beach in Barbados who looks like John Cleese’. Others yet are pathetically subordinate: many cases of ‘second second assistant director’ and ‘assistant to the assistant unit publicist’.

The jokes don’t stop at job titles.

The producers of The Erotic Adventures of Robinson Crusoe acknowledge “the makers of Planet of the

Apes for their inspiration, without which this picture would possibly have been better”. Terry Gilliam’s adaptation of Jabberwocky ends with the disclaimer that “all characters portrayed in this film are entirely fictitious and bear no resemblance to anyone living or dead, except for one”. In his twominute debut film Bambi Meets Godzilla, Marv Newland gives all the credits to himself (except “Marv Newland - produced by Mr. & Mrs. Newland”), then thanks “the city of Tokyo for their help in obtaining Godzilla”. Elsewhere, The Bed Sitting Room’s makers deal with the sensitive topic of billing order by listing their actors in order of height, while Woody Allen doesn’t even do Christopher Walken the courtesy of spelling his name right, citing him in the Annie Hall credits as ‘Christopher Wlaken’. Intentional or not, these nuggets are incentives to stay in the auditorium until the cleaners come in. See if you can spot the ones buried in this issue of ISIS.

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