Since the collapse of the English Defense League (EDL), a British group that intended to counter the rising tide of Islamic influence in the United Kingdom, a number of far-right organizations have been vying for the honor of leading the country's racists into a battle that no one else thinks they need to fight. One such group is Britain First, whose members like to see themselves as the elite of the national far-right—a kind of Navy SEALS complement to the EDL's regular army.

Their meme-heavy Facebook group makes it clear that Britain First's members believe they are Christian soldiers on a crusade. They don't bother with mass street protests, preferring instead to target their actions against people they consider to be enemies of their country. So far, this has been limited to hassling the more extreme fringes of British Islam. They set up a "Christian Patrol" in response to Anjem Choudary's "Muslim Patrols," which have been walking around East London bugging drinkers, gay people, prostitutes, and anyone else who has the temerity to act like Britain isn't a country ruled by Sharia law. (We made a film about all of this; it's called London's Holy Turf War.)

This weekend, however, Britain First retrained its focus, as it made the bold decision to harass ordinary Muslims in Yorkshire, a county in Northern England, as well as Scotland.

With their flat caps, All Saints haircuts, and matching windbreakers, Britain First members look a bit like those people who try to sell you discount stand-up comedy tickets on the street. But they're not; they're just an innocent far-right gang who want to be free to roam the city in uniform.

According to Britain First's Facebook page, Saturday "saw the launch of Britain First's Yorkshire brigade with a day of action in heavily Muslim Bradford." In the group's own words, “Our newly formed units descended on around 10 giant mega mosques, madrassas and Islamic centres across the town to distribute British Army bibles and anti-grooming leaflets.”

There's already a Muslim-led anti-grooming initiative based in Bradford, but apparently this didn't convince Britain First leader Paul Golding to go hassle the BBC or some Catholics instead. 

No doubt this guy was charmed to have his attempt at piety interrupted by a roving racist who'd come along to tell him that he's worshiping the wrong god.

But there was more. “Our brave activists also invaded the campaign HQ of Bradford Labour Party and spent a considerable amount of time giving the local councillors a dressing down for their inability to fight Muslim grooming gangs in their community."

If Britain First don't stand up to the wrath of local Labour Party officials and their weekend lackeys, who will?

Also given a serious "dressing-down" was this guy: a worker at a Subway that serves halal meat. I don't know for sure, but I suspect it's not the guy who works the Sunday shift who's in charge of sourcing those delicious meatballs.

“Finally,” Britain First is proud to declare, "after the Mayor of Bradford declined a meeting request, the assembled patriots visited his home address only to find he was too cowardly to come out and face us.”

Well, why wouldn’t the city’s serving Asian mayor want to spend his day off chilling with a bunch of Islamophobes who put stuff like this on their Facebook page all the time?

Maybe they wanted to have a constructive dialogue about the radicalization of some members of the Muslim community, or maybe they wanted to bash him over the head with a mace. It's impossible to say.

So, all in all, it was a busy day for the uniformed activists, who ended their report from the front line with the menacing promise that "this is the first of many such operations that are due to be launched across Yorkshire against Islam."

"The Yorkshire brigade is finally here and has 'blooded' itself in the most heavily Muslim town in Yorkshire,” they said.

On the one hand, Britain First's bizarrely over-the-top rhetoric is kind of funny. On the other hand, their Facebook page—and the hundreds of comments, like the one above, that are getting tons of "Likes"—are a bit worrisome.

Whether Britain First keeps its promise to make Yorkshire a Christian heartland remains to be seen, but it seems that the group is determined to spend the summer bothering Muslims. So that's something for everyone to look forward to.

Follow Si Cunningham on Twitter.

A still from Viral Loads

Treasure Island Media is a gay-porn studio based out of San Francisco that has always specialized in making films that pirouetted on the edge of outrage, but its most recent release, titled Viral Loads, headed straight into the abyss. It's an extremely hardcore video starring Blue Bailey, an allegedly HIV-positive man who's status is curiously exempt from the film's presser and—well, here's an excerpt from the studio's description of the film:

The willing, hungry lad gets gang-fucked by a roomful of studs. Most are poz [HIV-positive], some are neg. Who the fuck cares? Not Blue, that’s for fuckin’ sure.

To finish up his man worship initiation, we bring out a brimful jar full of more than 200 poz loads. Blue’s good buddies Dayton O’connor and Drew Sebastian carefully squirt every fucking drop up Blue’s knocked-up ass. Max X slurps Blue’s jizz-leaking ass throughout, establishing himself as the new world’s felching-champeen.

I called Treasure Island head honcho Paul Morris to ask what the heck was going on here, and he in turn asked if I was cut or uncut.

What follows is an excerpt from our conversation. I should say that getting in touch with him was challenging, which he later explained by telling me, “This is the first phone call I’ve taken in years. I don’t meet people, and I don’t talk to them. I deal with the men that I work with. It’s very rare that I meet somebody.”

VICE: Hey, Paul, thanks for talking to me. I’m flattered.
Paul Morris: Toby, I assume that you’re uncut.

Yep. A lot of us Australians have hoodies.
That’s kind of wonderful, isn’t it?

Yeah, it’s all right. You’re pretty shy on the phone. I understand your reserve; your porn doesn’t always receive the warmest reception.
I find the most offensive reaction to what I’ve done is people saying that I clearly don’t understand the suffering and what was lost due to HIV. The vast majority of my acquaintances and friends and lovers died. It isn’t that I’m untouched. It’s that I’m so deeply touched by it that I believe in the necessity of remembering what it is that they and I all explored—and not forgetting it. That’s crucial to me. The most painful thing for me to hear is I’m callous, or I’m doing this to make a buck on the deaths of other people or something like that. That’s horrifying to me.

In one scene in Viral Loads, there’s a jar of 200 different loads labeled “POZ CUM.” It is poured directly into Blue Bailey’s ass. You can see how that would upset people.
The number of men who have written to me asking to be the recipient of gallons of semen is virtually uncountable. These aren’t the incidental fantasies of a small fringe of outliers. These speak to the heart of the sexual imagination of most queer men. It wasn’t made for you. There’s no reason for you to see it. For you, it would read as an irrational stunt. But for the straight world, much of what comprises queer culture and life is incomprehensible. Regrettably, the same can still be said for many of the older members of the gay world. Years ago I stated that all gay men are HIV-positive. That is, every gay man alive today is defined as much by the viral load narrative as by any external homophobia. If you wonder at the meaning of a jar filled with poz loads being poured up the ass of a happy, intelligent, and more-than-willing young gay man, the primary meaning is that there is no reason or excuse for continuing to live in fear of a virus.

Then why the controversy?
We’re at a point where it’s altogether possible, given the simple strategies like PrEP, to render HIV a nonissue. And the gay world is panicking because too much money, too many institutions, too much of the gay mainstream has based itself on terror and fear and grief. It’s a cultural identity crisis. It’s a mass version of agoraphobia. A world that’s suddenly free of fear is daunting and very large.

Have any of your performers contracted HIV during one of your videos?
You’d have to ask my performers that question. I know everything about them. Everything.

Then surely you know this.
Yes. I do know this.

And?
And that’s between myself and those people. When people come to me, we have one of the most extensive interview processes of any company in porn. We get to know not just what their health status is—whatever “health” means—but we find out who they are. We talk with them about what books they’re reading. “Why are you coming to do porn?” We encourage people not to do it if there’s the slightest indication this isn’t something they really want or should do. Then they tell us everything. We put them into situations they want to be put into. Everyone who’s in one of our pieces is doing exactly what they most want to be doing. Now, what they tell me is extremely private. You’re asking me to tell you the most intimate information about the people with whom I work?

It’s hardly intimate in this context. You advertise this. You market it. It’s the kink in the middle of Viral Loads.
Why would you call it a kink? What does a kink mean? No. no, no, no. First of all, you’re not the person for whom this video is made, Toby.

Is that relevant?
The point is that this was made for a community of men who understand what it means.

What does it mean?
Some of the people that I’m most interested in right now are young, intelligent gay men who are educated, bright, upper-middle class. They refuse HIV meds because they’re proud of their viral load. Is that something you can understand?

It is. I get it.
Explain it to me.

If it were me? You’re right, I’d go crazy trying to live a normal life with a killer virus waiting to take me out.
Interesting. One of the elements of Viral Loads that I think from the outside might not be immediately apparent—is the term. “Viral load” is something that the entire gay world has held on to and labored under for two generations. One of the reasons I made this title was to simply say, exactly as you did, “Enough is enough.” We're living with this; let’s just be open and clear about it. I don’t see anything controversial about that, do you? If it seems odd to some people; they’re not the people I’m really interested in. Certainly they’re not the people I’m working for.

They’re part of your community. You should give a shit.
There are people who are locked for various reasons into archaic and counterproductive ways of thinking and living. I had an acquaintance who was in his late 70s; he was a fellow who hated my work. He assured me that he would only have safe sex because he didn’t want to become HIV-positive. A few weeks after we had that conversation, he died of a heart attack. I think he was insane. Gay men in their 50s and older are addicted to the notion that sex equals death, and the culture has to live under the burden of terror. The only wildness that is acceptable is the wildness of drag queens.

In gay culture, there’s never been more of an almost hysterical centering of life around two things—drag queens and marriage—both of which are unfortunate misogynistic parodies of heteroseuxal life. Gay men have completely lost the sense of who they are because they’ve been immersed in terror, because they’ve been living under a viral load for two generations.

Is HIV inextricably linked with the gay identity?
No, and in 20 years it’ll be all but forgotten. It is right now, and what I’m saying is, we’re more than this. The point of Viral Loads was for those people to whom it would make sense to look at it, say it, own it, and fucking move on. Fucking move on! In 20 years, there will be references to HIV, and young gay men will astonish and horrify people who are now in their 20s when they say, “What the fuck are you talking about?” And the men will say, “I remember the day when it was a big deal. I remember the day when if we had just fucked somebody and come up their ass, we were worried about HIV.” My point is: Time to fucking move on. Somebody said, “How safe does it have to be for you before you’ll just fuck somebody?” My answer is: It’s there! We’re there. We’ve been there. Now the important thing is to break the mould of stigma and terror and knee-jerk reaction.

Follow Toby McCasker on Twitter.

In The Hidden Language, Nat Towsen interviews an insider of a particular subculture in order to examine the terms and phrases created by that subculture to serve its own needs. This is language innate to an insider and incomprehensible, if not invisible, to an outsider.

Kevin Allison alternates between candid description (“In scat, the person being pooped on is the bottom.”) and mirthful laughter. Kevin is a kinkster, gay, and a member of the comedy group The State, but more importantly hosts the oft-downloaded podcast Risk! True Tales Boldly Told.

Two years ago, he took the advice of his own podcast sign-off  (“Take a risk!”) and accepted an invitation to “kink camp,"hoping to escape his comfort zone of blasé gay sex orgies. Two years later, he is an instructor at that same camp, teaching a class called “Everything You Can Do To An Ass, Other Than Fuck It.”

Kevin spoke to me about the world of kink. This is by no means a complete list of kink terminology, but rather a brief selection of key terms and terms of interest.

Kevin Allison. Photo by Gene Silvers

GLOSSARY OF TERMS

Quotation marks denote the words of Mr. Kevin Allison. Brackets denote paraphrasing by the author. All other text is directly quoted from Mr. Kevin Allison.

BDSM: [a portmanteau acronym for] Bondage and Discipline, Dominance and Submission, Sadism and Masochism

Kink: An easier way to say BDSM. Any fetish that has an erotic charge to it would be called kinky.

Thinking of sex as a limitless adventure. There is not a finite number of ways to do it. Sex is a constant process of discovery.

I met a guy in Amsterdam who said that everything is kink. Everything can be thought of [that way]. Pain can be perceived as pleasurable if you’re going about it differently.

Vanilla: adj.  Not kinky. Sexual activity that is generally accepted as normal.

Bottom: n. In any activity, someone who is being done to rather than the doer.

[note: the kink culture definition is far more abstract than the usage we find in gay culture, wherein “bottom” usually signifies the recipient of anal sex.]

e.g.  In scat, the person being pooped on is the bottom.

Top:  n.  antonym to [‘bottom’]. In kink play, a person who is doing something to a bottom.

Dom/sub:  n.  a person who is dominant/a person who is submissive.

Versus Top/Bottom:

There’s more psychological weight on the idea of being a dom or a sub, [whereas] a top or a bottom is someone who is basically just doing or being done to. A dom or sub has a higher-status or lower-status psychological role that they are playing.

Switch: n. a person who can be dominant and can be submissive, but does not identify as always a dom or always a sub

Top from the Bottom: v. [to direct or control the experience from the position of the bottom. Not generally permitted in dom/sub relationships.]

e. g. How about if you whipped me with that?

Houseboy sub: n. the agreement was that he would pay a very low rent and in exchange he would keep the house clean, and also just be my sexual plaything whenever I wanted.

Daddy Dom or Sensual Dom: n. [A dom who is] a little bit more sweet and nurturing, like a tough-love coach at times.”

Brat: n. A sub who is [deliberately] uncooperative. Someone who is topping from the bottom. Could be literally age play, someone pretending to be young.

24/7: [Dom/sub relationship in which the dominant partner controls nearly every aspect of submissive partner’s life, according to terms negotiated in advance.]

e.g. Can I tell you who you’re gonna vote for for president?

Negotiation: n. Before the scene ever starts (a lot of people like to do it a couple days before) people talk as human beings, outside of roles: limits, preferences, that kind of stuff. It can be kind of a seductive, fun, fantasy-filled conversation.

People draw up contracts, mostly for 24/7, not usually initial encounters

Protocol: n.[The procedure or rules of a D/s relationship.]Although there are plenty of stereotypical manners that people employ, it's usually a person-to-person agreed-upon thing.

e.g. Don't call me Sir, call me Master.

Soft Limit: n. [An activity that one party would rather avoid, established in negotiation.]

e.g I'd really rather not go there unless you want to in a huge way and you go into it slowly.

Hard Limit: n. [An activity banned by one party during negotiation.]

e.g. If you start take a shit on me, I'll safe-word immediately and end the scene.

Squick: v. [to bother on a pre-conscious level. Connotes an immediate reaction devoid of moral or value judgment.]

e.g. I’d prefer that you not talk about scat play at lunch because it squicks me out. No judgment!

Play: n. [Sex, or sex involving some form of role-playing.] Basically an easier way of saying ‘let’s have sex’ [is] ‘do you want to play?’ People will tag that on the end of different branches of kink, like puppy play. People do like to feel like it’s adult play, playtime

The more playful it is, the more there’s a feel of  “Ahh, this is new.”

Power Play: n.  a synonym for “dominance and submission.”

Sapio Play: n. A mindfuck. That part of play where nothing has actually even started happening. A person is just in their brain freaking out.

e.g. [an electro device being waved close to, without touching, the skin of a bound person]

extreme e.g. [a simulated castration, negotiated without explicit mention of its simulated nature, complete with beef brains and caro syrup]

Hypno Play: n. [kink play in which a dom hypnotizes a sub in order to make them believe there are bonded.] I don’t know how much I believe in that or not.

Animal Play: n. [kink play in which one partner, usually the sub, pretends to be an animal]

Puppy Play:  n.  Where the submissive takes the role of literally being like a canine.  The dom treats them the way that a dog trainer would. The weird part is that they also molest them.

It’s almost a way of infantilizing. The way I’ve usually seen it is that a younger person will want to run around with a muzzle on, barking, with a buttplug in that’s got a tail.

Pony Play: n.Anything having to do with horses. People who are really into pony play…you don’t hear about sex happening.  Those people are buying expensive horse gear, like saddles. And they’ll have a kind of horse that they are. “I am a wild Mustang.” Some are into dressage, being paraded around on show. That’s the play for them: It’s just to show off how much they can act like a horse.

I spoke to someone and she said, yes, she has had sex stuff happen in the context of grooming the horse.

Age Play:  n.acting like one person is an adult and one person is a child. [Somewhat taboo, even in the kink community, due to connotation of pedophilic desires.]

Electro: n.kink play that involves electrically-charged [objects]: stun guns, cattle prods, Violet Wands

Ella Fitzgerald: [A euphemism for scat play, used to get around content restrictions of certain online communities.] People have to say “I’m a fan of Ella Fitzgerald.”

[Kinkster social networking site] Fetlife bans any mention of the word scat. It turns out that is only because of their credit card company, [who] says “we don’t want to have anything to do with that fetish.” [Fetlife is] apologetic about it. [They] don’t mean to ostracize.

After-care: n. It’s considered the dom’s responsibility to bring a sub back down to earth at the end, make sure that person is calmed down, caressed, checked in with, [feeling] okay.

Bottom Drop: n. Subs sometimes fall into a brief depression after an intense scene. They made themselves vulnerable and needy. Now they're on their own.

Sub Space: n. Subs sometimes go into an almost ‘out of body’ or hypnagogic state if they get into the role successfully enough.

e.g. You can't tell someone who is into puppy play, “Oh, bark like a dog!” in random conversation. They'll likely answer, “Well, I have to be in sub space.”

Compersion: n.  When someone is pleased to see their lover getting sexual pleasure from someone else. The opposite of jealousy.

Munch:  n. A purely social gathering of kinksters, no sex involved.

THE TAKEAWAY

In the week since interviewing Kevin, I’ve found myself using the word squick with some frequency. It’s filled my need for a word that explains, without judgment, that while I support completely honest communication, there are certain topics that I have a hard time stomaching. Sapio might be a less useful vocabulary word, but the concept is applicable to myriad scenarios. A comedian who tells long, story-like jokes might consider the lead-up to the punchline—exposition which can nonetheless draw laughs via anticipation—to be a form of sapio. Topping from the bottom is also applicable outside the world of kink: a student who corrects their tutor’s methods; a restaurant patron with too many requests for the chef. For that matter, Top and Bottom are fun words to apply in an entirely non-sexual context: my physical therapist is a top; the reader of this article is a bottom.  Soft Limit andHard Limit are can also be applied non-sexual topics: mixing sweet and savory foods is a soft limit for me. And while I doubt I’ll have much practical use for the euphemism, I will always quietly chuckle when I hear someone say that they are “a fan of Ella Fitzgerald.”

FURTHER READING

For more kink vocabulary, DifferentEquals.com has a fairly thorough (though less personal) glossary of kink terminology.

Follow Nat Towsen on Twitter.

Mossless in America is a column featuring interviews with documentary photographers. The series is produced in partnership with Mossless magazine, an experimental photography publication run by Romke Hoogwaerts and Grace Leigh. Romke started Mossless in 2009, as a blog in which he interviewed a different photographer every two days; since 2012 the magazine has produced two print issues, each dealing with a different type of photography. Mossless was featured prominently in the landmark 2012 exhibition Millennium Magazine at the Museum of Modern Art in New York; it is supported by Printed Matter, Inc. Its third issue, a major photographic volume on American documentary photography from the last ten years, titled The United States (2003–2013), will be published this spring.

Vama Veche's reputation certainly precedes it. Situated in the southeast of Romania—right on the Black Sea coast, near the border with Bulgaria—the village has been regarded as a bohemian, non-mainstream tourist destination since communist times.

In more recent years, it has become widely known for the "Save Vama Veche" campaign, set up by locals who fear that their nudist beach and liberal morals are under threat from gentrification.

Yet, after having a look at these photos, I think we can safely say that Vama Veche's liberalism is still holding strong.

See more of Amdraci's photos here.

Does your town or city qualify for paradise status? Feel free to send your pitches to ukphotoblog@vice.com. Don't be shy.

No Lakotas in the picture. All photos courtesy of Daniel Lenchner's collection.

“Do you know about the Lakota Indians?” asked Daniel Lenchner, handing me a slightly faded photograph from the early 20th century. It was a class portrait with a location printed at the bottom: Lakota, North Dakota.

“Now,” challenged Lenchner, “can you find an Indian in this picture?”

I scanned the rows of Caucasian faces.

“Not going to happen,” he continued. “We got rid of them, you know. No more Lakotas in Lakota. It looks like a class portrait, but you could also say that this is a picture of genocide.”

That theme of implicit absence dominates Lenchner’s found-photograph collection. Scouring flea markets, estate sales, and the internet, Lenchner has collected over 500 snapshots of Nazis taken by Nazis that document their daily lives: their families, their friendships, and their leisure activities.  

As a Jewish man with ancestors who perished in the Holocaust, these intimate glimpses into the daily lives of his family’s persecutors bring him face to face with what political philosopher Hannah Arendt called  “the banality of evil.”

I met the 68 year old Lenchner last month in his sprawling New York apartment to look through his collection and discuss its implications.

VICE: What’s striking about so many of these images is that without the uniforms you really can’t tell that these people are Nazis, can you?
Daniel Lenchner: Yes, that’s really what my thesis is: These people are normal in appearance, but appearances are deceiving. There is the modern news phenomenon of people being interviewed in the street after they discover that their neighbor is a mass murderer. They’re always expressing surprise, that they didn’t realize it, that they should have known. The underlying assumption is that they could’ve known. But, if the truth is that there is no way to know, then you shouldn’t be surprised.

I interviewed the great-niece of Nazi leader Herman Göring once, and her family albums are filled with pictures like these. She talked about feeling the love that’s evident in so many of the scenes: fathers holding their children, spouses embracing, friends laughing. How do you confront the presence of those kinds of emotions?
Yes, these guys went home to their wives and children, and maybe they sang them nice German lullabies, but it’s not an exoneration. I mean, Hitler loved dogs, and he was a vegetarian. Great. But, it’s all kind of irrelevant. At the end of the day these things are reconcilable. No, not exactly reconcilable, but they coexist. The evil and the not-evil coexist in a person. But, in Nuremberg, it didn’t come up that they were nice to their wives because it didn’t matter.

It looks like the man in this picture wasn’t such a great husband. Is this a Dear John letter written on the back?
A Dear Johann letter, so to speak.

Can you describe what we’re looking it?
Well, here we have this handsome studio portrait of a German officer, and on the back is this message from a woman, apparently his mistress. She writes that she’s giving back this photograph because it’s brought her back luck. He’s a playboy. She refers to his “wanderings in Weimar,” and makes reference to his wife.

What do you like about this picture?
It’s just so normal, so banal, just a man screwing around on his wife—nothing so unusual there. He’s a regular scoundrel, but put him in a Nazi uniform and all of a sudden we have a special kind of scoundrel.

In this case, the story is right there on the image itself, but most of these pictures have very little context. How much of what you see comes from the pictures themselves and how much is your own projection?
That’s the million dollar question, isn’t it? Let me show you something that addresses that. This is one of the most stunning pictures I've ever bought and there's absolutely nothing on the back. Take a look and tell me what you see.

I see a massacre.  
Yes, a little massacre, with what I believe is a rape. This is surely a woman with her babushka. She's laid on this table with her legs splayed, and she’s been made a little comfortable with some straw under her head. I think everybody's dead here: bodies, bodies, bodies. And, the Germans are done now. They’re heading to what looks like a small train station. Their backs are all turned away. “We’ve done our work and now we’re leaving.”

What might be most disturbing of all is this detail of putting the straw under the woman’s head. It looks like an attempt to make her comfortable as they raped and killed her. It seems like a recognition of her humanity.
Also, it looks like this dead man has his arm around this person here, in a protective pose.

As if he could shield them from bullets.
As I said, there's nothing on the back of this photograph, but the story is very clearly there. I don't think we have to read too much into it.

And yet, it’s hard not to project, isn’t it? This is not so different from the kind of war photography that we’re all familiar with…
Right, this almost could have been taken by Robert Capa.

The composition is excellent and the focus is razor sharp.
That’s right. One thing you can say about the Nazis is that they went to war with good cameras. They didn't go with any goddamn instamatics. They went with Leicas: good cameras with good lenses. You can see the number on the train. You can see the blades of grass. You can see the dead man's eyes.

It’s similar to a Robert Capa, as you say, but—and this goes back to projection—knowing who took this picture gives it an intimacy that takes it beyond photojournalism. The photographer is part of the photograph. That almost gives it the quality of a family snapshot, except instead of standing and smiling, everyone is dead.
And then, the question you'll never answer: why did they take this picture?

Why do you think?
Sometimes you wonder, are they proud? Who knows. This I have no answer for.

Well, they certainly didn’t take it for your benefit. There’s something profoundly subversive about this ending up in your hands. I mean, the photographer could never have even imagined your existence.
No. But, who was it meant for? His superior officer, his friends, his wife, his children?

It’s jarring to see that photograph in the same collection as this other one here. This picture here seems delightful, really: a crowd of people laughing at something outside the frame.
Except, look there. Do you see the swastika? Suddenly it becomes sinister. What are they laughing at? We will never know. And, they are really cracking up. It’s great. You have examples of all the different ways that people laugh. Some people cover their face, and some bend at the waist, some hold their stomach, and here he’s leaning backwards, she’s covering her mouth, and she’s pointing to draw her friend’s attention.

You must be primed to see the swastika. It took me a second.
Yeah, that’s absolutely true. I’m so sensitive that I occasionally see swastikas where there are none.

With that kind of priming, what do you see when you look at the German people of today?
Well, I lived in Germany for five years as a college instructor for the American military. I taught comparative literature to GIs. That was during the mid-70s, so many of the people that I passed on the street had lived through the Nazi era. It was a little weird to say the least. You get on a German train and you can’t help but think about cattle cars packed with human beings. But, you’re also struck by all of the good things. The place is clean, and the trains run on time, and the people are so honest.

In what ways were they honest?
On the autobahn, for example, the bathrooms all had plates where you would leave a tip for the cleaning person. So, you walk into the bathroom, and there is a plate full of money. Now, you put that on the New Jersey Turnpike and it wouldn’t last three minutes. They’d steal the money and the plate too. But, in Germany not only do they not steal the money, but they put more in. You look at that and you think, Are these the same people responsible for the Holocaust? How can this be? Yet, some of those people must have been honest. They must have been honest in that narrow sense: placing money on the plate on their way to build a concentration camp.

The Lenchner family in Lodz, Poland in 1935. Only Daniel Lenchner's father (back row, second from right) survived the war.
 

Roc’s new book, And, was released recently. You can find more information on his website.

Interpol's annual Pink Panther conference. Photo courtesy of Interpol; all other photos by the authors

There are plenty of theories about how the Pink Panthers were formed. The international network of jewel thieves—who were given their nickname by Interpol in 1993 after one team of Panthers mimicked a theft from an Inspector Clouseau film—is thought to be made up of mostly Serbians and Montenegrins, which is why some believe that the organization was formed by Serbian militants during the Yugoslav Wars of the 90s.

The story goes that a number of the network's founding fathers belonged to the Arkan Tigers, a paramilitary group controlled by Serbian career criminal Željko Ražnatović, a.k.a. “Arkan,” and blamed for massacres in Bosnia. After meeting in the militia, the crooks supposedly went on a thieving rampage through Europe, ploughing the money made from their stolen goods back into their compatriots’ campaigns. Since those early days the criminal network is believed to have conducted 370 heists, nabbing some $500 million worth of jewels. They have disguised themselves as golfers, Hawaiian tourists, and workmen to pull off jobs, from which they've escaped in speedboats, scooters, and bicycles. They are the most successful band of diamond theives in history.

Of course, the above is mostly speculation at best—it’s hard to say anything definitive about the secretive group. But everyone agrees that they’re a highly organized, highly professional group of individuals. Thought to be dispersed throughout 35 different countries, the network is so prolific that Interpol has even created a special task force to chase them; the Pink Panthers project meets at an annual conference to exchange information, coordinate activities, and discuss how best to deal with their fabled foes.

In Greece, officers at the Property Crimes Unit (YDEZI) have caught three groups of Panthers since 2007. The most recent arrests were on March 3, when the cops apprehended four Serbian men, who, in the past year, have broken into 30 stores, most of them jewelry shops.

Some of the stolen items recovered by YDEZI after the recent Pink Panthers arrest.

We spoke to George Papasifakis, a YDEZI deputy involved in the arrest, while we looked over the Panthers’ recovered spoils. Piles of gold watches, jewelry, and cell phones were still scattered on tables in the YDEZI headquarters, waiting to be claimed by their owners. Among the evidence gathered by the police is the battering ram used by Panthers in “difficult” cases.

“We have mutual respect for each other,” Papasifakis said. “We ‘appreciate’ the way they work—their organization, speed, and their skill at evading us. But when we catch them, they too admit that we do a good job.”

Papasifakis has been in charge of investigating Pink Panther groups active in Greece for the past few years, and much of the credit when it comes to the recent arrests can be awarded to him and his experienced team of investigators.

Stolen phones recovered by YDEZI after the recent Pink Panthers arrest.

“All those arrested in Greece had fought in the war in former Yugoslavia, and this is one of the ways they relate to each other,” said Papasifakis, before explaining what he and his team have discovered about Pink Panther operations. “The criminal organization has a common modus operandi that involves three stages: preparation, penetration, and escape," he said.

"Initially, the Panthers perform surveillance of the place by pretending to be customers. They then steal cars from the 90s that don’t have electronic anti-theft systems installed, using impromptu passe-partout keys—known as ‘Polish keys’—which, by the by, is their signature move. And finally, using the ram-raiding method, they break into the shops.

“They’ve also used other methods to get into shops. On other occasions they’ve used straps, wires, or climbing ropes to tie the doors, then they normally dump the cars and escape on motorcycles, having snatched expensive watches and jewelry.”

Stolen watches recovered by YDEZI after the recent Pink Panthers arrest

As much as Papasifakis and his team have uncovered, trying to define the Panthers’ methodology is problematic, as there’s no centralized structure handing down orders of how things should be done. Unlike many crime syndicates, which have a leader at the top of a pyramid, the Pink Panthers operate in cells that go about their business independently from one another, much like al Qaeda and its various international affiliates.

That said, every Pink Panther robbery has its similarities—the primary one being that once they enter a shop or a jewelers, they know exactly where to go and exactly what to do. The average Pink Panther robbery takes 60 seconds or less; they decide what they want in advance and get out as quickly as they came in.

I asked Papasifakis how new members are indoctrinated. “Nobody really knows,” he answered. “Someone is definitely moving the strings on the ground in Serbia, and someone is in charge of initiating and educating the younger members—some members who have yet to be arrested pass on their expertise to others. Many wonder whether there’s an element of patriotism to the whole thing, but no one can answer with confidence. In my opinion, it’s more likely that they influence each other, imitating one another and learning the tricks of the trade.”



Evidence recovered by YDEZI after the recent Pink Panthers arrest.

The various Panther members all seem to take the same approach to their robberies. “They prefer to be sober to ensure they have complete control over their movements,” said Papasifakis. “And they never carry guns during a break-in either. Generally, they try to minimize risk by stealing cars from different neighborhoods, discarding their mobile phones, and generally by leading a quiet life.

"Only the first group [that we caught in 2007] ‘showed off’—the members stayed in lavish hotels in Glyfada [a wealthy neighbourhood in southern Athens], moved around in expensive rented cars, and spent a lot of money on their appearance and activities.”

That particular case was widely covered by the Greek press at the time because Olia Cirkovic—a female Serbian basketball player who’d played for a popular Greek team in the 90s—had participated in the robbery. The “spider-woman,” as she was dubbed after the raid, was in charge of casing the site before the robbery took place, and would then complete the job with her partners. She popped up again in the press when she escaped from Korydallos prison in 2011 before being apprehended four months later.

A flyer for this year's Interpol Pink Panthers conference among stolen items recovered in the recent YDEZI arrests.

The Panthers caught in March of this year were far more wary than Cirkovic and her squad. According to Papasifakis, the group had gone to great lengths to avoid being identified and captured: They used fake passports, fake ID cards, and fake driver's licenses, and communicated with each other using "ghost phones"—mobile phones registered under fake names.

With all of this protection in place, I asked Papasifakis how his team had managed to track the Panthers down. “No crime is perfect,” he said. “We keep a close eye on them. They’re bound to make a mistake, and it’s our duty to be there when that happens. During our most recent investigation, one of the perpetrators had a document with a photo and his personal information on it. The photo was real but the name on the document was fake. And we started to look into it… The main thing is to know what it is you’re looking for. We’ve studied the group for a long time and we have a good idea of what to look for now. From there on, we sit tight, waiting for the right moment to make simultaneous arrests in the area.

“Usually they won’t admit to anything on record. Even when we say we have incriminating evidence linking them to ten, 20, or 30 cases, they usually reply: ‘You may well have, but our code of honor won’t allow us to say anything.’ This is worthy of some respect,” admitted Papasifakis.

Before putting down the phone, I asked the deputy whether he thinks his team have won the battle against Pink Panthers—if the recent capture might put them off trying to bust into any more jewelry stores in Athens. “We may have already caught three groups, but we’re under no illusion that they’re going to disappear,” he answered. “They’re bound to make another appearance and, when they do, we’ll be here, with even more experience under our belts.”

Follow Lefteris Bidelas and Maria Psara on Twitter.

Denmark’s voting turnout for the 2009 EU elections was around 60 percent. Which isn’t half bad—turnout for the 2012 US presidential elections was 57.5 percent—but still, there’s always room for improvement. In an attempt to boost this year's numbers, Denmark’s parliament opted to combat youthful voting apathy by giving the kids what they love—a raging steroid freak who decapitates hipsters and literally punches women into voting booths.

Yesterday, Voteman was born. Briefly, the universe allowed him to exist.

The cartoon starts with Voteman getting blown by a group of four beautiful cartoon women when his phone rings. The voice on the other end of the line tells him there's a vote happening, and his lazy countrymen need his help. He smacks them away and rides two dolphins—his feet lodged firmly in their blowholes—away from his island's underground lair. After reaching mainland he goes on to throw a bunch of ninja stars at a guy walking down the street, kick about six people in the face, headbutt a woman, and throw a couple who are having sex out of a window. All in an attempt to make people vote.

Unfortunately, this mix of sex and violence wasn’t met with much warmth by certain sections of the Danish public and the ensuing criticism saw the video removed after just 24 hours.

“Many people whose opinions I deeply respect have perceived the cartoon from the EU information center as far more serious and offensive than it was intended,” the speaker of the Folketing (the national parliament of Denmark), Mogens Lykketoft, told Danish newspaper Ekstra Bladet about the $50,000 animation.

“I acknowledge that in the future Folketinget as an institution has to show more caution in terms of what we put our name to," Lykketoft continued.

Today it was announced that Swiss surrealist HR Giger, who designed the monster and sets for Alien, has died at the age of 74. Back in 2009, VICE paid him a visit in his house in Zurich and talked to him about his life, inspiration, and work. You can read the interview below.

HR Giger, regardless of how many museum or galleries he fills with volumes of his other work, will almost certainly go down in history as that strange Swiss guy behind the Alien movie. During the 1970s, Giger produced a book called Necronomicon, which established him as the foremost fantastical artist at the time. Salvador Dali was so impressed by his work that he invited him over to Spain for a visit and stole Giger’s girlfriend in the process.

In the 1980s, Giger got involved in the movies and got an Oscar for his work on Alien, but after a couple of awful cinematic collaborations in the 1990s he pretty much disappeared to everyone except the goths and metalheads raiding his back catalogue for tattoos.

He’s 69 now. Loathed by feminists and obscenity sticklers, Giger, the one-time king of darkness and the person Ridley Scott confessed to being petrified of meeting, is now no more scary than a grumpy old neighbor. He wears Crocs. He potters around the garden, mumbles to the cat, drops himself in front of the tube for the afternoon, and cracks open a bottle whenever he feels like it. His wife Carmen lives next door. Giger punched a hole through the wall to join the buildings. Giger’s side is painted black from floor to ceiling; Carmen’s, one assumes, ain’t so bad.

He divides his time between a castle in the Alps and his house in Zurich where he has a little train track running round the garden and right through the kitchen. When he sketches, he still likes to draw strange alien figures with hefty packages pinning fragile looking ladies to the floor, but his days of nightmarish visions and brutal hallucinations are over. He goes to bed at 5 AM and wakes at noon. The night before the interview, Giger had overdone it at the dinner table.

How was your fondue last night?
Heavy. Oh so heavy. After, I always say, "Oh my God, why have I done that?" But it’s so good.

What are you doing with yourself these days?
You know I haven’t painted since the 90s? I’m quiet now. I like watching television. I like the Wire, and the Sopranos is so good.

Yesterday we met your good friend Walter Wegmüller, who helped Timothy Leary when he was on the run. He spoke about the “freaky times” back in Switzerland in the 1970s. What were they like?
Ah, the freaky times. When Timothy Leary was in Switzerland, he was hoping to get asylum so he could stay here and not go back to prison in America. I was collecting signatures for him. My father was a pharmacist, you know? "What are you doing with this guy?" he asked me. It was funny. Timothy Leary was a very nice man. I didn’t meet him back then in Switzerland, but I met him later in Los Angeles when he wrote two articles for my books. They were very good and he was a very fine person.

Did you exchange ideas?
Oh not much. What could I say? He was a very intelligent man with a lot of knowledge and I’m, well, I’m just an artist.

Did you ever take LSD with him?
Ah, you know you can’t talk about that on record. LSD is still forbidden, so it’s not good to talk about those things.

You’ve said before that much of the inspiration for your art comes from dreams, and more specifically nightmares?
Everyone always wants to know about my dreams. The inspiration is mostly from literature actually. I have read so many things that have inspired me. Beckett was very much an inspiration for me. His theater, especially. I made paintings as a homage to Samuel Beckett [Homage to S. Beckett I,II,III]. They were some of the very few colored paintings I’ve done.

What other writers were an inspiration for you?
Crime writers especially. I started with Edgar Wallace and then all sorts of Western writers.

Your work comes from a much darker place than Beckett or Wallace?
Darker, yes. It came partly from Chur where I grew up; partly from the war. I was born in 1940 so I could feel the atmosphere when my parents were afraid. The lamps were always a bluish dark, so the planes would not bomb us. Switzerland and Germany are close. The targets weren’t always very well marked. I felt the fear of that very much. Later on at a certain time I saw a lot of witchcraft books and stuff like that. H. P. Lovecraft and these kind of people. I’d say my inspiration comes from books mostly, but dreams also.

Is there any way that you can control the dreams and manipulate your surroundings from within the dream?
Yeah, sometimes it happens and I can remember when I’m in a dream. Or I get the feeling like I’m out of my body. A long time ago, about 10 or even 20 years ago, I had that. But it didn’t happen to me often. Probably four or five times. But yeah, that was strong.

Was it frightening?
No. It wasn’t frightening. It was just, well, I was so surprised. A dream where I can’t get enough air, that’s frightening. Or the kind of dream where I was stuck in a grave or something like that, that was frightening. But later I developed these passages paintings [Passage I-XXX] and they were very good for that. I got some sort of relief. I got no more bad dreams when I painted these passages. It was helpful.

Does that happen often?
No, not often, but I did the right thing because at the time these passage dreams were ruining my work. It was the right thing to make me feel better.

Can you tell me about the dream behind Necronomicon your book that Ridley Scott used as the template for Alien?
These things come from H.P. Lovecraft. In the 70s, I was very familiar with Lovecraft.

And the Alien figure itself?
Well it all comes from the same place. I had already done Necronom IV and V, these monsters with the long heads. That’s what Ridley Scott saw. I showed them in a gallery in Paris. Jodoworsky visited the gallery and so did Ridley Scott and later on I got an invitation to do some work for movies. First, it was Jodoworsky for Dune then later on it was Ridley Scott for Alien.

What ever happened with Dune?
Dune never happened with me. I was asked to do it two times. Once with Jodorowsky and then another time with Ridley Scott, but the daughter of Dino de Laurentis had the rights for Dune and she gave them to David Lynch. And David Lynch was not very happy with me.

Why’s that?
He said that I had stolen his ideas, that I’d stolen his baby. I said I liked his baby from Eraserhead. I always said very nice things about him but he was a little strange. And he was jealous because I exhibited in a New York gallery and he couldn’t. He was sour. But I like him.

Do you have a favorite Lynch movie?
Yes, I mean all of Twin Peaks. That was really fabulous. And of course it all started with Eraserhead. All the films he did were wonderful.

How much control were you given during the production of Alien?
Well Ridley Scott directed it and I hadn’t much to say. Ridley Scott knew exactly what he wanted. I was happy that he accepted my book and he showed it to all the crew like it was the bible. He said, you have to do it exactly this way, and I was happy with that. I like him very much. He’s a great guy.

Giger's preliminary sketches for the Batmobile.

Certain other projects you did after Alien, like Poltergeist II and Killer Condom weren’t as well received, why did you choose to work on them?
After Alien things didn’t turn out so well in the movies because I didn’t get involved enough. I didn’t want to stay in another country. I had spent several months in Shepperton Studios working on Alien and wanted to be home. Later on when it came to doing these other projects I spent only a few days in the country for each one. When the movies eventually came out I thought, "Oh shit." But I couldn’t change it. There was no more time. So I thought that’s the wrong way to work. If you work on a film you have to be there all the time and be always looking at what they’re doing otherwise they’ll do what they want. In film, everybody wants to bring his own ideas in and make his own style, so it’s terrible. I was very depressed when I saw that.

Which film made you the most depressed?
All of them. I was only pleased with Alien and with the other things I was not very happy with.

After all your involvement in Hollywood, are you filthy rich?
Ah no. I’m actually poor. I had to sell several paintings to pay for the castle. That was shit. I had to sell some very nice, very important paintings.

When did you get the castle?
I did a show in Gruyeres in 1990 and fell in love with the town. I heard that they wanted to sell the castle, so I got it at auction. It was very difficult as I’m really not rich, you know? I got the money from many different places. I was always looking for something, a place for my paintings and sculptures, and I think a castle is the right place for me, no?

Is the castle a work in progress or is it finished?
More or less I’m finished, but it’s not done so well. I mean it was done on a really small budget. I can always make it better, but what I’m doing now is putting on shows in different countries to get publicity for the castle. And to find out where my paintings are.

What happened to your paintings?
Some of them were sold and I don’t know to where, and some of them got stolen. It’s horrible.

Were they stolen from your house?
Some, yes. And during the transport to shows. That’s shit. The two paintings for Emerson Lake and Palmer, for their Brain Salad Surgery album, were stolen.

What can you do in that situation?
Nothing. I tried. I said I’ll pay 10,000 francs if someone knows anything about them. I don’t know where they are. It upsets me so much. I like those things and I did them in 1973 and Emerson Lake and Palmer even came to Switzerland to see them.

If you were rich, what would you like to do with the castle?
I’d like to buy back some paintings. There was an idea for a train set running through the castle, but it’s too crazy. It’s fantastical. It costs too much to make such a train and you could never pay if off. It would be very funny to have, but I still have to pay for the castle. I have two million I have to pay back to the bank for the castle, and that’s heavy.

The castle gets a lot of visits from young rockers and goths. They seem to look on it as a bit of temple of darkness. Do you get any bizarre requests from them?
Oh yes. I get a lot of strange people who come to see my work in Gruyeres. It’s very nice. You know people from the village they know my fans when they see them. They’re all in black. They want to marry there, do photo shoots, all kinds of stuff.

Do you think they ever have sex in the castle?
Ha, it’s possible. I don’t know. We don’t have everything so tightly controlled.

Apart from art, is there anything else you collect?
I have weapons. I never want to be without weapons. As protection. I like weapons. From a child I always had weapons.

What’s your favorite weapon?
I have a small 5mm, 22 caliber, it’s a small revolver. That was what Li (Giger’s first wife) shot herself with. It’s very small. I have three revolvers with gunpowder in the barrel. You can fill them up. That’s fun.

Would you recommend the film industry to a fine artist?
Oh no, not at all. It’s very hard to work for film and you never have time to finish things in a really good way. Films make you crazy. You know once I wanted to work in Switzerland for the film industry. That was for the movie Species. Oh that was wrong.

Why was it so bad?
These guys I was working with, they didn’t want to work on Saturday and Sunday. It was terrible. They blamed me because I wanted them to work late. Film is great. I mean, I see what they do today and it’s wonderful. They know how to do it, they have all kinds of things, but it really makes you crazy.

Photo from Mike Mellia's portrait series Our Side of the Story: South Sudan

The April issue of VICE includes just one article in its 130 pages. The magazine's sole story, Saving South Sudan, by Robert Young Pelton, is a gonzo-style dive into the strife of the world’s newest nation, one that has faced perpetual war “with some sporadic days off” since 1955. In April, we received an invitation to a gallery exhibition by New York–based photographer Mike Mellia, whose project, Our Side of The Story: South Sudan, is a series of portraits of South Sudanese refugees turned artists. Subjects included supermodels who've walked for the likes of Louis Vuitton and appeared in Kanye West videos, an actor starring in an upcoming Reese Witherspoon movie, and a poet studying at Columbia University. Almost everyone in the series still has family in South Sudan, or a neighboring refugee camp, and many of the subjects' families don't know the extent of their current artistic lives.

We got in touch with several of the subjects of Our Side of The Story in hopes of giving them a platform to talk about their almost unbelievable voyages from Sudan to America, from refugee camps to runway shows and top-tier universities. VICE started this series by interviewing model and DJ, Mari “DJ Stiletto” Malek, and today we’re sharing the story of Amou Ajang.

Amou Ajang is a poet, a writer, and a current student at Columbia University. She left South Sudan in 1995 with her family and moved to Arizona, as the climate was similar to what they knew in Sudan. She won the Jack Kent Cooke Transfer Scholarship which gave her the opportunity to begin studying political science/international relations in Manhattan, and is set to graduate in 2015. She told us about pursuing writing and poetry, despite her family’s pressure to study something more practical like medicine, law, or engineering; a website she’s creating to share the art of female “wanderers”; and shared a poem titled “A Cyclical Sacrifice,” which remembers Nuer boys who drowned while trying to swim across the Nile in order to escape the civil war. 

VICE: Where in South Sudan were you born?
Amou Ajang: In spite of growing up in Tonj, I was born in Khartoum, Sudan in a family with six children. My sister and father are still in South Sudan today. My parents became refugees in the late 80s. At the time my mother was still a teenager living at home with her family in Tonj, and my father was a young adult studying at Khartoum University. My mother and her older sister decided to leave Tonj due to mass violence similar to that which took place in December of 2013—except at the hands of Arabs and Muslims from the north.

Before she had the opportunity to return to Tonj in 2008, my mother often described her last images of the town as those of burning buildings; the thatched homes of her childhood friends and neighbors crumbling in flames. 

Living in Khartoum during the Sudanese civil war was naturally difficult. South Sudanese lived under the constant anxiety of attack, especially as second class citizens. The UNHCR gave my family the opportunity to immigrate to Egypt in 1991, and we took it. I was an infant when we arrived to Egypt, and thus my earliest memories begin there.

Amou's mother's family in South Sudan. Her mother is the child sitting to the left of the only boy in the photo.

Tell me something idiosyncratic you remember about life in refugee camps.
I'm very fortunate that I was so young when we arrived to refugee quarters in Egypt. Older members of my family recall details of continued prejudice based on ethnicity and religion. Other than feeling the emotional shifts of the grown-ups around me, at the age of 1-4, I was rarely aware of the tense environment we lived in. I just knew that some days the adults were sad, some days they were stressed or scared, and some days they were angry. However they rarely spoke about it. I remember being curious about why they never seemed to speak about it.

Amou and her family reuniting re-united for the first time in 1999

Do you consider yourself an artist?
I consider myself a writer. Growing up in my household, saying that you were a writer or an artist was the equivalent of saying that you are an aroma therapist at your core (which, let's be honest, is valid in its own right). My parents pushed my siblings and I towards certain career paths (medicine, law, engineering), because they wanted us to have an opportunity to escape the instability that we lived as refugees. However, the older I get, the more I am haunted by the desire to write. I can no longer ignore the calling.

I create poems as a part of my daily life, and at times the process is almost thoughtless. I will open my phone and start writing notes, usually on life, an event, a frustration, a love, a pleasure, and then I will look later and think, oh that’s a poem. Other times it take the process is longer. Recently, I wrote a personal essay titled “Cyclical Sacrifice,” and decided to take the same concept to create a poem from it. I wrote the poem over a period of four hours, from 11pm-3am, last winter. It's about South Sudan and is still a work in progress. 

 A Cyclical Sacrifice

A love short lived, a brief passion

His memory warm, hurried, almost imagined

Invited to pre-mature rest/ his death? Consent-less

But he came back in a dream

toothless, smooth, ebony, full of light

swollen cheeks, deep dimples, small clasp, full of might

eager with that stupid gayety that accompanies a youthful laugh--

he smelled faintly of tenderness, he smelled faintly of new life

His name was Tong, or was it Riak, or was it Madut, or maybe Akech,

recalling the war for which his father fought, but from which he did not escape?

He came as brief solace, to a lonely woman in a world of few pleasures... but yet again…

a life short lived, just eleven

Equipped for war— textured coal completion

Invited to premature rest, he too, consent-less

He haunted her dreams…

Toothless, ebony, firm, cold of as ice

Swollen cheeks, deep dimples, empty clasp, devoid of life

She raised him to a concave breast, where stiff curved lips would not latch

He smelled faintly of new death and faintly of new strife

And so it felt as if her world wanted her to be raw and lifeless

Tempted by the prodding of wise-men whose very kindness it had devoured to

a boney carcass

In a traditional fashion

Textured coal complexion, geometric patterns,

Consent-less

hot blood flows,

Belonging to black baby lambs, a cyclical sacrifice,

Consent-less

And so it felt like her world was tempting her to become one of them.

A world of sharp ivory prongs

Grey shriveled flesh, smelling faintly of death

of swinging butchers to chubby hopes, chopping swollen lovelies

Bludgeoning them down to blunt nothing’s

Sloppy forgettable

empty used to Bes

bludgeoning them into uselessness, that they too might join the lifeless

Amou Ajang

Tell me something personal you’ve heard or witnessed in South Sudan that illustrates the current issues the country is facing.
My father and little sister live in our family home in Juba. During the first days of fighting two Nuer boys, our neighbors, came to our door. My family hid them for a few days. Those boys survived but I am told that their sister went missing and she still hasn’t been found. My family still doesn’t know what happened to her. We can only imagine what kind of horrible end she met. There are no words to describe how empty I feel when I think about the violence that has occurred on our soil for so long, but most specifically, the violence against women and children.

Another story that struck me came from an old friend over Christmas break. He is from Bor, one of the areas heavily hit with violence. He told me that the young bodies of children could be seen floating on the Nile River. Some children tried to swim across the river to get away from the fighting and drowned. I never saw pictures, but its an image that is very difficult to get out of my mind. My poem is dedicated to these children of war.

A photo Amou took at the memorial of former rebel leader, John Garang.

What upcoming projects do you have? Anything related to raising awareness about Sudan?
One of my favorite Artists is Khalid Kodi, a Sudanese activist, artist and professor. During the Sudanese Civil War he and his wife Nada Mustafa Ali (a researcher, professor, and activist) raised awareness of the plight of the Southern citizens. I’ve been lucky enough to be recruited on to one of his projects for Healing and Peace. In 2012 he started Artist Movement Engaging Non Violence (A.M.E.N.) in response to the burning of public places of worship by Muslim radicals in Sudan. The temple was significant because Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, essentially people of all faiths, gathered there to worship. To show solidarity, he enlisted several students to create religious paintings as gifts to the church.

Depending on our ability to find funders and collaborators, we hope to travel to Sudan and South Sudan within the next year, showcasing the works, and finally delivering them to their destination, the reconstructed house of worship. Alongside this traveling gallery, we hope to provide artistic workshops to promote this idea of healing through expression. There are several other phases of the project that we would like to realize, but for now we are looking for collaborators and support.

The pieces are magnificent, and will be displayed at Boston College in October. For more information, check out the Facebook page.

Since many of my poems have a strong component of the wandering woman, I might call my first collection Women Don’t Wander. (“Nyiir Accie Hou” in Dinka, my mother knows what this is about). It’s scary, you know—going from self-identifying as an artist in private, to sharing your work publicly. But it's exciting at the same time, like a first boyfriend.

What will it take to end the violence?
There are many barriers to overcome because the violence is cyclical, permeating all aspects of our society, both in the diaspora and back home. A structural remedy to political and tribal violence begins within the ruling elite Dinka and Nuer, who compose most of the ruling party and are not only known for their regality, but also for their tempers and stubbornness. We tend to be ambivalent towards new concepts and perceive change as threatening to our customs (which if we are honest, could use change because they have historically benefited certain groups over others).

I think it is new ideas that we need in order to see true peace. We have to make room for a new generation of leaders. This is not to say that we must completely dismiss those who have served our country since before independence, but the fresh ideas of several educated experts that we have at our disposal need to be allowed to penetrate the current system. It seems as if most of the current political positions are held by elite members of the SPLA, who reshuffle themselves every few years/months. It's important to add diversity of thought and process by adding new faces and giving them actual power. This will break up the power struggle within the party that is becoming nearly ancient.

What do I mean when I say that the violence is cyclical?

A similar violence broke out in 1991 within the party during the Sudanese Civil War between the Khartoum Regime and Southern rebels. Just like what happened last December, a rupture within the party led to widespread Dinka murders at the hands of Nuer militia, and pushed back peace for all 64 tribes. New faces will break this cycle.

As an artist, I believe that healing can come through expression. Many of us, from the civilians back home, to the lost boys and girls, to the new generation of South Sudanese in the diaspora, carry pain, trauma, tension and confusion; essentially, we carry an internal violence. The fact that we are rarely speak about these things leads to broken homes, to our youth acting out, to an increase in high school dropouts, not to mention the prolonged suffering from mental illness due to stigma. We need more people to stand up and speak out against the concept of that “which we do not speak of” that we seem so committed to as a people. Through merely talking about these things, or expressing ourselves creatively, we create healthy outlets and increase the numbers of successful and functional members of our communities.

In addition, we foster community and build connections. If I write a poem, and Khalid paints a painting, or South Sudanese pop artist Yaba Angeleso writes a song—these expressions are not only personally cathartic, but they allow us to connect, illuminating the fact that in our human experience, we are all much more similar than we are different.

Find out more about Mike Mellia’s South Sudan–focused portrait series, Our Side of the Story, on his website.

Follow Zach Sokol on Twitter.

Late last year, South Sudan's president, Salva Kiir, accused his former vice president, Riek Machar, of attempting a coup d'état amid accusations of rampant corruption within the government. Infighting immediately broke out within the presidential guard, sparking what has now become a brutal tribal and civil war that has pitted Machar’s ethnic Nuer loyalists against the majority Dinka, who have sided with Kiir. Machar narrowly escaped assassination, fleeing to the deep bush as Kiir’s troops razed his home and killed his bodyguards. And now the world’s newest sovereign nation is in imminent danger of becoming a failed state.

In February, journalists and filmmakers Robert Young Pelton and Tim Freccia set out on a grueling mission to locate Machar in his secret hideout in Akobo and get his side of the story. Accompanying was Machot Lat Thiep, a former child soldier and Lost Boy who had advised on South Sudan’s constitution and now works as a manager of a Costco in Seattle. Machot acted as a guide of sorts, arranging Pelton and Freccia’s rendezvous with Machar through a series of endless satellite-phone calls to old contacts and rebel platoons, who would eventually guide the group to the deposed vice president.

After spending a couple days with Machar, he granted Pelton and Freccia unprecedented access to the front lines of a battle in Malakal, where for the first time in history the pair documented the heretofore mythical White Army as they looted, murdered, and pillaged their way to some twisted interpretation of “victory.”

Saving South Sudan is a multi-platform exploration of the horrors of the country’s newest civil war. We devoted an entire issue of the magazine to Robert Young Pelton and Tim Freccia's sprawling 35,000-plus word epic exploration of the crisis in South Sudan. It's a companion piece of sorts; watch the documentary and read the issue or vice versa. But you won't get a full scope of the situation without doing both. 

This weekend Europe's eyes were on Denmark as it played host to the Eurovision Song Contest, an annual celebration of cheesy pop songs and international goodwill. (Conchita Wurst, a transgender woman with a beard, ended up winning.) Bizarrely enough, that same weekend Copenhagen decided to green-light the country's first official Nazi demonstration since World War II. On May 9, about 40 members of far right organization Danish National Front set up shop outside Parliament sporting propaganda-filled banners and Danish flags.

One skinhead even brought his acoustic guitar along, but before he could strum a single chord counter-protesters rained on the Nazis' parade with glass bottles. As the anti-fascists increased in numbers, riot police quickly formed a circle around the right-wing demonstrators. Around 3 PM, some 200 masked anti-fascists stormed the square, and Esben Kristensen, the leader of the Danish National Socialist Movement, pretty much had his ass handed to him before the police pulled out their truncheons and began forcing the demonstrators back.

To save the right-wing activists from punishment, riot police escorted them to safety and sent them on their way. Of course this only meant the trouble scattered out into the streets of Copenhagen—while families and tourists stood by stunned and speechless, packs of masked anti-fascists ran around the city looking for Nazis to beat up.

By the end of the day, 13 anti-fascist rioters had been arrested for throwing bottles, and one of them will likely face prison time. Twenty-one right-wing radicals were later arrested for public disturbance while on a train leaving Copenhagen. Everyone should have just stayed home and watched Eurovision.

When Glenn Greenwald first met Edward Snowden on the streets of Hong Kong, he was sure he had wasted his time flying halfway around the world. This guy? That young? No way he has the goods, thought Greenwald.

Snowden had asked the Guardian journalist to wait for a man with a Rubik’s cube. But the man was so young that Greenwald wondered whether perhaps it was the NSA whistleblower’s son or his lover who had come to the initial meeting.

Any doubts about Snowden’s position inside the NSA, however, were squelched when the whistleblower began recounting his improbable rise from high school dropout/video gamer to master of offensive cyber attacks on behalf of the Obama administration, all of which he had documented methodically.

Throughout their first adrenaline-pounding days together, Greenwald’s mind was understandably boggled at the enormity of the scoop. Snowden, meanwhile, ended the day saying he needed to rest, joking, “I call the bottom bunk at GITMO [Guantánamo].” Asked why he could sleep so well, Snowden quipped, “I figure I have very few days left with a comfortable pillow, so I might as well enjoy them.”

Judging from Greenwald’s first-person account, Snowden radiated a calm and an orderly logic that were essential parts of his psychological makeup. It was a combination that made him both the NSA’s up-and-coming star and their ongoing nightmare.

Greenwald’s eloquent book about the Snowden case, No Place to Hide, is less about Snowden than the “tens of thousands” of documents that the 29-year-old copied, organized, and handed off to Greenwald and a select group of other journalists.

Snowden told Greenwald he was inspired by Joseph Campbell’s book about mythological martyrs, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, and said, “What keeps a person passive and compliant is fear of repercussions, but once you let go of your attachment to things that don’t ultimately matter—money, career, physical safety—you can overcome that fear.”

Snowden’s defense of internet freedom was both theoretical and experiential. “Basically the internet allowed me to experience freedom and explore my full capacity as a human being,” Snowden told Greenwald. “For many kids, the internet is a means of self-actualization. It allows them to explore who they are and who they want to be, but that only works if we’re able to be private and anonymous, to make mistakes without them following us. I worry that mine was the last generation to enjoy that freedom.”

Greenwald—whose training as a lawyer and litigator make his arguments sound like they are expounded before a jury—is not naïve about the security threats of the post-Cold War era. Instead, he posits a fundamental American core value: Innocent until proven guilty. “The alternative to mass surveillance is not the complete elimination of surveillance. It is, instead, targeted surveillance, aimed only at those for whom there is substantial evidence to believe they are engaged in real wrongdoing,” he writes.

The most powerful sections of Greenwald’s book are not the individual documents but his accounts of the connivance of corporate America. The subservient role of Fortune 500 Corporations, especially Microsoft, allows a rare glimpse into the unspoken conspiracies that may never be written or seen but are felt by all. Microsoft, writes Greenwald, with ample evidence to back up the claim, spent months redesigning software to facilitate penetration by NSA spies.

Snowden meanwhile is depicted as a wise ascetic, a man willing to go down on the sword for the greater good. "I could not do this without accepting the risk of prison. You can't come up against the world's most powerful intelligence agencies and not accept the risk,” Snowden tells Greenwald. “If they want to get you, over time, they will." Usually such dire predictions are dismissed as paranoid rants. In this case they are the levelheaded analysis of a former top US intelligence operative.

It is true, Greenwald notes, that the Snowden revelations triggered a “global debate about the value of individual privacy in the digital age and prompted challenges to America’s hegemonic control over the internet.” But how much of the dirty, nitty-gritty detail will stick?

The Snowden documents highlight an unprecedented sabotage of internet privacy. In operation after operation, the documents show US officials lurching from one technical challenge to another, never asking, “Should we?” and obsessing with “getting it all." Referring to US intelligence, Snowden states, "We hack everyone everywhere. We like to make a distinction between us and the others. But we are in almost every country in the world. We are not at war with these countries."

The damage to human creativity, the subversion of personal privacy, and the overall betrayal of human rights from such intrusive spying will never fully be calculated. But even the small fraction of the Snowden papers thus far made public have shown that our intrinsic need to communicate, to share, to blog/tweet/upload has ushered in a radical new balance of power. Whether Snowden has stopped the forces of surveillance, merely slowed them, or allowed them to hone their tools has yet to be decided. In No Place to Hide, Glenn Greenwald makes a persuasive case that it is a battle that has engulfed us all, and one that has not yet ended.

Photos by Leo Malek

Just outside Prague, the once-wealthy silver mining town of Kutná Hora is home to arguably the most morbid tourist attraction in the world. If you’ve ever turned to Tumblr to avoid doing the work you’re paid to do, chances are you’ve already come across photos of the Sedlec Ossuary (or “the bone church”), a small Roman Catholic chapel that’s decorated with the bones of an estimated 40,000 to 70,000 victims of both the Black Death and the 15th-century Hussite Wars.

The hundreds of thousands of human bones have been arranged in all kinds of creative ways, from bone chalices and chandeliers to strings of skulls and bones hung across the ceiling like history’s most depressing party bunting. It’s the Ted Bundy approach to interior design: the entrance to Disneyland’s Nightmare Before Christmas ride if they’d sourced their raw materials from a morgue rather than a Hollywood prop department.

The basement at Sedlec, where all the bone sculptures are located, is open to the public and has long been one of the most popular tourist spots in the Czech Republic, attracting around 200,000 visitors every year. All kinds of people—from Polish pensioners to fans of “grief tourism” (a.k.a. sociopaths who holiday in Auschwitz and Chernobyl)—come here from all over the world to shoot their new profile pictures next to the piles of 500-year-old human skulls.

Now the 14th-century church building is in serious need of repair. The bones are beginning to crumble, and the church leans drunkenly to one side; the owners can’t put the restoration work off any longer.

Of course, this isn't going to be your standard church-restoration job. The basement hasn’t changed since 1870, and the grim decorations now have to be taken apart and moved for the first time since they were installed. Nothing like this has been done before, because—to the international authorities’ knowledge, at least—nothing like this has existed before outside the fictitious realm of Rob Zombie movies and hack-and-slash video games. Compounding their problems, the restorers in charge of Sedlec say that no one alive today actually knows how the bones were fixed together in the first place.

After an hour’s train journey from Prague, a walk down Kutná Hora's main road takes you past the bone church’s own dedicated tourist information office, cafe, and toilets, and a gift shop featuring an array of plastic skull necklaces, fridge magnets, and the most macabre beer cosies I’ve ever seen. There’s apparently almost always a line of international tour buses stationed outside the gates of the church.

None of this kitsch and fanfare helps much while trying to reflect on either my own individual insignificance within the universe, or the inescapable hand of death, which, I’ve read, are the two things the bone church was built to remind us of.

Skulls and crossbones on the spires of the church above the Sedlec Ossuary

Walking toward the church, the first thing you notice—besides the German teenagers in Monster snapbacks taking selfies by the entrance—is that there are skulls and crossbones everywhere, carved in stone on the gates, painted on the pavement outside, and even replacing the standard crucifixion-style symbol on top of the spires.

The church has been associated with death for centuries, long before the basement was filled with the skeletal bric-a-brac it is now. The legend goes that after a local monk brought some soil back from the Holy Land in 1278, Central Europe's wealthiest residents started queuing up for family burial plots. Two religious wars and one plague later, this holy ground was full to bursting. To make way for new graves, the older remains were exhumed in 1511 by a half-blind monk, who left them piled up in the church basement.

More than 300 years later, in 1870, the aristocratic Schwarzenberg family, who owned the church at the time, asked a woodcarver to do something with the forgotten bones, and what you see today is what he came up with. František Rint worked for decades to organize and style the remains into decorations, recruiting his wife and kids to help him in perhaps the least family-friendly family business I’ve ever come across.

An engraving on the wall in honour of František Rint

There are rumors that people had already started making things out of the bones before Rint came along, leaving the Schwarzenbergs no option but to pay someone to do it properly. Jana at the ticket desk told me this was probably true. “We know that a man called Santini—and possibly others—was already making bone decorations here in the early 18th century,” she said. “Rint’s work just continued that.”

Regardless of who was there first, the same problem still stands: There’s no record of how everything was originally put together. And for the restorers, that’s a major issue; taking a few piles of old bones apart doesn’t sound that hard, until you see the size of them. In each of the ossuary’s four corners there are huge pyramids of skulls and bones, stretching far back into the recesses of the walls and filled with cobwebs and money (Jana told me that people just started throwing coins in there two or three years ago, presumably for good luck, and nobody stopped them).

Coins that have been thrown behind the piles of human skulls

These mounds are going to provide the biggest headache for the restorers, since nobody knows what’s holding them together. What they do know is that it’s going to take at least a year to dismantle each pyramid, send the bones away to be cleaned, re-plaster the walls behind them and eventually put the piles of skulls back together. Overall, Jana said, the work will take at least five years.

Before they hop that hurdle, the restorers are going to start work on the ceiling. That means taking down the huge chandelier, which contains at least one of every bone in the human body, and the collection of skulls and bones strung up around it. No one at the church seemed to know exactly how they’ll make sure everything is put back the way it was. I was going to suggest taking a bunch of photographs and just labeling all the bones correctly, but apparently restorers are going to work out their own method at some point later this year.

Unlike the four big piles, the bone version of the Schwarzenberg family coat of arms—put together by Rint and featuring a raven picking out the eyes of a dead Turk—won’t need to be taken apart. You’ll presumably be pleased to hear that the terrifying cherubs sitting on top of towers of skulls and crossbones can also be safely left alone.

The place, unsurprisingly, can get a little unnerving, and even Jana admitted that she doesn’t like being left there alone after everyone else has gone (“I start to think strange things”). But the only notable incidents to have happened at the church involve the living; last year, for example, someone stole one of the skulls. “It happens sometimes,” Jana told me. “They sent it back in a box from abroad.”

The basement empties out briefly between tour groups, and when everyone’s gone you can see how badly damaged the church actually is. In one corner, the basement floor is sinking into the crypt below, though when it was opened up last year no one could see where the problem originated. Now, they’ll have to open up the various other crypts and side chapels around the ossuary, which are filled with yet more bones, in an attempt to find out the cause of the decay.

Despite the uncertainty, the church’s owners say the work desperately needs to be done; otherwise the whole place could collapse.

A tourist posing beneath the skull and bones chandelier

A local café owner named Josef told me that some local people aren’t happy about the renovation work. “Mostly older people, religious people, think it should be left alone,” he said. “Because it’s a Christian grave, they say it should be left in peace, even if that means it falls to ruin. Tourists shouldn’t be going in to look at it anyway. And everyone knows the restorers will never be able to put it back together the same.”

Despite the quibbles of the town's older residents, Josef wants to see the church restored, mainly because it brings visitors to his café. “I don’t know if they can do it,” he said, worried, “but without this church there would be a lot less people coming to Kutná Hora.”

Kutná Hora used to be rich, famous, and important in its own right back in the Middle Ages. Today, now completely overshadowed by Prague in the tourism stakes, it’s been reduced to a mere day trip for fans of faded grandeur and very old human remains. 

One American tour guide at the church told his group that “there are bone churches like this all over Europe.” He wasn’t totally wrong; Europe’s second-largest ossuary (after the Paris catacombs) was discovered ten years ago underneath the main square in the Czech city of Brno. It was opened up to the public in 2012, but the bones there haven’t been as artfully arranged and, despite being bigger, it’s nowhere near as well-known as the church in Sedlec.

If you like your bone churches a little quieter and much, much smaller, there’s a tiny chapel stuffed with decomposed human remains in Nizkov, a village in the Czech Vysočina region, and another small bone church 20 miles north of Prague in Mělník. There’s also an ossuary in Czermna, Poland, just 12 miles from Rint’s hometown of Česká Skalice, which might have been the inspiration for what he did here in Kutná Hora.

So, with plenty of alternatives available for anyone who's into that kind of thing, the restorers have their work cut out for them if they want to keep Kutná Hora's most popular tourist spot open to the public. For now, though, all we can do is wait, and check back in five years down the line to see if they managed the seemingly unmanageable. 

Follow Clare Speak on Twitter.