These pictures originally appeared in the 2014 VICE photo issue.

Kevin Zucker creates analog color Polaroids of sunsets by shooting through gray sheets of translucent plastic. They’re meant to convince us of something impossible: a color photo of a black-and-white sunset. Using Polaroid film emphasizes that each photograph in the ongoing series is a unique object, and the repetition of the subject leaves us wondering whether this is kitsch or appropriation, the sublime or the picturesque, fiction or nonfiction, nostalgia or forecast.

See more of Zucker's work here. Installation views available here, from a recent show of this work at Linn Lühn Gallery in Düsseldorf, Germany.

The VICE News Capsule is a news roundup that looks beyond the headlines. This week, an Egyptian court handed down life sentences in sex assault cases, Mexican police raided a group home amid sexual abuse allegations, Russia agreed 'in principle' to reopen a spy base in Cuba, and an ancient Chinese town was submerged in floodwaters.

Maybe it’s the heat. Maybe it’s the fear that a family of black bears will drag us out of our garages, or maybe it’s just all the damn mosquitoes in the humid cesspool some people call Florida. Whatever it is, it makes us crazy. While most Americans hide weed in seat cushions or backpacks, us Floridians prefer to shove our drugs in our asses.

Now this might be practical—even commendable—if we didn’t get caught, but try asking 23 pairs of inbred chromosomes to abide by the law. Florida’s drug laws may be stupid, but our methods of evasion are decidedly stupider.

Of course, come November, all of this could be irrelevant, when Florida votes on medical marijuana legalization, meaning in the future some Floridians could get off with a small fine or even offer a celebratory toke to their neighborhood patrolmen.

This law could be great for stoned Floridians, but will undoubtedly be bad for newspapers, bloggers and Florida haters who practice the timeless tradition of reading and writing about Floridians stuffing weed in their crotches. In honor of this legendary custom, here’s a comprehensive recent history of Floridians hiding our weed in our assholes, pussies, and other awkward orifices.

The Thank-God-It’s-Not-That-Time-of-the-Month Club

2012

After pulling over a friend of Naples resident Vida Golac for drifting between lanes, police officers found a bag of weed next to where Golac, 18, was sitting. Golac allegedly told cops the weed didn’t belong to her because she was “a medical student.” But after a thorough strip search at the jail, cops found additional marijuana stuffed up Golac’s cooch—pretty much confirming that the weed was hers.

Golac said she was just trying to protect the other passengers, but still faced charges of smuggling and possession, according to Sherriff’s Office records.

2013

Jayme Nicole Poma, 23, was originally arrested for a traffic violation, but police sent her to jail after finding an active warrant for her arrest. At the jail, a purple sock in Poma’s pants clued the pat-down officer in on the Port St. Lucie woman’s stash. The officer removed the sock and found a small plastic bag of weed. She then asked Poma to cough and squat, causing another baggy to fall out—this one full of cocaine.

2014

In May, Palm Beach County resident Jessica Johnston, 25, admitted to officials she had 2.6 grams stashed in her ­­­­gash after authorities told her bringing contraband into a jail is considered a felony.

If You Can’t Beat Them, Eat Them

2010

Police arrested Anthony Ramsey, a 25-year-old Gainesville resident, because he allegedly refused to answer the officer’s questions. When he finally opened his lips, he asked the officer why he was being arrested—with his mouth full of marijuana.

2013

“When’s the last time you smoked marijuana?” a Florida state trooper asked 35-year-old Johnny Fischer after chasing his weaving SUV down the Florida turnpike.

“I don’t smoke no marijuana.”

“You don’t smoke marijuana?”

“No, man.”

“Can I ask you a question then? Why is there marijuana in your beard?”

2014

In January, former University of Florida football player Jarvis Moss allegedly told police he was eating “food” after running a stop sign in Gainesville. He opened his mouth to reveal chunks of weed, prompting the officer to arrest the 29-year-old for possessing weed and tampering with the evidence.

2014

But what if you dispose of the evidence all together? That might have worked for Brevard county resident Tavish Smith if police hadn’t caught her crime on camera last month. After being arrested for driving the wrong way and crashing her truck, Smith allegedly slipped out of her handcuffs in the back of the police car and grabbed her confiscated sandwich bag of bud. She giggled and then ate her drugs.

There were reportedly enough crumbs left in the bag, and all over her face, to prove she possessed marijuana. Her disappearing trick also upgraded her misdemeanor for possession up to a felony.

“Bags of weed just don't go missing inside a police car,” the trooper said.

Don’t Hide Weed by Your Cox

2012

After responding to a crowd-control call at a Brevard County Denny’s, police saw smoke “pouring out into the air” from a black Toyota Camry, so Suzanne Japorica Baker made the mistake of hastily stuffing the weed into her bra. Unfortunately, breasts are the first place cops are going to look, even if they’re not looking for weed.

2014

After a non-fatal gunfight on April 15, police confronted Gainesville resident Tarris Cox at an apartment, where he consented to a weapons search. Cops didn’t find the gun, but they did notice an “unfamiliar bulge,” the police report called it, hidden in the 22-year-old’s underwear. That “unfamiliar bulge” was 19.6 grams of ganja, stashed by Cox’s cock. Moral of the story: If you’re carrying drugs in your underwear, it’s probably not the best idea to get in a gunfight, consent to a search, or, you know, have a small cock.

It’s a little unfair, though, that women get an extra hole for hideaway. What’s a Florida guy to do?

Ass Crack: the Great Equalizer

2010

“I then searched his immediate person and felt a soft object in the crack of his buttocks,” police wrote in a report about 25-year-old Marion County resident Raymond Roberts. After pulling Roberts over for speeding, the officer smelled the smoke and searched the suspect. He found both 4.5 grams of “a green leafy substance” and 27 pieces of white cocaine in his crack.

“The white stuff is not mine, but the weed is,” Roberts said.

He was charged possession of both pot and cocaine, cause, you know, it doesn’t matter what you say. If the drugs are in your butt, they’re yours.

2014

In May, cops reported finding an Osceola County couple with meth, a half-ounce of cocaine, and numerous packets of marijuana in their BMW, much of it hidden in an energy drink with a “false screw-on top.” At first, the couple only allegedly admitted to the weed.

“The blunt is in my underwear and I'll get it,” Angel Suazo, 26, said before he “voluntarily reached into his underwear between his buttocks and recovered an approximate two to three inches of a smoked brown in color cigar,” according to the police report.

He probably just wanted to get the blazing thing out of his ass, but at least he admitted to possessing the cigar.

2014

A two-to-three inch blunt is one thing, but try squeezing an inch-thick cylinder between your cheeks—and keeping it there, as 23-year-old Joshua Paul Manley did while Gainesville police pulled him over from a broken headlight in April.

He had somehow stuffed more than 11 grams of weed in the bottle and managed to finagle it into his butt crack – yet he left the rest on the passenger floorboard and in a visible blunt.

All that discomfort, only to get caught.

2014

Then again, when you can’t legally own it, how do you define property? Couldn’t you just say you’re someone else? That’s what 22-year-old Sammy Lee Simmons thought he could get away with after he ran a red light in Gainesville. The Delray Beach native told police he didn’t have a license, could not share his social security number, and could not give his address.

While some cops aren’t exactly known for their intelligence, Simmons’s ploy was pretty fallible. His car smelled strongly of weed, and after his 1.1 grams were discovered at the Alachua County Jail, he admitted to keeping the kush “behind his nuts.”

Whether our weed is behind our nuts, between our boobs, or in our butts, Floridians have a rich history of hiding cannabis contraband—and getting caught.

As the Israeli bombardment and invasion of the Gaza Strip continues—and militants continue to launch crude rockets into Israel—there's relative quiet in the other Palestinian territory, the West Bank. Since the conflict is focused on the Hamas-run Gaza Strip, it's easy to forget the West Bank used to be one of the focal points of resistance against the state of Israel. That may still be the case, but today in the West Bank, there are few demonstrations and no rockets being fired into Israel.

Palestinian security forces, activists, and ordinary Palestinians say this could change. VICE News brings you to the restive city of Hebron, which has historically supported Hamas, to find out if, how, and for how long things can stay this way.

Photos courtesy of Vivid Entertainment

When we think about porn sets, we automatically picture white leather couches, nauseating pieces of art tacked up on the (also white) walls, and a stray shag carpet. A million porn clichés burn in our heads, revolving around aesthetic choices secondary to sex, but thanks to Vivid’s parody films and successful Vivid Superheroes imprint, the porn industry is undergoing a production design renaissance.

Most of Vivid’s farces are directed by modern day porn legend Axel Braun. In AVN award-winning pornos like Batman XXX and Star Wars XXX, which X-Critic called “The mother of all porn parodies,” the performers fuck and suck on sets that look like the bastard children of George Lucas’s Industrial Light and Magic. Cum shots still take precedence to narrative, but the budgets are bigger, the costumes often look like the superheroes they’re mimicking, and the sets are less janky than you’d expect.

One married couple designs most these sets, winning AVN Awards for films like Star Wars XXX in the process. Kylie Ireland, a former performer who belongs to the AVN Hall of Fame, and Andy Appleton, a former nightclub manager, have been married for five years, and together they have made recreations of the Fortress of Solitude and other iconic sets. Like many couples, they talk over each other and have firm beliefs in their ideas—like their theory that their designs extend parody porn’s fantasies, allowing viewers to believe parody porn is as close to watching Princess Leia blow Darth Vader as they’ll ever get.  

Interested in learning more about the design duo’s artistic sensibilities and the process that goes into designing a porn parody, I called Ireland and Appleton to talk about their artistic process, making icebergs for porn stars to fuck on, and why they put so much effort into making set pieces that get less screen time than superheroes' jizz.

VICE: How did you start working in production design and art direction?
Kylie Ireland: I was dating a director named Eli Cross in the industry before I met Andy, and Eli was doing a lot of big movies, like $350,000 budgets—this doesn’t sound like a lot but it was. I started doing production design because we were working together. I started by directing things—a lot of gonzo—but I started art directing because it was a small budget and they couldn’t hire production, but I personally wanted the set to look cute or neat. I never really was officially into interior design; I just have a knack for it. 

What makes a sex scene more interesting or vibrant in terms of design?
Andy Appleton: We don’t try to date the films, so it’s like, “Oh, that was shot in 2014.” If we were doing a scene with a lawyer fucking his secretary, then we’d take into account that he’d have money.
Ireland: Or he’d have a bookshelf because he’s smart. Does that matter? Maybe not. But I care about it. If you give me a small space, I can make magic with it.
Appleton: We’ll have one location that’s first a living room, then a dentist’s room, then a moon base. We always manage to pull it off, but it’s always that little thing we spot that no one else spots.
Ireland: I think the attention to detail makes porn visually pleasing. 

How does adult film production follow the Hollywood structure?
Appleton: We have a lot of pre-production meetings. We have a lot of background on characters on the set—especially for superheroes. Like we’ll actually research their enemies, their costume, how they appeared in the comics over time.
Ireland: Once we had to build a castle for a shoot. You know what we did for that? I gutted my house. I gathered everything that was on my shelves that looked vaguely witch-like or dark art-related. Another time, we had to shoot the Superman parody in the desert because of Measure B—we had to be shooting out of LA County—so we go all the way out to an aircraft hanger that was empty.
Appleton: We storyboarded it because we had seen the movies. Everyone knows what the Fortress of Solitude looks like—it’s at a 45 degree angle. We had to construct icebergs.
Ireland: We’re getting really good at building things. Fans want it to be as close as humanely possible; the geeks and fans will notice and pick it apart.
Appleton: This is my fifth year in the industry, and every year we’ve been nominated for a production design award. Last year we won for Underworld, and also the year before for Star Wars XXX.

Haven’t you won some awards yourself for acting?
Ireland: I was Best New Starlet in 95. I didn’t win for ten years, and then I was inducted into the Hall of Fame. I was also a producer on a lot of big movies like Upload and the The 8th Day. I have a bunch of awards now! I stopped performing about three years ago.

Why did you stop?
Nowadays you get labeled as a MILF, and you have to start working with younger girls or younger guys—and younger guys are boring. After a couple scenes, I walked away feeling dirty because the actress looked 15 even though she was 18. And around that time I had met Andy. We do cam shows and clips for sale, so I’m still out there.

What’s poorly done in porn production?
Ireland: I notice bad editing a lot.
Appleton: Yes that!
Ireland: I don’t watch that much porn because at this point we know everyone in them. I know if the guy is struggling, or if the girl is bored. I loathe the studio look, maybe because I worked in it. In the 90s they were shot in one of three different studios. They were dingy, and had the same crappy couches, and had the same crappy walls, and it just had that empty porn look. Something that drove me nuts in the gonzo era, the 2000s, was the Valley houses. All the houses look the same—all white. 

In terms of production design and costumes, do you think colors subconsciously matter to the audience?
Appleton: There are supposedly statistics that say colors do sell. The companies monitor it all online and figure out what sells better and why. Apparently certain colors and certain sex positions do sell more. 

Over the course of your career, what was the hardest set to design?
Appleton: The Land Speeder [from Star Wars XXX] was the most complicated. Fortress of Solitude was a close second. Someone will often ask us to design something, and then Kylie will have to explain why the idea is not feasible.
Ireland: I’m the best support for the performers because I did it all myself. Someone on the directing side will pitch something, and I’ll say, “No that will be impossible to have sex on,” because I’ve been there. I take into account the height of objects, the angle, the material, and every specific aspect.

If you could make any porn parody, what would you do?
Appleton: I would love to do The Empire Strikes Back. Star Wars was so much fun, but making Yoda’s home planet would be amazing—it would be a nightmare, but I’d love it.

Is it ever frustrating that so much time goes into the design of these sets and they are always secondary to sex?
Ireland: People ask me, “Why do you do it?” Like for Thor XXX, we had to make a big hole in the desert, a crater, for when he slams the hammer. It took a few days, and in the movie you see it for less than two seconds. Often we spend hours building things and they’re on screen for just a second, but it’s that moment like finishing the Cantina [in Star Wars XXX], and all the lighting guys have done their thing, and you walk behind the camera, and it looks like the Cantina—exactly like it. That’s why you do it.
Appleton: And for the Instagram pics. 

Follow Zach Sokol on Twitter.

Photo via Google Street View

Before the days of Pornhub, Redtube, and bored eastern European men with waxed assholes blowing each other on cam, there was the porno theater. In a city once hailed as the smut capital of the world, the Cinema Kings Highway is one of the few remnants of the New York’s seamy past. 

Located in Midwood, a predominantly middle-class Hasidic neighborhood in Brooklyn, the Cinema Kings Highway is widely regarded as the borough's last porno theater, a designation that, in this post-Bloomberg era of sky-high rents and cronut lines, miraculously retains a perverse nostalgic appeal for longtime New Yorkers. Formerly a 1930s Art Deco movie theater called the Jewel (Woody Allen was allegedly a frequent attendee), the Cinema Kings Highway was converted into a porn theater in the 1960s, according to the Cinema Treasures directory. Today, the smut palace stands as a testament to a bygone era of sordidness. (It also functions as a pretty prominent gay cruising spot according to online reviews). 

Most people in the Orthodox Jewish Kings Highway neighborhood view the Cinema Kings Highway as an embarrassment, but when my friends and myself, four white kids raised on a steady diet of irony and Robin Byrd reruns, found out about the theater, we considered it nothing less than pervert Mecca. Armed with a giant thermos of Negronis, we decided to take the F train to the Kings Highway stop in Brooklyn to step into the time warp known as the last great New York City porno theater.

When we arrived at the Kings Highway stop, it was Shabbos, so most of the stores in the leafy, quiet neighborhood were closed. The only people we saw on the street were a Jamaican nanny and a gaggle of Hasidic men coming home from afternoon shul. “We’re going to the porno theater,” we told them. Although they were probably used to hipster derelicts traipsing around the neighborhood for that reason, they looked at us as if we had declared that we intended to shit into each other’s mouths.

At first glance, the Cinema Kings Highway looked shut down—the marquee was totally empty, and wooden boards covered the box office walls. The only indication that the theater was open was a printed sign directing us inside, where a taciturn, middle-aged Pakistani gentleman with a gold tooth sat at the box office. Admission was $12, which cost less than a mainstream movie theater but more than I expected a porno theater to charge. 

“This is porno theater. You understand?” he asked me about four times as I tried to buy a ticket. “We show pornos. People fucking. You know this?” I gently told him I understood and gave him my money. It took every ounce of self-control within me to refrain from saying, “Wait, this isn’t a revival screening of Feivel Goes West?” 

The theater lobby looked exactly as you probably would imagine: low-hanging fluorescent light bulbs, a row of 1980s arcade games in the corner near a small booth with free instant coffee and Swiss Miss hot chocolate, unshaven middle-aged men weaving in and out of the shadows. 

There were three screens in the theater: one for straight porn, one for gay porn, and one for what the proprietor described as “art house” cinema, although when we arrived at the theater they were playing Tom Cruise’s The Last Samurai. They played the movie because of a 1995 New York City zoning law requiring adult theaters to reserve at least 60 percent of its showings for mainstream films. You’re allowed to spend all day at Cinema Kings Highway and the theater lets you hop from screen to screen, so many of the patrons had likely been here for hours. It’s kind of like buying a Park Hopper pass at Disney World, except Disney World obviously has less dried cum on the walls. 

We headed into the straight porn theater, where there three or four men sat in silence. The projector showed a POV clip of a perky Eurasian girl slithering around a leather couch, displaying her yawning anus on screen; she wore frosted pink lip gloss and a diamond collar that said “Princess.” The guy behind the camera kept saying racist comments, like “Me love you long time” and “Bend over and show me that tight little Asian slit,” but nobody in the audience appeared to find the blatant cultural fetishization of Asian female sexuality offensive. Apparently, they hadn’t read Edward Said’s Orientalism.

Although no one was masturbating in the theater itself, the men kept walking behind the screen. I became curious and followed them, only to find a veritable Parisian catacomb of jerkoff booths. Small, 80s-era TVs played gay and straight porn, and there were drawings of comically oversized phalli and anti-Semitic epithets scrawled on the walls. One of the men waited outside an occupied booth, and a youthful-looking black male in a baseball cap gave me a nasty glare. I retreated back to the theater, terrified. 

I returned to the theater, where my male companion was loudly arguing with our friend Lizzy over whether or not ( a ) the Eurasian young woman on screen was sporting a rosebud, and ( b ) how prevalent the incidence of rosebuds are in the heterosexual female population. I looked around; none of the other patrons were there. We had chased everyone out of the theater, save for one man, a pale, chubby gentleman in unfashionable wire-rimmed glasses who looked like an anthropomorphized version of a blobfish. Oof. 

The man stood over us and stared, breathing heavily. He carried a plastic Duane Reade bag, and looked so much like the stereotype of a porn theater patron that it’s like he was dressing as one for Halloween. I began to get profoundly uncomfortable. Because we were, with the exception of my male companion, the only women in the place, I assumed we were being targeted because of our gender, and were not welcome there. 

I left to play a few rounds of Mrs. Pac Man, running through all my quarters in less than a minute, and then checked out a few minutes of The Last Samurai, where the only patron was an avuncular bearded man who for some reason kept wanting to talk about Vanilla Sky. I politely engaged him in conversation, then turned back to the action onscreen, admiring Tom Cruise’s 90s era Bruce Jenner-meets-the haircut I had during 4th grade picture day coiffure. If there were a Buzzfeed listicle of definitive Cruise haircuts, The Last Samurai should rank, like, third. 

The Pakistani proprietor cornered me and asked if me and my male friend needed some condoms when we went back to the booths. I politely demurred. Apparently taking that as a sign that I was available, he then requested that I give him a kiss on the cheek. I let him kiss my hand, his lips feeling cracked and dry on my skin. I felt like telling him they should start charging patrons for coffee and use the savings to invest in a humidifier. 

I then met my friends in the gay theater, where there were three or four men quietly sitting and watching the action on screen. The movie was titled Brazilian Butt Boys 8, and one of the butt boys in question looked and sounded exactly like the actor who plays Grey Worm on Game of Thrones. 

My male companion, now well in his cups, went up to the screen and started gesticulating wildly, pantomiming rimming Grey Worm’s asshole. In the midst of his performance, we felt a familiar presence in the theater: the man with the shopping bags. 

My female friends and I recoiled; I felt both intensely violated and intensely cruel. For the first time, it hit me that although we had wandered into this pervert’s Mecca as ironically detached tourists, this man was a permanent fixture here; it was his home. We had invaded his space and turned him into a spectacle to be gawked at, and now he was letting us know how it felt, and might even show us what was inside the Duane Reade plastic bag while he was at it. (First guess: sharpened baby penises). 

I felt sick to my stomach, and wanted nothing more than to leave. I told my male friend so. He refused, and turned to the man. “Hey, man, get a move on,” he shouted. He didn’t move. 

“Hey, man,” he shouted again. As if snapping out of a reverie, the man turned to us and gestured to the screen, where Grey Worm was enthusiastically rimming a South American man with butt acne.

“Are these guys Brazilian?” he asks in a sharp Brooklyn accent. “I’ve seen this one.”

Almost collectively, we heaved a sigh of relief. This wasn’t a dangerous pervert who wanted to give us a taste of our own medicine and shank us with infant members. This was just a lonely man who wanted to take the opportunity to talk shop with a fellow twink porn connoisseur. 

“I’ve been to Rio, in the eighties,” he continued. “They’re the most beautiful people. These guys are nothing compared to them.”  We then chatted awkwardly, if not politely, about Brazil and the upcoming World Cup until we excused ourselves and walked out into the sunlight. We hadn’t made a friend, but we’d probably made the closest thing to it that you could in a porno theater, without exchanging any bodily fluids. 

On the way back to the F train, our male friend loudly mocked our fear of the blobfish with the Duane Reade bags. “You idiots thought he was cruising you,” he said, “when, in fact, he was cruising me. Fuck you narcissistic bitches! He loved me.” On the way home, a few blocks past the porno theater, we passed a few bakeries. One of them was advertising cronuts. We didn’t buy any, but it felt good to know they were there. 

Follow EJ Dickson on Twitter

Photographer Bradley Scott takes pictures of sex workers. Sometimes it's for his own work and sometimes it's for their own promotional websites. Not surprisingly the images are heavy on sex, nudity, and general adult themes. When I first viewed his shots they suggested another Terry Richardson wannabe. But maybe that's kind of the point. Richardson makes expensive coffee table books that dudes jerk off to. His pictures are the product of a bare fantasy—sex that is as removed from gentle copulation as you can get. It’s about separating the body from the brain. Bradley Scott, whether by accident or design, bypasses the bit where he transforms the model into the subject. By photographing sex workers he addresses the fantasy directly. People try and explain away the role sex plays in art, but are we really just holding out to see tits? Bradley thinks so, and he skips all the faux-intellectualism to get there. 

VICE: Tell us about this side of your work.
Bradley Scott: I shoot sex workers. Sometimes I shoot it for myself—or sometimes they pay me to shoot and they’ll use it for their websites and things like that. I usually get referred on from other sex workers or spend the day trolling sex worker websites trying to find girls who look interesting.

Why sex workers?
Because they’re cool and open to doing what I want them to do. They seem to see the artistic side and the human side of sex—it’s not a taboo. Sex is sex and they do it for a living so they can see the other side of it, it’s not just porn.

Also—I’m going to sound like a dick—but I wanted to see tits. I wanted to see naked girls. I wanted to shoot naked girls. The girls at the modelling agencies, they’ll get naked, but for the right photographer. And at that stage I wasn’t that guy. I wasn’t someone who could just say, "cool take your top off” and they would trust me because I’d never had that experience. There’s something about sex workers that’s kind of interesting and made me want to shoot them.

It’s easy to look at this and see a Terry Richardson or Richard Kern runoff. What makes your work different from the sexualised photography trend that’s everywhere at the moment?
A lot of people make that comparison. In some ways I take reference from both of them. I don’t know, I hope I bring something more of myself into it. It’s more intimate than just sexualised fashion pictures. I go in there with the intent to create images that relate to me or of something that’s happened to me, I just capture that. I hope there’s some kind personal thing in there that people can see.

How did you get this job?
I have no idea. I moved to Sydney from Perth and I was just like, fuck it, I’m gonna see if I can work this out. I emailed a couple of sex workers and showed them my earlier stuff, like my fashion stuff and all my other photography, and just told them I wouldn’t charge them and they’d get all the photos. One said yes, I just built it off of that.

Are you different on shoots now?
Maybe. I mean I think I can talk to people a lot easier now, and I can judge how someone’s feeling a lot easier that I’ve done a lot of this work. I can get a sense of what’s cool and what’s not cool and what I will and won't be able to get.

In the past you've interviewed a number of renowned war and documentary photographers for VICE, including Tim Page and Stephen Dupont. How does this side of your work relate to their kind of output?
I could probably make up some bullshit about how sex and war are related and how the battle inside myself regarding women and relationships is that of a war zone but that wouldn't be true. I interviewed those guys because I wanted to show their talent to the readers of VICE. Their work inspires me of course, and i've learned many things from them; they're my friends, but i don't think you can really compare our separate works alongside each other.

Are you the go-to guy for sex worker promo shots?
I wouldn’t say I’m the go-to guy. I get referred on a lot but nah, I’d say I’m good at it but I’m not the best at it. I just do what I do.

Follow Wendy on Twitter: @Wendywends

All photos by Patrick Anderson

On the North Carolina/Tennessee border, a history of bootlegging in its many forms has become somewhat endearingly engrained in the pop cultural perception of the region. Since the age of prohibition-era feuds, illicit producers in the region have proven themselves outstandingly resilient against state and federal regulation. A romanticized sense of backwards wiliness like that of the mountaineers has earned a place in America’s heritage.  

In the reality of modern Appalachia, poor folks who are decidedly isolated—physically and mentally—from the commercial draws of the big city stay buried deep in historical tradition. The mindset of the region often spurs innovative businessmen to become self-sufficient—using the land, resources and other people around for profit in the face of otherwise stagnant local economies.

Bootlegging, as such, begins with moonshine.

“You made it and sold it because you didn’t have a job but you had a little bit of corn and the knowledge,” said Deputy Patrick Anderson of the Watauga County Sheriff’s office located in the small mountain town of Boone, in western North Carolina. Anderson grew up in neighboring Wilkes County, the birthplace of NASCAR, with friends who bragged about daddies who drove ‘shine with Junior Johnson back in the day.

“I know people in Wilkes 40 or 50 years ago that would have starved to death if it hadn’t been for moonshine,” Anderson said.

Today, however, as outside commercial influence still slowly permeates the region (Boone opened its first Wal-Mart Supercenter less than five years ago, to much local uproar), the illicit liquor trade has gradually lost its place as an economic necessity. In his eight years with the narcotics office, Anderson has personally seen only one distillery busted—a couple of college kids with no idea what they were doing.

The heritage behind ‘white lightning’, and the sense of family pride once carried with it, has since been assimilated into the mainstream. Tourists can buy legally distilled white whiskey in state-regulated ABC stores, touting mason jars sporting the licensed likenesses of Popcorn Sutton and other characters of local bootlegging legend. 

Bootlegging as a trade, meanwhile, still carries on in other forms as a necessity, a product of the cultural landscape of the region itself. Instead of liquor, though, seven of Anderson’ years on the force have been dedicated to one of the top crimes in the county for the last twelve years: meth lab busts. Meth and moonshine have drawn comparisons before, but in an area where moonshine once reigned, the local culture and customs may have helped the meth trade thrive.

Meth lab seizures in North Carolina overall rose from 196 incidents in 2008 to 395 in 2011, according to a North Carolina Drug Control update issued by the Office of National Drug Control Policy. That’s an increase of 102 percent, nearly twice as much as the national average rose in that same time. Of those incidents in North Carolina, many spawn from along the Tennessee border, in the often-overlooked nooks and crannies of sleepy mountain towns.

Last November, Boone law enforcement picked up one of the largest methamphetamine production cleanup jobs in state history—in a shack in the woods behind Watauga High School. Watauga Sheriff Len Hagaman told local news sources that police located and seized a total of 181 individual labs in a single search that day, accounting for nearly half of the entire state’s total busted labs that year.

The high rate of occurrences is only possible as meth labs in the region have shifted over time from more clandestine red phosphorus setups—full house projects, à la “Breaking Bad”—to portable “shake and bake” labs like those seized in November. One-pot methods like these can be produced in empty soda bottles, using less than $30 of legally obtained ingredients.

Smaller, quicker batches mean that instead of a house or a hotel room, cooks can now make meth in cars, outhouses and even backpacks, to cite a few recent arrests in Watauga County.

This kind of independence, especially to notoriously independent mountain people, is appealing, said Brittany Means, an Appalachian Studies graduate student at Appalachian State University in Boone.

“Mountain people have a long history of multiple lifestyle living—selling a number of things, working a number of jobs and combining many sources of income to make ends meet,” Means said. When this meets a cultural need for escapism, a common malady of mountain culture due to its isolation, a cycle of addiction is inescapable. In the modern economy, this manifests as a meth-addled workforce funneled into mountain tourism gigs, a dying culture escaping the present while upholding an ideal of the past, for show.

Meth production falls neatly into that work pattern, and for some residents of Watauga, this pattern is now all they know, said Sgt. Daniel Duckworth, who heads narcotics investigation at the Boone Police Department.

For many repeat offenders, drugs are now simply the family business.

“Most of them, they’re good people with addictions,” Duckworth said.

Local Forrest Yerman has spent his entire life in Watauga County. When he was 17 years old, working at a fast food joint in Boone, the drug started circulating among his coworkers under the name “fast” or “crank”. Meth seemed harmless until the night his manager stole a deposit and went on the run for two months before turning himself in to the police. 

In another incident at the same location, two employees almost died from a drug overdose in the manager's office, while on the clock.

Especially in Boone, where employment opportunities are slim, Yerman said that “a drug that makes you feel invincible” offers one way out of reality—an easy way out.

“Making moonshine was hard,” Anderson said. “You have to find a place to hide, you have to build your still, you have to slip out in the middle of the night. You’re carrying 50 pounds of corn into the woods.”

Meth can be manufactured and sold in mere hours from its inception.

“There’s no hard work in it,” Anderson said. “There’s no pride.”

As with moonshine, ritual still plays its role, in some sense. Meth can speed up time spent in isolation and shorten the half-life of tradition, so instead of cherished family mash recipes passed down for generations, you get a few years of cooks who learn from each other and insist on using an empty grape Fanta bottle every time to ensure quality, Duckworth said.

Another part of why these small batch operations have been on the rise in recent years is due to larger scale busts further south, in cities such as Atlanta and Jefferson City, where most of this region’s pure crystal meth originates.

That’s the other problem of being isolated in the mountains: the further the drug has to travel, the more likely someone is to get busted along the way. In the face of week-or-month-long dry spells after the drug was first introduced to the region, addicts were forced find ways to get their fix at home.

That said, like liquor, some users actually prefer the homemade for its quality. Due to the process of crystallization, most crystal meth that's imported from Mexico and driven up north can only reach about 80 percent purity, Anderson said, while theoretically a home batch could reach anywhere from 86 to 92 percent, if made well.

“They’re only limited by their imagination, and when you stay up for 23 hours out of the day, imagination runs wild,” Duckworth said.

The meth trade is by its very nature a modern issue flourishing on these fringes where the “outside world” meets the still-undiscovered corners of the mountains where production can occur. It cannot wholly escape to the edges of town, under cover of moonlight. The ingredients required for production are more than conspicuous when purchased or stolen together, and in Boone, drug store owners usually recognize local cooks and their accomplices by face anyway.

When legal options run out, the trade then also manifests itself in increased property crimes. Criminal investigator Sgt. Matt Stevens said that he has never seen a violent home invasion in Boone that was not drug related. Most of these robberies occur when newbie dealers, often students, get too loose with their pot, pills and heroin, more often the drugs of choice for the annually fleeting college crowd, he said. For “smurfs,” the groups of runners who obtain supplies and money for meth cooks, laid back dealers are easy money.

“We would have less work to do if people were not so drug addicted in general,” Stevens said.

In 2011, a North Carolina House bill placed strict limits on the legally purchased quantities of pseudoephedrine, the key ingredient found in the decongestant medicines used to make meth. Additionally, since last year, all pseudoephedrine buyers’ information is now logged in the state’s NPLEX registry system for police surveillance. At one point Anderson himself was the top user in the state of the system, which alerts authorities when any suspicious pseudo purchase is made.

While NPLEX makes it easier for police to track and spot purchasing trends, it’s not perfect. More often than not, the only difference for established cooks is the need for more “smurfs” to space out purchases and avoid suspicion.

For otherwise good people with addictions, that can be more bad news.

Those with any meth charges on their record are not eligible for subsidized housing or food stamps, said Sonya Hamby, lead service coordinator at Boone homeless shelter The Hospitality House. This cycle of Appalachian poverty is infinitely harder to escape when these programs don’t have it within their legal capacity to help. 

Officers don’t see an immediate solution to Boone’s situational problem outside of more government regulation either. Duckworh said that even if he sees the potential for improvement in offenders, his arrests are just protocol.

“I don’t have any other authority. It’s not an option. The only place I can put you is jail.”

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A recent Israeli attack on Gaza. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Israelis on a hilltop overlooking Gaza cheered as missiles flashed before them on Thursday.

“It is an astonishing, macabre, and awful thing, really, to watch this display of fire in the air,” CNN Correspondent Diana Magnay remarked in a live broadcast when a missile erupted—along with applause from Israelis who had gathered on the hill outside Sderot, a city that sits just a mile away from northern Gaza.

Shortly after she signed off, Magnay tweeted, “Israelis on hill above Sderot cheer as bombs land on #gaza; threaten to 'destroy our car if I say a word wrong'. Scum.”

Though she quickly deleted the tweet, many saw it as unprofessional and questioned whether Magnay could report on the conflict in an objective manner. CNN reassigned her to Moscow on Friday, though a network spokesperson told The Huffington Post, “She deeply regrets the language used, which was aimed directly at those who had been targeting our crew” and not everyone present at the scene. Regardless, Magnay seemed to have been taken aback by the hostile behavior of those on the hill.

496 Palestinians, including nearly 100 children, have been killed by Israeli forces so far in this latest round of fighting which began on July 8, according to health officials in Gaza. Israel, which began a ground operation into the Gaza Strip on Thursday, says that 18 of its soldiers along with two civilians have been killed in the conflict.

Snacking on popcorn and dragging on hookahs, Israelis continue to turn out to what Dutch journalist Allan Sørensen sardonically dubbed “Sderot cinema,” in a tweet that’s been shared more than 12,000 times since he sent it out last week. Social media denizens expressed outrage, calling the image—which notably features one young woman flashing a thumbs up—“sickening,” “gruesome,” and “so pathetic and fucked up.”

In a post offering context to the vitriolic image, Sørensen writes, “For me, this attitude wasn't to provoke anyone. The people there sincerely didn't think there was anything wrong with what they were doing.”

That’s part of what makes the scene so chilling. Sørensen, a veteran Middle East correspondent, points out that the sort of callous enmity on display at the “Sderot cinema” can be seen amongst Palestinians as well. “On both sides, there's a total lack of empathy that I've never seen before.”

“It’s not a new thing,” says Ben Hartman, a journalist with the Jerusalem Post. He says Israelis have been dragging lawn chairs and love seats to the hills outside Sderot for at least the last ten years. “Whenever there’d be some kind of operation or air raid, people in that part of Israel would go to those hills overlooking Gaza and watch.”

For people living in and around Sderot, the conflict cuts close to home.

It might not seem this way to outsiders because the Israeli army is so much more powerful than Hamas-led forces, but Hartman says Israelis living alongside Gaza feel particularly vulnerable to attack. For them, “There’s probably a psychological way they feel like they’re hitting back.”

That’s because “Sderot cinema” isn’t just a front-row seat to a war saga, it’s also on the frontlines of an actual battle—even if the foes are dramatically misaligned.

Aid workers make their way through rubble in Gaza City. Photo via Flickr user Joe Catron

“You’re just kind of on this exposed hilltop and there’s nothing you can do,” Hartman, who’s been up to the hill numerous times to report on Gaza over the years, tells me from Tel Aviv. “If a rocket siren goes off, all you can do really is hit the dirt because there’s no real shelter up there. You can hide behind your car, but of course, you really wouldn’t want to be next to a car that’s hit.”

While they’re often intercepted or deflected, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) believe Hamas has several thousand rockets capable of reaching Sderot from Gaza.

That sort of danger might be part of the appeal. "It's great to be here,” Aaron Dew, a Jerusalem resident who travelled nearly 100 miles to see the rockets fall, told Nikolaj Krak, one of Sørensen’s colleagues. “You can feel the thunder and see the rockets. It is a quest for excitement. Yesterday a rocket landed just below the hill.”

But the thrill doesn’t sidetrack from the primary intrigue of the outdoor cinema. “We sit and look at Israel creating peace," Eli Chone, 22, an American living in Israel, told Krak.

Including a 16-year-old who was burnt alive in a suspected revenge attack, more than 100 Palestinians have now been killed for each of the three Jewish students whose murders were exploited by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to justify this latest incursion into Gaza. Hamas officials on the ground claim that three-quarters of those that have been killed were civilians. The militant group has already launched retaliatory attacks to counter the Israeli ground offensive and thwart Jerusalem's renewed efforts to destroy underground tunnels the territory relies on for artillery—as well as goods that meet basic human needs amid a blockade. Israeli officials often refer to the structures simply as “terrorist tunnels.”

Israeli troops search for what they call "terror" or "terrorist" tunnels in Gaza. Photo via Flickr user Israel Defense Forces

"Today, we have come to see the rockets hitting our cities occupied since 1948 and to see these moments of dignity and pride carried out by the resistance in Gaza," a Palestinian man in the West Bank city of Hebron told Reuters as Hamas launched rockets at the Israeli capital of Tel Aviv from Gaza last weekend.

After Hamas announced that the salvo would take place on television, Palestinians gathered by the hundreds to cheer on the rockets, shouting chants of “Allah Akbar!”—God is Greatest—as if to push them along. Almost none of them wrought damage or causalities on their Israeli targets due, in part, to the nation's new Iron Dome shield.

Another video in which three men excitedly shout in Arabic about rockets sweeping over East Jerusalem led to their arrests earlier this week.

“There it is! There it is!” a man working in East Jerusalem tells a coworker. “Lower your voice!” another hisses. The men were accused by area police of incitement to racism, violence, and terrorism, though the grounds appear to have been too tenuous for a formal indictment. The three were released within hours of their arrest. Still, the video gained a wide circulation on social media, and caused, among Israelis, the same sort of vitriol that the “Sderot cinema” tweet aroused in people who support the Palestinian cause. 

Though he says he's “filled with anger” when he hears of Israelis celebrating attacks on Gaza where he lives, 17-year-old Hossam Alfarra, has very different feelings about Hamas' attempts at retaliation. “It gives us hope to know we can still fight back,” he writes me from the city of Khan Younis.

Palestinian missiles intercepted over the city of Sderot, near Gaza. Photo via Flickr user Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs

For Sørensen, the shock associated with these viral photos and videos points to a broader issue that underlines the conflict outside of the domain of social media.

"Almost no one sees the obvious link there exists between the Arabic demonization of Jews and the Israeli demonization of Arabs. For both parts, it's a matter of maintaining the myth that there is a difference,” he wrote in an article.

"Most importantly, some Israelis and some Palestinians try every day not to face the enemy in the mirror."

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These pictures originally appeared in the 2014 VICE photo issue.

Ass-Cheek Desert, offices of EGGFLAN Creative, Los Angeles

Labia Coffee Beans, offices of Brått Coffee, Portland, OR

Glass of Piss, Hampton Inn, Lake Havasu City, AZ

Used Tampon, Bellagio, Las Vegas

Used Condoms, Best Western, Wickenburg, AZ

Semen on Blue Paper, Peppermill Resort Spa Casino, Reno, NV

For this year's photography issue, Jamie Lee Curtis Taete installed some bland-looking pictures of gross stuff in corporate settings where they might pass as pleasant abstractions. Read all of the articles Jamie writes for VICE here. 

In 1998 the journalist Ron Rosenbaum published Explaining Hitler. Contrary to what the title might suggest, it is not an explanation of Hitler, per se, but rather a 500-page meta-analysis of different theories intended to explain Hitler. Ron Rosenbaum traveled from the ruins of Hitler's Austrian birthplace to meet the historians, psychologists, and Nazi-hunters who have promoted different explanations for Hitler's evil. Whether the basis of the theories are plausible (Hitler's Jewish ancestry) or extremely unlikely (Hitler's penis was bitten off while he attempted to pee into the mouth of a billy goat) they are all presented with a relentless skepticism that makes reading Explaining Hitler a unique and destabilizing experience. (For a near comprehensive investigation of Hitler's evil that rises to address human evil as a whole it is also surprisingly funny.) This week a new, updated edition of Explaining Hitler was released, so I called up Ron Rosenbaum for a chat about Hitler, evil, and despair.

VICE: I just finished reading the afterword to the updated edition of Explaining Hitler. I was really glad to see that you formally introduced an analysis of the Downfall parodies.
Ron Rosenbaum: You know, it’s so interesting how resilient the Downfall parodies are, because they can somehow take any cultural meme and apply Hitler and trivialize it, and yet he remains embodied as this evil presence, not diminished by being in a Downfall parody. The Downfall parodies don’t trivialize Hitler’s evil, instead they trivialize the trivializations.

It seems to be a unique sort of Hitler joke that is immune to anti-Semitic misappropriation—no matter what Hitler never looks good or reasonable. When Sacha Baron Cohen released Throw the Jew Down the Well, the Anti-Defamation League released an open letter expressing concern his song would be taken at face value i.e., as an incitement to throw Jews down wells, and if you go by the responses in YouTube comments they may have been right.
I’ve not really paid much attention to the YouTube comments. What is the attitude you’re talking about?

Many viewers are enjoying the song on a purely anti-Semitic level. For them the joke is not about how normal Americans will passively join a call for racial violence but rather, ‘Haha serves those Jews right for taking everybody’s money.’
I think YouTube commentators generally are recognized as the lowest of the low, really the bottom of the barrel of internet commenters, and that’s saying a lot. YouTube is almost like a magnet that pulls all the moronic iron filings of the world toward it. I’m not surprised that anti-Semites show up there.

I agree completely, but it’s easy to marginalize anti-Semitism and assume that it’s just self-identifying neo-Nazi groups, yet all over YouTube there is Holocaust denial and extreme racial hate seething within many otherwise “normal” people. 
That’s certainly a downside of the internet. It also allows the publication and spread of all these anti-Semitic books like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, or unauthorized copies of Mein Kampf, but occasionally there are flashes of wisdom. I read about Godwin’s Law, that at a certain point every conversation online will devolve into Nazi or Hitler comparisons—if someone says vegetarianism is good the response is ‘Well, Hitler was a vegetarian.’ Godwin’s Law is really interesting. I don’t think you should ban comparisons to Hitler, but on the other hand comparisons to Hitler do overstate things most of the time. You can respond to a ban on soda by saying ‘It’s just like Nazi Germany,’ but it’s not.

Do you really think the free availability of Mein Kampf is problematic? Obviously it’s a core historical text in anti-Semitism, but it’s not something that I see anyone, anti-Semites included, referencing to justify their beliefs. Aside from its geographical specificity, the book just doesn’t seem like a very convincing argument.
Here in America probably there are not going to be many people who find Mein Kampf a convincing argument, but worldwide studies show that many people believe in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which is a conspiracy theory about Jews ruling the world that Mein Kampf was based on and that has certainly been circulated on the internet and also been published in many languages. But I think that Holocaust denial has superseded pure Nazism—it’s a Truther theory in a way, and you can see how in some ways almost all conspiracy theories share elements with Holocaust denial. It starts with the outrageous ‘I bet you can’t possibly believe I can prove it’ premise, but the fact that it’s so outrageous allows people to argue that the truth about it has been suppressed. It’s fascinating how tenacious Holocaust denial is.

I’m amazed by the persistence of the theories that you deconstructed when Explaining Hitler was first published 15 years ago. Even then they were often 30 or 40 years old, yet they are still written about in tabloids and widely shared on Facebook today. News stories about Hitler having escaped to South America, etc.
In some ways Hitler has survived through these survival conspiracy theories. There’s a fascination with the Hitler survival myth—the idea that Hitler lives or Hitler could be revived. I went into a bookstore the other day and picked up a new edition of The Boys from Brazil, which is one of the first Hitler recreation stories. It’s almost as if there’s a necessity to believe that he’s still with us. Maybe it’s easier to believe a lie than confront the uncertainty of what actually happened. Sir Richard Evans wrote an interesting article recently in the London Review of Books about the Reichstag fire. The conventional wisdom is that it wasn’t set by this lone Dutch communist, Van Der Lubbe, but that Nazis set fire to the Reichstag in 1933, falsely accused the Communists, and that allowed Hitler to declare a state of emergency, bar civil liberties, and basically seize dictatorial powers. But Richard Evans, who’s one of the most respected historians of the Third Reich, traced all the evidence and makes a very convincing argument that it truly was this lone Dutch communist, Van Der Lubbe, and that Hitler promoted it as a large Communist conspiracy so he could seize power supposedly to protect the nation from Communist attacks. There is one very striking sentence in his article where he says, ‘The Third Reich was founded by a conspiracy theory.’ That is certainly important to know. Conspiracy theories aren’t just laughable fantasies, they can be used by malicious powers.

There’s a great line in your article about Danny Casolaro where you are arguing against the possibility Casolaro was assassinated by clandestine government operatives. You wrote: “Danny was not the victim of a conspiracy but rather of conspiracy theorists…”
Yes. People are disoriented by conspiracy theories, damaged by them, and in Danny Casolaro’s case you could argue they drove him to suicide, which is not to say that there are no conspiracies. There are conspiracies––conspiracies to assassinate Julius Caesar and Abraham Lincoln for instance––but you have to judge them case-by-case. The problem is people who respond to any uncertainty by building these castles-in-the-air conspiracy theories before they find any evidence, which often obscures the search for truth. When I was researching the tragic death of Danny Casolaro I found that really he had fallen victim to a group of predatory conspiracy theorists who fooled him into thinking he had found the solution to all the bad things that had happened in the last half century, and when he couldn’t prove it, he proclaimed he was about to prove it and, I believe, committed suicide in order to create the illusion that people wanted to silence him about this imaginary conspiracy.

After the Santa Barbra shooting there were conspiracy theories that suggested Elliot Rodger’s apparent homosexuality might have been a sign that he was actually an 'actor,' which only served to obscure the fact that Rodger had been bullied for years for appearing gay. A psychologist went on Fox to talk abut the possibility that Rodger was gay and provoked vicious debates between different factions of explainers. There is something universal in Explaining Hitler’s themes, they reappear in almost every instance of contemporary evil—clashes between schools of explanation, conspiracies that only serve to distract from the search for truth. 
Oh my God, there are so many terrible psychological attempts to explain Hitler. I think the subject brings out the worst in talk show psychologists. There’s a lot of 'psychopathic narcissism' among those psychologizing Hitler. The examples in my book were two psychoanalysts—one wanted to claim that Hitler became Hitler because he was beaten by his father, and the other psychoanalyst was equally determined to believe that Hitler had a malignant mother who was over-protective. As if everyone who has an over-protective mother or abusive father turns into Hitler. If everyone who has been struck by their father turned into Hitler we would be in a lot more trouble than we are. The failure of psychoanalysis, psychohistory, pyscho-everything to really understand what made Hitler is a kind of indictment of the whole profession because they unthinkingly take their pet theories and try to project them on Hitler. They think if their theory can prove what made Hitler Hitler then they’ve demonstrated their great wisdom.

Elliot Rodger’s manifesto concludes with a fantasy about building concentration camps to exterminate all women so men can live together in a utopian single-gender society free from sexual temptation. Reading material like that does raise the question of whether Hitler’s evil was unique, or rather his ability to execute that evil, and whether the attitudes in Nazi Germany were fundamentally different from anything that exists today, as was proposed by Daniel Goldhagen. 
What makes me skeptical about the Goldhagen thesis, which is that an "eliminationist anti-Semitism" existed that primed Germans to willingly participate in mass executions, is that there were Germans who did refuse to go along with this eliminationist ideology. The chapter in my book that I feel closest to was about the anti-Hitler journalists of the Munich Post. The Munich Post was a socialist newspaper that covered Hitler from 1920, when he first appeared on the streets, through his takeover. It was extremely brave for them to take on Hitler, who had no compunction about beating up and killing the opposition. It was fascinating to me that they are not recognized in Germany—they should be. You’d think they’d be heroic figures and yet even German journalists had not recognized them until I found their archives and wrote about them. There was very little, if anything, in post-war Germany about them, and I think the reason is that it demonstrated it was possible for Germans not to robotically follow Goldhagen’s eliminationist anti-Semitism, but to resist it. There were also resisters like Martin Niemöller and the White Rose. These people are heroes and also a refutation of the idea that the German people were somehow victims.

When I was taking your class at the University of Chicago, you mentioned that you’d spent a decade writing the book and became increasingly depressed in the process, that your editor had to forcibly take the manuscript away from you because you wanted to continue working on it.
I’m not sure if it was that dramatic, but it’s a book that I worked on for ten years and could have worked on for ten years more. I think my editor was wise in telling me that I’d actually produced a book that did its job, and that to try to do everything would mean the book would never be completed.

Since the first edition's publication there have been major new pieces of historical information uncovered—like diaries from Hitler's sister or Hitler's medical records—does any of it strike you as having significant explanatory value?
The most striking and disheartening thing I came across was in Daniel Blatman's book The Death Marches in which he documents the way, even after the war was all but lost and the death camps dismantled, the guards put the remaining tens of thousands of Jews on the road to be tormented and slaughtered even if it meant losing the chance to save their own lives. The Hitler spell prevailed. The other new thing that I find repulsive in the postwar cultural response to Hitler and the Holocaust is the emergence of what I call 'the feel good Holocaust genre,' where films must have uplifting tributes to the human spirit like Life Is Beautiful—these films do not confront the true depths of human nature Hitler revealed.

There is a great section in the book were you classify the types of despair people encounter when they attempt to explain Hitler: evidentiary despair, epistemological despair, and then a third level where the despair turns into hostility directed toward the process of explaining itself.
That’s a key point. The final type of despair is the position of Claude Lanzmann. He believes that all explanation ultimately becomes exculpation. If you try to explain Hitler then you’re really moving away from the acts of Hitler, and who Hitler was, and you're saying it was some set of psychological factors: he had a Jewish grandfather, he read the wrong books, his mother died under the care of a Jewish doctor, you blame these sources as the problem. Lanzmann says all explanation is an excuse, like the way people explain serial killers by saying ‘Oh, they were psychopaths’ or ‘Oh, they were sociopaths,’ as if that explains anything. It explains nothing. I actually think some of the reductionist conclusions from neuroscience and neuroimaging studies do give support to the Lanzmann position. If we had an fMRI of Hitler it might show abnormal functioning in some region of the brain and then we could all blame it on a simple neural defect. My feeling ultimately is that there are dangers in the explanation that Lanzmann has outlined, but we shouldn’t be forbidden from the attempt, we shouldn’t stop searching for evidence. I don't claim to have a unified field theory of Hitler, no Higgs boson of Hitler, but Lanzmann wants to shut people up and not allow them to discuss the question ‘why?’ and I think there’s no more important question than why, even if there’s still no answer.

I suppose part of it also has to do with self-preservation. It's easier to settle on an explanation or refuse to ask why than engage with one or more of these three levels of despair, or with the depth of the uncertainty. 
Yeah, well, I guess most of the time I feel all three levels of despair.

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To both Jews and non-Jews the idea of an anti-Zionist Jew can sound like a contradiction in terms—an abuse of Rabbi Hillel’s most famous ethical aphorism, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me." But for Sam Weinstein, and for around 30 others, me included, tucked together in a small Jewish bloc at Saturday’s Gaza demo in London, standing against Israel is precisely what our background demands.

“I come from a Jewish tradition that has always fought for the underdog,” Sam told me as he unfurled a banner of the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network in the sticky heat. “One that has fought for social justice because historically we were the ones getting killed by the state.”

On the 8th of July, Israel began Operation Protective Edge, a military offensive which used the kidnapping and murder of three boys in Kfar Etzion, a settlement in the occupied West Bank, as a pretext for the bombardment and invasion of the Gaza strip. Since then, over 80,000 Gazans have fled their homes and more than 500 have died, the majority of them civilians.

For British Jews and other diaspora communities that oppose this, the added tragedy is that it is done in our name, in the expectation of our full, unflinching support. Before the Second World War, there were many Jews that refused to accept political Zionism as an ideology. But since 1948, when the State of Israel was established, support for it has slowly become almost unanimous.

“The Israeli state identifies Israel with all Jews,” Naomi Winborne Idrissi, a co-founder of Jews for Boycotting Israel Goods said to me as we passed Downing Street. “It aims to speak for all of us. But we say Israel and Zionism does not represent us.” Refusing to be wrapped up in a cause that is blindly and destructively nationalistic is why we were demonstrating in our capacity as Jews—both expressing our solidarity with Palestine and reclaiming ownership of our Jewish identity.

That’s not an easy thing to do. For a long time when I was growing up I felt that Israel did represent me. In 2002, during the Second Intifada, I remember standing with 40,000 people in Trafalgar Square, swept up in a haze of blue and white flags, proud parents and slogans I only half understood. 2002 was also the year I was bar mitzvahed. Every Saturday morning for nearly 12 months I sat in my local synagogue in Essex to hear stale one-sided sermons from the man supposed to be teaching me about Jewish values, ethics and intellectual life. In my early teens I was a member of the Federation of Zionist Youth, one of thousands of emotionally charged and politically naive kids, sent on summer camps and tours across Israel to sample Israeli culture in the most santitised, ideologically curated way.

In Britain, the United Synagogue, the largest Jewish denomination, puts “the centrality of Israel in Jewish life” as one of its defining values. The British Board of Deputies, the primary representative body of British Jews, claims in its constitution that it seeks to advance “Israel’s security, welfare and standing”. Dwelling on these facts is the only way I can make sense of why otherwise decent people, family and friends, show their support for what seems so obviously and monumentally wrong.

“The direction in which Jewish and Israeli people are going in is terrifying,” said Dan Nemenyi, one of the younger demonstrators in the bloc. “The Jewish establishment in Britain remains as right wing as ever, and still holds power over schools, synagogues and the representation of the community. In Israel a solution needs to be found for the situation of the Palestinians. But the response is full military occupation and war whenever it’s needed.”

It’s a depressing state of affairs, as a 2000-strong pro-Israel rally, also held outside the Israeli embassy the following day demonstrated. On Sunday alone more than 100 Palestinians were killed and 500 injured. In Shuja’iyeh, a small neighbourhood in the East of Gaza City, 66 bodies were found by medical authorities, 17 of them children. Horrifying videos have appeared online of civilians fleeing by foot, charred, bloodied bodies lying strewn around them.

Not a single reference to this reality was captured in the recycled platitudes held up by the demonstrators—no trace of irony or shame in proclaiming Israel as “the only democracy in the Middle East."

“British Jews have come out because although we do not live in Israel we want the Israelis to know we support them,” one man told me. “If we are not there in body we are there in spirit. Israel is our land. And as long as they continue to do the right thing, they will get our support.”

“I’m out today because this is a time of crisis for Israel,” another man said. “What Israel is going through with rockets coming in from Gaza is absolutely abhorrent. It’s important I come out as a British Jew to defend against this anti-Semitism.”

As the rally continued, a growing number of counter-demonstrators arrived through the crowd to a small area cordoned off by the police. Almost all of them were goaded, booed and harassed as they passed. One pro-Israel demonstrator ripped a Palestinian flag out of a man’s hand before throwing it onto the street to loud cheers. Another was held back by the police as he lurched at a man with two young children holding what looked like an umbrella with Palestinian colours. “I feared for my safety and my children,” the father told me after.

Another demonstrator, Douaa Elterk, was driving through the crowd to join the counter-protest when the car she was in was attacked by pro-Israel demonstrators. “We were assaulted as we passed by holding a Palestinian flag,” she said. “We were hit with sticks and one of our flags was snatched. Water was thrown and we were spat at. Somebody then blocked the road to stop us before the police moved them on. The Israelis are holding banners saying peace not war but are attacking everyone passing by. It’s such hypocrisy.”

As the rally came to a close a number of younger, masked counter-demonstrators turned up to face the large section of Israel supporters that had peeled off from the main area. At one stage the new arrivals broke the police line and kicked the window mirror of a car driving past waving an Israeli flag.

As I left, I received a text from a close family member who spotted me at the rally. “So Philip who were you supporting today?” she asked. Whatever optimism can be taken from a small group of people saying, “Not in our name," for most diaspora communities around the world, Israel should never be publicly condemned.

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Keep up to date with developments in Gaza with the VICE News dispatches, Rockets and Revenge