From the Kalamazoo clean-up site. Photo by Michelle Barlond-Smith.

It’s been three and a half years since Enbridge’s Line 6B pipeline ruptured in Marshall, Michigan, leaking more than 843,000 gallons of diluted tar sands bitumen into the Kalamazoo River. It was the largest on-land oil spill in the history of the USA, and remains, so far, as the largest spill of tar sands oil ever. Yet despite Enbridge’s immense, ongoing clean-up operation, which has spanned more than three years, cost over a billion dollars, and removed significantly more oil from the river than the company will admit it spilled, those living in Enbridge’s sacrifice zone have more questions than answers—even as most areas of the river have been re-opened for public use. High on the list of concerns is a chilling refrain: What are these chemicals that work crews have been dumping into the river in massive quantities, and are they dangerous?

At first, eyewitness accounts of workers spraying what appeared to be chemicals at the ground or out of boats, pouring unidentified liquid detergents into the water, or dumping hundreds of truckloads of sand-like powder into the river from dump trucks, became subjects of intrigue and speculation among community members and local activists. Another telltale sign was mysterious, oily foam floating on the water, and frequent helicopter deliveries of cargo to back-wooded areas of the Kalamazoo. There was an air of secrecy amongst those who carried out the work. They conducted large operations at night and told the residents that they were only spraying water or pesticides to repel mosquitos. Michelle Barlond-Smith, a former resident of the heavily impacted Baker Trailer Park, told me that “a lot of us thought they were hiding and covering up stuff, trying to bury it, the oil. The first time I heard about it was probably a month into the spill. One of my neighbours said: ‘Hey Michelle, they’re back there, they’re spraying something on the ground.’ And I’d go racing back there and the minute they would see me they would take off, running—literally sometimes running.”

Craig Ritter, an intrepid explorer of the Kalamazoo and a fisherman turned activist, told me similar stories. “Along with other residents, we were seeing a lot of dump trucks backing up to the river and dumping product in, which we thought at the time was probably sand,” he said. He had assumed that the trucks were there to “put sand back into the river [in order] to fill the holes that they were dredging,” but discovered that the trucks weren’t carrying sand at all. “When I did get a chance to get close to one of those trucks it had a real strong herbicide, almost pesticide, chemical smell to it,” Ritter explained. Like Michelle Barlond-Smith, Ritter had also sensed that Enbridge was hiding something. As a result of his repeated explorations of the Kalamazoo, he found himself occasionally “followed around by personnel vehicles,” and noticed “cars pulled up, and kind of eyeballing, if not having a camera out and taking pictures of me” when he lingered in sections of the river that had already been re-opened for public use.

I asked Graham White, an Enbridge spokesperson, if these allegations were true. He explained that “the spraying that you described was in fact water that had no added chemicals into it… we didn’t even use fresh water for that… I did also ask around about this dumping of a sand-like substance into the river. Of everyone I spoke to nobody has any idea what that was, they just know it wasn’t us. That’s not something that we would have done. Whatever that activity is, it’s not associated with us or any aspect of the initial response cleanup or the later remediation or recovery.”

Yet, as Craig Ritter continued to explore the Kalamazoo, a series of unlikely discoveries turned this hearsay into evidence. When the river was re-opened, Ritter said he “started seeing some fish and thought I would start fishing again. And I got in there, wading the river, doing what I normally do, and I happened to walk on top of one of these rocks, and it crumbled.” The crumbled rock was, in fact, not a rock, but a semi-porous ball of rock and tar which released an oily sheen if pressed or crumbled. Following this initial discovery, Ritter found many more of these tar balls lining the floor of the Kalamazoo riverbed.

The tar balls. Photo by Craig Ritter.

After sending photos of his tar balls to the EPA, and receiving no response, Ritter raised funds from a Michigan doctor to have his discovery independently tested. He sent a tar ball, a water column sample, and a sample of the diluted bitumen taken on the second day of the spill to ACT laboratories in Alabama, where they were analyzed by chemist Robert Naman. The tests confirmed that the oil in the tar ball was the same oil released three years earlier, but also determined that compounds in the tar balls contained “chemical degradation products that were consistent with surfactant use.” Naman’s report concludes that, “it is blatantly obvious that surfactants were used as well in the Kalamazoo River spill of 2010 and the resulting compounds present mimic those formed and still present in the areas affected by the BP oil spill of 2010.”

Surfactants, like dispersants, are chemical solvents which can break apart oil into micro-particles, enabling them to sink in water while having the pleasant effect of making oil spills look as though they’ve been cleaned up, when really they’ve just been spread out. There are also reports that dispersants can send oil particles airborne, and make the oil persist for much longer in the environment. Naman told me that in order for his tests to detect these compounds, a very large quantity of surfactant would have had to have been put into the water—either “somebody spilled drums and drums of it out there,” or sprayed it “from a boat or... from an airplane.”

The problem here is that, dispersed into smaller parts, oil particles are much more dangerous to humans and animals alike. A statement by scientists compiled after the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico argued that “oil, when combined with dispersants in the water column is more toxic to marine species than either oil or dispersant alone” and “can enter the marine food chain and bio-accumulate in animal tissue.” As for human bodies, the “same properties that facilitate the movement of dispersant through oil also make it easier for them to move through cell walls, skin barriers, and membranes that protect vital organs, underlying layers of the skin, the surface of eyes, mouths, and other structures… dispersants facilitate the entry of oil into the body, into cells, which can result in damage to every organ system.” The side effects of oil exposure, the statement warns, are more likely to occur if oil is mixed with a dispersant, and can include “lung, liver and kidney damage, infertility, immune system suppression, disruption of hormone levels, blood disorders, mutations and cancer.”

Naman believes that the chemical used was Corexit 9527a, 9527, 9500, or some derivative of Corexit, and noted that he found “the two types of Corexit degradation products that will show up after use.” This dispersant, which is among the most toxic and least effective products of its kind, was made famous in 2010 when BP Oil bought a third of the world’s supply and spilled it into the Atlantic Ocean, making their massive Gulf of Mexico oil spill look less significant, while effectively increasing the damage it caused. “The actions taken to add surfactants to spilled oil in the Kalamazoo River oil spill were at a minimum criminal as were those during the BP Macondo oil spill into the Gulf of Mexico,” Naman said.

Workers at the spill site. Photo by Michelle Barlond-Smith.

On top of this, not surprisingly, while acting as a “delivery system” into the body, Corexit itself is incredibly toxic. The material safety data sheets for Corexit 9527a classify the substance as an “Immediate (Acute) Health Hazard,” a “Delayed (Chronic) Health Hazard,” and a “Fire Hazard,” advising those that handle this substance to “use personal protective equipment.” It can cause a disgusting litany of health problems, including central nervous system problems, nausea, vomiting, injury to red blood cells, the kidney, or the liver, as well as bleeding from the nose, eyes, and ass.

After a day of speaking to people at the “head office” and “the most senior level” of the company, as well as the department that “was at the scene and coordinated the emergency response and remediation aspects of the entire response from the Kalamazoo spill,” Graham White called me with the company’s final answer: “I can say now, with a very high level of confidence after speaking to all those people, that we used no chemicals including dispersants, bioremediation agents, surface washing agents, surfactants, or washing agents of any kind in any part of the clean-up and in fact made a conscious decision not to use any chemicals on the site in the clean-up whatsoever.”

But trudging through the woods, near the Talmadge Creek site where the spill originated, Craig Ritter made a second unlikely discovery after he pulled some weathered documents out of the mud, which directly contradict Enbridge’s story. Issued by the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality, the documents list a series of chemicals permitted for use at the cleanup site: Glyphosate (Aquaneat), Triclopyr (Garlon 3A), Cygnet Plus surfactant, and Cygnet Select dye. The documents, dated July 16^th, 2013 and September 30^th, 2013, also list restrictions for using the water, with boxes checked off indicating “do not swim or bathe,” “do not drink water,” “do not use water for domestic purposes,” “do not irrigate food crops,” and “do not water livestock” until dates that the person filling out the form didn’t bother to specify. The name on the form is Brian Majka, an employee of Cardno JFNew who is listed in a trade journal as being a “senior restoration specialist” who “met with the Enbridge team at the [Kalamazoo] site.” According to the journal, Cardno JFNew was contracted by Enbridge to develop a restoration plan, with Majka personally responsible for contacting “suppliers of restoration materials.”

Regarding these documents, neither the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality nor the federal Environmental Protection Agency could be reached. But both of these notices were issued when the Kalamazoo was open to the public. According to Michelle Barlond-Smith, “there was no public notice in newspapers, there was no public notice to people who might be going down the river… they’re putting this stuff into the creek that leads into the river and no one would have seen it… In my opinion we’ve been turned into a large experiment, a giant slide if you will. We’re the canaries and the lab rats.” I asked Michelle if anyone has been using the river recreationally, and she said that her neighbour’s son went tubing on the river once it re-opened, only to break out in rashes shortly after. “For me, personally, I will not go in that river without protective gear,” she said. “I don’t think it’s clean, I don’t think it’s ever going to be clean in my lifetime after studying other oil spills. Exxon Valdez, twenty five years ago, you can still go and dig up oil. This stuff is there probably for the rest of your lifetime and mine.”

I asked Enbridge about these documents, and Graham White, and after initially responding that “our statements still stand,” he told me that “these documents are authorizations from Michigan DEQ for one of our contractors, JFNew, to use these products to control vegetation along the banks for Talmadge Creek.” He also noted that “the listed products are aquatic herbicides and related products that are used to control weeds and nuisance plants. They are not used for oil spill response or oil recovery.”

But this explanation doesn’t entirely absolve the company, and contradicts their initial comment that no chemicals were used “in any part of the clean-up” operation. Additionally, even if some of these products, like Aquaneat, are classified as herbicides, Cygnet Plus Surfactant is described as a "penetrant, wetter, and surfactant all in one product," designed to increase the uptake of herbicide into plants. This chemical's material data safety sheet clearly warns that it should be kept “out of drains, sewers, ditches and waterways” and "DO NOT release this product into the environment." Robert Naman, the chemist who analyzed Ritter’s tar balls, noted that these herbicides also contain compounds with dispersant-like properties, that “activate and penetrate,” and include “polyethylene glycol... an OL compound very similar to what we found.” Naman also reiterated that a very large quantity of these chemicals would need to have been present in the river in order to be detected. “It would have to be used in the River to treat the oil in the same manner as they did in the BP oil spill,” he said.

Dr. Riki Ott, an oil spill anthropologist who has been assisting Barlond-Smith with community health surveys, suspects that Enbridge was able to use these products because they may belong to a category of chemicals separate from “dispersants” and “bioremediation agents” which “don’t have any reporting requirements.” She was also surprised that none of the chemicals listed in the document “are on the EPA product schedule. It’s supposed to be the only list of products that can be used.”

To Dr. Ott, the adverse health impacts of recent oil spills seem to be amplified by the use of solvents that are “petroleum distillates… the base chemicals for fracking fluids, diluents and dispersants.” She believes that, whether or not Enbridge’s clean-up operation involved dumping dispersant-like chemicals into the water, tar sands diluted bitumen is already a much more dangerous substance than conventional crude because it combines bitumen with a solvent. “The oil-solvent combination is more toxic than the oil alone. And I am fairly confident saying that same thing with diluents and tar sands, just based on the nature of the chemicals involved,” she said.

Spraying water? Pesticides? Something else? Photo by Michelle Barlond-Smith.

So when she visited Marshall, Michigan, she wasn’t surprised to see the same host of health problems that she encountered after the Gulf spill. “What I saw were seizures… respiratory problems that didn’t clear up… people complaining about tingling appendages, brain fog, confusion, and memory loss, really bad headaches, and this is all symptomatic of central nervous system problems that are a hallmark characteristic from oil or solvent exposure. I saw the skin lesions, hair loss… people have also been complaining of hemorrhoids,” Ott said. Barlond-Smith, similarly, noted that, in conducting health surveys, she is only now beginning to see the long-term impacts of the spill. “I’m starting to see kidney problems, liver problems, gallbladder problems, and the cancers are starting to show up,” she said.

Meanwhile, the Environmental Protection Agency estimates that “180,000 gallons of Line 6B oil (plus or minus 100,000 gallons) remain in the river bottom sediment.” They have ordered Enbridge to dig up the rest of the recoverable oil (“about 12,000 – 18,000 gallons”) and finish cleaning up altogether by December 31^st, 2013, leaving the remaining oil behind to collect over time in “sediment traps.” Enbridge has applied for their deadline to be pushed back until March 2014, but their application was denied after several earlier extensions were granted.

And as Enbridge is trying to buy themselves more time to clean-up, they are also seeking permission to pump diluted bitumen through many more pipelines across North America—including the proposed Northern Gateway pipeline over British Columbia’s Rocky Mountains and the 38-year-old Line 9 pipeline which runs through the two largest cities in Canada and is, in age, design, and integrity, almost identical to the Kalamazoo’s Line 6B. In each of those communities, Enbridge has encountered public resistance—even as the full scope of their Kalamazoo fuck-up is still coming to light.

For Craig Ritter, like Michelle Barlond-Smith who is committed to exposing the full health impact of this accident, there was never any question that the company must be forced to own up to the mess that they’ve made. “Everybody asks me why I’m doing this. I love the woods and the water, I love the air and the soil and all that stuff, you know? It’s that simple. It’s the right thing to do. I couldn’t have walked away from it and had all these questions… I hope the people that are responsible for getting this product into the river, whether it’s Enbridge themselves or contractors, I hope they’re held accountable and it’s made right. My biggest fear is for the deadline to come and go and Enbridge is given a clean bill and they’re able to walk away, and here the residents of Michigan and the taxpayers are going to be left with whatever type of clean-up or responsibility there is afterwards. And there’s no way in heck that anybody here in Michigan should be held liable or take any accountability for it,” Ritter said. “We’ve been suffering enough from it.”

NEWS

This Is What Winning Looks Like 

My Afghanistan War Diary 

By Ben Anderson

US Specialist Christopher Saenz looks out over the landscape during a patrol outside the village of Musa Qala, Helmand province. (AP Photo/Rodrigo Abd)

I didn’t plan on spending six years covering the war in Afghanistan. I went there in 2007 to make a film about the vicious fighting between undermanned, underequipped British forces and the Taliban in Helmand, Afghanistan’s most violent province. But I became obsessed with what I witnessed there—how different it was from the conflict’s portrayal in the media and in official government statements. 

All I had to do was trek out to one of the many tiny, isolated patrol bases that dot the barren, sunbaked landscape and hang out with British infantry troops to see the chaotic reality of the war firsthand: firefights that lasted entire days, suicide bombers who leaped onto unarmored jeeps from behind market stalls, IEDs buried everywhere, and bombs dropped onto Afghans’ homes, sometimes with whole families of innocent civilians inside. 

In 2006, when troops were sent into Helmand, British command didn’t think there’d be much fighting at all. The mission was simple: “Facilitate reconstruction and development.” The UK Defense Secretary John Reid even said he hoped the army could complete their mission “without a single shot being fired.”

But with each year that followed, casualties and deaths rose as steadily as the local opium crop. Thousands more British troops were deployed, then tens of thousands of US troops, at the request of General Stanley McChrystal, following a six-month review of the war after President Obama took office. Still, the carnage and confusion continued unabated. Suicide bombings increased sevenfold. Every step you took might reveal yet another IED.

In February 2013, on his last day at the helm of NATO forces in Afghanistan, General John R. Allen described what he thought the war’s legacy will be: ‘‘Afghan forces defending Afghan people and enabling the government of this country to serve its citizens. This is victory, this is what winning looks like, and we should not shrink from using these words.’’ 

The US and British forces are preparing to leave Afghanistan for good (officially, by the end of 2014), and my time in the country over the last six years has convinced me that our legacy will be the exact opposite of what Allen posits—not a stable Afghanistan, but one at war with itself yet again. Here are a few encapsulated snapshots of what I’ve seen and what we’re leaving behind. 

November 2012 – “Chai Boys”

Lieutenant Will Felder, left, after speaking with a villager in the Baghran Valley in Helmand province. (AP Photo/Rodrigo Abd)

For the vast majority of troops in Sangin, a city of 14,000 and a hub of opium production in the south of the country, the war was already over by late 2012. The US Marines had abandoned the patrol bases they’d established at great cost over the last six years and pulled back to the safety of their headquarters, just north of the city center, which they rarely left. Sangin was firmly in the hands of the Afghan government. Two teams of 18 marine “advisors” occasionally visited the patrol bases, which had been repurposed by the Afghan police and army, but in no way could this be construed as a sign of success. 

Transition is the fourth and final stage of NATO’s counterinsurgency policy, but it isn’t supposed to happen until the Taliban have been cleared out, infrastructure has been built up, and the Afghan security forces have been trained and recruited to the point where they are ready to take over without outside support. 

After spending five weeks in Sangin, it was obvious to me that Afghan security was nowhere near ready. I’d seen policemen so high on heroin they couldn’t stand up straight or tie sandbags, and soldiers firing hundreds of rockets, bullets, and grenades at the smallest of suspicious movements in the desert—“Fuck them, they are all Taliban here,” one blurted out when he was told to stop shooting at a father and son—and on at least six different occasions, the use of child soldiers.

The Afghan Police  was still active, too, kidnapping civilians for ransom or as bargaining chips in prisoner exchanges. Weapons, fuel, and equipment NATO had supplied to the Afghan National Army were being sold at the local bazaar, and “ghosts”—officers who technically didn’t exist—filled police payroll sheets. “Have you ever seen The Sopranos?” said Major Bill Steuber, the marine in charge of the police-advisory team, describing the corruption. “It’s vast.” 

Worst of all, police commanders were routinely abducting young men and using them as “chai boys,” house servants who were also kept as sex slaves. In separate incidents, three of those boys had been shot dead while trying to escape. One was shot in the face and one was shot at police headquarters. When a fourth boy was shot, Steuber marched into the police chief’s office and demanded action.

The police chief first said that the boys had chosen to live on the patrol bases: “They like being there and giving their asses at night.” He also claimed that the practice of soldiers sexually abusing them was necessary. “If my commanders don’t fuck these boys, who will they fuck? Their own grandmothers?” 

January 2011 – “The Taliban Will Be Here Half an Hour After You Leave.”

An Afghan National Army soldier prepares for an operation in Taliban-held territory.

The man who came out of the mosque told the marines standing in the street that his daughter had been shot in the shoulder by a stray bullet the day before. The family had taken her to a hospital themselves, with no help from either the marines or the Afghan National Army.

One of the marines blamed the shooting on the Taliban, saying that they use civilians for cover. He added that in the present scope of things, this was a good sign because it meant they were losing control and becoming more desperate. 

The mullah who accompanied the man from inside the mosque smiled as if his suspicions had been confirmed, then spoke directly to an Afghan National Army sergeant nearby. “There is no security beyond the road,” he said. “They are just saying this to make themselves happy. The Russians did the same. God willing, they will suffer the same fate as the Russians.

“Yes, the Taliban are here, but who are the Taliban? They are Afghans,” he continued, waving his hand at the marines. “Who are they? We two have to come together! Because my orphans will be left to you, yours to me. They,” he waved at the marines again, “will be leaving. God will cause them such problems that they will forget about here.” Instead of imparting the mullah’s words to the soldiers, the translator balked, saying instead, “We used to live in the Green Zone but it was dangerous, so now we live here and it’s very good. The children can play.” 

“That’s good,” said one marine, unaware of how badly he was being misled. “We are trying to increase security, and I’m happy that you feel safer.” 

The interpreter spoke directly to the mullah. “I told him you said it was very secure here. I didn’t tell him what you said. I told him the security was good here.”

The mullah argued that the three of them—the ANA sergeant, the translator, and himself—should unite against the foreigners. “Yesterday they killed six people in a house,” he said. “Only two babies were spared. Is that the meaning of democracy? We don’t want this democracy. We don’t want this law of the infidel. We want the rule of Islam.”

The mullah’s claim that six people had been killed in their home was eventually translated for the marine. “Well, we do drop a lot of bombs,” he said, “but when we do, we are very careful where we drop those bombs, and who we are dropping them on.”

“If you don’t get upset, I will tell you something,” said the mullah. “Whatever you have brought into Afghanistan, your people are here for killing. Your tanks are here for killing. Your cannons are here for killing. Your planes are here for killing. You haven’t brought anything that we like. All you have brought are the things for death.” 

“I understand that you don’t like us here because we attract bullets and we make a lot of noise and sometimes people get hurt because of us,” said the marine. “But these things are going to have to happen before your country can become peaceful, and if you help us and help the ANA and we win, we’re not going to have to be here in your lives.”

“The Taliban will be here half an hour after you leave,” said the mullah, smiling. “They don’t kill us. With them, we don’t worry about going outside. They don’t touch us. We don’t touch them.” 

It was difficult to tell if the mullah was on the verge of laughter or rage. “Thousands of people have died in this area. As you can see, it’s empty. All you have done is build one and a half kilometers of road in the bazaar, but against that, more than 5,000 people have lost their lives. Men, women, and children. Now you can compare these two things against each other, which one of these do you say is better?”

When the conversation ended, the mullah softened slightly. He said there was a small guesthouse inside the mosque and invited everyone in for a cup of tea. The marine looked at his watch and replied, “I would love to drink tea with you today, but unfortunately I’m all out of time, and I need to continue my patrol. But the next time we come down here, I would be more than happy to sit down with you and drink tea and discuss things.”

The mullah’s smile turned back to a snarl. He gave up on whatever he thought talking could have achieved. 

January 2010 – “Jesus Fucking Christ. It Was Right There.”

The Afghan police HQ is full of jeeps that have been destroyed by IEDs or shot up. US and British soldiers drive around in million-dollar bombproof trucks, but Afghan soldiers are given unarmored pickup trucks.

Outside a house in Sangin, several large rocks were suspiciously strewn along a path. Lance Corporal Jeff Payne was on his knees, scraping at the ground with his knife, feeling for metal. Lance Corporal Blake Hancock slowly followed, stretching each leg straight out and pressing lightly on the ground with his toes before each step, looking like someone trying to avoid puddles in his best pair of shoes. Hancock thought the rocks were a guide for someone at the other end of a command wire. “They see someone walk by it, they know that’s when to pull the trigger... Boom!” He fanned his hands out to demonstrate the explosion.

“See that hole filled with rock?” said Hancock. “I’m not going there. That’s like the one that hit McGuinness,” a fellow soldier who was the victim of an IED. 

We approached an S-shaped bend in the path, a junction of four alleys.
“There have to be IEDs on this fucking corner,” Hancock said. 

No one knew it at the time, but Hancock was absolutely right. Buried underneath our feet was a seven-IED-long daisy chain, designed to kill or maim an entire platoon. Two command wires led down a pair of alleys; at the end of one, someone watched, waiting to detonate the bombs. That person held the power source, probably a battery, in one hand and the command wire in the other. As soon as he connected the two, the daisy chain would go off. This method left no metal in the ground for the soldiers to detect. 

I held my breath until I got past the corner. Four marines appeared behind me, looking down each alley through the sights of their rifles. Payne propped a ladder against a wall, trying to find a route off the path—the “fucking path,” as everyone now called it. As he reached the top of the ladder, a huge explosion roared behind us. I turned to see two plumes of brown dust rising in the air. Stones and rocks rained down on us.

“IS ANYBODY HIT? IS ANYBODY HIT?” screamed the marines. I couldn’t see around the corner but could hear a few awful groans.

I walked back to see what had happened. Everyone had frozen where they stood. The groans became horrendous. As the dust cleared, I saw a crater with the fragments of a yellow plastic jug in it. The jug was big enough to have held about 40 pounds of explosives, enough to blow several people to pieces.

“Jesus fucking Christ. It was right there,” said a marine. He pointed at the crater, about eight feet away.

Another marine was on his knees, his right hand reaching for something to grab hold of. But his palm couldn’t find the ground. In the distance a medic was screaming: Could he hear? Could he see? Could he crawl away from the corner? At least three IEDs had gone off together, but everyone was certain there were more around them.

Payne appeared next to me. He surveyed the corner for a second, then quietly walked forward. He stepped over the first crater and bent down to assess the casualty. It was Corporal Christian Thomas, known as Big T. The other marines used to playfully mock him because he flinched at any explosion, even small, controlled ones.

“Can you stand up, can you see?” asked Payne.

“He’s blind! Big T’s a priority!” someone screamed into a radio. Less than three feet away from Big T’s head was another crater, full of a fizzing dark powder that sounded like a fistful of matches being scratched alight at once. 

Payne tried to get Big T onto his feet, but he just patted the ground around him and groaned. “Can you see? Can you stand up?”

“Huh?”

“Can you see?”

“Huh?”

“He can’t hear you, man,” the medic shouted. Big T was blind and deaf. Payne helped him to his feet, but he collapsed, groaning. “Arrrggggh, fuck.”

“Follow me, grab my shoulder,” said Payne. Putting Big T’s arm around his neck, he staggered back down the path.

I was suddenly alone, standing between two smoking craters. “Stay where you’re at, don’t move,” yelled a marine in front of me.

Big T was lowered to the ground. He groaned some more as his arms hung lifelessly from his body, like a stuffed dummy’s. The black powder in the crater was now on fire, crackling ominously.

Big T put his hands to his ears. His mouth was wide open, and his glasses were covered in thick dust, hiding his eyes. 

I shouted to the nearest marine that the powder was still burning. “Could it explode?”

“I don’t know, I’m not going over there,” he said.

Miraculously, none of the marines had been directly on top of the IEDs when they exploded. No one other than Big T had been seriously injured. The people at the front of the patrol—Payne, Hancock, four other marines, and me—had been standing on top of a bunch of the IEDs for about ten minutes before we had walked around the corner. Payne returned to continue sweeping the path until we could get up to a roof. 

A marine pointed down one of the alleys. He said he was sure that was where the triggerman was hiding. “It’s all right,” he said. “He’ll be dead soon.”

August 2009 – “This Is Some Vietnam Shit.”

An Afghan police officer so high on heroin that he can barely stand or tie sandbags.

The marines slept on the concrete floor of a long, thin building that was once a school. I was told to sleep with the medics, who had one room to treat casualties, one room for the doctor, and a mud courtyard that I shared with about 15 others. My bed was a stretcher, when the medics weren’t using it.

“Have you seen what’s next door?” said a marine. “A gynecologist’s bench with a dustbin at the end. How apt for this country.”

There was one casualty at the medical center. He was a local boy, a paraplegic who, despite being “somewhere between 16 and 30,” couldn’t have weighed more than 85 pounds. He’d been discovered in a nearby house that was ablaze after being hit by a Hellfire missile. His family had fled, along with everyone else, when the marines first landed. Unable to move and barely able to talk, the boy had almost starved to death. He told the interpreter that he’d been injured in a farming accident, which none of the marines believed. They assumed anyone who had been injured in the area was either involved in combat or making IEDs.

The marines patrolled the surrounding area daily, but the Taliban were all but invisible. “This is some Vietnam shit,” said one. “Most of the time it’s like we’re getting shot at by bushes.”

One soldier was miserable because his first phone call home had not gone well. During the pep talk before the operation, Echo Company had been told that “the world is watching,” but his friends back home told him that most Americans didn’t know there had been any fighting. He was just 21, had completed a tour of Iraq, and spent some time in prison for assault. 

“Our families know what’s going on,” he growled. “People in the military know, but the general population doesn’t. America’s not at war. America’s at the mall,” he growled. “No one fucking cares. It’s, ‘What’s up with Paris Hilton now? Britney Spears fucking this...’ The average American doesn’t fucking know when people die over here.”

Another marine agreed. “Every day, we get shot at. I finally got to make a phone call today, expecting it to be like, ‘Oh, I miss you so much.’ No. It’s ‘Everything’s fine. I’m partying, having a good life down here.’ Doesn’t even ask me how I’m doing. That’s when I realized that people don’t give a shit. No one even really mentions 9/11 anymore. To me, that’s the whole reason I’m over here. That’s why I went to Iraq, why I joined the Marine Corps. Now we’re here, and I really don’t know why.”

Some of the marines were just 11 or 12 years old when 9/11 happened. And the younger they were, it seemed, the less convinced they were that they were fighting the war on terror. One private, who had signed up exactly one year before, five days after his eighteenth birthday, said, “I don’t know. Where I was, the economy wasn’t good, you couldn’t get a job, my stepdad was suffering, had a hard time finding a job. I knew this was a good organization, regular paycheck, they take care of you. Sitting here now, I’m helping my parents out a lot.” His pay was just over $20,000 a year.

A fellow marine stroked a small bush with his gloved hand. “Look at this fucking thing, it’s nothing but thorns. It’s just angry. It literally has no function except to cause pain. Everything in this country is just so fucking angry.”

June 2007 – “They Are Our Kings.”

The finger of the Gereshk district police chief trembled as he raised it in emphasis. He was a small man with a neatly cropped, graying beard. “The ISAF [International Security Assistance Force] operations are not useful,” he said. “They leave, and the Taliban come back. They are indiscriminate. They see no difference between women and children and the Taliban.” 

I thought he was going over the top, trying to let everyone know that he empathized with them. But then I realized that he too had lost several family members to an air strike, which surprised no one but me. “They have hit me so hard that I am stunned. What can I do? I have lost four of my brothers. How can I look after their families now?”

When he had finished, the elders raged about the bombings, saying that the Taliban were often far away by the time the bombs were dropped, that security was getting worse, and that more civilians would soon start joining the Taliban if things didn’t change. “Life has no meaning for me anymore,” said one man. “I have lost 27 members of my family. My house has been destroyed. Everything I’ve built for 70 years is gone.”

Metal containers were brought in, placed on tables in front of the group, and opened. The elders were given bricks of 500-afghani notes, signing for them by dipping their right thumbs in ink and making prints. They received roughly $2,000 for each family member killed. 

“I lost 20 people, and I was given 2 million afghanis [about $36,000],” said one man. “It was before 12:30 at night, when your forces came to our area. They were involved in a fight, but the Taliban retreated. Later, a jet came and dropped bombs on our house. Two rooms were destroyed. In one of the rooms, my two nephews and my son were there. My son survived. I rescued him from the debris. Six of my uncle’s family were in the other room. All became martyrs. They were buried under the soil. I moved the children away and came back to rescue those under the debris. While we were trying to do that, the children were so frightened they started running away. The plane shot them one by one.

“All we want is security, whether you bring it or the Taliban. We are not supporting war. We support peace and security. If you bring peace and security, you are my king. If they bring security, they are our kings.” 

For more misery and hopelessness from Afghanistan, watch Ben Anderson’s new film, This Is What Winning Looks Like, airing this Wednesday on VICE.com.

Go buy Ben's book, No Worse Enemy, now out in paperback, and send him tweets at @BenJohnAnderson.

More stuff from Afghanistan: 

Inside Afghanistan

Life in Afghanistan

The Black Tar Tits of Afghanistan

As Syria’s bloody civil war enters its third year, fighting has reached the country’s Kurdish-dominated northeast, a region until recently almost untouched by the conflict. The Kurdish PYD party and its YPG militia, which is affiliated with the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) in neighboring Turkey, took over control of much of Hassakeh province from the Assad regime in the summer of 2012, and with it control of Syria’s precious oilfields.

But the PYD’s hopes of staying neutral in the conflict and building an autonomous Kurdish state were dashed when clashes broke out with Syrian rebel forces in the strategic border city of Ras al-Ayn. That encounter quickly escalated into an all-out war between the Kurds and a powerful alliance of jihadist groups, including the al-Qaeda affiliates ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra.

In September of 2013, VICE crossed the border into Syria’s Kurdish region to document the YPG’s counteroffensive against the jihadists, who had struck deep into rural Hassakeh in an attempt to surround and capture Ras al-Ayn. With unparalleled access to the Kurdish and Syrian Christian fighters on the frontlines, we found ourselves witnessing a bitter and almost unreported conflict within the Syrian war, where the Assad regime is a neutral spectator in a life or death struggle between jihadist-led rebels and Kurdish nationalists, pitting village against village and neighbor against neighbor.

Donka and Georgi Kostov in the burn-victim unit of St. George hospital in Plovdiv, two weeks after Georgi’s suicide attempt.
All photos by Jackson Fager.

I

t’s not every day that you meet someone who has set himself on fire. One reason for this is because it’s pretty much the most awful and insane thing imaginable. Another reason is that people who light themselves ablaze usually die soon afterward. Surprisingly, it’s not always the burns that kill them. Often, flames will enter a self-immolator’s lungs through his mouth, causing him to asphyxiate.

On a recent trip to Bulgaria, I met not one but two people who had survived suicide attempts by fire. “Solving problems with gasoline has become the new trend,” Georgi Kostov told me in the burn-victim unit of St. George hospital in Plovdiv, Bulgaria’s second-largest city. He was still in shock, so his wife, Donka, did most of the talking. 

She explained how the couple were unemployed, in debt, and struggling to feed their children, when, two weeks before my visit, Georgi disappeared into his bedroom at their apartment in the industrial city of Dimitrovgrad. He came out doused in gasoline, convinced that the Mafia was outside his front door to collect on his debts and kill him. Standing in front of his family, he flicked on his lighter and burst into flames. Donka leapt onto him to put out the blaze while his sister threw water on him. They succeeded in saving Georgi, but his wife suffered third-degree burns all over her arms in the process. “He was so depressed,” she said. “He didn’t know how to make anyone notice our poverty. So he did this horrible thing.” 

Georgi’s not the only one. In the past six months, Bulgaria has experienced a wave of self-immolations. During one span in February and March alone, six Bulgarians killed themselves with fire, and at least ten people in total have done so in the past six months. (That’s more than in any other country except China, where suicidal Tibetan Buddhist monks use the tactic to protest religious persecution.) 

A memorial to Plamen Goranov, outside City Hall in Varna, where the artist set himself on fire on February 20, 2013.

Some say the inspiration for it all was a 36-year-old photographer named Plamen Goranov, who burned himself on February 20 in front of City Hall in Varna, a resort city on the country’s Black Sea coast. According to investigative journalists, Varna’s commerce is controlled by a business group called TIM, which the former US ambassador to Bulgaria, James Pardew, accused of racketeering, prostitution, and extortion in a 2005 diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks. TIM, he said, was the “up-and-coming star of Bulgaria’s organized crime.” Plamen set himself on fire to protest TIM’s alleged relationship with Varna’s mayor, Kiril “Kiro” Yordanov. Before he set his body aflame, he propped up a sign demanding the “resignation of Kiro and all the city council by 5 PM.” 

When Plamen died 12 days later, he got his wish: memorials and vigils in his honor were held in every major city, and under pressure from his own political party, Yordanov resigned. Buoyed by this success, protests against corruption had erupted throughout the country, and by the end of February they’d grown so large that they forced the prime minister, an alleged former amphetamine smuggler named Boiko Borisov, to also resign. When his replacement, a Socialist named Plamen Oresharski, nominated a widely hated and allegedly corrupt media magnate named Delyan Peevski to run Bulgaria’s State Agency for National Security, protesters forced Peevski to step down too. 

LEFT: After he woke up from a coma in the hospital in Sofia, Dimitar Dimitrov took a selfie on his cell phone. “I dropped the phone five times trying to take it,” he said. “I looked like Quasimodo.”
RIGHT: A protester at one of the nightly marches in Sofia, calling for the resignation of the current prime minister, Plamen Oresharski.

On my visit to Sofia, Bulgaria’s capital, in June, thousands marched through the streets every night. By this point the protesters had upped their demands, calling for Prime Minister Oresharski’s resignation. In a shout-out to the man whose self-immolation in 1969 catalyzed the downfall of the Soviet regime in Czechoslovakia, people began celebrating Plamen as “Bulgaria’s Jan Palach.”

It remains to be seen whether the past six months have signaled the blooming of a Bulgarian Spring, or have instead been a disastrous demonstration of nihilism and despair. Whatever the case, one thing is clear: the self-immolations continue intermittently, and serve as one of the most dubious legacies of Bulgaria’s earnest attempt to create a less corrupt and more democratic country. “The only way to get anyone to listen to us and pay attention,” Dimitar Dimitrov, another self-immolation survivor, told me, as he was convalescing at a little cabin in the rural region of Silistra, “is to set ourselves on fire.” 

In a country where people are still struggling to embrace democracy after nearly 50 years of Communist rule, and where EU membership, which the country obtained in 2007, hasn’t significantly improved the poverty rate or transparency in government, self-immolation remains one of few available forms of critique in Bulgaria. “We are killing ourselves because there’s no way to meaningfully engage with the political system,” Dimitar told me. “But something weird happened to me—I survived. I survived so I can tell the story.” 

VICE: Describe what happened to you on March 13, the day you set yourself on fire.
Dimitar Dimitrov: That day started 23 years ago [since the Communist government collapsed, in 1989]. Our government—first the Communists and then the “democratic” politicians—has always been connected to the oligarchs, to the criminal world, to incompetent people. Under Communism, I had to wake up at 5 AM so that I could stand in line to buy milk and bread for my child. Under this government, I was a blacksmith until my workshop went out of business. The job that was feeding my family went away. Then electricity became impossible to afford. Under Communism, we had money, but there was nothing to buy. Now, there is everything to buy but no money. It’s always been a recession, and I finally got tired of it.

Dimitar Dimitrov at his wife’s cabin in the rural village of Silistra, four months after his self-immolation. 

What was the last straw?
I had decided to do it the day before. The prime minister [Boiko Borisov] had just resigned and new elections were announced, and I was sick of all of it. So I decided to kill myself in front of the president’s building. I woke up early and had coffee with my wife. I had made up my mind, but I didn’t tell her anything. I was very quiet. After that, I went to the store and got one beer. I drank it with my neighbors. I went to a gas station and pumped out some gas and poured it in an empty bottle of vodka. I got on the train to go downtown, and when I got there, I walked around for a while. It was about 10 AM, and I walked around until 1:30. During that time, I drank another beer alone in an unknown bar. I have one daughter, and I thought about her. It’s not that she lives so bad, but I want her to have the same life as American girls. I thought it was worth it for her to not have a father if she could have a better life. One can’t live in a constant recession. 

Eventually, I went and stood in front of the president’s building. I took my bottle of gasoline and poured it over my chest and head. I struck the lighter. I’ve worked with fire all my life [as a blacksmith], but this time there was a big fireball and I got scared. I screamed because of the pain. It surprised me that it hurt instantly. Have you ever burned yourself with a drop of oil from a frying pan? It was like being in a frying pan. My head, face, shoulders, hands, everything. 

Then I heard people shouting, “This guy set himself on fire!” It was the security guards, and they immediately ran over to me with fire extinguishers and tried to put me out. At this point, there had been so many suicides, they were ready. They were scared about someone doing what I did. So they put me out. I lost consciousness at some point, and I woke up in the hospital. I survived because the guards were so fast, and because the hospital was close by, but I don’t remember it. I was in a coma for a week.

When I woke up, I looked terrible. I took a photo of myself on my cell phone. I dropped it five times trying to get a good shot. I didn’t have skin. You could see my bones through my arms. I had no lips. I looked grotesque, like Quasimodo. When I saw the photo, I thought I would have to go off to live in a wild village all by myself. I looked like a vampire. I didn’t think I would ever get better.

But at Pirogov Hospital, when I was there recovering and having surgery, the health minister came to visit me every day. The nurses told me I was under the president’s supervision. Which means that I had to survive. Even if they had to fly me to New York to save me, they were going to do it. I had to live, because if a person dies in front of the president’s building, that’s bad news. I didn’t have the right to die. And so I survived.

Afterward, the government shut down my personal website, they deleted my profiles on social media—Facebook, everything. I am defined as “dangerous,” and they are afraid I will provoke others.

Why did you choose fire as a method? Why not a gun, for example?
I did not want to simply commit suicide. We had all of these protests—we’re still having them—and nothing gets done. Nothing changes. I didn’t want anything from the Bulgarian politicians. I was hoping that the world, people like you, would look at our country with a careful eye. When Plamen Goranov committed suicide, he ousted the mayor of Varna with his self-immolation. I wanted to oust the entire system. 

Watch our documentary about these self-immolations, Burning Men of Bulgaria.

More from the Hot Box Issue:

The Place Women Go to Get Raped

I Left My Lungs in Aamjiwnaang

The Ghost Rapes of Bolivia

The Book Report is a series that promises to deliver exactly what it promises: reports on books by the people who’ve read them. Catch evenings of live, in-person Book Reports that will remind you of the third grade in the best possible way with hosts Leigh Stein and Sasha Fletcher every month at The Gallery at Le Poisson Rouge on Bleecker Street in New York. The next one is January 21, 2014. Come All Ye Faithful.

“MARLEY was dead: to begin with” he says¹ which establishes some things². “As dead as a doornail” he says because right, yeah, inanimate objects, hell of dead. Anyway, OK, sorry. So this is about EBENEZER SCROOGE³, who is a shrewd, cold-hearted moneylender. But as we will soon find out, this was not always the case! Because of Literature!⁴ But so right, OK, in the present we meet SCROOGE who was partnered with MARLEY, who is now dead. SCROOGE has an employee named BOB CRATCHIT who is portrayed as a real nice dude who is underpaid and has a large family and also he is very into Christmas. SCROOGE is either grumpy or excited that around December people spend all their money on frivolities like gifts and dinner instead of their mortgages. And CRATCHIT is all yo can I get Xmas off and SCROOGE is all you you mean humbug day LOL that is what I call Christmas it is a humbug which is a dumb word like how Christmas is dumb and CRATCHIT is all like plz tho? and SCROOGE says mean stuff about Christmas cuz he is a real Grinch⁵ but CRATCHIT defeats him using logic⁶ and so the office gets Christmas off⁷.

OK then Scrooge goes home and his doorknocker is all oogy boogy and that’s weird⁸ and then he is all in his room and stuff and he keeps seeing things and being spooked and shit and explaining it away because that is what you do with things your brain doesn’t have room for, you construct a narrative to accommodate for the unknown in a way that doesn’t scare you with the unknown. And so then because I guess subtlety wasn’t working⁹ JACOB MARLEY, his former business partner¹⁰ shows up as a ghost¹¹ and he looks real creepy and transparent and has a bandage around his head and then he all unties it and his fucking lower jaw just gets unhinged and flaps around and then he starts talking and says basically YO BRO QUIT BEING A DICK OR YOUR LIFE WILL GET STUPID SHITTY AND YOU WILL DIE IN A WAY THAT IS NOT COOL AND EVERYTHING WILL BE JUST TOTAL AND UTTER BAD STUFF. And SCROOGE is all LOL NO WAY PLUS I BET YR JUST LIKE UNDIGESTED BEEF OR LIKE A FART. YOU ARE LIKE A FART, OR ACID REFLUX, OR MAYBE I AM JUST HAVING A STROKE. YEAH THAT’S TOTALLY IT. and MARLEY is all OK WHATEVER JUST YOU WAIT FUCKER. THREE SPIRITS. CALLING IT. THREE SPIRITS GONNA SHOW UP AND SCHOOL YOU HARD. And SCROOGE is all LOL.

OK so then SCROOGE goes to bed and then, while still in bed, wakes up and there is a real cute little girl who is floating and SCROOGE is all WTF and she is all I am THE GHOST OF XMAS PAST take my hand bro that way you’ll fly and then she takes him to his Christmases past and we learn stuff like once upon a time SCROOGE was real nice and sweet or like, so, he was basically this really lonely and sad little boy who was real studious because that seemed to him to be his chance to maybe get somewhere or also because of family pressure and he spent a lot of time working really hard and was super lonely and and then the GHOST is all whisking you away to another time where SCROOGE works for this awesome friendly dude who throws huge epic Christmas parties which set the company back a huge bundle of cash money but the boss doesn’t care because he is a sweet dude who wants everyone to have a good time, and then also SCROOGE meets this hottie named BELLE¹² and is all love is a thing I am feeling and SCROOGE is all oh man feelings I remember these and then the GHOST is all whisking you away to another time and SCROOGE sees himself becoming devoted to money and its accumulations¹³, and she is all U R NOT HOW U WERE U R SO COLD COME ON BB I LUV U Y CAN’T THIS B ENUF 4 US and he is all YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND I DO LOVE YOU DUH COME ON and she is all U USED 2 LUV ME and turns away all sad-like because sometimes none of us know how to really say the things in our hearts and so we say something else, anything else, and we commit to it because I guess of course we do, and so guess how that ends¹⁴. So SCROOGE is all sad and reflective and the GHOST takes him back.

OK so then SCROOGE goes to bed and then, while still in bed, wakes up and there is a real big fat guy with a huge beard hanging out in his room eating all kinds of food, like a lot, like some serious gluttony and opulence is happening. So imagine going through the shit that happened in that paragraph above and then some GIANT BEARDED FAT GUY is in yr house and eating a ton of fucking food and possibly really drunk and repeating himself a lot. Then he is all I am THE GHOST OF XMAS PRESENT and they make some jokes and maybe SCROOGE is loosening up and the GHOST is all I live in the now bro, let's go live in the now 2gether and then they do, live, in the now, 2gether, and they visit CRATCHIT’S family and it is like whoa these people are super poor, BUT THEY LOVE EACH OTHER VERY MUCH, AND ARE DOING THEIR BEST WITH THE MEAGER EARNING SCROOGE GIVES THEM, AND THERE IS MUCH SPITE BECAUSE OF IT, but BOB CRATCHIT is all no guys no he’s a jerk but like we are all of us just doing our best right? And at least we have this. And then we meet their son TINY TIM¹⁵ who is super ill and dying and they cannot do anything about it because SCROOGE will not pay a decent wage. Oh also they go to SCROOGE’S NEPHEWS house and everyone is all LOL ur uncle is a mean cheapskate and everyone is all yup. and SCROOGE is all is this really how people see me? and the GHOST is all bro i am the GHOST OF XMAS PRESENT and SCROOGE is like SO? and the GHOST is like bro I can literally only show you what is happening right now, in the present and SCROOGE is like FUCK this TINY TIM kid is adorable I hope nothing bad ever happens to him ever. Also SCROOGE is like will he die tho and the GHOST is all if he does he’d better do it the fuck now and decrease the surplus popu-fuckin-lation and SCROOGE is shocked and sad because that is a thing he has always said about the poor and he realizes that that is a seriously fucked thing. Also the GHOST has been getting older this whole time because he dies.

OK so then SCROOGE gets walked to a lonely hill and there is DEATH. OK not really, but like, tall, skeletal, wrapped in shrouds, real ominous, and SCROOGE is like who are you and nothing happens and he is like NO WHO ARE YOU and a voice in his head says I am THE GHOST OF XMAS YET TO COME and SCROOGE is like holy fuck and then a bunch of horrifying things happen and we see SCROOGE’s grave and it is like HERE IS A DEAD GUY WHO NOBODY LIKED BECAUSE HE WAS A FUCKING ASSHOLE TO LITERALLY EVERYONE EVER. And SCROOGE is like that’s harsh, but not really, because at this point he thinks he probably is basically just a shit-heel of a human who has totally misunderstood both the concept and place of love in both the personal and universal sense. And also TINY TIM is dead. And also people are robbing SROOGE’s stuff and saying shitty things about him and he is just all OH MY GOD I GET IT I AM THE WORST THING EVER EVERYONE IS HAPPY I AM DEAD AND BECAUSE I WAS A JERK NICE PEOPLE ALSO DIED AND I AM THE ABSOLUTE WORST and then he wakes up and it is Christmas day because he sticks his head out the window and is all YOU BOY WHAT DAY IS IT? And the boy is like IT IS XMAS DAY BRO WTF COME ON and SCROOGE throws him money and is all BUY ME A BIG TURKEY AND A TREE AND SHIT OK KEEP THE CHANGE YA FILTHY ANIMAL and he sends it all to the CRATCHIT’s and they have an awesome Christmas because now SCROOGE is a changed man because of GHOSTS.

So the moral of the story is that if you know a shitty person send them GHOSTS who will make them understand the ways in which trying to be a generous and giving human who attempts to be as excellent as possible to the people around them even if they fuck up sometimes because they are human and that happens but let’s keep trying anyway. GHOSTS. GHOSTS are the answer to all of your problems guys.¹⁶

Thurman and Sidney Sewell, better known as the ATL Twins, cozy up around a woman's butt in the bed of their penthouse apartment in Midtown Atlanta. Photos by Paul Birman, Chris Nieratko, and Troy Stains.

D o you think we could fuck Selena Gomez?” asked the voice on the other end of my iPhone, a little over a year ago. His deep Tennessean twang added extra emphasis to the word fuck.

“Yes, of course. Definitely,” I replied. “Who is Selena Gomez?”

“She’s that Disney bitch.”

In the year since this conversation, I’ve realized that most people find it hard to believe that I had never heard of one of the most famous young celebrities in the world until Sidney and Thurman Sewell—better known as the ATL Twins—mentioned her to me that day on the phone. But I’ve been a bit out of the loop on all things Disney since I stopped writing for their children’s digest, Disney Adventures, back in 1995. The only Disney bitch I know is Minnie Mouse. And even though I was unaware of Selena and her hit Disney teenybopper television show Wizards of Waverly Place before our call, I’m still confident that one day Thurm and Sid will double-penetrate her young orifices to oblivion. That’s what the ATL Twins do. So it was strange that they seemed so hesitant.

“But she’s dating Justin Bieber,” Thurm continued. 

“Do you think Justin Bieber has a nine-inch cock?” I asked. “And even if he does, he definitely doesn’t have two of them.” 

“Nah, I doubt it,” Thurm said and began laughing hysterically.

And that, my friends, is what you get when you fuck with the ATL Twins: 18 inches of raging-hard dick coming at you from either side. They are a package deal. The Twins had called to tell me that they had just been cast in Spring Breakers, Harmony Korine’s beautiful new film about four bikini-clad, seemingly goody-goody gals on spring break in St. Petersburg, Florida. The girls—Ashley Benson, Rachel Korine, and former Disney stars Selena Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens—get in way over their heads when they are arrested at an out-of-control hotel party, and a gun-toting drug dealer named Alien, played by a scumbagified James Franco, bails them out of jail alongside the Twins, who are employed as Alien’s silent henchmen. Despite not uttering a single word in the film, the Twins’ presence is as memorable as any of the headliners, and their unsettling silence only adds to their mystique. Their roles will only intensify the public’s curiosity about the real story behind the brothers, resulting in more pussy than they will possibly be able to handle (their volume is already at critical mass).  

The entire cast loved the Twins. Weeks before the film’s release Selena Gomez was on French radio saying that she and the girls passed time by laughing at their antics. And James Franco was so affected by working with them that their time together inspired a poem, published for the first time here: 

Double

Something scary: There is a pair of twins
From Atlanta.
They’re identical.

They’ve got hip-hop style
And chase ambulances
For a living.
But they want to be famous.

They’re the same person
In two bodies.
They are never apart.
They sleep in the same bed,

Finish each other’s sentences,
And share their women.
They like double penetration,
It’s all they talk about.

At one point they were engaged
To a Penthouse model;
Only one would have been legal,
But they both would have kissed

Her at the wedding ceremony.

Ever since they were put on this earth, the longest period of time the ATL Twins have spent apart has been six hours when Sidney was locked up for a DUI. Otherwise they are always together, with the exception of a few minutes here and there to shit, shave, and shower. Every possession, emotion, and experience is shared: They have one car, one bed, and sleep with the same women. At 13 they simultaneously lost their virginity to a 21-year-old stripper, and they were once both engaged to a Penthouse Pet who, according to the Twins, broke their hearts after her parents pressured her to leave them. Someday they want to father children from one woman, which isn’t so surprising when you consider that they believe themselves to be a single person with two bodies. They are mirror-image twins, meaning that the egg that spawned them split in two somewhere around ten days after fertilization, which is very late in the game (any longer and the chances of birthing conjoined twins increases dramatically). They are genetically and physically identical, but their features are reversed. Sid is right-handed, while Thurm’s a lefty. If they stand face-to-face, you notice that what seem like slight differences in their appearance actually mirror one another exactly. Unlike the bearded, fictitious dildo in those Dos Equis commercials, Sid and Thurm are truly the most unique and interesting men I know. 

As I’ve said since I first met them a year and a half ago, the ATL Twins are a psychologist’s wet dream, and as with most psychoses, their version of reality was formed at an early age. Growing up dirt poor in Chattanooga, they were forced to make friends with a wide variety of cockroaches, subsist off food stamps, and basically raise themselves. But even though their early life presented many challenges, they were still part of a loving family who tried their best to make ends meet even when their luck hit rock bottom.

“You got to understand how we grew up. My family all slept in one bed, five of us,” they said (because the Twins frequently finish each other’s sentences and sometimes speak in tandem, moving forward, all quotes will be attributed to both). “It wasn’t by choice, and it was normal. We lived in hood houses. Where we grew up in Chattanooga was gnarly. There were a bunch of killers and stone-cold motherfuckers around us. The movie Gummo gives you a pretty good idea of what it was like. People would try to kidnap you; you’d be outside and creepos would come up and ask if you needed a ride. It was scary. There were prostitutes and drug dealers. The old white people who were still there in the house behind us got broken into and murdered—they beat the dude and his wife to death.”

Family photos of the Twins with their two sisters, mother, and father. When they were 12, their dad injured himself lifting weights. This incident led to a downward spiral of health problems, including diabetes and dependence on a pacemaker. At one point, he was taking dozens of medications a day.

Given their environment, Sid and Thurm were forced to grow up fast and take care of each other. When they were 12 their father injured himself lifting weights and had to have shoulder surgery. It was the first in a long line of health problems, and within a few years, he had come down with diabetes, had a pacemaker installed, and was taking dozens of medications a day. Things got so bad that their mom moved out; the Twins told me that she just couldn’t handle the pressure. This left them to take care of their dad the best they could without much outside help.  

“When we were 14 we watched our dad die in our arms,” the Twins grimly told me as they recalled their father’s passing. “It was a Friday night and we were out skating and we were going to go party all night, but we got a weird feeling that we should go home. We went home and hung out with our dad all night. We watched the movie Tombstone, which I’ve never watched since and never will watch it again. We had a good time, we were talking about pussy and he was feeling good. The next morning he woke us up and said he wasn’t feeling good. He was dizzy, saying he felt like he was about to black out. We called 911 and they told us to try mouth-to-mouth while the ambulance was on its way, but that didn’t work. They showed up and were trying the electric-shock pads and that wasn’t working. We were hysterical. They didn’t say he was dead, but deep down we knew. They took him away, and an hour later our aunts called and said he’d passed. We were really close to our dad. He was always honest with us and told us how shit really was.” 

While their father’s death was one of the most traumatic memories of their lives, their inability to separate for more than a few moments was made apparent long before. Their mother, Patricia, explains: “They were enrolled in day care when they were about two years old. On one particular day one of them was sick and the other was not. When I took the well one to school, they held each other so tight I couldn’t pull them apart. They were screaming and crying, and it was painful and heart-wrenching to watch. Needless to say, they both stayed home that day.”

Despite an early start in schooling, the Twins didn’t make it past eighth grade. Their only ambition in life was skateboarding. After their father died they had nowhere to live, so they moved into their 17-year-old sister’s basement apartment, where they slept on the floor. They skated all day, every day, and partied all night.

LEFT: Sid shows off his snakehead necklace. RIGHT: Thurm smiles as he is groped by one of his many lady friends.

“It was amazing,” they said. “But one day this truancy officer shows up at 3:30 in the afternoon. We had just woken up because we’d sleep all day, and we got shook. We were fucking this older chick who would come to Atlanta to strip, and we called her up and asked her to give us a ride to Atlanta because our mom had just moved there. That’s how we came to be living in Atlanta.” 

When the Twins first arrived at their mother’s house they walked into what looked like a crack den, which wasn’t so far from the truth. The garage door was rammed in, and inside someone had punched holes all over the walls and smashed the TV. It didn’t take them long to realize that their mom’s live-in boyfriend, Kelvin, was responsible for the destruction. The Twins described him as a “piece-of-shit crackhead”—one of those guys who attempts to offset his balding head by letting his remaining hair grow long and keeping a thick moustache. It quickly became apparent that the domestic situation had spiraled out of control. 

“We’re in our room with this huge sack, smoking weed with this older stripper walking around half naked,” the Twins said. “It was probably about one in the morning when we hear this loud-ass knock at the door. It’s a 5-0. We’re high as fuck and thinking they’re after us because of that truancy-officer shit. Then this dude Kelvin runs in wearing Speedos and hands the stripper a bag of crack and says, ‘Here! Stuff this in your panties, honey!’ and then tells us, ‘You ain’t seen me!’ He runs out and a few minutes later the door is kicked open and all these cops come in and ask, ‘Where’s Kelvin?’ They start searching around the room; it smells of weed, we got this older chick in there, they’re like, ‘What the fuck is going on in here?’ Out in the hallway my mom is crying and sort of nodding up toward the drop-down door to the attic. They go up and get him, and he’s wrapped up in insulation, and he’s all, ‘Baby! Don’t do this!’ That’s when our mom tells us, ‘Yeah, he held me hostage for the past two days, stole my car, forced me to go buy crack, he beat the house up, and I was able to call the cops when he wasn’t looking.’ That was our first day in Atlanta.” 

Even though the Twins’ relationship with their mother is sometimes tense, she is nothing but happy for their success, even if she doesn’t completely support their lifestyle. “Despite incredible odds,” she said, “Sidney and Thurman have attained some impressive achievements. I am proud of them. They have a burning desire to become rich and famous, and I know they will reach their goal because they have the charisma, energy, and determination to accomplish whatever they set their mind to. Although I am proud of their success, I am not proud of their reckless lifestyle. I wish they would drink less and sleep more.”

The Twins roll around in their bed with a lovely young woman who is capable of charming more than one type of snake.

T he reason the Twins had called me in early 2012 was to discuss their rapid trajectory toward fame and stardom, and all the options that had come their way after I first interviewed them for VICE.com back in August 2011 while I was on a trip covering a Red Bull skate tour for Skateboarder magazine. Millions of readers on VICE’s website wanted to learn more about “those crazy double-penetrating twins,” and many of them doubted that they were real or, if they were, had any redeeming values whatsoever. Since they’d skated for the better part of two decades their sudden internet fame allowed them to befriend some of the biggest names in skateboarding. Girl Skateboards’ pro-skateboarder royalty, Guy Mariano, describes them as “a street-culture phenomenon. They are everywhere doing their thing, and whether you’re backing it or not they’re fascinating. It’s a win-win with the Twins.” 

Because of that initial interview for VICE.com, Sid and Thurm credit me with “discovering” them, but I think that’s a bit overstated. They’d existed for over two decades before we first met on that fateful day in Atlanta—people from all over Tennessee and Georgia were already very familiar with the twin skaters who partied all the time, banged the same girls, and generally ran amok wherever they pleased. I just happened to break their story to the rest of the world. 

To their credit, the Twins always tell anyone who asks that it was me who made their widespread notoriety possible. And because it was my name stamped on the interview, coupled with the fact that to this day they still are without an agent or any other form of representation, it was my number that Hollywood called to offer them every manner of television and acting gig. For months I fielded requests from major networks and the producers of the most successful reality-TV shows in history. Each time I’d go back to the Twins and report what had been offered, but none of the pitches seemed to fit who they really were: two poor, white-trash skaters from Tennessee who dropped out of school and moved to the big city in search of a better life. In trying to achieve the American dream, along the way they were forced to make pit stops working at a variety of shitty jobs—Babies“R”Us, Wendy’s, a sweatshop where they stuffed envelopes, plumber’s assistants (a grueling gig arranged by their ex-fiancée’s father, who owned a plumbing business), and letter couriers—before lucking into an opportunity that has allowed them to afford the lifestyle they always desired as kids. They became the assistants for a local lawyer, who quickly realized they had the charm to talk to anyone and everybody.

“Growing up the way we did, we dreamed of a dope life, the high life,” they said. “What happened was one of our friends needed help dropping off Christmas presents for this lawyer he was working for. We were like, ‘Hell yeah, we’ll help!’ and we killed it. The attorney was super impressed. We told him he should hire us, that we’d do anything he wanted. We’d babysit his kid, whatever—anything and everything. One day he called us and said his assistant had some serious heart problem, and that he’d be out for months. The lawyer said he’d hire us right then and there. He told us to quit our jobs and show up the next morning. That was ten years ago, and the rest is history. We got in there not knowing shit about legal shit at all, but we paid attention and learned. He liked that there was two of us: four eyes, four hands, two brains. That’s when we started getting a taste for money. We’d spend our whole paycheck on clothes. It was magical. We moved into a high-rise overlooking downtown Atlanta; we bought and paid for a Range Rover. We put on suits and go to work all day, every day and deal with some gnarly-ass shit. It’s funny because people go to school their whole lives to do this shit, and we never went to high school. But we now know this game so good that we could pass the bar and practice law.” 

The Twins evoke The Shining in the hallway of their apartment building on their way to work. They make a living working as the assistants to a powerful local attorney.

Legendary pro skateboarder and owner of Black Box Distribution Jamie Thomas, who won the California Entrepreneur of the Year award from Ernst & Young in 2006, knows a thing or two about business and summarized Sid and Thurm’s drive for success: “The Twins are the kind of people you hear about but never actually meet. They have taken a not-so-rad situation and hustled their way to celebrity and success. Love or hate them, the Twins are focused on making it big!” 

It cannot be denied that the Twins are a true American success story. Yet all the producers and agents who came calling after my initial interview with them were only interested in making mindless shows about two twin wiggers who were into doing wiggery things. Their pitches always ended with phrases like
“… and then antics will ensue.” It was typical, uninspired reality-TV bullshit, and you have to respect the Twins for refusing to compromise for a few quick bucks. What they needed was someone with vision and passion, someone who recognized that Hollywood, America, and the world, for that matter, have never seen anything like the ATL Twins and that their singular existence needed to be handled with great care. That visionary was filmmaker Harmony Korine. He personally cold-called them after reading my interview with an offer to write them into the script for Spring Breakers, a film that employs his usual controversial manner of storytelling, but given its cast and subject matter, is closer to a “mainstream” movie than anything he’s ever made. 

Harmony seems to love Sid and Thurm for all the same reasons I do: “The ATL Twins are the great American depraved underbelly come to life. Pathological fucktards and whore bangers. They are everything and nothing. They don’t eat food; they only snort drugs. Their hobby is passing kidney stones. They are mystic scumbags of the highest order. Double-penetrating hos is their religion. Neither one of them has ever read a book. Neither one of them has ever eaten a vegetable. They sleep in the same bed and shower together. All they want is fame and pussy. They are America’s greatest degenerates. I admire them both. They are free of all constraints. They will inherit the earth and drive it headfirst into the abyss. They are what makes America great.”

One of the Twins’ older sisters, Clarissa (who graduated with a BA in history from Harvard University, i.e., not the sister they moved in with when they were 17), concurred with Harmony’s sentiment, albeit with much different adjectives: “My brothers are fiercely loyal and loving—an odd mix of introverted retrospection and extroverted hedonism. Any self-doubt or fear that would be felt by an individual is quashed by the love and the support they have in each other as twins. Two heads are definitely better than one, and they have found a way to use it to their advantage in life, love, sex, business, and fame.” 

The Twins relax after a session at Da Playground skate park in Atlanta.

T his brings us back to the Twins’ intention of having filthy sex with a certain 20-year-old superstar. They called me a few weeks after shooting on Spring Breakers had wrapped. 

“So did you ever bang Selena Gomez?” I asked them. 

“No, we knew that wasn’t going to happen. She was always guarded and protected; her mom and bodyguard were always with her. But she was hella cool. Harmony was telling everyone how big our dicks were, and he was like, ‘Show them! Show them the photo of your dicks!’ So we pulled out our phone, and she looked at it. She just stared and didn’t say anything.”

“But her fans had quite a bit to say, right?”

“Oh, man. It was bad. We fuck a lot of girls, so our Instagram was super dirty, and somehow we got away with it. We get down there and Ashley Benson Instagrams a photo of us, and immediately our shit starts going HAM and we’re getting all these new followers. Then Selena posted a photo with us, and we started getting hella tweeny fans of hers saying, ‘Ewww… gross’ and ‘I’m reporting you!’ We’d block them as soon as we saw them, but there were thousands! We were ambushed! And then all of a sudden we were banned from Instagram, account gone. We were pissed and started talking shit on Twitter, like, ‘Fuck all these tweeny-ass Selena fans!’ Jesus Christ, those motherfuckers just went crazy. They attacked us. Finally we were like, ‘OK! We’re sorry! We surrender! Leave us alone!’ The next day we asked Selena to help us, and she said no. She was like, ‘My fans are crazy. You shouldn’t fuck with them. They have my back.’”

I know many people have already reached their verdict on the ATL Twins, and I understand why. To read the interviews and tales of their raunchy sexcapades, it’s easy for one to think they’re the evolution of MTV’s Jersey Shore. But Sid and Thurm’s full story has yet to be told, and even what I’ve written here only scratches the surface. Meeting them is an experience that will stick with you forever, regardless of your opinion of them after the fact. Through hard work and perseverance, they’ve realized dreams they never thought were real possibilities, but they’re no longer content with living in a penthouse apartment in Atlanta and driving a tricked-out Range Rover. They want more, and they’re coming to get it from both sides. With identical nine-inch penises. 

“We want to make millions like Justin Bieber,” they said. “We’d really like to act more; we feel like we can act naturally. We want to be fucking famous: balling, fucking dime-piece bitches in Hollywood, living that life. People say the grass isn’t always greener on the other side, but we came from nothing and now that we’ve tasted it, we want it. But even if nothing comes from all of this it’s already amazing enough what’s happened for us. Being in a Harmony Korine movie, shooting with Terry Richardson, being on the Rolling Stone 2012 ‘Hot List’—we’re super thankful. When we were little kids growing up in the ghetto, our dream was to have an L couch, and our family could never do it. Now we make good money and we got a leather L couch! But we want bigger things. We want to be millionaires. We want to fuck celebrities. We want to fuck all of them! We want to fuck Lindsay Lohan!”

“How hard can it really be to fuck Lindsay Lohan at this point?” I asked.

“You think anybody can fuck her?”

“I think you can,” I reassured them.

“Not just us, do you think anybody can fuck Lindsay Lohan?

“Yes, I think so. I’d put money that she’s on Craigslist.”

Regardless whether or not they get to DP Lindsay Lohan before she drowns in a pile of vomit and cocaine, the ATL Twins will carry on. They always have. They always will. And, as far as I can tell, the only thing that could stop them would be facing this cruel world separate and alone. 

“Earlier when we were talking you mentioned that people tried to kidnap you in Chattanooga,” I said. “What would happen if one of you were snatched up and separated for an indefinite amount of time?” 

“We’d have separation anxiety and something bad would happen,” they told me. “People ask what would happen if one of us died… well, the other one would die too and jump off the balcony or something. It’s not an option. There’s no way we can live without each other. No one will understand how it is to be how we are, just like we’ll never understand what it’s like to be alone or lonely. We don’t know what it’s like to be without each other and feel very blessed to be inseparable twins. At the end of the day, we’ll always have each other.”

Take a peek into the extraordinary lives of the ATL Twins with our three-part documentary The Twin Zone, airing throughout the month of March on YouTube along with a secial uncensored version on VICE.com.

More about the ATL Twins:

The Twins of Atlanta

The ATL Twins Would Like to Introduce You to the Li'l Twins

We Partied with Juelz Santana and the ATL Twins at Our Fashion Issue Release Party

It was my second day on Soylent and my stomach felt like a coil of knotty old rope, slowly tightening. I wasn’t hungry, but something was off. I was tired, light-headed, low-energy, but my heart was racing. My eyes glazed over as I stared out the window of our rental SUV as we drove over the fog-shrouded Bay Bridge to Oakland. Some of this was nerves, sure. I had 28 days left of my month-long all-Soylent diet—I was attempting to live on the food replacement longer than anyone besides its inventor—and I felt woozy already.

We were en route to Soylent HQ, where the 25-year-old Rob Rhinehart and his crew were whipping up the internet famous hacker meal—the macro-nutritious shake they think will soon replace the bulk of our meals. It’s just one of many visions currently vying for the future food crown. The world’s population is still burgeoning, after all, 600 to 800 million people are going hungry every year, and the specter of food riots is perpetually percolating—the demand for cheap, nutritious food is greater than ever.

So Googlers are investing in vitro meat, biotech firms are genetically modifying crops that promise increasingly robust yields, and Silicon Valley is nurturing a bevy of future-forward alt-food companies. Then there’s Rob, who came along and claimed that nobody had to eat food ever again.

Rob’s idea for a sci-fi-inspired nutrient shake sprouted from living the life of a hyperactive, science-obsessed bachelor. As a recent software engineering graduate and aspiring entrepreneur, he was too broke to eat out and too time-strapped to cook. But instead of stocking his pantry with plastic-wrapped ramen like everyone else, he tried to retool the act of eating itself, to make it cheaper and more efficient. He studied government food standards and nutrition textbooks—Berg’s Biochemistry was like his bible—and divined a set of basic ingredients that provided the calories and nutrients the human body needed to run.

Then, in what would soon prove irresistible fodder for Silicon Valley founder mythology, Rob lived on the yellow-grey stuff for 30 days, subjecting himself to lab tests and blogging the results. The concluding post, “How I Stopped Eating Food”, became an online sensation.

Continue reading over at Motherboard.

It's hard to pinpoint exactly when punk died. Some argue it was the day the Ramones logo was first screenprinted on an overpriced onesie. Others blame the energy drink-ification of the Warped Tour. Regardless, the once meaningful movement is now as dead as Sid "Joke's on You, My Bass Wasn't Even Plugged In" Vicious. That doesn't mean its bloated corpse can't still be flailed for fun and profit, though; far from it. Hermosa Beach's Abigale Restaurant, a "globally influenced and domestically sourced" eatery located where the Church, a rehearsal space famously utilized by venerable punk bands Black Flag, Descendents, Redd Cross and Circle Jerks once stood, isn't the first business to shamelessly hammer nails into the Misfits™ approved coffin of punk™, nor will it be the last.

Abigale is your industry standard, clinically organic restaurant priced slightly beyond the meager means of the common man. The menu extols the virtues of "Gastronome: The science of good food and drink without any borders or rules," and hawks $300 bottles of champagne and $110 bottles of ice wine to one-percenters who seek a classier kick than its house-infused bacon vodka.

$16 burgers and $30 steaks pair well with $6 house-brewed beers, which are concocted in huge, polished copper kettles located behind the restaurant's immaculate bar. Right down to its wood tables, bottomless mimosas, and mediocre beach view, Abigale is interchangeable with hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of restaurants actively contributing to the Etsying of modern society. The only thing that differentiates Abigale from these other bourgeoisie brunch spots is its inexplicable insistence on a "punk" (and I use that term loosely) theme. 

What makes Abigale "punk"? In a word, graffiti. Homages to the Misfits, G.B.H. and the Exploited have been artlessly spray-painted on the restaurant's main wall, overlapping decoupaged copies of Black Flag and Germs posters. The graffiti, done by Fletcher Dragge of Pennywise no less, is an impotent attempt to recreate the original look of the Church (as seen in the classic punk doc The Decline of Western Civilization).

The graffiti is juxtaposed alongside enormous flatscreen televisions. When I visited Abigale on a recent Saturday, said televisions were playing a football game. I tried to visualize a sports bar screening The Decline of Western Civilization instead of the Super Bowl—I couldn’t. To no surprise, the restaurant’s soundtrack reflected the taste of your average football fan. 80s Butt Rock songs like Poison’s "Talk Dirty to Me" and Whitesnake’s "Here I Go Again" loudly blasted overhead as my brunch companion, a fairly punk dude, and I alternated between laughing about the absurdity of it all and looking around in disgusted awe. 

We, however, were the only patrons in the restaurant tickled by its antithetical nature. No one in my periphery appeared to notice or give a shit about Abigale’s theme, which made sense. Neither the group of polar-fleeced, middle-aged women to my left, nor the enormous table of professional brunchers wearing "tacky" Christmas sweaters to my right, came for it. They came for the Lemon Ricotta Pancakes, “Sandos” (a nonexistent word, commonly used by assholes instead of “sandwiches”) and Roasted Medjool Date & Kale Salads. One of the pro brunchers, a rotundly rich turd of a man sporting a sleeveless Iron Maiden shirt and aviator sunglasses (indoors, mind you), stuffed his maw with organic fried chicken (from the “Brunch Carnage” section of the menu, natch).

Hungover from the night before, I gnawed at my frittata and wished I was still asleep. Brunch is the antithesis of punk, if only because it takes place at the ungodly hour of noon on a weekend. 

Before I visited Abigale, I cleared it with the restaurant’s PR person. (Yes, they employ a PR firm. Suspend your disbelief.) Instead of writing about Abigale, he suggested I “...do a story about its chef, Chef Tin.” According to him, there was “lots of buzz on his newest restaurant, Little Sister, which is a little sister to Abigaile and located nearby in Manhattan Beach. At Little Sister, it's a more intimate setting and Chef Tin serves up dishes as if he was cooking for you at his own home... even music wise, it's not your standard mix, it's what Chef Tin listens to when in the car; a mix of  Drake, Dre, Snoop, Jay z, Kanye, A$AP, 90's rap." I passed on writing the puff piece, but thoroughly enjoyed the email’s reveal of Tin’s musical tastes. Even the restaurant’s head chef didn’t give a shit about punk.

Granted, Chef Tin is not the owner of Abigale. Owner Jed Sanford, the mastermind behind a handful of other nondescriptly bougie eateries in the area, is the alleged punk fan. His story, I suppose, checks out. According to his personal Facebook profile, he "likes" Black Flag and Pennywise (along with a couple of generic-looking DJs and the abstract concept of “UK dubstep,” but that’s neither here nor there). These facts do nothing to redeem Abigale’s theme.

Before cementing its place as an important part of punk’s past, the Church was, as its name would imply, an honest-to-God Baptist church. Why not, then, make Abigale church-themed? Really, why give it a theme in the first place? After all, Los Angeles has history of not giving a shit about history; that being the case, the building that housed the Church has long been demolished. Abigale just happens to sit atop the ancient punk burial ground. Nowhere else in the area, however, do I know of a business that shittily pays homage to what it replaced. The legendary Brown Derby, for example, has been painted pink. It currently sits atop a strip mall in what is now LA’s Koreatown. The cafe inside is decidedly not Brown Derby-themed. Because, well, no one wants it to be.

NOTE: The food itself was damned good. As well it should be, given the prices. It goes without saying, however, that "true" punks would be financially and ethically unable to patronize it. Unless, like Henry Rollins, they have a sweetheart deal with Infiniti. 

@bornferal

For part one of the Geoff Rowley episode we went to his hometown of Liverpool, England. We also checked out London and Southbank, and talked with some well known names in British skateboarding.

Watch More Epicly Later'd:

Eric Dressen

Arto Saari

Elissa Steamer

For weeks, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian protesters have been flooding the streets of Kiev, occupying government buildings and taking over the city's Independence Square. Initially, the demonstrators were expressing discontent at President Viktor Yanukovych's decision to pull out of a deal that would bring Ukraine closer to joining the EU.

After an initial brutal police crackdown, the protests have grown in size and are now more about toppling the government and putting an end to corruption than joining the European Union. The police have tried and failed to clear the tent city that has sprung up in the Independence Square – also known as the Maidan – and the occupied city hall that has been dubbed the "Revolution HQ". Protesters remain in the streets, despite the below zero temperatures.

More from the protests in Kiev:

Police Tried and Failed to Clear Kiev's Independence Square

Ukrainian Protesters Toppled Kiev's Lenin Statue Last Night

Opposition Parties and Vitali Klitschko Are Calming Kiev's Protesters

Follow Nicola Formichetti and his team of artists as they create an alternative holiday experience and space for New York's most interesting and holiday-dubious residents to party, play, and fuck shit up.

It's been a crazy year for VICE. Our HBO show was nominated for an Emmy, Ad Age called us the Publishing Company of the Year, and our YouTube channel hit almost 4 million subscribers. As a great man once said, "that shit's cray."

To celebrate 2013—and to give you something to do while sneaking sips of whisky and avoiding your family during Christmas—we've compiled the 30 best videos we released across our YouTube network for your viewing pleasure. 3D-printed guns, Soylent, West African truckers, and paintballing with Tyler, the Creator; it's all there.

We'd say, "you're welcome," but we'd rather say, "thank you." Thank you for making 2013 our favorite year since, like, forever.

There comes a moment in every American cocksucker’s (and I use that term as an honorific) life when he/she pulls down a pair of trousers and is met not with a well-shorn sailor, but a hooded monk. Yes, I'm talking about the rare occasion (in America and Israel, at least) when you wind up with a foreskin in your hands. And, eventually, mouth.

As we all know, not every dink is created equal, and dealing with one of the uncut variety offers its own unique pleasures and challenges. I interviewed a bunch of uncut gay guys (the only demographic that has been on both the receiving and giving end of this particular activity) and they offered some simple tips for giving a long-skinned dude the beej of his lifetime.

The first thing to remember is that size DOES matter. Not only the length of the dong, but the size of the foreskin, too. Some foreskins will be tight as a drum when the penis is hard, while others have a bit of turkey neck dangling down even at full mast. How much they have will decide what you can do with it. Make sure you don't stretch a tight one, and be sure to diddle the ones with wiggle room generously.

The typical response from a cocksucker who isn’t used to having some extra dick slack is to Thermalift that shit by just pulling the foreskin back and pretending like it's not there. Big mistake. "My head is really sensitive," says Richard from San Francisco, who, like most uncut guys, is more sensitive than his snipped brothers (that's what happens when your head isn't numbed by rubbing inside your jeans every day for countless years). "If the skin is back it's really intense and feels good, but sometimes it's too intense. They're going down like it's a cut dick, and it's quite painful. They have to give it a break and switch it up." If the penis gets agitated, the best thing to do is give it a break by re-covering the head with the foreskin.

But not too much! Adam from Philadelphia cautions, "You have to pull the foreskin back a little. It doesn't feel like anything if you're just sucking the skin over the head." So, it needs to come back to the top, but don’t turn it into an empty Chinese finger trap. Got it?

No wonder everyone freaks out when they see a foreskin—those things are complicated. Pull it back, but not too far; push it forward, but not too much; don’t use it as a coin purse… the list goes on and on. The biggest thing to remember, though, is that unlike a cut cock, when dealing with an uncircumcised member you can grip hard and really work the skin.

"I like it when someone is using their hands during a blow job and pulling the foreskin over the head repeatedly. You should be pulling it over and then pulling it back. It feels like masturbating and that makes me want to cum," Adam says. You don't need your tonsils working the head when the guy’s skin will provide all the friction it needs. Just remember—when you're dealing with friction there can be pain. "Keeping the head wet is the key, I think. There is a point where it crosses over to just hurting the guy from rubbing too much," says Manny from New York.

Now that we have the basic bobbing technique down, here are some next-level tips that you can tell him your gay best friend taught you.

This is a move that was mentioned across the board: "Start by putting your tongue in it and rolling around in it. That drives guys crazy," Adam said and all the other beskinned gentleman agreed. Apparently this a go-to for any self-respecting foreskin pleasure-r.

After shoving your tongue all up in there, give your man’s slack some attention of its own. If he has lots of hood, suck on it and give it little nibbles, just be careful. "I like to be rough and in charge so I would bite more than someone else," says Richard. "Start off gently, and depending on the reaction maybe do it a little more. It’s like nipples—some are sensitive and some aren't." Adam says that biting on the foreskin isn't for a first-time encounter, and that you might want to ask a guy before chowing down on his shaft.

Now, if you really want to go for the chrome medal (you know, as in sucking it off a bumper) Manny has a recommendation that is really complicated but absolutely amazing. "One thing I like is doing the OPPOSITE move to the foreskin that you're doing to the dick. Like, when you're going down on the dick, pull the foreskin up, and when you're going up on the dick, push the foreskin down. If done right it can be great."

These tips are a good jumping off point, but like everything in sex, communication is key. If you have no clue what you're doing, ask the person on the other side of that cock what he wants. And remember: practice makes perfect, you slut.

Previously - How to Get Laid at the Gym

@BrianJMoylan

Photo courtesy Marc Serota/Mattel

The Sawgrass Mills Mall is the second biggest tourist attraction in Florida after Walt Disney World. Built in the shape of an alligator, the Everglades-themed outlet shopping center caters to South American tourists who’ve flown to South Florida to purchase discounted, damaged Louis Vuitton suitcases they’ll fill with cheap products purchased at T.J. Maxx and Banana Republic.

To locals, this place is obviously hell. But since this is Florida—where there is nothing to do except smoke crack at your house and smoke pills at motels built for tourists—neighborhood kids practically live at Sawgrass. When I was a tween, it was where I watched my friends turn into Juicy Couture sluts and where I groped a boy’s dick for the first time. (He later broke my heart at f.y.e.) It was my second home, and a broken one at that. So I was surprised when I learned via the Daily Mail that “The Barbie Dream House Experience” was opening at Sawgrass.

The Mail described the life-sized replica of Barbie’s Dream House as a “10,000 foot pink paradise.” But to my friends in Florida, the Dream House sounded like another cruel reminder of what it’s like to grow up in another person’s paradise.  

“That’s Barbie’s Dream House?” said my friend Alex, who still lives in Florida. “Yeah, F. Scott Fitzgerald was totally thinking about a fake house in the middle of an outlet mall built in the shape of an alligator when he wrote The Great Gatsby. This is the fucking American dream.”

But I wanted to find something good in Barbie’s Dream House. I find it hard to believe humanity could build something that has no redeeming qualities at all, even a mall that plays artificial bird sounds on loop.  

Last week, when I was in Fort Lauderdale visiting my mom, I returned to the Sawgrass Mall to experience the Dream House myself.

I planned to go alone, but my friend Melanie, who also still lives in Florida, insisted she join me. “Barbie’s Dream House sounds scarier than a chemical drug trip in Amsterdam,” she said. “You can’t go alone.” So I called up Barbie’s publicist and asked for two press tickets. He’d only give us tickets if we agreed to take no photos or videos, and told me a marketer named Yarni would meet us at the entrance.

Two hours later, Melanie and I entered through a pink gift shop, where a salesgirl sold dolls and dollhouses. Mesmerized by the pink overhead lights and the fake chandelier hanging above us, we forgot about Yarni. I felt like an Olivia Newton John song. I felt like fucking magic.

Yarni and a girl in a teal shirt stepped through the pink haze I was trapped in. “I’m Leila,” the girl said. “I’ll be your tour guide.”

Yarni reminded us that Barbie banned all guests—including non-media members—from taking photos, and then let Leila lead us into a tiny pink room lit by pink and blue lights. On the wall, a picture of Barbie started to move. Barbie explained that she was out of town and had “lost her glitter” (Florida stripper speak for “I lost my cocaine”) and needed our help “finding her glitter.”


Photo courtesy Marc Serota/Mattel

“This is just like the Haunted Mansion,” Melanie said.

“Um, no it’s not,” Leila corrected her. “The Haunted Mansion isn’t pink.”

Melanie shot me a frightened look—the wall slid open revealing a giant pink room. “The kitchen!” Leila shouted.

She sped into the giant pink room and told us to make cupcakes. There was no food in sight. I opened the kitchen drawers and found spoons and forks hidden in see-through plastic boxes. I tried to take off the lid, but they were sealed tight. Leila showed me a screen on the kitchen counter—by making cupcakes, she meant tapping touchscreens to create digital baked goods.

Then she brought Melanie and me into a giant freezer. Inside, we found a few cupcakes hidden behind glass, a massive sleigh built for “photo-ops,” over 15 dolls, and a flat-screen TV playing Barbie webisodes. Inside this, the Barbie dream fridge, there were no vegetables, meat, or old take-out. There was no food at all. I’m not sure what this was supposed to tell little girls, but to me it looked like Leila needed to stage an intervention for Barbie’s obvious eating disorder.  

But Leila had no time to participate in investigative journalism—she was sent on a mission by a publicist and needed to show us the living room, where she pointed at shelves full of Barbie dolls and untitled pink books.

“This is the Versace doll,” Leila said.

“Do the books have titles?” I asked.

“No,” Leila said, laughing. “They’re just Barbie books.” She then showed us Barbie’s white couch and family portraits, which, like the player in the freezer, were flat screens playing Barbie webisodes about her siblings and pet dolphins. Leila said girls love the webisodes.

“They already know where Barbie’s glitter is when they come here, because they’re seen every webisode,” she said. “The webisodes are really good. I started watching them at work and watch them at home, because I had to see how they end!”

In the next rooms, Barbie’s balcony and bedroom, Leila showed us more of what seemed to be an endless parade of pink. The balcony’s towel cabinet was full of dolls, and there were a dozen dolls showcased on the bedroom wall. Barbie’s bed was a solid block somebody had painted pink.

“Are there any pillows?” I asked as the three of us lay on the bed.

“They’re right there,” Leila said, pointing at pillows painted on.

“Oh my God!” Melanie shouted. “I had those bedsheets as a kid. Those are the bedsheets that were in my Dream House.”

“Right?” Leila said. “Where was this when we were kids?”

“What do you usually do with the kids you give tours in this room?” I asked.


Photo courtesy Marc Serota/Mattel

“We play ‘Barbie, Ken, Sparkle,’” she said. She explained this was a game where kids flex their muscles when she says, “Ken,” strike any pose they like when she says, “Barbie,” and make spirit fingers when she says “Sparkle.” I struggled not to laugh; Melanie smiled and asked Leila how she could apply to work at Barbie’s Dream House. She then followed Leila to the Glitterizer, a massive life-size doll box.

“What’s this for?” I asked as I stepped inside the Gitterizer.

“Barbie steps in every morning to glitterize,” replied Leila. Oh. I opened the box and walked in with Melanie, expecting glitter to cover me but nothing happened.

“Where’s the glitter?” I asked.

“It’s a photo-op for the kids that visit,” Leila explained. Suddenly, it dawned on me that I had been lied to—visitors could take photos. Barbie’s publicist had just fooled me into not taking photos.

But Melanie didn’t notice this, or didn’t care. She followed Leila into Barbie’s bathroom, where Barbie’s pet dolphin Flippy stuck his head out of the toilet, and then her closet. I expected the closet to be a life-size replica of Mariah Carey’s closet as seen on Cribs, but with the exception of ballerina clothes that could only fit on a toddler (and are probably for sale at Toys R Us), the closet only had dolls and accessories. Barbie’s interior decorator had installed mirrors on the end of the two walls that made up the room to make the closet look never-ending—a metaphor, I thought, for how all this pink glamour was a corporate mirage.

Yet Melanie still bought into the shtick. She stood with Leila in front of a mirror playing an interactive game that fits imaginary clothes on your body, smiling as if their dream, not Mattel’s, had come true. I followed the girls into Barbie’s plane, a white room that smelled like a decade-old fart and had yet another flat screen and two fake plane windows painted on the wall.

On the screen, Barbie told us we were going to her entertainment island, a private property in the shape of a heart where Barbie takes care of her jobs. I thought this would mean the roughly 1,000 jobs Barbie had obtained after over 50 years of leaning in. The white wall opened onto a display of Barbie’s biggest accomplishments, including becoming a rock star (in 1986) and President of the United States (2000).

“What do the girls do here?” I asked Leila.

“This is where they learn to model!” She led us across the pink room to a black curtain, which she parted, revealing a group of six-year-old girls learning how to catwalk down a white stage. “The girls get to choose their own makeup,” she said, gesturing at another employee putting children’s makeup on her face in the mirror reserved for elementary school girls. Children’s makeup. This was more terrifying than the Haunted Mansion could ever hope to be.  Leila turned away from the curtain and walked across the room to lead us to the exit through the gift shop.

I want to say that Barbie’s Dream House was a feminist inspiration, that behind the pink there was a core of inner beauty, but it was really just an interactive advertisement for internet videos and souvenirs, like an EDM fest for tween girls. It wasn’t even pop culture. It was just pop—a plastic pink promotion for a plastic doll that told girls they had to be plastic too.

Walking back to my mom’s BMW, Melanie wondered aloud why she had asked for a job application. “I would never work there,” she said. “What was I thinking? Those pink and blue lights were so dreamy. You know, they were just like pink strip club lights.”

@MitchSunderland

More terrifying travel:

An Open Letter fro the Worst Wax Museum in America

I Went Tornado Chasing with a Bunch of Storm Enthusiasts

Searching for Forrest Fenn's Gold

The Satanic Temple, a burgeoning community of worship devoted to the Dark Lord, has performed a “Pink Mass” over the grave of Westboro Baptist Church founder Fred Phelps Jr.’s mother. A Pink Mass is a ritual performed after death designed to turn a straight person into a homo, regardless of whether or not that person is currently alive. It’s not unlike the Mormon practice of baptizing the dead, only instead of being blessed with holy water, the person’s spirit becomes totally gay.

On Sunday the Satanic Temple, which first came into the national spotlight last January when the organization announced its support for Florida Governor Rick, went to the Phelps family graveyard in Mississippi to perform the ritual. Lucien Greaves, the Temple’s spokesperson, told me a Pink Mass is performed by TK.

Two Pink Masses were performed, one with a female couple and another with men. The idea for the mass came about in April when WBC announced their intention to protest the funerals of the Boston Bombing victims. The church never showed up, but later issued a statement saying they were there “in spirit.” As is always the case when WBC does or says anything, both the initial plans and the subsequent statement pissed off everyone in the world, including Satanists. And so the Satanic Temple decided “that a same-sex couple celebrating ceremony at the gravesite of Fred Phelps’s mother was an appropriate way to meet the Westboro Baptists, ‘in spirit’, but this time on our terms.”

After the Pink Mass was performed, the spirit of Catherine Idalette Johnston was officially into other chicks, meaning her gravesite is a viable target for one of her son’s “god hates fags” protests. The press release states that “The Satanic Temple now believes that Fred Phelps must believe that his mother is now gay, in the afterlife, due to our Pink Mass… And nobody can challenge our right to our beliefs.”

The Temple is encouraging other gay couples to make the trek to Magnolia cemetery in Mississippi and perform their own Pink Mass at the grave. According to the Temple, every time a same-sex couple makes out over the grave of a Pink Mass recipient, the spirit of the deceased “is pleasured in the afterlife,” presumably with spooky ghost orgasms.

In addition to providing vocal support for Governors and turning ghosts gay, the Satanic Temple has launched a bid to adopt a highway in New York City. They are hoping that their Pink Masses will raise awareness for their highway campaign, which is lacking in public support. You can watch a video about the project above, and they’ve set up an indiegogo page where you can donate money and help the Temple achieve their dream of contributing to the betterment of society by keeping our highways clean and litter-free.

In conclusion, your mom likes to scissor now, Fred.

Children playing on a broken wall in the Vel'ka Ida Roma settlement, in eastern Slovakia. The massive US Steel factory is visible in the background. Photos by Matt Lutton.

Throughout history, sometimes events seem perfectly aligned to spark racial violence. On March 10 of last year, the residents of the small village of Krásnohorské Podhradie, in the mountains of eastern Slovakia, looked up to the hilltop at the center of town to see their beloved 14th-century Krásna Hôrka Castle being engulfed in flames. By the time firefighters made it up the hill, the roof was gone and three bells had melted down into the tower. 

The next day, a police spokesman announced that the fire had been caused by two Roma boys, aged 11 and 12, who lived in a ghetto on the edge of the village. They had allegedly been trying to light a cigarette at the bottom of the hill when an unusually strong gust of wind carried a piece of smoldering ash up the mountain, where it ignited wood strewn on the castle grounds. Whether or not they were responsible, the accused and their families were terrified—perhaps because, in the last two years, according to data from the European Roma Rights Center, there have been dozens of violent attacks on Roma in Slovakia—the ethnic group better known as Gypsies. Fearing reprisal, the boys were quickly spirited out of town to stay with relatives, while Roma men prepared throughout the night to defend their community. Ultimately, the boys weren’t charged with any crime because they’re minors, but the damage was done: the image of Gypsy kids setting fire to a hallmark of Slovak national heritage seemed to only reinforce the prejudices many white ethnic Slovaks have toward their country’s poorest citizens. With the burning of Krásna Hôrka Castle, the far right in Slovakia had their equivalent of 1933’s Reichstag fire—the symbolic event needed to justify a crackdown. 

In mid-March, I flew to Slovakia and drove out to Krásnohorské Podhradie for a rally to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the burning of Krásna Hôrka. Marian Kotleba, a former teacher and leader of the far right People’s Party-Our Slovakia—named in honor of the clerical-fascist regime that ruled the Czechoslovak Republic between World War I and II—had pegged his dim electoral prospects on Krásna Hôrka and his stand against “Gypsy criminality.” 

On arrival, I entered a lot beside the municipal offices. A crowd of about 150 people—skinheads, tough-looking townspeople, and about 12 of Marian’s green-clad officer corps—stood around listening to Marian’s speech. My translator suggested parking away from the crowd so that there would be less of a chance of anyone noticing the Hungarian plates on our rental car. “If there’s one thing the neo-Nazis like less than Roma, it’s Hungarians,” he said, only half joking, referring to Slovak resentment of their former imperial neighbor.

A Roma boy with an infected gash who was playing around a trash fire in a feces-strewn field on the edge of the segregated Roma settlement outside the village of Huncovce, Slovakia.

A short, mustached man in black fatigues, Marian Kotleba stood in front of his blue zebra-striped Hummer flanked by two skinheads waving the party’s massive green flags. “We don’t like the way this government deprives polite people in order to improve the position of parasites,” he said in a stern, steady voice. An enormous yellow crane loomed above the castle on the hilltop, making repairs on the castle’s roof. “This burned castle is a symbol of the way it will go if the government doesn’t do anything with this growing and increasing menace,” Marian continued. “If we don’t do anything about it, the situation will continue getting worse… If the state wasn’t creating surprisingly good conditions for these Gypsy extremists, what do you think would happen? They would all go to England. They can go anywhere; they have freedom to move. If they suffer so much in Slovakia, no one is keeping them here. No one will miss them. I don’t have to tell you that I wouldn’t miss them at all.”

Enthusiastic applause rose up from the crowd. For another 20 minutes, Marian railed against the European Union and advocated for the rights of “polite people”—a code term for white ethnic Slovaks. The rally ended with Marian urging the townspeople to “open their eyes and do something.” 

After the speech, I spoke with some of the skinheads. One, named Marek, suggested that Roma be put on reservations, “like the ones you all have for Native Americans.” A teenager in gray camo with a patch that read all cops are bastards snarled, “All the Gypsies should be gassed,” before being pulled away by elder neo-Nazis.

Later that evening, in what would be the climax of the day’s events, Marian drove his Hummer into the poor Roma settlement at the edge of the village and threatened the residents. Using a plot of land he had been given by a local sympathizer as leverage, he attempted to evict the Roma and demolish their homes. The residents responded by throwing stones and attacking his Hummer with hammers. In a statement released in the wake of the incident, Marian wrote, “We had only two options. Deal with the situation radically in the style of Milan Juhász [an off-duty police officer in western Slovakia who killed and wounded five Roma men last summer, claiming that he had to “restore order”]. We had four short ball guns and about 250 rounds of ammunition; however, we decided to give one last chance to the police.”

Marian Kotleba, leader of the far right People's Party, speaking at a rally against "Gypsy criminality" in Krasnhorske Podhradie, Slovakia, for the one-year anniversary of a fire that damaged Krasna Horka Castle.

As the Eurozone crisis worsens and Slovakia considers austerity, moderates, left-wing politicians, and average Slovaks all seem to be colluding, if accidentally, to scapegoat the country’s most precarious minority. According to recent estimates, there are around 440,000 Roma in Slovakia, representing about 8 percent of the population—one of the highest concentrations in Europe. According to monitoring and reports provided by the European Roma Rights Center (ERRC), racist violence, evictions, threats, and more subtle forms of discrimination and prejudice have reached a crescendo over the past two years in Slovakia. The ERRC considers the situation in Slovakia to be one of the worst in Europe. In the past two years, 11 Slovak municipalities have erected walls to separate the residents of Roma ghettos from their white neighbors. On New Year’s Eve 2012, the mayor of the small village Zlaté Moravce (who, reportedly, was drunk) gave a speech in the town square to over 1,000 residents where he called on members of the “white race” to fight “unemployed parasites,” which prompted packs of skinheads to chase Roma teenagers out of bars throughout the town.

The issue is not only neo-Nazis but also the deep-seated prejudices of white Slovaks. In December, the decapitated body of a Roma man—beheaded by the town butcher—was found in a sewer in a nearby village. Last April, in the eastern Slovak village of Chotěbuz, a Czech man used a crossbow to shoot and kill a Roma man who was looking for scrap metal. The shooter allegedly shouted, “You black whores! I’ll kill you!” And over the past year, the Slovak Spectator has reported at least four cases of racially motivated violence against black and brown foreigners by neo-Nazis in Slovakia, including an American basketball player signed by a Slovak team. 

The Roma are a heterogeneous ethnic group historians believe migrated from India around the 9th century into what is now Iraq, ending up in the Balkans and Eastern Europe by the 14th century. They have always been persecuted. According to Isabel Fonseca’s book Bury Me Standing, laws passed in 15th-century Europe permitted the execution of Roma without any evidence of a crime. In medieval Wallachia and Moldavia, Roma were traded as slaves. One Roma slave could be traded for a pig. Up until the 17th and 18th centuries, aristocrats held “heathen hunts” and set forests on fire to drive Roma out of hiding and kill them. Today, there are approximately 13 million Roma in the world, the vast majority of them in Europe. 

Roma children huddle together in the segregated Roma settlement in the village of Vel'ka Ida, Slovakia. The settlement is only given access to water for two hours a day.

After the collapse of Communism and its separation from the Czech Republic in 1993, democratic Slovakia gave minority rights to Roma citizens, which in practice has resulted in their widespread marginalization by the white Slovak and Hungarian majority. In a speech made this February, the prime minister of Slovakia, Robert Fico, accused the Roma of trying to blackmail the Slovak state on the issue. “We did not establish our independent state for minorities, although we respect them, but mainly for the Slovak state-forming nation,” he said, going on to complain about the “strange tendency to put forward the position of minorities.” The topsy-turvy political constellation of the former Eastern bloc is such that Prime Minister Fico, a pragmatic, social-democratic politician, is also known for mocking human rights observers and indulging in nationalist rhetoric.

In 2005, an initiative co-sponsored by the EU, the European Commission, and the World Bank, among other organizations, was undertaken with the intention of making this the Decade of Roma Inclusion for Slovakia and 11 other countries. The European Social Fund committed a billion dollars to helping Roma in Slovakia meet predetermined benchmarks in employment, education, and social inclusion. Today there is little to show for those funds spent in Slovakia. A recent UN Development Program report painted a grim picture: of the 43 percent of contracts and funds designated to be relevant to marginalized Roma by Slovakian municipalities, only 18 percent have actually reached marginalized Roma communities. In my interviews with Roma, there was a widespread perception that white municipalities were funding self-serving development projects with funds that had been earmarked for Roma communities. 

On the other side, there is a persistent theory among white Slovaks that the EU architects are funneling money into Slovakia to turn it into a giant ghetto, thus preventing Roma from migrating to countries like Great Britain and France.

Both of these perceptions may not be entirely implausible. A source who was party to high-level European Commission and World Bank meetings (and who did not wished to be named) told me that she got the sense that the underlying reason for pushing social programs was to curtail Roma immigration from Eastern to Western Europe. There are also reports that the European Commission has threatened to nullify the Balkans visa-liberalization program—which allows Balkan residents to move fluidly between their borders and those of the EU—if they don’t do something to stabilize their Roma population. Western Europe doesn’t want the Roma, and Slovakia doesn’t want them either. 

Boys stand on a hill by the wall separating the Roma settlement of Ostrovany, Slovakia, from its non-Roma neighbors. From left to right: Ferko, 12, Lukas, 9, Lubomir Kaleja, 12, and David Kotler, 12.

A few days before the neo-Nazi rally, I visited a Roma ghetto. I drove past skeletal trees, black muddy fields, World War II monuments, and gothic, bleeding crucifixes on middle-of-nowhere country roads to Košice, a grim industrial city in eastern Slovakia that seemed little changed since the collapse of Communism. Earlier this year Košice was given the EU’s “2013 European Capital of Culture” award, alongside Marseille, France. It seemed like a strange choice. The cobblestone streets of the historic Old Town emptied out completely around ten at night, giving the place a vaguely Stasi feel. The selection seemed conveniently timed to stoke enthusiasm for the EU in a country facing austerity and a 33 percent youth unemployment rate. 

There are at least 14 informal Roma settlements scattered around Košice, in addition to massive social-housing projects like Luník IX, a cellblock for thousands of Roma that has become a kind of Epcot exhibition of devastating poverty. In late February, several hundred white Slovak activists—unaffiliated with the neo-Nazis—marched through the streets of Košice. The organizers told the media, “Gypsy criminality has destroyed many lives.”

On the outskirts of Košice, under a dystopian Eastern bloc skyline of steel factories, pods, and towers spewing smoke, we came to the exurban village of Vel’ká Ida. In August, Vel’ká Ida’s moderate-right mayor erected a six-foot concrete wall in front of the Roma settlement (ostensibly to keep Roma children from being struck by passing cars). Around the same time, the mayor cut access to the water supply for the community of 800 people to two hours a day, citing overuse.

At Vel’ká Ida, I met Carlo, the unofficial leader of the Roma settlement. Behind the wall that separates the community from the road, houses collapsed in on themselves, dogs perched on the edges of massive trash containers, and smoke wafted in from the industrial skyline. Carlo’s wife, a hardscrabble woman in her 50s, led us through the crowd and into their shack. 

Carlo, a short and tough middle-aged man, held court from his bed, which was situated in the kitchen. Out of the 800 Roma living in the settlement, he was one of the few who had been able to secure employment and proudly displayed his ID from US Steel, where he did manual labor for 350 euros a month. “Slovakia is the worst nation for Roma. The government is a bunch of racists,” he said. When I asked about the new wall he shrugged. “I know it’s racism, I know it’s segregation. But we’ve got bigger problems we’re dealing with at the moment, like the water; and the unemployment.” 

A Roma guy in his 20s sitting silently in the kitchen suddenly spoke up and disagreed with Carlo. “If the mayor was right about the wall being built to protect children, why did he build it up so high?” he asked. “It’s to make us invisible.” Carlo shook his head and said that drunk, local whites routinely drove into the settlement at night to harass them and shoot off guns. “Look, you can see poverty on us,” Carlo said. “Now with the far right people with their rhetoric against the Roma, what do they want from us? What do they want to take from us? We have nothing.”

Under Communism, the Roma had no official minority rights (the concept of minority rights ran counter to the uncompromising unity required to maintain the vast Soviet system). There was, however, guaranteed housing in the city centers and plenty of industrial jobs; integration was enforced and discrimination could be punished. The authorities relocated Roma around Czechoslovakia as needed, attempting to mold the ethnic group into a kind of malleable industrial workforce.

Over the past 20 years, through a process that could be viewed as coordinated gentrification, the Roma were pushed out of Slovakia’s city centers and into segregated settlements at the fringes of cities and villages. The number of informal Roma settlements and ghettos in Slovakia grew from 278 in 1988 to 620 in 2000. According to recent UN Development Program reports, Roma unemployment currently hovers around 70 percent—compared to 33 percent for non-Roma. Nearly all the Roma I interviewed were unemployed. Many white Slovaks I spoke with tended to attribute the Roma’s “work-shy” disposition, while human rights groups blame it on widespread discrimination and prejudice. 

The mayor of the village of Vel'ka Ida, Julius Beluscscak, in his office.

Two days after my time with Carlo, I sat in a municipal office in a 17th-century castle across the street from the Roma settlement, speaking with Vel’ká Ida’s mayor, Július Beluscsák. He struck me as a vain and priggish man, from his limp handshake to his pointy, zip-up snakeskin boots. I felt embarrassed that I had walked into his spotlessly clean office with dirty shoes, caked in the mud of the settlement. The mayor, a former physician and a coalition candidate from Slovakia’s center-right and center-left parties, rattled off the relevant statistics: there were 1,300 Roma in his town, 75 of whom were employed, “and somewhere around 200 stray dogs.” Ninety percent of the Roma, he claimed, didn’t understand basic hygiene. When asked about administering a district with these kinds of social problems, he sighed and said, “I’m envious of those mayors who have no Roma in their municipalities. The Roma settlement out here in Vel’ká Ida is probably one of the worst in all of Slovakia. The women are having children starting from age 13 to 33. We have a case of a 33-year-old woman who has 11 kids. They’re having children to get social benefits. They have no obligations or duties. The children don’t get vaccinated.”

One aspect of the prejudice toward Roma centers on notions of hygiene. While in the United States, the word Gypsy arguably doesn’t carry an explicitly negative connotation, the Slovak word Cigáni does—it roughly translates to “filthy Gypsy.” In 2011, ethnic Slovaks started a movement called Zobudme sa (“Let’s Wake Up”), collecting the signatures of the mayors of around 400 cities and towns in an attempt to coordinate demolitions of Roma shanty settlements. The signatories are attempting to use environmental law to reclassify informal settlements as dumping grounds, and evict their residents on the grounds of trash being strewn about and other unhygienic conditions. But the mayors behind the Let’s Wake Up movement aren’t proposing Roma integration into white communities or improved social housing. They just want them out of sight and out of mind. In October, the mayor of Košice evicted 156 people from a settlement and bought them one-way bus tickets out of town. The mayor of the village they were sent to—also a signatory of Let’s Wake Up—then bought them one-way bus tickets back to Košice. According to a recent ERRC monitor report, those who were evicted were squatting in the forest.

By exacerbating the conditions that made it difficult for the Roma to get work, vaccinations, and decent housing—by treating them as undesirables—weren’t the municipalities contributing to the conditions the Roma were being blamed for creating? The mayor’s explanations, like the ideology of Let’s Wake Up, seemed like a catch-22: according to him, the Roma are unhygienic because they are poor; but the Roma are poor because they’re unhygienic. Let’s just do away with them all, the logic seemed to be, and history has shown us where this thinking ultimately leads. 

When I asked the mayor how the situation of the town’s Roma could be improved, he said, “They need to be dealt with in a dictatorial fashion.” I pressed him on what exactly that meant, and he explained, “No, no. Dictatorial like under Communism. Back then, having a job was compulsory. If the children didn’t go to school, the police would come and beat the parents up.” 

The mayor then abruptly walked over to his cabinet and pulled out some village gift bags and a soccer pennant. The bags contained a towel and a badge, each adorned with Vel’ká Ida’s village crest—a castle turret guarded by two lancers. “Vel’ká Ida is very famous,” he gloated. “There actually used to be a Gypsy castle here in the 15th century. When the Czechs attacked, these Gypsy lancers helped to defend us.”

“This was a real castle? The Roma helped defend it?” I said, completely confused. 

“No,” the mayor replied, rubbing his chin. “It was only a myth.”

The wall and iron gate separating a Roma social-housing complex from the rest of the city, on the edge of Presov, Slovakia. The lock on the gate was recently broken open by Roma residents.

In recent Slovakian laws and the comments of elected officials, a word that is cropping up with disturbing frequency is inadaptable. The perception is that there are two types of Roma: those who can integrate into white society and those who choose to live in filthy, segregated settlements. 

In 2001, Prime Minister Fico said, “The great mass of Roma want to just lie in bed on social support and family benefit. These people have discovered that, because of family benefit, it is advantageous to have children.” Shockingly, forced and coerced sterilization of Roma women occurred in Slovakian hospitals as recently as 2004, when strategic litigation resulted in an informed consent requirement being written into the country’s health-care laws. Testimonies compiled by the Center for Civil and Human Rights in 2003 showed an egregious pattern of abuse perpetrated by white Slovak doctors in hospitals. They were reportedly telling Roma women that they were having too many children—and sometimes mentally disabled children—in order to receive increased child-support benefits. The testimonies are a collection of horrors: the attempted rape of a Roma woman by an ambulance driver as she was going into labor, women raped by their gynecologists, women saying they were not given painkillers during birth, and, in one particularly horrifying instance, a woman being forced to give birth on the hospital floor with a doctor screaming, “You are a pig, so you should give birth like a pig!” 

In my interviews and interactions with white Slovaks, many seemed to regard Roma as welfare queens bent on abusing government programs. Last April, Peter Pollak became the first Roma elected to Slovakia’s parliament. As Plenipotentiary for Roma Communities, he is also in charge of advising the government on Roma issues. While there are a few glimmers of hope, such as an amended antidiscrimination law that will take effect in April, enthusiasm for Pollak has somewhat dimmed with the perception that he is being used by the prime minister and ministry of interior to push a paternalistic set of reforms called the “Right Way,” written to address the children of “socially inadaptable citizens.” The laws, many of which have yet to be implemented, make it so that criminal records and children’s school attendance affect the social benefits Roma families can collect. For his part, Prime Minister Fico stated earlier this year that the best hope for Roma was to separate the children from their families and place them in boarding schools. “Someone should show these children they can live in a different way,” he said. 

Milan Dano, 52, the unofficial leader of a segregated Roma social-housing complex called the Old Brick-Kiln, which is home to 2,000 people. Milan was fired from his job for speaking out against the wall.

An hour north of Košice, at the edge of the city of Prešov, we visited another Roma ghetto—the Old Brick-Kiln, an enormous social-housing complex wedged beside the highway. Constructed 13 years ago with EU funds, this crumbling structure provides housing for 2,000 Roma and looks like something out of Robert Moses’s wet dreams. In 2010, the city built a wall and an iron gate on the hill behind the complex, closing off the easiest and safest access to the town. Keys were doled out to the non-Roma neighbors so that they could access their garden plots, but not the Roma residents. The 15-minute walk to school for Roma children became a 45-minute walk along a highway. And, of course, the municipality does not provide school buses. 

Slovakian schools still have segregated classrooms for Roma and whites. Many Roma children are diagnosed with disabilities and, according to ERRC reports, make up 60 percent of special-education schools. Although a historic 2012 verdict by a Slovak court ended overt segregation and was praised by human rights watchdogs, a de facto segregation persists much as after Brown v. Board of Education. Some Roma parents told me the only change is that Roma and white students now eat lunch together. Roma NGOs and media organizations report that white Slovaks are moving from villages into the cities to avoid having their children share classrooms with Roma children, in what constitutes a sort of reverse “white flight.”

In the Old Brick-Kiln, we were guided to the apartment of the unofficial leader of the complex, Milan Daňo. Milan, a stocky 50-year-old Roma man covered in tattoos from neck to knuckles, worked as a community coordinator for a Roma nonprofit until he was dismissed in November. Of the 2,000 residents who live in the Old Brick-Kiln, he was one of the few who had been able to secure employment. Milan said his dismissal was related to a statement he made to a journalist over the summer: “First they tore down the Berlin Wall, then they built up the Roma wall!” He had also signed a petition against the barrier. “I hear that the mayor says he doesn’t want to see me anymore,” he said, looking downcast.

In the 90s, the majority of Prešov’s Roma still lived on two streets in the city center. Their apartments were declared uninhabitable, they were evicted, and the Old Brick-Kiln was offered up as an alternative. “While they were building this place, they told us that it would be a military barracks, so we wouldn’t get frightened that they were going to relocate us.”

Milan and all the Old Brick-Kiln’s other residents pay rent and have leases at the complex. But, I wondered, why couldn’t people find other accommodations after they were evicted from the city center? Both the translator and Milan shook their heads balefully, indicating that I just didn’t understand. “It’s not possible—the non-Roma in the city would never rent to us.”

The ledger book still didn’t seem to add up. How did 2,000 unemployed Roma afford to pay 300 euros each, per month, for their apartments? “Some people use their child support to pay rent, others use social benefit or have informal jobs. We’re taking out loans,” Milan said. He explained that there had been a few “activation schemes”—work-stimulus programs financed by the EU and Slovakian municipalities—but that these temp gigs sweeping streets, cleaning gutters, and shoveling snow were only assigned to 15 or 20 people and sometimes didn’t even pay. 

Milan’s wife Zlata, a non-Roma but also unemployed, said, “The whole non-Roma public is criticizing us for being ‘work-shy.’ The thing is, being Roma keeps you from getting a job. If I can’t get a job, how can I expect him to with all this discrimination?” 

Milan and Zlata perceived these activation schemes to be less about providing sustainable employment than providing a modicum of busywork for habitually “work-shy” Roma communities. 

This industrial pig farm was built over a World War II-era Roma concentration camp, just outside the village of Lety, Czech Republic. An estimated 326 people died in the camp, and more than 500 were deported to Auschwitz.

The Czechoslovak Republic was the first country in 20th-century Europe to initiate a “solution” for the Roma. The 1927 Law of Migrating Gypsies required all gypsies to be filed, registered, and classified with the authorities. Austria and Weimar, Germany, followed suit with their Central Office for the Fight Against the Gypsies. They were banned from public baths, forced to carry ID cards, and their civil rights were impeded. The legislation intensified with Nazi Germany’s Nuremberg Laws, the Reich Citizenship Law, and a Gypsy version of Kristallnacht, called Gypsy Clean-Up Week. The “final solution to the Gypsy question” was first mentioned by Himmler in 1938. 

Most historians estimate that between 500,000 and 1.5 million Roma perished during the Nazi era. In the postwar reckoning and memorialization, the Roma were largely excluded and forgotten. They were not present during the score-settling Nuremberg trials and received no reparations. The view was that Roma were murdered by the Nazis and the Axis countries not for racial reasons, but for their persistently asocial and criminal behavior—the same reasons given for their persecution today. The Roma holocaust didn’t even receive a proper name until the 1990s, when it was dubbed Porajmos—the “Devouring.” 

As early as 1939, adult male Gypsies could be sent to disciplinary labor camps in the Czech Protectorate. In 1942, SS commander Horst Böhme in Prague issued an order to “fight against the Gypsy plague.” At least 1,039 Roma had their property confiscated and were deported to Lety, a former disciplinary camp an hour from Prague, which was operated not by the SS, but by Czechs. Today, a functioning, industrial pig farm sits on the site of the former camp.

On a cold night at a pub near the center of Prague, I met Markus Pape, an investigative journalist who authored the 1997 book Nobody Will Believe You: A Document of the Lety Concentration Camp. “The title,” he told me, “came from what the Roma survivors were told when they came out of Lety and tried to tell their story. People said, ‘No one will ever believe you.’” A chain-smoking German émigré to the Czech Republic, Markus has a haunted and disheveled demeanor that middle-aged investigative journalists so often seem to possess.

Markus’s book drew on archives and first-person testimonies of Roma survivors. It’s unfortunate that when we talk about the Nazi era, we deal with people as statistics—much in the same way the Nazis reduced humans to numbers. In the Europe-wide schema of extermination, the Lety camp was comparatively small. Three hundred and twenty-six people died in Lety, 241 of them children. The Czech historians who knew of Lety wrote it off as relatively benign, similar to the Japanese interment camps in the US during World War II. It was their view that the children who perished there had suffered from an unfortunate typhus outbreak in the Stalingrad winter of 1943. 

Markus’s book was the first to suggest that a grievous crime had been committed. In his research, he found that deaths occurred before the typhus outbreak of 1943. He argued that Lety should be reclassified as a concentration camp. This caused an uproar among Czech historians and the Czech government, and it didn’t help that Markus was German. “The view from the Czechs was, ‘This is not nice,’” he sighed. “It didn’t fit into this Czech self-perception as victims of World War II. Their view of themselves is, ‘Occasionally we broke the rules, but we were not like Germany or any imperial nation.’” Even if Lety was just used as an internment camp, more than 500 Roma were transported from there to the gas chambers of Auschwitz. 

Someone had written "Gypsies to the Gas!" in the guestbook at the information center about the Lety Concentration Camp.

The camp at Lety was demolished after the typhus outbreak, and none of the Czechs responsible were ever convicted of any crime. The camp remained forgotten until the early 90s when an American businessman and amateur genealogist named Paul Polansky rediscovered it in the Czech archives and informed the US Congress. In response, Václav Havel, the first president of the democratic Czech Republic, commissioned a small memorial to be erected near the pig farm in 1995 but didn’t solicit any Roma input during the design phase. “Can you imagine building a Holocaust memorial without consulting any Jewish people?” Markus asked rhetorically. The current Czech prime minister visited the memorial last summer but insisted there was no way to evict the owners of the pig farm. 

Markus, who now works part-time as a human rights monitor, mentioned that he watched the American film Mississippi Burning the night before. “I was shocked by how many things in the movie were the same kind of things that happen here with Roma,” he said, describing how in 2009, he had investigated an attack on a Roma apartment building by neo-Nazis that left a young girl permanently burned. “When I talk to my Czech friends about the Roma, they think it is a problem that will never be solved. Maybe it’s something like the Israel and Palestine issue. For Israel, there is no solution.” 

The next morning, Markus and I drove out to the funereal, empty Czech village of Lety and up over a hill to the site of the former camp. “The camp was built on the other side of a hill so no one could see what was going on,” he explained. We turned down a two-lane rural road that soon turned from pavement to dirt. In the gray afternoon, the pig farm, with its rusted barbed-wire fence and lines of gray barracks with foul-smelling smoke rising from the chimneys, looked like a textbook photograph of a concentration camp. We stood atop the cold hill, examining a historical placard that showed the location of the former site. “Survivors said they were tortured here,” Markus said. “One survivor who had been in both Auschwitz and Lety said that Lety was worse because it was the Czechs, their own people doing it. Auschwitz was very bad, but you could see the gas chambers coming. In Lety you never knew what would happen from day to day.”

Havel’s memorial, situated in a copse of snow-dusted trees, looked like the kind of outdoor Baptist amphitheater you might find in suburban Houston. “The problem is that visitors come here and they see the pig farm from the road, and they say, ‘Is that the memorial? It looks like a concentration camp,’” Markus said. Across a small pond, the pig farm continued to belch gray smoke. Markus pointed at the pond and said, “Survivors said that children were drowned in there.”

Back in the village, we visited an information center about the Lety camp. The small, unheated room smelled like wet cigarette butts, and strange funhouse mirrors hung on the walls. On the way out, after looking over the historical placards, we checked the guestbook. Someone had scrawled “Gypsies to the gas!” across a full page.

On the drive back to Prague, Markus and I discussed the future. “Today, any government that supports Roma will lose the next election,” he said. “Democracy is supposed to be the protection of minorities. Without that protection, the minorities will be suppressed by what the majority decides. I think people in post-Communist countries are having difficulty adjusting to this. After ’89, we lost a major part of our identity, being part of this international Communist bloc. And where are we now? What do we have to be proud of? We needed to revive our nationalistic approach to fill the void. And the Roma don’t fit into this approach.”

This artilce was reported in partnership with the Investigative Fund at the Nation Institute.

More stories from Aaron Lake Smith:

The Czechs of Montauk

Death of the American Hobo

Peeling Oniontown

This was a great year for the short story. George Saunders’s "Teeth of December" rocketed up the best seller list, Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and we saw a host of great new story collections by writers such as Aimee Bender, Peter Orner, and Karen Russell. For me, the best part of short stories in 2013 was Laura van den Berg’s second collection, The Isle of Youth. Published last month by FSG, The Isle of Youth contains eight noir-tinged stories of women haunted by secrets both external and internal. The stories cover everything from rival masked bank-robbing gangs to a woman flying to Antarctica to recover her brother’s bones. Equal parts mysterious and moving, these are stories you will remember.

I emailed with Van den Berg about existential film noir, MacGuffins, and the strangeness of Florida.  

VICE: I've heard you say that you were watching a lot of "existential noirs" like Vertigo and L'Avventura while writing these stories. Can you talk about how noir and "genre" in general has influenced your writing?

Laura van den Berg:I love creating mysteries, but I am terrible at solving them. I think it would be impossible for me to write a really good mystery in the conventional sense, with all the satisfying twists and turns in plot; that’s just not how my mind works, where my narrative interest lies. So what I love about films like The Passenger and L'Avventura is the way mystery is evoked but at a certain point other questions take over. Mystery becomes a state of being as opposed to a ball of yarn to be unraveled. Or take Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me by Javier Marias, such an amazing novel, which opens with a mysterious death, but ultimately that external mystery becomes an instrument of pressure that cracks open the narrator and allows the reader to see the mystery within. I was very interested in that model of mystery—both structurally and aesthetically. 

I love the idea of mystery as a "state of being." That's an effect I really admire in your writing, and something that I attempt to create in my own fiction. Your formulation sounds similar to the idea of a "MacGuffin," a term Hitchcock used for an object that sets the story in motion, but that doesn't do much else and often ends up being unimportant or even forgotten by the end. Some examples would be the briefcase in Pulp Fiction or the falcon in the The Maltese Falcon. Are these plot mysteries—a missing magician father, the bones of a deceased brother in Antarctica—what get the stories started for you? Or do they come later in the process?
Yes, exactly. The "MacGuffin” sets the story in motion, but ultimately the narrative eye is directed elsewhere. Usually those external elements are what opens the story for me—and my task is to figure the internal story behind the situation. I often start with voice, meaning I get a first line lodged in my brain and it won’t leave me (i.e. “My father leaving was his last act of magic”), and usually an event or situation, a "MacGuffin” element, is suggested in those first lines.

Short story collections often struggle to find a balance between cohesiveness and not being repetitive, but The Isle of Youthstrikes this balance perfectly. The nine stories cover a wide variety of locations, characters, and situations, yet they have common themes (disappearances, estranged family, elements of noir, etc.) that play off each other in interesting and resonant ways. How consciously were you working towards this balance in assembling the collection?  Was this simply how the stories came out? 
Initially it was just how the stories came out, but after I had written a few I would have had to be pretty inattentive to not notice that there were an inordinate amount of disappearances and twins and detectives, so pretty soon I realized I was working on a collection with clear thematic links. But I tried to not think too much about the larger shape of the book and to just keep writing what I felt like writing.

After I had finished the collection—in that I was pretty sure I had all the stories—I did a lot of work on the architecture and the arrangement. I was living in Baltimore at the time and had planned to use one summer to put together ISLE, only to discover that our building would be undergoing major renovations, which involved construction workers accessing a part of the interior that could, bizarrely, only be reached by going through our bedroom closet (I wrote about this whole apartment situation more here). Our apartment was a total disaster and I wasn’t working at all. But then some friends were moving and leaving a few weeks before their lease ended, so they let me work in their empty apartment. The luxury of all that empty space felt extraordinary—I had pages all over the floors, all over the walls. The physicality of that process allowed me to see certain architectural details: putting the one third-person story in the middle, as a kind of transitioning device; spacing out the two stories with missing fathers; how the last line of the first story which contains the word “evidence,” could bled into “Opa-Locka,” a story about private eyes. The first and last story bookend with arrivals and physical danger (a hurricane, an emergency landing); the narrator has a twin that died at birth in the first story; in the last one, the narrator has an adult twin that goes missing—they are re-writings of each other, in a way. Seeing the echoes helped me decide the order (and I think order becomes particularly crucial in a collection with so much linkage). I was also able to see where there were less useful repetitions, the ones that didn’t contribute to the larger enterprise, and tried to weed those out as much as possible.  

You and I were recently bemoaning the idea that "literary fiction" equals "realism." So many critics say this, despite the long history of "literary" writers like Kafka, Borges, Saunders, and so on. Although a lot of your stories might be called realist, they often contain elements of strangeness—detectives that name themselves after the Pythagorean Theorem, sand eating, rival masked bank robber gangs, etc.—that turn the world askew. Is "realism" something you work towards or against in a story? 
I think where a writer falls on the realism/non-realism continuum has a lot to do with their sight, as in: this is how I see the world. And it seems my sight is off-kilter and kind of strange, but I come by that naturally; I’m not consciously pushing toward a particular point on the continuum. I can remember being in workshop and people writing things like HOW WEIRD in the margins of my stories and I’d be like Really? You think that’s weird? It's one of those slightly uncomfortable moments when you realize your understanding of what's strange and what isn't is a little out of step with the people around you. I suspect part of this naturally weird sight is probably connected to growing up in Florida. For example, I did not appreciate how strange it was to have an alligator in your backyard until I moved north.

I love many realists, but very strongly resist the notion that realism presents a less stylized, more authentic version of the world. All fiction is a magic trick, but instead of pulling a rabbit out of a hat the aspiration—for me at least—is to do a trick that accesses or reveals some kind of truth. But realism is every bit as engineered, as stylized, as non-realism; it’s just that the tricks are different. I think that false correlation between "authenticity" and "realism" still exists and it bugs me. Actually even the idea of going to fiction for "authenticity" bugs me. Do you know what I mean? 

I definitely agree that "realism" is no less a trick than anything else. It reminds me of something I once heard George Saunders say about out how it isn't like in real life the patterns on your drapes are a perfect metaphor for your crumbling relationship. That’s no more “real” than Gregor Samsa turning into a beetle.

I know what you mean about the pointless of going to fiction for "authenticity." However, if this isn't too vague of a question, what do you go to fiction for? Are there effects you find in fiction that you don't in other forms of writing or art?
I go to fiction in part to disappear. When I’m absorbed in a work of fiction, time and place melts away, as though I’ve drifted away from my usual reality and been absorbed into another. It’s a transcendent feeling. And it’s usually only a feeling I can get from fiction. I love all kinds of art and get excited about and feel moved by all kinds of art, but when I am, say, looking at a painting at a museum there is often that slight bit of self-consciousness that can be hard to turn off, a small part of my brain that is actively aware that I am standing in a museum and looking at a painting. I lose that awareness when I’m reading; I forget where I am.

Did you read Leaving the Atocha Station? I really loved that book. I’m thinking of the opening scene where the narrator is in a museum, wanting to have some kind of meaningful experience with art, but he’s unable to get away from himself. I am not cursed with that dude’s level of self-consciousness, thank god.

I don’t mean to suggest, however, that fiction is escapism for me; it’s not at all. I go to fiction to be moved, rattled, woken up, and surprised. To experience something aesthetically interesting. To be asked to re-see some aspect of our world or some aspect of language or the nature storytelling. When I think about the feeling I had upon finishing some of the books that have been the most important to me, it’s not so much “finishing” as “coming out of.” As in, when I “came out of” The Loser or The Quick and the Dead the world looked a little different than it did before.

You mentioned growing up in Florida, and a lot of the stories in The Isle of Youth are set there. Strangeness seems integral to Southern writing from Flannery O'Connor to Cormac McCarthy. Do you feel connected to the tradition of Southern literature at all?
There are so many southern writers I am wild for, but I don’t really feel a strong connection to that tradition as a writer. Possibly because Florida is strange in its own particular way, or never seemed quite like living in the south. My mom is from Nashville—and lives there now—and she is adamant that Florida is not really the south. Florida is like three or four states packed into one; we lack the cohesive identity that I associate with other southern states. The identity of Florida feels more transient.

You are working on a novel now. Can you tell us anything about it? How does the process of writing novels compare to writing stories for you?   
Happily! I started this novel, Find Me, in 2008—which is actually the same year I started Isle. It’s about an epidemic that destroys memory and a young woman searching for her mother. In some ways I think Find Me is pretty different from the stories, but there is some overlap: a lot of ghosts and vanishings and a tilted sense of reality. Right now it’s scheduled to be out from FSG in early 2015.

For me the project of a short story and the project of a novel are so radically different, I find it difficult to compare the two. Certainly the size of the canvas is very different—and both intense, particular challenges and intense, particular joys accompany the larger scale. In respect to process, I find that stories are more compatible with being a person in the world. I can work for a few hours a morning, return when I have patches of time, and make headway. With the novel, I need to maintain a certain level of immersion and that can be harder to achieve for long stretches in my non-imaginary life. As a result, I started to spend more time away, at colonies and whatnot, and also ended up living my imaginary life within my non-imaginary life more. So if you ever meet me and I look like I don’t know where I am, that is probably why.

NEWS

Here Comes the White-Power Safety Patrol

They Want to Clean Up Your Campus

By Wes Enzinna

Members of the White Student Union, from left to right (they agreed to participate on condition we only used their first names): Sean, Ken, Paddy, Matthew Heimbach, Addie, and Shayne. Photos by Jackson Fager.

Matthew Heimbach insists he’s not a racist. This comes as a surprise to his fellow students at Towson University, in the suburbs of Baltimore, where Matthew has formed a group called the White Student Union that advocates for “persons of European heritage”—what most of us call “white people.” It also comes as a surprise to the African American students who feel targeted by the night patrols the senior history major began conducting in March. The patrols target supposed “black predators,” Matthew wrote on the WSU’s website, citing (among others) a case in which an African American man pulled out a knife and his penis, and wagged both at a co-ed couple who were copulating in a parking garage. “White Southern men,” he wrote, “have long been called to defend their communities when law enforcement and the State seem unwilling to protect our people.”

Also surprised by Matthew’s claim that he’s not a racist is Duane Davis. “You are a fat, racist little bitch,” the scrappy, dreadlocked man told Matthew one sunny Tuesday this April. There was a rally going on, organized by the Student Government Association and the Black Student Union. In a field behind Duane and Matthew, about 100 students protested the White Student Union by reading unity-themed slam poetry from a microphone. When Matthew showed up on the edge of the crowd, a dozen protesters had come to confront him. Down the façade of a parking garage, a banner unfurled reading, WSU GTFO (translation: White Student Union Get the Fuck Out).

“There’s no need to insult me,” Matthew told Duane, who looked one wrong reply away from punching the 21-year-old.

“I’ve killed people,” Duane said. “In self-defense... But I’ve killed people.”

Matthew has the look of someone who’s been bullied his whole life: he puffs out his chest to hide an abundant belly, wears unfashionable drugstore spectacles, and on this day sported what vaguely resembled a Morrissey T-shirt.

“Who is that on your shirt?” Duane said, jabbing Matthew in the chest. The onlookers leaned in to hear the answer.

“Ian Smith,” Matthew said, before rattling off the biography of the former prime minister of Rhodesia, a white supremacist who resisted efforts to end white rule there in the 60s. “He’s one of my heroes.”

A svelte woman in a dashiki interrupted. “If you were dying and needed a heart transplant,” she asked, “would you accept one from a black person?”

Matthew was silent. He cracked an awkward smile. From the microphone, the lyrics to John Lennon’s “Give Peace a Chance” were heard.

“He doesn’t need a black heart,” Duane said. “He’s already got one!”

Protesters at a “unity rally” on the Towson campus send a message to Matthew and company: “White Student Union Get The Fuck Out.” Photo by Iram Nayati.

Since launching the night patrols, Matthew has become the pasty public face of campus hate. He knows how to court the media, and the segments about him that have aired on CNN, CBS, the Thom Hartmann Program, and pretty much every news blog, all prove it. As such, going to Maryland and hanging out with him and his shadowy “comrades,” as we did recently, risks giving him the thing he wants even more than his own Rhodesia: attention. Yet accounts so far have treated the student as a vile curiosity rather than what he really is—the possible future of organized racism in America—and so we figured, what the hell, let’s go interview him. 

“I hate Hitler,” Matthew told me at his apartment, in an African American neighborhood in Baltimore about 15 miles from Towson’s campus. He resents being classified as a “racist” or “white supremacist,” he said, and despises the KKK and neo-Nazi organizations. “They’re just low-rent thugs trying to make themselves feel better. Frankly, they’re an embarrassment.”

Sipping coffee from a mug emblazoned with the Confederate flag, Matthew told me about the “race realist” movement of which he's a part—a group of activists and academics who some believe have traded burning crosses for PhDs and tweed jackets. They float a variety of ideologies, but the most popular are identitarianism (a term mostly used in Europe) and racial realism, interchangeable names for people who believe that whiteness is worth celebrating as much as blackness or any other identity. “We stand for positive love of our people,” Matthew told me, “but also respect for everyone else… That’s the key difference [between them and groups like the Klan]. Love will get us a lot further than yelling racial epithets into a bullhorn.” According to Matthew, identitarianism and racial realism reject white power but embrace white pride on the basis that if pride is a good thing for one group, it’s good for any group. “You’re never going to get anywhere in America by waving a swastika banner,” he said.

Matthew formed his first White Student Union when he was still in high school, in the rural town of Poolesville, Maryland, after the school tried to integrate. “There were, like, three black kids before that,” he said. But the group didn’t become a reality until years later when in August 2012, Matthew organized sympathizers at Towson (initially under the name of "Youth for Western Civilization") and enlisted a conservative professor to serve as its advisor. They went mostly unnoticed until one of their members, Scott Terry (who isn’t a Towson student), was spotted on national TV at the Conservative Political Action Conference this March. Scott told K. Carl Smith, the black founder of the Frederick Douglass Republicans, that Frederick Douglass should’ve thanked his master for “feeding and housing him.” Jon Stewart played the clip on The Daily Show and lambasted Scott. Their advisor dropped his support, and the group was denied official recognition by the university, but the group grew as a result: according to Matthew, it now allegedly has 57 members. He’s also helped form similar groups on other campuses, most recently at Indiana University, in Bloomington. (Though antiracist activists have since shut down that chapter.)

When I asked Matthew how he felt about Obama’s presidency, he said, “I’m not a fan, but not because he’s African American.” He explained how, for him, Obama’s two presidential victories underscored the waning power of white male voters in America. Pointing to US Census Bureau predictions that by 2040 whites will no longer be a majority (though they’ll still be the largest ethnic category), he said that, because of changing demographics across the country, Mitt Romney’s defeat in the 2012 presidential election showed that “we’ve already lost the ability to elect a president. Mitt Romney got 60 percent of the white vote. Ten years ago, if you got 60 percent of the white vote, you would win the presidency. Now it’s not enough. So the change in demographics spells to us the fact that we’ve lost the ability on a national level to even advocate for ourselves.” It was clear that his usage of “we” and “our” did not include non-Caucasian Americans.

According to Mark Potok, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center, this same sentiment has fueled a recent spike in white-supremacist activity: since 2008, there’s been an 800 percent increase in what he calls “patriot groups,” many of whom have armed themselves against the government, and a twofold increase in hate groups. He cites Obama’s presidency and the economic recession as motivating factors. “It’s about capitalizing on discontent,” Mark told me recently. “Heimbach couches his politics in vague, Christian-sounding language that’s designed to make the racist message palatable to young, disenfranchised, ignorant whites on college campuses or elsewhere.” The Southern Poverty Law Center recently listed Matthew on its annual Hatewatch list.

The weekend after my first visit to Towson, at a conference held by the American Renaissance outside Nashville, Tennessee, the theme of white victimization was on full display, as were the movement’s increasingly young followers. American Renaissance was founded in 1990 by Jared Taylor, a Yale-educated academic who has taught Japanese at Harvard and also runs a white-separatist organization called New Century Foundation. Jared has provided much of the intellectual heft for the identitarianism and racial-realism movement by publishing books brimming with dubious statistics, which argue that blacks are less intelligent than whites and more prone to commit crimes, yet he has barred neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers from joining his group. He is pro-Israel and celebrates Japan (where he was born) as a successful example of a homogenous ethnic state because he believes the Japanese are more “advanced”—genetically and socially—than whites. But at the conference, Jared, who looks a bit like Ted Danson and is a fan of foppish sport coats and collared shirts, dropped his polished tone for a more incendiary message. When he asked the 150 or so people there how many were first-time attendees, more than half raised their hands. From a stage, he explained the ultimate goal of his efforts. “We want a homeland where we are a majority,” he said. “We have a government of traitors... White people who express a desire for a homeland are labeled as haters.” He ended his speech to applause: “Think of secession…Think of hometowns. We have to build them ourselves… Survival is the first law. We have no choice but to keep fighting.”

Matthew had flown down from Baltimore to attend. He stood up and asked a question. “The federal government will continue its genocide of our people,” he said. “Where should we go? What’s the best way to create a homeland?”

“It will work itself out organically in ways we can’t predict,” Jared responded. “White anger may erupt in places we haven’t heard of.”

Matthew Heimbach and Duane Davis argue during the unity rally. Photo by Iram Nayati.

A week later, I tagged along with the White Student Union on a night patrol. “It’s the anniversary of Lincoln’s assassination,” Matthew said cheerily to the five WSU members who showed up. Until then, no reporters had met the other members of the group, and after repeated cancellations to go on patrol, I’d started to wonder if they really existed. But here they were. “Let’s do a little golf clap for Lincoln’s assassination,” Matthew said, kicking off the vigilante effort before the crew wended its way through the brick and ivy campus.

The cavalcade included a young skinhead-looking guy named Paddy and his fiancée, Addie, who said she was happy to lend a “female face to the movement.” There was a 40-something-year-old named Ken, who had driven all the way from Delaware to poke around Towson looking for unruly “black criminals.” The patrol was rounded out by Sean, who barely said a word to me the entire night, and Shayne, who described himself as a “cowboy.” (Oddly, when I later checked their enrollment statuses with a university official, she claimed none, except Matthew, were actually students at Towson, though this couldn’t be confirmed and it’s possible the university was simply trying to distance itself from the group.) The female patroller was armed with pepper spray, the men with flashlights. 

I asked the obvious: What kinds of crimes had they prevented on previous patrols?

“The worst we’ve encountered so far,” Matthew said, “were some sorority girls passed out from drinking too much. We put them in taxis and escorted them to their dorm rooms.”

It was 9 PM on a Monday and there were scores of kids out, playing softball or headed to the cafeteria. The campus was well lit. We walked around, but witnessing a crime in progress seemed unlikely, so after about an hour, Matthew had an idea. Let’s go "visit our brothers in the Black Student Union,” he said.

In a large brick building at the center of campus, we found four African American students typing on their laptops in the BSU office. They frowned when Matthew entered. “I’m Matt Heimbach from the White Student Union,” he said, flashing a politician’s smile, “and we just wanted to come by to invite you to patrol campus with us.”

“No, thanks,” they said, demurring. “We’ve got homework.”

A few days earlier, I had interviewed the former vice president of the Black Student Union, a senior from Baltimore named Ignacio Evans. “Sitting in a classroom with Matt is like putting Hitler in a class with Jews,” Ignacio told me, explaining how he had a modern Japanese-history course last semester with Matthew. “That’s how it feels to be stifled in a classroom with a person that you know hates your existence.” When I asked him about the night patrols, he said, “White supremacists don’t have to be loud. You show up with a hooded robe, I’m scared. My problem is that the White Student Union echoes that… it’s unsettling to be a hypermasculine black male and to feel scared on campus when you see these guys.”

When Matthew first announced the patrols on the WSU web page in February, he justified them as a response to a “black crime wave.” But local crime statistics cast doubt on this claim. With just six crimes committed per 1,000 students, Towson’s campus crime rate is the lowest it’s been in 17 years. In seven of the past ten years, Towson was ranked as the safest public campus in the entire state of Maryland. Of course, such statistics might be beside the point: it's hard to tell if the patrols are an earnest safety measure or simply a publicity stunt—an attempt to give a nice, community-service face to prejudice.

That, after all, is the strategy of identitarianism and racial realism—trying, with spiffed-up eugenics and slippery rhetoric, to reinvent racism for the 21st century, to present it with a smiley face. Even if it’s unlikely to convince the majority of students or teachers (or journalists), that’s not the point. The movement is geared toward whites who might feel threatened by or antagonistic toward minorities, but who don’t necessarily think of themselves as bona fide racists. “The only difference between Matt and the KKK,” Ignacio had told me, “is that Matt is PC, and he truly believes whites are victimized. Other than that, they’re exactly the same.”

Kicking off the night patrol with a Bible reading and speech. “United we’ll be able to wake to a new dawn of justice and righteousness.”

Outside the office of the Black Student Union, a dozen or so white frat boys had appeared. If Matthew and crew were disappointed that the black students hadn’t wanted a conflict, some of these guys looked like they did. “Matthew tries to pretend he’s not a racist,” a red-faced, doughy guy in a black blazer hissed, “but this is not the way to go about it. You’re spreading a message of hate, and I’m pissed about it.”

“Is it because you hate white people?” Matthew said.

“It’s ’cause you’re racist!” the frat guy shouted.

A dozen more Alpha Epsilon Pi brothers poured down the hall. The night patrol looked nervous. But then, instead of pummeling Matthew and his crew, the frat guys pulled their member, the red-faced one, into a classroom and slammed the door.

“It’s funny,” Matthew said as we left, obviously relieved. “Frat guys are usually the first ones behind closed doors to crack a black joke.”

But the real climax of the evening happened a half hour later, when we followed a mazy outdoor path called the International Walkway. Along it fly flags from every country Towson students hail from; as we passed the People’s Republic of China ensign billowing in the wind, Paddy, taking a leadership cue from Matthew, stopped the patrol. He wanted to give a speech. The Black Student Union, the frat boys, the commie flag… it had apparently riled him up.

“We’re heading toward a dissolution of the United States,” Paddy told his fellow patrollers. “But in a sense, that could be for the better because it may lead to a white ethno-state. That’s ultimately what we want. We want an ethno-state for our people, a strong nation-state that’s well-defended but at peace with the world.”

“What would the criteria of citizenship be for this ethno-state?” I asked.

“I’m just going to come out and say it,” Paddy said. “The criteria of citizenship would be based on race. It would be based on [being] white. Absolutely. One hundred percent.”

I turned to Matthew. In the spiritedness of the moment, the group seemed to be dropping its restrained tone. And Matthew was worked up, too. “If there are white people... who want to remain in this multicultural cesspool,” he said, “let them. We don’t want them. Let us mind our own business. Let us stand up for our own people, and create our own nation and new homeland for Europeans around the entire globe. So give us a homeland, and if you want to sell yourself and your children down the river of multiculturalism, you can do so.”

After that, on the way back to the parking garage to get our cars and call it a night, we finally witnessed a crime. We came upon three white students on a dark path, obviously engaged in a drug deal.

“Look at that,” Paddy said as we watched the transaction.

“And everyone tries to say there’s no crime at Towson,” Matthew said, shaking his head. “This is not a safe campus.”

“What are you going to do?” I asked.

No one intervened. 

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