Fifth Estate 292, June 19, 1978 Add to the Bookbuilder

“The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously; any sound that Winston made, above a whisper, would be picked up by it; moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment.”

— George Orwell, 1984

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To F.E.:

Anarchism can provide the perfect defense mechanism for dilettantes. In your “reply” to John and Paula Zerzan [“FE Criticized & Our Response,” FE #291, April 30, 1978] you come perilously close to demonstrating this when you excuse your conceptions of the. FE by reference to the nexus of capital within which, not surprisingly, you find yourselves.

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Alan Franklin

Ralph Franklin

E. B. Maple

Tina Nachalo

Sonny Tufts

Marilyn Werbe

Peter Werbe

Pat Halley

Edward R. Flynn

Peter Rachleff

Richard Schrader

The Fifth Estate Newspaper, a non-profit Michigan corporation, is published monthly at 4403 Second Ave., Detroit MI 48201; phone: (313) 831–6800. Office hours are sporadic, so call before coming down. Subscriptions are $4.00 for 12 issues; $6 for foreign. Call 259–1888 for retail sales outlets. Second Class postage paid at Detroit, Michigan. No copyright. No paid advertising accepted.

April of 1978 marks the closing of a publication that has had a definite impact on the gay movement of Detroit, even though most straight leftists (and probably many gays) were never aware of its existence—The Metro Gay News.

Its story begins a few months after the radical Gay Liberator closed its operations in March 1976. The Metro Gay News (MGN) commenced publication and its first meetings were well-balanced between men and women (one of its few points over the Liberator), but even in this early stage it was very obvious where the power of the paper was truly centered: in David Krumroy, a former steel lot salesman. Though MGN always had some articles by a few women, gradually they seemed to shift to the bottom of the staff box, or drop out entirely.

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Special thanks to all those readers who sent in contributions and became sustainers in response to last issue’s plea for funds. Financially we are at somewhat of an equilibrium, but still remain on the edge, so although we don’t want to keep calling “emergency” before the situation warrants it, we still urge readers to become sustainers and to renew their subscriptions when the time comes....

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The following is a statement sent to us by Emily Harris, who, along with Bill Harris, Joe Remiro and Russ Little, is one of the surviving members of the SLA. The four are currently prisoners of the State of California; six others were murdered by police in Los Angeles in 1975.

I was one of the prisoners in the women’s section of Santa Rita Jail near Oakland on the night of May 14 when it was destroyed by fire. Many women could have lost their lives in that fire because they came within a hair’s breath of being left locked in their cells with no way to get out. It was an outrageous and frightening experience and I want to share it so at least people will know what happened and will understand better how prisoners’ lives are threatened everyday in a million different ways by the very fact that one class of people—the police—has been granted the power of a key that locks the door.

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When Lenin and 32 other Russian refugees (30 adult revolutionaries and 2 children) were returning to Russia via a sealed train through Germany they encountered a number of problems living together. One of the earliest conflicts in the railroad carriage arose between smokers and non-smokers. Lenin was a nonsmoker and detested smoking. It had been agreed at the beginning of the journey that those people who wanted to smoke had to do so in the toilet. A line formed in the corridor outside the toilet and eventually arguments broke out between the smokers and the “comrades” who wanted to use the toilet for its intended purpose. Since the vast majority of the people were Bolsheviks, Lenin, as the leader of the Party, was called upon to settle the question. He wrote out passes, which had to be presented in order for the toilet to be used. There were two kinds of passes—those for organic use had the first priority, and those for inorganic, smoking purposes had second priority.

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Lorenzo “Komboa” Ervin is a thirty year old ex-GI now serving life in Marion maximum security jail for hijacking a plane as a protest against US involvement in Vietnam.

In the early ‘sixties, soon after joining up, he and other young black GIs serving in Mannheim, West Germany, secretly formed Black GIs United to fight racism in the army, and became involved in anti-Vietnam war activities, taking part in demonstrations with West German students. Later, as whole units of GIs in France and West Germany were sent to Vietnam, Black GIs United responded by calling on soldiers to desert. The consequent harassment suffered by Komboa and his friends came to a head when Komboa was himself drafted to Vietnam and decided to go AWOL instead.

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The “glorious” days of the Ford family empire seem to be numbered as its headcheese, Henry Ford II, finds himself in a swirl of legal, corporate, labor, marital and physical troubles.

Reports have floated into the Fifth Estate office that during his “emergency” press conference of May 1, 1978, the “chairman” not only seemed to be suffering from a bad case of the shakes, but also seemed to be losing his hearing. Oh, the woes of the super rich.

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The absolute removal of the blight of organized religion from the face of the planet. This will necessitate the immediate removal from every church, synagogue, mosque, temple, ashram, cathedral, etc. of any and every self-styled “representative of God on earth” including nuns, priests, ministers, rabbis, etc. and their (if necessary) forced dispossession of all the enormous wealth and power they have accumulated in centuries of domination and exploitation. Let the wealth, and the buildings, be used for the creation of playgrounds, abortion clinics, or whatever the people whose labor went to create them see fit.

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It is estimated by reputable quacks in the American Medical Association that at least one out of five people in the U.S. has some problem with mental illness. (Are the rest pretending?) It appears, surely, that there is no shortage of fools. Surely, should a swelling quantity of grads high-hurdle over the artificially maintained barriers of the psycho-therapeutic industry, thereby driving down rates through an overabundance of shrinks, the AMA will announce peculiarly that there is an alarming amount of oddballs, neurotic, and misanthropes.

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Despite the change of bureaucracy in China and attempts by the new rulers to make peace with the workers by offering them meager wage increases, it seems that political and social unrest continues. According to a recent French news agency report, there have been a series of executions of political and “criminal” prisoners in China since the beginning of 1978.

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In recent months Israel has been dismaying even its closest imperialist allies with its policy of retaliation against southern Lebanon for a single act by a small group of Palestinian guerrillas. The Israeli assault on Palestinian and Lebanese civilian villages has left the world press filled with horror shots of dead women and children at the hands of U.S.-made Israeli planes in what has become the modern equivalent of the Nazi’s ten-for-one policy of retribution.

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a review of

David F. Noble, America by Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism (N.Y.: Knopf, 1977). 384 pages, $12.95.

David Noble has written a genuinely path-breaking book, one which addresses critical issues in an analytically creative and historically concrete fashion. America by Design is distinguished not only by its scope, by the picture it offers of capitalist development in the first three decades of this century, but above all by the questions it poses. In this sense, the book itself represents a leap in historical perspectives, and it is to be hoped that future studies will begin with the concrete approach offered here, not those which it has surpassed.

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Ammunition Books shares space with the Fifth Estate Newspaper and can be found at 4403 Second Avenue, Detroit, Mich. 48201 (telephone-313-831-6800). Our hours vary, but we are generally open on Monday and Thursday afternoons (from 1pm to 5pm) and at scattered hours other times. It’s always a good idea to telephone us before you start the trek down, just to be safe.

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Though we do not accept commercial advertising, this Unclassified ad space is free for our readers’ use. We do not accept ads over the telephone, so please send your ads in writing to our office at: 4403 Second Ave., Detroit, Michigan 48201.

WOMEN IN THE SPANISH REVOLUTION—Liz Willis’s excellent pamphlet first published by Solidarity, London, has been reprinted in New York with some additional material by Liz and is available by writing to: Gonzalez/Kleinman, p.o. box 562 Cooper Station, New York, NY 10003. If you can afford it, send $1 to cover costs of publication, mailing and free copies which will be sent to people who are incarcerated and others without funds, upon request. Less (or of course, more) is acceptable. We will take valid US postal stamps, cheques (made out to N. Kleinman or J. Gonzalez) or real green money. In Europe, write to: Solidarity, c/o 123 Latham Rd., London E. 6, England; in New York, stop by Come!Unity Press.

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The bullet-ridden body of former Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro, which was discovered a short distance from the Italian Communist Party (CP) headquarters on May 9, brought the expected cries of protest from the expected quarters. From the crowned heads of Europe to political parties of all stripes came expressions of horror and demands that Red Brigade-style terrorism be eradicated.

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