Fifth Estate 305, March 18, 1981 Add to the Bookbuilder

What a Day!

Hostages Go Free; Reagan Sworn In

—Detroit Free Press Headline, January 21, 1981

“Kill the hostages; Turn them into sausages.”

—from “Kill the Hostages,” punk song by Benedict Arnold & the Traitors

“He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark mustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast!... everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the struggle over himself. He loved Big Brother.”

—George Orwell, 1984

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The New York Times headline trumpeted “[President] Urges Rises in Military Outlay, Cuts in Other Areas,” above an article which stated, “[The President] today proposed to Congress a series of substantial increases in military spending in the 1980s and cuts in many non-defense programs.”

Is this the dreaded Reagan slashing programs for the poor while spending ever more on the already glutted military monolith? No, not at all, but rather the president referred to in the Jan. 15, 1981 article is Jimmy Carter, who several days before leaving office proposed a fiscal 1982 budget which foreshadowed what his successor would announce several weeks later.

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Dear FE,

I have absolute revulsion for the “Friends of Entropy,” Animals Liberation Front and others of that ilk. While they will take the most violent and desperate measures to “rescue” a dog, guinea pig, and white mice from their cages (as described in their letter, FE #304, December 31, 1980), they stand mute while state fascist agents rape, murder, and oppress people in prison all over this country. (In fact, Arkansas has the most brutal prison system in the country, yet no one has ever dynamited that slaughterhouse at Cumming Farm where the bones of 60 men were found in a mass grave in 1969.) It is a hypocrisy for “Liberationists” to fight for the rights of animals, but to passively stand by while prisoners are slaughtered at Attica, San Quentin or Leavenworth (where I am) or other such death camps. These “animal lovers” hate people, and are sick!

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Tomega Therion

Primitivo Solis

Coquilles St. Jacques

Bob Brubaker

Alan Franklin

Ralph Franklin

Suzy Ruby Lips

Don Kirkland

The Unknown

T. Fulano

The Fifth Estate Newspaper (ISSN 0015–0800) is published bimonthly at 4403 Second Ave., Detroit, Michigan 48201 USA; phone (313) 831–6800. Office hours vary, so please call before visiting. Subscriptions are $4.00 for six issues; $6 for foreign including Canada. Second class postage paid at Detroit, Michigan. No copyright. No paid ads accepted.

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To the Fifth Estate:

Over the past couple of years that I have been reading your paper, I have been alternately intrigued, provoked, or irritated by some of the things you folks have written. And that’s as it should be. What has continued to hold my interest has been your refreshing tendency to re-examine issues that too many people in the so-called libertarian left have taken for granted. You have never hesitated to ask disturbing but necessary questions—without wishing to “resolve” them all at once.

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‘Pour myself a cup of ambition’

—Dolly Parton, “9 to 5”

And we pour cup after cup of coffee to the tune of almost 16 pounds per person a year for the 100 million coffee drinkers over the age of 18. This works out to a staggering consumption rate of 800 cups annually and that’s only-the average. The Statistical Abstract of the U.S. (100^th Edition) shows that 40% of us (I’m drinking a cup while writing this) drink 2 to 5 cups a day while 11% get really whacked out on six or more per day.

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Note: The following is an excerpt from an article, “The Regime and the Working Class in the USSR,” by Viktor Zaslaysky which appeared in Telos No. 42, Winter 1979–80. Telos, “a quarterly journal of radical thought,” is available at Box 3111 St. Louis MO 63160. Subscriptions are $15 yearly; single copies, $4.

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Note: The following article by The Unknown from Seattle was originally written as a contribution to the North American Anarchist newspaper as part of a debate on “the land.” The NAA agreed to print a section of it which has not been done to date; we gladly print it in its entirety. Communications to the Unknown may be sent to Box 81091, Seattle WA 98108.

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TEHRAN — In the flurry of yellow ribbons, parades, and righteous indignation at a nation Ronald Reagan characterized as barbaric, the identity of the real barbarians has been obscured. The fact that the Shah was a corrupt despot propped up by the force of U.S. arms was becoming apparent to increasing numbers of Americans prior to the hostage seizure. But after the embassy take-over, the U.S. ideological apparatus was able to shift the public’s awareness from the tyranny of the Shah to the plight of the hostages at the hands of “terrorist fanatics”.

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NEW YORK—Despite the lingering bitterness over the hostage crisis and the horrible events surrounding the inaugural crash, as many as 50 inquiries a day have been pouring into the Commerce Department from companies interested in resuming business ties with Iran.

“Even as the remains of the dead were being removed from Pennsylvania Avenue, businesses were calling up asking for information. In fact the number of inquiries reached a high point in the hours after the crash,” a department official said.

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WASHINGTON, D.C.—What was to have been one of the most triumphant days in U.S. history was brought to a tragic, fiery close today when the jetliner bringing the fifty-two former hostages back from captivity in Iran crashed into the Presidential inauguration ceremonies here, killing all aboard and taking with it numerous leaders of the United States government, armed forces and industry; including President Ronald Reagan, Vice President George Bush, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, Senators Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms, evangelist Billy Graham, former President and Vice President Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale, all nine members of the United States Supreme Court, General William Westmoreland, Henry Ford II, Frank Sinatra, Donnie and Marie Osmond and hundreds of other senators and congressmen, governors, mayors, Republican and Democratic Party officials, industrialists, bankers, religious leaders, military and police officials, and television and movie personalities.

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The FE Bookstore is located in the same place as the Fifth Estate and can be found at 4403 Second Ave. Detroit—telephone (313) 831–6800. The hours that we’re open vary quite a bit, so it’s always best that you give us a ring before coming down.

How to Order by Mail:

1) List the title of the book, quantity wanted, and price of each;

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Notice: Books reviewed in the “News & Reviews” section are not available through the FE Bookstore unless specifically stated otherwise.

The Alliance for the Liberation of Mental Patients publishes a newsletter from 1427 Walnut Street 4^th Floor, Philadelphia PA 19102, and sends it free of charge to all current and former psychiatric inmates...

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A shortage of staff, and not money problems, kept us from putting out this issue sooner. For the first time in a long time we are in good financial shape, thanks to your numerous and extremely generous contributions. The contributions have helped tremendously, but they haven’t solved our logistical problems. Most of us work, and those that don’t, scrape, and we find that our commitments to Capital—jobs, survival, cars that break down on an increasingly regular basis, all the vicissitudes of what is commonly referred to as “normal” existence—keep us from our true commitments and our projects. So be it; we’d be the last ones to deny the gulf that separates our desires and the pleasure we derive from this project and others like it on the one hand, and the struggling and daily despair on the other. Thanks again for your support. Hopefully we’ll have another issue in your hands within two months at most. We know you’ve heard that one before, folks, but this time we really mean it...

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More than a thousand people opposed to the draft met here in Detroit the weekend of February 12 to 15 at a conference called as a planning and organizing session by the National Committee Against Registration and the Draft (NCARD). The entire conference, from the Friday night pep rally at which a bevy of socialist and liberal politicians and labor bureaucrats spoke, to the workshops, and plenary sessions characterized by leftist block voting, caucuses and maneuvering, produced an eerie sensation of traveling back into the 1960s to one of the Student Mobilization conferences of that era. Every little political group, from the “support Albania” political bizarros to the laissez faire “student libertarians,” maintained a literature table in one salon which appeared to be a sort of political shopping mall, and one had to shoo away the newspaper salesmen like flies,

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