Fifth Estate 308, January 19, 1982 Add to the Bookbuilder

Faced with upwards of a million men who have refused to register for the draft, President Reagan announced on December 10, a halt to prosecutions scheduled in the cases of 161 resisters, This means that currently there are no legal sanctions for failing to comply with the Selective Service Act provisions and hopefully it will impel hundreds of thousands of additional young men to refuse to have any part of the U.S. war machine.

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The Fifth Estate has joined with a group of people from Detroit’s Grinning Duck Club to organize an anti-nuclear war conference at the club in March. Following is the text of the conference’s first call for participants. If you would like more information on the conference, please write NUKE FEAR, c/o P.O. Box 02455, Detroit MI 48202 or call (313) 831–6800, 3–5 pm. Preparations for the conference are still in the planning stage and weekly meetings are held each Sunday at the Grinning Duck Club, located on the southeast corner of W. Willis and Third Ave., just south of the Wayne State University campus. All individuals are invited, but no political parties need apply. Meetings are at 1:00 a.m.

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UPI—The dream of “containment” of a limited nuclear exchange to the European theater collapsed utterly today when the Reagan administration’s demonstration air-burst over the Baltic Sea touched off a rapidly-escalating series of events which culminated in all-out nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the West.

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Dear T. Fulano (and the FE)

I read your response to the defenders of technology with great trepidation [“Uncovering a Corpse: A Reply to the Defenders of Technology,” FE #307, November 19, 1981]. At every turn I expected you to say: “This is what we need to do: let’s dismantle everything and turn the clocks back to 700 A.D. or 500 B.C.” I thought you might announce a program that would alienate the people who oppose only parts of technology and oppose it for a variety of reasons; e.g., because they love old, vanishing crafts, because they are Christians, because they are nostalgists, or simply because they are technological incompetents.

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WAR!

The weapons are in place. The language of war is accepted everywhere. The rulers of the opposing empires confront each other menacingly.

Their fingers are poised on the button. The warheads ache to be launched. Will we wait passively for annihilation?

The words above are what should have shown through a light image of a mushroom cloud on our Nov. 19 [FE #307] cover, but were obscured due to a communication error with our printer. Our disappointment with the results was lightened somewhat when several people told us they thought it was a contest to see if the words could be discerned. Others said that the bomb obliterating our words was appropriate for the matter under discussion.

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FIFTH ESTATE, Number 308, Volume 17, No. 1, January 19, 1982

The Fifth Estate is a co-operative project, published by a group of friends who are in general, but not necessarily complete agreement with the articles herein. Each segment of the paper represents the collective effort of writing, typesetting, lay-out and proofreading.

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First appeared in the Kenyon Review, Kenyon College, Gambier, OH 43022.

Poet and translator Lewis Hyde has accomplished several distinct things with this article. First of all, by way of traditional (that is, “pre-” or non-capitalist) folk and fairy tales, as well as anthropological observations, he has revealed the origins of many of the commonplaces associated with capitalist social relations—for example, things have always been as they are today (primitive and traditional peoples are just societies of small-scale capitalists each working in his own self interest), a penny saved is a penny earned, you can’t have your cake and eat it too, the idea of a “noble savage” is only a modern romantic prejudice, etc. By showing how people—including our ancestors—treat property in, a society in which it is not the ruling sign or the axis around which all social relations orbit (indeed, in which present notions of property and wealth do not even apply), he presents a contrast to modern capitalist society which critiques it from a position of affirmation. Whereas many of our discussions of capital have generally implied only a vague sense of the life we envision, his article reveals that many elements are already to be found in our cultural memory. “Folk tales are like the soul’s morality plays,” he writes, but they are also a key to culture. Hence, he has not only undertaken an “economy of the imagination,” but, in a sense, a “political economy” of culture.

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Come and join us in an anti-nuclear war conference at Detroit’s Grinning Duck Club the weekend of March 5, 6 & 7 and add your voice to the growing resistance to nuclear madness. No admirals, no policy experts, no political candidates hopping on the latest bandwagon—just a lot of ordinary people tired of living in a world where our lives and the lives of our loved ones can be snuffed out in a moment by people we’ll never even see—and who will never see us. For further information and details on how you can participate, write NUKE FEAR, P.O. Box 02455, Detroit, MI 48202, or call (313) 831–6800. Better yet, come to a planning meeting, every Sunday at 1:00 pm at the Grinning Duck Club, southeast corner of Willis and Third, just south of the Wayne State University campus. We’ve all grown up under the threat of nuclear annihilation and we’d like to be the last generation that does—and we refuse to be the last generation.

The FE Bookstore is located in the same place as the Fifth Estate Newspaper, both of which are located at 4403 Second Ave., Detroit MI 48201—telephone (313) 831–6800. The hours we are open vary considerably, so it’s always best to give us a call before coming down.

HOW TO ORDER BY MAIL:

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

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Citizen G of Citizens for a Non-Linear Future (see letter in this issue) has published an educational comic as well as an article and questionnaire on despair. Send a self-addressed stamped envelope to Citizen G at Wallingford Station, PO Box 31638, Seattle, WA 98103...

Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed, is an irregular publication of the Columbia (Missouri) Anarchist League looking for readers and correspondents. Subscriptions are $3.00 for six issues, foreign subs are $6.00, and prisoners can receive subs for free. A recent issue (Vol. 1 No. 4) contains articles such as “Anarchy Under Fire,” “Marriage, Screwing, and Free Love,” “Ordinance to Limit Bicycle Right of Way” (?) and more. Write C.A.L., PO Box 380, Columbia MO 65205...

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a review of

The Year of the French, Thomas Flanagan, Pocket Books, New York, 1980, 642 pp., $4.50 (Canadian)

At first glance at the dust jacket of Thomas Flanagan’s book, one expects either the usual fluff which passes for “historical” novels these days or an exposition on England’s bloody-handed colonial rule as setting the stage for sympathy to the modern day IRA, much in the way accounts of the Nazi holocaust wind up to be sales pitches for Israel. Fortunately, this is not to be the case.

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a review of

Facing West, The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire Building, Richard Drinnon, New York, New American Library, 1980.

Richard Drinnon offers documentation of the attitudes and history of people with whom we are sickeningly familiar. He eloquently debunks the heroic myths of frontier life in the U.S. and also exposes the arrogance with which Europeans devastated this continent and beyond, once they reached the Pacific Ocean. Enlightenment ideology furnished the prop for the racism, greed and self-repression which have been part of U.S. history over the centuries, In the twentieth century, imperialist rhetoric has been polished by public relations experts who often obfuscate the real motives of the contemporary politician. This book makes clear the unbroken link with their predecessors who moreover shock us by their open expression of frenzied hatred and moral self-righteousness.

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A large, well-produced poster titled Libertarians found its way to our office not long ago. It is chiefly a translation of a text written in Spanish by “The International Friends,” denouncing the detention of more than fifty libertarians in Spanish prisons (as of September 1980) for alleged participation in armed activities. It contains a summation of the predicament of these libertarian and autonomous comrades, an analysis of the modern Spanish state (“the tardy reconciliation of all the victors of the counter-revolution”), criticism of the reconstituted CNT which “feels some real discomfiture in this affair. It is not out of indifference or prudence that it was brought to remain silent. The leaders of the CNT want to be an axis of regroupment of libertarians on a trade-unionist basis, in fact moderated and acceptable to the established order. The comrades who have resorted to expropriations represent, by this fact alone, an absolutely opposite axis of regrouping. If some are right, the others are wrong. Each person is the offspring of their works, and one must choose between these or the others by examining the meaning find the finality of their actions....” It then urges practical action to free the imprisoned libertarians, “those [actions] that create the most Scandal [being] the best.”

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As we witness the imposition of military rule in Poland it seems clear it was not something to have been unexpected. However, that realization does nothing to limit our anger and sadness as we helplessly watch tanks and faceless armed men crush at least the public manifestations of a movement that threatened to turn the world upside down.

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You don’t have to watch the nightly TV news to realize that money is tight these days. It is an international problem that has put many anti-authoritarian printing projects in jeopardy including this one. For that reason we are planning a benefit party to raise money for the international anti-authoritarian press.

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