Fifth Estate 314, Fall 1983 Add to the Bookbuilder

They’re at war! They appear nightly on television with their lying speeches trying to defend the growing slaughter. The body bags come home by the hundreds filled with the shattered remains of young men who swallowed the patriotic justifications for war, leaving grieving families, consoled only by the hollow speeches of politicians and generals.

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The night the Korean airliner crashed into the newspapers, I dreamed of a tornado. A tornado is a kind of spiral, which is the labyrinth and which is Death.

Death is very powerful right now. Instead of being a passage, Death has become a kind of equipment failure, a technical slaughterhouse. Human and technical failure become indistinguishable when the unquestioning robot and the drooling sadist merge. (I see the Soviet pilot being interviewed—he could be any Air Force gunslinger in any military machine—“I’d do it again—and even more—and love every second of it.” Of course he had the cooperation of the CIA and the U.S. military, who listened in, taping it all, without issuing any warnings to save lives. That, after all, is certainly not their business.)

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When millions of people fill the streets of Europe to protest the nuclear arms race, as occurred the weekend of October 22, 1983, only those most pessimistic about our prospects will fail to sit up and take notice. Whatever their shortcomings, the massive demonstrations against the installation of cruise and Pershing II missiles on European soil are an indication that human beings have not completely succumbed to the death instinct. And despite the fact that the demonstrators have failed in their objective to halt the Euromissiles, it is arguable that they will continue undeterred, and in perhaps more creative ways, to oppose the nuclear state.

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The following writer is one of the Vancouver Five. See our coverage of the start of their trials elsewhere in this issue.

Dear Fifth Estate:

I’ve just finished reading the Summer 1983 issue of the paper which you sent me. As usual, I found lots to think about in it, and it is a joy to read many ideas that I am more than less in agreement with. Zerzan was thought provoking, but I especially liked the article on economic recovery, and the replies to the letter by Ron Haley.

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The birthdays seem to be coming around faster and faster. This November marks the 18^th anniversary of the Fifth Estate’s appearance as an “underground” paper in 1965. Several of us were recently looking at some back issues and smiling at the lavish language they contained-“ALL POWER TO THE BROTHERS AND SISTERS WHO UNDERSTAND THE REVOLUTION AND WHO ARE WORKING TO MAKE IT HAPPEN.” But we were also marveling at how well much of it has stood the test of time. Is it to early to prepare for our twentieth anniversary celebration?

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Some of the 5,000 who marched in Paris Sept. 3 to protest the police suppression of Radio Libertaire.
—photo F. Arcos

Shouts of joy greeted the sounds of Radio Libertaire’s return to the airwaves Sept. 3 after having been shut down by a police raid six days previously.

At 5:45 am on Sunday morning, Aug. 28, the Paris premises of the anarchist radio station, Radio Libertaire, were broken into by police, the equipment trashed, the broadcasters arrested and kicked. The forces of “law and order” were experienced at this work, having silenced fourteen other “free” radio stations the previous weekend.

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On June 13^th the Toronto Metropolitan Police raided a home of several people active in producing the Bulldozer prison support paper and in supporting the Vancouver Five. Ostensibly seeking links to the Litton bombing, a series of charges were brought against the residents. Details of the raid appeared in FE #313, Summer 1983. The following is a report on recent developments.

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The Vancouver Five are activists from British Columbia who are currently facing 17 counts of sabotage and conspiracy. Besides being charged with destroying an environmentally damaging hydroelectric generator and firebombing a porn shop, they also are accused of a massive bomb attack on a Toronto cruise missile plant. Our report is from a Toronto supporter of the Five.

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With the Vietnam analogy on everyone’s lips, first for El Salvador and Nicaragua, and now for Lebanon, the signs of similarities arise ever more frequently. One such indication is shown here in the accompanying two photos. The first is from the front page of the January 15, 1967 Fifth Estate showing draftees marching in Ft. Polk, LA, beneath a racist portrayal of orientals exhorting the soldiers to “Bong the Cong.” “The Enemy Viet Cong” turned out to be all Vietnamese, whether soldier, guerrilla, civilian, woman or child, with a resultant one million Vietnamese slaughtered by the U.S. war machine. The second photo is from Lebanon, taken during October prior to the bombing of the Marine headquarters and similar to the Vietnam era, the soldiers are implored to “Kill All the Rag Heads.” All Arabs are reduced to their traditional headgear and all are the enemy. It is the same racism, the same arrogance, the same unquestioning obedience to the state military apparatus which masks another’s humanity in order to turn them into mere objects for murder.

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It is impossible to give any credence to the statistics of disaffection and disintegration assembled here by John Zerzan and at the same time take seriously a recent survey in which the vast majority of Americans asserted to pollster George Gallup that they were “satisfied with their lives.” Our tendency, as the reader might imagine, is to accept John’s wide-ranging compilations as closer to the truth than the response to a simplistic question posed by a poll-taker.

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If you are reading this right now, you are not making love. But you are presumably not assembling cars nor doing the dishes either. In this essay about sex you will not learn new techniques, ideas or perspectives. You might even get bored reading it, in which case I insist that you do something else immediately, as that is the whole point of what I am saying.

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[three_fourth padding=“0 25px 0 0”]In response to “Beginning of Time, End of Time” by John Zerzan, FE #313, Summer, 1983.

A project such as ours, based as it is on our mutual desire to abolish technological civilization, capital and domination, had to eventually take up the problem of time. All of us know with a visceral vengeance the horrid role of the clock in our lives. We don’t have to be convinced: we measure out our precious, limited im/mortality against the days, the hours and the minutes of captive time. So it was with great sympathy that I began John Zerzan’s ambitious essay on time. Unfortunately, my enthusiasm was dampened significantly by what I think were flaws not only in the form but in the intention or trajectory of the piece.

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On Sunday, July 17, at around 1:30 am, two masked men carrying machine guns broke into the house in Comiso, Sicily functioning as the coordinating center for the groups against the U.S. cruise missile base. Once inside they lined all the occupants up against the wall and aimed their guns.

About 20 people were subjected to this terror. They included most of the Anarchismo group from Catania and other local anti-militarists. A blast was fired in the direction where Alfredo Bonanno stood and it was later discovered that a bullet had passed through his clothing. The two intruders then ordered everyone in the house to get out of Comiso for good. The two men are assumed to have been mafiosi.

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The stage is set, houselights go out, curtain opens and a poignant silence reigns as actors hit the stage. Always the audience looks at the skin; arms and legs, usually attractive faces. The audience licks its lips. Honest observation must concede that beyond the facade of cultural awareness the real reason mass audiences attend the theatre or cinema lurks the haunting spectacle of cannibalism.

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Sorry for such a short column of News & Reviews this issue, but we are short of space this time around. Keep sending us news of your publications and activities—we like to read them and promise to give them more space next issue.

For news of political prisoners in Spain, write to: Associacio de Familiars i Amics dells presos politics, Rda. Sant Pere, 32, ter. E, Barcelona 10, Spain. Information comes in spanish and catalan.

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The Charles H. Kerr Company, the world’s oldest nonsectarian publisher of socialist and labor literature, is putting together a compendium entitled Who’s Who in U.S. Prisons: 1984. The book will gather short sketches of those imprisoned for labor, feminist, environmentalist, anti-racist, peace, anti-imperialist and other such activities. It will also include persons whose offenses are not strictly political but who are victims of racist, sexist and anti-gay prosecutions. The Kerr Co. asks defense committees and civil liberties organizations, as well as prisoners themselves, to write Charles H. Kerr Co., 1740 Greenleaf Ave., Suite 7, Chicago IL 60626 with information on such cases.

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