Fifth Estate 334, Summer, 1990 Add to the Bookbuilder

Canada is illegally renting out the territory of the Innu people to the NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) countries so that their bombers can practice bombing and surprise attacks. The establishment of a permanent NATO base could be announced soon. [see FE note at end of article]

The Innu people (sometimes called the Montagnais or the Naskapi) refer to their ancestral territories as the Nitassinan, literally our land, in their native language. The area was never ceded by treaty or otherwise by the original inhabitants. The presence of the Innu in this remote part of the world goes back at least 9,000 years. This area extends from Sept-Iles, to Lac St. Jean, Quebec, to the west; to Fort Cains, Quebec, to the north; and down to St. Augustine, Quebec, and Goose Bay, Labradore, to the east.

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While nonviolent action in China and Central Europe last year grabbed headlines around the globe, North American media seems to have all but forgotten the ongoing nonviolent direct action campaign for a nuclear-free future. Yet in 1989, nearly 5,500 arrests for anti-nuclear protest in the US and Canada—more than any other previous year—were reported in The Nuclear Resister newsletter.

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(Ieft) Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney, victims of an assassin’s bomb, playing earlier at a Redwood Summer benefit. (right) The car they were driving when the bomb exploded.

In a doubly bizarre set of circumstances, two California environmentalists experienced an assassination attempt followed by their arrest for “possessing” the device that almost killed them.

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On Monday, April 23, almost 2,000 demonstrators converged on New York’s Wall street and attempted to close this bastion of capitalism. Over 200 were arrested in the action which brought together a coalition of 60 or so groups.

At dawn demonstrators blockaded the entrances to Wall Street but were broken up by a massive show of riot police.

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Attention prisoners!

Throughout our 25-year history, this newspaper has maintained a policy of offering free subscriptions, through a special fund provided by our readers, to those held captive by the political state—prisoners and GIs. This is not done as an act of charity or social work, but as an expression of solidarity with those suffering in two of class society’s most authoritarian and key institutions—prison and the armed forces.

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According to our staff box, this newspaper is officially a quarterly, but in reality, we have become an “episodic,” corning out between or in conjunction with our political, cultural and environmental projects. It has been common practice in this space to offer explanations for our long printing delays and infrequent publishing schedule which is now about three issues a year. That is contrasted to twenty years ago when the Fifth Estate appeared weekly. It is perhaps time to formally declare that three-four times a year will be it for a while and devote this column to matters other than apologia.

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In a rite of spring, a festive gathering of zeks celebrated the biosphere—that fine layer of rust that covers the earth which gives and supports life. This rite was bizarre because it wasn’t happening around the wild fruit trees or among the paw and hoof prints of the wolf, brown bear and white-tailed deer, but in the land which did once support these sisters but now is transformed into the great Babylonian city of Detroit. It was also bizarre for it was a rite of de-structuring of this city’s greatest idol, its golden calf of black hooves which travels at incredible speeds. It was the rite called “Death of the Car.”

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Sometimes we have arguments about whether it is appropriate for anarchist-types to be participating in officially sanctioned political events with double-speak names like “public hearing” held before bogus, paid-off boards with Ministry of Truth names like “Michigan Air Pollution Control Commission.” Like the one held April 17^th to validate a backroom deal between the City of Detroit and the Department of Natural Resources (DNR) called a “consent order,” made to allow the Detroit trash incinerator to keep burning even though they couldn’t come up with a test result that didn’t grossly violate emissions standards—standards which consider 79 deaths per million residents an acceptable risk.

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Emma Goldman (June 27, 1869-May 14, 1940) was known as “the most dangerous woman in America” by the press in such articles as those to the right which chronicled a visit by her to Windsor, Ontario, across the border from Detroit, in 1939. She certainly was this country’s most famous anarchist in the early years of this century.

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Without much fanfare, another of those 20^th anniversaries of the 1960s passed by recently. At 4:45 a.m. on December 4, 1969, a detail of fourteen Chicago and Illinois State’s Attorney’s police raided a modest apartment in the all-black near West Side ghetto, a crash pad for Black Panther Party (BPP) members.

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The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense was formed in Oakland, California in 1966. Within two years it had dropped self-defense from its title and spread throughout the country, particularly in California and the northern ghettos. It also came under tremendous pressure as federal and state repression of the movement intensified.

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Geronimo Ji Jaga Pratt has been incarcerated in California’s maximum security prisons for almost 20 years. He was recently transferred to Tehachapi, in southern California, far from his growing base of support in the Bay Area.

On July 28, 1972 Pratt—a much-decorated Vietnam veteran and then head of the Los Angeles chapter of the Black Panther Party (BPP)—was sentenced to a seven-year-to-life term for the “Tennis Court Murder” of a white school teacher in Santa Monica in 1968. FBI infiltrator Melvin “Cotten” Smith, who was then head of Panther security in Los Angeles, has since come forward with details of the FBI/LA red squad plan to frame Geronimo. Now doing a life stretch of his own in Kentucky, Smith described a meeting in which agents and cops sat around trying to figure out which unsolved murder would be the best to pin on Pratt.

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a review of

The Strait by Fredy Perlman, Black & Red, Detroit, 1988

I began to make this a conventional review of Fredy Perlman’s book The Strait and it was a mistake. For if you begin reading it as a conventional book with a linear story and a stairway of characters The Strait will fail you and, what is worse for me, will fail Fredy and the leap of imagination which he put into it.

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Fredy Perlman with the cover of Letters of Insurgents at Detroit’s Black and Red Print co-op, 1976

referred to in this article:

Having Little, Being Much: A Chronicle of Fredy Perlman’s Fifty Years, by Lorraine Perlman, Black & Red (Detroit, 1989), 155 pages, $3.50

I cannot say with any certainty what kind of response this perceptive, if rather abbreviated memoir would elicit from a person who did not know Fredy Perlman or his writings. It was written, clearly, for those familiar at least with his work, and they without a doubt will enjoy this glimpse of the man whose voice played such a large role in reviving libertarian traditions and articulating the critical primitivism that has profoundly transformed anti-authoritarian ideas during the last decade.

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The Italian group Germinal sponsored the first-ever large scale planning meeting of anarchists from the East and West in Trieste, Italy from April 14 through 17. Although they did not intend to have a huge gathering, 332 people registered from 23 countries. Among the groups represented from Eastern Europe were the Confederation of Anarcho-Syndicalists (USSR), the Czechoslovakian Anarchist Union, Autonomia (Hungary), Autonomija and A! (Yugoslavia) and Black Aliens and the Polish Anarchist Federation (Poland).

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Earth Day supplement page 1

If there was ever a need for an “Earth Day,” “Earth Week,” or “Earth Year” “to get people thinking creatively about the problems we now confront, and looking for new ways to tackle them,” in the words of Earth Day 1970 organizer (and Earth Day 1990 CEO) Denis Hayes, now is certainly the time.

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Earth Day supplement page 3

It was perhaps an inappropriate time to ask a question since at that very moment two climbers from Greenpeace were struggling to unfurl a banner describing the pollution which would be emitted from Detroit’s giant trash incinerator. Their problems were compounded by the fact that they were hanging in the girders of the Detroit-Windsor Ambassador Bridge some 150 feet from the water below.

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Earth Day supplement page 5

In 1977, East German dissident Rudolph Bahro was arrested and accused of publishing “state secrets” in a book entitled The Alternative in Eastern Europe, in which he used a Marxist critique buoyed by the principles of Rosa Luxembourg to scrutinize the socialist system of his time. After more than two years in prison, he was released to West Germany where his profound preoccupation with the ecology crisis led him to become immersed in the green movement, and he eventually became a leading figure in the Green Party. Bahro’s association was, however, marred by conflicts in which his constant insistence on fundamental precepts of freedom, peace and ecological balance made him an irritating thorn in the side of the Party’s more compromising elements. He resigned from the Greens in June 1985, pointing out that through parliamentary and electoral politics, the group had sold out to the system, and that an inherent error had been made in deciding to become a political party in the first place.

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Earth Day supplement page 8

GM WORLD HEADQUARTERS

W. GRAND BLVD. AT SECOND AVE.

THURSDAY, APRIL 19, NOON

Assemble at WSU Gullen Mall

Call 831–6800 for more info.

1 CHANCE IN 10 MILLION

DIE FROM THE INCINERATOR

38 CHANCES IN 1 MILLION

Demonstrate Against the Detroit Trash Incinerator!

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a review of “Roger and Me,” a film produced and directed by Michael Moore.

“It was like a prison.” So says Deputy Fred, who evicts families that can no longer pay the rent. He is speaking of the auto assembly line, and this is the only direct reference in the entire film “Roger and Me” to the brutal nature of factory “life.” Michael Moore, founder (and loser?) of the Flint Voice, sacked editor of Mother Jones, has now transferred his lukewarm critique of capitalist relations to the silver screen as director and narrator.

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Hello. My name is Car. I am the new world citizen. My arrival in your neighbourhood brings with it a new kind of peace and prosperity.

You now find me, with minor variations in appearance, everywhere in the world. I am possible only because modern technology has been liberated from its historical restraints. The contemporary political and economic climate has fostered an exchange of technical information and an availability of natural resources that all previous national chauvinisms, physical barriers, and antiquated cultural taboos made impractical.

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The FE Bookstore is located at 4632 Second Ave., just south of W. Forest, in Detroit. We share space with the Fifth Estate Newspaper and may be reached at the same phone number: (313) 831–6800. Visitors are welcome, but our hours vary so please call before dropping in.

HOW TO ORDER BY MAIL:

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

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When I compare the straight columns, boxed graphics and even type of the Fifth Estate to the graphic wildness and literary adventure of the ‘zine Babyfish Lost Its Momma, it makes me wonder if the FE hasn’t gotten a little bit too straight-edged. Well, I guess you can’t force it, and Babyfish is tied solidly into a music, cultural, and lifestyle scene in Detroit’s Cass Corridor district where everything comes out a bit jagged and experimental. Issue No. 3 is a walloping 80 pages of Poetry, visuals, collages, music and literary reviews, fiction, communal action, radical sexuality and a lot of undefinables. Definitely for, as the lead editorial says, the “outlaws of Amerika.” A steal at $2.00. Available from: Babyfish at P.O. Box 11589, Detroit MI 48211 plus postage, or through FE Books.

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FE Note: The anarchist novel that J.G. Eccarius wrote is The Last Days of Christ the Vampire, excerpts from which appear in the box below. It was first published in 1988 with a second edition featuring a new front and back cover which includes a quote from the Fifth Estate describing Last Days...as “one of the most wildly blasphemous books we have seen since the classics of sacrilege.”

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While I appreciate David Porter’s long and serious review of my book, Emma Goldman in Exile (see FE #333, Winter 1990), I’d like to take issue with some of his points. Porter criticizes my “intrusiveness” for allegedly imposing my own political agenda on Goldman’s life, without making my politics explicit. Possibly he is right that I should have laid out my criteria for judgment more clearly.

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Dear Fifth Estate:

We appreciate your kind mention of our group in your last issue (see “300,000 at Pro-Choice Demo—Plus Us,” FE #333, Winter, 1990), but we are not “Storm Warning” as the article identified us.

Our name is Tornado Warning and we are a feminist action group devoted to Womyn’s self-determination, self-help, and self-knowledge.

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