Fifth Estate 344, Summer, 1994 Add to the Bookbuilder

“The political status quo in Mexico died on January 1. Every Mexican institution is now in a state of crisis.”

—El Financiero (Mexican business newspaper)

“If 53 people died in the riots in the Dominican Republic, 53,000 people could die if the Mexicans remember that they are a people with a history of rebellion. If that happens, capitalism in Latin America will go to the devil!”

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In our last issue George Bradford reported there are some five thousand pieces of junk floating around in space, including several nuclear reactors that will eventually fall back to earth. (See “Biosphere 2: The Future of the Planet?” FE #343, Fall-Winter, 1993.)

Alas, the situation is even worse. The broken solar panel thrown overboard by space shuttle astronoids working on the Hubble telescope last December actually became another of at least 7,300 pieces of junk out there bigger than a softball.

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Fifth Estate

The Fifth Estate is a cooperative, nonprofit project, published by a group of friends neither to secure wages nor as an investment in the newspaper industry. All articles represent a collective effort entailing writing, typesetting, lay-out and proofreading.

The Fifth Estate Newspaper (ISSN No. 0015) is published quarterly at 4632 Second Ave., Detroit, Michigan 48201 USA; Phone (313) 831–6800. Our office hours vary, so please call before visiting. Subscriptions are $6.00 for four issues; $8.00 foreign including Canada. Second Class postage paid at Detroit, Michigan. No copyright. No paid advertisements.

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[two_third padding=“0 20px 0 0”]with E.B. Maple (Peter Werbe)

Q: How do you know when there’s a major social problem in America?

A: It’s on the cover of Time and Newsweek.

Now it’s the “problem” of guns which shouts from the magazine racks, and liberals have an easy and seemingly obvious answer: gun confiscation by the state. Though voluminous human slaughter by musketry goes back to the European arrival here, the American obsession with firearms appears to have entered another dimension.

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After 3 years of action, an anarchist center closes its doors, but a more ambitious project opens down the street.

“The TAZ is like an uprising which does not engage directly with the State, a guerilla operation which liberates an area (of land, of time, of imagination) and then dissolves itself to re-form elsewhere/elsewhen, before the State can crush it. Because the State is concerned primarily with Simulation rather than substance, the TAZ can “occupy” these areas clandestinely and carry on its festal purposes for quite a while in relative peace.”

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Welcome to the Summer 1994 Fifth Estate. Our center eight pages feature the return of the once-a-decade Daily Barbarian, which last appeared as an FE supplement in 1984. Just wait until 2004! Also, this 40-page issue is the largest in our 28-year history.

We are late again with this edition. Our last was marked Fall/Winter 1993, Vol. 28, #3, and this is Summer 1994, Vol. 29, #1; no other issues appeared in between. Best way of keeping track of issues is by their whole numbers. This is issue #344; the previous, #343.

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U.S. “normalization” of relations with Vietnam ignores the slaughter of the war and continues the myth of the MIA/POW.

Why did President Clinton (whose opportunistic-draft dodging was the only worthy thing he’s ever done) lift the almost twenty-year ban on trade with Vietnam in February, beginning a process of “normalization” between the two countries?

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For three-quarters of a century, anarchists and other opponents of the 1917 Bolshevik putsch and subsequent counterrevolution have cited the uprising of the mutinous Baltic Fleet sailors and garrison soldiers at Kronstadt as one of the final social eruptions of the Russian Revolution.

The March 1921 events at the naval base on Kotlin Island, situated in the Gulf of Finland twenty miles west of St. Petersburg, are one of the landmark occurrences in the history of revolutionary resistance to the authoritarian state. In the wake of Kronstadt’s suppression, Lenin and his cabal were left in uncontested command of the solidified “dictatorship of the proletariat.”

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Talking about the weather just isn’t what it used to be. These days it is no longer a diversion. A January cold wave of historical dimensions resulted in all-time record lows in places such as Pittsburgh, Louisville and Indianapolis, records of all sorts over much of the eastern two-thirds of the U.S., and a seemingly endless series of snowstorms.

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At 4:30 am, January 17^th, an earthquake...measuring 6.2 on the Richter scale hit Los Angeles. Everyone was suddenly awakened as the earth tossed the city around for thirty seconds or so.

The damage was enormous. Power was temporarily knocked out, an apartment building collapsed killing 16 people, freeways fell to pieces and a motorcycle cop went flying off one of the collapsed ramps to his death. Because it was early morning the day of the Martin Luther King Day holiday, only 61 people were killed instead of the hundreds which could have been if it had struck in the middle of a normal work day.

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Godfrey Reggio is the director of two visionary films revealing the nature and impact of modern civilization on the natural world. He currently has a third in preparation.

There has been little news of film director Godfrey Reggio in the six years since the release of Powaqqatsi in 1988, the second film in his proposed Hopi-titled Qatsi trilogy. Conceived as a sensorial fresco depicting global lifestyles in the late twentieth century, Reggio’s effort throughout the trilogy is to dynamically provoke meditation on the destructiveness inherent in technology-based mass society. However, unlike the wide acclaim lavished upon his first film, Koyaanisqqatsi, (the most popular college film rental of the 1980s), Powaqqatsi received far less enthusiasm in its limited U.S. theatrical release.

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Noam Chomsky is a major figure in 20^th Century linguistics although best known for his social and political criticism. He has taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 1955.

The following interview was conducted Oct. 31, 1993 by a Fifth Estate staff member who hosts a radio interview show on a Detroit station.

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A recent decision by the Canadian Department of National Defense (DND) to close down its military training camp at Ipperwash in southwest Ontario, built on land confiscated from the Stoney Point Ojibwe in W.W.II, and return it to “the Kettle and Stony Point Band” looks good in the headlines: the government’s giving the land back to the Indians!

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a review of

Gone to Croatan: Origins of North American Dropout Culture, ed. Ron Sakolsky and James Koehnline, 382 pp. Autonomedia, New York, 1993, $12.

“(T)here is no single locus of great Refusal, no soul of revolt, source of all rebellions, or pure law of the revolutionary. Instead there is a plurality of resistances, each of them a special case: resistances that are possible, necessary, improbable; others that are spontaneous, savage, solitary, concerted, rampant, or violent; still others that are quick to compromise, interested, or sacrificial.”

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On Gogol Boulevard is produced for the Fifth Estate by New York City/Neither East Nor West, which links alternative oppositions in the East and West, and prints news and documents unavailable in the corporate or left media. OGB sometimes involves Third and Fourth World activists in these efforts. Similar sections also appear in Anarchy and Amor y Rabia.

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Fifth Estate Books is located at 4632 Second Ave., just south of W. Forest, in Detroit, in the same space as the Fifth Estate Newspaper. Hours vary, so please call before coming by.

HOW TO ORDER BY MAIL

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

2) add 10% for mailing costs—not less than $1.05 U.S. or $1.60 foreign (minimum for 4^th class book rate postage);

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Detroit’s Black & Red has just released The Story of Tatiana (see description [in Fifth Estate Books] to the right) by Jacques Baynac. A list of titles, including Fredy Perlman’s works, are available upon request from us or, write B&R at PO BX 02374, Detroit MI 48202.

Last issue we mentioned The Anarchist Cookbook along with Dave Foreman’s Eco-Defense as two books despised by the authorities, and were marveling at the 25,000 copies sold of the latter edition. However, the former has just celebrated its 2,000,000^th sale! The Anarchist Cookbook is not a culinary tract, but a how-to text of bombs, guns, booby-traps and incendiaries, and according to the New York Times, has become “a cult classic.” We have heard several times since it was published over twenty years ago that some of its “recipes” could backfire on the preparer. However, we never heard of an accident actually occurring.

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Television is not relaxing
Television dominates the senses
Television is addictive
Television is not a “neutral” technology
Television can only present biased views
Television creates social homogeneity
Television suppresses imagination
Television makes people impatient & irritable
Television cannot depict reality
Television isolates its viewers

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The New Jersey Green Journal, published by the Raritan-Brunswick Greens, is a green publication we have particularly enjoyed since they take a strong interest in many of the questions that animate us—technology as a system of domination, the question of civilization and empire, and neo-primitivism.

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In America’s big cities in the 1960s, white police forces patrolled black ghettos like an occupying army. Detroit took the lead in integrating its cops, and now also has the highest percentage of female officers in any big U.S. city. Yet this “modern” department has proven to be one of the most lethal in the country for its people. (See Detroit Seen in this issue).

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I imagine you, your voice stopped

by the speed with which the lives around you crumble.

I imagine you wanting, trying to write,

not about the blood stains at your door,

not about the fragments of your family

huddled in basements, nor about the hate

rising in pandemic streams

but about the tree hidden in some

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Given our infrequent publishing schedule, it is often difficult to keep abreast of timely announcements for events across the world’s anti-authoritarian community, but we will try. Please understand, though, if your event does not appear, it may have come too close to our printing date. Send announcements to 4632 Second Ave., Detroit MI 48201.

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Daily Barbarian > Thoughts on the Disappearance of History

“so that when there is no more story that will be our story when there is no forest that will be our forest”

—W.S. Merwin, “One Story”

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