Fifth Estate 352, Winter, 1999 Add to the Bookbuilder

If a death warrant for Mumia is signed, demonstrate the next day, 6 p.m. at local federal buildings & city halls.

Death row political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal’s appeal for a new trial was denied by the Pennsylvania State Supreme Court October 30 in an order upholding every detail of his racist and unfair frame-up. He is now under immediate threat of being executed.

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Kent State University (KSU) announced that on May 4, 1999, the Ohio college parking lot where Sandra Scheuer, Jeffrey Miller, Allison Krause, and Bill Schroeder were shot to death by the Ohio National Guard on May 4, 1970, will be closed to traffic and a full memorial created. The deaths occurred during a campus demonstration when troops fired armor-piercing ammunition at unarmed student anti-war protesters. The 67-shot barrage also wounded nine youths.

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FIFTH ESTATE #352, Winter, 1999, Vol. 34, No. 1, page 2

The Fifth Estate is a cooperative, nonprofit project, publishing since 1965. The people who produce it are a group of friends who do so neither to secure wages nor as an investment in the newspaper industry, but to encourage resistance to an unjust and destructive society.

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David “Gypsy” Chain, forest defender (June 17, 1974 – September 17, 1998)

On September 17, 24-year-old Earth First! activist David “Gypsy” Chain was pronounced dead in the woods he was working to defend.

Gypsy died from massive head injuries after being struck by a giant redwood purposely felled towards a small group of North Coast EF! activists who had gathered to protest an illegal logging operation on Pacific Lumber/Maxxam company land near Grizzly Creek State Park in Humboldt County, California.

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Welcome to the Winter 1999 issue of the Fifth Estate, #352. This edition follows our Summer issue by about six months. Maybe, like Anarchy has in its recently published issue, we should stop any pretense of quarterly publication, and openly state that we are publishing twice yearly for the time being. One problem with that is the Post Office demands a four time yearly schedule for us to remain eligible for our special mailing status. This issue was delayed even longer than normal due to the great Blizzard of ’99 which hit Detroit.

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Clinton’s US/UN imposed sanctions have already killed 10 percent of the Iraq population. 1.5 million people are dead which includes 6000 children who die monthly. The economic sanctions are weapons of mass destruction. They are a crime against humanity that have served to strengthen Hussein, weakened his opposition, and failed to force him to comply with UN resolutions.

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Monument to the anarchist Haymarket martyrs, Waldheim Cenetary, Chicago

Last issue, the Fifth Estate announced a ceremony where the famed Haymarket Martyrs Monument in Chicago was to be declared a federally designated National Historic Landmark. Unbeknown to us, there had been intense agitation by local anarchists against this. G.L. Doebler attended the dedication ceremony and his report makes clear why the opposition was so intense.

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Sam Mbah (1963–2014)

Although anarchism emerged in the 19^th century as a European political philosophy opposed to capitalism and the state, its ideals are manifest throughout the world.

A representative of Nigeria’s Awareness League, Sam Mbah, spoke at Detroit’s Trumbull Theatre in November on the application of libertarian ideals within an African context. He noted how the principles of anarchism were mirrored by traditional African village democracy, and how existing nation state boundaries on that continent are based on those of former colonies, ignoring tribal pre-state territories.

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Monument to the anarchist Haymarket martyrs, Waldheim Cenetary, Chicago

Comrades from Chicago’s Louis Lingg Society and Autonomous Zone are continuing their campaign to keep the truth about the Haymarket martyrs alive and to combat the lies and half-truths of the ILHS. As they so aptly ask, “is it not complete hypocrisy to love the martyrs and hate their anarchism?”

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When we left the Gandalf Three [“Building A Movement,” FE #351, Summer 1998], Noel Molland, Steve Booth and Saxon Burchnall-Wood, editors of England’s Green Anarchist, they were imprisoned following a guilty verdict for conspiring to incite others to cause criminal damage.

The charges and three year prison sentence stems from GA’s reporting of economic and ecological sabotage carried out by the shadowy animal and earth liberation fronts which have caused millions of pounds of damages to earth rapers and animal killers.

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* The world’s 225 richest men have a combined wealth of over $1 trillion—equal to the annual income of the poorest half of the world.

* Globally, the richest fifth of humanity holds 85 percent of the world’s wealth; the poorest fifth, 1.4 percent.

* The three richest men in the world have assets greater than the combined gross domestic product of the 48 poorest nations.

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Paul Schwartz with art

FE Note: The area in which the Fifth Estate office is located is known as the Cass Corridor. For years, due to its proximity to an urban university, it has been home to and nurtured endless generations of youthful rebels who cross-fertilized each other in the arts, politics and (Gaia forbid), alternative lifestyles. Each learned from the other, and sometimes there were no divisions as artists were political, and politicos lived alternative lifestyles and were artists, etc. Paul Schwarz was such an individual, who functioned mostly in the arts milieu, but who also was an astute political observer, and took part in many activities. As his friend and co-conspirator, poet Ken Mikolowski, averred in his eulogy to him printed below, Paul’s untimely departure left a hole in this community. In death, as well as life, Paul exemplified the entire community. He was buried wearing an IWW pin on his lapel.

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FE Note: We are publishing this essay to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the state of Israel. It is a substantially revised version of two articles written in the wake of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 (“The Israeli Massacre—Peace in Galilee?” FE #310, Fall, 1982 and “Latin American Terror: The Israeli Connection”) that also appeared in FE #310, Fall 1982.

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In the Negev Desert Israeli “Green Patrols” employed military intimidation and violence to force the Bedouins off their ancestral lands into closed areas similar to Indian reservations. In fact, all Palestinian areas have more and more come to resemble reservations or South African bantustans, a situation which has only been exacerbated by the Oslo Accords. Israel’s resemblance to the English colonial expansion in the Americas is notable, thus it should come as no surprise that Israel has also been one of the largest suppliers of arms to Latin American death squad regimes, often functioning as a proxy for the U.S. when political pressure made direct arms aid impossible. Israel’s customers have included El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Chile, Argentina, Bolivia and Haiti, and have generated billions of dollars in profit.

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Of all the issues raised by Israel’s fifty year anniversary, none holds more pain and longing, nor embodies the Palestinian experience more, than that of the refugees.

Numbering approximately 3.3 million, the Palestinians are the largest such group in the world and have suffered that status longer than any other. Besides being scattered in a diaspora in places as far-flung as Sweden and metropolitan Detroit, many continue to reside in refugee camps close to the land they were forced from a generation ago.

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FE Note: Because we are so late in coming out, this article may seem to be rather belated. In fact, the population-immigration debate continues.

Dave Foreman (former proprietor and editor of the Earth First! Journal) plays a key role in pushing an ugly, reactionary anti-immigration politics that does not remotely address the issues of empire and capitalism that are necessary to understand and to respond humanely and sanely to the population explosion.

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The poetry of Christina Pacosz is remarkable for its insistent and deeply compassionate crossing of that deceptive boundary between what we have been tragically trained to think of as the separate domains of culture and nature. Grief, protest, nurture and celebration are woven together in a body of work that places history within the household of the natural world, promising imminent and continual renewal of the spirit.

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[two_third padding=“0 30px 0 0”]The following interview with Mu Xidi, a former sailor, Chinese rebel, and since 1990, a refugee in Barcelona was taken from the French book Bureaucratie, Bagnes et Business (Bureaucracy, Prisons and Profits), published in Paris by L’insomniaque last year.

The editors, Hsi Hsuan-wou and Charles Reeve conducted 22 such interviews in China, Hong Kong, and Macao with Chinese individuals from different occupations and political perspectives. The views expressed below by Mu come closest to those enunciated by our publication on the subject of reform and revolution.

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SAN FRANCISCO—A federal magistrate ordered the FBI to provide further evidence to lawyers for the late Judi Bari and fellow Earth First! activist Darryl Cherney in their 7-1/2 year lawsuit against the FBI and Oakland Police Department.

On May 24, 1990, a bomb exploded beneath Judi Bari’s car seat after she and Cherney, her passenger, had received death threats aimed at their political organizing in defense of the redwoods (see FE #334, Summer 1990). The FBI arrived on the scene in Oakland, California within minutes and declared that Bari and Cherney—two prominent nonviolent organizers of Earth First! “Redwood Summer”—were knowingly transporting the bomb that nearly killed them. The Oakland Police arrested the two within hours, but no charges were ever filed. Judi died of breast cancer in 1997.

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TORONTO—Accompanied by much fanfare and a bit of controversy, this Canadian city was the setting August 17–23 for its second international anarchist/antiauthoritarian gathering in a decade. The organizers titled the event, “Active Resistance,” (AR), after the 1996 Chicago anarchist actions of the same name at the Democratic National Convention. (See FE #348, Fall 1996)

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A dreary, final issue of the federation’s newspaper dated Fall 1998 reached us after the article to the left was written. [“Love & Rage Implodes,” FE #352, Winter, 1999 ] The faction shedding anarchism presents its version of the breakup in disturbingly leftist terms. Issues are available from POB 853, Stuy. Sta., New York NY 10009.

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Talk about going out, not with a bang, but a whimper. Love & Rage, the failed attempt at a continental anarchist federation, formally imploded earlier this year. So insignificant was their demise that we were unable to find out any of the sordid details surrounding the final collapse.

We do know that a faction led by L&R chief bureaucrat, Chris Day, has ditched anarchism for a more general leftist approach and has begun a new organization. Why is it that he and his cohorts only picked up the worst ideas about splits and factions from their original partners in L&R, the Revolutionary Socialist League? To be fair, it is ironic that ex-RSL members are the ones keeping true to anarchism, while the former anarchists have turned to organizational leftism. Now, they can have all the alliances they choose with authoritarians like the RCP without having to suffer the barbs of their libertarian critics.

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a review of

Under the Sign of the Bicycle by Alon K. Raab (Portland: Gilgul Press), 31 pages, $3. from the Community Cycling Center, 2407 NE Alberta, Portland OR 97211.

“When I look at childhood,” begins Robert Bly in a poem in his stunning recent collection, Morning Poems,

I see the yellow rosebush

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reviewed in this article

Guy Debord—Revolutionary by Len Bracken, Feral House, Venice, California, 1997, 267 pp.

This book has much to offer. One of its stated purposes is to make the life and writings of Debord accessible and I am happy to report that in this Bracken has succeeded.

Guy Debord (1932–1994)

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Fifth Estate Books is located at 4632 Second Avenue, 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 $1.24 U.S. or $1.60 foreign (minimum for 4^th class book rate postage);

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In his foreword to Clifford Harper’s Designs for Anarchist Postage Stamps: Postage Stamps for After the Revolution, Colin Ward reminds us that some public institutions are worth saving. No radical activist could deny the immense importance of sending and receiving mail, and what this international public institution has meant to us.

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We received word in mid-October that Minneapolis’ Profane Existence magazine was printing its last issue. The collective also announced cessation of their wholesale and mail order distribution, and record production operations.

Besides noting some financial difficulties, this prolific group, cited being “overwhelmed,” “we have no personal lives,” and “the pay sucks.” In other words, terminal burn-out after a decade of what they define as “a very all-consuming undertaking.”

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Join men and women, gays and straights, freaks, faeries, nomads, communitarians, gardeners, artists, deschoolers, pansies, poets, musicians, magicians, herbalists, jugglers, and others in Middle Tennessee, May 28–31, for a magical weekend retreat of revolution and relaxation.

The site for this rebellion and revelry is Ida (Idyll Dandy Arts) a queer community tucked away on 243 acres where many neighboring communities and households focus on sustainable living, from salvaging building materials to picking wild greens to protesting the military-industrial complex.

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We welcome letters commenting on our articles, stating opinions, or giving reports of events in your area. We don’t guarantee to print everything received, but all letters are read by our staff and considered for publication.

Typed letters or ones on disk are appreciated, but not required. Length should not exceed two double-spaced pages. If you are interested in writing longer responses, please contact us.

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Numerous problems prevented a full version of our feature, On Gogol Boulevard, from appearing in this issue. Look for its return. In the meantime, important events continue to be played out in Ex-Eastern Bloc countries and the Third World. Contact OGB at 528 Fifth St., Brooklyn NY 11215 or on the web at flag.blackened.net/agony for updates. Items prepared by the Fifth Estate staff.

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Fifth Estate Note: Some terminology in this brief but potent essay differs somewhat from the language generally used in the FE.

For example, we normally do not invoke Marx and Engels in economic critiques, but much of their economic analyses remains valid into the modern era.

Also, we feel the commonly used term, employed here by the author, “developing,” is inaccurate to describe the nations of the South—that is the Southern tier, non-industrial countries. The phrase connotes a process that is not occurring, as the article ably points out

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Collage by Freddie Baer

“It’s rubble now.”

—General Henry H. Shelton, Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff, surveying damage from U.S. missile attacks on Iraq, December 17, 1998.

You were once a place before maps were drawn

and what became of you was named, a single morning

inhabited by winds off blue water—and perhaps

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