Fifth Estate 364, Spring, 2004 Add to the Bookbuilder

Unlimited Reward offered for the elimination of power held by Republicans, Democrats, & other politicians.

Known to be engaged in a vast conspiracy to spread death & disease, poverty & rape—a conspiracy to completely dominate our lives & eliminate human freedom.

G8 Summit

Where: Sea Island, GA

When: June 8 to 10, 2004

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Yevgeny Zamyatin by Boris Kustodiev (1923)

FE notes: The following passage is from Evgeny Zamyatin’s dystopian sci-fi satire We (1919).

Zamyatin, a naval engineer who specialized in building ice-breakers, had been imprisoned and driven into exile twice by the tzarist regime for subversive activity. During World War 1, he was an enthusiastic supporter of the revolutionary communist underground and was persecuted for antimilitarist activities.

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Welcome to another Fifth Estate! This marks our eighth issue since moving to Pumpkin Hollow. With an editorial office in the Barn and an editorial collective all over the continent, we are proud to approach our 40^th anniversary with a thriving publication as opposed to authority as ever.

When we announced the theme as “Conspirarchy and Elections,” little did we realize how much the edition would emerge as one focused on politics and rhetoric. In particular, we examine the growing tension between the horrific hallucination known as democracy and the utopian vision known as anarchy.

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The forces of capital have once again called upon their storm troopers and talking heads to physically and symbolically crush the growing, global anti-capitalist movement. In the United States, building from the tragic embarrassment of September 11 and overreacting to political defeats like Cancun and the Battle of Seattle, the State has intensified its sustained 150-year-old campaign to defile the public reputation of anarchists.

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Through late December and early January, explosive devices were mailed to the president of the European Commission, the governor of the European Central Bank, two members of the European Parliament, the directors of the European Union’s police and judicial cooperation agencies, and other officials.

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Agents of the Biotic Baking Brigade-NYC cell pied Operation Rescue founder Randall Terry, who was speaking on behalf of his new anti-abortion group, the Society for Truth and Justice.

The anti-choice group was holding a meek protest outside Planned Parenthood’s Manhattan office. Agent Cheesecake served up an organic chocolate cream pie while Terry was ranting to the local media about the evils of homosexuality and abortion.

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During the past few months, Michigan activists fighting the global economy’s developing market for water extraction have fought a multi-national corporation, the legal system, and the state’s liberal governor.

Also, over a thousand people gathered at a local community college to protest water and utility shut-offs in 80,000 Detroit homes alone. But neither Gov. Jennifer Granholm nor any other public official will declare a health emergency or bill amnesty.

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In preparation for the fourth World Social Forum, held in Mumbai, India, January 16–21, a call went out around the world for people to come to Delhi to work out a program of protection for water and water access to be presented to the larger gathering.

Since 2001, the World Social Forum has met to challenge the rules of investment and governance dictated by the corporate World Economic Forum. It proposes democratic, people-centered alternatives to imperialist globalization. Except for this year, it has met in Porto Allegro, Brazil.

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Here in the heart of imperial North America, it’s (s)election year, and whether we like it or not, public discourse over the next several months will be dominated by campaign shenanigans.

Finding the proper revolutionary response to this spectacle spawns the usual frustration and debate. While a few antiauthoritarians have joined the “Anybody but Bush” chorus rampant on the liberal-left, others have dusted off their quadrennial rants against the inherently corrupt capitalist system and its permanent war machine, claim to moral supremacy, and facade of representative democracy.

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Surprisingly, the Founding Fathers of the United States were anti-democrats. Democracy is supposed to be a regime where the people rule themselves directly. Such a system was thought to be favourable to the poor, who would easily have the majority at assembly. Writers and politicians who used the word “democracy” shared a quite negative opinion of the political value of such a regime.

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“It’s not the voting that’s democracy; it’s the counting.”

—Tom Stoppard

Electoral fraud is as old as elections. Societies that brag about traditions of electoral democracy can also claim a continuous history of electoral crime and chicanery. It’s a safe bet that large-scale electoral racketeering will not end with the Florida flimflam of 2000 and the judicial coup d’etat that installed the Bush-Cheney regime.

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To vote is to recognize the legitimacy of the state, its laws and its right to control your life.

To vote is to sanctify the government’s right to make war in your “defense” and in your name. To kill, maim, terrorize and torture people, yourself included, in both secret and conventional wars.

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After the election of Arnold Schwarzenegger as the new governor of California, most people could be forgiven for thinking that something much less than a political cataclysm has occurred in this state. The inhabitants go about their routines of work and leisure; there are no torchlight parades, or even rumors of same, to celebrate the victory of the former admirer of Hitler, Schwarzenegger, over the spectral and aptly named Gray Davis.

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Ironically, Iraqi Shi’ite Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani is currently disrupting US plans to democratize Iraq by demanding that the upcoming election process be more democratic. The Coalition Provisional Authority has balked at al-Sistani’s proposals, as it prefers the process for creating a new government to be a “selectocracy,” a series of easily stage-managed regional representative caucuses that can produce the most manageable batch of Iraqi collaborators. Al-Sistani and his followers, however, are calling for a more immediate and more direct process’ that would curtail external manipulation and the policing of election results by the US.

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Back in October 2002, driving from the hills to the anti-war rally in the city, we had plenty of time to talk. Conversation immediately turned to a possible conspiracy behind the plane crash the previous day. Did Bush’s people assassinate liberal senator Paul Wellstone just days before his possible re-election?

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In November, 2001, I was arrested protesting at the School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia. I received a six month sentence the next July, eventually seeing the insides of three Georgia county jails, a federal maximum security transit center, and a minimum security federal prison camp. At my politicized trial, the prosecutor knew I was an anarchist, and it was because of this, and because I openly criticized the judicial system, that I got the maximum sentence despite being a first-time offender.

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Recently, I was talking politics and revolution with a friend and she said to me the last thing we need is 19-year-old boys fighting a revolution. I think she was referring to me at 19. Sure enough, I don’t feel as invincible now as I did then.

Still, that’s not the point she was making. Our society is not ready for a revolution. Women still get raped everyday, communities are still divided along racial lines, people still don’t care about one another. If revolution came right now and we actually won, ultimately, we would replace what we have now with capitalism, racism and patriarchy because we still haven’t overcome those ailments or come up with alternatives

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A review of

Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist, Alexander Berkman, Pittsburgh: Frontier Press, 1970 [available from FE Books, see page 44 for information).

For political organizers, the great worth of Berkman’s Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist is the evolution of his political thought during incarceration. He is plunged into the bowels of the beast, stripped of his ultimate sense of worth, yet continuously analyzes his own positions and beliefs.

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Prisons are the essence of the state. But as Tom Big Warrior, historian for the traditional Lenape Nation in Pennsylvania puts it in the title of his essay, we must “Turn the Iron Houses of Oppression into Schools of Liberation.”

With the most conscious and articulate voices being muffled inside the jails, it seemed like the anarchist thing to do to get involved where the need was the greatest.

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Want a ‘zine or book reviewed? Want to trade bulk ‘zines between your distro and ours? Contact us!

Down at the Barn, we have a few ‘zines we can always recommend. Many of these are our sister publications in the Allied Press Syndicate (a radical newswire & publishing coalition). These include the Asheville Global Report and Clamor. We also trade copies on a regular basis with revolutionary mags like the Earth First! Journal, Slingshot, Anarchy, and Green Anarchy (an impressive, intelligent, insurrectionary ‘zine that has matured amazingly well since I prematurely dismissed it as macho rubbish in late 2002).

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April 5: Trial of Camilo Viveiros scheduled to begin in Philadelphia. Defend Camilo! Defend Dissent!

www.friendsofcamilo.org

April 9–11 — Positive Action’s Fourth Annual DIY/T (Do It Yourself/Do It Together) Fest and gathering in Athens, Ohio. If you’re interested please email pos_act@yahoo.com for more info.

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