anon.

London (UNS) By Mail — Stokely Carmichael participated in the International Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation in London at the Round House.

During his stay here, he also spoke with Black people from Asia, Africa and the West Indies.

On Sunday, July 23, he addressed a massive, mostly Black, session of the Congress and announced he would be unable to attend further meetings next week because he was leaving unexpectedly.

...

To the delight of the Black populace of Detroit, Stokely Carmichael, on a mission to raise funds for the incarcerated Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver, the convicted H. Rap Brown and other up-tight black freedom fighters, came to town June 8 and with all the ardor and volubility of that other conqueror, he came, he saw and really rapped.

...

The region known as Appalachia is one of the most beautiful and biologically diverse areas of this gorgeous little green-and-blue planet that we call home. The mountains and forests of Appalachia filter air and water, create soil, provide habitat and spiritual sanctuary, and generally make life possible and desirable. The beauty and diversity have been evolving here for eons.

...

This article originally appeared as “Berkeley Strikes the Coral Sea” in Fifth Estate #146, November 25 — December 8, 1971 (Vol. 6 No. 18) page 2

ALAMEDA, Calif.—With a Navy band blaring “Anchors Aweigh,” the USS Coral Sea sailed out of the Golden Gate for Vietnam Nov. 12 despite a mass petition drive by anti-war sailors, an offer of sanctuary to deserters from the Berkeley, Calif. City Council and a threat of mass disruption from civilian picketers.

...

Editors’ Note: This article was sent to us by an airman stationed at a weather station in Florida. His name has been omitted to protect him from reprisal.

A few months ago it seemed that the military was more up-tight than usual. As it turned out, this is the understatement of the year.

I have a VW mini-bus that is painted with pop art, stars, signs of the zodiac, etc. In the rear window, I had painted an anti-war symbol.

...

If the publishing of a sympathetic account of a union struggle seems inconsistent with our perspective, which views unions as auxiliary organs of Capital, let us clarify the matter. As people who have spent our adult lives as wage workers and members of several different trade unions, we have always supported the struggles of our fellow workers to improve their lot within Capital. What we are adamant about is that union struggles have absolutely nothing to do with the revolutionary struggle for a communist society.

...

“The ghetto atmosphere was illuminated last week in a study prepared for the President’s Commission on Law Enforcement. In a survey of three cities—Chicago, Washington and Boston—the study found that four out of every five white policemen working in Negro neighborhoods have prejudiced attitudes towards Negroes.

...

1. So he thinks he’s got my arms pinned, does he! Little does he know I’m.

2. Super Woman! I’ll drop back and thrust my thumbs into his groin...then he’ll move back and I’m ready for my next move...

3. Right in the groin! I’ve got his arm and head too!

4. Now I’ll kick with the knife-edge of my foot--right to the inside of his knee!

...

The first GIs to publicly refuse to go to Vietnam, known as the Fort Hood Three, asked the Supreme Court to hear their suit against the war, and against the government’s right to send them to Vietnam.

Jimmy Johnson, 21, Dennis Mora, 25, and David Samas, 21, first brought this suit while on leave from the army in June, 1966. At that time, they made public their refusal to go to Vietnam.

...

“Sympathy for the Devil,” Jean-Luc Godard’s first film since his masterly “Weekend,” is full of radical rhetoric, Black Power, white fascism, graffiti, pornographic novels and rock music. Watching it is often difficult and demanding because Godard poses questions while denying us answers. Yet it is an impressive visual and aural orchestration of incredibly diverse parts, and its appearance is a cinematic event of the highest order. “Sympathy for the Devil” is about, among other things, the experience of artistic creation.

...

“Don’t tase me, bro! I didn’t do anything”

--Florida

“It was like touching an electric fence they use, to keep cattle in, but instead of just where the initial shock goes in, the electricity goes through your entire body. It feels like every nerve cell is on fire.”

...

Fifth Estate note: The following text was sent to us anonymously via email. It contained a section following what is here describing an intense prison rebellion at an unnamed institution and without a date of its occurrence.

Although the uprising report was exciting, we had no way to check its authenticity, plus we knew its inclusion would guarantee that our prison subscribers would be denied this edition.

...

Returning members of the Venceremos Cane Cutting Brigade encountered their comrades who will take up the work of the first contingent of the brigade in the sugar cane fields of Cuba. The Venceremos Brigade is a group of young Americans who have been and will continue to be participating in the Cuban sugar harvest of 1970, now known internationally as the Battle for the Ten Million Tons.

...

While waiting at a traffic light in the city of Karlsruhe, West Germany, Chief Prosecutor Siegfried Buback was assassinated just as the light turned green.

Along with his chauffer and a bodyguard, Buback was killed by two people riding a stolen motorcycle, when they drove up to the right side of his limousine and emptied more than thirteen shots into the car with a submachine-gun.

...

In fall 1997, in Sechelt, a small coastal town in southwest British Columbia, Canada, Jamie Elder, owner of the Unity Skateboard Shop and drop-in point for local youth, approached me about painting a mural on the side of the trailer that housed his store which faced the highway directly opposite from a McDonald’s.

...

Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley has strongly defended the actions of his police department during the Democratic National Convention. A specially prepared 77 page report issued Sept. 6 by the mayor’s office stated that the disturbances and police actions were provoked by demonstrators led by out-of-town “revolutionaries.” The report also stated that police used the minimal amount of force necessary to control the protesters and added that demonstrators were encouraged by the news media to prolong confrontations with the police.

...

The anarchist avoidance of the electoral process began over a hundred years ago as a bulwark against the seduction of reformism, social democracy, and the like, when the possibility of revolution seemed imaginable. The new world, which anarchists carried in their hearts, seemed realizable then, and argued that a march to the polls forestalled one to the barricades.

...

Media hoopla commemorating the Quincentennial of Christopher Columbus’s first voyage to the New World, however sanitized, should have convinced anyone paying attention that the Spanish conquest was a disaster for both Native Americans and Africans.

Newspaper, magazine, and television celebrations of the 1492 “discovery” have paid scant attention, however, to its effects on Europeans themselves. The unspoken assumption is that the Americans’ and Africans’ loss must have been Europeans’ gain, that all that misery, destruction, and death in the New World must have benefited people in the Old.

...

Besides the sentencing of Marie Mason, there have been developments in a number of other Green Scare cases in the Midwest and beyond.

The Rhinelander case has affected a number of activists. Five hundred genetically-modified research trees were destroyed at a federal research facility in Rhinelander, WI in 2000. Activist-turned-government-collaborater Ian Wallace pled guilty in October 2008 to this action, as well as an attempt to damage two buildings at Michigan Technological University. In March 2009 he received three years.

...

The Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) undertook a series of urban guerrilla actions in 1973 and 1974 that made world-wide headlines. The assassination of a reactionary school official, the kidnapping of a wealthy heiress and a bank appropriation set off a massive search for the small band. Of the original ten SLA members, six were executed by the Los Angeles Police and the remaining four were captured and sentenced to multiple life imprisonments. The latter—Russ Little, Joe Remiro, Bill Harris and Emily Harris—were interviewed last year by the Bay Area Research Collective (BARC, P.O. Box 4344, Berkeley CA 94704) and related their experiences and assessments of the SLA experience. The Fifth Estate has excerpted sections of that interview and although the full text is not presented, we hope that the major thrust of their feelings and ideas is maintained. The entire interview is available from BARC or Ammunition Books for 75 cents.

...

The following are quotations from a variety of “leftist” politicians and organizations:

“Any romantic attachment that goes beyond the distance, outside the marriage bed, is actually a statutory offense, worth six months in jail for the over eager young man...”

-- from Women in China by Helen Snow

...

Although the phrase, “The first casualty in war is truth,” has been aptly realized in the media coverage of the Persian Gulf war, the truth is often the last casualty as well. In the case of America’s military adventure in Vietnam, numerous Big Lies about that conflict continue sixteen years after the U.S. defeat.

...

“The words that describe what’s happening in the Haight this summer are ‘Free,’ ‘Now,’ and ‘Do It.’”

The most spectacular development of recent months is the acquisition of a 482-room hotel in the area south of Market Street by the San Francisco Diggers. The hotel, located at 256 Sixth Street, was condemned some time ago by the City.

...

The dangerous MC-5, Detroit’s heroic “avant-rock” band considered by many the musical electronic equivalent of STP, has been run through the mill lately and may yet come out of it smelling like roses.

Their current trouble started when Uncle Russ Gibb booked the San Francisco rock band the Jefferson Airplane for a Ford Auditorium concert the end of June. The MC-5, who had been promised an appearance with the Airplane when they arrived in Detroit, were informed that they couldn’t play the concert without joining the American Federation of Musicians local in Detroit.

...

FE Note: In the random manner carnivals can get out of hand, so, too, does this article appear in our pages. A staff member sent it to us months ago, and we found it tucked away in our on-line files. It seemed like a good fit for our theme and we liked the subject matter, but upon reading it, realized that it had been printed elsewhere, particularly since it makes reference to an accompanying CD which obviously isn’t here.

...

Gang fever, like the Bird’s pitching, seems to have been just a-passing summer phenomenon. Both served their purpose for the Motor City and then disappeared. Of course, youth crime has not disappeared—just its exploitation by the media and city hall politicians has waned.

Hizoner Coleman Young is now preoccupied with concern about how far up in his administration the Federal drug probe will go (it’s already touched his political associates and relatives), and with the exception of a few feeble attempts like Channel 7’s “Summer of Terror” series, the media has gone back to its usual drab fare.

...

* An October issue of Earth News reported that a cow in the mid west United States came down with a bad case of the farts after continually eating vegetation that was gas producing. Disgusted by his cow’s continuous expelling of toxic fumes, the owner (an unnamed dairy farmer) called upon the expert help of a local veterinary (who was also unnamed) to plug up the milcher’s exhaust.

...

WASHINGTON, DC—A noted New Jersey physician of social malaises, Dr. Maynard G. Krebs, recently told a federal panel investigating the causes behind the current epidemic of job refusals, “The less you have to do, the more you must ask a high salary for it, because even this modest employment is the sign of the even more evident absurdity of your forced presence.”

...

Over a thousand angry protesters marched on Montreal’s posh St. James Hotel, April 14, causing havoc and disrupting the tea-time of the idle rich. The protest was part of a province-wide day of action marking the one-year anniversary of the elections that brought the Liberal Party to government in Quebec.

...

Just as the underground press movement of the sixties sprang up against corporate domination of information, so now is the rebel radio movement. For the first time, residents of Detroit’s Cass Corridor and surrounding areas will be able to tune in to the City’s first and only anti-commercial, non-government regulated radio station: Radio Free Detroit.

...

The following is taken from a declaration on sexual ethics published by the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. It was issued in January of this year and is considered church doctrine by Catholics.

“Experience teaches us that love must find its safeguard in the stability of marriage if sexual intercourse is truly to respond to the requirements of its own finality and to those of human dignity. Those requirements call for a conjugal contract sanctioned and guaranteed by society.”

...

A new United States postage stamp commemorating the 150^th anniversary of the birth of Henry David Thoreau has been designed by painter Leonard Baskin.

The stamp was first placed on sale July 12 at the writer-anarchist’s home town of Concord, Massachusetts.

The stamp came under fire recently from Thoreau devotees on the grounds that it makes bearded, long-haired Henry look like a “hippie.” Indeed, Thoreau’s appearance and his life style may qualify him as one of America’s first “hippies.”

Guru Snatchyurbananas has just arrived from Goa, India, to enlighten the western world with his proven, scientific method of T.M. (Transportation Meditation) to solve your problems of irrational hatred for your job and your superiors.

...

The old fashioned mail surveillance described on the opposite page is surprising since now most government snooping is done by modern technology. Apparently, however, the old-fashioned, J. Edgar Hoover-type is still around, although it too is being replaced by technology.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

It’s recently been exposed that every piece of U.S. mail which goes through the postal system is scanned and its exterior digitally retained just like the NSA files.

...

(page 1 of The South End insert)

The South End Political Affairs advisor has thrown his hat into the ring. No, he’s not running, but has gone out on a limb to predict the 1976 Republican candidate for president. Nelson Rockefeller is his name, ruling class, go-getting is his game. SEPA’s theory is that Rocky just ain’t acting like a submissive VP for nothing and that just as Ford arranged to pardon Nixon in advance, he also only planned to be Pres for the duration of Nixon’s term. Betty’s health, among other things, will give Jerry an out. What will Jerry do after his time is up? Return to Michigan and act as official target for the Michigan Police Pistol Team, a source has told the South End.

...

7:00

channel 2 Bozo the Clown

Bozo and Mr. Houdini are joined by Lyndon La Rouche (aka Lyn Marcus) of the U.S. Labor Party for kiddie games and a masquerade.

channel 4 Sesame Street

The Fonz (Henry Winkler) shows up on Sesame Street and teaches the children how to smoke cigarettes and sniff glue.

...

1. Track removal is only one element in the total strategy to interfere with the flow of weapons and obstruct U.S. military intervention in Central America (and elsewhere).

2. The more tracks removed the better.

3. The more people who participate the merrier;

4. We should respond to those who disagree with this tactic in a friendly and open manner, while our comrades continue to dismantle the track.

5. This demo belongs to no one group: our movement is strengthened by diversity of actions, and by our respect for those differences.

6. We are here to continue the work in which we have all been involved, and to which Brian Willson gave part of his body, and the people of Central America their lives.

...

Three persons prosecuted for their participation in the raid last March 13 on the Piedras Negras jail in Mexico were acquitted October 1 of most of the charges against them although two still face jail terms.

Mike Hill, Billy Blackwell and Sterling Davis held Mexican prison guards at gunpoint while eleven Americans and five Mexicans fled the jail and crossed the Rio Grande border to Eagle Pass, Texas.

...

Over the past year, ruling elites in Russia and Ukraine—often in collaboration with fascist gangs—intensified active repression of those who dare to express dissident points of view on a wide range of topics, from workers’ demands for back pay, to the rights of ethnic minorities, to antifascist activities.

...

SAN FRANCISCO, June 12 — Eldridge Cleaver, the Black Panther leader, was released from the California medical facility prison at Vacaville this afternoon on a court order that criticized the cancellation of his parole.

He had been held since April 7 as a parole violator. But Solano County Superior Court Judge Raymond J. Sherwin ordered his release on a $25 nominal bail. Judge Sherwin was critical of the California Adult Authority for ordering the parole revoked.

...

From the May 3 Wall Street Journal comes some interesting information about the United Mine Workers (UMW) union that bears heavily on future energy schemes, especially those dictated by our peanut president. Carter’s new energy policy calls for increased use of coal as a major energy source, but the underground miners of Appalachia are not showing much enthusiasm for digging it out.

...

H. Horatio Humphrey, United States vice-warlord, was welcomed to Detroit last week by a 200-man anti-war picket line in front of Cobo Hall.

Humphrey was in Detroit to speak about riots and other such domestic problems at the National Association of Counties Convention. Official U.S. policy on riots, according to Humphrey, is that the government is against them.

...

The Detroit Committee to End the War in Vietnam will take initial steps to place a referendum on the war in Vietnam on the ballot in Detroit.

Dean Jabara, attorney for the Detroit Referendum Committee, submitted to the Corporation Council a proposed amendment to the Detroit City Charter, the amendment would create the office of the “Director of Peace Priorities,” who would work to bring about an “immediate withdrawal of all U. S. military forces from Vietnam.”

...

Note: The following is an excerpt from an article, “The Regime and the Working Class in the USSR,” by Viktor Zaslaysky which appeared in Telos No. 42, Winter 1979–80. Telos, “a quarterly journal of radical thought,” is available at Box 3111 St. Louis MO 63160. Subscriptions are $15 yearly; single copies, $4.

...

ANN ARBOR — The Voice Political Party is shifting emphasis from demonstrations and sit-ins to an in creased educational effort on the question of U.S. policy in Viet Nam. In a meeting last week, it was decided to attempt to bring the Viet Nam issue to both the student body at U of M and the community at large on a more personal basis.

...

On December 3, a month after the Republican Party was swept from control of the U.S. Congress, Hugo Chavez was overwhelmingly re-elected president of Venezuela for a third four-year term. On the night of his victory, in a speech to thousands, Chavez said Venezuelans should expect an “expansion of the revolution” aimed at redistributing the country’s oil wealth among the poor.

...

PORT HURON—Two unidentified teenagers hurled broken concrete through two large plate glass windows of the Wallace Campaign Committee headquarters in Port Huron, according to state vice-chairman, James Hall.

Dean Cunningham, who is the chairman of the American Independent Party in St. Clair County, reported that police called him September 12 just after the vandalism had occurred.

...

At Blue Bird Food Products, a union plant on Chicago’s South side, thirty-five television cameras mounted on moveable tracks keep constant surveillance on 450 workers on the factory floor. In the monitoring room, an “expert” in time-study keeps detailed charts on workers suspected of talking to their neighbors too often or working too slowly, with the bosses having an instant replay of any of the worker’s actions.

...

Montreal’s fourth annual International Anarchist Theatre Festival is seeking submissions of anarchist theatre pieces to be staged May 11 — 14^th, 2009.

We are looking for theatre pieces in English or French, from 5 to 60 minutes long, about anarchists, anarchist ideas and history, or any subject related to anarchism including anti-state, against capitalism, racism, homophobia, sexism, etc. We will consider plays or monologues that are original work, ones that have already been performed, or that have been written by anarchists (historical or contemporary).

...

You, M. Pope, are a scoundrel and a cur. The more “personable,” the more popular and accessible you become, the more you inspire our absolute loathing for all that you represent: the self-alienation of the human subject and the invasion of the human spirit by the forces of domination. Let it be clear: we are your implacable enemies. Perhaps it is true that it is not you who pushes the button which sends screaming rocket bombs to annihilate whole populations, or who orders the dumping of murderous chemicals into the water supplies, or who dispatches the police to assassinate poets and rebels. And obviously it is true that the hullabaloo that you have stirred up with your visit to the United States should raise no more interest than the arrival of some anonymous charlatan astrologer. But you haven’t been ignored; you have been recognized, feted, adored, praised, gazed upon, cheered, and taken seriously. And you do represent the internalization of the forces which make it possible for the aforementioned crimes to continue unavenged. You are the living incarnation of the plague which legitimizes oppression, promotes passivity, and defuses rebellion. We are warning you: stay out of Detroit if you wish to avoid a sound, well-deserved thrashing.

...

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.

...

Werner Von Braun, 1912-soon

Although Wernher Von Braun is still alive, though bed-ridden with a terminal case of cancer, we feel that this is the appropriate time to wish him a speedy death.

The inventor of the V-2 rocket for Hitler during World War II and author of the book I Shoot for the Stars (and hit London?), Von Braun is directly responsible for the death of thousands of Britons during the final days of the War.

...

Why do we send our kids to school? We’ve been told that it is in elementary school that the bases of learning to read, write, and do math are acquired, although anyone who spends any time with children can clearly see that children want to learn what we do. They want to learn to read if they see us reading, to write if they see us writing, and to count if they see us counting.

...

They’re hee-ere! Yes, folks, it’s the quadrennial electoral charade where power-seeking charlatans attempt to craft tricky speeches and programs designed to convince people to abandon common sense and reason and elect them to political office.

Although one of the fast-talking money boys glad-handing the populace will eventually attain the position of chief executive officer of the Empire, he will attain this status only through the participation of a minority, one growing smaller with each election.

...

The following is a letter forwarded to us (after translation) by friends in Seattle. Though some of the factual information has already been published previously in the FE (see Oct./Nov. and Dec. ’77 issues) we found its first-hand nature and compelling sense of urgency more than sufficient reason to reprint it intact. Thanks to Wayne Parker and Helene Ellenbogen.

...

Reich being led to federal prison in 1957, where he died two years later.

Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957) was an Austrian-born physician, psychoanalyst, and revolutionary. He worked with Sigmund Freud in the 1920s before breaking with him. His sex-political activities in Germany led to his denunciation by the Communist Party in the early 1930s and expulsion from the International Psychoanalytic Association at the insistence of his former mentor.

...

The costs of religion should be born by those who practice it! Whether you go to church or whether you stay away from it, if you believe in god and religion or if you don’t, you are the one who pays for it in the end.

Section of a cartoon by 19^th century artist, Thomas Nast, who saw the organized forces of religion ready to devour a hapless public--little has changed in 100 years.

...

“The streets of our country are in turmoil. The universities are full of students rebelling and rioting. Communists are seeking to destroy our country. Russia is threatening us with her might and the republic is in danger.

“Yes, danger from within and from without. We need law and order. Without law and order our nation cannot survive.

...

At 6:46 p.m. Eastern Standard Time on January 16, 1991, George Bush, Commander-in-Chief of the Empire’s armed forces, announced in Washington DC, “The liberation of Kuwait has begun.” And, at that moment half a world away in Iraq, the most furious air assault in history commenced against a nation which fit perfectly into the larger schemes of the United States.

...

“A spectre is haunting Europe—the Spectre of Communism.”

— from The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx & Frederick Engels

One hundred and eighteen years later Communism is again haunting the combined heads of the world bourgeoisie, but in a way Marx or Engels never could have anticipated.

“Communism” now haunts Europe in the form of electoral activity with the pledge by Communist party leaders to play the game according to the rules set up by the capitalist state.

...

Students for a Democratic Society, a radical political organization, held a national convention in Ann Arbor recently during which they adopted a statement demanding equal rights for women, along with statements in opposition to the draft and the war in Vietnam.

The Women’s Liberation Workshop prepared the statement that demanded equal rights, equal positions of authority for competent women, birth control information and devices for all women, and literature on the subject of women’s rights.

...

THISTED, Denmark—Police are looking for a jobless worker who bit off the ear of a labor exchange official and left it wrapped in paper with the handwritten message: “This is your ear.” The victim was Arne Jensen, head of the Koldby labor exchange office near here.

Police identified Jensen’s assailant only as a 34-year-old worker who had been jobless for a long time and repeatedly had refused to take the jobs offered by the labor exchange. Police said he came rushing into the office after Jensen phoned him to say there was a job for him as a farm hand. The man made it clear he did not want that kind of work and then reacted violently at the prospect of losing his unemployment relief.

...

The anthill signals its submissiion to the leader by holding aloft his religiously imbued sayings.

Since the struggle for power within the Chinese bureaucracy sharpened following the death of Mao Tse-tung in September, events have begun swirling at an ever faster rate.

Coming on the heels of the political turmoil in the capital city, the startling news that several sections of the country are at the point of armed insurrection certainly lays waste to the myth of China as a peaceful, unified nation -struggling to build socialism.”

...

Special to the Fifth Estate

Ann Arbor: Elise Boulding of Ann Arbor has begun a write-in campaign for Congress from the Second District of Michigan. The district, which consists of the counties of Washtenaw, Livingston, Lenawee and Monroe, is presently represented in the House of Representatives by Wes Vivian. Vivian has backed the administration’s policy in Vietnam and vacillated on HUAC. His Republican opponent, State Representative Esch, has an equally unimpressive record.

...

While Time magazine was announcing the computer as its Man-of-the Year, Ronald Reagan, a former B-movie actor presently in command of the most sophisticated computerized system of annihilation in history, had something else in mind.

Calling Americans “hungry for a spiritual revival,” the President decided to designate 1983 as the Year of the Bible, and told diplomats and politicians at a National Prayer Breakfast that “America will not go forward” without faith in God.

...