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The Fifth Estate always welcomes letters commenting on our articles, stating opinions, or giving reports of events in local areas. We don’t guarantee we will print everything we receive, but all letters are read by our staff and considered.

Typed letters or ones on disk are appreciated, but not required.

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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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England’s Green Anarchist magazine is now available as single issues or in bulk from Autonome Distribution, PO Box 79119, New Orleans LA 70179. In GA the Earth First! Journal meets Class War and puts forth an anti-civilization perspective as uncompromising as ours. Their long-range strategy is to support “Revolution on the Periphery,” Third World revolts that deprive mass society of the resources it exploits from the poorer regions. (They don’t support national liberation struggles!) They see this as creating the basis for “self-governing, self-sufficient communities” which will be “easier to establish as the State loses control of the rest of the planet.”

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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. A similar section also appears in Black Fist.

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Guy Debord, the French author of Society of the Spectacle and a founder of the Situationist Internationale, took his own life on November 30, 1994. He was 62. His insights are valued and utilized by rebels and social critics.

Guy Debord (1932–1994)

In the past 20 years he lived largely in rural areas and this is where he died (at his home in Auvergne, a mountainous region in south-central France). He was born in Paris, however, and credits this city as well as other urban centers with furnishing him the elements to analyze contemporary society.

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Over the weekend of Sept. 30-Oct. 2, activists from around the country descended on the town of Monroe, Michigan to protest the restart of Detroit Edison’s crippled nuclear reactor, Fermi II.

Built at the site where its predecessor, Fermi I, suffered a partial core-melt accident in 1966, Fermi II was completed 20 years behind schedule and more than 2000% over budget.

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As E.B. Maple points out in the following article (which first appeared in FE #285, August 1977), the atomic bombings of civilians by the American Army Air Corps at the end of World War II was not the knockout punch that convinced an intransigent Japan to suddenly change its strategy and surrender.

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The following text first appeared in a special anti-nuclear issue of the Fifth Estate (FE #297, April 18, 1979). It was written earlier in that year just after an accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in eastern Pennsylvania. As news of the accident spread, official messages insisted, “There is no need to overreact, the situation is stable, the leaders have everything under control,” but eventually people living near the plant had to be evacuated.

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Nuclear power is a primary threat in the ongoing global environmental struggles at the end of the twentieth century. However, nuclear power is an issue many shy away from because of its complex and technical nature and the opaque power structures of gigantic corporations and government bureaucracy that perpetuates this dangerous, decaying technology.

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On December 11, 1993 The New York Times heralded that scientists at Princeton University had “plunged across a new physics frontier...with a series of experiments that may eventually lead to an inexhaustible source of energy.” After decades of effort, Princeton’s Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPL) had produced a short, controlled burst of fusion energy.

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Nuclearism is inherently totalitarian. The apparent controversy over nuclear power is not really a matter for debate: it mirrors the underlying question of social power. Its history makes this clear.

First developed as a weapon of war under the veil of military secrecy, and then in coordinated efforts with enormous corporate interests, it was never publicly debated before the whole society was heavily committed to it. At its inception, public opposition would have brought charges of treason, and nuclear technology and materials are still considered a matter of strict state security.

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by Michael William

An anarchist running for mayor; anarchist candidates for city council—what did Montreal do to deserve this? Indeed, with seven anti- authoritarian identified people running for office and more cast in supporting roles, our town would seem to be experiencing a phenomenon: the coalescing of an organized anarcho-electoral pole in the anti-statist milieu.

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“Consider the intelligence of the average man, then realize 50% are even stupider.”

—Mark Twain

“I am nothing, a cloak of skin with a mouth saying, Don’t kill everything so soon.”

—Mick Vranich and Wordban’d

Wouldn’t the headline, “61% of Electorate Avoid Polls; Conservative White Men Elect Right-Wing of Political Racket to Power,” after the Nov. 8 Republican sweep of Congressional seats have been more accurate than those in the media which trumpeted, “Americans Vote for Change?” Admittedly, mine is not exactly snappy, nor would it fit well as a banner headline, but it’s closer to the truth.

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Carla Glidden (1964–1994)

It is very difficult for me to write about Carla in the past tense. When she died of a blood clot in June, I lost my best friend and the Detroit alternative community and the Fifth Estate lost an untiring participant and supporter. Carla embodied the philosophy of community and mutual aid more than anyone I’ve known. Carla spurned no task as too humble or dangerous.

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Welcome to the Winter 1995 Fifth Estate. This is only the second edition we’ve published this year, so you probably have not missed any issues. This issue also marks the 29^th anniversary of continuous publication of the Fifth Estate. We probably should have a giant, wild celebration for our 30^th next year, but if the 25^th was any indication, the date may just slip by. However, if there is anyone in the Detroit area willing to organize a gathering/celebration event, let us know; we’re up for it.

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“Every year of her life...the Net had been growing more expansive and seamless. Computers did it. Computers melted other machines, fusing them together. Television-telephone-telex. Tape recorder-VCR-laser disk. Broadcast tower linked to microwave dish linked to satellite. Phone line, cable TV, fiber-optic cords hissing out words and pictures in torrents of pure light. All netted together in a web over the world, a global nervous system, an octopus of data. There’d been plenty of hype about it. It was easy to make it sound transcendentally incredible.

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The following text is a speech given by Fifth Estate staff member David Watson at a conference on July 9, 1994 at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, hosted by the New Jersey Greens. Entitled “A Radical Ecology Forum: Ecological and Communitarian Visions,” the gathering drew approximately one hundred people. For a report of the conference, and the introductory remarks made by Steve Welzer, see the latest edition of the Jersey Greens Journal, c/o Green World, P.O. Box 2029, Princeton NJ 08543. Please send $2 to cover costs.

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Fifth Estate

The Fifth Estate is a cooperative, non-profit project, published 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 and rebellion to this society.

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.

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1994 saw a new wave of activism in support of imprisoned American Indian Movement activist Leonard Peltier including the following events: Leonard Peltier Freedom Weekend in Washington D.C. in June, a summer cross-country Walk for Justice, a twelve day “People’s Fast for Justice” and an International Walk for Justice in Washington State and British Columbia in October.

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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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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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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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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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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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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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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);

...

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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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[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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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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Welcome to our Spring 2020 edition. Its theme is Justice. Since the political state arose thousands of years ago and began replacing communal societies, justice has meant “Just Us.” That is, the construction of legal systems solely benefiting the top of the social pyramid designed to protect the property of the ruling class and to thwart attempts to alter the repressive power and wealth arrangements. Our writers look at the history of justice, how it is used for class rule, and what would be an equitable solution. We know it as anarchism.

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P. 6 Greg Giegucz is a multimedia artist living and working in New Orleans. He moved to New Orleans from New York to draw its devastated landscape, still recovering from Hurricane Katrina. giegucz.com

P. 9 John Gruntfest is a saxophonist and artist. His free form jazz draws upon western and eastern radical artistic and philosophical traditions Ives to Coltrane, Buddha to Marx, Goldman to Debord, Whitman to Artaud.

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a tree shivers shade

to protect the thief, the wolf

from the prying sun

.

it is no coincidence that

the gods of the forest

are the patrons

.

are the patrons of

witches, slaves, outcasts,

are the patrons of outlaws

.

for the earth was a sanctuary

before a mortar-mediated sky

imposed survival on the living

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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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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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“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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Send letters to fe@fifthestate.org or Fifth Estate, POB 201016, Ferndale MI 48220

All formats accepted including typescript & handwritten.

Letters may be edited for length.

Your Winter 2019 issue [FE #405] is full of fine writing and provocative thinking, particularly so in the review of Godless: 150 Years of Disbelief by Peter Werbe. The final section, beginning with “Let’s devise a spiritual belief system...” is a beautiful manifesto worth sharing. I wish I’d written it!

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Brandon Jones Mooney, Tracy Michelle Hughes and Aishe Keita in “Reparations.”—photo: Aaron Jin

a review of

“Reparations”

Darren Canady, Playwright,

Jay O’Leary, Director

World Premiere, Sound Theatre Company, Seattle, Jan. 10, 2020

Reparations examines inherited historical trauma, whether that trauma can be healed, and, if so, how.

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a review of

Luigi Galleani: the Most Dangerous Anarchist In America by Antonio Senta. AK Press, 2019 akpress.org

Sacco and Vanzetti, the Italian-American anarchists executed in Massachusetts in 1927 for a robbery and murder they probably had nothing to do with, had a favorite newspaper. They regularly visited its editor and his family on their farm outside of Boston.

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Recently paroled MOVE9 political prisoners Debbie and Michael Africa, and their son Michael Africa Jr., delivering the keynote talk at the 2019 Fight Toxic Prisons (FTP) Convergence in Gainesville, Fla, in June.

After surviving a police siege on their Philadelphia home and forty years in prison on frame-up charges, Mike and Debbie were released from prison in 2018. They were imprisoned along with seven other members of MOVE, a revolutionary environmental Black liberation organization, in 1978.

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