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College and high school antiwar activists and leaders are scheduled to converge on the campus of Cleveland’s Case-Western Reserve University this month to discuss, debate and decide on a future course for the student antiwar movement.

The February 14 and 15 national conference, called by the Student Mobilization Committee to End The War in Vietnam (SMC), is expected to be the largest anti-war student gathering to date. The SMC is encouraging all young people against the war interested in helping to chart the Spring program and strategy for the SMC and the student anti-war movement to come and participate in the conference.

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Editor’s note: The following message from White Panther Minister of Defense in exile, Pun Plamondon, was read by his wife Geni at the Eastown Theatre, Jan 25 as part of the Free John Sinclair Day benefit.

“The beginnings will not be easy; they will be extremely difficult. All the oligarchies’ powers of repression, all their capacity for brutality and demagogy will be placed at the service of their cause. Our mission, in the first will be to survive....”

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Editors’ Note: The following is the introduction to a speech written by John Sinclair at Marquette prison and read by Jesse Crawford at the Free John Sinclair Day benefit at the Grande Ballroom, Jan 24. Contrary to reports on WABX’s Rock and Roll news the audience received the fifty minute reading with great interest and solemnity.

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Author’s Note: This article is not intended to define or thoroughly explain the muddled swamp which is today’s world of art/life/experience. In fact, its only a visceral (gut) reaction to looking at cars, looking at Lennon-Ono prints. In the next issue a more detailed exploration of art and people will be presented. But for the time being....

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American Civil Liberties Union: 961–4662

Ad Hoc Citizens Committee (Police Brutality Complaints): 872–2828

Creem Magazine: 831–0816

Draft Resistance (info on counseling): 874–4334

Detroit Anti-war Coalition: 873–4322

Fifth Estate Office: 831–6800

Fire Department: 962–0400

Grape Boycott Office: 825–4811

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On January 22 the usually quiet and staid University of Detroit joined the ‘70s as police arrested 17 students who were protesting the presence of a Navy recruiter on campus.

photo / A. Gotkin

The students, who began a non-violent, non-disruptive sit-in at the University’s Placement Center, refused to leave when ordered to by Dean for Student Affairs, Fred Shadrick. Then, as the headline of the U-D Varsity News put it, “Fred Calls Cops” and the Tactical Mobile Unit, a police riot bus and a paddy wagon took the students away.

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The Fifth Estate

EDITORIAL GROUP

Alan Gotkin

Peter Werbe

Cathy West

DISTRIBUTION

Keep On Truckin’ Co-op

ADVERTISING

Steve Dunn

STAFF

David Gaynes

Jim Kennedy

Rick London

Nick Medvecky

Bruce Montrose

Claudia Montrose

Bill Rowe

Marilyn Werbe

POLITICAL PRISONER

John Sinclair

The FIFTH ESTATE is published every other Thursday of each month by the Fifth Estate Newspaper, Inc., 1107 W. Warren, Detroit, Michigan 48201. Second class postage paid at Detroit, Michigan.

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The cement never sets on the WSU empire.

A sign is attached to the cement wall of the new Foreign Language Building at Wayne State University. It faces the John C. Lodge Freeway and the Matthaei Physical Education Complex beyond it. The sign, without reservation announces that Wayne is “Building For Our Second Century.”

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Things may never be the same again at Selfridge Air Force Base of Mt. Clemens.

Several of the Marines, Airmen and one Navy man stationed at the base are forming a chapter of the American Serviceman’s Union (ASU) and this has meant trouble for the brass at every base where the Union exists.

The ASU is committed to support of the enlisted man, the removal of all officer privileges and the stopping of the Armed Forces from being used in a politically reactionary way.

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Hartford’s Other Voice/UPS — The radio speech was never broadcast—yet old sho-biz Agnew got 14,000 letters of praise the next day. No one will admit who slipped.

What happened was that UPI, a news service, also makes news tapes used by independent radio stations. A month ago they recorded a full hour of the usual hard hitting, always missing, Agnew diatribe. The schedule said it was to be broadcast over dozens of stations on the weekend. But a foul up occurred—not a single station aired the speech.

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In Cooperation with Detroit Adventure

THURS. JAN. 22

MORE FREE MEDICAL HELP at the Open City Clinic. 4425 Second at Canfield. 6:30–8:30 p.m. Call 831–2770 before you come if possible.

ART AND ARCHITECTURE OF JAPAN, a lecture on this beautiful topic will be given at 8 p.m. in the Art Gallery of Windsor.

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Many people are still unaware of what Open City is and what it does. Rather than the common misconception that it is a service organization for the alternate community, Open City is the alternate community!!!

The many services provided by Open City are available only because of the effort of members of our community and those people sympathetic to it.

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Editors’ Note: At long last, here is the legal column we have been promising for several issues. “The Mouthpiece” will be a regular feature of the Fifth Estate and is in keeping with our motto of Serve The People.

However, no one should have any illusions about the law and its majesty; its function is solely to maintain the property and social relationships of capitalist society. Its so-called system of justice is not blind, but rather sees its way clearly to discriminate against the poor, the minorities and the politically active.

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a review of

The Solutions are Already Here: Strategies for Ecological Revolution from Below by Peter Gelderloos. Pluto Press 2022

The climate crisis is here. While climate change coverage in mainstream media remains paltry, it is impossible to miss the ways the climate crisis is unfolding. Year after year of record wildfire seasons, of the warmest years on record, of devastating heat waves in Europe and Asia. And, this is only the beginning.

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Since 2013, the Fifth Estate Archive (fifthestate.org/archive) has been an online source for this magazine’s radical reporting, essays, and other texts published in our print edition for more than fifty-seven years. The archives contain 5,221 articles online to date, with more being added constantly.

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Based on contraband, based on stealing fire, based on the thrill of nothingness I could consider paying taxes if reading is all you want and maybe a little tidying up. But as it is each night a new piece of shit falls from the hole in the sky. The vast arms that encircle us with their discontinuities remain unable to reach me aside from the occasional caress.

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Beloved long-time social justice activist, anarchist, and owner of the Oakland, Calif. Angel Cakes bakery, Jen Angel, died on Feb. 9. Jen passed on after three days on life support following critical injuries suffered in a robbery outside of an Oakland bank.

For over 30 years, Jen Angel was a visionary influence and pioneering participant within multiple movements and sub-cultures that significantly informed and shaped our lives.

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a review of

War by Other Means: The Pacifists of the Greatest Generation Who Revolutionized Resistance by Daniel Akst. Melville House, 2022

Violence is not all the same. Context matters.

There’s something much worse about violence when it’s perpetrated by or with the tacit acceptance of the State. It’s not just that governments and their allies in the capitalist class and the patriarchy have more resources, more weapons, and fewer ethical qualms about killing than most. Beyond these obvious assets, they can hide behind the veil of legitimacy that the State (allegedly) offers them. Hitler, George W. Bush, and Derek Chauvin may not have a lot in common personally, but all committed their crimes under the reasonable presumption that the social and political order sanctioned such behavior.

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Leni Sinclair, 1960s

Using the descriptor, ironic, to define almost anything has become an overused cliché. However, Leni Sinclair’s 1966 photo of John Coltrane taken at Detroit’s Drome Lounge deserves that adjective. The image has been displayed in museums and reproduced hundreds of times.

Leni Sinclair’s photos first appeared in the Fifth Estate that same year in the then-tabloid’s second edition. Although the paper’s content was filled with articles about opposition to the Vietnam War and support for civil rights, the cover story was entitled, “The New Sound of Sound,” written under her full name, Magdalene Sinclair, and was accompanied by her photographs of Detroit musicians who were turning the world of jazz upside down [FE #2, December 2–16, 1965].

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Alfredo Cospito is a 55-year-old incarcerated Italian anarchist who has been on hunger strike since October 2022, protesting the brutality of his imprisonment. As we publish in March 2023, his condition is uncertain. His comrades fear he is near death.

In 2012, Cospito and a comrade kneecapped Roberto Adinolfi, the CEO of Italy’s main nuclear power company, shooting him in the leg three times. Cospito was apprehended and sentenced to 10 years in prison. While imprisoned, he was convicted for planting bombs at a school for Carabinieri, the Italian elite police force. Although no one was injured in the explosions, he was given a life sentence without parole. The government decided that Cospito should be permanently removed from society as a dangerous anarchist terrorist.

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a review of

Passages of Rebellion by Fran Shor. Smart Set, 2021

Passages of Rebellion, with its focus on 1960s activism, feels perfectly curated for 2023 readers.

Just as the country was polarized and divided in the 1960s, today’s activists challenge convention and institutions, albeit with far more sophisticated technological capabilities, but with similar intent to their messaging.

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a review of

Breaking the Alphabet by Sascha Engel. Ardent Press 2022

Critiques of language and its objectifying, alienating effects are older than history itself (history defined as the linear, language-based story of civilization). Those early incarnations still exist today in mystical and spiritual practices like no-mind meditation, ecstatic dance, and mantra.

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Editors’ Note: Fifth Estate staffer Rick Londin is in Cuba with Venceremos Cane Cutting Brigade. The Brigade has been there since last November to assist the Cubans in harvesting 10 million tons of sugar cane as part of their program of attaining economic independence. The contingent Rick is with will be arriving back in the U.S. in early February and a second group will leave for Cuba at that time.

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“It’s what you call having your words and eating it too,” said the accused in reference to the penis in the councilman’s hand.

The accused, Ken Kelley, wild-maned editor of the Ann Arbor Argus was charged last August with “distributing an obscene newspaper” when he published a picture of Ann Arbor councilman James Stephenson holding a superimposed object that appeared to be an extremely large male cock. The councilman was grinning broadly.

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Dr. Eugene Schoenfeld speaking at Community Arts Auditorium, May 28, 1969 at a benefit for Open City. Photo: Alan Gotkin.

Brother:

I have a rather peculiar problem. When my girlfriend was younger, she had a rather bad dream concerning her breasts. The gist of the dream was that her breasts were kissed, sucked, etc., by a man who she thought loved her, but who, in reality, wanted only her body.

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In a near spontaneous action, People Concerned About Urban Renewal (PCAUR) led a demonstration against a local slumlord last Thursday.

The group, composed of more than twenty local residents, street kids and students converged on an apartment building complex on the near west side to confront the caretaker of the building concerning the heat and water conditions there which had become intolerable. The buildings are located on Hancock near Avery.

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At this time every year, aliens are required to register with the United States Government, who bring you Chevrolets, racism, Herb Alpert and the Tiajuana Brass and other fine products.

In spite of the fact that the government has kindly erected big, prominent buildings called post offices where aliens can register, each year many people who should notify the authorities of their alienation fail to do so.

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If you have information concerning this person, please contact your local FBI office. Telephone numbers and addresses of all FBI offices listed on back.

Identification Order 4343, December 30, 1969

Lawrence Robert Plamondon, as he is known to the pigs, or Pun as he is called by the people, is White Panther Party Minister of Defense. He is accused of conspiring with Jack Forrest, Detroit White Panther captain, and John Sinclair to dynamite the Ann Arbor CIA office in October of 1968. They were indicted by a Federal Grand Jury late last year on the testimony of imprisoned stoolie Dave Valler. Valler was head of a dynamite ring that carried out a series of bombings in 1968 and is now trying to get out of prison by finking on anyone the government mentions to him.

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Who says the New York Times favors the status quo? After a recent story listing “narcotic addicts, drunks, panhandlers, homosexuals and drifters” a staff memo was circulated explaining: “Times have changed and ‘homosexuals’ is no longer universally considered a term of opprobrium”... Meanwhile former Times editor Herman Dinsmore (editor, International Edition, 1951 through 1960) has written a Red-baiting book “documenting what anti-Communists have long known” billed by the Conservative Book Club as “Former Times Editor Exposes Own Paper!”...

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FLINT, Mich. (LNS) — Weathermen, Weatherwomen, some of their friends and some of their critics, met in a “war council” Dec. 27–30. The gathering was a serious political meeting, although it had been widely billed as an outasight international youth culture freak show.

About 400 young people from across the country made it to the bare Giant Ballroom in Flint to practice karate, rap in regional and collective meetings, dig a little music and hear the Weather Bureau lay down its political line for revolution in Amerika.

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Newsreel-ARM — Hollywood began to appreciate some years ago that the vision of life it was projecting for the people was increasingly irrelevant to their lives and uninteresting. It was a basic marketing problem—how to catch up with a broad social process that has some of the aspects of pre-revolutionary alienation from the system, without giving into it and confirming its concrete revolutionary potential?

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Reprinted from The Great Speckled Bird

Look what’s happening out in the streets

Got a revolution Got to revolution

Hey, I’m dancing down the streets

Got a revolution Got to revolution

Ain’t it amazing all the people I meet

Got a revolution Got to revolution

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One generation got old

One generation got soul

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“Everybody comes to you for gasoline boy, that’s some filling station you got there.”

--Jack Kerouac The Subterraneans

Hi, kids, it’s me, Artie, again. I got a story to tell you and something else too. You see, last Sunday (Nelson watches the gas station on Sunday) I was sleeping late with a pretty lady and a friend came over to my house & so did Sammy, my brother, & Sammy said what you gotta do is go to the Art Museum with me. So I said but I went there before & seen all that stuff before & it’s just a big shithouse, with old pictures by dead people & he said, no man they changed it so me and my lady got up & went after we had a hamburger cuz he would not let me get out of going.

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Walking along the river’s edge,

The water level low this year

The receded river reveals

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A lifetime’s worth of accumulated

Garbage. A bicycle straddles

A burned out, gutted blue

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Sofa, spilling its soggy innards

To a sun close and ragged.

I step through tall grasses

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And reeds and feel the ground

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SAIGON (LNS)—Bob Hope entertained the troops in Vietnam for his sixth consecutive Christmas, and took along the usual chorus line of women’s bodies for the men to gawk at. He also took with him Neil Armstrong, the moon-walker, for a round of repartee in which Armstrong played the straight man.

Hope: “Your first step on the moon was the second most dangerous of the year.”

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Ken Kelley, editor of the Ann Arbor Argus, fresh from a semi-victory over the forces of injustice, has scored another journalistic coup.

Kelley published the contents of the wallet of Washtenaw County’s fascist sheriff Doug Harvey in the latest issue of the Argus.

Kelley told the Fifth Estate that Harvey was drunk on his ass at a University of Michigan basketball game and staggered home leaving his wallet. It was retrieved by an unidentified but heroic citizen who brought it to the Argus office where its contents were photographed and then returned to the Sheriff.

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The simple and obvious freedoms that first inspire the imagination of young kids, freedom of movement and freedom from the constraints of physical laws, are so simple as to hide a much deeper liberatory kernel.

From the blood sacrifice initiatory trials of learning to skate to the insular lingo, skateboarding is every bit the revolutionary community, in many ways like the revolutionary secret societies of Haiti. In contemplating a subject as broad as and as theoretical as global anarchism, it seems to be much more productive to explore areas of inspiration rather than explain proper applications. To this end, I’d like to explore the radical potential of one of my lifelong passions. Skateboarding.

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After only three hours of deliberation on December 22 a half black half white Detroit Recorder’s Court jury found Alfred Hibbitt, member of the Black Legion, the paramilitary arm of the Republic of New Africa (RNA), innocent of assault with intent to kill. This was the first of three trials that are the result of charges stemming from a shooting at the New Bethel Church last March.

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a review of

Spoor (Pokot). Dir. Agnieszka Holland 2017

Deemed by some to be an eco-terrorist story, Olga Tokarczuk’s feminist novel, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead is adapted by director Agnieszka Holland into Spoor, an exceptionally accurate rendering of a Polish language anarchist thriller.

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a review of

The Menu. Dir: Mark Mylod (2022)

Judging from The Menu’s trailer and promotional images, it seemed as though it was going to literally be an Eat the Rich story. While a movie with a cannibal revenge plot would have been entertaining, there was some welcomed nuance and style within the film that made up for some of its disappointments.

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From the Fifth Estate photo archives. A reader holding a Fifth Estate extra prepared for the 1980 Republican National Convention. The article archive is available at fifthestate.org/archive/

Readers of the Fifth Estate know how much we value the history of opposition to oppression. Accounts of resistance have always filled numerous pages in the 413 issues we’ve published since 1965.

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Everybody has some idea of the kind of heavy political repression the power structure has been laying down, if only from the power-structure media itself.

The Liberation Conference Against Repression January 29–30 at St. Joseph’s Church should be able to clarify a lot of the distortions, fill in some of the gaps and describe the national-regional-local pattern of repression. See ad for list of speakers and workshops.

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Fifth Estate

“To Serve the People”

EDITORIAL GROUP

Alan Gotkin

Peter Werbe

Cathy West

MANAGING EDITOR

Bill Rowe

DISTRIBUTION

Keep On Truckin’ Co-op

ADVERTISING

Steve Dunn

STAFF

Jane Capellaro

David Gaynes

Jim Kennedy

Rick London

Nick Medvecky

Bruce Montrose

Claudia Montrose

Marilyn Werbe

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Nearly a dozen members of the Blue Flu smashed their way into a private party during a cowardly attack on the Highwaymen Motorcycle Club of Detroit.

The blitzkrieg-like attack was carried out in the early hours of Sunday morning Jan. 11, by police assigned to the Western District Morality Squad. This catchy title is a Spreen-style cover for the old-fashioned Vice Squad. The herd operates out of the 16^th (Northwest) Precinct pig pen.

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Editors’ Note: The trial of the Conspiracy 7 continues in Chicago and has turned into even more of a circus as the defense attempts to present its case. They are blocked at every avenue by senile Judge Julius (Magoo) Hoffman, who sustains every prosecution objection and denies every one that comes from the defense table.

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“Patrick Murphy is no great shakes as Public Safety Director. He is a poor administrator; he is weak, and he has no rapport with his men.”

—Richard Judd, former aide to Sen. Wayne Morse on D.C. Affairs Committee, U.S. Senate

We wanted to take this opportunity to introduce you to Patrick V. Murphy, Detroit’s new Police Commissioner, one of the first major appointments of Mayor Roman “Sheriff” Gribbs. Murphy was chosen by Gribbs because he says he agrees with Murphy’s philosophy on law enforcement.

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a review of

Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands by Kelly Lytle Hernández. WW Norton, New York, 2022

It is definitely a hopeful sign that a briskly selling book from a mainstream publisher (one long-listed for the National Book Award) not only features anarchists, but actually treats them with seriousness and presents them as the good guys—even heroes.

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On May 16, 1871, one of the most famous monuments in Europe, the Vendôme Column celebrating Napoleon’s imperial regime, was toppled to the cheers of thousands. It was one of the largest public ceremonies of the short-lived Paris Commune, where revolutionaries controlled the city, establishing a free and egalitarian society that lasted a little over two months until suppressed by force.

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in Cooperation with Detroit Adventure

THURS. JAN. 8

FROM SOCIAL DISEASES to the common cold, Open City will cure it, at their free medical clinic. 4425 Second at Canfield. 6:30–8:30 p.m. Call first or come in for an apt 831–2770.

PINK PILLS for PALE PEOPLE: Detroit’s Panaceas, this is another exciting gallery talk at the Detroit Historical Museum. 3:30 p.m.

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Charlie Haden—Liberation Music Orchestra Arrangements by Carla Bley. Impulse AS 9183

ORCHESTRA PERSONNEL

Perry Robinson, clarinet; Gato Barbieri, tenor saxophone and clarinet; Dewy Redman, alto and tenor saxophones; Don Cherry, cornet, Indian wood and bamboo flutes; Mike Mantler, trumpet; Roswell Rudd, trombone; Bob Northern, French horn, hand wood blocks, crow call, bells, and military whistle; Howard Johnson, tuba; Paul Motian, percussion instruments; Andrew Cyrille, percussion instruments; Sam Brown, guitar, Tanganyikan guitar, thumb piano; Carla Bley, piano, tambourine; Charlie Haden, bass violin.

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