Most Recent Additions

A review of

We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics edited by Andrea Abi-Karam and Kay Gabriel. Nightboat Books 2020

We Want It All is a big, unwieldy, overflowing book—in this particular moment, there is a need for excess to respond to excess; to the smug American Horror Story of overblown, overglossed oppression and hatred. As We Want It All’s editors, Andrea Abi-Karam and Kay Gabriel, state, “Our aim in the present collection is therefore both to register and to amplify this tendency” to write against these excesses of power. They identify eight separate “overlapping strategies and concerns” in this anthology, acknowledging they are far from comprehensive, among them explorations of the ecological and the historical, collaborative exchanges and serial poems, satire and lyricism.

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Throughout his life, David Graeber remained an eternal optimist who refused to accept the world as it is, and saw only what it could be. He envisioned international, directly democratic, and egalitarian politics. To achieve this required practice.

In Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, Graeber made an hypothesis: majoritarian democracy was in its origins essentially a military institution, a coercive political process in which the minority was compelled by force to do as the majority wanted. Often the “majority,” as in the case of Ancient Athens, was comprised only of white property-owning men. A real democracy could be found in non-Western examples, where people made decisions based on consent rather than coercion. He wrote, “If there is no way to compel those who find a majority decision distasteful to go along with it, then the last thing one would want to do is to hold a vote: a public contest which someone will be seen to lose.” Thus, in communities where the mechanism of coercion, most commonly the state, was absent, there was no reason to engage in a majoritarian process. Instead, he claimed, they operated by not only a formal consensus decision-making process, but a culture of consensus.

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The following interview with Chris Clark, editor of the Earth Island Journal, publication of Earth Island Institute, was taped the week of January 18. I chose Clark to interview since he and his organization seem sensible in their theoretical and activist approach to defense of the environment. This may appear as an endorsement to some and a condemnation to others.

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The present society produces an ever-increasing series of disasters, from stock market crashes to mass starvation. Most of this chaos winds up hurting the most dispossessed while the capitalists laugh all the way to the bank. Knowing this, as a revolutionary and professional programmer, I want to outline why the Man will get hit worse than he is anticipating by the particular crisis known as the Year 2000 or Y2K problem.

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Previous to this era, opponents of capitalism, particularly marxists, but also anarchists, saw the internal contradictions inherent in the political economy as the basis of the system’s overthrow; the working class was to be the agency of revolution. Other marxist theorists postulated that resistance to imperialist domination and colonial oppression, or a revolutionary peasantry, could carry out this task.

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a review of

Isle of Dogs by Jon Frankel. Whiskey Tit 2020

Every time Jon Frankel releases a novel it feels as if he’s managed to twist the English language into a new, illusory shape: a mobius strip made of words. Specimen Tank, his debut in 1994, is a lurid nightmarescape with one foot in the grimiest alley of 1980’s New York City and the other in the bizarro universe it took David Wong and all those Eraserhead Press writers another twenty years to finally tap into. If you strip down his latest book from Whiskey Tit, Isle of Dogs, it appears to resemble a political thriller—but it takes place in the year 2500 and all the politicians are multi-generational clones who ride flesh-eating horses around a war-torn, biopunk, feudalist-dystopian version of crumbling America. It’s like sitting down to watch a familiar courtroom drama and discovering your couch is releasing hallucinogenic spores while Netflix beams into your tv from two dimensions away. A word of warning: if you don’t first read Gaha: Babes of the Abyss (the sequel), you may ricochet off this book’s first chapter like a bullet shot into a centrifuge. Frankel must have snorted some Gene Wolfe recently, because he throws his reader directly into the center of the Sargon 4’s political web without wasting a single page on backstory, making it feel like a contemporary novel about life on Capitol Hill except now all the congress members have been replaced by techno-Spartans with delicate, epicurean palates. In a single scene, a couple of two-hundred year old clones might casually discuss mass genocide while drinking jasmine tea and referencing the latest issue of The New York Times, and Frankel continually mixes the familiarity of our modern day with his surreal vision of the future to keep the prose highly readable, yet somehow...askew. His style is a fusion of literary realism and highly imaginative science fiction that harkens back to works such as Philip K. Dick’s Martian Time-Slip, Samuel Delaney’s Trouble on Triton, and Ursula Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven. But compared to his other novels, such as The Man Who Can’t Die, Frankel has pumped the brakes on his graphic depictions of sexuality and violence, to the relief of some his readers and to the disappointment of others. This is possibly because Isle of Dogs is told from the perspective of the tyrannical Rulers rather than from their “genetically inferior” victims, and so the story has a familial warmth as the plot passes from character to character, almost as if the reader is peeking behind the curtains of the powerful kings or queens more typical of a high fantasy setting. Again, it’s difficult to pin a single genre on this or any of Frankel’s other works, but for the kind of reader who longs for a story that doesn’t have the slapped-together feel of too much of today’s popular fiction or the overwrought stylism of the literary novels hemorrhaging from Brooklyn’s coffee shops, this book will activate a part of your mind that you didn’t know was there before.

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NATO bombs rained down on her city, beginning in its suburbs and then moving into the heart of Belgrade. First the planes and cruise missiles came just at night. But then their aerial assault seemed to know no set time of day.

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Women in Black is against the whole continuum of violence, from male violence against women, to militarism and war. It is for justice and peace. It is for multi-ethnic democracy. It is for nonviolent, negotiated, means of resolving differences. There is an implicit analysis that a certain kind of masculinity fuels and is fueled by militarism and war, and that this is harmful not only for women, but also for men.

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Hi! My name is CBU-871B, but let’s not be formal. A lot of my friends call me Cluster Bomb. I’ve been busy lately, doing what I’m supposed to. And, I sure appreciate the careful treatment that I receive from the American news media.

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The articles on Kosovo were written in early April. The death rates from Serbian ethnic cleansing increase daily.

The articles have been edited for length; full text of the Chomsky and Cockburn pieces are available at www.zmag.org, a web site which contains many useful observations about the war in the Balkans.

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The Fifth Estate is a cooperative, nonprofit 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.

The Fifth Estate (ISSN No. 0015–0800) is published quarterly at 4632 Second Ave., Detroit, Michigan 48201 USA;

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Harvest moon. Moon of the spirits. Cactus moon. Grandmother moon. Nike moon.

Nike moon??

To the many faces and many names honoring the moon, a corporate imprint may soon be added, if a new advertising idea materializes.

Two London-based ad executives, Malcolm Green and Gary Betts, announced plans last year to turn the moon into a giant billboard. By using reflected sunlight from two large umbrella shaped mirrors, they propose projecting corporate logos onto the surface of the moon. They claim to have the assurance of NASA scientists that the plan is feasible.

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The United Nations Charter bans force violating state sovereignty; the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UD) guarantees the rights of individuals against oppressive states. The issue of “humanitarian intervention” arises from this tension. It is the right of “humanitarian intervention” that is claimed by the US/NATO in Kosovo, and that is generally supported by editorial opinion and news reports.

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A review of

Digigram by Barbara Henning. United Artists Books 2020

Many poets have used broad strokes to deplore the current reactionary environment (as Eliot Katz does so superbly in President Predator), expressing their outrage, disgust and sadness, but Barbara Henning in Digigram takes a different route, examining how the coarsened political climate has insinuated itself into all the interstices of everyday life.

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A review of

The Great Offshore Grounds by Vanessa Vaselka. Knopf Penguin/Random House (Bertelsmann) 2020

In Steinbeck’s East of Eden, an indecent woman comes gives birth to a set of twins: one cheats poor farmers to make back money for his father, one drops out of college and is eventually killed in World War I. Before all that can happen the sociopathic mother tells the cheating son that they are just alike but he refuses to believe it. He brings his altruistic brother to meet her and the shame he inflicts upon her is the end of her life. These characters are a mix of settlers: early colonial era, as well as recent Irish and Chinese immigrants. Of these settlers, only one set achieves whiteness in America. All benefit from stolen land. All think they have a choice like Cain and Abel. They can choose righteousness or they can choose sin. This is supposed to be freedom; that they can undo generational harm.

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It’s a pleasure to launch our Summer 1999 edition with a rare splash of color on our front page and center section. The other art and photos also provide an excellent setting for a diverse set of articles.

There are probably more people contributing to this issue than we’ve had in a long while. We haven’t had a color front page in six years, but Stephen Good-fellow’s terrific art and the page one photos made it almost a necessity.

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The “Whiteaker” is Eugene, Oregon’s oldest and poorest neighborhood. Over the past few years some significant anarchy-type situations have developed in Eugene, especially in Whiteaker.

Icky’s Tea House, open from 1994 to 1997, was an anti-institution institution, a haven for the dispossessed and disaffected. Everything at Icky’s was mainly free, including a library, video night, food for the homeless, and bike repair.

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“Alone we cannot change the terms of this rotten deal, but together anything is possible. Undo the leash of time and money. Take back your lives. We have the right, and we have the ability to make life worth living, to make our lives what we want them to be, not what the absurd logic of private property and wage labor says they must be.”

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A review of

The Beast and Other Tales by Jóusè d’Arbaud, translated by Joyce Zonana. Northwestern University Press 2020

“I was happy on this barren land that barely provides what I need to sustain this ancient body, but which grants me the wild wind I cannot live without…”

These are the words of The Beast of Vacares, the title character of the title story in Jóusè d’Arbaud’s powerful collection. First published in Provençal in 1926 and long treasured in its native land, the book has only now been translated into English. For many American readers it will be their first glimpse of a landscape, way of life, and language that were under threat even at the time this book was written, founded on the freedom of open spaces and solitude.

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On April 24, the 45^th birthday of death row political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal, approximately 20,000 people gathered in Philadelphia and other cities, to demand a new trial for the former Black Panther and revolutionary journalist known as the “Voice of the Voiceless.”

One of the many colorful, giant puppets which marched in Philadelphia April 24. Judge Albert Sabo is the hanging judge who sentenced Mumia to death in 1982 and then denied his appeal in 1995. photo/Julie Herrada

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The body is the locus of authoritarian control in Meg Elison’s Big Girl (number twenty-five in PM Press’s Outspoken Authors series.) Gorgeously surreal, the collection includes speculative short stories, essays and an interview with Elison by Terri Bisson.

Elison, whose debut novel Book of the Unnamed Midwife won a Phillip K Dick Award in 2014, has a stunning emotional range. Her work can be prosaic, comic, rageful, grotesque and full of sorrow, all within the same piece, sometimes within the same sentence. The title story recounts, through news reports, the journey of a sixteen-year old girl who grows to enormous proportions. She wakes one morning with birds roosting on her eyelashes, she slogs through the San Francisco bay, she flicks away men who climb her, and she comes to occupy her own island like a B-movie monster.

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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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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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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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May the intercession of the glorious gift, o holy Thief, free us from the bitter commodity & deliver us from the spiritual anorexia of capitalism—

O my goddess of perpetual potlatch, protect us today & always from the police, the managers, the mirrors, the security guards & electronic surveillance devices! O perfect parasite, divine for us impunity & the imperfect passions of free abundance.

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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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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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a review of

The Monster Enters: COVID-19 and the Plagues of Capitalism by Mike Davis. O/R Books 2020

As he has done in the past for California wildfires and famine in India, Mike Davis contextualizes pandemic disease in a matrix of capitalism and deprivation that make a particular kind of disaster inevitable. In The Monster Enters, Davis chronicles the emergence of a new virus; confusion reigns about how it spreads, how deadly it might prove, and how best to stop it. Some governments downplay the danger for political or economic reasons; others are hamstrung in their response by neglected public health infrastructure. People suffer and die—poor people most of all.

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a review of

People’s Republic of Neverland: The Child versus the State by Robb Johnson. PM Press 2020

Raising Free People by Akilah Richards. PM Press 2020

In the grammar of education, children are often passive objects. Children get educated; children get schooled. And what does education do to them? Charles Dickens described schoolchildren as “little parrots and small calculating machines.” A century and an ocean away from Victorian-era England, another artist and resistance worker, the musician Bob Marley, disavowed traditional education entirely: “If I was educated, I would be a damn fool.”

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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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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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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 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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A review of

Reverse Cowgirl by McKenzie Wark. Semiotext(e) 2020

Told in vignettes, Reverse Cowgirl follows McKenzie Wark’s life through the ever-evolving landscape of Sydney’s gay and straight universes, exploring how the self is fashioned by time, clothes, class, music and sex. Wark’s multi-textual memoir pulls fragments of fiction, theory and correspondence into her own narrative, uncovering meaning through rewriting and reinscribing myth. Both a conversation with herself, and with the reader, Wark interrogates how the body’s meaning becomes created, observed, and interpreted. Her writing refuses a coherent trans memoir, imparting a sense of reverence for both that which the body knows but cannot name, and the power of self-definition. Essentially though, Reverse Cowgirl is about fucking, or more accurately, about being fucked.

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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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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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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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[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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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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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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a review of

Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener. Macmillan/Farrar Straus Giroux/MCD Books (Holtzbrinck Publishing Group) 2020

To escape her stagnant work as an assistant in publishing, Anna Wiener sold out and took a job in tech. Now she’s written about her experience, and published it. The result, Uncanny Valley, is a portrait of Silicon Valley from the perspective of a literary impostor, promising to reveal the scandalous truth.

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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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A review of

Promise Me You’ll Shoot Yourself by Florian Huber. Little Brown/Hachette 2019

“Follow Your Leader!” reads the joyous anti-Nazi sticker portraying Adolph Hitler blowing his brains out with a pistol. And in 1945, as the Soviet Army rolled in from the East and Allied forces held the West, thousands upon thousands of “ordinary Germans” did just that in wave of mass suicide. They turned their guns upon themselves, prepared nooses for their entire families, and gobbled up the widely available cyanide ampules distributed by Nazi Party functionaries. Historian Florian Huber finds the suicide wave fascinating, and the widespread allegiance to Hitler and the Reich inexplicable, but the resultant book, Promise Me You’ll Shoot Yourself, falls flat—it’s the German historian equivalent of the 93^rd New York Times feature article about white Midwesterners who like Donald Trump.

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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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* 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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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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