Most Recent Additions
Fifth Estate Collective
In case of...
American Civil Liberties Union: 961–4462
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
Sep 9, 2019 Read the whole text...
Various Authors
Letters
I used to like ‘em too, just like everyone else, caught-up in that follow-the-other-people, emotional group-cohesion thing. But then I began to think! The Stooges are one example of a group that takes us (the audience) for fools and chumps.
Iggy goes thru all this sexual stuff and then he poses and finally JUMPS out into the audience on someone! He did this at Olympia, Halloween, and almost started a fight with the guy he jumped on! He cursed at the boy and called him names saying “Hit me, I dare ya” and stuff like that.
Sep 9, 2019 Read the whole text...
Rick London
Marie’s Song
Your fingers twitch in your sleep
for a moment before you open
your eyes and roll onto your back
You brush a small critter from your face
and pull a twig from your hair
A pink grey sky envelopes the landscape
as you make your way along an outcrop
of shale thru a field
of wet greens and browns
Sep 9, 2019 Read the whole text...
John Clark
The Dialectic of Enchantment
What Enchantment do we Seek?
According to a certain conventional wisdom, there has been an unfortunate disenchantment of the world, and what is desperately needed is that we rediscover and recreate an enchanted world. This is, however, at best a half truth, and perhaps even a dangerous one.
True, there is a battle between disenchantment and re-enchantment in which we must rally to the aid of enchantment. But there is also a war between contending forms of enchantment that already exist, here and now This is the ultimate world-historical conflict that must engage our creative energies.
Sep 9, 2019 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Unclassifieds
UNCLASSIFIEDS cost 50 cents per line per issue. Figure four words per line. (A word is a word including one and two letter words. A phone number is a word. Street numbers are words. Abbreviations should be sensible. DISCOUNT RATES: Five runs cost 35 cents per line, per issue. (i.e. 2 lines in 5 issues cost $3.50).
Sep 9, 2019 Read the whole text...
anon.
Anti-war GIs March
WASHINGTON—In August 1968 forty-three GIs at Ft. Hood, Texas refused to go to Chicago for riot duty. Their protest was the first in what has been a long series of anti-war and anti-military protests that have led to the growth of a nation-wide GI movement.
On Nov. 15 the most radical of these GIs assembled to form their own contingent in the anti-war demonstrations.
Sep 8, 2019 Read the whole text...
anon.
Coffee house busted
Muldraugh, Kentucky is a small town that lies just outside the gates of Fort Knox. Like most small army towns, it is tightly controlled by the Army. Thus, all has been quiet and conservative.
But when a group of GIs and civilian friends decided that Muldraugh’s old meat market would make a fine GI coffee house, all hell broke loose. And nobody’s keeping secrets.
Sep 8, 2019 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Freedom is Money
“To be free you have to have bread to do free things. The more bread you got, the freer you become.”
—Mike Quatro (Hippie band booking agent, explaining how he equates making money off “the movement”) Detroit News, Nov. 16, 1969
FREEDOM IS MONEY, MONEY IS FREEDOM, FREEDOM IS MONEY. MONEY IS FREEDOM—just ask Henry Ford II. How do you get freedom? Sell people a piece of shit car for twice what it is worth and pay the workers in wages half of the value they produce. Or dress in hip clothes, put on rock concerts and charge the people $8 a head. Two sure-fire ways to get freedom. But how do the rest of us get free—“You gotta get the hog out of the stream if you want to drink clean, clear water.”—Chairman Bobby Seale, Black Panther Party.
Sep 8, 2019 Read the whole text...
anon.
More Ft. Jackson Shit
FT. JACKSON, S. C. — In spite of the victory of the Ft. Jackson Eight last spring, when the Army was forced to drop all charges against eight leaders of GIs United Against the War in Vietnam, officials at Ft. Jackson are still trying to silence the voice of dissent on base.
Recently Pvt. E-1 Charles Carson was placed under arrest for “distributing petitions without proper authority.” The petition referred to was one circulated by the GI Press Service of the Student Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam.
Sep 8, 2019 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
This Time This Place
Centerfold photo feature
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more joy
than fear
more flesh
than mask & it glowed
very clear that this thing
we are doing
evo / revolution
dance / seeding
is way too
important to leave to the joyless
the solemnserious
the hooded men
the power junkies
young or old
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See Fifth Estate’s Vietnam Resource Page.
Sep 8, 2019 Read the whole text...
Liberation News Service
Washington
Anti-war protest, November 15, 1969
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WASHINGTON (LNS)--Karl Marx once said that a revolution is the festival of the oppressed and exploited. Washington wasn’t that. But it was some kind of festival. It was Woodstock without the rain or the mud. It: was the great silent majority of American youth come together and digging it. Quiet kids, kids who didn’t get really excited about any of the speeches they had come to hear, come to hear nothing more than what they already knew--that the war was bad, that the killing had to be stopped.
Sep 8, 2019 Read the whole text...
Liberation News Service
Fort Dix Trial
FORT DIX, N.J. (LNS)—The Army has decided to take three years of Jeffrey Russell’s life.
“It’s a total fraud,” says one establishment reporter.
The New York Post reporter refuses to stand for the court. One of the MP guards can’t quite keep his eyes dry as Cathy Russell screams “Why are you doing this to us!” and starts to climb up to the Judge’s rostrum, probably to kill him, if only she could. “You jive mother fuckers,” mutters a black GI, and another one, white, runs out of the courtroom screaming “Stinking pigs!” He’s arrested.
Sep 7, 2019 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Masthead
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
Dena Clamage
Bob Fleck
David Gaynes
Rick London
Bruce Montrose
Claudia Montrose
Marilyn Werbe
Sep 7, 2019 Read the whole text...
John Wilcock
Other Scenes
CHANGES: Hundreds of empty cans were dumped on the doorstep of Continental Can company in San Francisco by a group calling itself the Canyon League of Re-Cyclists. If the company makes money out of creating garbage it should do something about disposing of it, spokesmen explained. Continental Can officials disclaimed responsibility and had one of the protesters arrested for “littering”...
Sep 7, 2019 Read the whole text...
Frank H. Joyce
Political Repression in U.S.A.
“One man of 74 said he opposed the war but declined to write or send a telegram for fear that ‘if they find out, they’ll take my social security away.’ A housewife said, ‘My son’s in college now and I want him to finish. If I send your telegram (opposing the war) to the President, I know he’ll he drafted.’
Sep 7, 2019 Read the whole text...
Jane Capellaro
The Conspiracy
There is a growing movement in this country to end the exploitation and oppression of the people in our own country and the people of the world. As it grows, so do the attempts to squash that movement and its supposed leaders.
The latest attempt is to blame the trouble that arose on the November 15 march on Washington on a conspiracy of the leaders of the New Mobilization Committee.
Sep 7, 2019 Read the whole text...
George dePue
Vietnam North: Peoples’ War
An evaluation of the Newsreel propaganda film
At the outset, I would like to try to allay anyone’s concern about bias in a member of the Newsreel reviewing a Newsreel film. Clearly, I am not objective. I am partisan. So I would like to make clear the nature of that partisanship.
I once said in a rather superficial discussion within the Detroit Newsreel collective that my personal commitment was to the project of a people’s revolution in the United States, as part of the world revolution against imperialism and monopoly capitalism.
Sep 7, 2019 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Whither the anti-war movement?
In many respects the November 15th March on Washington was a monumental success: the issue of the war in Vietnam was once again brought before the American people with the drama that only masses in the streets can achieve. Many new participants were drawn into the anti-war movement and demonstrators left the capital with a sense of accomplishment and commitment rather than the disillusionment of less meaningful days.
Sep 7, 2019 Read the whole text...
Peter Gessner
Woodstock Nation
film review
Remember Bevo Francis, sports fans? Well, Abbie Hoffman does.
One of the least off-the-wall sections in “Woodstock Nation,” Abbie’s latest bildungsroman and advertisement for himself (the proceeds are pledged to the Motherfuckers who weren’t in on the Movement’s shakedown of hippie capitalist Woodstock Ventures, Inc.), deals with his visit to the one-horse college where fifteen years ago this Bevo Francis dude was the first human to score 100 points in a basketball game.
Sep 7, 2019 Read the whole text...
Blue Jesus
A Slam on the Slam
Editors’ Note: “Fortune and Men’s Eyes,” a play by John Herbert, will begin its Detroit run Nov. 28–30 and again on Dec. 5–7. Performances will begin at 8:30 p.m. Tickets may be purchased at Hudson’s box office or obtained through the mail at 2717 Montgomery, 48206, care of: “Fortune and Men’s Eyes.” All tickets are priced at $2.50. Performances will be at the Central Methodist House, 23 E. Adams. The proceeds from the performances will go to aid the people of Biafra.
Sep 6, 2019 Read the whole text...
David Watson
Detroit trash incinerator closing
—eco-apocalypse continues
The news in March 2019 that, due to “financial and community concerns,” the Detroit trash incinerator was to be closed was weirdly reminiscent of news back in the spring of 1986 that it was going to be built: It came as a surprise to almost everyone in the city. This time, obviously, it came as good news; people who had been working to shut it for decades naturally celebrated the closing as “a glorious day for the city and its residents,” as Sandra Turner-Handy, a long-term environmental justice activist, member of the Michigan Environmental Council, co-supervisor of Zero Waste Detroit, put it. [1]
Sep 6, 2019 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Editors’ Notes
We would like to apologize to any of our readers who were fooled by Mike Quatro’s ad in our paper for his Halloween Eve’s shuck at Olympia Stadium. The ad included a number of acts that had not been contracted and intimated that the show would go on as long as there were acts to perform, which of course didn’t happen.
Sep 6, 2019 Read the whole text...
Resa Jannett
Events Calendar
(in cooperation with Detroit Adventure)
THURS. NOV. 13
OPEN CITY free Medical clinic will cure any hippy disease you’ve picked up lately, or any other medical problem. Clinic-hours 6:30–8:30 p.m. at 4726 Third.-Come an hour early to sign in.
DETROIT SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA with Sixten Ehrling conducting a program of Beethoven, Gutche, and Brahms piano concert No. 1, with Bruno Gelber, pianist. Ford Aud. 8:30 p.m.
Sep 6, 2019 Read the whole text...
David Gaynes
F.E. Weirdo Meets ‘Right-eous’ J.J.
As any kid who plays sandlot baseball will tell you, the kid who owns the ball owns the game. It’s true.
J.J. Scott, of radio station WTAK (“1090 on your AM dial”), is still back there somewhere on that sandlot, and lets no one forget just whose game it really is.
I ran into him a week or two ago rather unexpectedly. I was downtown near Hudson’s selling Fifth Estates when I passed the WTAK trailer in the middle of the Kern block. Just for a goof, I tapped on the soundproof plexiglass front window, smiled my most fetching stoned-hippie type smile, and pointed to the stack of papers I was carrying.
Sep 6, 2019 Read the whole text...
Bernard Marszalek
Fifty Years Ago
The Origins of Berkeley’s Ohlone Park
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Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART), in the late 1960s, demolished 200 Berkeley homes to trench and submerge their rail system. BART then filled in tons of dirt on top of the tube it built and in this way “reclaimed” the land that it bulldozed.
It strip-mined Berkeley to submerge the trains and above left four blocks along Hearst Avenue a barren, ugly field of dust in summer and mud in winter. An eyesore. BART officials said that they didn’t have funds (or mental bandwidth?) to develop it, that is, monetize it.
Sep 6, 2019 Read the whole text...
Eugene Schoenfeld M.D.
HipPocratese
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QUESTION: I had enjoyed a close personal and sexual relationship with a girl to whom I was engaged. But then I began to vomit whenever I saw or thought of her. The frightening part of the story is that the same thing happened to me again during a casual sexual relationship with another girl.
Sep 6, 2019 Read the whole text...
Various Authors
Letters
The Students for a Democratic Society, the Radical Education Project (REP) and other radical groups in Detroit, were set up for harassment in the Detroit Free Press article of October 30, 1969 which printed one of our names and several addresses. The article implied that we were responsible for the unrest in local high schools this fall.
Sep 6, 2019 Read the whole text...
George dePue
Medium Cool
Film review
Review of “Medium Cool,” written, directed and photographed by Haskell Wexler, starring John Forster and Verna Bloom.
“Medium Cool” is a loose-jointed narrative about a TV news cameraman in Chicago who begins to lose his professional detachment and drop his plastic lifestyle shortly before the movement’s challenge to the 1968 Democratic Convention. He begins to fight to do stories of some human dimension. He is angered when he finds he has been used as a fink by his station, which has been turning his footage of draft-card burnings over to the FBI and the police.
Sep 6, 2019 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Planning for Peoples’ Power
A major recruitment and fund raising campaign is currently under way as a part of Open City’s winter offensive.
Open City is the service organization for the free community and has already opened a free medical service, a non profit general store, a food co-op, a free University, a counseling center and switchboard that operates twenty four hours a day.
In order to expand it’s operations Open City is scheduling a week of public meetings at the Unitarian Church (corner of Forest and Cass).
Sep 6, 2019 Read the whole text...
Hank Malone
Safe in Heaven
Jack Kerouac obituary
That old city-planner, Death, caught up with Jack Kerouac this October. Reportedly, it was an ugly death; drunk and despairing, his guts literally busting and bleeding inside the heavy lonely flesh. Kerouac had ruined his great good looks years before and now he had finally ruined his body, his brain, his life and perhaps his very spirit and karma. As Allen Ginsberg, his old friend, recently said, “he threw up his hands & wrote the universe don’t exist & died to prove it.”
Sep 6, 2019 Read the whole text...
Liberation News Service
Spiro Agnew and Kim
WASHINGTON (LNS) Look out, Spiro, there’s an effete snob in your very midst!
Spiro T. Agnew had a very unpleasant surprise come Moratorium day. Agnew’s 14-year-old daughter, Kim (after Kim il Sung, famed leader of the Korean People’s Revolution) decided she wanted to do her part in the struggle.
Attending the National Cathedral School for Girls, young Kim wanted to put on a black armband and march in the anti-war procession held in Washington on Moratorium eve. Papa said no.
Sep 6, 2019 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Unclassifieds
UNCLASSIFIEDS cost 50 cents per line per issue. Figure four words per line. (A word is a word including one and two letter words. A phone number is a word. Street numbers are words. Abbreviations should be sensible. DISCOUNT RATES: Five runs cost 35 cents per line, per issue. (i.e. 2 lines in 5 issues cost $3.50).
Sep 6, 2019 Read the whole text...
Thorstein Smith
View from the Top
A wave of strikes has been hitting Italy, France, and West Germany, in many cases over the opposition of official union leaderships. A recent strike in Italy was conceded by Fiat to have involved 1.3 million men and to have been 75% effective.
The main issue for European workers continues to be wages: for a 48-hour week at Pirelli (tires), the average worker makes $160 a month. A quarter-million coal miners in Germany recently won 14% pay increases:
Sep 6, 2019 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Women’s Rights
In a concerted effort to reform the outdated Michigan abortion laws, Michigan Women for Medical Control of Abortion has launched an all-out action program. The program has been set up to involve as many people as possible in working for the medical control of abortion in Michigan.
“Until there is a concerted effort on the part of hundreds of Michigan women, the legislators will not make changes in our abortion laws,” said Mrs. John H. Tanton of Petosky, President of the state organization. Mrs. Tanton pointed out that in a recent test of the old California abortion law, which was similar to Michigan’s, the Supreme Court of that State recently reversed the abortion conviction of a California physician, ruling that the law was invalid “because it infringed on a woman’s right to privacy without legislative reason.”
Sep 6, 2019 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Black Workers’ Power
Another letter has been engraved on the tombstone of the dying United Auto Workers bureaucracy as 300 members of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers gathered outside Cobo Hall Sunday morning, Nov. 9, to protest the racist practices of the UAW leadership.
The demonstration was to coincide with the UAW special convention to be concluded on Nov. 9. UAW president Walter Reuther, however, in an attempt to avert a confrontation with the militant rank-and-file movement arranged for the convention to be terminated on the previous evening.
Sep 2, 2019 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Chicago Conspiracy Act One
May, 1886
When revolution is in the air and extremist groups take to the streets, the Establishment smells a conspiracy to commit violence, usually led by outside agitators.
So it was in August, 1968, when 10,000 of us took to the streets of Chicago for six days of protest and eight of us were selected and are being tried for conspiracy to incite riot and crossing interstate lines with the intention to incite riot.
Sep 2, 2019 Read the whole text...
Victor Mansfield
Default
Rolf Dietrich, the scourge of Plymouth, let loose a barrage of legal fireworks in pursuit of his damage suit against Plymouth officials for confiscating 15 Fifth Estates from him earlier in the year.
Dietrich says that he has won his suit by default when the defendants failed to appear on Nov. 6. A postponement had been ordered by Judge Richard Hammer, but Dietrich insists this was improper and that the defendants were required to appear.
Sep 2, 2019 Read the whole text...
Liberation News Service
Dix Coffee House Evicted
WRIGHTSTOWN (LNS)—The GI movement at Ft. Dix is the largest and most advanced in the country, and this is due partly to the Coffeehouse for GIs in Wrightstown.
The organizing efforts of the Coffeehouse bring hundreds of GIs every week to relax, listen to music and talk about fighting imperialism, and they pulled off the first demonstration here when thousands of civilians invaded an Army base last Oct. 12.
Sep 2, 2019 Read the whole text...
Liberation News Service
Fort Dix Riot Trial Starts
But in two days of court martial proceedings (Nov. 4 and 5), the Army has been able to get only two scared young GIs—both of whom admit having been threatened with charges of their own if they refused to help the prosecution—to testify against Jeffrey Russell, first of the four to come to trial.
The Army’s other two eyewitnesses, Pvt. Alan Farrell and Airman. John Lisk, brought shocked and angry flushes to the faces of the Army’s two ambitious young prosecutors when they refused to testify against Russell.
Sep 2, 2019 Read the whole text...
R.B. Mandarin
Interview: Roman Gribbs
Fifth Estate: First of all, let me congratulate you on your victory.
Roman Gribbs: Thank you.
Fifth Estate: I understand that Mr. Austin issued a statement calling for brotherhood and unity between his supporters and yours.
Roman Gribbs: Yes, Mr. Austin did that. He ran a fine dignified campaign. He has earned the respect, admiration, and adulation of many people in this city. We plan to work together. We must work together to make Detroit the city where we can live together and prosper together.
Sep 2, 2019 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Keep the 2nd Coming
The Second Coming, a new underground newspaper at Eastern Michigan University, is locked in battle with the administration of that school over its right to distribute on campus.
University president Harold Sponberg (called the Phantom by students) is largely responsible for the hysteria, having freaked out after seeing issue number two of the Second Coming.
Sep 2, 2019 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Masthead
Fifth Estate
“To Serve the People”
EDITORIAL GROUP
Alan Gotkin, Peter Werbe, Cathy West
MANAGING EDITOR
Bill Rowe
DISTRIBUTION
Keep On Truckin’ Co-op
STAFF
Jane Capellaro
Dena Clamage
Bob Fleck
David Gaynes
Joel Landy
Bruce Montrose
Claudia Montrose
Marilyn Werbe
Tommye Wiese
POLITICAL PRISONER
Sep 2, 2019 Read the whole text...
Liberation News Service
Panther vs. Pig
CHICAGO (LNS)—Bobby Seale was sentenced to jail for four years Nov. 5 for repeatedly asserting his right to defend himself before Judge Julius Hoffman. The judge took an hour and a half to intone sixteen counts of contempt of court, each of them containing Seale’s firm insistence on his constitutional rights.
Sep 2, 2019 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Peoples’ Print Shop
The movement in Detroit has a functioning print shop again.
Located two doors from the Fifth Estate office the shop can do leaflets, pamphlets, booklets, brochures, letterheads and small underground papers.
Originally begun by Joel Landy, who has split the city for Ann Arbor, the Revolutionary Printing Cooperative is a joint project of this newspaper, Black & Red magazine, the Printing Coop of Ann Arbor, and the Radical Education Project. Printers at this time include Mike Davis, Mike Gove, Fred Perlman and Dan Wilder.
Sep 2, 2019 Read the whole text...
Victor Mansfield
Plymouth pigs bust Dietrich
On Halloween eve the Chief of the Plymouth pigs, in what was the culmination of an “extended investigation of the circulation and distribution of the Fifth Estate and the Ann Arbor Argus newspapers,” finally arrested Rolf Dietrich as he “did then and there” show, offer for sale, and sell an indecent or obscene paper(s) to wit: The Fifth Estate and The Ann Arbor Argus; contrary to the provisions of the ordinances of the City of Plymouth...” according to the warrant of the arrest.
Sep 2, 2019 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Seale won’t be silenced
Editor’s Note: The following note was written by Bobby Seale in his Chicago jail cell, smuggled into the courtroom on Thursday, October 30, and given to Jerry Rubin, who released it later that day.
Section 198, title 42 of the United States Government Code says that a black man cannot be discriminated against in any court in any legal defense matter.
Sep 2, 2019 Read the whole text...
Finn Black
Berkeley Free Clinic at 50
Mutual Aid Meets Health Care
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The Berkeley Free Clinic (BFC) is an all-volunteer, worker-owned collective that provides free medical and dental care, peer counseling, and information in Berkeley, Calif. We were founded in May 1969 on the ideas that healthcare is a human right, that professional licensing is not required to provide good medical care, and that medicine should not alienate people from their bodies. [See “Berkeley USA, 1969,” FE 81, June 12–25, 1969]
Sep 1, 2019 Read the whole text...
Barbara Henning
We Wait
—and wait—for the wild power of nature—Om nama Shivaya—anything—could happen—to turn around—scream our lungs out—protesters in Gaza—under the burning—midday sun—Om Nama Shivaya—gun shots into the crowd—turn it off—turn it on—social programs slashed—corporate greed—protections for the environment—eliminated—the EPA rolls back—and David Buckel—self-immolates—in the meadow—in the park—Om Nama Shivaya—this winter—the coldest—since 1961—everyday when I hit—the sidewalk—I think—it will never end—and yet—slowly and surely—the temperature will rise—and the might and mystery—of the cold wind—will surely spread—Shiva—Brahma—Narayana—their seeds everywhere—Shiva—Brahma—Om nama Narayanaya—
Sep 1, 2019 Read the whole text...
Hakim Bey
Anarchy and Ecstasy
a review of
Anarchy & Ecstasy: Visions of Halcyon Days by John Moore. Aporia Press, 308 Canberwell New Rd., London SE5 UK, 44 pp., $4. Available from FE Books.
Nineteenth century rationalist/materialist/atheist anarchists were wont to assert that “Anarchy is not chaos.” In recent years, a revaluation of the word chaos has been undertaken by a number of anarchist writers (the undersigned included) in the light of both “mythohistory” and science. Both fields now view chaos as more than merely violent disorder or entropy.
Aug 29, 2019 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Design Competition
U.S.-Saudi War Memorial
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THE FIFTH ESTATE ANNOUNCES:
A DESIGN COMPETITION FOR THE U.S.-SAUDI WAR MEMORIAL
Entries should be based on some of the following design elements:
* A war for oil.
* The slaughter of youth and innocents on both sides.
* Industrialism’s demand to sustain oil as the dominant energy source despite its ecological destructiveness.
Aug 29, 2019 Read the whole text...