John Sinclair
White Panther Statement

First I must say that this statement, like all statements is bullshit without an active program to back it up. We have a program which is on-going and total and which must not be confused with anything that is said or written about it.

Our program is cultural revolution through a total assault on the culture, which makes use of every tool, every energy and every media we can get our collective hands on. We take our program with us everywhere we go and use any means necessary to expose people to it.

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Liberation News Service
Beatle Squashed

LONDON (LNS)—Beatle John Lennon and his girlfriend, avant-garde filmmaker Yoko Ono, were busted in London recently for possession of marijuana. The pair were arrested when police raided Lennon’s fashionable apartment at Montague Square in the Marylebone district of the city. Both were charged with illegal possession of drugs and released on bail of 200 pounds each (the equivalent of $480) pending a court appearance November 28. [Editors’ note: Come the revolution there ain’t gonna be no more pot laws. How’s that for a “plan,” John baby?]

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Judie Davis
Eat It

I made a delicious beef stew the other day, a real one pot delight, filled with all kinds of vegetables and served over noodles. Pick up on it.

The meat to use in a beef stew is usually packaged as “stewing beef.” Actually it is sirloin tip or top round steak. Buy it when it’s called stew beef because it usually costs less and is easier to cut into cubes.

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Fifth Estate Collective
Events Calendar

Fri. Nov. 1

JEFF BECK GROUP back at the Grande to do some heavy blues (English style) along with the Toad and Pavement. Check out the hippy bullshit counter run by Barry Kramer and Bob Stark, they have some real trippy groovies on sale just in case you get bored. You gotta be 17. Grand River & Beverly

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Tony Reay
Flash Beatles New Release Introduced on WABX

WABX strikes again. The Phantoms of Underground Radio deliver yet another coup d’etat with their broadcasting of nine cuts from the new Beatles album.

I really don’t believe anybody would name an album “Sexy Sadie.” Now there’s several old ladies in Bloomfield Hills who are gonna have to buy this for somebody. And are they going to say the word “s-e-x-y” in a public record shop? No way!

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Fifth Estate Collective
SDS Calls Student Strike

In response to the election fraud being perpetrated on the American people by the U.S. ruling class, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) is coordinating a nation wide Student Strike on Election Day, November 5. The slogan is “No class today, no ruling class tomorrow.”

Locally, Wayne State SDS is participating by endorsing the Strike at Wayne and holding a freak-out rally on the Mall at 12:30 pm. This will be followed by a teach-in on the electoral system and the bankruptcy of American liberalism. The proceeding evening, November 4, People Against Racism will sponsor a pre-election rally at Community Arts Auditorium at 8 pm. Rennie Davis, of the National Mobilization Committee will be the featured speaker.

Fifth Estate Collective
Unclassified Ads

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.

Get “High on Mt. Rushmore”

Self-employed bachelor wants uninhibited women for exotic fun and games Phone Charlie at 867–9218, 10am to 10pm.

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Fifth Estate Collective
WABX Gets It On

As Tony Reay says [FE #65, October 31-November 13] “WABX strikes again.” And they did, with ripples from the blow coming all the way back to Detroit from England. The WABX audience was the first, anywhere in the world, to hear the new Beatles” double record album, “Sexy Sadie,” on tapes of the new release that came “from a source close to the Beatles,” according to station manager John Detz.

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Fifth Estate Collective
Bringing it All Back Home Interview with Larry Miller

Editors’ Note: Larry Miller, known to his longtime listeners in the Detroit area as the man who invented “underground radio,” has returned to Detroit after two years as “Midnight Miller” on KMPX-FM in San Francisco and is presently partying on at WABX on Saturdays and Sundays.

His radio programming is probably the most tasteful in the country, and his influence has spread to stations and disk jockeys all over the U.S.A. Miller’s Saturday afternoon shows on WDTM in Detroit in 1965 and 1966 introduced contemporary rock and roll music (Beatles, Stones, Bob Dylan and the Byrds at that time) into the FM radio scene, and his midnight-to-6 am show on KMPX in San Francisco set the scene for the current FM-rock revolution.

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Julius Lester
From the Other Side of the Tracks

Sometimes we are the victims of our own words. At best, words are poor conveyors of information. They are imprecise and must be used with the utmost care if they are to do what we want them to do. When they are used imprecisely, improperly and without regard for the many dangers inherent in them, they can turn upon the user, confounding and confusing him and eventually, be the cause of the user’s destruction.

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Fifth Estate Collective
Give it up Chrysler!

Over 100 persons picketed the Chrysler main headquarters in Highland Park on October 25 to protest the auto company’s role in the production of war material and its support of the racist government of South Africa. The marchers also were supporting the demands of the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM) against the Chrysler Hamtramck assembly plant. The demonstration was sponsored by the Black Panther Party and Students for a Democratic Society.

Liberation News Service
Straights Seed Love Weed

NEW YORK, N Y. (LNS)—Two groovy suburbanites have been growing grass in the gardens of the local police station, country club, American Legion, and Catholic church. The growers, Bill and Frank, are brothers and hale from Westchester County, where they own their own homes and belong to a country club. “We are only interested in decorating symbols of hypocrisy. We’d never do it to a high school or library,” but they hint that the U.N. may be a target.

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Karen Knorp
The High Priest of LSD

highThere is virtually no aspect of life in America today that is not concerned in one way or another with the drug scene. Hippies and politicians, students, parents, teachers. police and revolutionaries all contribute their harsh or thoughtful or inconsistent opinions. Their voices range from the educated, flat and clinical sermons of the AMA, to the educated, maniacal sermons of Timothy Leary.

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Nancy Homer
The S.C.U.M. Bag

a review of

S.C.U.M. Manifesto by Valerie Solanas. Olympia Press, 1968, Paperback 75 cents.

Miss Solanas, best known for trying to cut up Andy Warhol with a .38, presents a “rationale and program of action for SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men) which will eliminate through sabotage all aspects of society not relevant to women (everything). It will bring about a complete female take-over, eliminate the male sex and begin to create a swinging, groovy, out-of-sight female world.”

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Eugene Schoenfeld M.D.
Dr. HipPocrates

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

Dear Dr. Schoenfeld,

A couple of weeks ago my girlfriend and I got loaded and were making love. She told me that she wanted to show me something new that would be a real thrill to me. She said that one of her old boy friends liked to have her do it to him often, so without knowing what it was, I agreed to let her try it.

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Thomas Haroldson
Films

A little over a year ago I was a bit disturbed by the slight attention given the 12 victims of “Bonnie and Clyde’s” career. When I suggested that the movie should have given equal time to the victim’s point of view, a fan shot back, “What the hell kind of a picture would that be?”

Well, now, thanks to Francois Truffaut (who directed “400 Blows,” “Jules and Jim,” etc.) the question has been answered. “The Bride Wore Black” is a detailed account of how a woman kills five men to avenge her husband’s death, but the main focus of the film (interestingly enough) Is on the victims, rather than on the murderess.

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Various Authors
Letters

To the Editors:

Shit, man! I despise philosophical cretins like letter writer A.M. Holton [Letters, FE #64, October 17–30, 1968]. His archaic mind nurtures an imagination that’s 2,000 years behind the times. No wonder he got all shook up after reading Ayn Rand’s bullshit concerning the “mindless masses.” His idiotic outcry against us, reflects his despair at the thought of being a mediocrity. He says he’ll destroy us! There is no need to destroy him, cause he’s a self-destructive motherfucker.

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John Wilcock
Other Scenes

Hostility to the Beatles is building up in the underground press, exacerbated by the release of their recent record “Revolution,” whose lyrics (comments Rolling Stone) “really swing in that brand of political naivete for which the Beatles have long been known and castigated.”

Contrasted with the current Rolling Stones single, “Street Fighting Man,” and the celebrated battle over its album cover, the Beatles’ entry really seems to be an Establishment-oriented message. Rolling Stone’s Catherine Manfredi adds. “Conservatism is a British trend; they have been responsible for bringing back Jazz which they called ‘trad’; jug bands which they called ‘skiffle;’ and rock and roll which they call the Beatles.

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Stewart Albert
Piss in the Voting Booths

Liberation News Service—The American election itself is the candidate, and millions of Americans are going to vote against it. On election day, the streets, parks and voting booths will belong to the people.

Everyone who sees through the fraud will be doing his human thing—showing up the election for the fake it is.

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Fifth Estate Collective
San Francisco GIs March

from LNS and the Guardian

SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 12 — Over 10,000 marchers turned out on a drizzly, overcast morning to show their solidarity with the largest anti-war march ever organized by active-duty GIs and veterans.

There were at least 500 soldiers and sailors present wearing white caps lettered “GIs for Peace.” Several attended in uniform. The soldiers came despite weeks of intimidation from military officials. Military brass tried to ship Lt. Hugh Smith (USAF), one of the chief organizers, to Taiwan on Sept. 30 in hopes of quashing the demonstration. Two other march organizers, A1-C Michael Locks and A1-C John Bright, got orders to ship out to Utah, but the brass backed down after the two sought a court injunction prohibiting the move.

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Michael Dover
U of M Bombed

ANN ARBOR, Mich. (Liberation News Service) A dynamite bomb blasted open the Institute of Science and Technology Building on the University of Michigan campus on Oct. 15. It was the latest in a series of 13 bombings to hit the Detroit area in recent months, and followed by two weeks the destruction of a semi-secret CIA recruiting office in downtown Ann Arbor.

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Pun Plamondon
Want to Learn to Draw?

“Sooner or later in each historic epoch, as objective conditions ripen, consciousness is acquired, organization achieved, leadership arises, and revolution is produced. Whether this takes place peacefully or comes to the world after painful labor does not depend on the revolutionaries; it depends on the reactionary forces of the old society: it depends on their resistance against allowing the new society to be born, a society produced by the contradictions of the old society.”

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Pun Plamondon
A2 News Flashes

FLASH! The Ann Arbor Free School and in particular John Sinclair’s class “Total Assault on the Culture” have been doing some truly revolutionary things. Total Assault Class meets every Monday night and takes its assault to the street, where the class hands out free poetry books, newspapers and information. This is a class of about 10 to 20 who sweep down S. University yelling and screaming, handing out all sorts of great shit, then on to the Diag, where the class shows free movies on the side of the library.

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Fifth Estate Collective
Anti-war protest

6-o-fe-65-2-anti-war-protest.jpg

1,500 persons marched from Cass Park to Kennedy Square in downtown Detroit on October 26 as the city’s part in the international “Week of Solidarity with the Vietnamese People.” The marchers rested in the drained fountain of the square and listened while a variety of speakers denounced the presidential candidates, the war, and the system that produced it.

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Abbie Hoffman
Creating CHAOS

Editors’ Note: The following is from Abbie’s book Revolution For the Hell of It, to be published by Dial Press later this month, by the author “Free.”

LIBERATION News Service — Perhaps the best way to begin to relate to Chicago is to clear your throat of the tear gas fumes, flex those muscles stiff from cop punches, write lying down, collapsing from fifteen solid days on no more than three hours sleep each night, mouth AUM, smile and then roll on the floor laughing hysterically. I can only relate to Chicago as a personal anarchist, a revolutionary artist. If it sounds egotistical, tough shit. My concept of reality comes from what I see, touch and feel. The rest, as far as I’m concerned, didn’t happen. If it did, so what, then it happened. Great!

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Fifth Estate Collective
Editors’ Notes

Apparently Detroit’s two daily papers didn’t believe our interview in the last issue with the person who bombed the CIA office in Ann Arbor.

The News ran a front page synopsis of the interview and the next day both papers carried stories of the “authorities,” denying that it was authentic and the Free Press even accused us of taking it from other papers.

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Fifth Estate Collective
Masthead

Fifth Estate

A Newspaper of Detroit

EDITORS

Harvey Ovshinsky

Peter Werbe

EDITORIAL ASSISTANT

Cathy West

CIRCULATION

Tommye Wiese

NEWS EDITOR

Alan Gotkin

MUSIC EDITOR

John Sinclair

PHOTO EDITOR

Mike Tyre

ART DIRECTION

Blallen

ADVERTISING

Gunnar Lewis

CALENDAR

Resa Jannett

IDEOLOGUE

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Fifth Estate Collective
Fifth Estate Books

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 visiting.

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 $1.25 U.S. or $2.00 foreign (minimum for 4th class book rate postage);

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Various Authors
Letters to the Fifth Estate

Fifth Estate Letters Policy

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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Fifth Estate Collective
News & Reviews

Bound Together Books is presenting the fifth annual Bay Area Anarchist Book Fair, Saturday, April 15 at the San Francisco Hall of Flowers in the city’s Golden Gate Park.

The fair showcases anarchist publishers, distributors and activist groups with attendance at last year’s event having grown to 3,000. According to its organizers, the idea for the fair is to build an international radical community, exchange ideas and sell literature.

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Fifth Estate Collective
Statement of Ownership, Management & Circulation

Title of publication: Fifth Estate. Publication number: 710420. Date of Filing: February 24, 2000. Frequency of Issue: quarterly. Annual subscription price: $10. Complete mailing address 4632 Second Ave., Detroit, Wayne Co., Michigan 48201. Publisher: The Fifth Estate Newspaper. Editor: None. Managing Editor: None. Owner: The Fifth Estate Newspaper, 4632 Second Ave., Detroit, Wayne Co., Michigan 48201. Known bondholders, mortgages, and other security holders: None. Extent and nature of circulation (a) average number of copies each issue during the preceding 12 months; (b) actual number of single issue published nearest to filing date. Total number copies (net press run). (a) 5000; (b) 5000. Paid and or requested circulation: Sales through dealers and vendors: (a) 2424; (b) 2339. Mail subscriptions:

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Peter Werbe
The Toll of U.S. Sanctions A First-Hand Account

Rudy Simons, a 71-year-old social justice activist, was one of 13 people from Metro Detroiters Against Sanctions who visited Iraq in December 1999 to witness first-hand the effects of U.S. policies on the civilian population. Fifth Estate staff member Peter Werbe interviewed Simons soon after his return. A section of it follows.

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Walker Lane (Peter Werbe)
The Unabomber’s Unending 15 Minutes of Fame

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The host of TV’s “60 Minutes II” in front of a panel for a segment on Eugene’s anarchist community following WTO.

FE Note: Most of this article was written prior to the WTO demos and is not a contribution to the debate over tactics used there.

Ted Kaczynski, who pled guilty to the bombing campaign of the Unabomber, continues to pop up as a convenient mass media symbol of anarchism.

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Howard Zinn
Words for a New Millennium

To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, and kindness.

What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved so magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.

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Fifth Estate Collective
A Schedule of Seattles Coming to Your Neighborhood

April 9–17

Washington D.C. Days of Action for Global Economic Justice. Shut Down the IMF and World Bank, April 16. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank are meeting to expand their power over Third World nations’ economies. Information at www. 50years.org or call 202-IMF-BANK.

May 1

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Kerry Mogg
A Short History of Radical Puppetry The giant puppets we see at demonstrations in Washington DC, Toronto, & Seattle have a long and colorful history

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A Women Strike for Peace demo in downtown Detroit, 1965. An early protest against the Vietnam War with giant puppets influenced by Bread & Puppet Threatre. —FE file photo

“Puppets are not cute, like muppets. Puppets are effigies and gods and meaningful creatures.”

—Peter Schumann, Bread and Puppet Theatre

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Sunfrog (Andy “Sunfrog” Smith)
Compromising and Computing

Staff writers at the Fifth Estate collective have been vigorous critics of technology for more than two decades. Rather than isolate particular tools or situations for a contextual attack, our challenges to the totalitarian tenets of the megamachine look to the deeper motivations that propel producers and consumers to make and want more and more automobiles, nuclear power plants, computers, televisions (to mention only a few of the gadgets of modernity that have gouged biological communities).

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Fifth Estate Collective
Free Rob Los Ricos The State Takes Its Vengeance for Riot in Eugene

Outrage is the only word that comes to mind to describe the reaction to the sentence handed down by a vindictive judge to an Eugene, Oregon anarchist following a militant action on June 18, 1999.

On October 13, 1999 Robert Thaxton, activist and writer, better known to his friends and readers as Rob Los Ricos, received 70 months (do the math; it’s frightening) for the charges of second degree assault and rioting following his conviction by a Lane County jury.

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Sunfrog (Andy “Sunfrog” Smith)
Law & Religion: An Awful Combination

Last year, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to permit the display of the biblical Ten Commandments in schools as part of larger legislative efforts to combat youth violence.

Rather than “a first step toward reinstilling the value of human life in children influenced by violent culture,” as the politicians claim, this is yet another shallow gesture by hypocritical lawmakers to legislate ethical control in a culture that is ethically out-of-control.

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Allan Antliff
Money Lures Richard Mock’s Sculptures Hang in the Halls of Capital’s Temples

I have long admired Brooklyn-based Richard Mock for his outspoken commitment to anarchism and clear-sighted attacks on contemporary injustices.

Consequently, I was delighted to learn he has been exhibiting his most recent sculptures in bank lobbies, no less. But then, Mock has a way of getting what he wants: this show has graced several banks in Canada, the United States and Germany (hesitating bank managers get a free lure, Mock tells me).

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Citizen Cane
Organic Cuba Farming & Politics

In May, two former Fifth Estaters (turned farmers) will attend an international organic agriculture conference in Havana. Joining us there will be another farmer from Olympia, Washington, and friends from a Mayan community in the Western Highlands of Guatemala.

The event is co-sponsored by the American organizations Global Exchange and Food First, and the Cuban farming organization Grupo de Agricultura Organica (GAO). These groups co-sponsored a similar gathering there in 1996.

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Allan Antliff
Punching Holes in Russian Capitalism Seeds of the 1917 Revolution are Sprouting Again

During the 1917 Russian revolution, anarchists urged workers to take control of their lives by turning the capitalists out and seizing control of the means of production, the better to reconstruct society along anarchistic lines.

In some instances, property was communalized and a post-capitalist social order began to emerge. One such experiment was initiated by Boris Yelensky, an anarchist who returned to Russia in February 1917 after a lengthy exile in Chicago: Yelensky made his way to his home town of Novorossiysk in August where he formed an anarchist propaganda group.

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Alexander Cockburn
Jeffery St. Clair

So who did win in Seattle? Liberals Re-write History

Hardly had the tear gas dispersed from the streets of downtown Seattle before an acrid struggle broke out as to who should claim the spoils. It’s still raging.

On one side the lib-lab pundits, flacks for John Sweeney and James Hoffa like the Nation’s Marc Cooper, Molly Ivins and Jim Hightower, middle-of-the road greens, Michael Moore, recycled policy wonks from the Economic Policy Institute and kindred DC think-tanks, Doug Tompkins (the former czar of sweatshop-made sports clothing who funds the International Forum on Globalization), Medea Benjamin (empress of Global Exchange).

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Ali Moossavi
The U.S. War against the Iraqi People American sanctions are weapons of mass destruction

If you were to ask most people in this country to define the Persian Gulf War, they probably would describe it as a victorious, six-week long military conflict, in which the U.S. repelled Iraq, a hostile invader, and restored the sovereignty and dignity of a small nation, Kuwait.

Very few would include in that definition the unabated slaughter taking place in Iraq as a result of the US/UN sanctions as well as the almost daily bombings of that country.

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Acme Collective
Is Destruction of Private Property Violence? A communique from one section of the black bloc of N30 in Seattle

On November 30, several groups of individuals in black bloc attacked various corporate targets in downtown Seattle. Among them were (to name just a few):

Fidelity Investment (major investor in Occidental Petroleum, the bane of the U’wa tribe in Colombia), Bank of America, US Bancorp, Key Bank and Washington Mutual Bank (financial institutions key in the expansion of corporate repression), Old Navy, Banana Republic and the GAP (as Fisher family businesses, rapers of Northwest forest lands and sweatshop laborers).

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Michael Albert
On Trashing & Movement Building “Trashing had no positive effects”

This is a response to a post-Seattle debate troubling many folks regarding movement tactics. As a preface, it goes without saying, I hope, that we all understand that as far as violence is concerned, the violent parties in Seattle were first and foremost the President of the U.S., his entourage, the other major heads of state, the leadership of the WTO, etc. Poverty-inducing violence imposed with a pen trumps a brick breaking a window every time—not to mention that the former is to defend and enlarge injustice, while the latter is to fight it.

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Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
The Tyranny of Democracy “Consensus is a tricky issue”

Check out the December 15, 1999, San Francisco Bay Guardian (www.sfbg.com). Page 13 is devoted to a debate regarding property destruction in Seattle.

Medea Benjamin of Global Exchange, one of the organizations that formed the Direct Action Network, finally clarifies her position (along with a welcome apology for statements she made regarding calling the police on black bloc activists).

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Jens Bjorneboe
How Professor Arne Ness and I Conquered NATO The History of a Norwegian Nonviolent Action

From Norway, My Norway (1968) Translated by Esther Greenleaf Murer

Jens Bjorneboe (1920–1976) is one of Norway’s most noted post-WW authors; a poet, playwright, essayist and novelist. He was a complex personality embodying a variety of influences from anthroposophy to anarchism, who was both banned and honored in his home country. He is best known for his fiction, particularly the trilogy, The History Of Bestiality: Moment Of Freedom (1966), Powderhouse (1969), and The Silence (1973) and his novel The Sharks (1974). Philosopher Arne Ness is the founder of Deep Ecology.

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Starhawk
How We Really Shut down the WTO In Seattle, training, and organization closed the streets and gives a guide for future actions

It’s been two weeks now since the morning when I awoke before dawn to join the blockade that shut down the opening meeting of the WTO.

Since getting out of jail, I’ve been reading the media coverage and trying to make sense out of the divergence between what I know happened and what has been reported.

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David Watson
A Humble Call to Subvert the Human Empire

“A Humble Call to Subvert the Human Empire” by longtime Fifth Estate collaborator David Watson is from a recent collection of his writing, Against the Megamachine: Essays on empire & its enemies (Autonomedia, 1999); it’s one of a few in this highly recommended volume that has not previously appeared in this newspaper. See Bookstore page for ordering information.

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