J.R. Kennedy
Crash the Gate!

When the Rolling Stones came to Detroit, 14,000 kids gave Mike Quatro over $100,000. The Stones were great and the whole crowd was really into it.

Around 100 SDS Weathermen were digging the Stones too. Only they didn’t pay anything; neither did about 200 other kids.

They didn’t pay because they were fed up with the entire bullshit line about paying money to establishment pigs just so you can dig your own culture. So all the Weathermen got together and crashed the gates at Olympia.

...

anon.
Ecology Manifesto The four changes

1. POPULATION
The Condition

Position: Man is but a part of the fabric of life—dependent on the whole fabric for his very existence. As the most highly developed tool-using animal, he must recognize that the unknown evolutionary destinies of other life forms are to be respected, and act as gentle steward of the earth’s community of being.

...

anon.
Law and Order? Murder! Stop political repression

LOS ANGELES, Dec. 8—25 Black Panthers were arrested, three wounded, during police raids on two apartments and a four-and-a-half hour gun battle at the main Panther office in Watts.

The office was surrounded at 5:30 a.m. by a force of between 300 and 400 police. They were refused entrance to the office. They began to break down the front door, but were driven away by shotgun fire; two cops were wounded.

...

Fifth Estate Collective
Media Repression Insert: American Revolutionary Media / Detroit

Movies, radio and television, newspapers and magazines consistently distort news, information and images of the Black and white liberation movements, here and around the world.

With Black Nationalist groups like the Panther Party, the effort is to present them as aggressively, violently militant organizations of anti-white Black racists. In the case of the Panthers, this slander has been accomplished entirely by slant and innuendo. The Panther Party has never been reported in an incident of violence that was not a case of self-defense. Spokesmen have continually emphasized that the Panther Party is not anti-white, but anti-racist, not concerned with the destruction of white people, but concerned properly and necessarily with serving, defending and liberating its own Black people.

...

anon.
R.W.P. Revolutionary Wall Painting

Reprinted from Fire

I. Necessity

The average Amerikan cannot help but read several hundred thousand words per day of pig shit in the form of advertising, slogans on police cars, etc. Revolutionary wall painting effectively combats this totalitarian bombardment of the mass subconscious.

“A dull-witted army cannot defeat the enemy.”—Mao

...

David Gaynes
The Rolling Stones

a review of

The Rolling Stones, “Let It Bleed,” XZAL 9363, London Records

You must somehow listen to this album—whether you steal it, buy it, or play it with your nose is irrelevant, or rather, up to you.

As is everything.

If you do listen to “Let It Bleed,” and hear it, there’s not much I can say to you. If you don’t—nothing.

...

Fifth Estate Collective
Briefs

Winter Anti-War Offensive

The Winter Offensive against the war in Vietnam is beginning. The Fall Offensive culminated in 800,000 persons in Washington and people came back to Detroit with even a greater sense of the need to bring all the troops home now.

The December Moratorium will focus on organizing and support of anti-war GIs.

...

Fifth Estate Collective
Cop Killer Goes Free

Justice—Detroit style. Danny Royster was convicted last week of manslaughter in the slaying of the only pig killed during the July 1967 uprising. One problem—Danny didn’t off the pig and everyone including the State admits to that fact.

What happened was that Danny and a buddy were liberating some goods from a store on the near Eastside when they were discovered by the 13th Precinct Big 4. One particularly vicious pig, Roy (Butterfingers) St. Onge who works the Warren-Forest area entered the smashed out storefront and whopped Royster upside the head with his shotgun.

...

Fifth Estate Collective
GIs Resist the War News Items

GIs Resist the WarFort Dix

FT. DIX, N.J.—The trials of the Ft. Dix 38 accused of a variety of charges stemming from a stockade rebellion last June are continuing.

On Nov. 20 Pvt. Thomas Catlow was convicted at his court-martial of aggravated arson and riot despite the Fire Chief’s testimony that fire damage was of such a minor nature he did not even bother to examine it closely.

...

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

...

Tommie the Commie
Northland The time is right

“Gimme a p—P”

“Gimme a i—I”

“Gimme a g—G”

“What’s that spell—PIG!”

“What do they do—SUCK!”

Every Saturday afternoon the freeks and greasers from Northwest Detroit and the suburbs go to Northland shopping center to see their friends, get high and hang out.

Pigs at Northland, like all pigs, hate freeks and greasers and over the last year they have been busting the brothers and sisters on jive charges like “loitering” or for being “disorderly persons.” For months people have just kinda accepted that fucked-up harassment without complaining or anything. But Saturday, Dec. 6, the pigs busted one brother too many and all hell broke loose.

...

Liberation News Service
Songmy The Massacre

TROUNGAN, South Vietnam (LNS)—The inhabitants of this tiny village tell a story that one British Newspaper described as “The Massacre That Chilled The World”. They are the survivors of Songmy.

On March 16, 1968 a company of U.S. soldiers entered Songmy, meeting no opposition. They ordered all inhabitants out of their homes and gathered them together in three groups, about 200 yards apart. When the houses had been cleared the troops dynamited those made of brick and set fire to the wooden ones.

...

Kae Halonen
We’re gonna live here The development of people willing to fight for their land is all that will stop the University and the City.

Back in the “uncivilized” days of American history, when a company or government wanted land they killed or drove off the people who lived there and claimed the land as their own.

The Indians were the first to feel the Man’s wrath. The Indian land was needed for “progress”—factories and railroads—and so foot by foot the Indians were driven West with guns, firewater and treachery.

...

Fifth Estate Collective
Fifth Estate Archive Thousands of articles & graphics are accessible dating back to 1965 on the Web

4-s-fe-covermix-small.jpg

Some readers have wondered why a print publication with such a strong, longtime criticism of modern technology would bother with a website.

We are certainly not counting on it for building the social cooperation and solidarity we so desperately need to go beyond the current doomsday destination of modern societies. For this it will be necessary to create and nurture the direct bonds between living beings so vital for re-enchanting the world.

...

Resa Jannett
Events Calendar

(in cooperation with Detroit Adventure)

THURS. NOV. 27

THANK GOD! Just like your forefathers did. Kill a turkey for peace. Many places will be closed so call ahead before you go out.

FRI. NOV. 28

BEAUTY & THE BEAST directed by Jean Cocteau (This is not the version starring Bill Rowe and Peter Werbe). Presented by the WSU Cinema Guild at 7:30 & 9:45. Lower DeRoy Aud. 50 cents.

...

Peter Lamborn Wilson
Fool’s Day

Since the anti-wizard who disenchanted the world was Capitalism, we must assume that Capitalism will have to vanish by evolutionary necessity in order for re-enchantment to triumph.

Is it really possible to embrace such optimism? Let’s try.

An April 1, 2019 article in The Nation, “Warning: The Plastics Crisis is About to Get Worse,” begins with a “midrange” estimate of the amount of plastic garbage that is dumped in the ocean every year—eight million tons.

...

Eugene Schoenfeld M.D.
HipPocrates

9-n-fe-81-6-eugene-schoenfeld-1969.jpg
Dr. Eugene Schoenfeld speaking at Community Arts Auditorium, May 28, 1969 at a benefit for Open City. Photo: Alan Gotkin.

QUESTION: I am a very early riser, strictly a morning man and my mate is a late sleeper. Therein lies my dilemma.

There is nothing I like better than having intercourse with her as she awakes or, more precisely, waking her up with the actual coital act. When first awakened, she is sometimes a bit irritable but quickly gets over this.

...

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

...

Various Authors
Letters

To Those People Who Like The Stooges:

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.

...

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

...

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.

...

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).

...

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.

...

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.

...

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.

...

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.

...

Fifth Estate Collective
This Time This Place Centerfold photo feature

9-n-fe-93-12-moratorium-2.jpg

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

9-n-fe-93-12-moratorium-1.jpg
Related

See Fifth Estate’s Vietnam Resource Page.

Liberation News Service
Washington Anti-war protest, November 15, 1969

9-n-fe-93-12-moratorium-2.jpg

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.

...

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.

...

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

...

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”...

...

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.’

...

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.

...

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.

...

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.

...

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.

...

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.

...

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]

...

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.

...

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.

...

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.

...

Bernard Marszalek
Fifty Years Ago The Origins of Berkeley’s Ohlone Park

4-s-fe-404-14-ohlone-park-berkeley.jpg
Working on what was called, People’s Park Annex, 1969.

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.

...

Eugene Schoenfeld M.D.
HipPocratese

9-n-fe-81-6-eugene-schoenfeld-1969.jpg
Dr. Eugene Schoenfeld speaking at Community Arts Auditorium, May 28, 1969 at a benefit for Open City. Photo: Alan Gotkin.

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.

...

Various Authors
Letters

To the Editors:

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.

...

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.

...

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).

...

Hank Malone
Safe in Heaven Jack Kerouac obituary

I.

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.”

...

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.

...

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).

...

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:

...