Most Recent Additions

Author’s note: I tried to write a journalistic reportorial article about the “Miss Student Body” rape held on the WSU campus in honor of Fraternity Week, where mutilated people voted on the headless pictures of women in bikinis guided by criteria of the best “Bod.” This article was going to include an objective description of the protest demonstration of Friday, May 16, and other assorted responses of quasi-liberated men and women—but my anger got in the way. Sorry.

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In an unprecedented move Russ Gibb, Detroit rock and roll magnate and creator and owner of the Grande Ballroom, has announced that he is imposing a 1% community tax on the gate proceeds of the Detroit Rock and Roll Revival, held at the State Fairgrounds over the Memorial day weekend.

The 1% will come off the top of the gross proceeds, Gibb said, and will go into a new Community Fund which will then make disbursements through its Board of Directors to groups and/or individuals in the community who need money.

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NEW YORK—Norman Mailer kicked off his mayorality campaign with a rally at the Village Gate attended by George Plimpton’s party crowd and assorted dilettantes and sycophants. Targets of the evening were the NY Times, which hasn’t been giving Mailer the attention he demands; Esquire magazine whose money he’s been taking uncomplainingly for a decade; and his own audience, most of whom he correctly identified as being present “for the fun of it.”

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The theme for this issue, Anything Can Happen, originated as the title of a 1968 Fredy Perlman essay at a time when everything did, indeed, seem possible. The ebullience of that era, in which many believed revolution was on the horizon has faded, but the engagement of activist projects in confronting the worst abuses of the system continue apace.

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This first issue of Fire Ant, an anarchist prison solidarity zine, is published by Robcat and the incredibly energetic comrades in rural Maine.

It is a long term project for and with anarchist prisoners specifically, not a general prisoner support publication.

The goals are to raise material aid for imprisoned anarchists, spread information about imprisoned anarchists and anarchy, and foster communication between imprisoned and free roaming anarchists.

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“Every time I think about us women, I think about the trees, the subversive trees laden in blood but not bleeding the rebellious trees encrusted but not cracking.”

—Jayne Cortez

“Unless rooted in poetry the experience of ‘outside’ from within—even the deepest ‘deep ecology’ barely scratches the surface.”

—Franklin Rosemont

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In the 1990s, environmentalists and animal rights activists engaged in campaigns to put a stop to climate change, animal exploitation, and the destruction of biodiversity. They shut down board meetings, interrupted construction projects, organized demonstrations and sit-ins, held public outreach events at punk shows and vegan potlucks, liberated animals from captivity, and occasionally utilized vandalism, sabotage, and arson against corporations involved in particularly egregious behavior.

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Send letters to fe AT fifthestate DOT org or Fifth Estate, POB 201016, Ferndale MI 48220.

All formats accepted including typescript & handwritten. Letters may be edited for length.

Enjoyed your review of John Zerzan’s A People’s History of Civilization, “The Way of the Passenger Pigeon,” by Peter Werbe in FE #401, Summer 2018. In your reviewer’s analogy of civilization being a train heading towards a bridge that is out without the realization of those supping in the dining car, if I enjoy that last supper as it crosses that trestle, is that decadence?

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BERKELEY (LNS)—One man was murdered and over 200 people injured by police May 15 in the heaviest street battle in Berkeley yet over who controlled a city park.

Above, Berkeley Police shoot at the backs of free people. Below, a police car is burned in retaliation. Photos—LNS.

For the first time, cops used shotguns and rifles against the people. Over a hundred people were hit with birdshot, rock salt and with carbine bullets.

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a review of

The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth’s Past Mass Extinctions by Peter Brannen. Echo Press, 2017.

What is the best way to kill off most life on Earth? Forget those Hollywood asteroids and simply disrupt CO2 equilibrium in the atmosphere. The rest will take care of itself.

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In June and July, during a visit to Spain, my partner Marilynn Rashid and I spread some of the ashes of Federico Arcos, a companero, friend, and mentor to many of us in Detroit and Windsor, Ontario, including those on the Fifth Estate. Fede, as he was called, died in 2015 at the age of 94.

(For Federico’s memorial in Detroit in 2015, see FE issue 394, Summer 2015 and 395, Winter 2016.)

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a review of

Resisting Illegitimate Authority: A Thinking Person’s Guide to Being an Anti-Authoritarian—Strategies, Tools, and Models by Bruce E. Levine. AK Press, 2018

What makes someone anti-authoritarian? Bruce Levine, in his sometimes engaging book, Resisting Illegitimate Authority, starts by talking about his own childhood experiences testing adult authority, in this case, his teacher, and how he decided whether her authority was legitimate:

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During the outrage expressed in the national media following the delivery of over a dozen mail bombs in Late October addressed to prominent Democrats and a cable network, several commentators invoked the name of the Unabomber. (This ignores the role many of the targeted officials played in bombing other countries, but that’s a different story.)

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In July, the U.S. Attorney’s office in Washington DC finally gave up on its eighteen-month effort to prosecute people protesting the inauguration of Donald Trump as President.

The 217 people indicted on felony charges of conspiracy to riot, engaging in a riot and property destruction, related to the events of January 20, 2017, came to be known as the J20 defendants.

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WASHINGTON, D.C.—What was to have been one of the most triumphant days in U.S. history was brought to a tragic, fiery close today when the jetliner bringing the fifty-two former hostages back from captivity in Iran crashed into the Presidential inauguration ceremonies here, killing all aboard and taking with it numerous leaders of the United States government, armed forces and industry; including President Ronald Reagan, Vice President George Bush, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, Senators Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms, evangelist Billy Graham, former President and Vice President Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale, all nine members of the United States Supreme Court, General William Westmoreland, Henry Ford II, Frank Sinatra, Donnie and Marie Osmond and hundreds of other senators and congressmen, governors, mayors, Republican and Democratic Party officials, industrialists, bankers, religious leaders, military and police officials, and television and movie personalities.

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NEW YORK—Despite the lingering bitterness over the hostage crisis and the horrible events surrounding the inaugural crash, as many as 50 inquiries a day have been pouring into the Commerce Department from companies interested in resuming business ties with Iran.

“Even as the remains of the dead were being removed from Pennsylvania Avenue, businesses were calling up asking for information. In fact the number of inquiries reached a high point in the hours after the crash,” a department official said.

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A shortage of staff, and not money problems, kept us from putting out this issue sooner. For the first time in a long time we are in good financial shape, thanks to your numerous and extremely generous contributions. The contributions have helped tremendously, but they haven’t solved our logistical problems. Most of us work, and those that don’t, scrape, and we find that our commitments to Capital—jobs, survival, cars that break down on an increasingly regular basis, all the vicissitudes of what is commonly referred to as “normal” existence—keep us from our true commitments and our projects. So be it; we’d be the last ones to deny the gulf that separates our desires and the pleasure we derive from this project and others like it on the one hand, and the struggling and daily despair on the other. Thanks again for your support. Hopefully we’ll have another issue in your hands within two months at most. We know you’ve heard that one before, folks, but this time we really mean it...

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More than a thousand people opposed to the draft met here in Detroit the weekend of February 12 to 15 at a conference called as a planning and organizing session by the National Committee Against Registration and the Draft (NCARD). The entire conference, from the Friday night pep rally at which a bevy of socialist and liberal politicians and labor bureaucrats spoke, to the workshops, and plenary sessions characterized by leftist block voting, caucuses and maneuvering, produced an eerie sensation of traveling back into the 1960s to one of the Student Mobilization conferences of that era. Every little political group, from the “support Albania” political bizarros to the laissez faire “student libertarians,” maintained a literature table in one salon which appeared to be a sort of political shopping mall, and one had to shoo away the newspaper salesmen like flies,

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The FE Bookstore is located in the same place as the Fifth Estate and can be found at 4403 Second Ave. Detroit—telephone (313) 831–6800. The hours that we’re open vary quite a bit, so it’s always best that you give us a ring before coming down.

How to Order by Mail:

1) List the title of the book, quantity wanted, and price of each;

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a review of

The Duty to Stand Aside: Nineteen Eighty-Four and the Wartime Quarrel of George Orwell and Alex Comfort by Eric Laursen. AK Press 2018

George Orwell’s fiction and non-fiction writings are among the most relevant works for understanding our current societal plight, although he died in 1950. All we need to do is turn on the TV or radio or check the internet to be confronted with denial of truth and misinformation. And all we have to do is walk down a street or enter a store, bank or public building to be reminded of the increasing surveillance all around us.

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Notice: Books reviewed in the “News & Reviews” section are not available through the FE Bookstore unless specifically stated otherwise.

The Alliance for the Liberation of Mental Patients publishes a newsletter from 1427 Walnut Street 4^th Floor, Philadelphia PA 19102, and sends it free of charge to all current and former psychiatric inmates...

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TEHRAN — In the flurry of yellow ribbons, parades, and righteous indignation at a nation Ronald Reagan characterized as barbaric, the identity of the real barbarians has been obscured. The fact that the Shah was a corrupt despot propped up by the force of U.S. arms was becoming apparent to increasing numbers of Americans prior to the hostage seizure. But after the embassy take-over, the U.S. ideological apparatus was able to shift the public’s awareness from the tyranny of the Shah to the plight of the hostages at the hands of “terrorist fanatics”.

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What a Day!

Hostages Go Free; Reagan Sworn In

—Detroit Free Press Headline, January 21, 1981

“Kill the hostages; Turn them into sausages.”

—from “Kill the Hostages,” punk song by Benedict Arnold & the Traitors

“He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark mustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast!... everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the struggle over himself. He loved Big Brother.”

—George Orwell, 1984

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‘Pour myself a cup of ambition’

—Dolly Parton, “9 to 5”

And we pour cup after cup of coffee to the tune of almost 16 pounds per person a year for the 100 million coffee drinkers over the age of 18. This works out to a staggering consumption rate of 800 cups annually and that’s only-the average. The Statistical Abstract of the U.S. (100^th Edition) shows that 40% of us (I’m drinking a cup while writing this) drink 2 to 5 cups a day while 11% get really whacked out on six or more per day.

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Dear FE,

I have absolute revulsion for the “Friends of Entropy,” Animals Liberation Front and others of that ilk. While they will take the most violent and desperate measures to “rescue” a dog, guinea pig, and white mice from their cages (as described in their letter, FE #304, December 31, 1980), they stand mute while state fascist agents rape, murder, and oppress people in prison all over this country. (In fact, Arkansas has the most brutal prison system in the country, yet no one has ever dynamited that slaughterhouse at Cumming Farm where the bones of 60 men were found in a mass grave in 1969.) It is a hypocrisy for “Liberationists” to fight for the rights of animals, but to passively stand by while prisoners are slaughtered at Attica, San Quentin or Leavenworth (where I am) or other such death camps. These “animal lovers” hate people, and are sick!

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Tomega Therion

Primitivo Solis

Coquilles St. Jacques

Bob Brubaker

Alan Franklin

Ralph Franklin

Suzy Ruby Lips

Don Kirkland

The Unknown

T. Fulano

The Fifth Estate Newspaper (ISSN 0015–0800) is published bimonthly at 4403 Second Ave., Detroit, Michigan 48201 USA; phone (313) 831–6800. Office hours vary, so please call before visiting. Subscriptions are $4.00 for six issues; $6 for foreign including Canada. Second class postage paid at Detroit, Michigan. No copyright. No paid ads accepted.

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To the Fifth Estate:

Over the past couple of years that I have been reading your paper, I have been alternately intrigued, provoked, or irritated by some of the things you folks have written. And that’s as it should be. What has continued to hold my interest has been your refreshing tendency to re-examine issues that too many people in the so-called libertarian left have taken for granted. You have never hesitated to ask disturbing but necessary questions—without wishing to “resolve” them all at once.

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Note: The following article by The Unknown from Seattle was originally written as a contribution to the North American Anarchist newspaper as part of a debate on “the land.” The NAA agreed to print a section of it which has not been done to date; we gladly print it in its entirety. Communications to the Unknown may be sent to Box 81091, Seattle WA 98108.

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Note: The following is an excerpt from an article, “The Regime and the Working Class in the USSR,” by Viktor Zaslaysky which appeared in Telos No. 42, Winter 1979–80. Telos, “a quarterly journal of radical thought,” is available at Box 3111 St. Louis MO 63160. Subscriptions are $15 yearly; single copies, $4.

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The New York Times headline trumpeted “[President] Urges Rises in Military Outlay, Cuts in Other Areas,” above an article which stated, “[The President] today proposed to Congress a series of substantial increases in military spending in the 1980s and cuts in many non-defense programs.”

Is this the dreaded Reagan slashing programs for the poor while spending ever more on the already glutted military monolith? No, not at all, but rather the president referred to in the Jan. 15, 1981 article is Jimmy Carter, who several days before leaving office proposed a fiscal 1982 budget which foreshadowed what his successor would announce several weeks later.

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Mbeke Waseme in Malacca, Malaysia

I’ve never worked in a school with coloured people.

I looked at her wondering why she felt the need to tell us that. The day I submitted my poem, I found out why.

That moment when you submit a piece of work and you’re standing at the teacher’s desk not quite able to read what their thoughts are.

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a review of

Wartime Strikes: The Struggle Against the No-Strike Pledge in the UAW During World War II by Martin Glaberman, 1980, Bewick Editions, Detroit, 158 pp., $6 (Available from Fifth Estate Books).

Marty Glaberman’s account of auto worker militancy during the war years from the perspective of both an observer and a participant is essentially a tale of resistance to the orders of bosses—both union and government—to participate in the war mobilization under terms unfavorable to the workers.

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FROM PARTISAN PRESS:

Partisan Press is pleased to announce the long-awaited release of Scottish anarchist Stuart Christie’s autobiography The Christie File.

British orders can be placed with Cienfuegos Press; all non-U.K. orders can be sent to us ($9.95). Coming Spring 1981: Festival and Revolt Italy anthology), Heretic (a new left libertarian journal), and more. Donations needed urgently! Join the Partisan Sustainer fund: $30/year (all publications for that year), or $100+ (lifetime). For orders and inquiries, write Partisan Press, P.O. Box 2193, Seattle WA 98111.

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a review of

“BlacKkKlansman”

Director: Spike Lee

135 min.

“The cops and Klan go hand in hand!”

—frequent chant at anti-cop demonstrations

Spike Lee’s latest film “BlackKkKlansman,” the story of an African American police officer’s infiltration of the Ku Klux Klan in the early 1970s, has received generally excellent reviews in mainstream publications and from anti-racist activists.

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The FE Bookstore is located in the same place as the Fifth Estate and can be found at 4403 Second Ave. Detroit—telephone (313) 831–6800. The hours that we’re open vary quite a bit, so it’s always best that you give us a ring before coming down.

HOW TO ORDER BY MAIL:

1) List the title of the book, quantity wanted, and price of each;

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What they do...

“It was in Hiroshima, that morning of August 6. I had joined a team of women who, like me, worked as volunteers in cutting firepaths against incendiary raids by demolishing whole rows of houses. My husband, because of a raid alert the previous night, had stayed at the Chunichi (Central Japan Journal), where he worked.

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The following text, “On The Future of the Earth,” is a talk given by Russell Means at the Black Hills International Survival Gathering held last July at the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. The gathering was attended by groups which spanned the spectrum from local Indians and farmers, to Marxist-Leninists politicos, Sierra Club activists, Greenpeace, anti-power-line activists, to “alternative technology” entrepeneurs.

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a review of

Long Day, Counting Tomorrow by Jim Feast. Autonomedia, 2017

“Outside across a swath of bay was the Statue of Liberty its torch, like a match head in night’s gutter.”

—from Long Day, Counting Tomorrow

Set in the late 1990s, Jim Feast’s Long Day, Counting Tomorrow is a sequel to an earlier novel, phobe, written by him and Ron Kohn. Both are mysteries involving the same group of anarchist writers. Long Day’s main character is Rask Harp, an ex-drug addict, son, brother, poet, friend, occasional prostitute, a young man who is dying from AIDS.

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There has been a lot of activity during the past seven months in Zurich, Switzerland. It began last May when the young people of the city began demanding a free space where they could have an independent, self-governing or autonomous youth center. There were a number of general assembly meetings, followed by street demonstrations with anywhere between two and four thousand participants.

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A lone figure stood before a door. Townsfolk had ridiculed her for years because she walked daily to this same spot.

No one else saw any reason to do so. And when they asked her what drew her, she could only shake her head. An answer reverberated deep in her brain but she could never quite grasp what it was.

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This issue is in your hands for two reasons: 1) your generous and numerous response to our plea for financial assistance and 2) the feeling of support we got from the accompanying letters you sent in. Our problem was really two-fold, but we only told you about the money side of the difficulties we faced. The other, a feeling of demoralization and a questioning of the purpose of our project, was really a more serious matter, but your desire for the Fifth Estate to continue infused a similar determination in us as well. We did discriminate, though, in a manner we should apologize for; we sent direct letters of thanks to large contributors and left our small donors to receive our appreciation in this space. We know that often it is as hard for some of you (and us) to find a spare five dollars where others are fortunate enough to have larger sums to contribute. We meant no slight but just couldn’t possibly thank everyone personally. We were exceptionally fortunate to have gotten the money we did as we had several large expenses relating to our office plus sent off several hundred dollars to book publishers such as Partisan Press, Cienfuegos, Black & Red, and Bratach Dubh. These important projects are experiencing much of the same difficulties as we are and we thought the least we could do was to pass along your donations to us for the debts we owed them. We don’t know what the future looks like financially, but we feel that if we can publish fairly regularly and offer an interesting selection of books, we can continue our projects. Still, we were just informed by our printer that his price is going to rise by 50%, our postage costs are already up, and we may have to switch mailing companies, all of which will entail a goodly sum. Ugh! So, any of you who feel the spirit to pledge a certain sum per month to the maintainance of the paper, you can join the small group of sustainers who receive the paper first class mail each issue and are a vital part of keeping us afloat...

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Related: see FE Staff introduction, “Against Civilization,” in this issue.

The only possible opening for a statement of this kind is that I detest writing. The process itself epitomizes the European concept of “legitimate” thinking; what is written has an importance that is denied the spoken. My culture, the Lakota culture, has an oral tradition, so I ordinarily reject writing. It is one of the white world’s ways of destroying the cultures of non-European peoples, the imposing of an abstraction over the spoken relationship of a people.

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There she is, looking vaguely pornographic on the glossy covers of the weekly magazines, the planet Saturn. What have we discovered? I don’t know, I haven’t read them, feeling squashed as I do to the Earth by the giddying inertia of this century which plummets like a flaming satellite towards the nothingness. Grey skies, the weather turning cold, sirens in the distance. Some citizens walk by whispering reverently of the wonders of Saturn, disputing the number of rings and moons according to the latest counts, as the corroding universe about them threatens to be annihilated. They drool over photographs of a planet most of them couldn’t spot in a clear night sky—that is, if the night sky hadn’t already been colonized and obliterated by the city light and the lethal dust of the very civilization which made it possible to send gadgets and technicians to the stars. But everything is so groovy on Saturn, so colorful and tempestuous. They know because they watched it all on television.

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The letters on this page are responses to John Zerzan’s “The Refusal of Technology” which appeared in the October 20, 1980 edition [#303] of the Fifth Estate; below are our comments on the question. In the article, Zerzan accuses those whose vision of revolution contains a dependence upon “‘advanced’ technology” as not significantly breaking with the world as it is. We have edited each of the contributions for purposes of space and we can only hope that we have left intact the authors’ intent.

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Tomoga Therion

Primitivo Solis

Angela Di Sante

Larry Talbert

Alan Franklin

Ralph Franklin

Coquilles St. Jacques

E.B. Maple

Wanda Lust

Dora Kaplan

David Watson

Bill Watson

T. Fulano

Linda Wiens.

Mr. Venom

Don Kirkland

Ralph Rinaldi

The Fifth Estate Newspaper (ISSN 0015–0800) is published bi-monthly at 4403 Second Ave., Detroit, Michigan 48201 USA; phone (313) 8316800. Office hours vary, so please call before visiting. Subscriptions are $4.00 for six issues; $6 for foreign including Canada. Second class postage paid at Detroit, Michigan. No copyright. No paid ads accepted.

a review of

Fire on the Mountain by Terry Bisson. PM Press, 2009

Forget Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Lincoln was wrong or disingenuous when he told Harriet Beecher Stowe that her novel brought on the Civil War. The Slavocracy was not frightened by mawkish sentiment.

No, it was rifle-toting abolitionist zealots willing to die that caused Southern panic.

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Comrades:

At the recent cena (dinner) held by the Italian comrades $1,061 was raised. It was decided to divide it among the following publications: Black Flag, Fifth Estate, Freedom, Internationale, Open Road, Revista A, SRAF, North American Anarchist, Work and Pay, and Voluntà.

Best Wishes

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Members of Feral Crust, a small DIY ecologically-minded anarchist collective in the mountains of Marilog Davao (Southern Mindanao), Philippines are developing a rural community based on balance with the surrounding environment and social solidarity. Their community is located in a forest home to wildlife and indigenous people.

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In 1917, unable to break the unity of the miners, armed vigilante gangs organized by the copper corporations, rounded up 2,000 strikers at gun point in Bisbee, Az. They were forced onto crammed cattle cars and dumped in the desert.

A hundred years ago, in September 1918, more than a hundred leaders of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) were convicted of conspiracy to obstruct World War I. The trial marked a critical turning point for the union and the Left. In marking this centenary, we remember the Industrial Workers of the World as the most successful organization holding to a radical vision in U.S. history.

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On June 17, Father’s Day, a march and vigil was planned outside of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) headquarters in Southwest Portland, Ore., to protest the Trump administration’s policy of separating migrant children from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border. It quickly developed into something that the organizers hadn’t planned for: a six week occupation of the building that effectively shut it down for an extended period of time and brought ICE activities into sharp public attention.

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