Most Recent Additions

Who says the New York Times favors the status quo? After a recent story listing “narcotic addicts, drunks, panhandlers, homosexuals and drifters” a staff memo was circulated explaining: “Times have changed and ‘homosexuals’ is no longer universally considered a term of opprobrium”... Meanwhile former Times editor Herman Dinsmore (editor, International Edition, 1951 through 1960) has written a Red-baiting book “documenting what anti-Communists have long known” billed by the Conservative Book Club as “Former Times Editor Exposes Own Paper!”...

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FLINT, Mich. (LNS) — Weathermen, Weatherwomen, some of their friends and some of their critics, met in a “war council” Dec. 27–30. The gathering was a serious political meeting, although it had been widely billed as an outasight international youth culture freak show.

About 400 young people from across the country made it to the bare Giant Ballroom in Flint to practice karate, rap in regional and collective meetings, dig a little music and hear the Weather Bureau lay down its political line for revolution in Amerika.

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Newsreel-ARM — Hollywood began to appreciate some years ago that the vision of life it was projecting for the people was increasingly irrelevant to their lives and uninteresting. It was a basic marketing problem—how to catch up with a broad social process that has some of the aspects of pre-revolutionary alienation from the system, without giving into it and confirming its concrete revolutionary potential?

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Reprinted from The Great Speckled Bird

Look what’s happening out in the streets

Got a revolution Got to revolution

Hey, I’m dancing down the streets

Got a revolution Got to revolution

Ain’t it amazing all the people I meet

Got a revolution Got to revolution

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One generation got old

One generation got soul

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“Everybody comes to you for gasoline boy, that’s some filling station you got there.”

--Jack Kerouac The Subterraneans

Hi, kids, it’s me, Artie, again. I got a story to tell you and something else too. You see, last Sunday (Nelson watches the gas station on Sunday) I was sleeping late with a pretty lady and a friend came over to my house & so did Sammy, my brother, & Sammy said what you gotta do is go to the Art Museum with me. So I said but I went there before & seen all that stuff before & it’s just a big shithouse, with old pictures by dead people & he said, no man they changed it so me and my lady got up & went after we had a hamburger cuz he would not let me get out of going.

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Walking along the river’s edge,

The water level low this year

The receded river reveals

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A lifetime’s worth of accumulated

Garbage. A bicycle straddles

A burned out, gutted blue

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Sofa, spilling its soggy innards

To a sun close and ragged.

I step through tall grasses

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And reeds and feel the ground

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SAIGON (LNS)—Bob Hope entertained the troops in Vietnam for his sixth consecutive Christmas, and took along the usual chorus line of women’s bodies for the men to gawk at. He also took with him Neil Armstrong, the moon-walker, for a round of repartee in which Armstrong played the straight man.

Hope: “Your first step on the moon was the second most dangerous of the year.”

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Ken Kelley, editor of the Ann Arbor Argus, fresh from a semi-victory over the forces of injustice, has scored another journalistic coup.

Kelley published the contents of the wallet of Washtenaw County’s fascist sheriff Doug Harvey in the latest issue of the Argus.

Kelley told the Fifth Estate that Harvey was drunk on his ass at a University of Michigan basketball game and staggered home leaving his wallet. It was retrieved by an unidentified but heroic citizen who brought it to the Argus office where its contents were photographed and then returned to the Sheriff.

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The simple and obvious freedoms that first inspire the imagination of young kids, freedom of movement and freedom from the constraints of physical laws, are so simple as to hide a much deeper liberatory kernel.

From the blood sacrifice initiatory trials of learning to skate to the insular lingo, skateboarding is every bit the revolutionary community, in many ways like the revolutionary secret societies of Haiti. In contemplating a subject as broad as and as theoretical as global anarchism, it seems to be much more productive to explore areas of inspiration rather than explain proper applications. To this end, I’d like to explore the radical potential of one of my lifelong passions. Skateboarding.

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After only three hours of deliberation on December 22 a half black half white Detroit Recorder’s Court jury found Alfred Hibbitt, member of the Black Legion, the paramilitary arm of the Republic of New Africa (RNA), innocent of assault with intent to kill. This was the first of three trials that are the result of charges stemming from a shooting at the New Bethel Church last March.

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a review of

Spoor (Pokot). Dir. Agnieszka Holland 2017

Deemed by some to be an eco-terrorist story, Olga Tokarczuk’s feminist novel, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead is adapted by director Agnieszka Holland into Spoor, an exceptionally accurate rendering of a Polish language anarchist thriller.

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a review of

The Menu. Dir: Mark Mylod (2022)

Judging from The Menu’s trailer and promotional images, it seemed as though it was going to literally be an Eat the Rich story. While a movie with a cannibal revenge plot would have been entertaining, there was some welcomed nuance and style within the film that made up for some of its disappointments.

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From the Fifth Estate photo archives. A reader holding a Fifth Estate extra prepared for the 1980 Republican National Convention. The article archive is available at fifthestate.org/archive/

Readers of the Fifth Estate know how much we value the history of opposition to oppression. Accounts of resistance have always filled numerous pages in the 413 issues we’ve published since 1965.

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Everybody has some idea of the kind of heavy political repression the power structure has been laying down, if only from the power-structure media itself.

The Liberation Conference Against Repression January 29–30 at St. Joseph’s Church should be able to clarify a lot of the distortions, fill in some of the gaps and describe the national-regional-local pattern of repression. See ad for list of speakers and workshops.

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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

David Gaynes

Jim Kennedy

Rick London

Nick Medvecky

Bruce Montrose

Claudia Montrose

Marilyn Werbe

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Nearly a dozen members of the Blue Flu smashed their way into a private party during a cowardly attack on the Highwaymen Motorcycle Club of Detroit.

The blitzkrieg-like attack was carried out in the early hours of Sunday morning Jan. 11, by police assigned to the Western District Morality Squad. This catchy title is a Spreen-style cover for the old-fashioned Vice Squad. The herd operates out of the 16^th (Northwest) Precinct pig pen.

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Editors’ Note: The trial of the Conspiracy 7 continues in Chicago and has turned into even more of a circus as the defense attempts to present its case. They are blocked at every avenue by senile Judge Julius (Magoo) Hoffman, who sustains every prosecution objection and denies every one that comes from the defense table.

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“Patrick Murphy is no great shakes as Public Safety Director. He is a poor administrator; he is weak, and he has no rapport with his men.”

—Richard Judd, former aide to Sen. Wayne Morse on D.C. Affairs Committee, U.S. Senate

We wanted to take this opportunity to introduce you to Patrick V. Murphy, Detroit’s new Police Commissioner, one of the first major appointments of Mayor Roman “Sheriff” Gribbs. Murphy was chosen by Gribbs because he says he agrees with Murphy’s philosophy on law enforcement.

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a review of

Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands by Kelly Lytle Hernández. WW Norton, New York, 2022

It is definitely a hopeful sign that a briskly selling book from a mainstream publisher (one long-listed for the National Book Award) not only features anarchists, but actually treats them with seriousness and presents them as the good guys—even heroes.

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On May 16, 1871, one of the most famous monuments in Europe, the Vendôme Column celebrating Napoleon’s imperial regime, was toppled to the cheers of thousands. It was one of the largest public ceremonies of the short-lived Paris Commune, where revolutionaries controlled the city, establishing a free and egalitarian society that lasted a little over two months until suppressed by force.

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in Cooperation with Detroit Adventure

THURS. JAN. 8

FROM SOCIAL DISEASES to the common cold, Open City will cure it, at their free medical clinic. 4425 Second at Canfield. 6:30–8:30 p.m. Call first or come in for an apt 831–2770.

PINK PILLS for PALE PEOPLE: Detroit’s Panaceas, this is another exciting gallery talk at the Detroit Historical Museum. 3:30 p.m.

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Charlie Haden—Liberation Music Orchestra Arrangements by Carla Bley. Impulse AS 9183

ORCHESTRA PERSONNEL

Perry Robinson, clarinet; Gato Barbieri, tenor saxophone and clarinet; Dewy Redman, alto and tenor saxophones; Don Cherry, cornet, Indian wood and bamboo flutes; Mike Mantler, trumpet; Roswell Rudd, trombone; Bob Northern, French horn, hand wood blocks, crow call, bells, and military whistle; Howard Johnson, tuba; Paul Motian, percussion instruments; Andrew Cyrille, percussion instruments; Sam Brown, guitar, Tanganyikan guitar, thumb piano; Carla Bley, piano, tambourine; Charlie Haden, bass violin.

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I managed to get my hands on a copy of the Fifth Estate. Wow, what a paper. I passed it around my section and everyone thoroughly enjoyed it.

I’m a GI and I have been in Vietnam for six months. I despise the military and I believe the same as I did before I came here, that we don’t belong here.

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Here are four records you might want to have:

1. Otis Spann: Sweet Giant of the Blues, Bluestime BTS-9006.

2. Harmonica Slim: The Return of Harmonica Slim, Bluestime BTS9005.

3. T-Bone Walker/Joe Turner/Otis Spann: Super Black Blues, Bluestime BTS-9003.

4. Earl Hooker: Don’t Have to Worry, Bluesway BLS 6032.

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With a Lot of Help From His Friends

The object of this column will be twofold. We will act as a community action line where you don’t have to talk to a telephone answering machine and hope that your question or problem is the one in 10,000 they decide to work on. We also make you aware of all the free, inexpensive or unusual groovies available to you. Write us about your problems, questions or suggestions:

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Jan. 24 an

d 25

Saturday January 24 2 p.m.-1 a.m. $3.00 Grande Ballroom

Sunday, January 25 3 p.m.-11 p.m. $3.00 Grande Ballroom

FREE JOHN SINCLAIR

AND ALL POLITICAL PRISONERS!

HELP END MARIJUANA PROHIBITION

Mitch Ryder, Abbie Hoffman, Ken Cockrel, Skip Taube,

SRC, MC5, Stooges, Bob Seger, Up,

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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:

The other day a girlfriend of mine asked me to see a movie called “Daughters of Lesbo.” Something about this girl disturbs me.

First of all, the boys call her “Big Daddy Linda” and have said some very bad things about her. Although she is a bit domineering and aggressive she always seemed quite friendly with us all. My boyfriend says she’s a “Butch and a Dyke.” Could you please give me a definition for these names?

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Inching his way downtown, he hits the first food cart he can find, not an easy feat in this neighborhood. The cart stands in front of a worn old church converted into a disco, famous for getting shut down repeatedly. He devours a stale, greasy, half-cooked knish.

Across the street from the cart, appearing as a mirage, a bookshop. Real fringe spot. Rollie has been inside a few times over the years. He generally avoids that sort of place, owing to the aspects of their ideology he finds offensive. But none of that matters. Now, it is raining. Now, he needs to use the bathroom. Good reasons to enter a place as any.

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a review of

On Microfascism: Gender, War, and Death by Jack Z. Bratich. Common Notions, 2022

97-year-old Irmgard Furchner does not fit the stereotype of a murderous fascist. The diminutive German woman was slumped over in a wheelchair, cane in hand, when she was sentenced in court last December for her part in the murder of over 10,000 people during World War II.

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Writing about the Paul McCartney thing, Robert Somma speculates on how willing some people are to believe that a public figure is dead. Whatever future evidence there might be, he says, McCartney will BE dead in these people’s minds because they want him to be. Very true. And given that most people share this trait—a sort of transference deathwish—to some extent, why don’t we capitalise upon it? Let’s say NIXON IS DEAD and keep saying it over and over again until 200 million people have heard it. Some will take it at face value, others will accept it symbolically until eventually even the wire services and The New York Times are forced to deal with it as a mass phenomenon. Tell your friends...NIXON IS DEAD; don’t -explain it, don’t amplify it, don’t justify it. Just say it.

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147,000 workers at the General Electric Corporation went on strike October 27, 1969. Today, they’re still out of work with little hope of any rapid change in their bleak situation. General Electric’s (non-) negotiators have refused to budge a comma or penny from their pitiful initial offer of a settlement far below the union’s demands.

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FORT DIX, N.J. (LNS)—Pfc. William Brakefield has been found guilty of rioting at the stockade here last June and sentenced to three years at hard labor.

Newsmen and spectators looked at each other with surprise when the verdict came in. Having failed to come up with any substantial evidence that Brakefield had taken part in the rebellion in which 150 GIs tore up their cell blocks, throwing footlockers through the windows and setting mattresses aflame, the prosecutor claimed that given the stockade conditions it was “unbelievable” that Brakefield would not have rebelled.

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Via National Guardian

“This war is, I believe, a war for civilization.”

—Francis Cardinal Spellman

The bodies in the mass graves of Hue are not the victims of the National Liberation Front but of American bombs, bullets and napalm.

The NLF attack on Hue was coordinated with an internal uprising Jan. 31, 1968. The main part of the city was in the hands of liberation forces within hours—hardly a shot was fired.

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a review of

Bloc by Bloc: Uprising, The Insurrection Game 3^rd edition (Out of Order Games)

Bloc by Bloc is a strategy game inspired by contemporary protest movements. Designed and self-published by Greg Loring-Albright and TL. Simons from Out of Order Games, it uses the tabletop board game format to illustrate the impact of gentrification and the power of popular uprisings. As in the two previous editions, the goal is to liberate the city before the military arrives to reestablish order. In accordance with their anarchist ethics, low-cost upgrade kits are available for owners of the second edition, and the source files are free online.

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Once upon a time there was a large shopping center in a Land to the North, and a plastic store called (1 across). For many weeks long-haired freeks and greasers had hung around with nothing to do but laugh at (1 down) shoppers and hassle pigs.

Kind of a bogue life, but there didn’t seem to be much else to do.

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“Surrealism is the collective experience of individualism”

—André Masson

What is surrealist collectivity? A mutually opened wound, ever seeded by poetry, by revolt. A soft spectral voice in the darkness, urging all nonconformists to come out, and to play. An extradimensional vehicle for thought and action beyond all controls, a device powered by collective vulnerability and individual Becoming.

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TACOMA, Wash. (LNS)—The Army has declared the Shelter Half coffee house near Ft. Lewis here “off limits to all personnel serving in the Armed Forces.”

It is the first time the brass has tried this tactic in its campaign to squash GI rights.

The Shelter Half is an anti-war coffee house, and like most of its counterparts across the country, its warmth and lively political discussion has become increasingly popular for the young men trapped in the monstrous machinery of the U.S. military.

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If you are a serviceman in Vietnam receiving a free Fifth Estate subscription the only notice you will get of its expiration is the sudden disappearance of the paper from your life.

We still want to get you guys the news about our culture, the GI movement, and anti-war activity, so if you qualify for a renewal (still in ‘Nam) send us a letter telling us to put you back on our subscription list. If you are short we will be glad to send you papers for your remaining time. If you are still in the service, but not in ‘Nam, a year’s sub is $2; if you’re completely free of the green machine it’s $3.75. Power to you.

FT. HOOD, Texas (LNS)—Richard Chase, 26, was sentenced to two years hard labor in a Kangaroo Court-Martial here Dec. 20 for refusing to participate in riot control training.

In Jan., 1969 Chase informed his Company Commander that he was a Conscientious Objector and would not participate in riot control training. He was given unofficial C.O. status and became the company clerk. When Chase asked for the official C.O. application forms he was given only a blank sheet of paper.

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HANOI (LNS)—A U.S. Marine has left his unit, has joined up with soldiers of the National Liberation Front (NLF), and has issued an open letter to his former comrades-in-arms inviting them to follow him in this ultimate act of GI rebellion.

A dispatch from Prensa Latina, the Cuban news agency, identified the rebel Marine as Paul M. Sweeney, serial number 2467056.

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WASHINGTON, DC. (LNS)—An Army officer who sent out Christmas cards last year decorated with photos of stacks of Viet Cong killed by his regiment has been promoted, according to columnist Jack Anderson.

George Patton 3d has received a Brigadier General’s star. Last Christmas he sent his greetings out with a picture of him waving another war trophy—a polished Viet Cong skull, with a bullet hole above the left eye. The skull was a present from men in Patton’s 11^th Armored Cavalry.

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The following article was taken from “A Handbook for Radicals; Revolutionaries and Easy Riders” published by the International Liberation School. It is available for fifty cents and is an invaluable guide to small arms weaponry. Send to: People’s Office, 1925 Grove St., Berkeley CA.

America has a long tradition of vigilante paramilitary violence. Usually it has been directed against blacks and Third World people, poor whites and dissident political groups.

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Three ramshackle, trash-can heated huts on York Avenue between Second and Third stand as mute testimony to a strike against the General Electric Corporation which has gone on in Detroit and across the nation since October 26^th of last year.

Inside these cramped quarters GE workers from Detroit local 947 of the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America (UE) huddle together drinking hot coffee, between stints on the picket line, in an attempt to fight off the chill of subfreezing Michigan winter.

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Editors’ Note: The trial of the Chicago Conspiracy 7 is a trial of one consciousness by another. On December 11, Allen Ginsberg, poet and man of the planet, came to Julius Hoffman’s courtroom to speak in behalf of Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, and the Yippie Festival of Life that fell before police clubs in Lincoln Park and on Michigan Avenue last August at the Democratic Convention.

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Emma Goldman is reputed to have said, “If voting could change things, they’d make it illegal.” Contempt for the franchise permeates anarchism, so that anarchists who favor participating in state elections are both in the minority and on the defensive.

This essay places the struggle for Votes for Women in the context of anarchist aspirations for radical social transformation, and also reconsiders the anarchist rejection of voting in contemporary times. A century after “The Great Reform,” I suggest we reformulate Goldman’s logic: perhaps authorities try so hard to make voting illegal because it could actually change things.

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a review of

Divine Blue Light: for John Coltrane by Will Alexander. City Light Books, 2022

Will Alexander’s latest poems, collected in Divine Blue Light: for John Coltrane, “remain (in the author’s own prefatory words) parallels to nanograms as dazzling wattage.”

A nanogram, a billionth of a gram, is light on its feet, and the poet is asking the reader to be similarly nimble in responding to his lines, images, and appropriations of vocabulary from the sciences, mathematics, and non-Western dialects.

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A review of <em>

The Clash: All the Albums, All the Songs</em> by Martin Popoff. PM Press, 2022

Prolific Canadian music journalist Martin Popoff has written a remarkably exhaustive, song-by-song exhumation of the Clash, the astonishing rock and roll group (1976–1986) once popularly dubbed, “The only band that matters.”

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a review of

Surrealism and Anarchism by Pietro Ferrua, edited by Ron Sakolsky. Eberhardt Press, 2022.

Ron Sakolsky has uncovered a previously lost piece of anarchist history, one that explores the fertile crossroads of surrealism and anarchy.

This text originated as a 1982 lecture given by Pietro Ferrua (1930–2021), inaugurating the Anarchos Institute at the University of Montreal. The pamphlet provides a useful biographical sketch of Ferrua that helps situate his scholarship within a lifelong commitment to anarchism.

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a review of

Stepford Daughters: Weapons for Feminists in Contemporary Horror by Johanna Isaacson. Common Notions 2022

Johanna Isaacson, a professor of English at Modesto Junior College, presents a thought-provoking and exhaustively researched addition to contemporary horror criticism in Stepford Daughters.

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OTTAWA, Ont. (LNS)—Canadian Health Minister John Munro has indicated that the Canadian government is considering action within months to liberalize, and possibly abolish, laws which ban possession and use of marijuana.

Munro told a Canadian newspaper that increasingly widespread use of pot showed that harsh penalties were not working as a deterrent. He did not give any indication, however, that the government would change its stiff laws against the sale of grass.

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