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I am more than happy to state my opinion of the Army and the war in Viet Nam. I’ve been in the service nearly a year now and I have had several unpleasant experiences with the foolish and incompetent leaders of this organization.

I have been very fortunate and I have not had to kill to save my life, but many of my friends here have not been so fortunate. Three weeks ago we had 10 men killed and approximately 40 others who were wounded in an ambush just North of this city.

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EDITORS

Harvey Ovshinsky

Peter Werbe

EDITORIAL ASSISTANT

Cathy West

CIRCULATION

Tommye Wiese

Pat Klees

DISTRIBUTION

Eric Watkins

ADVERTISING

Gunnar Lewis

ART DIRECTOR

Ed Bania

CALENDAR

Naomi

STAFF

Cindy Lee

Marlene Tyre

Michael Tyre

Marilyn Werbe

The FIFTH ESTATE is published on the 1^st and 16^th of each month by the FIFTH ESTATE NEWSPAPER, Inc., 1007.W. Warren, Detroit, Michigan 48201. Subscription rate by third class mail is $3 for one year; $5 for two years. Canadian is $3.50 per year, all other foreign countries are $5 per year. Phone 831–6800.

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Of the many comments made following the shooting of Sen. Kennedy, perhaps the most incisive was given by Sen. McCarthy:

“It is not enough in my judgment to say that this was the act of one deranged man, if that is the case. The nation, I think, bears too great a burden of guilt, really, for the kind of neglect which has allowed the disposition to grow here in one’s own land, in part a reflection of violence which we have visited upon the rest of the world, or at least one part of the world.” Sen. McCarthy was talking about the violence that America has been and is still inflicting in Vietnam.

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The May 28^th performance of “Lysistrata and the War” at Community Arts Auditorium was permanently canceled, due in part to the war which the opera opposes: one of the leading male singers was drafted.

The people in charge of the production postponed the performance until June 14, to be held, with a new singer, in a room with much smaller seating capacity.

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Millbrook, that renowned dropout shrine in upstate New York, is closed and padlocked, its tribe scattered, its guru Tim Leary now living in Berkeley. And the end of an era was marked last month with a “farewell” party for Uncle Tim at NY’s Village Gate: the Group Image played, Paul Krassner and Allen Ginsberg did their respective things, and the Gate’s management tossed out a tablefull of people for passing a joint around...

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A strange polarization (or maybe it’s a natural one) seems to be happening with rock and roll fans right now, with white teenage audiences turning toward either total freek scenes or greasy reactionary hostility when confronted with the revolutionary guerrilla theatre tactics of the MC5. Three incidents in the last three weeks illustrate the current scene:

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Capitol Records thought so highly of this West Coast group that they saw fit to shell out a reputed $50,000 in advance to record them. On record Steve Miller’s band is deceivingly extraordinary. Listening to this L.P. for the first time was painfully boring. They are not obviously exciting the first time around. The album is so smooth and uncluttered it may give the illusion of childish simplicity.

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To the delight of the Black populace of Detroit, Stokely Carmichael, on a mission to raise funds for the incarcerated Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver, the convicted H. Rap Brown and other up-tight black freedom fighters, came to town June 8 and with all the ardor and volubility of that other conqueror, he came, he saw and really rapped.

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I have yet to read a really worthwhile movie review of “The Stranger,” and I’m not sure I can remedy the situation.

Like most film critics, I am tempted to write a long opinionated description of how well Albert Camus’s novel was transferred to the screen. I am even tempted to display my erudition, as many reviewers have done, by launching into a profound discussion of Existentialism.

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SAN FRANCISCO, June 12 — Eldridge Cleaver, the Black Panther leader, was released from the California medical facility prison at Vacaville this afternoon on a court order that criticized the cancellation of his parole.

He had been held since April 7 as a parole violator. But Solano County Superior Court Judge Raymond J. Sherwin ordered his release on a $25 nominal bail. Judge Sherwin was critical of the California Adult Authority for ordering the parole revoked.

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Liberation News Service, Washington, D.C.—Lyndon Johnson killed Robert Kennedy sure as you and I are alive. (Sure?) Robert Kennedy killed Lyndon Johnson sure as that man in the big white house is dead. (Sure?)

In America, life is power; power is expensive and physical life is cheap. The survival-of-the-fittest thing continues unabated over millions of years here. It is our national religion.

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The color of the Statue of Liberty

Grows ever more deathly pale

As, loving freedom with bullets

You shoot at yourself, America.

You can kill yourself this way!

It is dangerous to go out

Into this hellish world,

But it is still more dangerous

To hide in the bushes

There is a smell on earth of a universal

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Radical psychologists Wilhelm Reich and Eric Fromm answered the question of why people submit willingly to authority

While most of us were watching the 2016 presidential election with disgust, someone I’m very close to, looked at me with a fiendish grin and announced, “I’m voting for Donald Trump.”

This was perplexing. How could they be captivated by a racist, xenophobic, homophobic narcissist? Having starkly contrasting reactions towards the object of their affinity, I realized a lot of futile and draining arguments were likely to follow. Rifts, drama, and cut-offs between friends and family have become ubiquitous in American society over the past year, with many left bewildered by the resurgent appeal of authoritarianism.

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Everyday sexual predation on women by men of power and prestige in the entertainment world, politics, business, and the university has been an open secret that has suddenly gained massive public attention. Women’s words have been listened to and prominent men have experienced almost immediate banishment from their fields after exposure of their abusive actions.

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It’s a cold Friday night in November in Portland, Maine. Comrades from around the state have gathered at the Aphodian Theater to support our imprisoned friend, Herman Bell. The benefit features bands and speakers, including former political prisoner Ray Luc Lavasseur.

It is organized by our group of friends and family, Maine Anti-Racist Action, in order to raise funds to help pay for Herman’s family visits. We give out organic squash, anarchist papers including the Fifth Estate, and prisoner information.

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The Detroit Police has begun a reign of terror in the Warren-Forest area near Wayne University.

Almost all of it has been aimed at the local freaks. “It’s getting to be too much,” said Skip Cooper, who lives in the Castle on John Lodge. “All the cops do is hassle with anyone with long hair.”

Other people in the area have reported a marked increase in illegal searches and entries by the cops. Mostly, the cops involved are from the Tactical Mobile Units and the “Big Four.” The latter is the precinct cruiser that travels in a Dodge sedan with three plainclothes (and they are) patrolmen and one uniformed driver.

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A group of friends and myself recently decided to take on the problem of gouging by inner city food merchants. Calling ourselves ICHWAG, or Inner City Honky Women Against Gouging, five of us set out to prove the price differences between inner city and suburban stores. Wouldn’t you just know, soon as we got organized and set the next date for our coffee klatch business meeting, I find out that it is already being done: At a slightly more professional level, too.

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WEDNESDAY, JUNE 5

RASHOMON, Akira Kurosawa’s masterpiece at the Studio 1 Theater, Livemois at Davison at 7:30 & 9:30 pm. Adm. $2.

YOGA CLASSES at the International Institute at 7:30 pm. Call 675–1038 for information.

THURSDAY, JUNE 6

REPUBLICAN GALA with such stars as ABBE LANE and the SERENDIPITY SINGERS at Cobo Hall at 8 pm.

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Is it wrong to hope? Is it wrong to have a dream and to keep searching for the realization of that dream? I’ve been told that anything worth obtaining is invariably very difficult to obtain. To some people this means working overtime to get the resources for a long awaited vacation; to others it is the sacrifice of social position in return for personal integrity; and to still others (and these are few, unfortunately) it is the complete denial of oneself in order that someone else’s dreams be fulfilled. Of course, there are very few of us who are willing to go beyond the first mentioned sacrifice.

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“Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) foment disruption on campuses around the country, and contribute nothing to Wayne State University.”

The pontificating prose belongs to J.J. Scott, WTAK (1090-AM) announcer. His apparent vendetta has one main objective: to rid Wayne’s campus of SDS by September.

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“Your calendar June, 1968—The body has been there a long time...he has been dead a long time...those of you who want to understand, will understand. —Tom Sincavitch

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.

This newspaper will not accept ads that slander other persons (institutions are OK). Also, ads that have as their purpose meeting others or receiving phone calls must be accompanied by ‘the name and address of the person _placing the ad. This will not be put in the ad, but will allow us to check if we doubt the authenticity of it.

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Seventy-five persons picketed the Federal Building in downtown Detroit May 20 to protest the trial in Boston of Dr. Benjamin Spock and four others for conspiracy to violate the draft laws. The demonstration was sponsored by Detroit Area Resist.

A delegation from the group made up of the Rev. Robert Morrison, Fr. Carter Partee, Catherine Zimmerman, Ronald Halstead, and Mary Ravitz entered the building on Fort St. and visited Federal District Attorney Lawrence Gubow.

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Congress is still striving to preserve the American Way. The inventiveness of the House un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) has gone beyond the dangerous into the realm of ridiculous and petty harassment. The McCarran act of 1950, provided the President with powers to proclaim a state of Internal Security Emergency and have persons whom it felt would conspire with others to engage in sabotage put into places of detention.

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Are we in the midst of a revolution now? Or, are we on the verge of one? Can the revolution be comparatively bloodless, basically non-violent?

These are interesting questions we ask ourselves as summer approaches and its oppressive heat threatens to ignite this nation in the greatest internal turmoil since the Civil War.

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“Planet of the Apes” may turn out to be the “Bonnie and Clyde” of 1968.

Many film critics, after giving the picture an unfavorable review, are beginning to have second thoughts about it.

Richard Schickel, of Life magazine, said in a recent retraction: “I should have trusted my instincts, stood up and proclaimed my affectionate regard for the thing right off.”

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Detroit’s racist cops apparently unsatisfied at being forced to live in the city they occupy militarily blew their cool at a Detroit Common Council meeting May 17.

Robert Tindal, executive secretary of the Detroit NAACP was speaking strongly against relaxation of the rule requiring officers to live within the city. Several hundred white cops began yelling “racist” and “bigot” at Tindal and then stormed out of the hearing.

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This is my first column for the Fifth Estate in a long time and I’ll probably be a little rusty, so please bear with me, OK? and I’ll try to do something useful here.

I stopped writing for the Fifth Estate in January mainly for two reasons: I was tired of hassling the editors to get my columns printed intact, and I was even more tired of coming on like some kind of public personality and/or race-track tout in this space, and that was the context that’d been developed over a two-year period of writing a column almost every issue. I’d like to start over again now, if that’s possible, and do something different if I can get away with it.

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I.

“Of the heavy losses we have sustain e d”, author-sentimentalist Charles Beaumont once said, “none can be regarded with more melancholy than the loss of the great movie theatres.” A generation ago they proliferated, today they exist like brontosaurus, slipping into the churning swamp of American history.

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

QUESTION: I recently, at the advice of my friends, drank a bottle of Romilar C.F. cough syrup. This was supposed to get me stoned. It did just that. After about 20 minutes my arms and legs got limp. I could hardly think and slurred when I talked. I laid down and found myself hallucinating.

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It’s no secret that police departments around the country are arming themselves to the hilt in anticipation. They intend to get ready for anything and everything.

A couple of national magazines have even run features on all the new weapons now available.

One of the newest of these is mace, an extremely dangerous combination of chemicals which comes in pocket sized aerosol cans. A weapon specially designed for crowd control.

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Editors’ Note: We neglected last issue to welcome John Wilcock back to the pages of this newspaper. John was one of the founders of the Village Voice and the East Village Other. He publishes his own paper, Other Scenes which is a 20 times a year newspaper produced from wherever the editor happens to be. This could be Greece, Japan, England or anywhere else in the world. Subscriptions are $5 and should be sent to OS, Box 8, Village Post Office, N.Y., N.Y. 10014.

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New York, May 22, (LNS-NY) Round two of what has now turned into a naked fight for power between the striking students of Columbia and the Administration’s proxy, the New York Police, turned to European tactics in the hours before dawn May 22.

The night before, after a confrontation forced by the second student occupation of Hamilton Hall in four weeks, the University upped the ante to immediate suspension for anyone caught outside the dormitories. The students replied with bricks and flaming barricades.

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The Detroit office of the Student Nonviolent Co-ordinating Committee (SNCC) was bombed on May 17. The office is located at 12322 Dexter.

Two SNCC members, Kinley Summers and Roy Swan were slightly injured by the blast and the flying glass. The police said they found the remains of what appeared to be a home-made bomb.

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This band’s blues roots were first formed years ago during the British blues invasion started by The Rolling Stones. During this embryonic stage, many teenagers had suspicions that the Stones were copying...yes, copying, but from whom?

Some started research, combing through old Negro blues LP’s until they happened on a song title they recognized, and discovered that the Stones were drawing from many blues sources.

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FT. ORD, Calif., May 5 (LNS-SCN)—At Fort Ord today, the U.S. Army launched into the famous flexible-response strategy that has lost it a war in Vietnam.

Ten days ago, soldiers and officers on the base began promoting a love-in. They posted mimeographed fliers showing a hand sign of the V, with the simple caption, “5 May, First Brigade Parade Field.” That was all. The word spread through the ranks, and by the middle of this past week the Army had reacted with all the cool of a spastic ogre harassed by ants underfoot. Trying to stamp out the troublemakers, the ogre stepped on a lot of innocent ones, amply proving the organizers’ point that the ogre is no friend at all to the common GI.

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The King described the Poor People’s Campaign as being the last, great nonviolent movement. If tactical nonviolence met with failure in this movement, he felt, then nonviolence as a means to ends” was done for.

The Detroit Police Department seemingly tried their best, for reasons known only to them, to make nonviolence appear a rather poor tactic on Monday, May 13, when more than 6,000 persons marched to Detroit’s Cobo Hall in support of the Poor People’s Campaign The King inspired.

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EDITORS

Harvey Ovshinsky

Peter Werbe

EDITORIAL ASSISTANT

Cathy West

CIRCULATION

Tommye Wiese

Pat Klees

DISTRIBUTION

Eric Watkins

ADVERTISING

Gunnar Lewis

ART DIRECTOR

Ed Bania

CALENDAR

Naomi

STAFF

Cindy Lee

Marlene Tyre

Michael Tyre

Marilyn Werbe

The FIFTH ESTATE is published on the 1^st and 16^th of each month by the FIFTH ESTATE NEWSPAPER, Inc., 1007 W. Warren, Detroit, Michigan 48201. Subscription rate by third class mail is $3 for one year; $5 for two years. Canadian is $3.50 per year, all other foreign countries are $5 per year. Phone 831–6800.

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Frank Zappa and The Mothers Of Invention, New York City, November, 1970

With his Groucho eyes, Punch nose and Howdy Doody body, Frank Zappa is a replete image for his particular brand of satire. The medium for his message is the presentation of The Mothers of Invention, who recently appeared at the Grande Ballroom.

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The cause of criminal justice in Detroit received a setback with the appointment on May 23 of Roman S. Gribbs as Sheriff of Wayne County.

Gribbs, who is presently a Traffic Court Referee, will replace ticket-fixing Peter Buback who resigned from the post after removal proceedings had been begun against him by State Attorney General Frank Kelley.

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WASHINGTON, D.C. — It is almost like any other American city.

Resurrection City has its problems too. Mayor Ralph Abernathy and City Manager Jesse Jackson face: inadequate city funds; housing shortages; water pollution; and, a generation gap that has led to troubles with the city “police.”

But then it isn’t any other city. Resurrection City exists because the King and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference decided that the survival of one-fifth of American citizens was so In peril, it had to be dramatized by bringing thousands of poor to camp on the doorstep of Congress.

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Just driving by, there is little difference between “The Castle” on the Lodge service down the street from the Detroit Committee to End the War in Vietnam offices, and the same kind of run-down building a few blocks away. Both might be photographed by a person just driving by for an exhibit on poverty in Detroit.

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The Trans-Love Energies commune of Detroit, including the MC5 and the Trans-Love Light Company, have left the city of Detroit for good, to settle in Ann Arbor, that green and airy town some 45 miles west of Detroit.

The new address for Trans-Love and affiliates (including the Artists’ Workshop Press, LEMAR, Trans-Love Poster Company, and the Sun) is:

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Ammunition Books shares space with the Fifth Estate Newspaper and can be found at 4403 Second Avenue, Detroit, Mich. 48201 (telephone-313-831-6800). Our hours vary, but we are generally open on Monday and Thursday afternoons (from 1pm to 5pm) and at scattered hours other times. It’s always a good idea to telephone us before you start the trek down, just to be safe.

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The following is a statement issued from Stammheim Prison by jailed RAF lawyer Klaus Croissant, dated Nov. 20, 1977. Thanks to LNS.

“At Stammheim I have been subjected to the same conditions of isolation against which I have struggled for years as defense attorney for the RAF prisoners. I am systematically and completely deprived of all contact with other prisoners...Food is passed to me by a prison employee through a hole in the door of the cell...

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Though we do not accept commercial advertising, this Unclassified ad space is free for our readers’ use. We do not accept ads over the telephone, so please send your ads in writing to our office at: 4403 Second Ave., Detroit 48201.

“BOSSES’ Boy”—a UAW factional flier (leaflet) printed in the ‘40s—will pay $5 for one of them. Phone 823–1485.

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The five cartoon panels printed on this page are taken from “Red Guard Romance” (written and drawn by Jay Kinney) and appeared in Young Lust No. 5. Most of us read the comic and thought it funny, if not somewhat preposterous. However, proving again that being more radical than reality itself is always a difficult proposition, we ran across the accompanying article by Ross H. Munro in the Oct. 12, 1977 Toronto Globe and Mail.

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Dear Fifth Estate People,

I read your paper and like some of it. It is a little boring most of the time but except for that it is exciting.

Still you are the only ones who care. No one else minds kissing the ass of whoever happens to own them momentarily.

I never wrote much before, being a garbageman and part-time used Groucho Marx pubic hair salesman, but I hope you are unimpressed enough with everything else (or enough of everything else) to print this.

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With this issue of the Fifth Estate, the paper begins its thirteenth year of continuous publications with the first edition appearing November 19, 1965. Since that date 288 issues have been published, hundreds of people have come and gone from the staff, publishing schedules have varied from weekly to monthly and the politics contained within have flipped and flopped from liberal to New Left to Maoist to anarchist to its current perspectives. We keep on truckin’ through, sometimes with less of a sense of purpose than at others, but always with a desire for revolution and the demand for the sweetness of life. Hope you can dig a little of what we are doing, and are doing something we dig on as well. Through all of it, we always try to remember the immortal words of Sammy Smoot, “When you smash the State, keep a smile on your lips and a song in your heart”...

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While pondering over the November 14, 1977 issue of Newsweek magazine, we came across mention of the ole Fifth Estate in their article “Businessmen and Terrorism;” a fine representation of that mystical horseshit that makes us want to bring it all up—“objective journalism.”

How these seeping sacks of parrot droppings dare write such vacuous, pig-ignorant articles and pass them off as truth is beyond us. Why we wouldn’t even spit on the rotting carcasses of these slithering slugs, for fear of offending our saliva!

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