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Next issue will be our 400^th since we began publishing 52 years ago. If you’d like to be part of this historic edition, please send proposals for essays, articles, and fiction to our email address or post office box.

Photographs, art, and poetry are also welcome. Please view our submission and manuscript guidelines on our web site. All submissions should be consistent with our political views.

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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.

I moved to Detroit recently from the suburbs, but wasn’t even born when the 1967 Rebellion occurred.

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a review of

The Little Communist Who Never Smiled by Lola Lafon. Seven Stories Press, 2016, 320 pp. English translation from French by Nick Caistor

“Today, it is an older, wearier Nadia who raises her arms. She leans into a back walkover, but she falters and falls. “I am not a perfect 10 anymore,” Nadia says. “I can only try my best.”

—People Magazine, 1990 (she was 28)

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Birds of a Feather: Flights of the Anarcho-Surrealist Imagination by Ron Sakolsky. Eberhardt Press, 2017 eberhardtpress.org

Anarchists of many tendencies have long fought for freedom of the individual and the realization of solidarity within communities. Surrealists, in and out of formal groupings, have had their own take on modern un-freedom and the potential for subverting it. In parallel, and sometimes together, anarchists and surrealists have fruitfully explored new avenues of revolt.

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I’m afraid that Stanley Kubrick, who directed “Doctor Strangelove” and “Paths of Glory,” has NOT done it again. His new film, “2001: A Space Odyssey,” currently appearing downtown at the Summit Cinerama, cost more than 10 million dollars, and dollar for dollar it is probably the most boring movie ever made.

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WED., MAY 1

WHICH GOD IS DEAD? Agnostic Humanist Rabbi SHERWIN WINE speaks in the Detroit Rackham ESD Aud. at Farnsworth & Woodward at 8:30 p.m.

EMERGENCY IN THE GHETTO: Family, Pathology & Power. Dr. Hyman Rodman speaks at Merril Palmer Institute, 71 Ferry at 8:30 p.m.

THURS., MAY 2

THE KNACK, Richard Lesters crazy film starring Rita Tushingham, MSU Welles Hall in the Student Union.

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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: Our last kilo contained hundreds of chips of crushed moth balls. We have heard tell of grass cured in moth balls, but had never seen any before. The grass had a peculiar medicinal odor and a metallic taste, but it did stone us better than average. Could there be any possible harm in smoking or swallowing chips too small to see?

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Be kind to other people—this is what Jim and Jean are essentially about. They were in town last week and during a 3 a.m. interview with WABX I had a chance to know them a little better.

I’ve always thought their act was one of the most independently polished in the business mainly because they seem to have a feeling for doing the right thing just at the right moment. Jim and Jean sparkle on stage and off and it’s never an act. Jean sings even when she talks and when she describes a song she or Jim has written, you want to ask for more.

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The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee has asked support for a nationwide trading stamps drive through which it hopes to equip its Atlanta, Ga., garage. SNCC has recently been able to obtain, through redeeming such stamps, three mini-buses as well as several battery chargers, and tire-changing, wheel-balancing and other equipment which enables it to keep its cars operational.

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Marijuana—a harmful and dangerous drug.

This is the title of a paper by Joseph E. Maher, Recorders Court Judge, which states the ruling of a three judge panel on the constitutionality of Michigan’s marijuana laws. The decision stems from a case brought to court by John Sinclair, head of Trans-Love Energies, to test the constitutionality of these laws.

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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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WASHINGTON, D.C., April 10 (Liberation News Service) — Two editors of LNS were busted on narcotics charges yesterday in the culmination of a series of arrests of Area radicals on petty charges during the worst days of the urban insurrection here.

Martin A. Jezer and Ray Mungo were charged with possession of marijuana after a small packet of the stuff was allegedly found under the back seat of the 1953 Cadillac hearse in which they were riding. Marshall Bloom, Craig Spratt, Bill Robinson, Jezer, Mungo, and Larry Dean, Peter Novick, and Austin Pyne of the Washington Free Press have all been arrested once or more for violation of curfew charges, despite their press credentials.

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People of Detroit, someone needs you!

A girl in the Warren-Forest area will die of a rare blood disease in October if she doesn’t raise close to $1000 and 51 pints of blood.

Through a period of time in the hospital her diseased blood will be drained and healthy blood restored. If you can donate blood or money please contact Susie, 833–7260.

Fort Ord, Calif., (LNS)—Two GI’s, members of the American Serviceman’s Union, face possible charges of “promoting disloyalty and disaffection among the troops and the civilian populace.” Pvts. Ken Stolte, Jr. and Pfc. Daniel Amick are being investigated because of their leaflet, We Protest.”

The Army maintains “they did publish and distribute leaflets urging the formation of a union to organize their opposition to the war.

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Berkeley, April 16—On April 12, six days after Eldridge Cleaver was wounded in the foot by Oakland cops during the gun battle that preceded the killing of Black Panther Bobby Hutton, he was ordered to prison for three years by the California Adult Authority. The charge: parole violation.

Before the night of April 6, Cleaver, gifted author and Minister of Information for the Black Panthers, was serving the last eight months of his parole from San Quentin Prison.

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For the first time a presidential candidate has been busted for dealing grass.

On April 10, David Valler, the candidate who is known to his followers as simply “David” was arrested in his apartment at Third and Hancock by members of the Detroit Narcotics Bureau.

Leading the raid was none other than Det. Vaghan Kapegian, best known to readers as “Louie,” the undercover agent who infiltrated the Trans-Love commune and was responsible for the busting of 56 young dope smokers in January 1967. Included in these arrests was John Sinclair, head of Trans-Love, who now faces a 20 year minimum jail sentence because Kapegian claims Sinclair gave him two joints.

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A mass demonstration is being staged to confront those who reap rich rewards from burned villages, crops and people, namely the stockholders of Dow Chemical.

They are meeting May 8^th in the home of napalm, Midland, Michigan. (Isn’t it delightful that Michigan is blessed with such a proliferation of peace-keeping outfits such as Cadillac Gauge, General Motors and Dow. Perhaps next year’s plates should read “Munitions Wonderland”).

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Sorry about not making the last issue. Your Eat It girl was in the hospital, which gives her a good reason to rap on institutional feeding and freedom.

The curfew was on the week before I went into the hospital, which seemed to prepare me for the confinement. I became a body which had to be operated on, something which had nothing to do with my mind. First my civil liberties, then my body!

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Liberation News Service — The thousands of left-wing German students clashing with police on the streets of Berlin, Frankfort, Hanover, Munich and other German cities rallied for reasons beyond the original motivation of the shooting of Rudi Dutsche.

“Red Rudi,” a leader of the Socialist German Students League (SDS), was shot in Berlin by Joseph Bachmann, April 11. An admirer of Adolph Hitler, Bachmann claimed that his assassination attempt was inspired by the murder of Martin Luther King. Dutsche, however, is recovering from his wounds.

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Acey-Acey is a game that used to be played at Lou Walker’s Bar on Woodward. It is easy to learn and became quite popular a few years ago.

These are the rules: a number of people, at least three to four, but preferably five to six or more, gather around a bar table with a pack of cards; one is chosen dealer, and he deals one card at a time face-up to each player. Now the fun begins.

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The Detroit Public Schools will receive $6,000,000 to squander in the next three years from the Federal government for a special project to “enrich” five inner-city-schools.

Among other things, they will increase the staffs in these five schools—but at a heavy price they won’t publicly admit: the reduction of personnel available to the rest of the city’s schools. That’s the tragedy of most “crash” programs; with only a limited amount of teachers to utilize, school boards are more interested in “showcases” for their national public relations image than they are in genuine overall improvement of their antiquated systems.

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Editor’s note: The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense is an Oakland, California based militant black organization which believes in armed self-defense of the black community from what they call the “pigs” (police).

The group’s Minister of Defense, Huey Newton, is presently in jail awaiting trial on charges of killing one Oakland cop and wounding two others in a shoot-out last year. The Panther’s claim this incident climaxed two years of police harassment and that Huey shot in self-defense.

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Philadelphia, Penna., April 11—Today, U.S. Postal authorities arrested Steven Kuromiya, a former University of Pennsylvania student, for attempting to mail 1,000 posters to peace organizations throughout the country.

The posters depict a young man burning what might be a draft card, with the words “FUCK THE DRAFT” printed below. The man in the photo is a Detroiter, Bill Greenshields.

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Subtle and more unsubtle pressure has caused Detroit’s three up front papers to experience difficulties in the last few weeks in getting their papers printed.

The Inner-City Voice, a black revolutionary paper, the Warren-Forest Sun, a freek paper, and this newspaper all have been victims of attempted suppression.

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Everybody knows what the cops and the National Guard are supposed to do during a “civil disturbance,” right?

They are supposed to stop Black people from looting, burning, and killing. The only problem with this formulation is that these guardians of law and order usually involve themselves in the very activities they are supposed to be suppressing.

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In the aftermath of L.B.J.‘s sudden shocker,* a heated dialogue between Phil Ochs, folksinger, and Jerry Rubin, Yippie organizer, took place on the subject of America, Johnson, Kennedy and the movement. Perhaps it was not untypical...

RUBIN: The six-gun has surrendered; the machine will now move back into control of America’s banks. Rationality will replace the sloppy hand. Kennedy, the mechanical consumer product, will replace Johnson, the existential gambler. And things won’t be as interesting up there.

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Scene at GM building. photo: Bob Evans

Students for a Democratic Society declared the days between April 20 and 30 as “Ten Days to Shake the (American) Empire.

Locally, Wayne University SDS led an anti-imperialist march on April 24 of over 250 persons to the General Motors Building which was seen to quiver ever so slightly in the face of the onslaught.

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“A Long Time Comin’”

The Electric Flag (Columbia)

The Electric Flag’s long-awaited LP is in every respect a fine recording and well indicative of this group’s abundant talent and ability to communicate and excite.

It is due to Michael Bloomfield who has reigned in the U.S. as white bluesdom’s most charismatic guitarist and personality. He was perhaps the main attraction of The Butterfield Blues Band for more than two years.

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FIFTH ESTATE #53, May 1–15, 1968, Vol. 3, No. 1

EDITORS

Harvey Ovshinsky

Peter Werbe

EDITORIAL ASSISTANT

Cathy West

CIRCULATION

Tommye Wiese

Pat Klees

DISTRIBUTION

Eric Watkins

ADVERTISING

Gunner Lewis

ART DIRECTOR

Ed Bania

CONTRIBUTING EDITOR

Frank Joyce

STAFF

Wilson Lindsey

Ed Rom

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“A fascist government is a one-party system, highly centralized and authoritarian, with rigid control over every phase of a nation’s life...This government is militaristic, nationalistic and imperialistic and it claims dogmatic political faith.”

—Herbert Matthews of the New York Times on Nazi Germany

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Photo by Richard Stocker

At a carnival, when disruption strikes, the call for help goes out: “Hey Rube!” The call went out at Wayne State, last Friday, April 26, as it did across the world, as students on all continents boycotted classes and staged demonstrations in opposition to U.S. imperialism.

In Detroit, the Wayne Administration put out the call—HEY RUBE! and the campus was soon engulfed by carloads of full-decked Tactical Mobile Units, a half dozen members of the cavalry, a platoon of cops, and twenty six miles of metaphoric barb-wire; called out to quell the carnival. Boy, was it a riot.

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from San Francisco Express Times

San Francisco, April 18 — Easter noon on the steps of the Hall of Justice a cop with a red ribbon in his hat and an iris in his lapel took out a joint and lit up.

“I wasn’t there for grass, I was there for a bigger thing. We’re trying to start a disarmament program with a ten cent piece of ribbon.”

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Editor’s note: Dena is a Detroit movement activist who went to Cuba in February of this year. She was part of a group of 20 members of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) who made the trip at the invitation of the Cuban government. This is the fourth article in a series.

The situation regarding the status of the Cuban woman is similar to the situation of black people there. As with black people, women have been integrated into economic and political life of the country, but it has been impossible to completely erase in ten years the scars of centuries of male chauvinism.

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a review of

The Anarchist Roots of Geography: Toward Spatial Emancipation by Simon Springer. University of Minnesota Press, 2016

Anyone who wants evidence that anarchist geography is alive and well today need only read this book. The author, Simon Springer, is one of the most active anarchist intellectuals today. In 2016, he authored two books and edited five, mostly on anarchist themes, and he has written numerous articles, some technical, but many deeply immersed in contemporary struggles.

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Everybody knows we’re living in a period of unprecedented disillusionment. People everywhere are questioning even those basic assumptions which once bound their futures up safely and securely with the future of this society—a society they once felt themselves indispensable parts of.

Nobody trusts our government anymore. People hardly ever go to church anymore, and when they do, it’s only to vandalize the premises and assault priests with their own crucifixes. The family is falling apart. Everybody steals (look at New York!). Why; just the other day a poll taken by the Opinion Research Corporation revealed that, even with reduced work hours and increased pay, more people are dissatisfied with their jobs than at any time since they started taking the poll 25 years ago!

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a review of

On the Road, Jack Kerouac. Penguin Modern Classics, London, 1976

Naked Angels, The Lives and Literature of the Beat Generation, John Tytell. McGraw Hill, New York, 1977

Don’t let no one bullshit you—the ‘50s were a terrible time to live through. On TV it’s just the Fonz and all of his friends having “Happy Days,” but the reality frame was the American empire at its zenith. It was a world dominated by Eisenhower, Nixon, John Foster Dulles and other spokesmen for the American Century—the dominance of American military might abroad, and white, middle class culture at home—a time without rioting blacks, demonstrating students or Vietnamese in revolt to threaten the image.

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I recently read an incredibly annoying article in a 2015 New York Review of Books. This liberal-policy-wonk and literary monthly is run by Secular Humanoids, i.e., people trained by universities in the humanities who worship science more than most scientists, who (having studied science) do not usually confuse it with theology

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“Me, start a vanguard party to lead the working class to revolution? You must be kidding!”

Just imagine being a respected and beloved fatherly leader under whose wise guidance the revolutionary masses will forge ahead daily with the fiery zeal of “speed-up” campaign!!!

Your own central committee!

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Although everyone except the most self-deluded realizes that the Soviet Union is a totalitarian police state, its rulers still feel the need to wrap their bureaucratic authority in formal legalisms. Under the direction of Soviet Communist Party chief Leonid Brezhnev, a new Soviet Constitution has been proposed, the fourth since the Bolsheviks seized the government in 1917, which would replace the 1936 Constitution, authored by Stalin. Although both documents contain wordy guarantees of civil liberties and “rights,” the current one will have no more effect than the last which in no way inhibited Stalin from sending millions to forced-labor camps and murdering millions more.

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“Amid All the Camaraderie is Much Looting this Time; Seeing the City Disappear.”

—Wall Street Journal headline, July 15

The Journal went on to quote a cop on what he saw, as the great Bastille Day break-out unfolded: “People are going wild in the borough of Brooklyn. They are looting stores by the carload.” Another cop added later: “Stores were ripped open. Others have been leveled. After they looted, they burned.”

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This article originally appeared in the People & Energy Newsletter (1757 S. St., N.W, Washington, D.C.) and was based on research by Bruce Edwards.

The spectre of a nuclear police state has frequently been raised by atomic energy critics as one of the threats posed by the evolution of a nuclear energy based economy.

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The following article is reprinted from the 7 June 1977 edition of the Mexican newspaper Excelsior and was translated for us by a comrade in Montreal. Although written in a journalistic style (for instance calling people “anarchists” who might have no interest in the label) it chronicles activity similar to that of the Metropolitan Indians in Italy (see FE #284, July 1977) and the Breakers of Paris. There will undoubtedly be more to come.

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As we face the storms (both literal and figurative) of 2017, we offer a poem by Voltairine De Cleyre, dedicated to the memory of the May 1886 Haymarket strikes and demonstrations in Chicago, and especially to the anarchists murdered for their beliefs by the state.

De Cleyre was born in 1866 into a poor family in Leslie, Michigan. Schooling at a Catholic convent convinced her to reject all religion, and she became a free thinker, dedicated not to God, but to humanity.

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a review of

Breaking the Spell: A History of Anarchist Filmmakers, Video Tape Guerrillas and Digital Ninjas by Chris Robé. PM Press, 2017, 468 pages.

Reviewer’s note: I agreed to write this review before being aware that almost an entire chapter is dedicated to an analysis of my video work and that of sub.Media. It also includes some writing about my work with the Vancouver Media Co-op. I know Chris personally, and we’ve eaten tacos and drunk beers together.

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Staff Note: For nine years, the tenants of San Francisco’s International Hotel have been battling to save their residence from the attempts by the Four Seas Investment Corporation, a Hong Kong based firm, to turn the area into a multi-story shopping center. The cause of the elderly Chinese and Philippino residents has been taken up by a variety of leftist groups, even supported for a while by the local sheriff, and criticized by others as a defense of squalor. Our writer, a Fifth Estate staff member emeritus, has been wandering the hemisphere and arrived at the I-Hotel as the final confrontation with the bodyguards of property began.

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Caption for photos:

Contrasted with the U.S., European anti-nuclear demonstrations often result in violent clashes with police. Scene above (l.) shows a Clamshell demonstrator practicing nonviolence being dragged away by a New Hampshire State Trooper, May 1 at Seabrook, At right, part of a contingent of 30,000 who tried to march on a plant site at Creys-Malville, France, July 31. One demonstrator was left dead and a hundred others injured after police attacked, trying to block access to the plant. French Interior Minister Christian Bonnet issued a statement saying, “About a fifth of the demonstrators were foreigners. Among them were about a thousand troublemakers, indisputably anarchist in action and inspiration who ignore frontiers and who already have made trouble elsewhere, especially in West Germany.”

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“He who humbles himself wills to be exalted.”

—Nietzsche

I would like to present some thoughts and comments on terrorist organizations and activities in general and on the SLA and “The Last SLA Statement” in this context. My main intention is not to criticize the SLA as such, but to contribute to the discussion concerning what is to be done by those of us who fervently desire the transformation of the present “social order” into a free world.

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It is required now to bemoan the fact that the current US President is both a producer and product of Reality TV. Indeed, “reality,” “realty,” and “royalty” are all linked etymologically.

The real-estate tycoon, then, Reality TV boss, now completes the triumvirate by taking on a state executive role by treating it as his own monarchical sovereign seat. Instead of addressing this by seeking to reestablish correspondence-based truth via facts), we would be better off seeing reality as a terrain filled with metamorphosis machines, with subjectivities made and destroyed. We can begin an account of these reality wars by assessing the menagerie of alt-right and neo-fascist street actors emboldened by his victory.

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Related: see Letters in this issue.

The discussion regarding Black Rose Books, Ltd. (BRB) and concerning what constitutes a libertarian project has taken two distressing and, in our opinion, unproductive directions. The first is the absolute indignation on the part of BRB supporters that we would even question “the fine work BRB has done,” and that such an inquiry, which tries to assess the nature of their activity, is on the face of it objectionable. The other is the argument that all of us are compromised by living within capitalist society, that “pure” activity is impossible without a revolution, so why are we being so self-righteous when we, like BRB, exhibit numerous contradictions to libertarian ideals?

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