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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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Thinking about punk rock gives one the strange sensation of witnessing a phenomenon and trying to make intellectual sense of it rather than being immersed in it. That of course ages you immediately. No matter what your “sympathies” are toward the music and the social critique it carries with it, if you are writing about it in the manner of this article, you are obviously not of it.

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The Red Army Faction’s (RAF or Baader-Meinhof Group) initial phase of struggle (1968–72) was guided by the belief that it was possible to crack the imperialist “paper tiger” at any point through militaristic actions (the idea of creating “many Vietnams”). It was based on the perspective that the struggle would on one hand provoke a repressive reaction on the part of the State (already weakened by assassinations, bombings, etc.) thereby provoking the revolt of the “masses.”

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* An October issue of Earth News reported that a cow in the mid west United States came down with a bad case of the farts after continually eating vegetation that was gas producing. Disgusted by his cow’s continuous expelling of toxic fumes, the owner (an unnamed dairy farmer) called upon the expert help of a local veterinary (who was also unnamed) to plug up the milcher’s exhaust.

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Hi FE Folks,

After reading the two letters (FE #287, October 28, 1977) responding to my article in the August FE (#285, August, 1977), I have decided to abandon the use of the term “terrorism,” because I think it does tend to obscure more than it clarifies.

I agree with Laurance Kisinger that there is nothing essentially terrifying about an empty government building or an isolated utility being blown up; but I don’t think that there is necessarily anything revolutionary about it either. I don’t think that this kind of activity is “mindless violence” as Ervin—who obviously refused to really read the article on principle or perhaps sent his letter to the wrong address—asserts. But we all have to become more aware of what challenges and what perpetuates the status quo.

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Saludos Companeros:

Your review of the Dolgoff book on Cuba (FE #286, Sept. 1977) left a lot to be desired. As anarchist propaganda that book is a disaster. At the least, it’s sloppy work and may be even worse than that. One thing anarchists do not need to do is run out a line of bullshit rhetoric, exaggerate and distort when attacking an authoritarian enemy. Soviet style authoritarians provide sufficient ammunition and targets; there’s no need to create new ones. For sure, “names will never hurt them.”

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F. Briest

Angela DeSante

Alan Franklin

Ralph Franklin

Pat Halley

Tina Nachalo

Sabina Nachalo

E.B. Maple

Bob Nirkind

Govinda Haber

Peter Rachleff

Richard Rollins

Peter Werbe

Marilyn Werbe

Hughtheir White

The Fifth Estate Newspaper, a non-profit Michigan corporation, is published monthly at 4403 Second Ave., Detroit MI 48201; phone: (313) 831–6800. Office hours are sporadic, so call before coming down. Subscriptions are $4.00 for 12 issues; $5.00 for foreign. Call 259–1888 for retail sales outlets. Second Class postage paid at Detroit, Michigan. No copyright. No advertising.

a review of

Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook by Mark Bray. Melville House Books 2017

It’s hard to shake the feeling that we haven’t all wandered into a particularly demented time warp in the last year or so since that Nazi-sympathizer, Donald Trump, bumbled and ranted his way into the White House.

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Related: see “Anti-Fascism 101,” FE #400, Spring, 2018.

About 100 people filled a small auditorium at Detroit’s Wayne State University, October 17, to hear a talk by Mark Bray, a Dartmouth College lecturer on human rights and author of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook.

Bray’s lecture followed the lines of his book, that fascism was and is an authentic threat which should be confronted by means appropriate to the dangers it poses. Tactically, he advocates alliances between anarchists, a tradition with which Bray identifies, and sectors of the left, without consideration of their authoritarian nature.

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From South Africa comes the news that what even conservative observers took to be a very bad joke on the part of “Justice” Minister Jimmy Kruger turns out, on closer analysis, to be the certified honest-to-god truth.

Kruger had expressed complete ignorance of the source of the ‘train damage which had brought about the death of imprisoned black resister Steven Bike, suggesting that if as Kruger suspected, Biko’s head injuries were self-inflicted, he could nonetheless sympathize with the unfortunate man because he often felt the strains of his job to be akin to “banging my head against the wall.”

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The Fifth Estate newspaper (ISSN No. 0015–0800) is published quarterly at 4632 Second Ave., Detroit MI 48201 USA. Phone (313) 831–6800. Subscriptions: $5.00 per year; $7.00 per year foreign including Canada. Second Class postage paid at Detroit, Michigan. No copyright. No paid ads. Postmaster: Send address changes to Fifth Estate, P.O. Box 02548, Detroit MI 48202.

Hong Kong’s Black Book Fair took place November 17–19, 2017 in the lecture theatre of the Visual Arts Centre, close to the Admiralty area where the Umbrella Movement was ignited by a police attack on demonstrators three years earlier.

Collective members from a vegan restaurant in a working class community with a “pay what you feel is ight” free/autonomoous pricing operation presenting at the Hong Kong book fair.

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During his visit to Chile in January 2018, Pope Francis officiated a mass in the Araucania region—the ancestral territory of the Mapuche people.

The night before, unknown individuals burned three forest company helicopters, three churches, and a school. Fliers demanding the liberation of Mapuche political prisoners were found nearby.

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My attitude about voting has been like the old Jewish joke about chicken soup when you’ve got a cold—it may not help very much, but it can’t hurt. The more ideological argue that voting legitimizes the system, and they’ve got a point. The more pragmatic counter that such a purist position is an irresponsible luxury in the face of emergency—such as we in the United States are clearly now facing.

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Federal prosecutors announced in January the dismissal of charges against 129 J20 defendants for actions against the Trump inauguration in Washington DC on January 20, 2017.

Fifty-nine people are still facing seven felony charges each, punishable by over 60 years in prison. While the government alleges that these people damaged property, planned the protests, or had knowledge of the black bloc tactic, the case has always been about political repression and expanding the state’s ability to stifle resistance.

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When Lutxo Rodríguez recalls the local punks and social outcasts of the downtown Lima, Peru district he habituates “dressing in black in the ‘80s,” I smile wryly, remembering the Lower East Side of my own youth. But the urban decay that allowed for the florescence of bohemia and an anarcho-punk scene in this small enclave of a South American capital came “in the context of political violence,” he says.

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I want to thank the Fifth Estate for permitting me to purchase this ad in order to put forth a position they oppose. It’s not that I don’t agree with them that politics is the process of rulers and ruled and that the act of voting is an act of self-humiliation (the willing participation in one’s own domination), but I think there is a need for realism at some point. I too was once a revolutionary and had thoughts similar to yours about overthrowing capitalism, and I even dressed like many of you. But I’ve had to make some compromises in my life and I think the least you can do is make some yourselves in return for an ex-radical in city government.

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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

CARL AND DONNA: Much love from the whole gang—you’d better keep in touch while you’re away! We’ll keep up your drinking and dancing for you at the Miami if you’ll keep up our travelling for us while we hibernate. See you in six months!

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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 1 pm to 5 pm) 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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Dear F.E.:

It would be very interesting to know more about the character of the N.Y. looting but it is not clear to me that we can tell anything from the figures which the Zerzans passed on to us from the San Francisco Chronicle in your August issue [see “New York, New York: The blackout of 1977” by John Zerzan, Paula Zerzan, Fifth Estate # 285, August, 1977].

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In the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries, the rise of capitalism was met by bitter and intense resistance. Its establishment was only effectuated by the imposition of the factory system as a method of social control. The result was a tamed working class and a degradation of labor which lives today at the core of the marxist conception of socialism.

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“If you support this motion, you will not assist the government. You will paralyze it and indeed stand in danger of destroying it”

—Jack Jones, veteran trade union leader, pleading with delegates to the convention of the Transport and General Workers’ Union not to refuse the extended wage restraint of England’s celebrated “Social Contract” between the unions and the Labor government. The motion was supported.

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Note for web version: regular, bold and italic types are reproduced as in original.

It is appropriate to note at any time that humanity has lived over 99% of its existence in primitive society. Without even the benefit of laws, our ancestors were able to rest their arses on logs and cook over open fires. Without encyclopedias people raised cattle, made, cheese, drank wine. It is even thought by some anthropologists that uncivilized people made love and made music without the religious benefits of stereophonic machines!

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Last March in Canton, China, an unnamed Peking official replied to questions by the New York-Times, on the subject of political prisoners in China, by stating, “A few intellectuals deprived of free speech is only a minor question. In the Soviet Union, the workers, the peasants and the intellectuals are all being oppressed.”

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The Detroit primary elections, as usual, contained no surprises with a majority of both registered and eligible voters not bothering to venture out of their house to participate in selecting who shall rule them. Officials have even given up bemoaning the low turnouts and called this primary a success because 46% of the voters cast ballots...

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MULHOUSE, FRANCE — UPI-AP Leading German industrialist Hans-Martin Schleyer committed suicide Oct. 18 in the trunk of the car in which he had been held since his seizure Sep. 5^th by members of the German Red Army Faction.

The one-time Nazi reportedly shot himself after learning that negotiations between his captors and the Bonn government had completely broken down.

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NEW YORK (LNS)—In the more than six weeks following the kidnapping and execution of Hans-Martin Schleyer by guerrillas of the Red Army Faction (RAF), the West German Government took few visible steps to win the release of one of the country’s leading industrialists and ex-Nazi. But the government wasted little time in enacting laws that will take the country back a long ways toward the golden years of Schleyer’s youth, when he was in charge of stamping out anti-Nazi sentiment on university campuses, first in Heidelberg, then Innsbruck, Austria, and finally in Prague, Czechoslovakia.

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Press accounts have generally referred to the kidnapped Hans-Martin Schleyer as “a major West German industrialist.” He was certainly that—head of the West German Employers Association and top board member of Daimler-Benz, the multinational giant which produces Mercedes-Benz cars and trucks and invests throughout Europe, Africa and the United States.

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Unbelievably, it has become fashionable among some observers of the American political scene to associate the alt-right with punk rock, lauding Donald Trump for his “punk” presidency.

The liberal magazine, The Atlantic, noted in 2016, that Trump and his supporters “created a space in American politics that is uniquely transgressive, volatile, carnivalesque, and (from a certain angle) punk rock.” Similarly, the New York Post gushed that Trump “is a guy with a safety pin through his nose and a purple mohawk.”

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To The Fifth Estate:

I have been delegated by the Anarchist Fund Raising Picnic held Sept. 11 at Santa Teresa Park, San Jose, California, to disburse the following funds to support the anarchist propaganda projects in the English language including Black Flag, Black Star, Freedom and Open Road.

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The State of California has recently stepped up its attacks on Russell (Little and Joseph Remiro (imprisoned for the 1973 SLA assassination of Oakland, Calif. school official Marcus Foster) who are currently serving life terms.

In recognition of his two years of non-violent behavior in the maximum security Adjustment Center at San Quentin prison, promises were made to Russ Little that he would be transferred to a less restricted unit in another prison. These promises were made by counselors at San Quentin as well as various administrators in the California Department of Corrections over a period of five months.

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Millard Berry

Alan Franklin

Ralph Franklin

Pat Halley

Pat O’Bryan

Kathy Horak

Tina Nachalo

Bob Nirkind

E.B. Maple

Doug Larkins

Donna Saffioti

Peter Werbe

Marilyn Werbe

Govinda Habersplatte

John & Paula Zerzan

Rick Rollins

The Fifth Estate Newspaper, a non-profit Michigan corporation, is published monthly at 4403 Second Ave., Detroit MI 48201; phone: (313) 831–6800. Office hours are sporadic, so call before coming down. Subscriptions are $4.00 for 12 issues; $5.00 for foreign. Call 259–1888 for retail sales outlets. Second Class postage paid at Detroit, Michigan. No copyright. No advertising.

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