Most Recent Additions

a review of

Food for our Grandmothers: Writings by Arab-American and Arab-Canadian Feminists, Edited by Joanna Kadi, South End Press, Boston, 1994, $16.00

There’s sand in the pages of my edition of Food for our Grandmothers: Writings by Arab-American and Arab-Canadian Feminists. This is not a derogatory reference to those named in the title, but rather because I am reviewing the anthology of poetry and essays at Makena Beach, on Maui in Hawaii.

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Fifth Estate Letters Policy

The Fifth Estate always welcomes letters commenting on our articles, stating opinions, or giving reports of events in local areas. We don’t guarantee we will print everything we receive, but all letters are read by our staff and considered.

Typed letters or ones on disk are appreciated, but not required. Length should not exceed two double-spaced pages. If you are interested in Writing a longer response, please contact us.

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The prolific III Publishing group, PO Box 1581, Guala CA 95445, recently released two new books. Saab Lofton’s A.D. is set in 2410 where society is organized according to libertarian principles, but a menace from the past threatens the future. J.G. Eccarius, author of the blasphemous The Last Days of Christ the Vampire, latest book. Resurrection 2027, is a post-apocalyptic thriller set in the year of the title where rebellion is the only way out for children resurrected from the dead. III is also publishing Anti-Christ magazine, formerly The Stake, and wants to exchange ads with other zines.

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a review of

Poetry Like Bread: Poets of the Political Imagination, edited by Martin Espada. Curbstone Press (Willimantic CT. 1994). 282 pages.

In his forward to this anthology of 37 poets, all of whom have published or are soon to publish collections with Curbstone Press, the poet and editor Martin Espada defines the political imagination as a matter of both vision and language which “goes beyond protest to articulate an artistry of dissent.”

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a review of

Vice Versa: Bisexuality and The Eroticism of Everyday Life, Marjorie Garber, Simon and Schuster, 1995, 606 pp., $30.

Bisexual Politics: Theories, Queries and Visions, Edited by Naomi Tucker with Liz Highleyman and Rebecca Kaplan. Haworth Publishers, 1995, 358 pp., $14.95 paper (available from FE Books).

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The confluence of circumstances that creates openings for profound social transformation in America are few. Research reveals a pattern of repressive behavior by power structures in the United States when these rare historical opportunities for change occur. Extreme personalities such as J. Edgar Hoover become convenient scapegoats for the excesses of American political policing. In fact, the “reaction” of an organization like the FBI is more of an institutional knee-jerk dutifully carried out by a structure’s current billet-holders, combined with the more-or-less significant influences of historical personages.

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On Gogol Boulevard is produced for the Fifth Estate by New York City/Neither East Nor West, which links alternative oppositions in the East and West, and prints news and documents unavailable in the corporate or left media. OGB sometimes involves Third and Fourth World activists in these efforts.

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Every day for a week I peruse the crumpled quarter-page announcement I’ve been carrying around in my wallet. “MUDPEOPLE: 10^th Anniversary...We supply mud. Wear as little as possible. Bring drinks, food, towels, friends, wildness. Finally, the day is here.

Mudpeople confront the rich, Detroit Athletic Club, 1991 (Photo: Mike)

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In the old days, when the state hung somebody and the braided rope broke or the gallows came crashing to the ground it was taken by God-fearing men as a sign that a mistake had been made and the condemned soul was no longer theirs to take; the prisoner was reprieved.

Today’s wisdom, however, will abide no such mythology. Steeped in the profane religion of the New World Order, whose merchants of death trade haughtily in the machinery of holocausts, the only spirits that count are those that, indeed, count. Justice resides in the maintenance of profits, in preventing even for a moment the removal of pump from soil, head from noose.

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Last summer at Goddard College, social ecology luminary Murray Bookchin denounced the FE as “toilet literature flooding into the ecology movement and polluting it,” and a “manifestation of a middle class, petit bourgeois yuppie perspective.

AK Press recently published Bookchin’s diatribe, Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm, which excoriates this paper and others for—among other crimes—being both lumpen rebels and privileged yuppies. and even (horror of horrors), accomplices of a “Neo-Heideggerian reaction.”

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The December North Cass Community Union Newsletter gave some startling statistics about the 48201 ZIP Code the FE office is in.

Its population is a scant 13,010 and falling.

The median income is $10,001, the lowest of the 192 metro ZIP Codes. and the racial composition is 69 percent black.

“Nationalism offers them something concrete, something that has been tried and tested and is known to work.”

—Fredy Perlman, The Continuing Appeal of Nationalism

On the corner of my block lies an empty lot. One day fifty trees, mainly conifers, each set into a metal container, appeared in the space.

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Not if you want to succeed in business today. In the modern international marketplace, competition is tough. If the corporations which have brought us the standard of living we have recently come to enjoy are to continue doing so against an increasing foreign challenge, the killing field must be made level. The only way to do that is to do business with the Peoples’ Republic of China.

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Welcome to our 30^th anniversary issue—although you are reading this as we are already into our 31^st year. 1965 seems like ancient history or just a heartbeat away, depending on your current age. The cover logo on page one over our chronicle comes from our 1968–71 period.

As always we would like to express our gratitude to each reader, each Sustainer, each contributor. On the occasion of this anniversary, we feel this sense of gratitude even more deeply. Without your support, none of this would happen. We appreciate the patience with which all of you tolerate our sporadic publishing schedule although we have given up promising to appear more frequently.

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“The Fifth Estate supports the cause of revolution everywhere.”

—FBI Report

In my estimation, the above twelve-word summary by the nation’s secret police serves adequately as an abbreviated history of this paper on the occasion of its 30^th anniversary.

However, it will definitely not satisfy my friends and comrades on the FE staff who urged me on our 20^th and 25^th anniversaries to write a comprehensive account of the newspaper’s long existence as a radical publication.

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“Hey! What are you guys doing here? You hate unions!”

—A strike supporter

The labor militant who aimed this question at us was surprised, almost shocked, to see a group whom she considers anarchists critical of unions, shoulder-to-shoulder with striking Teamsters and newspaper reporters, squaring off against the cops at a suburban Detroit printing plant late one night last summer.

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The Fifth Estate is a cooperative, nonprofit project, publishing since 1965. The people who produce it are a group of friends who do so neither to secure wages nor as an investment in the newspaper industry, but to encourage resistance and rebellion to this society.

The Fifth Estate (ISSN No. 0015–0800) is published quarterly at 4632 Second Ave., Detroit, Michigan 48201 USA; Phone (313) 831–6800. Our office hours vary, so please call before visiting. Subscriptions are $6.00 for four issues; $8.00 foreign including Canada. Second Class postage paid at Detroit, Michigan. No copyright. No paid advertisements.

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When Mumia Abu-Jamal’s date with Pennsylvania’s executioner was indefinitely postponed Aug. 7, 1995, ten days before scheduled, it came as a surprise to the ex-Black Panther’s defense team. Judge Albert Sabo, who displayed gross prejudice at both the original trial and the current hearing, had never before granted a stay in the 32 death sentences he has handed out to Philadelphia murder defendants.

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We want to save the world, and we want to save ourselves. It’s the same thing. The problems confronting us are enormous and at every level: personal, social, planetary. I will spare you a list. My aim is to suggest they are all symptoms of one problem, and to propose a solution.

The problem: to find a way to live on earth which promotes our health and happiness, is conducive to the full development of our innate potential and at the same time democratic; that is, available to all—which does not use more than our share, and is harmonious with the biosphere’s evident drive toward increasing diversity, complexity and stability.

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The British libel proceeding brought by McDonald’s against two activists with Greenpeace London over their fact sheet, “What’s Wrong With McDonald’s,” continued into the new year with no end in sight. The $26 billion a year junk food giant objects to the leaflet’s characterization of them as abusing animals, destroying the rain forest, conning kids, creating mountains of waste, and being anti-labor.

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At the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York on September 6, 1901 Leon Czolgosz became America’s third presidential assassin when he shot William McKinley with a.32-caliber revolver hidden in his handkerchief-wrapped hand. The president died eight days later. Apprehended at the scene, Czolgosz (pronounced chol-gosh) was tried, found guilty and executed on October 29, less than two months later.

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The Martyrs’ Farewell
That we lost and have to die, does not diminish our appreciation and gratitude for your great solidarity with us and our families. Friends and Comrades, now that the tragedy of this trial is at an end, be all as of one heart. Only two of us will die. Our ideal, you our comrades, will live by millions. We have won. We are not vanquished. Just treasure our suffering, our sorrow, our mistakes, our defeats, our passion for future battles and for the great emancipation.
Be all as of one heart in this blackest hour of our tragedy. And we have heart. Salute for us all the Friends and Comrades on the earth.
We embrace you all and bid you our extreme good-bye with our hearts filled with love and affection.
Now and ever, long life to you all, long life to liberty.
Yours for life and death.
--Nicola Sacco, Bartolomeo Vanzetti (Death House, August 21, 1927)

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With “These faggots kill fascists” emblazoned on their banner, an army of international volunteers formed the first LGBT fighting unit to “smash the ISIS caliphate. This July photo shows them raising the rainbow flag in Raqqa, Syria. According to an online statement, The Queer Insurrection and Liberation Army, or TQILA, exists to “smash the gender binary...and advance the sexual revolution.”

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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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1. Subscribe. Subscribers are a publication’s life blood. If you bought this at a news stand, consider subscribing and buying one for a friend or a library.

2. Donate. Postal and printing costs continue to rise making financial stability an increasing challenge to publications which refuse commercial advertising. Donations also allow us to continue sending free subscriptions to prisoners & GIs.

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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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