Most Recent Additions

In “Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens,” Churchill invoked Malcolm X’s comments immediately following the assassination of president John F. Kennedy as he maintained that American foreign policy provoked the attacks on New York. At root in the controversy was Churchill’s comparison of Americans to the “good Germans” of Nazi Germany and his now famous phrase about “the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers.”

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Anarchist anthropologist David Graeber’s recent purge from Yale University—coming hot on the heels of the trial-by-media of Native American radical Ward Churchill—is one of many recent attacks on radical professors that have shaken the supposedly safe zone of the ostensibly liberal academy. Graeber’s contract was recently not renewed under highly suspicious circumstances after many years of teaching at the Ivy League school.

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BOULDER, COLO. Walking by the student center of the University of Colorado at Boulder (CU) one late winter day early this year, I saw campus Republicans swarming around several seven-foot tall poster boards. Usually, they fill these poster boards with meaningless—and largely ignored—right-wing slogans. But this day was different because the press also crowded the area, and a throng of onlookers had gathered. At the cost of being late to my next class, I cut through the mob to read the garish, neon-colored posters.

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In Paris, between 1900 and 1903, Alexandre Jacob (1879–1954) and his comrades organized a group of anarchist burglars which carried out 156 break-ins before being caught. Their targets were the wealthy and the gang’s project was to punish them by striking at their most sensitive organ—their wallet. Jacob and his friends were dubbed “Workers of the Night” by the sensationalist Paris press. These unusual robbers believed that theft should not be for personal gain, but an attack against the world of the powerful. Instead of becoming rich himself from the gang’s enterprises, Jacob generously donated to anarchist causes.

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This special section, announcing itself with the above headline, contains more of a critical and theoretical tension than may be immediately obvious at first reading. Imbedded in it is the difference between the clarion call proposed by Marxists to the international proletariat, “Workers of the World, Unite,” and another slogan, introduced in these pages some three decades ago—“Workers of the World, Relax!”

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Welcome to the second issue in the fortieth anniversary year of this publication. The first was published in February and was our official commemorative edition. It was the largest and most colorful issue ever printed since we began in 1965. The anniversary issue was a double one constituting our publishing efforts for both Spring and Summer 2005. Hence, you have not missed an issue and you are reading the next in our series.

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Unless we build a sustained practice of free relationships and liberated lives, we risk lengthening the long list of those who have created partial revolutions. The revolution is inside as well as outside ourselves. Misery and alienation reproduce themselves--not just in authoritarian institutions--but in our own character structure, imprisoned by the catastrophe of repressive consciousness.

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5 Occupied Iraq: The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill

7 First They Came For Ward Churchill

9 The New McCarthyism: On The Recent Purge Of David Graeber

11 Fear And Loathing At The University

12 Introduction: Wobblies At 100; Work At 4,000

15 Why I Was A Burglar

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The population of hard core anarchists from the ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s is slowly dwindling, and the next generation is unprepared to take up the slack.

Young people today are filled with apathy in a day and age where apathy is the one thing you don’t want. So, where are you guys? Where are the huge mass gatherings of rage and indignation? Where are the fliers, the meetings, the banners and protests?

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“What are kingdoms but great robberies? Indeed, that was an apt and true reply which was given to Alexander the Great by a pirate who had been seized. For when that king had asked the man what he meant by keeping hostile possession of the sea, he answered with bold pride, ‘What thou meanest by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, whilst thou who dost it with a great fleet art styled an emperor.’”

--Augustine of Hippo, The City of God (410 CE)

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This article is excerpted from “The Search for the Primitive,” an essay written by Stanley Diamond in 1963 and later revised and expanded for inclusion in his book In Search of the Primitive (Transaction Books, 1981). We are reprinting this excerpt because it is relevant to both our ongoing discussions of war and of primitive society, indigenism and modernity.

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a review of

Winter Soldiers: An Oral History of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, Richard Stacewicz, Twayne Publishers, 1997, New York, 471 pp.

FE Note: Nick Medvecky was a civil rights activist (1961–65) in the South and, later, an anti-war coordinator. He covered the VVAW Winter Soldier Investigation for Creem magazine. He is currently serving a federal prison term: #12155039, P.O. Box 8000, Bradford, PA 16701.

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Gothick Institutions by Peter Lamborn Wilson (Xexoxial 2005) $10 (see the review on page 38)

Garden Planet by William Kotke (AuthorHouse 2005) $11 (see the reprint on page 33)

Passion Fruit (Passion Fruit 2005) $5 (see the reprint on page 30–31)

Hymns for Brueghel: Brambles of Berries, Rants, and Poetic Orgies by (un)leash. (Primal Revival Press 2005) $20 (see the review on page 32)

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FE Note: A spin-off from our letters section, “Both Sides Now” presents two distinct views on a controversial topic, side by side. On the left [in print edition], FE reader Seaweed elaborates points first raised in his “Land And Liberty” (FE #367, p. 22–23). His views might be shared by many Fifth Estate readers and writers, but by no means all, as clearly evidenced by EB Maple’s response (see “Guns again?” in Letters, FE #370, p. 52). Hence, on the right [in print edition], we present Maples’s elaboration of an “opposing” view.

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a review of

Lower East Side Librarian Winter Solstice Shout Out. Contact Jenna Free at leslzine--at--gmail--dot--com for barter to library workers; $3 to everyone else.

With the new age personal ‘zine found on blogs and in online journals, the photocopied pamphlet as personal soapbox has become a novel antiquity. But in all its cut-and-paste glory, Jenna Free’s annual Shout Out is the best of what this genre can and should be.

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a review of

The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy by Murray Bookchin. AK Press. 2005. 491 pp. $23.

An influential theorist with a background in anarcho-syndicalism and Marxian theory, Murray Bookchin has spent the past thirty-five years developing and promoting social ecology, one of the few anarchist schools of thought to have its own school, the Institute for Social Ecology in Vermont. The latter part of his career has been devoted to curmudgeonly crusades to “save” anarchism and ecology from what he sees as its pitfalls: mysticism, biocentrism, and something called “lifestylism.”

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a review of

Gothick Institutions by Peter Lamborn Wilson. Xexoxial Editions. Dreamtime Village, 2005. 76 pages, $10. http://www.xexoxial.org. Available from the Barn.

A new Peter Wilson book is already a cause for celebration, but this lush collaboration exceeds even my already high expectations. Made beautiful by the production team of Miekal And Zon Wakest team at Dreamtime Village, our wise and playful rebel wields his waking fantasy to distill wild speculation in a dense and delirious brew of brave meditation.

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a review of

EcoVillage at Ithaca: Pioneering a Sustainable Culture by Liz Walker. 256 pages. New Society Publishers. 2005.

Those who are best comprehending The Problem are making alliances with those who are best comprehending The Solution. Liz Walker’s timely book is a chronicle, manual, and inspiration for that movement. The Problem being addressed is that the praxis of our civilization is unsustainable. The Solution is to move in the direction of living more locally and more lightly.

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a review of

Starlight on the Rails: Songbook, U. Utah Phillips, 4 CDs, AK Press, 2005, $39

Memory Against Forgetting, Casey Neill, CD, AK Press, 2005, $15. Available from http://akpress.org

Anarchist ideals have been expressed in a myriad of musical genres from rock to funk to jazz to world to trance. But the forms thoroughly connected to agit-prop are the most exemplary to me as they are extreme: folk, rap, and punk. This is not to say there’s never any revolutionary aspect to a saxophone riff or violin solo--or even an intoxicating sample tweaked to perfection on a laptop.

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a review of

How Nonviolence Protects the State by Peter Gelderloos. Signal Fire Press. 2005. 180 pages. $8. http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/peter-gelderloos-how-nonviolence-protects-the-state

Being a person deeply committed to nonviolence, to spiritual anarchy, and to actively not going along with the status quo in any way, I have to admit I started reviewing this book with the intention of trashing it. Initially, my reaction was, “Oh, this is ridiculous; this is absurd; this is twisted.” But the more I read it, and the more I talked with people about it, the more I came to agree with Peter Gelderloos. To a point.

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a review of

Hymns for Brueghel: Brambles of Berries, Rants, and Poetic Orgies by (un)leash. Published by Ink and Scribe in coordination with Cafe Press, 2005. Contact: Primal Revival Press at wyrdwizard < a t >hotmail < d o t >com. Available from the Barn for $20.

“The Full Moon strips civilization from the landscape, and it becomes fully 1,000 years ancient. The sun and moon know how to make eternal. But once an area is colonized, it stays colonized for so very long. How long before these delusions evaporate for good? Will I live to see it? Will I live my whole life under the occupation? [...] Yet I would Los Angeles become a Homeland again, for beneath my feet, by sunset or moonlight, crickets chirp by the tule villages where campfires are cooking acorn stew.”

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FE note: see related article Review, Toxic Psychiatry in this issue.

Breggin’s foundation web site: http://www.icspp.org/

Laing, R.D. & Esterson, A. (1964) Sanity, Madness, and the Family: Families of Schizophrenics. Penguin Books. ISBN 0140211578

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The sign read: “Men can wear one article of clothing, and women can wear two articles of clothing.” This was the second annual naked smoothie party that boasted not just fruity blender drinks and creative nudity, but also a steamy hot tub, a banana shaped pool, dancing, body painting, massage, and more.

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This is an excerpt from Garden Planet: The Present Phase Change of The Human Species by William H. Kotke. AuthorHouse, 2005. 146 pages. $11. Available from the Barn.

Fear is the fundamental of this cultural form. The assertion is that the basic spiritual shift in consciousness was from a reality-view that saw the entire cosmos as alive and fecund to a reality-view that saw the earth as meaningless matter to be used to battle the scarcity of the world. On the one hand, the human is at home on the earth sharing space with other cooperating neighbor species in a reality of mystery and power. On the other hand, one lives in a world of accumulation where fear of scarcity and survival is prevalent.

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“In any form of duality, the one we have judged as inferior is the one that rules us.”

--Rodolfo Scarfalloto

Of all the intoxicating notions of insurrection, “without borders” is one of the most enduring. The toppling of walls, the deletion of divisions, the repudiation of alienation and separation remains an ever-elusive vision and immediate attraction.

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a review of

Only a Beginning: An Anarchist Anthology. Edited by Allan Antliff. Arsenal Pulp Press. 2004. 352 pages. $25. Available from The Barn.

Left liberals in the United States laud Canada as a sort of parallel universe: a North American welfare state paradise where everyone has health care; foreign policy is about international peacekeeping; and a national propensity for politeness is translated into public discourse as civility. It’s a mythic place where anger doesn’t exist (except perhaps on the hockey ice), and anarchism is as genteel as a George Woodcock poem.

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As a survivor of more than a decade of psychiatric abuse, I oppose the pseudo-scientific concept of “Mental Illness” entirely. Unlike physical illnesses that are biologically based and sometimes have chemical cures, Mental Illness is a social construct used to justify abuse for the purpose of social control.

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If there is one enduring memory from my childhood, it is a small porcelain bowl containing three little white pills. The pills were as ubiquitous as morning orange juice and cereal, “Ben, don’t forget your Ritalin,” my mother would remind me as I rushed to meet my carpool on time.

“Don’t forget your Ritalin.” On any given day, some five million children and adolescents in the United States are given a psychostimulant of one form or another. Theory is that these drugs help young people handle their emotions, feelings, and reactions.

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In a classroom of five and six-year olds, I witness moments each day that vividly illuminate the tension and conflict within young minds struggling to understand their exposure to culture through mass media.

If survey data published in mainstream outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post are believed accurate, let’s consider the following: a television is on an average of nearly eight hours every day in US households, of which the average child watches 28 hours per week, viewing an average of 20,000 commercials per year. The imagery these numbers conjure is terrifying; any anti-authoritarian educational praxis (the combined process of action and reflection) must grapple with this fabricated reality or it is simply irrelevant. We’ll get to that later.

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a review of

Toxic Psychiatry by Peter R. Breggin. St. Martins Press. 1991. 464 pages. $18.

“The only known biochemical imbalances in the brains of nearly all psychiatric patients are those caused by the treatments.”

--Peter Breggin, Talking Back to Prozac

This book is as important and radical as R.D. Laing’s “The Politics Of Experience” or Thomas Szasz’s “The Myth of Mental Illness.” Breggin has been a long time campaigner for reform of the mental health system and in the early seventies he led a successful movement to end the horrific practice of Lobotomy in the US.

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After the disaster that struck the Gulf Coast in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, during the total failure of the government response, the first health services available in New Orleans were set up by anarchists and local residents.

The hub of this mutual aid effort was the Common Ground clinic, operated from a mosque in the Algiers neighborhood by former Black Panther, Malik Rahim, local residents, out-of-town anarchists and other radical activists. While local, state and federal governments were in a state of chaos and incompetence, neighbors organized their own spontaneous mutual aid, helping to rescue people from flooded homes and procuring food and supplies. Even some bars in the French Quarter established themselves as DIY relief centers.

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If you mention France, May 1968 today, you’re probably met with a shrug or a blank look. It’s easy to dismiss the ten million workers and students who went on general strike and the virtual shutdown of the French state as an historic blip. Another failed revolution.

But for the people who took part in those events, much more was going on--something besides a political uprising. Possibility bloomed. First hand accounts speak of a wave of mental liberation and spontaneous joy, with a sense that the old order of business had become obsolete overnight. How did reality shift so quickly into this new, liberated mood?

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Excerpted from a longer statement, November 2005

For three weeks, in the ghettos of the poor suburbs, on the outskirts of the outskirts, thousands of cars were burned, public utilities devastated, troops of police deliberately attacked.

This is a movement without explicit demands. This is a movement impossible to reduce to ethnic or racial demands.

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We live in a time and culture that does not understand, value, or manifest personal responsibility. The general doctrine is that even if you betray the rules of your religious practice you’ll be forgiven your digressions when you die, if you ask nice.

So, what happens when you combine a deeply entrenched culture of anarchy and individual responsibility with a political system, bureaucracy, cultural climate that is currently breaking records for its utter lack of introspection or capacity to admit mistakes? New Orleans meet America.

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The following letter was sent to an International Conference on Elisee Reclus, the 19^th century anarchist geographer and political theorist. The conference, which was held in Milan on October 12–13, was one of several planned for 2005 to celebrate the 175^th anniversary of Reclus’ birth and the 100^th anniversary of his death. I was invited to do a presentation but couldn’t leave New Orleans to attend. Fortunately, our electricity, which had been out for almost six weeks, resumed shortly before the conference, and I was able to write the letter hastily and find a place to email it. It arrived in Milan the day before the conference and was read during the proceedings, and it will be translated and published in the Italian anarchist magazine Libertaria.

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This issue’s theme--The Psychology of Freedom--comes to the reader without pretension or self-righteousness. We are not trying to instruct others on how they should conduct themselves in their personal or collective lives. Rather, we feel it is important to explore the anti-authoritarian ideals we often project onto society from the inside of our communities and lives.

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5 Letter from New Orleans

15 Psychic Liberation 6P the Almost Revolution

17 The War Against Imagination

20 No Borders

22 Retalin at Fifty

25 Poisoning the Poor

29 Psychology of Empire

30 Passion Fruit

27, 32–33, 37–38 Reviews

34 Both Sides Now

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I read with some surprise EB Maple’s letter (see FE 370, Fall 2005) regarding an article I wrote which was published in the Winter 2005 issue of the Fifth Estate.

Maple writes: “The standard issue primitivism of the article’s message appeals to me in many ways...” Thanks, a rather condescending way to agree with some aspects of my vision, but an acknowledgment nevertheless.

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Cover: http://orpheus.ucsd.edu/speccoll/visfront/index.html

Page 13: Peter Kuper, peterkuper.com

Page 21: Nik Moore, maladroitdrone.org

Page 24, 25, 32, 36: Private collection, Federico Arcos

Page 26, 34, 35: 1936: The Spanish Revolution, by The Ex

akpress.org

Page 30 & 31: Richard Warren from The Man Who Killed Durruti by Pedro De Paz, christiebooks.com

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Bush League Spectacles: Empire, Politics, and Culture in Bushwhacked America by Fran Shor (Factory School 2005) $13

“In the aftermath of 9/11, many of us looked to the Internet for the desperately needed analysis that was pushed out of the corporate media, and it’s there that we found writers such as Fran Shor. Combining an academic’s careful research and a political activist’s quest for justice, Shor speaks plainly and speaks with passion in these essays that analyze the political and cultural crisis of the contemporary United States.”

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The two publications to the right [in the print edition] and dozens more anarchist, feminist, abolitionist and prisoner zines are available from: South Chicago ABC Zine Distro, P.O. Box 721, Homewood, IL 60430; write for a catalog.

They Will Never Get us All — Harold Thompson

They Will Never Get Us All!, Harold H. Thompson, 2006, 50 pp., order from: Friends of Harold H. Thompson, 711 E. Holly St. PMB #748, Bellingham, WA 98225, send $3–7 (sliding scale) well concealed cash

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FE Note: The following is taken from the El Libertario web site. See the above article on this page for their URL.

In the last four years Venezuela has undergone a polarization induced by the top players vying for power: the old “punto fijista” bureaucracy (Fedecamaras, CTV, political parties) against the new Chavez bureaucracy that has supplanted the previous one. This antagonism, false as much as real vs. pretended exercise of power, sustained and amplified by the media, has benefited those who have cast themselves as legitimate voices of the sector of Venezuelan society they claim to represent.

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A Chinese journalist was freed in February after spending nearly 17 years in prison for splattering paint on a portrait of Mao during the 1989 pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square.

Yu Dongyue, now 38, and two friends, hurled eggs filled with red paint at the famous painting of Mao, which still stares at the Square from across the street. Yu and his family are expected to reunite in Hunan Province, but his younger brother said the family was deeply concerned about Yu’s mental health.

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“By banning the telephone from the home, Old Order Amish...try to maintain the primacy of communication within the context of community.”

--D.Z. Umble

“Church splits are bad, some things are worse, and one of them is to keep on compromising with something we know is sinful.”

--Anon., Separated Unto Christ (Old Order Mennonite tract, circa 1995)

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José Peirats, The CNT in the Spanish Revolution, published by The Meltzer Press (Vol. 1) and Christie Books (Vol. 2). They are essential reading.

Stuart Christie, We, The Anarchists, The Meltzer Press. A telling and thorough look at the FAI.

Much of our knowledge of the anarchist resistance to Franco comes from the work of Antonio Tellez and Miguel Garcia. All of the above publications are available from AK Press akpress.org and deserve close reading.

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US Marine Corp brig. Corpus Christi, Texas, 1964. “ON THE WALL! GET ON THE WALL, PRIDNER!” I had just been marched inside the sally port by two armed MP’s. The heavy barred gate slammed shut. My partner, Duke, was right behind me, flanked by two more MP’s.

“YOU DEAF, PRIDNER! I SAID--GET ON THE WALL!” Yellow handprints, greatly spaced, were spray-painted on the wall. Corresponding footprints, also widely-spaced, below me on the spit-shined sally port deck. I stared at the yellow prints on the deck. My face was rammed into the concrete bulkhead by one of the brig guards.

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Nothing can prepare you for New Orleans. All the dramatic rhetoric, righteous anger, extravagant allegory, profligate tears, and urgent broadcasts of need have not been wasted.

If some well-intentioned money has been squandered in a vortex of government and charity bureaucracy, all the love, prayer, intention, direct action, and indignation could not be better spent than on saving this amazing spiritual and cultural homeland.

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Paul Avrich (left) with Federico Arcos at Emma Goldman’s grave site, Waldheim Cemetery, Chicago, 1998. Photo: Julie Herrada

A beloved comrade and renowned scholar of 19^th and 20^th century anarchism passed away on February 17 at his home in New York City. Paul Avrich was author and editor of dozens of influential books and articles on the history of anarchism, including The Haymarket Tragedy; The Modern School Movement: Anarchism and Education in the United States; An American Anarchist: The Life of Voltairine de Cleyre; Anarchist Portraits; Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background, and Anarchist Voices: An Oral History of Anarchism in America.

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On December 7, the sudden arrest of six individuals rocked the activist community. All were accused of arsons claimed by the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) and/or Animal Liberation Front (ALF). Since then, the cases have taken many twists and turns: one of those arrested died in custody in an apparent suicide; six more activists were indicted (although three have not been apprehended); then, on January 20, a 65-count indictment against the remaining 11 arrestees blamed them for every major ELF action between 1996 and 2001, with a trial set for October 31. In February, two more activists were arrested and charged with some of the same arsons in Oregon.

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And, so we return to Spain. Nearly 70 years after the people’s response to a right-wing military uprising, those events remain a source of wonder, optimism, confusion, strife and tragedy. It was a high mark of personal and social possibility that has yet to be matched. It was a real revolution of everyday life that shattered the patterns and relationships created by the agencies that constituted a growing capitalism.

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