Full list of texts

WASHINGTON — (Liberation News Service) At least two, and perhaps three, American military men in the line of troops at the Pentagon took off their helmets, laid down their guns, and joined the demonstrators sitting in on the Pentagon steps, Saturday, October 21.

The fate of the demonstrators is unknown, since the Pentagon denies their existence. “There were no defectors. We have no AWOL’s; no one is missing,” stated a Defense Department press spokesman.

...

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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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As predictions for the eventual toll of the deadly AIDS disease grow higher, speculation as to the origin of the virus remain unanswered. Reports continue to surface that rather than a natural occurring new strain, the disease was a result of U.S. Army germ warfare research conducted at Fort Detrick, Maryland in the mid 1970s.

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Original poster by: SOCIAL WARFARE / WILDCAT, Room 37, 200 West 72^nd Street, New York, New York 10025 / USA

Panel 1: Drawing of an angry man.

Angry man: Work stinks!

Response, off: Well, you’re not the only one.

Panel 2: Two men in conversation

Man 1: When we fuck up on the job and steal from our boss, we begin to realize our own power.

...

Plymouth pigs went down in defeat in a frontal legal attack by Rolf Dietrich on December 18^th.

As reported earlier on these pages, the pigs of suburban Plymouth have hassled Dietrich from the beginning of the year when they first arrested him on a phony traffic charge and confiscated 15 copies of the Fifth Estate which he had on the back seat of his car. [See articles in FE Archive.]

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Digger O’Dell, world famous stunt man, will be buried in Detroit October 26^th, at 1 pm at 13505 Grand River east of Schaefer. Mr. O’Dell will be buried alive.

He will arrive on October 21 to begin construction of his concrete casket six feet beneath an abandoned gas station.

Digger estimates he has spent 6-1/2 of his 54 years buried in a self made grave and has been buried 93 times before. O’Dell, who earns his living either sitting on flagpoles or going to the other extreme of being buried alive, holds the present World Record of 78 days 20 minutes and 10 seconds for staying under six feet of dirt.

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The Crusader keeps wondering how long people are going to go on eating up images instead of music.

When a group comes to town all the hip people are here waiting to eat them up—which is as it should be—but even when the band isn’t making it musically or is just good, these people keep coming up and screaming about how out of sight they are or how the band is just blowing their minds.

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ANN ARBOR, Jan. 26—Euripides was so pissed after the Ann Arbor pigs busted the Performance Group’s performance of “Dionysus in ’69”—an updated and realistic version of his “Bacchae”—that the city was covered with a slick icy glaze for three days afterwards.

It all started when word leaked out that a nude performance was going to take place on the chaste floor of the Michigan Union Ballroom, as a part of the University of Michigan’s annual Creative Arts Festival.

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a review of

Direct Action: An Historical Novel by Luke Hauser

In Direct Action, Luke Hauser writes fiction so steeped in reality that he reproduces an era for us, with all of its excitement and frustrations.

Although the 1980s are generally thought of as a kind of dead zone for progressive activism, in the San Francisco Bay Area the early part of the decade was a time of fervent activism around nuclear issues.

...

On October 14 a bomb blast ripped apart a production building at the Litton Systems Canada Ltd. plant in Rexdale, Ontario, causing an estimated $5 million in damage. The group Direct Action claimed responsibility for the bombing, which also injured seven people.

Direct Action is apparently the same group that claimed responsibility for the bombing of power transformers on Vancouver Island in British Columbia (see FE #309, June 19, 1982, for Direct Action’s communique and our comments on it). This time, seven people were injured, due to the bomber’s mistakes and the apparent incompetence of Litton’s security personnel.

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Anarchist utopias are alive and well, not only in Chiapas or Rojava but also in the heart of capitalist Europe. In Germany, police repression and gentrification have dealt a decisive blow to traditional anarchist strongholds like Berlin, with numerous free spaces closed down since the pandemic started.

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Editor’s note: Last issue, we printed a review of Starhawk’s new book Webs of Power in the context of our spirituality feature. [See “The Spirit of Global Justice,” FE #359, Winter, 2002–2003.] The following piece comes from a post Starhawk made to an e-mail list devoted to discussing issues raised by that book. It offers a compelling critique of those elements in the peace and justice movement that seek to censor anger and conflict.

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a review of

Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer. Milkweed Editions, 2020 (original: 2013)

Don’t mistake the long lifespan on bestseller lists of Braiding Sweetgrass as something superficial. Certainly, Kimmerer’s excellent prose style attracts a broad range of readers. Yet the complexity of her ideas surely challenges those for whom nature equates to the landscape videos they capture on their smartphones.

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Neither the fire marshal nor the police have ever paid a visit to the Dirty Yeti. It’s a small house in Spokane, Wash. which has hosted shows for local bands and a variety of musicians and artists on tour, travelers from around the world, has been a kitchen and pantry for the local Food Not Bombs, and a zine publishing and workshop space alongside its rotating cast of permanent residents.

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a review of

There Plant Eyes: A Personal and Cultural History of Blindness by M. Leona Godin. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group 2021

More Than Meets the Eye: What Blindness Brings to Art by Georgina Kleege. Oxford University Press 2018

“I want freedom, the right to self expression, everybody’s right to beautiful, radiant things.”

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a review of

Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison by Michel Foucault. Trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977)

The book is now a Vintage paperback; the original French version was Surveiller et punir, Naissance de la prison (Paris: Gallimard, 1975)

Foucault insists that “delinquency, controlled illegality, is an agent for the illegality of the dominant groups” (p.279). Delinquency is a uniquely modern development, which first materialized in the nineteenth century. As Foucault delineates the process, tine Enlightenment reforms of the penal code and prison conditions were adapted to the new conditions of early industrial capitalism. Delinquency, then, is depoliticized crime, distinct from popular illegalities such as peasant uprisings, sans-culotte direct democracy, Luddism, strikes, insurrections and so on. The reformed penal code and the new criminal justice bureaucracy (police, courts, lawyers, prisons) created, in the nineteenth century, a circumscribed zone of illegality that was easily controlled and which posed no threat to the ruling class. On the contrary, delinquency became one of the principal modes by which the bourgeois regime maintained its legitimacy as a ruling class.

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Daily life has a new rhythm: routine disruptions. DPacing an accelerated news cycle and affective bursts from smart phone notifications, our subjective autonomous systems are increasingly synced up with crisis-state and techno security tempos.

We don’t know what the next surprise is going to be, but we know it’s coming.

...

WASHINGTON, Oct. 20 (AP) — Senator Stephen M. Young, Democrat from Ohio, said Thursday that he had learned that the Central Intelligence Agency hired persons to disguise as Vietcong and discredit Communists in Vietnam by committing atrocities.

The C.I.A. and Representative Cornelius E, Gallagher, Democrat of New Jersey, said it was not so.

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“Anti-Work and the Struggle for Control” in this issue [FE #309, June 19, 1982] continues John Zerzan’s work demonstrating the massive erosion of traditional American values, in this case centering on popular allegiance to the work ethic. Below is a rebuttal from Tim Luke, which appeared in Telos magazine No. 50 (Box 3111, St. Louis MO 63130, $5); this is followed by a reply from Zerzan and a comment by Bob Brubaker of the FE staff.

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In Raoul Vaneigem’s 1967 Situationist treatise, The Revolution of Everyday Life, he recounts what resulted from the flooding of the basement of Ivan Pavlov’s laboratory where the Russian physiologist kept his famous salivating dogs as experiments in classical conditioning.

It was a traumatic event for the dogs that had to struggle to live in the rising water. The ones who survived completely shed the conditioning Pavlov had worked so diligently to place in them.

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For too long we have gone on like sleepwalkers as the weapons of total extermination were manufactured and readied. Now it is becoming clear to even the most myopic that nuclear war threatens not only the present configurations of social and political relations, but all of life.

Such a war (which cannot even be described as a “war” if we are to maintain a sense of human proportion) would be an act of total, absolute destruction: destruction of human beings, destruction of human culture, destruction of the ecosphere. For all practical purposes nothing would survive the blast, the heat, the radiation and the destruction of the ozone layer, and all the intermingled secondary and tertiary effects of all-out nuclear confrontation.

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

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According to Time Magazine, prostitution has always been part of the American soldier’s life. It is a continuation of a grand tradition going back to the Crusades and extending through the vivandieres of World War I to the B-Girls called tea girls in Saigon today. After dysentery and other intestinal diseases had multiplied fourfold in four months and venereal disease had afflicted one-third of the 21,000 troopers of the U.S. first cavalry (Airmobile) in the small town of An Khe in the central highlands, the local commander acted. He made the town off limits. Prices, which the soldiers had forced up, and disease rates soon fell but, as Time puts it, “In March the first cases of ‘battle fatigue’ showed up.”

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Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue.

-- Oscar Wilde

...and then we go out and seize a square of singular symbolic significance and put our asses on the line to make it happen. The time has come to deploy this emerging stratagem against the greatest corrupter of our democracy: Wall Street, the financial Gomorrah of America.

-- From Adbusters (September/October 2011 issue)

We are not protesting. Who is there to protest to? What could we ask them for that they could grant? We are occupying. We are reclaiming those same spaces of public practice that have been commoded, privatized and locked into the hands of faceless bureaucracy, real estate portfolios and police ‘protection.’ Hold on to these spaces, nurture them and let the boundaries of your occupations grow.

-- Egyptian (Tahrir Square) Comrades

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A new book of oral histories edited by political prisoner Eric King and abolitionist Josh Davidson is now available for preorder through AK Press and Burning Books. Rattling the Cages: Oral Histories of North American Political Prisoners with a foreword by Angela Davis and an introduction by Sara Falconer is a fundraiser for, and a way to raise awareness of those imprisoned for politically motivated actions.

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On July 9, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis’s ruling New Democracy party pushed through an opportunistic law restricting public protest.

This is part of a larger assault on Exarchia, the Athens neighborhood that is home to autonomous anarchist projects, migrant communities, and self-managed squats.

...

Athens Neighborhood is Home to Anarchy

ATHENS — In February, The National Herald, a right-wing Greek newspaper based in the U.S., boasted, “Exarchia Anarchists will be Wiped Out.” For nearly fifty years, Exarchia, a neighborhood in central Athens, Greece has been an example of autonomous living.

The neighborhood, which is the site of a number of uprisings has achieved what anarchists long believed possible; a self-organized city within a city. For decades, police who entered would be immediately attacked and pushed out.

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In June 2001, 23-year-old forest defense activist Jeffrey “Free” Luers was sentenced to 22 years and 8 months in prison for a Eugene, Oregon arson. Free and his co-defendant Critter set fire to three Sport Utility Vehicles (SUV’s) at a local car dealership to raise awareness about global warming and the role that the gas-guzzlers play in the process. No one was hurt in this action nor was that their intent.

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The only time it’s legal to mask in town these days is Mardi Gras. In fact, an old law on the books predating this regime says it’s illegal to be in a parade and not mask. Meanwhile, the Icemen arrest anybody on a non-parade day who dares even to wear a head scarf like those Yemeni women I saw in my neighborhood until they fell under the ban and got shipped offshore.

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The Fifth Estate recently received a copy of “Divine Toad Sweat,” Church bulletin of the NeoAmerican Church, headquartered in Mt. Eden, California.

The Neo-American Church, although it does not employ set rituals, subscribes to three basic Principles. As stated in “Divine Toad Sweat” they are

“1) Everyone has the right to expand his consciousness and stimulate visionary experience by whatever means he considers desirable and proper without interference from anyone;

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NEW YORK (LNS)—The Army is planning a heavy vengeance for the June 5 rebellion of over 150 GIs imprisoned in the Ft. Dix stockade. [See “Army Stockades Blow,” FE #84, July 24-August 6, 1969.]

Apparently, 38 prisoners have already been hit with some kind of charge, or to declare the nature of the charges.

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WRIGHTSTOWN (LNS)—The GI movement at Ft. Dix is the largest and most advanced in the country, and this is due partly to the Coffeehouse for GIs in Wrightstown.

The organizing efforts of the Coffeehouse bring hundreds of GIs every week to relax, listen to music and talk about fighting imperialism, and they pulled off the first demonstration here when thousands of civilians invaded an Army base last Oct. 12.

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FIFTH ESTATE #384 Spring, 2011, Vol. 46, #1

Maybe the most persistent of all forms of external authority in our lives are the day-to-day tyrannies of specialists and experts. The Fifth Estate’s next issue investigates strategies of resistance to and liberation from this insidious system of technocratic mystification and domination with a look at the culture, ethics, and aesthetics of do-it-yourselfism.

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The New Physician, a national medical journal with a monthly circulation of over 60,000 physicians and medical students, has become the first major national medical journal to speak out in favor of the legalization of marijuana.

An editorial in the March 1969 issue entitled: “Pot: Hobby not Habit,” it was suggested that unless new medical evidence is unearthed to prove any ill effects from marijuana, then “marijuana should enjoy the same status as alcohol.”

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As a result of a pre-Christmas anti-war march the brass at Selfridge Air Force Base are trying to bring down a cloak of repression on GI activists.

The Detroit Coalition to End the War Now sponsored a candle light march on the evening of Dec. 23 in support of anti-war GIs and for an end to the war. Approximately 1,200 persons joined the parade in a driving snow storm that soon left almost all the participants with extinguished candles.

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MADISON, Wisc. (LNS)—Students and non-students in the University of Wisconsin community, responding to publicity which asked “Why don’t you do it in the road?”, found out why when they turned up for a block party on Saturday, May 3.

They were driven off the streets by police with clubs and gas in what led to three nights of fighting between cops and at least 1,000 young people on the tree-lined Madison streets.

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a review of

Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America by Virginia Delohn Anderson. Oxford University Press, 2006, 336 pp., $19.95

Civilization is a lie. Its images mask violence and its logic is that of genocide. Even the most banal scene of grazing cattle, while seemingly serene, portrays a weapon of war.

...

The hunter/gatherer school of anarcho-anthropology and the anarchist critique of Civilization (e.g., Perlman’s Leviathan) proposed the domestication of plants and animals as the first step toward separation and ultimately the State.

Sahlins posed the question: why would any sane free hunter/gatherers voluntarily take up the shit-work of the “primitive agriculturist” (or, by extension, pastoralist)?—the erosion of leisure, the impoverished diet, etc.? Given his premises, this unsolved puzzle hints at coercion and deprivation. With hindsight we see that domestication leads to misery. We assume it began that way.

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a review of

Shadow Work, Ivan Illich. Marion Boyers, Boston and London, 1981

“As progress and technology transform our way of life and our physical surroundings,” Lynne Clive writes [“Newspeak and the Impoverishment of Language,” FE #315, Winter, 1984], “they eat away at our language, enfeeble our spirit...” I would like to expand on this idea by making use of Ivan Illich’s insights discussed in his book Shadow Work, on language as one of the earliest areas of previous human competence—a cultural commons and focal point of shared meaning—to come under attack from church and state, and later from advancing technology and bureaucratic institutionalization. Illich argues that by undermining the “vernacular” domain in language, technics, and other areas of human activity, these forces of authority destroy self-sufficiency and freedom, making us all wards of the state and the disabling professional institutions.

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All donations for Marie Mason should be sent to

Support Marie Mason,

c/o Fifth Estate,

POB 201016,

Ferndale MI 48220.

Checks should be made out to Support Marie Mason.

Funds are used for her prison expenditures, plus support material such as t-shirts, leaflets and brochures to publicize the injustice of Marie’s sentence, provide travel stipends, and expenses for her pro bono lawyers.

...

This issue is dated Spring 2011 and follows our Summer 2010 number. It was intended for publication on November 1, but the tragic death of our friend and comrade, Don LaCoss, who was editing the issue, is the reason for our interruption in publishing.

Death’s scythe slices always cruelly, often unexpectedly, sweeping away those we cherish and need without regard for those left in grief. So it was with Don LaCoss, who succumbed on January 31 to complications from a respiratory illness he had been fighting for months.

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By working in secretarial jobs, at Ys, day care centers, and in other experimental ways, SDS hopes to do practical work in organizing women.

Besides these organizing collectives, the project will engage in intensive political study and research into Detroit. By the end of the summer the project will have trained a large number of people who can become sophisticated political cadre for -the organizing of a youth movement throughout Michigan as well as Detroit.

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a review of

Don’t Look Up, Dir: Adam McKay, 2021

Planet of the Humans Dir: Jeff Gibbs 2019

“You guys. The truth is way more depressing. They are not even smart enough to be as evil as you’re giving them credit for.”

—Kate Dibiasky (fictional astronomer in Don’t Look Up)

So, what to make of an unusual film about a streaking, earth-bound comet colliding with present-day distractions? Does it shake up the entertainment cycle only to disappear like a fairly close asteroid missing our orbital self-importance?

...

(from www.zmag.org)

Note: As we go to press, the jury in the “Judi Bari vs. the FBI” case is still deliberating. During the rally discussed below, the lawyers for the defendants filed a motion to dismiss the case because the protest might unfairly influence jurors against the FBI. The judge, however, rejected this motion. By the time you read this, the case has probably been decided. Visit judibari.org for the latest. Photo by unruLEE.

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CLEVELAND, July 26 (LNS)—The new penalty for filming the arrest of blacks on Cleveland’s East Side is possible broken ribs, multiple cuts and bruises and maybe a broken tooth, two NBC cameramen learned recently.

Cameraman Julius Boros was told by cops he was creating a “traffic hazard” by filming the arrest, which took place on East 105^th and Euclid Avenue. The cops smashed his camera and beat him with nightsticks; later at the station they threw lighted matches at him while he was being fingerprinted. He was charged with assault and battery.

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Don’t Vote—Piss in the Voting Booth

(back cover)

Another election, another opportunity to let someone else determine our lives. In modern capitalist society, the election of representatives has become an integral part of the general process of self-denial and self-repression standing at the center of modern life. It has become a prohibition to the real possibilities for self-realization. At root in bourgeois society—occurring fundamentally in creative human activity, in labor—is the phenomenon of alienation, an active process whereby human life and energy become crystallized in objects and institutions divorced from their creators and the creators become mere objects alien to themselves and available to be manipulated, dominated, controlled. This process is reproduced in the general life of bourgeois society and finds its political expression in electoral politics, in so-called “representative democracy”. Through the practice of voting we alienate the possibility for defining and administering our own lives by delivering this function to someone else. Electoral politics is an obstacle to both. And so we conclude that voting will get us nowhere. Don’t vote for reactionaries, don’t vote for liberals. They are all committed to the present state of affairs. Don’t vote for members of so-called Socialist or Communist Parties. They are charlatans incapable of a liberated vision of life. Don’t vote for fools, don’t vote for wisemen. Don’t vote for anyone. We can do it ourselves.

1. Poetry readings, mass meditation, flycasting exhibitions, demagogic yippie political arousal speeches, rock music, and song concerts will be held on a precise timetable throughout the week of August 25–30.

2. A dawn ass-washing ceremony with 10’s of 1000’s participating will occur each morning at 5:00 am as yippie revelers and protesters prepare for the 7:00 a.m. volley ball tournaments.

...

Reprinted from the San Francisco Express-Times

San Francisco—The American Medical Association’s report on the dangers of marijuana poses the issue in the lingo of narcotics police, not in scientific or humanitarian language, according to Dr. Joel Fort.

Moreover, the media made a bad report worse by paying so little attention to its constructive recommendations the lifting of criminal penalties against occasional users, and the loosening of federal controls restricting research on marijuana.

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Local folk singers David and Roselyn are the focal point of a campaign to raise $6,000 by August 15. David and Roselyn, who provided the music for Tom and Kate’s wedding and played at their reception (see last issue, FE #58, July 18–31, 1968) were from Houston, Texas. The trial for the inter-racial couple will be in Houston on August 16, and they are without money for a lawyer.

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The misanthropic and dystopian speculative-fiction writer J.G. Ballard once mused that the two most important inventions of the Twentieth Century were the aircraft ejection seat and the birth-control pill.

He never explained what he meant by this, but I suspect that he was pointing out how technologies of escape have profoundly shaped the direction of this civilization’s history. Both devices are used to limit the extent of the physical repercussions inherent in certain kinds of risky behavior--they’re safety nets developed in the last century that let people get away with taking big, stupid chances, whether it is piloting a fighter plane deep into enemy territory or falling into bed with someone of the opposite sex who you never want to see again.

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Although unions have long been identified by left revolutionaries as auxiliary organs of capital whose function is to regulate the sale of their members’ labor power, the myth still persists that they are “defense organs of the working class.” Even those who see no revolutionary potential for unions claim that at least unions have been responsible for a steady rise in workers’ income. John Zerzan attacks this thesis as being untrue and severs the last rationalization for their support. Revolutionary organization of workers will take place outside of the union structure.

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The anti-napalm protest scheduled in Midland, Mich., national headquarters of Dow Chemical Corp., for Aug. 7 and 8 will include participants from all across Michigan and northern Ohio and parts of Canada. The region wide action has been called by VOICE, the University of Michigan chapter of Students for a Democratic Society. The demonstration planned in New York on Hiroshima Day, Aug. 6, by the 5^th Avenue Peace Parade Committee, will culminate in a rally in front of the Dow Chemical offices at Rockefeller Plaza. Dow is a major supplier of napalm to the government and has been responsible for developing napalm-B, a deadlier variety. (“Napalm has been used to bomb Vietnamese villages during the war. The jelly-like substance sticks to whatever it touches and burns with such heat that all oxygen in the immediate area is quickly exhausted” (N.Y. Times, May 29, 1966). Protests have been held at napalm plants in Torrance, California, and Redwood City, California. A nationwide boycott of Dow’s domestic products is also being organized. The new kind of napalm which Dow has developed contains 50% polystyrene, which Dow makes. CHEM. & ENG. NEWS recently reported that, “Predictions of future use of polystyrene in napalm-B now are running as high as 25 million pounds a month.” This is a 50% increase in the production of polystyrene, a fact which has led to the building of new plants. Dow has also raised the price of its product. So that it is no surprise when it is reported that sales and profits for Dow Chemical “were higher than in any quarter of any prior year. (Det. News, July 21, 1966).

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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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Set in the red light district of Athens, Greece in the late 1980s, Cara Hoffman’s cult classic novel, Nike, is about getting by at the periphery. It chronicles the lives of a group of young expatriates from a global culture of war.

In this scene Maya Brennan, who has been raised on military bases throughout the US, and has sold her passport to finance her travels, uses the cultural capital of her upbringing to get the document re-issued. NIKE reveals a world where freelance military contractors, small-time traffickers, and refugees from the superficial materialism of the Reagan/Bush era surf undetected on the crest of a wave that was about to break in an era of perpetual military engagement.

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Eldridge Cleaver has a rap about how immigration screwed up the unity of the American working class. How the English immigrants came and kicked the Indians off the land and then had to import black people to do the work, so that the Indians and blacks were always at the bottom of the heap. And then how later the Germans, French, Polish, Italians and Irish made the scene, each group starting at the bottom of the white job market and clawing its way up, only when the next immigrant group arrived and was forced into the shittiest jobs.

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Atlanta—On Saturday, August 12, a crowd of 175 supporters and newsmen gathered at Atlanta’s Piedmont Park to watch 25 Atlanta students and workers take off and burn their Levi pants.

The “burn-in,” sponsored by the Southern Labor Action Movement (SLAM), marked the kickoff of a nation-wide boycott of all Levi Straus products. The boycott is being organized in support of the 400 workers now on strike at Levi Straus’ Blue Ridge, Georgia plant.

...

The Fifth Estate talked recently with Dr. Abram Hoffer, Director of Psychiatric Research at University Hospital, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada. Dr. Hoffer was one of the first legitimate scientists to become involved in research with the controversial drug LSD. In hopes of cutting through the hysteria currently clouding the use of the drug, The Fifth Estate discussed the problem, its origins and the prospects for the future with Dr. Hoffer.

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Burning draft cards in NYC 1967

Bruce Dancis’ book Resister: A Story of Protest and Prison (Cornell Press, 2014) chronicles his efforts during the Vietnam War to defy the draft and cripple the U.S. war effort.

Fifth Estate: You tore up your draft card and then led a mass burning of them in 1967.

Bruce Dancis: Very few people wanted to fight in the Vietnam War, even those who supported it. There were 27 million draft age men and 25 million didn’t go into the army.

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Demonstrators on the steps of the “Defense” Dept. during the March 22, 1980 Washington DC rally against the draft and war.

When bullet-headed Selective Service Director Bernard D. Rostker looked sternly into the TV cameras last July and predicted that all but 2% of the nation’s 19- and 20-year-old men would comply with the scheduled draft registration his self-confidence was chilling. It was easy to believe that a generation of youth untouched by the protests of the ’60’s and ’70’s and raised on the Fonz and skateboards would march dutifully off to their local Post Office to become willing parts of the state military machine.

...

The draft law (Universal Military Service and Training Act) will expire in July of this year. Because this country is supposedly run democratically, there will be debate on the renewal of the bill in Congress. Because there is a war being waged in Viet Nam, the flow of men to Southeast Asia will not be hampered.

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More than a thousand people opposed to the draft met here in Detroit the weekend of February 12 to 15 at a conference called as a planning and organizing session by the National Committee Against Registration and the Draft (NCARD). The entire conference, from the Friday night pep rally at which a bevy of socialist and liberal politicians and labor bureaucrats spoke, to the workshops, and plenary sessions characterized by leftist block voting, caucuses and maneuvering, produced an eerie sensation of traveling back into the 1960s to one of the Student Mobilization conferences of that era. Every little political group, from the “support Albania” political bizarros to the laissez faire “student libertarians,” maintained a literature table in one salon which appeared to be a sort of political shopping mall, and one had to shoo away the newspaper salesmen like flies,

...

The draft resistance movement in Detroit, which until now has operated underground, has surfaced with the opening of the Draft Resistance Center at 12820 Hamilton at Glendale.

The storefront office, rented by the Draft Resistance Committee and the Draft Committee of the Vietnam Summer Project, will serve primarily as the headquarters for their joint organizing project among draft age young men in Highland Park.

...

Each in its own way, the Draft Resistance Committee and the Highland Park Police Department both celebrated Anti-Draft Week, a week of intensive protest against the Vietnam war and the Selective Service System.

The new Detroit draft resistance movement attempted to communicate to the public through any means possible the discontent and resentment of young men being drafted to die in somebody else’s war in Vietnam.

...

Thirty-five people from the DCEWV picketed at the Detroit Stock Exchange, Thursday, May 19, protesting the fact that the war in Vietnam, although in the interest of certain American corporations making skyrocket profits from war production, benefits neither the Vietnamese people nor the GIs who are sent to Vietnam to kill and be killed.

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[two_third padding=“0 20px 0 0”]The reinstitution of the military draft is practically a foregone conclusion according to many observers. All that is needed is the official go-ahead from Congress to set the wheels in motion.

The October 1982 government exercise dubbed “Operation Proud Saber” proved that all is in a state of readiness. Draft boards have been trained and are ready to open; rules and regulations are up to date; and military reservists are ready to serve as temporary staff at induction centers across the country. The Selective Service System (SS) awaits only Congressional approval to begin calling up young men.

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An ad in the July 15–30 Fifth Estate calling for unknown playwrights and aspiring actors to help rejuvenate the American stage has blossomed into the Detroit Drama Workshop. First performance... two original one-act plays—Joan Feret’s “The Nightmare” and Sam Cohen’s “The Library Room.” Dates are September 14, 15, 16 and 21, 22, 23 at 616 West Hancock.

...

a review of

The Nation on No Map: Black Anarchism and Abolition by William C. Anderson, Saidiya Hartman (Foreword), Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin (Afterword). AK Press 2021

As a Black diasporic female academic and activist, it isn’t so easy to encounter the intersectionality of the struggles I encounter reflected in many academic or anarchist discussions.

...

Dear Dr. Hypocrisy,

My boyfriend just got over a “dose” of Trotskyism. He says he is “safe” to begin relations again, but I’m worried. What do you think?

Livonia Libertarian

I get lots of letters like this and it never ceases to amaze me how ignorant many people are of the dangers of social diseases.

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

Dear Dr. Schoenfeld,

A couple of weeks ago my girlfriend and I got loaded and were making love. She told me that she wanted to show me something new that would be a real thrill to me. She said that one of her old boy friends liked to have her do it to him often, so without knowing what it was, I agreed to let her try it.

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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: Can long continued use of spray deodorants cause cancer of the armpits?

ANSWER: At first, I thought your letter was a put-on. In fact, that might have been your intention but, nevertheless, you raise an interesting question. Certainly there has been no epidemic of cancer of the axilla or armpit. But spray deodorants have not been in use for very long. Cigarette smoking causes cancer of the lungs but it takes about 20 years for it to develop. We don’t yet have 20 years experience with spray deodorants.

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

arf! arf!

QUESTION: My wife and I think it might be interesting for her to have intercourse, perhaps regularly, with a German Shepherd dog. We have not experimented, however, because we are afraid of weird diseases that we might get. What’s the deal?

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

EDITOR’S NOTE: The following column will be a regular Fifth Estate feature. It is published regularly in our sister Underground Press Syndicate paper, The Berkeley Barb. Dr. Schoenfeld is a legitimate medical doctor and all of the questions he answers are authentic ones sent to him by readers of the UPS papers that syndicate his column. Your questions are welcome and may be sent to Dr. Schoenfeld at the Fifth Estate, 1107 W. Warren, Detroit, Michigan.

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Note: FE staffer Walker Lane interviewed Billy Bragg, the English singer/songwriter, when he played a 1998 Labor Day benefit for striking Detroit newspaper workers.

Lane: Rumor has it you once drank a glass of beer containing the ashes of the famous Wobbly songwriter, Joe Hill.

Bragg: It’s true, actually. Joe Hill was executed by the state of Utah in 1915 after a frame-up trial. When he died, he was cremated, and they had asked him where he wanted to be buried. He answered, “Anywhere but in Utah,” where he had been executed by a firing squad. So, what the Wobblies decided to do was to send his ashes to every union branch in the United States. They put them in little packets and mailed them out.

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A July 13, 2012 New York Times article, “That’s No Phone. That’s My Tracker,” by Peter Maass, suggests that we should consider smartphones, computers, and other connected devices as tracking machines rather than appliances of personal convenience.

The manufacturers of these now ubiquitous gadgets claim that aggregating data about individuals favors the consumer, so when you visit a web page, it might display ads relevant to your tastes and needs. But it’s widely speculated that far more sinister use is made of this information--that the government enjoys a cozy relationship with the private data gatherers, that information can and will be used against us, and/ or to the advantage of the military-industrial complex.

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The recent clamor by employers for mandatory drug testing of workers threatens to add yet another humiliating dimension to wage labor. Both private and governmental concerns have expressed strong support for the idea, and it was recently given a boost by a report from the President’s Commission on Organized Crime which recommended a national program which would subject most working Americans to urinalysis tests.

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Ron March, DRUM leader, addresses workers outside of Dodge Main. Photo: G. Simmons.

A group of militant black workers have begun to organize at a Detroit auto plant and have thrown both the union and the company into a near panic. It is called the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM) and is located at the Hamtramck Assembly plant, also known as Dodge Main.

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NEW YORK — Melvin L. Wulf, an ACLU Legal Director has announced that a brief was filed on August 18 challenging the right of US Attorney General Katzenbach to force the W.E.B. Du Bois Clubs to register with the Subversive Activities Control Board as a “Communist-front organization” under the 1950 Subversive Activities Control Act.

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On Thursday, January 23, 1969, the Metropolitan Detroit Branch of the American Civil Liberties Union will present a film, “The Seasons Change,” and a panel discussion on the events which occurred in Chicago during the Democratic Party Convention.

“The Seasons Change” is a one-hour film in response to the City of Chicago and Mayor Daley’s “What Trees Do They Plant?”, which was carried on many TV stations some months ago.

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reviewed in this article

The Net: The Unabomber, LSD, and the Internet by Lutz Dammbeck

Other Cinema, San Francisco, 2003

www.othercinemadvd.com/net.html

“Facts sometimes have a strange and bizarre power that makes their inherent truth seem unbelievable.”

--Werner Herzog, filmmaker.

“Truth is the invention of a liar.”

--Heinz von Foerster, cybernetician.

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Earth Day supplement page 1

If there was ever a need for an “Earth Day,” “Earth Week,” or “Earth Year” “to get people thinking creatively about the problems we now confront, and looking for new ways to tackle them,” in the words of Earth Day 1970 organizer (and Earth Day 1990 CEO) Denis Hayes, now is certainly the time.

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If there was ever a need for an “Earth Day,” “Earth Week,” or “Earth Year” “to get people thinking creatively about the problems we now confront, and looking for new ways to tackle them,” in the words of Earth Day 1970 organizer (and Earth Day 1990™ CEO) Denis Hayes; now is certainly the time.

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Fifth Estate Note: In “Earth Culture-Earth Diet” author William H. Koethke chronicles the life and culture of the inhabitants along New Mexico’s San Francisco River watershed over a millennium up to the present time. At the time he wrote the article William lived in the area described, but has since become a member of the consensus community of Breitenbush Hot Springs in Detroit, Oregon. He recently was arrested for blockading logging crews trying to cut the last remnant of undamaged old growth forest near his community.

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Fifth Estate note: The 12^th annual Earth First! Round River Rendezvous (RRR) was held in Colorado’s San Juan National Forest, June 28-July 5, with a direct action against an Amoco Corp. facility immediately after it.

Lone Wolf Circles, a long-time EF! activist, contributes the following report of the RRR and his impressions of it.

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Wow! I thought, look at all that color! Can it really be the Earth First! Journal? They pulled out all the stops creating this collage of Earth First! art, poetry, history and personal reminiscences of radical eco-warriors over the past 40 years!

It’s been a long while since there’s been an issue of the Journal chronicling the actions and campaigns of what the powers-that-be love to label eco-terrorism, but so many others see simply as a fight to save life on Earth!

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Earth First! is dead! Long live Earth First!

The irreconcilable differences within the dispute-plagued, radical environmental group finally led to what one of its founders, Dave Foreman, who is often at the center of the controversies, has long called for—a “no-fault divorce.” Although there is much behind-the-scenes acrimony among the leading figures on all sides, the public stance has been that each should go in peace and continue defending the environment in their own way.

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a review of

Earth House Hold by Gary Snyder, New Directions Paperback, 143 pp., $1.95

Liberation News Service — Gary Snyder spoke at a Berkeley teach-in on ecology and politics recently. It was the end of a long afternoon, at the end of two very long weeks, and most of the students had gone on about their business, but those who stayed found their poet.

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Note: The Hog Farm is an apolitical commune which has set up shop in New Mexico. A few innovators who had been involved in People’s Park and Woodstock got together with the Hog Farm and kindred spirits and have recently come up with a groovy idea—why not stake out an “Earth People’s Park” in some vast wilderness territory, move in about 20,000 of the beautiful people, and live together in love and harmony, taking good care of each other and the natural environment. The Earth People’s Park developers are trying to collect $1 million to buy about 100,000 acres in New Mexico on which to settle their 20,000 people. Twenty thousand who are not Mexican, not Spanish-speaking, not Indian. Ecology-minded people really dig the idea. Those who can’t stand the rat-race of city life, those who feel they’ve struggled long enough and want to drop out, those who feel they could somehow build a better life away from the repression of the cities, groove on the idea. The Governor of New Mexico, reassured that the Earth People plan to “obey all the laws of the state,” grooves on the idea. The Chicano and Latino and Indian people of New Mexico don’t groove on the idea at all. The following article is from El Grito del Norte, the Chicano paper that comes out of Espanola, N.M. It explains the position of the people who already live on the land that the Earth People want to buy. Earth People’s Park has a mailing address at 1230 Grant Ave., Box 313, San Francisco, Calif 94113, where they expect to receive donations. People might want to write to them to tell them what they think of the idea of setting up their “liberated zone” in an area already brutally “liberated” from its original inhabitants. ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ The basic message is: PLEASE DON’T COME! At least not now. Stop and think about a few things that you may not have heard about or thought about. Think about the fact that, much as you reject your middle class Anglo society and its values, you are still seen here as gringos. Anglos. Think about the 120-year old struggle by Chicanos and the even older struggle by Indians to get back millions of acres of land stolen from them by Anglo ranchers with their Anglo lawyer buddies. Think about what it means for a new influx of Anglos—no matter how different their purpose from those others—to come in and buy up land that the local people feel to be theirs and cannot afford to buy themselves. Think about the fact that a real estate agent in Taos reports having sold almost $500,000 worth of land to longhairs. Think, on the other hand, about how people have sometimes reacted to hippies who get welfare payments and food stamps. Even though this takes nothing away from poor Raza people, they have felt resentment. It seems like a false identification, when the hippies involved can get money from home or a decent job if necessary. Think about the water problem. Longhairs usually come from the big city, not knowing that water is precious and often hard to get. They see a stream and wash their feet or dishes in it. Hey! That’s our drinking water. We are used to being abused, ignored, scorned—but that’s too much. Think about not only the land and water, but also the culture. Longhairs come, often deliberately unwashed and ungroomed in their rebellion against a sterile, hypocritical middle-class society. They don’t see that, for the Spanish-speaking people, cleanliness is a weapon of cultural self-defense against the oppressor. It is not a symbol of hypocrisy but part of the little pride and self-respect left to them, preciously guarded. So is conventional morality: the tight-knit family is everywhere a source of strength and unity against a hostile environment. Longhair values might sometimes be better—but they cannot be imposed. Especially when you are not joining the struggle of the people against the oppression which is the source of many Raza values. Think about the educational advantages that you often have—whether you wanted to have them or not. You can come here and start a little business, and you will often succeed where Raza people fail (or would not even try). “Son muy vivo.” Raza people say—the hippies are very bright. It is often true, it is not your “fault,” but it is important to remember how many millions of times the Anglo’s education and technology helped to make him a successful oppressor. If you say, “I’ve come to learn from the people,” excuse us if we sometimes remember: that’s what the Anglos said when they came to Sierra Nevada, learned from us how to mine—and then drove us out, even murdered us. Think about yourself, and just how clear you are about rejecting your own society’s values. Recent events here have shown that, when things get heavy, the longhairs sometimes act very much like the society they have fled. When a hippie woman in Taos was raped by a Chicano youth (because the Chicanos don’t understand free women and because they have been taught not to see hippies as human beings) the longhaired men called the cops—THE COPS! In another case, the longhair went out and shot the Chicano dead for supposedly raping “his” woman. And he got off, with a hung jury. Think about this: the longhair has opted out. Most of the Chicanos and Indians have no option—except revolution. People here cannot flee to islands of peace in their nation of horrors, this is their nation. It cannot be said too often that there is a long, hard political and economic struggle in these beautiful mountains, a struggle for land and justice. That struggle calls for fighters and supporters, not refugees with their own set of problems. You may see the scenery as relief from an oppressive America. We see a battleground against oppression. You (rightly) condemn your own society, your own culture strongly, but why not go where it is, and change it? And if your answer to that is “I can’t” or “I won’t” then think about what this answer implies—and whether you are then a person needed by people here, who can be useful here. Now, finally, please think about this: if you must come, wait a while. Wait until things cool off for longhairs, wait until the speed freaks have hopefully left, wait until the longhairs who are already here can develop a better climate—if they can. While you wait, READ and LEARN about this part of the country. Read what has been done to the people here by the white man; find out why they see Kit Carson and those other frontier types as murderers—not heroes; find out what the U.S. Forest Service and Smokey the Bear represent here. Don’t just put on long skirts and beads, and think you understand “the Indians;” too many rich tourist ladies do that too: Learn Spanish, learn about the every day culture, hang around some poor Spanish-speaking families. Learn about the tradition of courtesy, and why you must not presume on it. Learn some humility; look in yourself for unconscious arrogance and selfishness. Ask yourself, what do I know? Do you know how many Mexican-Americans there are in this country? Do you know that, in terms of education and jobs, they are worse off even than the blacks? Can you imagine what it is to speak one language as a child and then suddenly be dumped into a classroom where another is enforced on you—and fall behind in class, then be told you are stupid? Can you see the difference between being poor and being without money? Can you go to a demonstration by poor people and let them run it their way, and not impose your style as did some longhairs in Santa Fe recently? Can you show respect for another people’s culture and not be disrespectful simply because that’s the way you feel toward your own culture. Can you in other words, do some hard thinking? If you think, you won’t come. Not now. And when you come, come as a revolutionary.

Continuation of a review: The Population Bomb, by Paul R. Ehrlich, Ballantine, 223 pp., 95 cents paper.

[For Part I see “Earth Read-Out,” FE #86, August 21-September 3, 1969].

Ehrlich says: “A general answer to the question, ‘What needs to be done?’ is simple. We must rapidly bring the world population under control, reducing the growth rate to zero or making it go negative. Conscious regulation of human numbers must be achieved. Simultaneously we must, at least temporarily, greatly increase our food production.

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a review of

The Population Bomb, by Paul R. Ehrlich, Ballantine, 223 pp., $.95, paper.

Ehrlich tries to reach a broad public in this book—but he’s not coy or campy.

He knows there’s no longer time for that.

His first words are: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergo famines—hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs -embarked upon now...

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BERKELEY—About 2,000 persons attended—off and on—a six hour teach-in on “Ecology and Politics in America” May 28 at the U-C Berkeley campus.

The idea was to relate the People’s Park issue to broader questions of planetary survival.

A lot of language under a hot sun—but hopefully the thing will get made into a book to help people past the old politics and into a root politics of ecology.

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The idea of getting a lot of great musicians together to work as a back-up band for a featured artist on rock recordings is almost as old as rock itself.

On most of these, the back-up people were lucky to get mentioned conspicuously on the album jacket. But somewhere along the line people began to really care about who played what.

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It was probably something I had coming for a long time, but it really caught me by surprise when it happened. After all I don’t write these pieces because I get paid for them. I do it because it gets me some free records, gets me into the clubs for free, and a few other fringe benefits. Or so I thought.

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The on again-off again break up of the Red, White and Blues Band is On-again-off again. After the original guitarist-harpist quit, he was replaced by two people, a singer-harpist and a lead player who never really worked out.

It was announced that the group was breaking up for good, then that they would just replace the singer and the guitarist with two new people. But bigger things were in the air, and now, it seems, piano player Skip has left the group to join the Wilson Mower Pursuit.

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While local music business people continue to hype the Detroit scene as a major center of the pop world the scene itself continues to deteriorate and no one seems to care enough about it to do anything constructive.

Quite the contrary, the trend seems to be toward copying all the mistakes that have been made in every other “major music center” in order to exploit every last nickel to be had from the people.

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The thought of hearing any music played in Olympia Stadium is distressing. There is no acoustical ceiling on the arena and the bare rafters not only echo much of the sound, but also distort it or often trap it. Also, setting up the stage at one end of the narrow stadium makes it difficult, if not impossible to clearly see what’s going on.

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East Detroit High School was the scene Jan. 10 of a student sit-in protesting school policies there.

The action involved some 450 students and had demands ranging from dress and hair regulations and money wasted on “hall mothers” who patrol the school’s halls to a general demand for a student veto on school policies.

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(The Sunday News supplement)

Caption: The feet that once walked the Sea of Galilee here protrude from the mud, still showing the nail scars from the crucifixion.

JERUSALEM--UPI-- The Christian Faith lies in ruins today as the central myth of the world-wide religion--the Resurrection of Christ-- was shattered by the discovery of a 2,000 year-old corpse and its positive identification as that of Jesus of Nazareth.

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YPSILANTI, Feb. 20 — On this cold Thursday morning over 100 black students seized the administration building of Eastern Michigan University and chained themselves inside.

Students massing on Eastern Michigan campus to support demands of black students.

After a one hour occupation approximately 100 riot-equipped Washtenaw County sheriff’s deputies sawed their way into the occupied building and busted the “leaders” of the demonstration. A list of people to be arrested had been drawn up by the university president the night before.

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On Tuesday, May 3, 1966. Thomas L. Baker, a 16 year old black youth was shot and wounded while entering the office of the Afro-American Youth Movement (A.A.Y.M.), formerly known as the Adult Community Movement for Equality, at 9211 Kercheval on Detroit’s East Side.

This incident is only one of a long series of violent acts directed at the A.A.Y.M., as well as A.C.M.E. The A.A.Y.M. has been in existence for approximately three months. In that time, burning rags have been thrown through the rear office window, a bomb has been tossed through the front window, and a shotgun blast at the office in the middle of the night.

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a review of

Ukraine & the Empire of Capital: From Marketisation to Armed Conflict by Yuliya Yurchenko. Pluto Press, 2018

This book was written four years before Russia massively invaded Ukraine, but is in some ways even more relevant now.

Yurchenko is a democratic socialist, yet takes a more rigorous neither/nor position regarding Russia and the West than some figures associated with the Western anarchist left, such as Noam Chomsky.

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