Full list of texts

“Sous les paves, la plage!” [Under the paving stones, the beach!]

—Revolutionary slogan; Paris 1968

1968 was an “Anything Can Happen” kind of year.

It was the year of the Prague Spring, the Tet Offensive, President LBJ’s abdication, massive student protests, the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy, the police riots at the Chicago Democratic Convention. The most historically momentous occurrence of that year was the May June uprising and general strike by students and workers in France.

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Charles Reeve has raised a number of important questions in his critique of John Zerzan’s “Unions Against Revolution.” [See The “Revolt Against Work” or Fight for the Right to be Lazy (FE 279, December, 1976).] These questions should not be tossed out of the window, nor should they be viewed as the only or most important questions which can be raised. For the moment, I would like to probe certain areas, in the hope that others will go even further in their considerations—or take issue with mine.

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a review of

Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, Harper & Row, New York, 1980, 600 pages plus index.

Howard Zinn is a “radical revolutionary,” whose People’s History is aptly named given its kinship with the various “Peoples Republics.” In fact, this “wild” book was conceived as a means of slaking Zinn’s “thirst for notoriety in the pecking order of the radical left,” as well as for the enrichment of himself and Harper & Row. So saith the reviewer for Barron’s [1] the financiers’ weekly.

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

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

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We catch ourselves reading the Book of Revelation because we cannot face the failure of the revolution. We consult the Mayan calendar and post-modern prophecies about the year 2012 because we can no longer realize mutual aid as an interpersonal policy that suffuses all of daily life.

The prevailing critique of all forms of “collapsism”--the notion that the end is both inevitable and imminent coupled with the subsequent idea that all radical acts for present transformation are thus futile--correctly chides its proponents. The latter half of the formulation finds collapsist rhetoric contributing to the contagion of apathy; this apathy then acts as a mental pesticide, drowning and choking the roots of resistance deep inside the collective consciousness of our culture. But if we are so brash as to suggest we break apart the collapsist formula, decoupling our acceptance of the inevitable from our subsequent sense of defeat, then all things are possible. It really is a go-for-broke moment, then, when we realize that tomorrow is in fact today. But why don’t our actions reflect this?

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Descending on Detroit from all parts of the nation and the globe, nearly 150 people attended the Anarchist People of Color Conference from October 3 to 5. Anarchists and anti-authoritarians drove over 20 hours from Texas, flew in from Seattle and rode the rails from the Northeast. Over a dozen activists from Canada made their way across the border, while others hailed from Brazil, Colombia, Bhutan, Jamaica and Korea.

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

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

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The court-martials for the three GIs who have refused to go to Vietnam began on September 6. All three were convicted—Pvt. David Samas and Pfc. James Johnson to five years at hard labor, forfeiture of pay and dishonorable discharges, and Pvt. Dennis Mora to three years at hard labor—and appeals are now being prepared by lawyer Stanley Faulkner. Each of the three were tried by a different trial panel of 10 officers, all of whom reached verdicts in less than a half hour.

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Moving from ideas to action has always been central to the anarchist project. Our work has long been inspired by visions of a transformed world, one in which prevailing institutions and relationships are overturned to create more liberatory ways of living and relating to each other.

Yet powerful forces stand in our way. Not only the entrenched ruling order with its vast resources including its repressive apparatus and cultural spectacle, but perhaps even more of a bulwark against change, a deeply ingrained mass culture of submission to authority which generates a fear of living liberated lives.

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FE Note: The police have always done surveillance of revolutionaries. What is new now is the technological capabilities of government snoops. Being noted on paper 3X5 cards didn’t stop our predecessors, and their electronic gadgets won’t deter us.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation defends civil liberties in the digital world. Founded in 1990, the San Francisco-based EFF states that it “champions user privacy, free expression, and innovation through impact litigation, policy analysis, grassroots activism, and technology development.”

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Dear Fifth Estate People,

I read your paper and like some of it. It is a little boring most of the time but except for that it is exciting.

Still you are the only ones who care. No one else minds kissing the ass of whoever happens to own them momentarily.

I never wrote much before, being a garbageman and part-time used Groucho Marx pubic hair salesman, but I hope you are unimpressed enough with everything else (or enough of everything else) to print this.

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Kathleen Hanna is a musician, zine writer, and feminist activist who was at the heart of the riot grrrl movement of the 1990s. This conversation between Ms. Hanna and Don LaCoss unfolded over a couple weeks in June 2010.

Fifth Estate: Is it an exaggeration to say that DIY culture helped to launch and sustain the riot grrrl movement?

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The accusation calling primitivists gleeful beckoners of “the collapse,” or misanthropic proto-nazis, reflects a clear misinterpretation of most primitivist writing, and even more primitivist practice. Few who generally agree with the primitivist analysis of the origins of civilization, if any at all, envision “industrial collapse” as some sort of political strategy. In one sense, collapse can definitely be seen as nature’s reaction to the pushing of ecological limits by industrial economies, but this perspective is not a value-based judgment. This possibility is but an observation of the predictable nature of wildness to do whatever it must to maintain ecological equilibrium.

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-- Stephen Goodfellow

Wilhelm Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism (MPF) was written in 1933, at the peak of Hitler’s rise to power. The book is, most immediately, an attempt to explain the victory of the Nazis, at a time when economic hardship in Germany should have provoked a turn to the Left.

More fundamentally, as Reich writes in MPF, it is an effort to diagnose the fascist phenomenon, not as a trend of national politics, but, as “the basic emotional attitude of man in authoritarian society, with its machine civilization and its mechanistic-mystical view of life.”

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a review of

Architecture and Anarchism: Building Without Authority by Paul Dobraszczyk. Paul Holberton Publishing 2021

To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. To a state, every human activity looks like it needs to be pounded into the correct, pre-planned shape. State authorities always claim their social engineering schemes will raise living standards and promote the general happiness. No surprise, their plans do not always work.

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In my personal experience, the simultaneous transition from Christianity to atheism, and from conservative statism to anti-authoritarianism, had ontological shifts to non-belief as their catalyst.

I have come to see belief in any political ideology as having essentially the same religious quality as belief in any religious system. Both, it seems to me, inhibit learning and the progression of becoming which prevent individuals and societies from growing beyond the confines of ideology and dogma.

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My country’s red, long so I was told

Victories, a star glows

Flag crimson, glorious so

Vanguard leads, the people follow.

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Red in sight, we have traded lives

Beat armies, lay siege to empires.

Red in mind, we have triumphed fights

Bathed rivals in blood and plight.

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Why today I see but grey

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In response to “The Collapse in Poland” by Rudy Perkins in this issue (FE #309, June 19, 1982).

A Movement Which is “Represented” is Unfree.

When I hear the term “seizure of power,” my flesh crawls. It is a hideous term originating in the Marxist-Leninist movement and produces images of police round-ups and the gulag; it is the code word for counterrevolution. It is a thoroughly inappropriate concept for those who believe in human freedom and one best left to those whose only program is the elevation of the police to complete political power, i.e., socialists and communists.

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No comment can be made about the writings and ideas of Andy Smith without first recognizing the enormous contributions he made to the Fifth Estate for almost twenty years. During the first years of the century he and his comrades in Tennessee were the mainstay of this publication, and it is easy to say, that without his stewardship during that era, this magazine probably wouldn’t exist today. Perhaps his greatest accomplishment was our 40^th anniversary edition which at 102 pages, tracing our intense history beginning in 1965, was the largest and most colorful issue we’ve published. Long thought to be out of print, we recently discovered a cache of them and now have it available again.

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a review of Dancing at Armageddon by Richard G. Mitchell (University of Chicago Press, 2002)

In sociologist Richard G. Mitchell’s Dancing at Armageddon (University of Chicago Press, 2002) we meet Zillah, dressed in home-patched camouflage, who has come to a weekend retreat with a sheaf of photocopied fliers detailing her vision of localized radical democracy. Sound like a familiar character? Well, you’ll never find Zillah at an infoshop or an anti-WTO action. She’s on a different FBI list: not an “anarchist” but a “survivalist,” and hence a subject for Mitchell, whose book is subtitled Survivalism and Chaos in Modern Times.

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“We might as well leave, Fred.”

Not many of us are fortunate enuf to have parents like the above.

For a book directed at (against) the establishment & the reaction, Tuli Kupferberg is seeking info about young people with ideas radically different from their families: case histories of the generation gap. For example: at the last great Pentagon demo, the daughter of Gen. Hershey’s first assistant was arrested. “A colonel’s son was arrested in Lawrence, Kansas, for parading in front of the local draft board with a sign reading: “Fuck the Draft.” An admiral’s son is a member of the Cornell resistance. Sen. McGovern’s daughter has been busted for dope, &c &c. (He is looking for people in all branches of the establishment, not just the military: i.e., in industry, finance, government, education, &c.)

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a review of

Bloc by Bloc: Uprising, The Insurrection Game 3^rd edition (Out of Order Games)

Bloc by Bloc is a strategy game inspired by contemporary protest movements. Designed and self-published by Greg Loring-Albright and TL. Simons from Out of Order Games, it uses the tabletop board game format to illustrate the impact of gentrification and the power of popular uprisings. As in the two previous editions, the goal is to liberate the city before the military arrives to reestablish order. In accordance with their anarchist ethics, low-cost upgrade kits are available for owners of the second edition, and the source files are free online.

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An experimental rant titled “Radical Poetry, Heretical Religion, and the Psychedelic Revolution” provided the germ and genesis for this rambling, review-essay.

I delivered that sermon in my over-the-top Reverend Bonobo mode for a gathering in western North Carolina called “Croatan.” Held in late April 2006, the event featured lectures by the likes of scientist and scholar of mind-altering substances Dennis McKenna (brother of the late Terence McKenna), late nights of electronic dance music, and thunderous spring rains that sprayed us all with epic torrents.

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In the late 1990s in Argentina, a new form of struggle emerged from the unemployed workers (who make up 20% of the people while another 20% are underemployed). This expression of resistance came from the provinces to the capital of the country and consisted of blocking roads to claim a subsidy for unemployment. Blocking roads has its origin with the well-known workers’ tactic called “piquete” (picket). It consisted of people preventing the entrance of scabs who were trying to break the strike. Its goal was to prevent production in support of the workers’ demands. Today, thrown out from production, the unemployed block the transportation of merchandise to support their demands. Not only is this blocking of circulation novel, but so is their organizational practice: direct democracy.

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The neighbors had broken into and occupied the bank building as I arrived in Parque Lezama. Middle aged and scruffy young activists carried out debris, scrubbed windows and floors and hung banners with the name of their assemblia popular and another that said “We are nothing. We want to be everything.”

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The following are three excerpts from Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television by Jerry Mander. The book is an insightful analysis not only of the medium, but the society which produces it. See p. 12

In less than four generations out of an estimated one hundred thousand, we have fundamentally changed the nature of our interaction with the planet.

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a review of

Ursula K. Le Guin, A Ride on the Red Mare’s Back. Illustrated by Julie Downing. New York: Orchard Books, 1992.

During a trip to Sweden in the 1980s, a friend gave Ursula Le Guin a small, red-painted wooden horse. This sort of figurine--called a Dalahiist, or “Dala Horse”--is a Swedish folk-art tradition that is at least four centuries old and is associated with the Dalarna region of central Sweden near the Norwegian border, and it fired Le Guin’s imagination.

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As the story goes, Abraham Lincoln met Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of the bestselling and game changing Uncle Tom’s Cabin. “So,” he said, “you’re the little lady who started all the trouble.”

Historian Gerald Horne started some trouble too. His book, The Counter Revolution of 1776, published in 2014, brought into the light of day the long suppressed truth about the so called revolution. More recently, the 1619 Project featured in The New York Times expanded awareness of how much the commitment to enslavement drove the violent secession from British colonial rule.

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The government of the United States believes in the concept of freedom so much it infiltrates movements that practice the concept and tries to set them up to commit illegal acts.

Dave Foreman, co-founder of Earth First!, and four others are being prosecuted for conspiracy, and although the government contends the “Arizona Five” conspired to sabotage the nuclear industry, it is apparent the reason behind the arrests and prosecution is to discredit the radical environmental movement and to jail Foreman because he wrote a book.

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The people eagerly awaiting Armageddon, from religious fundamentalists to paranoid Nazis, have no choice but to wish a fiery end. They’ve been such failures in this world, only the end of it can justify their miserable, creepy existence.

The fact is that their world has already ended, a long time ago, despite their protophilosophy’s occasional spurts of life. The apparent strength of fanatics from Iran to Michigan is no more than the jerky motions of a corpse animated by electric shocks. The God buried by Nietzsche in the last century found scores of other gods in that grave: one of humanity’s best tricks is the invention and disposal of gods.

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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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OCEANSIDE, Cal. (LNS)—A little after mid-night on April 29 about 25 active duty Marines from Camp Pendleton and civilian GI organizers were gathered in the staff house of the Movement for a Democratic Military (MDM) here. They talked in small groups about two successful meetings that had been held earlier that evening.

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Editors’ Note: The following is taken from the Ft. Bliss “Gigline,” the GI anti-war paper at that base. Its address is Box 31094, Summit Hts. Sta, El Paso, TX 79931.

Ft. Bliss, Tex.—General William Westmoreland expected to visit Ft. Bliss to perform a ritualistic inspection of the base, make a few speeches, and accept the plaudits of local citizens.

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MONTEREY, Calif. (LNS) — In over a dozen actions at military bases across the country on May 16, thousands of anti-war soldiers and civilians marched and rallied against the traditional celebration of Armed Forces Day.

Armed Forces Day ceremonies on May 16 were canceled at Fort Ord, California—and 22 other bases—because the Army couldn’t face the prospect of people going on post to discuss the war with GIs. Not even parents could visit the soldiers, most of whom were assigned to their barracks, riot-control training or make-work details.

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As the disturbing trend of mass shootings has steadily become a staple of American society, they serve as one extreme example of the collapsing modern social order.

Factors related to the rampages are isolation, hierarchy, the nature of school (where spree shootings often occur), militarization, and language.

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The fact that the East Eight Mile Road Light Guard Armory is strategically located in the heart of the industrial sector for the Detroit area is no accident (see story). The armory, also by no coincidence, is on the crucial border between Warren and the City. A recent Channel 1 newscast highlighted the fact that the building, housing enough weapons and munitions to equip a small army, is protected by only a small contingent of unarmed guards. (photo: Millard Berry)

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NEW YORK (LNS)—The Army is beginning to worry that too many “heads” are fighting the war in Vietnam.

The Pentagon released figures recently on the suspected use of “drugs” in the armed forces. Drug use in the military is on the rise, especially in Vietnam. There were 14,041 worldwide investigations in 1968 compared with 7,641 in 1967.

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TACOMA, Wash. (LNS)—The Army has declared the Shelter Half coffee house near Ft. Lewis here “off limits to all personnel serving in the Armed Forces.”

It is the first time the brass has tried this tactic in its campaign to squash GI rights.

The Shelter Half is an anti-war coffee house, and like most of its counterparts across the country, its warmth and lively political discussion has become increasingly popular for the young men trapped in the monstrous machinery of the U.S. military.

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Radical troops demonstrate in Lisbon

The rule of Capital continues to erode in Portugal as the increased activity of rank-and-file soldiers, workers and peasants comes into increasing conflict with the Sixth Provisional military government.

Perhaps the most dramatic example of the growing instability is the rebelliousness of the army troops and lower ranking officers. As has been well reported in the capitalist press, example after example of troops leading and taking part in mass demonstrations, giving arms to workers and “left” parties, and their refusal to obey government orders has precipitated the latest crisis for the moderate government of Premier Pinheiro Azevedo.

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Reprinted from The Bond: The Voice of the American Servicemen’s Union

SEATTLE—GIs from Fort Lewis and McChord Air Force Base held a trial of the Brass and its war in Vietnam before an audience of 1,500 at the University of Washington. A jury of twelve active-duty soldiers found the military “guilty” on charges of genocide, crimes against humanity and violations of soldiers’ rights.

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a review of

Army of None: Strategies to Counter Military Recruitment, End War, Build a Better World by Aimee Allison and David Solnit, 2007, Seven Stories Press, 194 pp.

“War is good business, invest your son!”

-- Vietnam-era slogan

Did you enlist...and then change your mind? GI rights advocates can help recruits get out of the DEP — Delayed Enlistment Program. They help service-members apply for discharge or file grievances for harassment or discrimination. The GI rights hotline is answered by a network of non-profit, non-governmental agencies who provide information to members of the military. 1-800-FYI-95GI

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NEW YORK, N.Y., July 1—The national office of the American Servicemen’s Union announced that two revolts had taken place in army stockades recently; on June 14 at Ft. Jackson, South Carolina and on June 22 at Ft. Riley, Kansas.

The uprising at Jackson was touched off by the beating of a prisoner, Julio Rivera, who had refused to pull K.P. Rivera was severely beaten by three sergeants and had to be hospitalized.

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SAN FRANCISCO (LNS)—The U.S. Army has decided that the easiest way to win a court martial conviction is to off the defense lawyer.

Terrence “Kayo” Hallinan, defense attorney for 16 of the 27 men charged with mutiny at the San Francisco Presidio last Oct. 14, has been a headache to the Army for more than a year now.

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from Community Reporter and Fifth Estate sources

For as long as most of them can remember, Larry Johns, Ernie Elswick, Van Johnson, Jimmy Brown, and their friends have been pushed around by Wayne State University.

They’ve seen their families forced to move because Wayne State “needed” the land their homes were on “for the good of the Community.”

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Oakland, Calif. police made an arrest in June of a 19-year-old man they say is responsible for the death of Jen Angel, the social justice activist, anarchist and baker, during a bungled robbery in February.

Ishmael Burch of San Francisco was identified as the person driving the car in which Jen became entangled as she tried to retrieve her purse grabbed from her as she exited a bank. Angel was the owner of Angel Cakes Bakery in Oakland.

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Opposition to the construction of potentially dangerous nuclear power plants escalated August 22 in Seabrook, New Hampshire as 176 people were arrested for conducting an “occupation” of a nuclear power plant construction site.

The action was organized by the Clamshell Alliance, a coalition of a dozen environmental and political groups in the New England area, and was preceded by a large rally of 1,500 persons in the Atlantic seaboard town. The rally organizers charge that the nuclear installation will be harmful to the environment and that an accidental release of radioactive material could kill nearly a million people.

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Detroit police arrested 11 neighborhood street brothers and sisters over Nov. 10^th and 11^th and charged them with “conspiracy to place explosives with intent to cause damage,” a bullshit rap that carries a 25-year maximum prison sentence.

Snatched up were David Valler, who was already in the Wayne County Jail in lieu of $10,000 bond on two phony marijuana sales beefs; Joseph Clever; Antoine Daghuyt; Gary. Miltemore; Ronald Pierce; John Schmittroth; William Ladd; James Moscara; Sandra Rousseau; Benjamin Parks; and Diedre Flowers.

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Things are happening in the Detroit art scene, and the latest event was the opening of the BRUSH and STONE Art Gallery, at 328 E. Eight Mile Road!

Carol Hartman Weisenauer and Philip Newton Kellogg make up the two man show that opened the gallery on Sunday, November 5 and continues to December 3. Together they have about 90 works on view, including welded steel, terra cotta, carved wood, bronzes, clay, plaster and wax sculptures and oil paintings by Kellogg and water colors by Carol Weisenauer.

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Critical Art Ensemble (CAE) is a collective of artists and academics who illustrate problems with science and technology through writing, performance, and installations. Their objective is to demystify high-tech tools so that the public can make informed decisions about the new technologies that are already impacting our lives in many ways.

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Art Attack

Do You Know the Symptoms?

1. Glazed Eyes

2. Shallow Breathing

3. Clammy Skin

4. Nausea

5. Victim May Smell of Linseed Oil and Formaldehyde

Art Attack victims will usually be found in museums, galleries and Art schools. (Art students have been found to have a propensity for attacks.) The fatal attack may be preceded by the onset of general studio malaise, and an occasional incidence of gallery narcolepsy. When the victim becomes aware of the division between his mundane life and his sanctified Art, he may attempt a self-cure through conceptual Art, punk, or other popular forms of “Anti-Art.” A more effective treatment involves the artist revolutionizing his relationship to the Art World. A simple case may be alleviated with the smashing of a particular work of Art. More advanced cases may require the destruction of entire galleries, museums and Art schools.

The factories of Detroit are the guts of the city. They are a central, common reality in the lives of Detroit people, whether people are working a 10-hour day on the line or just watching from their office windows as factory chimneys fill the air with thick, black smoke.

Most public art in Detroit tries to ignore this centrality. Factories are not pretty places. For the people who work in the factories life is not a pretty matter. So “The Spirit of Detroit” is a jolly green giant.

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When you receive a phone call or a letter from Marie Mason, the Green Scare pri

Kelly Poe’s photo of Marie Mason’s image of sanity and chair, table, and book.

soner serving the longest sentence for eco-sabotage, one is almost startled at how buoyant she is, filled with questions about what you’re doing and wanting to give her opinion on what is happening in the world.

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We welcome submissions of art and photography. Send high resolution images to fe@fifthestate.org. The Fifth Estate is an all-volunteer project. Images that appear in our pages are separate statements on subjects addressed in articles.

P. 5 Paul Signac, “Portrait of M. Felix Feneon” 1890.

Feneon was a French art critic and anarchist who coined the term Neo-Impressionism. Signac also was an anarchist.

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Images that appear in our pages are separate statements on the subject addressed in an article.

P. 29 Lars van Dooren is a Brooklyn-based artist. He is a 2020 Frederieke Sanders-Taylor Studio Projects Fund grant recipient. arsvandooren.com.

P. 20 Carla Repice’s work investigates systems of oppression and memory, and probes the effects of racism and dehumanization on the human psyche. She has an MFA in performance art, and studied painting and feminist theory at The Lorenzo de Medici School of Art in Florence, Italy. She lives in New York City.

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p. 4, 14, 25 Dennis Fox writes and has taught about the intersections of anarchism, law/justice, radical/critical psychology, and interpersonal connection. dennisfox.net He explores abstract, street, ft other forms of photography dennisfoxphoto.com

p. 6 Tylonn J. Sawyer lives and works in Detroit as a multidisciplinary artist educator and curator. His work juxtaposes themes of identity, both individual and collective, with investigations of race and history in popular culture. tylonn-j-sawyer.com

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P. 6 Greg Giegucz is a multimedia artist living and working in New Orleans. He moved to New Orleans from New York to draw its devastated landscape, still recovering from Hurricane Katrina. giegucz.com

P. 9 John Gruntfest is a saxophonist and artist. His free form jazz draws upon western and eastern radical artistic and philosophical traditions Ives to Coltrane, Buddha to Marx, Goldman to Debord, Whitman to Artaud.

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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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In the musical Rent, the archetypal hip, Lower East Side New York Bohemian protagonists call their landlord “the enemy of Avenue A” when he enters their chosen coffee shop, in the song “La Vie Bohême.” The title recalls that of the Puccini opera, La Bohême, on which Rent is based.

This in turn was based on stories published by the French writer Henry Murger in 1851, that established the archetype of the urban, artistic, liberal Bohemian that still prevails in gentrifying areas throughout today’s world.

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WORK, a journal of new writing, edited by John Sinclair

$1.00/copy, 4-issue subscriptions $3.00

CHANGE, a new jazz magazine, edited by John Sinclair & Charles Moore, $1.00/copy, 4-issue subscription: $3.00

WORKSHOP BOOKS, new writing from Detroit under the general editorship of Robin Eichele

WB/1 Book of Humors, Jim Senark, 25¢

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FE note: This is one of three responses to John Zerzan’s “The Case Against Art,” in FE #324, Fall 1986. The other two articles are: “A ‘Culture-in-Action’” by George Bradford and “Journal Notes on Art” by George Bradford.

Art, Life & Death

John Zerzan’s “Case Against Art” is an opus to the reality principle, Rationalist reaction, a puritanical attempt to reduce the multiverse into a limpid, linear, static version of nature and consciousness. Except for that, it is well-written and a masterly example of philosophical name-dropping.

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a review of

Suosso’s Lane by Robert Knox (Web-e-Pub 2016). web-e-books.com/suosso/paperback.html

During the Red Scare following World War I, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were the perfect candidates for judicial murder. Italian, immigrants, and anarchists.

They were convicted in 1921 of murdering a paymaster and a guard during an armed robbery at the Slater and Morrill Shoe Company in Braintree, Massachusetts. Although their innocence became increasingly evident, they were executed in the electric chair in 1927. Mass demonstrations protesting the trial and the verdict took place across North America and the world.

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April 9–17

Washington D.C. Days of Action for Global Economic Justice. Shut Down the IMF and World Bank, April 16. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank are meeting to expand their power over Third World nations’ economies. Information at www. 50years.org or call 202-IMF-BANK.

May 1

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a review of

Sea of Slaughter by Farley Mowat, 1985, Atlantic Monthly, 438 pp. $24.95

In a world where the victor writes the history books, we are grateful for Farley Mowat’s eloquent and dissenting account of the rape of the North American continent.

The ravagers came in search of oil, furs and food. The life they led was adventurous; it was also dangerous and violent. Mowat quotes the eyewitness report of a Professor J.B. Jukes, who in 1840 went as an observer to the main sealing patch in the brigantine Topaz:

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COMRADES! Fellow Marxist-Leninists of the Revolutionary Proletarian Vanguard!

Let us be open and honest, using the revolutionary method of criticism-self-criticism to sum up the experience of the Mao-Tse-Tung Memorial Meetings we called for September. Quite frankly, they were a flop! Although we blighted every city and college campus with our large, garish signs (much like this one) virtually no one showed up to pay $3.50 to hear us praise the Great Helmsman for his revolutionary virtues. No one seems to take our praise of this great revolutionary seriously anymore.

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Asheville Global Report

P.O. Box 1504

Asheville, NC 28802

Phone/fax: 828-236-3103

Web: www.agrnews.org

Email: editors@agrnews.org

A sister publication to FE and an ambitious weekly, the AGR crew covers news underreported by mainstream media, believing that a free exchange of information is necessary to organize for social change. AGR is distributed free every Thursday in Asheville and other cities, and is published weekly on the world wide web at www.agrnews.org. For out-of-towners, AGR is available for $50 for one year, 52 issues; $25 for six months, 26 issues. Donations: We gladly accept donations. Asheville Global Report is a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.

Hakim Bey, whose writings frequently appear in these pages, is perhaps best known for his book the TAZ--temporary autonomous zone--that describes when normally domesticated space is liberated, if only for a moment, for festive and subversive moments of happiness.

In 1969, Leni Sinclair took this photo during a meeting at the Fifth Estate office at 1107 West Warren. Included are members of the White Panthers and the FE, yet we’re not sure what the meeting was about. Seated on the chair to the right is Diana Oughton of Motor City SDS, and later, the Weather Underground. Oughton died (with her comrades Terry Robbins and Ted Gold) on March 6, 1970 in a Greenwich Village townhouse, from an explosion likely caused by a bomb she was making.

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A Women Strike for Peace demo in downtown Detroit, 1965. An early protest against the Vietnam War with giant puppets influenced by Bread & Puppet Threatre. —FE file photo

“Puppets are not cute, like muppets. Puppets are effigies and gods and meaningful creatures.”

—Peter Schumann, Bread and Puppet Theatre

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The word school comes from the Latin word schola meaning “free time consecrated to learning,” an institution idealized by the philosophers and ideologues and perceived as being a socially valued category, in opposition to the sphere of manual or productive labor.

In early civilizations, school was created by scribes and other government functionaries who occupied religious and administrative posts. Among the ancient Greeks, school had the purpose of training future soldiers before it was transformed to teach philosophy and rhetoric by the Sophists for the children of the rich who would never have to work.

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Editor’s note: The following article appeared on the Religion Page of the Detroit Free Press of August 19, 1967. It refers to the creative use of natural rhythm.

A leading doctor and editor of the national Journal of the American Institute of Hypnosis suggested that techniques of hypnosis be used to control riots in the future.

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Someone was more stoned than we were last night. He was walking down the Grand Trunk railroad tracks between Fourteenth and Grand River. He was a neighborhood resident of the slum area north of Warren on the near West side, close to the Fifth Estate office.

He had been in the uprising two years ago when the A&P and the Cunningham’s on Trumbull had been burned down. The thought grew in his mind: Fire. He wanted to burn. He wanted something to burn.

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We dare you to try to find the straight dope on recruiting statistics. Every month, armed forces recruiting numbers are announced, but when you read a handful of news stories about these same figures side-by-side, you find competing narratives about what these numbers mean.

But one indicator of how hard-up the military is for live, warm bodies is a startling relaxation of the silly “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT) policy. DADT prohibits any behavior that might suggest “a propensity or intent to engage in homosexual acts” on the grounds that it “would create an unacceptable risk to the high standards of morale, good order and discipline, and unit cohesion.” (And while we’re on the subject, we would like to say that we endorse any and all behaviors and acts that pose a threat to the military’s “high standards.”)

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Editors’ Note: “Fortune and Men’s Eyes,” a play by John Herbert, will begin its Detroit run Nov. 28–30 and again on Dec. 5–7. Performances will begin at 8:30 p.m. Tickets may be purchased at Hudson’s box office or obtained through the mail at 2717 Montgomery, 48206, care of: “Fortune and Men’s Eyes.” All tickets are priced at $2.50. Performances will be at the Central Methodist House, 23 E. Adams. The proceeds from the performances will go to aid the people of Biafra.

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Bruce Whitten, age 26, held the rank of Staff Sergeant in the Air Force until he received a general discharge on May 23, 1965. Whitten was assigned to the first Air Commando group spending two years in Vietnam. Whitten gave the interview despite his awareness that he might be endangering his future. He felt however, that the experiences which he had during his two years in Viet Nam were of unquestionable importance to the American people--especially to men of draft age.

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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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Rebellion is its own justification, completely independent of the chance it has to modify the state of affairs that gives rise to it. It’s a spark in the wind, but a spark in search of a powder keg.

—André Breton

If only one thing has brought me joy in the last few weeks, it began when the matriarchs at Unist’ot’en burned the Canadian flag and declared reconciliation is dead. Like wildfire, it swept through the hearts of youth across the territories. Reconciliation was a distraction, a way for them to dangle a carrot in front of us and trick us into behaving. Do we not have a right to the land stolen from our ancestors? It’s time to shut everything the fuck down!

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CAUTION! There are terrorists among us.

THEY infest this planet from Washington to New York, from Nuremburg to Moscow, from Peking to Santiago.

THEY detain millions of hostages every day and give them the ultimatum—become a slave to the state or an enemy.

THEY maintain large armies that are trained to kill in support of the ideology of the state.

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The following interview with Chris Clark, editor of the Earth Island Journal, publication of Earth Island Institute, was taped the week of January 18. I chose Clark to interview since he and his organization seem sensible in their theoretical and activist approach to defense of the environment. This may appear as an endorsement to some and a condemnation to others.

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In a scene that could have been taken from the movie version of “The Godfather,” four gunmen rushed into a small Italian restaurant on July 12 and shot to death Carmine Galante—the mafioso capo di tutti capi—the boss of all bosses of the Mafia.

Carlo Tresca (1879–1943)

This not unusual manner of demise for a scummy gangster chieftain raised few eyebrows or roused little interest in what is part of an ongoing battle between the old Bonanno and Gallo families for control of the New York City rackets.

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The following is a statement sent to us by Emily Harris, who, along with Bill Harris, Joe Remiro and Russ Little, is one of the surviving members of the SLA. The four are currently prisoners of the State of California; six others were murdered by police in Los Angeles in 1975.

I was one of the prisoners in the women’s section of Santa Rita Jail near Oakland on the night of May 14 when it was destroyed by fire. Many women could have lost their lives in that fire because they came within a hair’s breath of being left locked in their cells with no way to get out. It was an outrageous and frightening experience and I want to share it so at least people will know what happened and will understand better how prisoners’ lives are threatened everyday in a million different ways by the very fact that one class of people—the police—has been granted the power of a key that locks the door.

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Over the weekend of Sept. 30-Oct. 2, activists from around the country descended on the town of Monroe, Michigan to protest the restart of Detroit Edison’s crippled nuclear reactor, Fermi II.

Built at the site where its predecessor, Fermi I, suffered a partial core-melt accident in 1966, Fermi II was completed 20 years behind schedule and more than 2000% over budget.

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The State is understood as pure and inviolable, as capable of purifying the most repulsive things--even money--through the touch of its divine hand. Money, therefore, is pure insofar as it belongs to the State; so are, by association, those experts who are summoned to serve it. Even today power reenacts that ceremony where the despot shits in honor of his subjects, summoned to laud him for the gift of his royal turd.

-- Dominique Laporte, History of Shit

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Things may never be the same again at Selfridge Air Force Base of Mt. Clemens.

Several of the Marines, Airmen and one Navy man stationed at the base are forming a chapter of the American Serviceman’s Union (ASU) and this has meant trouble for the brass at every base where the Union exists.

The ASU is committed to support of the enlisted man, the removal of all officer privileges and the stopping of the Armed Forces from being used in a politically reactionary way.

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There has been a lot of activity during the past seven months in Zurich, Switzerland. It began last May when the young people of the city began demanding a free space where they could have an independent, self-governing or autonomous youth center. There were a number of general assembly meetings, followed by street demonstrations with anywhere between two and four thousand participants.

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In response to a letter from Jeffrey Vega, Tech Examined FE #315, Winter 1984.

Is it too much to ask that our critics take the time to read at least some of the voluminous material on the technology question rather than simply repeating the “well-worn” platitudes familiar to us all? In this case Jeffrey Vega would like to resolve a complex problem with a simple sleight-of-hand: look up the word in the dictionary and in such a way close the discussion by sanctioning the commonplaces which serve to mystify technology. Since his dictionary refers to “machines—not a system of domination,” there seems to be nothing to worry about; it must all be a neutral, passive machine or tool ready to be used in any way we desire.

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Atanas Porezoff was, as were so many revolutionaries of his generation, host to many names: Atanas Vidloff, Tony Bulgar, even affectionately “The Old Man.” But to those of us who knew him only in his later years, he was just Tony.

Once towards the end of his life, when we visited him in the hospital, he smiled at the nurse and, said, “See, I don’t need medicine, these people are my medicine.” And he would remind us at the end of each visit to remember the message contained in the works of his “great teachers, Bakunin, Kropotkin and Tolstoy.” His customary call of “Viva la anarchia” as we left after visiting will stay with us always. Tony lived a long and full life, yet we cannot mask our sadness for a departed friend and comrade.

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FT. JACKSON, S.C.—Four GIs are in the stockade as a result of an on-base meeting to discuss the war in Vietnam.

All are leaders of GIs United Against the War in Vietnam and are charged with “inciting to riot,” “disturbing the peace,” and “disrespect to an officer.”

The GI organization has been actively involved in opposing the war and demanding that GIs be allowed the same rights as civilians.

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a review of

Darlingtonia by Alba Roja. Left Bank Books, 2017 akpress.org; albaroja.noblogs.org

Darlingtonia begins with a juxtaposition characteristic of the times we live in. Anton works in the service industry in San Francisco, commuting each day into the city because he can’t afford to live there and providing concierge services for well-off hotel guests.

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“Every year of her life...the Net had been growing more expansive and seamless. Computers did it. Computers melted other machines, fusing them together. Television-telephone-telex. Tape recorder-VCR-laser disk. Broadcast tower linked to microwave dish linked to satellite. Phone line, cable TV, fiber-optic cords hissing out words and pictures in torrents of pure light. All netted together in a web over the world, a global nervous system, an octopus of data. There’d been plenty of hype about it. It was easy to make it sound transcendentally incredible.

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Bring the Fifth Estate to Washington as you march to bring the troops home. The Fifth Estate will have an increased press run of our issue scheduled to come out right before the next days of protest against the war. It will be available to vendors about noon on Wednesday, Nov. 13 from our office at 1107 W. Warren. The cost to vendors is 10 cents per copy and can be sold at the actions here for 20 cents and in Washington for a quarter.

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a review of

Night Games

Mai Zetterling strings out her Freudian implications to paper thinness, but then “Night Games,” in plot anyway, is not unlike tissue paper.

It suffices to say that Miss Zetterling’s pen clears a magnificent swath through the intricate Oedipal fantasies of adolesence. Unfortunately this directress is so plagued by Composition and form, her narrative reins up and the two never reach a comparable peak.

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In September 1971, the political landscape of the American Empire was very different from today’s. Detroit, Newark, Watts, and other cities still smoldered with the embers of urban insurgency.

The imperial army in Vietnam was disintegrating from open mutiny in the last days of a failed foreign war. Guardsmen and cops gunned down college students at Kent State and Jackson State, and martial law ruled the streets of Berkeley, California following riots over People’s Park. Functioning as political police, the FBI coordinated a nationwide secret and sometimes murderous campaign against dissidents. But rebellion continued, and in the prisons the spirit of the times reverberated and intensified. The uprising at Attica Correctional Facility in Upstate New York in response to the everyday horrors of prison life became a conscious political insurrection that soon to be murdered inmate spokesman Elliot Barkley described as “but the sound before the fury of those who are oppressed.”

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NEW YORK (LNS)--A little more than three years after the first Attica indictments were handed down at a snow-covered courthouse a few miles from Attica State Prison in upstate New York, the Attica defendants and their supporters have won an almost complete victory.

On February 26 and 27, all but one of the remaining indictments were dismissed by a Buffalo, New York judge. Under the shadow of pre-trial defense revelations of improprieties by state officials, a major indictment charging ten former Attica prisoners with kidnapping guards was dismissed. The next day two indictments charging three inmates with assaulting prison guards was also dismissed.

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Attilio Bortolotti (Toronto, 1993) photo / CIRA-Lausanne

Attilio Bortolotti died of pneumonia on February 10, 1995, in a nursing home near Toronto. He was born on September 19, 1903, in Codroipo, Friuli, Italy, the fifteenth of eighteen children of Luigi Bortolotti, a builder, and Maria Pittana.

Tilio emigrated to Canada in 1920 and became active in the anarchist and antifascist movements in Windsor and Detroit during the agitation for Sacco and Vanzetti. Arrested in Detroit in 1929 for distributing a leaflet announcing a Sacco-Vanzetti meeting, he was held for deportation to Italy, but jumped bail and fled to Toronto. There he worked as a tool-and-die maker and resumed his anarchist activities, editing Il Libertario from 1933 to 1935 and The Libertarian in 1968 and 1969.

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No discussion of end-of-the-world imaginings would be complete without some reference to wacky conservative Christian dispensationalism. Dispensationalism is a school of Protestant theology that favors a millennial interpretation of history--all roads lead to God cracking open a cataclysmic can of whup-ass on humans.

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Audrey Goodfriend with Federico Arcos. —photo: J. Herrada

Lifelong anarchist Audrey Goodfriend died on January 19 at 92.

Over her lifetime, Audrey engaged with generations of anarchists, and in many ways served as a bridge between them. The fact that as a teenager in the late 1930s, Audrey hitch-hiked to Toronto to meet Emma Goldman, gave younger anarchists who met her a direct connection with anarchist history.

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The New York Times headline trumpeted “[President] Urges Rises in Military Outlay, Cuts in Other Areas,” above an article which stated, “[The President] today proposed to Congress a series of substantial increases in military spending in the 1980s and cuts in many non-defense programs.”

Is this the dreaded Reagan slashing programs for the poor while spending ever more on the already glutted military monolith? No, not at all, but rather the president referred to in the Jan. 15, 1981 article is Jimmy Carter, who several days before leaving office proposed a fiscal 1982 budget which foreshadowed what his successor would announce several weeks later.

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There may be no smoke signals on the horizon or the beat of drums within earshot—but the United States has a candidate for President on the Indian ticket, once he is accepted into the tribe.

The candidate is Austin Burton, who is best known to Fifth Estate readers as the man who sent a brochure for the United Artificial penis to Luci Johnson’s husband and was arrested for mailing obscene matter and held on $200,000 bond. (See Fifth Estate, April 15–30, 1967). Burton is seeking to represent the New York state tribe of Oneida Indians and is being aided by Princess Sunbeam of that tribe.

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In September 2014, the people of Scotland voted on an independence referendum question, “Should Scotland be an independent country?” Following an intense campaign, the “No” side won with 55 percent voting against independence with a turnout of 85 percent.

Alexander writes from Glasgow with an assessment.

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Radical psychologists Wilhelm Reich and Eric Fromm answered the question of why people submit willingly to authority

While most of us were watching the 2016 presidential election with disgust, someone I’m very close to, looked at me with a fiendish grin and announced, “I’m voting for Donald Trump.”

This was perplexing. How could they be captivated by a racist, xenophobic, homophobic narcissist? Having starkly contrasting reactions towards the object of their affinity, I realized a lot of futile and draining arguments were likely to follow. Rifts, drama, and cut-offs between friends and family have become ubiquitous in American society over the past year, with many left bewildered by the resurgent appeal of authoritarianism.

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RALEIGH, NORTH CAROLINA--Following the second fraudulent US presidential election in a row, many liberals and leftists, and even some anarchists, were in a post-Bush-victory funk. But not the 200 anarchist-led demonstrators who on Nov. 5 defiantly marched to the state Republican headquarters carrying a banner, reading, “fuck Bush; Fuck Kerry; We Need A Revolution.”

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