Full list of texts

This poster appeared in the Fifth Estate, December 1976, vol. 12 no. 3 (279).

Un-Dewar’s Profiles

Leon F. Czolgosz

HOME: Everywhere. Moves freely in the world, recognizing no state boundaries.

PROFESSION: Czolgosz has no “profession,” refuses to sell his skills and resists definition by any of the categories of capitalist achievement. “If you must call me something,” he says, “call me an Urban Modality Redesigner--Explosives Division.”

...

Un-Dewar’s Profiles

Leon F. Czolgosz

HOME: Everywhere. Moves freely in the world, recognizing no state boundaries.

PROFESSION: Czolgosz has no “profession,” refuses to sell his skills and resists definition by any of the categories of capitalist achievement. “If you must call me something,” he says, “call me an Urban Modality Redesigner--Explosives Division.”

...

Unfuck the World, says the sign on this page and the next. It isn’t just a one-off, rude slogan held by someone justifiably angry at the state of things.

It stems from the 2017 rap/rock song of that name by The Prophets of Rage, a band comprised of members of Rage Against the Machine, Public Enemy, and Cypress Hill. It’s an anthem for what has become a worldwide movement that will host its 9^th annual UTW Day, September 18.

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Tay-lor-ism n. 1. The scientific management of industrial operations. 2. The systematic reduction of work within a given industrial operation to separate, distinct, routinized tasks devoid of policy decisions. Each aspect is measured and timed for its highest efficiency. 3. The system of such developed by Frederick Taylor in the late 1880s.

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The struggle for unionization in the 1930s has always been shrouded in myth and revered by both the labor movement and the Left as a period of labor militancy. A closer look at the developments shows a much different picture than was generally thought to be the case and exposes what the real role of the unions was.

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In one of the largest steps in its history, the American Federation of Musicians has drafted plans for a huge apprentice program for teen-age rock musicians which could alter the present music industry considerably.

The program, to be implemented by Detroit’s Local 5 under the supervision of business agent Dennis Day, calls for concerted action by the union on two major fronts: to convince teen musicians to join the union under its new “affiliate membership” plan, and to convince club owners that they should sign “union shop” agreements with Local 5 which would provide for employment only for union bands at union scale.

...

a review of

“But What About the Workers?,” a pamphlet by James Boggs and James Hocker, available from the Advocators, Box 07249, Gratiot Sta., Detroit MI 48207; $0.75, 43 pp.

James Boggs and James Hocker, like so many other revolutionaries, desire a unified working class capable of a socialist revolution and set out in their pamphlet to examine the state of unions today and why so many workers employ “individualistic” solutions to their problems.

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Reprinted from Internationalism No. 3

Unionism corresponded to a particular historical period of workers ‘ struggles. Its form was determined by its reformist content. Unions regrouped only a minority of the working class, just enough to be able to put pressure on the capitalist class. Unions organized workers in the image of the capitalist system itself: according to trade, job skills, industrial sector. Unions became increasingly bureaucratized as capitalism itself became more complex. Hierarchical relations became the norm as unions entered the field of bourgeois legality. Economic demands were the unions’ exclusive preoccupation and a political view of the system was relegated to a separate compartment: the political parties. But as long as reformism was a valid perspective, unions continued to play a role in improving the lot of the working class.

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Both Marxist and liberal historians have always depicted the Nazi movement as the bitter enemy of unions and the victory of German fascism as the death knell of the labor movement. A critical examination shows that, in fact, the opposite was the case and the Nazis used the unions in the same manner as their predecessors.

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From the May 3 Wall Street Journal comes some interesting information about the United Mine Workers (UMW) union that bears heavily on future energy schemes, especially those dictated by our peanut president. Carter’s new energy policy calls for increased use of coal as a major energy source, but the underground miners of Appalachia are not showing much enthusiasm for digging it out.

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As has been the case throughout colonial conquest, the military police force of the Canadian state, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) have facilitated the occupation of Indigenous lands by resource capital. Most recently, the state forced its way onto Wet’suwet’en territories in northern so-called British Columbia to secure access for a Coastal GasLink liquified natural gas pipeline (LNG).

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SAN FRANCISCO (LNS)—Black Panther Party Chairman, Bobby Seale recently reiterated his call for a United Front against Fascism in America. The United Front is to be inaugurated at a National Conference called by the Panthers in Oakland, Calif., July 18–20.

To this Conference have been invited representatives of groups across the country, not just radicals, but all who consider themselves “progressive” and who “take a firm stand against the development of fascism in America.”

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For two weeks after Burning Man, I felt like I was glowing, radiating spirals of energy that warbled just below the visible range. The constant brutality of the state, the frantic pace of life, the social isolation--none of these things could get me down. For years, I had heard about this experimental arts and cultural festival held annually on the playa on the Black Rock Desert in Nevada. I went for the first time this year and look forward to going again.

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George Armstrong Custer, whose “last stand” has been depicted by more than 200 artists since it occurred during the summer of 1876, has been made into a prime symbol of this country’s “winning of the West” from American Indians.

Glamorized in scores of books, and depicted as a gallant cavalier by Errol Flynn in films such as They Died With Their Boots On, Custer might even be seen as the centerpiece of a whole genre of American imperial mythology.

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Jacob and Workers of the Night breaking into the cathedral at
Tours, France, 1903, to steal the church’s riches (drawing by Flavio Costantini)

The excerpts on these pages are shortened versions of ones published in Defiance: Anarchist Statements Before Judge and Jury, a new title from Detritus Books in Olympia, Wash. detritusbooks.com. During the last 150 years, people identifying with the anarchist tradition have employed direct action many times against the state bringing repression and punishment upon them from the apparatus they seek to dismantle. This anthology chronicles 27 unrepentant voices of those facing courts and juries after apprehension and conviction.

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Mackenzie High School, located on Wyoming and Chicago, has been the scene of picketing, walkouts and militant assemblies since the beginning of the fall semester in September. The cause of the conflict, as in many Detroit inner-city schools, has been racial tension and hostility over poor education building up to a point where the whole thing had to explode. As a spokesman from the Black Council, a militant student-community organization, put it, “The spark lit the fuse that blew up the place.”

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I’m interested in unschooling because it’s an applied philosophy rather than a teaching method. This philosophy, which I strive to use daily with my son, who is now 16 years old, is also the one used in free schools. For me, this approach to life and to children’s’ development encourages independence, confidence, and pleasure in living. Experiencing unschooling with my son has permitted us to go beyond the simple accumulation of knowledge.

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TOPEKA (LNS)—Pvt. Donald Till wasn’t happy when the MP’s busted him for being AWOL.

When they decided to fly him to Fort Riley, Kansas for a court-martial, Till hatched a plan. Feigning fear of flying, he conned a parachute out of his captors, and then questioned them at length about its use.

Mid-flight, the industrious soldier leapt 3,000 feet to his freedom. Unfortunately he was captured a short time later.

Pictured at right are Federico Arcos, Fifth Estate comrade, and veteran of the Spanish anarchist militias of the 1930s, with Julie Herrada, April 7, at Hamtramck, Michigan’s 2739 Gallery, during the opening of the exhibit, ‘Unthinkable,’ a display of artifacts from the collection of Fredy and Lorraine Perlman. Featured were posters and publications from Paris 1968, and from ones produced at Detroit’s Print Co-op, as well as a first French edition of Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, and a floor-to-ceiling display of huge timeline sheets for Perlman’s, The Strait.

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Unlimited Reward offered for the elimination of power held by Republicans, Democrats, & other politicians.

Known to be engaged in a vast conspiracy to spread death & disease, poverty & rape—a conspiracy to completely dominate our lives & eliminate human freedom.

G8 Summit

Where: Sea Island, GA

When: June 8 to 10, 2004

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ANN ARBOR, Mich. (Liberation News Service) A dynamite bomb blasted open the Institute of Science and Technology Building on the University of Michigan campus on Oct. 15. It was the latest in a series of 13 bombings to hit the Detroit area in recent months, and followed by two weeks the destruction of a semi-secret CIA recruiting office in downtown Ann Arbor.

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NEW YORK (LNS)—Tuesday night, Oct. 22, the inmates of the Lower East Side, inspired by Julian Beck’s Living Theater and led by Up Against the Wail Motherfucker, laid cultural claim to the Fillmore East. They needed the space, a motherfucker leaflet declared, “To survive, grow freaky, breathe, love, struggle and turn on.” Graham said over his dead body, Julian Beck said right on and the rest of the script of that real, living theater can be summed up by this exchange:

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November 9—the fourteenth anniversary of the popular uprising that destroyed the Berlin Wall—was also an international day of protest against the more than 400 miles of wall being built by the Israeli government around and through Palestinian communities in the West Bank. All over the globe, special events and actions took place in solidarity against this construction project.

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Friday, 7pm-11pm, Community Church of Boston, 565 Boylston St.

Mitchell Verter, editor of Dreams of Freedom, on Mexican anarchist Ricardo Flores Magon and contemporary Magonism, a video and music.

The Bookfair. Saturday, 10am-7pm. Massachusetts College of Art, Pozen Center, 621 Huntington Ave. Tables from distros, radical bookstores, Info-shops, and publishers. Speakers, workshops, panel discussions, and films.

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FE’s Bill Blank, wearing a Free Marie t-shirt, crosses the finish line at the Indianapolis Half-Marathon, Sept. 2009. Shirt and other Marie merch available at freemarie.org.

FE Note: Most of the following information on Marie Mason is from the web site supportmariemason.org. Check for updates.

Marie, a long-time Fifth Estate contributor, was sentenced in February 2009 to almost 22 years in prison following a guilty plea for two acts of property destruction. She is currently an inmate at the Waseca, Minnesota federal correctional institution, serving the longest sentence of any Green Scare arrestee. (See Fifth Estate Spring and Summer 2009 editions.) These are available at the FE web site.

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ANN ARBOR—The long awaited single by the Up has been slated for release on Feb. 6. The tunes will be “Just Like An Aborigine” and “Hassan I Sabba.”

Artwork for the record label and jacket will be done by Youth International Party (YIP) Minister of Culture in exile, Gary Grimshaw. Grimshaw, who was working in California with the Berkeley Tribe fled for parts unknown recently after a Federal Fugitive Flight warrant was issued for him. He is wanted in Traverse City on a frame-up dope charge along with Pun Plamondon, Minister of Defense.

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There are only two paths open to a country whose internal and external empires are in the state of decay prevailing in the United States. That of the left or fascism.

The trend toward fascism in the United States is accelerating at an incredible rate. It is beginning to acquire the kind of mass base which served Hitler in Germany. The catalyst for tendencies always present in American society, is the equally accelerating struggle for black liberation.

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Dave Dellinger, Chairman of the Mobilization Committee, predicted that the response of the American people would be to speak out even more forcefully against the war and to insist on their democratic rights to do so. He reported that the Mobilization office had already received a flood of phone calls from persons who indicated that they would go to Washington on October 21. In a number of cases, people not previously planning to go to Washington on that date have phoned in to say that now nothing can keep them away.

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Ursula K. La Guin, photo by Eileen Gunn

Reprinted from Fifth Estate #382, Spring, 2010. Issues are available as single copies & in bulk.

Related, in this issue: “Le Guin’s Anarchism & Mine” by Andrew William Smith

In a writing career spanning nearly six decades, Ursula K. Le Guin pushed the boundaries of fiction, transcending genre and style conventions to create a unique and distinctive literary voice.

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In a writing career spanning nearly five decades, Ursula K. Le Guin has pushed the boundaries of fiction, transcending genre and style conventions to create a unique and distinctive literary voice. Her groundbreaking novels and stories have questioned gender constructions, challenging our notions about gender and identity, imagined an anarchist utopia, wrestled with ideas of free will and destiny, and subtly made commentary about race and race relations. At various times throughout her career critics have labeled Le Guin and her works feminist, anarchist, Taoist, and other labels, but they are both all of these and none of these things simultaneously. What is clearer than the labels of critics is her ability to think critically and turn that thought into finely wrought literature.

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“To objectivise life means to destroy it.”

-- Ana Esther Cecune, Development Dialogue, January 2009.

The Marxist David Harvey, who has made an academic career out of tracking neoliberal thought from the bungled Chilean coup in 1973 to present, achieved near-notoriety in the fall of 2008, as did a lot of other radicals who found themselves suddenly in demand on lecture circuits. With derivative market/swaps surfacing like so much bilge at a gated resort, many of us were intellectually unprepared for the sweep and alarm of the panic. But Harvey’s analysis was a soothing tonic. Invariably, though, as Harvey recalled (in December 2008), those discussions came down to neoliberalism and its predicted end. And, inevitably, he’d reply: “Well, it depends on what you mean by neoliberalism.”

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Via National Guardian

“This war is, I believe, a war for civilization.”

—Francis Cardinal Spellman

The bodies in the mass graves of Hue are not the victims of the National Liberation Front but of American bombs, bullets and napalm.

The NLF attack on Hue was coordinated with an internal uprising Jan. 31, 1968. The main part of the city was in the hands of liberation forces within hours—hardly a shot was fired.

...

a review of

We Hereby Refuse: Japanese American Resistance to Wartime Incarceration by Frank Abe, script and story; Tamiko Nimura, story; art, Ross Ishikawa and Matt Sasaki. Chin Music Press Inc, 2021

Resistance and oppression are perhaps the most consistent threads that link history. No matter what social system a population lives under, it is inevitable that people will at some point turn to resistance.

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Rambo-man Reagan is gearing up the U.S. military machine for an escalation of his wars against the Empire’s pandemic array of enemies. A trident of battle plans was announced from the White House on January 21 which included a decision to seek $100 million additional aid for the murderous Nicaraguan contras, “assistance” to the troops of South African stooge Jonas Savimbi who is trying to oust the Cuban-backed Angolan government, and increased support for Reagan’s doomsday Star Wars system.

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WASHINGTON, D.C.—Nixon’s public relations men are calling it an “economic readjustment,” but in English it’s a full blown economic recession.

U.S. Labor Dept. unemployment figures show joblessness for April at 4.8%, the highest since 1965, when U.S. “escalation” of the Vietnam war began.

Lines at unemployment compensation offices in Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Birmingham, Ala. are spilling out onto the sidewalks. 3,700,000 Americans can’t find jobs—and that’s one million more than a year ago.

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It’s too bad that he had to hear the word from Allah, but still it is heartening to know that at least one Marine refused to be used as cannon fodder in Reagan’s reckless war schemes.

Marine Cpl. Alfred Griffen, a practicing Muslim, told his military superiors in October 1983 that the Koran forbid him to kill fellow religionists in Lebanon or to participate in “a war of egression” in Grenada. Griffin was court-martialed for being AWOL and sentenced to a relatively light four months at hard labor.

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How could anyone fail to notice the sickening irony in the announcement from U.S. Secretary of State George Schultz that no reprisals would be taken against Nicaragua for shooting down an unmarked U.S. military helicopter and killing the pilot at the Honduras-Nicaragua border? Such a declaration is roughly equivalent to a bully saying he won’t retaliate for your biting his toe while he’s stomping your face in.

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Media commentators have grown so fond of labeling President Reagan’s mad scheme for placing laser and particle beam weapons in space “Star Wars” that it is hard to see why they have failed to extend the movie analogy logically forward and call the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) by a more appropriate name emanating from the same movie—“The Death Star.” Also, the prez certainly makes a better Darth Vader than a Luke Skywalker.

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Political speculation concerning rapidly changing political events in a journal such as this which appears so infrequently puts the writer at a distinct disadvantage, Even by the time this paper is published, a new crisis may have been created and the current ones described herein discarded or resolved.

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Utah Phillips at IWW Centenary, 2005, Chicago. On ends, folk singers Len Wallace and Charlie King; to Utah’s right, Federico Arcos.

The IWW and the labor movement lose a troubadour Utah Phillips, a seminal figure in American folk music, who performed tirelessly on two continents for 38 years, died May 23 of congestive heart failure in Nevada City, California, a small town in the Sierra Nevada mountains where he lived for the last 21 years with his wife, Joanna Robinson, a freelance editor. Phillips died at home, in bed, in his sleep, next to his wife.

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The following is a portion of a transcript of a May 7 interview with Utah Phillips conducted by long-time Fifth Estate contributor, Peter Werbe. It aired on his May 11 Detroit radio show in part to provide publicity for a benefit concert for Utah held in Ann Arbor. It is available as a podcast at wrif.compodcastnightcall for the show on that date. It follows the first two hours of phone-in talk.

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On February 6, progressive columnist Chris Hedges wrote a fairly predictable attack on Black Bloc militancy, “The Cancer in Occupy,” in Truthdig, the on-line news site.

It voiced, in general, the perspective of the liberal-moderate-reformist folks who have been mostly predominant in Occupy. Hedges’ screed against anarchists and others who “go too far” shows just what anti-authoritarians have been up against and why so few of them, in my experience, have been interested in Occupy.

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Dave Valler passed his sanity tests with flying colors and has pleaded guilty to two counts of possession of grass.

Valler’s court-appointed attorney requested the sanity hearings contending that, “Valler’s habitual and heavy use of drugs impaired his mental ability.” (See FE #77, April 17–30, 1969).

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Sanity tests have been ordered for Dave Valler who is facing trial on two counts of sales and possession of grass and for conspiring to dynamite several public facilities.

The police and prosecutor consider Valler to be the ringleader of the eight persons charged with the Detroit area bombings last year which hit police stations and cars, a draft board, the Ann Arbor CIA office and a research institute.

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The heavy hand of “justice” has fallen on Dave Valler, who was sentenced to 7 to 10 years in prison after pleading guilty to two counts of possession of marijuana.

Valler is still awaiting trial, along with six other persons, on conspiracy charges in connection with a series of dynamite bombings of a school, a draft board, and a policeman’s car.

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The Vancouver Five are activists from British Columbia who are currently facing 17 counts of sabotage and conspiracy. Besides being charged with destroying an environmentally damaging hydroelectric generator and firebombing a porn shop, they also are accused of a massive bomb attack on a Toronto cruise missile plant.

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The trials of the Vancouver Five are over and their long exiles in prison have begun (see FE #317, Summer 1984). The five pled guilty earlier this year to a series of guerrilla actions and bombings.

For those who missed the results of the sentencing, Ann Hansen was given a life term in prison; Brent Taylor sentenced 22 years; Julie Belmas received a 20 year sentence; Gerry Hannah, 10 years and Doug Stewart, six.

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VANCOUVER BC—A tomato thrown at the Judge sentencing her to life in prison clearly articulated Ann Hansen’s contempt for the “Justice System” that is sending her and four other members of the Canadian guerrilla group Direct Action—the Vancouver Five—to lengthy terms in prison.

A viciously right-wing judge with a lengthy history of anti-labor and antiradical sentiments, Judge S.M. Toy, gave Hansen the life term for her conviction on a charge of conspiring to rob a Brink’s guard in order to obscure the political basis of Hansen’s other charges for which lighter sentences were handed down.

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Every crime in Oklahoma was added to his name.

—Ballad of Pretty Boy Floyd by Woodie Guthrie

Seizing five anarchists on 17 charges of sabotage and conspiracy in British Columbia early this year (see FE #312, Spring 1983) gave the Canadian government the excuse it needed to begin “clearing” other unsolved bomb cases by attributing them to the arrested five.

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Mohawk and the other booze peddlers hit by anti-sexist vandals moved quickly to restore their insults to women. Further action against them has been promised.

Billboards are so plentiful in and around Detroit that they could almost be taken for granted as part of the natural environment. Indeed, in a society where profit outweighs everything else, billboards fit-in quite naturally. They are the “Au-natural” voice of capital, and their mimicry of the population’s repressed desires flaunts the consumer only with the ideal of escape via sex, liquor and flights far away.

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“Bartolomeo Vanzetti and Nicola Sacco”
Chris Vanzetti
The artist’s great grandfather, Amleto Fabbri, was the Secretary of the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee.
This painting references the famous photograph of the two anarchists.

Bartolomeo Vanzetti lived in Plymouth, Mass., when he and his comrade Nicolo Sacco were charged with robbing a factory payroll and murdering two guards, a crime they did not commit, but for which they were executed in 1927.

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H. Horatio Humphrey, United States vice-warlord, was welcomed to Detroit last week by a 200-man anti-war picket line in front of Cobo Hall.

Humphrey was in Detroit to speak about riots and other such domestic problems at the National Association of Counties Convention. Official U.S. policy on riots, according to Humphrey, is that the government is against them.

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PRENSA LATINA—When asked “why did you come to Cuba” one black youth from Detroit answered earnestly: “To meet the beautiful Cuban people and help them with their harvest.” His friend, also from Detroit said: “To mix with the people and to get the truth of what’s happening here.”

“De pieeee...” followed by its English equivalent, “On your feeeet...” comes through the loudspeaker and echoes across the cane fields.

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Six hundred young Americans are planning to show their support this winter for the Cuban revolution by taking to that country’s fields armed with machetes.

They will be members of the Venceremos Cane-Cutting Brigade and will join with Cubans in a battle to harvest 10 million tons of sugar cane.

Venceremos is Spanish for “We Shall Triumph” and is the motto of the Cuban revolution.

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Note: This is a shortened version of an essay that can be found in several locations on the Internet. Some material is likely dated at this point, given the rapidly changing situation in Venezuela. Since the essay primarily has value as a first-hand account, and since we have not returned to Venezuela since it was written, we have not attempted to update this version in any way.

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Barrel-assing around hair-pin turns at 6am in a crowded bus on a road with no barriers between us and a two thousand foot drop was not the manner in which I anticipated arriving in Venezuela for the Sixth World Social Forum (WSF).

This anus-clenching adventure was made necessary by the fact that a key viaduct on the highway from the airport into Caracas was recently determined to be on the verge of collapse. All traffic was forced to take an old mountain road, so what was normally a 40 minute ride had turned into a gridlocked six-hour nightmare journey.

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The Fifth Estate received this communication prior to the December 3 presidential election from the Venezuelan Commission of Anarchist Relations (Comision de Relaciones Anarquistas) and its organ, El Libertario. Hugo Chavez won handily against his opponent. Venezuelan government officials announced that 70 percent of eligible voters had cast ballots.

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FE Note: The comrades of Venezuela’s El Libertario magazine are unrelenting in their criticism of what they call the myth of Hugo Chavez’s “Eco-socialism of the XXI Century.”

They often write about the general unwillingness to see the authoritarian side of Chavez as an echo of how almost the entire Left, including many anarchists, refused to criticize the Cuban revolution.

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In this interview conducted with Fifth Estate via email, Le Guin discusses influences on her life and work, some of the ideas behind her famous novel The Dispossessed, what needs to be done to cause a shift in the perception of anarchism in the popular imagination, and the inspirations for her most recent novel Lavinia (Harcourt 2008).

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Despite its much publicized popularity, the film “Rambo...Part II”, has been blasted nationwide by many groups and individuals. A San Francisco Vietnam veterans group, calling themselves “Veterans’ Speakers Alliance,” picketed in July in front of a local theater showing the film.

This group of Vietnam vets, as well as others around the country, have been quoted as saying that Stallone’s film misrepresents the realities of the war, glorifies its horrors and exploits the sacrifices of the men who fought it.

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Detroit Area Veterans Against the War will be joining veteran contingents from many other cities in a Memorial Day Demonstration in Washington, DC. The veterans plan to hold memorial services at Arlington Cemetery and also will demonstrate at the Pentagon.

“Veterans can play an important role in the antiwar movement,” said Ed Chalom, chairman of the new group. “It is becoming increasingly clear that the strategy of the Administration is to shift the blame for the continuation of the war onto the shoulders of the peace bloc and further, to discredit peace people as being “unpatriotic.”

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Plymouth City Attorney Charles Lowe told a Detroit News reporter recently that “the Plymouth City Commission felt that the Wayne County Prosecutor’s office will no longer recommend warrants for violations of the state obscenity law and thus it has become necessary for us to write our own law.”

This comes on the heels of a well financed campaign by the local chapter of the VFW to “rub out smut” in Plymouth. They collected, according to a spokesman, more than 3000 signatures on petitions in support for new anti-obscenity legislation in the City of Plymouth.

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Two summers ago all we heard on the news were stories about the gangs that were terrorizing the citizens of Detroit—vicious, sadistic teen-agers who beat people up during rapes or robberies. People on the East side were afraid to come out of their homes. (See FE #276, September 1976). All the publicity about the gangs has died down what with the “Renaissance City” hype and all, but there is one gang that was operating then and that is still at large today. The members of this brutal gang are employed by the City of Detroit.

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We regret the loss of Germinal Garcia (Victor Garcia). Born in Barcelona August 24, 1919, he died in Montpellier, France May 10^th. He was a member of the Libertarian Youth and Quijotes del Ideal in 1936. Active in the anarchist movement, he was editor of Ruta and Solidaridad Obrera in 1947–48 in Spain, and of Ruta in Caracas from 1962–67 and 1970–80. A prolific writer, he published over thirty books and pamphlets. A more extensive article on the life of Victor Garcia will appear in our next issue. Our sincere condolences to his daughters and his companion.

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In 1903, two young sisters, Helen and Olivia Rossetti, published a novel under the pseudonym Isabel Meredith, chronicling their lives as radicals, propagandists, and key figures in the European anarchist movement of that era. Prior to that, while still in their teens, they edited The Torch--An International Newspaper of Communist Anarchism, from 1891 to 1896, which scandalously called for sexual equality, the destruction of religion, and the end of state rule by violent means.

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After seven years in a highly secretive, repressive unit of a Texas federal prison for women, environmental Green Scare political prisoner, Marius Mason, has finally been moved into a less restrictive section.

He is now able to go outside, touch the trees, and see the clouds and stars, something he reports he will never take for granted again.

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Breakfield, Russell, Klug and Catlow, four of the Ft. Dix 38 (Shakedown/LNS)

FORT DIX, N.J.—The court-martial of Pvt. Terry Klug is over. He is the GI who the Ft. Dix brass had singled out as the “ringleader” in the now famous stockade rebellion on that base last June.

The surprise verdict: Not Guilty on all counts.

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JACKSON, N.C.—The Army announced May 20 its “final disposition of the cases of the three anti-war soldiers who had been in the Fort Jackson stockade for two months.

There will be no courts-martial for Joseph Cole, Eugene Jose Rudder and Andrew Pulley; they were released from the stockade today and the Army says that they will be discharged from the service in short order.

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When we left the Gandalf Three [“Building A Movement,” FE #351, Summer 1998], Noel Molland, Steve Booth and Saxon Burchnall-Wood, editors of England’s Green Anarchist, they were imprisoned following a guilty verdict for conspiring to incite others to cause criminal damage.

The charges and three year prison sentence stems from GA’s reporting of economic and ecological sabotage carried out by the shadowy animal and earth liberation fronts which have caused millions of pounds of damages to earth rapers and animal killers.

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The man accused of murdering a Detroit policeman at the New Bethel Church last March had his charge reduced from first to second degree murder.

Judge Robert L. Evans, who has presided over the long Recorder’s Court pre-trial examination of Rafael Viera, bound Viera over for trial July 30 on the reduced charge.

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A little more than a year ago, David Brown, Jr. of Compton, California sat isolated and frightened in a Wayne County jail cell awaiting trial on charges of assault with intent to commit murder.

He was charged with having shot at Detroit Patrolman Harkewitz from a loft inside the New Bethel Baptist Church on the night of March 29, 1969.

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[two_third padding=“0 20px 0 0”]Another window gone at the office of the Detroit Committee to End the War in Vietnam.

RING — RING!

“Hello--Detroit Committee to End the War in Vietnam.”

“You Commie son of a bitch! If you have any more marches, you’re all going to wind up dead!”

Click!

And so it goes at the local office of one of the groups trying to bring about an end to the war in Vietnam. Committee members say this type of harassment increases when the organization is particularly active. Since last week the Committee announced in the FIFTH ESTATE its plans to hold a four — day long series of protests against the war, they are now bracing themselves for the inevitable bricks and phone calls.

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NEW YORK (LNS)—Top secret operations are being launched in Vietnam to kill or capture American deserters fighting for the NLF, according to a London Express story reprinted June 24 in the New York Post.

The operations have been ordered as the problem of troops going AWOL in the war zone becomes increasingly serious.

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U.S. “normalization” of relations with Vietnam ignores the slaughter of the war and continues the myth of the MIA/POW.

Why did President Clinton (whose opportunistic-draft dodging was the only worthy thing he’s ever done) lift the almost twenty-year ban on trade with Vietnam in February, beginning a process of “normalization” between the two countries?

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EDITORS NOTE: The following speech was given to a meeting of the Detroit Circle held November 21 in the McGregor Memorial Building. Dr. Pollack is a History professor at Wayne and long active in the movement protesting the war in Vietnam.

Perhaps the biggest mistake many of us make when speaking about Vietnam is that we focus only on Vietnam, and in doing so, engage in a debate with the forces supporting the Administration on their own ground. Not that a case against the war could not be made even there, for it could. But I think the time has come to enlarge the inquiry and to make a case not simply against the war, but against the structure of American society which makes that war possible in the first place. Why are we in Vietnam? Until we dig deeply into that question and explore all the ins and outs, we will be forced to remain on a superficial level and to confront the war as a single issue--and in thinking of the war as a single issue. when and if this war is resolved, then the basis for the criticism is removed. This is not as it should be. I urge you to consider that the Vietnam war, as important as it is, is only a symptom--only a symptom of the larger course American society is pursuing. And one does not accomplish very much by confronting symptoms when the underlying causes remain unhampered.

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With the Vietnam analogy on everyone’s lips, first for El Salvador and Nicaragua, and now for Lebanon, the signs of similarities arise ever more frequently. One such indication is shown here in the accompanying two photos. The first is from the front page of the January 15, 1967 Fifth Estate showing draftees marching in Ft. Polk, LA, beneath a racist portrayal of orientals exhorting the soldiers to “Bong the Cong.” “The Enemy Viet Cong” turned out to be all Vietnamese, whether soldier, guerrilla, civilian, woman or child, with a resultant one million Vietnamese slaughtered by the U.S. war machine. The second photo is from Lebanon, taken during October prior to the bombing of the Marine headquarters and similar to the Vietnam era, the soldiers are implored to “Kill All the Rag Heads.” All Arabs are reduced to their traditional headgear and all are the enemy. It is the same racism, the same arrogance, the same unquestioning obedience to the state military apparatus which masks another’s humanity in order to turn them into mere objects for murder.

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This past week the D.C.E.W.V. conducted a survey in the segment of the 17^th district in which we intend to concentrate our efforts on the Lafferty campaign this summer.

In order to plan specific strategy we thought that it would be important to know something about the people who lived there. We felt that with a survey we would have more of a concrete estimation of prevailing sentiment than one painfully derived from an endless committee discussion.

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Vietnam Newsletter

Detroit Committee to End the War in Vietnam

Vol. 1, No. 2

1101 W. Warren, 832–5700, May, 1966

The major activity of the DCEWV since the March 25–27 International Days of Protest was a demonstration at a fundraising function of the 17^th District Democrats. About 35 demonstrators carrying signs reading: STOP THE BOMBINGS; BRING THE TROOPS HOME; I WAS A LIBERAL UNTIL I DISCOVERED THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY SELLOUT: and MARTHA (Griffiths) MUST GO, formed an orderly picket line from 8 to 10 p.m. in front of the Latin Quarter where the affair was held. Three of the demonstrators, who managed to obtain tickets legitimately, participated in the cocktail party, despite police efforts to keep them out of the building. One of them, Dena Clamage, executive director of the Detroit Committee, engaged Rep. Martha Griffiths of the 17^th District in a discussion about the Vietnam war, which ended when Rep. Griffiths accused Miss Clamage of baiting her and suggested that if Miss Clamage were opposed to her (Griffiths’) Vietnam policies, she should support some other candidate running on a peace platform. Smiling, Miss Clamage assured Rep. Griffiths that she would.

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At the outset, I would like to try to allay anyone’s concern about bias in a member of the Newsreel reviewing a Newsreel film. Clearly, I am not objective. I am partisan. So I would like to make clear the nature of that partisanship.

I once said in a rather superficial discussion within the Detroit Newsreel collective that my personal commitment was to the project of a people’s revolution in the United States, as part of the world revolution against imperialism and monopoly capitalism.

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The Detroit Committee to End the War in Vietnam will take initial steps to place a referendum on the war in Vietnam on the ballot in Detroit.

Dean Jabara, attorney for the Detroit Referendum Committee, submitted to the Corporation Council a proposed amendment to the Detroit City Charter, the amendment would create the office of the “Director of Peace Priorities,” who would work to bring about an “immediate withdrawal of all U. S. military forces from Vietnam.”

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Reprint from Vietnam Report Vol. 1, No. 1, the official newsletter of the Detroit Committee to End the War in Vietnam (DCEWV), April 1966

All the way with LBJ—and Nguyen Cao Ky! (reprinted from Weekly People)

Using the occasion of the Tom Hayden speech during the International Days of Protest. James T. Lafferty, Chairman of the Citizens for Peace in Vietnam, announced his candidacy for the 17^th District U.S. Congressional seat presently held by Martha Griffiths.

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We are all outlaws in the eyes of America...

We are obscene lawless hideous dangerous dirty violent and young...

We are forces of chaos and anarchy

Everything they say we are we are

And, we are very Proud of ourselves

—“We Can Be Together” (Jefferson Airplane, from “Volunteers,” 1969)

And, traitorous.

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SAIGON (LNS)—The following letter is directed to the American anti-war movement from Hugo Hill, an American civilian who lives in Saigon. For the past nine months, Hugo Hill has frequently contributed articles to Liberation News Service.

SAIGON

Sept. 6, 1969

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

As you well know, the Vietnamese people need no help in defeating U.S. military strategy. They have already smashed Maxwell Taylor’s “special war” and Westmoreland’s “search and destroy” operations. They have seized control of their own land from under the noses of half a million expeditionary troops and right now they surround all the American military bases in their country.

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There is, even though you may not have noticed it lately, still a war going on in Vietnam.

More than forty people, representing virtually every white peace group in the city, met on Monday, June 5 to try to do something about it.

Despite the wide divergence of political viewpoints represented the group tenuously agreed to combine their efforts over the summer. Committees were established to probe programs in four areas including community organization; anti-draft action; marches, demonstrations, and mobilizations and political action. A fifth committee will make proposals for structure, coordination, the name of the group, the setting up of a central office and the like.

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“It is time now to meet the escalation of the War in Vietnam with an escalation of opposition to that War. I think the time has come for all people of good will to engage in a massive program of organization, of mobilization. This is the purpose of Vietnam Summer. And I’m happy to join as one of the sponsors of what I consider a most necessary program, a program that may well determine the destiny of our nation.”

—Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., at press conference announcing VIETNAM SUMMER, Cambridge, Mass., April 23, 1967

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“There is too much concern about free love and not enough concern about free hate in this society,” stated William Sloan Coffin in an anti-war address at central Methodist Church on May 9, 1967.

Coffin, the Chaplain at Yale University, was speaking on behalf of Clergy and laymen concerned about Vietnam, a new addition to peace and anti-war groups in the city. Coffin is an officer of the national Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam which is co-chaired by Rev. Martin Luther King.

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Shortly after we published our issue with a discussion of the war in Vietnam, [Looking back on the Vietnam War, FE #320, Spring, 1985] an article appeared in the New York Times about studies done by the Vietnamese government and the Switzerland-based International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources concerning the effects of the “ecocide” (a word coined during the Vietnam war to describe the U.S. war there) on the land since the end of the U.S. war. The study traces developments since 1945 in a 97-page document, portraying a rural and agricultural nation devastated by “deliberate destruction of the environment as a military tactic on a scale never before seen in the history of warfare.”

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a review of

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

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

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a review of

In the Crossfire: Adventures of a Vietnamese Revolutionary, by Ngo Van; Eds. Ken Knabb and Helene Fleury; Trans. Helene Fleury, Hillary Horrocks, Ken Knabb, and Naomi Sager; AK Press; 2010; $19.95

There is a sub-genre of science fiction called alternative history, which consists of works such as Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, in which Germany wins World War II, and Hitler becomes the ruler of the U.S. Works of this type offer a counterfactual version of past events, allowing readers to think along different lines about how the world has developed.

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I would like at this time to point out what I believe to be the central considerations involved in my position that the United States is totally unjustified in pursuing its current policy in Vietnam.

To begin with, the resumption of bombings of North Vietnam can lead only to escalation and intensification of the already dangerous war in Vietnam. Three presidents have warned us of the dangers of an all-out war on mainland Southeast Asia; and yet, this is exactly the situation which the United States is now confronting.

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a review of

Vietnam Will Win by Wilfred Burchett (New York: Guardian Books, 1968)

Everyone should read Vietnam Will Win—including those who have already read Burchett’s earlier books, Vietnam: Inside Story of the Guerrilla War (1965) and Vietnam North (1966).

These two works, especially the first, are important as the first successful attempt to introduce the Vietnamese struggle to Americans in human terms. Burchett’s unpretentious accounts of what he saw in NLF territory in late 1964, and his interviews with the people who live and fight there, continue to be more meaningful than all the abstract legal, political and moral arguments put forth by the U.S. left.

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The Movement in town is gearing itself for a week of political action this month, covering a variety of issues but organized around the theme of “Solidarity with the Vietnamese People.” Actions will be held around the country on this day.

The main event of the week is a mass march down Woodward Avenue to Kennedy Square slated for Saturday afternoon, October 26. The demonstration will culminate in a rally at Kennedy Square, with Peggy Terry of the National Community Union, Andy Stapp of the GI Servicemen’s Union, and Tom Hayden of the National Mobilization Committee as the featured speakers.

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A wave of strikes has been hitting Italy, France, and West Germany, in many cases over the opposition of official union leaderships. A recent strike in Italy was conceded by Fiat to have involved 1.3 million men and to have been 75% effective.

The main issue for European workers continues to be wages: for a 48-hour week at Pirelli (tires), the average worker makes $160 a month. A quarter-million coal miners in Germany recently won 14% pay increases:

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Small-scale demonstrations on Wall Street around the October 15 Moratorium again raise the question, “Is Business Really for the War?” Fortune (Sept. and Oct., 1969) has come up with some answers through its own polls of the heads of the 500 largest corporations, banks, insurance companies, retailers, transportation companies and utilities.

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Early this year, George Meany’s AFL—CIO pulled out of the International Confederation of “Free” Trade Unions because ICFTU, originally set up as an anti-Communist rival to a pro-Soviet World Federation of Trade Unions in 1949, is getting closer to dealing with WFTU bodies.

“In the future,” said the Wall Street Journal, “AFL-CIO will spend the money on its own international programs,” that is, the ICFTU will no longer be directly on the CIA payroll. Unfortunately, nationally-isolated trade unions run into other kinds of problems.

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The Establishment press has been full of three things lately: encounter groups, pollution-ecology-environmental control (which has got to be the most cooptable issue since sideburns) and wasteful spending by the Defense Department.

Two interesting mainstream views on the latter were in Look (Aug. 25, the second of a series) and Fortune (Aug. 1^st issue). Fortune lists the top 25 contractors, breaks down defense contracts by state and into dollars per head of the population per state (meaning: just how dependent a particular state is on the military), and shows how the 25 largest contractors account for nearly half the value of all contracts.

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This column will be devoted to an exploration of Establishment thinking, as revealed primarily in power structure publications such as the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Fortune, etc. The assumptions of the writer are Marxian, Marcusian, and C.W. Millsian: in brief, that there is a power structure largely centered in the economy; that the Establishment, in particular its economic wing, is still remarkably flexible; that we, as radicals, had better know a lot more about how this Establishment functions; and, on a strategy for change must try to understand the divisions within the Establishment so as to make use of them for revolutionary purposes.

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The possible trial and execution of United States airmen as war criminals by the Hanoi government has been handled by the administration and by the press as a crucial turning point in the war in Vietnam. Partially to justify the bombings of Hanoi and Haiphong, partially to pave the way for bombings of the Red River dikes and, perhaps, China, and partially to silence the peace movement and other dissenters, the administration is conducting an incredibly effective propaganda campaign to project the impression that the trials represent a significant escalation of the war by Hanoi, justifying further escalation on the part of the U.S.

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For as long as the “New Left” has been in existence, “New Leftniks” have talked about the need for serious thought and analysis within the various “movements” which have arisen: analysis of American society, its history, its power structure, its operating mechanisms; analysis of other countries, especially those of the under-developed (overexploited) Third World; analysis of the problems which this country is or very soon will be confronting, i.e., automation, foreign policy, poverty, etc.; and analysis of where we as a movement, should be concentrating our attention and organizing energies. Unfortunately, very few New Leftniks have actually undertaken this type of work.

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Women,

step up to your place

as bounty hunters,

claim your $10,000 reward.

Grab your knitting needles,

pinking shears and nail files.

Maim, castrate or, if need be, kill,

at your discretion, each man

who approaches you in a

manner indicating he intends to engage

any of your body parts.

Remember,

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