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Excerpted from Fifth Estate #367–368, Spring-Summer 2005 40^th anniversary issue. This is an edited version of Don’s essay.

The design shows a pyramid surmounted by an eye being blasted by a bolt of lightning. Bannered beneath the collapsing pyramid is the motto, “NON SERVIAM.”

If English, Spanish, Italian, or French is your native tongue, then you can probably guess the Latin translation: “I will not serve.” The phrase is taken from Paradise Lost (1674) by the radical poet of the English Revolution, John Milton, wherein the archangel Lucifer refuses to obey God and is cast into the frozen lake of Hell for his rebelliousness.

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The design shows a pyramid surmounted by an eye being blasted by a bolt of lightning. Bannered beneath the collapsing pyramid is the motto, “NON SERVIAM.”

If English, Spanish, Italian, or French is your native tongue, then you can probably guess the Latin translation: “I will not serve.” The phrase is taken from Paradise Lost (1674) by the radical poet of the English Revolution, John Milton, wherein the archangel Lucifer refuses to obey God and is cast into the frozen lake of Hell for his rebelliousness.

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What is the Sound of One Hand making a Clenched Fist?

If you see a Black Flag waving on the Flagpole, what moves?

Does the flag move? Does the wind move?

Does the revolutionary movement move?

What is your original nature--before May ’68, before the Spanish Revolution, before the Paris Commune?

Somehow this doesn’t seem quite right. And in fact, it’s unnecessary. From the beginning, Zen was more anarchic than anarchism. We can take it on its own terms. Just so you don’t think I’m making it all up, I’ll cite some of the greatest and most highly-respected (and respectfully ridiculed) figures in the history of Zen, including Hui-Neng (638–713), the Sixth Patriarch, Lin-Chi (d. 867), the founder of the Rinzai school, Mumon (1183–1260), the Rinzai master who assembled one of the most famous collections of koans, Dogen (1200–1253), the founder of Soto, the second major school, and Hakuin (1685–1768), the great Zen master, poet and artist who revitalized Zen practice.

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Smiling and serene Michio Kushi arrived in Detroit Tuesday, the 31^st day of January to talk about his life work, Macrobiotics. To audiences that night at the residence of Bill Reid and Ken Burns and at Jim Semark’s the next, he explained that Macrobiotics is a dietary approach to living based on the principle of yin and yang, two terms for which he has been unable to find an equivalent in our language.

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Ugly nationalism is surfacing everywhere. It is important for those who oppose the State to reject any and all forms it may take. The following addresses the problem in Canada, but applies to all nationalisms.

from A comrade from Quebec, with FE editing

As the orgy of nationalist stupidity approaches its climax, there has never been a better time to reappropriate the word sovereignty. Never has a need for autonomy been more painfully urgent than it is today. But now that Capital and the State occupy almost all the terrain, our minds become the only space that is usually left. The power of the courts, cops, bosses, and bureaucrats of the present and future States is awesome and undeniable. But for us, these institutions have no legitimacy and will have none in the future State.

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Zerowork No. 1; Available from P.O. Box 515, Station C, Toronto, Ontario, Canada or through Ammunition Books (see further in this issue).

The last few years have seen the appearance of few new journals, even fewer of which are worth taking seriously. Zerowork, however, is one of the exceptions. Despite a density of text and an absence of graphics and photographs, this journal is well worth reading.

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Bob Brubaker’s defense of agriculture [this issue, FE #330, Winter, 1988–89] seems to have two main components, one in which agriculture itself recedes in favor of “symbolic exchange.” Here it is argued that “symbolism, not agriculture, was the sun around which primitive life revolved,” and that “where there is symbolic interaction with nature, ecological destruction doesn’t take place.” But while it is more pleasant to hear the voices of ceremonials and rituals than to contemplate the ravages of agriculture, reality must also be encountered.

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Five-legged beast carved in basalt. Face of a Babylonian warlord and body of a desert flesh eater. His eyes saw for centuries into black sand and dust, into the thickened skin of the earth. Cities and cities, temples and temples, mountains of bone above him as a grave. He is a protective godling, seeing forward and seeing nothing.

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a review of

War of Dreams: A Field Guide to DIY Psy-Ops by Jason Rodgers. PM Press, 2024

At the height of the zine movement in the 1990s, thousands, perhaps tens of thousands—what could be thought of as armies of people—would march off to their post office boxes every day to engage in an ongoing assault on mainstream culture using low-circulation publications as their weapons of choice.

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a review of

The Gun and the Olive Branch: The Roots of Violence in the Middle East by David Hirst. Second Edition, 1984, Faber and Faber, 475 pp., £12.50.

In Mein Weltbild (1934) Albert Einstein identified Judaism with a specific “moral attitude” to life: “the essence of that conception seems to me to lie in an affirmative attitude to the life of all creation. The life of the individual only has meaning insofar as it aids in making the life of every living thing nobler and more beautiful. Life is sacred, that is to say, it is the supreme value, to which all other values are subordinate.” Yet in this same work, the great thinker and lover of peace and human brotherhood defended the Zionist realization of “Judaism” in Palestine

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Today (1973) a new imperialist war breaks out in the Middle East and the vicarious social-patriots who constitute today’s established “left” can hardly contain themselves in their eagerness to rush to the defence of one bourgeoisie against the other.

A few social-democrats and left-wing Zionists declare their solidarity with “plucky little Israel” against “Arab aggression”, ignoring the fact that the state of Israel is fighting a war over conquered territories, over vital raw materials such as the Sinai oil-fields, which now supply almost all of Israel’s oil, over Israel’s “right” to continue her repression and exploitation of thousands of Arab workers and peasants in the “administered areas”.

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This short account by Liberation News Service of Zionism’s sordid history as a white settler, colonialist movement barely scratches the surface in terms of the magnitude of the injustices committed in the name of the Jewish people, but should not in any way imply support for any of the Palestinian Nationalist groups who claim to speak for the refugees.

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This article is an excerpt from Our Roots Are Still Alive: The Story of the Palestinian People, by The Peoples Press Palestine Book Project, published by the leftist newspaper The Guardian and is available through the FE Book Service.

[In 1947] The United Nations Special Commission on Palestine (UNSCOP), which had no African or Arab members, recommended by a narrow margin that Palestine be divided into a Jewish and an Arab state. The partition plan granted 55 percent of Palestine to the Jews, who were 30 percent of the population and owned only 6 percent of the land. Some 407,000 Arabs, a number nearly equal to the number of Jews, were to live in the area assigned to the Jewish state. The Arab state was to include ten thousand Jews and 725,000 Arabs in the remaining 45 percent of Palestine.

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