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

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FIFTH ESTATE subscribers almost didn’t get their last issue because the Post Office couldn’t make up its mind whether the paper was pornographic or not.

A Postal Inspector Brown called the FIFTH ESTATE office and invited us to come down and discuss a new bulk rate. When our people arrived, the Inspector told them that he had to call the state postal authorities. Specifically, Brown objected to the ‘Poem for Warner Stringfellow’ by Detroit poet John Sinclair. The post office was upset about an alleged statement by Lt. Stringfellow that Sinclair was a “worthless prick.”

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EDITOR

Harvey Ovshinsky

MANAGING EDITOR

Peter Werbe

EDITORIAL ASSISTANT

Cathy West

NEWS EDITORS

Robert Fleck, Frank Joyce

ART

Dave Carlin

CIRCULATION

Wilson Lindsey

TRAVEL EDITOR

Sheil Salasnek

MUSIC & LITERARY EDITOR

John Sinclair

CALENDAR

Rhona Whipple

ADVERTISING

Leon Brenner

FILM EDITORS

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On Thursday, February 23 at 8 p.m. the editorial board of GUERRILLA will present a program of new Latin American poetry in Lower Helen DeRoy Aud. at Wayne State University. The program will include a film on the Venezuelan guerrilla struggle and a lecture on Hugo Blanco, the imprisoned Peruvian peasant leader. The evening will be presented in cooperation with the Committee To Defend Latin American Political Prisoners.

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In a spasm of concern for the political education of Oakland University students, the O.U. Young Dems invited Donald Lobsinger, chairman of the ultra-rightwing Breakthrough organization, to address the student body on Monday, February 6.

It was a circus. Over 400 people packed Oakland’s Gold Room to point, gape, and laugh at the Superfreak. All the campus hippies were there. SDS came to chuckle. A festival atmosphere pervaded the crowd.

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Dr. Sheil Salasnek addressed a crowd of over 130 people at the LEMAR Legalize Marijuana meeting Feb. 2^nd in Lower DeRoy Auditorium.

The paranoia from the recent bust was evident as everyone originally sat in the back of the room, avoiding the (bugged for what?) front rows of seats. However, after Joe Mulky urged everyone to move UP, and the doctor started talking, the meeting turned to a relaxed and comprehensive discussion of LSD and the psychedelics.

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One doesn’t expect to read much about spectator sports in the Fifth Estate. The multi-underground nature of professional boxing today, however, makes it and perhaps cock-fighting, an apt subject for followers of deviant American culture. Moreover, there is something of a tradition of writers, self styled or otherwise, commenting at least on heavyweight championships.

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Surprise “hero” of the recent narcotics bust—Recorder’s Court Judge Frank Schemanske. Lena Sinclair (John’s wife) and three others were going to be held a second night without being formally charged, pending a chemical analysis of the stuff seized in the raids. When Lena’s pregnant condition was pointed out to the judge, he called the Narcotics Bureau and ordered the prisoners’ immediate release without bond of any kind.

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There will be a meeting of the people who were illegally arrested and detained in the January 24^th “great marijuana raids” to discuss the possibilities of bringing suit against the Detroit Police Department for violation of their civil rights.

Attorney Dennis James will address the group and will answer questions about the legal problems involved. All those arrested who wish to look into this matter are urged to attend. The meeting will be held at the Artists’ Workshop, 4857 John Lodge, at 8:00 p.m. Monday, February 20, and will be sponsored by the 24^th of January Movement. People desiring more information can call the chairman of the subcommittee, Rita Cole, at 358–0425.

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The “great narcotics hoax” was pretty weird any way you look at it, and I’m happy too that this issue carries a “fact sheet” on the big “raids.” The daily “newspapers” and the idiot TV and radio interests do a good job as police propagandists, as well they should (like, when you consider the Commissioner Ray Girardin was a “newsman” for 30 years on the Times, you get the idea), and as usual the only source for anything even resembling the “facts” is this paper. But they know they haven’t got long now, and they’re doing everything in their power to hold off the revolution—which revolution, however, will not be stopped. Like the cop said to me, “I just hope those kids aren’t listening to you,” and all I could tell him was, well, they’re YOUR kids, baby, and they don’t HAVE to listen to me at all—you’re doing a pretty good job of alienating them all by yourself. They don’t NEED me to tell them anything. Yes.

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On Tuesday night the 24^th of January 56 Detroit citizens were arrested and held at least overnight in the City Jail. Most of these arrests—43—were entirely illegal and unconstitutional, and there is considerable doubt as to the legality of the arrests of the 13 people who were subsequently charged with selling and / or dispensing (giving away), and/or possessing, varying quantities of marijuana.

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Nothing demonstrates more clearly the intertwined nature of politics and the new music than a concert that I had the good fortune to be able to attend over the recent holidays. The concert was in New York’s Village Theatre, and it featured, besides the artistry of Jackie McLean, Marion Brown, Archie Shepp, and their respective groups, a short speech by none other than Stokely Carmichael.

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I visited the Grande for the first time in quite a while. Seems to have grown up. The lights are better, more people, wild pop clothes, and less self-conscious of ‘freaking out.’ The MC-5 played what has got to be the sound of the Big City. They come on with a rush of muscle; like being in the middle of a factory. It crashes and bangs and swirls you around; and it’s not a particularly easy trip. You sweat with them through some hard music.

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“Everything I say will come out just a little bit different, I don’t mean on the transcript, but as it leaves my mind and comes through my mouth, it gets a little bit messed up just around about the mouth, where the words start doing it.”

  ~

Miles: Are there any particular influences on your music?

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Are the officials of Dow Chemical Company, the local Selective Service system, and the Wayne University administration guilty of complicity in war crimes? This will be the subject of public hearings to be held at Wayne University between April 8 and 15.

The decision to hold the hearings was made unanimously at a planning conference for Vietnam Week in late January. The conference was called by the Wayne Committee to End the War in Vietnam and was chaired by Charles Larson, president of the Student-Faculty Council at Wayne. Also represented to the Conference were Detroit and Oakland Students for a Democratic Society, the Fifth Estate, the Detroit Committee to End the War in Vietnam, Detroit Citizens for Peace in Vietnam, and the Young Socialist Alliance.

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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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a review of

World War 3 Now? World War 3 Illustrated, Issue #54 by Jordan Worley, Nicole Shulman, Seth Tobocman, Sue Simensky Bietila, eds. AK Press, 2024

The new issue of World War 3 Illustrated, the 54^th, is one of the biggest in the history of this long-running project, with over 50 artists and writers contributing.

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a review of

The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic by Alan Moore and Steve Moore. Top Shelf Productions and Knockabout Comics, 2024

Two writers, life-long friends, became practicing magicians and decades later decided to share what they have learned. Alan Moore is almost certainly the most important comics writer of the last half-century, having greatly expanded both the range and the depth of the medium, subverting, deconstructing, or reinventing every genre in which he has worked.

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The man responsible for the death of Oakland, Calif. social justice activist, anarchist, and baker, Jen Angel, was sentenced to seven years imprisonment for manslaughter and robbery. Twenty-year-old Ishmael Burch accepted a plea deal in August of last year.

Angel was dragged to death in February 2023 when she became entangled in the car Burch was driving after he had stolen her purse.

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a review of

Fight for a New Normal? Anarchism and mutual aid in the Covid-19 pandemic crisis Ed. Jim Donaghey, Foreword by Ruth Kinna; Afterward by Rhiannon Firth. Freedom Press, 2024

People all over the world, including in the U.S., are facing increasing authoritarianism, natural disasters, industrially-produced destruction of the living environment and intensifying social breakdown. Nevertheless, there is some basis for hope because of the growing numbers of mutual aid projects with the potential to be part of strengthening community defense and decentralized liberatory communities, emerging everywhere.

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1920s Chilean workers scene from El Montaje. ¿Quién conoce a Gómez Rojas?, Teatro Fresa Salvaje (Chile), at 2016 Theatre Festival Photo: Alvaro Pachec

A longer version of this article is available on the Fifth Estate site at https://www.fifthestate.org/archive/416-spring-2025/the-montreal-international-anarchist-theatre-festival/the-montreal-international-anarchist-theatre-festival-long-version/

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A deadly drone war rages between Ukraine and Russia. A.I.-generated images are appearing on restaurant menus and as logos in grocery store aisles. Students all around the world are flooding ChatGPT essays into their online courses.

And, for some reason, the world’s richest man is now tampering with the secure government data banks of one of the world’s most powerful nations because the country re-elected a third-rate reality TV star who has a meme coin worth $180 billion dollars. Despite all of this, the assassination of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson in December by 26-year-old Luigi Mangione may be the most cyberpunk event of the 21^st century.

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I have never talked with anyone knowledgeable about Harlem affairs who does not believe that Esther James, the woman who sued Adam Clayton Powell for libel, was a bag woman as the Congressman had called her.

The problem is that in order to prove it, since the defense against libel is the truth, Adam Clayton Powell would have had to produce witnesses willing to testify about corruption in the New York Police Department. Where is the policeman who is willing to admit that he took the payments from Esther James? Or that the N.Y. police department runs the numbers racket in Harlem? So when Esther James admitted on the witness stand, as she did that she was a police informer, that in itself was a tacit admission that she was a bag woman.

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The floodlights and the TV cameras swung around in a wide arc to survey the results of a question asked from the podium. The question: “How many of you are willing right now to stand up and say you’re not willing to go and fight in Viet Nam?” In answer, more than one-half the 150 in the audience rose to their feet.

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Once, one approached Truffaut with satiate expectancy, awaiting only to be chewed up and spat upon beneath the marquee. In stark wonderment and in bitter tears one expected to be engulfed by the pleasures of cinema at its best. The mystery about him is depleted and this precious auteur now rates the same scrutiny as his far western brothers with only a slightly higher handicap. His reputation has been defiled through the medium of “Farenheit 451,” Truffaut’s latest endeavor, from the novel of the same name by Ray Bradbury.

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America—the world—lives in a period of transition of its entire way of life. On the one hand we live in utter confusion and yet on the other we are beginning to see the immense possibilities that are now available to us to construct a HUMAN society, a society in which man will be released from thousands of years of struggle and toil he has put himself to. Moreover, we live in a period of great spiritual discovery. We find ourselves at the beginning of a human epoch that will see each of us—all men—MAN flower into the beautiful creative animal he is.

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Militant Negro leaders in Detroit have called for a nation-wide strike and boycott by black communities in support of Adam Clayton Powell. Over 600 people attended the rally at Central United Church of Christ on January 24 calling for the boycott.

Comedian Dick Gregory, feature speaker at the rally, called for a “new attitude by Negroes.” He pointed out that while white southern senators were elected illegally and still remain seated, Congressman Powell was ousted because he was black. Gregory also said he would not mind if treatment were equal, but “please, Mr. President, don’t let Bobby Baker take the rap alone.”

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James Dickey, in his delightful book of essays The Suspect in Poetry, distinguishes four main ways of reacting to poems which are worth repeating as they may be applicable to film.

In ascending order of importance they are 1) “This probably isn’t so, and even if it were I could-not care less,” 2) “This may be true enough as far as it goes, but well ... so what? 3) “This is true or at least convincing, and therefore I respond to it differently than I do to poems in the first two categories, and 4) “This is true with a kind of truth at which I could never have arrived by myself, but its truth is better than the one I had believed.”

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I mistrust people who smoke pot loudly. Bragging, yelling, telling.

I don’t think it’s wrong to turn new people on. I’d just never thought of trying to sell marijuana in mass form. It seemed that LEMAR was trying to prove that psychedelics were safe “for the whole family.” I think they’re right, only I instinctively shrink away from anyone trying to lay something on me. American TV commercials did that to me.

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Special to the Fifth Estate

San Francisco — Hippies, Hippies, Hippies, and when you turn around, more of them were sitting on the grass, perched on fences, standing on benches, straining for a look, or entwined on the ground.

People carrying odd pennants, flags and signs, seeing colored smoke bombs going off. People dropping into the crowd by parachute, souls filing through the crowd handing out L.S.D., others handing out sticks of incense.

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I want to compliment you on the very fine article which you co-authored in the January 1 through 15, 1967, issue of the Fifth Estate [“Spare the Rod…?” FE #21, January 1–15, 1967]. I think that it was a well written article which discussed and documented very well the kinds of problems we have around corporal punishment here in the Detroit Public School system.

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Saturday night, January 14, at the Meadow Brook Theater was a Brechtian evening in more ways than one. A youthfully middle-aged audience, whose appearance and intermission conversation would have been classified by Brecht as bourgeois, reacted enthusiastically to a first-rate production of his ‘The Caucasian Chalk Circle.’ Despite the fact that it was an opening play for a new company, it was in some respects better than the production by the Lincoln Center Repertory Theater in New York last year.

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As forecast in the FIFTH ESTATE (Dec. 15–31, 1966) federal, state, and local “narcotic” agents swooped down upon Detroit’s underground community Jan. 24^th to enforce Michigan’s archaic and repressive narcotic statutes. The late night raids resulted in the arrests of 56 persons ranging in ages from 17 to 33 years old.

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So you think the Michigan Chronicle, Detroit’s only Negro newspaper, is conservative, its green color reflecting its primary purpose of making money rather than informing the community?

How does the idea of a Negro paper published by a white racist, who may have John Birch Society money behind him, grab you?

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Councilman Nicholas Hood’s recent “anti-crime” breakfast of Negro “leaders” may have been a lot more clever than one would think at first glance.

This writer’s first reaction was: What kind of crap is this—that, according to Hood, “Negroes should utilize the same energies devoted to the civil rights movement to the fight against crime.”

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“Why the Dearborn Referendum?” was the subject of a talk given by Dearborn Mayor Orville Hubbard at St. Joseph’s Episcopal Church, January 26.

The lecture was presented by Citizens for Peace in Vietnam as part of their Spring educational series. Other speakers will include William Pepper, who wrote the article in the January Ramparts on U.S. napalm effects on Vietnamese children and Harrison Salisbury of the New York Times, who recently returned from Hanoi.

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On Wednesday, January 18, the Ann Arbor Police Department confiscated Jack Smith’s film FLAMING CREATURES during a showing to 300 college students, hippies, and film buffs. This was, we suppose, an attempt to protect these people from having to see things that they weren’t supposed to see.

It was a very subtle bust, actually. Everyone was sitting there watching the film when the screen went black and the lights came up. There was confusion for a few minutes, people wondering if the film was over or what.

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In a sermon on Anti-Semitism on January 22, the Rev. David M. Gracie, St. Joseph’s Episcopal Church, called for stronger measures against Breakthrough, a local right-wing group, and its various disguises, better protection of community groups against their “disruption, harassment and embarrassment,” and “prosecution (of them) with at least as much zeal as was shown in the Hobart Street trespass case.”

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A news article in the January 21, 1967 MICHIGAN CHRONICLE, a Detroit Negro paper, reported their paper had received several phone calls complaining about the use of the word “nigger” in an anti-draft display at Wayne University.

The display, sponsored by the Wayne chapter of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), outlined different alternatives to the draft including conscientious objection (CO) and going to Canada. Also, the display suggested potential draftees could “cop out” by displaying erratic or disagreeable behavior at the induction center.

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THE POEM FOR WARNER STRINGFELLOW

OCTOBER, 1966

Detective Lieutenant, Detroit Narcotics Squad, who has been single-handedly responsible for busting me on two separate occasions for possessing & selling marijuana

and who stumbled into my new apartment last night by accident

over a year since the last time he saw me

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A series of free entertainment on Friday nights has been organized at Wayne State University by a group of students known as the Friday Night Coordinating Committee (FNCC)

On February 3 there will be a classical music concert at Community Arts Aud., at 8:00, presenting Dr. & Mrs. Hockberg of the Wayne State University School of Music.

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In his recently published book FOUR LIVES IN THE BEBOP BUSINESS, A.B. Spellman relates that Buell Neidlinger, former bassist with Cecil Taylor, told him: “I think Cecil Taylor is potentially the most important musician in the Western World ... And I’m basing this,” the “legitimately” trained Neidlinger went on, “on my experience with some of the very best of the new composers and the new orchestras ... Cecil has it, to my mind, clearly above all of them.”

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The New Age of man finds more and more people interested in living together for the mutual benefit of one another’s growth and development.

While many communes have been set up in the past they have generally been of limited success. Despite all the difficulties that one encounters in communal living it is the belief of many that it is only through such living together and the sharing of lives that man can achieve his maximum potential.

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