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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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Introduction by Sunfrog

As one of the more outspoken non-atheists in the FE collective, it’s fitting that one of my early memories of the project was an argument about religion. I was hanging out in the office under the auspices of helping the collective members in their battle to stop the Detroit trash incinerator. While I could usually hold my rhetorical own, I was outnumbered and intellectually outgunned that afternoon in early 1988. Before I left the office that day, one of the collective members pulled me aside, sensing that I was feeling emotionally bruised after taking such a verbal beating. He encouraged me not to take the discussion personally, told me that he valued my participation, and gave me a book by Frederick Turner called Beyond Geography. If it weren’t for that gesture by David Watson, I wonder if I might not be here as a co-editor, writing this intro to his most recent article.

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This project is seeking personal accounts of surveillance, violence, and repression upon temporary and permanent autonomous zones (convergence centers, info shops, community centers, squats, collectives, etc...). Titled Breaking and Entering: State Repression of Autonomous Zones, this book will be comprised of individual perspectives of raids, supplemented with theory-based analysis of repression. The effectiveness of this documentation relies on the participation of those who have been subjected to police repression.

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NEW YORK (LNS)—Tuesday night at Ungano’s Discotheque, located just west of Amsterdam Avenue at 70^th St., the atmosphere: dark, the clientele: negligible.

Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton, who headed the bill, relaxed in the back room between sets, as the hard throb of records splayed out across the empty dance floor. One of the truly all-time great blues artists, with a powerful emotive and oh-so-sensitive voice that transcends those of both the classical female giants, such as Bessie Smith, and many of the traditionally-styled male bluesmen, Big Mama even now has received scant attention for her dynamic performances here and in Europe.

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

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

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“If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen. As if a town had no interest in its forests but to cut them down! Most men would feel insulted if it were proposed to employ them in throwing stones over a wall, and then in throwing them back, merely that they might earn their wages. But many are no more worthily employed now.”

—Henry David Thoreau

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The march of human social organization is essentially the story of how people have found ways of harvesting ever more energy from their environments in order to sustain ever more humans. The story began with the harnessing of fire and the domestication of plants and animals, but it took a fateful turn at the commencement of the industrial revolution when we discovered fossil fuels.

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Over the course of a decade, almost ten million Americans served the US military in the Vietnam War, and one quarter of those were draftees. Almost 60,000 Americans died, and almost 60% of those were under the age of 21. In terms of sheer numbers, today’s all-volunteer army is much leaner. And many young people who signed up out of economic necessity aren’t that stoked about Bush’s War Without End.

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Tragedy of the Sixties: If you turn on and tune in—such heavily technophilic metaphors!—you can’t really hope to drop out of the technocracy. Too bad turn off, tune out, and secede isn’t nearly so snappy a slogan.

Car ads make great play with our unconscious realization that we need cars to get away to some place where there are no cars. To escape. The “freedom” of the American automobilist is a freedom from community, from place, from the human. It accomplishes all this, as Virilio might say, by its speed, which alienates (or “liberates”) the human from organic connection to space. The car causes pollution, death and disease; it demands paved highways and parking lots. It transforms nature into a tourist destination. It “makes” constant omnipresent noise, global warming and aesthetic blight—to name a few “side effects.” But the car produces social breakdown. This is what people buy their SUV’s for. There is the hidden hook in all car ads.

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“The tighter that our humanity closes ranks to conquer nature on Mars, the tighter the elements close theirs to avenge the victory.”

—from Aleksandr Malinovskii Bogdanov’s Red Star (1908)

It’s easy to laugh off the Bush-Cheney regime’s plans for “establishing an extended human presence” on the Moon and Mars. “We will build new ships to carry man forward into the universe, to gain a new foothold on the Moon,” said Bush, a man who constantly fails to correctly pronounce the word “nuclear” and whose own scientific wisdom has had him publicly defending creationist fairy tales over Darwinian evolutionary theory. “We choose to explore space because doing so improves our lives and lifts our national spirit.” Coming out of the mouth of such a cowardly, belligerent, and proudly ignorant obscurantist like Bush, talk of interplanetary missions sounds as unbelievably silly as the music on a Christian rock CD.

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As we go to press word has reached us that Recorder’s Court Judge Robert Colombo has dismissed charges of sales of marijuana against John Sinclair. His trial on the charge of possession began on June 24 and may be in progress at this writing. Call our office or White Panther headquarters for more information.

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Beat the Heat: How to Handle Encounters with Law Enforcement by Katya Komisaruk. Illustrated by Tim Maloney. AK Press, 2003

reviewed by MaxZine

I was impressed by attorney Katya Komisaruk at the San Francisco Anarchist Book Fair when she came to the podium to speak and said she did not want to give a lecture but preferred to simply answer questions about run-ins with the law. Her conviction to help arm people with an understanding of simple ways to use what rights we have to defend ourselves against the encroaching police state shines through in Beat the Heat: How to Handle Encounters with Law Enforcement.

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Once in the Jurassic about 150 million years ago, the Great Sun Buddha in this corner of the Infinite Void gave a

discourse to all the assembled elements and energies: to the standing beings, the walking beings, the flying

beings, and the sitting beings-even the grasses, to the number of thirteen billion, each one born from a seed,

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People have a lot more of the unknown than the known in their minds. The unknown is great; it’s like the darkness. Nobody made that. It just happens.

—Sun Ra

According to The World Atlas of the Artificial Night Sky Brightness, human civilization is drowning itself in luminous smog. The Atlas is a joint project of astrophysicists from Italy and Colorado and measures the level of perpetual industrial brightness that is reflecting off the inside rim of the sky.

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When you see “The First Time” you begin to think that this “Graduate” bit is becoming a pretty poor excuse for a movie.

This time the striking Jacqueline Bisset has the Mrs. Robinson role, and Wes Stern, Rick Kelman, and Wink Roberts all comprise the Benjamin Braddock figure, working under the assumption that three Dustin Hoffmanns are more fun than one.

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July 23, 1968 will have to go down in the history of the black revolutionary struggle as a day of even more importance than July 25, 1967 (Detroit) and August 11, 1965 (Watts). It was on Tuesday night, July 23, that a small group of black men set up an ambush for the police in the streets of Cleveland, Ohio. They set it well and carefully: “... there were telephone complaints about an abandoned, stripped white Cadillac left on Beulah St.,” wrote the New York Post’s Jimmy Breslin. “The police tow truck came up to the Cadillac, shots came from three directions. The driver was a civilian employee. He was not hit. He was doing what they wanted him to do, radio for help. They would use their aim later.”

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

Dear Dr. Schoenfeld:

Your discussion of the sneeze-orgasm question in a recent column gave me the unaccustomed and satisfying experience of becoming aware of a mysterious part of my own behavior.

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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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a review of

The Impoverished Students’ Book Of Cookery, Drinkery, & Housekeepery by Jay F. Rosenberg. New York: Doubleday. $1.25.

Not so different from Chaucer’s scholar, students today are usually poor and this book is meant to ease the pains and help the limited budget. An impoverished student is defined as an individual who loves to eat, bates to cook, and cannot really afford to do either.

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

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

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ATLANTA, GA.—Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. has announced a nationwide campaign “to give Americans an opportunity to vote on the Vietnam war -through the time honored institutions of initiative and referendum.”

The campaign, supported by the organization Vietnam Summer, seeks to place anti-war referenda or initiative petitions on local and state ballots across the nation this fall and next Spring. Projects are already underway in over a dozen localities including Detroit and Ann Arbor.

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At this point, the only safe speculation regarding the New Politics Conference to be held in Chicago over Labor Day is that you shouldn’t believe what the underground press is going to say about it.

The key debates at the Convention will center on 1968 electoral strategy.

Should energy and resources be expended on a national presidential campaign or a series of local insurgent campaigns or both? Should campaigns be conceived as one-shot protests against the war and racism or should they be viewed as mere organizing devices to create long range radical institutions? Should campaigns aim to bolster Reform and “Concerned” ‘ Democrats and “peace candidates” or is it necessary to abandon attempts to reform the two party system, creating a third party?

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To the Editor:

May I say one thing, I hope that the Fifth Estate is not losing it’s awareness, love, peace and spiritual splendor.

From reading the August 1–15 issue, exploiting the Detroit Riot scene, and all—that excess-baggage that was written along with it was just too much for me to bare.

I’ve been very loyal to the Fifth Estate and I hope to continue, but please for heaven’s sake don’t drop your fine paper into the acid of terror, etc.

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Editor’s note: Investigation of the murder of John Leroy reported in the last issue of the Fifth Estate is continuing. (See “Who Killed John Leroy?” FE #36, August 15–31, 1967.) News editor Frank H. Joyce has talked with two of the national guardsmen who were on the scene, the photographer who took pictures immediately after the shooting stopped and additional witnesses. His report of new information appears below.

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NEW YORK (UPS)—Paul Krassner was supposed to appear on the Joe Pyne show Sunday, July 16, but the tape was never shown. Paul had doubts that Pyne would show the tape even though his guest appearance was announced in the TV section of every paper.

As Paul tells it the producer of the show explained “If Joe don’t like it, Joe won’t show it!”

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Welcome to the first issue in our 41^st year of radical publishing. This edition, no different than the preceding 371, takes up our desire for revolution, one that ends the monstrous systems of capitalism and the state. It begins with a critical look at what is billed by the Left as the Bolivarian Revolution. Michael Staudenmaier, with Anne Carlson, describing their month long visit through Venezuela and relates anarchist perspectives on Chavismo. The FE’s Walker Lane writes about the 2006 Caracas World Social Forum (WSF) he attended, and offers critiques of the gathering and the direction the country is taking.

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Unclassifieds cost 50 cents per line per issue. Figure four words per line. (A word is a word including one and two letter words. A phone number is a word. Street numbers are words. Abbreviations should be sensible).

DISCOUNT RATES: Five runs cost 35 cents per line.

ALL UNCLASSIFIEDS MUST BE PAID IN ADVANCE BY MAIL OR PERSONAL DELIVERY

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US Marine Corp brig. Corpus Christi, Texas, 1964. “ON THE WALL! GET ON THE WALL, PRIDNER!” I had just been marched inside the sally port by two armed MP’s. The heavy barred gate slammed shut. My partner, Duke, was right behind me, flanked by two more MP’s.

“YOU DEAF, PRIDNER! I SAID--GET ON THE WALL!” Yellow handprints, greatly spaced, were spray-painted on the wall. Corresponding footprints, also widely-spaced, below me on the spit-shined sally port deck. I stared at the yellow prints on the deck. My face was rammed into the concrete bulkhead by one of the brig guards.

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A Chinese journalist was freed in February after spending nearly 17 years in prison for splattering paint on a portrait of Mao during the 1989 pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square.

Yu Dongyue, now 38, and two friends, hurled eggs filled with red paint at the famous painting of Mao, which still stares at the Square from across the street. Yu and his family are expected to reunite in Hunan Province, but his younger brother said the family was deeply concerned about Yu’s mental health.

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In 1936, groups of women in Madrid and Barcelona founded Mujeres Libres, an organization dedicated to liberation from their “triple enslavement to ignorance, as women, and as producers.” While it lasted for less than three years (its activities in Spain were brought to an abrupt halt by the victory of Franco’s forces in February 1939), Mujeres Libres mobilized over 20,000 women, and developed an extensive network of activities designed to empower individual women while building a sense of community.

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Freedom is a word with many meanings. What makes radio free from an anarchist point of view? In relation to the airwaves, the term commonly refers to a form of direct action broadcasting done without a government-approved license. It is popularly known as pirate radio.

The autonomous broadcasters of the free radio movement actively expand the everyday lived experience of freedom from state regulation by seizing the airwaves from their corporate and government masters, setting up unlicensed stations and helping others to do the same. On the other hand, the Prometheus Radio Project is a non-profit organization created by former radio pirates to facilitate the growth of a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) program known as Low Power FM (LPFM).

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Nothing can prepare you for New Orleans. All the dramatic rhetoric, righteous anger, extravagant allegory, profligate tears, and urgent broadcasts of need have not been wasted.

If some well-intentioned money has been squandered in a vortex of government and charity bureaucracy, all the love, prayer, intention, direct action, and indignation could not be better spent than on saving this amazing spiritual and cultural homeland.

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“By banning the telephone from the home, Old Order Amish...try to maintain the primacy of communication within the context of community.”

--D.Z. Umble

“Church splits are bad, some things are worse, and one of them is to keep on compromising with something we know is sinful.”

--Anon., Separated Unto Christ (Old Order Mennonite tract, circa 1995)

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José Peirats, The CNT in the Spanish Revolution, published by The Meltzer Press (Vol. 1) and Christie Books (Vol. 2). They are essential reading.

Stuart Christie, We, The Anarchists, The Meltzer Press. A telling and thorough look at the FAI.

Much of our knowledge of the anarchist resistance to Franco comes from the work of Antonio Tellez and Miguel Garcia. All of the above publications are available from AK Press akpress.org and deserve close reading.

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On December 7, the sudden arrest of six individuals rocked the activist community. All were accused of arsons claimed by the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) and/or Animal Liberation Front (ALF). Since then, the cases have taken many twists and turns: one of those arrested died in custody in an apparent suicide; six more activists were indicted (although three have not been apprehended); then, on January 20, a 65-count indictment against the remaining 11 arrestees blamed them for every major ELF action between 1996 and 2001, with a trial set for October 31. In February, two more activists were arrested and charged with some of the same arsons in Oregon.

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And, so we return to Spain. Nearly 70 years after the people’s response to a right-wing military uprising, those events remain a source of wonder, optimism, confusion, strife and tragedy. It was a high mark of personal and social possibility that has yet to be matched. It was a real revolution of everyday life that shattered the patterns and relationships created by the agencies that constituted a growing capitalism.

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The two publications to the right [in the print edition] and dozens more anarchist, feminist, abolitionist and prisoner zines are available from: South Chicago ABC Zine Distro, P.O. Box 721, Homewood, IL 60430; write for a catalog.

They Will Never Get us All — Harold Thompson

They Will Never Get Us All!, Harold H. Thompson, 2006, 50 pp., order from: Friends of Harold H. Thompson, 711 E. Holly St. PMB #748, Bellingham, WA 98225, send $3–7 (sliding scale) well concealed cash

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a review of

The Man Who Killed Durruti, Pedro de Paz, Translated from Spanish by Paul Sharkie, Postscript by Stuart Christie, Illustrations by Richard Warren. Christie Books (Read and Noir, PO Box 35, Hastings, East Sussex, U.K.), 2005, 135

In a book that’s both fiction and history, Pedro de Paz and Stuart Christie have combined to look once again at the question of who killed the anarchist militia leader, Buenaventura Durruti.

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“When one comes to think of it, it is strange that thousands of people in a great modern city should spend their waking hours swabbing dishes in hot dens underground. The question I am raising is why this life goes on--what purpose it serves, and who wants it to continue.”

--George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London

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FE Note: The following is taken from the El Libertario web site. See the above article on this page for their URL.

In the last four years Venezuela has undergone a polarization induced by the top players vying for power: the old “punto fijista” bureaucracy (Fedecamaras, CTV, political parties) against the new Chavez bureaucracy that has supplanted the previous one. This antagonism, false as much as real vs. pretended exercise of power, sustained and amplified by the media, has benefited those who have cast themselves as legitimate voices of the sector of Venezuelan society they claim to represent.

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The CIRA (Centre International de Recherches sur Anarchisme) in Lausanne, Switzerland is a large archive and small research facility. It has existed for over 50 years, but today, its existence is threatened. The CIRA works to retain the memory of the anarchist movement.

For 50 years they have collected texts written by anarchists from all over the world which are available for militants, researchers, and the curious. The collection includes nearly 20,000 books and brochures, hundreds of titles of magazines (the oldest of which is from 1848), films, and a personal archive of militants’ correspondence, etc., in over 20 languages.

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Mick Kubiak: Here Comes Spring

cdbaby.com

reviewed by Sean Flynn

Mick Kubiak is the girl you were in love with in school. Who read novels and wrote in a notebook during class, despised convention and carried her otherworldly beauty and sexuality as simple givens. A part of no clique, Kubiak began to form her eviscerating and hilarious social critique of a culture obsessed with possessing women when she was barely seventeen.

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Just the headline above alone probably condemns us to the gulag by uncritical leftist supporters of Hugo Chavez’s Bolivarian socialist revolution. But like most issues that vex the left, a look beneath the surface always provides more than what initially presents itself, and almost always, something worse.

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reviewed in this article

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

Other Cinema, San Francisco, 2003

www.othercinemadvd.com/net.html

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

--Werner Herzog, filmmaker.

“Truth is the invention of a liar.”

--Heinz von Foerster, cybernetician.

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September 7, 8, 9, at the Victoria Coolaid Society, 749 Pandora St., Victoria, BC

The only Anarchist Bookfair on the Canadian west coast will be part of a week-long Festival of Anarchy. Events include book and information, tables, workshops, readings, films, and presentations.

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There are certain things that jump out at you as soon as you arrive in Denmark. One thing you’ll notice, especially if you come from a place within that large mass of the world that is a bit closer to the equator, is that there is rarely anything you’d call direct sunlight.

It’s twilight most of the time. In the summer, it’s only really dark for an hour or so, but never completely light, either. In the winter, it’s dark most of the time, often accompanied by a cold, light rain.

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I begin with two insights. Global systems theorist, Immanuel Wallerstein, argues that throughout capitalist history the working class has been divided into a proletariat, which makes a living solely through waged labor, and a semi-proletariat which in its contemporary incarnation, juggles such pursuits as temp work, freelance projects, state subsidies (food stamps, artists in residence grants, or student loans), and maxing out on credit cards.

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

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Earth Day supplement page 1

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

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Earth First! is dead! Long live Earth First!

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

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