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The pretrial examination of 14 street people for dynamite conspiracy has been marked by the incredible legal buffoonery of Judge Thomas Poindexter. the assault of a defendant by a bailiff. and the testimony of a freek turned stool pigeon.

The fourteen are charged with con-spring to dynamite several police stations, a draft board, the CIA office in Ann Arbor and several other sites in the Detroit area.

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FE Note: The following article was sent to us anonymously several months ago and has generated an enormous amount of discussion among us by its charges that prisoners who are “thugs, murderers, pimps, rapists, conmen of every sort” have been “elevated to the level of anarchist heroes” and that the prison support movement showers “slavish devotion” on them.

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I came home one night many years ago to find my then girlfriend crying on the couch. “What happened?” I asked. “Nothing. Just some guy in the street.” “What did he do to you?”

“He wouldn’t let me cross the street unless I told him my name and agreed to go out with him. He kept blocking my way.”

She told me that this total stranger kept harassing her for blocks and wouldn’t give up. No one intervened.

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The American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan (ACLU) has condemned the announced intent of Colonel Arthur A. Holmes, state Selective Service Director, to use the Selective Service Act “as a device to punish dissent”.

Colonel Holmes was reported earlier as calling for “the immediate induction” of Vietnam war protesters who had violated Selective Service regulations or had caused any interruption of procedures.

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Milosevic by Richard Mock

Slobodan Milosevic has been at The Hague for a little more than a year, the first head of state to face a war crimes tribunal since the crime of genocide was codified in the UN Charter. The former autocrat stands accused of sixty-six accounts of war crimes, including ethnic cleansing in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosova; the murder of civilians and prisoners; and genocide in Bosnia.

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The American Civil Liberties Union asked the U.S. Supreme Court to review the case of a Richmond Professional Institute student who was kept out of the college for his senior year because he sported a beard and long hair.

The Virginia liberal arts college refused to allow Norman Thomas Marshall to register in September, 1965. In a brief filed with the high court on behalf of Marshall, a 26 year old scholarship student and past editor of the college’s literary magazine, the civil liberties group contended that the school’s “arbitrary, capricious and unreasonable” action refusing him registration on account of his groom violated the constitutional rights to free expression, due process of law, privacy and protection against cruel and unusual punishment.

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The American Civil Liberties Union last week urged the U.S. Post Office Department to reverse its decision to issue a 1966 Christmas stamp representing a religious scene, calling such governmental support of religion a violation of the First Amendment’s guarantee of separation of church and state.

In a letter to Postmaster General Lawrence O’Brien, ACLU executive director John de J. Pemberton Jr. sharply criticized the Post Office’s plan to reproduce Hans Memling’s “Madonna and Child with Angels” on a Christmas stamp. The ACLU spokesman declared that the government “has no mandate or authority to indoctrinate minorities in the religion of the majority, or to lend its instrumentalities and vast prestige to the celebration of the religious holidays of the majority.”

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VENICE—Most of the art freaks who came to Venice for the June Biennale arrived in an ambivalent frame of mind. They were revolutionaries weren’t they? don’t all artists and dealers consider themselves revolutionaries?—and so they understood why the Italian students protested the Biennale as a symbol of the Italian cultural establishment. Well, didn’t they?

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FT. JACKSON, S.C.—Anti-war GIs here are circulating a petition addressed to their commanding officer calling on him to have a meeting on the post to discuss the war in Vietnam.

[See Ft. Jackson Leaflet in this issue.]

They also want to discuss whether their rights as citizens and soldiers are being violated by post authorities. The answer seems obvious. Since the soldiers calling themselves GIs United Against the War in Vietnam began their petition drive there has been a steady stream of harassment and attempted intimidation of their group by Army officials.

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“Over North Vietnamese radio the voice of ‘Hanoi Hannah’ constantly harangues the Americans: ‘Don’t be the last G.I. to die in Vietnam.’”

—Ian Brodie, London Express

“Battles for bunkers in the Song Chang valley are merely tactical moves in the President’s strategy of retreat. He is asking Company A to fight for time to negotiate a settlement with Hanoi that will save his face, but may very well lose their lives. He is also carrying on the battle in the belief, or pretense, that the South Vietnamese will really be able to defend their country and our democratic objectives, when we withdraw, and even his own generals don’t believe the South Viet Namese will do it. It is a typical political strategy, and the really surprising thing is that there have been so few men, like the tattered remnants of Company A, who have refused to die for it.”

—James Reston, New York Times

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a review of

Los crepusculos de Anthony Wayne Drive/The Twilights of Anthony Wayne Drive, a bilingual edition by Hernan Castellano-Giron, translated by Emil Efthimides. Operation D.O.M.E. Press, Detroit, 1984.

This is a bilingual collection of poems by the exiled Chilean poet Hernan Castellano-Giron. Hernan was born in Chile in 1937 and lived in Santiago where he studied and taught at the University of Santiago. After the military coup in 1973, Hernan was forced to leave the country and found refuge in Italy during 1974 to 1981. He presently lives with his wife and son in Detroit where he is teaching Spanish.

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“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot’ stamping on the human face—forever.”

—O’Brien, in Orwell’s 1984

How do we begin to discuss something as immense as technology? To investigate it means to investigate the totality of this modern civilization, not only its massive industrial vistas which represent the structural apparatus, the stage scenery; not only the hierarchy of command and specialization which reveals the skeletal structure of this apparatus in human relations; not only “the humble objects,” which “in their aggregate ... have shaken our mode of living to its very roots,” as Siegfried Giedion has written; but also in that internalized country of our dreams and desires, in the way we unconsciously see ourselves and our world.

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Judith Melina and Hanon Reznikov

Because art breathes on in the legacy left with the living, death cannot defeat an artist. In this eternity of the permanent present, poems and plays and songs resist the tyranny of death. While this recognition hardly dulls the sting of mortality in the hearts of the bereaved when we lose a loved one, its message rings clearly today as we celebrate the life of the late Hanon Reznikov.

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A reply to Mr. Wilbert McClendon; not because he will listen (he won’t) but because someone has to maintain the balance:

Mr. McClendon: You said one right thing in your article and that was that some of the white people who protest the war in Vietnam are phony. Actually, you didn’t even say that right because you said they were ALL phony and that, Mr. McClendon, is ridiculous. There are a great many white protesters who are not phony. They have rallied in support of the Negro cause and that cause is much more honest and meaningful because of them. But even the phony white protesters are not harmful.

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Staff Note: The following is a letter that was recently sent to the Fifth Estate by Lorenzo Komboa Ervin. For more information about Komboa, see “Komboa: Anti-Vietnam Warrior,” FE #292, June 19, 1978.

Dear Comrades:

I am an Anarchist political prisoner confined in the infamous Control Unit Behavior Modification Program at the Marion Federal Penitentiary. Ten prisoners have died in the Control Unit In the past few years (3 deaths in 1977 alone!) and hundreds of others have been-driven to self-mutilation or insanity.

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a review of

Polymath: The Life and Professions of Dr. Alex Comfort, Author of ‘The Joy Of Sex’ by Eric Laursen. AK Press 2023

“We are the enemies of society and we must learn disobedience. Then we shall probably inherit the earth by default when the maniacs have burnt each other to a cinder. We shall be alive; they won’t.”

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Send letters to fe — AT — fifthestate — DOT — org or Fifth Estate, POB 201016, Ferndale MI 48220.

All formats accepted including typescript & handwritten; letters may be edited for length.

What Size?

Not many mistakes in your Summer 2013 edition, but one I saw that referred to the 7-1/2” penis. It shrank significantly from the headline measurement of “Lessons from a 7-Foot Penis.”

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Karen Malloy is out of jail and home in Columbus, Ohio.

Enough fuss was raised by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to force the Beast to “release” her on $5000 cash bond.

You see, Miss Malloy is one of the “key prosecution witnesses” in the bogus trial of suspended Detroit Pig Ronald August. This racist pig is due to stand trial in May for the vicious torture-slaying of Auburey Pollard, a 17-year old black who was among three blacks brutally murdered by the mad-dog agents of the Beast in the former Algiers Motel on Wednesday, July 26, 1967, during the height of the Rebellion.

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Beloved long-time social justice activist, anarchist, and owner of the Oakland, Calif. Angel Cakes bakery, Jen Angel, died on Feb. 9. Jen passed on after three days on life support following critical injuries suffered in a robbery outside of an Oakland bank.

For over 30 years, Jen Angel was a visionary influence and pioneering participant within multiple movements and sub-cultures that significantly informed and shaped our lives.

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Copyright 1966 by the Los Angeles Free Press. Reprinted with permission.

“All a man wants is a home like a castle, all a man wants is peace at his door, all a man wants is a tree by his window...”

(A poem fragment tape-recorded by Ginsberg on the Los Angeles freeways)

Last Friday I had a three hour conversation at the Free Press office with Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky, who are presently touring the country writing poetry, giving readings and meeting people.

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Face the Nation

Thru Hickman’s rolling earth hills

icy winter

gray sky bare trees lining the road

South to Wichita

you’re in the Pepsi Generation Signum enroute

Aiken Republican on the radio 60,000

Northvietnamese troops now infiltrated but over 250,000

South Vietnamese armed men

our Enemy—

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When this essay first appeared in the Fifth Estate in Spring 1985, the Vietnam War already seemed to be receding into ancient history. Central America was at that time being battered with money and proxies, rather than with “American boys,” who tend to get themselves unceremoniously killed while smashing up other people’s neighborhoods. A few hundred thousand deaths and mutilations later, we still await the tearful retrospectives with their admixture of regret and denial.

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The revolutionary spirit among young people has begun to rage in the secondary schools and one may be seeing a multitude of mini-Columbias as high school students begin to demand their rights.

A recent example occurred at Mumford High on the Northwest side the week of Oct. 1. Because of student grievances, a protest walk-out was being planned, but relatively few students knew about it.

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Demonstrator at a May Day demonstration in Tunis, Tunisia holding an English language sign. The Fifth Estate first publicized the slogan but stole it from Terry Southern’s The Magic Christian. Photo: Fedele Spadafora

Early this year, people involved with the Occupy Wall Street movement in New York City started talking about the COOLS, the Cultural Occupation of Liberty Square. The point was to get as many people possible back into Zuccotti Park, dubbed Liberty Square, where the movement began. The police carried out a mass eviction from the lower Manhattan park in November.

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translated & edited by FE collective members

This article was written by a participant in the VAAAG, the Village Alternatif Anticapitaliste et Anti-guerre (the Alternative Anti-capitalist and Anti-war Village) that was created during the Group of Eight summit meeting (G8) in Evian, Switzerland during June 2003. The anonymous author wants to make it clear that s/he was not a member of the coalition protesting the summit, the Convergence des Luttes Anti-Autoritaires et Anticapitalistes Contre le G8 (CLAAAC G 8). This text, the author says, is “addressed to comrades and companions on the other side of the Atlantic and elsewhere.”

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For the past five years I have been a reference librarian at a small public library in Florida. Today I pulled into the parking lot at my usual time of eight-thirty. The Library did not open until ten, but people often lined up early at the front doors. The library was the most impressive building in town. It was big, modern and well lit. It really stood out among the small rental houses and grungy bars that make up the rest of the area. The only person waiting when I arrived was Marco. Marco sat at his usual morning post on the green bench next to the main glass doors of the library. He got there every morning hours before the library opened. Marco was in his fifties. He described himself as a special forces killing machine created by the United States government. He did not look like much of a killing machine. He was an overweight guy with a dazed facial expression. His dazed expression may have been caused by the prescription medications he got from the veteran’s administration or perhaps that was just his natural state. I did not know. He always wore black and had a collection of crosses hanging around his neck. These were the kinds of crosses they sell at the flea market for bikers and metal heads. Because of these decorations Marco was known to the young teens who hang out at the library as Ozzy. My car was the only car in the parking lot except for a big black Escalade. I knew it was not Marco’s. Marco rode the bus.

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The Dispossessed

Author: Ursula, K. LeGuin

The best fictional account of an anarchist society in practice, from the perspective of a brilliant scientist from that society who leaves it to try and bridge the cultural gap between his society and that of their nearest neighbors.

Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice

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June 24, Quebec’s national holiday, St. Jean Baptist day, is usually an uneasy combination of healthy fun and not so healthy flag Waving. This year’s celebrations in Quebec City, the seat of the provincial parliament, turned hotter than usual.

Following the traditional outdoor concert, people flowed into D’Youville Square, the hangout of punk and countercultural types in the city, joining others already there.-Cops began making arrests, provoking resistance from the crowd. Bricks and bottles began to fly.

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The Montreal-based Anarchist Writers Bloc (AWB) has published Subversions Vol II, their second anthology of new anarchist fiction. The 260 page, trilingual (English, French & Italian) text is a powerful collection of 28 original short stories from 28 established and emerging anarchist writers from around the world.

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For anyone who wanted a late Christmas present, the Fleetwood Mac at the Grande Ballroom provided a good one. Score one against all the Blue Cheer fans who said the Mac were “another British blues group.”

But, for those of you who didn’t see them, go the next time. I always find it amazing when so many people in the hierarchy of the group world treat music as something which means something to them and nothing to others.

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As President Clinton delivered his nomination acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention (DNC) talking about “a bridge to the 21^st century,” a half a mile away Chicago police were raiding a building housing anarchists from the Active Resistance Counter-Convention (ARC).

The Corporate Power tower is dragged by its victims. Later, following a rebellion, it is transformed into utopian scenes of anarchy. — photo/Susan Simensky Bietila

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But in two days of court martial proceedings (Nov. 4 and 5), the Army has been able to get only two scared young GIs—both of whom admit having been threatened with charges of their own if they refused to help the prosecution—to testify against Jeffrey Russell, first of the four to come to trial.

The Army’s other two eyewitnesses, Pvt. Alan Farrell and Airman. John Lisk, brought shocked and angry flushes to the faces of the Army’s two ambitious young prosecutors when they refused to testify against Russell.

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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 FOR IN ADVANCE.

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a review of

Freedom Summer by Sally Belfrage (Viking, 1965)

The many aspects of the movement are presented in the often chaotic way they presented themselves to Sally Belfrage in the summer of 1964. Facts which could be dry and even boring if given in abstract take on life and meaning in the particular. They are sometimes present in connection with the personality of the person who spoke of them. Sometimes they are part of the history of a friend who survived them. Sometimes, facts come in to give meaning to the efforts of an Establishment man—a Greenwood deputy, an FBI agent, a representative of the justice department, a television reporter—to deny them. And sometimes, they are summed up in what was, for Sally Belfrage, one more step in the long walk of understanding.

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Editor’s note: Dave Dellinger, editor of Liberation magazine, arranged in Hanoi last spring for a group of Americans to meet with the North Vietnamese and members of the NLF in a midway meeting point—which developed to be Bratislava, Czechoslovakia. The Americans were drawn from the peace movement, the black liberation movement, university professors, community organizers, clergy, artists and film-makers. Raymond Mungo, former editor of the Boston University News, participated and spoke on behalf of the Liberation News Service.

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a review of

Passages of Rebellion by Fran Shor. Smart Set, 2021

Passages of Rebellion, with its focus on 1960s activism, feels perfectly curated for 2023 readers.

Just as the country was polarized and divided in the 1960s, today’s activists challenge convention and institutions, albeit with far more sophisticated technological capabilities, but with similar intent to their messaging.

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Though we do not accept commercial advertising, this Unclassified ad space is free for our readers’ use. We do not accept ads over the telephone, so please send your ads in writing to our office at: 4403 Second Ave., Detroit, Michigan 48201.

WOMEN IN THE SPANISH REVOLUTION—Liz Willis’s excellent pamphlet first published by Solidarity, London, has been reprinted in New York with some additional material by Liz and is available by writing to: Gonzalez/Kleinman, p.o. box 562 Cooper Station, New York, NY 10003. If you can afford it, send $1 to cover costs of publication, mailing and free copies which will be sent to people who are incarcerated and others without funds, upon request. Less (or of course, more) is acceptable. We will take valid US postal stamps, cheques (made out to N. Kleinman or J. Gonzalez) or real green money. In Europe, write to: Solidarity, c/o 123 Latham Rd., London E. 6, England; in New York, stop by Come!Unity Press.

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Though we do not accept commercial advertising, this Unclassified ad space is free for our readers’ use. We do not accept ads over the telephone, so please send your ads in writing to our office at: 4403 Second Ave., Detroit, Michigan 48201.

THE DAILY BARBARIAN. Although this is still a great publication, you’ll have to write to an all new address if you’d like to see a copy. (The Barbarian is free, but it would help us if you could send us stamps and a LARGE envelope to help with the mailing costs). We’re also planning to publish some pamphlets in the near future and possibly another Barbarian—whether you like it or not. URBANE GORILLA, P.O. Box 02455, Destroyit, Michigan 48202.

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Though we do not accept commercial advertising, this Unclassified ad space is free for our readers’ use. We do not accept ads over the telephone, so please send your ads in writing to our office at: 4403 Second Ave., Detroit, Michigan 48201.

No. 4 of ULTRA magazine features articles on nuclear protests, anarchist feminism, surrealism, Yippie! history, the recent smoke-in at the University of Houston, MacDeath’s, as well as an essay by prisoner Ruchell Cinque Magee on the Guyana incident. For your copy write to: ULTRA, PO Box 35253, S. Post Oak Station, Houston, TX 77035. Sample copies free, but assistance on postage is appreciated.

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[Translator’s note: Recently, a voluminous dossier began to circulate in France. The dossier, sent by Os Cangaceiros, included stolen prison plans and documents and a chronology outlining Os Cangaceiros’s campaign of sabotage against the “13,000 project” (new maximum security penitentiaries with room for 13,000 prisoners), as well as reproductions of communiques sent to those who were targeted. Interestingly, the police and companies which were attacked have been very discreet about this campaign, apparently wishing to give it as little publicity as possible. The following excerpts from the dossier have been translated from Mordicus, B.P. 11, 75622 Paris cedex 13, France, and Le Monde Libertaire, 145 rue Amelot, 75011 Paris, France].

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VOICE, the University of Michigan Chapter of Students for a Democratic Society has called for regional action Aug. 8 at the Dow Chemical Corp. in Midland, Mich., protesting that company’s production of napalm for use on Vietnamese villages.

Members of the participating organizations will travel to Midland on August 7^th to attempt to mobilize community support against napalm production there much in the same way a group of citizens did in Redwood City, California. On Monday, August 8^th, there will be a mass demonstration at the Dow Chemical plant. Participants are expected from all across Michigan and Northern Ohio. The Detroit Committee to End the War in Vietnam voted July 13 to support the action and will coordinate travel arrangements and publicity for the Detroit area. The Committee may be contacted at its office at 1101 W. Warren.

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Reprinted with permission of the Guardian, independent radical weekly, NYC

1968 was the year in which the momentum of the past eight years reached a climax. From the first day of that year, everyone could feel that this year was the year for a series of confrontations which would expose the enemy more and more. Columbia, Chicago, the Black Panthers and much more happened—and the enemy was exposed to those who were predisposed to look and some who were not.

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White middle-class America now has a President it can call its own. This is the middle-class America of people who have “pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps.” It is the middle-class America of the Puritan virtues of all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, but so what? It is the middle-class America of housing subdivisions midway between the cities and the suburbs, the middle-class America of rectangular lawns that are mowed on Saturday morning and car washing in the driveway on Saturday afternoon and a drive out in the country on Saturday evening. It is a respectable world which believes in the system because the system worked for them.

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Reprinted with permission of The Guardian, independent radical weekly, NYC.

A student movement has its own built-in limitations, both in terms of how much it can do and how much it can understand. In some ways, a student Movement tends to be artificial, because the student lives in an artificial environment—the university. Thus, it is natural that a student movement generally concerns itself with issues that the majority of society has hardly any time at all to-be concerned about. This is good to a point. Without the student demonstrations against the war, there would’ve been no antiwar movement. Without student consciousness of racism, blacks would be even more isolated and vulnerable to attack.

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Reprinted with permission of The Guardian, independent radical weekly, NYC

The very different nature of the problems facing the white and black communities necessitated a white radical movement and a black radical movement. In no organic way could these two movements merge, although they were both fighting the same enemy. That situation still exists, except the black and white radical movements have a common problem for the first time, a problem which can be more effectively fought if the two movements formally align with each other.

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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.”

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Fifth Estate

North America’s Oldest Anti-Authoritarian Periodical

Promoting rebellion since 1965

FIFTH ESTATE #360, Spring, 2003, Vol. 38, No. 1

The Fifth Estate (ISSN 00-15-0800) is published quarterly.

Subscriptions are $10 for four issues; $20 for international including Canada and Mexico.

No copyright; no paid advertising

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

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

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a review of

Food for our Grandmothers: Writings by Arab-American and Arab-Canadian Feminists, Edited by Joanna Kadi, South End Press, Boston, 1994, $16.00

There’s sand in the pages of my edition of Food for our Grandmothers: Writings by Arab-American and Arab-Canadian Feminists. This is not a derogatory reference to those named in the title, but rather because I am reviewing the anthology of poetry and essays at Makena Beach, on Maui in Hawaii.

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by Michael William

An anarchist running for mayor; anarchist candidates for city council—what did Montreal do to deserve this? Indeed, with seven anti- authoritarian identified people running for office and more cast in supporting roles, our town would seem to be experiencing a phenomenon: the coalescing of an organized anarcho-electoral pole in the anti-statist milieu.

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