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It was perhaps an inappropriate time to ask a question since at that very moment two climbers from Greenpeace were struggling to unfurl a banner describing the pollution which would be emitted from Detroit’s giant trash incinerator. Their problems were compounded by the fact that they were hanging in the girders of the Detroit-Windsor Ambassador Bridge some 150 feet from the water below.

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Earth Day supplement page 3

It was perhaps an inappropriate time to ask a question since at that very moment two climbers from Greenpeace were struggling to unfurl a banner describing the pollution which would be emitted from Detroit’s giant trash incinerator. Their problems were compounded by the fact that they were hanging in the girders of the Detroit-Windsor Ambassador Bridge some 150 feet from the water below.

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Last winter at a Draft Conference held in Central Methodist Church in downtown Detroit a Soviet flag was hurled at the speaker’s platform by Don Lobsinger, head of Breakthrough, a local kook group.

Despite the urgings of some draft resisters that the left join the right in stamping on “that dirty revisionist flag” it was rescued and remains intact. The flag is a beautiful revolutionary red with a gold hammer and sickle in the corner. It is a full five feet by three feet in dimension.

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The Draft Resistance sold its Red Flag, but didn’t make one hell of a big profit. $5 to be exact. Maybe people thought it was contaminated by its previous owner.

Incidentally, there was a bad typo in the article offering the flag for sale (FE #37, 1–15, 1967). The story read “the left join the right in stamping that dirty visionist (sic) flag.” The word should have been revisionist. Big deal.

The law suit seeking to stop Detroit and State Police political spy units and open up secret police files may be drawing to its final stages. Wayne County Circuit Court Judge James Montante has appointed liberal Detroit attorney Arthur Tarnow as a monitor for releasing the files after determining the best procedure “at a reasonable cost to the city and state.”

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Once upon a time there was a large shopping center in a Land to the North, and a plastic store called (1 across). For many weeks long-haired freeks and greasers had hung around with nothing to do but laugh at (1 down) shoppers and hassle pigs.

Kind of a bogue life, but there didn’t seem to be much else to do.

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Redwood Summer was modeled after the “Mississippi Summer” of the civil rights movement. The conditions were similar to those of Mississippi in 1964. African-American victims of the system needed outside intervention to advocate for them in hostile territory. In Northern California in 1990, it was Redwood ecosystems that needed help.

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“La Jeunesse de Bacchus” William Bouguereau 1884

Our call for the re-enchantment of the world isn’t a collapse into New Age dreaming, but rather a different, or perhaps more accurate description of what this publication has always stood for—revolution against capitalism, the state, patriarchy, and the forms of misery they generate.

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Reprinted from The Seed / UPS

YES FOLKS! NOW YOU CAN BE THE FIRST ON YOUR BLOCK TO EXPERIENCE THE ECOLOGICAL DISASTER.

WHY WAIT TILL 1980? DON’T LET THE FUTURE TAKE YOU BY SURPRISE.

PREPARE NOW FOR THE END OF CIVILIZATION.

REHEARSE FOR THE APOCALYPSE.

HERE ARE A FEW SUGGESTIONS:

Better start preparing your palette and stomach for the fare of the ‘80s:

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A surprise plea bargain was announced at a November pre-trial hearing for four environmental activists charged with a variety of Earth Liberation Front (ELF) and Animal Liberation Front (ALF) actions which had been carried out since the late 1990s. The defendants were arrested between December 2005 and February 2006, as part of the FBI’s “Operation Backfire,” which sought to cripple major ELF and ALF cells.

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ST. PAUL, MN--The case against eight Twin Cities anarchists known as the RNC 8 came to a conclusion October 19, when the remaining four defendants pled guilty to misdemeanors resolving their legal and political battle stemming from arrests at the 2008 Republican National Convention.

Last September, county prosecutors dropped all charges against RNC 8 defendants Monica Bicking, Eryn Trimmer, and Luce Guillen-Givins. In June, RNC 8 defendant Erik Oseland entered a guilty plea to one count of conspiracy to commit criminal damage, a gross misdemeanor

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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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On February 24, I joined a large crowd to march in a jazz funeral celebrating the life of our friend, the filmmaker and community activist, Helen Hill. Helen was murdered at her home on January 4 by an intruder whose motives remain a mystery.

Hundreds of people gathered in the Mid-City neighborhood at the home that she once shared with her husband, Paul Gailiunas, a doctor, musician, and fellow community activist, and their small child, Francis Pop.

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Our longtime friend and comrade Jim Campbell died suddenly last September 17 of heart failure. He was 57 years old. Jim was a mainstay of the Toronto (and larger Canadian and international) anarchist community. Though we had not been in close touch lately, we had a long political and personal relationship going back to the late 1970s, including political collaboration, correspondence, and visits in Detroit and Toronto.

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Rojava is still in my eyes. A fountain in the middle of desert. By desert, I mean authoritarian regimes, imperialist and colonialist forces, and Islamist warmongers. But it seems now that while at a societal level, Rojava is flourishing with ways to fight patriarchy, the environment is turning into an actual desert.

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When I entered Kent State University in the Fall of 1975 it was by no means a revolutionary situation I was stepping into. It is ironic, because ever since the shooting on May 4, 1970 by Ohio National Guardsmen of thirteen students, resulting in the death of four and the wounding of nine others, Kent had gained an almost worldwide reputation as being a radical campus. But when I was there in 1975 and 1976 the average member of the student body had about as much connection with what happened there just a few years earlier as they did with the man on the moon.

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Vi Landry (1974 — 2008)

“What have you done for New Orleans? What separates you from the tourists who come down here, party, maybe absorb a little culture and leave, besides the length of your stay?” Vi Landry asked me these difficult questions with her characteristic unflinching gaze as we sat in my kitchen during the spring of 2007, a year and a half after Hurricane Katrina.

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The Martyrs’ Farewell
That we lost and have to die, does not diminish our appreciation and gratitude for your great solidarity with us and our families. Friends and Comrades, now that the tragedy of this trial is at an end, be all as of one heart. Only two of us will die. Our ideal, you our comrades, will live by millions. We have won. We are not vanquished. Just treasure our suffering, our sorrow, our mistakes, our defeats, our passion for future battles and for the great emancipation.
Be all as of one heart in this blackest hour of our tragedy. And we have heart. Salute for us all the Friends and Comrades on the earth.
We embrace you all and bid you our extreme good-bye with our hearts filled with love and affection.
Now and ever, long life to you all, long life to liberty.
Yours for life and death.
--Nicola Sacco, Bartolomeo Vanzetti (Death House, August 21, 1927)

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(Guardian/UPS) One of the teeth-gritting things about living in Scum City is the opportunity to be insulted by the New York Times. That is why so many more “ordinary” people read the New York Daily News. It insults you on your own terms and in your own language.

What brings this to mind is a recent article about paperback books in the Times Sunday Book Review. This is the part of the paper in which all the college professors and second-division novelists review the books written by all the other college professors and second-division novelists. It smells like the inside of a literary cocktail party.

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Attention prisoners!

Throughout our 25-year history, this newspaper has maintained a policy of offering free subscriptions, through a special fund provided by our readers, to those held captive by the political state—prisoners and GIs. This is not done as an act of charity or social work, but as an expression of solidarity with those suffering in two of class society’s most authoritarian and key institutions—prison and the armed forces.

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There used to be a big debate within the peace movement about whether or not to call for immediate withdrawal of troops from Vietnam. Some thought this was too radical a demand and one that would find no acceptance with the American public.

Even today there is an organization called Negotiations Now! which considers immediate withdrawal to be an untenable position even though they are opposed to the war.

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The State of California has concocted another frame-up charge against imprisoned ex-SLA member Joseph Remiro. Already serving two life terms for murder and jail break, Joe is accused this time of plotting an escape attempt from Folsom Prison with two other prisoners.

The alleged plot came to light last June 4 (although no report was released on it until June 22) after a former associate of Remiro, Bobby Davis, handed a 9-mm pistol and 27 rounds of ammunition over to prison authorities and implicated Remiro in the alleged escape attempt.

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Joe Remiro, Russ Little, Bill and Emily Harris remain prisoners of the state as a result of the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) urban guerrilla activity in 1973–74. All have been sentenced to long prison terms and have been subjected to continuing harassment and abuse while in custody. (See past FEs.) The following is a report from Russ on the legal and penal status of the four and centers on a recent judicial appeal of his and Joe’s conviction for the 1973 assassination of an Oakland, Calif. school official.

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Brandon Jones Mooney, Tracy Michelle Hughes and Aishe Keita in “Reparations.”—photo: Aaron Jin

a review of

“Reparations”

Darren Canady, Playwright,

Jay O’Leary, Director

World Premiere, Sound Theatre Company, Seattle, Jan. 10, 2020

Reparations examines inherited historical trauma, whether that trauma can be healed, and, if so, how.

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After two months of silence the Defense Department indirectly answered a request for information sent to them by the News Editor of the FIFTH ESTATE. The inquiry, sent June 1, involved a report in the VIETNAM COURIER (published in Hanoi) that a battalion of the 1^st Infantry Division had attempted to desert in the midst of battle. (See article, FIFTH ESTATE, p. 6, July 15, 1966).

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REPUBLICANS! We mean it: pack your bags and leave Detroit! Take your vile political party, your cadaverous candidate, your stinking love for the state, your vicious racism, your blatant sexism, your hatred for the poor, your insane war plans, your nauseating patriotism, your putrid Christianity, your antiquated sexual morality, your contempt for the rest of the world, your millionaire officials, your middle-class sensibilities and your pathetic lack of vision and get out of our city!

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(via Dock of the Bay/UPS)

• Eldridge Cleaver is coming home within the year—maybe;

• Kathleen Cleaver gave birth to a baby boy named after black Cuban revolutionary Antonio Maceo;

• The Black Panther Party is setting up centers of information and propaganda distribution in Paris and other European and African centers;

• There may be a “summit meeting” of revolutionary groups in the relatively near future, in which “The Black Panther Party will play a key role;”

• The Chicago Headquarters of the Panther Party was attacked by police who claim they were shot at by armed Panthers. National Chairman Bobby Seale said at a recent press conference that the Chicago Panthers did not provoke attack, that since the Chicago headquarters were entirely covered with plywood it would have been impossible to shoot from the office anyway.

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Note. El Libertario, the voice of the Comision de relaciones anarquistas of Venezuela, analyzes the how and why of the increasing state repression against the growing social discontent that belies the pseudo-revolutionary discourse of the Chavez regime. See also: “In Chavez’s Venezuela” in this issue.

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The Red Army Faction’s (RAF or Baader-Meinhof Group) initial phase of struggle (1968–72) was guided by the belief that it was possible to crack the imperialist “paper tiger” at any point through militaristic actions (the idea of creating “many Vietnams”). It was based on the perspective that the struggle would on one hand provoke a repressive reaction on the part of the State (already weakened by assassinations, bombings, etc.) thereby provoking the revolt of the “masses.”

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On June 13^th the Toronto Metropolitan Police raided a home of several people active in producing the Bulldozer prison support paper and in supporting the Vancouver Five. Ostensibly seeking links to the Litton bombing, a series of charges were brought against the residents. Details of the raid appeared in FE #313, Summer 1983. The following is a report on recent developments.

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To the left is a reproduction of a one-page broadsheet published as a Convention Extra and distributed to the delegates who it managed to shock and enrage and to Detroit residents who took it a bit better. Reprinted below is the lead story to give a flavor of the paper.

We mean it; pack your bags and leave Detroit! Take your vile political party, your cadaverous candidate, your stinking love for the state, your vicious racism, your blatant sexism, your hatred for the poor, your insane war plans, your nauseating patriotism, your putrid Christianity, your antiquated sexual morality, your contempt for the rest of the world, your millionaire officials, your middle-class sensibilities and your pathetic lack of vision and get out of our city!

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On June 19 a group of young men declared their intention to confront the draft. The ceremony, originally scheduled for St. Patrick’s Church had to be quickly rescheduled for St. Joseph’s Church when church authorities declared the meeting would not be of a suitable nature for a church setting.

Father Michael J. O’Hara of St. Patrick’s Church began his talk by denouncing the war in Vietnam. He declared that conscientious opposition to the State is part of his religious heritage. He then read the letters from the Archdiocese of Detroit which had closed St. Patrick’s to the meeting.

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While working as a human rights activist in Guatemala, I learned some of the most profound lessons of resistance. There, I experienced some of the greatest despair imaginable and some of the greatest hope.

In the 1950s, reformers and an indigenous majority—who wanted to end hunger and virtual enslavement on fruit and coffee plantations—challenged generations of neo-colonial rule. Their pleas for freedom were met by a CIA/US corporate directed coup, a series of military dictators and a scorched earth campaign against Mayan villages. Death squads committed a notorious crime against Guatemalans, the torture and murder of desaparecidos thought to be subversives—tens of thousands have been disappeared and never heard from again. The targets: union organizers, students, human rights supporters, and anyone in the wrong place at the wrong time. When people spoke out against these horrors they, too, would disappear, ensuring a frightened public would not organize effective resistance.

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To add an event, please email johnjef@bledsoe.net

Sept 20–26—Idapalooza Fruit Jam—A Queer Music Festival in the hills of Tennessee!

www.planetida.com or planetida@planetida.com for info.

Sept 24–26—Katuah Earth First! Regional Rendezvous, Bark Camp Timber Sale, High Knob, Clinch River Watershed and Clinch Ranger District, Jefferson National Forest, south western Virginia. Contact: johnjef@bledsoe.net or call Chris at 423—633–8483 for more info.

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The Republican National Convention (RNC) was the ultimate slight to New York: those who made careers and a quick buck off the September 11^th events returned to feast like vultures on the corpses of the dead, attempting to rally support for a failing war and a disastrous regime by parading around near the site of Ground Zero.

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During October, two non-registrants in contact with the Fifth Estate received warning letters from the Selective Service System (SSS) regarding their failure to report. This broke an almost two year silence on the part of the government during which the two men had heard nothing on their status. Both initially assumed that the government was now on to their “delinquent” status and that, due to the recent prosecution of resisters taking place, a confrontation was in the making. This seemingly purposeful notification is probably due to the expanded efforts of the SSS to identify those who have failed to register by matching up registration forms with social security numbers, Internal Revenue Service computer printouts and some state Motor Vehicle Department lists. Still, other resisters known to the Fifth Estate have yet to receive any notification whatsoever, which indicates that the SSS process for identifying offenders remains haphazard.

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The U.S. defeat in the Vietnam war can be attributed to many things including the American military’s inability to vanquish the National Liberation Front and the North Vietnamese Army on the battlefield despite killing three million Indochinese and destroying the country’s infrastructure, and the enormous and unprecedented domestic opposition to the war.

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a review of

War by Other Means: The Pacifists of the Greatest Generation Who Revolutionized Resistance by Daniel Akst. Melville House, 2022

Violence is not all the same. Context matters.

There’s something much worse about violence when it’s perpetrated by or with the tacit acceptance of the State. It’s not just that governments and their allies in the capitalist class and the patriarchy have more resources, more weapons, and fewer ethical qualms about killing than most. Beyond these obvious assets, they can hide behind the veil of legitimacy that the State (allegedly) offers them. Hitler, George W. Bush, and Derek Chauvin may not have a lot in common personally, but all committed their crimes under the reasonable presumption that the social and political order sanctioned such behavior.

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FE readers may remember the case of Danny Gillis [Fifth Estate #337, Late Summer 1991], a black man from Baltimore, who refused to board the Marine Corps bus to Saudi Arabia last December 17, and was beaten up (with his hands cuffed behind his back) under his Sergeant’s orders by four white Marines. Gillis required an operation on his shoulder due to injuries received during that attack, and is serving out his 18 month sentence.

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If you are reading these words, it is almost certain that you are ill, sick, and infected. “With what?” you ask. The blight destroying our nation known as Free Enterprise, Supply & Demand, Capitalism, and more commonly Consumerism. It is a worm boring through the minds & souls of all our citizens.

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As part of a series of ten poetry readings across the country, there will be a poetry reading at St. Joseph’s Episcopal Church on April 29^th at 8 p.m.

The series is being coordinated by RESIST, a national organization of adults who support draft resistance and other anti-war activities. It is being sponsored locally by Detroit Resistance. The poets reading in Detroit will be Robert Bly, Donald Hall, Clayton Eshlemon, Ted Berrigan, David Henderson, and Ed Sanders of the Fugs.

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Oystercatcher #5 Review by J.L. Dale

I’m young, but I still had grade-school fantasies about bathing my neighborhood in a heavy wave of pirate radio--my voice and my songs out into the world.

So, I respect a man that can keep that way of thinking alive. The Oystercatcher #5, edited by Ron Sakolsky, though rather diverse in content and forms, keeps a strong, unified voice. Each piece is well edited and laid out nicely, taking advantage of The Oystercather’s full-size format.

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Recently, the rulers of the Western Hemisphere met in Miami to continue negotiations on the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) treaty, another blatant power grab by the corporate oligarchy. At the summit, Nov. 17–21, trade ministers signed a watered-down compromise that again blunted US plans for hemispheric domination. This version, dubbed FTAA Lite by critics, allows nations to opt out of provisions they don’t care for, or in the case of Bolivia, Ecuador, and Venezuela, provisions that the outraged citizenry won’t stand for. With the collapse of the WTO talks in Cancun, the North American elite desperately needed to keep the FTAA alive, even if in a compromised form. As might have been expected, this conciliatory agreement has been spun as a victory by both negotiators and resisters alike.

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The response of Detroit’s city government to the crisis of the homeless is what the poor can always expect: the cops were set on them! With the cutoff of the General Assistance welfare program (see accompanying article), entire buildings housing state aid recipients were emptied, the residents unceremoniously thrown out in the cold, rendering thousands homeless overnight.

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A review of

Digigram by Barbara Henning. United Artists Books 2020

Many poets have used broad strokes to deplore the current reactionary environment (as Eliot Katz does so superbly in President Predator), expressing their outrage, disgust and sadness, but Barbara Henning in Digigram takes a different route, examining how the coarsened political climate has insinuated itself into all the interstices of everyday life.

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The letter above [“Deep Ecology as Strategic Knowledge,” FE #331, Spring, 1989] was sent to the Fifth Estate last year in response to the essay I wrote, “How Deep Is Deep Ecology? A Challenge to Radical Environmentalism” (FE #327, Fall 1987). I had a brief correspondence with the author (who, interestingly, admitted to being an EF! man), and had planned to print his letter with several others from EF!ers (we eventually printed a selection of them in the Summer 1988 FE). The more I looked at “Miss Ann’s” (rather, Mr. Ann’s) letter, with its claims to an anti-technological, primitivist, even anarchist perspective, the more I realized its appropriateness as a starting point for my essay. However unkind one may judge me for using a relatively short letter as the focus for a long critical essay, I think the letter so representative of the entire range of problems with the deep ecology movement that I think the temptation is one worth following. If the form is strange, I can only hope that the ideas in the essay are important enough to overcome this problem. The form is in part a result of the shorthand manner in which deep ecologists tend to evade a genuinely critical dialogue. Deep ecology (DE) ideology appears to deflect criticism the way religious dogma does, by raising its voice over all others in defense of its intuitions and simply repeating its assertions (hallelujah and amen), as well as by conveniently misrepresenting the views of its critics.

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In “Self-Reliance” Emerson tells us that our alienation consists of living in a world that does not manifest our genius. We trust only in society and do not trust in fate. Society is built on a secondary selfhood that has its limits in the order of calculation. Its founding principles are conformity and consistency. Its relations are governed by envy, property, and debt. In society we are “ashamed before the blade of grass and the blowing rose.” We practice a false morality, as if in apology for our existence. Our original powers are sacrificed at the altar of a ghostly civilization.

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This edition begins our 42^nd year of continuous publishing as the longest running, English language anarchist publication in American history. We’ve got a ways to go to catch the Yiddish language Freie Arbeiter Stimme (Free Voice of Labor) which printed for 87 years, but we’re hot on the heels of the Italian Dunata dei Refrattari, which published between 1922 and 1971.

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-- drawing by Peter Welleman

“Autonomy is both the goal sought after and that whose presence--virtual--let us say, has to be supposed at the outset of an analysis or a political movement. This virtual presence is the will to autonomy, the will to be free.”

-- Cornelius Castoriadis

There exists a tendency, shared across different strains of radical political thought, to see the horrors of our present as comprising a false totality, that when torn asunder, will reveal a more liberatory existence hidden beneath. This is to understand revolution as revelation; as the dispelling of the conditions of false consciousness, and a reclamation of an autonomous existence that continues to live on, albeit deformed, within this world we must leave behind.

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“Consider the intelligence of the average man, then realize 50% are even stupider.”

—Mark Twain

“I am nothing, a cloak of skin with a mouth saying, Don’t kill everything so soon.”

—Mick Vranich and Wordban’d

Wouldn’t the headline, “61% of Electorate Avoid Polls; Conservative White Men Elect Right-Wing of Political Racket to Power,” after the Nov. 8 Republican sweep of Congressional seats have been more accurate than those in the media which trumpeted, “Americans Vote for Change?” Admittedly, mine is not exactly snappy, nor would it fit well as a banner headline, but it’s closer to the truth.

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