Who What Why

It’s been a long time…But we’re back

by Daily Barbarian

This is the eighth issue of the Daily Barbarian and it’s been almost nine years since our last. For those of you who have been reading the Barbarian since its birth in 1979, you’re probably not surprised about the years between issues, but we haven’t been just sitting around. Since our last issue in 1986—issue number seven—we’ve put together a poetry series (Seditiously Delicionsly Oral), played music (the Layabouts) and joined with others in the Detroit area to try and stop the building of the world’s largest trash incinerator right in the center of town (Evergreen Alliance).

Recently, though, we’ve been itching to get the Barbarian back on the streets, and thanks to our friends and comrades at the Fifth Estate newspaper, we’re up and running. This issue of the Barbarian will be included as the center-fold of their latest issue, insuring that people across the country will be seeing it. This is the second time the Fifth Estate collective has helped us like this, the first time was in 1983, and we want to take this time to thank them for their unwavering support. We will also be printing an additional 3,000 copies of the Daily Barbarian to be distributed around metropolitan Detroit.

The Daily Barbarian is not named to announce the regularity of its appearance, but rather the daily activities of our modern human society and the people who keep it rolling…all of us. To us at the Barbarian, this sham we call “civilization” is just a play on words, a rhetorical trick that while posing itself as progressive and liberatory, is in reality a destroyer and slave master. It’s a bad joke that we have for all too long fallen for. Well we don’t want to wait around for the punch-line (A: world war, B: systematic starvation, C: ecological devastation, D: “things as usual”, E: all of the above) and want to bring an end to this horror, civilization, manufacturing, modern industry, modern wage-slavery, modern prisons, modern schools, modern science, modern medicine, modern warfare… We want to bring a thundering halt to all the “progressive” steps and “modernizations” that have created so much organized despair and depression, while bringing not only humans, but the entire planet to a universal code of normality and boredom, (Detroit to Damascus, Berlin to Brasilia, and all around the globe everything starts to look the same) and at worst, to the brink of complete nuclear destruction.

But we do believe there is hope. Even though we are all products of this society, we are still capable of changing ourselves and thus the society as a whole. The publishing of the Daily Barbarian is our attempt to share our ideas, hopes and desires for such a change. We want the Barbarian to be a collection of information, theory, critique, poetry, art, humor, craziness, laughter, and much, much more. We also realize that a paper cannot, by itself, change the world and it is necessary to carry on a multitude of differing activities. We will try to do this and we hope you will too!