Anarchist and proud to be so

The pride I speak about is not presumption, it is not arrogance, on the contrary it makes possible the intellectual humility necessary to be continually open to doubt, to dialogue, to verification, to curiosity for all that is inside and outside of us.

Amedeo Bertolo (Milan 1941-2016), professor of agricultural economics at the University of Milan, as well as publisher and founder of elèuthera in 1986, was not only a man of thought, as evidenced by the essays of this collection, but also a man of action, with a dense network of international contacts, from Noam Chomsky to Murray Bookchin. Among the best known Italian anarchists, his activity began in the early Sixties with a resounding fact as the kidnapping of the Spanish Vice-Consul of Milan, the first post-war political kidnapping, carried out together with some young antifascists to save the life of a Spanish anarchist sentenced to death by the Francoist regime (sentence that will finally be commuted to life imprisonment). At the end of the Sixties, the massacre of Piazza Fontana and the violent death of Giuseppe Pinelli, of which Bertolo was a friend and companion, brought him to the front row in that counter-information campaign that soon led to the establishment of that historical truth known as the «Massacre of the State». Also at the end of the Sixties, he has launched the famous circled-A as a symbol of anarchy, a simple and unequivocal sign that left Milan, winning the walls around the world. In the following decades, Bertolo has been the protagonist of an intense cultural and publishing activity. In 1971 he founded, together with others, the monthly «A - Anarchist Magazine» and participated in the preparation of two other newspapers: the international quarterly «Interrogations» (from 1974 to 1979) and the theoretical in-depth magazine «Volontà» (from 1980 to 1996). In 1984, the Orwellian year par excellence, he organized in Venice, together with many others, the greatest international anarchist meeting of the twentieth century. But his attention was at this time mainly concentrated in the publication of books: he first founded the Antistato Editions in 1975 and, later, elèuthera in 1986. The heritage Bertolo leaves us, and which clearly emerges in the essays collected in this anthology, is that of a continuous research, made up of determination and doubt, a research which is never solitary, but always a collective act. An «us» that well reflects elèuthera's way of being, its coerence between means and ends that makes the «act» - even books making - a highly political act.
 
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