These days, he who is afraid of ideas is afraid of few books: every week the market offers an infinity of books but no ideas, while people have come to seek their ideas outside of the market and bookshops. So, in Italy as in Iran, it is in the street that people find what they are looking for.

And so, if thinking in writing is not yet forbidden, the reason for this is not the liberality of the lawgivers, but the fact that one doesn't run the risk of reading anything that has a punch to it. The result is that -- because this sector of social production is just as subject to falsification and pollution as any other -- anyone who wants to read a book that is worthwhile must write it themselves. The publishers who today publish anything actually publish nothing; in view of what they claim to publish, one can be certain that it is in what they dare not publish that the most interesting things are to be found. I wish to give an easy proof of this assertion, without which it might be easy to think that it is thanks to a lack of interesting writing that Italian publishers publish nothing interesting.

For two years, in the aftermath of the success of the scandalous pamphlet I wrote under the pseudonym "Censor," several bourgeois publishers made it known to me that they were quite diposed to close their eyes to the subversive content of what I write, in order to not lose the business that, in their opinion, my publications would have procured for them. While I was preparing to write another book, entitled Remedy to Everything, Mondadori hastened to submit to me a contract in which this publisher would have a monopoly on all my publications (including the book in question) for ten years, which was obviously a pretension way beyond his possibilities and which I consequently refused. Then he attempted to restrict himself to paying an advance for the book, which he wanted to buy sight-unseen and at his own risk [a scatola chiusa].

But when the zealous bosses of this famous publisher read the final manuscript, they were literally terrorized by it, as if no one had yet shown what can be said in writing about this State and its entire spectacle. According to marketing specialists, subversive ideas will certainly sell books and, indeed, more books than those without ideas, which is the speciality of these gentlemen. But at a time when workers no longer want to be workers, it should come as no surprise that publishers are afraid to be publishers. One could therefore say that, at this juncture, these audacious managers would have bought my book without thinking [a bischero sciolto], as is said in Florence. They imagined that I would write a eulogy for this world or a vain lamentation of its passing. They hoped to do good business with subversion, and, instead of this, by paying in order not to buy, they lost on their rash investment in "risk capital"! The administrators of our entire bankrupt economy resemble these incompetent but on the whole amusing publishing-house administrators: no one should be at all surprised if they are soon completely ruined.

While waiting, here at home, to overthrow the Shah (and more!), I am, for the moment, only publishing the dedication, the preface to Remedy to Everything and the chapter on the terrorism conducted with impunity by the State against the proletariat for the last decade. As for the rest of the book, it can wait. The truth about terrorism, which can now be read here, and only here, has no publishers, but, as can be seen from the current volume, has no need of any: this truth violently refuses the clandestinity to which some would like to see it consigned and it is capable of inaugurating an Italian samizdat.

Now the truth's unnumerable enemies in the political center, right and left will have to reveal themselves by combatting it on open ground, because their lies will no longer succeed in hiding it. And, whatever one may say about it today, in ten or twenty years' time, or even before that, when everything will have become clear to everyone, what people will remember about terrorism will be what I have written about it, not the rivers of ink spilled on the subject by all the professional liars and imbeciles.

To those who are afraid of the truth, I wish to offer a few scary truths; and to those who are not afraid of the truth, I wish to offer proof that the terrorism of truth is the only one that can be of benefit to the proletariat.

-- Milan, March 1979.

[LETTRIST INTERNATIONAL ARCHIVE] [SITUATIONIST INTERNATIONAL ARCHIVE]