Circle A history

Submitted by R Totale on May 6, 2025

Just a minor, fairly pointless bit of anarchist history trivia here - from that Freedom series last year ( https://freedomnews.org.uk/?s=circled+a+at+60 ), I learned that the circle A developed in Paris and Milan in the mid-1960s. Just happened to hear an interview with No Bonzo ( https://thefinalstrawradio.noblogs.org/post/2025/04/20/a-left-trans-voice-from-turkey-no-bonzo-on-art-and-anarchism/ ) where they mention:
"I also really enjoy taking those references from history and just incorporating them into my current work.

For example, something that I really am enjoying drawing nowadays are these circle A suns. A sun is rising in the background, and it has a circle A in it. This was very popular within Catalonia in the 30s. If you’re going through a lot of their publications, you’ll see this motif repeating over and over again, and whereas I’ve never found an explanation from them, about what they thought that meant, what it symbolize to them. I feel that to me it is a symbol of what was in that Malatesta quote that I mentioned earlier today: forever moving towards anarchism, or even a Belgado Pedrini line, ‘anarchy is jubilant dawning’."

I'd only seen the A sun design in the WSM logo before, but has anyone spent a lot of time going through 30s CNT stuff who can support or disprove Bonzo's claim there? They are definitely very well informed historically so I'd be surprised if they're getting it wrong, but at the same time if it's true then that makes the whole of that Freedom series look questionable. Or someone who uses Mastodon or whatever could ask them for examples, I suppose.

goff

1 month 1 week ago

Submitted by goff on May 7, 2025

In another article it says the Spanish IWA logo is more freemasonry than anarchism, when it definitely is and there wasn’t such delineations back then.

“the incipient IWA’s [International Workingman’s Association’s] organizing power was so weak that if not for the organizing efforts of the socialist Freemasons, the official founding meeting of the IWA on September 28, 1864 would never have come to pass.” Occult Features of Anarchism - Erica Lagalisse