Speaker 1: Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2: Hello, and welcome to Cool People That Did Cool Stuff,
Speaker 2: the podcast where we start by asking everyone on the
Speaker 2: call what a survival kit for them would look like
Speaker 2: in terms of when you're having a bad week. Because
Speaker 2: we were just talking about it off, Mike and I
Speaker 2: think it would be funny to start this way.
Speaker 3: Do I go first?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Sure?
Speaker 3: So Griffiths by the way, Oh sorry, no, it's okay,
Speaker 3: it's my job to introduce you. I'm assuming everyone listened
Speaker 3: to part one.
Speaker 2: Yeah, please go listen to part one.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 3: If you didn't, why are you here? Go back and
Speaker 3: listen to part one. We'll wait for you.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So a survival kit if someone were sending me one
Speaker 3: for like a long day of writing, would probably involve
Speaker 3: coffee and some sort of homemade baked goods because I'm
Speaker 3: a snob, so I need homemade stuff.
Speaker 2: Sophie h Happy Dogs, so like CBD treats healthy.
Speaker 5: Lebron James, So, I don't know what witchcraft we could
Speaker 5: do there. And my friend Lacy makes these really good
Speaker 5: gluten free double chocolate cookies, so specifically my friend Lacy's
Speaker 5: cookies highly see, I think.
Speaker 3: That we're both getting baked goods.
Speaker 5: Yeah, but they're like authentically baked baked goods.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think I'm going to join on the baked
Speaker 2: goods team. That sounds great.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Well, fortunately none of you all listeners have my actress,
Speaker 2: and if you do, don't send me anything because then
Speaker 2: I'll be anyway. Whatever. So this is part two of
Speaker 2: a two parter about the history of the song Belichow
Speaker 2: and how it ties into women who resisted fascism and
Speaker 2: also grew a lot of rice. Our guest is Gg Griffiths,
Speaker 2: Our producer Sophie Lickterman Hi, our audio engineers Rory Hi,
Speaker 2: Rory Hi, riy Hi or. Our theme musical was written
Speaker 2: for us by Unwoman, And if you all go into
Speaker 2: the bowels of the internet, you might find a version
Speaker 2: of me playing accordion for Unwoman singing bela Chow at
Speaker 2: a steampunk convention and I want to say Texas. Uh
Speaker 2: So that's the thing that people can do if they
Speaker 2: really want to see.
Speaker 3: And this is why you always have to listen to
Speaker 3: this second part of any episode because you get the
Speaker 3: easter egg.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. I hope I don't sing on that version
Speaker 2: of it. Hopefully I'm just play No.
Speaker 7: I hope you do.
Speaker 3: I'm ready like my Google history right after. This is
Speaker 3: going to be exactly that.
Speaker 2: I used to play accordion and play shows, and at
Speaker 2: one point I played this show and I didn't really
Speaker 2: like folk punk all that much, but I would play accordion,
Speaker 2: I would sing. And one time I played the show
Speaker 2: and the other person playing was this folk punk musician.
Speaker 2: I went up to him afterwards and I was like,
Speaker 2: you know, I don't really like folk punk all that much,
Speaker 2: but I really like what you did. And he looked
Speaker 2: at me really angry, and he was like, what do
Speaker 2: you call what you do? And that is the last
Speaker 2: show I ever played as a solo accordionist because I
Speaker 2: realized what I was doing was folk punk. He gotchas
Speaker 2: I know. It was like two thousand and nine. Wow. Anyway, anyway,
Speaker 2: script me, script me. Later I could tell a story
Speaker 2: about how I learned the song Belich how from the
Speaker 2: daughter of our Crumb, the weird illustrator Sick. So the
Speaker 2: fascist kind of liked the Mandine for a while, but
Speaker 2: that was not reciprocated at all. By the end of
Speaker 2: the nineteen twenties, almost all political organizers had quit or
Speaker 2: gone underground or left the country. There were various underground
Speaker 2: resistance groups and shit, But in terms of open organizing
Speaker 2: on the left, as far as I can tell, the
Speaker 2: Mondine stood alone, which is to say, I have read
Speaker 2: multiple historians that argue that they stood alone, and I
Speaker 2: expect sometime next year I'll like read about some other
Speaker 2: movement that kept organizing and trade unions or whatever during fascism,
Speaker 2: but not aware of it. They kept going and they
Speaker 2: kept doing their thing. In nineteen thirty four in fascist Italy,
Speaker 2: they struck against some wage cuts that happened to them,
Speaker 2: and then in nineteen forty one, during the fucking war,
Speaker 2: they struck for higher wages.
Speaker 3: That's so ballsy. I love these women, I.
Speaker 2: Know, And like I was first reading that and I
Speaker 2: was like, wow, they must have been like uniquely untouchable
Speaker 2: or something. And then like the next line in what
Speaker 2: I was reading was like, they were not untouchable by
Speaker 2: the fascists. They were irregularly arrested and beaten. They did
Speaker 2: it anyway, and I suspect they did it because they
Speaker 2: felt like they had no other choice, whether morally or personally, right,
Speaker 2: because they're also is hard work that you were not
Speaker 2: getting paid enough for and they're all like on the
Speaker 2: edge of starving and eating snakes, you know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, desperation breeds a lot of revolution.
Speaker 2: Yeah, totally. Then in nineteen forty three, Italy surrendered, like
Speaker 2: I was saying before, and northern Italy was occupied by
Speaker 2: a Nazi puppet state under Mussolini, and the Italian Civil
Speaker 2: War kicked off in the Maldine. They were part of
Speaker 2: the resistance first and foremost. A ton of them just
Speaker 2: outright refused to work for the Nazi occupation. A ton
Speaker 2: of them just walked off the job and never came back.
Speaker 2: And the thing it reminded me of was how during
Speaker 2: the American Civil War, enslave people worked the plantations of
Speaker 2: the Confederacy, right, and so they launched the single most
Speaker 2: important labor action in US history, the one that doesn't
Speaker 2: get talked about enough, and they pulled off a general
Speaker 2: strike that crippled the agricultural economy of the Confederacy, and
Speaker 2: they helped win their own freedom with the help of
Speaker 2: their allies in the Union Army.
Speaker 3: You covered that before, right with prop was your guest.
Speaker 2: I think, yeah. It was one of the first episodes
Speaker 2: we ever did the Civil Civil War war because of
Speaker 2: the Civil war within the Civil War. Yeah, I don't
Speaker 2: know the impact of the Mandine labor actions on the
Speaker 2: Nazi occupied Italian agricultural economy, which is a hard thing
Speaker 2: to say one way or the other. But it's a
Speaker 2: cool thing to do to refuse to work for fascists.
Speaker 3: It feels like the impact must have been big if
Speaker 3: they were still doing the anti pasta thing. And now
Speaker 3: they also don't.
Speaker 2: Have rice, yeah, totally. Yeah, he put all of his
Speaker 2: eggs in the pasta basket, and so now.
Speaker 3: The only thing they can eat is polenta. And I'm
Speaker 3: sure that it's not nutritionally sufficient just to eat plenta.
Speaker 2: Yeah, probably not. It's also my least favorite of these
Speaker 2: three things that we've described as food. True, I would
Speaker 2: go pasta.
Speaker 3: Yeah, not that they are food, but the thing that
Speaker 3: we described as food.
Speaker 2: Okay, fair enough. Other of the mundane would run messages
Speaker 2: for the partisans or house partisans or would you know
Speaker 2: the thing that a lot of women did, and it
Speaker 2: gets either written out of history or it gets a
Speaker 2: little played up by history, depending on which history you read.
Speaker 2: They picked up rifles and became partisans themselves. World War
Speaker 2: II had a ton of women fighting on the front lines.
Speaker 2: Actually all, including some of the fascist countries but mostly
Speaker 2: not especially partisan and communist forces had women fighting. And uh,
Speaker 2: this is not a post gender utopia. Most of the
Speaker 2: women in the armed forces, including in partisan and guerrilla
Speaker 2: units or in the USSR, were like given administrative roles,
Speaker 2: but not only and even.
Speaker 3: Those who are allowed to fight, Like as soon as
Speaker 3: the war was over, it was like, okay, get.
Speaker 2: Back to the kitchen.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, I'm thinking of like the night witches in
Speaker 3: the USSR, Like they were badasses who were flying planes
Speaker 3: and bombing shit and they were such a huge deal.
Speaker 3: And then as soon as it's over, the USSR's like, no, no,
Speaker 3: women can't fly.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: They're like we want we want to rebuild our We
Speaker 2: killed all the men, we need more of them, so
Speaker 2: we need you all to make them.
Speaker 3: Yeah, please make more men.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean I okay, whatever I think about like
Speaker 2: the fascist countries and they're like, we need everyone to
Speaker 2: make as many babies as possible for the war. I'm like,
Speaker 2: how long do you think this war's going on? For guys, like.
Speaker 3: But for the forever war?
Speaker 2: Yeah, Like I'm sorry to tell you, And I guess
Speaker 2: they didn't have history to look back at. But fascist
Speaker 2: countries don't live long enough for their for the fascists
Speaker 2: to have enough kids to go put into the.
Speaker 3: War, for the one year old to matter.
Speaker 2: Yeah, which is the thing that everyone should remember.
Speaker 3: It's the fascist quiverful movement.
Speaker 2: Though it's like, oh, absolutely.
Speaker 3: We're going to have babies so we can throw them
Speaker 3: at you.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean that is the modern quiverful movement too.
Speaker 2: But yeah, like I mean literally, yeah, they're like, well
Speaker 2: we do want to outnumber you or whatever. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: and yeah you're counting on things still being fascist eighteen
Speaker 2: years from now, you know. I they were optimistic. You
Speaker 2: got to give them that. They were also wrong.
Speaker 3: No matter what political party, we're always more optimistic than
Speaker 3: we should be. Let's be real.
Speaker 2: That's true. Okay, fair enough. So I think it is
Speaker 2: perfectly acceptable to call Belichow a partisan song, whether or
Speaker 2: not the explicitly partisan lyrics were written during the partisan
Speaker 2: era during the Italian Civil War, because Mondine were partisans
Speaker 2: and it was their song. There is also a decent
Speaker 2: chance that it was sung regularly by partisans and given
Speaker 2: partisan lyrics during the war, but there's no direct evidence
Speaker 2: of that. There are a few old partisans who make
Speaker 2: this claim that like this or that unit used to
Speaker 2: sing it, But there's like, there's no partisan claiming I
Speaker 2: sang it, my unit sang it. They're always like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 2: that song came from over there or whatever. Right, at
Speaker 2: least that any of the historians that I read found
Speaker 2: and they would circulate. The partisans would circulate songbooks, and
Speaker 2: this was not in any of the songbooks that were
Speaker 2: circulated by any of the partisans. This is one of
Speaker 2: the main arguments against the idea that it was sung
Speaker 2: during the partisan era.
Speaker 3: Was every other song that we consider a partisan song
Speaker 3: in the songbooks?
Speaker 2: I don't know, because there are later collections that include
Speaker 2: starting the nineteen fifties that have Belichow in it. And
Speaker 2: so that is actually a really good question. Are there
Speaker 2: other ones that sort of slipped through the cracks?
Speaker 3: And are they all by women?
Speaker 2: Right? And the fact that it's a woman's song might
Speaker 2: mean that it just wasn't written down into the songbooks
Speaker 2: that they circulated. It might have stayed oral. Also, the
Speaker 2: fact that it wasn't for the communists or for the
Speaker 2: anarchists or for the Catholics, like some of the songs
Speaker 2: we're going to listen to later. Right, So if you're
Speaker 2: putting together you're like, here's our unit songbook, you might
Speaker 2: not include that one because it might not be This
Speaker 2: is my conjecture. After the war, the Mandane kept going
Speaker 2: for a couple decades, and they remained symbols of leftist resistance.
Speaker 2: In nineteen forty nine, a movie called Bitter Rice came out.
Speaker 2: In real life, the Mandina wore long skirts while they worked,
Speaker 2: but in the movie they wore shorts and ripped stockings.
Speaker 2: And what I like about this is that they were like, ah,
Speaker 2: you misrepresented us. They were like, oh, okay, that looks cool.
Speaker 2: We're going to do that.
Speaker 3: Yes, I love that. This is our new fashion statement.
Speaker 3: Thank you.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And it kind of became a fashion craze in Italy,
Speaker 2: but the Mondine switched over to this.
Speaker 5: Look.
Speaker 3: This is kind of like when a fandom of like
Speaker 3: some show or book or whatever is like, we think
Speaker 3: the answered to the mystery is this, and the writers
Speaker 3: are like, huh, that's better than the idea we had.
Speaker 2: Yeah, totally, Like oh wow, you actually paid attention to
Speaker 2: all the plot points that we forgot about, and yeah, no,
Speaker 2: that does add up better.
Speaker 3: Yeah, perfect, got it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, after the fall of fascism, Italy did not turn
Speaker 2: into like a socialist paradise. The same year that Bitter
Speaker 2: Rice came out, which is nineteen forty nine, a former
Speaker 2: partisan named Maria Margotti was gunned down by the Italian
Speaker 2: police during an agricultural protest. And everyone argues about every
Speaker 2: single part of everything that has to do with the
Speaker 2: Mondine and Belichow and it is so annoying. Maria died
Speaker 2: wearing a white scarf and this is emblematic of the Mondine,
Speaker 2: and she had that around her neck, and she became
Speaker 2: a martyr of sorts for the Partisans, even though she
Speaker 2: died after the war, because she was a former partisan,
Speaker 2: right and she was died doing what Partisans do, which
Speaker 2: is fight against oppression, even though it's the Italian state
Speaker 2: now instead of the Italian fascist state. Everyone assumed she
Speaker 2: was a Mondine on top of everything else, and so
Speaker 2: she became an icon. She was actually a brickmaker, but whatever.
Speaker 2: And also mondane's seasonal work, so it seems like easily
Speaker 2: she could have done both jobs.
Speaker 3: People could have more than one job.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, when they're like starving peasant workers, I don't know,
Speaker 2: or people wore the white scarves as like a symbol
Speaker 2: of solidarity, which would be cool too. She was a widow,
Speaker 2: a proletarian and anti fascist and a veteran of the
Speaker 2: Civil War, and she'd been gunned down, so she became
Speaker 2: a martyr. After her death, the National Association of Italian
Speaker 2: Partisans took care of her kids financially, which is cool. Yeah,
Speaker 2: the Mondine stayed politically active, and eventually the one hundred
Speaker 2: thousand workers still on the job won the seven hour day,
Speaker 2: which is I was saying before, is the lower I've
Speaker 2: seen anyone accomplish besides like CEOs or whatever, who can
Speaker 2: somehow be the people who play Diablo the most apparently
Speaker 2: and still be the richest man in the world anyway, whatever,
Speaker 2: the Mondine didn't last too much longer as a profession,
Speaker 2: for better or worse. It's one of those things where
Speaker 2: you're like, I want people to have employment if they
Speaker 2: want it, and I want people to have the things
Speaker 2: they need, but like it's terrible work, yeah you know,
Speaker 2: and uh.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, you don't want to actually be like knee
Speaker 3: deep in this water, bent over, like pulling weeds and stuff.
Speaker 2: Yeah, seven hours a day is too many hours for
Speaker 2: that you know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, like ten minutes a day maximum.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I would do that for ten minutes a day,
Speaker 2: you know, Like.
Speaker 3: Yeah, like that's how long I weed my garden.
Speaker 2: That's fine, yeah exactly. Mechanization started to come for their job,
Speaker 2: and they organized unsuccessfully against that mechanization. I believe mostly
Speaker 2: they did labor actions and like would like sit in
Speaker 2: front of agricultural machines. One woman told an Oral History
Speaker 2: project quote, we went up against the combine harvesters together
Speaker 2: on the land and we stopped them. My husband told
Speaker 2: me one of these days they won't stop. I replied,
Speaker 2: I would happily die for my work.
Speaker 3: Also, probably you could get people to stop blocking them
Speaker 3: if you just gave them the living wage without making
Speaker 3: them do the back breaking work.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And the Mandina went into rapid decline
Speaker 2: in the early nineteen sixties with the introduction of herbicides
Speaker 2: and mechanization. By nineteen eighties, the jobs were entirely mechanized,
Speaker 2: and that's the where most of the stories will end.
Speaker 2: According to a twenty eleven piece by Weago, women in
Speaker 2: informal employment, globalizing and organizing bosses in Northern Italy realized
Speaker 2: that Chinese migrant labor is even cheaper than machines, and
Speaker 2: so now tens of thousands of Chinese men and women
Speaker 2: work as mondina in northern Italy every year, and for
Speaker 2: some weird reason, they aren't given the same cultural status
Speaker 2: and respect. I can't figure out what the differences must be.
Speaker 2: Just times must be the only thing that's different.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the only difference is like historical versus present.
Speaker 2: Yeah, totally. But that's the story of the Mandine. But
Speaker 2: what about the story of stuff and stuff that you
Speaker 2: should probably not buy? I mean by totally good. Everything
Speaker 2: is vetted by me personally, and I will stake my
Speaker 2: life on the efficacy of the following all of us
Speaker 2: a lie. But here's some ads, and we're back. But
Speaker 2: what about the song? What about Belichow? What happened with it? Well,
Speaker 2: as I was saying, there's no evidence that partisans actually
Speaker 2: sang Belichow, there's no evidence that they didn't. It is
Speaker 2: largely accepted that the partisan version of it was written later.
Speaker 2: But I actually no longer believe that. But we'll talk
Speaker 2: about that. I guess I've kind of hinted at that.
Speaker 2: But basically it comes down to I trust a specific
Speaker 2: woman have been telling the truth. That's what it comes
Speaker 2: down to for me, believe women in history. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2: So I had assumed that the Partisans didn't sing Belichow
Speaker 2: until late last night reading Diana Garvin's piece that talks
Speaker 2: in a long footnote about the oral history of the song.
Speaker 2: But let's talk about popular rebel music of the early
Speaker 2: twentieth century and World War Two in Italy. And not
Speaker 2: just because the start off is mostly anarchist music. But
Speaker 2: as I said way at the beginning, we all have
Speaker 2: our biases, and I think it's pretty cool that Italian
Speaker 2: radical music started with anarchist music. Popular rebel songs in
Speaker 2: Italy in the period between unification and Italy became Italy
Speaker 2: in the eighteen sixties, I think, and fascism it came
Speaker 2: especially from the anarchist tradition. Most of these songs were
Speaker 2: anonymously written, and a lot of them applied lyrics to
Speaker 2: existing melodies, which is folk music has been doing this forever.
Speaker 2: You hear a love song and you're like, yeah, but
Speaker 2: what a was about killing your boss instead? You know,
Speaker 2: or somehow both, which is kind of what I like
Speaker 2: about Belichiw. It kind of has like both vibes, you know,
Speaker 2: it really does.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's like a very beautiful song and also like fuck.
Speaker 2: You, Yeah, totally all right, fascists, I'm going to go
Speaker 2: to the mountains and shoot you until you shoot me.
Speaker 2: And it's fine. And one of the most popular songwriters
Speaker 2: of radical music in Italy during this period is a
Speaker 2: guy who I think I've talked about on the show
Speaker 2: before named Pietro Gory, because we did a four parter
Speaker 2: about Argentinian indigenous and anarchist uprisings in the late nineteen
Speaker 2: tens and Pietro was there because he winds up in
Speaker 2: Argentina and worked as an organizer there. As for why
Speaker 2: he was there, now, I know he wasn't welcome in
Speaker 2: Europe anymore. He was this well respected lawyer and journalist
Speaker 2: and poet. And I found one source that was in
Speaker 2: translation by Google Translate that implied he actually kind of
Speaker 2: just started off a socialist and then he got kind
Speaker 2: of caught up in all this stuff. He was living
Speaker 2: in France and he decided to defend an anarchist assassin
Speaker 2: in court. During this period, France was having this honestly
Speaker 2: kind of annoying thing going on where like an anarchists
Speaker 2: would assassinate an important guy, and so then the state
Speaker 2: would kill the assassin, so another assassin would avenge the
Speaker 2: other assassin. So the state would then round up a
Speaker 2: bunch of unrelated anarchists, including a bunch of like novelists
Speaker 2: and people who have nothing to do with like direct politics,
Speaker 2: and put them on trial. So another anarchists would like
Speaker 2: broad in their scope of what they considered acceptable targets
Speaker 2: and start bombing cafes, which I consider immoral. And I
Speaker 2: don't know, is this whole thing.
Speaker 3: Violence breeding more violence as we see like everything in history, right, yeah,
Speaker 3: and violence breeding violence against people just for ideological reasons
Speaker 3: who weren't violent, like haymarkt or.
Speaker 2: Whatever totally and including like, you know, the first one
Speaker 2: of these guys to one of the anarchist assassins to
Speaker 2: try and target just like random masses of people was
Speaker 2: the first one who was from the upper class himself,
Speaker 2: and he decided to like throw a bomb into a
Speaker 2: cafe and say there's no innocent among the bourgeoisie, which
Speaker 2: is kind of a fuck you Dad kind of thing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, very fuck you Dad vibes.
Speaker 2: And I don't like him. Emilan Rang anyway, this one anarchist.
Speaker 2: He was doing a retaliation thing and he kind of
Speaker 2: took things up pretty high up the food chain, and
Speaker 2: he stabbed the French president to death in eighteen ninety four. Okay,
Speaker 2: so he was on trial, which is you know, you're
Speaker 2: kind of lucky if you survived a trial after you
Speaker 2: stabbed the president. And Pietro Gory was like, well, I'll
Speaker 2: represent him. It's legal to represent someone in court. What
Speaker 2: could go wrong?
Speaker 4: Right?
Speaker 2: The state would be a hypocrite to come after someone
Speaker 2: for being a lawyer.
Speaker 3: The state has never been a hypocrite before, So I
Speaker 3: think I'll do this.
Speaker 2: Right, what could go wrong? He gets accused of having
Speaker 2: masterminded the entire thing, like he is the one who
Speaker 2: put the assassin up to kill Hi the guy. This
Speaker 2: is something that's always happens in radical history, especially anti
Speaker 2: authoritarian history. Is there always like yeah, well, couldn't have
Speaker 2: been this person's idea. There's got to be a some
Speaker 2: older man behind the you know, like steepling his fingers
Speaker 2: planning the whole thing.
Speaker 3: You know, well, especially if the person on trial is
Speaker 3: in any way a marginalized person or woman or.
Speaker 2: Whatever, like, yeah, they couldn't have come up with that
Speaker 2: idea on their own.
Speaker 3: A man had to come up with this and tell
Speaker 3: them about it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely, So he gets exiled to Switzerland, and then Switzerland,
Speaker 2: for their part, are like, you know what, we don't
Speaker 2: want you or any of these other anarchists either, and
Speaker 2: they arrest him and a bunch of other anarchists for
Speaker 2: being anarchists. And so he wrote a bunch of successful
Speaker 2: pop songs while he was in jail.
Speaker 3: I think I love about jail. I hate everything about
Speaker 3: jail except that people go in there and they get
Speaker 3: really creative.
Speaker 2: I know, I get the most mad when I find
Speaker 2: out that jail's like aren't allowing people pens or something,
Speaker 2: you know, Like, yeah, because I'm like A long time ago,
Speaker 2: I was interviewing fiction writers and one of them, I
Speaker 2: think it was as writer Starhawk, and she was like,
Speaker 2: things that are bad for other people are good for writers.
Speaker 3: I finally wrote my novel How I Was Locked Up?
Speaker 2: Yeah, and like, you know, or what'd you write about?
Speaker 6: Oh?
Speaker 2: Some traumatic stuff that happened to me, you know.
Speaker 3: At that time I almost died inspired me.
Speaker 2: The first several short stories that I wrote and sold
Speaker 2: were all based on very specific bad things that had
Speaker 2: happened to me, you know. So anyway, he writes a
Speaker 2: bunch of pop songs that are still sung today, including
Speaker 2: Farewell Beautiful, Logano and Logano is the name of the
Speaker 2: city in Switzerland that he was exiled to. And he
Speaker 2: wound up in Argentina and he organized a bunch there.
Speaker 2: But he wrote a bunch of six songs with names
Speaker 2: like Songs of Exile, which has the chorus our fatherland
Speaker 2: is the entire world, our law is liberty. And these
Speaker 2: songs aren't catchy like Belachow. I will talk about why later,
Speaker 2: but here's here's a little bit of of Songs of Exile.
Speaker 8: Opn bo Seva, Inside Beyond, album Going, Jelly Verda Saba,
Speaker 8: album Going, Charny Basia, three Bullycorgies Fall.
Speaker 2: It's it's not Belachoo, but still fun, you know.
Speaker 9: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I love that. It kind of was chill at first
Speaker 3: and tricked you into thinking it was going to be
Speaker 3: a relaxed song and then went a little bit crazy.
Speaker 9: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I like when it picks up. And so people are
Speaker 2: writing songs as things start getting bad, because people always
Speaker 2: write songs. The first protest song of the fascist era
Speaker 2: was apparently I wasn't able to track it down. An
Speaker 2: anarchist song written about the nineteen twenty four assassination of
Speaker 2: the Socialist Party leader Jacomo Madiatoi, which whose name I
Speaker 2: wrote down how to pronounce in the last episode and
Speaker 2: forgot to write down this time. I did not find
Speaker 2: this song, but I just thought it was interesting. The
Speaker 2: Fascist though, right, they see themselves as.
Speaker 3: Rebels and so no were they writing music too.
Speaker 2: Oh, they're writing music too, and they're even doing it
Speaker 2: in the same way, and so they had their own
Speaker 2: protest songs and shit. The official song of the Fascist
Speaker 2: Party was called Giovanzi, which some historians, and I don't
Speaker 2: know that this is true or not, some historians have
Speaker 2: claimed it is also based on a Mandine song from
Speaker 2: the previous century, though of course it's lyrics were written
Speaker 2: to be all about like, I'm not gonna play this
Speaker 2: one for you, but it's all about how like manly
Speaker 2: Italian manly men are going to march together for Italian
Speaker 2: civilization or whatever the fuck. Like literally, I don't eat pasta,
Speaker 2: Yeah no, I mean well they it says manly men,
Speaker 2: not soy boys eating eating girl noodles, which is what
Speaker 2: I'm gonna eat. For dinner tonight.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I remember, years before I even came out to anyone
Speaker 2: as trends, when people first started being like, if you
Speaker 2: eat a bunch of tofu, it's gonna make you girly,
Speaker 2: and I was like, I need more tofu. Give me
Speaker 2: all the tofu.
Speaker 3: You're like, this is the precursor to hormones?
Speaker 2: Is tofu? Yeah, exactly. I have read diverging accounts of
Speaker 2: the history of that particular song, the fascist Anthem. Rather
Speaker 2: than tracking it to the Mandine, I would guess it
Speaker 2: was written a politically in nineteen oh nine, unless that
Speaker 2: version was based on a Mandine song, which I don't know.
Speaker 2: And that version is a song is called Farewell and
Speaker 2: it was written by a soon to be fascist guy
Speaker 2: named Joseeppe Blanc and it was written as a graduation
Speaker 2: song for a university and it was popular among Italian
Speaker 2: soldiers in World War One. It's very like pomp and
Speaker 2: like here we go a march, and you know.
Speaker 3: What is soon to be fascist mean in this case,
Speaker 3: like what was he before he was fascist?
Speaker 2: I don't know. Everything I read said it was written
Speaker 2: a politically okay, but he became a fascist as soon
Speaker 2: as fascism was available as an option.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I don't know if it's the same in Italy,
Speaker 3: but I feel like a political usually means okay with
Speaker 3: the status quo.
Speaker 2: Yeah, totally, And like I think he was just a
Speaker 2: random conservative guy, whereas like a lot of the fascists
Speaker 2: did come from the left, and usually when I run
Speaker 2: across a fascist who came from the left, it's like
Speaker 2: really explicitly put like it's explicitly said. So I don't
Speaker 2: know what Guoseppe's up to besides writing a graduation song,
Speaker 2: and then later he's explicitly a fascist, Okay. A lot
Speaker 2: of the songs of World War II were popular World
Speaker 2: War One songs. So he writes this graduation song and
Speaker 2: then it was written as an anti fascist song before
Speaker 2: it was written as a fascist song in nineteen twenty one.
Speaker 2: But then Fascist did their own version like pretty much
Speaker 2: right away, basically like everyone's just taken a popular song
Speaker 2: and being like, we're gonna make this about our own shit, right,
Speaker 2: And this is the song that they sang on their
Speaker 2: March to Rome, which is what got Mussolini into power,
Speaker 2: and Mussolini had the official version composed in nineteen twenty four,
Speaker 2: Mussolini not only not like Pasta, he didn't like competition. Culturally.
Speaker 2: In nineteen twenty eight, Italy banned all American music and
Speaker 2: the They especially hated swing and jazz because those are
Speaker 2: black genres.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and revolutionary music, that's right.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And then all other foreign songs when they came into
Speaker 2: the country had to be translated into Italian, including Italian
Speaker 2: assizing the names of the singers.
Speaker 3: But it's like exactly what the States does now. It's
Speaker 3: like they anglicize everything. I'm like, totally, do we really
Speaker 3: need to call Peri Paris? No, we can say Pirie.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we can just learn the word for the thing.
Speaker 2: It's the name.
Speaker 3: We can learn that, not even like something that we
Speaker 3: don't have a sound in our language. Like I understand
Speaker 3: a little bit totally because in Portuguese we have sounds
Speaker 3: that we don't have in English, and I understand that
Speaker 3: that's harder. But when there's no sound difference, there's no
Speaker 3: reason to do this. Yeah, but I see Italy took
Speaker 3: it to the extreme as usual.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, absolutely, there's no there's no Peters in Italy
Speaker 2: at this point. This is the only one I know
Speaker 2: off the top of my head. Because Pietro. I tried
Speaker 2: doing some translate Google Translate stuff earlier, and it was
Speaker 2: like Peter, and I was like, who the hell is Peter,
Speaker 2: I'm writing about Pietro. And I'm like, oh right, okay,
Speaker 2: dear Google Translate, don't translate the name, thank you. Oh
Speaker 2: my god. And in nineteen twenty nine, the fascist regime
Speaker 2: banned all socialist songs, all anarchist songs, and all foreign
Speaker 2: national anthems. So obviously everyone was like, oh, I guess
Speaker 2: we're not allowed to sing, and so no one sang anymore. No,
Speaker 2: of course, you're not going to stop anarchists from singing.
Speaker 2: Anarchists songs are Italian him it's illegal.
Speaker 3: I love how they also are like, you know, anarchists foreigners.
Speaker 3: That's really the same. Anarchists are just.
Speaker 2: Foreigners totally, which is extra funny because Italy is like
Speaker 2: the primary exporter of anarchist assassins at this point.
Speaker 3: Great because they have to leave Italy by the way,
Speaker 3: They like, now I am a foreigner.
Speaker 2: Well, and like every other country is like all anarchists
Speaker 2: are foreigners, and by that they mean Italians at this point,
Speaker 2: you know.
Speaker 1: Mm hmm, yeah.
Speaker 3: I think it was an Italian anarchist that killed Empress
Speaker 3: CSI of the Habsburgs as well.
Speaker 2: Oh shit, okay, I would believe it.
Speaker 3: I think he was Italian. It was definitely an anarchist,
Speaker 3: and he definitely said the thing all the anarchist assassins
Speaker 3: of royalty said, which was like I did not kill
Speaker 3: an empress.
Speaker 2: I killed a position or like something totally that effect.
Speaker 3: But I think it was Italian.
Speaker 2: Yeah, was she did she reign? Or was she just
Speaker 2: a figurehead? Like like, was she was there an emperor?
Speaker 2: Was there a mister empress?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 3: So she was married to Franz Joseph and she was
Speaker 3: It's a long story, but basically she was kind of
Speaker 3: roped into it against her will actually.
Speaker 2: And because it sounds like misogyny to kill a random woman.
Speaker 3: Her big thing was like trying to be never around
Speaker 3: her husband, so she traveled the world, and that she
Speaker 3: actually got assassinated in Switzerland while she was traveling the
Speaker 3: world and staying away from her husband, which is the
Speaker 3: opposite of the romantic portrayal in The Empress, which I
Speaker 3: wrote the book for.
Speaker 2: Hm oh, okay, okay. I had always heard about that one,
Speaker 2: and like, like one day I'm just going to do
Speaker 2: a survey of anarchist assassinations and be like, did this
Speaker 2: make the world better or worse? Because like anarchist got
Speaker 2: over this idea in like by like besides a time Americans, but.
Speaker 3: I was gonna say Italians did not.
Speaker 2: Yeah, overall people move past like propaganda of the deed
Speaker 2: and like moved more into trade union organizing and things
Speaker 2: like that by the twentieth century. Anyway, whatever, this is
Speaker 2: a complete Yeah.
Speaker 3: They took us down.
Speaker 2: No, no, no, I'm excited to because this is one
Speaker 2: of the ones I don't know as much about. And
Speaker 2: I'm like in my mind, I'm like, well, kill the emperor,
Speaker 2: kill the one that's in charge. Like if an Irish
Speaker 2: person had killed the queen, I would not be like,
Speaker 2: well that's immoral, you know, like whatever, because that person
Speaker 2: was in charge. Yeah, you know when way in the past.
Speaker 2: I'm only talking about way statute limitations ago. Anyway, I
Speaker 2: don't think there's statue limitations on regist side.
Speaker 3: Hilarious.
Speaker 2: Anyway, By the time the Italian Civil War kicks off,
Speaker 2: every faction has their own songs. It's just like kind
Speaker 2: of a thing. Most of the most influential partisan groups
Speaker 2: are from the communist parties, and they're usually part of
Speaker 2: the Garibaldi Brigades, and the anthem of the Garibaldi Brigades
Speaker 2: is called Fishia ivento The wind whistles, and its melody
Speaker 2: is based on a Russian song. If you want the
Speaker 2: single most iconic and actual song of partisan resistance, the
Speaker 2: one that you can most easily source and say, this
Speaker 2: is a partisan song, the song on the most people's
Speaker 2: lips in the war, that was written for this war,
Speaker 2: it is the Wind Whistles, And we're gonna listen to
Speaker 2: a bit of in a second. But overall the lyrics
Speaker 2: are like, our shoes are broken, but we must march
Speaker 2: on to conquer the red spring, where the sun of
Speaker 2: our future rises. Every street is our street. Every woman
Speaker 2: sighs when we approach. Our hearts are strong. Gigi's making
Speaker 2: an amazing face at this. Our hearts are strong. If
Speaker 2: we die, other partisans will avenge us against the vile
Speaker 2: trees and as fascists, the proud partisan returns home with
Speaker 2: a red flag blowing in the wind. You know it's
Speaker 2: a communist rebel song.
Speaker 3: I love that we women are always on this sidelines,
Speaker 3: just like swooning as they walk past. That's our main role, I.
Speaker 2: Know, even though like just as involved in the partisan
Speaker 2: struggle as men, like even from a like like many
Speaker 2: of the many of them had guns and were shooting.
Speaker 2: But that's not the only part of a partisan struggle,
Speaker 2: running the messages, housing the people, running everything, feeding everyone,
Speaker 2: Like the behind the scenes work is just as important.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And like part of that behind the scenes work
Speaker 3: is swooning so that the men feel good about their totally.
Speaker 2: They're like sitting around and they're like, oh God, those
Speaker 2: fucking assholes are back in town. Like, oh, but we
Speaker 2: got to keep their spirits all right, just pretend to
Speaker 2: be impressed. Oh. Emotional labor, emotional labor of the partisan struggle.
Speaker 2: This song was kind of uniquely written as a partisan
Speaker 2: song bipartisans, and it was at least of those songs
Speaker 2: that we're going to play today, And it was first
Speaker 2: played on Christmas nineteen forty three, and we're gonna we're
Speaker 2: gonna play a little clip of.
Speaker 7: It, behand.
Speaker 5: Scar Old.
Speaker 8: Zabis Love.
Speaker 9: You know.
Speaker 2: I kind of like it musically.
Speaker 3: It's got this like kind of I don't know, funeral
Speaker 3: kind of march.
Speaker 2: Kind of Yeah, that's probably why I like it. Belichaw
Speaker 2: is happier than most of the music I listened to.
Speaker 2: Other people were singing older songs. Everyone was singing older songs.
Speaker 2: They're looking at the repertoire of like old radical songs
Speaker 2: and also World War One songs. These are the two
Speaker 2: main you know, because the old rebel songs are about
Speaker 2: being a rebel, and the World War One songs are
Speaker 2: about marching off of guns and stuff, and so you know,
Speaker 2: you put the two together and what do you got. Everyone,
Speaker 2: but especially the anarchists, sang Pietro Gorri's song Goodbye Beautiful Logano.
Speaker 2: They often changed the lyrics to be like goodbye beautiful
Speaker 2: Italy or wherever place or whatever.
Speaker 3: They're like, no, Switzerland, We're not doing Switzerland.
Speaker 2: It's Italy. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And one of the verses
Speaker 2: of that is in the of the originals, Goodbye Beautiful Logano,
Speaker 2: Oh sweet pious Land, expelled without guilt. The anarchists go
Speaker 2: away and leave, singing with hope in their hearts. It
Speaker 2: is for you, the exploited, for you, the workers, that
Speaker 2: we are shackled the same as criminals. Yet our idea
Speaker 2: is only an idea of love, you know, an anarchist rebel.
Speaker 6: Song Lugano, Beach's Got Shaddy, sasaku Ya, Nakichivam be.
Speaker 4: Ebolaspiran Cycle, Eblaspersco.
Speaker 2: I like that one too, I'm gonna say at the
Speaker 2: end of each of them because I like them.
Speaker 3: But yeah, they're all really great. It's funny to speak
Speaker 3: a romance language and listen to them too, because like
Speaker 3: you understand like thirty five percent of it and then
Speaker 3: like there's words chunks in between that you're like.
Speaker 2: I don't know, that makes sense. I got around Italy
Speaker 2: with my terrible Spanish.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I also got around France with my terrible Spanish.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Anywhere with a romance language, you can get around with
Speaker 3: another romance language, and it doesn't matter if you're good
Speaker 3: at the romance language.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, you know, like the super basic thing
Speaker 2: of like I would like to eat the food now
Speaker 2: or whatever it is, you know.
Speaker 3: Like give me directions I know right and left, Like.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, totally. Another anarchist partisan song to compare. Right,
Speaker 2: you've got the anarchist partisan song that's like goodbye, beautiful
Speaker 2: loganous anarchists. We fight for love, you know. This next
Speaker 2: one is called Death to the Savoa Dynasty. Bathed in
Speaker 2: waves of blood.
Speaker 1: Mm hmmm.
Speaker 7: On arm anybody, I'm out, I'm out that I like
Speaker 7: that one.
Speaker 2: Yeah, me too.
Speaker 3: I love an upbeat song about killing.
Speaker 2: Totally death to the King. And the best part about
Speaker 2: it is the king was n't their enemy.
Speaker 4: In this war.
Speaker 2: That's so funny.
Speaker 3: On brand though, on Brand, I know, I love it.
Speaker 2: The non communist Catholic partisans who are fighting against fascism.
Speaker 2: To be clear, there's obviously many Catholics who are on
Speaker 2: the side of fascism, but you know they had their
Speaker 2: own songs, like the one that I won't try and
Speaker 2: say in Italian, but it translates to the rifleman has
Speaker 2: a hundred feathers. And it was adapted from a war
Speaker 2: song about from World War One about the Alpine Front,
Speaker 2: and it was rewritten for the partisan struggle. The original
Speaker 2: and I bring this up because it sounds a little
Speaker 2: bit like bellachoo with dying with the beautiful flowers and stuff.
Speaker 2: The original ends with if he falls from the high cliffs,
Speaker 2: comfort your hearts because he falls amid the flowers and
Speaker 2: does not care that he dies. And the partisan version,
Speaker 2: the version we're going to listen to in a second,
Speaker 2: ends with when he falls wounded, do not cry your heart,
Speaker 2: because if someone dies free, he does not care about dying.
Speaker 3: Mm hmm.
Speaker 2: So yeah, that's my fora into partisan songs. And wow,
Speaker 2: that one. If you listen to the non partisan version,
Speaker 2: it's like overwhelmingly catholic sounding. It's just like you listen,
Speaker 2: it sounds like you're listening to Ava, Maria and or something.
Speaker 9: You know.
Speaker 3: Actually this one was already giving me like chorus in church.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, absolutely, which is why our biggest sponsor is
Speaker 2: chorus class. Uh go learn to sing. I don't know,
Speaker 2: but that's it's nice to sing with people. Here's a
Speaker 2: bunch of ads and we're back. I also like that
Speaker 2: the the two temperaments of these songs is either like
Speaker 2: here we go off to our deaths and it's okay
Speaker 2: that we die, or like, haha, we're off to war.
Speaker 2: We're gonna die. You know, those are the two.
Speaker 3: Vibes in the most upbeat way possible, and like, that's
Speaker 3: actually my favorite genre of human of song of book
Speaker 3: is like the funny upbeat darkness.
Speaker 2: Yeah totally, I'll take it. And also the pure doom
Speaker 2: and gloom. Right, but the like there's like a boring
Speaker 2: doom and gloom where like, oh everything just sucks, not
Speaker 2: the mopey doom and gloom, but it said the like
Speaker 2: this is a beautiful way that we will all end,
Speaker 2: you know.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, like our yeah doom and gloom, but like
Speaker 3: the kind of horror novels that are like really beautiful
Speaker 3: where it's like flowers are growing out of their grave.
Speaker 2: Totally. You ever listen to this song. I'm not gonna
Speaker 2: make everyone listen to it right now, but you're listen
Speaker 2: to song Gloomy Sunday. It's a song that I'm going
Speaker 2: to get the name of the country wrong. It's from
Speaker 2: an Eastern European country, and it's like the death song.
Speaker 2: And there's all these rumors that everyone who listens to
Speaker 2: it dies. This is clearly not true, right, I mean, well, yes,
Speaker 2: actually it's true. Everyone who listens to it dies, just
Speaker 2: on the longer timeline eventually.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And uh, there's a Damondic Gloss version that is just
Speaker 2: astoundingly good. But it's basically this like.
Speaker 1: It's composed by someone while living in Paris. Does that
Speaker 1: mean anything to you?
Speaker 2: Maybe? I think it's Hungarian the song because it's sometimes
Speaker 2: just called the Hungarian suicide song. It's It's it's real dark.
Speaker 1: Wrote a song around around the time of the Great Depression.
Speaker 1: Uh oh uh Native hung he in his influence in
Speaker 1: Native Hungary. Okay, yep, yep, yep, you're there, you were there,
Speaker 1: your brain at it.
Speaker 3: It's like the precursor to l Ron Hubbard's book that
Speaker 3: you Can't Read or you Die because it's so amazing.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, where it was like this song has been
Speaker 1: done by so many people, like it's been done by
Speaker 1: like Billie Holiday.
Speaker 2: I feel like it's been dead. Yeah yeah, wow, everyone
Speaker 2: ever is saying it dies.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean, oh yeah, it's I didn't know it
Speaker 5: had such a huge historical background.
Speaker 1: But it's a cool fucking song.
Speaker 2: It is anyway, that's my other vibe. There's a really good,
Speaker 2: uh funeral Doom version of it by Oh Now I'm
Speaker 2: just gonna forget the name of the band, and everyone's
Speaker 2: giving so annoyed that the three people who know what
Speaker 2: funeral Doom is as a genre are now mad at me.
Speaker 2: But it's real good.
Speaker 3: Gluis said, day is cool.
Speaker 5: It's so I'm gonna look it upside Foreign Death. I'm
Speaker 5: kurestige with the last breath of my soul. I'll be
Speaker 5: blessing you gloomy Sunday. Right, Yeah, it's fucking cool.
Speaker 2: Yeah cool. And it's just a you know, is everyone
Speaker 2: gonna be mad if I want to die too, just
Speaker 2: because you're dead. It's a this is a fun tangent.
Speaker 2: So dark anyway, Well like when you're listening to this,
Speaker 2: it's like a week ago is the darkest time of year.
Speaker 3: So hmm.
Speaker 2: Anyway, the rebels kept songbooks. They literally passed and printed
Speaker 2: out sheets with their songs and their sheet music with
Speaker 2: each other. None of these have Belichow. There are attestations
Speaker 2: from partisans saying, well they sang it over there and
Speaker 2: such and such brigades, but no one's saying like, well
Speaker 2: we sang it. M that's not true. Oh my god,
Speaker 2: I'm thinking about this script. There is the woman who
Speaker 2: says we sang it and she's just ignored. Oh my god. Wow,
Speaker 2: she even has a name. And I'm gonna get to
Speaker 2: it in a second. Immediately after the war, people collected
Speaker 2: partisan songbooks together, and for the first eight years none
Speaker 2: of the books had the song Belachow. This is like
Speaker 2: the main argument against Belichow. Haven't been sung by partisans.
Speaker 2: Are these two things combined? But some people were saying, yes,
Speaker 2: this existed. The one Italian folk musician, Carlo Pestelli, who
Speaker 2: was born in nineteen seventy three, So it wasn't there,
Speaker 2: he said in Prague in nineteen forty seven, during the
Speaker 2: First World Festival of Youth and Students, a group of
Speaker 2: former combatants from Amelia successfully spread Belachow. But then another historian,
Speaker 2: the historian who's kind of on the no when sang
Speaker 2: it page is like. I tried to follow that up
Speaker 2: and I found no evidence of it being sung. But
Speaker 2: he also didn't present like a song list. I don't
Speaker 2: know wild the first mention of it. It's so funny
Speaker 2: to be in combat with my own earlier version of
Speaker 2: the script as I read this. The first mention of
Speaker 2: it wasn't until nineteen fifty three, when a magazine called
Speaker 2: Lalapa mentioned it, which is interesting because it seems to
Speaker 2: be a Spanish word and not an Italian word. I
Speaker 2: don't know. Then in nineteen fifty five it's in a
Speaker 2: collection of partisan songs, and then another collection from nineteen
Speaker 2: sixty includes it, but its source is that nineteen fifty
Speaker 2: five book, and they claimed that it was adapted from
Speaker 2: a famous World War One song. This is almost certainly
Speaker 2: not true. There does not appear to be a famous
Speaker 2: World War One song Belichow. Then in nineteen sixty four
Speaker 2: the song appeared when a former mandina named Giovanni Daffini
Speaker 2: sang it at a festival, and basically she's like, this
Speaker 2: is a mandina song, and then it became a partisan song,
Speaker 2: and she sang both versions. And she was the one
Speaker 2: who in the nineteen thirties had written that verse about
Speaker 2: how we'll all be free one day, and there's like
Speaker 2: oral attestations of that being true. The next year, a
Speaker 2: man named Vasco Sconciani said he was the one who
Speaker 2: wrote the song down. And the way that the skeptical
Speaker 2: historians present this is he's the one who said he
Speaker 2: wrote the song, and he is sometimes credited as the songwriter,
Speaker 2: but historian Diana Garvin has traced it earlier, so he's
Speaker 2: the guy wrote it down, which he did in nineteen
Speaker 2: fifty one. For Tefani. This is a very familiar tale
Speaker 2: in folk music, is that a guy writes it down eventually,
Speaker 2: and so people were like, oh, he's the guy who
Speaker 2: wrote it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's the it's like the documentation bias meets with misogyny.
Speaker 2: Yeah, totally. Look, it's enough for me that Defani went
Speaker 2: and said that this is the song that we did.
Speaker 2: And there's also all this other evidence of Mundane saying, yeah,
Speaker 2: she wrote the following verse. You know, so she wasn't lying.
Speaker 2: There's no reason to believe she was lying when she
Speaker 2: said it was an old Monday a song. So why
Speaker 2: would she be lying that there's a partisan version. I
Speaker 2: think it just avoided being written down, and it was
Speaker 2: a non partisan partisan song. If I played you songs
Speaker 2: for the communists and the anarchists and the Catholics, but
Speaker 2: Bella Chow wasn't attached to a specific political ideology and
Speaker 2: it was not claimed by one. It was a partisan
Speaker 2: song for everyone. And frankly, it was also catchier than
Speaker 2: most songs of that era.
Speaker 3: Yeah, like it survived because it's still catchy to us today,
Speaker 3: like with our different tastes.
Speaker 2: Right, the reason that it might not have gotten written
Speaker 2: down at first was that it wasn't for anybody. But
Speaker 2: the reason it survived and is the song of the
Speaker 2: resistance is because therefore is for everybody, right, and the
Speaker 2: fact that it's catchy as hell, and we'll tie that
Speaker 2: to Croatia in a second. In nineteen seventy four, somebody
Speaker 2: else said that they wrote the original version of the
Speaker 2: song of the Mandine version an ex caribbeanari. An ex
Speaker 2: cop basically says that he wrote it in the nineteen
Speaker 2: thirties for a girl he liked in Mandine, but he
Speaker 2: couldn't register the song because of a fascist dictatorship. I
Speaker 2: think he was an anti fascist, that's my implication. And
Speaker 2: so those facts like, ah, these guys say they wrote
Speaker 2: it was like the reason that it was sort of
Speaker 2: stripped away and like, oh, this wasn't real. You know,
Speaker 2: all of these things can be true. It could have
Speaker 2: been written by this ex cop for a girl who
Speaker 2: sang it in the feats. That's where bella chow would
Speaker 2: have come from. The actual literal goodbye beautiful, because that's
Speaker 2: the part that in the Mandine version. Historians are like,
Speaker 2: I don't know why that part's there, Like what are
Speaker 2: they saying goodbye to? We're not sure If this guy's
Speaker 2: like goodbye beautiful, you're off to go work in the fields,
Speaker 2: he probably wrote her a song and they were like,
Speaker 2: we're not going to sing this song about like goodbye,
Speaker 2: you're off to go work. We're going to sing a
Speaker 2: song about how much it sucks to work. And so
Speaker 2: then the Mandine wrote the Mandine version of the song
Speaker 2: about their working conditions. Then a Mondina woman added verses
Speaker 2: about needing to be free to it and made it
Speaker 2: a rebel song. Then all of these Mondine became partisans
Speaker 2: and took the song with them. And so either they
Speaker 2: were just singing it the partisan version all throughout the war,
Speaker 2: or like everyone else, they're just singing old rebel songs
Speaker 2: that aren't about the war, right, Like we want to
Speaker 2: Kill the King wasn't a partisan song, but people with
Speaker 2: guns like singing it. You know, I'm sure the king
Speaker 2: loved that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, she's like a plus, super happy with this.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: It's like how we're watching right now, Like you can
Speaker 2: like shoot up a school full of kids and it's
Speaker 2: not terrorism, and you kill a CEO and like now
Speaker 2: it's terrorism.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, yeah, the CEO is all just take their
Speaker 3: information off their websites and now it's terrorism.
Speaker 2: Yeah. As soon as anarchists started killing kings back in
Speaker 2: the day, they literally invented international policing. They were like, oh,
Speaker 2: we got to do some about this.
Speaker 3: Whoops, people realized that we're horrible.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and so then probably in the nineteen fifties, that
Speaker 2: guy wrote down the version of it for his friend
Speaker 2: and gave it to her right, and then she sang
Speaker 2: it at a festival in nineteen sixty four. This feels
Speaker 2: like the most likely version for me. As for the melody,
Speaker 2: it's older. Still, it might be fucking ancient for all
Speaker 2: I know. But we know that in the year eighteen
Speaker 2: ninety nine in Odessa and what's currently Ukraine, a Christian
Speaker 2: roma man was born who grew up speaking Biddish. His
Speaker 2: name was Mishka Ziganoff. He moved to New York City
Speaker 2: and in nineteen nineteen he recorded a Klesmer song on
Speaker 2: accordion called colon or Cole. And here's some of that recording.
Speaker 1: That's so fun.
Speaker 3: I know, you feel the bellichow, you feel bellichow, and.
Speaker 2: The first couple of notes like that just it hits
Speaker 2: as belichow.
Speaker 3: Mm hmm.
Speaker 2: It's not note for note the modern belichiw. But the
Speaker 2: beginning is no one's exactly sure where the melody originated,
Speaker 2: other than that I read like eight different countries that
Speaker 2: people claimed the most likely. The one that seemed to
Speaker 2: come up the most was Dalmatia, which is part of Croatia,
Speaker 2: now which I had it never occurred to me that
Speaker 2: the Dalmatian dog is named because there was a place
Speaker 2: called Dalmatia, indeed obvious in retrospect, and so most people
Speaker 2: point there as the origin of the Klesmer melody of it.
Speaker 2: One writer Fausto Giavnardi conjectures that an Italian immigrant in
Speaker 2: New York City might have gone back home and brought
Speaker 2: the melody back with him, and this seems like the
Speaker 2: most likely. It also could have easily just come into
Speaker 2: Italy more directly some other person, like coming from Odessa
Speaker 2: or Croatia or like anywhere that this melody could have been.
Speaker 2: You know, so fuck yeah. The Partisans sang a song
Speaker 2: popularized by a Yiddish speaking Christian roma man in New
Speaker 2: York City, turned into a love song by a guy,
Speaker 2: turned into a work song, turned into a rebel work song,
Speaker 2: then turned into a rebels with gun song, turned into
Speaker 2: what might be kind of the internationalist anthem of the
Speaker 2: left in the world, and since World War Two, Belachow
Speaker 2: has spread around the world as a resistance song. You
Speaker 2: can hear it basically anywhere there's a street movement against
Speaker 2: the right wing. The first time I heard it was
Speaker 2: in Kurdish twenty five years ago in Amsterdam, at an
Speaker 2: anarchist bar, where a Kurdish exile sang it to us.
Speaker 2: I saw people bored of hearing it from that marching
Speaker 2: band in France, and I also saw people excited as
Speaker 2: hell by it in the same marching band. The Italian
Speaker 2: prime minister gets jeered with it. In October of this year,
Speaker 2: the far right Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban showed up
Speaker 2: at the European Parliament and a bunch of leftist MEPs
Speaker 2: stood up and sang bela chow at him.
Speaker 3: I love that so much, like I love songs as
Speaker 3: test like that is such a cool tradition, and it's
Speaker 3: been all over the world in so many different contexts,
Speaker 3: so like, Yeah, I don't know if you know anything
Speaker 3: about the singing revolution in the Baltic States, so like
Speaker 3: as the Soviet Union was like under Gorbachev and things
Speaker 3: had gotten a little bit less horrific for people. Basically Estonia, Latvia,
Speaker 3: and Lithuania in slightly different ways. I know most about Estonia,
Speaker 3: but they started what's called the Singing Revolution, and basically
Speaker 3: it started out by singing illegal like nationalist Estonian songs
Speaker 3: in the Estonian language, and instead of flying the Estonian flag,
Speaker 3: which was illegal, they would fly flags with each of
Speaker 3: the colors of the Estonian flag as like a loophole.
Speaker 2: Hell yeah, I was in Estonia once when I was
Speaker 2: a teenager, and I went to a flea market and
Speaker 2: bought a shirt that I wish I still had so desperately.
Speaker 2: And it was this shirt that the front said mclennon's
Speaker 2: and it was Lenin's face over McDonald's logo, and the
Speaker 2: back said the party is over. And it was like
Speaker 2: a burnt and broken hammer and sickle like red star
Speaker 2: because they were just like so happy that the Soviet
Speaker 2: Union had fallen, you know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and they, I mean they suffered, people suffered enormously.
Speaker 3: They're like a lot of people had to flee, like
Speaker 3: hundreds of thousands had to flee, more than I believe
Speaker 3: still more hundreds of thousands were sent to Siberian camps
Speaker 3: and never came back.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I believe it. And like I like the idea
Speaker 2: of singing Belichow at people as a protest, partly because
Speaker 2: it's not just like here's a song about resistance. It's like, hey,
Speaker 2: we're gonna shoot you if you keep doing this, you know.
Speaker 2: It's like, this is a song about people who killed fascists.
Speaker 2: Because fascism will fail, we will do it again. It's
Speaker 2: gonna suck, but we're going to do it again. Ukrainian
Speaker 2: soldiers sing it into trenches. There's like this viral video
Speaker 2: from about two years ago of two women in the trenches.
Speaker 2: One of them's loading magazines for her rifle while they
Speaker 2: sing Belichow and Ukrainian. And there's a video of Iranian
Speaker 2: women singing it without hajab and they're singing in Farsi
Speaker 2: and it went viral. A couple of years ago, the
Speaker 2: internationalist forces in the YPG in Reshava sing this song
Speaker 2: and like it's a good song and it's our song,
Speaker 2: and it was given to us by working women in Italy,
Speaker 2: and it was sung bipartisans. Whether it was sung in
Speaker 2: the Mondine version or whether it was sung in the
Speaker 2: partisan version, I almost don't care.
Speaker 3: It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter, like the revolutionary history
Speaker 3: kind of, I don't know it. Sometimes it doesn't matter
Speaker 3: if it's the exact wording or the exact you know
Speaker 3: history or this exact person wrote it. It's like it's
Speaker 3: still made this impact, that's still ringing today.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it's an internationalist song in its core because
Speaker 2: it's not an Italian melody. We just listened to a
Speaker 2: lot of Italian songs. It doesn't sound like them, you know.
Speaker 2: And even the wind whistles, the other big partisan song,
Speaker 2: the melody came from Russia, you know. And yeah, international
Speaker 2: is great and fascism sucks. That's my that's the moral
Speaker 2: of the story. People are gonna be shocked. People have
Speaker 2: been listening for three years now and they're like, wait, what,
Speaker 2: Margaret's on that page.
Speaker 3: You've done a full U turn.
Speaker 2: Yeah. But yeah, that's the story of Bellachow. If copyright
Speaker 2: were a different thing, I would now play you new versions.
Speaker 2: But you can go listen to yourself on YouTube.
Speaker 3: Thank you for this. This is so interesting. Like, I
Speaker 3: actually one of the things that I feel like as
Speaker 3: a gap in my historical knowledge is the like revolutionary
Speaker 3: history of music. I've been starting to get a little
Speaker 3: bit more into jazz, but like I feel like I
Speaker 3: know very little about it. So now I feel like
Speaker 3: I want to just go listen to Bella Chow for
Speaker 3: the rest.
Speaker 9: Of the.
Speaker 2: That's what I did as soon as I finished this script.
Speaker 2: As I went and listened to all kinds of versions,
Speaker 2: and yeah, I can, I can od on it, but
Speaker 2: I always come back to it. It's always it's always
Speaker 2: waiting for me.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I'm the kind of person that I'll take a
Speaker 3: song and just listen to it like three thousand times
Speaker 3: in a row, and then not listen to it for
Speaker 3: a year, and then come back and listen three thousand
Speaker 3: more times.
Speaker 2: Yeah, what's the There's like a meme around that about
Speaker 2: like we're gonna ring every little bit of dopamine out.
Speaker 3: Of the song, you know, and not come back until
Speaker 3: it's replenished itself.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly, And this song's full of it and got
Speaker 2: plenty of dopamine in this one.
Speaker 1: Mm hmm.
Speaker 2: But yeah, So if people like history, they might like
Speaker 2: your stuff.
Speaker 6: Is that?
Speaker 2: Is that a fair way to put it?
Speaker 3: That is a fair way to put it. I think
Speaker 3: if people like history, the first thing that I need
Speaker 3: to plug is The Sapling Cage by Margaret Kiljoy, because
Speaker 3: even though it's not historical fiction, you really can feel
Speaker 3: the historical knowledge in it, like I've actually never read
Speaker 3: a book before where I felt like the background of
Speaker 3: the book had all of these different ways of organizing
Speaker 3: society cleverly hidden in it, and I was just very
Speaker 3: delighted by this.
Speaker 2: Thank you.
Speaker 3: So first I'll plug Margaret, and then yeah, if you
Speaker 3: like history, if you like historical fiction, some of my
Speaker 3: So my books for adults are mostly just like historical
Speaker 3: adventure historical fiction, and my books for teens are mostly
Speaker 3: historical horror. So my most recent book is called We
Speaker 3: Are the Beasts, and it is based on the story
Speaker 3: of the Beast of Debanon, which was a true, real
Speaker 3: thing unsolved mystery of this creature that.
Speaker 2: Kills Was it probably a wolf? I just assume it
Speaker 2: was a wolf.
Speaker 3: I don't think it is a wolf. Oh, I don't
Speaker 3: think it is a wolf. So okay, little tangent.
Speaker 2: Yeah, let's hear. I want to hear what you think
Speaker 2: it is.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so well, I'm not going to tell you if
Speaker 3: you can read the book and find out what I
Speaker 3: think it is. Oh, but I will cool my tangent.
Speaker 9: Is.
Speaker 3: The reason I don't think it is a wolf is
Speaker 3: that lots and lots of peasants saw this creature and
Speaker 3: described it and said it wasn't a wolf. And the
Speaker 3: only reason that people are like it's a wolf is
Speaker 3: because they don't believe poor people.
Speaker 2: Oh interesting, okay, Okay.
Speaker 3: So I'm like, the peasantry is telling you, like literally
Speaker 3: hundreds of people saw it and survived or got mauled
Speaker 3: and survived or whatever and saw it real up close
Speaker 3: and described it, and they're like, it is not a wolf.
Speaker 3: They have seen wolves before, there's lots of wolves in
Speaker 3: that region. They're like, this is something else. And so
Speaker 3: I'm like, I believe them. I believe them when they
Speaker 3: and not only were they not believed because they're poor,
Speaker 3: but they're also young women. So I believe them when
Speaker 3: they say it's not a wolf.
Speaker 2: I just assumed it was a wolf.
Speaker 3: Sorry, now we're on that. But so basically the book,
Speaker 3: I've been fascinated by the Beast's history for a while,
Speaker 3: but I wasn't sure I wanted to write the book
Speaker 3: because it's like just a bunch of dead shepherdesses, and
Speaker 3: I think we have a problem in fiction where we
Speaker 3: just kind of walk over the corpses of dead women.
Speaker 3: So I was like, actually, I'm going to write it
Speaker 3: as a monster story about saving girls. So the two
Speaker 3: main characters decide to use the appearance of the beast
Speaker 3: in their region as a way to fake the deaths
Speaker 3: of girls who are in dire situations in their own homes.
Speaker 2: Oh hell yeah, I literally think I'm going to order
Speaker 2: it as soon as we get off this call. I'll
Speaker 2: send it to you.
Speaker 3: Margaret, you don't have okay.
Speaker 2: Well I will. Well, then you listener should order it.
Speaker 2: But I'm special and I get a free copy. All
Speaker 2: I had to do is write lots of books. Oh right, yep,
Speaker 2: writers just send each other their books for free. Anyways, Well,
Speaker 2: my plug's already been plugged, Sophie, you got anything.
Speaker 1: Uh, just follow a cool Zone Media on blue Sky,
Speaker 1: Twitter x and the Instagram, so we post all the
Speaker 1: current things cool.
Speaker 2: All right, Well we'll see you I think next week
Speaker 2: where we'll be back with more Cool People Did Cool Stuff?
Speaker 2: And or I think probably actually a Q and A.
Speaker 2: But I don't know whatever whatever's next is next, You'll
Speaker 2: just deal with it.
Speaker 1: Hye.
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