Speaker 1: Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2: Hello, and welcome to cool People did cool stuff. We're
Speaker 2: back in case you noticed, we weren't here, but now
Speaker 2: we're here. The we in this case is me Murder Kiljoy,
Speaker 2: and my producer Sophie Hi Sophie, my Magpie, and my.
Speaker 3: Guest Robert Evans Hi Magpie. I listened to when I
Speaker 3: was buying Hey today. Right before this, I went to
Speaker 3: go get hay for my livestock at the feed store
Speaker 3: and they were playing that song Brandy, And so now
Speaker 3: I am in my head remixing that song instead of
Speaker 3: being about a woman whose lover dies at sea, to
Speaker 3: be about you making podcasts.
Speaker 2: Excellent, Well, we can make hay from that one time
Speaker 2: Robert and I went and got Hey, and it was
Speaker 2: the first time in a little while at my pickup
Speaker 2: truck got to be a pickup truck. Besides, well, I
Speaker 2: guess it was a camper. Actually, we filled my camp
Speaker 2: full of hay, is what happened. Yes, And it took
Speaker 2: me a long time to get all the hay out.
Speaker 3: It does take a long time to get all the
Speaker 3: hay out.
Speaker 2: But it's worth it because then the goats got to eat.
Speaker 3: Hay, and the goats love hay So.
Speaker 1: Speaking of this week, speaking of saying hey, oh we
Speaker 1: should say hey to Rory.
Speaker 2: Who's our audio engineer? Hi Rory, Hi Riight, Hi Rory?
Speaker 2: And our theme music was written forced by unwoman and
Speaker 2: for no particular reason, not at all. I actually genuinely
Speaker 2: picked the subject and started researching it before the activities
Speaker 2: that happened last week.
Speaker 1: You did like, like, I can vouch for you.
Speaker 2: You and I'm glad you don't believe don't have to
Speaker 2: vouch for me in court about it.
Speaker 1: I'm just but but I would, and it would be
Speaker 1: I would be truthful. I have like documentation full.
Speaker 2: It's true because the thing we're going to talk about,
Speaker 2: Robert Evans, have you ever heard of people trying to
Speaker 2: assassinate people that they don't like?
Speaker 3: No assassinations. No one would ever do such a thing.
Speaker 3: No one would ever do such a thing and then
Speaker 3: have it immediately cause Blue Cross Blue Shield to reverse
Speaker 3: the policy on denying claims arbitrarily when the surgery takes
Speaker 3: too long to pay for anesthetic. That would never happen.
Speaker 2: No, there's not a whole saying about direct action gets
Speaker 2: the goods. You all are listening to this in the future,
Speaker 2: where the knock on effects will have become more clear.
Speaker 2: But right now we know very We only know one
Speaker 2: knock on effect of last week.
Speaker 3: Which is if you've got blue Cross, you now have
Speaker 3: to be less worried about getting surgery.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and waking up in the middle of surgery, which
Speaker 2: is basically everyone's nightmare.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Literally, that is.
Speaker 1: So like, so many people have that fear, and that
Speaker 1: it's grulish. Yeah, so goulish, it's so gross.
Speaker 2: Well, the person that we're going to talk about attempting
Speaker 2: to assassinate in the past, who's already dead, is a
Speaker 2: little fascist he might have heard of named Mussolini.
Speaker 3: Mussolini, I hardly know Leini. Okay, pass, and it's not
Speaker 3: gonna work. Sorry, Mussolini.
Speaker 2: Originally this was going to be a two parter where
Speaker 2: one part was the people who tried when Mussolini was
Speaker 2: coming up, and then the second part was going to
Speaker 2: be people who succeeded when he was coming down. But
Speaker 2: it's actually all going to be about people who tried
Speaker 2: when he was coming up because there were so many
Speaker 2: Did you know that an awful lot of people tried
Speaker 2: to kill Mussolini?
Speaker 3: Yes, I mean it's like with Hitler, right, like, you've
Speaker 3: got that guy who tried to blow him up, and
Speaker 3: that and almost did that fucking carpenter who tried to
Speaker 3: blow him up in one of the halls. He was
Speaker 3: speaking at all sorts of pre attempts. So I wasn't
Speaker 3: really familiar with the ones on Mussolini, but I was
Speaker 3: sure there had been some.
Speaker 2: We're going to talk about I think eight of them
Speaker 2: today or this week.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that sounds like the right himount Yeah.
Speaker 2: And so far, by my account, I was counting right
Speaker 2: before I recorded. I was talking to one of my
Speaker 2: friends about it. So far, by my account, we've got
Speaker 2: one socialist, one Catholic, one Republican, and five anarchists attempted
Speaker 2: to kill Mussolini. So, Benito Mussolini is famously one of
Speaker 2: the founders of fascism, the ideology that is genuinely and
Speaker 2: truly bad. That ninety five percent of the people on
Speaker 2: this planet agree is bad. We just don't agree about
Speaker 2: what counts as fascism.
Speaker 3: Yes, that's part of the problem. Yeah, yeah, it.
Speaker 2: Doesn't help that. I mean, because some people use fascism
Speaker 2: to just being anyone I don't like or any authoritarianism, right,
Speaker 2: And that's not an accurate way to talk about things.
Speaker 2: We shouldn't call our enemies fascists when they're not fascists.
Speaker 3: Now, like Stalin wasn't really a fascist, no, because in
Speaker 3: part fascists come to power through popular acclaim as a
Speaker 3: result of like setting themselves up in opposition to the left.
Speaker 3: There's this also idea that Stalin does kind of fit
Speaker 3: in with the attitude that like the fascist dictator embodies
Speaker 3: the people in some way, although the way in which
Speaker 3: like Soviet propaganda talk about Stalin was actually quite different
Speaker 3: from the way fascist propaganda tends to talk about the
Speaker 3: leader being like an embodiment of the people. But yeah,
Speaker 3: there are some similarities, Like there's a bunch of stuff.
Speaker 3: Syncretism is a big part go read your umburdo Echo.
Speaker 2: Well, there's gonna be a bunch of emburdos in this episode,
Speaker 2: but not echo. Yeah, but it turns out Umberto is
Speaker 2: sort of the mic of Italy. Well, yeah, McLay is
Speaker 2: probably the mic of Italy. But fascism is one of
Speaker 2: the most convoluted and complex political ideologies to ever come about,
Speaker 2: which is one of the reasons why you can kind
Speaker 2: of point to anything and call it fascism and be wrong,
Speaker 2: but also be like, you see where you're coming from
Speaker 2: about it, you know, because it's not actually a simple ideology.
Speaker 2: The more as I was reading this, because Italian fascism
Speaker 2: in particular comes out of where they're right and the
Speaker 2: left meet, and it is not a Well we'll talk
Speaker 2: about this. I'm not going to get too deep into
Speaker 2: the weeds of defining fascism today, but I want to
Speaker 2: talk first about someone who one hundred percent, absolutely I
Speaker 2: am certain, would have been fine with assassinating someone like
Speaker 2: Benito Mussolini. About fifteen years before Benito Mussolini came to power.
Speaker 2: That man who would have been totally fine with killing
Speaker 2: Benito Mussolini was Benito Mussolini.
Speaker 3: Oh because well yeah, yeah, I know that makes sense.
Speaker 2: Yeah, to open up a can of orbs that the
Speaker 2: Internet is not equipped to handle. Benito Mussolini, the founder
Speaker 2: of the world's deadliest part right ideology, started on the left.
Speaker 3: Yep, he sure did. Uh kind of adjacent to anarchism.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we're going to talk about that. There's gonna be
Speaker 2: a lot of it. Also started as a journalist, hooray.
Speaker 2: Uh yeah, yeah, he was a socialist for a long
Speaker 2: ass time, he was at least a second generation leftist.
Speaker 2: Mussolini was born in the year eight teen eighty three
Speaker 2: and he was the child of a blacksmith socialist and
Speaker 2: a Catholic school teacher. He got named after a series
Speaker 2: of socialists and leftists because of his father, and then
Speaker 2: he was baptized Catholic because of his mom. He's named
Speaker 2: Benito after Benito Juarez, the liberal president of Mexico, and
Speaker 2: his middle names, which I forgot to look up in
Speaker 2: Italian are Andrea and Amala Caare and these are after
Speaker 2: two anarchists because his father was part of the Anarchist International,
Speaker 2: which was an anti authoritarian socialist organization in the eighteen seventies.
Speaker 2: I'm just going straight into the like the this is
Speaker 2: like when I have to talk about eugenics on this show,
Speaker 2: you know, whenever I have to talk about something that
Speaker 2: was like really common and easily understood in the nineteenth century,
Speaker 2: that makes no sense in the twenty first century. Italian
Speaker 2: nationalism is really intertwined with the left, and it's really
Speaker 2: intertwined with anarchism.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and that, I mean it makes sense when you're
Speaker 3: coming out of a world well not very long before
Speaker 3: this period, Italy had been fucking Habsburg property. Much of
Speaker 3: Italy at least had been Habsburg property, right, And when
Speaker 3: all of these things that we now just see is like, well,
Speaker 3: obviously Italy's a country, obviously Croatia is a country. When
Speaker 3: they're all the property of some guy in his inbred family,
Speaker 3: it's a lot less weird that it's a left wing
Speaker 3: position to talk about nationalism.
Speaker 2: Yeah, totally. Benito Mussolini never did really roll with the anarchists.
Speaker 2: He kind of wanted to at different points. When he
Speaker 2: was a socialist, he was firmly in the authoritarian socialist camp,
Speaker 2: but he studied a lot of anarchist theory. He remained
Speaker 2: friendly with anarchists. He was either dating or just friends with.
Speaker 2: I've read both the anarchist orientalist poet named Leita Rafanelli.
Speaker 2: He translated two of the anarchist Peter Kropotkin's books from
Speaker 2: French into Italian. And because yeah, he was journalists, he
Speaker 2: read newspapers and kind of if you were a polytical
Speaker 2: person in the nineteenth century, if you were like a
Speaker 2: political leader, your thing was that you were a journalist.
Speaker 2: Your thing is that you ran a newspaper.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean it's the same. It's the same. Reason
Speaker 3: is that with the generation coming up and the next
Speaker 3: generation are all going to get their starts on TikTok
Speaker 3: and Twitter, and like we're already seeing this on the right, right,
Speaker 3: I mean in the left to a degree. You know,
Speaker 3: it's because that's totally that's not the journalism. Tweeting is not,
Speaker 3: or making TikTok is not journalism. But journalism wasn't what
Speaker 3: we would consider journalism back then. It was just the
Speaker 3: best way of getting propaganda to the masses.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it was Yeah, you wrote polemics, and propaganda
Speaker 2: just literally meant propagating ideas. If you had an idea
Speaker 2: and you wanted to tell people about it, you would
Speaker 2: propagandize the idea. So Mussolini, the thing that's going to
Speaker 2: come up throughout this week's story is that he's clearly
Speaker 2: into authoritarianism, right, But there's something he liked about the anarchists.
Speaker 2: He liked their courage, he likes their commitment, and he
Speaker 2: liked action. You know, he was he wasn't the kind
Speaker 2: of guy who wanted people to win around and talk
Speaker 2: about things. He wanted people to go out and do things.
Speaker 2: He also, for a long time shared their opinion that
Speaker 2: killing autocrats was just fine.
Speaker 3: I mean, look, there's a vin diagram. We do may
Speaker 3: not like to say it, but like, there's a Vinn
Speaker 3: diagram at points between me and Mussolini's life right now, Totally,
Speaker 3: I'm not against killing early twentieth century autocrats theoretically.
Speaker 2: Right, yeah, totally. Yeah, if we had a time machine,
Speaker 2: we would feel justified in going back and killing absolute
Speaker 2: monarchs from the nineteenth century and earlier.
Speaker 3: Look, if I could go back in time and stab
Speaker 3: the King of Italy, I would try to.
Speaker 2: Well, that's going to bring us to this week's first assassin.
Speaker 3: Is it the guy who stabbed the King of Italy?
Speaker 2: I actually can't remember whether this guy stabbed or shot him.
Speaker 2: This is the first Okay, this is the only successful
Speaker 2: assassin we're going to talk about for a while. But
Speaker 2: he shaped a lot of Italy's politics for a long time.
Speaker 2: And that man's name was Gaetano Bresci. He was a
Speaker 2: weaver from Italy who emigrated to the US in the
Speaker 2: nineteenth century to Patterson, New Jersey. And it's kind of
Speaker 2: funny because there's all of these different hidden, secret anarchist
Speaker 2: strongholds of the past. I don't normally think about New
Speaker 2: Jersey when I think about anarchism, but yeah, Patterson, New
Speaker 2: Jersey very strong Italian anarchist scene. The next little bit,
Speaker 2: because it's been a little while since I've looked up
Speaker 2: Gatana Brescia. I used to write about him a lot,
Speaker 2: So I'm kind of going into a little bit story
Speaker 2: mode when I talk about Katana Bresci. I'm gonna have
Speaker 2: more direct sources for the rest of the rest of
Speaker 2: the people I'm gonna talk about. So everyone knows Katana
Speaker 2: Breshi was hanging out New Jersey with his Irish wife, Sophie,
Speaker 2: which is a good name, I agree, right, yeah, and
Speaker 2: his two daughters, and she's gonna be all right in
Speaker 2: this story.
Speaker 1: Cool, yeah, okay, cool, don't bring the name down.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, no, she's great. No, no negative notes on Sophie.
Speaker 2: In eighteen ninety eight, there are these food riots in
Speaker 2: Italy and the government was like, well, a specific general
Speaker 2: is like, why don't we just murder the entire crowd
Speaker 2: that's rioting, And so they did that, and we will
Speaker 2: think food riots. They usually think like, oh, everyone like
Speaker 2: lost their mind and was running around and burning things
Speaker 2: or whatever. These were organized strikes that were met with
Speaker 2: lethal force. At least eighty protesters and two soldiers were killed.
Speaker 2: Jesus and so King Umberto the first what did he do?
Speaker 2: And everyone at the time was like, oh, the king
Speaker 2: is the true you know. A lot of like populism
Speaker 2: is based on the idea that the government's bad, but
Speaker 2: the king's good, you know.
Speaker 3: And this translates to fascism too, right during the Third Reich,
Speaker 3: there was always this idea that like, if only Hitler
Speaker 3: knew right about the worst Nazi policies. Yeah, yeah, this
Speaker 3: is the same thing with the czar. Yeah yeah, no, totally. Yeah.
Speaker 2: We see this again and again, and so I think
Speaker 2: everyone was kind of expecting Umberto to come in and
Speaker 2: be like, well, you probably shouldn't have done that, right, Oh,
Speaker 2: I did promise you more than one mburdo and this
Speaker 2: is one of them. There'sn be another one, probably on Wednesday.
Speaker 2: But what i'mburda the first did is awarded the guy
Speaker 2: who ordered the massacre a medal of honor, and Gatano
Speaker 2: Bresci he didn't like that. He was living in New
Speaker 2: Jersey with Sophie. He'd started an anarchist paper with some folks,
Speaker 2: and he'd put up a fuck ton of money to
Speaker 2: start that paper. It is like two hundred bucks at
Speaker 2: the time, which is like several thousand dollars now. He
Speaker 2: didn't want anyone else to get in trouble for what
Speaker 2: he decided to do, so he didn't tell anyone. He
Speaker 2: didn't tell Sophie. He just told her he had to
Speaker 2: go deal with some stuff, like family stuff in Italy.
Speaker 2: He didn't tell his comrades. He went into the newspaper
Speaker 2: and said, hey, all that seed money I put in,
Speaker 2: I need it back now. And they were like why,
Speaker 2: and he was like, the not your business, give me
Speaker 2: my money back. And so everyone kind of thought he
Speaker 2: was a sellout and he was just like getting his
Speaker 2: money to go fuck off, right. Everyone thought he left
Speaker 2: the movement. But he got his money back and he
Speaker 2: bought two things. He bought a Smith and Wesson and
Speaker 2: he bought a one way ticket to Paris.
Speaker 3: That's a song. That's a warren Zevon song right there,
Speaker 3: Smith and Wesson in a one way ticket to Paris. Excellent.
Speaker 2: And the king is going to die and unlike a
Speaker 2: lot of would be assassins that we've talked about on
Speaker 2: this show BRESHI practiced with the revolver.
Speaker 3: Which is always key. Yes.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he made his way probably to Rome. He made
Speaker 2: his way to Italy. He spent two days scouting out
Speaker 2: the area where he knew the king was going to be,
Speaker 2: and then on July twenty ninth, nineteen hundred, he went out.
Speaker 2: He got some ice cream. I think he had lunch
Speaker 2: with like a stranger and just hanging out and he
Speaker 2: was like, you're gonna remember me guy, And then he
Speaker 2: waited for Umberto to come through, waiting in the crowd
Speaker 2: that was all there to cheer on their you know,
Speaker 2: glorious leader, and he shot Umberto to death. The crowd
Speaker 2: immediately grabbed him. Gaetano said, I did not kill Umberto.
Speaker 2: I have killed the king. I have killed a principal.
Speaker 3: Hell oh that's a good line. That's a good line.
Speaker 2: Back home in New Jersey, his anarchist friends were like, oh,
Speaker 2: I guess we judged him wrong, and they started a
Speaker 2: fund to look after his kids and support his family.
Speaker 2: His wife came to Italy and testified to his good
Speaker 2: character in court. His whole family was like arrested in
Speaker 2: an investigation into conspiracy, but eventually everyone was let go
Speaker 2: and Italy under a king was actually had a more
Speaker 2: fair criminal justice system than the United States does today.
Speaker 2: They didn't have the death penalty. Mussolini's going to bring
Speaker 2: that back later, so he gets life in prison. He
Speaker 2: was held in solitary confinement. He had one hour a
Speaker 2: day of exercises, like feet were like manacled to the floor.
Speaker 2: They didn't treat him great. Less than a year later
Speaker 2: he was found hanging in his cell, and modern historians
Speaker 2: are recentably certain he was murdered. At the time, everyone's like, nah,
Speaker 2: I just killed himself. Interestingly enough, this assassination didn't bring
Speaker 2: in sweeping reactionary forces or anything like usually people are like, ah,
Speaker 2: you killed the king and something worse is going to happen.
Speaker 2: This changed things, but it the existing like kind of
Speaker 2: leftist government stayed in power, and things kind of chugged along. Okay,
Speaker 2: it didn't even lead to they like cracked down on
Speaker 2: the anarchist movement, but they didn't come through and destroy it.
Speaker 2: It did lead to more international cooperation between law enforcement.
Speaker 2: When I first started dreaming up this show years ago,
Speaker 2: it was kind of in a different context and I
Speaker 2: wanted to talk about anarchist history and I was like,
Speaker 2: you know, they literally invented international policing to stop us.
Speaker 2: Why are all of our books boring? Has been my
Speaker 2: like go to tagline because they did. International policing exists
Speaker 2: because of trying to stop the anarchist movement. Because yep,
Speaker 2: nothing gets people to work together. Like like when people
Speaker 2: go around and kill like poor people, everyone's like, oh,
Speaker 2: that sucks whatever. When people go around and kill kings,
Speaker 2: Kings work together to make sure that that stops.
Speaker 3: Yeah. No, kings are great at like really union behave
Speaker 3: they really work like unions royalty.
Speaker 2: Yeah, when when someone comes for them as a class,
Speaker 2: they band together.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: One person who defended Gaetano Breshi doing a little king
Speaker 2: murder was a man by the name of Benito Mussolini.
Speaker 2: His fellow socialists were claiming Bresci was crazy for having
Speaker 2: killed the king, right. Mussolini said that tyrann aside was
Speaker 2: quote the occupational hazard of being a king, which I
Speaker 2: don't know I.
Speaker 3: Mean talking about occupational hazards. Yeah, I feel confident saying
Speaker 3: that being a king is a pre existing condition.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, totally. But what isn't a pre existing No,
Speaker 2: but what else we're obliged to do is play ads
Speaker 2: for you now, Yeah, like these ones and we're back. Now,
Speaker 2: this might shock you, Robert, did you know Mussolini didn't
Speaker 2: stay leftist?
Speaker 3: Really? Now? I thought you were talking about Benny Mussolini,
Speaker 3: the man who invented the three day weekend.
Speaker 2: Well, I was reading a whole bunch on on that
Speaker 2: website X about how actually the fascist or socialists and leftists.
Speaker 3: You're, of course referring to the website that just plays
Speaker 3: a looping video of the song X gonta give it
Speaker 3: to you. That's where I get all of my historical
Speaker 3: information about anarchists in the early nineteen hundreds as well. Yes,
Speaker 3: uh huh, yeah.
Speaker 2: My ex feet is certainly playing looping videos of something
Speaker 2: right now. And so Mussolini was kicked out of the
Speaker 2: Socialist Party because he supported interventionism, he supported Italy fighting
Speaker 2: in World War One, and along the way he started
Speaker 2: developing his theories on fascism, which was basically, what if
Speaker 2: you took revolutionary socialism and then replaced it with revolutionary nationalism.
Speaker 2: Instead of class solidarity, you had national solidarity. What if
Speaker 2: you made all of the poor people suck up to
Speaker 2: the rich people and then defend the nation as a concept,
Speaker 2: the leftist trappings and some of the leftists strategies, but
Speaker 2: with right wing goals, because at the time, right wing
Speaker 2: was just like the status quo. Right if you defend
Speaker 2: like the monarchy or whatever, your right wing, so there's
Speaker 2: nothing really revolutionary about it. But fascism was like, no,
Speaker 2: but we want the revolution and we want to feel
Speaker 2: cool and edgy, but we also want to we really
Speaker 2: like the taste of boots, and so we're going to
Speaker 2: become fascists and invent this new ideology. For a few years,
Speaker 2: a lot of politics in Italy was happening in the streets,
Speaker 2: fascists versus anti fascists fighting it out, and for a
Speaker 2: good several years Mussolini tried to make common cause with
Speaker 2: the anarchists, specifically to join him against the socialists and
Speaker 2: the communists. After all, this is the period where the
Speaker 2: Bolsheviks and Russia were murdering anarchists on Moss and so
Speaker 2: some folks there was a chance that Mussolini was even
Speaker 2: going to go anarchists during this time. I actually don't
Speaker 2: buy it, but I read one person making this argument.
Speaker 2: He actually risked alienating his base with how much he
Speaker 2: appreciated the anarchists interesting because his base was like, no,
Speaker 2: those are the people we just go fight in the streets.
Speaker 2: But Mussolini kind of admires their commitment, right, and the
Speaker 2: anarchists don't want him. Mussolini said, quote, we are always
Speaker 2: ready to admire men who are willing to die for
Speaker 2: a faith they believe in selflessly. And this is him
Speaker 2: contrasting the anarchists to the cowardly socialists. The anarchists, in
Speaker 2: so many words, told him to eat shit and die,
Speaker 2: refuse his overtures again and again, and soon enough they're
Speaker 2: going to try really really hard to just outright kill
Speaker 2: this man. The most famous Italian anarchist then and now
Speaker 2: is this guy named Erico Malatesta. He's popped into a
Speaker 2: bunch of our stories on the show, like when comrades
Speaker 2: got him to Argentina by smuggling him in a crate
Speaker 2: of sewing machines, and then he helped the Baker's Union
Speaker 2: there become the most radical union in that country and
Speaker 2: the model that all the other unions rush to follow.
Speaker 2: And how today in Argentina there are still pastries named
Speaker 2: by the anarchist Bakers, like little books and little bombs.
Speaker 2: I really like Malatesta. He's always in and out of jail.
Speaker 2: He's an older fellow now, I think he's in his
Speaker 2: sixties at this point that we're talking about. And while
Speaker 2: he's in prison in Italy, there's a huge campaign to
Speaker 2: free him, and who supports that campaign but Benito Mussolini,
Speaker 2: even though his followers are fighting the anarchists in the
Speaker 2: streets during this time, Malatesta gets out and he can't
Speaker 2: get any paper for his newspapers because of political pressure
Speaker 2: against him, and Musolin offers him paper to print on
Speaker 2: and Malatist is like no, what No, So Mussolini keeps
Speaker 2: trying to be friends with them. But some anarchists and
Speaker 2: folks from every ideology did turn fascist, right, because you
Speaker 2: can't have a new ideology without starting with people who
Speaker 2: used to have other ideologies. An awful lot of anarchists
Speaker 2: turn fascist. Orwell has a really good essay about this.
Speaker 2: George Orwell has a really good essay about this called
Speaker 2: Notes on Nationalism that basically lays out the case that
Speaker 2: a lot of political extremists are into extremism, not the
Speaker 2: idea that the extremism is attached to. So you get
Speaker 2: people going from the radical left to the radical right
Speaker 2: reasonably often. And this unfortunately ties into the first time
Speaker 2: that I've found of someone trying to kill Mussolini. Some
Speaker 2: anarchists got together in nineteen twenty one, before Mussolini ever
Speaker 2: even took formal power. He does that in nineteen twenty two,
Speaker 2: and they're like, all right, we got to kill this guy.
Speaker 2: They delegate one among their number, a man named Biaggio Massi,
Speaker 2: to go kill Mussolini. Instead, Biaggio went to Mussolini and
Speaker 2: told him the whole plan. Mussolini protected him, and then
Speaker 2: the very next day, because Mussolini has just been I
Speaker 2: don't know, cunning or whatever, yeah, Mussolini goes and gives
Speaker 2: a speech about how the government needs to really release
Speaker 2: Mala Testa, right, even though he has just learned that
Speaker 2: the anarchists or trying to kill him. He's a forty
Speaker 2: chess kind of man, this Mussolini.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, unfortunately he is.
Speaker 2: He was.
Speaker 3: I mean, one thing you learned about Mussolini and all
Speaker 3: these guys, with the exception of Franco, who unfortunately kept
Speaker 3: a pretty good grip on his rationality throughout his life,
Speaker 3: is most of them are a lot more cunning and
Speaker 3: better at planning before they get into power. And it's
Speaker 3: almost like power damages your brain in a way that
Speaker 3: makes you less capable of like clamping down on your
Speaker 3: own worse impulses and analyzing things logically.
Speaker 2: That makes sense to me. There's also this thing where
Speaker 2: people are always like Mussolini's like the little brother of Hitler,
Speaker 2: you know, and he's kind of a joke because Italy's
Speaker 2: military mite is not the same as Germany's. Right, Mussolini
Speaker 2: pulled off something pretty incredible, like terrible evil, but like
Speaker 2: he did become dictator of a major country. That is
Speaker 2: like a hard thing to do.
Speaker 3: I mean, I think I could become dictator of Italy. Yeah, no,
Speaker 3: I know, but you get give me six months, Margaret, Okay,
Speaker 3: six months and a lot of pizza pies. If we
Speaker 3: know anything about our Italians, Pizza Hut. Pizza Hut's probably fine.
Speaker 2: I really like the pizza in Italy.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I like how every country of not every country, but
Speaker 2: most countries I've been to, the American version of their
Speaker 2: national food is hard to get vegan, but in the
Speaker 2: country that I'm in, it's actually reasonably easy. Like it's
Speaker 2: really easy to just go into any train station in
Speaker 2: Aley and by vegan pizza.
Speaker 3: You could feel about how this however you want, but
Speaker 3: undeniably like one of the most intense flexes in the
Speaker 3: history of international conflict is when the US had the
Speaker 3: former premiere of the Soviet Union become a spokesman for
Speaker 3: Pizza Hut, Like that was just such a wow. Well,
Speaker 3: I guess, yeah, I guess you guys lost that God
Speaker 3: like Jesus, Jesus.
Speaker 2: So Mussolini comes to power in October nineteen twenty two,
Speaker 2: first as the Prime minister. There's something that's like not
Speaker 2: not a coup. I mean, it's not a coup, but
Speaker 2: it's also not not a coup. Right, thirty thousand of
Speaker 2: his black Shirts, his personal army, marched on Rome. In
Speaker 2: the March on Rome. The Liberal government was like, hey,
Speaker 2: let's declare martial law to stop this, but then the
Speaker 2: king was like, no, let's just put that guy in
Speaker 2: charge instead. Mussolini immediately helped out the rich people. He
Speaker 2: was not a fucking leftist at this point, immediately helped
Speaker 2: out all the rich people, centralized power and just was
Speaker 2: a right wing shit bag. By nineteen twenty four, he
Speaker 2: was like, look, there's not a democracy anymore. Okay, it's
Speaker 2: just fascism, and Italy became fascist and people didn't really
Speaker 2: like that. There are some occupational hazards to being a dictator. First,
Speaker 2: and most famous at the time but not the most
Speaker 2: famous now was a socialist politician named Tito Zanaboni. And
Speaker 2: don't worry. If you're like, hey, that sounds like Zamboni
Speaker 2: and you think that's clever, don't worry. There's two Zamboni's later. Okay, okay,
Speaker 2: but this one's Xanaboni.
Speaker 3: This is not a serious country. Look, I know we're
Speaker 3: talking about serious things, but Italy, I just I'm sorry,
Speaker 3: it's just not.
Speaker 2: One time I was in Italy and my friend took
Speaker 2: me to like her very nice apartment in oh I
Speaker 2: don't remember which city. I was on tour for like
Speaker 2: a month and I went to a bunch of cities
Speaker 2: and she was like, looks out, and I'm like, how
Speaker 2: do you afford this like amazing, fantastic place. And she
Speaker 2: goes to the window and points down to this like
Speaker 2: public square right outside, and she's like, that's where the
Speaker 2: mafia assassinates, like executes people in public. No one wants
Speaker 2: to live here.
Speaker 3: I mean, shit, you could do that in front of
Speaker 3: my house if I could have paid, like, you know,
Speaker 3: thirty percent less. Absolutely. Look, I'm not I'm not getting
Speaker 3: involved with the mafia. They got no reason to be
Speaker 3: pissed at me. Yeah, I don't see shit. Yeah she
Speaker 3: stays here gunshots at night. I don't know what you're
Speaker 3: talking about. Yeah, MafA, what.
Speaker 2: Most of the places that have been really nice, that like,
Speaker 2: have been aesthetically really nice that I can afford to
Speaker 2: live in, have had gunshots outside at night. Yeah that's true.
Speaker 3: I mean I have twice been coming home to my
Speaker 3: house when someone has a couple of blocks away been
Speaker 3: shooting it out with the police. Yeah. A nice place
Speaker 3: to live, a nice place to live.
Speaker 2: And like, I'm not the police, so I'm not worried.
Speaker 3: Again, shut, I'm not the police. These people have no
Speaker 3: reason to be angry at me. Yeah.
Speaker 2: So before we talk about Tito, we're going to talk
Speaker 2: about another Italian socialist politician, Jacomo Matdietodi Madia Maddiodi.
Speaker 3: You best friend, Buca di Beppo.
Speaker 2: Tacoma Maddiot Maddieodi was a socialist politician who tried repeatedly
Speaker 2: to expose most Mussolini and fascism for what they were.
Speaker 2: After he published a book against the fascists and accused
Speaker 2: them of fraud the fascists, who were certainly people of action.
Speaker 2: On June tenth, nineteen twenty four, Jacomo was kidnapped by
Speaker 2: the Fascist secret police, who stabbed him to death with
Speaker 2: a carpenter's file. I believe in the car. This wasn't
Speaker 2: a lot of ways the thing that paved the way
Speaker 2: for Mussolini to declare himself dictator. I'm going to oversimplify
Speaker 2: this dangerously, but after a lot of handwringing and investigations
Speaker 2: and castigations of the fascists for this kind of thing,
Speaker 2: eventually Mussolini was like, look, I'm a fascist, though I'm
Speaker 2: in charge, and we're going to stab people to death
Speaker 2: with carpenter's files, and you're just gonna deal with it.
Speaker 2: This had an enormous amount of knock on effects. One
Speaker 2: of them was that this other socialist politician, tito 'sanaboni,
Speaker 2: he got real mad. He had been part of the
Speaker 2: search efforts to find his friend. Before that, he'd been
Speaker 2: part of signing a peace treaty between the socialists and
Speaker 2: the fascists. But after they killed his friend. Oh yeah,
Speaker 2: the Socialist signed of peace treaty of the fascists. After
Speaker 2: I talk about all the anarchists, he became fascists and stuff.
Speaker 2: It's worth pointing out the Socialist sign of peace treaty
Speaker 2: with the fascists. After they killed his friend, He's like,
Speaker 2: all right, fuck this, we got to shoot this guy.
Speaker 2: And he and his friends conspired to kill Massolini. Tito's
Speaker 2: a war hero, so he got a precision rifle and
Speaker 2: he set himself up to station himself in a window
Speaker 2: to shoot Mussolini from far away. But among his co
Speaker 2: conspirators was an informant. So Tito and actually a general
Speaker 2: in the army and the Italian Army were both sent
Speaker 2: to prison. I think they got the maximum set, which
Speaker 2: was thirty years. At the time, great, the United Socialist
Speaker 2: Party was no more. In court, Tito used the same
Speaker 2: defense as most of Mussolini's would be assassins used later,
Speaker 2: which is the defense of yeah, but fuck Mussolini, though
Speaker 2: somebody should shoot him just you know, not always the
Speaker 2: best way to get off in court, but like looks
Speaker 2: good in history.
Speaker 3: Books, Yeah, looks good. I mean, there's right around this time,
Speaker 3: the case of Saga Montealurian, who a Berlin jury decided like,
Speaker 3: oh no, no, it was totally fine that he assassinated
Speaker 3: that guy who did a genocide. Oh yeah, you're totally politician.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we covered this one on the Armenian Genocide episode. Yeah.
Speaker 3: I'm just saying, everybody who might wind up in a
Speaker 3: court in New York start looking up jury nullifications right now.
Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 1: So.
Speaker 2: Tito is released in nineteen forty three when the fascist
Speaker 2: government fell. Which is the other thing that comes up
Speaker 2: a lot, is that revolutionaries or in this case, I mean,
Speaker 2: it wasn't even a revolutionary as a politician who was like, yeah,
Speaker 2: but other politicians shouldn't murder people, you know, and people
Speaker 2: go to jail for a really long time. Right wing
Speaker 2: governments often fall, and if you can stay alive in
Speaker 2: jail long enough, you'll be free again. But someone else
Speaker 2: was directly inspired by the death of Jacamo Mattiot. One
Speaker 2: of my favorites strange and misunderstood assassins in history, Violet Gibson.
Speaker 2: Have you heard of I feel like that there's one
Speaker 2: I've heard the name. Yeah, if there's one assassin people
Speaker 2: have probably heard of. Violet Gibson This is the most
Speaker 2: widely known attempt on his life in the modern era
Speaker 2: because it's the one that makes the coolest social media headline.
Speaker 1: Is there like a song?
Speaker 2: There are there's actually there's songs about her.
Speaker 1: There's documentaries, and I really hope I'm thinking of the
Speaker 1: right person and also sound dumb.
Speaker 2: She was like really short, right, yeah, she's five foot one,
Speaker 2: yeah yeah, okay, oh.
Speaker 3: Yeah, hell yeah. So I love stories about short ladies
Speaker 3: doing badass that. My grandma was like four foot eleven.
Speaker 3: Hell yeah, my grandpa was six ' five And because
Speaker 3: she was so small during World War Two, she had
Speaker 3: a special job. They would hold her by her feet
Speaker 3: and shove her inside the wings of P fifty one
Speaker 3: mustangs so she could like weld them or like do bolting,
Speaker 3: or she was like welding them on the inside. There
Speaker 3: was like an area that needed welds that only the
Speaker 3: tiniest girls could fit.
Speaker 2: Hell yeah, fucking.
Speaker 1: Raby as somebody who definitely can't rich things on the
Speaker 1: top shelf. I'm very excited to hear more about Violet.
Speaker 2: Also, the only person who I'm going to talk about
Speaker 2: today who successfully shot the man.
Speaker 1: Well done.
Speaker 3: I mean, one of the lessons is that nobody knew
Speaker 3: how to shoot in the past. Yeah, and most people
Speaker 3: don't know how to shoot today. Also.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So.
Speaker 2: Violet Gibson was a forty nine year old Irish woman
Speaker 2: from Dublin who lived in a convent in Rome and
Speaker 2: shot Mussolini in the face on April seventh, nineteen twenty six.
Speaker 3: What's not to lot? God Ireland stays winning.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, I do. Mostly the part to not
Speaker 2: like about the story is that he turned his head
Speaker 2: at the last minute. Yeah, he didn't die, and she
Speaker 2: only grazed his nose. But there are good pictures of him,
Speaker 2: like with the like bandage on his nose or whatever.
Speaker 2: There's no comparisons that can be made now to the
Speaker 2: modern world.
Speaker 1: No about people turning their heads.
Speaker 2: Yeah and getting grazed. Yep. The world would have been
Speaker 2: a very different place if he had not turned his head.
Speaker 3: Yep.
Speaker 2: Violet Gibson was a thin woman about five foot one.
Speaker 2: Her father was the Lord Chancellor of Ireland. She grew
Speaker 2: up She's Anglo Irish, right, and she.
Speaker 3: Grew up like oh wow, so her like they're like
Speaker 3: the English landlord yeah type deal. Yeah yeah, yeah, oh
Speaker 3: like Lawrence of Arabia yeah.
Speaker 2: Totally uh And like Lawrence of Arabia, she's crazy as shit.
Speaker 2: But people use this to invalidate and like claim that
Speaker 2: her action wasn't political or thought out, and that's what
Speaker 2: I want to argue against. But I can't argue against
Speaker 2: her being crazy at shit, and I'm going to tell
Speaker 2: you why. But she grew up riches hell. She was
Speaker 2: a debutante, debuted in Queen Victoria's court, which I only
Speaker 2: vaguely understand what is through. Mostly my friends who are
Speaker 2: from the South, most telling to the story come down
Speaker 2: to I don't know she did it because she was crazy.
Speaker 2: I am going to make the case as she did
Speaker 2: it because she was a politically committed Catholic socialist who
Speaker 2: wanted to do right by God and people by killing
Speaker 2: a man who went on to be responsible for millions
Speaker 2: of deaths who was also crazy. She was always esoteric.
Speaker 2: She was raised Protestant right her mother became a Christian scientist,
Speaker 2: and so she herself experimented with Christian science and then
Speaker 2: she got into theosophy for a while, but then she converted.
Speaker 2: She found another esoteric religion to get involved in Catholicism.
Speaker 2: When she was twenty six and she stayed a Catholic
Speaker 2: for the rest of her life. She was sick all
Speaker 2: of the time, her body carried the scars of many surgeries,
Speaker 2: and she spent years working at various pacifist organizations. The
Speaker 2: craziest thing she did, which is left out of the
Speaker 2: leftist accounts of her story, but it's included in the
Speaker 2: right wing accounts of her story that are like demonizing her,
Speaker 2: but they're verifiable. There, I believe this happened. So she
Speaker 2: used to walk around Dublin with a Bible in one
Speaker 2: hand and a knife in the other.
Speaker 3: And I hate to say it, but that is that
Speaker 3: is pretty cool.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, no, like, yeah, no, she's I would want
Speaker 2: to meet her, maybe from a distance, but I would
Speaker 2: want to meet her.
Speaker 3: I would want to like observe her from a safe distance.
Speaker 2: Ye yeah, yeah, exactly. She talked all the time about
Speaker 2: the necessity of mortifying the flesh, which is normally about
Speaker 2: like killing the urge to sin, but she seemed to
Speaker 2: want to kill. That was that was part of her
Speaker 2: way of understanding that particular doctrine. Around nineteen twenty, she
Speaker 2: attacked a young woman with a knife, cutting the woman's
Speaker 2: face and hands, and so she spent two years in
Speaker 2: an asylum, and I don't know enough about that attack
Speaker 2: to know like if there's any motivation beyond something about
Speaker 2: how she wanted to like replicate the uh sacrifice of
Speaker 2: so and so in the Bible or whatever. Sure, when
Speaker 2: she got out, she moved a convent in Rome. I
Speaker 2: believe this was kind of a like, yeah, you're like
Speaker 2: super rich, though, so you can go be in this convent.
Speaker 2: Her friends thought to themselves, she's probably going to kill somebody,
Speaker 2: maybe the pope, but they didn't try to stop her,
Speaker 2: which is really funny because they're probably all Irish Catholics
Speaker 2: and they're just like, eh, whatever. Then in nineteen twenty four,
Speaker 2: when Jacamo was murdered, the guy murdered to death with
Speaker 2: a carpenter's file. Yeah, she was heartbroken because she was
Speaker 2: a Catholic socialist, right, and so she decided to like
Speaker 2: revenge that killing by shooting herself in the chest. The
Speaker 2: bullet bounced off her ribs and she survived. And if
Speaker 2: you want to survive in the world that's coming, you
Speaker 2: need to buy literally everything that is advertised on this show.
Speaker 2: It is the only way to survive. I believe it's
Speaker 2: not a guarantee. But here's ads.
Speaker 3: And we're back.
Speaker 2: Mussolini. At this point I read a whole bunch of
Speaker 2: New York Times articles and like other like newspaper articles
Speaker 2: from this time, and they're all like Mussolini's great. We
Speaker 2: all like Mussolini because he's stopping the Bolsheviks. You know.
Speaker 2: Mussolini was being courted by the Western world. The King
Speaker 2: of England awarded him the Order of the Bath, which
Speaker 2: is not in order to take a bath, unfortunately, but
Speaker 2: instead a knighthood, and Violet Gibson decided that the way
Speaker 2: to glorify God was to assassinate Mussolini. He showed up
Speaker 2: at one of his talks in nineteen twenty six with
Speaker 2: a revolver and a rock. The rock was to break
Speaker 2: his windshield if necessary, which later assassins would have been
Speaker 2: more successful if they had also brought a rock. The
Speaker 2: modern mind can't really understand her motive, I think, because
Speaker 2: her motive was primarily religious, but it was also political.
Speaker 2: She did it to quote glorify God, and Angel kept
Speaker 2: her arm steady. I told this story to a Catholic
Speaker 2: anarchist friend of mine, whose response was basically like, oh,
Speaker 2: those Irish and their angels. Mussolini turned his head. At
Speaker 2: the last minute, she grazed his nose. She tried to
Speaker 2: fire again, but the gun jammed. And I've read that
Speaker 2: what he yelled at the time that he was shot
Speaker 2: was fancy a woman, but that might have been later
Speaker 2: he told the crowd, don't be afraid. This is a
Speaker 2: mere trifle, and then like later he went on this
Speaker 2: rant about how he's totally down to die violently as
Speaker 2: long as like a good, glorious death, but if he's
Speaker 2: like killed by an old lady, he just can't handle it,
Speaker 2: which is why I wish Violet had succeeded over everyone else. Yeahs, Yeah.
Speaker 2: The crowd caught her and beat her, and she was
Speaker 2: whisked away by the cops and declared insane. People said
Speaker 2: that she was paranoid and that was why she tried
Speaker 2: to kill him, because she was paranoid. I hate to
Speaker 2: break it to the people back then, she was correct
Speaker 2: about this particular thing. She spent the rest of her
Speaker 2: life in various institutions. She wrote letter after letter pleading
Speaker 2: to be set free, but those letters were never sent
Speaker 2: because you know, men are crazy, right, That's fine, That's
Speaker 2: a sarcastic remind Yeah, probably caught onto that she told
Speaker 2: people that her mood controlled the weather.
Speaker 3: Okay, well did it.
Speaker 2: If she'd killed Mussolini, she would have stopped like three
Speaker 2: million deaths. Maybe her moods like I want to kill
Speaker 2: Mussolini have a pretty major impact.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, look, I can't prove that she's wrong.
Speaker 2: Yeah. It reminds me of when I covered Joan of
Speaker 2: Arc on this show, where people are like, oh, feminist
Speaker 2: icon except you know, obviously she was just crazy with
Speaker 2: her visions from God. And it's just that people were
Speaker 2: conceiving of reality in different ways than we conceive of
Speaker 2: it now. And I think that people have a hard
Speaker 2: time wrapping their heads around that she died in nineteen
Speaker 2: fifty six at the age of seventy nine. She did
Speaker 2: outlive Mussolini. No family members came to her funeral. History
Speaker 2: has vindicated her, and there's now a plaque for her
Speaker 2: on her childhood home in Dublin that describes her accurately
Speaker 2: as a committed anti fascist. And it was articles about
Speaker 2: this from like right wing Irish people. Is how I
Speaker 2: learned about how she would run around and stab people
Speaker 2: and things like that.
Speaker 3: Is it possible that there was like, no one at
Speaker 3: her funeral because this, I mean, I had just made
Speaker 3: a comment about Ireland's staying winning. But Ireland's history are
Speaker 3: e the fascists in this period is not particularly clean,
Speaker 3: in large part because the fascists were in opposed to
Speaker 3: the British government and so there was a lot of
Speaker 3: at least the enemy of my enemy is my friend
Speaker 3: thing among the Irish, as well as the fact that
Speaker 3: Franco was like a Catholic, Like, it's not a clean
Speaker 3: period for Ireland entirety.
Speaker 2: No either, it's not. But she's also Anglo Irish, right.
Speaker 3: Well, I mean he had that also makes sense, you right,
Speaker 3: had forgotten that.
Speaker 2: And I think it's I think overall it was just like, oh,
Speaker 2: there's our crazy aunt. She's just crazy. She just wanted
Speaker 2: to kill a guy. You know, that's like my best guess.
Speaker 2: But I'm not I'm not certain people didn't like her
Speaker 2: at the time, and now there's been kind of this
Speaker 2: reclamation of her legacy. But Mussolini was particularly good at
Speaker 2: turning attempts on his life into popular support, which is
Speaker 2: like what you do if someone tries to kill you, right,
Speaker 2: You neither say like, oh no, I'm afraid and the
Speaker 2: enemy is scary and bad, which is not a good
Speaker 2: way to gain power. Or you can say like ha
Speaker 2: ha haa, they can't get me, but they want it
Speaker 2: because they're evil. You know, almost every article about attempts
Speaker 2: on Mussolini's life from then or now is basically like,
Speaker 2: but this particular attempt is what Mussolini used to consolidate power.
Speaker 2: Everything was fine until this person tried to kill him,
Speaker 2: and then woo, she just like swept in with fascism.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, exactly. I think that that's people number one.
Speaker 3: It's like working backwards, which you shouldn't do when you're
Speaker 3: trying to analyze people psychologically. Now that said, I don't
Speaker 3: know that I would say there's it didn't have an
Speaker 3: impact on the character of the regime, just like it's
Speaker 3: probably fair to like, whatever Trump does next, the shooting
Speaker 3: will probably have impacted because it clearly affected his mental.
Speaker 2: State right totally.
Speaker 3: Maybe it'll mean that he's a little less coherent and
Speaker 3: a little less like, maybe even less willing to take
Speaker 3: risks he might otherwise have taken. Maybe it'll mean he's
Speaker 3: more vengeful. We don't know yet. We'll all be learning soon.
Speaker 3: But it definitely. The presidency we are going to get
Speaker 3: out of him now is different than if he had
Speaker 3: won and nobody had shot him, right, Like, that's just
Speaker 3: we don't know how, and we'll never know how. But
Speaker 3: that's just a reality. Because nearly being shot to death
Speaker 3: on live television changes you, changes anybody. You don't have
Speaker 3: to be a good person.
Speaker 2: And it's like people talk about like hindsight is twenty twenty,
Speaker 2: but it's not, because you don't know what the other
Speaker 2: options were. You know, you can only see the one
Speaker 2: thing that happened. Yeah, and Mussolini would have become dictator
Speaker 2: if no one had tried to kill him, yeah, you know. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and it he used moments like this to consolidate power,
Speaker 2: because anyone would.
Speaker 3: Yeah, because you can't let something like this go to waste.
Speaker 3: And also just like continuing to work after you've nearly
Speaker 3: been shot to death in the head probably also just
Speaker 3: kind of mentally necessary, Like you're gonna make use of
Speaker 3: that because otherwise you're going to sit alone in a
Speaker 3: room and think about how you nearly got your brains
Speaker 3: blown out.
Speaker 2: Yeah, totally, Yeah, Yeah, he keeps you know, he's got
Speaker 2: a lot of mistresses. Although new York Times just is
Speaker 2: gonna run articles. I'll talk about him later, but New
Speaker 2: York Times like, oh, he's just hanging out with his family.
Speaker 2: He's a family man.
Speaker 3: Like, Oh, they loved Mussolini, Benito. I mean a lot
Speaker 3: of Americans really liked Mussolini in part because, like he was,
Speaker 3: he was a very very much a celebrity dictator in
Speaker 3: a way that Hitler. Hitler was, but not in this
Speaker 3: like Hitler was, you know, famous and managed to become
Speaker 3: beloved in Germany. Mussolini had a level of like international
Speaker 3: like movie star cloud in part because he looked handsome
Speaker 3: in his photos in a way Hitler didn't really like
Speaker 3: he looked like a movie star, you know, not in
Speaker 3: real life. But he you know, he had good he
Speaker 3: had good people, worry, and he had a lot of
Speaker 3: movie stars hanging out with him, by the way, a
Speaker 3: lot of American ones. And he like knew.
Speaker 2: More about philosophy and art and shit like that, you know,
Speaker 2: which was like a lot of the ways to be
Speaker 2: kind of like cool at the time. And like, I mean,
Speaker 2: he created a philosopher one that is still around.
Speaker 3: Yep.
Speaker 2: It's a bad one, yep. So there's another thing that's
Speaker 2: going to tie into this that is going on the
Speaker 2: Italian anarchist world and the Italian American world and just
Speaker 2: the news in general. And it's another thing that, like,
Speaker 2: looking back, it's hard to see why this is as
Speaker 2: big of a deal as it was. And this is
Speaker 2: the trial of Sacco and Vinzetti. Have you heard of this?
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, those are the two American anarchists
Speaker 3: who there was a bombing. They got accused of it executed,
Speaker 3: didn't do it, right, am I am? I own the
Speaker 3: basics there.
Speaker 2: So what's funny about it? It's messy.
Speaker 3: The general version is usually it is Yeah, this was
Speaker 3: like cumulatively four sentences over the course of my high
Speaker 3: school education.
Speaker 2: And it's probably the only time during anyone' high school
Speaker 2: education the word anarchist gets mentioned. Besides like maybe you're
Speaker 2: going to get sho gosh killing McKinley, but probably not.
Speaker 3: I don't even think I learned about McKinley getting assassinated.
Speaker 3: I don't think I learned it was an anarchist. But
Speaker 3: maybe I barely remember high school.
Speaker 2: Yeah, fair enough. I honestly, whenever I'm like my high
Speaker 2: school teacher didn't teach me this, I'm like I don't
Speaker 2: know how would I have known. I got c's like
Speaker 2: what you know.
Speaker 3: But I definitely remember knowing that Saco and Vinzetti had
Speaker 3: been anarchists.
Speaker 2: Because that one was inescapable, and it was this incredibly
Speaker 2: important celebrity trial all over the world. And basically some
Speaker 2: Italian American anarchists or mafia, but almost certainly anarchists, were
Speaker 2: robbing a guy who carried the wages, basically the equivalent
Speaker 2: of an armored truck robbery, and someone shot and killed
Speaker 2: the paymaster and a guard. Two Italian American anarchists, Saqua
Speaker 2: and Venzetti were put on trial. The entire leftist world,
Speaker 2: not just the anarchists, was convinced that they were innocent,
Speaker 2: and basically this whole thing was seen as like a
Speaker 2: travesty of justice. In nineteen twenty one, they were found
Speaker 2: guilty and sentenced to death, but it took years for
Speaker 2: the state to kill them because the outcry was so
Speaker 2: much that they had to have all these appeals and
Speaker 2: investigation and things like that. This dragged on for years.
Speaker 2: Later historians have been like, well, Sacho probably did it,
Speaker 2: uh and Venzetti maybe, Like it's possible Venzetti was there
Speaker 2: and therefore actually criminally liable, but like didn't pull the trigger.
Speaker 2: It's also possible that they weren't there because a lot
Speaker 2: of the evidence that they did do it comes from
Speaker 2: a guy we're going to talk about later who's an
Speaker 2: anarchist bomb maker who turned into a fascist informant named
Speaker 2: Mario Buddha. H.
Speaker 3: Well, it's also an unfortunate truth that a lot of
Speaker 3: times that people who are most willing to make things
Speaker 3: like bombs are also driven more by rage than like
Speaker 3: political conviction, and thus very easy to swing to a
Speaker 3: politics that entirely exists on the basis of rage. Yeah,
Speaker 3: which is why we really do try here not to
Speaker 3: idolize people whose only contribution is that they did a violence. Yeah, totally,
Speaker 3: even when everybody's making some very funny jokes on social media,
Speaker 3: Yeah right now about a thing that just happened.
Speaker 2: No, it's true, and that is like something that yeah
Speaker 2: fun time to have decided to write this episode. But
Speaker 2: the important thing about the Saque and Benzetti case is
Speaker 2: that this trial was huge, The outcry was enormous, and
Speaker 2: one thing that happened in this is that the fascists
Speaker 2: tried hard to capitalize on it. And did capitalize on
Speaker 2: it because most of the outcry against the trials that
Speaker 2: the trial was unfair as a result of the US's
Speaker 2: anti Italian and anti anarchist bigotry. A fuck ton of
Speaker 2: the Italian American crowd was either anarchist or fascist, and
Speaker 2: so both the fascists and the anarchists rallied for Saquo
Speaker 2: and Venzetti. Mussolini was cynically using the trial to stir
Speaker 2: up nationalism at home and continuing his oddtures to the anarchists,
Speaker 2: even though he was in power by most of this point,
Speaker 2: and he's cracking down on the anarchists left and right.
Speaker 2: His soldiers are burning photos of that guy Mala Testa.
Speaker 2: Anarchists are being rounded up and stuff. Yet Mussolini is
Speaker 2: telling his ambassadors to try and intervene on behalf of
Speaker 2: Saco and Benzetti because Mussolini wanted to be seen as
Speaker 2: the man who protected Italians everywhere. And he has all
Speaker 2: these quotes that are like, I cannot agree with anything
Speaker 2: that these men stand for, but they're Italian by God,
Speaker 2: and America shouldn't kill them or whatever I'm now paraphrasing.
Speaker 2: Terribly great stuff.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I don't love their murders, but I support them.
Speaker 3: Being Italian, they ought to be free.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly, exactly, fair enough. And what does this have
Speaker 2: to do with Violet Gibson. Well, this is going to
Speaker 2: turn into one of the best zings against America that
Speaker 2: I've ever read about h only third, nineteen twenty seven,
Speaker 2: Mussolini wrote, it is certain that the execution of Saco
Speaker 2: Vanzetti would provide the pretext for a vast and continuous
Speaker 2: agitation throughout the world. The fascist government, which is strongly
Speaker 2: authoritarian and does not give quarter to the Bolsheviks, very
Speaker 2: often employs clemency in individual cases. The governor of Massachusetts
Speaker 2: should not lose the opportunity for a humanitarian act whose
Speaker 2: repercussions would be especially positive in Italy, and fascist newspapers
Speaker 2: were now contrasting the American government as more totalitarian than
Speaker 2: the fascist Italian government because the Italian system, the fascist system,
Speaker 2: had let Violet Gibson return to her own country, and
Speaker 2: there is no death penalty in Italy at this point.
Speaker 3: That's nice.
Speaker 2: People could literally kill kings and get life in prison.
Speaker 2: Comparing this to the barbaric United States. And this is
Speaker 2: the thing that I love about it is like the
Speaker 2: dude's got a point yep. The US president industrial system
Speaker 2: is like a nightmare. It sure is, and was worse
Speaker 2: than the fascist government.
Speaker 3: I mean at the you know, it depends on the stage,
Speaker 3: but at the early stages, you know, Mussolini does eventually
Speaker 3: invade Ethiopia and deploy chemical weapons. Yeah, yeah, that's certainly
Speaker 3: an argument that you could have made earlier in Mussolini's regime.
Speaker 3: You have to remember he was not He definitely was
Speaker 3: killing his political enemies.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, he had the stabbed a dude to death
Speaker 2: of a file.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, not necessarily in a way. That's a higher
Speaker 3: body count than, for example, the number of black people
Speaker 3: being murdered by police in apartheid states in the United States, right, yeah, like,
Speaker 3: which is not a different thing to me. I don't
Speaker 3: consider that to be better than I don't know, rounding
Speaker 3: up like a few dozen socialists and murdering them or
Speaker 3: whatever like that, and the constant mass the constant murder
Speaker 3: at a pretty high rate of blackmen in the set
Speaker 3: by cops and vigilantes, like both things that I would
Speaker 3: put on a similar moral level.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. I'm not trying to be like Benito Mussolini
Speaker 2: is great.
Speaker 3: You know no, no, no, no, I didn't. I didn't
Speaker 3: think you were. Yeah, I'm just saying like, yeah, that's
Speaker 3: not an irrational statement to make at that point in time,
Speaker 3: knowing what they knew.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, And Violet she was not alone in her
Speaker 2: quest to see the duke die. The next attempt was
Speaker 2: on September eleventh, nineteen twenty six, and this is why
Speaker 2: people remember September eleventh, and this is probably the most
Speaker 2: organized attempt. Sophie is clearly agrees with me.
Speaker 3: Did anything else happen on September eleventh? Ever? That seems
Speaker 3: like one of those.
Speaker 2: Is that coup that happened somewhere is such a smooth joke? Yeah,
Speaker 2: thank you.
Speaker 3: I'm looking. I'm looking at my calendar of various September
Speaker 3: elevenths that I keep for no reason. Yet it doesn't
Speaker 3: look like anything's ever happened on another September eleventh that
Speaker 3: I can Yeah, that I've got. Okay, you're the funniest
Speaker 3: person I know. That must be why I celebrate nine
Speaker 3: to eleven. Wait, exactly, shit, Margaret, Margaret, I'm getting some
Speaker 3: very bad Google results. Suddenly, we need to edit that out. Oh,
Speaker 3: my god, Oh my god, all those poor people. Holy shit.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I lived in New York City y September eleven,
Speaker 2: so I saw the towers on fire. There's all the
Speaker 2: smoking remains. But anyway, the socialist politician had failed. The
Speaker 2: Catholic wingnut had failed. Time to bring in the professionals.
Speaker 2: If there's one group that knows about killing kings and
Speaker 2: monarchs and stuff, it's the anarchists. Again, we all know
Speaker 2: they failed, but you know what, they tried real hard.
Speaker 2: The next attempt was by a man named Gino Lucetti,
Speaker 2: who I'll tell you about along with his cousin Gino,
Speaker 2: because his name is Geno, but so is his cousin.
Speaker 2: That's the thing I'm saying. Well, i'll tell you about
Speaker 2: it on Wednesday.
Speaker 3: Excellent. You know, Wednesday, Margaret, is the day that comes
Speaker 3: after Tuesday. That's a little science fact. Those of you
Speaker 3: in the audience, thank.
Speaker 1: You so much for telling us that. I have no idea.
Speaker 1: I have no idea how we would have.
Speaker 3: Wait, we tried to shoot a little bit a couple
Speaker 3: of facts your way.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's why it's edutainment.
Speaker 3: That's why it's edutainment.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So remember, folks, Wednesday, day after Tuesday. Thursday comes
Speaker 3: the day before Monday, and that's all I gotta say.
Speaker 2: It comes before Monday.
Speaker 3: Yes, yes, yes, Tomorrow is Saturday.
Speaker 2: And after Monday. Is the weirdest thing about Thursday.
Speaker 3: I know, I know, it's the day so nice they
Speaker 3: made it happen twice.
Speaker 2: It I can't even there's nothing I can do with that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, oh, Margant, I wish you and I could hang
Speaker 3: out all eleven days of the week.
Speaker 2: I know, I know that'd be nice, but I only
Speaker 2: have so many hours in the day and I don't
Speaker 2: remember how many it.
Speaker 3: Is forty one?
Speaker 2: Oh okay, no, yeah, that makes sense. Yes, but Robert Evans,
Speaker 2: where can people find more about you or what do
Speaker 2: you do?
Speaker 3: Well, you can find me wedding away in my basement,
Speaker 3: because you and I only use an antique coptic Christian
Speaker 3: calendar and day system based largely on a step pyramid
Speaker 3: that used to exist but was bulldozed in what was
Speaker 3: once Sumeria, so it takes a lot of time to
Speaker 3: remember what day it is. Yeah, we really kept this
Speaker 3: bit going for a while.
Speaker 2: I feel like at the end of a Gijoe episode
Speaker 2: where you tell kids to like not hide in refrigerators. Right.
Speaker 2: I feel like it's worth pointing out that I really
Speaker 2: am talking about history here and that nothing necessarily good
Speaker 2: happened for many of the attempts that I'm describing. I
Speaker 2: am not morally against the attempts that I am describing.
Speaker 2: I'm clearly not of this thing that happened in the
Speaker 2: nineteen twenties, but I want to be clear on that.
Speaker 3: Just that is the thing. I can think of very
Speaker 3: few assassinations in history where ultimately you would look at
Speaker 3: it and say that, like, yeah, that worked out really well.
Speaker 3: Is particularly that worked out well by the person carrying
Speaker 3: out the assassination standards. Really the one that like Sogam
Speaker 3: and Tealurian who shot you know, one of the young
Speaker 3: Turks who orchestrated the Armenian genocide, that worked out great
Speaker 3: by his standards, and everyone else's that guy who shot
Speaker 3: Abe seems to the long run of that seems to
Speaker 3: have been positive. Very few other instances, like I don't
Speaker 3: know that i'd say McKinley worked well in the long run.
Speaker 3: Obviously shooting the archduke fucking disaster.
Speaker 2: Yeah, No, it's it is worth thinking about that anarchists
Speaker 2: had given up on propaganda by the deed at this point,
Speaker 2: propaganda by the deed. It was this anarchist idea that
Speaker 2: people were like, well, the masses don't really read theory,
Speaker 2: so let's just show them by killing all the kings
Speaker 2: and the you know, the people who are in charge
Speaker 2: of them. And it overall was disastrous for the anarchist
Speaker 2: movement because it just led people to then defend the
Speaker 2: very systems that the anarchists were opposed to. And this
Speaker 2: happened time and time again. There are exceptions. During are
Speaker 2: the run up to the Russian Revolution. You have like
Speaker 2: about from like nineteen oh three to nineteen seventeen, anarchists
Speaker 2: and other groups were all doing these attendants, all doing
Speaker 2: these assassinations, and it did lead to a revolutionary situation, which,
Speaker 2: of course, i'll kind of ended badly and created the
Speaker 2: United the USSR. But usually these kind of things destroy
Speaker 2: a social movement. Sometimes, if enough people are interested in it,
Speaker 2: it builds a social movement, but usually it doesn't. And
Speaker 2: that is the like it's a crapshoot at best, It's
Speaker 2: a like, let's redraw our hand of cards and probably
Speaker 2: get something worse yep. But still, if someone had successfully
Speaker 2: killed Mussolini. I bet the world would have been a
Speaker 2: better place.
Speaker 3: Yes, yes, but the if within the if contains a
Speaker 3: lot of reasons. Why you know, we're going to say
Speaker 3: for legal reasons here, assassinations probably not worth it.
Speaker 2: And we're gonna talk about like five more of them
Speaker 2: on Wednesday.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: At the end here, I just want to plug if
Speaker 1: you haven't listened, I just am plugging this on anything
Speaker 1: I can. I just want to plug our colleague James
Speaker 1: Stouts series from Reporting from the Darien Gap about one
Speaker 1: of the worst land migration places in the world, and
Speaker 1: just you know, the stories and people he talked to there,
Speaker 1: and I just want to plug that because it's an
Speaker 1: amazing series and I'm very proud of James.
Speaker 2: I started listening to it. I haven't finished it yet.
Speaker 2: It is really good. It's really good.
Speaker 1: Yes, So if you have time around the end of
Speaker 1: the year and you're like, oh, I need something to binge,
Speaker 1: James did five episodes.
Speaker 2: On It could happen here on it could have thank you,
Speaker 2: and it could happen here. All right, see y'all on Wednesday.
Speaker 3: Bye.
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