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Speaker 1: Cool Zone Media.

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Speaker 2: Hello, and welcome to Cool peopleeted Cool Stuff, your weekly

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Speaker 2: reminder that when there's bad things, there's good things. I'm

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Speaker 2: your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and with me today is my

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Speaker 2: guest Gigi Griffiths.

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Speaker 3: How are you hey, I'm good. I'm so happy to

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Speaker 3: be here.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm happy to have you. Gigi is a historical

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Speaker 2: fiction author, and the bio I wrote was whose books

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Speaker 2: I really want to read after I start looking into them,

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Speaker 2: because they seem to be about girls and women in

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Speaker 2: medieval Europe doing cool things. There's probably more. I was

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Speaker 2: just looking at the book We Are the Beasts, which

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Speaker 2: I now want to read. How would you describe yourself?

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Speaker 3: Yeah, so that's a pretty good description. So a lot

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Speaker 3: of girls and women who are either revolutionaries or somehow

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Speaker 3: otherwise rebellious in their time and usually trying to turn

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Speaker 3: history or mythology on its head in some way.

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Speaker 2: Okay. Our producer is Sophie Lichtermann. Hi, Sophie, it's me Hi.

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Speaker 2: Our theme music was written forced by unwomen. I did

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Speaker 2: this in the raw order. And then our audio engineer

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Speaker 2: is Rory. Everyone has to say had a hi to Rory. Hi.

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Speaker 2: Rory Hi.

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Speaker 3: Ro Rory.

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Speaker 1: Rory's great.

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Speaker 2: So I was like, all right, europe revolutionary women in

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Speaker 2: terms of what I was trying to pick for this

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Speaker 2: week's topic, and I decided this week's story it's a

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Speaker 2: story of anti fascist resistance. It's a story about culture,

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Speaker 2: it's a story about food, it's a story about women,

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Speaker 2: and it's a story about a particular song, Bellichow.

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Speaker 3: We're going to Italy.

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Speaker 2: We are going to Italy. It will be mostly in

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Speaker 2: Italy today. Okay, I presume you have heard this song before, Bellichow.

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Speaker 3: Yes, yes, you if you are, like not even just

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Speaker 3: in Italy, but in other like parts of Europe, and

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Speaker 3: you're just walking down the street, some street performer will

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Speaker 3: be singing bellachow.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, to the point where I think people get kind

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Speaker 2: of annoyed at it.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, or like confused, like they don't understand the context,

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Speaker 3: which I don't eat. So I'm excited about this, but

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Speaker 3: I am curious to what the history is.

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Speaker 2: It's a good history, and it was wrapped in far

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Speaker 2: more mystery than I expected, but we'll talk about that.

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Speaker 2: I have heard the song more times than I can count,

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Speaker 2: in more languages than I know, in maybe every country

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Speaker 2: I've ever been to. If you've been to a good

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Speaker 2: street protest outside the US, you've heard a marching band

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Speaker 2: play Belachow. And if you've been to a really good

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Speaker 2: street protest in the US, you've heard a marching band

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Speaker 2: playing Belichow. When we tried to storm the meeting of

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Speaker 2: the FTAA in two thousand and three in Miami, the

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Speaker 2: song on our lips as we marched towards the police

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Speaker 2: was Belichow. We sang the version written for that era

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Speaker 2: by veterans of the pod, the anarcho pop group Tumblewamba,

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Speaker 2: and it's a good song. It's both catchy and poetic

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Speaker 2: at once. We're going to listen to an old recording

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Speaker 2: of it. First. These episodes are going to have more

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Speaker 2: audio clips than usual because I think I've actually never

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Speaker 2: done it on this show before.

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Speaker 3: But I feel like maybe once you have, but yeah,

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Speaker 3: that seems likely.

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Speaker 2: We're gonna listen to an old recording of it. And

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Speaker 2: I don't know the provenance of this recording because the

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Speaker 2: YouTube caption is a lie. According to YouTube, this version

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Speaker 2: is from a wax cylinder in nineteen eighteen. This isn't true.

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Speaker 2: For one thing, The wax cylinders was more or less

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Speaker 2: replaced by records by nineteen eighteen. For another thing, the

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Speaker 2: version we're about to listen to is the version claimed

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Speaker 2: to be a song of the Italian Partisans, and that

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Speaker 2: happened in the nineteen forties. Famously, most likely Belichaw is

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Speaker 2: written in the nineteen thirties, but we'll get to that.

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Speaker 2: But it's an old enough recording that it's probably say

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Speaker 2: for us to play. So we're gonna listen to a

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Speaker 2: short full version of the song.

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Speaker 4: What time or then my child, a child?

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Speaker 1: That child? What what.

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Speaker 4: Any says Moby Hoby single model, my hakey goad or

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Speaker 4: that child and that child and that ounn say your yo.

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Speaker 1: For me?

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Speaker 4: Then he said, hey, I'll sweep one time or ben

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Speaker 4: that's sound? Then look out there's a ton dont send

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Speaker 4: the passing what something love you reel it is my

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Speaker 4: seven or then my job.

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Speaker 2: And a child and a down and as.

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Speaker 4: A pay myself sent you with the jolly say tadle

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Speaker 4: or then.

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Speaker 3: That child then that's out, then that time down.

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Speaker 2: I really like that song.

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Speaker 3: I love it, and I'm curious if this will have

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Speaker 3: any intersection with like revolutionary jazz, because this is I

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Speaker 3: don't know if this came later, or if this came earlier.

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Speaker 3: But this is a song I hear a lot of

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Speaker 3: big bands play because I've been a swing dancer for

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Speaker 3: twenty years and so I go to a lot of

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Speaker 3: like jazz concerts, and this comes up more than you

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Speaker 3: would think, even though it's not really like in the

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Speaker 3: big band repertoire.

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Speaker 2: I do know that it comes from klezmer, the melody

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Speaker 2: comes from klezmer, but I don't know. It wouldn't surprise me,

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Speaker 2: but no, I in this research, I don't know of

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Speaker 2: any connections to the jazz scene. Okay, but there's so

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Speaker 2: many versions of this song and so many people sing it,

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Speaker 2: Like when you hear street performer singing, are they usually

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Speaker 2: singing it in Italian? Or are they usually singing it

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Speaker 2: in whatever language wherever you're at, or.

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Speaker 3: I'd say mostly I think that it's Italian. I do

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Speaker 3: not speak every language of each of these places, but

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Speaker 3: I when I've heard it here in Portugal, it has

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Speaker 3: not been in Portuguese, which I do speak, So okay,

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Speaker 3: I think it's an Italian.

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Speaker 2: If it's not going to be in the local language,

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Speaker 2: it'll probably be Italian. As my guess. Yeah, unless you're well,

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Speaker 2: we'll get to it. I've seen like Kurdish performers in

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Speaker 2: other countries and things like that. But so there's a

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Speaker 2: million versions of the lyrics. It's long been called a

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Speaker 2: partisan song. It's long been claimed to have been sung

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Speaker 2: by the Italian Partisans in their war against fascism in Italy.

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Speaker 2: And here's where it gets MESSI it's going to stay messy.

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Speaker 2: That's maybe not true.

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Speaker 3: But that sounds on brand for history research.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. I actually had an entire version of the

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Speaker 2: script at about midnight last night when I found an

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Speaker 2: academic article that i'll talk about in site later that

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Speaker 2: gave me the more information about it, and I had

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Speaker 2: to rewrite everything.

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Speaker 3: But at least it's not one of your ones where

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Speaker 3: you're like, this person's so cool and then you find

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Speaker 3: out they're kind of abusive to their wife in the

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Speaker 3: eleventh hour.

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Speaker 2: So well, that's how it felt when I couldn't find

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Speaker 2: there's no, there's no All of the people involved in

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Speaker 2: this are good people, as far as I can tell.

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Speaker 2: But I was like, I came into it knowing this

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Speaker 2: one particular story about Belichow and then found out I

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Speaker 2: was wrong, But then found out I was right again.

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Speaker 2: And so it's been a I don't know if it's

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Speaker 2: gonna be a roller coaster for you, but it was

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Speaker 2: a roller coaster for me as I was writing it.

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Speaker 2: One of the better modern translations is the version sung

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Speaker 2: by Tom Waits versions in English, and this says more

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Speaker 2: or less, and this is fairly faithful to the original.

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Speaker 2: One fine morning, I woke up early to find the

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Speaker 2: fascist at my door. O partisan, I'm paraphrasing, but O partisan,

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Speaker 2: please take me with you. I'm not afraid anymore If

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Speaker 2: I die, bury me on the mountain beneath the shadow

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Speaker 2: of a beautiful flower, so that when people pass by

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Speaker 2: they can say, what a beautiful flower. The last verse

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Speaker 2: of that version is, this is the flower of the partisan.

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Speaker 2: Obela chow bella chow bella chow chow chow. This is

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Speaker 2: the flower of the partisan who died for freedom.

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Speaker 3: I love that.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, no, it's it gets to me whenever I'm like,

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Speaker 2: whenever any of litill pick me up. I listened to

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Speaker 2: Tom Waite singing, you know, I woke one morning to

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Speaker 2: find the fascist at my door. But I'm not afraid,

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Speaker 2: you know, yeah, because uh well, I guess you don't

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Speaker 2: live in the US, but I assume I don't know

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Speaker 2: anything about modern Portuguese politics. But it's not really looking

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Speaker 2: good anywhere right now.

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Speaker 3: No, we unfortunately, in our most recent election went a

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Speaker 3: little bit right, not as right as the US, which

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Speaker 3: every party in the US is the Portuguese righth but

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Speaker 3: we went a little bit toward the right, which is

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Speaker 3: bad news.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, fair enough. Bella chow, the actual words means roughly

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Speaker 2: goodbye beautiful. But the thing is, no one says bella

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Speaker 2: chow in Italy, at least not anymore. I don't know

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Speaker 2: if they ever did. Italians say chow bella, which means

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Speaker 2: goodbye beautiful, bella choo as a phrase just means this

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Speaker 2: song Bellichow is just a reference to this song, and

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Speaker 2: it just references this essential song of world shaping importance

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Speaker 2: that's been sung by hundreds of thousands of resistance movements,

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Speaker 2: hundreds or thousands, probably not hundreds of thousands, hundreds or

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Speaker 2: thousands of resistance movements in the near century since World

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Speaker 2: War Two. It is a song and a legacy that

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Speaker 2: most non fascist Italians are proud of. We're going to

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Speaker 2: get into modern Italian politics.

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Speaker 3: Real briefly, but woh, it's not gonna be fun times

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Speaker 3: for us.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, it's gonna make a Portugal and kind of even

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Speaker 2: the well it's around on par with the US actually.

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Speaker 4: Yeah.

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Speaker 2: On April twenty fifth, every year, Italians across the political

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Speaker 2: spectrum besides fascists, celebrate the defeat of the Nazis with

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Speaker 2: Liberation Day. Because Italy fought alongside the Nazis in World

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Speaker 2: War Two. I think most people know that, but Italy

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Speaker 2: actually surrendered to the Allies in nineteen forty three after

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Speaker 2: the king was like all right, whatever, fuck you Ussolini

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Speaker 2: and deposed the fascist leader. After the surrender, the Nazis

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Speaker 2: came down and occupied northern and central Italy, creating what's

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Speaker 2: called the Italian Social Republic, which was a puppet state

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Speaker 2: of Nazi Germany. And Mussolini is the leader of this,

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Speaker 2: so the Italian Civil War kicks off. This is where

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Speaker 2: the partisans are really doing their thing, is nineteen forty three.

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Speaker 2: The fascists are on one side and the partisan units

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Speaker 2: are on the other side. The biggest umbrella of resistance

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Speaker 2: fighters is collectively called the Italian Resistance. Most but not all,

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Speaker 2: of the partisan units were represented by the National Liberation Committee,

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Speaker 2: which is a politically diverse group that included various liberal,

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Speaker 2: socialist and communist parties, as well as Catholic and monarchist partisans,

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Speaker 2: everyone together fighting the Nazis.

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Speaker 3: Good, Yes, collaboration, Yeah.

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Speaker 2: No, totally. But interestingly, but the Trotskyis and the anarchists

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Speaker 2: were not part of the National Liberation Committee, but they

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Speaker 2: were part of the Italian resistance. So your umbrella has

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Speaker 2: like larger and smaller umbrellas.

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Speaker 3: Within him, like umbrellas under umbrellas.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, totally, because they were still I mean, there's anarchists

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Speaker 2: and Trotskis in other units, right, but there was like

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Speaker 2: specific anarchists and Trotzkis units and they kind of weren't

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Speaker 2: playing nice at the same time, but they were still

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Speaker 2: on the same side and whatever. That's not actually super related.

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Speaker 2: It is, however, talking about how partisan the Partisans are.

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Speaker 2: Eh is gonna come up later. Okay, That war went

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Speaker 2: on until nineteen forty five when Hitler did. People don't

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Speaker 2: give Hitler this is going to take it. People don't

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Speaker 2: give Hitler enough credit, right, because he did one unquestionably

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Speaker 2: moral act during his life. He actually pulled off what

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Speaker 2: all other anti fascists failed to do. He killed Hitler.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, I was gonna say he killed himself. Okay, Yeah, I.

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Speaker 2: Mean critical support to Hitler for assassinating Hitler, the thing

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Speaker 2: everyone else was trying to do.

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Speaker 3: He succeeded at well, kind of like what you said

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Speaker 3: during the Mussolini ones, like Musolini would have been pro

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Speaker 3: assassinating himself like fifteen years before. So right, exactly, Yeah,

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Speaker 3: the revolutionaries, Mussolini and Hitler. That's what you should take

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Speaker 3: away from this podcast.

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Speaker 2: Everyone, Yeah, exactly. That is the official This is not

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Speaker 2: the official position. I hate this man. I'm glad he's dead,

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Speaker 2: and that's the only thing he did good was kill himself. Anyway.

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Speaker 2: So there's Liberation Day in Italy on April twenty fifth,

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Speaker 2: and this is the day that basically they sort of

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Speaker 2: gave it a final like announced to like, here's our

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Speaker 2: final push to drive out the Nazis, because they knew

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Speaker 2: things were going their way, and so the day they

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Speaker 2: called for that was April twenty fifth. So that's the

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Speaker 2: day that they picked as Liberation Day. Every year people

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Speaker 2: get together and celebrate in a big national holiday, which

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Speaker 2: is particularly funny right now because a far right politician

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Speaker 2: who is more or less a fascist, who has explicitly

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Speaker 2: fascist roots is in charge.

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Speaker 3: Of Italy right, so we celebrate not being fascist with

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Speaker 3: a fascist in power.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, and then she actually shows up and celebrates Liberation

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Speaker 2: Day and it's really messy and no one's happy.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, but that's actually such a common thing,

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Speaker 3: like as people don't recognize what they are after, like

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Speaker 3: historically they look back and they're like, I'm not like Hitler,

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Speaker 3: I'm not like Mussolini, right, But so the modern fascists,

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Speaker 3: when you talk to a fascist, they don't know that

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Speaker 3: they're fascists a lot of times.

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Speaker 2: Totally, like the modern American right wing, the modern Trump

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Speaker 2: right wing party is Mussolini style fascism, and I think

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Speaker 2: partly because it's not quite Hitler style fascism. They're like, whoa,

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Speaker 2: we're not fascist because Americans only know about the Nazis,

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Speaker 2: you know, but they're they're real Italian style.

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Speaker 3: It's the not all men of the fascism world.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, totally. Yeah, And a girl boss is there representing

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Speaker 2: fascism in Italy right now. And the far right in

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Speaker 2: Italy likes to grouse about Liberation Day. And if you

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Speaker 2: spend your time as I did this week, reading like

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Speaker 2: modern and forums of Italians talking about Bellachow, you'll run

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Speaker 2: into a couple people being like, oh, we don't well,

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Speaker 2: there's some people on the left you don't like a

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Speaker 2: song because they're tired of it. But overall people are like,

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Speaker 2: it's fine. And then there's some people will be like, no,

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Speaker 2: only the communists like that song, but then centrist will

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Speaker 2: chime in. As one Internet comment are on the website

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Speaker 2: Wanted in Rome put it in Italy, we say that

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Speaker 2: Liberation Day in Bellichow is divisive only if you're a fascist. Hmm,

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Speaker 2: So it's not just the communist in Italy who like

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Speaker 2: this song. Part of the reason that the song is

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Speaker 2: more popular than other songs is because it wasn't just

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Speaker 2: the communist.

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Speaker 3: Song, but when it's like fascist's favorite thing to just

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Speaker 3: call anything that they don't like communist or like only

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Speaker 3: communists like this totally.

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Speaker 2: And it's funny in Italy because like, well, communists were

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Speaker 2: a big part of deposing the fascist in Italy, but

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Speaker 2: they weren't all of it. You know, the word chow

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Speaker 2: itself means both goodbye and hello. A lot of languages

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Speaker 2: have words like that. I saw a lot of languages

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Speaker 2: literally just use choo and just are like, eh, it

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Speaker 2: was good enough for Italy, it's good enough for us.

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Speaker 3: That's us. Over here in Portugal, everyone's just saying choo.

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Speaker 2: I was wondering, Yeah, I was guessing in Bulgaria, which

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Speaker 2: is isn't a romance language at all. Bulgarian isn't a

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Speaker 2: romance language. They say chow yeah, so.

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Speaker 3: Here which is I think this originally comes from Brazilian Portuguese,

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Speaker 3: but it's been adopted back here in Portugal as well.

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Speaker 3: Is Sometimes to cute it up, they'll say chow zeno,

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Speaker 3: which is kind of like little chow, like little.

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Speaker 2: Goodbye, Oh nice, okay cool. The etymology of the word

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Speaker 2: choo is that it comes from the same root as

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Speaker 2: the English word slave.

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Speaker 3: Oh right, interesting.

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Speaker 2: It comes from the medieval Latin word sclawss. In Venice,

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Speaker 2: people were very dramatic. Folks would say I am your slave,

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Speaker 2: so chao vostro, and this is kind of like saying

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Speaker 2: I am at your service. Right. Oh, I don't remember this.

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Speaker 2: There's a spanish Ish word like this, and I don't

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Speaker 2: remember what it is. I don't know if Portuguese has

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Speaker 2: it too, I don't know any portug He's Honestly, I

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Speaker 2: just assume it's Spanish but pronounced strong.

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Speaker 3: I don't know if there's something similar to like I'm

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Speaker 3: your slave.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, fair enough. The medieval word sklawis is actually a

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Speaker 2: loan word from medieval Greek, and it comes from the

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Speaker 2: word Slavic because most Greek slaves were from the Balkans

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Speaker 2: at that point. So if you're ever wondering why like

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Speaker 2: slav sounds like the word slave, it's because of that.

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Speaker 2: And I never would have I never would have made

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Speaker 2: the jump from slave to choo, but there it is.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, it feels like a quite the leap.

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Speaker 4: Yeah.

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Speaker 2: Eventually people in northern Italy just started saying chow. And

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Speaker 2: to be clear, when we talk about northern Italy or

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Speaker 2: Italy at all, at this point, we are using a

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Speaker 2: word for a place that did not exist. We've talked

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Speaker 2: about this a bit on the show before, but Italy

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Speaker 2: itself is only like one hundred and sixty odd years old.

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Speaker 2: The word chow spread around the world and a lot

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Speaker 2: of places use it. The reputation of this song Bella

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Speaker 2: Choo is that it's the song of the Italian resistance

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Speaker 2: to fascism. As to whether or not that's its actual history.

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Speaker 2: I don't know. There's an awful lot of mystery around

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Speaker 2: its actual origins. The most common story of Balichow is

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Speaker 2: the song that partisans sang, but that's not likely to

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Speaker 2: be true as popularly understood. There's no evidence of partisan

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Speaker 2: troops singing this song. I'm going to get into later

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Speaker 2: why I think that some of them did anyway, But

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Speaker 2: that's conjecture.

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Speaker 3: But I do feel like a lot of times we

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Speaker 3: were like, Okay, well there's no evidence over here. But

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Speaker 3: I just think people are people, and sometimes people if

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Speaker 3: something existed, there's like someone singing the song, there's someone

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Speaker 3: thinking the thought. There's someone who is thinking in a

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Speaker 3: way that would translate into whatever it is that you're

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Speaker 3: talking about.

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Speaker 2: Absolutely, And also like the songs of certain types of

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Speaker 2: people are less likely to get written down. One of

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Speaker 2: those types of people is women.

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Speaker 3: Yes, exactly. Like it just feels like there's misogyny at

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Speaker 3: play and also white supremacy at play. When we're like, oh,

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Speaker 3: well it wasn't written down totally, Well, who was writing

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Speaker 3: things down?

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Speaker 2: Well, I'll tell you who wasn't writing things down? Because

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Speaker 2: it's an audio medium. It's the sponsors of this show

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Speaker 2: did Magpie, just go mute on you.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, I also lost it.

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Speaker 1: Oh Magpie, you've gone mute, you said, but in very

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Speaker 1: comedic timing it.

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Speaker 2: What you know, who also does it? And then it

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Speaker 2: was completely silent, and.

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Speaker 3: Then we went to an ad break without hearing that

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Speaker 3: it happened.

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Speaker 2: Oh no, well, here's that ad break.

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Speaker 4: And we're back.

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Speaker 2: So the people that the song was almost certainly written by,

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Speaker 2: I'm going to go with it was written by was

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Speaker 2: women working in the rice fields, and they were absolutely

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Speaker 2: resisting fascism. Some of them worked directly as partisans. My overall,

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Speaker 2: I'm going to spend the next several hours explaining why

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Speaker 2: I think this was I think it is fair to

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Speaker 2: call this a partisan song, even if the odds are

368
00:19:04,160 --> 00:19:07,640
Speaker 2: good that the explicitly partisan lyrics weren't added until after

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Speaker 2: the war, although even that have gone back and forth about.

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Speaker 2: Like I've said, I've rewritten the script like eight times

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Speaker 2: in the past twelve hours. But the partisans at the

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Speaker 2: start of the war weren't singing partisan songs. They were

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Speaker 2: singing old rebel songs. So while we don't know everything

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Speaker 2: about everything that happened with this song, we know an

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Speaker 2: awful lot about the radical history that it weaves its

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Speaker 2: way through, and it's a history full of songs, strikes,

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Speaker 2: and armed resistance. So we're going to tell it. And

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Speaker 2: first we're going to trace the first version of this

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Speaker 2: song to northern Italy. Northern Italy grows a lot of rice.

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Speaker 2: There's this huge valley along the Poe River in northern Italy.

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Speaker 2: And this valley along the Poe River is called it's

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Speaker 2: going to shock you, it's called the Poe Valley. What

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Speaker 2: I know, I know, watch MeV pronouncing that word wrong.

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Speaker 3: I wonder where they got that name from.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, Yeah, for hundreds of years people have

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Speaker 2: grown rice there, but rice cultivation really got going at

387
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Speaker 2: scale in the nineteenth century. It's actually still the only

388
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Speaker 2: net exporter of rice in Europe is Italy. And where

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Speaker 2: you've got agriculture, you've got seasonal laborers. And where you've

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Speaker 2: got seasonal labor, you've got precarious labor. And where you've

391
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Speaker 2: got precarious labor, you've got oppression. Well, you kind of

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Speaker 2: have oppression anywhere you've got capitalism. But that's besides the point.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, where do we not have oppression? It's the question there.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, the seasonal labor here in the rice fields was

395
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Speaker 2: weeding from May to July. The flooded fields that are

396
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Speaker 2: full of mosquitoes and malaria needed people to go around

397
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Speaker 2: and pick out all the weeds to not like choke

398
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Speaker 2: out the rice plants, and then replant everything that needed replanting.

399
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Speaker 2: These women who did the weeding were called the weeders

400
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Speaker 2: or the mandina. Most of them were young women, and

401
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Speaker 2: most of the women in the Italian work at least

402
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Speaker 2: the turn of the twentieth century were peasants, either weeding

403
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Speaker 2: or picking olives. They're not an industrial proletarian class. They're

404
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Speaker 2: not working in the cities. They're working in agriculture. And

405
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Speaker 2: the Mondine were around, I think for hundreds of years,

406
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Speaker 2: but I couldn't promise you. Most of what I know

407
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Speaker 2: about them is roughly nineteen hundred to nineteen sixty.

408
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Speaker 3: And I don't know if people have been around like

409
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Speaker 3: olive harvesting before, but I have been. I have not

410
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Speaker 3: been there in Italy, so I don't know if it's

411
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Speaker 3: different there. But the olive harvesting that I was around,

412
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Speaker 3: which was in Morocco, was incredibly hard labor, and I

413
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Speaker 3: think people just kind of maybe you would picture it

414
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Speaker 3: if you don't know of Like, oh, people are just

415
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Speaker 3: picking olives. People like holding these huge sticks above their

416
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Speaker 3: heads for long periods of time and like having to

417
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Speaker 3: whack olives off of branches.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, and holding things above your head is literally one

419
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Speaker 2: of the hardest exercises.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, that will like kill your back.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, as does crouchy over for fifteen to sixteen hours

422
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Speaker 2: a day.

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Speaker 1: Yeah.

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Speaker 2: One hundred and fifty thousand women a year worked as

425
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Speaker 2: mondine from May to July. Most of them came from

426
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Speaker 2: nearby large agricultural towns, but people traveled from all over

427
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Speaker 2: the country, taking like days and cattle cars to come

428
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Speaker 2: up for the work. They were paid by the day

429
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Speaker 2: and worked fifteen to sixteen hour days. Sometimes they bent

430
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Speaker 2: over knee deep in water. Some of the pay was money,

431
00:22:30,160 --> 00:22:32,439
Speaker 2: some of it was just rice, often rice that had

432
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Speaker 2: gone bad. In order to not starve to death on

433
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Speaker 2: the job, women would catch fish and frogs and snakes

434
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Speaker 2: while they were working. The overseers were men with rods

435
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Speaker 2: who presumably beat them if they flagged in the labor.

436
00:22:45,080 --> 00:22:47,320
Speaker 2: I haven't specifically heard like and then they would hit us,

437
00:22:47,359 --> 00:22:50,239
Speaker 2: but I've read about the overseers with rods standing over them,

438
00:22:50,359 --> 00:22:52,040
Speaker 2: So there's some implications.

439
00:22:51,480 --> 00:22:53,360
Speaker 3: Here, yeah, like why else would you have a rod

440
00:22:53,560 --> 00:22:55,520
Speaker 3: like you just it's for decoration.

441
00:22:56,119 --> 00:23:01,639
Speaker 2: Yeah, the mosquitoes were terrible. Malaria is the single biggest

442
00:23:01,720 --> 00:23:04,439
Speaker 2: killer of these women. But the women also suffered from

443
00:23:04,440 --> 00:23:08,959
Speaker 2: all kinds of other stuff, rheumatism, skin diseases, digestive disorders, parasites,

444
00:23:09,040 --> 00:23:12,960
Speaker 2: all that stuff. They were routinely sexually harassed at work

445
00:23:13,040 --> 00:23:15,920
Speaker 2: by the owners and by the overseers, the men with

446
00:23:16,000 --> 00:23:20,800
Speaker 2: the rods. Yeah, there's a lot of academic papers are

447
00:23:20,840 --> 00:23:22,440
Speaker 2: going to be more likely to like talk about the

448
00:23:23,040 --> 00:23:25,320
Speaker 2: symbolism of the rod and things like that more than

449
00:23:25,359 --> 00:23:29,280
Speaker 2: they're like more than I whatever. The symbolism is there,

450
00:23:30,920 --> 00:23:33,080
Speaker 2: and uh, the symbolism was there a little bit in

451
00:23:33,119 --> 00:23:36,399
Speaker 2: how society saw them, because society was like, y'all are

452
00:23:36,400 --> 00:23:37,440
Speaker 2: a bunch of loose women.

453
00:23:38,320 --> 00:23:40,560
Speaker 3: Yeah, I was gonna say. Society is like, well, if

454
00:23:40,600 --> 00:23:44,040
Speaker 3: we're treating you bad, you must be sex workers. Yeah,

455
00:23:44,240 --> 00:23:46,040
Speaker 3: because that's who we treat bad.

456
00:23:46,800 --> 00:23:47,040
Speaker 1: Yeah.

457
00:23:48,160 --> 00:23:51,000
Speaker 2: And so they're looked down upon as loose women because

458
00:23:51,000 --> 00:23:53,080
Speaker 2: they are alone with the men who hired them in

459
00:23:53,200 --> 00:23:54,200
Speaker 2: the fields. Sometimes.

460
00:23:54,560 --> 00:23:57,760
Speaker 3: Oh yes, that's you know, the definition of loose is

461
00:23:57,880 --> 00:23:59,000
Speaker 3: being around men.

462
00:23:59,760 --> 00:24:02,040
Speaker 2: Yeah, who are hitting you if you don't pick up

463
00:24:02,200 --> 00:24:03,440
Speaker 2: the weeds fast enough.

464
00:24:04,359 --> 00:24:04,520
Speaker 4: Yeah.

465
00:24:04,600 --> 00:24:08,879
Speaker 3: I saw someone today actually saying that their favorite like

466
00:24:08,960 --> 00:24:12,840
Speaker 3: mythology was the like nimph or whatever, like the beautiful

467
00:24:12,880 --> 00:24:16,520
Speaker 3: woman that's known for luring men by just like existing

468
00:24:16,680 --> 00:24:20,360
Speaker 3: and standing alone. And it's like history plays this out

469
00:24:20,440 --> 00:24:22,919
Speaker 3: that this mythology is actually just how men behave.

470
00:24:23,640 --> 00:24:25,879
Speaker 2: Yeah, and then the Gorgans are like, just leave me alone,

471
00:24:26,040 --> 00:24:27,880
Speaker 2: and then men show up anyway, and you're like, look,

472
00:24:27,920 --> 00:24:29,159
Speaker 2: you're gonna get turned to stone.

473
00:24:29,840 --> 00:24:32,320
Speaker 3: Like, guys, no one told you to come over here.

474
00:24:32,359 --> 00:24:33,159
Speaker 3: We were just singing.

475
00:24:33,760 --> 00:24:40,120
Speaker 2: Yeah, totally. And malaria was so rampant that the first

476
00:24:40,200 --> 00:24:42,520
Speaker 2: law anyone put into place to protect the weeders was

477
00:24:42,560 --> 00:24:46,040
Speaker 2: in eighteen sixty six, and it was the Cantelly Regulations,

478
00:24:46,119 --> 00:24:48,160
Speaker 2: which said that you can't make people work in these

479
00:24:48,200 --> 00:24:51,560
Speaker 2: fields during dawn or dusk when the mosquitoes are at

480
00:24:51,600 --> 00:24:54,359
Speaker 2: their worst. And I first read that before I found

481
00:24:54,359 --> 00:24:56,440
Speaker 2: the thing that they were working fifteen sixteen hour days.

482
00:24:57,040 --> 00:25:00,400
Speaker 2: I assumed it meant like, therefore their day star when

483
00:25:00,400 --> 00:25:02,520
Speaker 2: the sun has fully risen and ends when the sun

484
00:25:02,680 --> 00:25:03,600
Speaker 2: is fully gone down.

485
00:25:04,200 --> 00:25:07,120
Speaker 3: But no, it means they have a break.

486
00:25:07,600 --> 00:25:10,400
Speaker 2: Yeah, they have a break. You imagine we're even more

487
00:25:10,440 --> 00:25:12,720
Speaker 2: than I mean, whatever.

488
00:25:12,680 --> 00:25:15,720
Speaker 3: This is your fifteen minutes because it's dawn.

489
00:25:16,480 --> 00:25:18,520
Speaker 2: Yeah, we don't want the mosquito is to kill you

490
00:25:18,760 --> 00:25:19,480
Speaker 2: right now?

491
00:25:19,760 --> 00:25:22,560
Speaker 3: Okay, yeah, yeah, anytime after that is fine.

492
00:25:23,320 --> 00:25:25,560
Speaker 2: Yeah. You will be shocked to know this was not

493
00:25:25,640 --> 00:25:28,840
Speaker 2: really enforced and readers worked regularly through the most dangerous

494
00:25:28,840 --> 00:25:29,439
Speaker 2: hours of the day.

495
00:25:30,200 --> 00:25:30,600
Speaker 3: Shocking.

496
00:25:31,160 --> 00:25:34,879
Speaker 2: Yeah, the women were regularly sick as hell. Miscarriages were

497
00:25:34,920 --> 00:25:37,520
Speaker 2: so common that they were actually part of the culture.

498
00:25:37,880 --> 00:25:41,000
Speaker 2: Like there's conversations with women about I'm not going to

499
00:25:41,040 --> 00:25:42,879
Speaker 2: get too into it. I try not to cover that

500
00:25:42,960 --> 00:25:45,359
Speaker 2: kind of detail, but about how women would choose and

501
00:25:45,400 --> 00:25:47,080
Speaker 2: where they would choose to miss carry in things.

502
00:25:47,640 --> 00:25:50,560
Speaker 3: Oh wow, Yeah, so you like create kind of almost

503
00:25:50,600 --> 00:25:53,280
Speaker 3: a sacred way to deal with this pain.

504
00:25:53,680 --> 00:25:58,000
Speaker 2: Wow. Yeah, exactly, like going back out into the fields

505
00:25:58,040 --> 00:26:02,040
Speaker 2: in order to miscarry, and they miscarry both because of

506
00:26:02,080 --> 00:26:05,240
Speaker 2: ill health but also because you will be shocked to

507
00:26:05,359 --> 00:26:08,960
Speaker 2: know that in Catholic Italy in nineteen hundred, abortion was

508
00:26:09,040 --> 00:26:10,040
Speaker 2: not readily available.

509
00:26:10,920 --> 00:26:13,480
Speaker 3: Still isn't in Italy actually cool?

510
00:26:14,600 --> 00:26:19,080
Speaker 2: Or half the United States, which doesn't even have the

511
00:26:19,119 --> 00:26:20,359
Speaker 2: Catholic excuse anyway?

512
00:26:20,400 --> 00:26:23,040
Speaker 3: Whatever, Yeah, in Italy it's all a religious thing because

513
00:26:23,040 --> 00:26:27,160
Speaker 3: it's I believe it's technically legal, but it's difficult to get,

514
00:26:27,359 --> 00:26:30,400
Speaker 3: especially in religious parts of the country, because doctors can

515
00:26:30,640 --> 00:26:32,440
Speaker 3: deny it to you if they're religious.

516
00:26:33,440 --> 00:26:38,440
Speaker 2: Godd which until eighteen seventy or so, the Catholic Church

517
00:26:38,480 --> 00:26:42,560
Speaker 2: didn't have an opinion about abortion before the quickening. But anyway, whatever,

518
00:26:42,920 --> 00:26:45,960
Speaker 2: amazing people pretend like that's as old as the church.

519
00:26:46,119 --> 00:26:52,480
Speaker 2: It is not. Nope. So anyway, sometimes women would miscarry

520
00:26:52,520 --> 00:26:56,640
Speaker 2: on purpose, which is very dangerous to do. And also

521
00:26:56,680 --> 00:27:01,240
Speaker 2: they weren't allowed to work while pregnant, so which makes.

522
00:27:01,080 --> 00:27:03,159
Speaker 3: It more likely that you'd miscarry on purpose if you

523
00:27:03,960 --> 00:27:05,920
Speaker 3: like our living hand to mouth.

524
00:27:06,119 --> 00:27:08,560
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly, and then this is the like two months

525
00:27:08,600 --> 00:27:12,440
Speaker 2: of the year you can get this job. Because of

526
00:27:12,520 --> 00:27:15,439
Speaker 2: all the illness, the children themselves of these women did

527
00:27:15,520 --> 00:27:19,160
Speaker 2: not do so well. Author Alessandra Bergaman put it among

528
00:27:19,240 --> 00:27:22,520
Speaker 2: the Mondine it was estimated that for every thousand children born,

529
00:27:22,840 --> 00:27:24,880
Speaker 2: six hundred died in their first year of life.

530
00:27:26,080 --> 00:27:29,680
Speaker 3: Wow, wow, yeah, staggering.

531
00:27:30,800 --> 00:27:35,480
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's real bad. And if this sounds like hell,

532
00:27:36,000 --> 00:27:38,719
Speaker 2: you're not the only person who thinks so. An Italian

533
00:27:38,760 --> 00:27:40,520
Speaker 2: politician in mill of the twentieth century said that if

534
00:27:40,560 --> 00:27:42,680
Speaker 2: Dante had known about the Mandine, he would have added

535
00:27:42,720 --> 00:27:47,200
Speaker 2: another circle to his hell. It is possible, although this

536
00:27:47,320 --> 00:27:50,240
Speaker 2: is questioned by some historians, that the Mondine weren't allowed

537
00:27:50,280 --> 00:27:53,359
Speaker 2: to talk while they worked, and so they sang. They

538
00:27:53,440 --> 00:27:55,280
Speaker 2: definitely sang. The question is whether or not they were

539
00:27:55,280 --> 00:27:57,879
Speaker 2: allowed to talk at work. My guess is sometimes they

540
00:27:57,920 --> 00:27:59,760
Speaker 2: were allowed to talk and other times they weren't. And

541
00:28:00,119 --> 00:28:03,000
Speaker 2: people have been singing work songs since forever. If you

542
00:28:03,400 --> 00:28:05,800
Speaker 2: listen to our episodes about John Henry, you can learn

543
00:28:05,840 --> 00:28:09,600
Speaker 2: more about that. The Mandina developed an elaborate repertoire of

544
00:28:09,680 --> 00:28:12,119
Speaker 2: call and response songs, many of which are sung by

545
00:28:12,160 --> 00:28:14,320
Speaker 2: choirs at festivals around the world to this day. So

546
00:28:14,400 --> 00:28:17,200
Speaker 2: there's like I had never really heard of the Mandina. Besides,

547
00:28:17,280 --> 00:28:20,240
Speaker 2: like I was vaguely aware of this history of Bellachow.

548
00:28:21,119 --> 00:28:23,960
Speaker 2: But they are an important part of the culture of

549
00:28:24,040 --> 00:28:27,520
Speaker 2: northern Italy in its history. One of those songs that

550
00:28:27,600 --> 00:28:29,760
Speaker 2: people sang, if it had a name at all, might

551
00:28:29,800 --> 00:28:32,120
Speaker 2: have been called a la montina up on a alzada

552
00:28:32,680 --> 00:28:37,560
Speaker 2: in the morning, just got up. This song is clearly Bellachow.

553
00:28:38,440 --> 00:28:41,760
Speaker 2: The first verse, as translated by I believe Alessandra Bergermann,

554
00:28:41,840 --> 00:28:45,320
Speaker 2: who I just recently quoted. Alexandra wrote a piece for

555
00:28:45,400 --> 00:28:48,000
Speaker 2: Lapham's Quarterly called Rehearsing for Rebellion, which was one of

556
00:28:48,040 --> 00:28:49,880
Speaker 2: the major starting points for this part of the story

557
00:28:49,920 --> 00:28:53,680
Speaker 2: in my own research. The first verse goes, in the morning,

558
00:28:53,960 --> 00:28:57,120
Speaker 2: just got up, bella chow bellachow, bella chow chow chow.

559
00:28:57,600 --> 00:29:00,280
Speaker 2: In the morning, just awakened in the rice field, I

560
00:29:00,400 --> 00:29:05,440
Speaker 2: must go. We don't know when this song was first sung,

561
00:29:05,880 --> 00:29:08,719
Speaker 2: or at least I don't, but by the nineteen thirties

562
00:29:08,720 --> 00:29:10,960
Speaker 2: at least, which is in the fascist era. A woman

563
00:29:11,000 --> 00:29:14,200
Speaker 2: named Giovanni Defani wrote a verse that goes, it's the

564
00:29:14,280 --> 00:29:18,040
Speaker 2: last verse in this version the overseer with his rod

565
00:29:18,160 --> 00:29:21,920
Speaker 2: oh bellichow, belichow, bellichow chow chow, and us bent over

566
00:29:22,000 --> 00:29:24,240
Speaker 2: at work, But a day will come when all of

567
00:29:24,360 --> 00:29:28,760
Speaker 2: us will work in liberty. This particular translation of that

568
00:29:28,960 --> 00:29:32,240
Speaker 2: is probably by Diana Garvin, whose paper Singing Truth to

569
00:29:32,320 --> 00:29:35,200
Speaker 2: Power was the thing that I found at midnight. Found

570
00:29:35,280 --> 00:29:37,480
Speaker 2: someone showed me at midnight last night that upended all

571
00:29:37,560 --> 00:29:40,200
Speaker 2: my writing and finally answered a bunch of questions I

572
00:29:40,280 --> 00:29:45,360
Speaker 2: hadn't found answers for so clearly Bellichow was a song

573
00:29:45,400 --> 00:29:48,560
Speaker 2: of resistance in the fascist era, although it was a

574
00:29:48,640 --> 00:29:53,120
Speaker 2: work song of resistance at the very least right. The

575
00:29:53,200 --> 00:29:56,480
Speaker 2: Mondine suffered, but they did more to fight their oppression

576
00:29:56,560 --> 00:30:00,560
Speaker 2: than just sing songs. They were fiercely political. They were

577
00:30:00,600 --> 00:30:03,800
Speaker 2: so fiercely political that, honestly, I think they're one of

578
00:30:03,840 --> 00:30:06,800
Speaker 2: the major places that you can trace Italian class consciousness

579
00:30:06,880 --> 00:30:09,160
Speaker 2: to at the turn of the twentieth century because they're

580
00:30:09,200 --> 00:30:11,640
Speaker 2: kind of a ahead of the curve on a lot

581
00:30:11,680 --> 00:30:15,280
Speaker 2: of this. So take that, Karl Marx and your assumptions

582
00:30:15,320 --> 00:30:17,360
Speaker 2: about class consciousness and how it needs to develop first

583
00:30:17,400 --> 00:30:21,120
Speaker 2: in the industrialized cities and the male proletarian workers. And

584
00:30:21,240 --> 00:30:23,080
Speaker 2: also take that everyone who works hard to write women

585
00:30:23,120 --> 00:30:23,840
Speaker 2: out of every story.

586
00:30:24,640 --> 00:30:25,400
Speaker 3: Yeah take that.

587
00:30:26,400 --> 00:30:26,600
Speaker 4: Yeah.

588
00:30:28,120 --> 00:30:31,520
Speaker 2: Also, agricultural migrant worker women in southern Italy and Puglia

589
00:30:32,080 --> 00:30:34,920
Speaker 2: were massively radical too, but they're not as directly tied

590
00:30:34,920 --> 00:30:36,600
Speaker 2: into the story we're trying to tell today. So we're

591
00:30:36,600 --> 00:30:40,640
Speaker 2: not being like the only agricultural women were the mundane.

592
00:30:40,840 --> 00:30:44,720
Speaker 2: That's just not true. The Mundine were political from the jump.

593
00:30:44,840 --> 00:30:47,760
Speaker 2: It seems exactly what it looks like for them to

594
00:30:47,800 --> 00:30:50,760
Speaker 2: have been political is a matter of some debate. The

595
00:30:50,840 --> 00:30:52,800
Speaker 2: best I can tell, and I'm comparing a bunch of

596
00:30:52,880 --> 00:30:54,920
Speaker 2: sources that all disagree with each other, as I've been

597
00:30:54,960 --> 00:30:59,000
Speaker 2: doing all week, is that the early class consciousness among

598
00:30:59,040 --> 00:31:02,440
Speaker 2: the Mundine was sort of it was instinctive. It was

599
00:31:03,000 --> 00:31:07,280
Speaker 2: a moral class consciousness. My coworker Mia Wong has been

600
00:31:07,320 --> 00:31:09,320
Speaker 2: talking a lot on it could happen here about the

601
00:31:09,400 --> 00:31:12,960
Speaker 2: idea of a moral economy, the idea that people often

602
00:31:13,040 --> 00:31:16,480
Speaker 2: act less along ideological lines and more on moral lines.

603
00:31:17,040 --> 00:31:18,880
Speaker 2: Not a lot of like the food riots and things

604
00:31:18,960 --> 00:31:20,920
Speaker 2: like that. Are people being like, you know, I have

605
00:31:20,960 --> 00:31:22,680
Speaker 2: an idea abou how much bread should cost? And this

606
00:31:22,760 --> 00:31:30,560
Speaker 2: ain't it? Hima Himiya Himia and historians have argued the

607
00:31:30,640 --> 00:31:33,920
Speaker 2: same about peasant organizing and revolt in the late nineteenth

608
00:31:33,960 --> 00:31:36,880
Speaker 2: and early twentieth century in the po Valley, that it

609
00:31:36,960 --> 00:31:39,239
Speaker 2: was about an instinctive sense of right or wrong, rather

610
00:31:39,280 --> 00:31:42,960
Speaker 2: than being religiously or ideologically framed. I read another historian

611
00:31:43,000 --> 00:31:46,320
Speaker 2: that claimed, and this wasn't intended as disparaging, that women

612
00:31:46,400 --> 00:31:48,680
Speaker 2: in Italy at this time were far more likely to

613
00:31:48,880 --> 00:31:52,080
Speaker 2: organize with trade unions and non party organizations than they

614
00:31:52,080 --> 00:31:54,640
Speaker 2: were with like political parties. So it was less about

615
00:31:54,760 --> 00:31:58,200
Speaker 2: like the Communist Party and more about like the labor

616
00:31:58,320 --> 00:32:02,440
Speaker 2: union I'm in, or this organization that I work with, which.

617
00:32:02,280 --> 00:32:05,000
Speaker 3: Makes sense because a lot of times I think political

618
00:32:05,120 --> 00:32:08,360
Speaker 3: parties it's so philosophical and so sometimes it doesn't really

619
00:32:08,480 --> 00:32:11,280
Speaker 3: like reach you in the same way that these people

620
00:32:11,400 --> 00:32:14,800
Speaker 3: are organizing with me. For you know, the wage that

621
00:32:14,880 --> 00:32:17,120
Speaker 3: I deserve so that I can feed my family is

622
00:32:17,200 --> 00:32:18,720
Speaker 3: going to hit you every time.

623
00:32:19,320 --> 00:32:24,200
Speaker 2: Totally, and I like caring more about that. Like, obviously

624
00:32:24,280 --> 00:32:27,320
Speaker 2: I have my own like ideological and theoretical conceptions of

625
00:32:27,360 --> 00:32:29,280
Speaker 2: the world, but like, when it comes down to it,

626
00:32:29,320 --> 00:32:32,120
Speaker 2: I'm much more interested in what when people actually just

627
00:32:32,240 --> 00:32:36,760
Speaker 2: do you know. The Mauldine in particular, worked with the

628
00:32:36,800 --> 00:32:39,280
Speaker 2: Italian Women's Union and with a movement I hope to

629
00:32:39,320 --> 00:32:43,200
Speaker 2: cover sometime soon, the Casa de Popolo, the People's Houses,

630
00:32:44,320 --> 00:32:47,960
Speaker 2: which were and are cooperatively run social centers that offer

631
00:32:48,000 --> 00:32:50,640
Speaker 2: affordable meals and free libraries and cool shit like that.

632
00:32:52,040 --> 00:32:56,440
Speaker 2: Italy rapidly politicized in the early twentieth century, more explicitly

633
00:32:56,520 --> 00:32:59,960
Speaker 2: along ideological lines. By the nineteen tens and the nineteen

634
00:33:00,120 --> 00:33:04,760
Speaker 2: twenties and into the Fascist era, the Mondine were explicitly leftists.

635
00:33:05,840 --> 00:33:08,160
Speaker 2: It seems likely that the majority of them were card

636
00:33:08,240 --> 00:33:11,000
Speaker 2: carrying members of the Communist Party, so much so that

637
00:33:11,080 --> 00:33:15,280
Speaker 2: they call themselves the sisters of Togliati, the aka Pomiro Togliati,

638
00:33:15,280 --> 00:33:18,920
Speaker 2: who was a Communist leader. This was probably more in

639
00:33:18,920 --> 00:33:21,000
Speaker 2: the late twenties and early thirties when they have this,

640
00:33:21,280 --> 00:33:24,280
Speaker 2: which is even more rad for them to have done,

641
00:33:24,480 --> 00:33:27,320
Speaker 2: because that means they were doing it during the fascist

642
00:33:27,360 --> 00:33:31,160
Speaker 2: era when it was illegal to claim out that you're

643
00:33:31,200 --> 00:33:34,840
Speaker 2: part of the Communist Party. Right. Others among them were

644
00:33:34,880 --> 00:33:37,640
Speaker 2: socialists and anarchists, and I suspect a lot of them

645
00:33:37,680 --> 00:33:39,440
Speaker 2: were also just like I work with the people's houses

646
00:33:39,480 --> 00:33:40,680
Speaker 2: and I don't give a shit about any of that.

647
00:33:41,120 --> 00:33:41,480
Speaker 2: I don't know.

648
00:33:42,720 --> 00:33:45,160
Speaker 3: Wherever there are labels, there are people who say no,

649
00:33:45,280 --> 00:33:47,240
Speaker 3: thank you to the labels totally.

650
00:33:47,560 --> 00:33:50,080
Speaker 2: And then you also have to go through and read

651
00:33:50,520 --> 00:33:54,280
Speaker 2: and find the political ideology of the historian that you're reading,

652
00:33:54,880 --> 00:33:56,880
Speaker 2: because they're more likely to write themselves in like I

653
00:33:57,000 --> 00:33:59,320
Speaker 2: am more likely to include I wish I wasn't I

654
00:33:59,320 --> 00:34:01,520
Speaker 2: wish I was complete neutral, I try to be well.

655
00:34:01,800 --> 00:34:05,320
Speaker 2: Neutral is not the right word objective whatever I am

656
00:34:05,400 --> 00:34:07,600
Speaker 2: more likely to make sure that the anarchists and the

657
00:34:07,640 --> 00:34:11,720
Speaker 2: women are included in stories, and so might overemphasize them sometimes,

658
00:34:11,800 --> 00:34:15,040
Speaker 2: but I think, oh, usually they're de emphasized.

659
00:34:14,600 --> 00:34:17,240
Speaker 3: Right, right, So it's just balancing the universe.

660
00:34:17,880 --> 00:34:19,719
Speaker 2: And so it's like I started off by reading someone

661
00:34:19,800 --> 00:34:21,759
Speaker 2: being like all of them were card carrying communists, and

662
00:34:21,760 --> 00:34:23,880
Speaker 2: then I compare like eight other historians and they're like

663
00:34:24,200 --> 00:34:26,239
Speaker 2: most of them didn't have any politics at all, and

664
00:34:26,320 --> 00:34:28,680
Speaker 2: another ones are like a lot of them are communists,

665
00:34:28,880 --> 00:34:30,640
Speaker 2: some of them are socialists, some of them are anarchists,

666
00:34:31,360 --> 00:34:35,279
Speaker 2: and basically all left wing, just like all of the

667
00:34:35,320 --> 00:34:37,520
Speaker 2: sponsors of this show, which are all.

668
00:34:39,680 --> 00:34:42,839
Speaker 3: They're all cool people who cool.

669
00:34:42,920 --> 00:34:44,800
Speaker 2: Yeah, and if I don't like them, it's because of

670
00:34:44,920 --> 00:34:47,160
Speaker 2: some weird split and leftist ideology.

671
00:34:47,600 --> 00:34:49,080
Speaker 3: No, it's just infighting.

672
00:34:49,760 --> 00:34:52,320
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly, it's my infighting is why I don't like

673
00:34:53,000 --> 00:34:57,600
Speaker 2: whatever ad comes next that we totally have no control over.

674
00:34:59,200 --> 00:35:13,040
Speaker 2: Here they are and we're back. So the Mondane they

675
00:35:13,520 --> 00:35:16,479
Speaker 2: fucking loved going on strike yay.

676
00:35:17,920 --> 00:35:18,160
Speaker 4: Yeah.

677
00:35:18,239 --> 00:35:21,400
Speaker 2: No, they were so good at it or they were

678
00:35:21,480 --> 00:35:22,680
Speaker 2: terrible at it because I had to keep doing it.

679
00:35:22,719 --> 00:35:25,960
Speaker 2: I don't know which, because I read one article that

680
00:35:26,080 --> 00:35:28,760
Speaker 2: was like, after this, they went on thousands more strikes,

681
00:35:28,800 --> 00:35:31,759
Speaker 2: and I was like, that's clearly hyperbole.

682
00:35:31,560 --> 00:35:34,560
Speaker 3: Right, or they count like every day that they strike

683
00:35:34,680 --> 00:35:35,720
Speaker 3: as a strike.

684
00:35:36,200 --> 00:35:39,560
Speaker 2: Like I think what it is is that there's like

685
00:35:40,480 --> 00:35:42,880
Speaker 2: so many of these different farms, and so the strikes

686
00:35:42,920 --> 00:35:45,839
Speaker 2: might not be you know, one big strike for all

687
00:35:45,920 --> 00:35:47,960
Speaker 2: of the one hundred and fifty thousand workers or whatever. Right,

688
00:35:49,400 --> 00:35:51,239
Speaker 2: So it is not hyperbole to say that they went

689
00:35:51,280 --> 00:35:55,400
Speaker 2: on thousands of strikes. In nineteen oh one, they organized

690
00:35:55,440 --> 00:35:59,000
Speaker 2: probably Italy's first general strike if you like google, dear Internet,

691
00:35:59,200 --> 00:36:02,279
Speaker 2: how much or when was Italyast first general strike? They'll

692
00:36:02,280 --> 00:36:05,479
Speaker 2: say nineteen oh four, But that's because it wasn't by women.

693
00:36:07,040 --> 00:36:10,239
Speaker 2: Women did one in nineteen oh one. In nineteen oh

694
00:36:10,320 --> 00:36:13,520
Speaker 2: four alone, they had two hundred and eight strikes. In

695
00:36:13,640 --> 00:36:16,680
Speaker 2: nineteen oh seven, at the peak of their like strike craze,

696
00:36:17,239 --> 00:36:20,239
Speaker 2: there's three hundred and seventy seven strikes, which is more

697
00:36:20,320 --> 00:36:21,120
Speaker 2: than there are days.

698
00:36:22,080 --> 00:36:25,800
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's amazing, and actually it speaks to kind of

699
00:36:25,920 --> 00:36:28,919
Speaker 3: how Europe feels today. Like in the US, you don't

700
00:36:28,960 --> 00:36:31,800
Speaker 3: see so much strike culture, but like here, in places

701
00:36:31,880 --> 00:36:34,640
Speaker 3: like Italy and France in particular, they are ready to

702
00:36:34,719 --> 00:36:36,560
Speaker 3: strike at the drop of a hat like you. There

703
00:36:36,600 --> 00:36:38,600
Speaker 3: are strikes all the time, and.

704
00:36:38,680 --> 00:36:41,800
Speaker 2: That's how they like are able to have middle class

705
00:36:41,840 --> 00:36:45,520
Speaker 2: incomes despite working class jobs. And you know, like I

706
00:36:45,560 --> 00:36:47,920
Speaker 2: remember I was living in Amsterdam and the I think

707
00:36:48,000 --> 00:36:50,560
Speaker 2: every year at that point, the garbage workers would go

708
00:36:50,640 --> 00:36:51,480
Speaker 2: on strike once.

709
00:36:51,320 --> 00:36:54,000
Speaker 3: A year just to remind everyone.

710
00:36:54,760 --> 00:36:59,120
Speaker 2: Yeah, and the city just fills with garbage within twenty

711
00:36:59,160 --> 00:37:02,160
Speaker 2: four hours if no one's emptying the garbage on the streets,

712
00:37:02,280 --> 00:37:07,560
Speaker 2: you know. And so these striking weaders, they won stuff

713
00:37:08,080 --> 00:37:11,240
Speaker 2: all the time. They seem to have organized at first

714
00:37:11,320 --> 00:37:14,799
Speaker 2: with the Socialist Agricultural Workers Union, but they remained autonomous

715
00:37:14,840 --> 00:37:19,080
Speaker 2: within that. In nineteen oh four, they won the ten

716
00:37:19,160 --> 00:37:22,759
Speaker 2: hour workday. Was that enough for them? No, they were

717
00:37:22,880 --> 00:37:24,520
Speaker 2: just nothing's too much for them.

718
00:37:24,760 --> 00:37:27,680
Speaker 3: Good keep going because you guys had fifteen. So we

719
00:37:27,800 --> 00:37:29,560
Speaker 3: get it down to ten and then go to like two.

720
00:37:30,760 --> 00:37:34,120
Speaker 2: Well later after the war they bring it down to seven,

721
00:37:34,200 --> 00:37:37,680
Speaker 2: which is the lowest I've seen any union bring their

722
00:37:37,760 --> 00:37:41,680
Speaker 2: workday down to in any episode I've ever done. In

723
00:37:41,800 --> 00:37:44,520
Speaker 2: nineteen oh six, they won the nine hour workday. In

724
00:37:44,640 --> 00:37:47,759
Speaker 2: nineteen oh nine they won the eight hour workday, and

725
00:37:48,160 --> 00:37:50,520
Speaker 2: according to one source, this makes them the first people

726
00:37:50,560 --> 00:37:52,800
Speaker 2: in Italy to win the eight hour day. According to

727
00:37:52,840 --> 00:37:55,239
Speaker 2: another source, they won someone else the eight hour day

728
00:37:55,280 --> 00:37:59,359
Speaker 2: before then. I don't know which is true and why

729
00:38:00,200 --> 00:38:02,560
Speaker 2: the first ten years of the twentieth century so uniquely

730
00:38:02,640 --> 00:38:06,239
Speaker 2: kind a worker's struggle in Italy. Well, one story and

731
00:38:06,320 --> 00:38:08,719
Speaker 2: I read traced it to the fact that in the

732
00:38:08,800 --> 00:38:11,120
Speaker 2: year nineteen hundred, as we talked about a couple weeks

733
00:38:11,120 --> 00:38:13,880
Speaker 2: ago on our episode about people tried to kill Mussolini

734
00:38:14,719 --> 00:38:18,000
Speaker 2: the year nineteen hundred, the Italian anarchist Gaetano Breshi, who

735
00:38:18,080 --> 00:38:20,799
Speaker 2: lived in Patterson, New Jersey at the time, he got

736
00:38:20,880 --> 00:38:22,920
Speaker 2: on a boat with a revolver and he went and

737
00:38:23,000 --> 00:38:25,719
Speaker 2: he shot King Omberto the First because Umberto had just

738
00:38:26,080 --> 00:38:29,120
Speaker 2: rewarded a subordinate who had massacred people protesting against their

739
00:38:29,160 --> 00:38:32,400
Speaker 2: own starvation. There's a bread riot, the general guy like

740
00:38:32,480 --> 00:38:34,800
Speaker 2: guns everyone down. Everyone's like, oh, the King's going to

741
00:38:34,840 --> 00:38:36,840
Speaker 2: do something about that. And what the king did was

742
00:38:36,920 --> 00:38:39,279
Speaker 2: reward him, and so then Amberto was like, well, that's

743
00:38:39,320 --> 00:38:40,760
Speaker 2: not going to work. So he went back to Italy

744
00:38:40,800 --> 00:38:41,440
Speaker 2: and he killed the guy.

745
00:38:41,920 --> 00:38:43,000
Speaker 3: So he rewarded the king.

746
00:38:43,520 --> 00:38:48,680
Speaker 2: Yeah exactly. Yeah. Killing authoritarian leaders and or kicking them

747
00:38:48,719 --> 00:38:50,680
Speaker 2: out of power is like a kind of a It's

748
00:38:50,719 --> 00:38:53,440
Speaker 2: like a crap shoot. It's like I don't I clearly

749
00:38:53,560 --> 00:38:55,239
Speaker 2: don't play a lot of poker. It's like drawing a

750
00:38:55,280 --> 00:38:57,399
Speaker 2: completely new hand in poker. I don't know if that's

751
00:38:57,400 --> 00:38:59,840
Speaker 2: the thing you can do, but if it were a

752
00:38:59,880 --> 00:39:03,279
Speaker 2: thing you could do, that is what killing your ruler does.

753
00:39:04,040 --> 00:39:07,800
Speaker 2: You know. Quite often the new hand you draw is

754
00:39:07,880 --> 00:39:13,799
Speaker 2: even worse. Right, other times it makes things better, or you.

755
00:39:13,960 --> 00:39:17,000
Speaker 3: Draw a new hand that's good, and then the US

756
00:39:17,160 --> 00:39:19,719
Speaker 3: comes into whatever your country is and kills whatever good

757
00:39:19,800 --> 00:39:21,600
Speaker 3: leader you have, so that you get a bad hand.

758
00:39:22,280 --> 00:39:25,000
Speaker 2: That's true. That is actually a really good point. That's

759
00:39:25,080 --> 00:39:26,719
Speaker 2: like the dealer is like, oh wait, I gave you

760
00:39:26,800 --> 00:39:28,759
Speaker 2: a good hand. Oh no, never mind, I'm taking that

761
00:39:28,840 --> 00:39:29,239
Speaker 2: one back.

762
00:39:29,400 --> 00:39:32,839
Speaker 3: We better stack this deck again, because no Patrice la Mumba,

763
00:39:32,960 --> 00:39:36,799
Speaker 3: no thank you, and so yeah.

764
00:39:37,520 --> 00:39:39,800
Speaker 2: Italy took a strong shift to the left after the

765
00:39:39,880 --> 00:39:44,120
Speaker 2: death of their tyrannical king and labor organizing exploded. The

766
00:39:44,200 --> 00:39:47,680
Speaker 2: medine loved striking. One of the most dramatic years that

767
00:39:47,680 --> 00:39:49,600
Speaker 2: they're striking was nineteen oh six, the year that they

768
00:39:49,640 --> 00:39:52,600
Speaker 2: won the nine hour Day. They were shooting for eight.

769
00:39:52,719 --> 00:39:55,359
Speaker 2: Of course, at that point in May nineteen oh six,

770
00:39:55,400 --> 00:39:58,200
Speaker 2: at the beginning of the weeding season, work stoppages would

771
00:39:58,200 --> 00:40:00,400
Speaker 2: spread from farm to farm as the women would like

772
00:40:00,560 --> 00:40:02,680
Speaker 2: march along and tell everyone the good news that they

773
00:40:02,719 --> 00:40:06,279
Speaker 2: were calling for a general strike. And one of their

774
00:40:06,400 --> 00:40:11,080
Speaker 2: songs was called if eight hours seems too few, and

775
00:40:11,160 --> 00:40:14,719
Speaker 2: the lyrics are, if eight hours seem too few to you,

776
00:40:15,280 --> 00:40:18,200
Speaker 2: try working and you'll see the difference between work and

777
00:40:18,320 --> 00:40:21,560
Speaker 2: giving orders. Hmm, it's so good.

778
00:40:21,960 --> 00:40:22,440
Speaker 4: Mm hmmm.

779
00:40:22,719 --> 00:40:24,960
Speaker 3: Yeah, Like, let's trade places here and see how you

780
00:40:25,000 --> 00:40:26,880
Speaker 3: feel about it exactly.

781
00:40:27,920 --> 00:40:30,360
Speaker 2: And uh, I just love the like there's been a

782
00:40:30,360 --> 00:40:32,520
Speaker 2: couple of times I've read, we've talked about rural strikes,

783
00:40:32,560 --> 00:40:35,480
Speaker 2: and sometimes the rural strikes are just the workers march

784
00:40:35,520 --> 00:40:37,160
Speaker 2: from one place to the next and are like, hey,

785
00:40:37,200 --> 00:40:39,359
Speaker 2: you're free now. And I was like, sick, We're free,

786
00:40:39,640 --> 00:40:41,200
Speaker 2: you know, right, And.

787
00:40:41,239 --> 00:40:43,280
Speaker 3: It's just as soon as you have that domino effect,

788
00:40:43,440 --> 00:40:45,279
Speaker 3: like what can the like two people who were in

789
00:40:45,400 --> 00:40:46,239
Speaker 3: charge do about it?

790
00:40:46,760 --> 00:40:51,680
Speaker 2: Yeah, and this one works strikes were biggest in this year.

791
00:40:51,719 --> 00:40:54,000
Speaker 2: In May nineteen oh six in the city of Vercelli,

792
00:40:54,360 --> 00:40:58,200
Speaker 2: and textile workers, bakers, millers, gardeners, all of them joined in.

793
00:40:59,040 --> 00:41:02,239
Speaker 2: They more or less shut the city down. Workers took

794
00:41:02,320 --> 00:41:05,279
Speaker 2: over the main square. Troops were like set up to

795
00:41:05,360 --> 00:41:08,359
Speaker 2: stop them, so they drove the troops out, and then

796
00:41:08,360 --> 00:41:10,839
Speaker 2: they set up barricades around the entire town to keep

797
00:41:10,920 --> 00:41:16,080
Speaker 2: soldiers in scabs from getting in. Yeah, yeah, they like

798
00:41:16,160 --> 00:41:18,800
Speaker 2: did it, and it there's so often like like I

799
00:41:18,840 --> 00:41:21,080
Speaker 2: would read the entire novel set Oh you're a historical

800
00:41:21,160 --> 00:41:23,520
Speaker 2: fiction author. I would read the entire novel set in

801
00:41:23,640 --> 00:41:26,360
Speaker 2: Vercelli in nineteen oh six, right, But instead I have

802
00:41:26,480 --> 00:41:29,920
Speaker 2: like three lines you know that are like I mean,

803
00:41:29,960 --> 00:41:32,560
Speaker 2: I I suspect somewhere there is a book about Vertelli

804
00:41:32,680 --> 00:41:34,759
Speaker 2: nineteen oh six, but it's probably an Italian and it

805
00:41:34,840 --> 00:41:37,400
Speaker 2: was probably written in like nineteen forty nine, you know.

806
00:41:38,960 --> 00:41:44,759
Speaker 2: And they won the business class folded. Everyone got better pay.

807
00:41:45,600 --> 00:41:49,280
Speaker 2: Bakers won this thing that's been a goal of bakers

808
00:41:49,440 --> 00:41:51,000
Speaker 2: for a very long time. Politically, it was a big

809
00:41:51,080 --> 00:41:53,800
Speaker 2: part of the Paris Commune's demands. They won the abolition

810
00:41:53,920 --> 00:41:56,560
Speaker 2: of night work. Just like particularly interesting with baker's right,

811
00:41:56,560 --> 00:41:58,640
Speaker 2: because the whole thing is that bakers work at night

812
00:41:58,640 --> 00:42:00,840
Speaker 2: and you get your fresh bread in the morning, and

813
00:42:00,880 --> 00:42:02,200
Speaker 2: they're like, now we don't want to work at night.

814
00:42:02,200 --> 00:42:03,760
Speaker 2: You get your fresh bread when it's done.

815
00:42:04,719 --> 00:42:04,880
Speaker 4: You know.

816
00:42:05,239 --> 00:42:08,680
Speaker 3: Yeah, I love that. There's always like there's certain people

817
00:42:08,719 --> 00:42:10,960
Speaker 3: that show up in revolutionary history all the time, and

818
00:42:11,120 --> 00:42:12,359
Speaker 3: bakers are always there.

819
00:42:12,800 --> 00:42:17,399
Speaker 2: Yeah, totally. Food history is like such an important part

820
00:42:17,440 --> 00:42:19,400
Speaker 2: of it that I know I never paid attention to

821
00:42:19,560 --> 00:42:22,560
Speaker 2: until shout out to my friend Wren, who's often a

822
00:42:22,600 --> 00:42:24,960
Speaker 2: guest on this teaching me food history, who's also the

823
00:42:25,040 --> 00:42:29,000
Speaker 2: person who broke my evening by sending me a bunch

824
00:42:29,040 --> 00:42:33,560
Speaker 2: of sources at midnight last night. Thanks Ren, Yeah, thank

825
00:42:33,600 --> 00:42:37,000
Speaker 2: you Ren. And here's where two of my sources disagree.

826
00:42:37,800 --> 00:42:39,720
Speaker 2: One source says that as a result of the strike,

827
00:42:39,840 --> 00:42:42,560
Speaker 2: everyone but the Weededers got the eight hour day, but

828
00:42:42,680 --> 00:42:45,000
Speaker 2: another sources that Weeders were the first Italians to get

829
00:42:45,040 --> 00:42:46,680
Speaker 2: the eight hour day and did so three years later.

830
00:42:47,600 --> 00:42:51,680
Speaker 2: I don't know either way. Good stuff happened, so like,

831
00:42:51,960 --> 00:42:52,600
Speaker 2: but how would that.

832
00:42:52,680 --> 00:42:54,759
Speaker 3: Work if it was the Waders who were the last two,

833
00:42:54,920 --> 00:42:56,640
Speaker 3: Like they just were like, Okay, we're going to give

834
00:42:56,640 --> 00:42:59,400
Speaker 3: it to everyone but you because you struck like niner

835
00:42:59,480 --> 00:43:00,160
Speaker 3: niner Like.

836
00:43:01,160 --> 00:43:04,720
Speaker 2: I think it's because they successfully The city of Vercelli

837
00:43:04,920 --> 00:43:07,319
Speaker 2: wasn't a didn't have like a rice field. Maybe Havid

838
00:43:07,400 --> 00:43:09,440
Speaker 2: rice fields around it, right, But I think it was

839
00:43:09,480 --> 00:43:12,920
Speaker 2: like all of the businesses in the city had had

840
00:43:12,960 --> 00:43:15,080
Speaker 2: to give up to get the city running again. Right,

841
00:43:15,880 --> 00:43:17,920
Speaker 2: But that's true. It actually means that it must mean

842
00:43:17,960 --> 00:43:21,640
Speaker 2: that the weaders must have been like, well, all right, fine,

843
00:43:21,680 --> 00:43:23,400
Speaker 2: we'll call off the strike even though we only got

844
00:43:23,480 --> 00:43:26,279
Speaker 2: the nine hour day out of this or whatever. But

845
00:43:26,360 --> 00:43:29,279
Speaker 2: I don't know. But also I think sometimes people use

846
00:43:29,719 --> 00:43:32,479
Speaker 2: the eight hour day as like shorthand for a labor

847
00:43:32,560 --> 00:43:37,160
Speaker 2: demand around shorter hours, you know. But after its quick

848
00:43:37,320 --> 00:43:40,400
Speaker 2: leftward swing, Italy started shifting to the right, and they

849
00:43:40,440 --> 00:43:42,680
Speaker 2: did this without changing their prime minister, the same prime

850
00:43:42,719 --> 00:43:45,480
Speaker 2: minister who came into power in nineteen hundred after Romberto

851
00:43:45,560 --> 00:43:50,200
Speaker 2: got got. His name is Giovanni Giolatti, and he's kind

852
00:43:50,239 --> 00:43:52,440
Speaker 2: of a radical centrist. His whole thing is that is

853
00:43:52,840 --> 00:43:55,080
Speaker 2: he's trying to keep the extreme right and the extreme

854
00:43:55,200 --> 00:43:56,200
Speaker 2: left from taken over.

855
00:43:57,000 --> 00:43:59,480
Speaker 3: We've never heard that political talking point.

856
00:44:00,080 --> 00:44:04,879
Speaker 2: Now now it's completely unfamiliar to the modern audience. Oh

857
00:44:05,000 --> 00:44:07,880
Speaker 2: my god, the amount of stuff that rhymes with you know,

858
00:44:07,960 --> 00:44:09,719
Speaker 2: the whole history doesn't repeat it rhymes thing.

859
00:44:10,200 --> 00:44:14,800
Speaker 3: It's yeah, it's actually insane. And like anyone who studies

860
00:44:14,920 --> 00:44:18,319
Speaker 3: history is just listening to this and going like, oh yeah,

861
00:44:18,440 --> 00:44:21,759
Speaker 3: that sounds exactly like here, exactly like now.

862
00:44:22,280 --> 00:44:26,319
Speaker 2: Yeah, and he starts swinging to the right the new

863
00:44:26,360 --> 00:44:29,000
Speaker 2: prime Minister because he's, you know, things are geting a

864
00:44:29,000 --> 00:44:31,960
Speaker 2: little too left. And so one of the things that

865
00:44:32,040 --> 00:44:35,759
Speaker 2: he undoes was literally the law from fifty years ago

866
00:44:35,840 --> 00:44:38,200
Speaker 2: about you can't work during dawn and dusk because the

867
00:44:38,239 --> 00:44:41,719
Speaker 2: mosquitoes will kill you. So he is like gutting what

868
00:44:41,880 --> 00:44:42,279
Speaker 2: they've won.

869
00:44:43,239 --> 00:44:43,840
Speaker 4: So I like that.

870
00:44:44,000 --> 00:44:46,839
Speaker 3: It's like, Okay, what can I do to like keep

871
00:44:46,920 --> 00:44:48,200
Speaker 3: us from going extreme left?

872
00:44:48,680 --> 00:44:48,879
Speaker 4: Mmm?

873
00:44:49,560 --> 00:44:50,880
Speaker 3: Give more people malaria?

874
00:44:51,400 --> 00:44:54,480
Speaker 2: Yeah, just well, I mean that's what's happening right now

875
00:44:54,520 --> 00:44:56,360
Speaker 2: in the United States when they're like getting rid of

876
00:44:56,400 --> 00:44:58,319
Speaker 2: the polio vaccine or whatever. Yeah.

877
00:44:58,719 --> 00:45:01,160
Speaker 3: I guess if people are dead, they can't go left.

878
00:45:01,719 --> 00:45:01,959
Speaker 4: Yeah.

879
00:45:04,400 --> 00:45:08,359
Speaker 2: Oh god, that is how fascism successfully took over large

880
00:45:08,440 --> 00:45:09,440
Speaker 2: chunks this type of space.

881
00:45:11,040 --> 00:45:13,200
Speaker 3: I'm sorry, this is not supposed to be a bleak podcast.

882
00:45:13,239 --> 00:45:14,520
Speaker 3: I feel like I brought the bleak.

883
00:45:14,360 --> 00:45:15,880
Speaker 2: To you though. Oh no, no, this is not one

884
00:45:15,880 --> 00:45:17,920
Speaker 2: of my favorite songs super PASSI. But I mean it's like,

885
00:45:17,960 --> 00:45:19,200
Speaker 2: of course, this is one of my favorite songs. It's

886
00:45:19,200 --> 00:45:21,080
Speaker 2: a song about like and if I die fighting you

887
00:45:21,320 --> 00:45:22,839
Speaker 2: you know what I mean. Of course I like that song,

888
00:45:22,960 --> 00:45:25,000
Speaker 2: so you need the you need a good villain, right.

889
00:45:26,480 --> 00:45:29,040
Speaker 2: And you know, if I lived in Utopia, what i'd do.

890
00:45:29,160 --> 00:45:31,080
Speaker 2: I'd actually be very happy and I would play music

891
00:45:31,120 --> 00:45:34,840
Speaker 2: all day hmmm and write books. I guess that's what

892
00:45:34,920 --> 00:45:38,960
Speaker 2: I do now, but it'd be easier anyway. Whatever. I

893
00:45:39,040 --> 00:45:44,840
Speaker 2: am very lucky within my position within our society. Eventually,

894
00:45:44,920 --> 00:45:47,719
Speaker 2: fascism came around for Italy. It was coined as a

895
00:45:47,840 --> 00:45:50,920
Speaker 2: term in nineteen fifteen. Mussolini came to power in nineteen

896
00:45:50,960 --> 00:45:53,960
Speaker 2: twenty two, and he declared himself dictator in nineteen twenty five.

897
00:45:54,719 --> 00:45:56,759
Speaker 2: Fascism is, as we've talked about in the People Who

898
00:45:56,760 --> 00:45:59,000
Speaker 2: Try to Kill Missolini episodes from a couple of weeks ago,

899
00:45:59,400 --> 00:46:02,040
Speaker 2: taking the revel lutionary spirit of the left and applying

900
00:46:02,120 --> 00:46:05,799
Speaker 2: it to traditional conservativism and the right, which is to say, oh,

901
00:46:05,840 --> 00:46:07,719
Speaker 2: here's the paragraph where I wrote what we were just

902
00:46:07,760 --> 00:46:11,280
Speaker 2: talking about, which is to say exactly what Trump Republicans

903
00:46:11,320 --> 00:46:14,440
Speaker 2: are doing today. People keep saying, Maga are Nazis, and

904
00:46:14,560 --> 00:46:17,480
Speaker 2: that is not true. Maga are fascists, and I mean

905
00:46:17,560 --> 00:46:19,640
Speaker 2: that in the traditional Italian Mussolini sense of the word.

906
00:46:20,120 --> 00:46:23,800
Speaker 2: They are applying this insurgent attitude traditionally associated with the

907
00:46:23,880 --> 00:46:26,400
Speaker 2: left and applying it to right wing politics. You ever

908
00:46:26,480 --> 00:46:29,680
Speaker 2: watch the like people on Twitter get mad at Tom

909
00:46:29,760 --> 00:46:31,680
Speaker 2: Morello from Rage against the Machine thing.

910
00:46:32,480 --> 00:46:33,360
Speaker 3: No, I don't know about this.

911
00:46:33,840 --> 00:46:35,880
Speaker 2: It is one of the most entertaining things that happens

912
00:46:35,920 --> 00:46:38,960
Speaker 2: on like a regular basis about once a year. All

913
00:46:39,040 --> 00:46:42,520
Speaker 2: the like MAGA people realize that Rage against the Machine

914
00:46:42,560 --> 00:46:46,799
Speaker 2: is leftists, and they like throw a fit and they're

915
00:46:46,840 --> 00:46:50,719
Speaker 2: like rage for the machine more like it because they

916
00:46:51,040 --> 00:46:54,080
Speaker 2: see themselves as the insurgency.

917
00:46:54,120 --> 00:46:59,040
Speaker 3: Right right, they're the oppressed, a group pushing back. It's

918
00:46:59,080 --> 00:47:01,920
Speaker 3: so funny. This is actually my favorite genre of like

919
00:47:02,080 --> 00:47:06,680
Speaker 3: complaining right wing person is the like I wasted my

920
00:47:07,280 --> 00:47:10,719
Speaker 3: quote unquote wasted my time listening to your product or

921
00:47:10,800 --> 00:47:14,360
Speaker 3: reading your product or whatever, and now I'm mad about it.

922
00:47:14,680 --> 00:47:17,320
Speaker 3: Like my personal favorite reviews of my own are not

923
00:47:17,440 --> 00:47:20,680
Speaker 3: the nice reviews. They're the like far right people that

924
00:47:20,800 --> 00:47:23,680
Speaker 3: are pissed off that my books don't like cops.

925
00:47:23,760 --> 00:47:28,160
Speaker 2: Like, and you're, like, you used to not like cops.

926
00:47:28,680 --> 00:47:31,439
Speaker 2: Everyone agreed on this until like ten years ago.

927
00:47:32,160 --> 00:47:34,200
Speaker 3: Yeah, until you guys decided you were the cops.

928
00:47:34,560 --> 00:47:39,160
Speaker 2: Yeah, like watching people in rural areas would be like

929
00:47:39,520 --> 00:47:43,279
Speaker 2: and the thin blue line. I'm like you moonshine, I know,

930
00:47:43,520 --> 00:47:47,480
Speaker 2: like you drive a motorcycle on an eight without a

931
00:47:47,600 --> 00:47:50,359
Speaker 2: license you like anyway.

932
00:47:50,200 --> 00:47:52,120
Speaker 3: Right, if a cop comes up to you, you hate them.

933
00:47:52,440 --> 00:47:54,680
Speaker 3: It just you like them when they're harassing other people.

934
00:47:55,160 --> 00:47:59,840
Speaker 2: Totally, totally. Everyone likes state power when it's their state power.

935
00:48:00,280 --> 00:48:00,440
Speaker 4: Hm.

936
00:48:01,600 --> 00:48:05,040
Speaker 2: Anyway, the fascists came into power, right, and they wanted

937
00:48:05,040 --> 00:48:07,399
Speaker 2: to get women out of the workforce by and large

938
00:48:07,400 --> 00:48:10,359
Speaker 2: and get them home making babies and making dinner. It's

939
00:48:10,360 --> 00:48:14,160
Speaker 2: where they belong. Except they have a soft spot for

940
00:48:14,280 --> 00:48:16,759
Speaker 2: the mondine, who they try to hold up as their

941
00:48:16,840 --> 00:48:18,480
Speaker 2: symbol of fascist femininity.

942
00:48:20,360 --> 00:48:23,200
Speaker 3: That's amazing. I know, the women who are out there

943
00:48:23,280 --> 00:48:25,920
Speaker 3: like catching and cooking snakes for dinner. That's like the

944
00:48:26,000 --> 00:48:27,239
Speaker 3: fascist ideal woman.

945
00:48:27,800 --> 00:48:31,440
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean you can see that. Like, ah, I

946
00:48:31,560 --> 00:48:34,279
Speaker 2: watched the wrong parts of YouTube. There was like some

947
00:48:34,440 --> 00:48:37,480
Speaker 2: women in Camo who's like hunting alligators or something, and

948
00:48:37,600 --> 00:48:39,520
Speaker 2: then like half the comments are like here's the perfect

949
00:48:39,560 --> 00:48:41,080
Speaker 2: woman in the other half, or like why is she

950
00:48:41,400 --> 00:48:44,320
Speaker 2: out catching animals? She should be in the kitchen or whatever,

951
00:48:44,920 --> 00:48:49,800
Speaker 2: like make up your mind. So, yeah, they're trying to

952
00:48:49,800 --> 00:48:52,120
Speaker 2: hold the mandina up as a symbol of fascist femininity.

953
00:48:52,239 --> 00:48:54,080
Speaker 2: They work all day in the fields, and they raise

954
00:48:54,200 --> 00:48:56,560
Speaker 2: huge families so that Italy can build up its economy

955
00:48:56,600 --> 00:48:59,239
Speaker 2: and send young men into a meat grinder. And they

956
00:48:59,280 --> 00:49:04,640
Speaker 2: worked in rice. And did you know the fascists hated pasta? No?

957
00:49:05,960 --> 00:49:06,800
Speaker 2: What the fuck?

958
00:49:07,080 --> 00:49:10,200
Speaker 1: I mean, It's like, come on, I know.

959
00:49:10,640 --> 00:49:13,560
Speaker 2: The Italian nationalists hate pasta.

960
00:49:14,120 --> 00:49:18,320
Speaker 1: Why did somebody like Linco It was somebody in charge

961
00:49:18,440 --> 00:49:21,000
Speaker 1: like have like a really bad gluten allergy and then

962
00:49:21,160 --> 00:49:24,960
Speaker 1: like like like make it make everyone else suffer because

963
00:49:25,000 --> 00:49:27,040
Speaker 1: of it more or less?

964
00:49:27,640 --> 00:49:28,959
Speaker 3: So is that real?

965
00:49:29,560 --> 00:49:32,600
Speaker 2: So no, okay, there's a version where it could be real.

966
00:49:32,680 --> 00:49:36,640
Speaker 3: As a food allergy. Baby, this is like, don't do that,

967
00:49:38,640 --> 00:49:38,840
Speaker 3: I know.

968
00:49:39,880 --> 00:49:42,760
Speaker 2: Oh god, I'm not excited for when like fascist vegans

969
00:49:42,800 --> 00:49:43,280
Speaker 2: take power.

970
00:49:43,600 --> 00:49:43,840
Speaker 1: I know.

971
00:49:45,040 --> 00:49:47,560
Speaker 2: So I say this as a vegan for all the

972
00:49:47,560 --> 00:49:50,000
Speaker 2: people are suddenly mad at me. Well whatever, I don't care.

973
00:49:50,360 --> 00:49:55,880
Speaker 2: So Mussolini did this whole war on pasta thing, and

974
00:49:55,960 --> 00:49:59,960
Speaker 2: he made tons of anti pasta propaganda, and the propaganda

975
00:50:00,440 --> 00:50:03,360
Speaker 2: said it was because it made Italian men soft and lazy.

976
00:50:04,400 --> 00:50:07,640
Speaker 3: Amazing, Oh my god, I wish that's the only thing

977
00:50:07,719 --> 00:50:10,360
Speaker 3: Mussolini would have done like this if this is what

978
00:50:10,480 --> 00:50:12,359
Speaker 3: he was known for, is this is like the man

979
00:50:12,400 --> 00:50:15,000
Speaker 3: who went to war with pasta. History would be just

980
00:50:15,280 --> 00:50:16,759
Speaker 3: ridiculous and not bad.

981
00:50:17,440 --> 00:50:21,680
Speaker 2: Yeah, totally if every far right politician picked one thing

982
00:50:21,760 --> 00:50:24,960
Speaker 2: that only kind of mattered and went after it aggressively.

983
00:50:25,800 --> 00:50:28,439
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's like that meme recently that they had where

984
00:50:28,440 --> 00:50:32,120
Speaker 3: they're like, men, what is the weirdest thing that you've

985
00:50:32,160 --> 00:50:34,600
Speaker 3: been told? Is like too girly? And they were saying,

986
00:50:34,680 --> 00:50:38,840
Speaker 3: like eating salads and the Yeah, so the answer in

987
00:50:38,880 --> 00:50:39,720
Speaker 3: Italy is pasta.

988
00:50:40,400 --> 00:50:48,239
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, totally. The real reason that Mussolini went to

989
00:50:48,280 --> 00:50:52,120
Speaker 2: war against pasta is that he believed in a self

990
00:50:52,200 --> 00:50:56,360
Speaker 2: reliant Italy, and Italy ate so much pasta that it

991
00:50:56,440 --> 00:51:00,200
Speaker 2: relied on grain imports. So the hell with the rest

992
00:51:00,239 --> 00:51:03,000
Speaker 2: of the world. Real Italians eat rice because we can

993
00:51:03,080 --> 00:51:03,400
Speaker 2: grow it.

994
00:51:03,440 --> 00:51:05,800
Speaker 3: Here, make rice pasta.

995
00:51:06,000 --> 00:51:09,560
Speaker 1: It's not somebody who can't eat normal you fucking that's

996
00:51:09,600 --> 00:51:14,360
Speaker 1: what I eat. I can't eat normal pasta, you fucking weirdo.

997
00:51:15,080 --> 00:51:18,759
Speaker 3: God, the fascists like, make a new flag and it's

998
00:51:18,880 --> 00:51:19,560
Speaker 3: just risotto.

999
00:51:20,440 --> 00:51:25,880
Speaker 1: I'm so delicious, God, so weird.

1000
00:51:26,600 --> 00:51:28,520
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think it was like polenta and I

1001
00:51:28,600 --> 00:51:31,640
Speaker 2: spent a little while reading like what they were eating

1002
00:51:31,760 --> 00:51:34,680
Speaker 2: instead of pasta, but it was a rabbit hole that

1003
00:51:34,719 --> 00:51:36,239
Speaker 2: I was like, this is the wrong rabbit hole. But

1004
00:51:36,360 --> 00:51:39,280
Speaker 2: I just love. I love that the fascists hated because

1005
00:51:39,560 --> 00:51:42,840
Speaker 2: they wanted Italy to be a nationalist, self reliant country

1006
00:51:42,960 --> 00:51:46,400
Speaker 2: so much that they attacked one of the primary things that.

1007
00:51:46,760 --> 00:51:49,000
Speaker 3: Italy is no yeah, the thing they're known for.

1008
00:51:49,600 --> 00:51:49,799
Speaker 1: Yeah.

1009
00:51:51,280 --> 00:51:53,240
Speaker 2: As for what the Mundy and I did under fascism

1010
00:51:53,600 --> 00:51:55,640
Speaker 2: and the music of the Partisans, including a bunch of

1011
00:51:55,840 --> 00:51:58,560
Speaker 2: more musical selections, you all are gonna have to wait

1012
00:51:59,239 --> 00:52:02,879
Speaker 2: until part two because this is the end of part one.

1013
00:52:03,880 --> 00:52:06,680
Speaker 2: And Gigi, how are you feeling about the Monday Nay?

1014
00:52:06,760 --> 00:52:09,000
Speaker 2: And also, well, let's start with that.

1015
00:52:10,160 --> 00:52:14,880
Speaker 3: I think they're rad. I basically anyone from history that

1016
00:52:15,160 --> 00:52:18,239
Speaker 3: people were like they're probably sex workers, I probably think

1017
00:52:18,360 --> 00:52:18,719
Speaker 3: is rad.

1018
00:52:18,840 --> 00:52:24,160
Speaker 2: So totally I'm on board with them whether or not

1019
00:52:24,320 --> 00:52:26,600
Speaker 2: they were. It doesn't matter. Both both ways are great.

1020
00:52:26,719 --> 00:52:29,279
Speaker 3: It doesn't matter at all. Like, if anyone's calling you

1021
00:52:29,360 --> 00:52:32,279
Speaker 3: a sex worker, you're rad. That's the GG stamp of

1022
00:52:32,320 --> 00:52:33,440
Speaker 3: approval from history.

1023
00:52:34,200 --> 00:52:37,239
Speaker 2: That's a good. That's a good, like basic starting point

1024
00:52:37,239 --> 00:52:39,600
Speaker 2: about whether or not someone's doing good stuff is whether

1025
00:52:39,680 --> 00:52:41,680
Speaker 2: or not people accuse them of being a sex worker.

1026
00:52:41,680 --> 00:52:43,520
Speaker 3: It really is, or even not good stuff. Like you

1027
00:52:43,600 --> 00:52:46,160
Speaker 3: get women in history who are like extreme villains but

1028
00:52:46,280 --> 00:52:51,920
Speaker 3: doing wildly interesting stuff, and some male historian somewhere has

1029
00:52:52,000 --> 00:52:53,879
Speaker 3: been like, and they were a sex worker.

1030
00:52:54,200 --> 00:52:57,120
Speaker 2: Right, which is interesting because then actual sex workers, if

1031
00:52:57,160 --> 00:52:59,880
Speaker 2: they do other stuff, their sex work gets written out

1032
00:52:59,880 --> 00:53:02,839
Speaker 2: of history, you know, because it's like, well that part

1033
00:53:02,920 --> 00:53:06,080
Speaker 2: isn't nice to talk about. If someone's a hero, their

1034
00:53:06,120 --> 00:53:08,799
Speaker 2: sex work is erased, or it's like, oh, when they

1035
00:53:08,840 --> 00:53:11,120
Speaker 2: were young, they really briefly did this one thing and

1036
00:53:11,160 --> 00:53:13,360
Speaker 2: don't worry. It was just the legal kind or you know,

1037
00:53:13,440 --> 00:53:14,080
Speaker 2: whatever it was.

1038
00:53:14,239 --> 00:53:17,719
Speaker 3: You know, Yeah, it's just to villainize whatever woman you

1039
00:53:17,760 --> 00:53:20,560
Speaker 3: want to villainize, whether she's a villain or not totally.

1040
00:53:21,920 --> 00:53:24,719
Speaker 2: Well, if people want to villainize you by reading your

1041
00:53:24,760 --> 00:53:27,080
Speaker 2: books and then realizing that how did they make it

1042
00:53:27,120 --> 00:53:28,920
Speaker 2: this far into the podcast? If they're far right? But

1043
00:53:29,080 --> 00:53:31,520
Speaker 2: if they want to read your books, what are some

1044
00:53:31,640 --> 00:53:31,920
Speaker 2: of them?

1045
00:53:32,800 --> 00:53:35,080
Speaker 3: Well, and if you have someone who is far right

1046
00:53:35,120 --> 00:53:36,800
Speaker 3: and you hate them, you can buy them my books

1047
00:53:36,840 --> 00:53:38,719
Speaker 3: and I will really enjoy the review that they give

1048
00:53:38,800 --> 00:53:42,800
Speaker 3: me afterward, but they can find me and my books

1049
00:53:42,840 --> 00:53:47,279
Speaker 3: at Gggriffiths dot com. And my latest release is called

1050
00:53:47,360 --> 00:53:49,520
Speaker 3: We Are the Beasts and it is based on the

1051
00:53:50,040 --> 00:53:53,160
Speaker 3: unsolved mystery of the Beast of Jebdon, which was a

1052
00:53:53,719 --> 00:53:59,640
Speaker 3: unknown creature that attacked between one hundred and two hundred shepherdesses,

1053
00:54:00,320 --> 00:54:04,640
Speaker 3: young people in the French countryside in early modern France.

1054
00:54:05,239 --> 00:54:09,120
Speaker 2: WHOA, Okay, Well, I liked the title and I liked

1055
00:54:09,200 --> 00:54:11,040
Speaker 2: the description, but I like this part of the description

1056
00:54:11,120 --> 00:54:14,640
Speaker 2: even more so I'm going to probably read it and

1057
00:54:14,760 --> 00:54:16,319
Speaker 2: so you all should too.

1058
00:54:17,360 --> 00:54:17,480
Speaker 4: Oh.

1059
00:54:17,560 --> 00:54:20,279
Speaker 3: Can I also plug a book I read recently that

1060
00:54:20,440 --> 00:54:23,320
Speaker 3: was amazing called The Sapling Cage by Margaret Kiljoy.

1061
00:54:23,560 --> 00:54:28,319
Speaker 2: Oh interesting? Oh yeah, thanks. Oh, I have a new book.

1062
00:54:28,480 --> 00:54:30,720
Speaker 2: It's called The Sapling Cage. What do you got, Sophie.

1063
00:54:31,680 --> 00:54:34,319
Speaker 2: It's still so wild to me that you put out

1064
00:54:34,320 --> 00:54:35,239
Speaker 2: another book this year.

1065
00:54:35,320 --> 00:54:37,400
Speaker 1: First of all, it's so.

1066
00:54:37,600 --> 00:54:41,040
Speaker 3: Good too, it was beautiful. I want to plug.

1067
00:54:41,480 --> 00:54:43,279
Speaker 1: I want to plug sixteenth Bit of Fame hosted by

1068
00:54:43,360 --> 00:54:46,600
Speaker 1: Jamie Loftis. She just put out a big series on

1069
00:54:46,880 --> 00:54:50,279
Speaker 1: the Manosphere that everyone should listen to. It is fantastic

1070
00:54:50,400 --> 00:54:51,320
Speaker 1: journalism and writing.

1071
00:54:52,200 --> 00:54:54,399
Speaker 2: Oh and I also want to plug. Jamie Loftis from

1072
00:54:54,440 --> 00:54:58,960
Speaker 2: the year twenty fifty four has sent us communications about

1073
00:54:59,000 --> 00:55:02,000
Speaker 2: what's going on in the dyne War, and her and

1074
00:55:02,080 --> 00:55:04,200
Speaker 2: I in twenty fifty four have been covering that as

1075
00:55:04,239 --> 00:55:06,040
Speaker 2: well as the rest of the cool Zone team that

1076
00:55:06,120 --> 00:55:08,120
Speaker 2: you can check out on this very I guess on

1077
00:55:08,160 --> 00:55:09,880
Speaker 2: this feed you probably already knew about it, but in

1078
00:55:09,960 --> 00:55:12,640
Speaker 2: case you didn't, it's every Sunday on cool Zone Media

1079
00:55:12,680 --> 00:55:15,040
Speaker 2: book Club. If you stop listening to book Club, well

1080
00:55:15,080 --> 00:55:18,160
Speaker 2: you should start listening again because there's dinosaurs now and

1081
00:55:18,520 --> 00:55:19,520
Speaker 2: we'll see you all on Wednesday.

1082
00:55:25,160 --> 00:55:27,600
Speaker 1: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of

1083
00:55:27,680 --> 00:55:30,759
Speaker 1: cool Zone Media. For more podcasts and cool Zone Media,

1084
00:55:30,920 --> 00:55:34,120
Speaker 1: visit our website Foolzonemedia dot com or check us out

1085
00:55:34,280 --> 00:55:37,600
Speaker 1: on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get

1086
00:55:37,680 --> 00:55:38,400
Speaker 1: your podcasts.