Speaker 1: Cool Media.
Speaker 2: Hey, everybody, Robert here, it is the end of the year.
Speaker 2: You're cooling down from a Christmas, you know, still probably
Speaker 2: finishing up pie and other goodies that you got. I
Speaker 2: hope you had a good one. We're all bracing for
Speaker 2: the new year to come. Behind the Bastards is of
Speaker 2: course continuing to publish as we normally do around this
Speaker 2: time of year, but we've also got some specials for
Speaker 2: you from elsewhere in our network. And today we have
Speaker 2: collected two great episodes from Cool People Who Did Cool
Speaker 2: Stuff about all of the people who tried to kill
Speaker 2: Benito Mussolini. This is with the great Margaret Killjoy. I
Speaker 2: think it is very fitting for the end of this year.
Speaker 3: Hello, and welcome to Cool People Did Cool Stuff. We're
Speaker 3: back in case you noticed we weren't here, but now
Speaker 3: we're here. The we in this case is me Murder Killjoy,
Speaker 3: and my producer Sophie Hi Sophie by Pie, and my
Speaker 3: guest Robert Evans Hi Magpie.
Speaker 2: I listened to when I was buying Hey today, right
Speaker 2: before this, I went to go get hay for my
Speaker 2: livestock at the feed store and they were playing that
Speaker 2: song Brandy, And so now I am in my head
Speaker 2: remixing that song instead of being about a woman whose
Speaker 2: lover dies at sea, to be about you making podcasts excellent.
Speaker 3: Well, we can make hay from that one time Robert
Speaker 3: and I went and got hey, and it was the
Speaker 3: first time in a little while at my pickup truck
Speaker 3: got to be a pickup truck. Besides well, I guess
Speaker 3: it was a camper. Actually, we filled my camper full
Speaker 3: of hay, is what happened. Yes, And it took me
Speaker 3: a long time to get all the hay out.
Speaker 2: It does take a long time to get all the
Speaker 2: hay out, Yeah, but.
Speaker 3: It was worth it because then the goats got to
Speaker 3: eat hay, and the goats love hay.
Speaker 4: So, speaking of this week, speaking of saying hey, oh,
Speaker 4: we should say hey to Rory, who's our audio engineer?
Speaker 3: Hi Rory, Hi, riight, hy Rory? And our theme musical
Speaker 3: was written for us by unwoman and for no particular reason,
Speaker 3: not at all. I actually genuinely picked the subject and
Speaker 3: started researching it before the activities that happened last week.
Speaker 4: You did like like I can vouch for you.
Speaker 3: And I'm glad you don't Belee, don't to vouch for
Speaker 3: me in court about it.
Speaker 4: I'm just but but I would, and it would I
Speaker 4: would be truthful. I have like documentation full.
Speaker 3: It's true because the thing we're going to talk about,
Speaker 3: Robert Evans, have you ever heard of people trying to
Speaker 3: assassinate people that they don't like.
Speaker 2: No assassinations. No one would ever do such a thing.
Speaker 2: No one would ever do such a thing and then
Speaker 2: have it immediately cause Blue Cross Blue Shield to reverse
Speaker 2: the policy on denying claims arbitrarily when the surgery takes
Speaker 2: too long to pay for anesthetic. That would never happen.
Speaker 3: No, there's not a whole saying about direct action gets
Speaker 3: the goods. You all are listening to this in the
Speaker 3: future where the knock on effects will have become more clear.
Speaker 3: But right now we know very We only know one
Speaker 3: knock on effect of last week.
Speaker 2: Which is, if you've got Blue Cross, you now have
Speaker 2: to be less worried about getting surgery.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and waking up in the middle of surgery, which
Speaker 3: is basically everyone's nightmare.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Literally, that is.
Speaker 4: So like, so many people have that fear and that
Speaker 4: it's gulish. Yeah, so grulish. It's so gross.
Speaker 3: Well, the person that we're going to talk about attempting
Speaker 3: to assassinate in the past who's already dead is a
Speaker 3: little fascist he might have heard of named Mussolini.
Speaker 2: Mussolini, I hardly know Leini, Okay, pass and it's not
Speaker 2: gonna work.
Speaker 3: Sorry, Mussolini. Originally this was going to be a two
Speaker 3: parter where one part was the people who tried when
Speaker 3: Mussolini was coming up, and then the second part was
Speaker 3: going to be people who succeeded when he was coming down.
Speaker 3: But it's actually all going to be about people who
Speaker 3: tried when he was coming up because there were so
Speaker 3: many Did you know that an awful lot of people
Speaker 3: tried to kill Mussolini?
Speaker 2: Yes, I mean it's like with Hitler, right, Like you've
Speaker 2: got that guy who tried to blow him up and
Speaker 2: that and almost did that fucking carpenter who tried to
Speaker 2: blow him up in one of the halls. He was
Speaker 2: speaking at all sorts of pre attempts. So I wasn't
Speaker 2: really familiar with the ones on Mussolini, but I was
Speaker 2: sure there had been some.
Speaker 3: We're going to talk about I think eight of them
Speaker 3: today or this week.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that sounds like the right them ount Yeah.
Speaker 3: And so far by my account, I was counting. Right
Speaker 3: before I recorded, I was talking to one of my
Speaker 3: friends about it. So far, by my account, we've got
Speaker 3: one socialist, one Catholic, one Republican, and five anarchists attempted
Speaker 3: to kill Mussolini. So Benito Mussolini is famously one of
Speaker 3: the founders of fascism. The ideology that is genuinely and
Speaker 3: truly bad. That ninety five percent of the people on
Speaker 3: this planet agree is bad. We just don't agree about
Speaker 3: what counts as fascism.
Speaker 2: Yes, that's part of the problem.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, it doesn't help that. I mean, because some
Speaker 3: people use fascism to just being anyone I don't like
Speaker 3: or any authoritarianism, right, and that's not an accurate way
Speaker 3: to talk about things. We shouldn't call our enemies fascists
Speaker 3: when they're not fascists.
Speaker 2: Now, like Stalin wasn't really a fascist, No, because in
Speaker 2: part fascists come to power through popular acclaim as a
Speaker 2: result of like setting themselves up in opposition to the left.
Speaker 2: There's this also idea that Stalin does kind of fit
Speaker 2: in with the attitude that like the fascist dictator embodies
Speaker 2: the people in some way, although the way in which
Speaker 2: like Soviet propaganda talk about Stalin was actually quite different
Speaker 2: from the way fascist propaganda tends to talk about the
Speaker 2: leader being like an embodiment of the people. But yeah,
Speaker 2: there are some similarities, like there's a bunch of stuff.
Speaker 2: Syncretism is a big part. Go read your umburdo.
Speaker 3: Echo. Well, there's gonna be a bunch of emburdos in
Speaker 3: this episode, but not Echo. Yeah, but it turns out
Speaker 3: on Birdo is sort of the mic of Italy. Well, yeah,
Speaker 3: mcla is probably the mic of Italy. But fascism is
Speaker 3: one of the most convoluted and complex political ideologies to
Speaker 3: ever come about, which is one of the reasons why
Speaker 3: you can kind of point to anything and call it
Speaker 3: fascism and be wrong, but also be like, you see
Speaker 3: where you're coming from about it, you know, because it's
Speaker 3: not actually a simple ideology. The more as I was
Speaker 3: reading this, because Italian fascism in particular comes out of
Speaker 3: where they're right and the left meet, and it is
Speaker 3: not a Well we'll talk about this. I'm not going
Speaker 3: to get too deep into the weeds of defining fascism today,
Speaker 3: but I want to talk first about someone who one
Speaker 3: hundred percent absolutely I am certain would have been fine
Speaker 3: with assassinating someone like Benito Mussolini. About fifteen years before
Speaker 3: Benito Mussolini came to power. That man who would have
Speaker 3: been totally fine with killing Benito Mussolini was Benito Mussolini.
Speaker 2: Oh because well yeah, yeah, I know that makes sense.
Speaker 3: Yeah, to open up a can of orbs that the
Speaker 3: Internet is not equipped to handle. Benito Mussolini, the founder
Speaker 3: of the world's deadliest far right ideology, started on the left.
Speaker 2: Yep, he sure did. Uh kind of adjacent to anarchism.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we're going to talk about that. There's gonna be
Speaker 3: a lot of also started as a journalist, hooray. Uh yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: he was a socialist for a long ass time. He
Speaker 3: was at least a second generation leftist. Mussolini was born
Speaker 3: in the year eighteen eighty three and he was the
Speaker 3: child of a blacksmith socialist and a Catholic school teacher.
Speaker 3: He got named after a series of socialists and leftists
Speaker 3: because of his father, and then he was baptized Catholic
Speaker 3: because of his mom. He's named Benito after Benito Juarez,
Speaker 3: the liberal president of Mexico, and his middle names, which
Speaker 3: I forgot to look up in a Italian are Andrea
Speaker 3: and Amalakare And these are after two anarchists because his
Speaker 3: father was part of the Anarchist International, which was an
Speaker 3: anti authoritarian socialist organization in the eighteen seventies. I'm just
Speaker 3: going straight into the like the this is like when
Speaker 3: I have to talk about eugenics on this show, you know,
Speaker 3: whenever I have to talk about something that was like
Speaker 3: really common and easily understood in the nineteenth century, that
Speaker 3: makes no sense in the twenty first century. Italian nationalism
Speaker 3: is really intertwined with the left, and it's really intertwined
Speaker 3: with anarchism.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that, I mean it makes sense when you're
Speaker 2: coming out of a world well not very long before
Speaker 2: this period, Italy had been fucking Habsburg property. Much of
Speaker 2: Italy at least had been Habsburg property, right, and when
Speaker 2: all of these things that we now just see is like, well,
Speaker 2: obviously Italy is a country, obviously Croatia is a country.
Speaker 2: When they're all the property of some guy in his
Speaker 2: inbred family, it's a lot less weird that it's a
Speaker 2: left wing position to talk about nationalism.
Speaker 3: Yeah, totally. Benito Mussolini never did really roll with the anarchists.
Speaker 3: He kind of wanted to at different points. When he
Speaker 3: was a socialist, he was firmly in the authoritarian socialist camp,
Speaker 3: but he studied a lot of anarchist theory. He remained
Speaker 3: friendly with anarchists. He was either dating or just friends with.
Speaker 3: I've read both the anarchist orientalist poet named Lyda Rafanelli.
Speaker 3: He translated two of the anarchist Peter Kropotkin's books from
Speaker 3: French into Italian. And because yeah, he was journalists. He
Speaker 3: read newspapers and kind of if you were a political
Speaker 3: person in the nineteenth century, if you were like a
Speaker 3: political leader, your thing was that you were a journalist.
Speaker 3: Your thing is that you read a newspaper.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean it's the same, it's the same. Reason
Speaker 2: is that with the generation coming up and the next
Speaker 2: generation are all going to get their starts on TikTok
Speaker 2: and Twitter, and like we're already seeing this on the right, right,
Speaker 2: I mean in the left to a degree. You know,
Speaker 2: it's because that totally that's not the journalism. Tweeting is
Speaker 2: not or making a TikTok is not journalism. But journalism
Speaker 2: wasn't what we would consider journalism back then. It was
Speaker 2: just the best way of getting propaganda to the masses.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and it was. Yeah, you wrote polemics, and propaganda
Speaker 3: just literally meant propagating ideas. If you had an idea
Speaker 3: and you want to have to tell people about it,
Speaker 3: you would propagandize the idea. So Mussolini, the thing that's
Speaker 3: going to come up throughout this week's story is that
Speaker 3: he's clearly into authoritarianism, right, but there's something he liked
Speaker 3: about the anarchists. He liked their courage, he liked their commitment,
Speaker 3: and he liked action. You know, he was He wasn't
Speaker 3: the kind of guy who wanted people to wait around
Speaker 3: and talk about things. He wanted people to go out
Speaker 3: and do things. He also, for a long time shared
Speaker 3: their opinion that killing autocrats was just fine.
Speaker 2: I mean, look, there's a Vin diagram. We do may
Speaker 2: not like to say it, but like there's a Vin diagram.
Speaker 2: It points between me and Mussolini's life. Right, No, totally,
Speaker 2: I'm not against killing early twentieth century autocrats theoretically.
Speaker 3: Right, yeah, totally. Yeah, if we had a time machine,
Speaker 3: we would feel justified in going back and killing absolute
Speaker 3: monarchs from the nineteenth century and earlier.
Speaker 2: Look, if I could go back in time and stab
Speaker 2: the King of Italy.
Speaker 3: I would try to Well, that's going to bring us
Speaker 3: to this week's first assassin, is it the guy who
Speaker 3: stabbed the King of Italy? I actually can't remember whether
Speaker 3: this guy stabbed or shot him. This is the first Okay,
Speaker 3: this is the only successful assassin we're going to talk
Speaker 3: about for a while. But he shaped a lot of
Speaker 3: Italy's politics for a long time. And that man's name
Speaker 3: was Gaetano Breshi. He was a weaver from Italy who
Speaker 3: emigrated to the US in the nineteenth century to Patterson,
Speaker 3: New Jersey. And it's kind of funny because there's all
Speaker 3: of these different hidden, secret anarchist strongholds of the past.
Speaker 3: I don't normally think about New Jersey when I think
Speaker 3: about anarchism, but yeah, Addison, New Jersey very strong Italian
Speaker 3: anarchist scene. The next little bit, because it's been a
Speaker 3: little while since I've looked up Gatana Brescia. I used
Speaker 3: to write about him a lot, so I'm kind of
Speaker 3: going into a little bit story mode when I talk
Speaker 3: about Gatana Breshci. I'm gonna have more direct sources for
Speaker 3: the rest of the rest of the people. I'm gonna
Speaker 3: talk about. So everyone knows Katana Breshi was hanging out
Speaker 3: in New Jersey with his Irish wife, Sophie, which is
Speaker 3: a good name, I agree, right, yeah, and his two daughters,
Speaker 3: and she's gonna be all right in this story. Cool.
Speaker 4: Yeah, okay, cool, don't don't bring the name down.
Speaker 3: Yeah no, no, she's great. No, no negative notes on Sophie.
Speaker 3: In eighteen ninety eight, there are these food riots in
Speaker 3: Italy and the government was like, well, a specific general
Speaker 3: is like, why don't we just murder the entire crowd
Speaker 3: that's rioting, And so they did that, and we will
Speaker 3: think food riots, they usually think like, oh, everyone lost
Speaker 3: their mind and was running around and burning things or whatever.
Speaker 3: These were organized strikes that were met with lethal force.
Speaker 3: At least eighty protesters and two soldiers were killed. Jesus
Speaker 3: and so King umberto the first what did he do?
Speaker 3: And everyone at the time was like, oh, the king
Speaker 3: is the true you know. A lot of like populism
Speaker 3: is based on the idea that the government's bad, but
Speaker 3: the king's good, you know, and.
Speaker 2: This translates to fascism too. Right during the Third Reich,
Speaker 2: there was always this idea that like if only Hitler
Speaker 2: knew right about the worst Nazi policies. Yeah yeah, this
Speaker 2: is the same thing with the czar. Yeah yeah, no,
Speaker 2: totally yeah.
Speaker 3: We see this again and again, and so I think
Speaker 3: everyone was kind of expecting Umberto to come in and
Speaker 3: be like, well, he probably shouldn't have done that, right, Oh,
Speaker 3: I did promise you more than one, Imberto, and this
Speaker 3: is one of them. There'sn be another one, probably on Wednesday,
Speaker 3: m But what Umberto the first did is awarded the
Speaker 3: guy who ordered the massacre of Medal of Honor and
Speaker 3: Katano Breshi. He didn't like that. He was living in
Speaker 3: New Jersey with Sophie. He'd started an anarchist paper with
Speaker 3: some folks, and he'd put up a fuck ton of
Speaker 3: money to start that paper. It is like two bucks
Speaker 3: at the time, which is like several thousand dollars now.
Speaker 3: He didn't want anyone else to get in trouble for
Speaker 3: what he decided to do, so he didn't tell anyone.
Speaker 3: He didn't tell Sophie. He just told her he had
Speaker 3: to go deal with some stuff, like family stuff in Italy.
Speaker 3: He didn't tell his comrades. He went into the newspaper
Speaker 3: and said, hey, all that seed money. I put in,
Speaker 3: I need it back now, and they were like why
Speaker 3: and he was like, the not your business, give me
Speaker 3: my money back. And so everyone kind of thought he
Speaker 3: was a sellout and he was just like getting his
Speaker 3: money to go fuck off, right. Everyone thought he left
Speaker 3: the movement. But he got his money back and he
Speaker 3: bought two things. He bought a Smith and Wesson, and
Speaker 3: he bought a one way ticket to Paris.
Speaker 2: That's a song. That's a warren Zevon song right there.
Speaker 2: Smith and Wesson and a one way ticket to Paris. Excellent.
Speaker 3: And the King is gonna die And unlike a lot
Speaker 3: of would be assassins that we've talked about on this show,
Speaker 3: Breshi practiced with the revolver, which is always key.
Speaker 4: Yes.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he made his way probably to Rome. He made
Speaker 3: his way to Italy. He spent two days scouting out
Speaker 3: the area where he knew the King was going to be.
Speaker 3: And then on July twenty ninth, nineteen hundred, he went out.
Speaker 3: He got some ice cream. I think he had lunch
Speaker 3: with like a stranger and just hanging out and he
Speaker 3: was like, you're gonna remember me guy, and then he
Speaker 3: waited for umberto to come through waiting in the crowd
Speaker 3: that was all there to cheer on their you know,
Speaker 3: glorious leader, and uh he shot Umberto to death. The
Speaker 3: crowd immediately grabbed him. Gaetano said, I did not kill Umberto.
Speaker 3: I have killed the king. I have killed a principal.
Speaker 2: Hell oh, oh, that's that's a good line. That's a
Speaker 2: good line.
Speaker 3: Back home in New Jersey, his anarchist friends were like, oh,
Speaker 3: I guess we judged him wrong, and they started a
Speaker 3: fund to look after his kids and support his family.
Speaker 3: His wife came to Italy and testified to his good
Speaker 3: character in court. His whole family was like arrested in
Speaker 3: an investigation into conspiracy, but eventually everyone was let go,
Speaker 3: and Italy, under a king was actually had a more
Speaker 3: fair criminal justice system than the United States does today.
Speaker 3: They didn't have the death penalty. Musolini's going to bring
Speaker 3: that back later, so he gets life in prison. He
Speaker 3: was held in solitary confinement. He had one hour a
Speaker 3: day of exercises, like feet were like manacled to the floor.
Speaker 3: They didn't treat him great. Less than a year later
Speaker 3: he was found hanging in his cell, and modern historians
Speaker 3: are recentably certain he was murdered. At the time, everyone's like, nah,
Speaker 3: I just killed himself. Interestingly enough, this assassination didn't bring
Speaker 3: in sweeping reactionary forces or anything like usually people are like, ah,
Speaker 3: you killed the king and something worse is going to happen.
Speaker 3: This changed things, but it the existing like kind of
Speaker 3: leftist government stayed in power, and things kind of chugged along. Okay,
Speaker 3: it didn't even lead to they like crack down on
Speaker 3: the anarchist movement, but they didn't come through and destroy it.
Speaker 3: It did lead to more international cooperation between law enforcement.
Speaker 3: When I first started dreaming up this show years ago,
Speaker 3: it was kind of in a different context and I
Speaker 3: wanted to talk about anarchist history and I was like,
Speaker 3: you know, they literally invented international policing to stop us.
Speaker 3: Why are all of our books boring? Has been my
Speaker 3: like go to tagline because they did. International policing exists
Speaker 3: because of trying to stop the anarchist movement. Because yep,
Speaker 3: nothing gets people to work together, Like like when people
Speaker 3: go around and kill like poor people, everyone's like, oh,
Speaker 3: that sucks. Whatever. When people go around and kill kings,
Speaker 3: kings work together to make sure that that stops.
Speaker 2: Yeah, No, kings are great at like really union behave
Speaker 2: they really work like unions royalty.
Speaker 3: Yeah, when when someone comes for them as a class,
Speaker 3: they band together.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: One person who defended Gaetano Breshi doing a little king
Speaker 3: murder was a man by the name of Benito Mussolini.
Speaker 3: His fellow socialists were claiming Bresci was crazy for having
Speaker 3: killed the king.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 3: Mussolini said that tarrann Aside was quote the occupational hazard
Speaker 3: of being a king, which I don't know I.
Speaker 2: Mean talking about occupational hazards. Yeah, I feel confident saying
Speaker 2: that being a king is a pre existing condition.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, totally. But what isn't a pre existing No,
Speaker 3: But what else we're obliged to do is play ads
Speaker 3: for you now, Yeah, like these ones and we're back.
Speaker 3: Now this might shock you, Robert, did you know mus
Speaker 3: didn't stay leftist? Really?
Speaker 2: Now? I thought you were talking about Binny Mussolini, the
Speaker 2: man who invented the three day weekend.
Speaker 3: Well, I was reading a whole bunch on on that
Speaker 3: website X about how actually the fascists or socialists and leftists.
Speaker 2: You're, of course referring to the website that just plays
Speaker 2: a looping video of the song X Gonna give It
Speaker 2: to You. That's where I get all of my historical
Speaker 2: information about anarchists in the early nineteen hundreds as well.
Speaker 3: Yes, uh huh, yeah, my ex feet is certainly playing
Speaker 3: looping videos of something right now. And so Mussolini was
Speaker 3: kicked out of the Socialist Party because he supported interventionism,
Speaker 3: he supported Italy fighting in World War One, and along
Speaker 3: the way he started developing his theories on fascism, which
Speaker 3: was basically, what if you took revolutionary socialism and then
Speaker 3: replaced it with revolutionary nationalism. Instead of class solidarity, you
Speaker 3: had national solidarity. What if you made all of the
Speaker 3: poor people suck up to the rich people and then
Speaker 3: defend the nation as a concept the leftist trappings and
Speaker 3: some of the leftists strategies, but with right wing goals
Speaker 3: because at the time, right wing was just like the
Speaker 3: status quo. Right if you defend like the monarchy or whatever,
Speaker 3: your right wing, so there's nothing really revolutionary about it.
Speaker 3: But fascism was like, no, but we want the revolution
Speaker 3: and we want to like feel cool and edgy, but
Speaker 3: we also want to we really like the taste of boots,
Speaker 3: and so we're going to become fascists and invent this
Speaker 3: new ideology. For a few years, a lot of politics
Speaker 3: in Italy was happening in the streets, fascist versus anti
Speaker 3: fascists fighting it out, and for a good several years,
Speaker 3: Mussolini tried to make common cause with the anarchists, specifically
Speaker 3: to join him against the socialists and the communists. After all,
Speaker 3: this is the period where the Bolsheviks and Russia were
Speaker 3: murdering anarchists on Moss and so some folks there's a
Speaker 3: chance that Mussolini even going to go anarchists during this time.
Speaker 3: I actually don't buy it, but I read one person
Speaker 3: making this argument. He actually risked alienating his base with
Speaker 3: how much he appreciated the anarchists. Interesting because his base
Speaker 3: was like, no, those are the people we just go
Speaker 3: fight in the streets. But Mussolini kind of admires their commitment, right,
Speaker 3: and the anarchists don't want him. Mussolini said, quote, we
Speaker 3: are always ready to admire men who are willing to
Speaker 3: die for a faith they believe in selflessly. And this
Speaker 3: came contrasting the anarchists to the cowardly socialists. The anarchists,
Speaker 3: in so many words, told him to eat shit and die.
Speaker 3: They refuse his overtures again and again, and soon enough
Speaker 3: they're going to try really really hard to just outright
Speaker 3: kill this man. The most famous Italian anarchist then and
Speaker 3: now is this guy named Erico Malatesta. He's popped into
Speaker 3: a bunch of our stories on the show, like when
Speaker 3: comrades got him to Argentina by smuggling him in a
Speaker 3: crate of sewing machines, and then he helped the Baker's
Speaker 3: Union there become the most radical union in that country,
Speaker 3: and the model that all the other unions rush to follow.
Speaker 3: And how today in Argentina there are still pastries named
Speaker 3: by the anarchist Bakers, like little books and little bombs.
Speaker 3: I really like Malatesta. He's always in and out of jail.
Speaker 3: He's an older fellow now, I think he's in his
Speaker 3: sixties at this point that we're talking about. And while
Speaker 3: he's in prison in Italy, there's a huge campaign to
Speaker 3: free him, and who supports that campaign but Benito Mussolini,
Speaker 3: even though his followers are fighting the anarchists in the
Speaker 3: streets during this time, Malatesta gets out and he can't
Speaker 3: get any paper for his newspapers because of political pressure.
Speaker 3: Against him, and Mussolini offers him paper to print on
Speaker 3: and Mala Testa is like no, what No, So Mussolini
Speaker 3: keeps trying to be friends with them. But some anarchists
Speaker 3: and folks from every ideology did turn fascist, right, because
Speaker 3: you can't have a new ideology without starting with people
Speaker 3: who used to have other ideologies. An awful lot of
Speaker 3: anarchists turn fascist. Orwell has a really good essay about this.
Speaker 3: George Orwell has a really good essay about this called
Speaker 3: Notes on Nationalism that basically lays out the case that
Speaker 3: a lot of political extremists are into extremism, not the
Speaker 3: idea that the extremism is attached to. So you get
Speaker 3: people going from the radical left to the radical right
Speaker 3: reasonably often. And this unfortunately ties into the first time
Speaker 3: that I've found of someone trying to kill Mussolini. Some
Speaker 3: anarchists got together in nineteen twenty one, before Mussolini ever
Speaker 3: even took formal power. He does that nineteen twenty two,
Speaker 3: and they're like, all right, we got to kill this guy.
Speaker 3: They delegated one among their number, a man named Biaggio Massi,
Speaker 3: to go kill Mussolini. Instead, Biaggio went to Mussolini and
Speaker 3: told him the whole plan. Mussolini protected him, and then
Speaker 3: the very next day, because Mussolini is just being I
Speaker 3: don't know, connin or whatever, yeah, goes and gives a
Speaker 3: speech about how the government needs to really release malat Testa, right,
Speaker 3: even though he has just learned the anarchists or trying
Speaker 3: to kill him. He's a forty chess kind of man,
Speaker 3: this Mussolini.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, unfortunately he is.
Speaker 4: He was.
Speaker 2: I mean, one thing you learned about Mussolini and all
Speaker 2: these guys, the exception of Franco, who unfortunately kept a
Speaker 2: pretty good grip on his rationality throughout his life, is
Speaker 2: most of them are a lot more cunning and better
Speaker 2: at planning before they get into power. And it's almost
Speaker 2: like power damages your brain in a way that makes
Speaker 2: you less capable of like clamping down on your own
Speaker 2: worse impulses and analyzing things logically.
Speaker 3: That makes sense to me. There's also this thing where
Speaker 3: people are always like Mussolini's like the little brother of Hitler,
Speaker 3: you know, and he's kind of a joke because Italy's
Speaker 3: military might is not the same as Germany's. Right, Mussolini
Speaker 3: pulled off something pretty incredible, like terrible evil, but like
Speaker 3: he did become dictator of a major country. That is
Speaker 3: like a hard thing to do.
Speaker 2: I mean, I think I could become dictator of Italy. Yeah, no,
Speaker 2: I know, but you get you give me six months, Margaret, Okay,
Speaker 2: six months and a lot of pizza pies. If we
Speaker 2: know anything about our Italians, Uh, Pizza Hut. Pizza Hut's
Speaker 2: probably fine.
Speaker 3: I really like the pizza in Italy.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I like how every country, not every country, but most
Speaker 3: countries I've been to, the American version of their national
Speaker 3: food is hard to get vegan, but in the country
Speaker 3: that I'm in, it's actually reasonably easy. Like it's really
Speaker 3: easy to just go into any train station in Aley
Speaker 3: and buy vegan pizza.
Speaker 2: You could feel about how this however you want, but
Speaker 2: undeniably like one of the most intense flexes in the
Speaker 2: history of international conflict is when the US had the
Speaker 2: former premiere of the Soviet Union become a spokesman for
Speaker 2: Pizza Hut. Like it's just such a wow. Well I guess, yeah,
Speaker 2: I guess you guys lost that God with Jesus Jesus.
Speaker 3: So Mussolini comes to power in October nineteen twenty two. First,
Speaker 3: as the prime minister, there's something that's like, not not
Speaker 3: a coup. I mean it's not a coup, but it's
Speaker 3: also not not a coup. Right, thirty thousand of his
Speaker 3: black Shirts, his personal army, marched on Rome. In the
Speaker 3: March on Rome. The liberal government was like, hey, let's
Speaker 3: declare martial law to stop this, but then the king
Speaker 3: was like, no, let's just put that guy in charge instead.
Speaker 3: Mussolini immediately helped out the rich people. He was not
Speaker 3: a fucking leftist at this point. Immediately helped out all
Speaker 3: the rich people, centralized power, and just was a right
Speaker 3: wing shit bag. By nineteen twenty four he was like, look,
Speaker 3: there's not a democracy anymore. Okay, it's just fascism, and
Speaker 3: Italy became fascist and people didn't really like that. There
Speaker 3: are some occupational hazards to be in a dictator. First,
Speaker 3: and most famous at the time but not the most
Speaker 3: famous now, was a socialist politician named Tito Zanaboni. And
Speaker 3: don't worry. If you're like, hey, that sounds like Zamboni
Speaker 3: and you think that's clever, don't worry. There's two Zamboni's later. Okay, okay,
Speaker 3: but this one's Xanaboni.
Speaker 2: This is not a serious country. Look, I know we're
Speaker 2: talking about serious things, but Italy, I just I'm sorry,
Speaker 2: it's just not.
Speaker 3: One time I was in Italy and my friend took
Speaker 3: me to like her very nice apartment in oh I
Speaker 3: don't remember which city. I was on tour for like
Speaker 3: a month, and I went to a bunch of cities
Speaker 3: and she was like, looks out, and I'm like, how
Speaker 3: do you afford this like amazing, fantastic place. And she
Speaker 3: goes to the window and points down to this like
Speaker 3: public square right outside, and she's like, that's where the
Speaker 3: mafia assassinate, like executes people in public. No one wants
Speaker 3: to live here.
Speaker 2: I mean, shit, you could do that in front of
Speaker 2: my ass if I could have paid like, you know,
Speaker 2: thirty percent less. Absolutely, Look, I'm not going I'm not
Speaker 2: getting involved with the mafia. They got no reason to
Speaker 2: be pissed at me. Yeah, I don't see shit.
Speaker 3: Yeah you stay here?
Speaker 2: Gunshots at night? I don't know what you're talking about. Yeah, MafA, what.
Speaker 3: Most of the places that have been really nice, that
Speaker 3: like have been aesthetically really nice that I can afford
Speaker 3: to live in, have had gunshots outside at night. Yeah,
Speaker 3: that's true.
Speaker 2: I mean I have twice been coming home to my
Speaker 2: house when someone has a couple of blocks away been
Speaker 2: shooting it out with the police.
Speaker 3: Yeah. You know, a nice place to live, A nice
Speaker 3: place to live, and like, I'm not the police, so
Speaker 3: I'm not worried again.
Speaker 2: Shot, I'm not the police. These people have no reason
Speaker 2: to be angry at me.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So before we talk about Tito, we're gonna talk about
Speaker 3: another Italian socialist politician, Jacomo Mattiatodi Madia Maddiodi.
Speaker 5: And best friend Buca di Beppo Tacoma Maddio Maddieodi was
Speaker 5: a socialist politician who tried repeatedly to expose most Mussolinian
Speaker 5: fascism for what were After he published a book against
Speaker 5: the fascists and accused them of fraud the fascists, who
Speaker 5: were certainly people of action.
Speaker 3: On June tenth, nineteen twenty four, Jacomo was kidnapped by
Speaker 3: the Fascist secret police, who stabbed him to death with
Speaker 3: a carpenter's file. I believe in the car. This wasn't
Speaker 3: a lot of ways the thing that paved the way
Speaker 3: for Mussolini to declare himself dictator. I'm going to oversimplify
Speaker 3: this dangerously. But after a lot of handwringing and investigations
Speaker 3: and castigations of the fascists for this kind of thing,
Speaker 3: eventually Mussolini was like, look, I'm a fascist, though, I'm
Speaker 3: in charge, and we're going to stab people to death
Speaker 3: with Carpenter's files, and you're just going to deal with it.
Speaker 3: This had an enormous amount of knock on effects. One
Speaker 3: of them was that this other socialist politician, Tito Zanaboni,
Speaker 3: he got real mad. He had been part of the
Speaker 3: search efforts to find his friend. Before that, he'd been
Speaker 3: part of signing a peace treaty between the socialists and
Speaker 3: the fascists. But after they killed his friend, Oh yeah,
Speaker 3: the socialist sign of peace treaty of the fascists. I
Speaker 3: think that after I talk about all the like anarchists
Speaker 3: who became fascists and stuff, it's worth pointing out the
Speaker 3: socialist sign of peace treaty with the fascists. After they
Speaker 3: killed his friend, He's like, all right, fuck this, we
Speaker 3: gotta shoot this guy. And he and his friends conspired
Speaker 3: to kill Massolini. Tito is a war hero, so he
Speaker 3: got a precision rifle and he set himself up to
Speaker 3: station himself in a window to shoot Mussolini from far away.
Speaker 3: But among his co conspirators was an informant. So Tito
Speaker 3: and actually a general in the army and the Italian
Speaker 3: Army were both sent to prison. I think they got
Speaker 3: the maximum sentence, which was thirty years. At the time, great,
Speaker 3: the United Socialist Party was no more. In court, Tito
Speaker 3: used the same defense as most of Mussolini's would be
Speaker 3: assassins used later, which is the defense of yeah, but
Speaker 3: fuck Mussolini, though somebody should shoot him. M h just
Speaker 3: you know, not always the best way to get off
Speaker 3: in court, but like, looks good in history books.
Speaker 2: Yeah, looks good. I mean there's right around this time
Speaker 2: the case of Sagam Montalurian, who Berlin jury decided like,
Speaker 2: oh no, no, it was totally fine that he assassinated
Speaker 2: that guy who did a genocide. Oh yeah, politician.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we covered this one on the Armenian Genocide episode. Yeah.
Speaker 2: I'm just saying, everybody who might wind up in a
Speaker 2: court in New York start looking up jury nullifications right now.
Speaker 3: Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 4: So.
Speaker 3: Tito is released in nineteen forty three when the Fascist
Speaker 3: government fell, which is the other thing that comes up
Speaker 3: a lot is that revolutionaries or in this case, I
Speaker 3: mean it wasn't even a revolutionary, as a politician who
Speaker 3: was like, yeah, but other politicians shouldn't murder people, you know,
Speaker 3: And people go to jail for a really long time.
Speaker 3: Right wing governments often fall, and if you can stay
Speaker 3: alive in jail long enough, you'll be free again. But
Speaker 3: someone else was directly inspired by the death of Jacamo Mattiot.
Speaker 3: One of my favorite strange and misunderstood assassins in history,
Speaker 3: Violet Gibson. Have you heard of I feel like that
Speaker 3: there's one I've heard the name.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: If there's one assassin, people have probably heard of Violet Gibson.
Speaker 3: This is the most widely known attempt on his life
Speaker 3: in the modern era because it's the one that makes
Speaker 3: the coolest social media headline.
Speaker 4: Is there like a song?
Speaker 3: There are there's actually there's songs about her, there's documentaries,
Speaker 3: and I.
Speaker 4: Really hope I'm thinking of the right person and also
Speaker 4: sound dumb.
Speaker 3: She was like really short, right, yeah, she's five foot
Speaker 3: one yeah, yeah, okay.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, hell yeah. So I love stories about short
Speaker 2: ladies doing badass. My grandma was like four foot eleven hell.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 2: My grandpa was six ' five and because she was
Speaker 2: so small during World War Two she had a special job.
Speaker 2: They would hold her by her feet and shove her
Speaker 2: inside the wings of P fifty one mustangs so she
Speaker 2: could like weld them up or like you bolting, or
Speaker 2: she was like welding them on the inside. There was
Speaker 2: like an area that needed welds that only the tiniest
Speaker 2: girls could fit.
Speaker 3: Tell yeah fucking rab Yeah.
Speaker 4: As somebody who definitely can't reach things on the top shelf,
Speaker 4: I'm very excited to hear more about Violet.
Speaker 3: Also, the only person who I'm going to talk about
Speaker 3: today who successfully shot the man.
Speaker 4: Well done.
Speaker 2: I mean one of the lessons is that nobody knew
Speaker 2: how to shoot in the past. Yeah, and most people
Speaker 2: don't know how to shoot today.
Speaker 3: Also. Yeah, So Violet Gibson was a forty nine year
Speaker 3: old Irish woman from Dublin who lived in a convent
Speaker 3: in Rome and shot Mussolini in the face on April seventh,
Speaker 3: nineteen twenty six.
Speaker 2: What's not to lot?
Speaker 3: God Ireland stays winning? Yeah, you know, I don't. Mostly
Speaker 3: the part to not like about the story is that
Speaker 3: he turned his head at the last minute. Yeah, he
Speaker 3: didn't die, and she only grazed his nose, but there
Speaker 3: are good pictures of him, like with the like bandage
Speaker 3: on his nose or whatever. There's no comparisons that can
Speaker 3: be made now to the modern world.
Speaker 4: No about people turning their heads.
Speaker 3: Yeah and getting grazed yep mm. The world would have
Speaker 3: been a very different place if he had not turned
Speaker 3: his head yep. Violet Gibson was a thin woman, about
Speaker 3: five foot one. Her father was the Lord Chancellor of Ireland.
Speaker 3: She grew up She's Anglo Irish, right, and she grew.
Speaker 2: Up like oh wow, so her like they're like the
Speaker 2: English landlord yeah type deal, yeah yeah yeah, oh like
Speaker 2: Lawrence of Arabia.
Speaker 3: Yeah, totally and h and like Lawrence of Arabia. She's
Speaker 3: crazy as shit. But people use this to invalidate and
Speaker 3: like claim that her action wasn't political or thought out,
Speaker 3: and that's what I want to argue against. But I
Speaker 3: can't argue against her being crazy at shit, and I'm
Speaker 3: gonna tell you why. But she grew up riches hell.
Speaker 3: She was a debutante, debuted in Queen Victoria's court, which
Speaker 3: I only vaguely understand what is through mostly my friends
Speaker 3: who are from the South, most telling into the store
Speaker 3: come down to I don't know she did it because
Speaker 3: she was crazy. I am going to make the case
Speaker 3: as she did it because she was a politically committed
Speaker 3: Catholic socialist who wanted to do right by God and
Speaker 3: people by killing a man who went on to be
Speaker 3: responsible for millions of deaths, who was also crazy. She
Speaker 3: was always esoteric. She was raised Protestant right Her mother
Speaker 3: became a Christian scientist, and so she herself experimented with
Speaker 3: Christian science, and then she got into Theosophy for a while,
Speaker 3: but then she converted. She found another esoteric religion to
Speaker 3: get involved in Catholicism when she was twenty six, and
Speaker 3: she stayed a Catholic for the rest of her life.
Speaker 3: She was sick all of the time, her body carried
Speaker 3: the scars of many surgeries, and she spent years working
Speaker 3: at various pacifist organizations. The craziest thing she did, which
Speaker 3: is left out of the leftist accounts of her story,
Speaker 3: but it's included in the right wing accounts of her
Speaker 3: story that are like demonizing her, but they're verifiable. I
Speaker 3: believe this happened. So she used to walk around Dublin
Speaker 3: with a Bible in one hand and a knife in
Speaker 3: the other. And I hate to say it, but that
Speaker 3: is that is pretty cool. Oh yeah, no, like, yeah, no,
Speaker 3: she's I would want to meet her, maybe from a distance,
Speaker 3: but I would want to meet her.
Speaker 6: I would want to like observe her from from a
Speaker 6: safe distance. Yeeah, yeah exactly. She talked all the time
Speaker 6: about the necessity of mortifying the flesh, which is normally
Speaker 6: about like killing the urge to sin, but she seemed
Speaker 6: to want to kill. Was that was part of her
Speaker 6: way of understanding that particular doctrine. Around nineteen twenty, she
Speaker 6: attacked a young woman with a knife, cutting the woman's
Speaker 6: face and hands. And so she spent two years in
Speaker 6: an asylum. And I don't know enough about that attack
Speaker 6: to know, like if there's any motivation beyond something about
Speaker 6: how she wanted to like replicate the uh sacrifice of
Speaker 6: so and so in the Bible or whatever.
Speaker 3: Sure, when she got out, she moved a convent in Rome.
Speaker 3: I believe this was kind of a like, yeah, you're
Speaker 3: like super rich, though, so you can go be in
Speaker 3: this convent. Her friends thought to themselves, She's probably going
Speaker 3: to kill somebody maybe the Pope, but they didn't try
Speaker 3: to stop her, which is really funny because they're probably
Speaker 3: all Irish Catholics and they're just like, eh, whatever. Then
Speaker 3: in nineteen twenty four, when Jacamo was murdered, the guy
Speaker 3: murdered to death with a carpenter's file. Yeah, she was
Speaker 3: heartbroken because she was a Catholic socialist, right, and so
Speaker 3: she decided to like revenge that killing by shooting herself
Speaker 3: in the chest. The bullet bounced off her ribs and
Speaker 3: she survived. And if you want to survive in the
Speaker 3: world that's coming, you need to buy literally everything that
Speaker 3: is advertised on this show. It is the only way
Speaker 3: to survive. I believe it's not a guarantee. But here's
Speaker 3: ads and we're back Mussolini at this point. God, I
Speaker 3: read a whole bunch of New York Times articles and
Speaker 3: like other newspaper articles from this time, and they're all
Speaker 3: like Mussolini's great. We all like Mussolini because he's stopping
Speaker 3: the Bolsheviks. You know, Mussolini was being courted by the
Speaker 3: Western world. The King of England awarded him the Order
Speaker 3: of the Bath, which is not in order to take
Speaker 3: a bath, unfortunately, but instead a knighthood, and Violet Gibson
Speaker 3: decided that the way to glorify God was to assassinate Mussolini,
Speaker 3: so she showed up at one of his talks in
Speaker 3: nineteen twenty six with a revolver and a rock. The
Speaker 3: rock was to break his windshield if necessary, which later
Speaker 3: assassins would have been more successful if they had also
Speaker 3: brought a rock. The modern mind can't really understand her motive,
Speaker 3: I think, because their motive was primarily religious, but it
Speaker 3: was also political. She did it to quote glorify God,
Speaker 3: and Angel kept her arm steady. I told this story
Speaker 3: to a Catholic anarchist friend of mine, whose response was
Speaker 3: basically like, oh, those Irish and their angels. Mussolini turned
Speaker 3: his head the last minute, she grazed his nose. She
Speaker 3: tried to fire again, but the gun jammed. And I've
Speaker 3: read that what he yelled at the time that he
Speaker 3: was shot was fancy a woman, But that might have
Speaker 3: been later. He told the crowd, don't be afraid, this
Speaker 3: is a mere trifle, And then like later, he went
Speaker 3: on this rant about how he's totally down to die
Speaker 3: violently as long as like a good, glorious death. But
Speaker 3: if he's like killed by an old lady, he just
Speaker 3: can't handle it, which is why I wish Violet had
Speaker 3: succeeded over everyone else. Ahlas. Yeah, the crowd caught her
Speaker 3: and beat her, and she was whisked away by the
Speaker 3: cops and declared insane. People said that she was paranoid
Speaker 3: and that was why she tried to kill him, because
Speaker 3: she was paranoid. I hate to break it to the
Speaker 3: people back then, she was correct about this particular thing.
Speaker 3: She spent the rest of her life in various institutions.
Speaker 3: She wrote letter after letter pleading to be set free,
Speaker 3: but those letters were never sent because you know, I mean,
Speaker 3: are crazy, right, That's fine, that's a sarcastic remind Yeah,
Speaker 3: probably caught onto that. She told people that her mood
Speaker 3: controlled the weather.
Speaker 2: Okay, well did it.
Speaker 3: If she'd killed Mussolini, she would have stopped like three
Speaker 3: million deaths. Maybe her moods like I want to kill
Speaker 3: Mussolini have a pretty major impact.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, look, I can't prove that she's wrong.
Speaker 3: Yeah. It reminds me of when I covered Joan of
Speaker 3: Arc on this show, where people are like, oh, feminist icon,
Speaker 3: except you know, obviously she was just crazy with her
Speaker 3: visions from God. And it's just that people were conceiving
Speaker 3: of reality in different ways than we conceive of it now,
Speaker 3: and I think that people have a hard time wrapping
Speaker 3: their heads around that she died in nineteen fifty six
Speaker 3: at the age of seventy nine. She did outlive Mussolini.
Speaker 3: No family members came to her funeral. History has vindicated her,
Speaker 3: and there's now a plaque for her on her childhood
Speaker 3: home in Dublin that describes her accurately as a committed
Speaker 3: anti fascist. And it was articles about this from like
Speaker 3: right wing Irish people, is how I learned about how
Speaker 3: she would run around and stab people and things like that.
Speaker 2: Is it possible that there was like no one at
Speaker 2: her funeral because this, I mean, I had just made
Speaker 2: a comment about Ireland staying winning. But Ireland's history are
Speaker 2: the fascists in this period is not particularly clean, in
Speaker 2: large part because the fascists were in opposed to the
Speaker 2: British government and so there was a lot of at
Speaker 2: least the enemy of my enemy is my friend thing
Speaker 2: among the Irish, as well as the fact that Franco
Speaker 2: was like a Catholic like It's not a clean period
Speaker 2: for Ireland entirely either.
Speaker 3: It's not, but she's also Anglo Irish, right, well, I.
Speaker 2: Mean, yeah, that also makes sense, you right, I'd forgotten.
Speaker 3: That, and I think it's I think overall it was
Speaker 3: just like, oh, there's our crazy aunt. She's just crazy.
Speaker 3: She just wanted to kill a guy. You know, that's
Speaker 3: like my best guess. But I'm not certain people didn't
Speaker 3: like her at the time, and now there's been kind
Speaker 3: of this reclamation of her legacy. But Mussolini was particularly
Speaker 3: good at turning attempts on his life into popular support,
Speaker 3: which is like what you do if someone tries to
Speaker 3: kill you, right. You neither say like, oh no, I'm
Speaker 3: afraid and the enemy is scary and bad, which is
Speaker 3: not a good way to gain power, or you can
Speaker 3: say like ha ha haa, they can't get me, but
Speaker 3: they want it because they're evil. You know, almost every
Speaker 3: article about attempts on Mussolini's life from then or now
Speaker 3: is basically like, but this particular attempt is what Mussolini
Speaker 3: used to consolidate power. Everything was fine until this person
Speaker 3: tried to kill him, and then wo she just like
Speaker 3: swept in with fascism.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, exactly. I think that that's people number one.
Speaker 2: It's like working backwards, which you shouldn't do when you're
Speaker 2: trying to analyze people psychologically. Now that said, I don't
Speaker 2: know that I would say there's it didn't have an
Speaker 2: impact on the character of the regime, just like it's
Speaker 2: probably fair to like whatever Trump does next, the shooting
Speaker 2: will probably have impacted because it clearly affected his mental.
Speaker 3: State right totally.
Speaker 2: Maybe it'll mean that he's a little less coherent and
Speaker 2: a little less like, maybe even less willing to take
Speaker 2: risks he might otherwise have taken.
Speaker 3: Maybe it'll mean he's more vengeful. We don't know yet.
Speaker 2: We'll all be learning soon. But it definitely the presidency
Speaker 2: we are going to get out of him now is
Speaker 2: different than if he had won and nobody had shot him, right, Like,
Speaker 2: that's just we don't know how, and we'll never know how.
Speaker 2: But that's just a reality because nearly being shot to
Speaker 2: death on live television changes you, changes anybody. You don't
Speaker 2: have to be a good person.
Speaker 3: And it's like people talk about like hindsight is twenty twenty,
Speaker 3: but it's not because you don't know what the other
Speaker 3: options were. You know, you can only see the one
Speaker 3: thing that happened. Yeah, and Mussolini would have become dictator
Speaker 3: if no one had tried to kill him. Yeah, you know, yeah,
Speaker 3: and he used moments like this to consolidate power because
Speaker 3: anyone would.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because you you can't let something like this go
Speaker 2: to waste. And also just like continuing to work after
Speaker 2: you've nearly been shot to death in the head probably
Speaker 2: also just kind of mentally necessary, like you're you're gonna
Speaker 2: make use of that, because otherwise you're gonna sit alone
Speaker 2: in a room and think about how you nearly got
Speaker 2: your brain's blown out.
Speaker 3: Yeah, totally. Yeah. Yeah, he keeps busy. You know, he's
Speaker 3: been a lot of mistresses. Although New York Times just
Speaker 3: is gonna run articles. I'll talk about him later, but
Speaker 3: New York Times like, oh, he's just hanging out with
Speaker 3: his family. He's a family man.
Speaker 2: Like, oh, they loved Mussolini, the Mito. I mean a
Speaker 2: lot of Americans really liked Mussolini in part because like
Speaker 2: he was he was a very very much a celebrity
Speaker 2: dictator in a way that Hitler Hitler was, but not
Speaker 2: in this like Hitler was, you know, famous and managed
Speaker 2: to become beloved in Germany. Mussolini had a level of
Speaker 2: like international like movie star cloud in part because he
Speaker 2: looked handsome in his photos in a way Hitler didn't
Speaker 2: really like he looked like a movie star, you know,
Speaker 2: not in real life. But he you know, he had
Speaker 2: he had good people, worry, and he had a lot
Speaker 2: of movie stars hanging out with him, by the way,
Speaker 2: a lot of American ones.
Speaker 3: And he like knew more about philosophy and art and
Speaker 3: shit like that, you know, which was like a lot
Speaker 3: of the ways to be kind of like cool at
Speaker 3: the time. And like, I mean, he created a philosophy
Speaker 3: one that is still around.
Speaker 2: Yep.
Speaker 3: It's a bad one, yep. So there's another thing that's
Speaker 3: going to tie into this that is going on the
Speaker 3: Italian anarchist world and the Italian American world and just
Speaker 3: the news in general. And it's another thing that like,
Speaker 3: looking back, it's hard to see why this is as
Speaker 3: big of a deal as it was. And this is
Speaker 3: the trial of Sacho and Zetti. Have you heard of this,
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2: Those are the two American anarchists who there was a bombing,
Speaker 2: they got accused of it executed, didn't do it right?
Speaker 2: Am I am I?
Speaker 3: And the basics there, so what's funny about it? It's messy.
Speaker 2: The general version is usually it is Yeah, this was
Speaker 2: like cumulatively four sentences over the course of my high
Speaker 2: school education, and.
Speaker 3: It's probably the only time during anyone's high school education
Speaker 3: the word anarchist gets mentioned, besides like, maybe you're going
Speaker 3: to get show gosh killing McKinley, but probably not.
Speaker 2: I don't even think I learned about McKinley getting assassinated.
Speaker 2: I don't think I learned it was an anarchist, but
Speaker 2: maybe maybe it was. I barely remember high school.
Speaker 3: Yeah, fair enough. I honestly, whenever I'm like, my high
Speaker 3: school teacher didn't teach me this, I'm like, I don't know,
Speaker 3: how would I have known? I got c's like what
Speaker 3: you know.
Speaker 2: But I definitely remember knowing that Sacho and Vinzetti had
Speaker 2: been anarchists.
Speaker 3: Because that one was inescapable, and it was this incredibly
Speaker 3: important celebrity trial all over the world, and basically some
Speaker 3: Italian American anarchists or mafia, but almost certainly anarchists were
Speaker 3: robbing a guy who carried the wages basically the equivalent
Speaker 3: of an armored truck robbery, and someone shot and killed
Speaker 3: the paymaster and a guard. Two Italian American anarchists, Saqua
Speaker 3: and Venzetti, were put on trial. The entire leftist world,
Speaker 3: not just the anarchists, was convinced that they were innocent,
Speaker 3: and basically this whole thing was seen as like a
Speaker 3: travesty of justice. In nineteen twenty one, they were found
Speaker 3: guilty and sentenced to death, but it took years for
Speaker 3: the state to kill them because the outcry was so
Speaker 3: much that they had to have all these appeals and
Speaker 3: investigations and things like that. This dragged on for years.
Speaker 3: Later historians have been like, well, Saco probably did it,
Speaker 3: and Venzetti maybe, Like it's possible Venzetti was there and
Speaker 3: therefore actually criminally liable, but like didn't pull the trigger.
Speaker 3: It's also possible that they weren't there, because a lot
Speaker 3: of the evidence that they did do it comes from
Speaker 3: a guy we're going to talk about later who's an
Speaker 3: anarchist bomb maker who turned into a fascist informant named
Speaker 3: Mario Buddha.
Speaker 2: Well, it's also an unfortunate truth that a lot of
Speaker 2: times the people who are most willing to make things
Speaker 2: like bombs are also driven more by rage than like
Speaker 2: political conviction and thus very easy to swing to a
Speaker 2: politics that entirely exists on the basis of rage. Yeah,
Speaker 2: which is which is why we really do try here
Speaker 2: not to idolize people whose only contribution is that they
Speaker 2: did a violence. Yeah, totally, even when everybody's making some
Speaker 2: very funny jokes on social media, Yeah right now about
Speaker 2: a thing that just happened.
Speaker 3: No, it's it's true, and that is like something that yeah, fun,
Speaker 3: time to have decided to write this episode. But the
Speaker 3: important thing about the Saquo and Benzetti case is that
Speaker 3: this trial was huge. The outcry was enormous, and one
Speaker 3: thing that happened in this is that the fascists tried
Speaker 3: hard to capitalize on it and did capitalize on it,
Speaker 3: because most of the outcry against the trial is that
Speaker 3: the trial was unfair as a result of the US's
Speaker 3: anti Italian and anti anarchist bigotry. A fuck ton of
Speaker 3: the Italian American crowd was either anarchist or fascist, and
Speaker 3: so both the fascists and the anarchists rallied for Saco
Speaker 3: and Vinzetti. Mussolini was cynically using the trial to stir
Speaker 3: up nationalism at home and continuing his odd overtures to
Speaker 3: the anarchists, even though he was in power by most
Speaker 3: of this point, and he's cracking down on the anarchist
Speaker 3: left and right. His soldiers are burning photos of that
Speaker 3: guy Mala Testa. Anarchists are being rounded up and stuff.
Speaker 3: Yet Mussolini is telling his ambassadors to try and intervene
Speaker 3: on behalf of Saco and Vinzetti because Mussolini won to
Speaker 3: be seen as the man who protected Italians everywhere. And
Speaker 3: he has all these quotes that are like, I cannot
Speaker 3: agree with anything that these men stand for, but they're Italian,
Speaker 3: my god, and America shouldn't kill them or whatever I'm
Speaker 3: now paraphrasing. Terribly great stuff.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I don't love their murders, but I support them.
Speaker 2: Being Italian, they thus they ought.
Speaker 3: To be free. Yeah, exactly, exactly fair enough. And what
Speaker 3: does this have to do with Violet Gibson. Well, this
Speaker 3: is going to turn into one of the best zings
Speaker 3: against America that I've ever read about h On July
Speaker 3: twenty third, nineteen twenty seven, Mussolini wrote, it is certain
Speaker 3: that the execution of Saco Vanzetti would provide the pretext
Speaker 3: for a vast and continuous agitation throughout the world. The
Speaker 3: fascist government, which is strongly authoritarian and does not give
Speaker 3: quarter to the Bolsheviks, very often employs clemency in individual cases.
Speaker 3: The governor of Massachusetts should not lose the opportunity for
Speaker 3: a humanitarian act whose repercussions would be especially positive in Italy,
Speaker 3: and fascist newspapers were now contrasting the American government as
Speaker 3: more totalitarian than the fascist Italian government because the Italian system,
Speaker 3: the fascist system, had let Violet Gibson return to her
Speaker 3: own country, and there is no death penalty in Italy
Speaker 3: at this point.
Speaker 2: That's nice.
Speaker 3: People could literally kill kings and get life in prison.
Speaker 3: Comparing this to the barbaric United States, and this is
Speaker 3: the thing that I love about it. It is like
Speaker 3: the dude's got a point yep. The US president industrial
Speaker 3: system is like a nightmare and was worse than the
Speaker 3: fascist government.
Speaker 2: I mean at the you know, it depends on the stage,
Speaker 2: but at the early stages, you know, Mussolini does eventually
Speaker 2: invade Ethiopia and deploy chemical weapons. Yeah, yeah, that's certainly
Speaker 2: an argument that you could have made earlier in Mussolini's regime.
Speaker 2: You have to remember he was not he definitely was
Speaker 2: killing his political enemies.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, he had stabbed a dude to death of
Speaker 3: a file Yeah yeah, not necessarily in a way.
Speaker 2: That's a higher body count than, for example, the number
Speaker 2: of black people being murdered by police in apartheid states
Speaker 2: in the United States, right, yeah, like, which is not
Speaker 2: a different thing to me. I don't consider that to
Speaker 2: be better than I don't know, rounding up like a
Speaker 2: few dozen socialists and murdering them or whatever like that,
Speaker 2: and the constant mass the constant murder at a pretty
Speaker 2: high rate of black men in the South by cops
Speaker 2: and vigilantes, like both both things that I would put
Speaker 2: on a similar moral level.
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly. I'm not trying to be like Benito Mussolini
Speaker 3: is great, you know.
Speaker 2: No, no, no, no, I didn't. I didn't. I didn't
Speaker 2: think you were. Yeah, I'm just saying, like, yeah, that's
Speaker 2: not an irrational statement to make at that point in time,
Speaker 2: knowing what they knew.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, And Violet, she was not alone in her
Speaker 3: quest to see the Duke die. The next attempt was
Speaker 3: on September eleventh, nineteen twenty six. And this is why
Speaker 3: people remember September eleventh, and this is probably the most
Speaker 3: organized attempt. Sophie is clearly agrees with me.
Speaker 2: Did anything else happen on September eleventh? Ever, that seems
Speaker 2: like one of those that coup.
Speaker 3: That happened somewhere is such a smooth joke. Yeah, thank you.
Speaker 2: I'm looking. I'm looking at my calendar of various September
Speaker 2: elevenths that I keep for no reason. Yeah, it doesn't
Speaker 2: look like anything's ever happened on another September eleventh that
Speaker 2: I can that I've got.
Speaker 3: Okay, you're the funniest person I know.
Speaker 2: That must be why I celebrate nine to eleven. Ye, wait, exactly, shit, wow, Margaret, Margaret,
Speaker 2: I'm getting some very bad Google results. Suddenly we need
Speaker 2: to edit that out.
Speaker 3: Oh my god, Oh my god, all those poor people.
Speaker 3: Holy shit. Yeah, I lived in New York City. Yeah,
Speaker 3: September eleventh, two one, so saw the towers on fire.
Speaker 3: There's all the smoking remains. But anyway, the socialist politician
Speaker 3: had failed, The Catholic wingnut had failed. Time to bring
Speaker 3: in the professionals. If there's one group that knows about
Speaker 3: killing kings and monarchs and stuff, it's the anarchists. Again,
Speaker 3: we all know they failed, but you know what. They
Speaker 3: tried real hard. The next attempt was by a man
Speaker 3: named Gino Lucetti, who I'll tell you about along with
Speaker 3: his cousin Gino, because his name is Geno, but so
Speaker 3: is his cousin. That's the thing I'm saying. Well, i'll
Speaker 3: tell you about it on Wednesday. Excellent.
Speaker 2: You know, Wednesday, Margaret, is the day that comes after Tuesday.
Speaker 2: That's a little science fact for those of you in
Speaker 2: the audience.
Speaker 4: Thank you so much for telling us that.
Speaker 3: I have no idea.
Speaker 4: I have no idea how we would have.
Speaker 2: Wait, we tried to shoot a little bit a couple
Speaker 2: of facts in your way.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's why it's edutainment.
Speaker 2: That's why it's edutainment.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So remember, folks, Wednesday day after Tuesday. Thursday comes
Speaker 2: day before Monday. And that's all I gotta say.
Speaker 3: It comes before Monday. Yes, yes, yes, Tomorrow is Saturday
Speaker 3: and after Monday. Is the weirdest thing about Thursday.
Speaker 2: I know, I know, it's the day. So nice they
Speaker 2: made it happen twice.
Speaker 3: It I can't even there's nothing I can do with that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Oh, Margan, I wish you and I could hang
Speaker 2: out all eleven days of the week.
Speaker 3: I know that'd be nice, but I only have so
Speaker 3: many hours in the day, and I don't remember how
Speaker 3: many it is forty one? Oh okay, no, yeah, that
Speaker 3: makes sense. Yes, But Robert Evans, where can people find
Speaker 3: more about you or what do you do? Well?
Speaker 2: You can find me sweating away in my basement because
Speaker 2: you and I only use an antique coptic Christian calendar
Speaker 2: and day system based largely on a step pyramid that
Speaker 2: used to exist but was bulldozed in what was once
Speaker 2: sume Aria, So it takes a lot of time to
Speaker 2: remember what day it is.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I don't know. We really kept this bit going
Speaker 3: for a while. I feel like at the end of
Speaker 3: a Gi Joe episode where you tell kids to like
Speaker 3: not hide in refrigerators. Right, I feel like it's worth
Speaker 3: pointing out that I really am talking about history here
Speaker 3: and that nothing necessarily good happened from many of the
Speaker 3: attempts that I'm describing. I am not morally against the
Speaker 3: attempts that I am describing. I'm clearly not of this
Speaker 3: thing that happened in the nineteen twenties, but I want
Speaker 3: to be like clear on that just like that.
Speaker 2: Is the thing I can think of very few assassinations
Speaker 2: in history where ultimately you would look at it and
Speaker 2: say that, like, yeah, that worked out really well. Is
Speaker 2: particularly that worked out well by the person carrying out
Speaker 2: the assassination standards. Really the one that like Sogamu and
Speaker 2: Tealurian who shot you know, one of the young Turks
Speaker 2: who orchestrated the Armenian genocide, that worked out great by
Speaker 2: his standards, and everyone else's that guy you shot Abe
Speaker 2: seems to the long run of that seems to have
Speaker 2: been positive. Very few other instances, like I don't know
Speaker 2: that I'd say McKinley worked well in the long run.
Speaker 2: Obviously shooting the archduke fucking disaster.
Speaker 3: Yeah, no, it's it is worth thinking about that anarchists
Speaker 3: had given up on propaganda by the deed at this point,
Speaker 3: propaganda by the deed. It was this anarchist idea that
Speaker 3: people were like, well, the masses don't really read theory,
Speaker 3: so let's just show them by killing all the kings
Speaker 3: and the you know, the people who are in charge
Speaker 3: of them. And it overall was disastrous for the anarchist
Speaker 3: movement because it just led people to then defend the
Speaker 3: vary systems that the anarchists were opposed to, and this
Speaker 3: happened time and time again. There are exceptions. During the
Speaker 3: the run up to the Russian Revolution, you have like
Speaker 3: about from like nineteen oh three to nineteen seventeen, anarchists
Speaker 3: and other groups were all doing these attendants, all doing
Speaker 3: these assassinations, and it did lead to a revolutionary situation,
Speaker 3: which of course all kind of ended badly and created
Speaker 3: the United the USSR. But usually these kinds of things
Speaker 3: destroy a social movement. Sometimes, if enough people are interested
Speaker 3: in it, it builds a social movement, but usually it doesn't.
Speaker 3: And that is the like, it's a crapshoot at best,
Speaker 3: It's a like, let's redraw our hand of cards and
Speaker 3: probably get something worse.
Speaker 2: Yep.
Speaker 3: But still, if someone had successfully killed Mussolini, I bet
Speaker 3: the world would have been a better place.
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, but the if within the if contains a
Speaker 2: lot of reasons.
Speaker 3: Why.
Speaker 2: Uh, you know, we're going to say for legal reasons
Speaker 2: here assassinations probably not worth.
Speaker 3: It, and we're gonna talk about like five more of
Speaker 3: them on Wednesday. Yeah.
Speaker 4: At the end here, I just want to plug if
Speaker 4: you haven't listened, I just am plugging this on anything
Speaker 4: I can I just want to plug our colleague James
Speaker 4: Stout series from reporting from the Darien Gap. Yeah, about
Speaker 4: one of the worst land migration places in the world
Speaker 4: and just you know, the stories and people he talked
Speaker 4: to there, and I just want to plug that because
Speaker 4: it's an amazing series and I'm very proud of James.
Speaker 3: Started listening to it. I haven't finished it yet. It
Speaker 3: is really good.
Speaker 4: It's really good.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: So if you have time around the end of the
Speaker 4: year and you're like, Ohm, I need something to binge.
Speaker 4: James did five episodes on It could happen here on
Speaker 4: It could app Thank you, and it could happen here all.
Speaker 3: Right, see y'all on Wednesday.
Speaker 1: Bye. Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production
Speaker 1: of Cool Zone Media. More podcasts and cool Zone Media.
Speaker 1: Visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com or check us out
Speaker 1: on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
Speaker 1: your podcasts.
Speaker 3: Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff.
Speaker 3: You're a weekly reminder that when there's bad things happening,
Speaker 3: people try to confront those bad things in various ways,
Speaker 3: lots of various ways. One of the way, no, just
Speaker 3: a person, one of the people who's also on this
Speaker 3: podcast with me is Robert Evans, my guest.
Speaker 2: Hi, that's right, I'm Robert Evans, and uh, I'm Robert Evans.
Speaker 2: That's me.
Speaker 3: Well, I brought you on because you're an expert about Italy.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean I know several things about Italians, Margaret
Speaker 2: number one, number two.
Speaker 3: Spice, here's where we remind Italian.
Speaker 2: Whatever the hat is that they that the that the
Speaker 2: chefs wear in those kind of racist caricatures. Look, it's fine.
Speaker 2: We all decided that it's okay with Italians now.
Speaker 3: Yeah, despite the huge trial that we talked about last
Speaker 3: time about anti Italian prejudice in the United States.
Speaker 2: Look, if they'd been you, I have the opposite position
Speaker 2: of that guy. I'm fine with the murder. If they'd
Speaker 2: been on trial for being Italian, I would have said,
Speaker 2: fucking yeah.
Speaker 3: Hang you know, yeah exactly, hang am I yeah, maybe
Speaker 3: upside down maybe. Uh that's a dead Mussolini joke, which
Speaker 3: is which is not gonna happen in today's episode. A
Speaker 3: lot of people are gonna try give the old college try.
Speaker 3: Our producer is Sophie. Hi, Sophie, it's me.
Speaker 4: I'm Sophie High.
Speaker 3: I realized when I got my podcast you listened to
Speaker 3: the most in twenty twenty four that four of them
Speaker 3: were Sophie podcasts.
Speaker 4: The loyalties unmatched, unmapped.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 3: I'm a little bit surprised that that not all five were.
Speaker 3: But I think the problem was that the Pathfinder podcast
Speaker 3: I listened to has really long episode. Need one raised,
Speaker 3: like five?
Speaker 4: Yeah, you need one break for me?
Speaker 2: We should do a Pathfinder podcast, Margaret.
Speaker 3: I would love to do a live play podcast.
Speaker 2: Maybe I'll reach out to the guy who created Pathfinder
Speaker 2: and listens to our podcasts, talk to him about that.
Speaker 3: I would love that guy who created Pathfinder. Y'all are
Speaker 3: great and your system rules and I play it anyway.
Speaker 3: So but yeah, no, cools on media needs a live
Speaker 3: play podcast, That's all I'm saying. And if you listener agree,
Speaker 3: bug these people on the internet about it. And then
Speaker 3: because I needed more podcasts to be on whatever, I
Speaker 3: don't care.
Speaker 2: There's a shortage of podcasts. I don't know if you're
Speaker 2: aware of this. Yeah, but the CDC has said that
Speaker 2: it's probably the largest threat to our national collective health.
Speaker 3: Well, it's the only thing that they're trying to put
Speaker 3: a tariff on that everyone's in favor of is that
Speaker 3: they're trying to make it harder for people to make podcasts.
Speaker 2: That's right, that's right.
Speaker 3: All podcast mics, Oh my god, that actually is good.
Speaker 3: Most of the podcast mics are probably not made in
Speaker 3: the US. Whatever I got mine, I have no idea.
Speaker 3: I have no idea where they make our microphones, Margaret, No, no,
Speaker 3: I do not.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Anyway, this is part two on a two part episode
Speaker 3: about people trying to kill Mussolini. Later we'll probably talk
Speaker 3: about the people who succeeded. It took a whole war,
Speaker 3: but some people tried to just cut to the chase
Speaker 3: and circumvent the need for the war. And we've already
Speaker 3: mentioned several of them, but we're going to talk a
Speaker 3: lot more of them today. First, we're gonna talk about Rory,
Speaker 3: who's our audio engineer. Hi Rory, Hi, right, Hy Rory?
Speaker 3: And that our theme musical was written forced by unwoman,
Speaker 3: and that Gino Lucetti was born working class in the
Speaker 3: year nineteen hundred in Karra, Tuscany. You ever heard of Carra.
Speaker 2: I've heard of Tuscany because the Tuscan coast is pretty famous.
Speaker 2: I've never heard of Carra. Other than that, it makes
Speaker 2: me think of that song that goes Tara Ra boom Da,
Speaker 2: which I don't know what that's a reference to.
Speaker 3: Is that a slur? I have no idea.
Speaker 2: I should probably look into that song see if there
Speaker 2: was anything fucked up. It's like celebrating genocide. That's often
Speaker 2: the case with old songs. What a lovely tune?
Speaker 3: Oh no, yeah, Well, Carrara is famous for two things.
Speaker 3: It is famous for its marble quarries. It produces some
Speaker 3: of the finest marble from which the most iconic buildings
Speaker 3: and statues in the world are made. There's a whole
Speaker 3: list of them, and I forgot to write them down,
Speaker 3: But like, think of an old Italian statue from Rome,
Speaker 3: Old Rome, and the marble might have come from Carrara.
Speaker 3: It has like blue veins. I spent way too long
Speaker 3: reading about this marble.
Speaker 2: It's good ass marble.
Speaker 3: Yeah. The other thing the Carrara is famous for is anarchism.
Speaker 3: Oh okay. When my anarchist friends took me through Italy
Speaker 3: when we were near Carrara, they pointed out and they
Speaker 3: were like, hey, that's that place. Was an anarchist stronghold
Speaker 3: for a long, long time among the Stonemasons who put
Speaker 3: that town on the map enough so that I was
Speaker 3: like double checking this today. I was like, Carrara. That
Speaker 3: sounds familiar, right, I was looking at a mainstream tour
Speaker 3: company's website, Carrara Marble Tour, and they offer an anarchic
Speaker 3: Carra tour.
Speaker 2: Oh wow, really double dipping. I mean, and that's you know,
Speaker 2: because there's so many It's like you and I always say, Margaret,
Speaker 2: with so many Anarchistsinnara audience, you know, every there's there's
Speaker 2: nothing that goes together like anarchism and marble quarries. Yeah,
Speaker 2: two great tastes that taste great together.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 2: That's why. By the way, let's have a word for
Speaker 2: our sponsor, Big Marble.
Speaker 3: Marble.
Speaker 2: Maybe we could use it again for some stuff.
Speaker 3: Marble one time statute of limitations Ago I had to
Speaker 3: empty all the Marbles out of my pocket before a
Speaker 3: mass arrest.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Marble, if you use it to make all of
Speaker 2: your streets and sidewalks like they do in Greece, it
Speaker 2: makes things incredibly treacherous in the rain, actually horrible, horrible
Speaker 2: material to.
Speaker 3: Use the way that they use it. Yeah, but it's
Speaker 3: pretty though, Yeah, years and years ago, my dad told
Speaker 3: me this spooky story that he wrote called the thirty
Speaker 3: seven Marble Steps, and I was like a kid, so
Speaker 3: I was just assuming that these were steps with marbles
Speaker 3: embedded in them. But Gina Lucetti was from Carrara in
Speaker 3: the early nineteen twenties. There are factory occupations all over Italy.
Speaker 3: I don't know enough about these yet, but they've come
Speaker 3: up a bunch of times, and they'll probably be one
Speaker 3: of their own episodes at one of these points. And
Speaker 3: I know that in the end of these factory occupations,
Speaker 3: the socialist parties kind of gave up and gave power
Speaker 3: back to the bosses, which made an awful lot more
Speaker 3: anarchists from those socialists who you know, had just seized
Speaker 3: the means of production and were like, but isn't this
Speaker 3: our goal? Isn't our goal that the workers control the
Speaker 3: means of production? Why would we give them back. I
Speaker 3: don't know enough about the ins and nights out of
Speaker 3: that struggle, but a lot of people were mad. Gina
Speaker 3: Lucetti was at these occupations and somewhere along the way
Speaker 3: he got into a gun fight with the black shirts.
Speaker 3: He got a guy in the ear who got him
Speaker 3: in the neck in return, and okay, this second time
Speaker 3: we've had an anti fascist get it in the neck
Speaker 3: and survive on the show. The other one was George orwell.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, that's that's uh. I mean, I'm not gonna
Speaker 2: say but that that's very lucky.
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly. Don't get shot in the neck.
Speaker 2: The neck is very low on the number of places
Speaker 2: on your body you would want to get shot.
Speaker 3: Yeah, not a good tournique spot. It turns out.
Speaker 2: Hard to turnikit and neck unless you're Google Ai, which
Speaker 2: has told me repeatedly that you can turnikit the neck. Hell, yeah,
Speaker 2: that's just a hanging, folks, you're just strangling someone to death.
Speaker 2: Oh my god, don't TURNI quit next.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it seems self evident. But an AI is not
Speaker 3: does not have our best interests in heart.
Speaker 2: No, it just sees, well, there's fucking there, there's fucking
Speaker 2: arteries there.
Speaker 3: Turnick it away. Yeah, yeah, it detaches a limb. If
Speaker 3: a head is a limb appendage, whatever a head is anatomically,
Speaker 3: I guess it's a head. So he couldn't find a
Speaker 3: doctor in Italy to get the bullet out. I do
Speaker 3: not know why. So comrades smuggled him to France, where
Speaker 3: he was finally treated, and he was like, you know what,
Speaker 3: I don't need to be in Italy right now. They
Speaker 3: are in the middle of a fascism and I am
Speaker 3: in the middle of just got shot in the neck
Speaker 3: by a fascist. Yeah. There was a large political refugee
Speaker 3: scene in France at the time. Anarchists, socialists and communists
Speaker 3: had formed a popular front against fascism there, not only
Speaker 3: just in general in France, but like specifically the Italian
Speaker 3: refugees had. They were like, all right, look all that
Speaker 3: stuff going on in Russia, We're all mad at each other,
Speaker 3: but right now Italy is being taken over by fascists.
Speaker 3: We got to do something about that, right, And they
Speaker 3: all agreed what needed to be done was kill Mussolini.
Speaker 3: And this action was intended to be anything but a
Speaker 3: propaganda of the deed action, which is I think actually
Speaker 3: a really important point for kind of what we were
Speaker 3: ended on talking about last week. Right as a libcom
Speaker 3: dot org article put it, quote, propaganda of the deed
Speaker 3: attacks were supposed to inspire the working classes to rise,
Speaker 3: and in this they were entirely unsuccessful. In this instance, however,
Speaker 3: The urge to kill Mussolini was the expression of a
Speaker 3: convergence of opinion among many popularly representative political groupings, and
Speaker 3: was commonly perceived as a necessity at that point in time.
Speaker 3: So it wasn't like, oh, we're gonna spur on the
Speaker 3: revolution and radicalize people by showing them that, you know,
Speaker 3: our opponents are made of flesh and blood. It was like, no,
Speaker 3: Mussolini is basically the enemy war leader that we're in
Speaker 3: a war against. You know, one word that has never
Speaker 3: been successfully applied to anarchists is cowardice. Gino agreed to
Speaker 3: do the deed.
Speaker 2: And I mean it's the thing that you come across
Speaker 2: over and over again when you read about like militant
Speaker 2: moves moments and like civil wars and where there are
Speaker 2: anarchist groups, is that the anarchists are always very brave.
Speaker 2: Not always the best fighters, yeah, but always very brave.
Speaker 3: Yeah. And specifically other groups like putting us in the front.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because that's an aspect of it.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I remember when I first became an anarchist, I
Speaker 3: was like just going to protest and things twenty seven
Speaker 3: years ago, and my roommate in college was like, you
Speaker 3: anarchists you're just the berserkers of the protest movement. People
Speaker 3: just throw you in the front to like soak up
Speaker 3: all the damage. And I was like, no, he was
Speaker 3: a little bit right at least in terms of how
Speaker 3: people perceive us and use us. So of course, when
Speaker 3: they're like, who's going to go risk their life to
Speaker 3: go do this? An anarchists volunteered and twice he returned
Speaker 3: to Italy to meet with comrades there to plan the assassination,
Speaker 3: and they met aboard a ship at sea, which is
Speaker 3: aesthetic as fuck, off the Tuscany coast, and this time
Speaker 3: there were no informants among them. He had several co
Speaker 3: conspirators worth mentioning. Stefano Vadieroni was an anarchist tinsmith from
Speaker 3: Rome who was the secretary of the library. The fucking
Speaker 3: librarian was in on this assassination. The secretary of Mussolini's
Speaker 3: library supplied all of the details, including Mussolini's routes by car.
Speaker 3: Vadderoni funded the thing by selling his family's land near Carrara.
Speaker 3: Another anarchist, Leandro Sorrio, was a waiter who was planning
Speaker 3: to finance the group's escape from the country, but then
Speaker 3: they all decided. Basically, they were like, well, we're actually
Speaker 3: just all going to get arrested and stand trial. There
Speaker 3: you go. We want to make a statement. Maltesta, the
Speaker 3: anarchist guy who's old at this point, was briefed on
Speaker 3: the plan and signed off on it. So this wasn't
Speaker 3: a like spur of the moment attack. This was a
Speaker 3: you know, huge conspiracy across borders to try and kill
Speaker 3: this guy. Armngino went back to Italy and he went
Speaker 3: to Rome. He waited for Mussolini's car and then he
Speaker 3: threw a pineapple grenade at it. The grenade had been
Speaker 3: made by his cousin, and he threw it into the windshield. Famously,
Speaker 3: grenades are on timers, not like pressure sensitive. They like
Speaker 3: don't explode on impact, no, because.
Speaker 2: That would be very dangerous. Margaret, I have I told
Speaker 2: you the story about the Iraqi soldier. We're behind this
Speaker 2: berm embedded with this unit of the Iraqi federal police
Speaker 2: that are in this very active gunfight with some ISIS guys.
Speaker 2: But they're also kind of showing off because like I'm
Speaker 2: there and my photographer's there with the camera, and.
Speaker 3: So I put the dudes.
Speaker 2: One of the dudes clips into the buttons of his
Speaker 2: like button up shirt, a grenade over each button. He
Speaker 2: like sticks the little handle arm of the grenade around,
Speaker 2: and he like runs up and he like fires, and
Speaker 2: then he leans over to pick up a magazine that's
Speaker 2: like lying behind the berm, and all of the grenades
Speaker 2: fall off of his shirt and roll down directly towards me.
Speaker 3: So thankfully they're not set off by impact. Yeah, fair enough.
Speaker 3: In this case, it didn't get through the windshield. This
Speaker 3: is the guy who should have brought a rock. Yeah,
Speaker 3: if Violet Gibson was right, you need to get through
Speaker 3: the windshield. The grenade bounced a few meters away and exploded.
Speaker 3: Mussolini's bodyguards caught up with Gino and beat the shit
Speaker 3: out of him. That sounds about right. Yeah, And when
Speaker 3: they arrested him, they found him with a second bomb,
Speaker 3: a handgun with six hollow points poisoned with muriatic acid,
Speaker 3: which I don't know anything about.
Speaker 2: And a dagger isn't myriadic acid. The thing in like swimming.
Speaker 3: Pools, isn't that chlorine?
Speaker 4: No?
Speaker 2: No, I mean I think you have muriatic acid for
Speaker 2: swimming pools too. I remember I've seen like jars one sec.
Speaker 3: I actually didn't want to google this today. That's what
Speaker 3: happened to me today is I was like, I wonder
Speaker 3: what this stuff is.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, you use mriadic acid to lower like
Speaker 2: pH in your pool. It's like, I'll let like a shit.
Speaker 2: Millions of Americans have this shit and like their shed.
Speaker 3: Okay, yeah, I have no idea why you would. I
Speaker 3: either he was being really extra or like or he
Speaker 3: just thought it.
Speaker 2: He might have thought it was more sketchy than it was.
Speaker 3: I don't know. Yeah, like this one's his acid, you know, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: when it's really no, I don't know. I don't know.
Speaker 2: I don't know. I don't know much about it other
Speaker 2: than that, I know I've seen it in people's like
Speaker 2: backyards because they have pools.
Speaker 3: Yeah. And also like there's so much mythbuilding, both positively
Speaker 3: and negative about all of these things, you know, So
Speaker 3: it could have been like, oh, he had a dagger
Speaker 3: and muriatic acid and actually used the word dumb dumb
Speaker 3: bullets instead of hollow points because that's what they called him.
Speaker 3: A round that expands at the time, you know. So
Speaker 3: he's tortured, he gives a false name in location and
Speaker 3: eventually they get the truth out of him. Lucetti was
Speaker 3: given thirty years in prison, the waiter got twenty years,
Speaker 3: and the tin smith got nineteen years and nine months.
Speaker 3: Thirty years is the maximum anyone's allowed to be given
Speaker 3: in Italy at the time, which again more, I mean
Speaker 3: later they're going to start killing people. But yeah, for
Speaker 3: three years Lucetti was in solitary and had only a
Speaker 3: sparrow that would visit at the window for company.
Speaker 2: Okay, yeah, sure, yeah, it's his best friend, the sparrow.
Speaker 3: I mean that's sweet. Actually, I know.
Speaker 2: I bet he was giving it some of his like,
Speaker 2: very very rare bread that he didn't have a whole
Speaker 2: lot of because he was a nice man.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he lived off of I think is just literally
Speaker 3: soup and bread, and that sounds about right. He died
Speaker 3: after seventeen years in prison in nineteen forty three. He
Speaker 3: died during a US air raid. Some claimed that he
Speaker 3: was killed by the shelling, but the man who identified
Speaker 3: the body said that he had been killed by the
Speaker 3: occupying Germans during the raid. The Italian Communists tried to
Speaker 3: claim his legacy. They published that one of his fellow
Speaker 3: inmates claimed he had become a communist in his later years,
Speaker 3: but his brother and his fiancee, who kept visiting him
Speaker 3: until the end of his days, denied this adamantly. I'm like, no,
Speaker 3: he wasn't anarchists who died an anarchist. During the partisan
Speaker 3: reclamation of Italy, two different anarchist battalions named themselves after
Speaker 3: Gino Lucetti. Each was about sixty fighters. I believe, both
Speaker 3: men and women. I know one of the other anarchist
Speaker 3: battalions I'm going to talk about later was both men
Speaker 3: and women, and they helped rid Italy of fascism. So
Speaker 3: he won in a way after his death, and that
Speaker 3: is all most of us can hope for, I would.
Speaker 2: Say, yeah, definitely. I mean in the long run, it's
Speaker 2: all any of us can hope for, right because, as
Speaker 2: we've seen, every struggle worth fighting occurs over a long
Speaker 2: time frame.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Absolutely. As for the man who made the bomb,
Speaker 3: that's a different story about another Gino, because his cousin's
Speaker 3: name was also Gino. And I want to tell you
Speaker 3: about that story. But did you know what I want
Speaker 3: to tell you about? More?
Speaker 5: Uh?
Speaker 2: Products?
Speaker 3: I love products.
Speaker 2: Services. Maybe I don't know if you'd ever if there'd
Speaker 2: ever be a service on it here, I do.
Speaker 3: Like a good service.
Speaker 2: Oh okay, yeah, okay, fascinating yeah, no, yeah.
Speaker 3: Whatever whatever they pay me to talk about, or whatever
Speaker 3: they pay someone else to talk about in an insert
Speaker 3: into my podcast. All right, I'm really excited about here,
Speaker 3: and we're back.
Speaker 5: We are.
Speaker 3: Gina Lucetti had a cousin, Gino Bibby, very serious country
Speaker 3: as you said, Yes, absolutely, Gino Bibby was from a
Speaker 3: more middle class background. His father owned a sawmill. Gino Bibby.
Speaker 3: Did you know what anarchist invented the missile?
Speaker 1: No?
Speaker 2: Was he like a scientist being forced to do stuff
Speaker 2: by the not So I'm going to get to it.
Speaker 4: You know what.
Speaker 2: That's got to be one of the top anarchism fails.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it didn't work out well in the end. I
Speaker 3: would say missiles.
Speaker 2: I mean, there's definitely some anarchists, you know, in anarchist
Speaker 2: related groups that have used missiles and are using them
Speaker 2: right now. But uh, boy howdy, it's a general rule,
Speaker 2: not a tool that has reduced state power.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Oh, that's an L I know. And it's so messy,
Speaker 3: big L for us. And if you google I'll talk
Speaker 3: about it a little bit more. Later when he actually
Speaker 3: does the inventing, but I guess to it. But if
Speaker 3: you google who invented the missile, you get the Nazis.
Speaker 3: But he's gonna pull out missiles, guided missiles that go
Speaker 3: twenty kilometers in the Spanish Civil War. Shit missile in
Speaker 3: this case being a rocket, but guided.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah yeah.
Speaker 3: And as a teen, this second Geno, Gino Bibby went
Speaker 3: around on a bicycle and distributed anarchist leaflets until fascists
Speaker 3: dragged him off his bike, beat him up, burned his motorcycle,
Speaker 3: and then burned his father's sawmill. Great, because they were
Speaker 3: a little extra the fascists. This did not make it
Speaker 3: Gino less radical, It just made him more angry. He's
Speaker 3: going to have the last laugh against fascists in Italy,
Speaker 3: as often how things go. Yeah yeah. He spent a
Speaker 3: while in lock up for fighting fascists in the early
Speaker 3: nineteen twenties, then fled to Spain, where he started learning
Speaker 3: how to fly in case he needed to assassinate Mussolini
Speaker 3: from the air. Okay, which is kind of like how
Speaker 3: I learned a while ago for a prison break episode
Speaker 3: that an awful lot of the prison breaks in the
Speaker 3: early aughts were it.
Speaker 2: Used to be a lot easier to get a helicopter.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, learn to fly. That's how you
Speaker 3: get people out of prison back in the day. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Come the Spanish Civil War, he worked behind enemy lines,
Speaker 3: blowing shit up and flying reconnaissance, and then he maybe
Speaker 3: designed the first missile. If you google right now the
Speaker 3: first missile, you get Nazi Germany World War two. But
Speaker 3: Gino design missiles that went twenty kilometers and the Drudi
Speaker 3: column fired them at Francoist forces. So it started off
Speaker 3: as a good idea, just a very Pandora's box.
Speaker 2: That's pretty cool.
Speaker 3: Yeah. You know what else? The anarchist is not a
Speaker 3: products in service switch. Do you know what else anarchists
Speaker 3: invented during the Spanish Civil War? No, you ever played foosball?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Is that ours?
Speaker 3: Did you ever know? An anarchist named Alejandro I forget
Speaker 3: his last name because it's not my script, invented foosball.
Speaker 2: Alejandro foos, let's call it. Let's say alanro fos cool.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there was a again I'm completely off script here
Speaker 3: and going from memory, but there was a guy who
Speaker 3: was injured in the Spanish Civil War and he was
Speaker 3: like an inventor, and he was like, but I want
Speaker 3: to keep playing soccer, but I can't because I got
Speaker 3: really badly injured. I'm going to invent table soccer, and
Speaker 3: other people had invented it, but his invention is the
Speaker 3: one that people play today.
Speaker 2: Okay, So fascinating.
Speaker 3: Spanish Civil War, the anarchist gave us missiles and foosball to.
Speaker 2: The two key cornerstones of the of modern civilization.
Speaker 3: Missiles and foosball.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Meanwhile, while Gino is inventing missiles and doing specop's missions,
Speaker 3: the Stalinists murdered his sister. Listen to any of our
Speaker 3: episodes about the Spanish Civil War for more about how
Speaker 3: Stalins betrayed their comrades and started arresting folks that they
Speaker 3: didn't like and torturing people and killing them. The Stalinists
Speaker 3: actually arrested Gino two, but the anarchists in the government,
Speaker 3: which is another odd thing that happened in the Spanish
Speaker 3: Civil War, were like, oh no, fuck no, and the
Speaker 3: Stalinists were forced to let him out. When the Spanish
Speaker 3: Republic fell, Like everyone else, he fled into France and
Speaker 3: was held in a concentration camp. Not a Nazi one,
Speaker 3: but a pre VG France one where from he escaped,
Speaker 3: and then he moved back to Italy and he joined
Speaker 3: the Partisans there, and he freed his own fucking hometown
Speaker 3: from fascists as part of an anarchist partisan unit. I
Speaker 3: really like this guy. To quote author Nick Heath, he
Speaker 3: died at the age of one hundred on the eighth
Speaker 3: of August nineteen ninety nine. He was cremated with a
Speaker 3: red and black scarf tied around his neck. His ashes
Speaker 3: were interred in the anarchist corner of the graveyard in Carrara.
Speaker 2: Man' that's dope. Also, nineteen ninety nine, great year to
Speaker 2: kind of clock out. Yeah, missed a lot of messinists,
Speaker 2: got to see most of the good star treks.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and uh yeah, Geno Bbe I got kind of
Speaker 3: tiary when I was writing about the life of the anarchist. Spy, pilot, bombmaker, engineer, partisan,
Speaker 3: an invention, spilot, spilot, Margaret Oh spilot, yes, the spilot, Yes,
Speaker 3: an inventor of the guided missile system, which again not
Speaker 3: our best move. Later, I'm going to talk about a
Speaker 3: military invention, or actually a terrorism invention of the anarchist
Speaker 3: that's even worse. Uh oh, the Irish are mostly famous
Speaker 3: for it, but it was an Italian anarchist who later
Speaker 3: became a fascist. Anyway, back to our main story, people
Speaker 3: trying to kill Mussolini. Only a few months after Gino
Speaker 3: one through Gino Two's grenade at Mussolini, another young hero
Speaker 3: stepped forward to give it as all a really young
Speaker 3: hero kind of a This is the most heartbreaking part
Speaker 3: of the story. A fifteen year old kid who had
Speaker 3: just quit the fascist youth and become an anarchist. That's
Speaker 3: good for him. Antio Zamboni.
Speaker 2: God damn it.
Speaker 3: I promised you, Zamboni.
Speaker 2: Get Jamie Loftus on the horn. She needs to know
Speaker 2: about this name.
Speaker 3: I genuinely thought I was very glad that you were
Speaker 3: my guest until I got to Zamboni, and I was like, ah,
Speaker 3: if I was gonna have anyone else, it would be
Speaker 3: Jamie Loftus, also more experienced killing me. Never mind, No, no,
Speaker 3: I'm not allowed to join the bit about trying to
Speaker 3: implicate okay, just checking no.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah. Until the court case is over and the
Speaker 2: grand jury rules on the new evidence brought forward in
Speaker 2: that case, we probably should keep our mouths quiet.
Speaker 3: By a mysterious person with a bad, fake Boston accent. No,
Speaker 3: for anyone who doesn't know what we're talking about, I'm
Speaker 3: proud of you.
Speaker 4: Well done. Way to be less terminally online.
Speaker 3: You should listen Jamie Loptis's podcasts. He should. Antio Zamboni
Speaker 3: was born into a working class political family in Bologna.
Speaker 3: His parents were anarchists who became fascists, or at least
Speaker 3: his father had. He was never baptized. His parents only
Speaker 3: had a civil union because they refused to let the
Speaker 3: state or the church have anything to do with their
Speaker 3: marriage before they became fascists. His father, Mamolo Zamboni, when
Speaker 3: he became a fascist, The New York Times called it
Speaker 3: quote disassociating from radical action, because being an anarchist is radical,
Speaker 3: being a fascist is normal. According to the New York
Speaker 3: Times in nineteen twenty six and now, yeah, Mamolo called
Speaker 3: himself quote an anarchist and a fascist. So okay, what
Speaker 3: a guy.
Speaker 2: I mean, there's a lot of that too. Unfortunately, Oh yeah,
Speaker 2: I could look into there's a I mean, he considered
Speaker 2: himself and was very angry about other like people who
Speaker 2: called themselves anarchists because he had a different attitude towards it.
Speaker 2: But the guy who wrote A Storm of Steel, Ernst Junger,
Speaker 2: was like called himself an anarch and I guess the
Speaker 2: difference is he just believed in anarchism for himself as
Speaker 2: like an individual choice, still serving the Nazi state. He
Speaker 2: was kind of an incoherent fella politically in my opinion,
Speaker 2: but wrote a very good World War One memoir.
Speaker 3: Well, I think that that sounds like approximately half of
Speaker 3: the modern Libertarian party that the other half of the
Speaker 3: Libertarian party is very embarrassed about. Yeah. Yeah. Antio had
Speaker 3: two brothers, one of whom was in a Fascist militia,
Speaker 3: the other of whom was in the army. Antio was
Speaker 3: a young anarchist with way better politics than his dad,
Speaker 3: and he took a shot at Mussolini while the man
Speaker 3: drove past him in an open car. He missed, he
Speaker 3: pierced the Fascist collar, and the crowd killed him. Just
Speaker 3: stab this child to death. Oh I have you know
Speaker 3: a fifteen year old either like a kid or an adult. Yeah,
Speaker 3: Antio's a kid. This is a child. Yeah, I mean
Speaker 3: every fifteen year old is a child. But the crowd
Speaker 3: knew they were killing a child.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, they did.
Speaker 4: Not.
Speaker 2: It was not just like somebody who could have passed
Speaker 2: for seventeen or eighteen, like they were very aware they
Speaker 2: were killing a kid.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he could have passed for twelve. Yeah, gotcha. I
Speaker 3: looked at the I don't normally do this to myself,
Speaker 3: but I looked at the corpse photo because the only
Speaker 3: other photos that anyone has of him is when he's
Speaker 3: like eight. You know, and his coward fascist father tried
Speaker 3: to distance himself from the actions of his son until
Speaker 3: after the war. But we'll get to that. The New
Speaker 3: York Times reported the father walked into the police station
Speaker 3: to see the body and said, quote, I knew it
Speaker 3: would happen. It was faded. He was a strange boy
Speaker 3: with strange notions. I had a dreadful premonition that something
Speaker 3: would happen to him. Our doctor said he might go
Speaker 3: mad one day. This is the father trying to save
Speaker 3: his own ass. It's not going to work. Then New
Speaker 3: York Times writes a little glowing article about Mussolini playing
Speaker 3: his violin with his wife and kids at home, taking
Speaker 3: solace after the attack. Then they talk about how everyone
Speaker 3: is saying that if Mussolini stays alive, fascism will keep
Speaker 3: Italy normal and peaceful.
Speaker 2: But if he were killed, it seems like what fascism
Speaker 2: will do.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, violent fascist might take over if Mussolini's killed.
Speaker 3: And on the exact same page of the New York
Speaker 3: Times from nineteen twenty six, there's a different article about
Speaker 3: fascist black shirts rating anti fascist newspapers at gunpoint.
Speaker 2: Uh huh. But you know, but in a normal way,
Speaker 2: you know, Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3: Being a fascist did not protect Mamolo the father. He
Speaker 3: and his sister in law were both sentenced to thirty
Speaker 3: years for being vaguely connected to antio. Basically, they're like, oh,
Speaker 3: the kid couldn't come up with doing it. It must
Speaker 3: have been a plot by previously anarchy dad. But by
Speaker 3: nineteen thirty two, the elder Zamboni received a pardon directly
Speaker 3: from Mussolini in exchange for becoming an informant for the fascists. Then,
Speaker 3: after the war, Mamlo went one eighty again and started
Speaker 3: writing pamphlets speaking of the courage of his son and
Speaker 3: started publishing anarchist material again. Great he died in nineteen
Speaker 3: fifty two. And he's not the only anarchist in the
Speaker 3: story who went fascist and then anarchist again. Yeah, this guy,
Speaker 3: I don't like him.
Speaker 2: Yeah, again, a lot of It's just like a lot
Speaker 2: of people are more dripp will always be a decent
Speaker 2: number of people, sizeable minority, always mostly just driven by
Speaker 2: whatever's pissing them off in the moment, you know, as
Speaker 2: opposed to principles totally.
Speaker 3: I'm just so mad at him for turning his back
Speaker 3: on his kid and trying to throw this dead kid
Speaker 3: under the bus to save his own ass.
Speaker 2: I mean it sounds like a guy who sucks. Yeah,
Speaker 2: sounds like a guy, a bastard that maybe someone should
Speaker 2: get behind.
Speaker 3: I know, it's kind of a little weird guy too, Like, yeah,
Speaker 3: after Antio is a t Mussolini. All other political parties
Speaker 3: were outlawed, but they already didn't have any power, and
Speaker 3: Mussolini was going to do that anyhow, was my argument.
Speaker 3: This more or less ends open anarchist organizing in Italy,
Speaker 3: as I understand it, And Mussolini brings back the death
Speaker 3: penalty now for anyone trying to kill him or the king.
Speaker 3: That didn't stop people from trying to kill him. No
Speaker 3: one tries to kill a dictator thinking it's a safe
Speaker 3: thing to do.
Speaker 2: Nope. Yeah, nobody's ever killed a dictator being like this,
Speaker 2: This is more relaxing than staying home at night and
Speaker 2: reading the newspaper.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm going to get away from this just fine.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, although later the people who do kill Missolini
Speaker 3: do but yeah.
Speaker 2: That's a different time. That's really not an assassination.
Speaker 1: No, no.
Speaker 3: The next attempt we're going to talk about was a
Speaker 3: man who, like Atano Breshi before him, abandoned the safety
Speaker 3: of the United States and kind of abandoned his family
Speaker 3: there to return to Italy to try and do what
Speaker 3: was right. His name was Mikela Shiroukay, which to me
Speaker 3: looks like it's spelled Michelle if anyone's curious, But it's
Speaker 3: like the French. But it's not. It's Italian, so it's Maclay. Micklay.
Speaker 3: Shiro was born in eighteen ninety nine on Sardinia, which
Speaker 3: is an Italian island. His father had already emigrated to
Speaker 3: the US, and Michaelay was raised by his mother. He
Speaker 3: was twice arrested in demonstrations as a kid. He was
Speaker 3: conscripted into World War One, and, like a lot of
Speaker 3: anarchists at the time, he was hoping the war would
Speaker 3: turn into a war of liberation. It did not famously.
Speaker 2: It's a bummer, yeah.
Speaker 3: Mcklay became convinced of anarchism after the Communist Party, he
Speaker 3: felt sold out the factory occupations and let the bosses
Speaker 3: back in. He eventually moves to Manhattan. He starts fighting
Speaker 3: Italian fascists in the streets. He worked as a mechanic
Speaker 3: and then he became a banana wholesaler in the Bronx.
Speaker 3: He married an Irish American woman named Minnie. He had
Speaker 3: two kids. I think he had a son and a daughter.
Speaker 3: But he was watching Italy fall to fascism and he
Speaker 3: couldn't handle it. He was like, someone's got to do something.
Speaker 3: I'm someone. I'm gonna do something. He went first to
Speaker 3: France and then likely coordinated with anarchists there, but he
Speaker 3: kept his mouth shut about it, so we never know.
Speaker 3: We'll never know like who else was involved because they
Speaker 3: were never arrested. He went up to Belgium and he
Speaker 3: worked in an anarchist bomb making workshop. I don't know,
Speaker 3: there's like a like fly you go to like the
Speaker 3: punk show and there's a flyer. It's like, hey, come
Speaker 3: to the anarchist bomb making workshop. This Saturday. Yeah, but
Speaker 3: he made himself two bombs, and then he traveled to
Speaker 3: Rome in January nineteen thirty one. M h, we've only
Speaker 3: got his confession under duress to work from, so we don't.
Speaker 3: You know, famously not always the most honest and not
Speaker 3: a great source. Yeah. But his original plan, he said,
Speaker 3: was that he was going to use the bombs in
Speaker 3: Paris against the Soviet embassy in revenge for the murder
Speaker 3: of anarchists in the USSR. But then he decided to
Speaker 3: kill Mussolini himself. I think that that was his backup plan.
Speaker 3: I think that he went to I think he went
Speaker 3: back to Europe to try and kill Mscelini. But in
Speaker 3: Rome he rented two hotel rooms, one for himself and
Speaker 3: one for his bombs, because bombs need privacy too, you know,
Speaker 3: of course.
Speaker 2: Yes, that's actually my primary political issue, yeah, is extending
Speaker 2: privacy rights to modern military explosives. You know, nobody needs
Speaker 2: to know what a couple of jade ams get up
Speaker 2: to in their spare time. That's between them and God
Speaker 2: and whatever village they're hitting.
Speaker 3: While he was there, he was either shacking up with
Speaker 3: or conspiring with a Hungarian dancer named Anna Lukowski. If
Speaker 3: I were writing the story, it would be both. Also,
Speaker 3: everyone writes sex work out of history, so I would
Speaker 3: put money that she was a sex worker, But that
Speaker 3: doesn't make her less or more likely to have been
Speaker 3: one of the conspirators. And there is reason to believe
Speaker 3: that he is part of a broader conspiracy working, but
Speaker 3: he never rats them out. And the reason that we
Speaker 3: think this is that he spent money really freely while
Speaker 3: he was there. He was renting two hotel rooms, but
Speaker 3: he had no money on him when he was arrested,
Speaker 3: and there was like no money in any of the
Speaker 3: rooms or whatever. Right, So he was probably working with
Speaker 3: a bunch of people who wanted Mussolini dead. A lot
Speaker 3: of people wanted Mussolini dead. Yeah, for some reason, his
Speaker 3: plan was really simple. One of his hotel rooms overlooked
Speaker 3: a common route for Mussolini's car. He was going to
Speaker 3: wait and drop a bomb on Mussolini, but he wanted
Speaker 3: to do it when there was no bystanders around, of course,
Speaker 3: And this is the thing that has come up a
Speaker 3: bunch of times on the show, but has left out
Speaker 3: a lot of the sensationless stuff about bomb assassinations, as
Speaker 3: all of the bystanders who get killed. There have been
Speaker 3: so many times in history, and there's gonna be two
Speaker 3: in this episode where people don't do it because they
Speaker 3: can't find a way to do it without hurting people.
Speaker 3: He's there for like three weeks and he can't find
Speaker 3: a way to not hurt anyone else. He had all
Speaker 3: but given up, and he was figuring he'd go back
Speaker 3: to Paris and attack the Soviets instead when he was
Speaker 3: stopped on the street by cops on February third, nineteen
Speaker 3: thirty one. And I think he was just like stopped
Speaker 3: for being a sketchy guy because it's a fascist state,
Speaker 3: you know, and they take him to a holding sell
Speaker 3: for investigation. There were three cops in the room. He
Speaker 3: pulled a gun and shot all three cops. Wow, and
Speaker 3: then he shouted long live anarchy and put the gun
Speaker 3: in his own mouth and pulled the trigger. Well, okay,
Speaker 3: all four men survived. Oh my god. Yeah wow.
Speaker 2: I mean that does have to win my award for
Speaker 2: worst with a gun of anyone on this podcast. To
Speaker 2: shoot four people, including yourself and have them all live
Speaker 2: is a real yeah. Honestly though, I got to a
Speaker 2: given the time, something that probably just goes down to
Speaker 2: how much worse ammunition was back then, you know, powder
Speaker 2: loads were less reliable.
Speaker 3: He may have loaded himself, you know, yeah, like I
Speaker 3: think he like he seriously injured one of the cops
Speaker 3: in himself, Jesus Christ. He was like rushed to emergency surgery,
Speaker 3: and they, you know, wanted him fit to stand trial.
Speaker 2: Right, stand trial for killing no one.
Speaker 3: That's actually part of the thing. I was reading newspapers
Speaker 3: at the time and they were like, look, shooting cops
Speaker 3: didn't carry the death penalty, so it actually was against
Speaker 3: their own laws to try and give him the death penalty.
Speaker 3: But he admitted that he was there to kill Missolini.
Speaker 3: In fact, he pretty much they were like, what are
Speaker 3: you doing? He was like, I'm here to kill Missolini.
Speaker 3: He tried to write his wife, and his wife tried
Speaker 3: to write him while he was in jail, but their
Speaker 3: letters were confiscated. He wrote to his father to the
Speaker 3: same effect. In May nineteen thirty one, he was tried
Speaker 3: by a fascist judge with no jury, and all the
Speaker 3: lawyers and witnesses had to be put before a special
Speaker 3: tribunal before they could come in. His defense was basically
Speaker 3: I came here to blow out Mussolini during the trial,
Speaker 3: he decried both fascism and communism. They told him he
Speaker 3: would be executed, shot in the back. He didn't say
Speaker 3: a word as the sentence came down. When he was
Speaker 3: asked if he had anything to add, he shrugged his shoulders.
Speaker 3: At two thirty am the next morning, they came into
Speaker 3: his cell and told him he would be killed at sunrise.
Speaker 3: He said he did not need a priest, and he
Speaker 3: was shot in the back by a firing squad of
Speaker 3: twenty four fascists, folks from his home of Sardinia, who
Speaker 3: had volunteered specifically to kill him.
Speaker 2: Well, I guess that's a nice at least you. No,
Speaker 2: it's your guys. You went to high school with murdering. Yeah,
Speaker 2: totally Actually sounds much worse.
Speaker 3: Yeah. His wife Minnie lived to nineteen eighty seven, dying
Speaker 3: at eighty three. Their son sparred A, died in two
Speaker 3: thousand and five. I found an article I couldn't get
Speaker 3: access to behind an academic wall of Spartaco writing about
Speaker 3: his father, and I'm kind of sad I couldn't get it.
Speaker 3: But here's an assassin who didn't go through with his
Speaker 3: actions because he couldn't do it without hurting anyone else.
Speaker 3: Now let's talk about the opposite sure, but before that,
Speaker 3: let's talk about the other opposite products and services. Ah,
Speaker 3: I love products and services. Well, someone's going to get hurt.
Speaker 2: M's that's the promise we make.
Speaker 3: Here they are and we're burke. We are burt. Now
Speaker 3: I'm going to talk about my least favorite anarchist in history.
Speaker 2: Oh, there's a couple of jokes. There's a couple of
Speaker 2: jokes I could make.
Speaker 3: People we know. But yeah, no, my least favorite anarchist
Speaker 3: I've never met. You don't stay in a political scene
Speaker 3: without making a few. Let's go with frenemies. Yeah. So,
Speaker 3: there's a long list of things anarchists have invented which
Speaker 3: can be used for good or evil. The carriage mounted
Speaker 3: machine gun, missiles apparently, the getaway car, foosball, steampunk, free
Speaker 3: bike programs, signal, the messaging app. One thing that you
Speaker 3: can say was probably invented by someone who called themselves
Speaker 3: an anarchist at the time was the car bomb.
Speaker 2: Uh well, yeah, look, I've seen a couple of car bombs.
Speaker 2: I've even seen one kill people, and uh not a
Speaker 2: fan of car bombs. No, Well, it was a vbied,
Speaker 2: which I guess is like and it's in that line
Speaker 2: of descent.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm still sorry you to see anyone die.
Speaker 2: It's okay, I mostly I'm I mean they were far
Speaker 2: enough away that I just kind of saw them turned
Speaker 2: into smoke.
Speaker 3: Okay, yeah, no, I'm sure that doesn't have any effects
Speaker 3: on yourself. No, not at all, not at all.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Before the Oklahoma City bombing, the deadliest terrorist attack in
Speaker 3: US history was the Wall Street bombing of September sixteenth,
Speaker 3: nineteen twenty.
Speaker 2: Oh. I have heard of this.
Speaker 3: Yeah, someone it is not certain who used a horse
Speaker 3: drawn wagon as the first car bomb. And every time
Speaker 3: I say the first in any show, it's like, you know,
Speaker 3: I don't know the first that I know about. Right,
Speaker 3: there's a whole book about the history of the car
Speaker 3: bomb called Buddha's Wagon, because we're going to get to ooh,
Speaker 3: that's how it was. Probably Mario Buddha.
Speaker 2: Yeah, in this car bomb, I thought there were talk.
Speaker 2: I was hoping there were some Buddhist history with car
Speaker 2: bombs that I hadn't heard. But okay, that makes sense.
Speaker 3: No, I mean maybe I don't know, but yes, in
Speaker 3: this carriage was one hundred pounds of dynamite, five hundred
Speaker 3: pounds of cast iron weights for shrapnel, and they rode
Speaker 3: the horse up and then the driver got out and
Speaker 3: left and blew up on Wall Street, not in one
Speaker 3: of the buildings. It killed forty people, and then like injure,
Speaker 3: hundreds of people, and almost everyone that killed were like
Speaker 3: fucking kids that worked as messengers and like clerks and shit.
Speaker 2: Again, this is like the problem of like just this
Speaker 2: thing you get on Twitter whenever stuff happens where it's
Speaker 2: like somebody has attacked this group of people that like
Speaker 2: leftists broadly dislike, and it's like, I don't know, wait
Speaker 2: a minute to see if that's who they hit. Yeah,
Speaker 2: you know, I'm not talking about you know, the recent thing,
Speaker 2: but like it happens often where it's like yeah, it
Speaker 2: turns out like, oh no, no, that's not that's not
Speaker 2: who got hurt. Yeah, because that's you know, with bombs,
Speaker 2: very hard to be. It's the same thing, like it's
Speaker 2: not just a leftist thing, Like it's mostly not a
Speaker 2: leftist thing. It's a thing that I grew up watching
Speaker 2: all of the adults around me celebrate as like bombs
Speaker 2: got dropped in places that I now know because I
Speaker 2: understand more of out bombs and talk to people who
Speaker 2: were in those places when they were being bombed. Were
Speaker 2: largely killing civilians because precision bombing is mostly a myth.
Speaker 3: Yeah totally.
Speaker 2: It's just like people love explosions.
Speaker 3: And the guy who had recently just tried to kill
Speaker 3: MUSSLINI earlier on the story didn't do it because it
Speaker 3: wasn't a good buy chance. Yep.
Speaker 2: And don't make bombs. I shouldn't need to say that.
Speaker 2: Don't be making mombs. Don't do bombs bombs. Bomb's bad.
Speaker 2: You will not be the one who figures out how
Speaker 2: to use bombs ethically, No one ever has been. Yeah.
Speaker 3: And this wasn't some kids who died as collateral damage,
Speaker 3: but we killed some big shots. This was all collateral damage,
Speaker 3: no regular damage. Cool.
Speaker 2: Really put the fear of God into those people who
Speaker 2: didn't get hurt.
Speaker 3: Yep. And I would argue that of every major political
Speaker 3: ideology of the last two hundred years, ANA because I'm
Speaker 3: probably is the least innocent blood on its hands.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, yeah, in part because we we generally don't
Speaker 2: wind up in power. Yeah totally, which is you know,
Speaker 2: I mean, is part of the goal. But yeah, totally.
Speaker 2: But the Wall Street bombing is a decent chunk of
Speaker 2: the innocent blood on our hands.
Speaker 3: Of the anatist movement.
Speaker 2: That's a bad one.
Speaker 3: The most likely suspect is an Italian anarchist named Mario Buddha,
Speaker 3: who was actually probably with Sacho when they robbed and
Speaker 3: killed those people in the Sacho and Vanzetti case. Mario
Speaker 3: Budda is like a mystery man in history and there's
Speaker 3: a lot of like takes on him, and he was
Speaker 3: like kind of almost everywhere that like violence was happening.
Speaker 3: Mario Buddha went on to almost certainly become a fascist
Speaker 3: infemant in Italy. Cool, yeah, and almost certainly foil another
Speaker 3: anarchist attempt on Mussolini's life. He is the worst. Yeah,
Speaker 3: you're right.
Speaker 2: That is as shitty as you can possibly be as
Speaker 2: an anarchist militant. I know, honestly, I'm mad. I'm mad,
Speaker 2: but I am a little impressed. Yeah, Like, if I
Speaker 2: was making up an anarchist for you to get mad at,
Speaker 2: I couldn't do better than this.
Speaker 3: Absolutely. After murdering a bunch of kids and shit in
Speaker 3: the name of anarchy, he made his way back to
Speaker 3: Italy got caught up in the hubbub.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it stops someone from killing Musolini. Yeah, yeah, Jesus.
Speaker 3: By nineteen thirty three, it seems likely that he is
Speaker 3: cooperating with police informing on anarchists, and a lot of
Speaker 3: like people who are really into anarchist history are skeptical
Speaker 3: of this because for a while, the only information that
Speaker 3: anyone had about this was that a communist newspaper accused
Speaker 3: him of this. At the time, yeah, and a lot
Speaker 3: of people, even anarchists, listened and were like, oh, we
Speaker 3: don't trust this guy anymore. But other people were like, oh,
Speaker 3: that's the communist plain sectarian politics. And then later you
Speaker 3: can see historians have done the work of being like
Speaker 3: here's where Mario Budo was dropped off the list of
Speaker 3: dangerous anarchists to keep an eye out for, and like
Speaker 3: here's you know, he's basically like the fascist took him
Speaker 3: under their wing. And even if half of what they
Speaker 3: say about Mario Buddha is true, I don't like him
Speaker 3: at all. I don't like blowing up kids on Wall Street.
Speaker 3: I don't like cooperating fascists, I don't like Foilian an
Speaker 3: attempt Mussolini's life.
Speaker 2: Yeah again, I uh yeah. Really. One of my very
Speaker 2: few lines is you probably should don't go don't be
Speaker 2: killing kids. dB kk. That's my little like, what would
Speaker 2: Jesus do? Bracelet in case you ever need not kill cat? Yeah,
Speaker 2: look at a bracelet. Oh no, you know what, I
Speaker 2: shouldn't kill kids.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Also, if you need to look at a bracelet to
Speaker 2: remind you not to kill kids, I would. Maybe there's
Speaker 2: a lot of things you probably need to do.
Speaker 3: Therapy.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Meanwhile, back to a regular anarchist, when I like, who
Speaker 3: doesn't become a fascist? Sure, there's a blacksmith named Umberto.
Speaker 3: I promise you another Mberto Thomasini. Umberto got involved in
Speaker 3: politics when he was thirteen. He joined the nineteen oh
Speaker 3: nine General Strike in response to the murder of the
Speaker 3: Spanish anarchists educator and veteran of the Pod franc Sisc Farrar.
Speaker 3: He went on to fight in World War One. He
Speaker 3: won a Cross for valor. But according to his own take,
Speaker 3: what happened is he got to the war because he
Speaker 3: was conscripted and he just shot into the air and
Speaker 3: he was like trying not to kill anyone.
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, that's actually I mean, there's some evidence, although
Speaker 2: the studies around it have been to a degree, there's
Speaker 2: a lot of critiques about them, but like some evidence
Speaker 2: that that was more the norm than not with combat soldiers.
Speaker 3: And I bet especially when you're talking about like trenches
Speaker 3: and stuff, where you're yes, yes, go shoot that dot
Speaker 3: on the horizon, whereas like if someone's like running through
Speaker 3: a trench trying to kill me, I'm like, I'm gonna
Speaker 3: shoot that man, even if we have the same political ideology,
Speaker 3: if someone's trying to kill me with that, I just
Speaker 3: don't want to get shot. Yeah, but yeah, no, totally.
Speaker 3: And he He spent some time as a pow during
Speaker 3: the war, and then he returned home to return to
Speaker 3: work as a blacksmith, and he more formally committed to
Speaker 3: anarchism alongside his brothers, who, like all everyone else, they
Speaker 3: left the Socialist Party in nineteen twenty one after the
Speaker 3: Socialist sold out the movement. Again, I don't know as
Speaker 3: much about that, but that is what Umberto felt, and
Speaker 3: his brothers felt. Umberto's life could easily be his own episode.
Speaker 3: He helped get the bombs from one Gino to the
Speaker 3: other Gino in nineteen twenty six, then spent six years
Speaker 3: in prison during the crackdown on it. Like after Musolin
Speaker 3: he came to power, he sent a whole bunch of
Speaker 3: the anarchists to prison. Right during those six years he
Speaker 3: met an anarchist in prison named Mario Buddha. Then Umberto
Speaker 3: fled Italy on foot to Yugoslavia. Then he went to Paris,
Speaker 3: where he met his partner Anna and had his son Renee.
Speaker 3: In nineteen thirty six, Spain was under attack and so
Speaker 3: Umberto left the then safety of Paris to go to
Speaker 3: the front lines teaching anarchists about trench warfare. And then
Speaker 3: he became an anarchist specops guy, and he went off
Speaker 3: to go mine franco As ships.
Speaker 2: Oh cool, I know, the opposite of the guy who
Speaker 2: just killed children and saved Mussolini.
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly exactly, and he shouldn't have been friends with
Speaker 3: that guy. He was arrested by Stalinists and prevented from
Speaker 3: attacking the fascists while he was off to go mind
Speaker 3: these ships. He broke out of Stalinis prison, and then
Speaker 3: he returned back to the prison he'd just broken out
Speaker 3: of alongside anarchists from the government to negotiate everyone's release.
Speaker 3: I think this is the same situation as the last man,
Speaker 3: the missile inventor man. But this might have just happened
Speaker 3: a bunch of times, yeah, because I read about these
Speaker 3: in different sources. Then in nineteen thirty seven, he goes
Speaker 3: back to France, so we can plot how to kill Mussolini.
Speaker 3: One problem. One of his co conspirators, a man who
Speaker 3: has absolute trust for is Mario Budda, whom he had
Speaker 3: met in prison. Mario leaked the plan to the Italian police,
Speaker 3: who foiled it. After the war, Mario Budda went back
Speaker 3: to the anarchist movement.
Speaker 2: Hooray, great, he sounds trustworthy. I'm sure really worked on things.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, don't want to cancel him just for
Speaker 3: saving Mussolini's life and murdering children. I can't find much
Speaker 3: about this particular assassination attempt that he foiled. Mostly I
Speaker 3: found a lot of ins and outs about the informant.
Speaker 3: But to follow umberto, He, like so many other anarchists,
Speaker 3: wound up in a non Nazi concentration camp in France.
Speaker 3: Then he was turned over to the Italian police, where
Speaker 3: he was imprisoned until the end of the war. Finally
Speaker 3: he's freed. He returns to his wife and his son,
Speaker 3: and his work as a blacksmith, and to anarchist organizing.
Speaker 3: When the spirit of sixty eight swings through, he starts
Speaker 3: organizing again. He's like about seventy years old, and he's
Speaker 3: like organizing with a bunch of twenty year old kids, right,
Speaker 3: because it's the it's nineteen sixty eight.
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, that's who there's going to be to organize with.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think it's Coole as shit. He kept publishing
Speaker 3: shit that would send him back to jail. I think
Speaker 3: he was sent back to jail like multiple times just
Speaker 3: for continuing to publish anarchist literature. And then he died
Speaker 3: in nineteen eighty. He wrote an autobiography, but I don't
Speaker 3: believe it's been translated. And there's a documentary about him
Speaker 3: called An Anarchist Life from twenty thirteen that I haven't
Speaker 3: seen yet that I want to see. And he was
Speaker 3: real cool. But I don't know what he did to
Speaker 3: try and Colle Mussolini. I just know he made the
Speaker 3: wrong friend.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well we all do sometimes.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: For example, I mean there was there was one summer
Speaker 2: that Benita Mussolini and I were inseparable. I mean we
Speaker 2: would spend just hours on the beach, telling each other's secrets,
Speaker 2: having pig nicks. You know, there was there was that
Speaker 2: one wine drenched to night, and then I found out
Speaker 2: he'd been the dictator of Italy this whole time. I
Speaker 2: had no idea, Margaret, I had no idea.
Speaker 1: I know.
Speaker 3: I mean, what's funny is that pre him becoming Mussolini.
Speaker 3: That is the story that a lot of people tell.
Speaker 3: People do have that story, like the woman Lita, who
Speaker 3: is probably his lover, who is an anarchist, who was
Speaker 3: like later she was like I misjudged his character, you know, Yeah,
Speaker 3: he whom'st amongst us hasn't been friends with the inventor
Speaker 3: of fascism?
Speaker 2: Well, Cohen, I mean, let's we've got a There was
Speaker 2: another Italian who might deserve that title a little more.
Speaker 2: But we talked about him on Behind the Bastards. Wait
Speaker 2: which one, Oh, the guy who wore a banana hamnock?
Speaker 2: One sec Wait what does.
Speaker 3: He invent the banana hammock?
Speaker 4: No? No, no, but he I don't remember this person's
Speaker 4: name either. We definitely talked about it though.
Speaker 2: Gabriel Danunzio, Yeah, yes, Gabriel Danunzio, who was a big
Speaker 2: influence on Mussolini and was like is often credited as
Speaker 2: the inventor of fascism. He never called himself a fascist.
Speaker 2: He's like partially right, there's not just one guy, but
Speaker 2: he is earlier in the chain of the development of
Speaker 2: fascist mes a concept than Mussolini and an influence on Benito.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Oh h yeah, Gabriel Danunzio. You can listen to our
Speaker 2: two parter on him, very much worth it. He is
Speaker 2: the guy who in Fume as an independent city. He's
Speaker 2: a guy who marches into Fume and takes it over
Speaker 2: as like, oh, along with a bunch of there were
Speaker 2: anarchists and communists and fascists all kind of together because
Speaker 2: they were all very much anti just all of the
Speaker 2: things that are going on right now, but those ideologies
Speaker 2: hadn't really hardened into in the concrete way they would
Speaker 2: a couple of years later. Fascinating time, kind of like
Speaker 2: how a lot of our most prominent right wing fas
Speaker 2: a lot of them are prominent fascist media ideologues today,
Speaker 2: were part of occupy. Yeah.
Speaker 3: God, Actually, the occupy versus Fume thing is actually makes
Speaker 3: a lot of really specific sense. That's the thing that's
Speaker 3: like it's so hard to talk about. Is that in
Speaker 3: a certain way, fascism is the red Brown alliance because
Speaker 3: it is taking ideas from leftism but applying into right
Speaker 3: wing ideology.
Speaker 2: Yes, well, two.
Speaker 3: More people at least tried to kill Mussolini. One of
Speaker 3: them don't know much about. Isn't even on the list
Speaker 3: of people who tried to kill Mussolini Wikipedia. His name
Speaker 3: is Domenico Bavone and he was a Republican. Republican on
Speaker 3: our list. He tried to build bombs to kill Mussolini,
Speaker 3: but he didn't go to the bomb making workshop for
Speaker 3: the punk show Flyer told him about in Brussels. That's
Speaker 3: a shame. So he failed at making the bombs properly,
Speaker 3: and he blew up his own house on September fifth,
Speaker 3: nineteen thirty one, killing his own mother.
Speaker 2: Well, bad job, bro, that's a that's about his bad
Speaker 2: I mean. And again, don't build bombs. There are so many.
Speaker 2: By far, the most normal story in political radical tries
Speaker 2: to make a bomb is political radical kills themselves, their
Speaker 2: friends or their family. Yeah, yeah, don't make bombs. Yeah,
Speaker 2: they're very indiscriminate.
Speaker 3: And under interrogation he admitted he was trying to kill Mussolini,
Speaker 3: and he was shot in the back by a firing squad.
Speaker 3: And then there is Angelo Pellegrono Sabard Aletto. Angelo was
Speaker 3: born in nineteen oh seven in mel Italy, and he
Speaker 3: was the fifth of eleven children, which means I do
Speaker 3: not need to tell you he was from a Catholic family,
Speaker 3: but he was His family was poor as hell. The
Speaker 3: article I read specifically indicated they were poor as hell
Speaker 3: because they had eleven children. But you know, whatever you do,
Speaker 3: you people can make their own decisions on how many
Speaker 3: kids to have. They fled poverty to France, then Luxembourg,
Speaker 3: then Belgium. Angelo was a miner and a machine hand.
Speaker 3: He became an anarchist as a teenager, talking to other
Speaker 3: immigrant workers who were mostly political refugees. Soon enough he
Speaker 3: was on lists of dangerous extremists and draft dodgers and shit.
Speaker 3: And he was inspired by Mikelo Sheirou and he met
Speaker 3: almost the exact same fate. In nineteen thirty two, he
Speaker 3: went to Rome to kill Mussolini, but like Maclay before him,
Speaker 3: he couldn't find a moment when he could bomb Mussolini
Speaker 3: without hurting anyone else. He spent months trying. Just bought
Speaker 3: a gun. That man should have bought a gun. I
Speaker 3: mean whatever, I.
Speaker 2: Don't know how hard it was to buy guns in
Speaker 2: Mussolini's Italy, fair enough, Yeah.
Speaker 3: But you know, he spent months trying, and he was
Speaker 3: on the verge of giving up when, like mcklay, he
Speaker 3: was arrested seemingly by happenstance on a train station, just
Speaker 3: like some cops were like, Eh, you're suspicious, We're going
Speaker 3: to search you. Which is you know, fascism. Also, the
Speaker 3: same thing happens in New York City subways, but you
Speaker 3: know whatever. Yeah, when he was searched, he had a
Speaker 3: Swiss passport, a pistol. Oh, he had a fucking gun.
Speaker 2: Well, okay, I guess not that hard, yeah, question answered.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and two bombs and he was tortured, and under
Speaker 3: torture he said he was there to avenge mckelay Shiro.
Speaker 3: He'd written a letter previously that year that said, quote,
Speaker 3: I have no choice to be free. Tyranny must be
Speaker 3: beaten to build tomorrow a new order in which all
Speaker 3: can enjoy the fruits of their labor and freely express
Speaker 3: their thoughts. We must destroy today all the injustices which
Speaker 3: render this impossible. His trial was a show trial. It
Speaker 3: was two days long. Journalists decried him as surly and
Speaker 3: sinister and would like literally make stuff up about how
Speaker 3: he looked. They were like he had a low forehead,
Speaker 3: you know, which he didn't. But even if he did,
Speaker 3: fuck you, you know. His lawyer asked him to write
Speaker 3: Ussolini for clemency. He refused. He shouted long Live Anarchy
Speaker 3: when he was shot in the back. After he was killed,
Speaker 3: the Fascist government decided to hide forever his burial site.
Speaker 3: No one knows where his body is. A biographer for
Speaker 3: Mussolini said that he would have pardoned the anarchists if
Speaker 3: they had asked, because he lauded their courage. I mean,
Speaker 3: considering a lot of his fucking people were former anarchists. Yep,
Speaker 3: I don't know. Maybe you would have, but fuck that,
Speaker 3: I mean whatever. I wouldn't be mad if anyone was like, oh,
Speaker 3: please don't kill me, mister Missolini, whatever, I would be like,
Speaker 3: you weakling, give the shit.
Speaker 2: Yeah Mussolini, I hardly know.
Speaker 1: Ye.
Speaker 2: Yeah, did I already do that joke? It just occurred
Speaker 2: to me.
Speaker 5: So yeah.
Speaker 3: Originally I was going to talk about the Partisans who
Speaker 3: finally did him in. But I think we've covered a
Speaker 3: lot of trying to kill Mussolini. There are too many
Speaker 3: cool people. I didn't want a skim pass. You got
Speaker 3: a Socialist, a Catholic, or Republican, at least five anarchists
Speaker 3: who tried to do him in. But it took a
Speaker 3: whole ass war. We got him in the end, though.
Speaker 2: And you know what folks would I'll say right now,
Speaker 2: is you can still try to take a shot at
Speaker 2: Mussolini and he's a lot easier to hit.
Speaker 3: Now. I assume he's buried somewhere. Probably I feel like, yeah,
Speaker 3: go dig him up, Yeah, and take a shot.
Speaker 2: Take a shot.
Speaker 3: Yeah, hard miss that way. Yeah, gender neutral shooting range,
Speaker 3: that's what they say.
Speaker 2: Take a shot with. You know, it could just be
Speaker 2: with the tool that you have on hand, so to speak.
Speaker 2: That was a penis joke.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we know. I could have been a p joke
Speaker 3: because you can have a tool on hand without a penis.
Speaker 2: You're right, you could use You can use a shili
Speaker 2: for example. You know there's all sorts of g or
Speaker 2: just you cut the bottom of a water bottle out
Speaker 2: and then like cut the top to widen it and
Speaker 2: you kind of jam it in there. It sort of works.
Speaker 3: And I can't believe that's the note we're ending on,
Speaker 3: but that's where we're at. Everyone, Uh go kill Mussolini,
Speaker 3: but only Mussolini. We're talking about the past.
Speaker 2: Yes, only in the past.
Speaker 3: And if you want to know more about the knock
Speaker 3: on effects of various types of violence, listen to this
Speaker 3: entire show's history because it is full of knock on effects,
Speaker 3: many of which are negative.
Speaker 2: And in terms of things I will continue to say
Speaker 2: for the modern era, don't make bombs.
Speaker 3: Yeah, don't make bombs.
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