Behind the Bastards Presents: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff

Here are a couple of our favorite episodes of Margaret Killjoy's Cool Poeple Who Did Cool Stuff podcast series.

All the People Who Tried to Kill Mussolini, Parts 1 & 2

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Media.

Speaker 2 (00:03):
Hey, everybody, Robert here, it is the end of the year.
You're cooling down from a Christmas, you know, still probably
finishing up pie and other goodies that you got. I
hope you had a good one. We're all bracing for
the new year to come. Behind the Bastards is of
course continuing to publish as we normally do around this
time of year, but we've also got some specials for

(00:24):
you from elsewhere in our network. And today we have
collected two great episodes from Cool People Who Did Cool
Stuff about all of the people who tried to kill
Benito Mussolini. This is with the great Margaret Killjoy. I
think it is very fitting for the end of this year.

Speaker 3 (00:44):
Hello, and welcome to Cool People Did Cool Stuff. We're
back in case you noticed we weren't here, but now
we're here. The we in this case is me Murder Killjoy,
and my producer Sophie Hi Sophie by Pie, and my
guest Robert Evans Hi Magpie.

Speaker 2 (01:05):
I listened to when I was buying Hey today, right
before this, I went to go get hay for my
livestock at the feed store and they were playing that
song Brandy, And so now I am in my head
remixing that song instead of being about a woman whose
lover dies at sea, to be about you making podcasts excellent.

Speaker 3 (01:27):
Well, we can make hay from that one time Robert
and I went and got hey, and it was the
first time in a little while at my pickup truck
got to be a pickup truck. Besides well, I guess
it was a camper. Actually, we filled my camper full
of hay, is what happened. Yes, And it took me
a long time to get all the hay out.

Speaker 2 (01:43):
It does take a long time to get all the
hay out, Yeah, but.

Speaker 3 (01:47):
It was worth it because then the goats got to
eat hay, and the goats love hay.

Speaker 4 (01:51):
So, speaking of this week, speaking of saying hey, oh,
we should say hey to Rory, who's our audio engineer?

Speaker 3 (01:57):
Hi Rory, Hi, riight, hy Rory? And our theme musical
was written for us by unwoman and for no particular reason,
not at all. I actually genuinely picked the subject and
started researching it before the activities that happened last week.

Speaker 4 (02:11):
You did like like I can vouch for you.

Speaker 3 (02:16):
And I'm glad you don't Belee, don't to vouch for
me in court about it.

Speaker 4 (02:20):
I'm just but but I would, and it would I
would be truthful. I have like documentation full.

Speaker 3 (02:24):
It's true because the thing we're going to talk about,
Robert Evans, have you ever heard of people trying to
assassinate people that they don't like.

Speaker 2 (02:34):
No assassinations. No one would ever do such a thing.
No one would ever do such a thing and then
have it immediately cause Blue Cross Blue Shield to reverse
the policy on denying claims arbitrarily when the surgery takes
too long to pay for anesthetic. That would never happen.

Speaker 3 (02:51):
No, there's not a whole saying about direct action gets
the goods. You all are listening to this in the
future where the knock on effects will have become more clear.
But right now we know very We only know one
knock on effect of last week.

Speaker 2 (03:02):
Which is, if you've got Blue Cross, you now have
to be less worried about getting surgery.

Speaker 3 (03:07):
Yeah, and waking up in the middle of surgery, which
is basically everyone's nightmare.

Speaker 2 (03:11):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (03:11):
Literally, that is.

Speaker 4 (03:12):
So like, so many people have that fear and that
it's gulish. Yeah, so grulish. It's so gross.

Speaker 3 (03:19):
Well, the person that we're going to talk about attempting
to assassinate in the past who's already dead is a
little fascist he might have heard of named Mussolini.

Speaker 2 (03:30):
Mussolini, I hardly know Leini, Okay, pass and it's not
gonna work.

Speaker 3 (03:37):
Sorry, Mussolini. Originally this was going to be a two
parter where one part was the people who tried when
Mussolini was coming up, and then the second part was
going to be people who succeeded when he was coming down.
But it's actually all going to be about people who
tried when he was coming up because there were so
many Did you know that an awful lot of people

(03:58):
tried to kill Mussolini?

Speaker 2 (04:00):
Yes, I mean it's like with Hitler, right, Like you've
got that guy who tried to blow him up and
that and almost did that fucking carpenter who tried to
blow him up in one of the halls. He was
speaking at all sorts of pre attempts. So I wasn't
really familiar with the ones on Mussolini, but I was
sure there had been some.

Speaker 3 (04:17):
We're going to talk about I think eight of them
today or this week.

Speaker 2 (04:22):
Yeah, that sounds like the right them ount Yeah.

Speaker 3 (04:25):
And so far by my account, I was counting. Right
before I recorded, I was talking to one of my
friends about it. So far, by my account, we've got
one socialist, one Catholic, one Republican, and five anarchists attempted
to kill Mussolini. So Benito Mussolini is famously one of
the founders of fascism. The ideology that is genuinely and

(04:48):
truly bad. That ninety five percent of the people on
this planet agree is bad. We just don't agree about
what counts as fascism.

Speaker 2 (04:56):
Yes, that's part of the problem.

Speaker 3 (04:59):
Yeah, yeah, it doesn't help that. I mean, because some
people use fascism to just being anyone I don't like
or any authoritarianism, right, and that's not an accurate way
to talk about things. We shouldn't call our enemies fascists
when they're not fascists.

Speaker 2 (05:16):
Now, like Stalin wasn't really a fascist, No, because in
part fascists come to power through popular acclaim as a
result of like setting themselves up in opposition to the left.
There's this also idea that Stalin does kind of fit
in with the attitude that like the fascist dictator embodies
the people in some way, although the way in which

(05:38):
like Soviet propaganda talk about Stalin was actually quite different
from the way fascist propaganda tends to talk about the
leader being like an embodiment of the people. But yeah,
there are some similarities, like there's a bunch of stuff.
Syncretism is a big part. Go read your umburdo.

Speaker 3 (05:54):
Echo. Well, there's gonna be a bunch of emburdos in
this episode, but not Echo. Yeah, but it turns out
on Birdo is sort of the mic of Italy. Well, yeah,
mcla is probably the mic of Italy. But fascism is
one of the most convoluted and complex political ideologies to
ever come about, which is one of the reasons why
you can kind of point to anything and call it

(06:15):
fascism and be wrong, but also be like, you see
where you're coming from about it, you know, because it's
not actually a simple ideology. The more as I was
reading this, because Italian fascism in particular comes out of
where they're right and the left meet, and it is
not a Well we'll talk about this. I'm not going

(06:36):
to get too deep into the weeds of defining fascism today,
but I want to talk first about someone who one
hundred percent absolutely I am certain would have been fine
with assassinating someone like Benito Mussolini. About fifteen years before
Benito Mussolini came to power. That man who would have
been totally fine with killing Benito Mussolini was Benito Mussolini.

Speaker 2 (07:03):
Oh because well yeah, yeah, I know that makes sense.

Speaker 3 (07:06):
Yeah, to open up a can of orbs that the
Internet is not equipped to handle. Benito Mussolini, the founder
of the world's deadliest far right ideology, started on the left.

Speaker 2 (07:17):
Yep, he sure did. Uh kind of adjacent to anarchism.

Speaker 3 (07:21):
Yeah, we're going to talk about that. There's gonna be
a lot of also started as a journalist, hooray. Uh yeah, yeah,
he was a socialist for a long ass time. He
was at least a second generation leftist. Mussolini was born
in the year eighteen eighty three and he was the
child of a blacksmith socialist and a Catholic school teacher.

(07:45):
He got named after a series of socialists and leftists
because of his father, and then he was baptized Catholic
because of his mom. He's named Benito after Benito Juarez,
the liberal president of Mexico, and his middle names, which
I forgot to look up in a Italian are Andrea
and Amalakare And these are after two anarchists because his

(08:06):
father was part of the Anarchist International, which was an
anti authoritarian socialist organization in the eighteen seventies. I'm just
going straight into the like the this is like when
I have to talk about eugenics on this show, you know,
whenever I have to talk about something that was like
really common and easily understood in the nineteenth century, that
makes no sense in the twenty first century. Italian nationalism

(08:30):
is really intertwined with the left, and it's really intertwined
with anarchism.

Speaker 2 (08:34):
Yeah, and that, I mean it makes sense when you're
coming out of a world well not very long before
this period, Italy had been fucking Habsburg property. Much of
Italy at least had been Habsburg property, right, and when
all of these things that we now just see is like, well,
obviously Italy is a country, obviously Croatia is a country.

(08:55):
When they're all the property of some guy in his
inbred family, it's a lot less weird that it's a
left wing position to talk about nationalism.

Speaker 3 (09:03):
Yeah, totally. Benito Mussolini never did really roll with the anarchists.
He kind of wanted to at different points. When he
was a socialist, he was firmly in the authoritarian socialist camp,
but he studied a lot of anarchist theory. He remained
friendly with anarchists. He was either dating or just friends with.

(09:24):
I've read both the anarchist orientalist poet named Lyda Rafanelli.
He translated two of the anarchist Peter Kropotkin's books from
French into Italian. And because yeah, he was journalists. He
read newspapers and kind of if you were a political
person in the nineteenth century, if you were like a
political leader, your thing was that you were a journalist.
Your thing is that you read a newspaper.

Speaker 2 (09:46):
Yeah, I mean it's the same, it's the same. Reason
is that with the generation coming up and the next
generation are all going to get their starts on TikTok
and Twitter, and like we're already seeing this on the right, right,
I mean in the left to a degree. You know,
it's because that totally that's not the journalism. Tweeting is
not or making a TikTok is not journalism. But journalism
wasn't what we would consider journalism back then. It was

(10:08):
just the best way of getting propaganda to the masses.

Speaker 3 (10:11):
Yeah, and it was. Yeah, you wrote polemics, and propaganda
just literally meant propagating ideas. If you had an idea
and you want to have to tell people about it,
you would propagandize the idea. So Mussolini, the thing that's
going to come up throughout this week's story is that
he's clearly into authoritarianism, right, but there's something he liked
about the anarchists. He liked their courage, he liked their commitment,

(10:34):
and he liked action. You know, he was He wasn't
the kind of guy who wanted people to wait around
and talk about things. He wanted people to go out
and do things. He also, for a long time shared
their opinion that killing autocrats was just fine.

Speaker 2 (10:50):
I mean, look, there's a Vin diagram. We do may
not like to say it, but like there's a Vin diagram.
It points between me and Mussolini's life. Right, No, totally,
I'm not against killing early twentieth century autocrats theoretically.

Speaker 3 (11:05):
Right, yeah, totally. Yeah, if we had a time machine,
we would feel justified in going back and killing absolute
monarchs from the nineteenth century and earlier.

Speaker 2 (11:14):
Look, if I could go back in time and stab
the King of Italy.

Speaker 3 (11:17):
I would try to Well, that's going to bring us
to this week's first assassin, is it the guy who
stabbed the King of Italy? I actually can't remember whether
this guy stabbed or shot him. This is the first Okay,
this is the only successful assassin we're going to talk
about for a while. But he shaped a lot of
Italy's politics for a long time. And that man's name

(11:39):
was Gaetano Breshi. He was a weaver from Italy who
emigrated to the US in the nineteenth century to Patterson,
New Jersey. And it's kind of funny because there's all
of these different hidden, secret anarchist strongholds of the past.
I don't normally think about New Jersey when I think
about anarchism, but yeah, Addison, New Jersey very strong Italian

(12:02):
anarchist scene. The next little bit, because it's been a
little while since I've looked up Gatana Brescia. I used
to write about him a lot, so I'm kind of
going into a little bit story mode when I talk
about Gatana Breshci. I'm gonna have more direct sources for
the rest of the rest of the people. I'm gonna
talk about. So everyone knows Katana Breshi was hanging out
in New Jersey with his Irish wife, Sophie, which is
a good name, I agree, right, yeah, and his two daughters,

(12:26):
and she's gonna be all right in this story. Cool.

Speaker 4 (12:29):
Yeah, okay, cool, don't don't bring the name down.

Speaker 3 (12:33):
Yeah no, no, she's great. No, no negative notes on Sophie.
In eighteen ninety eight, there are these food riots in
Italy and the government was like, well, a specific general
is like, why don't we just murder the entire crowd
that's rioting, And so they did that, and we will
think food riots, they usually think like, oh, everyone lost
their mind and was running around and burning things or whatever.

(12:55):
These were organized strikes that were met with lethal force.
At least eighty protesters and two soldiers were killed. Jesus
and so King umberto the first what did he do?
And everyone at the time was like, oh, the king
is the true you know. A lot of like populism
is based on the idea that the government's bad, but
the king's good, you know, and.

Speaker 2 (13:15):
This translates to fascism too. Right during the Third Reich,
there was always this idea that like if only Hitler
knew right about the worst Nazi policies. Yeah yeah, this
is the same thing with the czar. Yeah yeah, no,
totally yeah.

Speaker 3 (13:27):
We see this again and again, and so I think
everyone was kind of expecting Umberto to come in and
be like, well, he probably shouldn't have done that, right, Oh,
I did promise you more than one, Imberto, and this
is one of them. There'sn be another one, probably on Wednesday,
m But what Umberto the first did is awarded the
guy who ordered the massacre of Medal of Honor and

(13:48):
Katano Breshi. He didn't like that. He was living in
New Jersey with Sophie. He'd started an anarchist paper with
some folks, and he'd put up a fuck ton of
money to start that paper. It is like two bucks
at the time, which is like several thousand dollars now.
He didn't want anyone else to get in trouble for
what he decided to do, so he didn't tell anyone.

(14:09):
He didn't tell Sophie. He just told her he had
to go deal with some stuff, like family stuff in Italy.
He didn't tell his comrades. He went into the newspaper
and said, hey, all that seed money. I put in,
I need it back now, and they were like why
and he was like, the not your business, give me
my money back. And so everyone kind of thought he
was a sellout and he was just like getting his

(14:29):
money to go fuck off, right. Everyone thought he left
the movement. But he got his money back and he
bought two things. He bought a Smith and Wesson, and
he bought a one way ticket to Paris.

Speaker 2 (14:40):
That's a song. That's a warren Zevon song right there.
Smith and Wesson and a one way ticket to Paris. Excellent.

Speaker 3 (14:46):
And the King is gonna die And unlike a lot
of would be assassins that we've talked about on this show,
Breshi practiced with the revolver, which is always key.

Speaker 4 (15:00):
Yes.

Speaker 3 (15:00):
Yeah, he made his way probably to Rome. He made
his way to Italy. He spent two days scouting out
the area where he knew the King was going to be.
And then on July twenty ninth, nineteen hundred, he went out.
He got some ice cream. I think he had lunch
with like a stranger and just hanging out and he
was like, you're gonna remember me guy, and then he

(15:21):
waited for umberto to come through waiting in the crowd
that was all there to cheer on their you know,
glorious leader, and uh he shot Umberto to death. The
crowd immediately grabbed him. Gaetano said, I did not kill Umberto.
I have killed the king. I have killed a principal.

Speaker 2 (15:39):
Hell oh, oh, that's that's a good line. That's a
good line.

Speaker 3 (15:46):
Back home in New Jersey, his anarchist friends were like, oh,
I guess we judged him wrong, and they started a
fund to look after his kids and support his family.
His wife came to Italy and testified to his good
character in court. His whole family was like arrested in
an investigation into conspiracy, but eventually everyone was let go,

(16:06):
and Italy, under a king was actually had a more
fair criminal justice system than the United States does today.
They didn't have the death penalty. Musolini's going to bring
that back later, so he gets life in prison. He
was held in solitary confinement. He had one hour a
day of exercises, like feet were like manacled to the floor.

(16:28):
They didn't treat him great. Less than a year later
he was found hanging in his cell, and modern historians
are recentably certain he was murdered. At the time, everyone's like, nah,
I just killed himself. Interestingly enough, this assassination didn't bring
in sweeping reactionary forces or anything like usually people are like, ah,
you killed the king and something worse is going to happen.

(16:50):
This changed things, but it the existing like kind of
leftist government stayed in power, and things kind of chugged along. Okay,
it didn't even lead to they like crack down on
the anarchist movement, but they didn't come through and destroy it.
It did lead to more international cooperation between law enforcement.
When I first started dreaming up this show years ago,

(17:11):
it was kind of in a different context and I
wanted to talk about anarchist history and I was like,
you know, they literally invented international policing to stop us.
Why are all of our books boring? Has been my
like go to tagline because they did. International policing exists
because of trying to stop the anarchist movement. Because yep,
nothing gets people to work together, Like like when people

(17:33):
go around and kill like poor people, everyone's like, oh,
that sucks. Whatever. When people go around and kill kings,
kings work together to make sure that that stops.

Speaker 2 (17:44):
Yeah, No, kings are great at like really union behave
they really work like unions royalty.

Speaker 3 (17:51):
Yeah, when when someone comes for them as a class,
they band together.

Speaker 4 (17:56):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (17:58):
One person who defended Gaetano Breshi doing a little king
murder was a man by the name of Benito Mussolini.
His fellow socialists were claiming Bresci was crazy for having
killed the king.

Speaker 4 (18:11):
Right.

Speaker 3 (18:12):
Mussolini said that tarrann Aside was quote the occupational hazard
of being a king, which I don't know I.

Speaker 2 (18:21):
Mean talking about occupational hazards. Yeah, I feel confident saying
that being a king is a pre existing condition.

Speaker 3 (18:31):
Yeah, yeah, totally. But what isn't a pre existing No,
But what else we're obliged to do is play ads
for you now, Yeah, like these ones and we're back.

(18:56):
Now this might shock you, Robert, did you know mus
didn't stay leftist? Really?

Speaker 2 (19:03):
Now? I thought you were talking about Binny Mussolini, the
man who invented the three day weekend.

Speaker 3 (19:13):
Well, I was reading a whole bunch on on that
website X about how actually the fascists or socialists and leftists.

Speaker 2 (19:21):
You're, of course referring to the website that just plays
a looping video of the song X Gonna give It
to You. That's where I get all of my historical
information about anarchists in the early nineteen hundreds as well.

Speaker 3 (19:31):
Yes, uh huh, yeah, my ex feet is certainly playing
looping videos of something right now. And so Mussolini was
kicked out of the Socialist Party because he supported interventionism,
he supported Italy fighting in World War One, and along
the way he started developing his theories on fascism, which

(19:53):
was basically, what if you took revolutionary socialism and then
replaced it with revolutionary nationalism. Instead of class solidarity, you
had national solidarity. What if you made all of the
poor people suck up to the rich people and then
defend the nation as a concept the leftist trappings and
some of the leftists strategies, but with right wing goals

(20:16):
because at the time, right wing was just like the
status quo. Right if you defend like the monarchy or whatever,
your right wing, so there's nothing really revolutionary about it.
But fascism was like, no, but we want the revolution
and we want to like feel cool and edgy, but
we also want to we really like the taste of boots,
and so we're going to become fascists and invent this
new ideology. For a few years, a lot of politics

(20:39):
in Italy was happening in the streets, fascist versus anti
fascists fighting it out, and for a good several years,
Mussolini tried to make common cause with the anarchists, specifically
to join him against the socialists and the communists. After all,
this is the period where the Bolsheviks and Russia were
murdering anarchists on Moss and so some folks there's a
chance that Mussolini even going to go anarchists during this time.

(21:01):
I actually don't buy it, but I read one person
making this argument. He actually risked alienating his base with
how much he appreciated the anarchists. Interesting because his base
was like, no, those are the people we just go
fight in the streets. But Mussolini kind of admires their commitment, right,
and the anarchists don't want him. Mussolini said, quote, we

(21:25):
are always ready to admire men who are willing to
die for a faith they believe in selflessly. And this
came contrasting the anarchists to the cowardly socialists. The anarchists,
in so many words, told him to eat shit and die.
They refuse his overtures again and again, and soon enough
they're going to try really really hard to just outright
kill this man. The most famous Italian anarchist then and

(21:49):
now is this guy named Erico Malatesta. He's popped into
a bunch of our stories on the show, like when
comrades got him to Argentina by smuggling him in a
crate of sewing machines, and then he helped the Baker's
Union there become the most radical union in that country,
and the model that all the other unions rush to follow.
And how today in Argentina there are still pastries named
by the anarchist Bakers, like little books and little bombs.

(22:12):
I really like Malatesta. He's always in and out of jail.
He's an older fellow now, I think he's in his
sixties at this point that we're talking about. And while
he's in prison in Italy, there's a huge campaign to
free him, and who supports that campaign but Benito Mussolini,
even though his followers are fighting the anarchists in the
streets during this time, Malatesta gets out and he can't

(22:35):
get any paper for his newspapers because of political pressure.
Against him, and Mussolini offers him paper to print on
and Mala Testa is like no, what No, So Mussolini
keeps trying to be friends with them. But some anarchists
and folks from every ideology did turn fascist, right, because

(22:56):
you can't have a new ideology without starting with people
who used to have other ideologies. An awful lot of
anarchists turn fascist. Orwell has a really good essay about this.
George Orwell has a really good essay about this called
Notes on Nationalism that basically lays out the case that
a lot of political extremists are into extremism, not the
idea that the extremism is attached to. So you get

(23:17):
people going from the radical left to the radical right
reasonably often. And this unfortunately ties into the first time
that I've found of someone trying to kill Mussolini. Some
anarchists got together in nineteen twenty one, before Mussolini ever
even took formal power. He does that nineteen twenty two,
and they're like, all right, we got to kill this guy.

(23:39):
They delegated one among their number, a man named Biaggio Massi,
to go kill Mussolini. Instead, Biaggio went to Mussolini and
told him the whole plan. Mussolini protected him, and then
the very next day, because Mussolini is just being I
don't know, connin or whatever, yeah, goes and gives a

(24:01):
speech about how the government needs to really release malat Testa, right,
even though he has just learned the anarchists or trying
to kill him. He's a forty chess kind of man,
this Mussolini.

Speaker 2 (24:11):
Yeah, yeah, unfortunately he is.

Speaker 4 (24:14):
He was.

Speaker 2 (24:14):
I mean, one thing you learned about Mussolini and all
these guys, the exception of Franco, who unfortunately kept a
pretty good grip on his rationality throughout his life, is
most of them are a lot more cunning and better
at planning before they get into power. And it's almost
like power damages your brain in a way that makes
you less capable of like clamping down on your own

(24:35):
worse impulses and analyzing things logically.

Speaker 3 (24:39):
That makes sense to me. There's also this thing where
people are always like Mussolini's like the little brother of Hitler,
you know, and he's kind of a joke because Italy's
military might is not the same as Germany's. Right, Mussolini
pulled off something pretty incredible, like terrible evil, but like

(25:01):
he did become dictator of a major country. That is
like a hard thing to do.

Speaker 2 (25:06):
I mean, I think I could become dictator of Italy. Yeah, no,
I know, but you get you give me six months, Margaret, Okay,
six months and a lot of pizza pies. If we
know anything about our Italians, Uh, Pizza Hut. Pizza Hut's
probably fine.

Speaker 3 (25:24):
I really like the pizza in Italy.

Speaker 4 (25:26):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (25:27):
I like how every country, not every country, but most
countries I've been to, the American version of their national
food is hard to get vegan, but in the country
that I'm in, it's actually reasonably easy. Like it's really
easy to just go into any train station in Aley
and buy vegan pizza.

Speaker 2 (25:42):
You could feel about how this however you want, but
undeniably like one of the most intense flexes in the
history of international conflict is when the US had the
former premiere of the Soviet Union become a spokesman for
Pizza Hut. Like it's just such a wow. Well I guess, yeah,
I guess you guys lost that God with Jesus Jesus.

Speaker 3 (26:09):
So Mussolini comes to power in October nineteen twenty two. First,
as the prime minister, there's something that's like, not not
a coup. I mean it's not a coup, but it's
also not not a coup. Right, thirty thousand of his
black Shirts, his personal army, marched on Rome. In the
March on Rome. The liberal government was like, hey, let's
declare martial law to stop this, but then the king

(26:31):
was like, no, let's just put that guy in charge instead.
Mussolini immediately helped out the rich people. He was not
a fucking leftist at this point. Immediately helped out all
the rich people, centralized power, and just was a right
wing shit bag. By nineteen twenty four he was like, look,
there's not a democracy anymore. Okay, it's just fascism, and
Italy became fascist and people didn't really like that. There

(26:55):
are some occupational hazards to be in a dictator. First,
and most famous at the time but not the most
famous now, was a socialist politician named Tito Zanaboni. And
don't worry. If you're like, hey, that sounds like Zamboni
and you think that's clever, don't worry. There's two Zamboni's later. Okay, okay,
but this one's Xanaboni.

Speaker 2 (27:15):
This is not a serious country. Look, I know we're
talking about serious things, but Italy, I just I'm sorry,
it's just not.

Speaker 3 (27:23):
One time I was in Italy and my friend took
me to like her very nice apartment in oh I
don't remember which city. I was on tour for like
a month, and I went to a bunch of cities
and she was like, looks out, and I'm like, how
do you afford this like amazing, fantastic place. And she
goes to the window and points down to this like
public square right outside, and she's like, that's where the

(27:44):
mafia assassinate, like executes people in public. No one wants
to live here.

Speaker 2 (27:52):
I mean, shit, you could do that in front of
my ass if I could have paid like, you know,
thirty percent less. Absolutely, Look, I'm not going I'm not
getting involved with the mafia. They got no reason to
be pissed at me. Yeah, I don't see shit.

Speaker 3 (28:05):
Yeah you stay here?

Speaker 2 (28:06):
Gunshots at night? I don't know what you're talking about. Yeah, MafA, what.

Speaker 3 (28:11):
Most of the places that have been really nice, that
like have been aesthetically really nice that I can afford
to live in, have had gunshots outside at night. Yeah,
that's true.

Speaker 2 (28:19):
I mean I have twice been coming home to my
house when someone has a couple of blocks away been
shooting it out with the police.

Speaker 3 (28:26):
Yeah. You know, a nice place to live, A nice
place to live, and like, I'm not the police, so
I'm not worried again.

Speaker 2 (28:33):
Shot, I'm not the police. These people have no reason
to be angry at me.

Speaker 4 (28:37):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (28:40):
So before we talk about Tito, we're gonna talk about
another Italian socialist politician, Jacomo Mattiatodi Madia Maddiodi.

Speaker 5 (28:48):
And best friend Buca di Beppo Tacoma Maddio Maddieodi was
a socialist politician who tried repeatedly to expose most Mussolinian
fascism for what were After he published a book against
the fascists and accused them of fraud the fascists, who
were certainly people of action.

Speaker 3 (29:08):
On June tenth, nineteen twenty four, Jacomo was kidnapped by
the Fascist secret police, who stabbed him to death with
a carpenter's file. I believe in the car. This wasn't
a lot of ways the thing that paved the way
for Mussolini to declare himself dictator. I'm going to oversimplify
this dangerously. But after a lot of handwringing and investigations
and castigations of the fascists for this kind of thing,

(29:31):
eventually Mussolini was like, look, I'm a fascist, though, I'm
in charge, and we're going to stab people to death
with Carpenter's files, and you're just going to deal with it.
This had an enormous amount of knock on effects. One
of them was that this other socialist politician, Tito Zanaboni,
he got real mad. He had been part of the

(29:52):
search efforts to find his friend. Before that, he'd been
part of signing a peace treaty between the socialists and
the fascists. But after they killed his friend, Oh yeah,
the socialist sign of peace treaty of the fascists. I
think that after I talk about all the like anarchists
who became fascists and stuff, it's worth pointing out the
socialist sign of peace treaty with the fascists. After they

(30:13):
killed his friend, He's like, all right, fuck this, we
gotta shoot this guy. And he and his friends conspired
to kill Massolini. Tito is a war hero, so he
got a precision rifle and he set himself up to
station himself in a window to shoot Mussolini from far away.
But among his co conspirators was an informant. So Tito
and actually a general in the army and the Italian

(30:35):
Army were both sent to prison. I think they got
the maximum sentence, which was thirty years. At the time, great,
the United Socialist Party was no more. In court, Tito
used the same defense as most of Mussolini's would be
assassins used later, which is the defense of yeah, but
fuck Mussolini, though somebody should shoot him. M h just

(30:58):
you know, not always the best way to get off
in court, but like, looks good in history books.

Speaker 2 (31:03):
Yeah, looks good. I mean there's right around this time
the case of Sagam Montalurian, who Berlin jury decided like,
oh no, no, it was totally fine that he assassinated
that guy who did a genocide. Oh yeah, politician.

Speaker 3 (31:16):
Yeah, we covered this one on the Armenian Genocide episode. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (31:19):
I'm just saying, everybody who might wind up in a
court in New York start looking up jury nullifications right now.

Speaker 3 (31:26):
Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 4 (31:30):
So.

Speaker 3 (31:31):
Tito is released in nineteen forty three when the Fascist
government fell, which is the other thing that comes up
a lot is that revolutionaries or in this case, I
mean it wasn't even a revolutionary, as a politician who
was like, yeah, but other politicians shouldn't murder people, you know,
And people go to jail for a really long time.
Right wing governments often fall, and if you can stay

(31:53):
alive in jail long enough, you'll be free again. But
someone else was directly inspired by the death of Jacamo Mattiot.
One of my favorite strange and misunderstood assassins in history,
Violet Gibson. Have you heard of I feel like that
there's one I've heard the name.

Speaker 2 (32:14):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (32:15):
If there's one assassin, people have probably heard of Violet Gibson.
This is the most widely known attempt on his life
in the modern era because it's the one that makes
the coolest social media headline.

Speaker 4 (32:25):
Is there like a song?

Speaker 3 (32:27):
There are there's actually there's songs about her, there's documentaries,
and I.

Speaker 4 (32:32):
Really hope I'm thinking of the right person and also
sound dumb.

Speaker 3 (32:34):
She was like really short, right, yeah, she's five foot
one yeah, yeah, okay.

Speaker 2 (32:38):
Oh yeah, hell yeah. So I love stories about short
ladies doing badass. My grandma was like four foot eleven hell.

Speaker 6 (32:45):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (32:46):
My grandpa was six ' five and because she was
so small during World War Two she had a special job.
They would hold her by her feet and shove her
inside the wings of P fifty one mustangs so she
could like weld them up or like you bolting, or
she was like welding them on the inside. There was
like an area that needed welds that only the tiniest

(33:06):
girls could fit.

Speaker 3 (33:07):
Tell yeah fucking rab Yeah.

Speaker 4 (33:11):
As somebody who definitely can't reach things on the top shelf,
I'm very excited to hear more about Violet.

Speaker 3 (33:18):
Also, the only person who I'm going to talk about
today who successfully shot the man.

Speaker 4 (33:23):
Well done.

Speaker 2 (33:24):
I mean one of the lessons is that nobody knew
how to shoot in the past. Yeah, and most people
don't know how to shoot today.

Speaker 3 (33:32):
Also. Yeah, So Violet Gibson was a forty nine year
old Irish woman from Dublin who lived in a convent
in Rome and shot Mussolini in the face on April seventh,
nineteen twenty six.

Speaker 2 (33:46):
What's not to lot?

Speaker 3 (33:47):
God Ireland stays winning? Yeah, you know, I don't. Mostly
the part to not like about the story is that
he turned his head at the last minute. Yeah, he
didn't die, and she only grazed his nose, but there
are good pictures of him, like with the like bandage
on his nose or whatever. There's no comparisons that can
be made now to the modern world.

Speaker 4 (34:07):
No about people turning their heads.

Speaker 3 (34:10):
Yeah and getting grazed yep mm. The world would have
been a very different place if he had not turned
his head yep. Violet Gibson was a thin woman, about
five foot one. Her father was the Lord Chancellor of Ireland.
She grew up She's Anglo Irish, right, and she grew.

Speaker 2 (34:26):
Up like oh wow, so her like they're like the
English landlord yeah type deal, yeah yeah yeah, oh like
Lawrence of Arabia.

Speaker 3 (34:34):
Yeah, totally and h and like Lawrence of Arabia. She's
crazy as shit. But people use this to invalidate and
like claim that her action wasn't political or thought out,
and that's what I want to argue against. But I
can't argue against her being crazy at shit, and I'm
gonna tell you why. But she grew up riches hell.
She was a debutante, debuted in Queen Victoria's court, which
I only vaguely understand what is through mostly my friends

(34:57):
who are from the South, most telling into the store
come down to I don't know she did it because
she was crazy. I am going to make the case
as she did it because she was a politically committed
Catholic socialist who wanted to do right by God and
people by killing a man who went on to be
responsible for millions of deaths, who was also crazy. She
was always esoteric. She was raised Protestant right Her mother

(35:20):
became a Christian scientist, and so she herself experimented with
Christian science, and then she got into Theosophy for a while,
but then she converted. She found another esoteric religion to
get involved in Catholicism when she was twenty six, and
she stayed a Catholic for the rest of her life.
She was sick all of the time, her body carried
the scars of many surgeries, and she spent years working

(35:43):
at various pacifist organizations. The craziest thing she did, which
is left out of the leftist accounts of her story,
but it's included in the right wing accounts of her
story that are like demonizing her, but they're verifiable. I
believe this happened. So she used to walk around Dublin
with a Bible in one hand and a knife in
the other. And I hate to say it, but that

(36:07):
is that is pretty cool. Oh yeah, no, like, yeah, no,
she's I would want to meet her, maybe from a distance,
but I would want to meet her.

Speaker 6 (36:15):
I would want to like observe her from from a
safe distance. Yeeah, yeah exactly. She talked all the time
about the necessity of mortifying the flesh, which is normally
about like killing the urge to sin, but she seemed
to want to kill. Was that was part of her
way of understanding that particular doctrine. Around nineteen twenty, she

(36:39):
attacked a young woman with a knife, cutting the woman's
face and hands. And so she spent two years in
an asylum. And I don't know enough about that attack
to know, like if there's any motivation beyond something about
how she wanted to like replicate the uh sacrifice of
so and so in the Bible or whatever.

Speaker 3 (36:58):
Sure, when she got out, she moved a convent in Rome.
I believe this was kind of a like, yeah, you're
like super rich, though, so you can go be in
this convent. Her friends thought to themselves, She's probably going
to kill somebody maybe the Pope, but they didn't try
to stop her, which is really funny because they're probably
all Irish Catholics and they're just like, eh, whatever. Then

(37:23):
in nineteen twenty four, when Jacamo was murdered, the guy
murdered to death with a carpenter's file. Yeah, she was
heartbroken because she was a Catholic socialist, right, and so
she decided to like revenge that killing by shooting herself
in the chest. The bullet bounced off her ribs and
she survived. And if you want to survive in the

(37:43):
world that's coming, you need to buy literally everything that
is advertised on this show. It is the only way
to survive. I believe it's not a guarantee. But here's
ads and we're back Mussolini at this point. God, I

(38:10):
read a whole bunch of New York Times articles and
like other newspaper articles from this time, and they're all
like Mussolini's great. We all like Mussolini because he's stopping
the Bolsheviks. You know, Mussolini was being courted by the
Western world. The King of England awarded him the Order
of the Bath, which is not in order to take
a bath, unfortunately, but instead a knighthood, and Violet Gibson

(38:34):
decided that the way to glorify God was to assassinate Mussolini,
so she showed up at one of his talks in
nineteen twenty six with a revolver and a rock. The
rock was to break his windshield if necessary, which later
assassins would have been more successful if they had also
brought a rock. The modern mind can't really understand her motive,

(38:56):
I think, because their motive was primarily religious, but it
was also political. She did it to quote glorify God,
and Angel kept her arm steady. I told this story
to a Catholic anarchist friend of mine, whose response was
basically like, oh, those Irish and their angels. Mussolini turned
his head the last minute, she grazed his nose. She
tried to fire again, but the gun jammed. And I've

(39:18):
read that what he yelled at the time that he
was shot was fancy a woman, But that might have
been later. He told the crowd, don't be afraid, this
is a mere trifle, And then like later, he went
on this rant about how he's totally down to die
violently as long as like a good, glorious death. But
if he's like killed by an old lady, he just
can't handle it, which is why I wish Violet had

(39:41):
succeeded over everyone else. Ahlas. Yeah, the crowd caught her
and beat her, and she was whisked away by the
cops and declared insane. People said that she was paranoid
and that was why she tried to kill him, because
she was paranoid. I hate to break it to the
people back then, she was correct about this particular thing.

(40:05):
She spent the rest of her life in various institutions.
She wrote letter after letter pleading to be set free,
but those letters were never sent because you know, I mean,
are crazy, right, That's fine, that's a sarcastic remind Yeah,
probably caught onto that. She told people that her mood
controlled the weather.

Speaker 2 (40:25):
Okay, well did it.

Speaker 3 (40:27):
If she'd killed Mussolini, she would have stopped like three
million deaths. Maybe her moods like I want to kill
Mussolini have a pretty major impact.

Speaker 2 (40:35):
Yeah, I mean, look, I can't prove that she's wrong.

Speaker 3 (40:39):
Yeah. It reminds me of when I covered Joan of
Arc on this show, where people are like, oh, feminist icon,
except you know, obviously she was just crazy with her
visions from God. And it's just that people were conceiving
of reality in different ways than we conceive of it now,
and I think that people have a hard time wrapping
their heads around that she died in nineteen fifty six
at the age of seventy nine. She did outlive Mussolini.

(41:02):
No family members came to her funeral. History has vindicated her,
and there's now a plaque for her on her childhood
home in Dublin that describes her accurately as a committed
anti fascist. And it was articles about this from like
right wing Irish people, is how I learned about how
she would run around and stab people and things like that.

Speaker 2 (41:22):
Is it possible that there was like no one at
her funeral because this, I mean, I had just made
a comment about Ireland staying winning. But Ireland's history are
the fascists in this period is not particularly clean, in
large part because the fascists were in opposed to the
British government and so there was a lot of at
least the enemy of my enemy is my friend thing

(41:43):
among the Irish, as well as the fact that Franco
was like a Catholic like It's not a clean period
for Ireland entirely either.

Speaker 3 (41:51):
It's not, but she's also Anglo Irish, right, well, I.

Speaker 2 (41:55):
Mean, yeah, that also makes sense, you right, I'd forgotten.

Speaker 3 (41:57):
That, and I think it's I think overall it was
just like, oh, there's our crazy aunt. She's just crazy.
She just wanted to kill a guy. You know, that's
like my best guess. But I'm not certain people didn't
like her at the time, and now there's been kind
of this reclamation of her legacy. But Mussolini was particularly

(42:20):
good at turning attempts on his life into popular support,
which is like what you do if someone tries to
kill you, right. You neither say like, oh no, I'm
afraid and the enemy is scary and bad, which is
not a good way to gain power, or you can
say like ha ha haa, they can't get me, but
they want it because they're evil. You know, almost every
article about attempts on Mussolini's life from then or now

(42:43):
is basically like, but this particular attempt is what Mussolini
used to consolidate power. Everything was fine until this person
tried to kill him, and then wo she just like
swept in with fascism.

Speaker 2 (42:56):
Yeah, yeah, exactly. I think that that's people number one.
It's like working backwards, which you shouldn't do when you're
trying to analyze people psychologically. Now that said, I don't
know that I would say there's it didn't have an
impact on the character of the regime, just like it's
probably fair to like whatever Trump does next, the shooting
will probably have impacted because it clearly affected his mental.

Speaker 3 (43:19):
State right totally.

Speaker 2 (43:21):
Maybe it'll mean that he's a little less coherent and
a little less like, maybe even less willing to take
risks he might otherwise have taken.

Speaker 3 (43:28):
Maybe it'll mean he's more vengeful. We don't know yet.

Speaker 2 (43:31):
We'll all be learning soon. But it definitely the presidency
we are going to get out of him now is
different than if he had won and nobody had shot him, right, Like,
that's just we don't know how, and we'll never know how.
But that's just a reality because nearly being shot to
death on live television changes you, changes anybody. You don't

(43:53):
have to be a good person.

Speaker 3 (43:54):
And it's like people talk about like hindsight is twenty twenty,
but it's not because you don't know what the other
options were. You know, you can only see the one
thing that happened. Yeah, and Mussolini would have become dictator
if no one had tried to kill him. Yeah, you know, yeah,
and he used moments like this to consolidate power because

(44:18):
anyone would.

Speaker 2 (44:19):
Yeah, because you you can't let something like this go
to waste. And also just like continuing to work after
you've nearly been shot to death in the head probably
also just kind of mentally necessary, like you're you're gonna
make use of that, because otherwise you're gonna sit alone
in a room and think about how you nearly got
your brain's blown out.

Speaker 3 (44:36):
Yeah, totally. Yeah. Yeah, he keeps busy. You know, he's
been a lot of mistresses. Although New York Times just
is gonna run articles. I'll talk about him later, but
New York Times like, oh, he's just hanging out with
his family. He's a family man.

Speaker 2 (44:47):
Like, oh, they loved Mussolini, the Mito. I mean a
lot of Americans really liked Mussolini in part because like
he was he was a very very much a celebrity
dictator in a way that Hitler Hitler was, but not
in this like Hitler was, you know, famous and managed
to become beloved in Germany. Mussolini had a level of

(45:10):
like international like movie star cloud in part because he
looked handsome in his photos in a way Hitler didn't
really like he looked like a movie star, you know,
not in real life. But he you know, he had
he had good people, worry, and he had a lot
of movie stars hanging out with him, by the way,
a lot of American ones.

Speaker 3 (45:29):
And he like knew more about philosophy and art and
shit like that, you know, which was like a lot
of the ways to be kind of like cool at
the time. And like, I mean, he created a philosophy
one that is still around.

Speaker 2 (45:41):
Yep.

Speaker 3 (45:41):
It's a bad one, yep. So there's another thing that's
going to tie into this that is going on the
Italian anarchist world and the Italian American world and just
the news in general. And it's another thing that like,
looking back, it's hard to see why this is as
big of a deal as it was. And this is
the trial of Sacho and Zetti. Have you heard of this,

(46:01):
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (46:02):
Those are the two American anarchists who there was a bombing,
they got accused of it executed, didn't do it right?
Am I am I?

Speaker 3 (46:12):
And the basics there, so what's funny about it? It's messy.

Speaker 2 (46:16):
The general version is usually it is Yeah, this was
like cumulatively four sentences over the course of my high
school education, and.

Speaker 3 (46:24):
It's probably the only time during anyone's high school education
the word anarchist gets mentioned, besides like, maybe you're going
to get show gosh killing McKinley, but probably not.

Speaker 2 (46:34):
I don't even think I learned about McKinley getting assassinated.
I don't think I learned it was an anarchist, but
maybe maybe it was. I barely remember high school.

Speaker 3 (46:42):
Yeah, fair enough. I honestly, whenever I'm like, my high
school teacher didn't teach me this, I'm like, I don't know,
how would I have known? I got c's like what
you know.

Speaker 2 (46:50):
But I definitely remember knowing that Sacho and Vinzetti had
been anarchists.

Speaker 3 (46:54):
Because that one was inescapable, and it was this incredibly
important celebrity trial all over the world, and basically some
Italian American anarchists or mafia, but almost certainly anarchists were
robbing a guy who carried the wages basically the equivalent
of an armored truck robbery, and someone shot and killed
the paymaster and a guard. Two Italian American anarchists, Saqua

(47:18):
and Venzetti, were put on trial. The entire leftist world,
not just the anarchists, was convinced that they were innocent,
and basically this whole thing was seen as like a
travesty of justice. In nineteen twenty one, they were found
guilty and sentenced to death, but it took years for
the state to kill them because the outcry was so
much that they had to have all these appeals and

(47:39):
investigations and things like that. This dragged on for years.
Later historians have been like, well, Saco probably did it,
and Venzetti maybe, Like it's possible Venzetti was there and
therefore actually criminally liable, but like didn't pull the trigger.

(47:59):
It's also possible that they weren't there, because a lot
of the evidence that they did do it comes from
a guy we're going to talk about later who's an
anarchist bomb maker who turned into a fascist informant named
Mario Buddha.

Speaker 2 (48:14):
Well, it's also an unfortunate truth that a lot of
times the people who are most willing to make things
like bombs are also driven more by rage than like
political conviction and thus very easy to swing to a
politics that entirely exists on the basis of rage. Yeah,
which is which is why we really do try here

(48:35):
not to idolize people whose only contribution is that they
did a violence. Yeah, totally, even when everybody's making some
very funny jokes on social media, Yeah right now about
a thing that just happened.

Speaker 3 (48:50):
No, it's it's true, and that is like something that yeah, fun,
time to have decided to write this episode. But the
important thing about the Saquo and Benzetti case is that
this trial was huge. The outcry was enormous, and one
thing that happened in this is that the fascists tried
hard to capitalize on it and did capitalize on it,

(49:13):
because most of the outcry against the trial is that
the trial was unfair as a result of the US's
anti Italian and anti anarchist bigotry. A fuck ton of
the Italian American crowd was either anarchist or fascist, and
so both the fascists and the anarchists rallied for Saco
and Vinzetti. Mussolini was cynically using the trial to stir

(49:36):
up nationalism at home and continuing his odd overtures to
the anarchists, even though he was in power by most
of this point, and he's cracking down on the anarchist
left and right. His soldiers are burning photos of that
guy Mala Testa. Anarchists are being rounded up and stuff.
Yet Mussolini is telling his ambassadors to try and intervene
on behalf of Saco and Vinzetti because Mussolini won to

(50:00):
be seen as the man who protected Italians everywhere. And
he has all these quotes that are like, I cannot
agree with anything that these men stand for, but they're Italian,
my god, and America shouldn't kill them or whatever I'm
now paraphrasing. Terribly great stuff.

Speaker 2 (50:18):
Yeah, and I don't love their murders, but I support them.
Being Italian, they thus they ought.

Speaker 3 (50:25):
To be free. Yeah, exactly, exactly fair enough. And what
does this have to do with Violet Gibson. Well, this
is going to turn into one of the best zings
against America that I've ever read about h On July
twenty third, nineteen twenty seven, Mussolini wrote, it is certain
that the execution of Saco Vanzetti would provide the pretext

(50:48):
for a vast and continuous agitation throughout the world. The
fascist government, which is strongly authoritarian and does not give
quarter to the Bolsheviks, very often employs clemency in individual cases.
The governor of Massachusetts should not lose the opportunity for
a humanitarian act whose repercussions would be especially positive in Italy,

(51:08):
and fascist newspapers were now contrasting the American government as
more totalitarian than the fascist Italian government because the Italian system,
the fascist system, had let Violet Gibson return to her
own country, and there is no death penalty in Italy
at this point.

Speaker 2 (51:29):
That's nice.

Speaker 3 (51:30):
People could literally kill kings and get life in prison.
Comparing this to the barbaric United States, and this is
the thing that I love about it. It is like
the dude's got a point yep. The US president industrial
system is like a nightmare and was worse than the
fascist government.

Speaker 2 (51:49):
I mean at the you know, it depends on the stage,
but at the early stages, you know, Mussolini does eventually
invade Ethiopia and deploy chemical weapons. Yeah, yeah, that's certainly
an argument that you could have made earlier in Mussolini's regime.
You have to remember he was not he definitely was
killing his political enemies.

Speaker 3 (52:06):
Oh yeah, he had stabbed a dude to death of
a file Yeah yeah, not necessarily in a way.

Speaker 2 (52:12):
That's a higher body count than, for example, the number
of black people being murdered by police in apartheid states
in the United States, right, yeah, like, which is not
a different thing to me. I don't consider that to
be better than I don't know, rounding up like a
few dozen socialists and murdering them or whatever like that,

(52:34):
and the constant mass the constant murder at a pretty
high rate of black men in the South by cops
and vigilantes, like both both things that I would put
on a similar moral level.

Speaker 3 (52:46):
Yeah, exactly. I'm not trying to be like Benito Mussolini
is great, you know.

Speaker 2 (52:50):
No, no, no, no, I didn't. I didn't. I didn't
think you were. Yeah, I'm just saying, like, yeah, that's
not an irrational statement to make at that point in time,
knowing what they knew.

Speaker 3 (52:57):
Yeah. Yeah, And Violet, she was not alone in her
quest to see the Duke die. The next attempt was
on September eleventh, nineteen twenty six. And this is why
people remember September eleventh, and this is probably the most
organized attempt. Sophie is clearly agrees with me.

Speaker 2 (53:18):
Did anything else happen on September eleventh? Ever, that seems
like one of those that coup.

Speaker 3 (53:22):
That happened somewhere is such a smooth joke. Yeah, thank you.

Speaker 2 (53:26):
I'm looking. I'm looking at my calendar of various September
elevenths that I keep for no reason. Yeah, it doesn't
look like anything's ever happened on another September eleventh that
I can that I've got.

Speaker 3 (53:36):
Okay, you're the funniest person I know.

Speaker 2 (53:38):
That must be why I celebrate nine to eleven. Ye, wait, exactly, shit, wow, Margaret, Margaret,
I'm getting some very bad Google results. Suddenly we need
to edit that out.

Speaker 3 (53:47):
Oh my god, Oh my god, all those poor people.
Holy shit. Yeah, I lived in New York City. Yeah,
September eleventh, two one, so saw the towers on fire.
There's all the smoking remains. But anyway, the socialist politician
had failed, The Catholic wingnut had failed. Time to bring
in the professionals. If there's one group that knows about

(54:09):
killing kings and monarchs and stuff, it's the anarchists. Again,
we all know they failed, but you know what. They
tried real hard. The next attempt was by a man
named Gino Lucetti, who I'll tell you about along with
his cousin Gino, because his name is Geno, but so
is his cousin. That's the thing I'm saying. Well, i'll

(54:30):
tell you about it on Wednesday. Excellent.

Speaker 2 (54:34):
You know, Wednesday, Margaret, is the day that comes after Tuesday.
That's a little science fact for those of you in
the audience.

Speaker 4 (54:41):
Thank you so much for telling us that.

Speaker 3 (54:43):
I have no idea.

Speaker 4 (54:44):
I have no idea how we would have.

Speaker 2 (54:45):
Wait, we tried to shoot a little bit a couple
of facts in your way.

Speaker 3 (54:49):
Yeah, that's why it's edutainment.

Speaker 2 (54:51):
That's why it's edutainment.

Speaker 6 (54:53):
Right.

Speaker 2 (54:53):
Yeah, So remember, folks, Wednesday day after Tuesday. Thursday comes
day before Monday. And that's all I gotta say.

Speaker 3 (55:03):
It comes before Monday. Yes, yes, yes, Tomorrow is Saturday
and after Monday. Is the weirdest thing about Thursday.

Speaker 2 (55:09):
I know, I know, it's the day. So nice they
made it happen twice.

Speaker 3 (55:13):
It I can't even there's nothing I can do with that.

Speaker 2 (55:17):
Yeah, Oh, Margan, I wish you and I could hang
out all eleven days of the week.

Speaker 3 (55:21):
I know that'd be nice, but I only have so
many hours in the day, and I don't remember how
many it is forty one? Oh okay, no, yeah, that
makes sense. Yes, But Robert Evans, where can people find
more about you or what do you do? Well?

Speaker 2 (55:38):
You can find me sweating away in my basement because
you and I only use an antique coptic Christian calendar
and day system based largely on a step pyramid that
used to exist but was bulldozed in what was once
sume Aria, So it takes a lot of time to

(55:58):
remember what day it is.

Speaker 3 (56:00):
Yeah, I don't know. We really kept this bit going
for a while. I feel like at the end of
a Gi Joe episode where you tell kids to like
not hide in refrigerators. Right, I feel like it's worth
pointing out that I really am talking about history here
and that nothing necessarily good happened from many of the
attempts that I'm describing. I am not morally against the
attempts that I am describing. I'm clearly not of this

(56:22):
thing that happened in the nineteen twenties, but I want
to be like clear on that just like that.

Speaker 2 (56:27):
Is the thing I can think of very few assassinations
in history where ultimately you would look at it and
say that, like, yeah, that worked out really well. Is
particularly that worked out well by the person carrying out
the assassination standards. Really the one that like Sogamu and
Tealurian who shot you know, one of the young Turks
who orchestrated the Armenian genocide, that worked out great by

(56:50):
his standards, and everyone else's that guy you shot Abe
seems to the long run of that seems to have
been positive. Very few other instances, like I don't know
that I'd say McKinley worked well in the long run.
Obviously shooting the archduke fucking disaster.

Speaker 3 (57:08):
Yeah, no, it's it is worth thinking about that anarchists
had given up on propaganda by the deed at this point,
propaganda by the deed. It was this anarchist idea that
people were like, well, the masses don't really read theory,
so let's just show them by killing all the kings
and the you know, the people who are in charge
of them. And it overall was disastrous for the anarchist

(57:28):
movement because it just led people to then defend the
vary systems that the anarchists were opposed to, and this
happened time and time again. There are exceptions. During the
the run up to the Russian Revolution, you have like
about from like nineteen oh three to nineteen seventeen, anarchists
and other groups were all doing these attendants, all doing

(57:49):
these assassinations, and it did lead to a revolutionary situation,
which of course all kind of ended badly and created
the United the USSR. But usually these kinds of things
destroy a social movement. Sometimes, if enough people are interested
in it, it builds a social movement, but usually it doesn't.
And that is the like, it's a crapshoot at best,

(58:12):
It's a like, let's redraw our hand of cards and
probably get something worse.

Speaker 2 (58:17):
Yep.

Speaker 3 (58:18):
But still, if someone had successfully killed Mussolini, I bet
the world would have been a better place.

Speaker 2 (58:25):
Yes, yes, but the if within the if contains a
lot of reasons.

Speaker 3 (58:31):
Why.

Speaker 2 (58:31):
Uh, you know, we're going to say for legal reasons
here assassinations probably not worth.

Speaker 3 (58:39):
It, and we're gonna talk about like five more of
them on Wednesday. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (58:47):
At the end here, I just want to plug if
you haven't listened, I just am plugging this on anything
I can I just want to plug our colleague James
Stout series from reporting from the Darien Gap. Yeah, about
one of the worst land migration places in the world
and just you know, the stories and people he talked

(59:08):
to there, and I just want to plug that because
it's an amazing series and I'm very proud of James.

Speaker 3 (59:13):
Started listening to it. I haven't finished it yet. It
is really good.

Speaker 4 (59:16):
It's really good.

Speaker 2 (59:18):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (59:18):
So if you have time around the end of the
year and you're like, Ohm, I need something to binge.
James did five episodes on It could happen here on
It could app Thank you, and it could happen here all.

Speaker 3 (59:28):
Right, see y'all on Wednesday.

Speaker 1 (59:30):
Bye. Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production
of Cool Zone Media. More podcasts and cool Zone Media.
Visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com or check us out
on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
your podcasts.

Speaker 3 (59:57):
Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff.
You're a weekly reminder that when there's bad things happening,
people try to confront those bad things in various ways,
lots of various ways. One of the way, no, just
a person, one of the people who's also on this
podcast with me is Robert Evans, my guest.

Speaker 2 (01:00:15):
Hi, that's right, I'm Robert Evans, and uh, I'm Robert Evans.
That's me.

Speaker 3 (01:00:25):
Well, I brought you on because you're an expert about Italy.

Speaker 2 (01:00:29):
Yeah, I mean I know several things about Italians, Margaret
number one, number two.

Speaker 3 (01:00:36):
Spice, here's where we remind Italian.

Speaker 2 (01:00:41):
Whatever the hat is that they that the that the
chefs wear in those kind of racist caricatures. Look, it's fine.
We all decided that it's okay with Italians now.

Speaker 3 (01:00:52):
Yeah, despite the huge trial that we talked about last
time about anti Italian prejudice in the United States.

Speaker 2 (01:00:58):
Look, if they'd been you, I have the opposite position
of that guy. I'm fine with the murder. If they'd
been on trial for being Italian, I would have said,
fucking yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:01:07):
Hang you know, yeah exactly, hang am I yeah, maybe
upside down maybe. Uh that's a dead Mussolini joke, which
is which is not gonna happen in today's episode. A
lot of people are gonna try give the old college try.
Our producer is Sophie. Hi, Sophie, it's me.

Speaker 4 (01:01:26):
I'm Sophie High.

Speaker 3 (01:01:28):
I realized when I got my podcast you listened to
the most in twenty twenty four that four of them
were Sophie podcasts.

Speaker 4 (01:01:36):
The loyalties unmatched, unmapped.

Speaker 2 (01:01:39):
Yeah, that's right.

Speaker 3 (01:01:41):
I'm a little bit surprised that that not all five were.
But I think the problem was that the Pathfinder podcast
I listened to has really long episode. Need one raised,
like five?

Speaker 4 (01:01:51):
Yeah, you need one break for me?

Speaker 2 (01:01:52):
We should do a Pathfinder podcast, Margaret.

Speaker 3 (01:01:55):
I would love to do a live play podcast.

Speaker 2 (01:01:57):
Maybe I'll reach out to the guy who created Pathfinder
and listens to our podcasts, talk to him about that.

Speaker 3 (01:02:05):
I would love that guy who created Pathfinder. Y'all are
great and your system rules and I play it anyway.
So but yeah, no, cools on media needs a live
play podcast, That's all I'm saying. And if you listener agree,
bug these people on the internet about it. And then
because I needed more podcasts to be on whatever, I

(01:02:26):
don't care.

Speaker 2 (01:02:27):
There's a shortage of podcasts. I don't know if you're
aware of this. Yeah, but the CDC has said that
it's probably the largest threat to our national collective health.

Speaker 3 (01:02:36):
Well, it's the only thing that they're trying to put
a tariff on that everyone's in favor of is that
they're trying to make it harder for people to make podcasts.

Speaker 2 (01:02:42):
That's right, that's right.

Speaker 3 (01:02:44):
All podcast mics, Oh my god, that actually is good.
Most of the podcast mics are probably not made in
the US. Whatever I got mine, I have no idea.
I have no idea where they make our microphones, Margaret, No, no,
I do not.

Speaker 4 (01:02:56):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:02:57):
Anyway, this is part two on a two part episode
about people trying to kill Mussolini. Later we'll probably talk
about the people who succeeded. It took a whole war,
but some people tried to just cut to the chase
and circumvent the need for the war. And we've already
mentioned several of them, but we're going to talk a

(01:03:19):
lot more of them today. First, we're gonna talk about Rory,
who's our audio engineer. Hi Rory, Hi, right, Hy Rory?
And that our theme musical was written forced by unwoman,
and that Gino Lucetti was born working class in the
year nineteen hundred in Karra, Tuscany. You ever heard of Carra.

Speaker 2 (01:03:41):
I've heard of Tuscany because the Tuscan coast is pretty famous.
I've never heard of Carra. Other than that, it makes
me think of that song that goes Tara Ra boom Da,
which I don't know what that's a reference to.

Speaker 3 (01:03:53):
Is that a slur? I have no idea.

Speaker 2 (01:03:55):
I should probably look into that song see if there
was anything fucked up. It's like celebrating genocide. That's often
the case with old songs. What a lovely tune?

Speaker 3 (01:04:04):
Oh no, yeah, Well, Carrara is famous for two things.
It is famous for its marble quarries. It produces some
of the finest marble from which the most iconic buildings
and statues in the world are made. There's a whole
list of them, and I forgot to write them down,
But like, think of an old Italian statue from Rome,

(01:04:27):
Old Rome, and the marble might have come from Carrara.
It has like blue veins. I spent way too long
reading about this marble.

Speaker 2 (01:04:35):
It's good ass marble.

Speaker 3 (01:04:37):
Yeah. The other thing the Carrara is famous for is anarchism.
Oh okay. When my anarchist friends took me through Italy
when we were near Carrara, they pointed out and they
were like, hey, that's that place. Was an anarchist stronghold
for a long, long time among the Stonemasons who put
that town on the map enough so that I was
like double checking this today. I was like, Carrara. That

(01:04:58):
sounds familiar, right, I was looking at a mainstream tour
company's website, Carrara Marble Tour, and they offer an anarchic
Carra tour.

Speaker 2 (01:05:06):
Oh wow, really double dipping. I mean, and that's you know,
because there's so many It's like you and I always say, Margaret,
with so many Anarchistsinnara audience, you know, every there's there's
nothing that goes together like anarchism and marble quarries. Yeah,
two great tastes that taste great together.

Speaker 4 (01:05:25):
You know.

Speaker 2 (01:05:26):
That's why. By the way, let's have a word for
our sponsor, Big Marble.

Speaker 3 (01:05:31):
Marble.

Speaker 2 (01:05:31):
Maybe we could use it again for some stuff.

Speaker 3 (01:05:34):
Marble one time statute of limitations Ago I had to
empty all the Marbles out of my pocket before a
mass arrest.

Speaker 2 (01:05:41):
Yeah, Marble, if you use it to make all of
your streets and sidewalks like they do in Greece, it
makes things incredibly treacherous in the rain, actually horrible, horrible
material to.

Speaker 3 (01:05:53):
Use the way that they use it. Yeah, but it's
pretty though, Yeah, years and years ago, my dad told
me this spooky story that he wrote called the thirty
seven Marble Steps, and I was like a kid, so
I was just assuming that these were steps with marbles
embedded in them. But Gina Lucetti was from Carrara in

(01:06:15):
the early nineteen twenties. There are factory occupations all over Italy.
I don't know enough about these yet, but they've come
up a bunch of times, and they'll probably be one
of their own episodes at one of these points. And
I know that in the end of these factory occupations,
the socialist parties kind of gave up and gave power
back to the bosses, which made an awful lot more

(01:06:36):
anarchists from those socialists who you know, had just seized
the means of production and were like, but isn't this
our goal? Isn't our goal that the workers control the
means of production? Why would we give them back. I
don't know enough about the ins and nights out of
that struggle, but a lot of people were mad. Gina
Lucetti was at these occupations and somewhere along the way

(01:06:59):
he got into a gun fight with the black shirts.
He got a guy in the ear who got him
in the neck in return, and okay, this second time
we've had an anti fascist get it in the neck
and survive on the show. The other one was George orwell.

Speaker 2 (01:07:14):
Yeah, yeah, that's that's uh. I mean, I'm not gonna
say but that that's very lucky.

Speaker 3 (01:07:19):
Yeah, exactly. Don't get shot in the neck.

Speaker 2 (01:07:21):
The neck is very low on the number of places
on your body you would want to get shot.

Speaker 3 (01:07:25):
Yeah, not a good tournique spot. It turns out.

Speaker 2 (01:07:28):
Hard to turnikit and neck unless you're Google Ai, which
has told me repeatedly that you can turnikit the neck. Hell, yeah,
that's just a hanging, folks, you're just strangling someone to death.
Oh my god, don't TURNI quit next.

Speaker 3 (01:07:45):
Yeah, it seems self evident. But an AI is not
does not have our best interests in heart.

Speaker 2 (01:07:50):
No, it just sees, well, there's fucking there, there's fucking
arteries there.

Speaker 3 (01:07:54):
Turnick it away. Yeah, yeah, it detaches a limb. If
a head is a limb appendage, whatever a head is anatomically,
I guess it's a head. So he couldn't find a
doctor in Italy to get the bullet out. I do
not know why. So comrades smuggled him to France, where
he was finally treated, and he was like, you know what,

(01:08:16):
I don't need to be in Italy right now. They
are in the middle of a fascism and I am
in the middle of just got shot in the neck
by a fascist. Yeah. There was a large political refugee
scene in France at the time. Anarchists, socialists and communists
had formed a popular front against fascism there, not only
just in general in France, but like specifically the Italian

(01:08:37):
refugees had. They were like, all right, look all that
stuff going on in Russia, We're all mad at each other,
but right now Italy is being taken over by fascists.
We got to do something about that, right, And they
all agreed what needed to be done was kill Mussolini.
And this action was intended to be anything but a
propaganda of the deed action, which is I think actually

(01:08:59):
a really important point for kind of what we were
ended on talking about last week. Right as a libcom
dot org article put it, quote, propaganda of the deed
attacks were supposed to inspire the working classes to rise,
and in this they were entirely unsuccessful. In this instance, however,
The urge to kill Mussolini was the expression of a

(01:09:20):
convergence of opinion among many popularly representative political groupings, and
was commonly perceived as a necessity at that point in time.
So it wasn't like, oh, we're gonna spur on the
revolution and radicalize people by showing them that, you know,
our opponents are made of flesh and blood. It was like, no,
Mussolini is basically the enemy war leader that we're in

(01:09:43):
a war against. You know, one word that has never
been successfully applied to anarchists is cowardice. Gino agreed to
do the deed.

Speaker 2 (01:09:55):
And I mean it's the thing that you come across
over and over again when you read about like militant
moves moments and like civil wars and where there are
anarchist groups, is that the anarchists are always very brave.
Not always the best fighters, yeah, but always very brave.

Speaker 3 (01:10:11):
Yeah. And specifically other groups like putting us in the front.

Speaker 2 (01:10:18):
Yeah, because that's an aspect of it.

Speaker 3 (01:10:21):
Yeah. I remember when I first became an anarchist, I
was like just going to protest and things twenty seven
years ago, and my roommate in college was like, you
anarchists you're just the berserkers of the protest movement. People
just throw you in the front to like soak up
all the damage. And I was like, no, he was
a little bit right at least in terms of how

(01:10:42):
people perceive us and use us. So of course, when
they're like, who's going to go risk their life to
go do this? An anarchists volunteered and twice he returned
to Italy to meet with comrades there to plan the assassination,
and they met aboard a ship at sea, which is
aesthetic as fuck, off the Tuscany coast, and this time

(01:11:04):
there were no informants among them. He had several co
conspirators worth mentioning. Stefano Vadieroni was an anarchist tinsmith from
Rome who was the secretary of the library. The fucking
librarian was in on this assassination. The secretary of Mussolini's
library supplied all of the details, including Mussolini's routes by car.

(01:11:27):
Vadderoni funded the thing by selling his family's land near Carrara.
Another anarchist, Leandro Sorrio, was a waiter who was planning
to finance the group's escape from the country, but then
they all decided. Basically, they were like, well, we're actually
just all going to get arrested and stand trial. There
you go. We want to make a statement. Maltesta, the

(01:11:47):
anarchist guy who's old at this point, was briefed on
the plan and signed off on it. So this wasn't
a like spur of the moment attack. This was a
you know, huge conspiracy across borders to try and kill
this guy. Armngino went back to Italy and he went
to Rome. He waited for Mussolini's car and then he
threw a pineapple grenade at it. The grenade had been

(01:12:10):
made by his cousin, and he threw it into the windshield. Famously,
grenades are on timers, not like pressure sensitive. They like
don't explode on impact, no, because.

Speaker 2 (01:12:20):
That would be very dangerous. Margaret, I have I told
you the story about the Iraqi soldier. We're behind this
berm embedded with this unit of the Iraqi federal police
that are in this very active gunfight with some ISIS guys.
But they're also kind of showing off because like I'm
there and my photographer's there with the camera, and.

Speaker 3 (01:12:38):
So I put the dudes.

Speaker 2 (01:12:40):
One of the dudes clips into the buttons of his
like button up shirt, a grenade over each button. He
like sticks the little handle arm of the grenade around,
and he like runs up and he like fires, and
then he leans over to pick up a magazine that's
like lying behind the berm, and all of the grenades
fall off of his shirt and roll down directly towards me.

Speaker 3 (01:13:04):
So thankfully they're not set off by impact. Yeah, fair enough.
In this case, it didn't get through the windshield. This
is the guy who should have brought a rock. Yeah,
if Violet Gibson was right, you need to get through
the windshield. The grenade bounced a few meters away and exploded.
Mussolini's bodyguards caught up with Gino and beat the shit

(01:13:26):
out of him. That sounds about right. Yeah, And when
they arrested him, they found him with a second bomb,
a handgun with six hollow points poisoned with muriatic acid,
which I don't know anything about.

Speaker 2 (01:13:37):
And a dagger isn't myriadic acid. The thing in like swimming.

Speaker 3 (01:13:40):
Pools, isn't that chlorine?

Speaker 4 (01:13:43):
No?

Speaker 2 (01:13:43):
No, I mean I think you have muriatic acid for
swimming pools too. I remember I've seen like jars one sec.

Speaker 3 (01:13:47):
I actually didn't want to google this today. That's what
happened to me today is I was like, I wonder
what this stuff is.

Speaker 2 (01:13:52):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, you use mriadic acid to lower like
pH in your pool. It's like, I'll let like a shit.
Millions of Americans have this shit and like their shed.

Speaker 3 (01:14:01):
Okay, yeah, I have no idea why you would. I
either he was being really extra or like or he
just thought it.

Speaker 2 (01:14:09):
He might have thought it was more sketchy than it was.

Speaker 3 (01:14:11):
I don't know. Yeah, like this one's his acid, you know, yeah, yeah, yeah,
when it's really no, I don't know. I don't know.

Speaker 2 (01:14:17):
I don't know. I don't know much about it other
than that, I know I've seen it in people's like
backyards because they have pools.

Speaker 3 (01:14:22):
Yeah. And also like there's so much mythbuilding, both positively
and negative about all of these things, you know, So
it could have been like, oh, he had a dagger
and muriatic acid and actually used the word dumb dumb
bullets instead of hollow points because that's what they called him.
A round that expands at the time, you know. So
he's tortured, he gives a false name in location and

(01:14:42):
eventually they get the truth out of him. Lucetti was
given thirty years in prison, the waiter got twenty years,
and the tin smith got nineteen years and nine months.
Thirty years is the maximum anyone's allowed to be given
in Italy at the time, which again more, I mean
later they're going to start killing people. But yeah, for
three years Lucetti was in solitary and had only a

(01:15:05):
sparrow that would visit at the window for company.

Speaker 2 (01:15:09):
Okay, yeah, sure, yeah, it's his best friend, the sparrow.

Speaker 3 (01:15:13):
I mean that's sweet. Actually, I know.

Speaker 2 (01:15:15):
I bet he was giving it some of his like,
very very rare bread that he didn't have a whole
lot of because he was a nice man.

Speaker 3 (01:15:22):
Yeah, he lived off of I think is just literally
soup and bread, and that sounds about right. He died
after seventeen years in prison in nineteen forty three. He
died during a US air raid. Some claimed that he
was killed by the shelling, but the man who identified
the body said that he had been killed by the
occupying Germans during the raid. The Italian Communists tried to

(01:15:46):
claim his legacy. They published that one of his fellow
inmates claimed he had become a communist in his later years,
but his brother and his fiancee, who kept visiting him
until the end of his days, denied this adamantly. I'm like, no,
he wasn't anarchists who died an anarchist. During the partisan
reclamation of Italy, two different anarchist battalions named themselves after

(01:16:07):
Gino Lucetti. Each was about sixty fighters. I believe, both
men and women. I know one of the other anarchist
battalions I'm going to talk about later was both men
and women, and they helped rid Italy of fascism. So
he won in a way after his death, and that
is all most of us can hope for, I would.

Speaker 2 (01:16:25):
Say, yeah, definitely. I mean in the long run, it's
all any of us can hope for, right because, as
we've seen, every struggle worth fighting occurs over a long
time frame.

Speaker 3 (01:16:36):
Yeah. Absolutely. As for the man who made the bomb,
that's a different story about another Gino, because his cousin's
name was also Gino. And I want to tell you
about that story. But did you know what I want
to tell you about? More?

Speaker 5 (01:16:51):
Uh?

Speaker 2 (01:16:52):
Products?

Speaker 3 (01:16:53):
I love products.

Speaker 2 (01:16:55):
Services. Maybe I don't know if you'd ever if there'd
ever be a service on it here, I do.

Speaker 3 (01:17:00):
Like a good service.

Speaker 2 (01:17:01):
Oh okay, yeah, okay, fascinating yeah, no, yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:17:03):
Whatever whatever they pay me to talk about, or whatever
they pay someone else to talk about in an insert
into my podcast. All right, I'm really excited about here,
and we're back.

Speaker 5 (01:17:24):
We are.

Speaker 3 (01:17:26):
Gina Lucetti had a cousin, Gino Bibby, very serious country
as you said, Yes, absolutely, Gino Bibby was from a
more middle class background. His father owned a sawmill. Gino Bibby.
Did you know what anarchist invented the missile?

Speaker 1 (01:17:45):
No?

Speaker 2 (01:17:46):
Was he like a scientist being forced to do stuff
by the not So I'm going to get to it.

Speaker 4 (01:17:53):
You know what.

Speaker 2 (01:17:53):
That's got to be one of the top anarchism fails.

Speaker 3 (01:17:57):
Yeah, it didn't work out well in the end. I
would say missiles.

Speaker 2 (01:18:00):
I mean, there's definitely some anarchists, you know, in anarchist
related groups that have used missiles and are using them
right now. But uh, boy howdy, it's a general rule,
not a tool that has reduced state power.

Speaker 4 (01:18:14):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:18:15):
Oh, that's an L I know. And it's so messy,
big L for us. And if you google I'll talk
about it a little bit more. Later when he actually
does the inventing, but I guess to it. But if
you google who invented the missile, you get the Nazis.
But he's gonna pull out missiles, guided missiles that go
twenty kilometers in the Spanish Civil War. Shit missile in

(01:18:36):
this case being a rocket, but guided.

Speaker 2 (01:18:38):
Yeah yeah yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:18:40):
And as a teen, this second Geno, Gino Bibby went
around on a bicycle and distributed anarchist leaflets until fascists
dragged him off his bike, beat him up, burned his motorcycle,
and then burned his father's sawmill. Great, because they were
a little extra the fascists. This did not make it
Gino less radical, It just made him more angry. He's

(01:19:03):
going to have the last laugh against fascists in Italy,
as often how things go. Yeah yeah. He spent a
while in lock up for fighting fascists in the early
nineteen twenties, then fled to Spain, where he started learning
how to fly in case he needed to assassinate Mussolini
from the air. Okay, which is kind of like how
I learned a while ago for a prison break episode
that an awful lot of the prison breaks in the

(01:19:24):
early aughts were it.

Speaker 2 (01:19:25):
Used to be a lot easier to get a helicopter.

Speaker 3 (01:19:27):
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, learn to fly. That's how you
get people out of prison back in the day. Yeah.
Come the Spanish Civil War, he worked behind enemy lines,
blowing shit up and flying reconnaissance, and then he maybe
designed the first missile. If you google right now the
first missile, you get Nazi Germany World War two. But
Gino design missiles that went twenty kilometers and the Drudi

(01:19:49):
column fired them at Francoist forces. So it started off
as a good idea, just a very Pandora's box.

Speaker 2 (01:19:55):
That's pretty cool.

Speaker 3 (01:19:56):
Yeah. You know what else? The anarchist is not a
products in service switch. Do you know what else anarchists
invented during the Spanish Civil War? No, you ever played foosball?

Speaker 4 (01:20:06):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (01:20:07):
Is that ours?

Speaker 3 (01:20:07):
Did you ever know? An anarchist named Alejandro I forget
his last name because it's not my script, invented foosball.

Speaker 2 (01:20:12):
Alejandro foos, let's call it. Let's say alanro fos cool.

Speaker 3 (01:20:18):
Yeah, there was a again I'm completely off script here
and going from memory, but there was a guy who
was injured in the Spanish Civil War and he was
like an inventor, and he was like, but I want
to keep playing soccer, but I can't because I got
really badly injured. I'm going to invent table soccer, and
other people had invented it, but his invention is the
one that people play today.

Speaker 2 (01:20:38):
Okay, So fascinating.

Speaker 3 (01:20:39):
Spanish Civil War, the anarchist gave us missiles and foosball to.

Speaker 2 (01:20:45):
The two key cornerstones of the of modern civilization.

Speaker 3 (01:20:49):
Missiles and foosball.

Speaker 4 (01:20:51):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:20:53):
Meanwhile, while Gino is inventing missiles and doing specop's missions,
the Stalinists murdered his sister. Listen to any of our
episodes about the Spanish Civil War for more about how
Stalins betrayed their comrades and started arresting folks that they
didn't like and torturing people and killing them. The Stalinists
actually arrested Gino two, but the anarchists in the government,
which is another odd thing that happened in the Spanish

(01:21:14):
Civil War, were like, oh no, fuck no, and the
Stalinists were forced to let him out. When the Spanish
Republic fell, Like everyone else, he fled into France and
was held in a concentration camp. Not a Nazi one,
but a pre VG France one where from he escaped,
and then he moved back to Italy and he joined
the Partisans there, and he freed his own fucking hometown

(01:21:36):
from fascists as part of an anarchist partisan unit. I
really like this guy. To quote author Nick Heath, he
died at the age of one hundred on the eighth
of August nineteen ninety nine. He was cremated with a
red and black scarf tied around his neck. His ashes
were interred in the anarchist corner of the graveyard in Carrara.

Speaker 2 (01:21:57):
Man' that's dope. Also, nineteen ninety nine, great year to
kind of clock out. Yeah, missed a lot of messinists,
got to see most of the good star treks.

Speaker 3 (01:22:09):
Yeah, and uh yeah, Geno Bbe I got kind of
tiary when I was writing about the life of the anarchist. Spy, pilot, bombmaker, engineer, partisan,
an invention, spilot, spilot, Margaret Oh spilot, yes, the spilot, Yes,
an inventor of the guided missile system, which again not

(01:22:32):
our best move. Later, I'm going to talk about a
military invention, or actually a terrorism invention of the anarchist
that's even worse. Uh oh, the Irish are mostly famous
for it, but it was an Italian anarchist who later
became a fascist. Anyway, back to our main story, people
trying to kill Mussolini. Only a few months after Gino
one through Gino Two's grenade at Mussolini, another young hero

(01:22:55):
stepped forward to give it as all a really young
hero kind of a This is the most heartbreaking part
of the story. A fifteen year old kid who had
just quit the fascist youth and become an anarchist. That's
good for him. Antio Zamboni.

Speaker 2 (01:23:12):
God damn it.

Speaker 3 (01:23:12):
I promised you, Zamboni.

Speaker 2 (01:23:14):
Get Jamie Loftus on the horn. She needs to know
about this name.

Speaker 3 (01:23:18):
I genuinely thought I was very glad that you were
my guest until I got to Zamboni, and I was like, ah,
if I was gonna have anyone else, it would be
Jamie Loftus, also more experienced killing me. Never mind, No, no,
I'm not allowed to join the bit about trying to
implicate okay, just checking no.

Speaker 2 (01:23:36):
Yeah, yeah. Until the court case is over and the
grand jury rules on the new evidence brought forward in
that case, we probably should keep our mouths quiet.

Speaker 3 (01:23:45):
By a mysterious person with a bad, fake Boston accent. No,
for anyone who doesn't know what we're talking about, I'm
proud of you.

Speaker 4 (01:23:55):
Well done. Way to be less terminally online.

Speaker 3 (01:23:59):
You should listen Jamie Loptis's podcasts. He should. Antio Zamboni
was born into a working class political family in Bologna.
His parents were anarchists who became fascists, or at least
his father had. He was never baptized. His parents only
had a civil union because they refused to let the
state or the church have anything to do with their
marriage before they became fascists. His father, Mamolo Zamboni, when

(01:24:25):
he became a fascist, The New York Times called it
quote disassociating from radical action, because being an anarchist is radical,
being a fascist is normal. According to the New York
Times in nineteen twenty six and now, yeah, Mamolo called
himself quote an anarchist and a fascist. So okay, what

(01:24:46):
a guy.

Speaker 2 (01:24:47):
I mean, there's a lot of that too. Unfortunately, Oh yeah,
I could look into there's a I mean, he considered
himself and was very angry about other like people who
called themselves anarchists because he had a different attitude towards it.
But the guy who wrote A Storm of Steel, Ernst Junger,
was like called himself an anarch and I guess the

(01:25:09):
difference is he just believed in anarchism for himself as
like an individual choice, still serving the Nazi state. He
was kind of an incoherent fella politically in my opinion,
but wrote a very good World War One memoir.

Speaker 3 (01:25:24):
Well, I think that that sounds like approximately half of
the modern Libertarian party that the other half of the
Libertarian party is very embarrassed about. Yeah. Yeah. Antio had
two brothers, one of whom was in a Fascist militia,
the other of whom was in the army. Antio was
a young anarchist with way better politics than his dad,
and he took a shot at Mussolini while the man

(01:25:46):
drove past him in an open car. He missed, he
pierced the Fascist collar, and the crowd killed him. Just
stab this child to death. Oh I have you know
a fifteen year old either like a kid or an adult. Yeah,
Antio's a kid. This is a child. Yeah, I mean

(01:26:07):
every fifteen year old is a child. But the crowd
knew they were killing a child.

Speaker 2 (01:26:12):
Yeah, yeah, they did.

Speaker 4 (01:26:13):
Not.

Speaker 2 (01:26:13):
It was not just like somebody who could have passed
for seventeen or eighteen, like they were very aware they
were killing a kid.

Speaker 3 (01:26:20):
Yeah, he could have passed for twelve. Yeah, gotcha. I
looked at the I don't normally do this to myself,
but I looked at the corpse photo because the only
other photos that anyone has of him is when he's
like eight. You know, and his coward fascist father tried
to distance himself from the actions of his son until
after the war. But we'll get to that. The New

(01:26:41):
York Times reported the father walked into the police station
to see the body and said, quote, I knew it
would happen. It was faded. He was a strange boy
with strange notions. I had a dreadful premonition that something
would happen to him. Our doctor said he might go
mad one day. This is the father trying to save
his own ass. It's not going to work. Then New

(01:27:01):
York Times writes a little glowing article about Mussolini playing
his violin with his wife and kids at home, taking
solace after the attack. Then they talk about how everyone
is saying that if Mussolini stays alive, fascism will keep
Italy normal and peaceful.

Speaker 2 (01:27:16):
But if he were killed, it seems like what fascism
will do.

Speaker 3 (01:27:19):
Yeah, yeah, violent fascist might take over if Mussolini's killed.
And on the exact same page of the New York
Times from nineteen twenty six, there's a different article about
fascist black shirts rating anti fascist newspapers at gunpoint.

Speaker 2 (01:27:35):
Uh huh. But you know, but in a normal way,
you know, Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:27:42):
Being a fascist did not protect Mamolo the father. He
and his sister in law were both sentenced to thirty
years for being vaguely connected to antio. Basically, they're like, oh,
the kid couldn't come up with doing it. It must
have been a plot by previously anarchy dad. But by
nineteen thirty two, the elder Zamboni received a pardon directly
from Mussolini in exchange for becoming an informant for the fascists. Then,

(01:28:07):
after the war, Mamlo went one eighty again and started
writing pamphlets speaking of the courage of his son and
started publishing anarchist material again. Great he died in nineteen
fifty two. And he's not the only anarchist in the
story who went fascist and then anarchist again. Yeah, this guy,
I don't like him.

Speaker 2 (01:28:26):
Yeah, again, a lot of It's just like a lot
of people are more dripp will always be a decent
number of people, sizeable minority, always mostly just driven by
whatever's pissing them off in the moment, you know, as
opposed to principles totally.

Speaker 3 (01:28:41):
I'm just so mad at him for turning his back
on his kid and trying to throw this dead kid
under the bus to save his own ass.

Speaker 2 (01:28:46):
I mean it sounds like a guy who sucks. Yeah,
sounds like a guy, a bastard that maybe someone should
get behind.

Speaker 3 (01:28:53):
I know, it's kind of a little weird guy too, Like, yeah,
after Antio is a t Mussolini. All other political parties
were outlawed, but they already didn't have any power, and
Mussolini was going to do that anyhow, was my argument.
This more or less ends open anarchist organizing in Italy,
as I understand it, And Mussolini brings back the death

(01:29:15):
penalty now for anyone trying to kill him or the king.
That didn't stop people from trying to kill him. No
one tries to kill a dictator thinking it's a safe
thing to do.

Speaker 2 (01:29:26):
Nope. Yeah, nobody's ever killed a dictator being like this,
This is more relaxing than staying home at night and
reading the newspaper.

Speaker 3 (01:29:35):
Yeah, I'm going to get away from this just fine.
Yeah yeah, although later the people who do kill Missolini
do but yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:29:43):
That's a different time. That's really not an assassination.

Speaker 1 (01:29:46):
No, no.

Speaker 3 (01:29:49):
The next attempt we're going to talk about was a
man who, like Atano Breshi before him, abandoned the safety
of the United States and kind of abandoned his family
there to return to Italy to try and do what
was right. His name was Mikela Shiroukay, which to me
looks like it's spelled Michelle if anyone's curious, But it's

(01:30:10):
like the French. But it's not. It's Italian, so it's Maclay. Micklay.
Shiro was born in eighteen ninety nine on Sardinia, which
is an Italian island. His father had already emigrated to
the US, and Michaelay was raised by his mother. He
was twice arrested in demonstrations as a kid. He was
conscripted into World War One, and, like a lot of
anarchists at the time, he was hoping the war would

(01:30:32):
turn into a war of liberation. It did not famously.

Speaker 2 (01:30:36):
It's a bummer, yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:30:38):
Mcklay became convinced of anarchism after the Communist Party, he
felt sold out the factory occupations and let the bosses
back in. He eventually moves to Manhattan. He starts fighting
Italian fascists in the streets. He worked as a mechanic
and then he became a banana wholesaler in the Bronx.
He married an Irish American woman named Minnie. He had

(01:30:59):
two kids. I think he had a son and a daughter.
But he was watching Italy fall to fascism and he
couldn't handle it. He was like, someone's got to do something.
I'm someone. I'm gonna do something. He went first to
France and then likely coordinated with anarchists there, but he
kept his mouth shut about it, so we never know.

(01:31:20):
We'll never know like who else was involved because they
were never arrested. He went up to Belgium and he
worked in an anarchist bomb making workshop. I don't know,
there's like a like fly you go to like the
punk show and there's a flyer. It's like, hey, come
to the anarchist bomb making workshop. This Saturday. Yeah, but
he made himself two bombs, and then he traveled to
Rome in January nineteen thirty one. M h, we've only

(01:31:41):
got his confession under duress to work from, so we don't.
You know, famously not always the most honest and not
a great source. Yeah. But his original plan, he said,
was that he was going to use the bombs in
Paris against the Soviet embassy in revenge for the murder
of anarchists in the USSR. But then he decided to
kill Mussolini himself. I think that that was his backup plan.

(01:32:06):
I think that he went to I think he went
back to Europe to try and kill Mscelini. But in
Rome he rented two hotel rooms, one for himself and
one for his bombs, because bombs need privacy too, you know,
of course.

Speaker 2 (01:32:20):
Yes, that's actually my primary political issue, yeah, is extending
privacy rights to modern military explosives. You know, nobody needs
to know what a couple of jade ams get up
to in their spare time. That's between them and God
and whatever village they're hitting.

Speaker 3 (01:32:40):
While he was there, he was either shacking up with
or conspiring with a Hungarian dancer named Anna Lukowski. If
I were writing the story, it would be both. Also,
everyone writes sex work out of history, so I would
put money that she was a sex worker, But that
doesn't make her less or more likely to have been
one of the conspirators. And there is reason to believe

(01:33:01):
that he is part of a broader conspiracy working, but
he never rats them out. And the reason that we
think this is that he spent money really freely while
he was there. He was renting two hotel rooms, but
he had no money on him when he was arrested,
and there was like no money in any of the
rooms or whatever. Right, So he was probably working with
a bunch of people who wanted Mussolini dead. A lot

(01:33:23):
of people wanted Mussolini dead. Yeah, for some reason, his
plan was really simple. One of his hotel rooms overlooked
a common route for Mussolini's car. He was going to
wait and drop a bomb on Mussolini, but he wanted
to do it when there was no bystanders around, of course,
And this is the thing that has come up a
bunch of times on the show, but has left out

(01:33:44):
a lot of the sensationless stuff about bomb assassinations, as
all of the bystanders who get killed. There have been
so many times in history, and there's gonna be two
in this episode where people don't do it because they
can't find a way to do it without hurting people.
He's there for like three weeks and he can't find

(01:34:04):
a way to not hurt anyone else. He had all
but given up, and he was figuring he'd go back
to Paris and attack the Soviets instead when he was
stopped on the street by cops on February third, nineteen
thirty one. And I think he was just like stopped
for being a sketchy guy because it's a fascist state,
you know, and they take him to a holding sell

(01:34:25):
for investigation. There were three cops in the room. He
pulled a gun and shot all three cops. Wow, and
then he shouted long live anarchy and put the gun
in his own mouth and pulled the trigger. Well, okay,
all four men survived. Oh my god. Yeah wow.

Speaker 2 (01:34:45):
I mean that does have to win my award for
worst with a gun of anyone on this podcast. To
shoot four people, including yourself and have them all live
is a real yeah. Honestly though, I got to a
given the time, something that probably just goes down to
how much worse ammunition was back then, you know, powder
loads were less reliable.

Speaker 3 (01:35:04):
He may have loaded himself, you know, yeah, like I
think he like he seriously injured one of the cops
in himself, Jesus Christ. He was like rushed to emergency surgery,
and they, you know, wanted him fit to stand trial.

Speaker 2 (01:35:19):
Right, stand trial for killing no one.

Speaker 3 (01:35:23):
That's actually part of the thing. I was reading newspapers
at the time and they were like, look, shooting cops
didn't carry the death penalty, so it actually was against
their own laws to try and give him the death penalty.
But he admitted that he was there to kill Missolini.
In fact, he pretty much they were like, what are

(01:35:43):
you doing? He was like, I'm here to kill Missolini.
He tried to write his wife, and his wife tried
to write him while he was in jail, but their
letters were confiscated. He wrote to his father to the
same effect. In May nineteen thirty one, he was tried
by a fascist judge with no jury, and all the
lawyers and witnesses had to be put before a special
tribunal before they could come in. His defense was basically

(01:36:07):
I came here to blow out Mussolini during the trial,
he decried both fascism and communism. They told him he
would be executed, shot in the back. He didn't say
a word as the sentence came down. When he was
asked if he had anything to add, he shrugged his shoulders.
At two thirty am the next morning, they came into
his cell and told him he would be killed at sunrise.

(01:36:30):
He said he did not need a priest, and he
was shot in the back by a firing squad of
twenty four fascists, folks from his home of Sardinia, who
had volunteered specifically to kill him.

Speaker 2 (01:36:42):
Well, I guess that's a nice at least you. No,
it's your guys. You went to high school with murdering. Yeah,
totally Actually sounds much worse.

Speaker 3 (01:36:53):
Yeah. His wife Minnie lived to nineteen eighty seven, dying
at eighty three. Their son sparred A, died in two
thousand and five. I found an article I couldn't get
access to behind an academic wall of Spartaco writing about
his father, and I'm kind of sad I couldn't get it.
But here's an assassin who didn't go through with his

(01:37:15):
actions because he couldn't do it without hurting anyone else.
Now let's talk about the opposite sure, but before that,
let's talk about the other opposite products and services. Ah,
I love products and services. Well, someone's going to get hurt.

Speaker 2 (01:37:33):
M's that's the promise we make.

Speaker 3 (01:37:38):
Here they are and we're burke. We are burt. Now
I'm going to talk about my least favorite anarchist in history.

Speaker 2 (01:37:56):
Oh, there's a couple of jokes. There's a couple of
jokes I could make.

Speaker 3 (01:38:01):
People we know. But yeah, no, my least favorite anarchist
I've never met. You don't stay in a political scene
without making a few. Let's go with frenemies. Yeah. So,
there's a long list of things anarchists have invented which
can be used for good or evil. The carriage mounted
machine gun, missiles apparently, the getaway car, foosball, steampunk, free

(01:38:28):
bike programs, signal, the messaging app. One thing that you
can say was probably invented by someone who called themselves
an anarchist at the time was the car bomb.

Speaker 2 (01:38:40):
Uh well, yeah, look, I've seen a couple of car bombs.
I've even seen one kill people, and uh not a
fan of car bombs. No, Well, it was a vbied,
which I guess is like and it's in that line
of descent.

Speaker 3 (01:38:54):
Yeah, I'm still sorry you to see anyone die.

Speaker 2 (01:38:58):
It's okay, I mostly I'm I mean they were far
enough away that I just kind of saw them turned
into smoke.

Speaker 3 (01:39:04):
Okay, yeah, no, I'm sure that doesn't have any effects
on yourself. No, not at all, not at all.

Speaker 4 (01:39:08):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:39:11):
Before the Oklahoma City bombing, the deadliest terrorist attack in
US history was the Wall Street bombing of September sixteenth,
nineteen twenty.

Speaker 2 (01:39:20):
Oh. I have heard of this.

Speaker 3 (01:39:21):
Yeah, someone it is not certain who used a horse
drawn wagon as the first car bomb. And every time
I say the first in any show, it's like, you know,
I don't know the first that I know about. Right,
there's a whole book about the history of the car
bomb called Buddha's Wagon, because we're going to get to ooh,
that's how it was. Probably Mario Buddha.

Speaker 2 (01:39:42):
Yeah, in this car bomb, I thought there were talk.
I was hoping there were some Buddhist history with car
bombs that I hadn't heard. But okay, that makes sense.

Speaker 3 (01:39:50):
No, I mean maybe I don't know, but yes, in
this carriage was one hundred pounds of dynamite, five hundred
pounds of cast iron weights for shrapnel, and they rode
the horse up and then the driver got out and
left and blew up on Wall Street, not in one
of the buildings. It killed forty people, and then like injure,
hundreds of people, and almost everyone that killed were like

(01:40:13):
fucking kids that worked as messengers and like clerks and shit.

Speaker 2 (01:40:18):
Again, this is like the problem of like just this
thing you get on Twitter whenever stuff happens where it's
like somebody has attacked this group of people that like
leftists broadly dislike, and it's like, I don't know, wait
a minute to see if that's who they hit. Yeah,
you know, I'm not talking about you know, the recent thing,
but like it happens often where it's like yeah, it

(01:40:39):
turns out like, oh no, no, that's not that's not
who got hurt. Yeah, because that's you know, with bombs,
very hard to be. It's the same thing, like it's
not just a leftist thing, Like it's mostly not a
leftist thing. It's a thing that I grew up watching
all of the adults around me celebrate as like bombs
got dropped in places that I now know because I

(01:40:59):
understand more of out bombs and talk to people who
were in those places when they were being bombed. Were
largely killing civilians because precision bombing is mostly a myth.

Speaker 3 (01:41:07):
Yeah totally.

Speaker 2 (01:41:09):
It's just like people love explosions.

Speaker 3 (01:41:12):
And the guy who had recently just tried to kill
MUSSLINI earlier on the story didn't do it because it
wasn't a good buy chance. Yep.

Speaker 2 (01:41:20):
And don't make bombs. I shouldn't need to say that.
Don't be making mombs. Don't do bombs bombs. Bomb's bad.
You will not be the one who figures out how
to use bombs ethically, No one ever has been. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:41:36):
And this wasn't some kids who died as collateral damage,
but we killed some big shots. This was all collateral damage,
no regular damage. Cool.

Speaker 2 (01:41:44):
Really put the fear of God into those people who
didn't get hurt.

Speaker 3 (01:41:49):
Yep. And I would argue that of every major political
ideology of the last two hundred years, ANA because I'm
probably is the least innocent blood on its hands.

Speaker 2 (01:41:58):
Oh yeah, yeah, in part because we we generally don't
wind up in power. Yeah totally, which is you know,
I mean, is part of the goal. But yeah, totally.
But the Wall Street bombing is a decent chunk of
the innocent blood on our hands.

Speaker 3 (01:42:13):
Of the anatist movement.

Speaker 2 (01:42:15):
That's a bad one.

Speaker 3 (01:42:16):
The most likely suspect is an Italian anarchist named Mario Buddha,
who was actually probably with Sacho when they robbed and
killed those people in the Sacho and Vanzetti case. Mario
Budda is like a mystery man in history and there's
a lot of like takes on him, and he was
like kind of almost everywhere that like violence was happening.

(01:42:37):
Mario Buddha went on to almost certainly become a fascist
infemant in Italy. Cool, yeah, and almost certainly foil another
anarchist attempt on Mussolini's life. He is the worst. Yeah,
you're right.

Speaker 2 (01:42:53):
That is as shitty as you can possibly be as
an anarchist militant. I know, honestly, I'm mad. I'm mad,
but I am a little impressed. Yeah, Like, if I
was making up an anarchist for you to get mad at,
I couldn't do better than this.

Speaker 3 (01:43:09):
Absolutely. After murdering a bunch of kids and shit in
the name of anarchy, he made his way back to
Italy got caught up in the hubbub.

Speaker 2 (01:43:15):
Yeah, it stops someone from killing Musolini. Yeah, yeah, Jesus.

Speaker 3 (01:43:22):
By nineteen thirty three, it seems likely that he is
cooperating with police informing on anarchists, and a lot of
like people who are really into anarchist history are skeptical
of this because for a while, the only information that
anyone had about this was that a communist newspaper accused
him of this. At the time, yeah, and a lot
of people, even anarchists, listened and were like, oh, we
don't trust this guy anymore. But other people were like, oh,

(01:43:43):
that's the communist plain sectarian politics. And then later you
can see historians have done the work of being like
here's where Mario Budo was dropped off the list of
dangerous anarchists to keep an eye out for, and like
here's you know, he's basically like the fascist took him
under their wing. And even if half of what they
say about Mario Buddha is true, I don't like him

(01:44:04):
at all. I don't like blowing up kids on Wall Street.
I don't like cooperating fascists, I don't like Foilian an
attempt Mussolini's life.

Speaker 2 (01:44:09):
Yeah again, I uh yeah. Really. One of my very
few lines is you probably should don't go don't be
killing kids. dB kk. That's my little like, what would
Jesus do? Bracelet in case you ever need not kill cat? Yeah,
look at a bracelet. Oh no, you know what, I
shouldn't kill kids.

Speaker 3 (01:44:27):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:44:29):
Also, if you need to look at a bracelet to
remind you not to kill kids, I would. Maybe there's
a lot of things you probably need to do.

Speaker 3 (01:44:37):
Therapy.

Speaker 4 (01:44:38):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:44:40):
Meanwhile, back to a regular anarchist, when I like, who
doesn't become a fascist? Sure, there's a blacksmith named Umberto.
I promise you another Mberto Thomasini. Umberto got involved in
politics when he was thirteen. He joined the nineteen oh
nine General Strike in response to the murder of the
Spanish anarchists educator and veteran of the Pod franc Sisc Farrar.
He went on to fight in World War One. He

(01:45:01):
won a Cross for valor. But according to his own take,
what happened is he got to the war because he
was conscripted and he just shot into the air and
he was like trying not to kill anyone.

Speaker 2 (01:45:11):
Well, yeah, that's actually I mean, there's some evidence, although
the studies around it have been to a degree, there's
a lot of critiques about them, but like some evidence
that that was more the norm than not with combat soldiers.

Speaker 3 (01:45:24):
And I bet especially when you're talking about like trenches
and stuff, where you're yes, yes, go shoot that dot
on the horizon, whereas like if someone's like running through
a trench trying to kill me, I'm like, I'm gonna
shoot that man, even if we have the same political ideology,
if someone's trying to kill me with that, I just
don't want to get shot. Yeah, but yeah, no, totally.
And he He spent some time as a pow during

(01:45:46):
the war, and then he returned home to return to
work as a blacksmith, and he more formally committed to
anarchism alongside his brothers, who, like all everyone else, they
left the Socialist Party in nineteen twenty one after the
Socialist sold out the movement. Again, I don't know as
much about that, but that is what Umberto felt, and
his brothers felt. Umberto's life could easily be his own episode.

(01:46:08):
He helped get the bombs from one Gino to the
other Gino in nineteen twenty six, then spent six years
in prison during the crackdown on it. Like after Musolin
he came to power, he sent a whole bunch of
the anarchists to prison. Right during those six years he
met an anarchist in prison named Mario Buddha. Then Umberto
fled Italy on foot to Yugoslavia. Then he went to Paris,

(01:46:29):
where he met his partner Anna and had his son Renee.
In nineteen thirty six, Spain was under attack and so
Umberto left the then safety of Paris to go to
the front lines teaching anarchists about trench warfare. And then
he became an anarchist specops guy, and he went off
to go mine franco As ships.

Speaker 2 (01:46:46):
Oh cool, I know, the opposite of the guy who
just killed children and saved Mussolini.

Speaker 3 (01:46:51):
Yeah, exactly exactly, and he shouldn't have been friends with
that guy. He was arrested by Stalinists and prevented from
attacking the fascists while he was off to go mind
these ships. He broke out of Stalinis prison, and then
he returned back to the prison he'd just broken out
of alongside anarchists from the government to negotiate everyone's release.
I think this is the same situation as the last man,

(01:47:16):
the missile inventor man. But this might have just happened
a bunch of times, yeah, because I read about these
in different sources. Then in nineteen thirty seven, he goes
back to France, so we can plot how to kill Mussolini.
One problem. One of his co conspirators, a man who
has absolute trust for is Mario Budda, whom he had

(01:47:37):
met in prison. Mario leaked the plan to the Italian police,
who foiled it. After the war, Mario Budda went back
to the anarchist movement.

Speaker 2 (01:47:47):
Hooray, great, he sounds trustworthy. I'm sure really worked on things.

Speaker 3 (01:47:55):
Yeah, you know, don't want to cancel him just for
saving Mussolini's life and murdering children. I can't find much
about this particular assassination attempt that he foiled. Mostly I
found a lot of ins and outs about the informant.
But to follow umberto, He, like so many other anarchists,

(01:48:15):
wound up in a non Nazi concentration camp in France.
Then he was turned over to the Italian police, where
he was imprisoned until the end of the war. Finally
he's freed. He returns to his wife and his son,
and his work as a blacksmith, and to anarchist organizing.
When the spirit of sixty eight swings through, he starts
organizing again. He's like about seventy years old, and he's

(01:48:35):
like organizing with a bunch of twenty year old kids, right,
because it's the it's nineteen sixty eight.

Speaker 2 (01:48:40):
Right, Yeah, that's who there's going to be to organize with.

Speaker 3 (01:48:43):
Yeah, I think it's Coole as shit. He kept publishing
shit that would send him back to jail. I think
he was sent back to jail like multiple times just
for continuing to publish anarchist literature. And then he died
in nineteen eighty. He wrote an autobiography, but I don't
believe it's been translated. And there's a documentary about him
called An Anarchist Life from twenty thirteen that I haven't
seen yet that I want to see. And he was

(01:49:05):
real cool. But I don't know what he did to
try and Colle Mussolini. I just know he made the
wrong friend.

Speaker 2 (01:49:10):
Yeah, well we all do sometimes.

Speaker 3 (01:49:13):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:49:13):
For example, I mean there was there was one summer
that Benita Mussolini and I were inseparable. I mean we
would spend just hours on the beach, telling each other's secrets,
having pig nicks. You know, there was there was that
one wine drenched to night, and then I found out
he'd been the dictator of Italy this whole time. I
had no idea, Margaret, I had no idea.

Speaker 1 (01:49:33):
I know.

Speaker 3 (01:49:34):
I mean, what's funny is that pre him becoming Mussolini.
That is the story that a lot of people tell.
People do have that story, like the woman Lita, who
is probably his lover, who is an anarchist, who was
like later she was like I misjudged his character, you know, Yeah,
he whom'st amongst us hasn't been friends with the inventor

(01:49:55):
of fascism?

Speaker 2 (01:49:57):
Well, Cohen, I mean, let's we've got a There was
another Italian who might deserve that title a little more.
But we talked about him on Behind the Bastards. Wait
which one, Oh, the guy who wore a banana hamnock?
One sec Wait what does.

Speaker 3 (01:50:11):
He invent the banana hammock?

Speaker 4 (01:50:13):
No? No, no, but he I don't remember this person's
name either. We definitely talked about it though.

Speaker 2 (01:50:19):
Gabriel Danunzio, Yeah, yes, Gabriel Danunzio, who was a big
influence on Mussolini and was like is often credited as
the inventor of fascism. He never called himself a fascist.
He's like partially right, there's not just one guy, but
he is earlier in the chain of the development of

(01:50:41):
fascist mes a concept than Mussolini and an influence on Benito.

Speaker 3 (01:50:45):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:50:46):
Oh h yeah, Gabriel Danunzio. You can listen to our
two parter on him, very much worth it. He is
the guy who in Fume as an independent city. He's
a guy who marches into Fume and takes it over
as like, oh, along with a bunch of there were
anarchists and communists and fascists all kind of together because
they were all very much anti just all of the
things that are going on right now, but those ideologies

(01:51:09):
hadn't really hardened into in the concrete way they would
a couple of years later. Fascinating time, kind of like
how a lot of our most prominent right wing fas
a lot of them are prominent fascist media ideologues today,
were part of occupy. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:51:25):
God, Actually, the occupy versus Fume thing is actually makes
a lot of really specific sense. That's the thing that's
like it's so hard to talk about. Is that in
a certain way, fascism is the red Brown alliance because
it is taking ideas from leftism but applying into right
wing ideology.

Speaker 2 (01:51:43):
Yes, well, two.

Speaker 3 (01:51:46):
More people at least tried to kill Mussolini. One of
them don't know much about. Isn't even on the list
of people who tried to kill Mussolini Wikipedia. His name
is Domenico Bavone and he was a Republican. Republican on
our list. He tried to build bombs to kill Mussolini,
but he didn't go to the bomb making workshop for

(01:52:07):
the punk show Flyer told him about in Brussels. That's
a shame. So he failed at making the bombs properly,
and he blew up his own house on September fifth,
nineteen thirty one, killing his own mother.

Speaker 2 (01:52:17):
Well, bad job, bro, that's a that's about his bad
I mean. And again, don't build bombs. There are so many.
By far, the most normal story in political radical tries
to make a bomb is political radical kills themselves, their
friends or their family. Yeah, yeah, don't make bombs. Yeah,

(01:52:38):
they're very indiscriminate.

Speaker 3 (01:52:40):
And under interrogation he admitted he was trying to kill Mussolini,
and he was shot in the back by a firing squad.
And then there is Angelo Pellegrono Sabard Aletto. Angelo was
born in nineteen oh seven in mel Italy, and he
was the fifth of eleven children, which means I do

(01:53:00):
not need to tell you he was from a Catholic family,
but he was His family was poor as hell. The
article I read specifically indicated they were poor as hell
because they had eleven children. But you know, whatever you do,
you people can make their own decisions on how many
kids to have. They fled poverty to France, then Luxembourg,
then Belgium. Angelo was a miner and a machine hand.

(01:53:22):
He became an anarchist as a teenager, talking to other
immigrant workers who were mostly political refugees. Soon enough he
was on lists of dangerous extremists and draft dodgers and shit.
And he was inspired by Mikelo Sheirou and he met
almost the exact same fate. In nineteen thirty two, he
went to Rome to kill Mussolini, but like Maclay before him,

(01:53:44):
he couldn't find a moment when he could bomb Mussolini
without hurting anyone else. He spent months trying. Just bought
a gun. That man should have bought a gun. I
mean whatever, I.

Speaker 2 (01:53:56):
Don't know how hard it was to buy guns in
Mussolini's Italy, fair enough, Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:54:01):
But you know, he spent months trying, and he was
on the verge of giving up when, like mcklay, he
was arrested seemingly by happenstance on a train station, just
like some cops were like, Eh, you're suspicious, We're going
to search you. Which is you know, fascism. Also, the
same thing happens in New York City subways, but you
know whatever. Yeah, when he was searched, he had a

(01:54:23):
Swiss passport, a pistol. Oh, he had a fucking gun.

Speaker 2 (01:54:28):
Well, okay, I guess not that hard, yeah, question answered.

Speaker 3 (01:54:32):
Yeah, and two bombs and he was tortured, and under
torture he said he was there to avenge mckelay Shiro.
He'd written a letter previously that year that said, quote,
I have no choice to be free. Tyranny must be
beaten to build tomorrow a new order in which all
can enjoy the fruits of their labor and freely express

(01:54:52):
their thoughts. We must destroy today all the injustices which
render this impossible. His trial was a show trial. It
was two days long. Journalists decried him as surly and
sinister and would like literally make stuff up about how
he looked. They were like he had a low forehead,
you know, which he didn't. But even if he did,

(01:55:12):
fuck you, you know. His lawyer asked him to write
Ussolini for clemency. He refused. He shouted long Live Anarchy
when he was shot in the back. After he was killed,
the Fascist government decided to hide forever his burial site.
No one knows where his body is. A biographer for
Mussolini said that he would have pardoned the anarchists if

(01:55:33):
they had asked, because he lauded their courage. I mean,
considering a lot of his fucking people were former anarchists. Yep,
I don't know. Maybe you would have, but fuck that,
I mean whatever. I wouldn't be mad if anyone was like, oh,
please don't kill me, mister Missolini, whatever, I would be like,
you weakling, give the shit.

Speaker 2 (01:55:53):
Yeah Mussolini, I hardly know.

Speaker 1 (01:55:55):
Ye.

Speaker 2 (01:55:56):
Yeah, did I already do that joke? It just occurred
to me.

Speaker 5 (01:56:02):
So yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:56:03):
Originally I was going to talk about the Partisans who
finally did him in. But I think we've covered a
lot of trying to kill Mussolini. There are too many
cool people. I didn't want a skim pass. You got
a Socialist, a Catholic, or Republican, at least five anarchists
who tried to do him in. But it took a
whole ass war. We got him in the end, though.

Speaker 2 (01:56:19):
And you know what folks would I'll say right now,
is you can still try to take a shot at
Mussolini and he's a lot easier to hit.

Speaker 3 (01:56:26):
Now. I assume he's buried somewhere. Probably I feel like, yeah,
go dig him up, Yeah, and take a shot.

Speaker 2 (01:56:34):
Take a shot.

Speaker 3 (01:56:35):
Yeah, hard miss that way. Yeah, gender neutral shooting range,
that's what they say.

Speaker 2 (01:56:42):
Take a shot with. You know, it could just be
with the tool that you have on hand, so to speak.
That was a penis joke.

Speaker 3 (01:56:51):
Yeah, we know. I could have been a p joke
because you can have a tool on hand without a penis.

Speaker 2 (01:56:56):
You're right, you could use You can use a shili
for example. You know there's all sorts of g or
just you cut the bottom of a water bottle out
and then like cut the top to widen it and
you kind of jam it in there. It sort of works.

Speaker 3 (01:57:09):
And I can't believe that's the note we're ending on,
but that's where we're at. Everyone, Uh go kill Mussolini,
but only Mussolini. We're talking about the past.

Speaker 2 (01:57:18):
Yes, only in the past.

Speaker 3 (01:57:20):
And if you want to know more about the knock
on effects of various types of violence, listen to this
entire show's history because it is full of knock on effects,
many of which are negative.

Speaker 2 (01:57:29):
And in terms of things I will continue to say
for the modern era, don't make bombs.

Speaker 3 (01:57:34):
Yeah, don't make bombs.

Speaker 1 (01:57:41):
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
cool Zone Media. More podcasts and cool Zone Media, visit
our website Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on
the iHeartRadio app, app a podcasts, or wherever

Speaker 3 (01:57:53):
You get your podcasts.