Part One: All the People Who Tried to Kill Mussolini

Margaret tells Robert Evans about the awful large amount of people who tried to take Mussolini out.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media.

Speaker 2 (00:05):
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 Kiljoy,
and my producer Sophie Hi Sophie, my Magpie, and my.

Speaker 3 (00:22):
Guest Robert Evans Hi Magpie. 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

(00:43):
be about you making podcasts.

Speaker 2 (00:46):
Excellent, 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 camp
full of hay, is what happened. Yes, And it took
me a long time to get all the hay out.

Speaker 3 (01:04):
It does take a long time to get all the
hay out.

Speaker 2 (01:07):
But it's worth it because then the goats got to eat.

Speaker 3 (01:09):
Hay, and the goats love hay So.

Speaker 1 (01:12):
Speaking of this week, speaking of saying hey, oh we
should say hey to Rory.

Speaker 2 (01:17):
Who's our audio engineer? Hi Rory, Hi Riight, Hi Rory?
And our theme music was written forced 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 1 (01:32):
You did like, like, I can vouch for you.

Speaker 2 (01:35):
You and I'm glad you don't believe don't have to
vouch for me in court about it.

Speaker 1 (01:40):
I'm just but but I would, and it would be
I would be truthful. I have like documentation full.

Speaker 2 (01:45):
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 3 (01:55):
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 2 (02:12):
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 3 (02:23):
Which is if you've got blue Cross, you now have
to be less worried about getting surgery.

Speaker 2 (02:27):
Yeah, and waking up in the middle of surgery, which
is basically everyone's nightmare.

Speaker 3 (02:31):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:32):
Literally, that is.

Speaker 1 (02:33):
So like, so many people have that fear, and that
it's grulish. Yeah, so goulish, it's so gross.

Speaker 2 (02:40):
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 3 (02:51):
Mussolini, I hardly know Leini. Okay, pass, and it's not
gonna work. Sorry, Mussolini.

Speaker 2 (03:01):
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 tried
to kill Mussolini?

Speaker 3 (03:20):
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 2 (03:38):
We're going to talk about I think eight of them
today or this week.

Speaker 3 (03:42):
Yeah, that sounds like the right himount Yeah.

Speaker 2 (03:45):
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

(04:09):
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 3 (04:16):
Yes, that's part of the problem. Yeah, yeah, it.

Speaker 2 (04:22):
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 3 (04:36):
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

(04:59):
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 Echo.

Speaker 2 (05:16):
Well, there's gonna be a bunch of emburdos in this episode,
but not echo. Yeah, but it turns out Umberto is
sort of the mic of Italy. Well, yeah, McLay 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 fascism and be wrong,

(05:37):
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 to get too deep into

(05:57):
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

(06:18):
Benito Mussolini was Benito Mussolini.

Speaker 3 (06:23):
Oh because well yeah, yeah, I know that makes sense.

Speaker 2 (06:26):
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 part right ideology, started on the left.

Speaker 3 (06:37):
Yep, he sure did. Uh kind of adjacent to anarchism.

Speaker 2 (06:41):
Yeah, we're going to talk about that. There's gonna be
a lot of it. 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 eight teen eighty three
and he was the child of a blacksmith socialist and

(07:03):
a Catholic school teacher. 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
Italian are Andrea and Amala Caare and these are after

(07:24):
two anarchists because his 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,

(07:45):
that makes no sense in the twenty first century. Italian
nationalism is really intertwined with the left, and it's really
intertwined with anarchism.

Speaker 3 (07:55):
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's a country, obviously Croatia is a country. When

(08:15):
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 2 (08:23):
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.

(08:45):
I've read both the anarchist orientalist poet named Leita 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 polytical
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 ran a newspaper.

Speaker 3 (09:06):
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's totally that's not the journalism. Tweeting is not,
or making TikTok is not journalism. But journalism wasn't what
we would consider journalism back then. It was just the

(09:29):
best way of getting propaganda to the masses.

Speaker 2 (09:31):
Yeah, and it was Yeah, you wrote polemics, and propaganda
just literally meant propagating ideas. If you had an idea
and you wanted 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.

(09:52):
He liked their courage, he likes their commitment, and he
liked action. You know, he was he wasn't the kind
of guy who wanted people to win 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 3 (10:10):
I mean, look, there's a vin diagram. We do may
not like to say it, but like, there's a Vinn
diagram at points between me and Mussolini's life right now, Totally,
I'm not against killing early twentieth century autocrats theoretically.

Speaker 2 (10:26):
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 3 (10:34):
Look, if I could go back in time and stab
the King of Italy, I would try to.

Speaker 2 (10:40):
Well, that's going to bring us to this week's first assassin.

Speaker 3 (10:43):
Is it the guy who stabbed the King of Italy?

Speaker 2 (10:46):
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 was Gaetano Bresci. He was a
weaver from Italy who emigrated to the US in the
nineteenth century to Patterson, New Jersey. And it's kind of

(11:09):
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, Patterson, New
Jersey very strong Italian 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

(11:30):
mode when I talk about Katana Bresci. 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 New Jersey with his Irish wife, Sophie,
which is a good name, I agree, right, yeah, and
his two daughters, and she's gonna be all right in
this story.

Speaker 1 (11:49):
Cool, yeah, okay, cool, don't bring the name down.

Speaker 2 (11:53):
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 like
lost their mind and was running around and burning things

(12:15):
or whatever. 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.

Speaker 3 (12:35):
And 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 2 (12:47):
We see this again and again, and so I think
everyone was kind of expecting Umberto to come in and
be like, well, you probably shouldn't have done that, right, Oh,
I did promise you more than one mburdo and this
is one of them. There'sn be another one, probably on Wednesday.
But what i'mburda the first did is awarded the guy
who ordered the massacre a medal of honor, and Gatano

(13:09):
Bresci 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 hundred 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. He

(13:30):
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
money to go fuck off, right. Everyone thought he left

(13:53):
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 3 (14:01):
That's a song. That's a warren Zevon song right there,
Smith and Wesson in a one way ticket to Paris. Excellent.

Speaker 2 (14:07):
And the king is going to die and unlike a
lot of would be assassins that we've talked about on
this show BRESHI practiced with the revolver.

Speaker 3 (14:18):
Which is always key. Yes.

Speaker 2 (14:21):
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

(14:41):
waited for Umberto to come through, waiting in the crowd
that was all there to cheer on their you know,
glorious leader, and 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 3 (14:59):
Hell oh that's a good line. That's a good line.

Speaker 2 (15:06):
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

(15:26):
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. Mussolini'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.

(15:48):
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.

(16:10):
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 cracked 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,

(16:31):
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

(16:53):
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 3 (17:05):
Yeah. No, kings are great at like really union behave
they really work like unions royalty.

Speaker 2 (17:12):
Yeah, when when someone comes for them as a class,
they band together.

Speaker 3 (17:16):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (17:18):
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, right. Mussolini said that tyrann aside was
quote the occupational hazard of being a king, which I

(17:41):
don't know I.

Speaker 3 (17:42):
Mean talking about occupational hazards. Yeah, I feel confident saying
that being a king is a pre existing condition.

Speaker 2 (17:51):
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. Now,

(18:17):
this might shock you, Robert, did you know Mussolini didn't
stay leftist?

Speaker 3 (18:23):
Really? Now? I thought you were talking about Benny Mussolini,
the man who invented the three day weekend.

Speaker 2 (18:33):
Well, I was reading a whole bunch on on that
website X about how actually the fascist or socialists and leftists.

Speaker 3 (18:41):
You're, of course referring to the website that just plays
a looping video of the song X gonta give it
to you. That's where I get all of my historical
information about anarchists in the early nineteen hundreds as well. Yes,
uh huh, yeah.

Speaker 2 (18:54):
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 was basically, what if

(19:15):
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, because at the time, right wing

(19:38):
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 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,

(19:59):
a lot of politics in Italy was happening in the streets,
fascists 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 was a chance that Mussolini was even

(20:20):
going to go anarchists during this time. 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

(20:41):
anarchists don't want him. Mussolini said, quote, we are always
ready to admire men who are willing to die for
a faith they believe in selflessly. And this is him
contrasting the anarchists to the cowardly socialists. The anarchists, in
so many words, told him to eat shit and die,
refuse his overtures again and again, and soon enough they're

(21:03):
going to try really really hard to just outright kill
this man. The most famous Italian anarchist then and 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.

(21:25):
And how today in Argentina there are still pastries named
by the anarchist Bakers, like little books and little bombs.
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,

(21:48):
even though his followers are fighting the anarchists in the
streets during this time, Malatesta gets out and he can't
get any paper for his newspapers because of political pressure
against him, and Musolin offers him paper to print on
and Malatist is like no, what No, So Mussolini keeps

(22:08):
trying to be friends with them. But some anarchists and
folks from every ideology did turn fascist, right, because 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

(22:31):
a lot of political extremists are into extremism, not the
idea that the extremism is attached to. So you get
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

(22:53):
even took formal power. He does that in nineteen twenty two,
and they're like, all right, we got to kill this guy.
They delegate 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

(23:13):
the very next day, because Mussolini has just been I
don't know, cunning or whatever, yeah, Mussolini goes and gives
a speech about how the government needs to really release
Mala Testa, right, even though he has just learned that
the anarchists or trying to kill him. He's a forty
chess kind of man, this Mussolini.

Speaker 3 (23:31):
Yeah, yeah, unfortunately he is.

Speaker 2 (23:34):
He was.

Speaker 3 (23:34):
I mean, one thing you learned about Mussolini and all
these guys, with 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

(23:55):
own worse impulses and analyzing things logically.

Speaker 2 (23:59):
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 mite is not the same as Germany's. Right, Mussolini
pulled off something pretty incredible, like terrible evil, but like

(24:21):
he did become dictator of a major country. That is
like a hard thing to do.

Speaker 3 (24:27):
I mean, I think I could become dictator of Italy. Yeah, no,
I know, but you get give me six months, Margaret, Okay,
six months and a lot of pizza pies. If we
know anything about our Italians, Pizza Hut. Pizza Hut's probably fine.

Speaker 2 (24:45):
I really like the pizza in Italy.

Speaker 3 (24:47):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (24:47):
I like how every country of 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 by vegan pizza.

Speaker 3 (25:03):
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 that was just such a wow. Well,
I guess, yeah, I guess you guys lost that God

(25:24):
like Jesus, Jesus.

Speaker 2 (25:29):
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

(25:51):
king 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

(26:14):
like that. There are some occupational hazards to being 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 3 (26:35):
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 2 (26:44):
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

(27:05):
mafia assassinates, like executes people in public. No one wants
to live here.

Speaker 3 (27:12):
I mean, shit, you could do that in front of
my house if I could have paid, like, you know,
thirty percent less. Absolutely. Look, I'm not I'm not getting
involved with the mafia. They got no reason to be
pissed at me. Yeah, I don't see shit. Yeah she
stays here gunshots at night. I don't know what you're
talking about. Yeah, MafA, what.

Speaker 2 (27:32):
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 3 (27:39):
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. Yeah. A nice place
to live, a nice place to live.

Speaker 2 (27:51):
And like, I'm not the police, so I'm not worried.

Speaker 3 (27:53):
Again, shut, I'm not the police. These people have no
reason to be angry at me. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (28:00):
So before we talk about Tito, we're going to talk
about another Italian socialist politician, Jacomo Matdietodi Madia Maddiodi.

Speaker 3 (28:08):
You best friend, Buca di Beppo.

Speaker 2 (28:11):
Tacoma Maddiot Maddieodi was a socialist politician who tried repeatedly
to expose most Mussolini and fascism for what they were.
After he published a book against the fascists and accused
them of fraud the fascists, who were certainly people of action.
On June tenth, nineteen twenty four, Jacomo was kidnapped by

(28:33):
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,
eventually Mussolini was like, look, I'm a fascist, though I'm

(28:56):
in charge, and we're going to stab people to death
with carpenter's files, and you're just gonna deal with it.
This had an enormous amount of knock on effects. One
of them was that this other socialist politician, tito 'sanaboni,
he got real mad. He had been part of the
search efforts to find his friend. Before that, he'd been

(29:16):
part of signing a peace treaty between the socialists and
the fascists. But after they killed his friend. Oh yeah,
the Socialist signed of peace treaty of the fascists. After
I talk about all the anarchists, he became fascists and stuff.
It's worth pointing out the Socialist sign of peace treaty
with the fascists. After they killed his friend, He's like,
all right, fuck this, we got to shoot this guy.

(29:37):
And he and his friends conspired to kill Massolini. Tito's
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 Army were both sent
to prison. I think they got the maximum set, which

(30:00):
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 just you know, not always the
best way to get off in court, but like looks

(30:22):
good in history.

Speaker 3 (30:23):
Books, Yeah, looks good. I mean, there's right around this time,
the case of Saga Montealurian, who a Berlin jury decided like,
oh no, no, it was totally fine that he assassinated
that guy who did a genocide. Oh yeah, you're totally politician.

Speaker 2 (30:36):
Yeah, we covered this one on the Armenian Genocide episode. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (30:39):
I'm just saying, everybody who might wind up in a
court in New York start looking up jury nullifications right now.

Speaker 2 (30:47):
Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 1 (30:50):
So.

Speaker 2 (30:51):
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 alive in

(31:13):
jail long enough, you'll be free again. But someone else
was directly inspired by the death of Jacamo Mattiot. One
of my favorites strange and misunderstood assassins in history, Violet Gibson.
Have you heard of I feel like that there's one
I've heard the name. Yeah, if there's one assassin people

(31:36):
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 1 (31:46):
Is there like a song?

Speaker 2 (31:48):
There are there's actually there's songs about her.

Speaker 1 (31:50):
There's documentaries, and I really hope I'm thinking of the
right person and also sound dumb.

Speaker 2 (31:54):
She was like really short, right, yeah, she's five foot one,
yeah yeah, okay, oh.

Speaker 3 (31:58):
Yeah, hell yeah. So I love stories about short ladies
doing badass that. My grandma was like four foot eleven.
Hell yeah, 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 or like do bolting,

(32:21):
or she was like welding them on the inside. There
was like an area that needed welds that only the
tiniest girls could fit.

Speaker 2 (32:27):
Hell yeah, fucking.

Speaker 1 (32:30):
Raby as somebody who definitely can't rich things on the
top shelf. I'm very excited to hear more about Violet.

Speaker 2 (32:38):
Also, the only person who I'm going to talk about
today who successfully shot the man.

Speaker 1 (32:44):
Well done.

Speaker 3 (32:44):
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. Also.

Speaker 2 (32:53):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (32:54):
So.

Speaker 2 (32:54):
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 3 (33:06):
What's not to lot? God Ireland stays winning.

Speaker 2 (33:10):
Yeah, you know, I do. 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 1 (33:28):
No about people turning their heads.

Speaker 2 (33:30):
Yeah and getting grazed. Yep. The world would have been
a very different place if he had not turned his head.

Speaker 3 (33:37):
Yep.

Speaker 2 (33:39):
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.

Speaker 3 (33:47):
Grew up like oh wow, so her like they're like
the English landlord yeah type deal. Yeah yeah, yeah, oh
like Lawrence of Arabia yeah.

Speaker 2 (33:55):
Totally uh 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 going to 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 who are

(34:17):
from the South, most telling to the story 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.

(34:37):
She was raised Protestant right her mother 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

(34:58):
of the time, her body carried the scars of many surgeries,
and she spent years working 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. There, I believe this happened. So she

(35:19):
used to walk around Dublin with a Bible in one
hand and a knife in the other.

Speaker 3 (35:25):
And I hate to say it, but that is that
is pretty cool.

Speaker 2 (35:29):
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 3 (35:36):
I would want to like observe her from a safe distance.

Speaker 2 (35:39):
Ye yeah, 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. That was that was part of her
way of understanding that particular doctrine. Around nineteen twenty, she
attacked a young woman with a knife, cutting the woman's

(36:02):
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. Sure, when
she got out, she moved a convent in Rome. I

(36:23):
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 in nineteen twenty four,

(36:45):
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 world that's coming, you

(37:05):
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.

Speaker 3 (37:26):
And we're back.

Speaker 2 (37:28):
Mussolini. At this point I read a whole bunch of
New York Times articles and like other like 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

(37:50):
instead a knighthood, and Violet Gibson decided that the way
to glorify God was to assassinate Mussolini. He 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

(38:13):
modern mind can't really understand her motive, I think, because
her 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. At
the last minute, she grazed his nose. She tried to

(38:35):
fire again, but the gun jammed. And I've 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

(38:57):
like killed by an old lady, he just can't handle it,
which is why I wish Violet had succeeded over everyone else. Yeahs, 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

(39:18):
break it to the people back then, she was correct
about this particular thing. 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, men are crazy, right, That's fine, That's
a sarcastic remind Yeah, probably caught onto that she told

(39:42):
people that her mood controlled the weather.

Speaker 3 (39:45):
Okay, well did it.

Speaker 2 (39:47):
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 3 (39:55):
Yeah, I mean, look, I can't prove that she's wrong.

Speaker 2 (39:59):
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

(40:20):
outlive Mussolini. 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

(40:41):
and things like that.

Speaker 3 (40:42):
Is it possible that there was like, no one at
her funeral because this, I mean, I had just made
a comment about Ireland's staying winning. But Ireland's history are
e 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

(41:02):
thing among the Irish, as well as the fact that
Franco was like a Catholic, Like, it's not a clean
period for Ireland entirety.

Speaker 2 (41:10):
No either, it's not. But she's also Anglo Irish, right.

Speaker 3 (41:14):
Well, I mean he had that also makes sense, you right,
had forgotten that.

Speaker 2 (41:17):
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 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 good at

(41:41):
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 is basically like,

(42:05):
but this particular attempt is what Mussolini used to consolidate power.
Everything was fine until this person tried to kill him,
and then woo, she just like swept in with fascism.

Speaker 3 (42:16):
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 2 (42:39):
State right totally.

Speaker 3 (42:41):
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. Maybe it'll mean he's
more vengeful. We don't know yet. 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

(43:02):
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 have
to be a good person.

Speaker 2 (43:15):
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 it he used moments like this to consolidate power,

(43:38):
because anyone would.

Speaker 3 (43:39):
Yeah, because 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 gonna make use of
that because otherwise you're going to sit alone in a
room and think about how you nearly got your brains
blown out.

Speaker 2 (43:56):
Yeah, totally, Yeah, Yeah, he keeps you know, he's got
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 3 (44:07):
Like, Oh, they loved Mussolini, Benito. 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

(44:28):
beloved in Germany. Mussolini had a level of 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 good 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. And he like knew.

Speaker 2 (44:51):
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 philosopher one that is still around.

Speaker 3 (45:01):
Yep.

Speaker 2 (45:02):
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 Sacco and Vinzetti. Have you heard of this?

Speaker 3 (45:22):
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, 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 own the
basics there.

Speaker 2 (45:33):
So what's funny about it? It's messy.

Speaker 3 (45:36):
The general version is usually it is Yeah, this was
like cumulatively four sentences over the course of my high
school education.

Speaker 2 (45:45):
And it's probably the only time during anyone' high school
education the word anarchist gets mentioned. Besides like maybe you're
going to get sho gosh killing McKinley, but probably not.

Speaker 3 (45:54):
I don't even think I learned about McKinley getting assassinated.
I don't think I learned it was an anarchist. But
maybe I barely remember high school.

Speaker 2 (46:02):
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 3 (46:10):
But I definitely remember knowing that Saco and Vinzetti had
been anarchists.

Speaker 2 (46:14):
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

(46:38):
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

(46:59):
investigation and things like that. This dragged on for years.
Later historians have been like, well, Sacho probably did it,
uh and Venzetti maybe, Like it's possible Venzetti was there
and therefore actually criminally liable, but like didn't pull the trigger.

(47:20):
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. H.

Speaker 3 (47:34):
Well, it's also an unfortunate truth that a lot of
times that 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 why we really do try here not to

(47:56):
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 2 (48:11):
No, 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 Saque 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

(48:33):
it because most of the outcry against the trials 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 Saquo
and Venzetti. Mussolini was cynically using the trial to stir

(48:56):
up nationalism at home and continuing his oddtures to the anarchists,
even though he was in power by most of this point,
and he's cracking down on the anarchists 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

(49:17):
Saco and Benzetti because Mussolini wanted to 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 by God,
and America shouldn't kill them or whatever I'm now paraphrasing.
Terribly great stuff.

Speaker 3 (49:38):
Yeah, and I don't love their murders, but I support them.
Being Italian, they ought to be free.

Speaker 2 (49:47):
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 only third, nineteen twenty seven,
Mussolini wrote, it is certain that the execution of Saco
Vanzetti would provide the pretext for a vast and continuous

(50:09):
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, and fascist newspapers

(50:30):
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 3 (50:49):
That's nice.

Speaker 2 (50:50):
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 is like the
dude's got a point yep. The US president industrial system
is like a nightmare. It sure is, and was worse
than the fascist government.

Speaker 3 (51:09):
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 2 (51:27):
Oh yeah, he had the stabbed a dude to death
of a file.

Speaker 3 (51:29):
Yeah. Yeah, not necessarily in a way. 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

(51:53):
whatever like that, and the constant mass the constant murder
at a pretty high rate of blackmen in the set
by cops and vigilantes, like both things that I would
put on a similar moral level.

Speaker 2 (52:06):
Yeah, exactly. I'm not trying to be like Benito Mussolini
is great.

Speaker 3 (52:10):
You know no, no, no, no, 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 2 (52:18):
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 3 (52:38):
Did anything else happen on September eleventh? Ever? That seems
like one of those.

Speaker 2 (52:42):
Is that coup that happened somewhere is such a smooth joke? Yeah,
thank you.

Speaker 3 (52:46):
I'm looking. I'm looking at my calendar of various September
elevenths that I keep for no reason. Yet it doesn't
look like anything's ever happened on another September eleventh that
I can Yeah, that I've got. Okay, you're the funniest
person I know. That must be why I celebrate nine
to eleven. Wait, exactly, shit, Margaret, Margaret, I'm getting some
very bad Google results. Suddenly, we need to edit that out. Oh,

(53:08):
my god, Oh my god, all those poor people. Holy shit.

Speaker 2 (53:11):
Yeah, I lived in New York City y September eleven,
so I 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 killing kings and
monarchs and stuff, it's the anarchists. Again, we all know

(53:35):
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 tell you about
it on Wednesday.

Speaker 3 (53:53):
Excellent. You know, Wednesday, Margaret, is the day that comes
after Tuesday. That's a little science fact. Those of you
in the audience, thank.

Speaker 1 (54:02):
You so much for telling us that. I have no idea.
I have no idea how we would have.

Speaker 3 (54:05):
Wait, we tried to shoot a little bit a couple
of facts your way.

Speaker 2 (54:09):
Yeah, that's why it's edutainment.

Speaker 3 (54:12):
That's why it's edutainment.

Speaker 1 (54:13):
Right.

Speaker 3 (54:14):
Yeah, So remember, folks, Wednesday, day after Tuesday. Thursday comes
the day before Monday, and that's all I gotta say.

Speaker 2 (54:23):
It comes before Monday.

Speaker 3 (54:25):
Yes, yes, yes, Tomorrow is Saturday.

Speaker 2 (54:27):
And after Monday. Is the weirdest thing about Thursday.

Speaker 3 (54:29):
I know, I know, it's the day so nice they
made it happen twice.

Speaker 2 (54:33):
It I can't even there's nothing I can do with that.

Speaker 3 (54:37):
Yeah, oh, Margant, I wish you and I could hang
out all eleven days of the week.

Speaker 2 (54:42):
I know, I know that'd be nice, but I only
have so many hours in the day and I don't
remember how many it.

Speaker 3 (54:48):
Is forty one?

Speaker 2 (54:49):
Oh okay, no, yeah, that makes sense. Yes, but Robert Evans,
where can people find more about you or what do
you do?

Speaker 3 (54:58):
Well, you can find me wedding 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 Sumeria, so it takes a lot of time to

(55:19):
remember what day it is. Yeah, we really kept this
bit going for a while.

Speaker 2 (55:25):
I feel like at the end of a Gijoe 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 for 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 thing that happened in the
nineteen twenties, but I want to be clear on that.

Speaker 3 (55:46):
Just that 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 Sogam
and Tealurian who shot you know, one of the young

(56:06):
Turks who orchestrated the Armenian genocide, that worked out great
by his standards, and everyone else's that guy who 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 2 (56:29):
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

(56:49):
movement because it just led people to then defend the
very systems that the anarchists were opposed to. And this
happened time and time again. There are exceptions. During are
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

(57:09):
these assassinations, and it did lead to a revolutionary situation, which,
of course, i'll kind of ended badly and created the
United the USSR. But usually these kind 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, It's

(57:32):
a like, let's redraw our hand of cards and probably
get something worse yep. But still, if someone had successfully
killed Mussolini. I bet the world would have been a
better place.

Speaker 3 (57:45):
Yes, yes, but the if within the if contains a
lot of reasons. Why you know, we're going to say
for legal reasons here, assassinations probably not worth it.

Speaker 2 (58:02):
And we're gonna talk about like five more of them
on Wednesday.

Speaker 3 (58:06):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (58:08):
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
Stouts series from Reporting from the Darien Gap about one
of the worst land migration places in the world, and
just you know, the stories and people he talked to there,

(58:29):
and I just want to plug that because it's an
amazing series and I'm very proud of James.

Speaker 2 (58:33):
I started listening to it. I haven't finished it yet.
It is really good. It's really good.

Speaker 1 (58:38):
Yes, So if you have time around the end of
the year and you're like, oh, I need something to binge,
James did five episodes.

Speaker 2 (58:43):
On It could happen here on it could have thank you,
and it could happen here. All right, see y'all on Wednesday.

Speaker 3 (58:51):
Bye.

Speaker 1 (58:57):
Cool People who Did Cool Stuff is a product of
cool Zone Media. More podcasts from Cool Zone Media. Visit
our website folezonemedia dot com, or check us out on
the iHeartRadio app, Apple

Speaker 2 (59:08):
Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.