Part One: Bella Ciao and the Migrant Laboring Women Who Gave Us an Anthem

Margaret talks to author Gigi Griffis about the most famous partisan song of them all and its strange and mysterious origins.

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Episode Transcript

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

Speaker 2 (00:04):
Hello, and welcome to Cool peopleeted Cool Stuff, your weekly
reminder that when there's bad things, there's good things. I'm
your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and with me today is my
guest Gigi Griffiths.

Speaker 3 (00:15):
How are you hey, I'm good. I'm so happy to
be here.

Speaker 2 (00:18):
Yeah, I'm happy to have you. Gigi is a historical
fiction author, and the bio I wrote was whose books
I really want to read after I start looking into them,
because they seem to be about girls and women in
medieval Europe doing cool things. There's probably more. I was
just looking at the book We Are the Beasts, which
I now want to read. How would you describe yourself?

Speaker 3 (00:37):
Yeah, so that's a pretty good description. So a lot
of girls and women who are either revolutionaries or somehow
otherwise rebellious in their time and usually trying to turn
history or mythology on its head in some way.

Speaker 2 (00:52):
Okay. Our producer is Sophie Lichtermann. Hi, Sophie, it's me Hi.
Our theme music was written forced by unwomen. I did
this in the raw order. And then our audio engineer
is Rory. Everyone has to say had a hi to Rory. Hi.
Rory Hi.

Speaker 3 (01:05):
Ro Rory.

Speaker 1 (01:06):
Rory's great.

Speaker 2 (01:08):
So I was like, all right, europe revolutionary women in
terms of what I was trying to pick for this
week's topic, and I decided this week's story it's a
story of anti fascist resistance. It's a story about culture,
it's a story about food, it's a story about women,
and it's a story about a particular song, Bellichow.

Speaker 3 (01:31):
We're going to Italy.

Speaker 2 (01:32):
We are going to Italy. It will be mostly in
Italy today. Okay, I presume you have heard this song before, Bellichow.

Speaker 3 (01:40):
Yes, yes, you if you are, like not even just
in Italy, but in other like parts of Europe, and
you're just walking down the street, some street performer will
be singing bellachow.

Speaker 2 (01:51):
Yeah, to the point where I think people get kind
of annoyed at it.

Speaker 3 (01:56):
Yeah, or like confused, like they don't understand the context,
which I don't eat. So I'm excited about this, but
I am curious to what the history is.

Speaker 2 (02:05):
It's a good history, and it was wrapped in far
more mystery than I expected, but we'll talk about that.
I have heard the song more times than I can count,
in more languages than I know, in maybe every country
I've ever been to. If you've been to a good
street protest outside the US, you've heard a marching band
play Belachow. And if you've been to a really good
street protest in the US, you've heard a marching band

(02:27):
playing Belichow. When we tried to storm the meeting of
the FTAA in two thousand and three in Miami, the
song on our lips as we marched towards the police
was Belichow. We sang the version written for that era
by veterans of the pod, the anarcho pop group Tumblewamba,
and it's a good song. It's both catchy and poetic
at once. We're going to listen to an old recording

(02:50):
of it. First. These episodes are going to have more
audio clips than usual because I think I've actually never
done it on this show before.

Speaker 3 (02:57):
But I feel like maybe once you have, but yeah,
that seems likely.

Speaker 2 (03:03):
We're gonna listen to an old recording of it. And
I don't know the provenance of this recording because the
YouTube caption is a lie. According to YouTube, this version
is from a wax cylinder in nineteen eighteen. This isn't true.
For one thing, The wax cylinders was more or less
replaced by records by nineteen eighteen. For another thing, the

(03:24):
version we're about to listen to is the version claimed
to be a song of the Italian Partisans, and that
happened in the nineteen forties. Famously, most likely Belichaw is
written in the nineteen thirties, but we'll get to that.
But it's an old enough recording that it's probably say
for us to play. So we're gonna listen to a
short full version of the song.

Speaker 4 (04:00):
What time or then my child, a child?

Speaker 1 (04:04):
That child? What what.

Speaker 4 (04:09):
Any says Moby Hoby single model, my hakey goad or
that child and that child and that ounn say your yo.

Speaker 1 (04:22):
For me?

Speaker 4 (04:22):
Then he said, hey, I'll sweep one time or ben
that's sound? Then look out there's a ton dont send
the passing what something love you reel it is my
seven or then my job.

Speaker 2 (04:43):
And a child and a down and as.

Speaker 4 (04:46):
A pay myself sent you with the jolly say tadle
or then.

Speaker 3 (04:56):
That child then that's out, then that time down.

Speaker 2 (05:09):
I really like that song.

Speaker 3 (05:10):
I love it, and I'm curious if this will have
any intersection with like revolutionary jazz, because this is I
don't know if this came later, or if this came earlier.
But this is a song I hear a lot of
big bands play because I've been a swing dancer for
twenty years and so I go to a lot of
like jazz concerts, and this comes up more than you
would think, even though it's not really like in the

(05:33):
big band repertoire.

Speaker 2 (05:35):
I do know that it comes from klezmer, the melody
comes from klezmer, but I don't know. It wouldn't surprise me,
but no, I in this research, I don't know of
any connections to the jazz scene. Okay, but there's so
many versions of this song and so many people sing it,
Like when you hear street performer singing, are they usually

(05:55):
singing it in Italian? Or are they usually singing it
in whatever language wherever you're at, or.

Speaker 3 (06:00):
I'd say mostly I think that it's Italian. I do
not speak every language of each of these places, but
I when I've heard it here in Portugal, it has
not been in Portuguese, which I do speak, So okay,
I think it's an Italian.

Speaker 2 (06:14):
If it's not going to be in the local language,
it'll probably be Italian. As my guess. Yeah, unless you're well,
we'll get to it. I've seen like Kurdish performers in
other countries and things like that. But so there's a
million versions of the lyrics. It's long been called a
partisan song. It's long been claimed to have been sung
by the Italian Partisans in their war against fascism in Italy.

(06:35):
And here's where it gets MESSI it's going to stay messy.
That's maybe not true.

Speaker 3 (06:42):
But that sounds on brand for history research.

Speaker 2 (06:46):
Yeah, exactly. I actually had an entire version of the
script at about midnight last night when I found an
academic article that i'll talk about in site later that
gave me the more information about it, and I had
to rewrite everything.

Speaker 3 (06:59):
But at least it's not one of your ones where
you're like, this person's so cool and then you find
out they're kind of abusive to their wife in the
eleventh hour.

Speaker 2 (07:05):
So well, that's how it felt when I couldn't find
there's no, there's no All of the people involved in
this are good people, as far as I can tell.
But I was like, I came into it knowing this
one particular story about Belichow and then found out I
was wrong, But then found out I was right again.
And so it's been a I don't know if it's

(07:25):
gonna be a roller coaster for you, but it was
a roller coaster for me as I was writing it.
One of the better modern translations is the version sung
by Tom Waits versions in English, and this says more
or less, and this is fairly faithful to the original.
One fine morning, I woke up early to find the
fascist at my door. O partisan, I'm paraphrasing, but O partisan,

(07:45):
please take me with you. I'm not afraid anymore If
I die, bury me on the mountain beneath the shadow
of a beautiful flower, so that when people pass by
they can say, what a beautiful flower. The last verse
of that version is, this is the flower of the partisan.
Obela chow bella chow bella chow chow chow. This is
the flower of the partisan who died for freedom.

Speaker 3 (08:08):
I love that.

Speaker 2 (08:09):
Yeah, no, it's it gets to me whenever I'm like,
whenever any of litill pick me up. I listened to
Tom Waite singing, you know, I woke one morning to
find the fascist at my door. But I'm not afraid,
you know, yeah, because uh well, I guess you don't
live in the US, but I assume I don't know
anything about modern Portuguese politics. But it's not really looking
good anywhere right now.

Speaker 3 (08:30):
No, we unfortunately, in our most recent election went a
little bit right, not as right as the US, which
every party in the US is the Portuguese righth but
we went a little bit toward the right, which is
bad news.

Speaker 2 (08:43):
Yeah, fair enough. Bella chow, the actual words means roughly
goodbye beautiful. But the thing is, no one says bella
chow in Italy, at least not anymore. I don't know
if they ever did. Italians say chow bella, which means
goodbye beautiful, bella choo as a phrase just means this

(09:05):
song Bellichow is just a reference to this song, and
it just references this essential song of world shaping importance
that's been sung by hundreds of thousands of resistance movements,
hundreds or thousands, probably not hundreds of thousands, hundreds or
thousands of resistance movements in the near century since World
War Two. It is a song and a legacy that
most non fascist Italians are proud of. We're going to

(09:27):
get into modern Italian politics.

Speaker 3 (09:29):
Real briefly, but woh, it's not gonna be fun times
for us.

Speaker 2 (09:34):
Yeah, it's gonna make a Portugal and kind of even
the well it's around on par with the US actually.

Speaker 4 (09:39):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (09:39):
On April twenty fifth, every year, Italians across the political
spectrum besides fascists, celebrate the defeat of the Nazis with
Liberation Day. Because Italy fought alongside the Nazis in World
War Two. I think most people know that, but Italy
actually surrendered to the Allies in nineteen forty three after
the king was like all right, whatever, fuck you Ussolini

(10:01):
and deposed the fascist leader. After the surrender, the Nazis
came down and occupied northern and central Italy, creating what's
called the Italian Social Republic, which was a puppet state
of Nazi Germany. And Mussolini is the leader of this,
so the Italian Civil War kicks off. This is where
the partisans are really doing their thing, is nineteen forty three.

(10:22):
The fascists are on one side and the partisan units
are on the other side. The biggest umbrella of resistance
fighters is collectively called the Italian Resistance. Most but not all,
of the partisan units were represented by the National Liberation Committee,
which is a politically diverse group that included various liberal,
socialist and communist parties, as well as Catholic and monarchist partisans,

(10:46):
everyone together fighting the Nazis.

Speaker 3 (10:49):
Good, Yes, collaboration, Yeah.

Speaker 2 (10:51):
No, totally. But interestingly, but the Trotskyis and the anarchists
were not part of the National Liberation Committee, but they
were part of the Italian resistance. So your umbrella has
like larger and smaller umbrellas.

Speaker 3 (11:03):
Within him, like umbrellas under umbrellas.

Speaker 2 (11:06):
Yeah, totally, because they were still I mean, there's anarchists
and Trotskis in other units, right, but there was like
specific anarchists and Trotzkis units and they kind of weren't
playing nice at the same time, but they were still
on the same side and whatever. That's not actually super related.
It is, however, talking about how partisan the Partisans are.
Eh is gonna come up later. Okay, That war went

(11:29):
on until nineteen forty five when Hitler did. People don't
give Hitler this is going to take it. People don't
give Hitler enough credit, right, because he did one unquestionably
moral act during his life. He actually pulled off what
all other anti fascists failed to do. He killed Hitler.

Speaker 3 (11:47):
Yeah, I was gonna say he killed himself. Okay, Yeah, I.

Speaker 2 (11:51):
Mean critical support to Hitler for assassinating Hitler, the thing
everyone else was trying to do.

Speaker 3 (11:56):
He succeeded at well, kind of like what you said
during the Mussolini ones, like Musolini would have been pro
assassinating himself like fifteen years before. So right, exactly, Yeah,
the revolutionaries, Mussolini and Hitler. That's what you should take
away from this podcast.

Speaker 2 (12:09):
Everyone, Yeah, exactly. That is the official This is not
the official position. I hate this man. I'm glad he's dead,
and that's the only thing he did good was kill himself. Anyway.
So there's Liberation Day in Italy on April twenty fifth,
and this is the day that basically they sort of
gave it a final like announced to like, here's our
final push to drive out the Nazis, because they knew

(12:31):
things were going their way, and so the day they
called for that was April twenty fifth. So that's the
day that they picked as Liberation Day. Every year people
get together and celebrate in a big national holiday, which
is particularly funny right now because a far right politician
who is more or less a fascist, who has explicitly
fascist roots is in charge.

Speaker 3 (12:52):
Of Italy right, so we celebrate not being fascist with
a fascist in power.

Speaker 2 (12:58):
Yeah, and then she actually shows up and celebrates Liberation
Day and it's really messy and no one's happy.

Speaker 3 (13:04):
Yeah, you know, but that's actually such a common thing,
like as people don't recognize what they are after, like
historically they look back and they're like, I'm not like Hitler,
I'm not like Mussolini, right, But so the modern fascists,
when you talk to a fascist, they don't know that
they're fascists a lot of times.

Speaker 2 (13:21):
Totally, like the modern American right wing, the modern Trump
right wing party is Mussolini style fascism, and I think
partly because it's not quite Hitler style fascism. They're like, whoa,
we're not fascist because Americans only know about the Nazis,
you know, but they're they're real Italian style.

Speaker 3 (13:42):
It's the not all men of the fascism world.

Speaker 2 (13:44):
Yeah, totally. Yeah, And a girl boss is there representing
fascism in Italy right now. And the far right in
Italy likes to grouse about Liberation Day. And if you
spend your time as I did this week, reading like
modern and forums of Italians talking about Bellachow, you'll run
into a couple people being like, oh, we don't well,

(14:05):
there's some people on the left you don't like a
song because they're tired of it. But overall people are like,
it's fine. And then there's some people will be like, no,
only the communists like that song, but then centrist will
chime in. As one Internet comment are on the website
Wanted in Rome put it in Italy, we say that
Liberation Day in Bellichow is divisive only if you're a fascist. Hmm,

(14:27):
So it's not just the communist in Italy who like
this song. Part of the reason that the song is
more popular than other songs is because it wasn't just
the communist.

Speaker 3 (14:35):
Song, but when it's like fascist's favorite thing to just
call anything that they don't like communist or like only
communists like this totally.

Speaker 2 (14:44):
And it's funny in Italy because like, well, communists were
a big part of deposing the fascist in Italy, but
they weren't all of it. You know, the word chow
itself means both goodbye and hello. A lot of languages
have words like that. I saw a lot of languages
literally just use choo and just are like, eh, it
was good enough for Italy, it's good enough for us.

Speaker 3 (15:05):
That's us. Over here in Portugal, everyone's just saying choo.

Speaker 2 (15:08):
I was wondering, Yeah, I was guessing in Bulgaria, which
is isn't a romance language at all. Bulgarian isn't a
romance language. They say chow yeah, so.

Speaker 3 (15:17):
Here which is I think this originally comes from Brazilian Portuguese,
but it's been adopted back here in Portugal as well.
Is Sometimes to cute it up, they'll say chow zeno,
which is kind of like little chow, like little.

Speaker 2 (15:28):
Goodbye, Oh nice, okay cool. The etymology of the word
choo is that it comes from the same root as
the English word slave.

Speaker 3 (15:37):
Oh right, interesting.

Speaker 2 (15:39):
It comes from the medieval Latin word sclawss. In Venice,
people were very dramatic. Folks would say I am your slave,
so chao vostro, and this is kind of like saying
I am at your service. Right. Oh, I don't remember this.
There's a spanish Ish word like this, and I don't
remember what it is. I don't know if Portuguese has
it too, I don't know any portug He's Honestly, I

(16:01):
just assume it's Spanish but pronounced strong.

Speaker 3 (16:04):
I don't know if there's something similar to like I'm
your slave.

Speaker 2 (16:08):
Yeah, fair enough. The medieval word sklawis is actually a
loan word from medieval Greek, and it comes from the
word Slavic because most Greek slaves were from the Balkans
at that point. So if you're ever wondering why like
slav sounds like the word slave, it's because of that.
And I never would have I never would have made
the jump from slave to choo, but there it is.

Speaker 3 (16:30):
Yeah, it feels like a quite the leap.

Speaker 4 (16:33):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (16:35):
Eventually people in northern Italy just started saying chow. And
to be clear, when we talk about northern Italy or
Italy at all, at this point, we are using a
word for a place that did not exist. We've talked
about this a bit on the show before, but Italy
itself is only like one hundred and sixty odd years old.
The word chow spread around the world and a lot
of places use it. The reputation of this song Bella

(16:56):
Choo is that it's the song of the Italian resistance
to fascism. As to whether or not that's its actual history.
I don't know. There's an awful lot of mystery around
its actual origins. The most common story of Balichow is
the song that partisans sang, but that's not likely to
be true as popularly understood. There's no evidence of partisan

(17:17):
troops singing this song. I'm going to get into later
why I think that some of them did anyway, But
that's conjecture.

Speaker 3 (17:23):
But I do feel like a lot of times we
were like, Okay, well there's no evidence over here. But
I just think people are people, and sometimes people if
something existed, there's like someone singing the song, there's someone
thinking the thought. There's someone who is thinking in a
way that would translate into whatever it is that you're
talking about.

Speaker 2 (17:43):
Absolutely, And also like the songs of certain types of
people are less likely to get written down. One of
those types of people is women.

Speaker 3 (17:52):
Yes, exactly. Like it just feels like there's misogyny at
play and also white supremacy at play. When we're like, oh,
well it wasn't written down totally, Well, who was writing
things down?

Speaker 2 (18:03):
Well, I'll tell you who wasn't writing things down? Because
it's an audio medium. It's the sponsors of this show
did Magpie, just go mute on you.

Speaker 3 (18:13):
Yeah, I also lost it.

Speaker 1 (18:14):
Oh Magpie, you've gone mute, you said, but in very
comedic timing it.

Speaker 2 (18:20):
What you know, who also does it? And then it
was completely silent, and.

Speaker 3 (18:25):
Then we went to an ad break without hearing that
it happened.

Speaker 2 (18:28):
Oh no, well, here's that ad break.

Speaker 4 (18:38):
And we're back.

Speaker 2 (18:41):
So the people that the song was almost certainly written by,
I'm going to go with it was written by was
women working in the rice fields, and they were absolutely
resisting fascism. Some of them worked directly as partisans. My overall,
I'm going to spend the next several hours explaining why
I think this was I think it is fair to

(19:01):
call this a partisan song, even if the odds are
good that the explicitly partisan lyrics weren't added until after
the war, although even that have gone back and forth about.
Like I've said, I've rewritten the script like eight times
in the past twelve hours. But the partisans at the
start of the war weren't singing partisan songs. They were
singing old rebel songs. So while we don't know everything

(19:23):
about everything that happened with this song, we know an
awful lot about the radical history that it weaves its
way through, and it's a history full of songs, strikes,
and armed resistance. So we're going to tell it. And
first we're going to trace the first version of this
song to northern Italy. Northern Italy grows a lot of rice.
There's this huge valley along the Poe River in northern Italy.

(19:46):
And this valley along the Poe River is called it's
going to shock you, it's called the Poe Valley. What
I know, I know, watch MeV pronouncing that word wrong.

Speaker 3 (19:57):
I wonder where they got that name from.

Speaker 2 (19:59):
Yeah, you know, Yeah, for hundreds of years people have
grown rice there, but rice cultivation really got going at
scale in the nineteenth century. It's actually still the only
net exporter of rice in Europe is Italy. And where
you've got agriculture, you've got seasonal laborers. And where you've
got seasonal labor, you've got precarious labor. And where you've

(20:19):
got precarious labor, you've got oppression. Well, you kind of
have oppression anywhere you've got capitalism. But that's besides the point.

Speaker 3 (20:28):
Yeah, where do we not have oppression? It's the question there.

Speaker 2 (20:30):
Yeah, the seasonal labor here in the rice fields was
weeding from May to July. The flooded fields that are
full of mosquitoes and malaria needed people to go around
and pick out all the weeds to not like choke
out the rice plants, and then replant everything that needed replanting.
These women who did the weeding were called the weeders

(20:53):
or the mandina. Most of them were young women, and
most of the women in the Italian work at least
the turn of the twentieth century were peasants, either weeding
or picking olives. They're not an industrial proletarian class. They're
not working in the cities. They're working in agriculture. And
the Mondine were around, I think for hundreds of years,

(21:16):
but I couldn't promise you. Most of what I know
about them is roughly nineteen hundred to nineteen sixty.

Speaker 3 (21:21):
And I don't know if people have been around like
olive harvesting before, but I have been. I have not
been there in Italy, so I don't know if it's
different there. But the olive harvesting that I was around,
which was in Morocco, was incredibly hard labor, and I
think people just kind of maybe you would picture it
if you don't know of Like, oh, people are just
picking olives. People like holding these huge sticks above their

(21:45):
heads for long periods of time and like having to
whack olives off of branches.

Speaker 2 (21:50):
Yeah, and holding things above your head is literally one
of the hardest exercises.

Speaker 3 (21:54):
Yeah, that will like kill your back.

Speaker 2 (21:57):
Yeah, as does crouchy over for fifteen to sixteen hours
a day.

Speaker 1 (22:03):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (22:05):
One hundred and fifty thousand women a year worked as
mondine from May to July. Most of them came from
nearby large agricultural towns, but people traveled from all over
the country, taking like days and cattle cars to come
up for the work. They were paid by the day
and worked fifteen to sixteen hour days. Sometimes they bent

(22:26):
over knee deep in water. Some of the pay was money,
some of it was just rice, often rice that had
gone bad. In order to not starve to death on
the job, women would catch fish and frogs and snakes
while they were working. The overseers were men with rods
who presumably beat them if they flagged in the labor.
I haven't specifically heard like and then they would hit us,

(22:47):
but I've read about the overseers with rods standing over them,
So there's some implications.

Speaker 3 (22:51):
Here, yeah, like why else would you have a rod
like you just it's for decoration.

Speaker 2 (22:56):
Yeah, the mosquitoes were terrible. Malaria is the single biggest
killer of these women. But the women also suffered from
all kinds of other stuff, rheumatism, skin diseases, digestive disorders, parasites,
all that stuff. They were routinely sexually harassed at work
by the owners and by the overseers, the men with
the rods. Yeah, there's a lot of academic papers are

(23:20):
going to be more likely to like talk about the
symbolism of the rod and things like that more than
they're like more than I whatever. The symbolism is there,
and uh, the symbolism was there a little bit in
how society saw them, because society was like, y'all are
a bunch of loose women.

Speaker 3 (23:38):
Yeah, I was gonna say. Society is like, well, if
we're treating you bad, you must be sex workers. Yeah,
because that's who we treat bad.

Speaker 1 (23:46):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (23:48):
And so they're looked down upon as loose women because
they are alone with the men who hired them in
the fields. Sometimes.

Speaker 3 (23:54):
Oh yes, that's you know, the definition of loose is
being around men.

Speaker 2 (23:59):
Yeah, who are hitting you if you don't pick up
the weeds fast enough.

Speaker 4 (24:04):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (24:04):
I saw someone today actually saying that their favorite like
mythology was the like nimph or whatever, like the beautiful
woman that's known for luring men by just like existing
and standing alone. And it's like history plays this out
that this mythology is actually just how men behave.

Speaker 2 (24:23):
Yeah, and then the Gorgans are like, just leave me alone,
and then men show up anyway, and you're like, look,
you're gonna get turned to stone.

Speaker 3 (24:29):
Like, guys, no one told you to come over here.
We were just singing.

Speaker 2 (24:33):
Yeah, totally. And malaria was so rampant that the first
law anyone put into place to protect the weeders was
in eighteen sixty six, and it was the Cantelly Regulations,
which said that you can't make people work in these
fields during dawn or dusk when the mosquitoes are at
their worst. And I first read that before I found

(24:54):
the thing that they were working fifteen sixteen hour days.
I assumed it meant like, therefore their day star when
the sun has fully risen and ends when the sun
is fully gone down.

Speaker 3 (25:04):
But no, it means they have a break.

Speaker 2 (25:07):
Yeah, they have a break. You imagine we're even more
than I mean, whatever.

Speaker 3 (25:12):
This is your fifteen minutes because it's dawn.

Speaker 2 (25:16):
Yeah, we don't want the mosquito is to kill you
right now?

Speaker 3 (25:19):
Okay, yeah, yeah, anytime after that is fine.

Speaker 2 (25:23):
Yeah. You will be shocked to know this was not
really enforced and readers worked regularly through the most dangerous
hours of the day.

Speaker 3 (25:30):
Shocking.

Speaker 2 (25:31):
Yeah, the women were regularly sick as hell. Miscarriages were
so common that they were actually part of the culture.
Like there's conversations with women about I'm not going to
get too into it. I try not to cover that
kind of detail, but about how women would choose and
where they would choose to miss carry in things.

Speaker 3 (25:47):
Oh wow, Yeah, so you like create kind of almost
a sacred way to deal with this pain.

Speaker 2 (25:53):
Wow. Yeah, exactly, like going back out into the fields
in order to miscarry, and they miscarry both because of
ill health but also because you will be shocked to
know that in Catholic Italy in nineteen hundred, abortion was
not readily available.

Speaker 3 (26:10):
Still isn't in Italy actually cool?

Speaker 2 (26:14):
Or half the United States, which doesn't even have the
Catholic excuse anyway?

Speaker 3 (26:20):
Whatever, Yeah, in Italy it's all a religious thing because
it's I believe it's technically legal, but it's difficult to get,
especially in religious parts of the country, because doctors can
deny it to you if they're religious.

Speaker 2 (26:33):
Godd which until eighteen seventy or so, the Catholic Church
didn't have an opinion about abortion before the quickening. But anyway, whatever,
amazing people pretend like that's as old as the church.
It is not. Nope. So anyway, sometimes women would miscarry
on purpose, which is very dangerous to do. And also

(26:56):
they weren't allowed to work while pregnant, so which makes.

Speaker 3 (27:01):
It more likely that you'd miscarry on purpose if you
like our living hand to mouth.

Speaker 2 (27:06):
Yeah, exactly, and then this is the like two months
of the year you can get this job. Because of
all the illness, the children themselves of these women did
not do so well. Author Alessandra Bergaman put it among
the Mondine it was estimated that for every thousand children born,
six hundred died in their first year of life.

Speaker 3 (27:26):
Wow, wow, yeah, staggering.

Speaker 2 (27:30):
Yeah, that's real bad. And if this sounds like hell,
you're not the only person who thinks so. An Italian
politician in mill of the twentieth century said that if
Dante had known about the Mandine, he would have added
another circle to his hell. It is possible, although this
is questioned by some historians, that the Mondine weren't allowed
to talk while they worked, and so they sang. They

(27:53):
definitely sang. The question is whether or not they were
allowed to talk at work. My guess is sometimes they
were allowed to talk and other times they weren't. And
people have been singing work songs since forever. If you
listen to our episodes about John Henry, you can learn
more about that. The Mandina developed an elaborate repertoire of
call and response songs, many of which are sung by
choirs at festivals around the world to this day. So

(28:14):
there's like I had never really heard of the Mandina. Besides,
like I was vaguely aware of this history of Bellachow.
But they are an important part of the culture of
northern Italy in its history. One of those songs that
people sang, if it had a name at all, might
have been called a la montina up on a alzada
in the morning, just got up. This song is clearly Bellachow.

(28:38):
The first verse, as translated by I believe Alessandra Bergermann,
who I just recently quoted. Alexandra wrote a piece for
Lapham's Quarterly called Rehearsing for Rebellion, which was one of
the major starting points for this part of the story
in my own research. The first verse goes, in the morning,
just got up, bella chow bellachow, bella chow chow chow.
In the morning, just awakened in the rice field, I

(29:00):
must go. We don't know when this song was first sung,
or at least I don't, but by the nineteen thirties
at least, which is in the fascist era. A woman
named Giovanni Defani wrote a verse that goes, it's the
last verse in this version the overseer with his rod
oh bellichow, belichow, bellichow chow chow, and us bent over

(29:22):
at work, But a day will come when all of
us will work in liberty. This particular translation of that
is probably by Diana Garvin, whose paper Singing Truth to
Power was the thing that I found at midnight. Found
someone showed me at midnight last night that upended all
my writing and finally answered a bunch of questions I
hadn't found answers for so clearly Bellichow was a song

(29:45):
of resistance in the fascist era, although it was a
work song of resistance at the very least right. The
Mondine suffered, but they did more to fight their oppression
than just sing songs. They were fiercely political. They were
so fiercely political that, honestly, I think they're one of
the major places that you can trace Italian class consciousness

(30:06):
to at the turn of the twentieth century because they're
kind of a ahead of the curve on a lot
of this. So take that, Karl Marx and your assumptions
about class consciousness and how it needs to develop first
in the industrialized cities and the male proletarian workers. And
also take that everyone who works hard to write women
out of every story.

Speaker 3 (30:24):
Yeah take that.

Speaker 4 (30:26):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (30:28):
Also, agricultural migrant worker women in southern Italy and Puglia
were massively radical too, but they're not as directly tied
into the story we're trying to tell today. So we're
not being like the only agricultural women were the mundane.
That's just not true. The Mundine were political from the jump.
It seems exactly what it looks like for them to
have been political is a matter of some debate. The

(30:50):
best I can tell, and I'm comparing a bunch of
sources that all disagree with each other, as I've been
doing all week, is that the early class consciousness among
the Mundine was sort of it was instinctive. It was
a moral class consciousness. My coworker Mia Wong has been
talking a lot on it could happen here about the
idea of a moral economy, the idea that people often

(31:13):
act less along ideological lines and more on moral lines.
Not a lot of like the food riots and things
like that. Are people being like, you know, I have
an idea abou how much bread should cost? And this
ain't it? Hima Himiya Himia and historians have argued the
same about peasant organizing and revolt in the late nineteenth

(31:33):
and early twentieth century in the po Valley, that it
was about an instinctive sense of right or wrong, rather
than being religiously or ideologically framed. I read another historian
that claimed, and this wasn't intended as disparaging, that women
in Italy at this time were far more likely to
organize with trade unions and non party organizations than they
were with like political parties. So it was less about

(31:54):
like the Communist Party and more about like the labor
union I'm in, or this organization that I work with, which.

Speaker 3 (32:02):
Makes sense because a lot of times I think political
parties it's so philosophical and so sometimes it doesn't really
like reach you in the same way that these people
are organizing with me. For you know, the wage that
I deserve so that I can feed my family is
going to hit you every time.

Speaker 2 (32:19):
Totally, and I like caring more about that. Like, obviously
I have my own like ideological and theoretical conceptions of
the world, but like, when it comes down to it,
I'm much more interested in what when people actually just
do you know. The Mauldine in particular, worked with the
Italian Women's Union and with a movement I hope to
cover sometime soon, the Casa de Popolo, the People's Houses,

(32:44):
which were and are cooperatively run social centers that offer
affordable meals and free libraries and cool shit like that.
Italy rapidly politicized in the early twentieth century, more explicitly
along ideological lines. By the nineteen tens and the nineteen
twenties and into the Fascist era, the Mondine were explicitly leftists.

(33:05):
It seems likely that the majority of them were card
carrying members of the Communist Party, so much so that
they call themselves the sisters of Togliati, the aka Pomiro Togliati,
who was a Communist leader. This was probably more in
the late twenties and early thirties when they have this,
which is even more rad for them to have done,
because that means they were doing it during the fascist

(33:27):
era when it was illegal to claim out that you're
part of the Communist Party. Right. Others among them were
socialists and anarchists, and I suspect a lot of them
were also just like I work with the people's houses
and I don't give a shit about any of that.
I don't know.

Speaker 3 (33:42):
Wherever there are labels, there are people who say no,
thank you to the labels totally.

Speaker 2 (33:47):
And then you also have to go through and read
and find the political ideology of the historian that you're reading,
because they're more likely to write themselves in like I
am more likely to include I wish I wasn't I
wish I was complete neutral, I try to be well.
Neutral is not the right word objective whatever I am
more likely to make sure that the anarchists and the

(34:07):
women are included in stories, and so might overemphasize them sometimes,
but I think, oh, usually they're de emphasized.

Speaker 3 (34:14):
Right, right, So it's just balancing the universe.

Speaker 2 (34:17):
And so it's like I started off by reading someone
being like all of them were card carrying communists, and
then I compare like eight other historians and they're like
most of them didn't have any politics at all, and
another ones are like a lot of them are communists,
some of them are socialists, some of them are anarchists,
and basically all left wing, just like all of the
sponsors of this show, which are all.

Speaker 3 (34:39):
They're all cool people who cool.

Speaker 2 (34:42):
Yeah, and if I don't like them, it's because of
some weird split and leftist ideology.

Speaker 3 (34:47):
No, it's just infighting.

Speaker 2 (34:49):
Yeah, exactly, it's my infighting is why I don't like
whatever ad comes next that we totally have no control over.
Here they are and we're back. So the Mondane they

(35:13):
fucking loved going on strike yay.

Speaker 4 (35:17):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (35:18):
No, they were so good at it or they were
terrible at it because I had to keep doing it.
I don't know which, because I read one article that
was like, after this, they went on thousands more strikes,
and I was like, that's clearly hyperbole.

Speaker 3 (35:31):
Right, or they count like every day that they strike
as a strike.

Speaker 2 (35:36):
Like I think what it is is that there's like
so many of these different farms, and so the strikes
might not be you know, one big strike for all
of the one hundred and fifty thousand workers or whatever. Right,
So it is not hyperbole to say that they went
on thousands of strikes. In nineteen oh one, they organized
probably Italy's first general strike if you like google, dear Internet,

(35:59):
how much or when was Italyast first general strike? They'll
say nineteen oh four, But that's because it wasn't by women.
Women did one in nineteen oh one. In nineteen oh
four alone, they had two hundred and eight strikes. In
nineteen oh seven, at the peak of their like strike craze,
there's three hundred and seventy seven strikes, which is more

(36:20):
than there are days.

Speaker 3 (36:22):
Yeah, that's amazing, and actually it speaks to kind of
how Europe feels today. Like in the US, you don't
see so much strike culture, but like here, in places
like Italy and France in particular, they are ready to
strike at the drop of a hat like you. There
are strikes all the time, and.

Speaker 2 (36:38):
That's how they like are able to have middle class
incomes despite working class jobs. And you know, like I
remember I was living in Amsterdam and the I think
every year at that point, the garbage workers would go
on strike once.

Speaker 3 (36:51):
A year just to remind everyone.

Speaker 2 (36:54):
Yeah, and the city just fills with garbage within twenty
four hours if no one's emptying the garbage on the streets,
you know. And so these striking weaders, they won stuff
all the time. They seem to have organized at first
with the Socialist Agricultural Workers Union, but they remained autonomous

(37:14):
within that. In nineteen oh four, they won the ten
hour workday. Was that enough for them? No, they were
just nothing's too much for them.

Speaker 3 (37:24):
Good keep going because you guys had fifteen. So we
get it down to ten and then go to like two.

Speaker 2 (37:30):
Well later after the war they bring it down to seven,
which is the lowest I've seen any union bring their
workday down to in any episode I've ever done. In
nineteen oh six, they won the nine hour workday. In
nineteen oh nine they won the eight hour workday, and
according to one source, this makes them the first people
in Italy to win the eight hour day. According to

(37:52):
another source, they won someone else the eight hour day
before then. I don't know which is true and why
the first ten years of the twentieth century so uniquely
kind a worker's struggle in Italy. Well, one story and
I read traced it to the fact that in the
year nineteen hundred, as we talked about a couple weeks
ago on our episode about people tried to kill Mussolini

(38:14):
the year nineteen hundred, the Italian anarchist Gaetano Breshi, who
lived in Patterson, New Jersey at the time, he got
on a boat with a revolver and he went and
he shot King Omberto the First because Umberto had just
rewarded a subordinate who had massacred people protesting against their
own starvation. There's a bread riot, the general guy like
guns everyone down. Everyone's like, oh, the King's going to

(38:34):
do something about that. And what the king did was
reward him, and so then Amberto was like, well, that's
not going to work. So he went back to Italy
and he killed the guy.

Speaker 3 (38:41):
So he rewarded the king.

Speaker 2 (38:43):
Yeah exactly. Yeah. Killing authoritarian leaders and or kicking them
out of power is like a kind of a It's
like a crap shoot. It's like I don't I clearly
don't play a lot of poker. It's like drawing a
completely new hand in poker. I don't know if that's
the thing you can do, but if it were a
thing you could do, that is what killing your ruler does.

(39:04):
You know. Quite often the new hand you draw is
even worse. Right, other times it makes things better, or you.

Speaker 3 (39:13):
Draw a new hand that's good, and then the US
comes into whatever your country is and kills whatever good
leader you have, so that you get a bad hand.

Speaker 2 (39:22):
That's true. That is actually a really good point. That's
like the dealer is like, oh wait, I gave you
a good hand. Oh no, never mind, I'm taking that
one back.

Speaker 3 (39:29):
We better stack this deck again, because no Patrice la Mumba,
no thank you, and so yeah.

Speaker 2 (39:37):
Italy took a strong shift to the left after the
death of their tyrannical king and labor organizing exploded. The
medine loved striking. One of the most dramatic years that
they're striking was nineteen oh six, the year that they
won the nine hour Day. They were shooting for eight.
Of course, at that point in May nineteen oh six,
at the beginning of the weeding season, work stoppages would

(39:58):
spread from farm to farm as the women would like
march along and tell everyone the good news that they
were calling for a general strike. And one of their
songs was called if eight hours seems too few, and
the lyrics are, if eight hours seem too few to you,
try working and you'll see the difference between work and

(40:18):
giving orders. Hmm, it's so good.

Speaker 4 (40:21):
Mm hmmm.

Speaker 3 (40:22):
Yeah, Like, let's trade places here and see how you
feel about it exactly.

Speaker 2 (40:27):
And uh, I just love the like there's been a
couple of times I've read, we've talked about rural strikes,
and sometimes the rural strikes are just the workers march
from one place to the next and are like, hey,
you're free now. And I was like, sick, We're free,
you know, right, And.

Speaker 3 (40:41):
It's just as soon as you have that domino effect,
like what can the like two people who were in
charge do about it?

Speaker 2 (40:46):
Yeah, and this one works strikes were biggest in this year.
In May nineteen oh six in the city of Vercelli,
and textile workers, bakers, millers, gardeners, all of them joined in.
They more or less shut the city down. Workers took
over the main square. Troops were like set up to
stop them, so they drove the troops out, and then

(41:08):
they set up barricades around the entire town to keep
soldiers in scabs from getting in. Yeah, yeah, they like
did it, and it there's so often like like I
would read the entire novel set Oh you're a historical
fiction author. I would read the entire novel set in
Vercelli in nineteen oh six, right, But instead I have
like three lines you know that are like I mean,

(41:29):
I I suspect somewhere there is a book about Vertelli
nineteen oh six, but it's probably an Italian and it
was probably written in like nineteen forty nine, you know.
And they won the business class folded. Everyone got better pay.
Bakers won this thing that's been a goal of bakers
for a very long time. Politically, it was a big

(41:51):
part of the Paris Commune's demands. They won the abolition
of night work. Just like particularly interesting with baker's right,
because the whole thing is that bakers work at night
and you get your fresh bread in the morning, and
they're like, now we don't want to work at night.
You get your fresh bread when it's done.

Speaker 4 (42:04):
You know.

Speaker 3 (42:05):
Yeah, I love that. There's always like there's certain people
that show up in revolutionary history all the time, and
bakers are always there.

Speaker 2 (42:12):
Yeah, totally. Food history is like such an important part
of it that I know I never paid attention to
until shout out to my friend Wren, who's often a
guest on this teaching me food history, who's also the
person who broke my evening by sending me a bunch
of sources at midnight last night. Thanks Ren, Yeah, thank

(42:33):
you Ren. And here's where two of my sources disagree.
One source says that as a result of the strike,
everyone but the Weededers got the eight hour day, but
another sources that Weeders were the first Italians to get
the eight hour day and did so three years later.
I don't know either way. Good stuff happened, so like,
but how would that.

Speaker 3 (42:52):
Work if it was the Waders who were the last two,
Like they just were like, Okay, we're going to give
it to everyone but you because you struck like niner
niner Like.

Speaker 2 (43:01):
I think it's because they successfully The city of Vercelli
wasn't a didn't have like a rice field. Maybe Havid
rice fields around it, right, But I think it was
like all of the businesses in the city had had
to give up to get the city running again. Right,
But that's true. It actually means that it must mean
that the weaders must have been like, well, all right, fine,

(43:21):
we'll call off the strike even though we only got
the nine hour day out of this or whatever. But
I don't know. But also I think sometimes people use
the eight hour day as like shorthand for a labor
demand around shorter hours, you know. But after its quick
leftward swing, Italy started shifting to the right, and they
did this without changing their prime minister, the same prime

(43:42):
minister who came into power in nineteen hundred after Romberto
got got. His name is Giovanni Giolatti, and he's kind
of a radical centrist. His whole thing is that is
he's trying to keep the extreme right and the extreme
left from taken over.

Speaker 3 (43:57):
We've never heard that political talking point.

Speaker 2 (44:00):
Now now it's completely unfamiliar to the modern audience. Oh
my god, the amount of stuff that rhymes with you know,
the whole history doesn't repeat it rhymes thing.

Speaker 3 (44:10):
It's yeah, it's actually insane. And like anyone who studies
history is just listening to this and going like, oh yeah,
that sounds exactly like here, exactly like now.

Speaker 2 (44:22):
Yeah, and he starts swinging to the right the new
prime Minister because he's, you know, things are geting a
little too left. And so one of the things that
he undoes was literally the law from fifty years ago
about you can't work during dawn and dusk because the
mosquitoes will kill you. So he is like gutting what
they've won.

Speaker 4 (44:43):
So I like that.

Speaker 3 (44:44):
It's like, Okay, what can I do to like keep
us from going extreme left?

Speaker 4 (44:48):
Mmm?

Speaker 3 (44:49):
Give more people malaria?

Speaker 2 (44:51):
Yeah, just well, I mean that's what's happening right now
in the United States when they're like getting rid of
the polio vaccine or whatever. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (44:58):
I guess if people are dead, they can't go left.

Speaker 4 (45:01):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (45:04):
Oh god, that is how fascism successfully took over large
chunks this type of space.

Speaker 3 (45:11):
I'm sorry, this is not supposed to be a bleak podcast.
I feel like I brought the bleak.

Speaker 2 (45:14):
To you though. Oh no, no, this is not one
of my favorite songs super PASSI. But I mean it's like,
of course, this is one of my favorite songs. It's
a song about like and if I die fighting you
you know what I mean. Of course I like that song,
so you need the you need a good villain, right.
And you know, if I lived in Utopia, what i'd do.
I'd actually be very happy and I would play music
all day hmmm and write books. I guess that's what

(45:34):
I do now, but it'd be easier anyway. Whatever. I
am very lucky within my position within our society. Eventually,
fascism came around for Italy. It was coined as a
term in nineteen fifteen. Mussolini came to power in nineteen
twenty two, and he declared himself dictator in nineteen twenty five.
Fascism is, as we've talked about in the People Who

(45:56):
Try to Kill Missolini episodes from a couple of weeks ago,
taking the revel lutionary spirit of the left and applying
it to traditional conservativism and the right, which is to say, oh,
here's the paragraph where I wrote what we were just
talking about, which is to say exactly what Trump Republicans
are doing today. People keep saying, Maga are Nazis, and
that is not true. Maga are fascists, and I mean

(46:17):
that in the traditional Italian Mussolini sense of the word.
They are applying this insurgent attitude traditionally associated with the
left and applying it to right wing politics. You ever
watch the like people on Twitter get mad at Tom
Morello from Rage against the Machine thing.

Speaker 3 (46:32):
No, I don't know about this.

Speaker 2 (46:33):
It is one of the most entertaining things that happens
on like a regular basis about once a year. All
the like MAGA people realize that Rage against the Machine
is leftists, and they like throw a fit and they're
like rage for the machine more like it because they
see themselves as the insurgency.

Speaker 3 (46:54):
Right right, they're the oppressed, a group pushing back. It's
so funny. This is actually my favorite genre of like
complaining right wing person is the like I wasted my
quote unquote wasted my time listening to your product or
reading your product or whatever, and now I'm mad about it.

(47:14):
Like my personal favorite reviews of my own are not
the nice reviews. They're the like far right people that
are pissed off that my books don't like cops.

Speaker 2 (47:23):
Like, and you're, like, you used to not like cops.
Everyone agreed on this until like ten years ago.

Speaker 3 (47:32):
Yeah, until you guys decided you were the cops.

Speaker 2 (47:34):
Yeah, like watching people in rural areas would be like
and the thin blue line. I'm like you moonshine, I know,
like you drive a motorcycle on an eight without a
license you like anyway.

Speaker 3 (47:50):
Right, if a cop comes up to you, you hate them.
It just you like them when they're harassing other people.

Speaker 2 (47:55):
Totally, totally. Everyone likes state power when it's their state power.

Speaker 4 (48:00):
Hm.

Speaker 2 (48:01):
Anyway, the fascists came into power, right, and they wanted
to get women out of the workforce by and large
and get them home making babies and making dinner. It's
where they belong. Except they have a soft spot for
the mondine, who they try to hold up as their
symbol of fascist femininity.

Speaker 3 (48:20):
That's amazing. I know, the women who are out there
like catching and cooking snakes for dinner. That's like the
fascist ideal woman.

Speaker 2 (48:27):
Yeah, I mean you can see that. Like, ah, I
watched the wrong parts of YouTube. There was like some
women in Camo who's like hunting alligators or something, and
then like half the comments are like here's the perfect
woman in the other half, or like why is she
out catching animals? She should be in the kitchen or whatever,
like make up your mind. So, yeah, they're trying to

(48:49):
hold the mandina up as a symbol of fascist femininity.
They work all day in the fields, and they raise
huge families so that Italy can build up its economy
and send young men into a meat grinder. And they
worked in rice. And did you know the fascists hated pasta? No?
What the fuck?

Speaker 1 (49:07):
I mean, It's like, come on, I know.

Speaker 2 (49:10):
The Italian nationalists hate pasta.

Speaker 1 (49:14):
Why did somebody like Linco It was somebody in charge
like have like a really bad gluten allergy and then
like like like make it make everyone else suffer because
of it more or less?

Speaker 3 (49:27):
So is that real?

Speaker 2 (49:29):
So no, okay, there's a version where it could be real.

Speaker 3 (49:32):
As a food allergy. Baby, this is like, don't do that,
I know.

Speaker 2 (49:39):
Oh god, I'm not excited for when like fascist vegans
take power.

Speaker 1 (49:43):
I know.

Speaker 2 (49:45):
So I say this as a vegan for all the
people are suddenly mad at me. Well whatever, I don't care.
So Mussolini did this whole war on pasta thing, and
he made tons of anti pasta propaganda, and the propaganda
said it was because it made Italian men soft and lazy.

Speaker 3 (50:04):
Amazing, Oh my god, I wish that's the only thing
Mussolini would have done like this if this is what
he was known for, is this is like the man
who went to war with pasta. History would be just
ridiculous and not bad.

Speaker 2 (50:17):
Yeah, totally if every far right politician picked one thing
that only kind of mattered and went after it aggressively.

Speaker 3 (50:25):
Yeah, it's like that meme recently that they had where
they're like, men, what is the weirdest thing that you've
been told? Is like too girly? And they were saying,
like eating salads and the Yeah, so the answer in
Italy is pasta.

Speaker 2 (50:40):
Yeah, yeah, totally. The real reason that Mussolini went to
war against pasta is that he believed in a self
reliant Italy, and Italy ate so much pasta that it
relied on grain imports. So the hell with the rest
of the world. Real Italians eat rice because we can

(51:03):
grow it.

Speaker 3 (51:03):
Here, make rice pasta.

Speaker 1 (51:06):
It's not somebody who can't eat normal you fucking that's
what I eat. I can't eat normal pasta, you fucking weirdo.

Speaker 3 (51:15):
God, the fascists like, make a new flag and it's
just risotto.

Speaker 1 (51:20):
I'm so delicious, God, so weird.

Speaker 2 (51:26):
Yeah, and I think it was like polenta and I
spent a little while reading like what they were eating
instead of pasta, but it was a rabbit hole that
I was like, this is the wrong rabbit hole. But
I just love. I love that the fascists hated because
they wanted Italy to be a nationalist, self reliant country
so much that they attacked one of the primary things that.

Speaker 3 (51:46):
Italy is no yeah, the thing they're known for.

Speaker 1 (51:49):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (51:51):
As for what the Mundy and I did under fascism
and the music of the Partisans, including a bunch of
more musical selections, you all are gonna have to wait
until part two because this is the end of part one.
And Gigi, how are you feeling about the Monday Nay?
And also, well, let's start with that.

Speaker 3 (52:10):
I think they're rad. I basically anyone from history that
people were like they're probably sex workers, I probably think
is rad.

Speaker 2 (52:18):
So totally I'm on board with them whether or not
they were. It doesn't matter. Both both ways are great.

Speaker 3 (52:26):
It doesn't matter at all. Like, if anyone's calling you
a sex worker, you're rad. That's the GG stamp of
approval from history.

Speaker 2 (52:34):
That's a good. That's a good, like basic starting point
about whether or not someone's doing good stuff is whether
or not people accuse them of being a sex worker.

Speaker 3 (52:41):
It really is, or even not good stuff. Like you
get women in history who are like extreme villains but
doing wildly interesting stuff, and some male historian somewhere has
been like, and they were a sex worker.

Speaker 2 (52:54):
Right, which is interesting because then actual sex workers, if
they do other stuff, their sex work gets written out
of history, you know, because it's like, well that part
isn't nice to talk about. If someone's a hero, their
sex work is erased, or it's like, oh, when they
were young, they really briefly did this one thing and
don't worry. It was just the legal kind or you know,
whatever it was.

Speaker 3 (53:14):
You know, Yeah, it's just to villainize whatever woman you
want to villainize, whether she's a villain or not totally.

Speaker 2 (53:21):
Well, if people want to villainize you by reading your
books and then realizing that how did they make it
this far into the podcast? If they're far right? But
if they want to read your books, what are some
of them?

Speaker 3 (53:32):
Well, and if you have someone who is far right
and you hate them, you can buy them my books
and I will really enjoy the review that they give
me afterward, but they can find me and my books
at Gggriffiths dot com. And my latest release is called
We Are the Beasts and it is based on the
unsolved mystery of the Beast of Jebdon, which was a

(53:53):
unknown creature that attacked between one hundred and two hundred shepherdesses,
young people in the French countryside in early modern France.

Speaker 2 (54:05):
WHOA, Okay, Well, I liked the title and I liked
the description, but I like this part of the description
even more so I'm going to probably read it and
so you all should too.

Speaker 4 (54:17):
Oh.

Speaker 3 (54:17):
Can I also plug a book I read recently that
was amazing called The Sapling Cage by Margaret Kiljoy.

Speaker 2 (54:23):
Oh interesting? Oh yeah, thanks. Oh, I have a new book.
It's called The Sapling Cage. What do you got, Sophie.
It's still so wild to me that you put out
another book this year.

Speaker 1 (54:35):
First of all, it's so.

Speaker 3 (54:37):
Good too, it was beautiful. I want to plug.

Speaker 1 (54:41):
I want to plug sixteenth Bit of Fame hosted by
Jamie Loftis. She just put out a big series on
the Manosphere that everyone should listen to. It is fantastic
journalism and writing.

Speaker 2 (54:52):
Oh and I also want to plug. Jamie Loftis from
the year twenty fifty four has sent us communications about
what's going on in the dyne War, and her and
I in twenty fifty four have been covering that as
well as the rest of the cool Zone team that
you can check out on this very I guess on
this feed you probably already knew about it, but in
case you didn't, it's every Sunday on cool Zone Media

(55:12):
book Club. If you stop listening to book Club, well
you should start listening again because there's dinosaurs now and
we'll see you all on Wednesday.

Speaker 1 (55:25):
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
cool Zone Media. For more podcasts and cool Zone Media,
visit our website Foolzonemedia dot com or check us out
on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
your podcasts.