Cool Zone Media.
Hello, and welcome to Cool People That Did Cool Stuff, the podcast where we start by asking everyone on the call what a survival kit for them would look like in terms of when you're having a bad week. Because we were just talking about it off, Mike and I think it would be funny to start this way.
Do I go first?
Yeah?
Sure?
So Griffiths by the way, Oh sorry, no, it's okay, it's my job to introduce you. I'm assuming everyone listened to part one.
Yeah, please go listen to part one.
Yeah.
If you didn't, why are you here? Go back and listen to part one. We'll wait for you.
Yeah.
So a survival kit if someone were sending me one for like a long day of writing, would probably involve coffee and some sort of homemade baked goods because I'm a snob, so I need homemade stuff.
Sophie h Happy Dogs, so like CBD treats healthy.
Lebron James, So, I don't know what witchcraft we could do there. And my friend Lacy makes these really good gluten free double chocolate cookies, so specifically my friend Lacy's cookies highly see, I think.
That we're both getting baked goods.
Yeah, but they're like authentically baked baked goods.
Yeah, I think I'm going to join on the baked goods team. That sounds great.
Yeah.
Well, fortunately none of you all listeners have my actress, and if you do, don't send me anything because then I'll be anyway. Whatever. So this is part two of a two parter about the history of the song Belichow and how it ties into women who resisted fascism and also grew a lot of rice. Our guest is Gg Griffiths, Our producer Sophie Lickterman Hi, our audio engineers Rory Hi,
Rory Hi, riy Hi or. Our theme musical was written for us by Unwoman, And if you all go into the bowels of the internet, you might find a version of me playing accordion for Unwoman singing bela Chow at a steampunk convention and I want to say Texas. Uh So that's the thing that people can do if they really want to see.
And this is why you always have to listen to this second part of any episode because you get the easter egg.
Yeah, exactly. I hope I don't sing on that version of it. Hopefully I'm just play No.
I hope you do.
I'm ready like my Google history right after. This is going to be exactly that.
I used to play accordion and play shows, and at one point I played this show and I didn't really like folk punk all that much, but I would play accordion, I would sing. And one time I played the show and the other person playing was this folk punk musician. I went up to him afterwards and I was like, you know, I don't really like folk punk all that much, but I really like what you did. And he looked at me really angry, and he was like, what do
you call what you do? And that is the last show I ever played as a solo accordionist because I realized what I was doing was folk punk. He gotchas I know. It was like two thousand and nine. Wow. Anyway, anyway, script me, script me. Later I could tell a story about how I learned the song Belich how from the daughter of our Crumb, the weird illustrator Sick. So the fascist kind of liked the Mandine for a while, but
that was not reciprocated at all. By the end of the nineteen twenties, almost all political organizers had quit or
gone underground or left the country. There were various underground resistance groups and shit, But in terms of open organizing on the left, as far as I can tell, the Mondine stood alone, which is to say, I have read multiple historians that argue that they stood alone, and I expect sometime next year I'll like read about some other movement that kept organizing and trade unions or whatever during fascism, but not aware of it. They kept going and they
kept doing their thing. In nineteen thirty four in fascist Italy, they struck against some wage cuts that happened to them, and then in nineteen forty one, during the fucking war, they struck for higher wages.
That's so ballsy. I love these women, I.
Know, And like I was first reading that and I was like, wow, they must have been like uniquely untouchable or something. And then like the next line in what I was reading was like, they were not untouchable by
the fascists. They were irregularly arrested and beaten. They did it anyway, and I suspect they did it because they felt like they had no other choice, whether morally or personally, right, because they're also is hard work that you were not getting paid enough for and they're all like on the edge of starving and eating snakes, you know.
Yeah, desperation breeds a lot of revolution.
Yeah, totally. Then in nineteen forty three, Italy surrendered, like I was saying before, and northern Italy was occupied by a Nazi puppet state under Mussolini, and the Italian Civil War kicked off in the Maldine. They were part of the resistance first and foremost. A ton of them just outright refused to work for the Nazi occupation. A ton of them just walked off the job and never came back.
And the thing it reminded me of was how during the American Civil War, enslave people worked the plantations of the Confederacy, right, and so they launched the single most important labor action in US history, the one that doesn't get talked about enough, and they pulled off a general strike that crippled the agricultural economy of the Confederacy, and they helped win their own freedom with the help of their allies in the Union Army.
You covered that before, right with prop was your guest.
I think, yeah. It was one of the first episodes we ever did the Civil Civil War war because of the Civil war within the Civil War. Yeah, I don't know the impact of the Mandine labor actions on the Nazi occupied Italian agricultural economy, which is a hard thing to say one way or the other. But it's a cool thing to do to refuse to work for fascists.
It feels like the impact must have been big if they were still doing the anti pasta thing. And now they also don't.
Have rice, yeah, totally. Yeah, he put all of his eggs in the pasta basket, and so now.
The only thing they can eat is polenta. And I'm sure that it's not nutritionally sufficient just to eat plenta.
Yeah, probably not. It's also my least favorite of these three things that we've described as food. True, I would go pasta.
Yeah, not that they are food, but the thing that we described as food.
Okay, fair enough. Other of the mundane would run messages for the partisans or house partisans or would you know the thing that a lot of women did, and it gets either written out of history or it gets a little played up by history, depending on which history you read. They picked up rifles and became partisans themselves. World War II had a ton of women fighting on the front lines. Actually all, including some of the fascist countries but mostly
not especially partisan and communist forces had women fighting. And uh, this is not a post gender utopia. Most of the women in the armed forces, including in partisan and guerrilla units or in the USSR, were like given administrative roles, but not only and even.
Those who are allowed to fight, Like as soon as the war was over, it was like, okay, get.
Back to the kitchen.
Oh yeah, I'm thinking of like the night witches in the USSR, Like they were badasses who were flying planes and bombing shit and they were such a huge deal. And then as soon as it's over, the USSR's like, no, no, women can't fly.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They're like we want we want to rebuild our We killed all the men, we need more of them, so we need you all to make them.
Yeah, please make more men.
Yeah, I mean I okay, whatever I think about like the fascist countries and they're like, we need everyone to make as many babies as possible for the war. I'm like, how long do you think this war's going on? For guys, like.
But for the forever war?
Yeah, Like I'm sorry to tell you, And I guess they didn't have history to look back at. But fascist countries don't live long enough for their for the fascists to have enough kids to go put into the.
War, for the one year old to matter.
Yeah, which is the thing that everyone should remember.
It's the fascist quiverful movement.
Though it's like, oh, absolutely.
We're going to have babies so we can throw them at you.
Yeah, I mean that is the modern quiverful movement too. But yeah, like I mean literally, yeah, they're like, well we do want to outnumber you or whatever. Yeah, yeah, and yeah you're counting on things still being fascist eighteen years from now, you know. I they were optimistic. You got to give them that. They were also wrong.
No matter what political party, we're always more optimistic than we should be. Let's be real.
That's true. Okay, fair enough. So I think it is perfectly acceptable to call Belichow a partisan song, whether or not the explicitly partisan lyrics were written during the partisan era during the Italian Civil War, because Mondine were partisans and it was their song. There is also a decent chance that it was sung regularly by partisans and given partisan lyrics during the war, but there's no direct evidence
of that. There are a few old partisans who make this claim that like this or that unit used to sing it, But there's like, there's no partisan claiming I sang it, my unit sang it. They're always like, oh, yeah, that song came from over there or whatever. Right, at least that any of the historians that I read found and they would circulate. The partisans would circulate songbooks, and this was not in any of the songbooks that were
circulated by any of the partisans. This is one of the main arguments against the idea that it was sung during the partisan era.
Was every other song that we consider a partisan song in the songbooks?
I don't know, because there are later collections that include starting the nineteen fifties that have Belichow in it. And so that is actually a really good question. Are there other ones that sort of slipped through the cracks?
And are they all by women?
Right? And the fact that it's a woman's song might mean that it just wasn't written down into the songbooks that they circulated. It might have stayed oral. Also, the fact that it wasn't for the communists or for the anarchists or for the Catholics, like some of the songs we're going to listen to later. Right, So if you're putting together you're like, here's our unit songbook, you might not include that one because it might not be This
is my conjecture. After the war, the Mandane kept going for a couple decades, and they remained symbols of leftist resistance. In nineteen forty nine, a movie called Bitter Rice came out. In real life, the Mandina wore long skirts while they worked, but in the movie they wore shorts and ripped stockings. And what I like about this is that they were like, ah, you misrepresented us. They were like, oh, okay, that looks cool. We're going to do that.
Yes, I love that. This is our new fashion statement. Thank you.
Yeah, And it kind of became a fashion craze in Italy, but the Mondine switched over to this.
Look.
This is kind of like when a fandom of like some show or book or whatever is like, we think the answered to the mystery is this, and the writers are like, huh, that's better than the idea we had.
Yeah, totally, Like oh wow, you actually paid attention to all the plot points that we forgot about, and yeah, no, that does add up better.
Yeah, perfect, got it.
Yeah, after the fall of fascism, Italy did not turn into like a socialist paradise. The same year that Bitter Rice came out, which is nineteen forty nine, a former partisan named Maria Margotti was gunned down by the Italian police during an agricultural protest. And everyone argues about every single part of everything that has to do with the
Mondine and Belichow and it is so annoying. Maria died wearing a white scarf and this is emblematic of the Mondine, and she had that around her neck, and she became a martyr of sorts for the Partisans, even though she died after the war, because she was a former partisan, right and she was died doing what Partisans do, which is fight against oppression, even though it's the Italian state
now instead of the Italian fascist state. Everyone assumed she was a Mondine on top of everything else, and so she became an icon. She was actually a brickmaker, but whatever. And also mondane's seasonal work, so it seems like easily she could have done both jobs.
People could have more than one job.
Yeah, yeah, when they're like starving peasant workers, I don't know, or people wore the white scarves as like a symbol of solidarity, which would be cool too. She was a widow, a proletarian and anti fascist and a veteran of the Civil War, and she'd been gunned down, so she became a martyr. After her death, the National Association of Italian
Partisans took care of her kids financially, which is cool. Yeah, the Mondine stayed politically active, and eventually the one hundred thousand workers still on the job won the seven hour day, which is I was saying before, is the lower I've seen anyone accomplish besides like CEOs or whatever, who can somehow be the people who play Diablo the most apparently and still be the richest man in the world anyway, whatever, the Mondine didn't last too much longer as a profession,
for better or worse. It's one of those things where you're like, I want people to have employment if they want it, and I want people to have the things they need, but like it's terrible work, yeah you know, and uh.
Yeah, yeah, you don't want to actually be like knee deep in this water, bent over, like pulling weeds and stuff.
Yeah, seven hours a day is too many hours for that you know.
Yeah, like ten minutes a day maximum.
Yeah, I would do that for ten minutes a day, you know, Like.
Yeah, like that's how long I weed my garden.
That's fine, yeah exactly. Mechanization started to come for their job, and they organized unsuccessfully against that mechanization. I believe mostly they did labor actions and like would like sit in front of agricultural machines. One woman told an Oral History project quote, we went up against the combine harvesters together on the land and we stopped them. My husband told me one of these days they won't stop. I replied, I would happily die for my work.
Also, probably you could get people to stop blocking them if you just gave them the living wage without making them do the back breaking work.
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And the Mandina went into rapid decline in the early nineteen sixties with the introduction of herbicides and mechanization. By nineteen eighties, the jobs were entirely mechanized, and that's the where most of the stories will end.
According to a twenty eleven piece by Weago, women in informal employment, globalizing and organizing bosses in Northern Italy realized that Chinese migrant labor is even cheaper than machines, and so now tens of thousands of Chinese men and women work as mondina in northern Italy every year, and for some weird reason, they aren't given the same cultural status and respect. I can't figure out what the differences must be. Just times must be the only thing that's different.
Yeah, the only difference is like historical versus present.
Yeah, totally. But that's the story of the Mandine. But what about the story of stuff and stuff that you should probably not buy? I mean by totally good. Everything is vetted by me personally, and I will stake my life on the efficacy of the following all of us a lie. But here's some ads, and we're back. But what about the song? What about Belichow? What happened with it? Well, as I was saying, there's no evidence that partisans actually
sang Belichow, there's no evidence that they didn't. It is largely accepted that the partisan version of it was written later. But I actually no longer believe that. But we'll talk about that. I guess I've kind of hinted at that. But basically it comes down to I trust a specific woman have been telling the truth. That's what it comes down to for me, believe women in history. Yeah, exactly.
So I had assumed that the Partisans didn't sing Belichow until late last night reading Diana Garvin's piece that talks in a long footnote about the oral history of the song. But let's talk about popular rebel music of the early twentieth century and World War Two in Italy. And not just because the start off is mostly anarchist music. But as I said way at the beginning, we all have our biases, and I think it's pretty cool that Italian
radical music started with anarchist music. Popular rebel songs in Italy in the period between unification and Italy became Italy in the eighteen sixties, I think, and fascism it came especially from the anarchist tradition. Most of these songs were anonymously written, and a lot of them applied lyrics to existing melodies, which is folk music has been doing this forever. You hear a love song and you're like, yeah, but
what a was about killing your boss instead? You know, or somehow both, which is kind of what I like about Belichiw. It kind of has like both vibes, you know, it really does.
Yeah, it's like a very beautiful song and also like fuck.
You, Yeah, totally all right, fascists, I'm going to go to the mountains and shoot you until you shoot me. And it's fine. And one of the most popular songwriters of radical music in Italy during this period is a guy who I think I've talked about on the show before named Pietro Gory, because we did a four parter about Argentinian indigenous and anarchist uprisings in the late nineteen tens and Pietro was there because he winds up in
Argentina and worked as an organizer there. As for why he was there, now, I know he wasn't welcome in Europe anymore. He was this well respected lawyer and journalist and poet. And I found one source that was in translation by Google Translate that implied he actually kind of just started off a socialist and then he got kind of caught up in all this stuff. He was living in France and he decided to defend an anarchist assassin
in court. During this period, France was having this honestly kind of annoying thing going on where like an anarchists would assassinate an important guy, and so then the state would kill the assassin, so another assassin would avenge the other assassin. So the state would then round up a bunch of unrelated anarchists, including a bunch of like novelists and people who have nothing to do with like direct politics,
and put them on trial. So another anarchists would like broad in their scope of what they considered acceptable targets and start bombing cafes, which I consider immoral. And I don't know, is this whole thing.
Violence breeding more violence as we see like everything in history, right, yeah, and violence breeding violence against people just for ideological reasons who weren't violent, like haymarkt or.
Whatever totally and including like, you know, the first one of these guys to one of the anarchist assassins to try and target just like random masses of people was the first one who was from the upper class himself, and he decided to like throw a bomb into a cafe and say there's no innocent among the bourgeoisie, which is kind of a fuck you Dad kind of thing.
Yeah, very fuck you Dad vibes.
And I don't like him. Emilan Rang anyway, this one anarchist. He was doing a retaliation thing and he kind of took things up pretty high up the food chain, and he stabbed the French president to death in eighteen ninety four. Okay, so he was on trial, which is you know, you're kind of lucky if you survived a trial after you stabbed the president. And Pietro Gory was like, well, I'll represent him. It's legal to represent someone in court. What could go wrong?
Right?
The state would be a hypocrite to come after someone for being a lawyer.
The state has never been a hypocrite before, So I think I'll do this.
Right, what could go wrong? He gets accused of having masterminded the entire thing, like he is the one who put the assassin up to kill Hi the guy. This is something that's always happens in radical history, especially anti authoritarian history. Is there always like yeah, well, couldn't have been this person's idea. There's got to be a some older man behind the you know, like steepling his fingers planning the whole thing.
You know, well, especially if the person on trial is in any way a marginalized person or woman or.
Whatever, like, yeah, they couldn't have come up with that idea on their own.
A man had to come up with this and tell them about it.
Yeah, absolutely, So he gets exiled to Switzerland, and then Switzerland, for their part, are like, you know what, we don't want you or any of these other anarchists either, and they arrest him and a bunch of other anarchists for being anarchists. And so he wrote a bunch of successful pop songs while he was in jail.
I think I love about jail. I hate everything about jail except that people go in there and they get really creative.
I know, I get the most mad when I find out that jail's like aren't allowing people pens or something, you know, Like, yeah, because I'm like A long time ago, I was interviewing fiction writers and one of them, I think it was as writer Starhawk, and she was like, things that are bad for other people are good for writers.
I finally wrote my novel How I Was Locked Up?
Yeah, and like, you know, or what'd you write about?
Oh?
Some traumatic stuff that happened to me, you know.
At that time I almost died inspired me.
The first several short stories that I wrote and sold were all based on very specific bad things that had happened to me, you know. So anyway, he writes a bunch of pop songs that are still sung today, including Farewell Beautiful, Logano and Logano is the name of the city in Switzerland that he was exiled to. And he wound up in Argentina and he organized a bunch there. But he wrote a bunch of six songs with names like Songs of Exile, which has the chorus our fatherland
is the entire world, our law is liberty. And these songs aren't catchy like Belachow. I will talk about why later, but here's here's a little bit of of Songs of Exile.
Opn bo Seva, Inside Beyond, album Going, Jelly Verda Saba, album Going, Charny Basia, three Bullycorgies Fall.
It's it's not Belachoo, but still fun, you know.
Yeah.
I love that. It kind of was chill at first and tricked you into thinking it was going to be a relaxed song and then went a little bit crazy.
Yeah.
I like when it picks up. And so people are writing songs as things start getting bad, because people always write songs. The first protest song of the fascist era was apparently I wasn't able to track it down. An anarchist song written about the nineteen twenty four assassination of the Socialist Party leader Jacomo Madiatoi, which whose name I wrote down how to pronounce in the last episode and forgot to write down this time. I did not find
this song, but I just thought it was interesting. The Fascist though, right, they see themselves as.
Rebels and so no were they writing music too.
Oh, they're writing music too, and they're even doing it in the same way, and so they had their own
protest songs and shit. The official song of the Fascist Party was called Giovanzi, which some historians, and I don't know that this is true or not, some historians have claimed it is also based on a Mandine song from the previous century, though of course it's lyrics were written to be all about like, I'm not gonna play this one for you, but it's all about how like manly Italian manly men are going to march together for Italian
civilization or whatever the fuck. Like literally, I don't eat pasta, Yeah no, I mean well they it says manly men, not soy boys eating eating girl noodles, which is what I'm gonna eat. For dinner tonight.
Yeah.
I remember, years before I even came out to anyone as trends, when people first started being like, if you eat a bunch of tofu, it's gonna make you girly, and I was like, I need more tofu. Give me all the tofu.
You're like, this is the precursor to hormones?
Is tofu? Yeah, exactly. I have read diverging accounts of the history of that particular song, the fascist Anthem. Rather than tracking it to the Mandine, I would guess it was written a politically in nineteen oh nine, unless that version was based on a Mandine song, which I don't know. And that version is a song is called Farewell and it was written by a soon to be fascist guy named Joseeppe Blanc and it was written as a graduation song for a university and it was popular among Italian
soldiers in World War One. It's very like pomp and like here we go a march, and you know.
What is soon to be fascist mean in this case, like what was he before he was fascist?
I don't know. Everything I read said it was written a politically okay, but he became a fascist as soon as fascism was available as an option.
Yeah, I don't know if it's the same in Italy, but I feel like a political usually means okay with the status quo.
Yeah, totally, And like I think he was just a random conservative guy, whereas like a lot of the fascists did come from the left, and usually when I run across a fascist who came from the left, it's like really explicitly put like it's explicitly said. So I don't know what Guoseppe's up to besides writing a graduation song, and then later he's explicitly a fascist, Okay. A lot of the songs of World War II were popular World
War One songs. So he writes this graduation song and then it was written as an anti fascist song before it was written as a fascist song in nineteen twenty one.
But then Fascist did their own version like pretty much right away, basically like everyone's just taken a popular song and being like, we're gonna make this about our own shit, right, And this is the song that they sang on their March to Rome, which is what got Mussolini into power, and Mussolini had the official version composed in nineteen twenty four, Mussolini not only not like Pasta, he didn't like competition. Culturally.
In nineteen twenty eight, Italy banned all American music and the They especially hated swing and jazz because those are black genres.
Yeah, and revolutionary music, that's right.
Yeah.
And then all other foreign songs when they came into the country had to be translated into Italian, including Italian assizing the names of the singers.
But it's like exactly what the States does now. It's like they anglicize everything. I'm like, totally, do we really need to call Peri Paris? No, we can say Pirie.
Yeah, we can just learn the word for the thing. It's the name.
We can learn that, not even like something that we don't have a sound in our language. Like I understand a little bit totally because in Portuguese we have sounds that we don't have in English, and I understand that that's harder. But when there's no sound difference, there's no reason to do this. Yeah, but I see Italy took it to the extreme as usual.
Yeah, no, absolutely, there's no there's no Peters in Italy at this point. This is the only one I know off the top of my head. Because Pietro. I tried doing some translate Google Translate stuff earlier, and it was like Peter, and I was like, who the hell is Peter, I'm writing about Pietro. And I'm like, oh right, okay, dear Google Translate, don't translate the name, thank you. Oh
my god. And in nineteen twenty nine, the fascist regime banned all socialist songs, all anarchist songs, and all foreign national anthems. So obviously everyone was like, oh, I guess we're not allowed to sing, and so no one sang anymore. No, of course, you're not going to stop anarchists from singing. Anarchists songs are Italian him it's illegal.
I love how they also are like, you know, anarchists foreigners. That's really the same. Anarchists are just.
Foreigners totally, which is extra funny because Italy is like the primary exporter of anarchist assassins at this point.
Great because they have to leave Italy by the way, They like, now I am a foreigner.
Well, and like every other country is like all anarchists are foreigners, and by that they mean Italians at this point, you know.
Mm hmm, yeah.
I think it was an Italian anarchist that killed Empress CSI of the Habsburgs as well.
Oh shit, okay, I would believe it.
I think he was Italian. It was definitely an anarchist, and he definitely said the thing all the anarchist assassins of royalty said, which was like I did not kill an empress.
I killed a position or like something totally that effect.
But I think it was Italian.
Yeah, was she did she reign? Or was she just a figurehead? Like like, was she was there an emperor? Was there a mister empress?
Yeah?
So she was married to Franz Joseph and she was It's a long story, but basically she was kind of roped into it against her will actually.
And because it sounds like misogyny to kill a random woman.
Her big thing was like trying to be never around her husband, so she traveled the world, and that she actually got assassinated in Switzerland while she was traveling the world and staying away from her husband, which is the opposite of the romantic portrayal in The Empress, which I wrote the book for.
Hm oh, okay, okay. I had always heard about that one, and like, like one day I'm just going to do a survey of anarchist assassinations and be like, did this make the world better or worse? Because like anarchist got over this idea in like by like besides a time Americans, but.
I was gonna say Italians did not.
Yeah, overall people move past like propaganda of the deed and like moved more into trade union organizing and things like that by the twentieth century. Anyway, whatever, this is a complete Yeah.
They took us down.
No, no, no, I'm excited to because this is one of the ones I don't know as much about. And I'm like in my mind, I'm like, well, kill the emperor, kill the one that's in charge. Like if an Irish person had killed the queen, I would not be like, well that's immoral, you know, like whatever, because that person was in charge. Yeah, you know when way in the past. I'm only talking about way statute limitations ago. Anyway, I don't think there's statue limitations on regist side.
Hilarious.
Anyway, By the time the Italian Civil War kicks off, every faction has their own songs. It's just like kind of a thing. Most of the most influential partisan groups are from the communist parties, and they're usually part of the Garibaldi Brigades, and the anthem of the Garibaldi Brigades is called Fishia ivento The wind whistles, and its melody
is based on a Russian song. If you want the single most iconic and actual song of partisan resistance, the one that you can most easily source and say, this is a partisan song, the song on the most people's lips in the war, that was written for this war, it is the Wind Whistles, And we're gonna listen to a bit of in a second. But overall the lyrics are like, our shoes are broken, but we must march on to conquer the red spring, where the sun of
our future rises. Every street is our street. Every woman sighs when we approach. Our hearts are strong. Gigi's making an amazing face at this. Our hearts are strong. If we die, other partisans will avenge us against the vile trees and as fascists, the proud partisan returns home with a red flag blowing in the wind. You know it's a communist rebel song.
I love that we women are always on this sidelines, just like swooning as they walk past. That's our main role, I.
Know, even though like just as involved in the partisan struggle as men, like even from a like like many of the many of them had guns and were shooting. But that's not the only part of a partisan struggle, running the messages, housing the people, running everything, feeding everyone, Like the behind the scenes work is just as important.
Yeah, And like part of that behind the scenes work is swooning so that the men feel good about their totally.
They're like sitting around and they're like, oh God, those fucking assholes are back in town. Like, oh, but we got to keep their spirits all right, just pretend to be impressed. Oh. Emotional labor, emotional labor of the partisan struggle. This song was kind of uniquely written as a partisan song bipartisans, and it was at least of those songs that we're going to play today, And it was first played on Christmas nineteen forty three, and we're gonna we're gonna play a little clip of.
It, behand.
Scar Old.
Zabis Love.
You know.
I kind of like it musically.
It's got this like kind of I don't know, funeral kind of march.
Kind of Yeah, that's probably why I like it. Belichaw is happier than most of the music I listened to. Other people were singing older songs. Everyone was singing older songs. They're looking at the repertoire of like old radical songs and also World War One songs. These are the two main you know, because the old rebel songs are about being a rebel, and the World War One songs are about marching off of guns and stuff, and so you know,
you put the two together and what do you got. Everyone, but especially the anarchists, sang Pietro Gorri's song Goodbye Beautiful Logano. They often changed the lyrics to be like goodbye beautiful Italy or wherever place or whatever.
They're like, no, Switzerland, We're not doing Switzerland.
It's Italy. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And one of the verses of that is in the of the originals, Goodbye Beautiful Logano, Oh sweet pious Land, expelled without guilt. The anarchists go away and leave, singing with hope in their hearts. It is for you, the exploited, for you, the workers, that we are shackled the same as criminals. Yet our idea is only an idea of love, you know, an anarchist rebel.
Song Lugano, Beach's Got Shaddy, sasaku Ya, Nakichivam be.
Ebolaspiran Cycle, Eblaspersco.
I like that one too, I'm gonna say at the end of each of them because I like them.
But yeah, they're all really great. It's funny to speak a romance language and listen to them too, because like you understand like thirty five percent of it and then like there's words chunks in between that you're like.
I don't know, that makes sense. I got around Italy with my terrible Spanish.
Yeah.
I also got around France with my terrible Spanish.
Yeah.
Anywhere with a romance language, you can get around with another romance language, and it doesn't matter if you're good at the romance language.
Yeah, I mean, you know, like the super basic thing of like I would like to eat the food now or whatever it is, you know.
Like give me directions I know right and left, Like.
Yeah, yeah, totally. Another anarchist partisan song to compare. Right, you've got the anarchist partisan song that's like goodbye, beautiful loganous anarchists. We fight for love, you know. This next one is called Death to the Savoa Dynasty. Bathed in waves of blood.
Mm hmmm.
On arm anybody, I'm out, I'm out that I like that one.
Yeah, me too.
I love an upbeat song about killing.
Totally death to the King. And the best part about it is the king was n't their enemy.
In this war.
That's so funny.
On brand though, on Brand, I know, I love it.
The non communist Catholic partisans who are fighting against fascism. To be clear, there's obviously many Catholics who are on the side of fascism, but you know they had their own songs, like the one that I won't try and say in Italian, but it translates to the rifleman has a hundred feathers. And it was adapted from a war song about from World War One about the Alpine Front,
and it was rewritten for the partisan struggle. The original and I bring this up because it sounds a little bit like bellachoo with dying with the beautiful flowers and stuff. The original ends with if he falls from the high cliffs, comfort your hearts because he falls amid the flowers and
does not care that he dies. And the partisan version, the version we're going to listen to in a second, ends with when he falls wounded, do not cry your heart, because if someone dies free, he does not care about dying.
Mm hmm.
So yeah, that's my fora into partisan songs. And wow, that one. If you listen to the non partisan version, it's like overwhelmingly catholic sounding. It's just like you listen, it sounds like you're listening to Ava, Maria and or something.
You know.
Actually this one was already giving me like chorus in church.
Oh yeah, absolutely, which is why our biggest sponsor is chorus class. Uh go learn to sing. I don't know, but that's it's nice to sing with people. Here's a bunch of ads and we're back. I also like that the the two temperaments of these songs is either like here we go off to our deaths and it's okay that we die, or like, haha, we're off to war. We're gonna die. You know, those are the two.
Vibes in the most upbeat way possible, and like, that's actually my favorite genre of human of song of book is like the funny upbeat darkness.
Yeah totally, I'll take it. And also the pure doom and gloom. Right, but the like there's like a boring doom and gloom where like, oh everything just sucks, not the mopey doom and gloom, but it said the like this is a beautiful way that we will all end, you know.
Oh yeah, like our yeah doom and gloom, but like the kind of horror novels that are like really beautiful where it's like flowers are growing out of their grave.
Totally. You ever listen to this song. I'm not gonna make everyone listen to it right now, but you're listen to song Gloomy Sunday. It's a song that I'm going to get the name of the country wrong. It's from an Eastern European country, and it's like the death song. And there's all these rumors that everyone who listens to it dies. This is clearly not true, right, I mean, well, yes, actually it's true. Everyone who listens to it dies, just on the longer timeline eventually.
Yeah.
And uh, there's a Damondic Gloss version that is just astoundingly good. But it's basically this like.
It's composed by someone while living in Paris. Does that mean anything to you?
Maybe? I think it's Hungarian the song because it's sometimes just called the Hungarian suicide song. It's It's it's real dark.
Wrote a song around around the time of the Great Depression. Uh oh uh Native hung he in his influence in Native Hungary. Okay, yep, yep, yep, you're there, you were there, your brain at it.
It's like the precursor to l Ron Hubbard's book that you Can't Read or you Die because it's so amazing.
Yeah yeah, where it was like this song has been done by so many people, like it's been done by like Billie Holiday.
I feel like it's been dead. Yeah yeah, wow, everyone ever is saying it dies.
Yeah, I mean, oh yeah, it's I didn't know it had such a huge historical background.
But it's a cool fucking song.
It is anyway, that's my other vibe. There's a really good, uh funeral Doom version of it by Oh Now I'm just gonna forget the name of the band, and everyone's giving so annoyed that the three people who know what funeral Doom is as a genre are now mad at me. But it's real good.
Gluis said, day is cool.
It's so I'm gonna look it upside Foreign Death. I'm kurestige with the last breath of my soul. I'll be blessing you gloomy Sunday. Right, Yeah, it's fucking cool.
Yeah cool. And it's just a you know, is everyone gonna be mad if I want to die too, just because you're dead. It's a this is a fun tangent. So dark anyway, Well like when you're listening to this, it's like a week ago is the darkest time of year.
So hmm.
Anyway, the rebels kept songbooks. They literally passed and printed out sheets with their songs and their sheet music with each other. None of these have Belichow. There are attestations from partisans saying, well they sang it over there and such and such brigades, but no one's saying like, well we sang it. M that's not true. Oh my god, I'm thinking about this script. There is the woman who says we sang it and she's just ignored. Oh my god. Wow, she even has a name. And I'm gonna get to
it in a second. Immediately after the war, people collected partisan songbooks together, and for the first eight years none of the books had the song Belachow. This is like the main argument against Belichow. Haven't been sung by partisans. Are these two things combined? But some people were saying, yes,
this existed. The one Italian folk musician, Carlo Pestelli, who was born in nineteen seventy three, So it wasn't there, he said in Prague in nineteen forty seven, during the First World Festival of Youth and Students, a group of former combatants from Amelia successfully spread Belachow. But then another historian, the historian who's kind of on the no when sang it page is like. I tried to follow that up and I found no evidence of it being sung. But
he also didn't present like a song list. I don't know wild the first mention of it. It's so funny to be in combat with my own earlier version of the script as I read this. The first mention of it wasn't until nineteen fifty three, when a magazine called Lalapa mentioned it, which is interesting because it seems to be a Spanish word and not an Italian word. I
don't know. Then in nineteen fifty five it's in a collection of partisan songs, and then another collection from nineteen sixty includes it, but its source is that nineteen fifty five book, and they claimed that it was adapted from a famous World War One song. This is almost certainly not true. There does not appear to be a famous
World War One song Belichow. Then in nineteen sixty four the song appeared when a former mandina named Giovanni Daffini sang it at a festival, and basically she's like, this is a mandina song, and then it became a partisan song, and she sang both versions. And she was the one who in the nineteen thirties had written that verse about how we'll all be free one day, and there's like oral attestations of that being true. The next year, a man named Vasco Sconciani said he was the one who
wrote the song down. And the way that the skeptical historians present this is he's the one who said he wrote the song, and he is sometimes credited as the songwriter, but historian Diana Garvin has traced it earlier, so he's the guy wrote it down, which he did in nineteen fifty one. For Tefani. This is a very familiar tale in folk music, is that a guy writes it down eventually, and so people were like, oh, he's the guy who wrote it.
Yeah, it's the it's like the documentation bias meets with misogyny.
Yeah, totally. Look, it's enough for me that Defani went and said that this is the song that we did. And there's also all this other evidence of Mundane saying, yeah, she wrote the following verse. You know, so she wasn't lying. There's no reason to believe she was lying when she said it was an old Monday a song. So why would she be lying that there's a partisan version. I think it just avoided being written down, and it was
a non partisan partisan song. If I played you songs for the communists and the anarchists and the Catholics, but Bella Chow wasn't attached to a specific political ideology and it was not claimed by one. It was a partisan song for everyone. And frankly, it was also catchier than most songs of that era.
Yeah, like it survived because it's still catchy to us today, like with our different tastes.
Right, the reason that it might not have gotten written down at first was that it wasn't for anybody. But the reason it survived and is the song of the resistance is because therefore is for everybody, right, and the fact that it's catchy as hell, and we'll tie that to Croatia in a second. In nineteen seventy four, somebody else said that they wrote the original version of the
song of the Mandine version an ex caribbeanari. An ex cop basically says that he wrote it in the nineteen thirties for a girl he liked in Mandine, but he couldn't register the song because of a fascist dictatorship. I think he was an anti fascist, that's my implication. And so those facts like, ah, these guys say they wrote it was like the reason that it was sort of stripped away and like, oh, this wasn't real. You know,
all of these things can be true. It could have been written by this ex cop for a girl who sang it in the feats. That's where bella chow would have come from. The actual literal goodbye beautiful, because that's the part that in the Mandine version. Historians are like, I don't know why that part's there, Like what are
they saying goodbye to? We're not sure If this guy's like goodbye beautiful, you're off to go work in the fields, he probably wrote her a song and they were like, we're not going to sing this song about like goodbye, you're off to go work. We're going to sing a song about how much it sucks to work. And so then the Mandine wrote the Mandine version of the song about their working conditions. Then a Mondina woman added verses about needing to be free to it and made it
a rebel song. Then all of these Mondine became partisans and took the song with them. And so either they were just singing it the partisan version all throughout the war, or like everyone else, they're just singing old rebel songs that aren't about the war, right, Like we want to Kill the King wasn't a partisan song, but people with guns like singing it. You know, I'm sure the king loved that.
Yeah, she's like a plus, super happy with this.
Yeah.
It's like how we're watching right now, Like you can like shoot up a school full of kids and it's not terrorism, and you kill a CEO and like now it's terrorism.
Oh yeah, yeah, the CEO is all just take their information off their websites and now it's terrorism.
Yeah. As soon as anarchists started killing kings back in the day, they literally invented international policing. They were like, oh, we got to do some about this.
Whoops, people realized that we're horrible.
Yeah, and so then probably in the nineteen fifties, that guy wrote down the version of it for his friend and gave it to her right, and then she sang it at a festival in nineteen sixty four. This feels like the most likely version for me. As for the melody, it's older. Still, it might be fucking ancient for all I know. But we know that in the year eighteen ninety nine in Odessa and what's currently Ukraine, a Christian roma man was born who grew up speaking Biddish. His
name was Mishka Ziganoff. He moved to New York City and in nineteen nineteen he recorded a Klesmer song on accordion called colon or Cole. And here's some of that recording.
That's so fun.
I know, you feel the bellichow, you feel bellichow, and.
The first couple of notes like that just it hits as belichow.
Mm hmm.
It's not note for note the modern belichiw. But the beginning is no one's exactly sure where the melody originated, other than that I read like eight different countries that
people claimed the most likely. The one that seemed to come up the most was Dalmatia, which is part of Croatia, now which I had it never occurred to me that the Dalmatian dog is named because there was a place called Dalmatia, indeed obvious in retrospect, and so most people point there as the origin of the Klesmer melody of it.
One writer Fausto Giavnardi conjectures that an Italian immigrant in New York City might have gone back home and brought the melody back with him, and this seems like the most likely. It also could have easily just come into Italy more directly some other person, like coming from Odessa or Croatia or like anywhere that this melody could have been.
You know, so fuck yeah. The Partisans sang a song popularized by a Yiddish speaking Christian roma man in New York City, turned into a love song by a guy, turned into a work song, turned into a rebel work song, then turned into a rebels with gun song, turned into what might be kind of the internationalist anthem of the left in the world, and since World War Two, Belachow has spread around the world as a resistance song. You can hear it basically anywhere there's a street movement against
the right wing. The first time I heard it was in Kurdish twenty five years ago in Amsterdam, at an anarchist bar, where a Kurdish exile sang it to us. I saw people bored of hearing it from that marching band in France, and I also saw people excited as hell by it in the same marching band. The Italian
prime minister gets jeered with it. In October of this year, the far right Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban showed up at the European Parliament and a bunch of leftist MEPs stood up and sang bela chow at him.
I love that so much, like I love songs as test like that is such a cool tradition, and it's been all over the world in so many different contexts, so like, Yeah, I don't know if you know anything about the singing revolution in the Baltic States, so like as the Soviet Union was like under Gorbachev and things had gotten a little bit less horrific for people. Basically Estonia, Latvia,
and Lithuania in slightly different ways. I know most about Estonia, but they started what's called the Singing Revolution, and basically it started out by singing illegal like nationalist Estonian songs in the Estonian language, and instead of flying the Estonian flag, which was illegal, they would fly flags with each of the colors of the Estonian flag as like a loophole.
Hell yeah, I was in Estonia once when I was a teenager, and I went to a flea market and bought a shirt that I wish I still had so desperately. And it was this shirt that the front said mclennon's and it was Lenin's face over McDonald's logo, and the back said the party is over. And it was like a burnt and broken hammer and sickle like red star because they were just like so happy that the Soviet Union had fallen, you know.
Yeah, and they, I mean they suffered, people suffered enormously. They're like a lot of people had to flee, like hundreds of thousands had to flee, more than I believe still more hundreds of thousands were sent to Siberian camps and never came back.
Yeah, I believe it. And like I like the idea of singing Belichow at people as a protest, partly because it's not just like here's a song about resistance. It's like, hey, we're gonna shoot you if you keep doing this, you know. It's like, this is a song about people who killed fascists. Because fascism will fail, we will do it again. It's gonna suck, but we're going to do it again. Ukrainian
soldiers sing it into trenches. There's like this viral video from about two years ago of two women in the trenches. One of them's loading magazines for her rifle while they sing Belichow and Ukrainian. And there's a video of Iranian women singing it without hajab and they're singing in Farsi and it went viral. A couple of years ago, the internationalist forces in the YPG in Reshava sing this song and like it's a good song and it's our song, and it was given to us by working women in Italy,
and it was sung bipartisans. Whether it was sung in the Mondine version or whether it was sung in the partisan version, I almost don't care.
It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter, like the revolutionary history kind of, I don't know it. Sometimes it doesn't matter if it's the exact wording or the exact you know history or this exact person wrote it. It's like it's still made this impact, that's still ringing today.
Yeah, and it's an internationalist song in its core because it's not an Italian melody. We just listened to a lot of Italian songs. It doesn't sound like them, you know. And even the wind whistles, the other big partisan song, the melody came from Russia, you know. And yeah, international is great and fascism sucks. That's my that's the moral of the story. People are gonna be shocked. People have been listening for three years now and they're like, wait, what, Margaret's on that page.
You've done a full U turn.
Yeah. But yeah, that's the story of Bellachow. If copyright were a different thing, I would now play you new versions. But you can go listen to yourself on YouTube.
Thank you for this. This is so interesting. Like, I actually one of the things that I feel like as a gap in my historical knowledge is the like revolutionary history of music. I've been starting to get a little bit more into jazz, but like I feel like I know very little about it. So now I feel like I want to just go listen to Bella Chow for the rest.
Of the.
That's what I did as soon as I finished this script. As I went and listened to all kinds of versions, and yeah, I can, I can od on it, but I always come back to it. It's always it's always waiting for me.
Yeah. I'm the kind of person that I'll take a song and just listen to it like three thousand times in a row, and then not listen to it for a year, and then come back and listen three thousand more times.
Yeah, what's the There's like a meme around that about like we're gonna ring every little bit of dopamine out.
Of the song, you know, and not come back until it's replenished itself.
Yeah, exactly, And this song's full of it and got plenty of dopamine in this one.
Mm hmm.
But yeah, So if people like history, they might like your stuff.
Is that?
Is that a fair way to put it?
That is a fair way to put it. I think if people like history, the first thing that I need to plug is The Sapling Cage by Margaret Kiljoy, because even though it's not historical fiction, you really can feel the historical knowledge in it, like I've actually never read a book before where I felt like the background of the book had all of these different ways of organizing society cleverly hidden in it, and I was just very delighted by this.
Thank you.
So first I'll plug Margaret, and then yeah, if you like history, if you like historical fiction, some of my So my books for adults are mostly just like historical adventure historical fiction, and my books for teens are mostly historical horror. So my most recent book is called We Are the Beasts, and it is based on the story of the Beast of Debanon, which was a true, real thing unsolved mystery of this creature that.
Kills Was it probably a wolf? I just assume it was a wolf.
I don't think it is a wolf. Oh, I don't think it is a wolf. So okay, little tangent.
Yeah, let's hear. I want to hear what you think it is.
Yeah, so well, I'm not going to tell you if you can read the book and find out what I think it is. Oh, but I will cool my tangent.
Is.
The reason I don't think it is a wolf is that lots and lots of peasants saw this creature and described it and said it wasn't a wolf. And the only reason that people are like it's a wolf is because they don't believe poor people.
Oh interesting, okay, Okay.
So I'm like, the peasantry is telling you, like literally hundreds of people saw it and survived or got mauled and survived or whatever and saw it real up close and described it, and they're like, it is not a wolf. They have seen wolves before, there's lots of wolves in that region. They're like, this is something else. And so I'm like, I believe them. I believe them when they and not only were they not believed because they're poor,
but they're also young women. So I believe them when they say it's not a wolf.
I just assumed it was a wolf.
Sorry, now we're on that. But so basically the book, I've been fascinated by the Beast's history for a while, but I wasn't sure I wanted to write the book because it's like just a bunch of dead shepherdesses, and I think we have a problem in fiction where we just kind of walk over the corpses of dead women. So I was like, actually, I'm going to write it
as a monster story about saving girls. So the two main characters decide to use the appearance of the beast in their region as a way to fake the deaths of girls who are in dire situations in their own homes.
Oh hell yeah, I literally think I'm going to order it as soon as we get off this call. I'll send it to you.
Margaret, you don't have okay.
Well I will. Well, then you listener should order it. But I'm special and I get a free copy. All I had to do is write lots of books. Oh right, yep, writers just send each other their books for free. Anyways, Well, my plug's already been plugged, Sophie, you got anything.
Uh, just follow a cool Zone Media on blue Sky, Twitter x and the Instagram, so we post all the current things cool.
All right, Well we'll see you I think next week where we'll be back with more Cool People Did Cool Stuff? And or I think probably actually a Q and A. But I don't know whatever whatever's next is next, You'll just deal with it.
Hye.
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com or check us out on the iHeartRadio, app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. W