Italian Communist Party

Um, and, um, you know, Gasperi is like, like, like pushing to make this, you know, a policy priority and, you know, making it an unconditional, um, imperative, you know, for, for his government was essential.

Um, when, uh, when he did take, uh, when, when he did become prime minister that first time succeeding Fruccio Perry, he inherited a coalition that included both Italian communist party and Italian socialist party, um, delegates along with, uh, along with other like smaller parties that were nominally independent or, you know, had names, you know, like the, you know, like a liberal Republican party or the action party, but, you know, some of which had very much, you know, were, were communist adjacent, if not, you know, out and out, you know, proxies, um, to, um, to Gasperi's credit, um, his deputy prime minister, Palmiro Togliatti, um, did cooperate in, um, Gasperi's attempts to soften the terms of the impending allied peace treaty, um, with Italy, you know, again, you know, seeing very much what was being done to Germany.

Um, and this was, um, this, this was very, you know, him, um, lobbying so heavily and so very publicly for relief through and cooperation therein the European recovery program, you know, which was the tagline for the Marshall plan.

Um, you know, this, this, this was opposed vociferously by the communists, but, um, um, Gasperi did manage to hold this, you know, initial prime ministership together, despite all odds, especially when you consider, you know, the, the fact that he was dealing with a cabinet that very much stopped, but that was very much stocked by ops.

It's like, I don't, I, you know, the political was the economic and I mean, that's a liberal conceit, man.

That's not the way you should think of things anyway.

But, you know, Andradi, again, is also, his two other kind of big commitments were, you know, staunchly supporting and annexing with the Vatican and, you know, a strong hostility towards the Italian Communist Party and the Soviet Union.

Now.

And it's important to note that La Perla's in Bologna, um, which has this long history as a kind of a leftist stronghold.

The Italian Communist Party, uh, was in charge of the city for, you know, almost like five decades.

Um, so, you know, they were, these seamstresses were part of that tradition, part of that culture.

So they organized, they created, um, kind of a union organization, and they protested.

...

Italian Communist Party, and no sense of direction, two laughs.

One.

Christopher Langham, Jewish Embarrassed Party-

Kamat was one of his students, basically.

And Bordiga was one of the co-founders of the Italian Communist Party alongside Gramsci.

And then he goes to jail and Gramsci basically sets the stage for what becomes totally autism, the kind of conservative arc of the...

Italian Communist Party.

And then Bordiga emerges from jail in the 50s and writes all this really interesting stuff.

But he doesn't really engage in politics at that point, because he sort of sees the defeat on the horizon or something.

Huh?

Well, isn't this a membership card in the Italian Communist Party? Oh, oh.

Well, I can explain this, Signora.

Yes, I'll bet you can.

Ya con pasaporte costarricense, se establece en Italia a finales de la década de 1940, que por supuesto, era uno de los grandes campos de batalla donde el comunismo y el capitalismo se enfrentaban.

El Partido Comunista de Italia era el más poderoso de Europa.

Ese.

The Communist Party of Italy was the most powerful in Europe.

El Partido Comunista de Italia era el más poderoso de Europa.

Ese.

Y es probablemente la historia más extraordinaria del libro.

So he would escape prison at night to go to nearby farming villages and try and organize the workers before going back to the prison in the morning.

After the war, he was repatriated to Italy, joined the Italian Communist Party, and became a sort of wacky celebrity in Australia, from what I can tell, who did several documentaries with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

Honestly, even reading like period media coverage of this guy, nobody really seemed threatened by him, more just sort of mystified and annoyed.

There had been other isolated breakouts, like a group of four German prisoners who broke out of a camp in Victoria in May 1942, but overall, prison breaks had not been a huge issue, for the reasons we already noted.