Anti Fascism Blog

The Modena City Ramblers were formed in 1991, a casual musical group that came together to entertain friends and family playing Irish folk music. Meeting up to jam more and more often, the Ramblers began to write their own tunes, inspired by popular Celtic-influenced bands like the Pogues and the Waterboys. Two years after their formation, the band recorded their first demo tape called Combat Folk. Featuring their punk/Irish folk songs and Italian resistance ballads, the demo sold more than 3000 copies, earning the Ramblers grassroots recognition all over Italy. Picked up by the independent label Helter Skelter, the band’s debut album, Riportando Tutto a Casa was released in 1994. Eventually distributed by Mercury, the disc went on to sell an impressive 185,000 copies. In the years that followed, Modena City Ramblers earned a reputation as a powerful live act, performing throughout Europe in collaboration with artists such as the Chieftains and Italian rock vocalist Bob Geldof. Their sophomore effort, La Grande Famiglia, experienced similar success to its predecessor, followed by Terra e Liberta which ushered in an era of international attention during which the Ramblers performed in nations such as Bolivia, Spain, Cuba and more. Known for their progressive politics, the band aligned itself with musicians of similar values such as Manu Chao, performing at festivals like the Independent Days Festival in Bologna and the Awesome Africa Festival in South Africa. Their 2002 production Radio Rebelde garnered them invitations to perform in locations near and far, including Algeria, the Czech Republic, Amsterdam and Mexico. The band’s 2004 album Viva la Vida! Viva la Muerte! (a quote from Zapatista leaders) found its way to Italian Top Ten charts, and opened doors for a 120 city tour. The Modena City Ramblers have become a staple of both the Italian rock scene and the leftist musical circuit alike.

After graduating from the University of Bologna law school, Matteotti entered law practice and joined the Italian Socialist Party. He was elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 1919 and reelected in 1921 and 1924, by which time he had become secretary general of his party. In the meantime, Mussolini, who had succeeded in gaining power, was conducting terroristic attacks on leftists. On May 30, 1924, Matteotti addressed a ringing denunciation of the Fascist Party to the Chamber. Less than two weeks later (June 10) six Fascist squadristi kidnapped Matteotti in Rome, murdered him, and hastily buried his body outside the city near Riano Flaminio.

Mussolini, at first taken aback by his loss of public favour, decided to take the offensive. On Jan. 3, 1925, in a speech to the Chamber, he took full responsibility for the murder as head of the Fascist party (although whether he gave a direct order for the murder remains uncertain) and dared his critics to prosecute him for the crime, a challenge that never was made since they were too weak to take it up.

The Matteotti Crisis marked a turning point in the history of Italian Fascism. Mussolini abandoned any plan of working with Parliament and took steps to create a totalitarian state, including suppression of the opposition press, exclusion of non-Fascist ministers, and formation of a secret police.

After World War II the democratic regime instituted a new inquiry, and the surviving three assassins were sentenced to 30 years in prison.

Joan Baez was born in Staten Island, New York. Her father was a physicist, born in Mexico, and her mother of Scottish and English descent. She grew up in New York and California, and when her father took a faculty position in Massachusetts, she attended Boston University and began to sing in coffeehouses and small clubs. Bob Gibson invited her to attend the 1959 Newport Folk Festival where she was a hit.

Vanguard Records signed Baez and in 1960 her first album, Joan Baez, came out. Baez was known for her soprano voice, her haunting songs, and, until she cut it in 1968, her long black hair. Early in her career she performed with Bob Dylan, and they toured together in the 1970s.

Subjected to racial slurs and discrimination in her own childhood because of her Mexican heritage and features, Joan Baez became involved with a variety of social causes early in her career, including civil rights and nonviolence. She was sometimes jailed for her protests. Joan Baez married David Harris, a Vietnam draft protestor, in 1968, and he was in jail for most of the years of their marriage. They divorced in 1973, after having one child, Gabriel Earl.

In 1967, the Daughters of the American Revolution denied Joan Baez permission to perform at Constitution Hall, resonating with their famous denial of the same privilege to Marian Anderson.

Early in her career, Joan Baez stressed historical folk songs, adding political songs to her repertoire during the 1960s. Later, she added country songs and more mainstream popular music, though always including many songs with political messages. She supported such organizations as Amnesty International and Humanitas International. Joan Baez continues to speak and sing for peaceful solutions to violence in the Middle East and Latin America.

Woody Guthrie is the original folk hero. It was Guthrie who, in the Thirties and Forties, transformed the folk ballad into a vehicle for social protest and observation. In so doing, he paved the way for Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen and a host of other folk and rock songwriters who have been moved by conscience to share experiences and voice opinions in a forthright manner. Guthrie wrote literally hundreds of songs, including such revered classics as “This Land Is Your Land,” “So Long, It’s Been Good to Know You,” “Grand Coulee Dam,” “I Ain’t Got No Home” and “Dust Bowl Refugees.” The colorful life he led became as legendary as the songs he wrote. Fueled by a boundless curiosity about the world, Guthrie hit the road during the Depression, hitchhiking and riding the rails across the Midwest and Far West. From those experiences came source material for his songs and a lifelong commitment to radical politics.

Woodrow Wilson Gurthrie was born on July 14th, 1912, in Okemah, Oklahoma. His father was a real-estate broker who fell on hard times, and his mother suffered from Huntington’s Chorea, a genetic nerve disorder that led to her death in a state mental hospital. Guthrie learned how to play guitar, mandolin, fiddle and harmonica in his adolescence. He also read and wrote voraciously, drew cartoons and painted. In the Thirties, Guthrie traveled and slept among migrants, hobos and Dust Bowl refugees, accumulating the life experiences that fueled his songs and stories (as well as an autobiography, Bound for Glory). By decade’s end, his populist convictions led him to embrace communism, although he was denied membership in the Communist Party because he refused to renounce religion.

Arriving in New York in 1940, Guthrie took the city’s left-wing community by storm. He performed on network radio, wrote a column for the Communist Daily Worker, played at strikes and rallies, and recorded prolifically for the Folkways label. All the while, the self-taught folksinger studied politics, economics, science and religion. By mid-decade, Guthrie began experiencing bouts of depression and disorientation that signaled the onset of Huntington’s Chorea (the genetic disorder that had afflicted his mother). His health slowly deteriorated and he was eventually confined to hospitals, where he was visited by young admirers like  Bob Dylan When he died on October 3rd, 1967, Guthrie left behind three wives, eight children (including folksinger Arlo Guthrie) and about a thousand songs.

Federico García Lorca was born in Fuente Vaqueros, Granada on the 5th of June, 1898 and died the 19th of August, 1936. His life spanned the years between the Year of Disaster and the Spanish Civil War which ultimately victimized him. He travelled throughout Spain and America, principally Argentina, living and writing some of the most beautiful poetry ever written. His poetry has been translated into a dozen languages and his name is known worldwide. His personal life is the subject of much debate now, relating to his tendencies and friends.

Lorca’s poetry and plays combine elements of Andalusion folklore with sophisticated and often surrealistic poetic techniques, cut across all social and educational barriers. Works include: Thus Five Years Pass, The Public, Dona Rosita. He is toted to have succeeded in the creation of a viable poetic idiom for the stage, superior to the works of his contemporaries, Yeats, Eliot and Claudel.

August 9, 1936, Falangist soldiers dragged the Spanish poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca into a field, shot him and tossed his body into an unmarked grave… Franco’s government tried to obliterate Lorca’s memory. His books were prohibited, his name forbidden.

One of the first and most famous casualties of the Spanish Civil War, Lorca quickly became an almost mythical figure, a symbol of all the victims of political oppression and fascist tyranny. People began speaking publicly about Lorca again in the late 1940’s, and The House of Barnardo Alba was the first of his plays to be produced in Spain (1950), since his death and since the end of the war. Though foreign influence helped to loosen the Franco regimes control over Lorca’s work, bans were still placed as late as 1971. Due to public outcry however, Lorca’s work was produced.

Lorca’s reconquest of the Spanish public, and his growing prestige among scholars is a relatively recent phenomenon. When his works began to recirculate freely, many people who knew only the Gypsy Ballads and two or three of the more popular plays considered Lorca a poet of limited interest and local color. When his later poetry -Poet in New York- and experimental plays such as The Public came to be better known and understood, attitudes changed.

For well over 30 years, Inti-Illimani (the name translates as “Sun God”) has held a beacon for Chilean music, both the traditional folk styles and the more contemporary nueva cancion. Back in 1967 a group of students at Santiago’s Technical University formed a band to perform folk music. Taking their name from the Aymaran Indian language of the Andes, they began playing traditional music — something few did back then — and quickly earned a reputation around the capital, becoming more and more adept on their instruments. By the ’70s they’d grown into a political beast, taking on the nueva cancion (literally “new song”) of many young groups, and being quite outspoken lyrically — enough to be forced into exile in 1973, where they’d stay for 15 years. However, they refused to be cowed by the Chilean dictatorship. Basing themselves in Rome, Italy, they continued to record, and toured more heavily then ever before, earning a powerful reputation around the globe, and becoming very unofficial ambassadors of Chilean music, as well as opponents to the ruling regime. In addition to performing with a number of famous, political figures, they were included on the famous 1988 Amnesty International Tour. It was, perhaps, their highest profile moment, at least in worldwide terms, and set the stage for their return to their homeland, where they’ve continued to be outspoken. While they’ve remained a force in world music, their career in the U.S. was hampered by the lack of any consistent record deal until 1994, when they signed with Green Linnet offshoot Xenophile. Prior to that, only a few of their 30-plus discs made it into domestic U.S. record bins. The eight-piece lineup remained stable until 1996, when Max Berru decided to retire from music after almost three decades, shortly after the group had been celebrated with a Best Of disc in Italy (not to be confused with the 2000 Best Of on Xenophile, which collected tracks from their last four releases only). Instead of replacing him, they’ve continued since as a septet. 1997 saw the band honored with a U.C. Berkeley Human Rights Award for their labors in the past. Since then, although they’ve continued to release albums and tour, they’ve cut back on their earlier hectic schedule, but also widened their musical horizons, as 1999’s Amar De Nuevo looked at the complete spectrum of Latin roots music and its Creole heritage.

Oscar Romero was born in Ciudad Barrios, a town in the mountainous east of El Salvador, on 15 August 1917. He was the second of seven children. When he was thirteen he declared a vocation to the priesthood. In February 1977, Oscar Romero became archbishop of San Salvador.

As Archbishop of San Salvador, Father Romero was a source of strength and hope for the poor and for the oppressed of his country, working with and for them, taking their struggles as his own. Romero wrote and spoke passionately and publicly of the need for Christians to work for justice, frequently faced with threat and danger from those who opposed his ideas. On March 24, 1980, while celebrating the Eucharist, Archbishop Romero was shot and killed at the altar by a death squad assassin, paying the highest price for the commitment about which he spoke so often and so eloquently. Because of his courageous stand for justice, he became a martyr not only for poor Salvadorians but for all struggling to overcome oppression and poverty. Today, his sermons are read as powerful reminders of Christians’ obligation to fight for a just society. Shortly before he was murdered, Romero said: “It is my hope that my blood will be the seed of freedom and the sign that hope will soon be reality” The example of Romero’s courageous life and ultimately death continue to inspire those who struggle for human dignity and justice.