To preface the post: I don’t have anything against the song itself. It’s a beautiful and historically significant song about Italian antifascist partisans.
My point is that it’s been marketed by fucking Netflix show Money Heist, it’s been emptied and hollowed of all its meaning, and EVEN if it hadn’t, it’s again glorifying the role of western antifascists instead of those who won the fucking war: the Soviets.
It was NOT Italian Partisans who SAVED EUROPE from fascism. It was the Bolsheviks. I do not want a world where Bella Ciao isn’t sung, I want a world in which for every time we sing Bella Ciao, we sing 10 times Katyuscha, the Soviet Anthem, Svyaschyonnaya Voyna, or Krasnaya Armiya Vsyekh Sil’nyey. The Soviets were the only country that sold fucking weapons and sent trained soldiers, tank drivers and pilots to Republican Spain (the country where Money Heist was made), and yet we’re commercializing songs about the Italian partisans. FUCK ME SIDEWAYS.
I love how many different versions of it are out there with wildly different lyrics… but yeah, on the point that Soviet songs are way better, sorry Western antifascists, I gotta agree with you. Though that’s probably my personal biases at play, I love Soviet war songs (and the pre/during revolution era Bolshevik stuff’s good in a very “shows its age” way).
I think it frames very well what was at stake during the Russian Revolution: a fucking return to monarchic absolutism!
Oh yeah, the messaging of pretty much all of them is great, I just mean some of the traditional melodies don’t really sound quite like we expect from “commie war songs” today, or like later Soviet revolutionary songs.