Possibly interesting stuff about May!

There's a cartoon going around which portrays Theresa May sulkily complaining that the French elected a centrist president just to interfere with the British parliamentary elections coming up in June. Ho! Hum!

In the real world Iain Duncan Smith has declared that Macron is an "absolute threat" to French prosperity and warned him to be constructive on Brexit if he wants to protect his country's trade. It's odd how these Tories seem to think that negotiation means making threats! Read more at this link.

I misread some of his other stuff and thought that he was actually recommending that high earners should move themselves and their money abroad if the Labour party get in and impose new income tax rates. Just as I was about to accuse him of being singularly unpatriotic I realised that he was predicting that that is what would happen. He did, however, suggest that MacDonnell is too far to the left: "He’s always been a lover of Marx... he had a copy of Marxist thoughts and theories at the dispatch box."

This smacks of the kind of anti-communism that was around in post war USA. We have been talking about this sort of thing in my Italian class, despite our teacher Adalgisa assuring a visiting fellow Sicilian that her classes are not political. She just teaches Italian language and culture. If the mafia, political corruption and other such stuff comes up, it's purely incidental.

Anyway, part of this (co)incidental cultural stuff involved May Day celebrations, May Day being a public holiday in most places: International Workers' Day, la Festa dei Lavoratori, la Fête du Travail. But just a bank holiday in the UK and Loyalty Day in the USA. I checked up on the last one because I had half heard a thing on the news saying that the USA had moved Labor Day to the first Monday in September because they didn't want it to look as though they were supporting communists.

The first site I found tried to give the lie to that; the information there said that it was felt that there was a such long time between Independence Day in July and Thanksgiving in November that someone decided to give the poor overworked folk another day's holiday.

Not entirely true apparently!
Another website said that in the fifties, with the Cold War in full swing and a lot of anti-communist, anti-trades unions stuff around they did decide precisely to disconnect the 1st of May with anything that smacked of solidarity with the dreaded reds. And so the 1st of May became Loyalty Day. Much better!

Oddly enough, my research led me to Chicago in 1886 when a planned strike for May 1st, demanding a reduction to an 8 hour working day, led to violence in the streets with people dead and injured. It became known as the Haymarket Affair because most of the violence took place in Haymarket Square. A few years later an International Socialist Conference declared that the First of May should be henceforth be a day of political action: International Workers's Day. And the rest is history.

Which brings me back to my Italian class and a text we read about the Portella della Ginestra massacre in Sicily, one of the more violent acts in the history of modern Italian politics, when 11 people were killed and 27 wounded during May Day celebrations on May 1, 1947. Those held responsible were the bandit and separatist leader Salvatore Giuliano and his band – although their motives and intentions are still a matter of controversy.

It was at that point, as we discussed the mystery of the motives of MR Giuliano, that our Adalgisa's fellow Sicilian, here on a short visit, threw in a little bit of extra information. He told us that Giuliano was part of a separatist organisation that wanted Sicily stop being part of Italy, declare itself an independent state and become part of the USA!

Who knew?