0:02

Spain. I'm

0:04

Robert Evans. This is Behind the Bastards. But

0:06

actually, yeah,

0:08

Spain, that's what I got. This

0:10

is Behind the Bastards. It's actually Behind the Insurrections

0:13

special Behind the Bastards miniseries talking about

0:16

the history of fascist attempts to seize power

0:18

from democracies. Yes,

0:21

um, we started our our first

0:24

opening of this episode with me shouting,

0:26

what's bombing Mike Guernica's But then we decided

0:29

that would get me canceled and was a bad idea.

0:32

Um, we would be talking about what I

0:34

mean. I would have just gone, yeah, I just shouted

0:36

the name Spain. Alternate

0:41

pitch what about Yeah,

0:44

there we go, There we go, There we go power.

0:48

Unfortunately, my knowledge of Spanish

0:51

is mostly limited to buying drugs.

0:53

That's the NBA player from that that

0:55

was a really great laker. But you know has

0:57

really good seafood. You can say that about Spain.

0:59

I can. Oh my god, Yes,

1:02

I have had some amazing piea. One

1:05

of the pie as I had was partly responsible

1:08

for me vomiting on the limousine of the

1:10

King of Spain. But um, that's amazing.

1:12

That's a story for another day. Best

1:16

friend, my best friend died in Spain. I don't

1:18

know. No, that's a great thing to say. That's

1:20

years ago. My old DJ flew to Spain. He

1:22

was actually doing a he was doing a

1:24

master chef class with his pias. He's Filipino,

1:27

dude, he was going to do this like piea

1:29

adobo. It was this crazy

1:31

Filipino Spanish. He sounds amazing. Yeah,

1:33

yeah, and he had like and he just

1:36

his blood pressure dropped his zero. Oh

1:38

ship died in his airbnb. That's

1:41

horrible. That's horrible. Well,

1:44

we are going to talk about a lot of people

1:46

dying in Spain today, so

1:49

that's the effect, though, love you doubt that

1:52

that's there's Actually this is actually gonna

1:54

be a very sad episode in a lot of ways. So that's

1:56

an appropriate emotional tone to start

1:58

it off with. Ye, the fuck Spain

2:02

throws down a current Spain is

2:04

not your fault. Um.

2:08

So we're gonna be talking about the Spanish

2:10

Civil War today. Uh. And we left off

2:13

last time with the establishment of an actual,

2:15

like real, fat, organized fascist

2:17

party in Spain. The Philogists, Um,

2:20

they went the first, but they were the first to kind of like, I

2:22

don't get it right, is a weird phrase

2:24

to apply to fascism, but they were. They were

2:26

the Spanish fascists who would, um

2:29

become kind of the watchword for

2:31

Spanish fascism. When people talk about the fascists

2:33

in Spain, they're talking about the philogists,

2:36

you know, yeah, the philangers

2:39

um fa lenx is, which kind of also I

2:41

think that I think philanges comes

2:43

from fai lenx because it's that word for that Greek

2:46

military. You know, we have a shiploaded dudes standing

2:48

in like a series of lines,

2:51

all supporting each other in kind of like

2:53

a hand I don't know, that'd be my guess. I'm not

2:55

a worder. So the

2:57

oddest thing about the phlogists, um

3:00

is that alone among fascists pretty

3:02

much any period I'm aware of, they

3:05

well except for maybe the modern period, they were

3:07

giant wusses to start out with. And this may

3:09

be due to the fact we've talked a lot about how like

3:11

World War One is why the Italian

3:14

and German fascists were terrifying

3:16

people, um because they, you

3:18

know, we're very comfortable killing people. Spain

3:21

stayed out of World War One. Most of the early

3:24

fascists were like more on this, like

3:26

fascist intellectuals than street fighters,

3:28

and they weren't initially very willing

3:30

to use force. Now they talked about violence

3:33

a lot. Um and Jose Antonio,

3:35

their leader, was definitely a fascist,

3:37

but he was very uncomfortable with physical violence,

3:40

even when when it was directed at him and it

3:42

was repeatedly, he was loath to actually

3:44

organize retaliatory violence. During

3:47

his speech he gave after his party's unification

3:49

with the John Seasta's, a leftist gunman opened

3:51

fire, intending to kill Jose Antonio

3:54

and instead killing a spectator and wounding

3:56

for other people. The fascists launched

3:58

no reprisals against theft in response,

4:00

which is like you you look at Germany or Italy's

4:02

is very strange, yeah,

4:05

very different than it was elsewhere. Um.

4:07

And the kind of unwillingness in this period

4:09

of the fascists to use violence

4:12

lead one columnist for a right wing newspaper

4:14

to note sarcastically, so

4:16

that everything will be incongruous

4:18

here, it is that the fascists who are made to

4:21

swallow castor oil, which is

4:23

referring to the fact that in Italy the

4:25

fascists would force castor oil down the throats

4:27

of their enemies to make them ship themselves sometimes

4:29

to death, like it was a horrible torture, Like

4:31

they thought it was funny, but it killed people. And

4:34

this guy's being like in Italy,

4:36

the fascists make their enemies drink castor

4:38

oil. Here, we have to drink the castor oil, right,

4:40

because we're not willing to use violence. Um,

4:43

that's weird. It is very odd. It does

4:45

not last. But this is a period of

4:47

time early in the fascist So also,

4:50

every black person's grandma made them drink

4:53

castor oil at some point. Sucks

4:56

one of those you know that,

4:59

you know that that image macro

5:01

from from the movie Predator where uh

5:03

those two guys are shaking hands and meeting

5:06

in the middle. Yeah, Italian

5:09

fascists and black grandma's

5:12

feeding people castor oil. Yes, dang

5:17

it. Grandma's stomach was just

5:19

just give me. Look, it had been fine. Just let me

5:21

drink some water. God drink this cast or. Can't

5:24

tell her no either, tell the black woman

5:27

no, I dare you. And they were, you know, the Italians

5:29

were giving people much larger like it killed

5:31

people sometimes. Yeah, other

5:34

Phalangists leaders were happier to endorse

5:36

physical violence than Jose Antonio was. But

5:38

for a little while. Initially, a number of them

5:40

kind of felt like it was good to have some of their

5:42

members gutted down by the left. When

5:45

one Phalangist was killed in the movement's first

5:47

street fight, it was thought that the brawl had been a

5:49

successful baptism of fire. Basically,

5:52

we're trying to ramp these people up to violence,

5:54

so it's good that we're like this. It's

5:56

positive for us that we're being tested with like

5:58

deadly force. Um. This was some

6:01

people's attitude initially, but the deaths kept

6:03

coming, and for a while they were entirely caused

6:05

by leftists. Most of this

6:07

violence occurred between nineteen thirty four and nineteen

6:10

thirty six, during a period of escalating political

6:12

violence that historians call the militarization

6:15

of politics during the Second Republic. And

6:18

when you're talking about at least the violence that was between

6:20

fascists and the left, it was pretty one sided

6:22

for a while. While fascists being

6:24

fascists always talked about violence,

6:26

Jose Antonio particularly resisted

6:29

putting the party on a militant footing. Now,

6:32

this was unpopular within the movement, and

6:34

one internal meeting, Jose Antonio expressed

6:36

his desire to engage the left in the

6:38

dialectic of fists and pistols.

6:41

But he was kind of being more metaphorical than anything

6:43

right, like we're gonna have like the verbal equivalent

6:45

of war, and he was kind of himing

6:47

and hawing around because he wasn't really willing to

6:50

commit fully at this point. Meanwhile,

6:52

one of his colleagues in the same meeting expressed

6:54

a desire to treat leftists as enemies

6:56

in a state of war. Now,

6:58

there were discussions with the party of overthrowing

7:01

Jose Antonio and replacing him with a more violent

7:03

fascist because he just wasn't willing to kill

7:05

fast enough um and these

7:07

suggestions were shot down because they couldn't

7:09

really exist without him. At this point. The police

7:12

kept shutting down their party offices, so the

7:14

only place they could gather was Jose Antonio's

7:16

law offices. He was also like the one who

7:18

had money, um and so they couldn't

7:21

A lot of people were angry at him, but they couldn't really

7:23

exist without him. Um on

7:25

A Simo Redondo, who was another phalangeious

7:27

leader uh and probably the one who urged violence

7:30

most openly around the same time,

7:32

was very willing to kind of go against

7:34

Jose Antonio and say people like we should

7:37

be we should be ready to kill people

7:39

in the streets. In December of nineteen thirty three,

7:41

he promised his followers a situation

7:43

of absolute violences approaching. And I'm

7:45

gonna quote now from a speech he gave to Phalangeist

7:48

youth, young workers, young Spaniards.

7:50

Prepare your weapons, get used to the crack of

7:52

the pistol. Caress your dagger. Be

7:55

inseparable from your vindictive club.

7:57

Young people must be trained in physical combat,

8:00

must love violence as a system, must

8:02

arm themselves with whatever they can, and must be

8:04

prepared to finish off by whatever means. A few

8:07

dozen Marxist impostors. There's

8:10

a lot that's in there. Yeah, I'm really

8:12

And when he's saying there, when he especially when he says they

8:14

must love violence as a system, he's kind

8:16

of yeah, spanishifying

8:19

the concept the Italians had and

8:21

that the Germans developed of like the cult

8:23

of action for action's sake, the

8:25

almost this almost worship of violence as an

8:28

an end in and of itself. Um,

8:30

you're seeing that start to percolate

8:32

into Spanish fascist culture in

8:35

this period. Now more

8:37

than a dozen Phalangists and other fascists were

8:39

killed by anarchists and communists before

8:41

the fascist right properly organized

8:43

itself for violence, but organized themselves for

8:45

violence they did, and I'm gonna quote now from

8:47

the book Fascism in Spain. The

8:49

point of inflection in the political violence took

8:51

place on Sunday, June tenth. The

8:54

Chibberries of the Young Socialists had

8:56

been prohibited by authorities from marching in the

8:58

streets of Madrid, but during the warm weather organized

9:01

regular weekend outings to the Casa de Campo

9:03

recreation area on the west side of Madrid.

9:06

On the tenth a group of Phalangists intercepted

9:08

them, and the usual fight took place. An eighteen

9:10

year old Phalangists, Juan Queler, son

9:12

of a police inspector, was killed and his corpse

9:15

was subsequently mutilated, his head apparently

9:17

crushed with rocks. One of Ansaldo's

9:19

squads was quick to respond, allegedly

9:21

without obtaining approval from the tree embers who

9:24

directed the party. The Fascist Party later

9:26

that evening, as a bus transporting the Young Socialist

9:28

excursionists unloaded some of them in Madrid,

9:30

a car full of Phalangist Pistolero's personally

9:33

led by Ensaldo, who's a fascist militant,

9:35

was waiting. It slowly passed the young

9:37

couple on the sidewalk, spraying them with bullets.

9:39

A twenty year old shop clerk, Juanito Rico,

9:42

was killed. The Phalangists claimed she had been

9:44

involved in desecrating the corpse. Her twenty

9:46

one year old brother was left permanently disabled

9:48

and several others were wounded. Four days

9:50

earlier, a Phalangist smallholder in

9:53

Torre perogl Jane Province had

9:55

been killed during a farm workers strike. So that Queller

9:57

was the fifteenth or sixteenth John Cisto or

9:59

Phale and just killed since the John ceased

10:01

to teenager had been slain by assault guards, which

10:04

are like socialist militants, and uh

10:06

May of nineteen thirty two, all the others

10:09

had been killed by the left. Though numerous

10:11

leftists had been injured by philogists and street

10:13

of phrase and university assaults, Rico was

10:15

the first leftist fatality at their hands

10:17

for years. She would be commemorated as the first

10:19

victim of fascism in Spain. So

10:23

that's really the start of Yeah,

10:25

yeah, there's so much there, man, Like, first

10:28

of all, I'm still dangling

10:30

at the phrase dialectic of fists

10:32

and pencils. I'm like, that's that's

10:35

raptists and pistols. Yeah and

10:38

pencils. No, no, fist dialectic

10:40

a fist like a conversation that involves

10:43

yeah, yeah, yeah, no I I actually yeah,

10:45

yours is better. Yeah. I was like yeah,

10:49

I was like yo, those are bars man, Okay.

10:53

And then also, you

10:55

know, there's

10:59

there's a part of you

11:02

know, and then it's

11:04

a strange like survival tactic

11:07

or just just a byproduct

11:10

of like just

11:12

being around like inner city just

11:15

kind of like gang violence that like you

11:19

the desensitization of it, like where you're

11:21

just like, you know, people die daily,

11:23

you know what I'm saying, Like you just kind of like get

11:25

used to and used

11:27

to such a bad word to explain what I'm trying to say.

11:29

But no, no, you, but you get it. It's

11:32

like violence is just a part of life

11:35

and and it but it's

11:37

still like even knowing that, you

11:39

know, I'm an adult, you know, and I'm moved out, we you

11:42

know, done so many different things now and it's not like I still don't

11:44

live in an active community. But like, um,

11:47

at the same time, though, like

11:50

you know, like I was crazy,

11:53

Like, okay, so that shooting, the

11:56

shooting at that walmart in Texas, Uh

12:00

yeah, yeah,

12:02

the A Chance shooting. Yeah, Like I

12:05

watched the video of

12:07

like a cell phone video of like you

12:09

know, like a hood dude that was at

12:11

the walmart that I when the shooting started,

12:13

he was just like that, that's crazy fool shooting. We

12:16

probably better slide out. How calm he was

12:19

is because of how we grew

12:21

up, you know what I'm saying. So you're just like somebody

12:23

got a tech. That's a tech. I know what that

12:25

is. You know what I'm saying. And it's like it's

12:28

so weird. It's

12:31

just a weird thing. So we So when I

12:33

hear this, when I hear y'all talk, when

12:35

you know, we talk about this like moment

12:37

of this like political upheaval, there's

12:40

still part of me that goes, but

12:43

I still don't understand why you're killing

12:46

each other, you know what I'm saying. And

12:48

then and then the idea of how I

12:52

gave that whole preference to say, it's

12:54

still jolting

12:57

to hear the

13:00

type of like mutilation now he has

13:02

with a rock. And then like like got

13:04

dog, like you know, you know, I like

13:08

crazy, you gotta be to blunt force

13:10

trauma killer person like that's

13:13

it's just I don't

13:15

know anyway, it's just going

13:18

on here. I think you're It's very important

13:21

to point out the desensitization that occurs

13:23

during this that that's why the phrase is

13:25

used that like um

13:28

um, the militarization of politics.

13:30

It's a process that starts in thirty one

13:33

and doesn't really reach its apothesis

13:35

until ninety six when the Civil War

13:37

starts. But it's a process of getting people

13:39

ready to that of escalating street violence.

13:42

And you see that just within the Fascist party, where

13:44

initially the fascists are willing to fight.

13:46

There's brawls in the street from day one, right as

13:48

soon as there's fascists, before the John

13:51

Z Eastas merge with UM with Jose

13:53

Antonio's group, there's street fighting and

13:55

stuff. But it when the killing

13:58

starts, a lot of these fascists because

14:00

these are not and and again we get to the civil

14:02

war, a significant chunk of the fascist military

14:04

are combat veterans, and and

14:06

these are the guys who come up from Africa. Um.

14:09

But these these dudes who are actually in Iberia,

14:12

they don't have experience killing people, not

14:14

not by and large, and it takes number

14:16

one, it takes time of some of them being

14:19

killed before they really start responding

14:21

with deadly violence as a matter of course.

14:23

And once you have that on both sides, once you

14:26

have anarchists and communists and

14:28

and other kinds of like left socialists killing

14:30

fascists in the streets and fascists committing

14:32

murder right back and vice versa,

14:35

then you have this. It starts to

14:37

ramp up the whole kind of level of comfort

14:39

with deadly violence in society up

14:41

to a level that you can have the

14:43

kind of war that we're about to talk about it. But

14:45

you're right, it is a process um and

14:48

I think in terms of like how people would justify

14:50

like bashing the kid's head in with Iraq and desecrating

14:53

his corpse, It's less about

14:55

that guy. It's not that individual

14:57

dude. They were probably angry, but they're looking at what's

14:59

happening in Spain and in Germany and

15:01

what fashion the concentration camps that have

15:03

already been set up, the mass executions

15:06

of leftists in Italy and in Germany, the

15:08

thousands who are already dead, and they're going the

15:10

only way to stop that here is to kill as many

15:13

of And and you can argue that was that

15:15

that was the wrong tact. Take that.

15:17

You could argue that you could argue that it actually

15:20

raised the level of violence to a point where you were

15:22

able to have this open conflict that the left

15:24

doesn't win. But at

15:26

the time, all they know is they see what's

15:28

happening in Germany and in Italy, and they think, I

15:31

don't know what else to do but be violent,

15:33

you know, and I yeah, it's

15:35

it's fucked like the whole situation. But yeah,

15:37

it's like, yeah, that's the thing where you're like, okay,

15:40

they you know, the streets that

15:42

that's like, you know, they take one, we take four

15:45

exactly one of ours. We kill for yours,

15:48

you know. And and it's supposed to be the

15:51

turrent. And that means like, okay,

15:53

so I'm saying this to say, don't

15:55

kill ours. Yeah, and you call it, I

15:57

mean, it is street ship. But it's also like U

15:59

S military policy and massive retaliation,

16:02

right, And this is what yes, speaking of

16:04

us in speaking of

16:06

like US history, recent

16:08

history and the history of like terrorism on the right. Tim

16:11

McVeigh when he blew up the Murra Building

16:13

was very consciously being like, this

16:15

is the kind of reaction. Uh, this

16:18

is like I am attacking the government because

16:20

they killed all these people in Waco, and

16:22

I learned that this is an acceptable His

16:25

argument was, I learned this was an acceptable way

16:27

to respond to violence because that's how the military

16:29

trained me. Right. You can quibble with how

16:31

honest McVeigh was being there, but like hard

16:34

not to see some through lines. You know, you look at the

16:36

first Iraq War or the more reason like, right, it's

16:38

it is the way everything works, right,

16:41

yeah, how how the idea of how the idea

16:43

of Pearl Harbor, Yeah is equivalent

16:45

to rosiuma yeah right,

16:49

yeah, well you take out a base, we take out an

16:51

island. Yeah, it's like yeah

16:54

yeah, and collective punishment. There's

16:57

a lot to say about all of that. We need to move on to the

16:59

rest. T Yeah, this because I'm pretty

17:01

sure you wrote seventy yeah,

17:03

more or less. Now, while all of this was

17:05

happening, while the Philangists were starting

17:07

to commit murder and stuff, and and the street

17:10

fighting between left and right is escalating

17:12

in Spain, well, all this is happening on the ground,

17:14

the political situation and like the actual

17:17

like elected politics and stuff, is continuing

17:19

to unravel, and this is due in large

17:21

part to the fact that the Africanistas, who were

17:23

again the members of the Spanish military who had

17:25

fought in Morocco, were increasingly

17:28

frustrated with the Republic in nineteen

17:30

thirty two, So just like a year after the Republic

17:32

starts, one general, a guy named san Juro,

17:35

launches a coup that fails. But rather

17:37

than wonder if the African Eestas weren't a problem

17:39

and a threat to democracy, the government

17:41

brought in Franco and his foreign legion to

17:44

massacre anarchists and communists during their

17:46

nineteen thirty four uprising, where the foreign

17:48

legion executes more than a thousand people. Um.

17:52

So, the Republic knows that the

17:54

military these African veterans

17:56

are a problem and also uses them to crush

17:58

the left when the left rises up because

18:01

you know, governments generally smart.

18:04

Um So a gap begins to form

18:06

during the Republican period between the

18:08

the the the junta's officers

18:11

and the Peninsula who supported the Republic,

18:13

and the African and Eistas who the Junta is called stormtroopers.

18:16

Um. Now, by nineteen thirty six,

18:19

the political situation, which had simmered for

18:21

years, broke out into an open boil.

18:23

The explanation as to why starts with

18:25

the Popular Front. In nineteen thirty

18:27

four, the USSR announced that given the

18:30

worldwide advance of fascism, it was now acceptable

18:32

for good communists to make political alliances

18:35

with other left wing groups. This included

18:37

both moderate liberals and people like anarchists

18:39

and even in some cases like Trotskyists, which

18:42

communists trot Skits are communists too.

18:44

They don't like each other, right, Um,

18:46

and this is this is a real big change. And we

18:48

talked about in our in our the

18:51

non Nazi bastards who made Hitler. One of the reasons

18:53

why the left failed to stop the

18:56

Nazis is that the Communist

18:58

Party in Germany, which you know, generally

19:00

under orders from Moscow UH

19:03

called the Social Democrats social fascists.

19:05

And I'll admit right now we weren't entirely

19:07

fair to the Communists in that episode. The Social

19:10

Democrats did some really fucked up stuff to the Communists

19:12

that we will talk about later in this very series.

19:15

Um, they had good reasons to distrust the Social

19:17

Democrats, that said, the failure to work

19:19

with them to stop Hitler was very clearly

19:21

a mistake. Like, and

19:24

the USSR admits them is like, you know what, maybe

19:27

maybe it's necessary in countries facing fascism

19:29

for there to be for for us to allow communists

19:32

are kind of communists at least to have a broad popular

19:35

front with other people in the left. UM.

19:37

And this is a very successful idea politically.

19:40

UM. And in fact, there was also a Popular Front

19:42

in France that that succeeded in pushing

19:44

some major reforms, and we will talk about that later

19:46

too. The tactic worked very well

19:49

politically electorally in Spain. The

19:51

Popular Front swept the nineteen thirty

19:53

six elections UM, but in a way that

19:56

will be familiar to everyone listening. They

19:58

did so in a way that enraged the right wing,

20:00

and it's not hard to see why

20:03

the right felt like they've been cheated. Right

20:05

Wing parties pulled four million, five hundred

20:07

and five thousand, five hundred and twenty four votes

20:09

and gained a hundred and twenty four seats in

20:11

the ninety six election. Now, the Popular

20:14

Front only got about a hundred and sixty thousand

20:16

more votes, but they gained two hundred

20:18

and seventy eight seats, So they get a hundred

20:21

and sixty thousand more votes in an election with nine

20:23

or ten million votes twice as many

20:25

seats. You can see why people on the right would be like

20:27

kind of piste about this. Right. Um,

20:29

and there may have been cheating. I don't really know, like it's

20:31

I'm not going to get into whether or not there was cheating.

20:34

What's important is that the right felt that they had been cheated,

20:36

right. That's what actually matters, as opposed

20:38

to whether or not there was um any

20:41

kind of electoral malfeasance. Um.

20:43

And of course the c e d A, that Catholic

20:45

kind of right wing party that's the dominant right

20:47

wing party, and the Phalangists the fascists

20:50

absolutely would have cheated themselves in this election

20:52

and they actually they probably did. Um.

20:55

And as a matter of fact, when Roblez, the head of the c

20:57

e d A, realized that he wasn't going

20:59

to be a winted prime minister after the nineteen

21:01

thirty six election, he started negotiating

21:03

with Africans to generals to try to convince them

21:06

to do a coup, to force it, like, to put

21:08

him into power um as a dictator

21:10

basically uh. And he failed, but there

21:12

was a lot of sympathy for the ideal. While

21:14

the left looked at the Phalanges and the C. E. D A

21:17

and saw Hitler and Mussolini, the right looked

21:19

at the Popular Front and saw it as the inevitable

21:21

prelude to Soviet style state communism.

21:24

Uh and I'm going to quote from a write up in lumen dot

21:27

UK right now. When

21:30

this coalition came to power, popular unrest

21:32

in the countryside exploded into land seizures,

21:34

encouraged by radical anarchists. So as soon

21:36

as like the Popular Front wins the election, the anarchists

21:39

are like, we're we're going to do our thing now,

21:41

like it's time to it's time to take power for the

21:43

people. There was little attempt by the anarchists

21:45

to moderate their behavior and no demands

21:47

to allow the Popular Front to reassure moderate

21:49

elements. In Spain, a C and T, which

21:52

is an anarchist party conference held in May nineteen

21:54

thirty six, was full of revolutionary language.

21:57

It seemed that the New Republic had not been able to

21:59

control the major revolutionary group. The

22:01

murder of a former finance minister, Jose

22:03

Calvo Sotelo, on thirteenth July nineteen

22:06

thirty six was the trigger for the war, and

22:08

much the same way as the assassination of Archduke

22:10

Franz Ferdinand had sparked the First World War.

22:12

Sotelo had been an exile from nineteen thirty

22:14

one to thirty four, but had returned to become a leading

22:17

right wing figure associated with the

22:19

Spanish Fascists and a deputy

22:21

for the Spanish Revival Group.

22:23

He clashed with the socialists and the Assembly and was

22:25

murdered by left wing members of the Civil Guard.

22:28

So you have a couple of things happened. The Popular Front wins

22:30

election, the anarchists just start seizing

22:32

the ship out of land and saying, like the revolution, We're

22:34

doing a revolution. Um,

22:37

it's happening. And at the same time, another

22:39

left wing group of left wing people murders

22:41

a popular right wing politician. Um.

22:44

So this all kind of snowballs

22:47

into the start of the Civil War, you

22:49

know, Uh Okay, Now,

22:51

when the c e d A lost the election,

22:54

that was kind of it for them. Um, and

22:56

most of the party, like after failing

22:58

to win in thirty six, just kind of gets

23:01

fully on board with authoritarianism. One

23:03

scholar writes that everyone got the message

23:05

to quote abandon the ballot box and

23:07

take up arms. The c E d

23:10

AS youth movement collapses. Yeah,

23:12

yeah, that's so like the

23:14

the Young Republicans. Basically they collapse

23:16

overnight and they all joined the Falange.

23:19

So all of the young like conservatives

23:21

who had been in the c E d A and trying to get

23:23

out the vote, immediately joined the

23:25

Fascist Party and start picking up guns. Um,

23:28

and street fighting and political murders reach

23:30

a fever pitch in this in this period. Now,

23:33

the quote I read earlier mentioned land seizures

23:35

by the CNT and other groups of anarchists

23:38

um, And it's actually true that in the trade unions

23:40

major strongholds, the areas where the anarchists

23:43

the Anarchist Trade Union was most powerful Barcelona,

23:45

Zaragosa and Seville, there was actually

23:48

very little in the way of like strikes or mass

23:50

demonstrations in the lead up to the war. The

23:52

CNT tried to keep their people kind

23:54

of calm um. But there are a

23:56

lot of their anarchists, right, A lot of them aren't

23:58

part of the CNT, and a bunch of them

24:00

and a bunch of socialists occupy land

24:03

in battle Yaws which took over seventh

24:05

and like this land occupation. I mentioned

24:07

at the start of the Republic that they took about ten

24:09

percent of the undeveloped land and gave it to peasants.

24:12

This occupation of land in battle Yaws

24:15

takes seven times that much land and starts

24:17

redistributing it to like peasants um.

24:20

And this fucking terrifies the rich people

24:22

in Spain. If you've at

24:24

this point, the anarchists have fucked with the money, right,

24:26

I've talked about about the money, funked up

24:28

the money. I talked about how like Trump

24:31

a big part of why on the day

24:33

on the six, like all these fucking banks

24:35

started coming out of like Chase Bank and Chevron

24:37

or like yeah, like condemning President Trumble

24:40

because with the money, you can't suck up the money.

24:42

Dot can't suck up the money. And of course

24:44

anarchists are all about like they want to funk

24:46

up the point, which is one of the things I like

24:48

about them, not saying that's wrong, but they funk

24:50

up the money, and that that gets a lot

24:53

of the a lot of rich people, a lot of like

24:55

the Spanish kind of like ruling class

24:57

on board some sort of revolution

25:00

and against the left. Now in

25:02

Spain. The seizure of about yas convinces

25:06

a lot of these like rich people that the government can't

25:08

guarantee stability anymore. So while

25:10

past coup attempts by generals had generally

25:12

folded due to a lack of support from the dominant

25:14

classes who didn't want to see a coup right, they didn't

25:16

like the left, but I don't want to have like a coup

25:18

again, by nineteen thirty

25:20

six, a lot more of those folks are like, you know what,

25:23

it's either a coup or we don't get to be rich

25:25

people anymore. And they do what rich

25:27

people do. Who it is, who it

25:30

is. So the government

25:32

had known that the African EASTA generals

25:34

weren't super trustworthy, which is why they tried

25:36

to post the ring leaders, General Franco and a

25:38

guy named General Mola to the Canary Islands

25:41

and Pamplona, respectively, right keep them out

25:43

of the center of ship. But these guys were

25:45

still collaborating with a codra of other officers,

25:47

and on July seventeenth, under orders from

25:50

Franco, troops and Morocco rebelled

25:52

and obviously the foreign legion are

25:54

kind of like the core of this over the

25:56

next three days, military units and commanders

25:59

all over Spain rose up against the legitimate

26:01

government, and the hope from Franco and

26:03

his fellows had been that they would swiftly take control

26:05

of major cities, jail their political opponents,

26:07

and install a dictator like they've done with de

26:10

Rivera, not all that long ago, right, Vera

26:12

comes to power like a decade or so earlier.

26:14

So they were hoping it would follow that

26:17

trend. But the left was way more organized

26:19

now and it did not work out that way. And I'm

26:22

gonna quote now from a write up in the New Left Review.

26:25

Confidence in a rapid rebel victory was quickly

26:27

dispelled when the insurrection in most major

26:29

cities, notably Madrid and Barcelona, was

26:32

crushed in the streets by a combination of loyal

26:34

security forces and political and trade union

26:36

militants. Where this combination failed

26:38

or the security forces went over to the rebels,

26:41

the rising was almost immediately successful,

26:43

as in Seville and Saragosa. The fact

26:45

that less than half the army and security forces

26:47

united behind the rebellion was the principal reason

26:49

why the coup failed in its principal objective

26:51

and turned into a civil war. Now

26:53

that's not the unified opinion

26:56

on things, right, the idea that yeah,

26:59

they're they're significan a debate over why

27:01

the coup failed, right, because who does fail?

27:03

Right? The speciest win in the end, but they don't get they

27:05

don't succeed by coup. They have to fight a war, and

27:08

a lot of scholars will actually argue A lot

27:10

of them will argue that, well, it was the security

27:13

because most of the security forces didn't

27:16

go with the rebels. That's why the rebels

27:18

didn't win immediately. A lot of scholars

27:20

will also argue that actually the bulk

27:22

of the credit for halting rebel victory goes

27:25

to local militias, which are kind of spontaneously

27:27

organized just because a bunch

27:29

of people started picking up guns. The argument

27:32

is that in the wake of the coup, the Spanish military

27:34

and the Republican government lost basically

27:37

all cohesion incredibility, which they

27:39

did, right, Like half of your military

27:41

like decides to overthrow the government. Not

27:43

a lot of people had to have faith in the government and

27:47

the arrest of all can stop these people from taking

27:49

my land from me? Yeah, like y'all.

27:51

And the reason that Franco and his allies

27:54

these scholars who will kind of take

27:56

this out of it argue that the reason Frankoin his allies

27:58

didn't win immediately that hundreds of

28:00

thousands of civilians took to the streets and these

28:03

is a general rule in the early days, these

28:05

citizens militias. Um. These people

28:07

were just like picking up their grandpa's hunting rifle or

28:09

in a lot of cases, looting sporting goods stores,

28:12

like busting like busting into like a fucking

28:14

a sportsman warehouse and just taking all the guns.

28:17

Okay, like we need guns, these

28:19

guys have them, let's grab them. Um. And

28:21

you know there's later too, there's looting off like

28:24

military barracks is. But like, yeah, they just

28:26

get whatever guns they fucking can and they

28:28

start fighting the Africanistas,

28:30

who are at that point very

28:32

experienced, disciplined and well equipped

28:35

veterans. UM. So it's

28:37

like this mix if you've got hundreds of thousands of

28:39

men and women, because women are a part of the fighting

28:41

forces briefly in this period, just picking

28:44

up whatever guns they can get and going to

28:46

war against one of the most veteran military

28:48

units in all of Europe. Um

28:50

in his nineteen eight six essay on the matter, Morae.

28:53

Book Chin writes quote to have

28:55

stopped Franco's Army of Africa, composed

28:57

of foreign legionnaires and Moorish mercenary

29:00

perhaps the bloodthirsty ist and certainly

29:02

one of the most professionalized troops at the disposal

29:05

of any European nation at the time, and it's

29:07

well trained civil guards and political auxiliaries

29:09

would have been nothing less than miraculous once

29:11

it established a strong base on the Spanish

29:13

mainland. That hastily formed untrained

29:16

and virtually unequipped militiamen and women

29:18

slowed Franco's army's advance on Madrid

29:20

for four months and essentially stopped it on

29:22

the outskirts of the capitol, is a feat for

29:24

which they have rarely earned the proper tribute

29:27

from writers on the civil war of the past century.

29:30

Wow. Yeah, yeah, just everyone

29:33

picking up their guns and being like fuck these guys,

29:36

right, yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

29:38

yeah. I think there's like this, you

29:41

know, um

29:44

yeah. The miracle that they was actually

29:46

able to stop this fool or

29:49

these dudes is like yeah,

29:51

it's I mean, obviously ultimately they don't, but like

29:53

that, I think about like

29:57

what we used to call like like dad

29:59

strong, you know, like you

30:02

just you're you don't you know, your

30:04

dad's strong, but you don't, like you don't really

30:06

believe it, you know what I'm saying. And then you're like, then

30:08

you're sixteen and you want to like throw hands

30:10

with him, you know what I'm saying, and

30:12

then he just lays you out

30:15

flat, you know what I mean. You're like, I don't

30:17

I I didn't expect you to

30:19

be this strong, you know that? To

30:21

me sometimes it's like I feel like that with

30:24

like military dudes that are like super trained,

30:26

where it's like you think,

30:28

you think you can take them, and then

30:31

you're like, oh, yeah, no, you're actually trained.

30:33

This is not a game. So

30:35

so knowing that, but

30:38

then the fact that just the

30:41

that these just untrained militias

30:43

were still able to like, yeah,

30:46

pull this off, you know, in four months

30:48

of brutal fighting. Yeah, and they

30:50

lose a funk load of thousands

30:53

like and it and it is. It is a very

30:55

lopsided kill ratio at this point, right

30:58

because you're you are these are some

31:00

of the most veteran military units in all of Europe,

31:02

right um, going up

31:04

against like fucking grandpa

31:07

and grandma with hunting rifles

31:09

right, Yeah, it's it's ugly.

31:11

It is ugly, but they they slow,

31:14

They stopped Franco from winning in the thirties

31:16

six, you know, and there seems

31:18

to be very little debate about that that they were

31:20

Some people argue how critical, but they were critical

31:23

in stopping the nationalists,

31:25

which is what the other thing. The rebels are called

31:27

at the gates of Madrid, and they're not the only

31:30

ones. We'll talk a little bit about the We're gonna talk about

31:32

the international brigades in a second, Um,

31:34

but first you have to take an ad break,

31:36

sir. You know who else would

31:38

have stopped Franco at the Gates of Madrid, Sophie.

31:42

Yeah, Sophie would have. Um, Sophie

31:44

would have backed by the

31:46

militant products and services that support

31:49

this podcast, Yes, including

31:51

Sportsman's warehouse where you two can steal

31:53

guns to fight the fat Well now, okay,

31:56

maybe not not. I might be the wisest.

31:58

Okay,

32:08

we're back back and for a

32:10

brief time in nineteen thirty six, the

32:12

Spanish Republican military was vastly

32:15

dominated by, as opposed to like a kind

32:17

of traditional military, a dizzying

32:19

array of independent, interlocking, and largely

32:22

democratic militias. Most of the militias

32:24

are either anarchist or trotskyist,

32:26

So there's the the c n T and the p o

32:28

u M, and then there's groups that aren't a part of those, but like

32:30

a lot, largely they're either anarchist or kind of trotskyist,

32:33

and both are heavily democratic. So

32:35

men and women take up arms together, they vote

32:37

for their leaders, so their officers are elected

32:39

in recallable um

32:42

and yeah, it's it's it is.

32:44

You know, there's critiques to make up the system. We'll

32:46

talk about that a bit, but that's what

32:48

the military is at this point in nineteen thirty

32:50

six. It's largely just a funkload of these militias

32:53

because the actual military is not

32:55

in a good way, you know, very chaotic

32:58

and and disorganized itself. And in a lot of cases,

33:00

because of the fact that a lot

33:02

of the military had rebelled, soldiers will

33:04

leave their units and join militias.

33:06

So it's a very complicated Please

33:09

do not take this as a comprehensive or

33:11

particularly in depth explanation of

33:13

what happens with the Spanish militia

33:16

system in the Republican like. It is incredibly

33:18

complicated. This is an overview. This

33:20

is all an overview. The Spanish Civil War

33:22

is is very very complex.

33:25

Um so, yeah. And

33:27

while this is happening, while while all these democratic

33:30

militias are rising up to fight the fascists

33:32

in the countryside, behind the lines and

33:34

sometimes right up to the lines, something equally

33:36

interesting is happening. I'm gonna quote Moray Bookchin's

33:39

article here again. The wave

33:41

of collectivizations that swept over Spain

33:43

in the summer and autumn of nineteen thirty six

33:45

has been described in a recent BBC Granada

33:47

documentary as the greatest experiment

33:50

and workers self management. Western Europe

33:52

has ever seen a revolution more far

33:54

reaching than any which occurred in Russia during nineteen

33:56

seventeen to twenty one and the years before and

33:58

after it an anarchist industrial areas

34:01

like Catalonia and estimated three quarters

34:03

of the economy was placed under workers

34:05

control as it was an anarchist

34:07

rural areas like Aragon. The

34:09

figure of tapers downward, where the U G T, which

34:12

is another group shared power with the C and T or

34:14

else predominated fifty and anarchist

34:16

and socialist Valencia and thirty in socialist

34:19

and liberal Madrid and more thoroughly anarchist

34:21

areas, particularly among the agrarian collectives.

34:24

Money was eliminated and the material means

34:26

of life were allocated strictly according to need

34:28

rather than work, following the traditional concepts

34:30

of a libertarian communist society.

34:33

As the BBC Granada television documentary

34:35

puts it, the ancient dream of a collective society

34:37

without profit or property was made reality.

34:39

In the villages of Aragon, all forms

34:42

of production were owned by the community, run

34:44

by their workers. And again, as

34:46

books to notes, this is not you know, this is different

34:48

everywhere that in Republican Spain. But

34:51

in Catalonia, which has a lot of industrial

34:53

areas, three quarters of the industrial economy

34:55

is directly controlled by the workers

34:58

manning these factories as opposed to them

35:00

like even having elected bosses and stuff.

35:03

Um, which is really interesting. Um,

35:05

it's it's something that doesn't happen. Yeah,

35:10

Like how long was it like kind of working.

35:15

There's debate as to how long it worked,

35:17

but a couple of ye generally

35:19

speaking, a year or two. You know, It's it's different

35:22

in different regions. We're going to talk about what

35:24

happens there. Um. Bookshon continues,

35:27

the administrative apparatus of Republican

35:29

Spain belonged almost entirely to the unions

35:31

and their political organizations. Police

35:33

in many cities were replaced by armed workers

35:35

patrols. Militia units were formed

35:37

everywhere in factories, on farms, and in socialist

35:40

and anarchist community centers and union halls,

35:42

initially including women as well as men.

35:45

A vast network of local revolutionary committees

35:47

coordinated the feeding of the cities, the operations

35:49

of the economy, and the meeting out of justice. Indeed,

35:52

almost every facet of Spanish life, from production

35:54

to culture, bringing the whole of Spanish society

35:56

and the Republican zone into a well organized

35:59

and coherent whole. This historically unprecedented

36:01

appropriation of society by its most oppressed

36:04

sectors, including women, who were liberated

36:06

from all the constraints of a highly traditional Catholic

36:08

country, be it the prohibition of abortion

36:11

and divorce, or a degraded status in the economy,

36:13

was the work of the Spanish proletariat and peasantry.

36:16

It was a movement from below that overwhelmed

36:19

even the revolutionary organizations of the

36:21

impressed, including the C and T. Significantly,

36:24

no left organization issued calls

36:26

for revolutionary takeovers of factories,

36:29

workplaces or the land, observes Ronald

36:31

Fraser and one of the most up to date accounts of the

36:33

popular movement. Indeed, the C

36:35

and T leadership in Barcelona, epicenter

36:37

of urban anarcho syndicalism, went further

36:40

rejecting the offer of power presented to

36:42

it by President Companies, the head of the Catalan

36:44

government. It decided that the libertarian

36:46

revolution must stand aside for collaboration

36:49

with the Popular Front forces to defeat the common

36:51

enemy. The revolution that transformed Barcelona

36:54

in a matter of days into a city virtually run

36:56

by the working class sprang initially

36:58

from individual C and T Union impelled

37:00

by their most advanced militants, and as their

37:02

example spread, it was not only large enterprises,

37:05

but small workshops and businesses that were being taken

37:07

over. So what Bookstion is saying there is

37:10

this is a true bottom up revolution. And

37:12

even in some cases this the anarchist trade

37:15

union is like, don't do this, we need to work with

37:17

the government. We're not calling for revolution,

37:19

and the individual groups of workers are like, no, we're

37:21

just going to take over our office. We're just taking

37:24

over. That's fine, it's fine.

37:26

That's fine, um, And it

37:28

proves to be a mixed bag, like we'll we'll talk

37:30

about this. There's fair critiques about what happens,

37:32

but it is amazing and unprecedented and

37:35

one of the great what ifs of histories. If there had

37:37

not also been this massive civil war and this

37:39

fascist invasion, might it have worked?

37:41

You know? And they're under a

37:44

pressure that is kind of impossible to overcome

37:46

in this invasion. But it is an interesting

37:48

question what is Yeah, dude, what is strange?

37:51

Like it was strange because we've never seen

37:53

it, but like, yeah, what was that year?

37:55

Like you know what I'm saying, Like rates

37:57

were, like what was the I don't say

37:59

like petty crimes, you know what I'm saying. Like, one

38:02

of these days I will do because

38:05

I don't know nearly enough about this.

38:07

One of these days I would like to do like a

38:09

hardcore history link, like a twelve hour

38:11

deep dive into the Spanish Civil War where

38:13

it's mostly focused on like, yeah, what

38:15

what are these? Like what are these your place? The cops

38:18

with like citizens patrols? How did that actually work? What

38:20

was that? Like? What are what are what are kind of like the

38:22

first person accounts we can have of those. Um,

38:25

obviously we don't have the time

38:27

to go into that much detail today,

38:30

so but it's definitely like, yeah, that would

38:32

that would call for like a twelve hour Yes,

38:35

yes, it's a very complicated and this is just

38:37

I'm hoping what this mostly does is wet

38:39

people's appetite to read more themselves,

38:41

right, which I am also going to do. But it's

38:43

a very interesting period of history. Now,

38:46

obviously this system had a number of upsides,

38:48

if you want to call it a system. What happens in Spain

38:50

in this period has a number of upsides. That mobilizes

38:53

a huge portion of the republic citizenry

38:55

very quickly. Um, it brings

38:57

a people into arms very rapid

39:00

more rapidly probably than a central government could

39:02

have done. And these people were highly motivated

39:04

to resist fascism. But they also

39:07

in large part weren't motivated to live

39:09

under the republic, and coordination between

39:11

all of these groups was very difficult and sometimes

39:13

impossible. Meanwhile, the rebels

39:16

the nationalists had a strict military

39:18

hierarchy, and that's a benefit in a war

39:20

sometimes, right, it can also be you know, you

39:22

can you can look at the Germans in World War DWO. It doesn't

39:24

always work out. But when you've got one side

39:26

that's made up of a thousand different fractious people

39:29

who agree on some things and disagree on a lot,

39:31

that can deplete your ability

39:33

to counterattack and to organize effectively.

39:36

Meanwhile, Franco winds up,

39:38

and you know there's a process. He's not initially

39:40

the only guy, but eventually he's the only

39:43

dude whose opinion really matters. He's the guy at

39:45

the top um and and that

39:47

happens fairly quickly, and Franco is

39:49

able to coordinate a centralized

39:52

military in order to like like

39:55

attack this very decentralized folks.

39:59

Motherfucker. He's a sneaky

40:01

guy. There's also one of his fellow generals

40:03

dies in a plane crash, so some of it's just like dumb

40:05

lock um. Now,

40:07

since the c E d A had failed, that

40:10

he didn't he Franco didn't really want to like wrap

40:12

himself in the c E d a s flag because they've gotten

40:14

their asses kicked in the thirty six selection. And

40:16

he kind of winds up embracing the Phalangists.

40:18

And this is part of why people argue of Franco

40:20

himself was really a fascist. If he was just kind of

40:23

co opting fascism, I don't really see

40:25

the point in getting involved in that. Franco

40:27

gets in like wraps himself in the Phalange

40:30

Party and like like they become kind

40:32

of a dominant right wing force in this

40:34

in the nationalist cause. Now, Jose

40:36

Antonio, who had been the leader of the Phalangists,

40:39

had been arrested by the republic right at the start

40:41

of the rebellion, and he was almost immediately executed

40:43

for sedition even though he'd been incarcerated

40:46

when the rebellion cooked off. Like, if

40:48

you want to argue how just it was, he didn't really have

40:50

much to do with it. Um. But they kill him.

40:52

Um, And I'm not, I don't care he's a fascist.

40:54

Like, I'm not, I'm not gonna weep over him.

40:58

But Franco takes Jose

41:00

Antonio and turns him into a martyr right. Um.

41:03

And he also imprisons the guy who takes over the

41:05

Phalangists after Jose Antonio, so that

41:07

he can turn the Phalangists into his

41:09

own basically like cult of personality.

41:11

Yeah, exactly, um, And Franco

41:14

co opting the fascists had the side effect

41:16

of making this war, which had started as a

41:18

conflict between Spanish left and right and a conflict

41:21

between you know, the Africanist military

41:23

and and the Republic, into

41:25

the world's first open battle ground between

41:28

fascism and democracy. And

41:30

the first three months of the civil war were

41:32

some of the bloodiest. Both sides carried

41:34

out a horrific series of assassinations.

41:37

Is a very the the early period. There's

41:39

this amazing rising up of of the people

41:41

to defend themselves, and there's also a ton

41:43

of fucking vigilante murders, and it does occur

41:46

on both sides. It's really ugly. And I'm going to

41:48

read a quote from the New Left Review here. Even

41:51

so, there were significant differences between

41:53

the massacres on the left and the right. Many voices

41:55

unheard on the rebel side were raised in the Republican

41:58

zone against the slaughter. By early September,

42:00

a new government under Largo Caballero began

42:03

to create a semblance of public order, which slowly

42:05

put it into the killings there, but not soon enough.

42:08

News of the anti clerical violence, which included

42:10

the disinternament of nuns, coffins, widespread

42:12

burning of churches and desecration of religious

42:14

objects, was broadcast around the world,

42:17

creating extremely negative international

42:19

image of the Republican zone does not not good

42:22

optics yet. Yeah yeah, yeah, look

42:24

man, yeah, you messing with the nuns. Like

42:27

we all like, yeah that the

42:29

nuns are fine guys. Yeah, and we felt

42:31

earlier about how like you can you know, there's arguments

42:34

to be made about like obviously there's a lot of

42:36

problematic priests part, but disentering

42:38

nun's coffins, there's really not that

42:41

I know of. They're like, come on, okay, guys.

42:46

Yeah, and it it is bad

42:49

for the early rebel pr Now

42:52

on the rebel side, with occasional exception,

42:54

tight censorship kept the assassinations out

42:56

of the news. The Church, which would soon sanctify

42:59

the insurgents War a religious crusade,

43:01

turned a blind eye, though hundreds of clergy

43:03

were witnessed the oppression executed not only

43:05

by the military but by Philangists and normally

43:08

law abiding conservative Catholic citizens.

43:10

So, of course the church is both victim and

43:12

perpetrator and a lot of and the

43:14

death toll is much higher in terms of people

43:16

killed by the right than people killed by the left.

43:19

Um and again on in the Republic

43:21

there's outcries against the vigilante

43:24

violence, and on the right there's like, don't talk about it, keep killing

43:26

people, don't talk stop

43:28

just stop putting it on TV, like do

43:31

what you gotta do. But hey, yeah,

43:33

Now, on the Republican side, the two

43:35

largest left wing groups at the start of the war, because

43:38

the communists are very small at the start of the war. Again,

43:40

because Spain doesn't industrialize into

43:42

a lot later than a lot of the it doesn't

43:44

have a very powerful communist party at this period.

43:47

At the start of things, the two largest and

43:49

left wing groups are the anarchists and the Trotskyists,

43:52

and they were immediately torn between stopping

43:54

fascism at all costs and of course funk

43:57

the state right like there's

43:59

a there's this is a tough choice for them. Now.

44:01

The CNT, the largest anarchist organization,

44:03

lands on the side of allying with the state

44:06

to fight fascism, but many local

44:08

workers councils were not on board.

44:11

Now. While this is happening in the early part of the war,

44:13

the communists very quickly come to hold significant

44:15

power within the confusing and fractious

44:18

Republican military establishment. Now

44:20

and they grow rapidly at this period too,

44:22

and this is due to the pretty sensible

44:25

fact that the communists had a communist

44:27

state, the USSR, that they could

44:29

go to and beg for aid, right the

44:33

like the USSR is provides aid.

44:35

We'll talk about that a bit more to the Republicans.

44:37

And so the Communists very quickly gain a

44:39

lot of power within the military establishment of

44:41

the Republic. Now, unfortunately, the

44:43

fascists also had states they could go to for

44:45

help, Italy and Germany, and from the very beginning

44:48

of this war they're Italian and German troops

44:50

fighting on the ground alongside the

44:52

nationalist Spanish troops um

44:54

And unfortunately for everybody, the fascist

44:56

states were way more willing to provide direct

44:58

aid to their side than the Communists

45:01

were. I'm gonna quote again from the New Left Review

45:03

here. Without Fascist

45:05

aid, most of it provided on credit, the rebels

45:07

would not long have been able to continue the war,

45:09

let alone win it. Aside from the Nazis

45:11

condor legion, Germany and Italy together

45:13

provided tens of thousands of troops, mainly

45:15

Italian, nearly six hundred

45:18

war planes, thousands of armored vehicles,

45:20

and hundreds of field guns. Equally

45:22

important were the three point five million tons

45:24

of oil provided on credit by Texico

45:27

and Shell, double the amount imported

45:29

by the Republic, without which Franco's

45:31

army could not have maneuvered as rapidly as it did. So.

45:33

Yes, the victory of the fascists in

45:35

Spain is a

45:37

great deal to our good friends Texico and

45:39

Shell. O my Texico

45:42

and Shell. Should we back fascists

45:45

or not? Fashion fascists? Of course we're Texico.

45:47

Yeah. Yeah, Oh

45:49

my god. They don't talk about that no more.

45:52

No, let me tell you the last

45:54

two names. I thought

45:56

you was going to say right now, yeah, Texico

45:59

and Shell. Like I was like, wait, wait

46:01

what yah?

46:04

Yeah?

46:06

Uh So. Not wanting to provoke

46:08

Britain and France, with whom he was still seeking an

46:10

anti fascist alliance, Stalin initially

46:12

held back, but blatant Nazi and Fascist

46:15

intervention increasingly alarmed him, ensuring

46:17

that all European powers were made aware that Soviet

46:19

aid to the Republic was not in support of advancing

46:22

revolution. In October nineteen thirty

46:24

six, the first Soviet shipment of arms and the first

46:26

contingent of the International Brigades reached

46:28

Madrid and the nick of time to help prevent the capital's

46:31

fall and all the Soviet unions since seven

46:33

hundred war planes and four hundred armored vehicles,

46:35

plus some two thousand pilots, engineers,

46:37

military advisers, and in k v

46:39

D secret police. Now

46:42

there's a lot. We're going to talk a lot about criticisms

46:44

of Soviet AID and of Soviet policy in this and

46:46

there are a lot of valid ones to give. But it's

46:48

also worth noting that Soviet AID was absolutely

46:51

crucial in stopping Madrid from falling

46:53

when Franco made his first advance, right, the militias

46:55

slowed it down, but without this hard

46:57

core military equipment, they probably

47:00

don't stop Franco from taking Madrid in ninety

47:02

six. You know, I was

47:04

gonna say, like, uh,

47:08

that like tradition of like Communist

47:12

Russia AID,

47:16

I've been I've been thinking about that a little bit, Like

47:18

you know, I'm

47:21

I'm stretching this as far as this this idea

47:24

that like the way that they

47:27

exported AID in communists

47:29

like block countries like you know, at

47:32

the like there was once upon a time,

47:34

like North Korea was actually doing way better

47:36

than South Korea, you know, because of this Communists

47:39

AID. You know what I'm saying, a number of other reasons

47:41

to like the nature of the Japanese

47:43

invasion. But yeah, absolutely, you know.

47:45

And then when I think about like Cuba

47:49

and I got I got friends from

47:51

like you know, South Africa, Western

47:53

African countries, Zambia, all these

47:55

things, and they're like, yo, you could say whatever you

47:57

want. They're like every

48:00

every every nation in Africa got

48:02

a Cuban doctor. You know what I'm

48:04

saying. It just this idea that like it

48:08

was like it's just like when you the

48:10

more I traveled, the more I started going day,

48:12

maybe they just think about aid and

48:15

they this is Understaalin.

48:18

It's very like, for one thing, the Cuban medical

48:20

aid, which is incredible. The way that the

48:22

Cuban government sends out doctors, what

48:25

Cuban doctors do and have been doing

48:27

for decades is absolutely amazing, and

48:29

as far as I know, it is done without any sort of hope of

48:31

recompense. The Soviets are getting

48:33

paid very well. So when

48:36

when Republican Spain happens,

48:38

when there's this split, the Republic winds up with

48:40

Spain's gold stockpile, which

48:42

is the largest gold reserves on planet

48:44

Earth at the time, about eight hundred and five million

48:47

dollars and that that time's currency.

48:49

Um And while the fascists

48:51

provided aid to Franco on credit

48:53

right, Italy and Germany are like, you don't

48:56

have to pay now, We'll just give you stuff and

48:58

you'll owe us. You'll pay us later. Um.

49:01

Stalin's like, I you know, I'm gonna need some cash up,

49:04

ye do

49:06

you? I'm I'm Joseph Stalin, Like, I

49:09

don't just give people ship you know. Um

49:13

he does later in the war a bit he was

49:15

him alone. But where he

49:18

they they so about

49:20

eight five million dollars is what Spain's

49:22

gold reserves the Republican Spain's gold reserves

49:24

are. At the start of the war, they pour more

49:26

than five hundred million dollars

49:28

in gold into the Soviet Union by the end

49:30

of the war. Um And because

49:33

a lot yeah, and also

49:35

they have to they have to burn a bunch of money on like

49:37

shady arms dealers and like it's

49:39

very bad. Like and a lot of the blame also

49:42

goes to France, who makes it difficult to get

49:44

shipped through the border, which is why they have to go with arms

49:46

smugglers as opposed to just getting weapons directly

49:48

imported. Um, it's very messy.

49:51

The fascists also had the benefit

49:53

of receiving much better guns

49:55

um. And I don't know how much you can blame the Soviets for this.

49:58

The Germans had the best weaponry and the planet at

50:00

this point in time, so the quality of arms

50:02

that Franco receives blows everything

50:04

Soviet out of the water. Now, a lot

50:06

of the blame for the Republic's loss tends

50:08

to go to Stalin and

50:11

the u s s R. But if we're really being and that

50:13

like when you read articles trying to like

50:15

a lay blame, a lot of people will put blame on Stalin

50:18

in the USSR, and there are very legitimate

50:20

things to criticize them about. But if we're truly

50:23

being fair, the foreign nations

50:25

most responsible for the victory of fascism

50:27

in Spain where the United States, England and France

50:30

um, because the entire free world

50:33

basically engaged in a policy of non

50:35

intervention within the Spanish Civil War.

50:37

This was part of the appeasement policy that

50:39

the British were doing with the Germans at the time,

50:42

and they were trying to get the Germans basically agreed

50:44

to neutrality in the war, and Germany would

50:46

put some lip services at this, but they didn't

50:48

like they sent soldiers and planes and

50:50

arms in both fascist states intervened

50:53

directly, which meant that the Republic

50:55

of Spain was standing on their own against

50:57

the entire fascist international fact

51:00

Spain, fascist Italy, fascist Germany.

51:02

And they have some backup from the Soviets,

51:04

and that's it, right. Everyone else is like fuck

51:07

you, the French closed the border. We're

51:09

not jumping in. Yeah, the Democrats

51:11

and this is again part of why this the communists

51:13

their criticisms of decisions

51:16

made by Communist advisors and communist

51:18

leaders in the Spanish Republican cause.

51:20

The reason the Communists wind up in power

51:23

largely in the Spanish Republican side

51:25

is because the democracies are like, oh, we don't want any

51:28

part in this ship. Right, could have been different,

51:30

if you know, damn right. Yeah, so

51:32

I can't blame the USSR here,

51:35

you know. Yeah that's good dude, because

51:37

it's like, yeah, you getting you see a homeboy getting

51:39

like slept, you know what I'm saying, Like somebody

51:41

just brought the night quill, just knocking the holme me out,

51:44

and then everybody jumping into help, and you're

51:46

like, well, I thought we all agreed we weren't going to

51:48

jump in. Yeah, but like, if

51:50

you isn't good at throwing a

51:52

haymaker, it's not really his fault. He fucking tried.

51:54

You're the one. None

51:56

of y'all was jumping in. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

51:59

Um So, the like

52:02

the failure of the democratic world,

52:04

so to speak, to get involved in any kind

52:07

of organized way is one of the great

52:09

tragedies and maybe one of the reasons World War

52:11

two happens, right, maybe one of the

52:13

reasons why no, no, no,

52:15

this is this is FDR FDR.

52:17

Yeah, because I watched the speech about

52:20

this time of him explaining

52:23

why he was like, we don't

52:25

want no parts of this. I remember, I remember

52:27

exactly, but I remember being really

52:30

interested in the fact that like, yeah, like

52:32

you know, awesome, Like look, we

52:35

like some isolation and stuff, awesome, Like look, man,

52:37

we got our own problems here. Man. We look, we

52:40

just we can't even feed ourselves.

52:42

Like I'm not gonna like send people. Maybe

52:45

we should stay out of this one. Yeah, that's that.

52:47

That is very much the attitude and

52:50

the the fascists use Spain, particularly

52:52

Germany, you Spain as a testing ground

52:54

for new weapons and tactics, particularly

52:56

their new air force because the air and the concept of

52:58

an air force is very new. There had been air

53:01

forces in World War One, but they mostly just shot

53:03

at each other and like spotted

53:05

right for artillery and ship. Now you've

53:07

got bombers right now, Now you have

53:09

air tactical air support that can destroy

53:12

armor and stuff. And the Spanish civil

53:14

wars the first time this really comes together in

53:16

an organized way, and it provides the LEFTWAFFA,

53:19

the Nazi Air Force with a way to test

53:21

out its tactics and bombs on Spanish

53:23

cities and civilians in many cases.

53:26

And we'll talk about that a little bit later in the episode

53:28

two. But first,

53:31

you know who won't attack Spanish cities

53:33

and civilians with Stuka dive

53:35

bombers, And Sophie won't. So

53:38

Sophie, we might, though, if you start messing with her

53:40

products and cyrus. I have been worried about

53:42

Sophie's cash of Stuka dive bombers. I

53:45

am consumed saying why you have so

53:47

many cut to check where my contract?

53:49

So she might If they

53:51

don't, she might they don't money, she

53:54

might bomb Spain. You know I've

53:56

always said that about Sophie. Spain's lucky

53:58

they gave us pogosol, or else things

54:01

might be different.

54:04

Alright, here's some products. All

54:12

right, so we're back now.

54:14

While the Republic lacked official

54:16

international support. Uh

54:19

so again, the the governments

54:21

of the democratic world like, uh,

54:23

fun, you guys, like you're on your own right. I don't

54:26

know, but an awful lot of their citizens

54:28

and citizens from like Poland is a

54:30

huge number of these guys, an awful lot of people from around

54:32

the world. Individual people correctly

54:35

see that, like, well, I don't live in Spain, but

54:37

I don't like fascism, and I think

54:39

that whatever happens in Spain will probably directly

54:42

impact my future. So I'm going to

54:44

go travel to Spain and try to get ahold

54:46

of a rifle and shoot some fucking fascists.

54:49

Um, A lot of people do

54:52

this movie. There's

54:54

a couple and there's being worked on

54:56

right now that I hope will wind up being good. Yeah.

54:58

There's this c where Big HOMEI like, uh

55:01

gives this big speech about why he's

55:03

still willing to like from

55:05

America go volunteer in this

55:08

war. I forget the name of this movie, but it was like a

55:10

it's an interesting scene about this time that

55:12

like, Okay, the government saying we're not going to do it,

55:14

but that don't stop me. I could fly out there, I hope.

55:17

Yeah. Yeah, you know, there's a lot of These

55:19

are the people who recognize what is a timeless

55:21

truth, which is that, um, fascism

55:23

and authoritarianism in in

55:26

one part of the world is a

55:28

threat to freedom everywhere in the world.

55:30

And that's the way it's always been. And we can talk a lot

55:32

about the fallout from

55:34

what happened in Syria. Um,

55:36

but you know, there's a lot of there's a lot of stories

55:39

of that in history, you know. Um,

55:42

So while the Republic

55:44

lacked, Yeah, so a funklet of

55:46

people, eventually something close to forty people

55:48

will wind up volunteering to fight in Spain.

55:51

And two of the first foreigners to volunteer

55:53

to fight in Spain where a twenty one year old

55:55

classics graduate from Cambridge named Bernard

55:58

Knox and his friend John Cornford. They

56:00

took with them an old pistol that had belonged to

56:02

John's Cornfia it's a weird name.

56:05

Um. They took with them an old pistol. Yes,

56:07

Cornford, Sophie, they took with him.

56:10

He dies fighting fascists. He's a good guy. But

56:13

alright, they took with them an

56:15

old pistol. Okay, Sophie,

56:19

sorry, So they

56:21

traveled to Spain together with just like nothing

56:23

but an old handgun that had belonged to John's dad

56:25

in the First World War. Knox

56:27

had to carry a gun. The gun because his friend

56:29

had already been to Spain once before. And the British

56:32

policy of non intervention mean they did everything,

56:34

meant that Britain like was trying to

56:36

actively stop people from going to Spain

56:38

to fight fascism. Um. But

56:41

but Cornford and his buddy join a militia,

56:43

like get to Spain, they joined a militia as soon as

56:45

they land. Um, which is like at

56:47

this point one of the many groups that had taken up arms

56:49

to fight against the military coup. Um.

56:52

And as I had said, the early days of this war, there's

56:54

a lot of women who are fighting in the militia's.

56:56

This ends at like the end of nineteen thirty

56:58

six when Largo Caballero comes to power

57:00

because he kind of he argues that women are needed

57:02

behind the lines, so they're not really fighting

57:04

in the front. After this point, it's a pretty brief

57:06

period and that's again

57:09

a criticism, one of the good criticisms

57:11

of the Spanish Republican government is like, well,

57:14

I lost out on a lot of soldiers. Huh

57:17

yeah, so yeah, people will in a suit.

57:20

You told him stay home. In those early

57:22

days of revolutionary ardor though,

57:24

when Cornford and his friend arrive in Spain,

57:26

uh, like, Spain is kind of like overtaken

57:29

by this this feeling of revolution um

57:31

and and this is swellowed by the

57:33

fact that the people of Republican Spain had literally

57:36

taken to the streets to defend themselves in mass

57:38

and it lent cities like Barcelona a revolutionary

57:41

air that international volunteers noticed.

57:44

One of those volunteers was a young George Orwell,

57:47

and he described the atmosphere in Barcelona

57:49

as startling and overwhelming and like a

57:51

positive sense, just like so incredible, this

57:54

like outpouring of of of liberty.

57:57

Now, the Communist International or common

57:59

turn quickly re allies that volunteers

58:01

like Cornford represented a massive opportunity,

58:03

so they devoted some of their resources to organize

58:06

in what came to be known as the International Brigades.

58:08

So it's it's the Communist who put together the International

58:11

Brigades, which are a huge factor in

58:13

in both why the republic

58:16

last so long and why um it

58:18

becomes so internationally famous. Although a lot of these

58:20

volunteers are anarchists and not communists,

58:23

you know, it's a bunch of different kinds and Trotsky like

58:25

a bunch of different kinds of people volunteer.

58:28

And I'm gonna quote from a rite up on the International

58:30

Brigades and the Guardian. Another

58:32

recruit, Winston Churchill's rebel nephew,

58:35

Esmond Romilly, had cycled across France

58:37

fueled by coffee and kognac before volunteering

58:40

and declaring himself a member of that very

58:42

large class of unskilled laborers with a

58:44

public school accent. He sailed

58:46

on a boat from Marseilles with watch duties split

58:48

in two hour shifts between French, German

58:50

Poles, Italians, Yugoslav's, Belgians,

58:52

Flemish and Russian speakers. And

58:55

it's yeah, it's very dope.

58:59

Yeah, it's it's we're gonna talk

59:01

mostly it is very dope. Yeah, Winster Churchill's

59:03

nephew is showing up. Yeah. It was like coffee

59:06

and cone out here with the hobbies,

59:08

like we're on the streets right now. I look, I went

59:10

to public school, Hobbie. You get this accent?

59:13

I love it. I'm like, okay, okay,

59:16

and it's um and and it's it's

59:18

there's a couple of things going on there. Um. One

59:20

of them is that like by public school that in England actually

59:22

means like a fancy school. So

59:24

he's like, I I have I have a public school accent.

59:26

But I too am like whatever you call

59:29

what I call it an unskilled labor, like I identified

59:32

okay, that's that's actually even cooler it is

59:34

because I don't have to do this, okay.

59:36

It's the opposite of like, you know, that common

59:39

people thing where it's like I want to be, you

59:41

know, like a labor. Is like, well, I want to

59:43

be like a laborer. So I'm gonna go stand

59:46

with a rifle next to them and fight the fascist, which

59:49

yeah, I'm not gonna I'm not gonna talk to you about

59:51

you for doing that. And

59:53

it's also worth noting we're gonna talk mostly about American

59:56

volunteers um here.

59:58

One of the largest nation is that that a

1:00:01

lot of people volunteer to fight in Spain from

1:00:03

is Poland. UM. And obviously Poland

1:00:05

becomes the first one of the first large

1:00:07

national victim at least of nazism

1:00:10

um. So you and you can see why, right, Like a

1:00:12

lot of Poles looking at Germany on their doorstep,

1:00:14

agitating about taking back land

1:00:16

given to them by Versailla, and you're like, we should probably

1:00:19

go try to stop this. Yeah. So

1:00:22

the invasion of Madrid was the first terrible

1:00:24

battle of the Civil War the verse like really massive

1:00:27

and important one, I think. And Franco's

1:00:29

colonial army, including the Spanish foreign

1:00:31

Legion, were airlifted from Morocco to

1:00:33

Seville by German planes in order to fight

1:00:35

there in an operation that Hitler himself

1:00:38

named Operation Magic Fire,

1:00:40

which is based on a part of a Wagner opera,

1:00:43

Franco's Fast. So they and again the

1:00:46

bulk of the nationalist troops don't get out

1:00:48

of Africa to fight in Spain without

1:00:50

Hitler's airlift. They did, they had, they would have

1:00:52

had because the navy doesn't go fascist. The

1:00:55

Spanish navy, such as it is, stays loyal

1:00:57

um in large part because like there's actually a lot of spam

1:01:00

fish naval officers who try to go

1:01:02

against the Republic and then their crews

1:01:04

killed them and stuff. You know. Um,

1:01:07

so the only reason that Franco's army

1:01:09

gets to Iberia is because the Nazis

1:01:12

airlift them. Um.

1:01:14

Now, Franco's fascist towards tour through

1:01:16

Republic territory on their way to Madrid. They

1:01:19

were slowed by the militias

1:01:21

um and eventually turned back by a

1:01:23

significant amount of Soviet armored aid UM.

1:01:26

And you know, a lot of people sacrificed

1:01:28

to stop them. But a lot of the credit for

1:01:30

finally stopping the fascist advanced

1:01:32

on Madrid goes to the International

1:01:34

Brigades who turned back the fascists

1:01:36

at a place called University City, which

1:01:39

is like a college campus, in a

1:01:41

heroic defense that has become like

1:01:43

very like famous in history. Now,

1:01:45

most of the International Brigade members at this point

1:01:48

were untrained, inexperienced, and nearly

1:01:50

all of them were poorly armed. They found

1:01:52

themselves confronting a battle hardened army

1:01:54

with cutting edge German weaponry, and

1:01:57

somehow they held the line. Cornford

1:01:59

Squad operated a machine gun nest

1:02:01

in the philosophy faculty offices

1:02:03

of the University City campus. They

1:02:05

built barricades out of books in order to

1:02:08

stop fascist bullets. The Guardian

1:02:10

notes, yeah, okay quote

1:02:12

enemy bullets gave up before reaching

1:02:15

page three fifty, making them believe

1:02:17

old tales of soldiers saved by bibles

1:02:19

in their breast pockets. I think

1:02:21

I killed a fascist, Cornford, a former

1:02:23

pacifist, wrote excitedly to his girlfriend

1:02:25

Margot Hyneman on eighth December

1:02:28

fifteen or sixteen of them were running from a bombardment.

1:02:30

If it is true, it's a fluke, that's

1:02:34

yeah, yeah yeah, building this

1:02:36

entire like building

1:02:39

barricades out of philosophy books

1:02:41

to stop fascist bullets. Yeah, it's it's

1:02:44

yes. That is punk rock. He was

1:02:46

like about page three as

1:02:50

they can get. Yeah.

1:02:54

Uh. Now. The achievement of the International

1:02:56

Brigades at University City turned them into

1:02:58

a symbol both in Spain and in worldwide

1:03:00

of resistance to fascism.

1:03:03

They also received more international attention

1:03:05

because their numbers included men who spoke dozens of

1:03:07

different languages. They were like fifty four nations

1:03:09

represented eventually, and this made

1:03:11

it really easy for the foreign press to

1:03:13

to embed with people because they could find people

1:03:15

that they could talk to, you know, like it like as

1:03:17

just speaking of somebod who's done war zone reporting. If there's

1:03:19

a group of people like that that I can embed with. That's what I'm

1:03:21

gonna do because I'll meet other people who are

1:03:23

English speakers and it's way easier to

1:03:26

conduct interviews and stuff that. Um.

1:03:28

And of course, the United States was well

1:03:31

represented among the international volunteers.

1:03:33

Now, it was very illegal for U. S citizens

1:03:36

to join a foreign military force at this

1:03:38

time, but still hundreds and hundreds

1:03:40

joined what came to be known as the Abraham

1:03:42

Lincoln Battalion. These soldiers

1:03:45

underwent two weeks of clandestine training

1:03:47

near New York City before shipping out. New

1:03:49

York, by the way, was the source of a huge

1:03:52

number of Lincoln Battalion troops. It is

1:03:54

worth noting that about one tenth of foreign Spanish

1:03:56

volunteers were Jewish, so of all

1:03:58

of the people who could like and again, it's the same

1:04:00

thing as the polls, a lot of Jewish folks are

1:04:03

like, looking at Nazi Germany are like, we should probably

1:04:05

gonna do something about this problem.

1:04:07

There's gonna be a problem for us, I think. Um.

1:04:10

And in fact, American historian and international

1:04:13

veteran Albert Prago called the International

1:04:15

Brigades quote the vehicle through

1:04:17

which Jews could offer the first armed

1:04:19

resistance to European fascism,

1:04:22

and that's pretty rad Now.

1:04:24

One of the most notable aspects of the Abraham

1:04:27

Lincoln Battalion is that, in an era in which racism

1:04:29

was almost unbelievably present in

1:04:31

American society, and there in which even

1:04:34

the military was heavily segregated, the

1:04:36

Abraham Lincoln Battalion was completely

1:04:38

unsegregated. Black men could not

1:04:41

only join, they could become officers

1:04:43

and command white troops in battle, and this had

1:04:45

never happened in the U. S s. This point that I am

1:04:47

aware of this brings me to the

1:04:49

incredible story of El Word

1:04:52

Luteal McDaniels, and I'm going to quote

1:04:54

from a writ up in the Smithsonian Magazine here.

1:04:57

L Lord Lute McDaniels traveled across

1:04:59

the Atlantic in nineteen thirty seven to fight

1:05:01

fascists in the Spanish Civil War, where he became

1:05:03

known as El Fantastico for his

1:05:05

prowess with a grenade. As a platoon

1:05:08

sergeant with the McKenzie Papinau Battalion

1:05:10

of the International Brigades, the twenty five year

1:05:12

old African American from Mississippi commanded

1:05:14

white troops and led them into battle against

1:05:16

the forces of General Franco, men who

1:05:18

saw him as less than human. It

1:05:21

might seem strange for a black man to go to such

1:05:23

links to fight in a white man's war so far

1:05:25

from home. Wasn't there enough racism to

1:05:27

fight in the United States, But McDaniels

1:05:29

was convinced that anti fascism and anti racism

1:05:31

were one and the same. I saw the invaders

1:05:34

of Spain were the same people I've been fighting

1:05:36

all my life, McDaniels

1:05:38

says. I've seen lynching and starvation,

1:05:41

and I know my people's enemies. Let's

1:05:44

go First of all, Man's last

1:05:46

name is McDaniels, which already tells

1:05:48

you someone Yep, you know what I'm saying, So

1:05:51

we know his family story. You know what I'm saying.

1:05:54

And yeah, that just and

1:05:56

the Fanessa just just the culture that

1:05:58

you get there and get a nickname immediately, you know what I'm

1:06:00

saying, Like El fantastical because

1:06:02

she's really good at killing fascist at

1:06:05

this ship, Dan,

1:06:08

I was crazy, I was gonna say that that.

1:06:10

Yeah, that like a stut, like you

1:06:13

know, like the

1:06:17

observation of just like where we're just like, look, man,

1:06:19

you gotta trust us. Like I'm trying

1:06:21

to tell you this is the same same ease, like

1:06:24

this is the same people to the people

1:06:27

trying to tell you the same problem. Yeah.

1:06:30

Now. The United States in this period also banned

1:06:32

black men from serving as fighter pilots,

1:06:34

but three black pilots, James Peck,

1:06:36

Patrick Roosevelt, and Paul Williams, served

1:06:39

in Spain. Canute Wilson, a black

1:06:41

American volunteer, was the head mechanic

1:06:43

for the International Garage, which maintained

1:06:45

all of the Brigades fighting vehicles. He

1:06:48

wrote this of his reasons for volunteering

1:06:50

to fight in Spain, and a letter home to his family.

1:06:53

We are no longer in isolated minority

1:06:56

group fighting hopelessly against an immense

1:06:58

giant, because, my dear, we have joined

1:07:00

with and become an active part of a great progressive

1:07:02

force on whose soldiers rests the responsibility

1:07:05

of saving human civilization from

1:07:07

the planned destruction of a small group of

1:07:10

degenerates gone mad in their lust

1:07:12

for power. Because if we crush fascism

1:07:14

here, we'll save our people in America and

1:07:16

in other parts of the world from the vicious persecution,

1:07:19

wholesale imprisonment, and slaughter which

1:07:21

the Jewish people suffered and our suffering under

1:07:24

Hitler's fascist heels. That

1:07:27

is that is sentenced, that

1:07:29

is that is I

1:07:32

think there's like this like this, this part

1:07:34

of this like longing and I'm going to speak

1:07:36

in like generalities, but just this

1:07:39

longing in that like that

1:07:41

African American like the black community, I

1:07:43

think that's gone. That goes

1:07:45

very far back to say, surely

1:07:48

not all white people are like this. Yeah,

1:07:50

you know what I'm saying, Like you have you're like this. It

1:07:53

can't be. It can't be all

1:07:55

of y'all, you know what I'm saying.

1:07:57

So like when you when you find

1:08:00

like I mean, obviously I'm marketing

1:08:02

back to history, but when you like like when you

1:08:05

see when you see, uh, during like

1:08:07

the Harlem Renaissance, you see black people going

1:08:09

to going to France and being like,

1:08:12

look, there's reasonable white people. Like I'm

1:08:14

telling you there they have to exist,

1:08:17

you know, there has it

1:08:19

has to exist, you know what I'm saying. So

1:08:22

like it's it's almost like I hear

1:08:24

that in this guy's statement, like

1:08:26

look, dude,

1:08:27

the reasonable

1:08:30

white people. Yeah. Well,

1:08:32

and in speaking about you know the fact that L word's

1:08:34

last name is McDaniels, right, that probably means

1:08:36

that like an Irish person owned his

1:08:39

ancestors, not all that far back.

1:08:41

We're talking about like like like let like

1:08:43

not all that long ago, like his grandpa. Yeah.

1:08:47

Now, because

1:08:49

of the realities of the war, babe, when it

1:08:51

were there were a funkload of Irish volunteers

1:08:54

and Irish American volunteers, which

1:08:56

means it's conceivably like part

1:08:58

of what probably happened here is he was leading

1:09:00

irishman, Irish descendediment into battles

1:09:03

man who had been enslaved by an Irish

1:09:05

descendent, leading them into into combat,

1:09:07

which is amazing. Shit happens, and yeah,

1:09:10

yeah, yeah, yeah,

1:09:12

during its brief and and yeah,

1:09:14

it's it's amazing. In some ways, during

1:09:17

its brief period of existence, wartime

1:09:19

Republican Spain was in some ways

1:09:21

almost impossibly progressive. In nineteen

1:09:24

thirty six, Largo Caballero appointed

1:09:26

Federica monts Ceni, a female

1:09:28

anarchist, to be the nation's Minister of

1:09:30

Health. Federica immediately set

1:09:32

to work focusing the embattled nations health

1:09:34

infrastructure to serve the needs of the

1:09:36

poor and the working class. She believed

1:09:39

that health care should be decentralized, locally

1:09:41

organized, and based around prevention

1:09:43

rather than treatment. She was also responsible

1:09:46

for making Republican Spain the first nation

1:09:48

on Earth to legalize on demand abortion.

1:09:51

Wow yeah, now

1:09:53

yeah, there's a lot of really interesting ship

1:09:56

yeah now months Senny was

1:09:58

a controversial figure in anarchists,

1:10:01

and she engaged in some pretty officious arguments

1:10:03

with Emma Goldman, who is another very famous anarchist.

1:10:05

In particular, and the general focus

1:10:07

of criticism on Monsini and other anarchists

1:10:09

who take part in the Republican government, um

1:10:12

is on the subject of whether or not it was ethical

1:10:14

for anarchists to coordinate with governments

1:10:16

and with Marxists, because obviously in the Soviet

1:10:18

Union they kill a funkload of anarchists too,

1:10:21

you know. Um, this

1:10:23

is a recurring theme in anarchist history and

1:10:25

it's something that's very hotly debated to this day.

1:10:27

I could note here that Nestor mak know who we talked

1:10:29

about in our Christmas episode, also

1:10:31

had to thread this moral needle because he collaborated

1:10:34

with the post revolutionary government of Russia,

1:10:36

which he didn't like, to fight against the white forces

1:10:38

which were worse. You know, it's a it's

1:10:41

a debate that anarchists have had a number

1:10:43

of times in history, and is never really

1:10:45

settled to a satisfactory degree. But it happens

1:10:48

now. A decent number of the anarchists who

1:10:50

fought for Republican Spain would in fact

1:10:52

come to regret their collaboration with the government

1:10:54

and the communists, and they had some good reasons

1:10:57

to do that. For one thing, Republican

1:10:59

Spain has lost the war. For another thing,

1:11:01

the broad left unity that characterized some

1:11:03

of the early stages of the war did not last.

1:11:07

The government of Republican Spain, which did at

1:11:09

one point include four anarchist ministers,

1:11:11

as well as a number of communists and of course many more

1:11:13

moderate Republicans, made a lot of tremendous

1:11:16

errors. For one thing, the government fled

1:11:18

Madrid while Franco was advancing, something

1:11:20

which hampered their ability to capitalize on the moral

1:11:22

victory of halting the fascists. Right, you

1:11:25

can't brag about it as much because you ran away.

1:11:27

You know you ran though. Yeah.

1:11:30

For another reason, starting in late nineteen

1:11:32

thirty six, the Republic's new government embarked

1:11:34

on what they called militarization. This

1:11:36

involved involved integrating the hundreds of different

1:11:39

militias into the formal Spanish military.

1:11:41

On the surface, this was a sensible call and it may

1:11:43

have been the right one, and it was one that was heavily backed

1:11:45

by communist advisors the USSR had sent

1:11:48

in. Many historians will argue that it was necessary

1:11:51

um and and some of the evidence for

1:11:53

this is that, like in February of nineteen thirty seven,

1:11:55

Malaga fell due in part to the fact that

1:11:57

it was defended by a patchwork of militia's

1:12:00

that we're not well coordinated. UM.

1:12:02

But these militias that are being inducted

1:12:04

into the formal military establishment,

1:12:07

a lot of them have been again anarchist and Trotskyist,

1:12:09

and they've been free democratic fighting units.

1:12:12

This led to problems and there were cases where

1:12:14

you know, like whole battalions would vote to leave

1:12:16

combat zones while the fighting was happening.

1:12:18

This happened in the Battle of Madrid with when

1:12:20

a guy named Drudy gets killed with like his guys

1:12:23

leave UM. But it also meant

1:12:25

so it's not like obviously before militarization,

1:12:27

they decided to militarize because there's a lot of problems

1:12:30

with the fact that all these militias are so decentralized.

1:12:33

These militias are also very motivated

1:12:35

and very resistant to the idea of losing

1:12:37

their democratic rights and bring brought under

1:12:40

military discipline. UM. So, while

1:12:42

a lot of militias were integrated to the Republican

1:12:44

military, a significant number of fighters

1:12:46

refused to join UM And whether

1:12:48

or not this was a good idea is still

1:12:50

hotly debated. And George,

1:12:52

a lot of people will argue that because

1:12:55

there's kind of a broad consensus, I would say among

1:12:57

a lot of historians, I read that after

1:12:59

the initial period where they were necessary, the militia's

1:13:02

kind of hindered things more than they helped because of how

1:13:04

disorganized they were. George Orwell

1:13:06

himself argued against that um

1:13:09

and argued in his opinion at

1:13:11

least and he was, you know, his opinion was as a ground

1:13:13

level soldier, that the shortcomings

1:13:15

of the militias system had less to do with the fact

1:13:17

that they were democratic and decentralized

1:13:20

and more to do with the fact that they were inexperienced.

1:13:22

And I'm gonna quote Orwell here it's a good

1:13:24

argument. Later it became the fashion

1:13:26

to decry the militias and therefore to pretend

1:13:28

that the faults, which were due to lack of training and

1:13:30

weapons, were the result of the equalitarian

1:13:33

system. Actually, a newly raised draft

1:13:35

of militia was an undisciplined mob, not because

1:13:38

the officers called the private comrade, but

1:13:40

because raw troops are always an undisciplined

1:13:42

mob. And a worker's army discipline is

1:13:44

theoretically based on class loyalty, while

1:13:47

the discipline of a bourgeoisie conscript army

1:13:49

is based ultimately on fear. The popular

1:13:51

army that replaced the militias was midway between

1:13:54

the two types. When a man refused to obey

1:13:56

an order, you did not immediately get him punished.

1:13:58

You first appealed to him and name of comradeship.

1:14:01

Cynical people with no experience handling

1:14:03

men, will say instantly that this would never work,

1:14:05

but as a matter of fact, it does work in the

1:14:08

long run. Revolutionary discipline depends

1:14:10

on an understanding of why orders must

1:14:12

be obeyed. It takes time to diffuse this,

1:14:14

but it also takes time to drill a man into

1:14:16

an automaton on the barracks square. And

1:14:18

it is a tribute to the strength of the revolutionary

1:14:21

discipline that the militias state in the field at

1:14:23

all. And or Well has a good point here, that's

1:14:26

a that's a whole there's a whole

1:14:28

like worldview,

1:14:31

philosophy in those

1:14:33

two approaches. I'm

1:14:36

about to compare this to

1:14:38

parenting, but yeah,

1:14:41

because like there's

1:14:43

parts of me that go, Man, if I just

1:14:45

parented the way I

1:14:47

was parented, I see why my parents quicker.

1:14:51

You know what I'm saying. It's like, you know, you're

1:14:53

just it's like it's less emotional

1:14:55

work to just be like, hey,

1:14:58

it's time to do the dishes. Wh what

1:15:02

why you ever say what I'm saying,

1:15:05

dude, the you got five seconds

1:15:07

to get up and do the dishes, you know what I'm saying. Right,

1:15:10

So, and I'm like, y'all, don't care if you

1:15:12

you scrunch up your face how you want to scrunch up

1:15:14

your face. You better hide your emotions. I don't

1:15:16

need to see it, you know what I'm saying, Like that

1:15:18

you live here, you washing

1:15:21

dishes? I bought you know, I'm using

1:15:23

using water. I'm paying for him. So I'm

1:15:25

black dadding on you. But like that's

1:15:27

the way we was raised, you know what I'm saying. So

1:15:30

Like, but it's just like but

1:15:32

I know, the whole time I'm doing this, I'm

1:15:35

just like, man, I can't wait to get out of this house. Man always.

1:15:37

You know what I'm saying, Like I'm just salty. I'm

1:15:39

gonna do it, and I'm not gonna say

1:15:41

nothing to it. Yes, sir, you know what I'm saying. But

1:15:43

like I don't like you, I

1:15:46

don't respect this ship. You know what I'm

1:15:48

saying. I'm not doing this because I understand

1:15:51

that the dishes are dirty. I'm doing this because

1:15:54

I don't wanna hear your mouth. You know what I'm saying. I

1:15:56

don't want the I don't want the consequences

1:15:59

with my child. Now it's like,

1:16:01

hey, the we

1:16:04

have we have budgeted the amount

1:16:07

of money we have for

1:16:09

our water bill, which means that we can run

1:16:11

our our dishwasher this many times

1:16:13

we need it by We needs to happen by

1:16:15

two because when we start cooking dinner, since

1:16:18

we in this quarantine, we need to have clean

1:16:20

dishes to do this or it's gonna pile up. And

1:16:22

now it's gonna be two runs instead of one. So, like

1:16:24

you, I make sure you finish this by two so we can have plates

1:16:27

to eat off when it's time for dinner. She

1:16:29

goes, all right, and

1:16:32

it's like and so now it's like I've

1:16:34

included you into this, so you

1:16:37

have a steak into Like it's not me

1:16:39

being a bully, it's just I

1:16:42

mean it's functional, like we need

1:16:44

we need place to eat off and

1:16:46

the dishes are your chore, so just

1:16:49

so do it. So just do it, you know what I'm

1:16:51

saying. And and when she tell me she don't feel

1:16:53

like it, like now I'm not appealing

1:16:56

to like while i'm your father, you do it because

1:16:58

I tell you to. I'm appealing to

1:17:00

like, yeah, you don't feel like doing it either, but I also

1:17:02

want something to eat off on dinner. You have saying it.

1:17:05

So she's like all right, yeah, you

1:17:07

know what I'm saying, Like so, and I think, yeah, you

1:17:09

can make an argument that like, you know, you

1:17:11

get the dishes done faster if you're just the If

1:17:13

you don't do the dishes, there's fucking consequences.

1:17:16

Then if you explain why it's necessary,

1:17:19

but it's a long term results are

1:17:21

probably better. The long term is

1:17:23

probably better. So now it's

1:17:25

like now she actually, you

1:17:28

know, if some drama going on or her little

1:17:30

friends, she's actually willing to talk to me, rather

1:17:33

like this is oritarian ruler

1:17:35

that tells me what to do all the time. You know, the Will's

1:17:37

argument is that like the long term would have

1:17:40

been better if they had stuck with a malicious

1:17:42

system, maybe with some reforms and stuff now

1:17:45

and again, a lot of why a lot

1:17:47

of historians will kind of just assume

1:17:49

like, yeah, it was bad, like that the malicious

1:17:52

system like needed to be reformed, it needed to be militarized.

1:17:54

It was the only way to do things. It's what the communists

1:17:57

felt, It's what most of like the cinterests

1:17:59

and and stuff felt. And you

1:18:02

know, there's very strong arguments

1:18:04

to be made that that's that that's true just based

1:18:06

on military history. There's also strong

1:18:08

arguments to be made that like, well, you

1:18:11

guys were just like that's what all of you assumed,

1:18:13

because all of you are the kind of people who are

1:18:16

in favor of some form of centralized state

1:18:18

and in favor of us why of a centralized

1:18:20

military, and that you're listening to like standard

1:18:23

military people's attitudes, which

1:18:25

aren't always right, and maybe this

1:18:27

could have worked and other things. Systems like

1:18:30

it have worked in other militaries for different

1:18:32

periods of time. I get interesting results

1:18:34

when I bring up the idea of a democratically,

1:18:38

of of a military that votes

1:18:40

democratically on its officers. Um

1:18:42

when I talk, because that's what how these militias worked.

1:18:45

And I've talked to some friends of mine who are veterans,

1:18:47

and it's interesting some of some people say,

1:18:49

like, I don't see how that could work. I've had a good friend

1:18:51

of mine who is a veteran say, oh, you know

1:18:53

what, that makes sense because when you've

1:18:55

been in combat with a group of people, you

1:18:58

know who you trust to give orders, like

1:19:00

right, you know who you was? Like yeah,

1:19:02

yeah, it's like I know you got

1:19:05

the ranks. Mom listening to him because this boy

1:19:07

kept me alive. Yeah, yeah,

1:19:09

so sure, yes, sir, I'm not gonna

1:19:12

I'm certainly not going to say I know more about this

1:19:14

than a number of historians who will say that militarization

1:19:17

was really the only option they had. I'm

1:19:19

just saying there's argument about that, and it's

1:19:21

something you should read about. I'm not going to make a harsh

1:19:23

stance on it, because like an expert

1:19:26

on war or an expert on the Spanish Civil

1:19:28

War, there's there's there, there's

1:19:30

something that we said at least to like to make sure that

1:19:32

your militia knows what they're doing. Yeah,

1:19:34

absolutely, that needs

1:19:36

to happen. At least some level of

1:19:38

cohesiveness of communications seems

1:19:40

like it has to be necessary. There's some

1:19:42

degree you at least need, like a centralized communication

1:19:45

network to make sure people know. But I think

1:19:47

anyway, one of the tragedies of

1:19:49

the Spanish Civil War is that there's a lot of cool what

1:19:51

ifs that because there's this horrible

1:19:54

war happening, nobody gets the time to

1:19:56

really figure out, Right, maybe this could have worked

1:19:58

if they hadn't been at the edge

1:20:00

of extermination, right, Yeah, we weren't facing

1:20:02

a minute. Yeah. Now, The

1:20:04

unrest between anarchists and Trotskyists

1:20:06

and communists within Republican Spain eventually

1:20:09

led to bloodshed in the streets of Barcelona

1:20:11

as anarchists and Trotskyist militants

1:20:13

fought in the streets against communists and socialists.

1:20:16

This right up from the New Left Review, does I think a

1:20:18

fair job of explaining how this all

1:20:20

got underway. Quote, under

1:20:23

the revolutionary ferment, a struggle for power

1:20:25

and control of scarce arms was being waged.

1:20:27

That was the real meaning of the Barcelona fighting.

1:20:29

The Communist Party's increasing influence in the

1:20:31

army and political life and the growth of its membership

1:20:34

do mainly to Soviet aid direct government

1:20:36

interventions stop finally stopped the fighting in the

1:20:38

streets and shortly thereafter ended the revolutions.

1:20:40

Consolidation that has ended the

1:20:43

the anarchists and sort of trotsky Is the far left

1:20:46

like consolid like gaining of power,

1:20:48

taking of businesses, all that sort of stuff. The

1:20:50

immediate beneficiary of the crisis was Juan

1:20:52

Nigrin, a forty five year old socialist

1:20:55

physiologist, polyglot and acknowledged expert

1:20:57

in financial affairs. As Treasury Minister,

1:20:59

he organized the dispatch of gold to Moscow,

1:21:02

whom President Azana appointed Prime

1:21:04

Minister. To put an end to the indiscipline and disarray

1:21:06

in the rear Guard, especially in Catalonia and

1:21:08

Aragon, the government took over public

1:21:11

order in Catalonia, dissolved the anarchist

1:21:13

dominated a Council of Aragon, and sent

1:21:15

Enrique Lister's Communist Army Division

1:21:17

to break up the rural Aragonese collectives

1:21:19

more easily expedited the p O U WIM

1:21:21

trotsky Is, which is the trotsky Ist militia,

1:21:24

which they called trotsky Is provocateurs and

1:21:26

fascist spies. Clamored. The Spanish

1:21:28

Communist Party was outlawed, its army division

1:21:30

disbanded, and its leader, Andrew Ninn,

1:21:32

one of Trotsky's former secretaries, was disappeared,

1:21:35

in fact, kidnapped and murdered by the n k v

1:21:37

D. The affair further deepened the distrust

1:21:40

between Communists and the rest of the political organizations,

1:21:43

especially the anarchists and left socialists,

1:21:45

and it made clear to the republic serious

1:21:47

ongoing problems of internal political discord,

1:21:50

which were a considerable stumbling block to

1:21:52

winning the war. On the other side of the lines,

1:21:54

there was no such problem. Franco By, now head

1:21:56

of the so called nationalist side, crushed

1:21:58

dissent in the bud forcibly unite the Phalangen

1:22:00

Carlists the only permitted civilian political

1:22:03

organizations now.

1:22:06

And there's a lot of debate about what happens in Barcelona

1:22:09

orwell was there for most of this part He

1:22:11

was. He took part in the fighting in Barcelona,

1:22:13

and he was with the p o u M. He's with this Trotskyist

1:22:16

militia, and his recollections of the

1:22:18

purging of the po U M are

1:22:20

available for free in his book Homage to Catalonia.

1:22:23

He reserves tremendous criticisms for the

1:22:25

Communist Party, in large part because they murdered

1:22:27

some of his friends. There are of course

1:22:29

very good critiques of Orwell's narrow

1:22:31

perspective in this, because he's on the ground,

1:22:34

and long after the war he would admit himself

1:22:36

that he was somewhat myopic and unfair

1:22:38

to the Republican government and the communists

1:22:40

In this. Critics will point out that the

1:22:42

C and T and the p o u M undermined

1:22:44

coordination and unity in the Republic, and

1:22:47

that the violent certain anarchists carried out against

1:22:49

the clergy in particular, helped dissuade foreign

1:22:51

governments from wanting to help. So this is again a

1:22:53

complicated issue, but the

1:22:56

fact that the left is literally in

1:22:58

fighting here is a big part of what underminds

1:23:00

their ability to fight the fascists. Although historians

1:23:04

are very split as to how much of a factor the behavior

1:23:06

of the Spanish Communists or which were

1:23:08

directed by Moscow played in the Republican

1:23:11

defeat. Um Julian Casanova

1:23:13

directly credits the Republic's defeat

1:23:15

mostly to the international situation. So he says,

1:23:18

you can talk about what the communists did

1:23:20

wrong with the anarchist did wrong. The reason

1:23:22

Republican Spain lost is because

1:23:24

nobody helped them out except for the communists

1:23:26

a bit, whereas the fascists had to modern

1:23:29

states throwing huge amounts of aid in military

1:23:31

forces. It right, That's why they lost. It's

1:23:34

like you can debate who made mistakes.

1:23:36

Everybody made mistakes. They lost because nobody,

1:23:38

like almost only the communists

1:23:40

helped them in. You know, you just

1:23:43

out in the fascists had a lot, Yeah, the fascists had a lot

1:23:45

more help, you know. Yeah. Um.

1:23:47

Now, while I think it's fair to criticize the nature

1:23:50

of the help the USSR sent, both of its reduced

1:23:52

quantity relative to the fascists and the fact

1:23:54

that it made the republic pay up front, you

1:23:56

have to be fair here and note that the Russian Civil

1:23:58

War had not been over for all that long when

1:24:00

the Spanish Civil War started, and like nine

1:24:02

million people had died in that country. After nine

1:24:05

million had died in World War One, and it

1:24:07

was fucking devastated, Italy and Germany

1:24:09

were in comparatively better shape and able to provide

1:24:11

more aid. Now. British military

1:24:14

historian Anthony Beaver, however, does

1:24:16

blame the Republic's high command, which was Communists

1:24:18

dominated and Soviet military advisors,

1:24:21

for their quote disastrous conduct

1:24:23

of the war, and he has some very fair critiques

1:24:25

here. Um He criticizes them for engaging

1:24:27

in multiple disastrous conventional offensives,

1:24:30

which where this happened a few times, where they get a huge

1:24:32

number of soldiers together, most of

1:24:34

which were not super well trained, and

1:24:37

send them on these massive offensives that would

1:24:39

they would get mowed down. And the purpose of

1:24:41

this was for propaganda to be able to show, look,

1:24:43

we're advancing against the fascists, and

1:24:45

of course the fascists are better armed in train and

1:24:47

would just dig in and massacre these people.

1:24:50

Um And and Anthony Beaver will argue

1:24:52

that these this series of horrible,

1:24:55

horrible decisions taken for mainly

1:24:57

propaganda quote gradually destroyed

1:24:59

the re Public's army and resistance. Now,

1:25:03

no matter what kind of leftist or liberal

1:25:05

or whatever you happen to be, there are

1:25:07

aspects of your ideology that should be

1:25:09

challenged by observing the way the Spanish Civil

1:25:11

War went. Speaking as an anarchist, it is

1:25:13

impossible to ignore the fact

1:25:15

that the fascists had the great advantage of centralized

1:25:18

control and particularly food distribution.

1:25:21

Meanwhile, Republican territories had more

1:25:23

than twenty independent food collectives.

1:25:26

Workers in many of these collectives were hostile

1:25:28

to the government because they were anarchists, and

1:25:30

in some areas money had been entirely

1:25:32

abolished, and since money did exist

1:25:35

in the rest of the Republic, that made cooperation

1:25:37

difficult. Food shortages were

1:25:39

common in the Republic and this also contributed

1:25:42

to their defeat. UM And

1:25:44

again it's the kind of thing where like this system of local

1:25:46

sort of food exchanges might have worked, if

1:25:48

they might have figured out how to make it work

1:25:51

had there not been a war on. But it's hard.

1:25:53

It is hard to beta test

1:25:55

an entire system of social organization

1:25:58

while fighting a war of exter the

1:26:00

nation. Yeah, it's hard. It's

1:26:02

hard to get all grey people to fight for you, you

1:26:04

know what I'm saying, Like if we hung gry, it's like, well,

1:26:07

oh no, who got the food? And it's

1:26:09

it's worth noting that of all the people fighting,

1:26:12

you know, about half of the prisoners of war the

1:26:14

fascists took wound up fighting

1:26:16

for the fascists. They were organized into

1:26:18

into fighting units UM

1:26:20

and a significant number of the captured fascists

1:26:23

wound up fighting in units for the Republics.

1:26:25

Like that happened on both sides. A lot of these guys are just dudes,

1:26:28

you know. Um, They're not all like the

1:26:30

Internet. The International Volunteers tend to be very

1:26:32

ideological. That's not all in the case with a

1:26:34

lot of soldiers. In early nineteen

1:26:36

thirty seven, Franco's forces had recovered

1:26:38

from their defeat outside of Madrid, and they launched

1:26:40

an invasion of the northern Basque territories

1:26:42

of the Republic. The success of this offensive

1:26:45

is largely credited to the Condor Legion,

1:26:47

a German led air force that spent the Spanish

1:26:49

Civil War experimenting with new textniques the Loofwava

1:26:52

would later use. This experimentation

1:26:54

started in earnest with the bombing of Madrid in

1:26:56

nineteen thirty six, which killed and wounded

1:26:58

a lot of civilians, like hundreds of people

1:27:01

killed and wounded, but did nothing but harden

1:27:03

Republican resistance. And the Germans realized

1:27:05

this, Like the guys in charge of the Condor

1:27:08

Legion of like, just bombing a bunch of civilian

1:27:10

targets seems to piss them off and make them want

1:27:12

to fight harder. Perhaps that's not the best

1:27:14

tactic. Um. Now, several

1:27:16

cities were bombarded by the Condor Legion during

1:27:19

the advance in Tabasque territory, leading

1:27:21

to a lot of civilian casualties, but

1:27:23

none of these bombings were more famous than the city

1:27:25

of Guernica and their significant debate

1:27:27

over Guernica. As well, historians will note

1:27:29

that the command or of the Condor Legion was

1:27:31

more or less abiding by the rules of war

1:27:34

UM, striking at bridges and roads and cities,

1:27:36

like aiming primarily for targets of military

1:27:39

value. Um. There were civilian

1:27:41

casualties because precision bombing is a myth,

1:27:43

but the goal was not what's called terror

1:27:45

bombing, which they kind of rejected after Madrid,

1:27:48

And like this guy goes to trial in Nuremberg

1:27:50

and that is kind of the conclusion of the Allied militaries,

1:27:53

Like his bombing of Guernica was part

1:27:55

of a military action. Like

1:27:58

you to repeat the line that you precision

1:28:01

bombing is a myth. Precision bombing is

1:28:03

absolutely a myth, as someone who who

1:28:05

watched it is a myth. Now

1:28:08

it was even more of a mythent. Yes,

1:28:10

I have a friend who lives in Iraq,

1:28:13

and he's like, yeah, no, there's no such thing.

1:28:15

No, No, you're just blowing up neighborhoods, guys.

1:28:17

Yeah yeah, Um,

1:28:19

Now how much of a difference it makes that their goal

1:28:21

was not terror bombing? You know what

1:28:24

they did. They killed a funkload of civilians and leveled

1:28:26

a lot of Guernica. And it's it's horrible,

1:28:28

horrible, horrible thing. I'm

1:28:30

not trying to justify it, um,

1:28:33

But what's happened in what actually

1:28:35

happened and what is kind of like remembered about Guernaka

1:28:37

are sometimes two different things. Because

1:28:40

the bombing of Guernica, for whatever reason, horrifies

1:28:42

the entire world. It becomes and there's when

1:28:45

I say thout every reason, because there are other cities

1:28:47

that are bombed in a similar manner that don't

1:28:49

get as famous in this period of time. Um,

1:28:51

it's not the first time that the civilian population

1:28:54

is bombed as a part of a war, but it becomes the most

1:28:56

famous. The Republicans made a lot

1:28:58

out of it and used it for propagate and purposes. They would

1:29:00

claim that sixteen hundred people had died, a

1:29:03

figure that's likely impossible because

1:29:05

they calculated basically when you're

1:29:07

looking at like civilian casualties.

1:29:10

There are calculations you can do to estimate them

1:29:12

by estimating the number of people killed per tonnage

1:29:14

of bombs dropped. And if sixteen hundred

1:29:16

people died in Guernica, it would meant that it would

1:29:18

have meant that the Condor Legion were killing

1:29:20

more civilians than the US did during

1:29:22

its bombings of like Dresden, like

1:29:24

like per per tonnage, you know, which

1:29:27

is not possible really like um,

1:29:29

credible death counts range from as low as a hundred

1:29:31

and fifty to the to the low hundreds, which

1:29:33

is terrible, Like that's hundreds of civilians

1:29:35

killed by bombs from the sky. It's

1:29:38

it's horrible. I'm not saying it's not. But

1:29:40

again it's also seeing the Republicans

1:29:42

see this as a way to like, oh, this is something

1:29:44

we can use to get international support, which we

1:29:46

desperately need. Um.

1:29:49

And while Republican forces used Guernica

1:29:51

to try to generate international sympathy, the

1:29:53

fascists used it as a cudgel. When

1:29:55

Hitler met with the Premiere of Austria prior

1:29:57

to the Angelus, which is when they Kapaie

1:30:00

Austria, he brings the commander

1:30:02

of the Condor Legion with him as a not

1:30:04

so subtle threat to Vienna, because the

1:30:07

the the image internationally is

1:30:09

that Guernack has been wiped out

1:30:12

by the Condor Legions. So Hitler once this guy is

1:30:14

sitting next to him, so that when he meets with the premiere of Austria,

1:30:16

this guy's like, They're gonna level Vienna

1:30:18

if I don't, if I don't agree to whatever

1:30:20

Hitler wants, you know. So Hitler

1:30:23

makes a lot of use out of the terrible reputation

1:30:25

that the Condor Legion gets, regardless

1:30:27

of how much that reputation may be

1:30:29

earned. Um

1:30:32

now, the battle and I mainly quibble

1:30:34

on how terrible the Condor Legion was because

1:30:37

by any objective measure, the United

1:30:39

States Air Force was a lot worse in

1:30:41

World War Two in terms of its its willingness

1:30:43

to kill civilians, not in terms of its goals obviously,

1:30:46

but to blast. Yeah there's

1:30:48

the yeah, I I I still can't

1:30:51

because I mean, I've never lived in like an

1:30:53

actual active war zone, you know. But obviously

1:30:56

more more humans alive

1:30:59

now have lived

1:31:01

in active war zones than not, So

1:31:04

like I know that I'm in the minority

1:31:06

for that, and it's a very privileged position.

1:31:09

But I still can picture or

1:31:12

having a hard time wrapping my mind around the idea

1:31:14

that like death is coming from the sky.

1:31:17

It's fun. I'm saying, like that's yeah,

1:31:19

that's it changes you, I

1:31:21

mean it changes. And just to have that experience for a

1:31:23

few days, Um,

1:31:26

it's something else,

1:31:28

man, Just like seeing breathing

1:31:31

in the dust that includes

1:31:33

pulverized concrete and incinerated

1:31:35

bodies. Um, Like an

1:31:37

air strike is yeah, unreal

1:31:40

that like, yeah, it's a laser from space,

1:31:42

like you can't. Yeah, there's like

1:31:44

it's the hammer of God, you know. Yeah.

1:31:46

Yeah, it's terrible, Yeah, terrifying.

1:31:49

Yeah. Now, the battle over

1:31:51

Guernica was very consequential.

1:31:54

The city's fall helped enable Franco's forces

1:31:56

to cut Republican held territory in two,

1:31:58

so to separate the two junks of Republican

1:32:00

territory, the north from the south. Um.

1:32:03

Now, around the same time, the French, like

1:32:05

Germany, occupies Austria and

1:32:07

the French start getting really scared of the Nazis

1:32:10

um and so they reopened their border and this

1:32:12

allows thousands of tons of war material

1:32:14

to flow into the Republic freely for the first time,

1:32:17

and the republic is able to like gin

1:32:19

up a new Republican army made up in part

1:32:21

of prisoners of war and conscripts as young

1:32:23

as sixteen UM. And this what's

1:32:25

known as the Army of the Ebro, launches

1:32:28

what would come to be known as the last great Republican

1:32:30

assault of the war. And like there are other great

1:32:32

assaults, it was a fucking disaster. Thirty

1:32:35

thousand Republican fighters died to just sixty

1:32:37

Fascist casualties. UM.

1:32:40

Just an absolute nightmare. Now,

1:32:43

the war officially ended in April

1:32:45

of nineteen thirty nine with the unconditional

1:32:47

surrender of the Republicans to the fascist

1:32:49

Francisco Franco. In the areas

1:32:51

the Fascist retook, they were as brutal as

1:32:53

you might expect. The most egregious

1:32:55

example of this happened in August of nineteen thirty

1:32:57

six and Batillas, which we talked about earlier,

1:32:59

that where the anarchists and socialists

1:33:01

take a huge amount of land and give it to the people

1:33:04

while the fascists take back bad of yaws

1:33:06

and they just they massacre everyone. Then get

1:33:09

their fucking hands on more than four thousand people,

1:33:11

mostly civilians and prisoners gunned

1:33:14

down, including hundreds of people who

1:33:16

are dragged into the bowl ring to

1:33:18

the stadium where they hold bullfights and

1:33:20

surrounded by machine guns and just massacred

1:33:23

in a circle by the foreign legion. Um.

1:33:26

Now, brutality knows no allegiance

1:33:29

in war. Somewhere around fifty thousand

1:33:31

civilians were killed in the Republican zone

1:33:33

over the course of the war, and acts of brutality

1:33:36

that many in the Republican government deplored. Federica

1:33:38

Montseny described the slaughter as a lust

1:33:41

for blood, inconceivable and honest man

1:33:43

before but republic War crimes

1:33:45

bore little resemblance to the crimes of the fascists,

1:33:48

who in the same period of time murdered

1:33:50

more than a hundred and thirty thousand civilians.

1:33:53

And those deaths, of course, occurred during

1:33:55

the war. During his decades in power, Franco's

1:33:57

forced labor, concentration camps, torture

1:34:00

and execution of political enemies led

1:34:02

to another thirty to fifty thousand deaths,

1:34:04

and as we know, that would make Franco

1:34:06

one of the less deadly fascist dictators

1:34:09

in history. Um. But yeah,

1:34:11

you can compare the number of people kill Yeah,

1:34:14

what is it? About just

1:34:18

what's the point of being in charge

1:34:20

if you kill everybody you're supposed to be in charge of. Because

1:34:23

you're killing all the people you don't like that

1:34:25

you're supposed to be in charge of. That's

1:34:27

easier than arguing dad, Yeah,

1:34:29

well touche. Yeah, I guess

1:34:31

you're right. Yeah, they're killing. There's

1:34:33

like, we just killed people disagree with us. We just

1:34:35

kill we disagree with us. Yeah, okay,

1:34:39

so my bad. I understand your logic. Now.

1:34:41

Yeah, obviously the Republicans

1:34:44

lost their war, UM, but many of

1:34:46

the more than thirty five thousand men who joined

1:34:48

the International Brigades, and something like ten thousand

1:34:50

of them died in the Spanish Civil War. UM.

1:34:54

Many of those guys would continue fighting

1:34:56

fascism in World War Two. Some of

1:34:58

them fought in the French Resistance. Some of them fought

1:35:00

in the U. S. Army after being by the

1:35:02

way, when US veterans like l Ward

1:35:04

come home, they get like spite on

1:35:06

by the FBI because they're suspected

1:35:09

of being communist sympathizers

1:35:11

and stuff like, and some

1:35:13

of those people. Some of that stops when the war

1:35:15

starts. People like, ah, maybe you had

1:35:17

a point. It doesn't all stop. Um.

1:35:20

But a number of these guys continue

1:35:22

fighting. Um. And while they

1:35:24

failed in their ultimate goals, the battle

1:35:26

cry of the Spanish anti fascists, they

1:35:29

shall not pass or no pass

1:35:31

Ian still rings loudly and anti

1:35:33

fascist rallies today. And that's

1:35:35

you know, yeah, the fight isn't

1:35:37

over. They didn't win in Spain. They didn't succeed

1:35:40

in in turning back fascism

1:35:42

and bringing in a new golden

1:35:44

age for humanity there. But it

1:35:47

didn't end in the fight didn't end in Spain

1:35:49

either, you know, and it it continues to this

1:35:51

day, Yes

1:35:55

it does. Oh man, Yeah,

1:35:57

let's let's let that one breathe for a second. Yeah,

1:36:01

okay, everybody

1:36:03

take a deep breath. Yeah.

1:36:08

Anyway, man, So

1:36:12

at some point we're going to talk about when

1:36:15

Spain stops being fascist. Yeah,

1:36:17

I'm gonna do episodes on Franco at some point

1:36:20

that will that will get into that history. Um.

1:36:22

But this is more specifically about vomiting on the

1:36:24

King's limits. Yeah, this

1:36:26

was this is about fascism. You

1:36:28

know, I wanted to talk about how the fascists

1:36:30

gained power in Spain. This

1:36:33

is and it's like it's

1:36:35

such a like because

1:36:38

of like you said, because of the enormity

1:36:41

of other fascist reasimes, this

1:36:44

guy gets so overlooked. But it's

1:36:46

so such a pivotal

1:36:49

moment in just even just

1:36:51

the meta narrative. But what we understand is

1:36:53

like western modern, Western civilization, like you

1:36:55

have to have this moment, you know, if you're

1:36:57

not talking about it, it's like you the

1:36:59

story line. I feel like the storyline

1:37:01

doesn't make sense if you're trying to get

1:37:04

from World War One to World War Two, and

1:37:06

why all the players are on

1:37:08

the play are on the board game the way

1:37:10

that they are if you don't include

1:37:12

the Spanish Civil War, and

1:37:15

you you can argue in a lot of people,

1:37:17

the historians will that had the Republic

1:37:20

one, we might not have had a Second

1:37:22

World War because that might have

1:37:24

been a check to fascist ambitions. Now

1:37:26

I don't know how much I agree with that. It's certainly arguable

1:37:29

that had there been a concerted had the had

1:37:31

the democracies of the world been willing

1:37:34

to take concerted action against the

1:37:36

fascists in Spain, uh,

1:37:38

that probably would have meant they would have been willing to take considered

1:37:41

actions to stop Hitler from

1:37:43

gaining from taking over Czechoslovakia.

1:37:46

Austria eventually Poland UM.

1:37:48

And then the Nazi state would have collapsed

1:37:51

because it was never based on anything but

1:37:53

stealing land from other people,

1:37:56

and without the ability to do that, it would not

1:37:58

have lasted. The economy would have apps,

1:38:00

there would have been some sort of a revolution um,

1:38:02

and maybe we would have not had World War two.

1:38:05

Um. That's a pretty

1:38:07

solid argument you can make. Obviously,

1:38:09

any any historical debate like

1:38:12

that is like, who knows what the truth is? I wonder what I

1:38:14

wonder how the cold would have looked if

1:38:17

we had at some point, or if it would have been if

1:38:20

would have been like I guess the communists, I mean, I

1:38:22

mean it's that bad, you know, because

1:38:25

like you know, Stalin not a

1:38:27

big fan of Stalin. Um. But

1:38:29

you can argue, like, well, one of

1:38:31

the best things that happened to Stalin's personal

1:38:33

power was World War Two. If there's no World

1:38:35

War Two, and if there's less open

1:38:38

conflict between you know, fascism

1:38:40

and communism, to Stalin stay in power, does

1:38:42

the does the Soviet Union take a different path

1:38:45

that maybe more resembles what a lot of the people

1:38:47

who fought for it initially wanted. Um,

1:38:49

How like or yeah,

1:38:52

I mean, who knows or does all of the Western

1:38:54

world go to war in Russia and as many people die

1:38:57

and an even dumber war, like who the

1:38:59

funding? Nobody, nobody's fan fiction right

1:39:01

here. Yeah,

1:39:03

but it's it's an interesting conversation to

1:39:05

have, and I think, like, yeah, I

1:39:08

I am, I'm always intrigued by some of these like counterfactuals.

1:39:10

But you know, what we what we know is

1:39:13

what happened. What happened is um

1:39:15

a very flawed alliance of a lot

1:39:17

of brave people and a lot of messy

1:39:20

people did their best and

1:39:22

ultimately failed to stop fascism

1:39:24

before the Holocaust. You know it isn't

1:39:28

isn't at all of history a bunch of messy

1:39:30

people and yeah, yeah, just trying

1:39:32

to figure to ship out man. Damn

1:39:35

yeah, damn Robert.

1:39:38

Yeah, there's a lot of lessons in there, a lot of lessons

1:39:40

in the story of the Spanish Civil War.

1:39:42

And obviously I'm not I hope

1:39:44

no one takes this is like anything comprehensive

1:39:47

or or like anything. But here's

1:39:50