Once the last time you took a time out. I'm Ev Rodsky, author of the New York Times bestseller fair Play and Find Your Unicorn Space, activists on the gender division of labor, attorney and family mediator. And I'm doctor Addina Rukar, a Harvard physician and medical correspondent with an expertise in the science of stress, resilience, mental health, and burnout. We're so excited to share our podcast, time Out, a production of I Heart Podcasts and Hello Sunshine, repealing back the layers around why society makes it so easy to guard men's time like it's diamonds and treat women's time like it's infinite like sand. And so whether you're partnered with or without children, or in a career where you want more boundaries, this is the place for you, for people of all family structures. So take this time out with us to learn, get inspired, and most importantly, reclaim your time. Listen to time Out, a fair Play podcast on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or We're ever you get your podcasts. Look for your children's eyes and you will discover the true magic of a forest. Find a forest near you and start exploring a discover the Forest dot Org, brought to you by the United States Forest Service and the AD Council After the Uprising The Death of don Ye Dion Jones was nominated for the n double A CP Image Award for Outstanding News and Information Podcast. The eleven part series investigates the hanging death of Ferguson protester Donye Jones. Listen on the I Heart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts, and then please vote for your favorite podcast at vote dot n a A CP Image Awards dot net. Spain, I'm Robert Evans. This is Behind the Bastard. Actually, yeah, Spain, that's what I got. This is Behind the Bastards. It's actually Behind the Insurrections special Behind the Bastards miniseries talking about the history of fascist attempts to seize power from democracies. Yes. Um, we started our our first opening of this episode with me shouting, what's bombing my Guernica's But then we decided that would get me canceled and was a bad idea. Um, so we will be talking about me. I would have just gone, yeah, I just shouted the name Spain prop alternate pitch what about Yeah, there we go. There we go, There we go. Unfortunately, my knowledge of Spanish is mostly limited to buying drugs. That's an NBA player from that that was a really great laker. But you know, has really good seafood. You can say that about Spain. I can. Oh, my god, yes, I have had some amazing piea. One of the pie as I had was partly responsible for me vomiting on the limousine of the King of Spain. But um, that's amazing. That's a story for another day. Best friend, my best friend died in Spain. I don't know. No, that's a great thing to say. That's years ago. My old DJ, he flew to Spain. He was actually doing a he was doing a master chef class with his pis. He's Filipino, dude. He was going to do this like piea adobo. It was this crazy Filipino Spanish. He sounds amazing. Yeah yeah, and he had like and he just his blood pressure dropped. His zero. Oh ship died in his Airbnb. That's horrible. That's horrible. Well, I'm kid. We are going to talk about a lot of people dying in Spain today. So that's the PDJ effect though, love you doubt that that's there's actually this is actually gonna be a very sad episode in a lot of ways. So that's an appropriate emotional tone to start it off with. Yes, that the buck Spain throws down his current Spain is not your fault. Um. So we're gonna be talking about the Spanish Civil War today. Uh. And we left off last time with the establishment of an actual, like real fat organized fascist party in Spain. The philogists, Um, they went the first, but they were the first to kind of like, I don't get it right as a weird phrase to apply to fascism, but they were. They were the Spanish fascists who would um become kind of the watchword for Spanish fascism. When people talk about the fascists in Spain, they're talking about the philogists, you know, Yeah, the philangers um fa lenx is, which kind of also I think that I think philanges comes from fai lenx because it's that word for that Greek military you know, where you have a shiploaded dudes standing in like a series of lines, all supporting each other in kind of like a hand. I don't know that'd be, my guests, I'm not a worder So the oddest thing about the phlogists, um is that alone among fascists pretty much any period I'm aware of, they well except for maybe the modern period, they were giant wosses to start out with. And this may be due to the fact talked a lot about how like World War One is why the Italian and German fascists were terrifying people, um, because they, you know, we're very comfortable killing people. Spain stayed out of World War One. Most of the early fascists were like more on this like fascist intellectuals than street fighters, and they weren't initially very willing to use force. Now they talked about violence a lot um. And Jose Antonio, their leader, was definitely a fascist, but he was very uncomfortable with physical violence, even when when it was directed at him and it was repeatedly, he was loath to actually organize retaliatory violence. During his speech he gave after his party's unification with the John Seasta's, a leftist gunman opened fire, intending to kill Jose Antonio, and instead killing a spectator and wounding for other people. The fascists launched no reprisals against the left in response, which is like you you look at Germany or Italy's is very strange. Yeah, very different than it was elsewhere. Um. And the kind of unwillingness in this period of the Fascionists to use violence lead one columnist for a right wing newspaper to note sarcastically, so that everything will be incongruous here it is that the fascists who are made to swallow castor oil, which is referring to the fact that in Italy the fascists would force castor oil down the throats of their enemies to make them ship themselves, sometimes to death. Like it was a horrible torture, Like they thought it was funny, but it killed people. And this guy's being like in Italy the fascists make their enemies drink castor oil. Here we have to drink the castor oil, right, because we're not willing to use violence. Um. That's weird. It is very odd. It does not last. But this is a period of time early in the fascist So also, every black person's grandma made them drink castor oil at some point. Sucks one of those you know that you know that, Um that image Macro from from the movie Predator, where uh, those two guys are shaking hands and the meeting in the middle Italian fascists. Black. Grandma's feeding people castor oil. Yes, grandma's stomach was just just give me. Look, it had been fine. Just let me drink some water. God drink this castle. Can't teller no either, tell the black woman no, I dare you? And they were, you know, the Italians were giving people much larger to like it killed people sometimes. Yeah. Other Phalangists leaders were happier to endorse physical violence than Jose Antonio was, but for a little while, initially a number of them kind of felt like it was good to have some of their members gutted down by the left. When one Phalangist was killed in the movement's first street fight, it was thought that the brawl had been a successful baptism of fire. Basically, we're trying to ramp these people up to violence, so it's good that we're like this. It's positive for us that we're being tested with like deadly force. Um. This was some people's attitude initially, but the deaths kept coming, and for a while they were entirely caused by leftists. Most of this violence occurred between nineteen thirty four and nineteen thirties six, during a period of escalating political violence that historians call the militarization of politics during the Second Republic, And when you're talking about at least the violence that was between fascists and the left, it was pretty one sided for a while. While fascists being fascists always talked about violence, Jose Antonio particularly resisted putting the party on a militant footing. Now, this was unpopular within the movement, and one internal meeting, Jose Antonio expressed his desire to engage the left in the dialectic of fists and pistols, but he was kind of being more metaphorical than anything right, like we're gonna have like the verbal equivalent of war, And he was kind of himming and hawing around because he wasn't really willing to commit fully at this point. Meanwhile, one of his colleagues in the same meeting expressed a desire to treat leftists as enemies in a state of war. Now, there were discussions within the party of overthrowing Jose Antonio and replacing him with a more violent fascist because he just wasn't willing to kill fast enough. Um and these suggestions were shot down because they couldn't really exist without him. At this point, the police kept shutting down their party offices, so the only place they could gather was Jose Antonio's law offices. He was also like the one who had money, um and so they couldn't A lot of people were angry at him, but they couldn't really exist without him. Um on A. Simo Redondo, who was another Phalangeious leader uh and probably the one who urged violence most openly around the same time, was very willing to kind of go against Jose Antonio and say people like we should be we should be ready to kill people in the streets. In December of nineteen thirty three, he promised his followers a situation of absolute violences approaching. And I'm gonna quote now from a speech he gave to phalangeiost youth, young workers, young Spaniards. Prepare your weapons, get used to the crack of the pistol. Caress your dagger. Be inseparable from your vindictive club. Young people must be trained in physical combat, must love violence as a system, must arm themselves with whatever they can, and must be prepared to finish off by whatever means. A few dozen Marxist imbosts there's a lot that in there. Yeah, I'm really and when he's saying there, when he especially when he says they must love violence as a system, he's kind of yeah, spanishifying the concept the Italians had and that the Germans developed of like the cult of action for action's sake, the almost this almost worship of violence as an an end in and of itself. Um, you're seeing that start to percolate into Spanish fascist culture in this period. Now more than a dozen Phalangists and other fascists were killed by anarchists and communists before the fascist right properly organized itself for violence, but organized themselves for violence they did. And I'm gonna quote now from the book Fascism in Spain. The point of inflection in the political violence took place on Sunday, June tenth. The Chibberries of the Young Socialists had been prohibited by authorities from marching in the streets of Madrid, but during the warm weather organized regular weekend outings to the Cassa de Campo recreation area on the west side of Madrid. On the tenth a group of Phalangists intercepted them, and the usual fight took place, and he teen year old Phalangeists Juan Queler, son of a police inspector, was killed and his corpse was subsequently mutilated, his head apparently crushed with rocks. One of ensaldo squads was quick to respond, allegedly without obtaining approval from the tree Embers who directed the party the Fascist Party. Later that evening, as a bus transporting the young socialist excursionists unloaded some of them in Madrid, a car full of Phalangist Pistolero's, personally led by Ensaldo, who's a Fascist militant, was waiting. It slowly passed the young couple on the sidewalk, spraying them with bullets. A twenty year old shop clerk, Juanito Rico, was killed. The Phalangists claimed she had been involved in desecrating the corpse. Her twenty one year old brother was left permanently disabled and several others were wounded. Four days earlier, a Phalangist smallholder in Torre perogl Jane Province had been killed during a farm workers strike, so that Queller was the fifteenth or sixteenth John Cista or Phialangist killed since the John Ceesta teenager had been slain by assault guards, which are like socialist militants, and uh May of nineteen thirty two, all the others had been killed by the left, though numerous leftists had been injured by philogists and street of phrase and university assaults, Rico was the first leftist fatality at their hands. For years, she would be commemorated as the first victim of fascism in Spain. So that's really the start of Yeah, yeah, there's so much there, man. Like first of all, I'm still dangling at the phrase dialectic of fists and pencils. I'm like, that's that's raptists and pistols. Yeah, I thought pencils. No, no fist, dialectic fist like a conversation, Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, I I actually yeah, yours is better. Yeah. I was like yeah, I was like, yo, those are bars man, Okay. And then also, you know, there's there's a part of like you know, and then it's a strange like survival tactic or just just a byproduct of like just being around like inner city just kind of like gang violence that like you the desensitization of it, like where you're just like you know, people die daily. You know what I'm saying, Like you just kind of like get used to and used to such a bad word to explain what I'm trying to say. But no, no, you but you get it. It's like violence is just a part of life and and it. But it's still like even knowing that, you know, I'm an adult, you know, I'm moved out with you know, done so many different things now and it's not like I still don't live in an active community. But like, um, at the same time, though, like like I was crazy, like Okay, so that shooting, the shooting at that walmart in Texas, Uh yeah, yeah, chance shooting. Yeah a chance shooting. Yeah. Like I watched the video of like a cell phone video of like you know, like a hood dude that was at the walmart that I've when the shooting started. He was just like that, that's crazy fool shooting. We probably better slide out. How calm he was is because of how we grew up, you know what I'm saying. So you're just like somebody gotta tech. All that's a tech I know what that is, you know what I'm saying. And it's like it's so weird because it's just a weird thing. So we so when I hear this, when I hear y'all talk, when you know, we talk about this like moment of this like political upheaval, there's still part of me that goes, but I still don't understand why you're killing each other, you know what I'm saying. And then and then the idea of how I gave that whole preference to say, it's still jolting to hear the type of like mutilation. Now you have somebody with a rock and then like like got dog, like you know, you know, like crazy you gotta be to blunt force trauma killer person like that's It's just I don't know anyway, it's just going on here. I think you're It's very important to point out the desensitization that occurs during this that that's why the phrase is used that like um um, the militarization of politics, it's a process that starts in thirty one and doesn't really reach its apothesis until nineteen thirty six when the Civil War starts. But it's a process of getting people ready to that of escalating street violence. And you see that just within the Fascist Party, where initially the fascists are willing to fight. There's brawls in the street from day one, right as soon as there's fascists, before the Jones Eastas merge with UM with Jose Antonio's group, there's street fighting and stuff. But it when the killing starts a lot of these fascists because these are not and and again we get to the civil war, A significant chunk of the fascist military are combat veterans, and and these are the guys who come up from Africa. Um. But these these dudes who are actually in Iberia, they don't have experience killing people, not not by and large. And it takes number one, it takes time of some of them being killed before they really start responding with deadly violence. As a matter of course, and once you have that on both sides, once you have anarchists and communists and and other kinds of like left socialists killing fascists in the streets and fascists committing murder right back and vice versa, then you have this. It starts to ramp up the whole kind of level of comfort with deadly violence in society up to a level that you can have the kind of war that we're about to talk about. But you're right, it is a process, um. And I think in terms of like how people would justify like bashing the kid's head in with Iraq and desecrating his corpse, It's less about that guy. It's not that individual, dude. They were probably angry, but they're looking at what's happening in Spain and in Germany and what fashion the concentration camps that have already been set up, the mass executions of leftists in Italy and in Germany, the thousands who are already dead, and they're going the only way to stop that here is to kill as many of And and you can argue that was that that was the wrong tact. Take that. You could argue that, you could argue that it actually raised the level of violence to a point where you were able to have this open conflict that the left doesn't win. But at the time, all they know is they see what's happening in Germany and in Italy, and they think, I don't know what else to do but be vient, you know, And I yeah, it's it's fucked like the whole situation. Yeah, it's like, yeah, that's the thing where you're like, okay, they you know, the streets. Shit, that's like you know, they take one, we take four exactly one of ours. We kill for yours, you know. And and it's supposed to be the Trent. And that means like, okay, so I'm saying this to say, don't kill ours. Yeah, and you call it, I mean it is street ship. But it's also like U S military policy massive retaliation. Right, And this is what speaking of us in speaking of like US history, recent history and the history of like terrorism on the right. Tim McVeigh when he blew up the Murrah building was very consciously being like, I this is the kind of reaction. Uh, this is like I am attacking the government because they killed all these people in Waco, and I learned that this is an acceptable His argument was, I learned this was an acceptable way to respond to violence because that's how the military trained me. Right. You can quibble with how honest McVeigh was being there, but like hard not to see some through lines. You know, you look at the first Iraq War or the more reason like right, it's it is the way everything works, right, Yeah, how how the idea of how the idea of Pearl Harbor, Yeah, is equivalent to Roshima. Yeah right, yeah, Well you take out a base, we take out an island. Yeah, it's like yeah, yeah, and collective punishment. There's a lot to say about all of that. We need to move on to the yeah, because I'm pretty sure you wrote seventy yeah, more or less. Now, while all of this was happening, while the Philangists were starting to commit murder and stuff, and and the fighting between left and right is escalating in Spain, well, all this is happening on the ground, the political situation and like the actual like elected politics and stuff is continuing to unravel. And this is due in large part to the fact that the Africanistas, who were again the members of the Spanish military who had fought in Morocco, were increasingly frustrated with the Republic in nineteen thirty two, So just like a year after the Republic starts, one general, a guy named san Juro, launches a coup that fails. But rather than wonder if the African Eastas weren't a problem and a threat to democracy, the government brought in Franco and his foreign legion to massacre anarchists and communists during their nineteen thirty four uprising. Where the foreign legion executes more than a thousand people. Um. So, the Republic knows that the military, these African veterans are a problem and also uses them to crush the left when the left rises up, because you know, governments generally not smart. Um. So a gap begins to form during the Republican period between the the the the junta's officers in the peninsula who supported the Republic, and the Africanistas who the junta is called stormtroopers. Um. Now, by nineteen thirty six, the political situation, which had simmered for years, broke out into an open boil. The explanation as to why starts with the Popular Front. In nineteen thirty four, the USSR announced that given the worldwide advance of fascism, it was now acceptable for good communists to make political alliances with other left wing groups. This included both moderate liberals and people like anarchists and even in some cases like Trotskyists, which communists trot Skits are communists too. They don't like each other, right, um, And this is this is a real big change. And we talked about in our in our the non Nazi bastards who made Hitler one of the reasons why the left failed to stop the Nazis is that the Communist Party in Germany, which was you know, generally under orders from Moscow UH, called the Social Democrats social fascists. And I'll admit right now we weren't entirely fair to the Communists in that episode. The Social diffic It's did some really fucked up stuff to the Communist that we will talk about later in this very series. UM. They had good reasons to distress the Social Democrats. That said, the failure to work with them to stop Hitler was very clearly a mistake. Like and the USSR admits that is like, you know what, maybe maybe it's necessary in countries facing fascism for there to be for for us to allow communists are kind of communist at least to have a broad popular front with other people in the left. UM. And this is a very successful idea politically, UM. And in fact, there was also a popular Front in France that that succeeded in pushing some major reforms, and we will talk about that later too. The tactic worked very well politically electorally in Spain. The Popular Front swept the nineteen thirty six elections. UM. But in a way that will be familiar to everyone listening. They did so in a way that enraged the right wing. And it's not hard to see why the right felt like they've been cheated. Right Wing parties pulled four million, five hundred and five thousand, five hundred two votes and gained a twenty four seats in the nineteen thirty six election. Now, the Popular Front only got about a hundred and sixty thousand more votes, but they gained two hundred and seventy eight seats, So they get a hundred and sixty thousand more votes in an election with nine or ten million votes twice as many seats. You can see why people on the right would be like kind of piste about this right. Um, and there may have been cheating. I don't really know, Like it's I'm not going to get into whether or not there was cheating. What's important is that the right felt that they had been cheated, right. That's what actually matters, as opposed to whether or not there was um any kind of electoral malfeasance. UM. And of course the c e d A that Catholic kind of right wing party, that's the dominant right wing party, and the Phalangists, the fascists absolutely would have cheated themselves in this election, and they actually they probably did. Um And as a matter of fact, when Roblez, the head of the c E d A, realized that he wasn't going to be appointed prime minister after the nineteen thirty six election, he started negotiating with African EASTA generals to try to convince them to do a coup to force it, like, to put him into power um as a dictator basically. Uh And he failed, but there was a lot of sympathy for the ideal. While the left looked at the Phalanges and the c E d A and saw Hitler and Mussolini, the right looked at the Popular Front and saw it as the inevitable prelude to Soviet style state communism. Uh And I'm going to quote from a write up in lumen dot UK right now. When this coalition came to power, popular unrest in the countryside exploded into land seizures, encouraged by radical anarchists. So as soon as like the Popular Front wins the election, the anarchists are like, we're we're going to do our thing now, like it's time to it's time to take power for the people. There was little attempt by the anarchists to moderate their behavior and no demands to allow the Popular Front to reassure moderate elements. In Spain, a c and T, which is an anarchist party conference held in May nineteen thirty six, was full of revolutionary language. It seemed that the New Republic had not been able to control the major revolutionary group. The murder of a former finance minister, Jose Calvo Sotelo, on thirteenth July nineteen thirty six, was the trigger for the war, and much the same way as the assassination of arch Franz Ferdinand had sparked the First World War. So Tello had been an exile from nineteen to thirty four, but had returned to become a leading right wing figure associated with the Spanish Fascists and a deputy for the Spanish Revival Group. He clashed with the Socialists and the Assembly and was murdered by left wing members of the Civil Guard. So you have a couple of things happened. The Popular Front wins election, the anarchists just start seizing the ship out of land and saying, like the revolution, we're doing a revolution um it's happening. And at the same time, another left wing group of left wing people murders a popular right wing politician. Um. So this all kind of snowballs into the start of the Civil war, you know. Okay, Now, when the c E d A lost the election, that was kind of it for them, um, and most of the party, like after failing to win in thirty six, just kind of gets fully on board with authoritarianism. One scholar writes that everyone got the message to quote, abandon the ballot box and take up arms. The c E d a s youth movement collapses. Yeah, yeah, that's so like the the Young Republicans. Basically they collapse overnight and they all joined the Phalange. So all of the young like conservatives who had been in the c e d A and trying to get out the vote immediately joined the fascist party and start picking up guns. Um, And street fighting and political murders reach a fever pitch in this in this period. Now, the quote I read earlier mentioned land seizures by the CNT and other groups of anarchists. Um. And it's actually true that in the trade unions major strongholds, the areas where the anarchists the anarchist Trade Union was most powerful Barcelona, Zaragosa and Seville. There was actually very little in the way of like strikes or mass demonstrations in the lead up to the war. The CNT tried to keep their people kind of calm um. But there are a lot of their anarchists, right, A lot of them aren't part of the CNT, and a bunch of them and a bunch of socialists occupy land in battles which took over seventh And like this land occupation. I mentioned at the start of the Republic that they took about ten percent of the undeveloped land and gave it to peasants. This occupation of land and batty yaws takes seven times that much land and starts redistributing it to like peasants um. And this fucking terrifies the rich people in Spain. If you've at this point, the anarchists have fucked with the money, right, I'm talked about about the money. You funked up the money I talked about how like Trump a big part of why on the day on the six, like all these fucking banks started coming out of like Chase Bank and Chevron are like like condemning President Trumble because with the money, you can't suck up the money. Doc can't suck up the money. And of course anarchists are all about like they want to funk up. That's the point, which is one of the things I like about them, not saying that's wrong, but they funk up the money, and that that gets a lot of the a lot of rich people, a lot of like the Spanish, kind of like ruling class on board some sort of revolution against the left. Now in Spain, the seizure of Batta Yaws convinces a lot of these like rich people that the government can't guarantee stability anymore. So while past coup attempts by generals had generally folded due to a lack of support from the dominant classes, who didn't want to see a coup, right, they didn't like the left, but I don't want to have like a coup again, by nineteen thirty six a lot more of those folks are like, you know what, it's either a coup or we don't get to be rich people anymore. And they do what rich people do. Who it is, who it is. So the government had known that the African easta generals weren't super trustworthy, which is why they tried to post the ring leaders, General Franco and a guy named General Mola to the Canary Islands and Pamplona, respectively, right keep them out of the center of ship. But these guys were still collaborating with a codra of other officers, and on July seventeenth, under orders from Franco, troops and Morocco rebelled, and obviously the foreign legion are kind of like the core of this. Over the next three days, military units and commanders all over Spain rose up against the legitimate government, and the hope from Franco and his fellows had been that they would swiftly take control of major cities, jail their political opponents, and install a dictator like they've done with de Revere and not all that long ago. Right very comes to power like a decade or so earlier, so they were hoping it would follow that trend. But the left was way more organized now and it did not work out that way. And I'm gonna quote now from a write up in the New Left Review. Confidence in a rapid rebel victory was quickly dispelled when the insurrection in most major cities, notably Madrid and Barcelona, was crushed in the streets by a combination of loyal security forces and political and trade union militants. Where this combination failed or the security forces went over to the rebels, the rising was almost immediately successful, as in Seville and Saragosa. The fact that less than half the army and security forces united behind the rebellion was the principal reason why the coup failed in its principal objective and turned into a civil war. Now that's not the unified opinion on things, right, the idea that yeah, they're they're significant debate over why the coup failed, right, because he does fail. Right, the speciest win in the end, But they don't get they don't succeed by coup. They have to fight a war. And a lot of scholars will actually argue a lot of them will argue that, well, it was the security because most of the security forces didn't go with the rebels, that's why the rebels didn't win immediately. A lot of scholars will also argue that actually the bulk of the credit for halting rebel victory goes to local militias, which are kind of spontaneously organized just because a bunch of people started picking up guns. The argument is that in the wake of the coup, the Spanish military and the Republican government lost basically all cohesion incredibility, which they did, right, like half of your military like decides to overthrow the government. Not a lot of people had to have faith in the government. And the arrest of all can't stop these people from taking my land from me. Yeah, like y'all. And the reason that Franco and his allies, these the scholars who will kind of take this out of it, argue that the reason Franco and his allies didn't win immediately is that hundreds of thousands of civilians took to the streets and these is a general rule in the early days, these citizens militias. Um, these people were just like picking up their grandpa's hunting rifle or in a lot of cases looting sporting goods stores, like busting like busting into like a fucking a sportsman warehouse and just taking all the guns. Okay, like we need guns, these guys have them, let's grab them. Um. And you know there's later too, there's looting off like military barracks is but like, yeah, they just get whatever guns they fucking can and they start fighting the African Eastas, who are at that point very experienced, disciplined and well equipped veterans. UM. So it's like this mix if you've got hundreds of thousands of men and women, because women are a part of the fighting forces briefly in this period, just picking up whatever guns they can get and going to war against one of the most veteran military units in all of Europe. Um. In his nineteen six essay on the matter, Morae book Chin writes quote to have stopped Franco's Army of Africa, composed of foreign legionnaires and Moorish mercenaries, perhaps the bloodthirsty ist and certainly one of the most professionalized troops at the disposal of any European nation at the time, and it's well trained civil guards and political auxiliaries would have been thing less than miraculous once it established a strong base on the Spanish mainland. That hastily formed, untrained and virtually unequipped militiamen and women slowed Franco's Army's advance on Madrid for four months and essentially stopped it on the outskirts of the Capitol is a feat for which they have rarely earned the proper tribute from writers on the Civil War of the past century. Wow yeah yeah, just everyone picking up their guns and being like fuck these guys, right, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think there's like this you know, um yeah. The miracle that they was actually able to stop this fool or these dudes is like yeah, it's I mean, obviously ultimately they don't. But like that, I think about like what we used to call like like dad strong. You know, like you you just you're you don't you know your dad's strong, but you don't, like you don't really believe it, you know what I'm saying. And then you're like then you're sixteen and you want to like throw hands with him, you know what I'm saying, and then he just lays you out flat, you know what I mean. You're like, I don't I I didn't expect you to be this strong. You know that. To me sometimes it's like I feel like that with like military dudes that are like super trained, where it's like you think, you think you can take them, and then you're like, oh, yeah, no, you're actually trained. This is not a game. So so knowing that, but then the fact that just the that these just untrained militias were still able to like, yeah, pull this off, you know, four months of brutal fighting. Yeah, and they lose a funk load of thousands, like and it and it is. It is a very lopsided kill ratio at this point, right, because you're you are these are some of the most veteran military units in all of Europe, right, Um, going up against like fucking Grandpa and grandma with hunting rifles, right, Yeah, it's it's ugly, It is ugly. But they they slow, They stopped Franco from winning in the thirties six, you know, and there seems to be very little debate about that that they were Some people argue how critical, but they were critical in stopping the nationalists, which is what the other thing the rebels are called at the Gates of Madrid, and that they're not the only ones. We'll talk a little bit about the We're gonna talk about the international brigades in a second, um, but first you have to take an ad break, sir. You know who else would have stopped Franco at the gates of Madrid, Sophie, Yeah, Sophie would have Um Sophie would have backed by the militant products and services that support this podcast. Yes, including Sportsman's Warehouse where you two can steal guns to fight the fat Well now, okay, maybe not might be the wisest okay products. Adoption of teams from foster care is a topic not enough people know about. In we are here to change that. I'm April Dinnuity, host of the new podcast Navigating Adoption, presented by adopt Us Kids. Each episode brings you compelling, real life adoption stories told by the families that lived them, with commentary from experts. Visit adopt us Kids dot org, slash podcast, or subscribe to Navigating Adoption presented by adopt Us Kids, brought to you by the U. S. 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Discover the forest dot org brought to you by the United States Force Service and the AD Council. We're back. We're back, and for a brief time in nineteen thirty six, the Spanish Republican military was vastly dominated by, as opposed to like a kind of traditional military, a dizzying array of independent, interlocking and largely democratic militias. Most of the militias are either anarchist or trotskyist, So there's the c n T and the p o U M, and then there's groups that aren't a part of this, but like a largely they're either anarchist or kind of trotskyist, and both are heavily democratic. So men and women take up arms together, they vote for their leaders, so their officers are elected. It in recallable. Um and yeah, it's it's it, it is. You know, there's critiques to make up the system. We'll talk about that a bit, but that's what the military is at this point in ninety six. It's largely just a funckload of these militias because the actual military is not in a good way, you know, very chaotic and disorganized itself. And in a lot of cases, because of the fact that a lot of the military had rebelled, soldiers will leave their units and join militias. So it's very complicated. Please do not take this as a comprehensive or particularly in depth explanation of what happens with the Spanish militia system in the Republican like. It is incredibly complicated. This is an overview. This is all an overview. The Spanish Civil war is is very very complex. Um So. Yeah, and while this is happening, while while all these democratic militias are rising up to fight the fascists in the countryside, behind the lines and sometimes right up to the lines, something equally interesting is happening. I'm gonna quote Marae book Chains article here in. The wave of collectivizations that swept over Spain in the summer and autumn of nineteen thirty six has been described in a recent BBC Granada documentary as the greatest experiment and workers self management. Western Europe has ever seen a revolution more far reaching than any which occurred in Russia during nineteen seventeen to twenty one and the years before and after it an anarchist industrial areas like Catalonia and estimated three quarters of the economy was placed under workers control as it was an anarchist rural areas like Aragon. The figure of tapers downward, where the U, G T, which is another group shared power with the C and T or else predominated fifty percent in anarchist and socialist Valencia and thirty percent in socialist In liberal Madrid and more thoroughly anarchist areas, particularly among the agrarian collectives, Money was eliminated and the material means of life were allocated strictly according to need rather than work, following the traditional concepts of a libertarian communist society. As the BBC Granada television documentary puts it, the ancient dream of a collective society without profit or property was made reality. In the villages of Aragon, all forms of production were owned by the community, run by their workers. And again, as books and notes, this is not you know, this is different everywhere that in Republican Spain. But in Catalonia, which has a lot of industrial areas, three quarters of the industrial economy is directly controlled by the workers manning these factories, as opposed to them like even having elected bosses and stuff. Um, which is really interesting. Um, it's it's something that doesn't happen. Yeah, yeah, Like how long was it like kind of working. There's debate as to how long it worked, but a couple of yeah, generally speaking, a year or two. You know, It's it's different in different regions. We're going to talk about what happens there. Um. Bookshon continues. The administrative apparatus of Republican Spain belonged almost entirely to the unions and their political organizations. Police in many cities were replaced by armed workers patrols. Militia units were formed everywhere in factories, on farms, and in socialist and anarchist community centers and union halls, initially including women as well as men. A vast network of local revolutionary committees coordinated the feeding of the cities, the operations of the economy, and the meeting out of justice. Indeed almost every facet of Spanish life, from production to culture, bringing the whole of Spanish society and the Republican zone into a well organized and coherent whole. This historically unprecedented appropriation of society by its most oppressed sectors, including women, who were liberated from all the constraints of a highly traditional Catholic country, be it the prohibition of abortion or and divorce, or a degraded stats in the economy, was the work of the Spanish proletariat and peasantry. It was a movement from below that overwhelmed even the revolutionary organizations of the impressed, including the C and T. Significantly, no left organization issued calls for revolutionary takeovers of factories, workplaces or the land, observes Ronald Fraser and one of the most up to date accounts of the popular movement. Indeed, the C and T leadership in Barcelona, epicenter of urban anarcho syndicalism, went further rejecting the offer of power presented to it by President Companies, the head of the Catalan government. It decided that the libertarian revolution must stand aside for collaboration with the Popular Front forces to defeat the common enemy. The revolution that transformed Barcelona in a matter of days into a city virtually run by the working class sprang initially from individual c and t unions impelled by their most advanced militants, and as their example spread, it was not only large enterprises, but small workshops and businesses that were being taken over. So a bookstion is saying there is this is a true bottom up revolution. And even in some cases this the anarchist trade union is like, don't do this, we need to work with the government. We're not calling for revolution, and the individual groups of workers are like, no, we're just going to take over our office. We're just taking over. That's fine, it's fine, that's fine. And it proves to be a mixed bag, like we'll we'll talk about this. There's fair critiques about what happens, but it is amazing and unprecedented and one of the great what ifs of histories. If there had not also been this massive civil war in this just invasion, might it have worked you know, and they're under a pressure that is kind of impossible to overcome in this intention, but it is an interesting question. What is yeah, dude, what is strange? Like it was strange because we've just never seen it, but like, yeah, what was that year? Like you know what I'm saying, like name rates were, like what was the I don't say like petty crimes, you know what I'm saying, Like, one of these days I will do because I I don't know nearly enough about this. One of these days I would like to do like a hardcore history link, like a twelve hour deep dive into the Spanish Civil War where it's mostly focused on like, yeah, what what are these? Like what are these? You your place? The cops with like citizens patrols? How did that actually work? What was that? Like? What are what are what are kind of like the first person accounts we can have of those. Um, obviously we don't have the time to go into that much detail today, but it's definitely like, yeah, that would that would call for like a twelve hour Yes, yes, it's a very complicated and this is just I'm hoping what this mostly does is wet people's appetite to read more themselves, right, which I am also going to do. But it's a very interesting period of history. Now, obviously this system had a number of upsides, if you want to call it a system. What happens in Spain in this period has a number of upsides. That mobilizes a huge portion of the republic citizenry very quickly. Um it brings a people into arms very rapidly, more rapidly probably than a central government could have done. And these people were highly motivated to resist fascism, but they also in large part weren't motivated to live under the republic. And coordination between all of these groups was very difficult and sometimes impossible. Meanwhile, the rebels the nationalists had a strict military hierarchy, and that's a benefit in a war sometimes, right, it can also be you know, you can you can look at the Germans in World War Two. It doesn't always work out. But when you've got one side that's made up of a thousand different fractious people who agree on some things and disagree on a lot, that can deplete your ability to counter attack and to organize effectively. Meanwhile, Franco winds up and you know there's a scess he's not initially the only guy, but eventually he's the only dude whose opinion really matters. He's the guy at the top um And and that happens fairly quickly, and Franco is able to coordinate a centralized military in order to like like attack this very decentralized folks. He's a sneaky guy. There's also one of his fellow generals dies in a plane crash, so some of it's just like dumb lot um. Now, since the c E d A had failed that he didn't he Franco didn't really want to like wrap himself in the c E d a s flag because they've gotten their asses kicked in the thirty six election. And he kind of winds up embracing the philogists. And this is part of why people argue with Franco himself was really a fascist. If he was just kind of co opting fascism, I don't really see the point in getting involved in that. Franco gets in like wraps himself in the Phalange Party and like like they become kind of a dominant right wing force in this in the nationalist cause. Now, Jose Antonio, who had been the leader of the Phalangists had been arrested by the republic right at the start of the rebellion, and he was almost immediately executed for sedition, even though he'd been incarcerated when the rebellion cooked off. Like, if you want to argue how just it was, he didn't really have much to do with it. Um. But they kill him, Um, And I'm not, I don't care he's a fascist, Like, I'm not, I'm not gonna weep over him. But Franco takes Jose Antonio and turns him into a martyr, right, Um. And he also imprisons the guy who takes over the Phalangists after Jose Antonio so that he can turn the Phalangists into his own basically like cult of personality, Yeah, exactly, um. And Franco co opting the fascists had the side effect of making this war, which had started as a conflict between Spanish left and right and a conflict between you know, the Africanist military and and the Republic, into the world's first open battle ground between fascism and democracy, and the first three months of the civil war were some of the bloodiest. Both sides carried out a horrific series of assassinations is a very the early period, there's this amazing rising up of of the people to defend themselves, and there's also a ton of fucking vigilante murders, and it does occur on both sides. It's really ugly. And I'm going to read a quote from the New Left Review here. Even so, there were significant differences between the massacres on the left and the right. Many voices unheard on the rebel side were raised in the Republican Zone against the slaughter. By early September, a new government under Largo Caballero began to create a semblance of public order, which slowly put an endo the killings there, but not soon enough. News of the anti clerical violence, which included the disinternament of nun's coffins, widespread burning of churches, and desecration of religious objects, was broadcast around the world, creating extremely negative international image of the Republican Zone. Does not not good optics yet. Yeah, yeah, look man, yeah, you messing with the nuns. Like we all like, yeah that the nuns are fine guys. Yeah, And we've talked earlier about how like you can you know, there's arguments to be made about like, obviously there's a lot of problematic priests part of but disentering nun's coffins, there's really that I know of. They're like, come on, okay, guys, yeah, and it it is bad for the early rebel pr Now, on the rebel side, with occasional exception, tight censorship kept the assassinations out of the news. The church, which would soon sanctify the insurgents war, is a religious crusade turned a blind eye though hundreds of clergy were witnessed through oppression executed not only by the military but by Philangists and normally law abiding conservative Catholic citizens. So of course the church is both victim and perpetrator and a lot of and the death toll is much higher in terms of people killed by the right than people killed by the left. Um and again on in the republic there's outcries against the vigilante violence, and on the right there's like, don't talk about it, keep killing people, don't talk stop just stop putting it on TV, Like, I mean, do what you gotta do. But hey, yeah, Now, on the Republican side, the two largest left wing groups at the start of the war, because the Communists are very small at the start of the war. Again, because Spain doesn't industrialize into a lot later than a lot of the it doesn't have a very powerful communist party at this period. At the start of things, the two largest and left wing groups are the anarchists and the Trotskyists, and they were immediately torn between stopping fascism at all costs and of course funk the state right like there's a there's This is a tough choice for them. Now. The CNT, the largest anarchist organization, lands on the side of allying with the state to fight fascism, but many local workers councils were not on board. Now. While this is happening in the early part of the war, the communists very quickly come to hold significant power within the confusing and fractious Republican military establishment now and they grow rapidly at this period too, And this is due to the pretty sensible fact that the communists had a communist state, the USSR, that they could go to and beg for aid right the like the USSR is provides aid we'll talk about that a bit more to the republicans, And so the communists very quickly gained a lot of power within the military establishment of the Republic. Now, unfortunately, the fascists also had states they could go to for help, Italy and Germany, And from the very beginning of this war they're Italian and German troops fighting on the ground alongside the nationalist Spanish troops. Um and unfortunately for everybody, the fascist states were way more willing to provide direct aid to their side than the Communists were. I'm gonna quote again from the New Left Review here. Without Fascist aid, most of it provided on credit, the rebels would not long have been able to continue the war, let alone win it. Aside from the Nazis condor legion, Germany and Italy together provided tens of thousands of troops, mainly Italian, nearly six hundred war planes, thousands of armored vehicles, and hundreds of field guns. Equally important were the three point five million tons of oil provided on credit by Texico and Shell, double the amount imported by the Republic, without which Franco's army could not have maneuvered as rapidly as it did so. Yes, the victory of the fascists in Spain owes a great deal to our good friends Texico and Shell. My Texico and Shell. Should we back fascists or not fashion fascists? Of course we're Texico. Yeah yeah, Oh my god, they don't talk about that. No more. No, let me tell you the last two names. I thought you was going to say right now, yeah, Texico and Shell. I was like, I was like, wait, wait what yeah? Yeah? Uh so. Not wanting to provoke Britain and France, with whom he was still seeking an anti fascist alliance, Stalin initially held back, but blatant Nazi and Fascist intervention increasingly alarmed him, ensuring that all European powers were made aware that Soviet aid to the Republic was not in support of advancing revolution. In October nineteen thirty six, the first Soviet shipment of arms and the first contingent of the International Brigades reached Madrid and the nick of time to help prevent the capital's fall. And all the Soviet unions since seven hundred war planes and four armored vehicles, plus some two thousand pilots, engineers, military advisers, and in kV the secret police. Now there's a lot. We're going to talk a lot about criticisms of Soviet aid and of Soviet policy and this, and there are a lot of valid ones to give, but it's also worth noting that Soviet AID was absolutely crucial in stopping Madrid from falling when Franco made his first advance, right, the milicias slowed it down, but without this hardcore military equipment they probably don't stop Franco from taking Madrid in ninety six. You know, I was gonna say, like, uh that like tradition of like Communist Russia AID, I've been I've been thinking about that a little bit, Like you know, I'm stretching this as far as this this idea that like the way that they exported AID in Communists like block countries, like you know, at the like there was once upon a time like North Korea was actually doing way better than South Korea, you know, because of this Communists AID. You know what I'm saying a number of other reasons to like the nature of the Japanese invasion, but yeah, absolutely, you know, and then when I think about like Cuba, and I got I got friends from like you know, South Africa, Western African countries, Zambia, all these things, and they're like yo, you could say whatever you want. They're like every every every nation in Africa got a Cuban doctor. You know what I'm saying. It just this idea that like it was like, it's just like when you the more I traveled, the more I started going day. Maybe they just think about aid and they this is Understaalin. It's very like, for one thing, the Cuban medical aid, which is incredible. The way that the Cuban government sends out doctors, what Cuban doctors do and have been doing for decades is absolutely amazing. As far as I know, it is done without any sort of hope of recompense. The Soviets are getting paid very well. So when when Republican Spain happens, when there's the split, the Republic winds up with Spain's gold stockpile, which is the largest gold reserves on planet Earth at the time, about eight hundred and five million dollars and that that time's currency. Um And while the fascists provided aid to Franco on credit, right, Italy and Germany are like, you don't have to pay now, We'll just give you stuff and you'll owe us. You'll pay us later, right, um. Stalin's like, you know I'm gonna need some cash up, do you I'm I'm Joseph Stalin. Like, I don't just give people ship, you know. Um, he does later in the war a bit he was him alone. But where he they they So about eight hundred five million dollars is what Spain's gold reserves the Republican Spain's gold reserves are at the start of the war. They pour more than five hundred million dollars in gold into the Soviet Union by the end of the war. Um and because a lot yeah, and also they have to they have to burn a bunch of money on like shady arms dealers and like it's a very bad like and a lot of the blame also goes to France, who makes it difficult to get shipped through the border, which is why they have to go with arms smugglers as opposed to just getting weapons directly imported. Um, it's very messy. The fascists also had the benefit of receiving much better guns. Um. And I don't know how much you can blame the Soviets for this. The Germans had the best weaponry and the planet at this point in time. So the quality of arms that Franco receives blows everything Soviet out of the water. Now, a lot of the blame for the Republic's loss tends to go to Stalin and the USSR. But if we're really being and that, like when you read articles trying to like allay blame, a lot of people will put blame on Stalin in the USSR, and there are very legitimate things to criticize them about. But if we're truly being fair, the foreign nations most responsible for the victory of fascism in Spain where the United States, England and France um because the entire free world basically engaged in a policy of non intervention within the Spanish Civil War. This is part of the appeasement policy that the British were doing with the Germans at the time, and they were trying to get the Germans basically agreed to neutrality in the war, and Germany would put some lip services at this, but they didn't like. They sent soldiers and planes and arms, and both fascist states intervened directly, which meant that the Republic of Spain was standing on their own against the entire fascist international, fascist Spain, fascist Italy, fascist Germany. And they have some backup from the Soviets, and that's it, right, Everyone else is like, fuck you, the French closed the border. We're not jumping in. Yeah, the Democrats And this is again part of why this the communists their criticisms of decisions made by Communist advisors and Communist leaders in the Spanish Republican cause. The reason the Communists wind up in power largely in the Spanish Republican side is because the democracies are like, oh, we don't want any part in this ship. Right, could have been different if you know, damn right. Yeah, so I can't blame the USSR here, you know, Yeah, that's good dude, because it's like, yeah, you get you see a homeboy getting like lept, you know what I'm saying, Like somebody just brought the night will just knocking the held me out, and then everybody jumping into help. And you're like, well, I thought we all agreed we weren't going to jump in, But like you, if your friends throwing a haymaker, it's not really his fault. He fucking tried. You're the one none of y'all was jumping in. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Um. So, the like the failure of the democratic world, so to speak, to get involved in any kind of organized way is one of the great tragedies and maybe one of the reasons World War two happens, right, maybe one of the reasons why no, no, no, this is a this is FDR FDR Yeah, because I watched the speech about this time of him explaining why he was like, we don't want no parts of this. I remember, I remember exactly, but I remember being really interested in the fact that like, yeah, like you know, awesome, Like look, we like some isolation and stuff on someone. Look, man, we've got our own problems here. Man, we look, we just we can't even feed ourselves. Like I'm not gonna like sind people. Maybe we should stay out of this one. Yeah, that's that. That is very much the attitude and the the fascists use Spain, particularly Germany. You Spain as a testing ground for new weapons and tactics, particularly their new air force, because the air and the concept of an air force is very new. There have been air forces in World War One, but they mostly just shot at each other and like spotted right for artillery and ship. Now you've got bombers right now, Now you have air tactical air support that can destroy armor and stuff. And the Spanish Civil Wars the first time this really comes together in an organized way, and it provides the LEFTWAFFA, the Nazi Air Force with a way to test out its tactics and bombs on Spanish cities and civilians in many cases. And we'll talk about that a little bit later in the episode two. But first, you know who won't attack Spanish cities and civilians with Stuka dive bombers want so Sofie, we might, though she started messing with her products and Cyrus. I have been worried about Sophie's cash off Stuka dive bombers. I am consuner. I'm saying, why you have so many cut to check where my contract? That's Sophie, So she might If they don't, she might. They don't say money, she might bomb Spain. You know, I've always said that about Sophie. 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I don't know, but an awful lot of their citizens, and citizens from like Poland is a huge number of these guys, an awful lot of people from around the world. Individual people correctly see that, like, well, I don't live in Spain, but I don't like fascism, and I think that whatever happens in Spain will probably directly impact my future. So I'm going to go travel to Spain and try to get ahold of a rifle and shoot some fucking fascists. Um, a lot of people do this movie. There's a couple and there's being worked on right now that I hope will wind up being good. Yeah, there's this scene where big holl Me like uh, gives this big speech about why he's still willing to like from America go volunteer in this war. I forget the name of this movie. But it was like a resting seen about this time that like, Okay, the government saying we're not going to do it, but that don't stop me. I could fly out there, I hope. Yeah. You know, there's a lot of these are the people who recognize what is a timeless truth, which is that, um, fascism and authoritarianism in in one part of the world is a threat to freedom everywhere in the world. And that's the way it's always been. And we can talk a lot about the fallout from what happened in Syria. Um, but you know there's a lot of there's a lot of stories of that in history, you know. Um So while the Republic lacked, Yeah, so a funklet of people, eventually something close to forty people will wind up volunteering to fight in Spain. And two of the first foreigners to volunteer to fight in Spain where a twenty one year old classics graduate from Cambridge named Bernard Knox and his friend John Cornford. They took with them an old pistol that had belonged to John cornfora it's a weird name. Um. They took with them an old yes Cornford Sophie. They took with him. He dies fighting ashes. He's a good guy, but alright, they took with them an old pistol okay, Sophie. So they traveled to Spain together with just like nothing but an old handgun that had belonged to John's dad in the First World War. Knox had to carry a gun. The gun because his friend had already been to Spain once before. And the British policy of non intervention mean they did everything, meant that Britain like was trying to actively stop people from going to Spain to fight fascism. Um. But but Cornford and his buddy join a militia, like get to Spain, they joined a militia as soon as they land. Um, which is like at this point one of the many groups that had taken up arms to fight against the military coup. Um. And as I had said the early days of this war, there's a lot of women who are fighting in the militia's. This ends at like the end of nineteen thirty six when Largo Caballero comes to power because he kind of he argues that women are needed behind the lines, so they're not really fighting in the front. After this point, it's a pretty brief period. And that's again a criticism. One of the criticisms of the Spanish Republican government is like, well, I lost out on a lot of soldiers. Huh yeah, so yeah, people will in a suit. You told him stay home. In those early days of revolutionary ardor though, when Cornford and his friend arrive in Spain, uh, like, Spain is kind of like overtaken by this this feeling of revolution um and and this is swelled by the fact that the people of Republican Spain had literally taken to the streets to defend themselves in mass and it lent cities like Barcelona a revolutionary air that international volunteers noticed. One of those volunteers was a young George Orwell, and he described the atmosphere in Barcelona as startling and overwhelming and like a positive sense, just like so incredible, this like outpouring of of of liberty. Now, the Communist International or common tern quickly realized that volunteers like Cornford represented a massive opportunity, so they devoted some of their resources to organize in what came to be known as the International Brigades. So it's it's the Communist who put together the National Brigades, which are a huge factor in in both why the Republic last so long and why um it becomes so internationally famous. Although a lot of these volunteers are anarchists and not communists, you know, it's a bunch of different kinds and Trotsky like a bunch of different kinds of people volunteer. And I'm gonna quote from a rite up on the International Brigades and the Guardian. Another recruit, Winston Churchill's rebel nephew, Esmond Romilly, had cycled across France fueled by coffee and kognac before volunteering and declaring himself a member of that very large class of unskilled laborers with a public school accent. He sailed on a boat from Marseilles with watch duties split in two hour shifts between French, German Poles, Italians, Yugoslav's, Belgians, Flemish and Russian speakers. And it's yeah, it's very kind of dope. Yeah, it's it's we're gonna talk mostly is very depe. Yeah, Winster Churchill's nephew is showing up. Yeah, it was like coffee and come out here with the homies, like on the streets right now. I look, I want to quote with school. How you get this accent? I love it. I'm like, okay, okay, and it's um and and it's it's there's a couple of things going on there. Um. One of them is that like by public school that in England actually means like a fancy school. So he's like, I I have I have a public school accent. But I too am like whatever you call what I call it an unskilled laborer, like I identified Okay, that's that's actually it is because I don't have to do this, okay. It's the opposite of like, you know, that common people thing where it's like I want to be, you know, like a labor is like, well, I want to be like a laborer. So I'm gonna go stand with a rifle next to them and fight the fascist, which yeah, I'm not gonna I'm not gonna talk to you about you for doing that. Um And. It's also worth noting we're gonna talk mostly about American volunteers UM here. One of the largest nations that that a lot of people volunteer to fight in Spain from is Poland. UM And obviously Poland becomes the first one of the first large national victim at least of nazism um. So you and you can see why, right, like a lot of Poles looking at Germany on their doorstep, agitating about taking back land given to them by versaillae, or like we should probably go try to stop this, yea. So the invasion of Madrid was the first terrible battle of the Civil War the verse like really massive and important one, I think. And Franco's colonial army, including the Spanish foreign Legion, were airlifted from Morocco to Seville by German planes in order to fight there in an operation that Hitler himself named Operation Magic Fire, which is based on a part of a Wagner opera, Franco's Fast. So they and again the bulk of the nationalist troops don't get out of Africa to fight in Spain without Hitler's airlift. They did they had they would have had because the navy doesn't go fascist. The Spanish navy, such as it is, stays loyal um in large part because like there's actually a lot of Spanish naval officers who try to go against the Republic and then their crews killed them and stuff, you know. Um, So the only reason that Franco's army gets to Iberi is because the Nazis airlift them. Um. Now, Franco's fascist towards tour through Republic territory on their way to Madrid. They were slowed by the militias um and eventually turned back by a significant amount of Soviet armored aid um. And you know, a lot of people sacrificed to stop them. But a lot of the credit for finally stopping the fascist advanced on Madrid goes to the International Brigades who turned back the fascists at a place called University City, which is like a college campus, in a heroic defense that has become like very like famous in history. Now, most of the International Brigade members at this point were untrained, inexperienced, and nearly all of them were poorly armed. They found themselves confronting a battle hardened army with cutting edge German weaponry, and somehow they held the line. Cornford Squad operated a machine gun nest in the philosophy faculty offices of the University City campus. They built barricades out of books in order to stop fascist bullets. The Guardian notes okay. Quote enemy bullets gave up before reaching page three fifty, making them believe old tales of soldiers saved by bibles in their breast pockets. I think I killed a fascist, Cornford, a former pacifist, wrote excitedly to his girlfriend Margot Hyneman on eighth December fifteen or sixteen of them were running from a bombardment. If it is true, it's a fluke, that's yeah, yeah yeah, building this entire like building barricades out of philosophy books to stop fascist bullets. Yeah, it's it's yes, that is punk rock. He was like to that about page three as they can get yeah. Uh. Now. The achievement of the International Brigades at University City turned them into a symbol, both in Spain and worldwide of resistance to fascism. They also received more international attention because their numbers included men who spoke dozens of different languages. They were like fifty four nations represented eventually, and this made it really easy for the foreign press to to embed with people because they could find people that they could talk to, you know, like it like it's just speaking of somebody who's done war zone reporting. If there's a group of people like that that I can embed with. That's what I'm gonna do because I'll meet other people who are English speakers and it's way easier to conduct interviews and stuff that. Um. And, of course, the United States was well represented among the international volunteers. Now, it was very illegal for U. S citizens to join a foreign military force at this time, but still hundreds and hundreds joined what came to be known as the Abraham Lincoln Battalion. These soldiers underwent two weeks of clandestine training near New York City before shipping out. New York, by the way, was the source of a huge number of Lincoln Battalion troops. It is worth noting that about one tenth of foreign Spanish volunteers were Jewish, so of all of the people who could like and again, it's the same thing as the polls. A lot of Jewish folks are like, looking at Nazi German are like, should probably go do something about this problem. There's gonna be a problem for us, I think, um. And in fact, American historian and international veteran Albert Prago called the International Brigades quote the vehicle through which Jews could offer the first armed resistance to European fascism, and that's pretty rad Now. One of the most notable aspects of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion is that, in an era in which racism was almost unbelievably present in American society, and there in which even the military was heavily segregated, the Abraham Lincoln Battalion was completely unsegregated. Black men could not only join, they could become officers and command white troops in battle, and this had never happened in Uss. This point that I am aware of. This brings me to the incredible story of l Lord Luteal McDaniels, and I'm going to quote from a writ up in the Smithsonian Magazine here. L Lord Lute McDaniels traveled across the Atlantic in nineteen thirty seven to fight fascists in the Spanish Civil War, where he became known as El Fantastico for his prowess with a grenade. As a platoon sergeant with the McKenzie Papinau Battalion of the International Gads, the twenty five year old African American from Mississippi commanded white troops and led them into battle against the forces of General Franco, men who saw him as less than human. It might seem strange for a black man to go to such links to fight in a white man's war so far from home. Wasn't there enough racism to fight in the United States? But McDaniels was convinced that anti fascism and anti racism were one and the same. I saw the invaders of Spain were the same people I've been fighting all my life, McDaniels says. I've seen lynching and starvation, and I know my people's enemies. Let's go first of all, Man's last name is McDaniels, which already tells you someone Yep, you know what I'm saying, So we know his family story. You know what I'm saying. And yeah, that just and the Fanessa just just the culture that you get there and get a nickname immediately, you know what I'm saying, Like l fantastical because she's really good at killing fascist. I'm good at this ship. Dann. I was crazy. I was gonna say that that. Yeah, that like a stut, like you know, like the observation of just like where we're just like, look, man, you gotta trust us. Like I'm trying to tell you this is the same same ease, like this is the same people to the people. I'm trying to tell you the same problem. Yeah. Now. The United States in this period also banned black men from serving as fighter pilots, but three black pilots, James Peck, Patrick Roosevelt, and Paul Williams, served in Spain. Canute Wilson, a black American volunteer, was the head mechanic for the International Garage, which maintained all of the Brigades fighting vehicles. He wrote this of his reasons for volunteering to fight in Spain, and a letter home to his family. We are no longer an isolated minority group fighting hopelessly against an immense giant, because, my dear, we have joined with and become an active part of a great progressive force on whose soldiers rests the responsibility of saving human civilization from the planned destruction of a small group of degenerates gotten mad in their lust for power. Because if we crush fascism here, we'll save our people in America and in other parts of the world from the vicious persecution, wholesale imprisonment, and slaughter which the Jewish people suffered and our suffering under Hitler's fascist heels, that is, that is sentenced. That is I think it's like this, like this, this part of this like longing and I'm gonna speak in like generalities, but just this longing in that like that African American like the black community, I think that's gone. That goes very far back to say, surely not all white people are like this. Yeah, you know what I'm saying, Like you have you're like this, It can't be. It can't be all of y'all, you know what I'm saying. So like when you when you find it like I mean, obviously I'm marketing back to history, but when you like like when you see when you see, uh, during like the Harlem Renaissance, you see black people going to going to France and being like, look, there's reasonable white people. Like I'm telling you there they have to exist, you know, there has it has to exist, you know what I'm saying. So like it's it's almost like I hear that in this guy's statement, like dude, I found them reasonable white people. Yeah. Well, and in speaking about you know the fact that L word's last name is McDaniels, right, that probably means that like an Irish person owned his ancestors, not all that far back. We're talking about like like like like not all that long ago, like his grandpa. Yeah. Now, because of the realities of the war, babe, when it were there were a funkload of Irish volunteers and Irish American volunteers, which means it's conceivable, like part of what probably happened here is he was leading irishman Irish descendedment into battles man who had been enslaved by an Irish descendent, leading them into into combat, which is amazing. Ship happens, and yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh Now during its brief and and yeah, it's it's amazing. In some ways, during its brief period of existence, wartime Republican Spain was in some ways almost impossibly progressive. In nineteen thirty six, Largo Caballero appointed Federica mont Senni, a female anarchist, to be the nation's Minister of Health. Federica immediately set to work focusing the embattled nation's health infrastructure to serve the needs of the poor and the working class. She believed that health care should be decentralized, locally organized and based around prevention rather than treatment. She was also responsible for making Republican Spain the first nation on Earth to legalize on demand abortion. Wow yeah, now yeah, there's a lot of really interesting ship. Yeah now months City was a controversial figure among anarchists, and she engaged in some pretty officious arguments with Emma Goldman, who is another very famous anarchist. In particular, and the general focus of criticism on Montseny and other anarchists who take part in the Republican government, um is on the subject of whether or not it was ethical for anarchists to coordinate with governments and with Marxists, because obviously in the Soviet Union they kill a funkload of anarchists too, you know. Um, this is a recurring theme in anarchist history and it's something that's very hotly debated to this day. I could note here that Nestor mak know who we talked about in our Christmas episode, also had to thread this moral needle because he collaborated with the post revolutionary government of Russia, which he didn't like, to fight against the white forces which were worse. You know, it's a it's a debate that anarchists have had a number of times in history, and is never really settled to a satisfactory degree. But it happens now. A decent number of the anarchists who fought for Republican Spain would in fact come to regret their collaboration with the government and the communists, and they had some good reasons to do that. For one thing, Republican Spain has lost the war. For another thing, the broad left unity that characterized some of the early stages of the war did not last. The government of Republican Spain, which did at one point include four anarchists ministers, as well as a number of communists and of course many more moderate Republicans, made a lot of tremendous errors. For one thing, the government fled Madrid while Franco was advancing, something which hampered their ability to capitalize on the moral victory of halting the fascists. Right, you can't brag about it as much because you ran away. You know you ran though. Yeah. For another reason, starting in late nineteen thirty six, the Republic's new government embarked on what they called militarization. This involved involved integrating the hundreds of different militias into the formal Spanish military. On the surface, this was a sensible call and it may have been the right one, and it was one that was heavily backed by communist advisors the USSR had sent in. Many historians will argue that it was necessary um and and some of the evidence for this is that, like in February of nineteen thirty seven, Malaga fell due in part to the fact that it was defended by a patchwork of militias that were not well coordinated. UM. But these militias that are being inducted into the formal military establishment, a lot of them had been again anarchist and Trotskyist, and they'd been free democratic fighting units. This led to problems and there were cases where you know, like whole battalions would vote to leave combat zones while the fighting was happening. This happened in the Battle of Madrid with when a guy named Drudy gets killed with like his guys leave. Um. But it also meant so it's not like obviously before militarization, they decided to militarize because there's a lot of problems with the fact that all these militias are so decentralized. These militias are also very motivated and very resistant to the idea of losing their democratic rights and bring brought under military discipline. UM. So, while a lot of militias were integrated to the Republican military, a significant number of fighters refused to join UM And whether or not this was a good idea is still hotly debated. And George, a lot of people will argue that because there's kind of a broad consensus, I would say among a lot of historians, I read that after the initial period where they were necessary, the militia's kind of hindered things more than they helped because of how disorganized they were. George Orwell himself argued against that um and argued in his pay at least, and he was, you know, his opinion was as a ground level soldier that the shortcomings of the militias system had less to do with the fact that they were democratic and be centralized, and more to do with the fact that they were inexperienced. And I'm gonna quote Orwell here it's a good argument. Later it became the fashion to decry the militias and therefore to pretend that the faults, which were due to lack of training and weapons, were the result of the equalitarian system. Actually, a newly raised draft of militia was an undisciplined mob, not because the officers called the private comrade, but because raw troops are always an undisciplined mob. And a worker's army discipline is theoretically based on class loyalty, while the discipline of a bourgeoisie conscript army is based ultimately on fear. The popular army that replaced the militias was midway between the two types. When a man refused to obey an order, you did not immediately get him punished. You first appealed to him in the name of comradeship. Cynical people with no experience handling men, will say instantly that this would never work, but as a matter of fact, it does work in the long run. Revolutionary discipline depends on an under standing of why orders must be obeyed. It takes time to diffuse this, but it also takes time to drill a man into an automaton on the barracks square. And it is a tribute to the strength of the revolutionary discipline that the militias state in the field at all. And or Well has a good point here. That's a that's a whole there's a whole like worldview, philosophy in those two approaches. I'm about to compare this to parenting, but yeah, because like there's parts of me that go, Man, if I just parented the way I was parented, I see why my parents is quicker. You know what I'm saying. It's like, you know, you're just it's like it's less emotional work to just be like, hey, it's time to do the dishes. Why what why you never say what I'm saying. Dude, you got five seconds to get up and do the dishes, you know what I'm saying. Right, So, and I'm like, y'all, don't care if you scrunch up your face how you want to scrunch up your face. You better hide your emotions. I don't need to see it, you know what I'm saying, Like that you live here, you you washing dishes? I bought you know, I'm using using water. I'm paying for him. So I'm black dadding on you. But like that's the way we was raised, you know what I'm saying. So Like, but it's just like but I know, the whole time I'm doing this, I'm just like, man, I can't wait to get out of this house. Man always. You know what I'm saying, Like, I'm just salty. I'm gonna do it, and I'm not gonna say nothing to it. Yes, sir, you know what I'm saying. But like I don't like you, I don't respect this ship. You know what what I'm saying. I'm not doing this because I understand that the dishes are dirty. I'm doing this because I don't wanna hear your mouth. You know what I'm saying. You don't want the I don't want the consequences with my child. Now it's like, hey, the we have we have budgeted the amount of money we have for our water bill, which means that we can run our our dishwasher this many times we need it by We needs to happen by two because when we start cooking dinner, since we in this quarantine, we need to have clean dishes to do this or it's gonna pile up. And now it's gonna be two runs instead of one. So like, you make sure you finish this by two so we can have plates to eat off when it's time for dinner. She goes, all right, and it's like and so now it's like I've included you into this, so you have a steak into Like it's not me being a bully, it's just I mean it's functional, like we need we need place to eat off and the dishes are your chore, so just so do it. So just do it, you know what I'm saying. And it and when she tell me she don't feel like it, like now I'm not appealing to like while i'm your father, you do it because I tell you to, I'm appealing to like, yeah, I don't feel like doing it either, but I also want something to eat off on dinner, you know what I'm saying it. So she's like all right, yeah, you know what I'm saying. So and I think, yeah, you can make an argument that like, you know, you get the dishes done faster if you're just the If you don't do the dishes, there's fucking consequences. Then if you explain why it's necessary, but it's a long term results are probably better. The long term is probably better. So now it's like now she actually, you know, if some drama going on or her little friends, she's actually willing to talk to me rather like this is I Thinkian ruler that tells me what to do all the time. You know. The Will's argument is that, like the long term would have been better if they had stuck with a malicious system, maybe with some reforms and stuff now and again, a lot of why a lot of historians will kind of just assume like, yeah, it was bad, like that the malicious system like needed to be reformed, It needed to be militarized. It was the only way to do things. It's what the communists felt, It's what most of like the cinterests and stuff felt. And you know, there's very strong arguments to be made that that's that that's true, just based on military history. There's also strong arguments to be made that like, well, you guys were just like that's what all of you assumed, because all of you are the kind of people who are in favor of some form of centralized state and in favor of us why of a centralized military, and that you're listening to like standard military people's attitudes, which aren't always right, and maybe this could have worked and other things. Systems like it have worked in other militaries for different periods of time. I get interesting results when I bring up the idea of a democratically of of a military that votes democratically on its officers. Um when I talk, because that's what how these militias worked. And I've talked to some friends of mine who are veterans, and it's interesting some of some people say, like, I don't see how that could work. I've had a good friend of mine who is a veteran say, oh, you know what, that makes sense because when you've been in combat with a group of people, you know who you trust to give orders, like, right, you know who you Yeah? Yeah, it's like I know you got the ranks. Mom listening to him, because this boy kept me alive. Yeah, yeah, So sure, yes, sir, I'm not gonna I'm certainly not going to say I know more about this than a number of historians who will say that militarization was really the only option they had. I'm just saying there's argument about that, and it's something you should read about. I'm not going to make a harsh stance on it, because, like I thought, an expert on war, or an expert on the Spanish Civil War, there's there's there, there's something that we said. At least they like to make sure that your militia knows what they're doing. Yeah, absolutely, that needs to happen. At least some level of cohesiveness of communications seems like it has to be necessary. There's some degree you at least need, like a centralized communication network to make sure people know. But I think anyway, one of the tragedies of the Spanish Civil War is that there's a lot of cool what ifs that because there's this horrible war happening, nobody gets the time to really figure out, Right, maybe this could have worked if they hadn't been at the edge of extermination. Yeah, we weren't facing a minute. Yeah. Now, the unrest between anarchists and Trotskyists and communists within Republican Spain eventually led to bloodshed in the streets of Barcelona as anarchist and Trotskyist militants fought in the streets against communists and socialists. This right up from the New Left Review, does I think a fair job of explaining how this all got underway. Quote, under the revolutionary ferment, a struggle for power and control of scarce arms was being waged. That was the real meaning of the Barcelona fighting. The Communist Party's increasing influence in the army and political life and the growth of its membership do mainly to Soviet aid direct government interventions stop finally stopped the fighting in the streets and shortly thereafter ended the revolutions. Consolidation that has ended the the anarchist and sort of trotsky Is the far left like consolid like gaining of power, taking of businesses, all that sort of stuff. The immediate beneficiary of the crisis was Jan Nigrin, a forty five year old socialist physiologist, polyglot and acknowledged expert in financial affairs. As Treasury Minister, he organized the dispatch of gold to Moscow, whom President Azana appointed Prime Minister. To put an end to the indiscipline and disarray in the rear Guard, especially in Catalonia and Arragon, the government took over pub order in Catalonia, dissolved the anarchist dominated a Council of Aragon and sent Enrique Lister's Communist Army Division to break up the rural Aragonese collectives more easily expedited the p O U WIM trotsky Is, which is the trotsky Ist militia, which they called trotsky Is provocateurs and fascist spies. Clamored. The Spanish Communist Party was outlawed, its army division disbanded, and its leader Andrew Ninn, one of Trotsky's former secretaries, was disappeared, in fact, kidnapped and murdered by the n k v D. The affair further deepened the distrust between Communists and the rest of the political organizations, especially the anarchists and left socialists, and it made clear to the republic serious ongoing problems of internal political discord, which were a considerable stumbling block to winning the war. On the other side of the lines, there was no such problem. Franco By, now head of the so called nationalist side, crushed dissent in the bud forcibly uniting the Phalangen Carlists, the only permitted civilian political organizations now. And there's a lot of debate about what happens in Barcelona orwell was there for most of this part. He was. He took part in the fighting in Barcelona, and he was with the p o u M. He's with this Trotskyist militia, and his recollections of the purging of the po U M are available for free in his book Homage to Catalonia. He reserves tremendous criticisms for the Communist Party, in large part because they murdered some of his friends. There are of course, very good critiques of Orwell's narrow perspective in this, because he's on the ground, and long after the war he would admit himself that he was somewhat myopic and unfair to the Republican government and the communists In this. Critics will point out that the c and T and the p O U WIM undermined coordination and unity in the Republic, and that the violent certain anarchists carried out against the clergy in particular, helped dissuade foreign governments from wanting to help. So this is again a complicated issue, but the fact that the left is literally in fighting here is a big part of what undermines their ability to fight the fascists. Although historians are very split as to how much of a factor the behavior of the Spanish Communists or which were directed by Moscow played in the Republic can defeat um. Julian Casanova directly credits the Republic's defeat mostly to the international situation, So he says, you can talk about what the communists did wrong with the anarchist did wrong. The reason Republican Spain lost is because nobody helped them out except for the communists a bit, whereas the fascists had to modern states throwing huge amounts of aid in military forces. It right, That's why they lost. It's like you can debate who made mistakes. Everybody made mistakes. They lost because nobody, like almost only the communists helped them in. You know, you just out in the fascists had a lot, Yeah, the fascists had a lot more help, you know. Yeah. Um. Now, while I think it's fair to criticize the nature of the help the USSR sent, both in its reduced quantity relative to the fascists and the fact that it made the republic pay up front, you have to be fair here and note that the Russian Civil War had not been over for all that long when the Spanish Civil War started, and like nine million people had died in that country. After nine million had died in World War One, and it was fucking devastated, Italy and Germany were in comparatively better shape and able to provide more aid. Now. British military historian Anthony Beaver, however, does blame the Republic's high command, which was Communist dominated and Soviet military advisors, for their quote disastrous conduct of the war, and he has some very fair critiques here. Um He criticizes them for engaging in multiple disastrous conventional offensives, which where this happened a few times, where they get a huge number of soldiers together, most of which were not super well trained, and send them on these massive offensives that would they would get mowed down. And the purpose of this was for propaganda to be able to show, look, we're advancing against the fascists, and of course the fascists are better armed in train and would just dig in and massacre these people. Um And and Anthony Beaver will argue that these this series of horrible, horrible decisions taken for mainly propaganda quote gradually destroyed the Republic's army and resistance. Now, no matter what kind of leftist or liberal or whatever you happen to be, there are aspects of your ideology that should be challenged by observing the way the Spanish Civil War win. Speaking as an anarchist, it is impossible to ignore the fact that the fascists had the great advantage of centralized control and particularly food distribution. Meanwhile, Republican territories had more than independent food collectives. Workers in many of these collectives were hostile to the government because they were anarchists, and in some areas money had been entirely abolished, and since money did exist in the rest of the Republic, that made cooperation difficult. Food shortages were common in the Republic, and this also contributed to their defeat. UM. And again it's the kind of thing where like this system of local sort of food exchanges might have worked, if they might have figured out how to make it work had there not been a war on. But it's hard. It is hard to beta test an entire system of social organization while fighting a war of extermination. Yeah, it's hard. It's hard to get hungry people to fight for you, you know what I'm saying, Like, if we hungry, it's like, well, oh no, who got the food? And it's it's worth noting that of all the people fighting, you know, about half of the prisoners of war the fascists took wound up fighting for the fascists. They were organized into into fighting units um and a significant number of the captured fascists wound up fighting in units for the republics. Like that happened on both sides. A lot of these guys are just dudes, you know. Um, they're not all like the Internet. The International volunteers tend to be very ideological. That's not all the case with a lot of soldiers. In early nineteen thirty seven, Franco's forces had recovered from their defeat outside of Madrid, and they launched an invasion of the northern Basque territories of the Republic. The success of this offensive is largely credited to the Condor Legion, a German led air force that spent the Spanish Civil War experimenting with new textniques. The Loofwava would it later use. This experimentation started in earnest with the bombing of Madrid in nineteen thirty six, which killed and wounded a lot of civilians, like hundreds of people killed and wounded, but did nothing but harden Republican resistance. And the Germans realized this, Like the guys in charge of the Condor Legion of like, just bombing a bunch of civilian targets seems to piss them off and make them want a fight harder. Perhaps that's not the best tactic. Um. Now, several cities were bombarded by the Condor Legion during the advance in Tabasque territory, leading to a lot of civilian casualties, but none of these bombings were more famous than the city of Guernica and their significant debate over Guernica. As well, historians will note that the command or of the Condor Legion was more or less abiding by the rules of war um, striking at bridges and roads and cities, like aiming primarily for targets of military value. Um. There were civilian casualties because precision bombing is a myth, but the goal was not what's called terror bombing, which they kind of rejected after Madrid, and like this guy goes to trial in Nuremberg and that is kind of the conclusion of the Allied militaries, Like his bombing of Guernica was part of a military action. Like you to repeat the line that you said, precision bombing is a myth. Precision bombing is absolutely a myth. As someone who who watched it as now it was even more of avent. Yes, I have a friend who lives in Iraq and he's like, yeah, no, there's no such thing. No, No, you're just blowing up neighborhoods, guys. Yeah yeah, Um, Now how much of a difference it makes that their goal was not terror bombing? You know what they did. They killed a funkload of civilians and leveled a lot of Guernica. And it's it's horrible, horrible, horrible thing. I'm not trying to justify it, um, But what's happened in what actually happened and what is kind of like remembered about Guernaka are sometimes two different things. Because the bombing of Guernica, for whatever reason, horrifies the entire world. It becomes and there's what I say, forout ever reason, because there are other cities that are bombed in a similar manner that don't get as famous in this period of time. Um, it's not the first time that the civilian population is bombed as a part of a war, but it becomes the most famous. The Republicans made a lot out of it and used it for propaganda purposes. They would claim that six people had died, a figure that's likely impossible because they calculated. Basically, when you're looking at like civilian casualties, there are calculate aations. You can do to estimate them by estimating the number of people killed per tonnage of bombs dropped. And if six people died in Guernica, it would meant that it would have meant that the Condor Legion were killing more civilians than the US did during its bombings of like Dresden, like like per per tonnage, you know, which is not possible, really credible. Deaf counts range from as low as a hundred and fifty to the to the low hundreds, which is terrible, Like that's hundreds of civilians killed by bombs from the sky. It's it's horrible. I'm not saying it's not. But again, it's also seeing the Republicans see this as a way to like, oh, this is something we can use to get international support, which we desperately need. Um And while Republican forces used Guernica to try to generate international sympathy, the fascists used it as a cudgel. When Hitler met with the Premiere of Austria prior to the Angelus, which is when they occupy Austria, he brings the commander of the Condor Legion with him as a not so subtle threat to Vienna because the the the image internationally is that Guerna has been wiped out by the Condor Legions. So Hitler once this guy is sitting next to him, so that when he meets with the premiere of Austria, this guy's like, they're gonna level Vienna if I don't, if I don't agree to whatever Hitler wants, you know. So Hitler makes a lot of use out of the terrible reputation that the Condor Legion gets, regardless of how much that reputation may be earned. Um now, the battle and I mainly quibble on how terrible the Condor Legion was because by any objective measure, the United States Air Force was a lot worse in World War Two in terms of it's its willingness to kill civilians, not in terms of its goals obviously, but to blast. Yeah, there's the yeah. I I I still can't because I mean I've never lived in like an actual active war zone, you know. But obviously more more humans alive now have lived in active war zones than not hand So, like, I know that I'm in the minority for that, and it's a very privileged position, but I still can picture or having a hard time wrapping my mind around the idea that like death is coming from the sky. It's fun. I'm saying, like that's yeah, that's it changes, you, I mean it changes. And just to have that experience for a few days. Um, it's something else, man, just like seeing breathing in the dust that includes pulverized concrete and incinerated bodies. Um. An air strike is yeah, unreal that like, yeah, it's a laser from space, like you can't. Yeah, there's like it's the hammer of God, you know. Yeah, it's terrible, Yeah, terrifying. Yeah. Now, the battle over Guernica was very consequential. The city's fall helped enable Franco's forces to cut Republican held territory in two, so to separate the two chunks of Republican territory, the north from the south. Um. Now, around the same time, the French, like Germany, occupies Austria and the French start getting really scared of the Nazis um and so they reopen their border. And this allows thousands of tons of war material to flow into the Republic freely for the first time, and the Republic is able to like gin up a new Republican army made up in part of prisoners of war and conscripts as young as sixteen UM. And this what's known as the Army of the Ebro, launches what would come to be known as the last great Republican assault of the war. And like there are other great assaults, it was a fucking disaster. Thirty thousand Republican fighters died to just sixty Fascist casualties. UM. Just an absolute nightmare. Now, the war officially ended in April of nineteen thirty nine with the unconditional surrender of the Republicans to the fascist Francisco Franco. In the areas the Fascist retook they were as brutal as you might expect. The most egregious example of this happened in August of nineteen thirty six and bat Ayas, which we talked about earlier. That's where the anarchists and socialists take a huge amount of land and give it to the people. Well, the fascists take back bat of Yaws and they just they massacre everyone then get their fucking hands on. More than four thousand people, mostly civilians and prisoners, gunned down, including hundreds of people who are dragged into the bowl, ring to the stadium where they hold bullfights and surrounded by machine guns and just massacred in a circle by the foreign legion. Um. Now, brutality knows no allegiance in war. Somewhere around fifty thousand civilians were killed in the Republican zone over the course of the war, and acts of brutality that many in the Republican government deplored. Federica Montseny described the slaughter as a lust for blood, inconceivable and honest man before But republic war crimes bore little resemblance to the crimes of the fascists, who in the same period of time murdered more than a hundred and thirty thousand civilians. And those deaths, of course occurred during the war. During his decades in power, Franco's forced labor, concentration camps, torture and execution of political enemies led to another thirty to fifty thousand deaths, and as we know, that would make Franco one of the less deadly fascist dictators in history. Got um, But yeah, you can compare with the number of people kill. Yeah, what is it about? Just what's the point of being in charge? If you kill everybody you're supposed to be in charge of, because you're killing all the people you don't like that you're supposed to be in charge of. That's easier than arguing. Yeah, yeah, well touche. Yeah, I guess you're right. Yeah, they're killing. There's like, we just killed people disagree with us. We just kill we disgree with us. Yeah yeah, okay, so my bad. I understand your logic. Now. Yeah, obviously the Republicans lost their war, UM, but many of the more than thirty five thousand men who joined the International Brigades, and something like ten thousand of them died in the Spanish Civil War. UM. Many of those guys would continue fighting fascism in World War Two. Some of them fought in the French Resistance, some of them fought in the U. S. Army after being by the way, when US veterans like l Ward come home, they get like spied on by the FBI because they're suspected of being communists sympathy and stuff like, and some of those people. Some of that stops when the war starts. People like, ah, maybe you had a point. It doesn't all stop, but a number of these guys continue fighting UM and while they failed in their ultimate goals. The battle cry of the Spanish anti fascists, they shall not pass or no passeran still rings loudly and anti fascist rallies today, and that's you know, Yeah, the fight isn't over. They didn't win in Spain. They didn't succeed in in turning back fascism and bringing in a new golden age for humanity there. But it didn't end in the fight didn't end in Spain either, you know, and it it continues to this day, Yes it does. Oh man, Yeah, let's let's let that one breathe for a second. Yeah, okay, everybody take a deep breath, yeah, breath anyway. Man, So at some point we're going to talk about when Spain stops being fascist. Yeah, I'm gonna do episodes on Franco at some point that will that will get into that history. Um. But this is more specifical about vomiting on the King's limits. Yeah, this was This is about fascism. You know, I wanted to talk about how the fascist gained power in Spain. This is and it's like it's such a like because of like you said, because of the enormity of other fascist reasimes. This guy gets so overlooked, but it's so such a pivotal moment in just even just the meta narrative. But what we understand is like western modern, Western civilization, like you have to have this moment, you know, if you're not talking about it, it's like you the storyline. I feel like the storyline doesn't make sense if you're trying to get from World War One to World War Two, and why all the players are on the play are on the board game the way that they are if you don't include the Spanish Civil War, and you you can argue in a lot of people historians will that had the Republic one, we might not have had a Second World War because that might have been a check to fascist ambitions. Now, I don't know how much I agree with that, it's certainly arguable that had there been a concerted had the had the democracies of the world been willing to take concerted action against the fascists in Spain, uh, that probably would have meant they would have been willing to take concerted actions to stop Hitler from gaining from taking over Czechoslovakia, Austria, eventually Poland, Um and then the Nazi state would have collapsed because it was never based on anything but stealing land from other people, and without the ability to do that, it would not have lasted. The economy would have collapsed, it would have been some sort of a revolution. Um, and maybe we would have not had World War two. Um, that's a pretty solid argument you can make. Obviously, any any historical debate like that is like, who knows what the truth is? I wonder what I wonder how the Cold War would have looked if we had at some point or if it would have been I would have been like, I guess the communists, I mean, I mean it's that bad, you know, because like you know, Stalin not a big fan of Stalin. Um. But you can argue, like, well, one of the best things that happened to Stalin's personal power was World War Two. If there's no World War Two, and if there's less open conflict between you know, fascism and communism to stalin state in power, does the does the Soviet Union take a different path that maybe more resembles what a lot of the people who fought for it initially wanted. Um, how like or yeah, I mean, who knows or does all of the Western world go to war in Russia and as many people die and an even dumber war, like who the funding nobody? Right, Yeah, but it's it's an interesting conversation to have, and I think, like, yeah, I I am I'm always intrigued by some of these like counterfactual but you know, what we what we know is what happened. What happened is um a very flawed alliance of a lot of brave people and a lot of messy people did their best and ultimately failed to stop fascism before the Holocaust. You know, it isn't kind, isn't at all of history a bunch of messy people And yeah, yeah, just trying to figure this ship out, man, Damn Yeah, damn Robert. Yeah, there's a lot of lessons in there, a lot of lessons in the story of the Spanish Civil War. And obviously I'm not I hope no one takes this is like anything comprehensive or or like anything. But here's an overview of stuff you might want to read more about. Yeah, totally have a lot more reading to do, you know. Yeah, it's it's important that like, you know, the the current American does we Yeah that that like that you know, American exceptionalism is to the hell of a drug that like you, we think that all of our issues are unique, you know what I'm saying, Because we're uniquely special where God's little boy, you know what I'm saying. So like this stuff is important to know, Like I mean, we we hammer it all the time, but just to be like, man, look at all these different moments throughout history, Like this ship is not new, you know what I'm saying, Like we are toddlers when it comes to the world scene, you know. So yeah, yeah, and that's you know, Spain is going through a lot of the same as our colonial as our power as a colonial nation, ebbs, as the result of horrible decisions we've made and the fact that colonialism is never a very stable platform. We're dealing with a lot of the same issues that Spain was dealing with, you know, and in the ramp up as fascism came to Spain because it's fascism is in part a reaction to like fail failures of colonialism fail, like the like like like you need to have some sort of golden age you can market back to, right, the Italians, the Germans, Spanish, I'll have that um and so do American fascists, and so while you should never treat it all as if it's too similar, you also shouldn't ignore that there are some real similarities. Yeah, I love it anyway you could, you could follow Sophie and why Sophie? Why Hell yeah, I threw that one in there. That's a little curveball, you know what I'm saying. Oh god, yeah, now profit fop dot com. I knew what you was gonna say. Uh, follow me a prop hip hop and I'll be looking at all y'all's replies because I'll tell you what, man, this pod has got some amazing fans and followers. I like y'all. Yes, you're like you're weird in the right ways, you know what I'm saying. Like, you know, you know people like got like a thing. You know, it's like it's like you want to you want to be a little weird. You know, you're a little weird in the right ways. And I feel like if you're if you're not weird, I'm not a yeah, you know what I'm saying, Like, can't be just we don't need no like low sodium khaki, you know, beige fans, you know what I'm saying. Man, ah man, You're not wonder brid y'all like Brios. I don't know. I think I'm done. You had cooked my brain? Boy, Yeah yeah, yeah, I'm cooked, and I'm ready to cook another meal for next week, when we close out Behind the Insurrections with episodes on the fascists that failed and a retrospective of some anti fascists throughout history where we'll talk about some fun shit. Um, but that's all for this week. Um, So go read about the International Brigades and the anarchist militias of Spain. Uh. Um. Read George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia. But remember that it's a single dude's perspective who had no understanding of the broader tactical situation because he was just a dude fighting. But there's a lot of great George Orwell talking about what grenades are best to kill people. George Orwell was very good with grenade. That's the thing. Nobody, nobody told me when we were reading nineteen eighty four that George Orwell had extensively written about which grenades are best to kill fascists with. I probably would have paid much more attention. If I knew the man was like, I would have paid more attention. You know. Yeah, it's the It's one of the coolest things you can be good with. That's why they called that other data fantastic. You know. Mr Williams, who was my who's my teacher? Mr Pollicky? He was Mr Pollicky Polosh Dude. I was like, they should have led with that and lead with the fact that the guy grenade Jesus. Alright, alright, spots over, what's up? What's up? This is Robin Dixon, co host of reason Doable Shadey, which has just been nominated for an in Double A CP Image Award in the Outstanding Arts and Entertainment Podcast category. This is so big for Gezelle and I and of course we must thank all of our fantastic listeners, but we need your help. Visit vote dot in double A CP Image Awards dot net to vote for Reasonably Shady. That's vote dot in a A CP Image Awards dot net. But don't wait. Voting closes on February five at nine pm Eastern and make sure to listen to Reasonably Shady every single Monday on the Black Effect Podcast Network. We've all felt left out and for people who moved to this country that feeling lasts more than a moment. We can change that. Learn how it belonging begins with us dot Org, brought to you by the AD Council. Hello, and welcome to our show. I'm Zoe Deschanel and I'm so excited to be joined by my friends and cast mates Hannah Simone and Lamar and Morris to recap our hit television series, New Girl. 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