Behind the Bastards - Behind the Insurrections - The Birth of Spanish Fascism, Part 1
Aired: 2021-01-26
Duration: 01:47:16


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=== Echo Outlines Fascism (17:26) ===

[00:02:18]  What's Francisco and my Franco's?
[00:02:22]  This is Robert Evans.
[00:02:24]  Yeah.
[00:02:24]  Farting fuzz.
[00:02:26]  Yep, there we go.
[00:02:27]  We introduced it.
[00:02:29]  It's not as big a name as Hitler.
[00:02:31]  Like, I'm going to be honest with you.
[00:02:32]  Not, not, doesn't have the kind of star power.
[00:02:34]  Like, if Hitler, Hitler's like Ben Affleck, right?
[00:02:38]  Yeah.
[00:02:39]  And we're doing like the Matt Damon of fascism today.
[00:02:43]  He's just not the same.
[00:02:45]  That is not accurate.
[00:02:46]  You are completely wrong.
[00:02:47]  You just like his tattoo.
[00:02:48]  Come on.
[00:02:50]  I love his trashy, gigantic, fullback Phoenix tattoo.
[00:02:53]  It's pretty funny.
[00:02:54]  It's rad.
[00:02:55]  Okay, we got to think of somebody that's like a deep.
[00:02:57]  Matt Damon is more famous than Ben Affleck.
[00:03:00]  It's more like a Scotty Pippin.
[00:03:01]  You know what I'm saying?
[00:03:02]  Scotty Pippin to Hitler's the Michael Jordan of fascism.
[00:03:06]  It is like Scotty Pippin.
[00:03:07]  We're talking the Scotty Pippin.
[00:03:08]  And like Scotty Pippin.
[00:03:10]  Yeah.
[00:03:11]  Francisco Franker.
[00:03:12]  Yeah, he's a, yeah, yeah.
[00:03:13]  Francisco's underrated.
[00:03:15]  You know, he's a good, well, not good.
[00:03:16]  He's a monster.
[00:03:18]  Pippin had a shoe.
[00:03:20]  Exactly.
[00:03:20]  Exactly.
[00:03:21]  Pippins.
[00:03:22]  Like, we're talking about like Franco's, which would be jack boots almost as tall as the Hitler jack boots and not quite as shiny.
[00:03:28]  Yeah, costly.
[00:03:29]  But still jack boots.
[00:03:30]  Yeah, and they're a little cheap.
[00:03:31]  Still jack boots.
[00:03:32]  Yeah, for the fascist on a budget, you know?
[00:03:36]  I just wanted to talk about the tattoo again.
[00:03:38]  I did.
[00:03:39]  I always want to talk and how and how sad Ben Affleck looks every time he's captured in the wild.
[00:03:45]  Just looks like he's been dying for the last 20 straight years, and I'm here for it.
[00:03:52]  Oh, it's incredible.
[00:03:53]  He's just so miserable all the time.
[00:03:55]  It just feels like he spent so much time being attractive that he just got tired of it and was just like, oh my God.
[00:04:01]  Speaking of fascism, you've heard of the Führer principle, the idea that like a single man can embody the spirit of a people, which is what Hitler used to rise to power.
[00:04:12]  I never believed in it until Ben Affleck, because Ben Affleck is the spiritual embodiment of Boston.
[00:04:18]  He really is.
[00:04:19]  Yeah, he's perfect.
[00:04:20]  Yeah.
[00:04:20]  He's really bad.
[00:04:21]  He really is.
[00:04:23]  I, I, yeah, like, if, if the Southeast weren't so damn racist, I would really like that area.
[00:04:29]  You know what I'm saying?
[00:04:30]  Well, I like the Celtics, but yeah.
[00:04:33]  Oh, yeah.
[00:04:34]  All damn.
[00:04:34]  Yeah, I don't know.
[00:04:35]  I know anything about the Celtics.
[00:04:36]  But I know a bit about fascism.
[00:04:37]  And prop, fascism's a little bit different in every country.
[00:04:41]  It's kind of like Skittles, you know, different flavors.
[00:04:44]  Chocolate chips.
[00:04:46]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:04:46]  Catch all chips.
[00:04:48]  Yeah, milk chocolate as opposed to the dark.
[00:04:50]  You know, this is part of why scholars and theorists have such a damnable time defining what fascism is in the first place.
[00:04:56]  There's a dictionary definition, right?
[00:04:57]  There's going to be a dictionary definition in any dictionary you open, but it's not really useful in part because a lot of dictionary definitions of fascism apply almost as well to like communist regimes, any authoritarian regime.
[00:05:10]  Yeah.
[00:05:10]  Which is, you know, there's some points there, which is that whenever you have a totalitarian system, similar bad things often do happen.
[00:05:17]  But fascism is unique for a number of reasons, including its ability to subvert healthy democracies.
[00:05:24]  And so when you have historians of fascism, people whose whole life is studying this thing, this amorphous thing that we're still kind of getting grips on, all of them kind of tend to have their own definitions of it.
[00:05:35]  And often those definitions don't contrast.
[00:05:37]  They're just different ways of kind of wording the same things.
[00:05:39]  I tend to feel confident that Umberto Echo has done the best job of defining it in his essay on Urfascism.
[00:05:46]  I'm a big fan of the way Echo talked about fascism.
[00:05:50]  And I think that Echo would have named Trump as a fascist straight away.
[00:05:54]  In part because in the mid-90s, when he wrote his essay on Urfascism, he predicted that the internet and like the way that it would allow people to spread messages and crowdsource activism would lead to the rise of a unique kind of fascists.
[00:06:06]  And I think that Trump embodied that in a lot of ways.
[00:06:09]  And I think Echo would have seen it right away.
[00:06:10]  Now, on the other hand.
[00:06:12]  I think I may know where Echo is going.
[00:06:13]  I haven't read the thing, but I have this theory about the type of fascist that Trump is, but I'd love to hear what this guy says.
[00:06:19]  Yeah, I mean, Echo kind of outlined a number of different things that are like that are when you have a mix of these things and sort of a constellation, that is what fascism is.
[00:06:29]  So there's a mix of like, you know, popular resentment against the left, like a sense of machismo, of misogyny, a cult of action for action's sake, syncretism, the ability to like pull other things in and kind of attach them to itself, other like aspects of spirituality and whatnot.
[00:06:48]  There were a bunch of different things that Echo noted as kind of key aspects of fascism.
[00:06:53]  Okay.
[00:06:54]  Now, okay.
[00:06:56]  Oh, sorry.
[00:06:56]  No, no, what you were saying.
[00:06:57]  No, because I was going to say, well, it was so interesting about like what I feel like what we're going to hear as history nerds for the next, you know, 100 years about the unique, this, the, what Trump symbolizes.
[00:07:09]  And it might just be a new type of fascism for the rest of our life, but just this fascism that doesn't have a foreseeable goal, like, except for just being in power.
[00:07:20]  You know what I'm saying?
[00:07:21]  So that's what was so interesting to me about the uniqueness about Trump's fascism is like, yeah, but what's your end game here?
[00:07:27]  Like, what are you, what are you doing?
[00:07:30]  You know what I'm saying?
[00:07:30]  Whereas like we knew what Mussolini was doing.
[00:07:33]  We know what, you know, we knew, yeah, he did it.
[00:07:37]  Like, we knew what you were doing.
[00:07:39]  This was your goal.
[00:07:40]  You know what I'm saying?
[00:07:41]  And I'm just like, what you're like, yeah, what are you doing, dude?
[00:07:45]  You know, his lack of a plan, right?
[00:07:48]  Singles.com.
[00:07:49]  Yeah, apparently.
[00:07:50]  Trump said that selling stakes in schools and universities.
[00:07:54]  That did, I think, threw some people off is that he clearly didn't have as much of it, like Mussolini, I do think is more similar to Trump than Hitler is in the kind of fascist that he was and in his goals.
[00:08:03]  But Mussolini had a plan to like take and hold power.
[00:08:07]  And I guess one of the things that's been revealed is that like Trump definitely wanted to take and hold power, but he did not have much of a plan, not a plan.
[00:08:15]  Yeah, I was like, your goal is to reach a goal, which is your goal was just almost like, yeah, he's, there's a lot to be said.
[00:08:25]  I don't have to say that.
[00:08:25]  You just want to keep being right.
[00:08:27]  You know, and I'm like, about what?
[00:08:28]  Yeah, anyway, let's go on.
[00:08:30]  It's interesting.
[00:08:30]  And a number of, like, there are other scholars of fascism who took a lot longer to kind of decide that Trump fit their definition of fascism.
[00:08:37]  I'm thinking about Robert Paxton here.
[00:08:39]  And Paxton is a very well-respected scholar of fascism.
[00:08:42]  He wrote a book called The Anatomy of Fascism.
[00:08:44]  That's a very good book.
[00:08:46]  And he only felt comfortable declaring Trump a fascist after January 6th.
[00:08:49]  And he was like, that was the line.
[00:08:51]  Like, Paxton had been consistent.
[00:08:53]  He's an authoritarian.
[00:08:54]  There's fascist elements in what he does, but he didn't kind of name him a fascist until after the 6th.
[00:08:59]  And I'm not slamming Paxton.
[00:09:01]  I think there's a room for intellectual debate on that.
[00:09:03]  And I understand kind of why he, like you said, Trump's a different kind of one.
[00:09:07]  Right.
[00:09:07]  And fascism changes based on the country and based on the time period, you know?
[00:09:13]  And I do think kind of one of the things that Echo was sort of peering around the edges of when he was talking about how he thought we were going to see an internet-based fascism in the future was the idea that like another aspect of fascism, and he didn't define this as a key aspect of fascism, but I think that it is, is the fascist, is the ability to find a way to utilize new media technology in a way that no one else understands yet, which Trump did, right?
[00:09:38]  No other politician understood how to use social media in the way that Trump did when Trump came onto the scene.
[00:09:44]  It's a big part of his success.
[00:09:46]  Anyway, so there's a lot of debate over what is a fascist.
[00:09:49]  And as a result of this debate, there's actually quite a lot of argument on whether or not the regime of Francisco Franco in Spain was truly fascist.
[00:09:57]  And you'll find a lot of argument about this, about whether or not Franco was a fascist.
[00:10:01]  There were fascists in Spain, absolutely, whether or not Franco and his regime really counts.
[00:10:07]  And what's not up for debate is that many elements of the Spanish right leading up to and during the Spanish Civil War were fascists and that fascist powers, Italy and Germany, intervened in that civil war because they saw what was happening there as a battle between fascism and socialism, largely.
[00:10:24]  And more to the point, whatever you can say about Franco himself, and we'll talk about him more in part two, the battle over Spain in the late 1930s absolutely ranks as the first open military conflict between fascism and democracy and fascism and socialism too, right?
[00:10:39]  Like all of that was kind of in the mix.
[00:10:41]  And on the Spanish side, the Republican side, you had like the Spanish Republic who were, you know, liberals more or less, people who supported like a constitutional democracy.
[00:10:50]  And you had anarchists and communists and socialists of varying kind of lesser strains, Trotskyists too, who were, but it's a very complicated civil war.
[00:10:58]  It's more like Syria than a lot of other conflicts because there's so much going on, so many different kind of corners to it.
[00:11:06]  What's interesting, real quick, before you get into this is like, you know, in a past life, I was like a history and social science like high school teacher.
[00:11:14]  And I went through the entire credentialing process all the way up to masters.
[00:11:20]  And at no point in any of our California standards was it ever required to talk about this.
[00:11:29]  And which is so interesting to me to win, especially when I'm trying to set up, you know, because since I wasn't a direct history teacher, I was more like a social science teacher trying to set up how cultures get where they get and like why it was so weird around World War II and why we got so like, we was already itchy, why a lot of a lot of us was like, man, we really don't want to go over there.
[00:11:52]  It's because we was, I was like, well, because of the Spanish Civil War, like we kind of, you know, we was kind of going back and forth about sending troops over there.
[00:11:58]  Like, it was been, and the students were like, wait, what?
[00:12:01]  And I'm like, yeah, the Spain, yeah, Spain had a civil war.
[00:12:04]  Like, this happened.
[00:12:06]  Like, you know what I'm saying?
[00:12:07]  This was like, it was right before World War II.
[00:12:09]  Like, this happened.
[00:12:09]  And it was like, it was this whole big thing.
[00:12:11]  That's like, it's a big thing.
[00:12:12]  And we were involved.
[00:12:14]  Like, we almost, you know what I'm saying?
[00:12:15]  But just like, that's like in no thousands of Americans volunteered.
[00:12:18]  Yeah.
[00:12:19]  Yes.
[00:12:19]  And I'm like, it's not required to talk about.
[00:12:22]  And I'm like, oh my God, this is, you're missing this, you're missing a lot of the story if you don't understand why even World War II was so touchy for us.
[00:12:31]  Yeah.
[00:12:32]  And part of it was this.
[00:12:33]  Anyway, go on.
[00:12:34]  One of the reasons people don't like to talk about this is that it is, it's very complicated.
[00:12:37]  And it is not as much of a cut and dried story as makes it easy to sort of summarize, right?
[00:12:43]  Once the fighting starts, once the civil war starts, it is a bit easier.
[00:12:46]  But even then, it's a very fucking messy war.
[00:12:49]  And there are really shitty people on the good guys' side, too, right?
[00:12:54]  Like there's a lot of like very ugly stuff that happens because it's a war, you know?
[00:12:57]  The same is true of World War II.
[00:12:59]  It's just been heavily whitewashed.
[00:13:00]  And the Nazis were so fucking bad that it makes it a lot easier to make your side seem like the good dudes.
[00:13:07]  Now, in some ways, like because of how complicated it is, and we're going, this whole episode is about the birth of Spanish fascism.
[00:13:14]  And we're going to do some pretty deep history here.
[00:13:17]  And in some ways, the story of how fascism evolves in Spain bears a lot less resemblance to what's happened in America than either of the two stories we've discussed so far.
[00:13:26]  But while the similarities are a lot less direct, I actually think there's a lot here that's valuable because we're going to kind of lay out how this evolved over time and how the birth of fascism in Spain was woven into the birth of democracy itself.
[00:13:38]  And I think that's a really important story.
[00:13:41]  But we're going to need a lot of context.
[00:13:43]  So Spain is unique, fairly unique among European nations in that it has not had a sense of nationalism for most of modern history.
[00:13:51]  Not in nearly the same way that you got with England or with France or with Germany once, you know, 1870, whatever rolls around.
[00:13:58]  The Spanish state does go back very far to 1478 when Ferdinand and Isabella, you know, the Columbus folks, right?
[00:14:05]  Yeah, when they decided to call it all of South America.
[00:14:09]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:14:10]  And before that, they were the ones like Spain, they kick out the Moors, you know, the Muslims who had kind of taken over a chunk of Iberia as a result of a counter.
[00:14:21]  Anyway, they take back Spain for Christendom.
[00:14:23]  That would be the way they would have framed it.
[00:14:25]  But they don't actually make a nation, not in any modern sense.
[00:14:28]  Spain is a bunch of independent kingdoms.
[00:14:31]  And those independent kingdoms, up until fairly recently, never really melded together.
[00:14:35]  You've got the Aragonese and you've got Catalans and you've got the Basque.
[00:14:38]  And they all have their, and there's more than that, right?
[00:14:41]  Don't pretend.
[00:14:42]  I'm not going to pretend this is good.
[00:14:43]  Spanish history is incredibly complicated.
[00:14:46]  I am very far from an expert.
[00:14:49]  And there are still issues with like a lot of Catalans and a lot of Basques still want like some at least some degree of independence from the Spanish state.
[00:14:56]  Yeah.
[00:14:57]  Recognition from the nation.
[00:14:58]  Yeah.
[00:14:58]  Yeah.
[00:14:59]  And they all have their own languages and cultural traditions.
[00:15:01]  And one of the things that I learned that's interesting actually is that the like Spanish, what we know as Spanish comes from the chunk of like the language group that was kind of most dominant in Iberia, but they actually stole the word for the country from, I think it was the Catalans.
[00:15:20]  So like it's, it's very, anyway, very complicated history.
[00:15:24]  And for most of Spanish history, the only unifying factors of all these very disparate groups of people were the crown, the king, and the Catholic Church, and mainly the Catholic Church, right?
[00:15:35]  Now, in the 1800s, Spain was dominated by a revolution, or Spain was kind of overtaken.
[00:15:41]  Spanish thought was overtaken by a revolution in classical liberalism, right?
[00:15:45]  That sort of takes over a lot of parts of Europe at this point in time.
[00:15:48]  And Spain is included in that.
[00:15:51]  But in Spain, this kind of new liberal wave largely failed to push for any kind of mass Spanish identity.
[00:15:57]  It didn't like, and this is where you start to get like French identity, right?
[00:16:00]  And like, but you don't really get that.
[00:16:04]  I mean, in France, it starts earlier than the 1800s, but like you don't really get that in a big way in Spain.
[00:16:09]  And part of the reason is that kind of the cultural elites fail to institute any meaningful education reforms for the majority of the population.
[00:16:17]  Like France in the same period establishes a functional education system.
[00:16:21]  And by contrast, Spain's failure to do this means that education remained the purview of the Catholic Church.
[00:16:26]  They do most of the educating, and it's only for the wealthy.
[00:16:29]  And the country would deal with widespread illiteracy well into the 1900s.
[00:16:33]  And when you don't have mass public education, one of the things you don't have is a widespread idea of the history and like what your nation is.
[00:16:41]  And like, right, that's part of why.
[00:16:43]  Yeah.
[00:16:44]  Anyway, there's not nationalism is not really much of a thing in Spain as a result of this.
[00:16:49]  They're too busy killing off Mesoamericans.
[00:16:52]  And they're absolutely, that's one of the things that's weird.
[00:16:54]  They're a huge imperial power.
[00:16:56]  In some ways, they're the first world power.
[00:16:59]  Like the first power that's like on a level of like what the U.S. was earlier in our lifetimes.
[00:17:04]  Yeah.
[00:17:04]  Yeah.
[00:17:05]  Knowing like being a Californian married to a Mexican woman, like, you know, you, you have to somehow kind of know a little Spanish history as to why these, why these Mayans are speaking Spanish.
[00:17:16]  You know what I'm saying?
[00:17:17]  And like, and, and, you know, because the part of Mexico she's from, they're from southern Mexican, Mexico.
[00:17:22]  So like they're, they're kind of Mayan, you know what I mean?
[00:17:25]  And, um, but yeah, this like weird, like how they exported this like colorism and just this weird elites.
[00:17:35]  And yeah, but at the same time, can't nobody in your country read, you know, so it was just this weird like thing happening with Spain.
[00:17:43]  Yeah.
[00:17:44]  It's, it's very weird.
[00:17:45]  And like, if we're going to be completely fair, like if you look at the system of sort of slavery that was instituted in what we now call Latin America, um, it's, it's one of the few systems of slavery in history that's like on the same level as what we had in the American South.
[00:17:59]  Like absolutely.
[00:18:00]  And genocides.
[00:18:02]  So I'm not trying to like whitewash Spanish history.
[00:18:04]  No, no, no.
[00:18:04]  I'm saying they don't have nationalism.
[00:18:06]  It's just not, it's not the same as it is with a lot of people.
[00:18:08]  Yeah, that's what I'm saying.
[00:18:08]  But that's, I'm, I'm adding to it.
[00:18:10]  Like it's peculiar that they had such an imperialistic power without this like national identity.
[00:18:17]  Yeah, it is.
[00:18:17]  It's very odd.
[00:18:18]  Like Spain is an interesting country to study.
[00:18:21]  Now, the Catholic Church was a major force in Spain for pushing against the development of a modern liberal state, right?
[00:18:27]  In the 1800s, you don't really have nations anywhere up until like it started, like that concept kind of starts like in the 1700s.
[00:18:36]  Shit's a lot less, the idea of like a nation the way that we conceive of one is kind of born in this period, 17, 1800s.
[00:18:43]  And the Catholic Church in Spain really pushes against the modern liberal state.
[00:18:48]  This was largely due to the fact that liberalism had an anti-clerical bias, right?
[00:18:53]  The Catholic Church for the medieval period is like the most power, the big power in the world, right?
[00:18:57]  They have influence everywhere in Christendom.
[00:18:59]  And they start to lose it in this period because governments are like, well, where are we going to let a church in Italy tell our government, like, we're England?
[00:19:06]  I don't like, I don't give a shit what you say.
[00:19:09]  Yeah.
[00:19:12]  And, you know, Catholicism is huge in Spain, and the church is like, we don't want any of this shit going on.
[00:19:17]  So Spain, the church pushes against kind of a lot of modernizing ideas.
[00:19:22]  And one of those things is that Spain fails to develop a modern military system.
[00:19:26]  And while it was, again, a massive military power, they never do like what France does, where you start this idea of a nation under arms and a modern professional style of the military.
[00:19:36]  That takes a lot longer to develop in Spain.
[00:19:39]  And it's part of why they don't do so well when everyone else develops a modern military, right?

=== Spain's Underdeveloped Right Wing (15:13) ===

[00:19:44]  And they start losing their empire both to a combination of European powers taking their shit from them and from a lot of revolutions in places they had controlled that overthrows them.
[00:19:54]  And so the 1700s and 1800s see a rapid decline in Spanish power.
[00:19:58]  It had been declining before then, but yeah.
[00:20:00]  Now, the ultimate collapse of Spanish imperialism really comes in 1898 when the United States goes to war with Spain for no reason really and takes over Cuba and the Philippines.
[00:20:11]  Just because it's a just randomly just like, hey, you want a new imperial power?
[00:20:17]  We could be that.
[00:20:18]  And there, you know, Spain is unbelievably brutal, particularly in the Philippines.
[00:20:22]  And then we take over and we're unbelievably brutal in the Philippines.
[00:20:25]  And the people there are like, oh, you guys, so are we going to have a democracy now?
[00:20:29]  And we're like, no, We want your shit.
[00:20:33]  Like, we want your shit, you know?
[00:20:34]  No, we're going to take your shit.
[00:20:36]  We're setting you free so we can own you.
[00:20:37]  That's, I mean, I don't know.
[00:20:39]  It's that kind of freedom.
[00:20:43]  Yeah.
[00:20:44]  Like, we don't even let women in our country vote.
[00:20:46]  You think we're going to let you vote?
[00:20:47]  What are you, what are you talking about?
[00:20:49]  It's 1898, motherfuckers.
[00:20:53]  So interesting.
[00:20:54]  Yeah, nothing changes.
[00:20:55]  No.
[00:20:56]  It's just your leaders speak English now.
[00:20:58]  Yeah.
[00:20:58]  I mean, our guns are better.
[00:20:59]  Our guns are a lot better than Spanish guns.
[00:21:01]  Oh, their guns sucked.
[00:21:02]  That's why we're in charge now.
[00:21:08]  Colonialism.
[00:21:10]  So one of the things that's interesting about Spain is late 1800s, you know, 1890s, early 1900s, that's like the height of colonialism, right before World War I starts, like murders a lot of the great powers that controlled the whole world.
[00:21:24]  So like they are, they are riding high.
[00:21:26]  Africa's just been like, you know, murdered in a lot of ways, like colonized the scramble for Africa is like at its height.
[00:21:32]  You know, Belgium owns the Congo.
[00:21:34]  It's that period.
[00:21:34]  Yeah.
[00:21:35]  So everyone else who's doing imperialism is doing gangbusters and Spain's empire collapses.
[00:21:41]  So what happens to everyone else in like the 50s, 60s, 70s really happens to Spain like 60, a couple of generations earlier.
[00:21:50]  So they actually go through the collapse.
[00:21:52]  They're an empire who goes through the collapse of colonialism while everyone else is doing great at colonialism, which is one of the things that makes them very interesting.
[00:21:59]  So some of the things that happen in colonial powers when their empires collapse, these things that we've seen in Germany and France and England that we're seeing now in the United States happen in Spain in the late 1890s because it's just the stuff that happens when you're an empire that fails.
[00:22:14]  I find that really interesting.
[00:22:15]  Historian Stanley Payne calls 1898 the first modern post-colonial trauma in Western Europe.
[00:22:24]  And I think you do have to view it as a trauma for the people in Spain.
[00:22:27]  And probably the best equivalent to our own society would be the ongoing trauma that a lot of Americans have faced in Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan.
[00:22:33]  And I'm not trying to minimize the traumas faced in those countries as a result of U.S. action, which are commensurately greater.
[00:22:39]  But we've seen in the MAGA movement, right?
[00:22:41]  And all of these that have come home and stormed the capital and shit.
[00:22:44]  Like it is a trauma.
[00:22:46]  It's a trauma when you're an empire that fails.
[00:22:48]  It fucks people up who were used to being the empire.
[00:22:51]  Yeah, that's, that's, that, I, find that part like, you know, as again, being a black dude, being like, you know, we, the, the, the saying, you know, that like equality is oppression if all you know is privilege.
[00:23:05]  Yes.
[00:23:06]  You know what I'm saying?
[00:23:06]  So like when if you're just, you're so used to the system working for you, the second it doesn't, you're like, something must be broken.
[00:23:14]  You're like, oh, no, it was broke.
[00:23:15]  That's why it only worked for you.
[00:23:17]  You know what I'm saying?
[00:23:18]  Yeah.
[00:23:18]  Yeah.
[00:23:19]  It was always broke.
[00:23:20]  You always were one of the people it worked for.
[00:23:23]  So yeah, Spain deals with this post-colonial trauma very early, right?
[00:23:28]  Before the rest, before the rest of the Western world, right, really does, because it fails for them.
[00:23:32]  They were the first for it to work and they were the first that it failed for, which I guess makes sense.
[00:23:37]  Yeah.
[00:23:37]  Now, like in the U.S., all those failing colonial ventures that we had flooded the United States with disaffected veterans, debt, and it fueled the rise of a resentful right wing, as well as fueling the rise of a dissident left wing, right?
[00:23:49]  Like both of all of that stuff was really incited in a lot of ways by, and obviously I'm not calling the dissident left a bad thing, but like those horrible colonial wars we had really fueled a lot of that.
[00:24:03]  And the situation in Spain after 1898 is not all that different.
[00:24:07]  Now, with her years as a great power seemingly behind her, Spanish intellectuals began to wonder if the sense of exceptionalism that they'd always taken for granted had been based on false premises.
[00:24:17]  And I'm going to quote from historian Stanley Payne here.
[00:24:19]  I know, right?
[00:24:20]  Interesting.
[00:24:21]  Yeah.
[00:24:22]  Symptomatic of the dismay of the nationalist military was an editorial in El Geraldo Militar on 23rd November 1908 entitled, Worse Than Anywhere.
[00:24:31]  It declared, wherever we look, we find greater virility than in our own people.
[00:24:36]  In Turkey, Persia, China, the Balkan states, everywhere we find life and energy.
[00:24:40]  Even in Russia, in Spain, there was only apathy and submission.
[00:24:44]  How sad it is to think about the situation in Spain.
[00:24:48]  Damn.
[00:24:48]  Yeah.
[00:24:49]  Yeah.
[00:24:50]  Kind of feels like us in the coronavirus.
[00:24:53]  We're like, yeah, I think Americans can identify with a lot of people.
[00:24:57]  It's just like, wait, they're hearing here.
[00:24:58]  Even if you don't feel it, because colonialism is bad, you know the intellectuals in our own society who are saying the same shit, right?
[00:25:05]  Yes.
[00:25:06]  Yes.
[00:25:07]  Now, the Spanish political system was not at all stable domestically during the period after, like, while her empire was in free fall.
[00:25:14]  And that's part of why the empire didn't last.
[00:25:16]  From 1803 to the early 1900s, there were more than a dozen military coups.
[00:25:20]  Between 1833 and 1876, Spain was wracked by three civil wars, the Carlist Wars, which were not battles against everybody's favorite Tertiary Simpsons character, but were instead members of a conservative pro-church political movement.
[00:25:34]  The Carlists were the violent armed wing of Catholics, right?
[00:25:37]  They were the embodiment of clerical resentment against liberal Spain.
[00:25:41]  They were religious extremists who didn't want the country to modernize.
[00:25:45]  And I found a very detailed write-up for students on limond.uk that notes the Carlist wars, quote, were fought with a fervor and brutality derived from deep divisions within Spain.
[00:25:55]  They also lasted longer than national wars and were more difficult to resolve.
[00:25:59]  They anticipated the Spanish Civil War in a number of respects.
[00:26:02]  There was a strong element of different and conflicting beliefs within the country.
[00:26:06]  Profound traditional Catholicism against modern liberal thought, regional independence against traditional central control, political liberalism against deep conservative monarchism.
[00:26:16]  So this is all the stuff that's been cooking up in the background of Spanish politics at the turn of the 20th century.
[00:26:21]  Now, partly as a result of the Carlist wars, Spain had a relatively underdeveloped right wing in this period because, you know, a lot of them had gotten killed in wars.
[00:26:30]  And they'd been very tied to the church.
[00:26:32]  So there wasn't as much like a nationalist right wing.
[00:26:34]  It was a Catholic right wing.
[00:26:36]  Now, Spanish nationalism, as I said, was kind of nascent and didn't really start to erupt into the street until after World War I. Spain was neutral in World War I.
[00:26:44]  So you'd think they might be in a better position because they don't really get involved in this shit.
[00:26:48]  And it does delay a lot of political extremism in the country.
[00:26:51]  It's why they don't have like, you know, a communist movement that's really a big deal until after the war.
[00:26:56]  The first big street fight in Spain between radical political groups actually happened between two opposed groups of nationalists in 1919.
[00:27:05]  Radical Catalanists, which are like big, like advocates of Catalan separatism, had been holding peaceful nightly demonstrations in favor of independence throughout 1918.
[00:27:14]  In January of 1919, a group of right-wing Espanolistas, who were like nationalists, violent Spanish nationalists, assaulted this gathering of peaceful Catalanists.
[00:27:24]  Both groups battled it out in the streets of Barcelona in what would soon become a familiar display.
[00:27:28]  The Españolistas were a mix of local army officers and men from a group calling itself the Liga Patriotica Española.
[00:27:35]  This violence was soon superseded by a spree of organized political murders by anarcho-syndicalists from a labor federation called the CNT.
[00:27:42]  And this is like unrelated to the national separatism.
[00:27:45]  There's also, and we'll talk about anarchism in a second, but a bunch of anarchist extremists start murdering people based on like political, like based on class, really.
[00:27:54]  And that brings us a temporary stop to all of the street fighting because the murders bring the cops out against all sorts of what are considered to be political extremists.
[00:28:02]  And it briefly clamps, it's what we're about to see in the United States.
[00:28:06]  And it briefly clamps down on all political organization in the streets.
[00:28:09]  Yeah.
[00:28:10]  Now, in most of Western Europe, anarchists tended to be smaller.
[00:28:14]  Like they weren't fairly rare for anarchists to make a large percentage of political radicals in a European country.
[00:28:21]  And it's much more common for like socialists and communists to be a significant like force, a significant like sized force.
[00:28:28]  Ukraine would be an exception to that.
[00:28:30]  We talked about Nestor Mackno on our Christmas episodes.
[00:28:34]  And part of why Ukraine had a large and organized anarchist movement is that Ukraine was largely agrarian.
[00:28:39]  And one of the things we see in like Europe in this period of time is that nations that have a large industrial base and a lot of industrial workers have a huge communist movement.
[00:28:50]  Nations that are primarily rural and agricultural have a large anarchist movement because anarchists are more common, kind of come out of agrarian rural communities more often than communes.
[00:29:00]  Because communism is a workers' movement.
[00:29:02]  Marx early on in his career was very much like you like kind of wrote off for a long time, rural people.
[00:29:08]  It was like, no, it's all about the workers.
[00:29:10]  It's about industrial, like them you can organize and you can use them to take, you know, take over the system basically.
[00:29:16]  And like rural people are kind of a lost cause.
[00:29:18]  And he did change on that later in his life and stop.
[00:29:21]  But like, that's part of why you don't really see communism erupt out of rural areas in this period.
[00:29:27]  You see anarchism when you see left-wing extremes.
[00:29:30]  Yeah.
[00:29:30]  Okay.
[00:29:31]  Yeah.
[00:29:31]  So I'm going to quote it.
[00:29:32]  Yeah.
[00:29:33]  It's interesting, right?
[00:29:34]  I didn't actually think about it.
[00:29:35]  I thought of that.
[00:29:36]  Yeah.
[00:29:37]  And that's part of why when I think about ways in which to pull people in rural America away from right-wing extremism, I think of more systems like democratic confederalism or libertarian municipalism like Bookchin that are kind of more of an out of a more anarchist view.
[00:29:52]  Because like a lot of these libertarians, I do think you can pull into a more reasonable system that's not right-wing extremism because a lot of their basic ideology is, I want to be left alone.
[00:30:02]  And I think...
[00:30:03]  Yeah, you could be like, well, we want to leave you alone.
[00:30:05]  We just also would like to be left alone.
[00:30:07]  Can we figure out a way to like, so I'm going to quote from Lehman.uk again on kind of politics in Spain in this period.
[00:30:16]  Quote, capitalist industry had not developed in the same way as it had in Germany, Britain, and America, and Spain had little in the way of organized labor.
[00:30:23]  After small-scale beginnings in 1868, anarchism came to be a major revolutionary influence of the 20th century and was more widely embraced in Spain than other left-wing ideas.
[00:30:32]  The movement first gained notice in the 1870s.
[00:30:35]  After a violent incident at the town of Alcoy in 1873, when anarchists took advantage of a strike to spread radical ideas, causing the police to fire on the gathered populace, a clampdown was enforced that sent the movement underground.
[00:30:47]  Consequently, it became largely based in rural areas, which were more difficult to police.
[00:30:51]  Anarchism was reduced to individual acts of terrorism, which in turn were met by repression and torture by the state throughout the 1880s and 1890s.
[00:30:59]  By the early 20th century, terrorism had given way to a belief in anarcho-syndicalism.
[00:31:03]  This was the theory that the state could be challenged by cooperative action by the workers in strikes.
[00:31:08]  The Federation of Workers' Societies of the Spanish region was formed in 1900.
[00:31:12]  This movement organized strikes to exercise political power and was again suppressed.
[00:31:16]  Wage cuts and closures of factories in Barcelona in 1909, together with the call-up of men for a colonial war in Morocco, led to a general strike in the city on 26th of July.
[00:31:25]  This turned out to be a major event with 1,700 arrests, attacks on railway lines and anti-clericalism, hostility to the church.
[00:31:32]  80 churches and monasteries were attacked.
[00:31:35]  The government response was swift and merciless, and five leaders were executed.
[00:31:39]  And this is a big thing with like particularly the anarchists in Spain.
[00:31:42]  They burn a lot of churches down and they kill a lot of Catholic priests.
[00:31:47]  And some of that, a lot of that is them murdering people who didn't deserve it.
[00:31:50]  And a lot of them is that is them murdering people who did because the Catholic Church is also terrible.
[00:31:54]  Like kind of wild.
[00:31:56]  They're pretty out of pocket.
[00:31:58]  Yeah, let's not coach this.
[00:32:00]  If you're looking for like a pure good guy or a pure victim, you will rarely find it in this.
[00:32:05]  Like there are, right?
[00:32:06]  Like, obviously, I'm not saying like, like, there's nuns and shit that get murdered.
[00:32:10]  That's not chill.
[00:32:11]  Yeah.
[00:32:11]  The Catholic Church is also responsible for horrible repression.
[00:32:13]  It's very messy.
[00:32:14]  You know?
[00:32:15]  Yeah, They're, yeah, they, you know, they have their own, you know, both versions of like Bastard episode of like the like the good Christmas one that's like, oh, we indeed in orphanages.
[00:32:28]  You know what I'm saying?
[00:32:29]  It's like, oh, that's actually great.
[00:32:30]  You know, yeah.
[00:32:31]  And then there's, then there's this.
[00:32:33]  Yeah.
[00:32:33]  And the Catholic Church is so big because you can also, you could obviously, we could do multiple episodes, and we probably will at some point about the massive and pervasive sexual abuse of children that was enabled by the Catholic Church.
[00:32:43]  We could and should also do a Christmas episode on the significant number of priests and nuns in Latin America who were like dogged and constant enemies of U.S. imperialism and right-wing extremism during like the period when the U.S. was doing most of its fucking around in Latin America.
[00:32:59]  All of that's part of the church's history.
[00:33:01]  All of it's true that like half of our hospital beds are actually Catholic.
[00:33:04]  You know what I'm saying?
[00:33:06]  Yeah, this like weird mix.
[00:33:08]  Yeah.
[00:33:08]  Yeah.
[00:33:09]  I'm not a person who wants to like simplify all this.
[00:33:12]  It's very messy.
[00:33:13]  This is a messy episode.
[00:33:14]  Messy, boy.
[00:33:16]  By this point, when you've got these anarcho-syndicalists organizing and like, and in some cases, carrying out, not all of them, but some of them carrying out terrorist attacks.
[00:33:24]  And some of those attacks are on shitty people, and some of those attacks are on people who don't deserve it.
[00:33:28]  Like it's very messy.
[00:33:30]  And at the same period of time, you've got Gabriel D'Annunzio in Italy occupying, well, I guess in Yugoslavia, occupying the city of Fiume, and you've got Mussolini in the early stages of forming his black shirts and sicking them on left-wing newspapers.
[00:33:42]  This is happening contemporaneously to that.
[00:33:44]  You're going to have to like, you're going to have to release with this one a vocabulary list.
[00:33:50]  You've introduced some new names, some new words to say.
[00:33:52]  Well, we talked about D'Annunzio and Fume.
[00:33:54]  No, no, I'm not talking about him.
[00:33:55]  I'm talking about the different factions in Spain.
[00:33:58]  Yeah.
[00:33:58]  You said anarcho-anarchicalism.
[00:34:02]  Yeah.
[00:34:02]  Yeah, anarcho-syndical.
[00:34:03]  You know what I'm saying?
[00:34:04]  Sterno-Klato masto without this bug.
[00:34:06]  You know what I mean?
[00:34:07]  Anarcho-syndicalists.
[00:34:09]  The basic idea is that workers need workers who work for different factories or whatever, who work in farms, need to form syndicates together to organize, kind of like unions, to organize and have syndicates that work together against the state and against capital in order to, in some cases, just gain better wages for workers, in some cases, in order to revolt against the system.
[00:34:31]  But it's this idea that different groups of workers need to organize themselves and then work with other organizations of workers rather than having bosses in a strict hierarchy.
[00:34:41]  And they totally need to sell drugs.
[00:34:42]  That's why they call it narcos.
[00:34:44]  Yeah.
[00:34:47]  The good thing about this period is that drugs are all legal everywhere.
[00:34:52]  So by this point, like I said, D'Anunzio is occupying Fiume and Mussolini's in the early stages of forming the black shirts.

=== Narcos and Legal Drugs (03:00) ===

[00:34:58]  Fascism's getting started in Italy.
[00:35:01]  And in Spain, though, anarchists are by far the largest and best organized group of political radicals in the country.
[00:35:06]  The communists aren't really a big factor.
[00:35:08]  And the right wing isn't really a big factor.
[00:35:10]  It's just kind of the anarchists fighting the government a lot of the time.
[00:35:12]  And the Catholic Church, you know, is kind of a lot of their supporters are kind of taking the part of right-wing organizing, but the Carlist wars kind of drained them.
[00:35:21]  So it's not a big deal there.
[00:35:23]  And this is not really the case anywhere else that you could think of.
[00:35:26]  And it's part of why I find Spain so interesting.
[00:35:28]  Fascism, by contrast, had a much slower time starting off in Spain.
[00:35:32]  Portugal actually beat Spain to the punch when it came to like having fascists.
[00:35:37]  Yeah.
[00:35:38]  And it was because a proto-nationalist group called Nationalismo Lusitano was formed in Lisbon in 1923, and it was directly inspired by Mussolini's Italian fascism.
[00:35:47]  Now, a number of other Mussolini wannabes sprang up in Europe during this period.
[00:35:51]  You could even call Hitler at the time of the beer hall putsch kind of like a Mussolini imitator.
[00:35:56]  But the idea didn't really catch on in Spain, not yet.
[00:35:59]  Spanish intellectuals were, however, watching events in Italy.
[00:36:03]  And one of them, a guy named Foix, suggested that this new political system might just be the thing to help rebuild Spain's failing empire.
[00:36:10]  He wrote of fascism as a social movement.
[00:36:13]  It gave voice to a vein of mysticism and idealism that exalted the concept of the Patria in its full realization, the concept of a fatherland.
[00:36:21]  Yeah, yeah, Patriot.
[00:36:22]  There's a Patriot coffee shop in Compton.
[00:36:24]  Yeah.
[00:36:24]  Anyway, with some troubling.
[00:36:26]  Yeah.
[00:36:27]  So the name of the game for Foix was National Restoration.
[00:36:31]  But Mussolini's fun idea was popular outside of right-wing circles, too.
[00:36:35]  There was actually a left-wing Catalan separatist movement that found themselves drawn to Italian fascism, particularly its emphasis on militia-based direct action.
[00:36:43]  And they weren't fascists.
[00:36:45]  They didn't embrace, for example, Mussolini's doctrine of therapeutic violence, you know, the cult of violence for violence's sake.
[00:36:51]  They just liked, number one, the imagery of this non-state group of armed people marching in order to take power for themselves.
[00:36:58]  And they wanted to do that.
[00:36:59]  So, like, the left is, when we talked about this in our first episode, a lot of folks who are just kind of hate the system play with both fascist and anarchist and left and right-wing ideas throughout this period of time.
[00:37:11]  Also, I like that you brought up Portugal because I feel like they always fly under the radar.
[00:37:16]  They do.
[00:37:17]  They just, everybody just not noticing.
[00:37:18]  They could just exist in the shadows.
[00:37:20]  They were the first in Africa.
[00:37:22]  You know what I'm saying?
[00:37:22]  So, yeah.
[00:37:23]  Like, nobody, like, how come nobody ever talk about Portugal?
[00:37:26]  And they're also the case of a country that was incredibly powerful and colonized a fuckload of the world and then collapsed before the rest of colonialism did.
[00:37:34]  And you see the same thing happen in Portugal, where all these authoritarians start coming into power because there's this sense of like, we need a strong man.
[00:37:41]  And this is like intellectuals in Spain will be like, we have to, or in Portugal, will be like, we can't have a republic for a while.
[00:37:47]  We have to have basically a dictator come in because he needs to fix everything.
[00:37:50]  Like, we have all these problems.
[00:37:51]  We can't argue.
[00:37:52]  We just need one visionary to come in.
[00:37:54]  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:37:55]  And it's not quite fascism, but it has a lot of elements of that, right?

=== Capitalism Transition Aspects (04:08) ===

[00:37:59]  Yeah.
[00:38:00]  Um, Robert, can you hit Ad Rick real quick?
[00:38:02]  You know what else has elements of fascism, Sophie?
[00:38:07]  No, no, grand capitalism.
[00:38:10]  Transition for sponsor aspects of services.
[00:38:13]  Yeah, here's what's up, everyone.
[00:38:21]  I'm Ego Monument.
[00:38:22]  My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
[00:38:30]  It's Will Farrell.
[00:38:33]  My dad gave me the best advice ever.
[00:38:37]  I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
[00:38:42]  I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
[00:38:44]  I'm working my way up through, and I know it's a place to come look for up and coming talent.
[00:38:48]  He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
[00:38:53]  Yeah.
[00:38:54]  He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
[00:38:56]  And he's like, just give it a shot.
[00:38:58]  He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
[00:39:06]  If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
[00:39:09]  It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
[00:39:16]  Yeah, it would not be.
[00:39:18]  Right, it wouldn't be that.
[00:39:19]  There's a lot of luck.
[00:39:21]  Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:39:31]  10-10 shots fired, City Hall building.
[00:39:34]  A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
[00:39:38]  From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
[00:39:44]  How could this have happened in City Hall?
[00:39:46]  Somebody tell me that!
[00:39:47]  Jeffrey Hood did it.
[00:39:48]  July 2003.
[00:39:50]  Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
[00:39:55]  Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
[00:39:58]  And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
[00:40:06]  Everybody in the chamber ducks.
[00:40:09]  A shocking public murder.
[00:40:10]  I screamed, get down, get down.
[00:40:12]  Those are shots.
[00:40:13]  Those are shots.
[00:40:14]  Get down.
[00:40:14]  A charismatic politician.
[00:40:16]  You know, you just bent the rules all the time, man.
[00:40:18]  I still have a weapon.
[00:40:21]  And I could shoot you.
[00:40:24]  And an outsider with a secret.
[00:40:26]  He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
[00:40:28]  That may or may not have been political.
[00:40:30]  That may have been about sex.
[00:40:32]  Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app.
[00:40:36]  Apple Podcasts are wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:40:45]  There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
[00:40:49]  Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
[00:40:52]  You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
[00:40:55]  And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
[00:40:59]  We always say, trust your girlfriends.
[00:41:03]  I'm Anna Sinfield.
[00:41:04]  And in this new season of The Girlfriends...
[00:41:06]  Oh my God, this is the same man.
[00:41:08]  A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
[00:41:13]  I felt like I got hit by a truck.
[00:41:15]  I thought, how could this happen to me?
[00:41:17]  The cops didn't seem to care.
[00:41:19]  So they take matters into their own hands.
[00:41:22]  I said, oh, hell no.
[00:41:24]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[00:41:26]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[00:41:30]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[00:41:32]  Trust me, babe.
[00:41:33]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:41:43]  I'm Laurie Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
[00:41:49]  This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
[00:41:56]  I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
[00:42:02]  From power to parenthood.
[00:42:04]  Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.

=== Generals Dragged to Morocco (15:03) ===

[00:42:08]  This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
[00:42:10]  From addiction to acceleration.
[00:42:12]  The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
[00:42:17]  You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
[00:42:23]  And it's a multiplayer game.
[00:42:26]  What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
[00:42:32]  Find out on Mostly Human.
[00:42:34]  My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
[00:42:37]  Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
[00:42:48]  We're back.
[00:42:48]  We're back from...
[00:42:50]  Sorry.
[00:42:50]  If by strong man, you mean a strong Sophie that keeps us in place, then yes, these ads have elements of fascism.
[00:42:59]  But it's good fascism.
[00:43:01]  It's a fashion.
[00:43:02]  It's a fascist word, which is fine.
[00:43:08]  It's fine.
[00:43:11]  And we're glasses in the dope.
[00:43:14]  We appreciate our podcast dictator, Sophie.
[00:43:16]  Yes.
[00:43:17]  Our podcast, Dick Poole.
[00:43:19]  With an iron fist and does operate a system of political re-education camps, but that is a story for another episode.
[00:43:28]  So, in late 1923, Spain gained its first real fascist party, the Trasistas.
[00:43:34]  They wore a blue uniform because blue is the color of the working class for the right wing.
[00:43:39]  Red is the color of the working class for the left wing, right?
[00:43:41]  Like, I know, I know.
[00:43:42]  It's yeah.
[00:43:43]  And we got it backwards here, which is weird, right?
[00:43:47]  Yeah, they wore a blue uniform and they hoped to spread throughout the country, but the organization fizzled.
[00:43:52]  There just wasn't any real interest in fascism in Spain in this period.
[00:43:55]  Now, while political fascism failed to gain meaningful purchase in Spain during this time, fascist thought and inclinations were spreading among a lot of influential Spanish thought leaders, and particularly within the military and military officers.
[00:44:09]  Much of this had to do with the rise of the revolutionary left in the 1890s, these anarchists that I was talking about.
[00:44:15]  In his landmark book, Fascism in Spain, scholar Stanley Payne notes that the military resistance to the left had less to do with politics than you might expect.
[00:44:23]  Officers largely accepted moderate left-wing social and economic aims, and there was even a strong strain of anti-capitalist thought among Spanish military leaders.
[00:44:32]  Despite this, Payne writes, army officers demanded suppression of the left's disorder, violence, and subversion of national unity.
[00:44:40]  So, again, it's this the military's big problem with the left is they're disordered, right?
[00:44:45]  They're trying to tear down this system, and we're we're doing pretty well in this system.
[00:44:48]  I mean, it's the thing that is always the case, right?
[00:44:50]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:44:52]  Now the military itself was also heavily divided in this time, not along political lines, but between bureaucratic officers on the peninsula itself and combat officers who'd spent time fighting in Spain's last colonial possession, northern Morocco.
[00:45:06]  So, Spain's, most of its empires has collapsed right now, but they have northern Morocco.
[00:45:11]  And Spain had gotten Morocco basically during the last stages of the scramble for Africa, and it was given to them by France and England, who, you might notice, don't have the right to give Morocco to anyone, but they did.
[00:45:24]  And it was due to like diplomatic support that Spain gave them.
[00:45:27]  Like, it was literally like it was them the way that like a normal person would be like, hey, man, I'll help you move if you help me set up my sound system this week.
[00:45:35]  Like, that's how Spain got Morocco.
[00:45:37]  It's very crazy.
[00:45:38]  Yeah, it's, you know, it's bullshit.
[00:45:40]  It's also a beautiful country.
[00:45:42]  Gorgeous, yeah.
[00:45:43]  Morocco's beautiful.
[00:45:45]  Now, so they were given the right to occupy the land by France and England in 1906 in exchange for diplomatic support.
[00:45:51]  And Spain's conquest of Morocco was kind of like the first one-night stand you have after a breakup.
[00:45:56]  They just had like a big, you know, they needed something to boost their confidence after losing to the United States.
[00:46:04]  And Spain turned out to be pretty bad at conquering Morocco.
[00:46:07]  Their control never amounted to much more than a few towns, cities, and roads on the coast.
[00:46:12]  Much of the territory and its people refused to yield.
[00:46:15]  And in 1921, a charismatic Moroccan leader named Abdul Karim rose an army and launched what became known as the Riffy Insurrection.
[00:46:23]  For a time, it was the strongest rebellion against colonialism anywhere in the Afro-Asian world.
[00:46:28]  Like these guys actually do great for a while, you know?
[00:46:33]  Now, the war attracted ambitious young Spanish officers eager to make a name for themselves.
[00:46:38]  One of these guys was a fellow named Francisco Franco, who rose to the rank of colonel fighting the insurgents.
[00:46:45]  Now, Francisco and a lot of young officers were very frustrated by the corrupt and bureaucratic nature of the military, which had not seen a major reorganization or modernization in decades.
[00:46:54]  It was a lot, in a lot of ways, like a Napoleonic army with somewhat better guns, which is part of why they're getting their asses kicked.
[00:47:00]  Now, Franco and a number of other officers formed military councils of like-minded officers and lobbied for reforms, and some of those reforms were successful.
[00:47:08]  But nothing they did was enough to right the inertia.
[00:47:11]  In early 1921, the Spanish army launched an offensive into northern Morocco from the coastal territories they held.
[00:47:18]  Now, because the people in charge were idiots, they didn't properly prepare lines of communication, and they almost immediately advanced beyond their supply lines.
[00:47:25]  No defensible forts were left behind to secure supply routes or water.
[00:47:29]  And on July 22nd, after five days of skirmishes, a force of 5,000 Spanish troops were attacked by 3,000 Rift fighters.
[00:47:36]  This should have been an easy win for a European military, but the Spanish had poor organization and were basically out of ammo because they'd outrun their supply lines.
[00:47:44]  So the Rifts, the Riffy, like, overrun the Spanish army and they advanced like several hundred miles, slaughtering Spanish soldiers, taking over supply depots and positions as they go.
[00:47:55]  The Spanish army shatters entirely.
[00:47:57]  They lose more than 13,000 men wounded in a matter of days, and the Rifts suffer around 800 casualties.
[00:48:03]  This is like one of the worst defeats suffered by any colonial power in Africa.
[00:48:09]  They get their asses handed to them.
[00:48:14]  The defeat was so extensive and so shameful that the Spanish general committed suicide in the field and his remains were never found.
[00:48:22]  Like it is, they it is bad.
[00:48:26]  And the Rift, this whole insurrection is fascinating to read about because like these guys fucking have it on lockdown, you know?
[00:48:32]  It is hard to imagine how shattering this was to the people of Spain and their image of themselves and how much it disrupted Spanish politics.
[00:48:40]  The military was, of course, enraged.
[00:48:42]  And even though the failures were entirely their own, they blamed their failures on the support of the civilian government.
[00:48:47]  It's y'all's fault.
[00:48:53]  That's what's wrong with my cheese mode.
[00:48:55]  You know what I'm saying?
[00:48:57]  Like, well, I didn't lose this war.
[00:48:59]  Yeah.
[00:49:00]  Yeah.
[00:49:00]  I mean, you see it on the right here where it's like it was the liberals and like the left that lost us the wars.
[00:49:04]  And they're like, no, you, we're we suck at this.
[00:49:06]  We're bad at it.
[00:49:08]  Look, man, take it on its in, okay?
[00:49:10]  We're bad at it, and it's bad.
[00:49:12]  It was, you shouldn't have been there in the first place.
[00:49:14]  Yeah.
[00:49:15]  If we fucking stopped this shit in like, I don't know, 1945, we'd still be like, you know, what we're good at is war.
[00:49:22]  Don't have to do it often, but we're good at it.
[00:49:24]  But when we show up, it's real.
[00:49:26]  When we show up.
[00:49:27]  Yeah.
[00:49:27]  Yeah.
[00:49:29]  Ugh.
[00:49:30]  Now, again, yeah, really fucks up a lot in Spain at this period of time.
[00:49:36]  And obviously, the liberal government is also enraged, largely at the cost in Spanish life and treasure in this colonial adventure.
[00:49:42]  And in early September 1923, three liberal ministers resign in protest because the military draws up plans for a new offensive in Morocco.
[00:49:49]  And they're like, come on, guys, like you just got your asses kicked.
[00:49:53]  This is a terrible idea.
[00:49:55]  Fellas.
[00:49:55]  Fellas.
[00:49:57]  Can you not take the message?
[00:50:04]  It's bad.
[00:50:05]  It's bad.
[00:50:06]  Catalanists, who didn't even really want to be part of Spain, let alone send their sons to die in fucking Morocco for Spain, held a huge rally in Barcelona where the Spanish flag was dragged through the ground.
[00:50:17]  This really pisses off the military.
[00:50:20]  And it pisses off a bunch of senior generals, most prominently a career military man from a career military family named Miguel Primo de Rivera.
[00:50:28]  Now, as the captain general of Barcelona, the guy in charge of the military in Barcelona, Di Rivera was a desk officer, not an African veteran.
[00:50:36]  And that's kind of like the break between the army.
[00:50:39]  But he sides with the African veterans and he sees this liberal government as having failed his illustrious Spanish army.
[00:50:46]  He also had seen Mussolini's march on Rome in 1922.
[00:50:49]  And while he is not a fascist, he really likes Mussolini.
[00:50:53]  And the March on Rome convinces him that with the army behind him, he could force an end to the parliamentary politics that he felt were holding the military back.
[00:51:01]  And I'm going to quote now from a book called Fascism in Spain about like this revolt that Di Rivera leads.
[00:51:07]  The revolt began in Barcelona as a classic pronunciento.
[00:51:11]  I'm sorry, Spain.
[00:51:13]  With a local takeover in the Catalan capital by its captain general, who called upon the rest of the army and other patriotic Spaniards to rally round.
[00:51:20]  In fact, also in the traditional style, all but one of the other captains general at first sat on their fence.
[00:51:25]  The pronunciento succeeded above all because the liberal government did almost nothing to defend itself.
[00:51:31]  The issue was finally decided two days later by the crown, as Alfonso VIII, without invoking constitutional limits or procedures, transferred power to what would become the first direct military dictatorship in Spanish history.
[00:51:42]  Primo di Rivera gave no evidence of any explicit theory or plan.
[00:51:46]  His assumption of power was at first predicated on a 90-day emergency military directory to deal with such problems as attempted subversion, the stalemate in Morocco, administrative corruption, and political reform.
[00:51:58]  In fact, his only professed ideology was constitutional liberalism.
[00:52:02]  He insisted that the Constitution of 1876 remained the law of the land and initially denied that he was a dictator in any genuine sense, insisting in his first public statement, no one can, with justice, apply that term to me.
[00:52:14]  Of course, everyone since has called him a dictator.
[00:52:17]  He's a dictator.
[00:52:18]  Yeah, the years of D. What is it about is I have two questions about this.
[00:52:22]  Like, I forget what, I forget what historian I heard say it, but he's just talking about like just generals.
[00:52:30]  Like, they all kind of have this like diva gene.
[00:52:33]  Like, just kind of divas.
[00:52:35]  You know what I'm saying?
[00:52:36]  Like, it's kind of hard to like, what is that?
[00:52:39]  So that's like my first thing.
[00:52:41]  It's very deep in Western civilization, particularly, right?
[00:52:45]  Like, you have to look back to Rome at this stuff.
[00:52:47]  So the way generals in Rome were treated, number one, if you were a general in Rome and you had a major military victory, the Senate would vote for you to have what was called a triumph, which is where you were all but in all but name king for a day of Rome.
[00:53:01]  And there was this, the whole city had this huge party for you, and all of your trophies of war were dragged through the streets.
[00:53:06]  And like, because you were so powerful and so like basically worshipped that day, it was one guy's whole job to stand next to you the whole time and throughout the day whisper to you, you will die at one point.
[00:53:18]  Like you're going to die someday.
[00:53:19]  Yeah.
[00:53:20]  Like that was like, yeah, like that, that like to remember.
[00:53:22]  And Rome constantly had civil wars that were the result of generals taking their armies and taking power.
[00:53:28]  It happened all of the fucking time.
[00:53:29]  Yeah.
[00:53:30]  It's why you got Caesar.
[00:53:31]  It's why it stopped being a republic, you know?
[00:53:33]  Yeah.
[00:53:34]  One of the reasons why the United States military is organized the way it is and why there's such, if you look at like some of the shit the military was saying at the end of Trump's time, like why they had so many statements about the military having no role in the elections, is because from the beginning, the founders of this country were like, that's going to be a problem.
[00:53:50]  It's like we're going to have a military.
[00:53:52]  That's going to be it.
[00:53:53]  And at first, a lot of them were like, we shouldn't have a military.
[00:53:55]  Why would you like, it always is a problem.
[00:53:57]  Let's just have a bunch of militias.
[00:53:58]  Yeah.
[00:53:58]  You know, which there's something to be said for that.
[00:54:01]  Yeah.
[00:54:02]  Anyway, but like, yeah, this.
[00:54:04]  Yeah, they are divas.
[00:54:05]  Like, if you're going to take the responsibility for the lives of tens of thousands of men into your own personal control, you got to be a little bit of a diva, right?
[00:54:13]  Kind of.
[00:54:13]  Yeah, it seemed like it.
[00:54:15]  You know?
[00:54:16]  Yeah.
[00:54:16]  Yeah.
[00:54:16]  Anyway, so obviously everyone today calls Primo di Rivera a dictatorship.
[00:54:20]  The years of his leadership are generally known in Spanish history as la dictadura.
[00:54:25]  And this was met like his coming to power was met by a lot less resistance than you might guess.
[00:54:30]  Spain was exhausted by years of political bickering, foreign policy setbacks, and economic frustration.
[00:54:35]  Several years earlier, political theorists in Portugal had talked about the need to bring in a temporary dictator, what they called an iron surgeon, to solve intractable problems.
[00:54:44]  And Primo Di Rivera was one of a lot of strongmen who came to power throughout Europe in this period who weren't fascists, although they often admired fascists and took some ideas from them.
[00:54:54]  But Di Rivera doesn't really have an ideology.
[00:54:56]  He just wants to fix things and figures, is enough of a narcissist that he's like, I know how to do this.
[00:55:02]  And while Di Rivera wasn't a fascist, his brief reign would help further lay the groundwork for fascism in Spain.
[00:55:09]  And the war that he brought to Morocco was in many ways a prelude of fascist wars of extermination to come.
[00:55:14]  Only it was waged with the help of his allies, the French.
[00:55:18]  Uh-oh.
[00:55:20]  Yeah.
[00:55:21]  See, after the Spanish army broke at Annual, which is that big battle where they lose like 13,000 dudes, Abdel Karim, who was the guy in charge of the Reef and his like insertion, I don't know what you want to call them.
[00:55:34]  I'll call them revolutionaries, established a republic.
[00:55:37]  Now, France, who just fought a whole war, you know, World War I, over what they claimed was the right of national self-determination and who were a republic themselves, did not like that Abdel Karim and his Rif had established a republic in Morocco because they're afraid they own a bunch of Africa.
[00:55:53]  They own a bunch of Africa near Morocco.
[00:55:55]  Very close.
[00:55:56]  People are going to hear that there's a republic that isn't run by Europe and they're not going to want to have us in charge anymore.
[00:56:05]  Wait, this is an option?
[00:56:07]  Yeah.
[00:56:07]  Not having y'all is an option?
[00:56:09]  Yeah.
[00:56:10]  Yeah.
[00:56:11]  We can have a democracy and not you.
[00:56:13]  Yeah.
[00:56:14]  Yeah.
[00:56:15]  I kind of like that.
[00:56:15]  Yeah.
[00:56:16]  Yeah.
[00:56:16]  France is like, no, that's not.
[00:56:17]  That's not going to happen.
[00:56:18]  No, it's not an option.
[00:56:20]  Not an option.
[00:56:20]  Not an option.
[00:56:21]  So they decide to enter the war against the Rif on Spain's side to crush the rebels.
[00:56:26]  In 1925, France and Di Rivera's reformed Spanish army begin a counteroffensive against the Rif.
[00:56:32]  Now, leading things on the French side was a fellow named Marshall Petain, hero of the Battle of Verdun during World War I, and the guy who would become the leader of Vichy France during World War II.
[00:56:42]  He's the guy who collaborates with the Nazis.
[00:56:45]  Now, Petain at this point, yeah, I know, he's a real piece of shit.
[00:56:48]  How come the Moroccans didn't kill this guy?
[00:56:51]  He's a war hero at this point, too, though, because he led France through the Battle of Verdun is, if you're making a shortlist of the very worst battles in the entire history of human warfare, Verdun might be number one.
[00:57:02]  You know, Stalingrad, there's a couple of other like, but it's, it is, it's in, it's in the running, you know, it's horrible.
[00:57:08]  Like a million people die.
[00:57:10]  It's a terrible, terrible battle.

=== Franco's Foreign Legion Uniforms (06:31) ===

[00:57:11]  So he's a big war hero.
[00:57:13]  And when he decides he wants to go to Morocco, the French government is going to give him everything he asks for.
[00:57:18]  So he puts together a force of 150,000 men to face Abdel Karim's tribesmen, who were very well organized and good fighters, but they numbered just 20,000.
[00:57:28]  The offensive started with one of the first amphibious landings.
[00:57:32]  Yeah.
[00:57:32]  There's no like Gandalf showing up and helping.
[00:57:35]  No, no, no, no.
[00:57:37]  We don't get a Gandalf in this story.
[00:57:39]  I'm sorry.
[00:57:39]  You are outgunned and outmanned.
[00:57:41]  Yeah, you guys are just like, you're fucked.
[00:57:43]  It's a bummer.
[00:57:45]  And this amphibious landing is started, spearheaded, by a young colonel named Francisco Franco, who led the soldiers of the Spanish Foreign Legion into battle.
[00:57:54]  Now, you have seen the Spanish Foreign Legion.
[00:57:57]  Everyone in America pretty much did, because at the start of the coronavirus lockdown, when Spain had a lockdown, they brought in the military to help, there were pictures of a bunch of very jacked and very handsome Spanish soldiers in incredibly tight-fitting uniforms marching down the streets of Barcelona.
[00:58:12]  And a bunch of U.S. liberals were like, oh my God, they're so hot.
[00:58:15]  Why can't we have those soldiers here?
[00:58:17]  I'm going to tell you the backstory of those soldiers because those were the men of the Spanish Foreign Legion.
[00:58:21]  And it's not a great backstory.
[00:58:23]  No.
[00:58:25]  So what's crazy is about the geography right now.
[00:58:31]  I don't know this backstory that you're about to say, but I'm just picturing the geography because off of Costa del Sul at the edge of the edge of Spain to the tip of Tangiers in Morocco, it's just the Mediterranean Sea.
[00:58:44]  It's a 90-minute boat ride.
[00:58:46]  Yeah, it's so far, right?
[00:58:47]  It's not far.
[00:58:48]  It's almost like you could sit in Morocco and watch it.
[00:58:51]  Like, yeah, you come to Spanish.
[00:58:52]  You can get a kick.
[00:58:54]  You can get Spain to Africa in the time you would get a quarter of the way across Texas.
[00:58:59]  Right?
[00:58:59]  Like, it's nothing.
[00:59:00]  It really is.
[00:59:02]  Do we know who designed the uniforms?
[00:59:05]  We're going to talk about why the uniforms look the way they do.
[00:59:08]  Yeah.
[00:59:08]  So the Spanish Foreign Legion were founding.
[00:59:11]  Wait away, Sophie.
[00:59:13]  He's not a pointy motherfucker.
[00:59:15]  No, no, no.
[00:59:15]  No, they're hot.
[00:59:16]  They're hot.
[00:59:19]  Look at these uniforms.
[00:59:20]  They're like a nice, like, they are flashy.
[00:59:23]  They look good.
[00:59:24]  But they are hot.
[00:59:25]  Nobody's arguing that they're not hot.
[00:59:27]  Pants are subjectively way too tight.
[00:59:30]  Yeah, no one is arguing that they're not good-looking men.
[00:59:33]  Yeah, we're not going to disagree about this.
[00:59:35]  But problematic.
[00:59:37]  So the Spanish Foreign Legion was founded in 1919 in mimicry of the French Foreign Legion, since Spain was also mimicking French ambitions in North Africa at this point.
[00:59:46]  The founder of the Legion was a guy named Milan Estray, a veteran of Spain's brutal war in the Philippines and of the fighting in Morocco.
[00:59:53]  And he wanted to create a colonial army for Spain that they could use to regain some of their lost glory.
[00:59:59]  He created an interlocking series as he founded, like when he founded the Foreign Legion, he wanted them to be brutal.
[01:00:06]  Because if you're going to keep a colonial possession, you have to murder a lot of people, right?
[01:00:10]  Sheesh.
[01:00:10]  That's how colonialism.
[01:00:11]  You have to kill a lot of people.
[01:00:13]  And so your soldiers have to be soulless, broken men in order to gun down the proper number of children to keep an empire.
[01:00:21]  He wanted shock troops.
[01:00:23]  Yeah, I mean, and fine as hell.
[01:00:26]  She just sent me the picture.
[01:00:27]  That's why I was like, good God.
[01:00:28]  God damn it.
[01:00:29]  I know.
[01:00:29]  I know.
[01:00:30]  Nobody's arguing.
[01:00:32]  I get why the reaction was what it is.
[01:00:36]  The Spanish Foreign Legion today look like characters in, like, they look like characters in a pornography.
[01:00:41]  Like, they don't look like real soldiers.
[01:00:43]  They look like fake soldiers from a sleazy porn.
[01:00:45]  Yes.
[01:00:46]  Yes.
[01:00:47]  Yeah.
[01:00:47]  And they kind of did then.
[01:00:49]  So Milan Astray, in order to make sure these guys are as brutal as possible, creates for them an interlocking series of hazing rituals with the goal of like shattering these men's souls.
[01:00:59]  And he wants to, explicitly, he's like, I want to separate these men from their past lives and unify them in, quote, brotherhood and death.
[01:01:07]  Now, Milan Astray was a big fan of the Bushido code of the samurai.
[01:01:12]  Oh, here we go.
[01:01:13]  Yeah, I know, I know.
[01:01:14]  All of these fucking guys.
[01:01:16]  And he cribs from Bushido to write his own legionary creed, which emphasized tireless duty, bodily hardness, which is why they're all jacked, unconditional brotherhood, and fighting to the death.
[01:01:28]  And I'm going to quote from a write-up in Prospect magazine on the Foreign Legion here.
[01:01:33]  Many of these themes were common across fascist movements and the militaries they influenced, but others were distinct to the Legion.
[01:01:39]  Legionaries swore to become bridegrooms of death from the title of a popular song about a legionnaire's sacrifice in the riff, renouncing familial and romantic bonds and sublimating them into loyalty to each other and the legion's flag.
[01:01:52]  You are married to death.
[01:01:53]  Death is your wife.
[01:01:56]  You're not married to the streets.
[01:01:58]  You're not married to the game.
[01:02:00]  You married to death.
[01:02:02]  So if you think these guys are a hot, I have bad news for you.
[01:02:05]  They're fucking the Grim Reaper.
[01:02:07]  Yeah, you don't attract them.
[01:02:11]  You are too alive for me.
[01:02:13]  That's not my type.
[01:02:14]  Yeah.
[01:02:15]  So these guys, the reason why they have these shirts with like really open, weird necklines is that.
[01:02:22]  I'm sorry.
[01:02:23]  I'm going to need you to rephrase that.
[01:02:26]  What's weird about that?
[01:02:28]  Good.
[01:02:28]  I just said they're showing it off.
[01:02:32]  They are showing it off.
[01:02:33]  It's also meant to emphasize their willingness to fight in the hot desert air.
[01:02:38]  And the green is from like the color.
[01:02:40]  It's like early camouflage.
[01:02:42]  Yeah.
[01:02:43]  Sophie need her a saddie.
[01:02:45]  This is what I wish was normal.
[01:02:49]  Sophie, they are married to the concept of murdering children.
[01:02:52]  I'm sorry.
[01:02:53]  I mean, I'm not here for that, but the they even got bulges, dog.
[01:02:57]  I know they have bulges.
[01:02:59]  I said the pants are subjectively too tight, but like, go ahead.
[01:03:05]  This is not functional.
[01:03:06]  It's like a nice pastel mint color, you know?
[01:03:11]  None of that uniforms ain't functional.
[01:03:14]  They are not.
[01:03:15]  You have to be married to death because nothing about this says you ready to survive.
[01:03:22]  It kind of looks like if the tin man from The Wizard of Oz worked at Baskin Robbins and had to go do a porno shoot later.
[01:03:31]  So Franco and his foreign legion men.
[01:03:34]  Franco and his foreign legion men were the tip of the spear of the French and Spanish governments thrust into the heart of Morocco.
[01:03:40]  Okay, you know what you just did there.
[01:03:42]  Are you talking about this?

=== Marry Death for Survival (04:10) ===

[01:03:43]  I know, yeah, I know.
[01:03:45]  I know, Sophie, but we're about to talk about genocide, okay?
[01:03:48]  Okay, but you know what you just did there.
[01:03:50]  You know what?
[01:03:51]  We need to take a break.
[01:03:53]  Tip of the spear doesn't just mean a dip.
[01:03:55]  Take a break, Robert.
[01:03:56]  Frusted.
[01:03:57]  All right.
[01:03:57]  We're going to go to ads.
[01:03:58]  We're going to go to ads, and then we're going to talk about a colonial genocide.
[01:04:03]  Yes.
[01:04:06]  What's up, everyone?
[01:04:07]  I'm Ago Moda.
[01:04:08]  My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network, it's Will Farrell.
[01:04:20]  My dad gave me the best advice ever.
[01:04:23]  I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
[01:04:28]  I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
[01:04:30]  I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place to come look for up and coming talent.
[01:04:34]  He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
[01:04:39]  Yeah.
[01:04:40]  He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
[01:04:43]  And he's like, just give it a shot.
[01:04:44]  He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
[01:04:52]  If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
[01:04:55]  It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
[01:05:02]  Yeah, it would not be.
[01:05:04]  Right, it wouldn't be that.
[01:05:05]  There's a lot of luck.
[01:05:07]  Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:05:17]  10-10 shots fired, City Hall building.
[01:05:20]  A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
[01:05:24]  From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach.
[01:05:29]  Murder at City Hall.
[01:05:30]  How could this have happened in City Hall?
[01:05:32]  Somebody tell me that.
[01:05:33]  Jeffrey Hood did it.
[01:05:34]  July 2003.
[01:05:36]  Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
[01:05:41]  Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
[01:05:44]  And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
[01:05:53]  Everybody in the chamber's ducks.
[01:05:55]  A shocking public murder.
[01:05:57]  They screamed, get down, get down.
[01:05:59]  Those are shots.
[01:05:59]  Those are shots.
[01:06:00]  Get down.
[01:06:01]  A charismatic politician.
[01:06:02]  You know, he just bent the rules all the time, man.
[01:06:05]  I still have a weapon.
[01:06:07]  And I could shoot you.
[01:06:10]  And an outsider with a secret.
[01:06:12]  He alleged you was a victim of flat down.
[01:06:15]  That may or may not have been political.
[01:06:16]  That may have been about sex.
[01:06:18]  Listening to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app.
[01:06:22]  Apple Podcasts are wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:06:31]  There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
[01:06:35]  Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
[01:06:39]  You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
[01:06:41]  And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
[01:06:45]  We always say, trust your girlfriends.
[01:06:49]  I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends.
[01:06:53]  Oh my God, this is the same man.
[01:06:55]  A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
[01:06:59]  I felt like I got hit by a truck.
[01:07:01]  I thought, how could this happen to me?
[01:07:03]  The cops didn't seem to care.
[01:07:05]  So they take matters into their own hands.
[01:07:08]  I said, oh, hell no.
[01:07:10]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[01:07:12]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[01:07:17]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[01:07:18]  Trust me, babe.
[01:07:19]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:07:29]  Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
[01:07:35]  I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
[01:07:39]  Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
[01:07:45]  Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy.

=== Birth of Organized Political Right (16:34) ===

[01:07:53]  Really too many to name.
[01:07:54]  And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
[01:08:00]  Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
[01:08:03]  He related to the Phantom at that point.
[01:08:06]  Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
[01:08:08]  That's so funny.
[01:08:09]  Shari, stay with me each night, each morning.
[01:08:18]  Say you love me.
[01:08:20]  You know I.
[01:08:22]  So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:08:32]  All right.
[01:08:32]  All right.
[01:08:33]  We're back and we are no longer talking about hot guys.
[01:08:37]  We're talking about the genocide those hot guys helped commit.
[01:08:40]  Well, kind of.
[01:08:42]  You brought it up like that.
[01:08:43]  You know what you're doing, bro.
[01:08:45]  I don't.
[01:08:46]  I'm trying to emphasize that sometimes things that look nice are also fashy as hell.
[01:08:51]  And it might be on guard.
[01:08:54]  Sometimes the good looks will stick it to you.
[01:08:56]  So the overwhelming force.
[01:08:57]  That's what you just did there, too.
[01:09:00]  Overwhelming force?
[01:09:01]  No.
[01:09:01]  That's anyway.
[01:09:03]  Yeah, they just thrust their pen.
[01:09:05]  Okay, goddamn it.
[01:09:06]  Damn it.
[01:09:06]  Okay.
[01:09:07]  You know what you're doing.
[01:09:08]  Okay.
[01:09:08]  I know I'm trying to talk about the use of chemical war weapons upon civilians.
[01:09:13]  All I'm saying is I've never wished Jamie Loftus was here more right now.
[01:09:17]  I am very glad.
[01:09:18]  Dog, she would murder us in the double entendres.
[01:09:22]  She's a professional at this.
[01:09:24]  Jesus Christ.
[01:09:25]  I love you, TV.
[01:09:28]  The French and the Spanish have so many soldiers and so much high-grade military hardware that there is no chance the Riff are going to actually win.
[01:09:37]  Victory was only a matter of time.
[01:09:39]  But Di Rivera and Marshal Patain were not willing to wait.
[01:09:42]  And so they started using chemical weapons to slaughter tribespeople en masse.
[01:09:46]  And they're not using them on military forces.
[01:09:48]  They first start bombarding the city of Tangier with phosgene gas, which is a deadly chemical weapon.
[01:09:55]  It's what they used in the trenches.
[01:09:56]  It chokes people to death on their own rotting lungs.
[01:09:59]  It's horrific stuff.
[01:10:01]  The Spanish army began pounding the outskirts of the town.
[01:10:04]  And as soon as Spanish forces started gassing tribespeople, other commanders in the country begged to be able to do the same.
[01:10:10]  One Spanish general wrote of his desire to use them, them being chemical weapons, with delight.
[01:10:15]  This was all very good for France, who profited not just from stability in northern Africa, but because they were selling Spain the gas, they also profited financially.
[01:10:24]  I'm going to quote from an article on the website RS21 here.
[01:10:28]  It was in fact a French business, Schneider, which in 1922 helped to open a plant for the production of toxic shells in Melila.
[01:10:34]  And indeed, the French made an official request, one French general, Liotli, made an official request to his supervisors for provisions of chemical weapons in June 1925, justifying that the use of these munitions with their toxic power allows us to spare human lives during our attacks.
[01:10:51]  In face of these bombs dropped in the most populated regions of the territories controlled by Abdel Kreem, the Riffians tried to fight back with non-explosive projectiles, as well as making shells charged with pepper power, with little success.
[01:11:03]  Right up to the end of the Rift War, the Spanish army would continue to use these lethal gases with the support of the French forces, with Marshal Pétain at their head in Morocco.
[01:11:12]  So to spare human life, they attacked civilian targets with chemical weapons.
[01:11:17]  They're like, so look, hear me out.
[01:11:19]  I didn't shoot him.
[01:11:21]  I gassed him and his family.
[01:11:23]  He just, he died from the air.
[01:11:25]  Yeah, it's some real we had to destroy the village to save it vibes.
[01:11:29]  Yeah.
[01:11:29]  Yeah.
[01:11:30]  So victory in Morocco started the dictator's time and power off, we're talking about Di Rivera here, with widespread popular support.
[01:11:37]  He created a political party, the UP, the Patriotic Union, whose motto was monarchy, fatherland, and religion.
[01:11:43]  His mouthpieces at the UP declared that the Di Rivera dictatorship was only a transitional thing and that the military dictatorship would eventually be replaced with a civil dictatorship.
[01:11:52]  So this military dictatorship, just temporary.
[01:11:55]  We got a civil dictator.
[01:11:56]  It's going to be fine.
[01:11:57]  It's going to be a good, totally reasonable kind of dictatorship.
[01:12:00]  It's like a dictator without the guns.
[01:12:02]  Like, it's cool.
[01:12:03]  It's cool.
[01:12:03]  Yeah.
[01:12:04]  Yeah.
[01:12:05]  Now, this would be difficult.
[01:12:06]  Yeah.
[01:12:07]  So the Patriotic Union or the UP was mostly composed of middle-class conservative Catholic Spaniards.
[01:12:13]  And historian Stanley Payne notes that in some provinces, sectors of the old political elite did join and dominate, but the organization also incorporated ordinary middle-class people who had not previously been politically active.
[01:12:25]  So in spite of the fact that electoral politics didn't exist during Di Rivera's dictatorship, it served a purpose of rallying and in some ways activating the middle class as a political entity.
[01:12:35]  The UP's goal was to ensure some form of right-wing dictatorship remained, the permanent government of Spain.
[01:12:41]  And much of their support came from their victory in Morocco and their success in, for the first time, igniting widespread nationalism among the Spanish population.
[01:12:49]  The UP held the country's first mass rallies, and for a while, Di Rivera and his party were popular.
[01:12:55]  But by 1929, the worldwide economic crash had started to hit Spain as well.
[01:13:00]  The wealthy financiers who'd backed his regime started to sour on him and some of his interventionalist economic policies.
[01:13:06]  At the same time, Di Rivera faced growing resistance from students who were a political factor for the first time in Spain due to the fact that the dictatorship had reformed the education system.
[01:13:15]  In his last years in power, Rivera sought to stay dictator by taking a leaf from the book of a man he idolized, Benito Mussolini.
[01:13:22]  And this is the first time Di Rivera actually kind of goes fascist a little bit.
[01:13:26]  I'm going to quote from the history of Spanish fascism here.
[01:13:29]  Italian diplomatic correspondents from Madrid in the final days of 1929 reported that Primo Di Rivera was indicating that he would soon begin a fundamental reorganization of the UP along the lines of the fascist party.
[01:13:40]  This reorganization never got started.
[01:13:42]  As Javier Toussell and Ismail Osaz have written, what the Spanish dictator felt for Mussolini was considerably more than platonic admiration.
[01:13:49]  He was pathetically incapable of transferring Italian institutions to Spain and was often infantile in his effusive expressions to Mussolini.
[01:13:56]  So he wants to be a fascist by this point.
[01:13:59]  And he's like, he's kind of simping on Mussolini here.
[01:14:04]  Yeah, just like, you're so good.
[01:14:06]  I just want to do what you do.
[01:14:08]  Why can't I be as cool as you?
[01:14:10]  It's kind of sad.
[01:14:11]  My country would be.
[01:14:13]  He's an old man, too, at this point.
[01:14:14]  He's not doing great.
[01:14:16]  It is very weird.
[01:14:18]  He's a Mussolini stan hardcore, but he just doesn't have what it takes to be a fascist dictator.
[01:14:23]  He just, he's only a normal dictator, you know?
[01:14:25]  You hate to see it.
[01:14:27]  In January of 1930, this dictator was shit canned by his king, who followed him out the door about a year or so later because popular support for the monarchy collapsed as a result of the dictatorship.
[01:14:37]  For a brief, awkward period, Spain lacked any kind of legitimate government.
[01:14:41]  Its king and parliament were gone.
[01:14:43]  A short succession of strongmen held power as the national political elite struggled to cobble together some kind of functional government.
[01:14:49]  The whole experience further radicalized the middle class, this time activating large numbers of Spanish liberals, who advocated in the streets for a Republican government.
[01:14:58]  In 1931, the Spanish Republic was born.
[01:15:02]  Now, this did not thrill a lot of people.
[01:15:04]  Like, it thrilled people, a lot of people, but it also kind of pissed off a lot of people, particularly young military officers who'd supported the dictatorship.
[01:15:12]  Francisco Frayco was one of these frustrated men.
[01:15:15]  He'd been a close student of Primo Di Rivera and had liked his unofficial title of national boss, like Jefe Nacional or something like that.
[01:15:24]  Yeah, Jefe Nacional is kind of what they called him.
[01:15:27]  And he was like, I like that idea.
[01:15:28]  I like being everybody's boss.
[01:15:30]  Yeah, the years of dictatorship proved to Franco that a strong man could unify Spain, bring law and order, and military victory.
[01:15:39]  The only error that Di Rivera had made in Franco's mind was that he didn't have any kind of ideology.
[01:15:44]  Franco didn't really believe in anything other than like, I'm the guy who can fix Spain.
[01:15:48]  And when you don't have that concerted kind of ideology, you can't hold together a dictatorship very long unless you're willing to be brutal.
[01:15:56]  And Primo, you know, he was not a great guy, very brutal in Morocco, but was not willing to be brutal in Spain.
[01:16:02]  Not really.
[01:16:03]  Not compared to any other dictator.
[01:16:05]  And Franco, Franco was with him in Spain.
[01:16:08]  I mean, was with him in Morocco, right?
[01:16:09]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:16:10]  Franco was like, he was a colonel in Morocco.
[01:16:12]  Yeah, okay.
[01:16:14]  And so, and one of the like people will say that like Di Rivera was a bloodless dictator, which again, looking at what happened in Morocco, not true.
[01:16:22]  But if you're living in Spain, he's not mass executing people.
[01:16:25]  He's not even mass imprisoning people.
[01:16:27]  He's not hosting huge executions of his political enemies.
[01:16:31]  He's a pretty, if you're in Spain, a pretty mild dictator, about as mild as they get this century, you know, which is not to like whitewash him or anything.
[01:16:39]  It's just like part of why he doesn't stay in power long, you know?
[01:16:42]  You got to be more brutal than he is if you're going to hold power as a dictator.
[01:16:46]  Now, Primo Di Rivera's fall from power was also a lesson to Benito Mussolini.
[01:16:51]  It convinced him that his regime could not afford to compromise its power at all with an elected parliament.
[01:16:56]  This was, and Mussolini saw basically like, ah, the only option, I have to become so authoritarian that no one can push me out.
[01:17:02]  And as a result, Di Rivera's fall was a major, it pushes Mussolini to spring towards more radical authoritarian policy in 1932.
[01:17:11]  All of this stuff is interconnected, you know, just like everything, just like, just like the Syrian civil war is directly connected to why President Donald Trump became the president, you know?
[01:17:19]  Yeah.
[01:17:20]  Like it's all, everything always is connected.
[01:17:22]  That's the way the fucking world works.
[01:17:23]  The Spanish Republic would have just five years of pre-war existence.
[01:17:27]  For its first two years, the socialists dominated the government.
[01:17:31]  So not like hardcore communists, but definitely like left-wing.
[01:17:35]  First two years, the left is dominating the republic.
[01:17:38]  For the next two, a center-right counter-reformation pushes back against the gains of the left.
[01:17:43]  The tug of war was largely in politics between socialists, Republican centrists, and Catholic conservatives.
[01:17:49]  And the Catholic conservatives, starting in 1933, were represented by Spain's first mass Catholic political party and first really powerful right-wing political party, the CEDA.
[01:17:59]  And I'm even going to try to tell you what it stands for.
[01:18:01]  We'll call them CETA, you know?
[01:18:04]  That's the birth of like the organized political right in Spain in a way that actually is able to take some power.
[01:18:09]  The CETA was the primary home for the conservative middle class who'd been radicalized first by Primo Di Rivera's dictatorship and next by the early years of left-wing power in the Republic.
[01:18:20]  And they're being radicalized both by the fact that the socialists are in power and they're doing the things socialists do, which is in part to say the church is not going to have power.
[01:18:27]  Like we're not going to like let the Catholic Church run things, but also by the anarchists who are still fucking up churches and stuff in this period of time.
[01:18:35]  So it's the same it is here.
[01:18:36]  You've got kind of these more moderate people on the left, and then you've got people on the left in the streets doing things that scare these religious conservatives and make them decide like we have to take back our country.
[01:18:46]  That happens in Spain too.
[01:18:48]  It's a familiar story, again, to everyone listening.
[01:18:50]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:18:52]  Now, a number of socialist laws were passed that clamped down on the power and prestige of the church in this period.
[01:18:57]  And obviously, there were, again, widespread, like there were anarchists attacked 50 convents in Madrid in 1931.
[01:19:03]  And again, this helps energize the right.
[01:19:05]  It's also, if you're a Spanish anarchist who grew up living under a Catholic church that did all of the kind of fucked up shit we know the Catholic Church to do, nobody's, again, nobody's shedding a tear.
[01:19:16]  Nobody is a monster here.
[01:19:17]  Well, there are some monsters.
[01:19:18]  We're about to talk about them.
[01:19:20]  But yeah, this enraged fundamentalists and the CEDA, like, because of how angry they were at the left, the CETA is never a party that accepts the necessity of democracy, right?
[01:19:31]  They want to take power and institute a Catholic state.
[01:19:34]  They don't believe the republic that they're participating in is legitimate, which also sounds familiar to a republic.
[01:19:40]  The Dominions.
[01:19:41]  Yeah.
[01:19:42]  The Dominionists.
[01:19:42]  Okay.
[01:19:43]  Yeah.
[01:19:43]  Yeah.
[01:19:44]  Now, again, while this is all going on, the radical left in Spain tried several times to carry out insurrections against the Republic.
[01:19:50]  So the anarchists, because they're anarchists, do try to overthrow the Republic because they don't like the Republic either for different reasons than the CEDA.
[01:19:58]  In some cases, they even fought alongside communists.
[01:20:01]  Communists and anarchists are pretty good at working together in this period compared to how they'll be later.
[01:20:06]  They attack police stations.
[01:20:07]  And in 1934, they succeed in taking over large chunks of the state of Asturias.
[01:20:12]  This insurrection got far enough that the Republic called in their imperial shock troops, the Foreign Legion, who brutally suppressed their revolt by massacring basically everybody they could, just gunning people down in huge numbers.
[01:20:25]  The thing, the only thing that they do, you know?
[01:20:27]  That's why you have these guys to murder everybody.
[01:20:31]  To put everybody down.
[01:20:32]  Everybody shut up.
[01:20:33]  When I get there.
[01:20:33]  Yeah.
[01:20:34]  Everybody shut up.
[01:20:35]  Everybody's sitting down.
[01:20:36]  We do not have machine guns because we're good at being like at discriminating with our violence.
[01:20:42]  We have machine guns because it makes it faster.
[01:20:45]  Sounds like Aunt Stephanie.
[01:20:46]  She just come in and I'm not asking who did what or why this is broke.
[01:20:52]  Everybody sit down.
[01:20:53]  Yes.
[01:20:54]  It's your aunt who comes in with the fucking sandal and just starts.
[01:20:58]  You know what I'm saying?
[01:20:59]  Because we in Spain.
[01:21:00]  She come in with the champ.
[01:21:01]  She's just everybody getting it.
[01:21:03]  I don't got no, I don't want to hear nothing.
[01:21:05]  Everybody getting it.
[01:21:06]  You know what I'm saying?
[01:21:08]  That's my Stephanie.
[01:21:10]  What's up, Mon Stephanie?
[01:21:11]  The CNT, who's that anarcho-syndicalist party, launches constant strikes in this period, largely because they're angry that the Republic had failed to rest it.
[01:21:20]  So when the Republic comes to power, the far left is like, because the far left are anarchists and they're agricultural, right?
[01:21:26]  They're primarily in rural areas.
[01:21:27]  And most of Spain's agricultural land, like 70% or more, is owned by just like rich assholes who make the people who are actually farming it pay them unreasonable rent and it like keeps them impoverished.
[01:21:38]  And the radical left is like, we should, the land should belong to the people who farm it.
[01:21:42]  Yeah.
[01:21:43]  Maybe, why don't we do that?
[01:21:45]  I don't understand.
[01:21:46]  We got a lot of radical thoughts.
[01:21:47]  This don't feel radical, though.
[01:21:49]  Yeah, it doesn't.
[01:21:49]  It's not like it isn't the time.
[01:21:51]  It shouldn't be.
[01:21:52]  Yeah, this really shouldn't be a radical.
[01:21:54]  They want the land, so they should own it.
[01:21:58]  The Republic being a republic gave them some of what they want, but not much.
[01:22:02]  They redistribute about 10% of Spain's uncultivated land to the peasants.
[01:22:06]  And that really pisses off the anarchists.
[01:22:08]  So they launch a bunch of, in addition to these insurrections that other anarchists are doing, the CNT is doing like strikes and stuff in this period, as protests.
[01:22:16]  In 1933, a peasant protest was suppressed by Republican police who shot 19 of them dead.
[01:22:23]  So this government, which is broadly speaking, we'll call it a liberal government, is a government.
[01:22:27]  They still, you know, gun people down when you fuck up, right?
[01:22:30]  Like, yeah.
[01:22:31]  Now, the constant unrest damaged the left's middle class support, and the infighting between communists, anarchists, and Republicans hurt the broadly speaking liberal and left ability to keep control of the government from the right.
[01:22:43]  In 1934, the CEDA, led by Jose Marie Gil Robles, became the dominant power in government, or at least gained a lot of power in government.
[01:22:52]  This provoked outrage from the Spanish.
[01:22:54]  They weren't in control or anything, but they had power for the first time.
[01:22:57]  This really pissed off the Spanish left because in the rest of Europe, at the same time, Hitler has just consolidated all of his power and destroyed Weimar democracy.
[01:23:06]  Italy is completely fascist now.
[01:23:09]  And there's dictators all throughout Europe.
[01:23:10]  So the left sees the CEDA gain some power and they're like, This is the start of what we're seeing happen.
[01:23:16]  The fascists are going to take over.
[01:23:18]  They're not wrong to be terrified that way because that is what happens.
[01:23:22]  You know, like, yeah, I was like, it's happening.
[01:23:24]  That's because it's going to happen.
[01:23:25]  It's happening here, they say.
[01:23:27]  Yes.
[01:23:28]  And they're not wrong.
[01:23:29]  Yeah.
[01:23:30]  So again, the left in Spain, and when I say the left in this sense, I mean both like the liberals, the anarchists, the communists, the socialists, like all of them, start to get really panicked.
[01:23:40]  And this fear is reinforced by the fact that Gil Robles consistently gave speeches ranting against democracy and in favor of what he called a totalitarian concept of the state.
[01:23:51]  Stanley Payne writes, quote, it seems fairly clear that the CEDA's basic intentions were to win decisive political power through legal means, the exception being an ill-defined emergency situation, and then to enact fundamental revisions to the new Republican Constitution, which restricted Catholic rights, in order to protect religion and property and alter the basic political system.
[01:24:11]  So again, they're not out of line to be afraid of what is going to happen by the CEDA gaining power.
[01:24:17]  Left-wing fears that the CEDA would bring fascism to Spain were further stoked by the fact that CEDA magazines kept running huge, loving articles about how good fascism was.

=== Police Crackdown on Fascists (14:46) ===

[01:24:27]  They would have like these huge spreads about fascist Italy and what a perfect state it was.
[01:24:31]  There were articles about the Nazi regime in Germany.
[01:24:34]  Now, broadly speaking, the Spanish far right is more Italian fascist than German.
[01:24:38]  For one thing, they don't really get the anti-Semitism.
[01:24:41]  Like, like everyone in Europe, they're kind of anti-Semitic, but it's not an organizing principle for them.
[01:24:47]  And the Nazis, they see as like kind of weird, but like, still, you know, they're better than the left.
[01:24:53]  Yeah, it's like, I get what y'all are going for.
[01:24:56]  I really don't understand this part.
[01:24:57]  I don't need to meet you this, but yeah, I'm vibing with you.
[01:25:00]  We kicked out the Muslims.
[01:25:02]  I mean, I guess it's the same, but I don't know.
[01:25:04]  Anyway, you'll say right.
[01:25:06]  Yeah.
[01:25:06]  So Robles even visited, the guy in charge of the CEDA even visited Germany in 1933 to attend the annual Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg.
[01:25:14]  So again, the CEDA is not entirely a fascist party, but the left in Spain in this time calls them objectively fascist, and you can see why.
[01:25:25]  Now, for his part, Robles only really rejected fascism because he saw it as foreign.
[01:25:30]  During a speech in 1933, he said, We want a totalitarian patriot, but it is strange that we're invited to look for novelties abroad when we find a unitary and totalitarian policy in our own tradition.
[01:25:42]  So he's like, fascism, like, I like it, but it's foreign.
[01:25:45]  And we in Spain have our own totalitarian tradition that we should be embracing.
[01:25:49]  And when he said this, he was actually referencing Ferdinand and Isabella, the first Spanish monarchs, who were not totalitarian.
[01:25:56]  It wasn't, you couldn't be back then.
[01:25:58]  You just didn't exist.
[01:26:00]  But yeah, thank you.
[01:26:01]  Yeah, it's very silly and very ahistorical.
[01:26:03]  Yeah.
[01:26:04]  In the same speech, Robles continued, For us, power must be integral.
[01:26:08]  For the realization of our ideal, we shall not be held back by archaic forms.
[01:26:12]  When the time comes, parliament will either submit or disappear.
[01:26:16]  Democracy must be a means, not an end.
[01:26:18]  We are going to liquidate the revolution.
[01:26:21]  Liquidate.
[01:26:22]  Liquidate.
[01:26:23]  So yeah.
[01:26:25]  In addition to the CDEDA, who, if you don't want to call them fascists, they're at least pretty close.
[01:26:30]  Fascist, low-sodium fascists.
[01:26:32]  Yeah, low-sodium fascists.
[01:26:34]  They're like Diet Mountain Dew.
[01:26:36]  Gluten-free fascists.
[01:26:37]  Like, you don't want to go all the way, but you're on the spectrum.
[01:26:41]  Yeah.
[01:26:42]  Now, Spain also had its own explicitly fascist political parties.
[01:26:45]  And when I don't call the CEDA fascist, it's because I do want to differentiate between the people who are like, we're fascists.
[01:26:51]  You know, like it is important to do that.
[01:26:54]  That grew and evolved throughout the early 1930s.
[01:26:56]  Now, the founding father of Spanish fascism was a guy named Ramiro Ledesmo Ramos Ramos.
[01:27:02]  And like most fascist intellectuals, he wanted to be a novelist before he got into politics.
[01:27:07]  And he wrote a fake memoir of it.
[01:27:10]  It's very Ben Shapiro, okay?
[01:27:12]  Yes, yes, yes.
[01:27:13]  He wrote a fiction novel, which was a fake memoir about a depressed intellectual who commits suicide, which seems like it was very self-pitying.
[01:27:22]  And nobody is well.
[01:27:22]  He writes it when he's 18.
[01:27:24]  Nobody's willing to take it.
[01:27:24]  And his rich uncle pays to publish it, which tells you all you need to know about Ledesma, the fascist, the father of Spanish fascism.
[01:27:33]  So as a pseudo-intellectual, Ledesma's greatest concern was that Spanish culture had not given the world a truly dominant political ideology.
[01:27:41]  He complained, we are the only great people who have still not borne the philosophical scepter and who therefore have not projected an intellectual dictatorship over the world.
[01:27:51]  And so as a result of this, he decided to steal a political system from Italy and become a fascist.
[01:27:56]  He eventually formed the Juntas di Ofensiva Nacional Sindicalista, or Johns.
[01:28:03]  And his followers are called the Jonsistas, which is silly, but that's what they're called.
[01:28:08]  Yeah, Ledesma and his fellow Johnsistas refused to call themselves fascists, but they were.
[01:28:13]  They talked lovingly of Italian fascism and they wanted the same things.
[01:28:16]  One of Ledesma's first followers was the first Spanish translator for Hitler's Mein Kampf.
[01:28:21]  But to his credit, Ledesma did try to find ways to make Spanish fascism unique.
[01:28:25]  In part, he attempted to do this by marrying it to Spanish anarcho-syndicalism.
[01:28:30]  Ledesma adopted syndicalism, the idea of worker councils governing themselves and striking to make their demands met, or adopted aspects of that, and he kind of awkwardly welded it to Spanish revolutionary nationalism.
[01:28:40]  And one of the things that is odd that characterizes Spanish fascists in this period is they really reach out to the anarchists.
[01:28:47]  They're trying to convert anarchists.
[01:28:50]  In part because the anarchists are like the most vital anti-government movement in this period.
[01:28:54]  Yeah.
[01:28:55]  It is a weird, yeah.
[01:28:57]  Yeah, they were reading the tea leaves of being like, you know, I think you don't like the same shit we don't like.
[01:29:02]  Yeah.
[01:29:03]  Maybe I can't.
[01:29:05]  Yeah.
[01:29:05]  And it happens for some of them, right?
[01:29:07]  Like that is a story that's very uncomfortable about anarchist history is that during the period of time when fascism rises, a number of anarchists in different countries and an uncomfortable number of them decide, nah, you know what?
[01:29:19]  I'm a fascist, which is not great.
[01:29:21]  Yeah.
[01:29:22]  And it's important, you know, whatever you believe to be honest about its history, and that includes the ugly parts.
[01:29:29]  So Ledesma and his fellow Johnsistas refused to call.
[01:29:32]  And also, we're going to talk in part two about the fact that a fuckload of anarchists died fighting fascism in Spain and were a lot of the very first people who were willing to put their lives on the line to fight global fascism before the United States was willing to fight the Nazis.
[01:29:47]  A fuckload of anarchists died fighting fascism.
[01:29:50]  And I'm not trying to say that, and that's much more dominant a part of anarchist history than the ones who went fascist, but a number of them do go fascist.
[01:29:58]  And it's something the fascists directly try to encourage.
[01:30:01]  Yeah.
[01:30:02]  It's like the Black Trump.
[01:30:05]  Yeah.
[01:30:06]  Yeah, exactly.
[01:30:07]  Exactly.
[01:30:07]  Look, man, they're still us dog.
[01:30:09]  I can't lie.
[01:30:10]  That's still my uncle, man.
[01:30:12]  Yeah.
[01:30:12]  And it doesn't erase the fact that Biden only won the election because of a fuckload of organized black voters.
[01:30:20]  Yeah.
[01:30:20]  So like the left wing of the Nazi party had done, Ledesma sought to make fascism collectivist, stressing that the individual has died and that the collectivist state is all that matters.
[01:30:31]  This was not an initially successful line of propaganda.
[01:30:34]  And by the end of 1932, there were barely any Johnsistas.
[01:30:38]  Spanish fascism might not have taken off at all if it had not been for a fellow named Jose Antonio Di Rivera, the son of the now dead dictator.
[01:30:46]  So Di Rivera's kid becomes like really the first prominent Spanish fascist.
[01:30:52]  And one of the things, this guy is such a figure in Spanish history that he's one of the only people from this period of Spanish history who's known by his first names.
[01:31:00]  He's Jose Antonio.
[01:31:01]  They don't call, like they call his dad Di Rivera.
[01:31:03]  He's Jose Antonio, which is like kind of a mark of how significant this guy was.
[01:31:07]  Yeah.
[01:31:07]  Now, Jose was a weird fascist.
[01:31:09]  We'll talk more about him in part two.
[01:31:11]  He is not like other.
[01:31:12]  He's not nearly, for one thing, he doesn't.
[01:31:14]  really like violence in the same way that a lot of fascists do.
[01:31:17]  And he's like weirdly friendly with a lot of socialists like in government.
[01:31:21]  Like he's he's like, and not in a, I don't know.
[01:31:24]  He's a, he's a very weird fascist.
[01:31:26]  His background though makes complete sense.
[01:31:28]  He's the rich son of a military family whose father took almost absolute power in order to murder foreigners and steal their shit.
[01:31:34]  So it's not weird that he becomes a fascist.
[01:31:36]  Yeah.
[01:31:36]  He's like, yeah, you know, it's like representation matters.
[01:31:40]  Like you have to see something to believe that it's possible.
[01:31:43]  So he's like, my dad took over the country.
[01:31:45]  I mean, I bet I can too.
[01:31:46]  Yeah.
[01:31:46]  And you could see him as like kind of what I'm sure one of the Trump kids will try to do.
[01:31:50]  Although I would argue he's a better person than any of the Trump kids.
[01:31:53]  Wow.
[01:31:55]  Wow.
[01:31:55]  Not a high bar.
[01:31:57]  So he creates his own fascist party based on the idea of bringing in another dictator like his dad, but not sucking at it this time, right?
[01:32:04]  Like we need a dictator.
[01:32:05]  My dad had the right idea, but he didn't have an ideology.
[01:32:07]  I'm going to bring in an ideology.
[01:32:09]  And both Jose Antonio's party and the Joncistas receive a shot in the arm on January 30th, 1933, when Hitler takes power in Germany.
[01:32:17]  A magazine, El Fascio, which is a very subtle name.
[01:32:22]  I peeked.
[01:32:23]  My vocal peaked right there.
[01:32:24]  I was El Fascio Turner Red.
[01:32:27]  El Fascio.
[01:32:30]  God dog it.
[01:32:31]  So Hitler takes power in Germany and El Fascio gets launched in Spain and the government shuts that shit down right away and bans publication of future editions.
[01:32:40]  We're just like, when in doubt, look, you need your brand to be clear.
[01:32:44]  Yeah.
[01:32:44]  You need to be clear so that.
[01:32:47]  And we're talking a lot in the United States now about the value of deplatforming fascists, about the, and I'm an advocate for aspects of that, about the value of taking away these people's ability to reach a mass audience.
[01:32:58]  They do a harder, much harder core version of that in Spain.
[01:33:01]  You get in, one of the things that's unique about Spain is the police in this period crack down on the fascists more than they do on the left, which is weird.
[01:33:10]  It's unique historically.
[01:33:12]  Everywhere else, it is the opposite.
[01:33:15]  And part of why is because the Republic is very scared of these fascists for good reason.
[01:33:20]  And if we're looking at like the effectiveness of deplatforming, to what extent it works, Spain shows us that it doesn't necessarily stop them from gaining power because they deplatform the fascists.
[01:33:31]  They try hard to deplatform the fascists in the Spanish Republic.
[01:33:34]  It doesn't do the trick.
[01:33:36]  So again, useful historical context here, which is not to say there's no value in deplatforming, but we should be paying attention to what happened in Spain.
[01:33:44]  And the deplatforming in Spain is being done by the government, you know, by cops and shit.
[01:33:49]  Now, the law for the defense of the republic gave the Spanish Republic power to ban anything that threatened the Republic's existence.
[01:33:56]  Banning fascist propaganda, though, was not enough to stop the contagious excitement over fascism and the broader right-wing reaction against the recent victories of the left.
[01:34:04]  The Joncistas and Jose Antonio's movement grew.
[01:34:07]  Jose Antonio was noted as not being particularly charismatic, but he was good with words and he was a successful lawyer, so he had money.
[01:34:15]  He entered into frequent public debates with left-wing intellectuals where he would say stuff like this.
[01:34:19]  So again, he's a big, like kind of like Richard Spencer.
[01:34:22]  I will go down and sit down and talk with all of you.
[01:34:23]  I'll be very nice.
[01:34:24]  I'll be very polite and I'll talk about fascism in that way.
[01:34:27]  He's that kind of fascist.
[01:34:29]  Okay.
[01:34:30]  Quote, this is Jose Antonio from a debate he had with kind of a more liberal guy.
[01:34:36]  The liberal state believes in nothing, not even in itself.
[01:34:38]  It watches with folded arms as all sorts of experiments, even those aimed at the destruction of the state itself.
[01:34:44]  Fascism was born to light a faith.
[01:34:46]  Neither of the right, which at the bottom aspires to preserve everything, even the unjust, nor of the left, which at the bottom aspires to destroy everything, even the just, but a collective, integral, national faith.
[01:34:57]  And you can see why people would be appealed to us.
[01:35:00]  Four things like, we're not right-wing, we're not left-wing, they're both bad.
[01:35:02]  We're something different.
[01:35:04]  And he also, the thing that all fascists have to do in order to succeed is point out things that are true and problems with the system.
[01:35:12]  And he does.
[01:35:12]  The liberal state believes in nothing, not even in itself.
[01:35:16]  You know, that's a good, that's a true statement.
[01:35:18]  That's a good idea.
[01:35:19]  That's a good idea.
[01:35:19]  Yeah.
[01:35:22]  Yeah.
[01:35:22]  And that's part of why, again, that's part of why he does succeed in bringing in some people from the left to the fascists and converting people.
[01:35:28]  And at least in getting a lot of them to be like, well, he's not that.
[01:35:31]  He's not as bad as the state.
[01:35:32]  You know, a lot of people will say that.
[01:35:34]  In July of 19, and a lot of people don't, by the way, anarchists murder a, we'll talk about this in part two, murder a fuckload of fascists in this period.
[01:35:40]  So when I say a number of people on the left are like, well, he's not as bad as the state.
[01:35:43]  A lot of people on the left are like, no, they're bad.
[01:35:45]  And we have to start shooting them to death now.
[01:35:48]  So like, yeah, let's not, it's a lot, a lot's going on.
[01:35:52]  You said in the beginning, this is messy.
[01:35:54]  Yeah.
[01:35:54]  Surely.
[01:35:55]  Yeah.
[01:35:56]  In July of 1934, the Jon Sistas launched an attack on the Madrid offices of the friends of the USSR, damaging the offices and threatening people with pistols.
[01:36:05]  Okay.
[01:36:05]  This caused a government crackdown, both on the fascists and on the anarchists, arresting some 3,000 people nationwide.
[01:36:12]  Again, like we'll probably about to see.
[01:36:14]  This is what the government does.
[01:36:15]  Yeah.
[01:36:16]  I mean, in fairness, like right now, the anarchists are not doing much other than standing outside of buildings and breaking windows.
[01:36:23]  In this, they were gunning people down.
[01:36:25]  So it's different.
[01:36:28]  Yeah, I don't want to try to make the case that Spanish history is exactly, but like you, I think there are useful parallels.
[01:36:34]  So one of the things, again, Spanish police did arrest more fascists and more will were more willing to than other members of the left or the members of the left at this point.
[01:36:43]  And in fact, the first two years of Jose Antonio's movement, anarchists assassinated and gunned down and stabbed a fuckload of fascists in brawls and outside of speeches.
[01:36:52]  Now, Jose Antonio was fairly unique among fascists, both in that he had genuinely warm and respectful relationships with a lot of left-wing politicians and that he seemed to abhor violence.
[01:37:03]  This was a problem for his young party, and we'll talk about that more in part two.
[01:37:07]  Now, in October of 1934, Jose Antonio traveled to Spain for a brief meeting with Mussolini and to tour a fascist state.
[01:37:15]  He found it inspiring and he wrote, Fascism is not just an Italian movement.
[01:37:19]  It is a total, universal sense of life.
[01:37:21]  Italy was the first to apply it, but it is not the concept of the state as an instrument in the service of a permanent historical mission valid outside of Italy.
[01:37:29]  Who can say that such goals are only valuable for Italians?
[01:37:33]  He returned from Italy eager to make, and so again, the Joncistas, the other chunk of the fascist movement, are like, we don't want to do a fascism, Italian fascism, because we're Spanish.
[01:37:42]  We're Spain.
[01:37:43]  Yeah.
[01:37:43]  Jose Antonio is like, no, no, no, fascism is a global thing and it appeals to all of us.
[01:37:47]  And he returns from Spain eager to make a deal with the Jon Sistas in order to merge both movements.
[01:37:52]  He recognizes your propaganda is better.
[01:37:54]  I have more people.
[01:37:56]  I'm better at like organizing the street movement.
[01:37:58]  If we work together, we can bring fascism to Spain.
[01:38:01]  In early November, both groups of fascists came to an agreement.
[01:38:05]  They initially wanted to use the name Fascismo Español, but decided to change this to Falange Española, which means Spanish phalanx.
[01:38:14]  The phalanges would, in time, go on to earn a terrible and bloody reputation in Spanish history.
[01:38:19]  But that is going to be in part two.
[01:38:24]  A lot of history in this.
[01:38:25]  Oh, man, this is dope.
[01:38:29]  One, it's like for every, I love that, like, for every kid that, you know, either sat next to or was the little stoner kid that was like drawing the anarchist A on their folder in high school that was just like, no rules.
[01:38:44]  Like, no, it's a real thing.
[01:38:48]  It's an ideology.
[01:38:49]  It's not just you not getting suspended for, you know, slapping a kid.
[01:38:55]  It's a real thing.
[01:38:56]  It's a way to organize the world and society that a bunch of different ideas, right?
[01:39:02]  The anarcho-syndicalists have one.
[01:39:03]  There's a lot of different attitudes.
[01:39:05]  And there are also anarchists like anarcho-primitivists and stuff who don't want to or who like want to go back to a more like, there's a bunch of shit within anarchists.

=== Anarchist Trivia and Grenades (08:02) ===

[01:39:14]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:39:15]  But it's not you with your little, drawing your little A on your skateboard, you know, your little shit.
[01:39:20]  That's just how it starts.
[01:39:21]  And I will say, I've seen a lot of people in Portland do very interesting things with skateboards.
[01:39:26]  A lot of teenage anarchists this year.
[01:39:28]  That's how it starts for some people.
[01:39:30]  Okay, okay, okay.
[01:39:31]  If that's the entry level, I'll give you that.
[01:39:33]  It's deeper than that.
[01:39:34]  There's a lot going on.
[01:39:37]  I'm just like, hey, this doesn't mean that you never have to read again, Chad.
[01:39:40]  You have to read.
[01:39:41]  You have to read a lot.
[01:39:44]  There's a thought.
[01:39:46]  I don't know why I named him Chad.
[01:39:47]  I'm sorry.
[01:39:47]  Yeah.
[01:39:48]  Yeah.
[01:39:48]  That's, yeah.
[01:39:49]  Well, I think we could stand to convert more of the Chads.
[01:39:53]  Anyway, this has been part one, The Birth of Spanish Fascism.
[01:39:58]  In part two, we're going to talk about the Spanish Civil War, which is one of the most fascinating and important pieces of history that almost no one knows a goddamn thing about.
[01:40:06]  And it's frustrating.
[01:40:08]  It's very frustrating.
[01:40:09]  It's so frustrating people don't know about this.
[01:40:11]  No, so many few people know that.
[01:40:12]  Like the author of 1984, George Orwell, traveled to Spain on the premise that every single decent person should kill one fascist and then killed a bunch of fascists with grenades.
[01:40:24]  George Orwell was incredible with grenades.
[01:40:26]  He knew all the different kinds of grenades.
[01:40:28]  He killed a lot of people with grenades.
[01:40:31]  He got shot in the throat.
[01:40:33]  Oh my God.
[01:40:35]  Yeah.
[01:40:35]  And I'm going to give you this as another piece of trivia that has to do with another hip-hop trivia that you, this good Easter egg for your listener.
[01:40:44]  And then for you, just, I think you might find this interesting.
[01:40:47]  And pull this out one day when you're drinking with friends.
[01:40:51]  Iced tea.
[01:40:53]  The not the drink, but the rapper guy became the actor in Law and Order.
[01:40:58]  The guy that made an album called Cop Killer and became a cop on TV.
[01:41:02]  Yeah.
[01:41:03]  Greatest hustle ever.
[01:41:04]  Right.
[01:41:05]  Yeah.
[01:41:05]  Anyway, there's this story he tells that about when he was getting his record deal.
[01:41:14]  And he, the, the, as, as the legend goes, he never played one song for the people he that signed him for his first record deal.
[01:41:24]  Right.
[01:41:24]  And they were like, how are you going to do this?
[01:41:28]  How are we going to, why would you sign if we haven't heard any music?
[01:41:30]  He goes, hey, if you're selling a box of grenades, if I blow up a grenade, I need to blow up a grenade for you to see for you to know that they're good.
[01:41:38]  Like, I can't blow it up because then you won't buy them.
[01:41:41]  They already done.
[01:41:42]  And then the guy was like, man, that's the most iced tea thing I've ever heard.
[01:41:45]  Yeah, so I see.
[01:41:46]  And the guy was like, oh, it's actually a good point.
[01:41:49]  And then he goes, what made you think of that?
[01:41:52]  He goes, well, I used to sell grenades.
[01:41:59]  Iced T.
[01:42:00]  And I totally believe that.
[01:42:02]  He was running around South Central selling grenades.
[01:42:07]  I would never call Iced T a liar for saying that he sold grenades.
[01:42:10]  No, no, no.
[01:42:11]  Absolutely not.
[01:42:13]  He comes from a, you know, you've got your eras of gangster rap where they're just talking.
[01:42:17]  And then you've got your era of gangster rappers.
[01:42:19]  It's like, no, you did all of the things you're talking about.
[01:42:22]  This is why you're not in jail.
[01:42:24]  It's because you're raping.
[01:42:25]  There was a period of time for you where you were like, it was a good day because I didn't have to use my hand.
[01:42:33]  These are true stories, y'all.
[01:42:35]  Yeah.
[01:42:36]  That's why most of them didn't make it very long.
[01:42:39]  Yes.
[01:42:39]  Yes.
[01:42:43]  All right.
[01:42:43]  Well, in preparation for the Spanish Civil War, which is pretty gangster, listen to some old school iced tea, you know?
[01:42:52]  And then watch some Law and Order, you know?
[01:42:54]  Really embrace the hypocrisy that we all embody at some point today.
[01:42:58]  At some point.
[01:42:58]  You don't need to watch the iced tea and cocoa reality show, though.
[01:43:02]  I am not recommending that.
[01:43:03]  I don't know.
[01:43:04]  Please don't watch that.
[01:43:05]  No, but a little bit of Law and Order, you know, it's whatever.
[01:43:08]  It's on literally at all times.
[01:43:11]  Yeah, it's a lot like, it's a lot like heroin, you know?
[01:43:15]  It's probably not going to kill you, but it's bad for you.
[01:43:19]  I've seen every episode of Laundra to SVU.
[01:43:21]  I'm not ashamed at all.
[01:43:23]  Every episode.
[01:43:24]  I believe it.
[01:43:25]  Every episode.
[01:43:26]  Because it's on at any given time of the day.
[01:43:29]  Yeah.
[01:43:30]  Yeah.
[01:43:30]  Exactly.
[01:43:31]  When my mom was in gospel, we watched every episode because it was always on.
[01:43:36]  I've seen every episode.
[01:43:38]  There's a belief in some Aboriginal Australian cultures, and this is kind of where the, what is the long tube that they've been doing?
[01:43:45]  That's the proper thing that's ever happened.
[01:43:46]  No, no, no.
[01:43:49]  The didgerido.
[01:43:50]  The didgeridoo ties into this, that like you always have to be, someone always has to be playing music because you sing the world into being.
[01:43:57]  And if the music stops, the world ends.
[01:43:59]  And I have adopted as a religious belief that with Law and Order SVU.
[01:44:03]  As long as it's playing somewhere, the world can continue.
[01:44:06]  I think that's how we ended up with Trump.
[01:44:08]  Man, so everybody turned off their TV one day in Law and Order Stop playing one hour without Law and Order and everything which is what happened.
[01:44:21]  All right.
[01:44:21]  Well, this has been part one of our two-parter of Behind the Insurrections on the Spanish fascist Frankfurt Civil War.
[01:44:31]  We'll talk about Spanish Civil War in part two.
[01:44:34]  And then next week, we're going to talk about the fascists who failed.
[01:44:38]  And we're going to talk about, we're going to give a little overview of some anti-fascist history you might not know.
[01:44:42]  We're going to close out with Antifa and some fun stuff like the Idolvist Pirates, which were little kids who murdered Nazis.
[01:44:50]  It was great.
[01:44:51]  Fucking rad.
[01:44:52]  All right.
[01:44:53]  Here we go.
[01:44:54]  Listen to some iced tea.
[01:44:57]  That's the episode.
[01:45:01]  When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
[01:45:09]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[01:45:12]  He is not going to get away with this.
[01:45:14]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[01:45:16]  We always say, trust your girlfriends.
[01:45:20]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[01:45:22]  Trust me, babe.
[01:45:23]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:45:33]  I'm Laurie Siegel, and this is Mostly Human, a tech podcast through a human lens.
[01:45:37]  This week, an interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
[01:45:41]  I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to the products we put out in the world.
[01:45:48]  An in-depth conversation with the man who's shaping our future.
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[01:46:11]  You related to the Phantom at that point.
[01:46:14]  Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
[01:46:16]  That's so funny.
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[01:46:33]  What's up, everyone?
[01:46:34]  I'm Ego Mode.
[01:46:35]  My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
[01:46:40]  My dad gave me the best advice ever.
[01:46:43]  He goes, just give it a shot.
[01:46:44]  But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
[01:46:51]  If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration, it would not be on a calendar of you know the cat just hang in there.
[01:47:01]  Yeah, it would not be right, it wouldn't be that.
[01:47:04]  There's a lot of life.
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