Behind the Bastards - Behind the Insurrections - How Fascism Won The Spanish Civil War, Part 2
Aired: 2021-01-28
Duration: 01:57:28


=== Trust Your Girlfriends (02:18) ===

[00:00:00]  This is an iHeart podcast.
[00:00:02]  Guaranteed human.
[00:00:04]  When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
[00:00:13]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[00:00:15]  He is not going to get away with this.
[00:00:17]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[00:00:19]  We always say that.
[00:00:21]  Trust your girlfriends.
[00:00:24]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[00:00:25]  Trust me, babe.
[00:00:26]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:00:31]  I got you.
[00:00:32]  I got you.
[00:00:36]  I'm Laurie Siegel, and this is Mostly Human, a tech podcast through a human lens.
[00:00:41]  This week, an interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
[00:00:44]  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.
[00:00:51]  An in-depth conversation with a man who's shaping our future.
[00:00:55]  My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
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[00:01:07]  Hey, it's Nora Jones, and my podcast, Playing Along, is back with more of my favorite musicians.
[00:01:12]  Check out my newest episode with Josh Groban.
[00:01:15]  You related to the Phantom at that point.
[00:01:18]  Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
[00:01:20]  That's so funny.
[00:01:21]  Share stay with me each night, each morning.
[00:01:29]  Listen to Nora Jones is playing along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:01:37]  What's up, everyone?
[00:01:38]  I'm Ego Modem.
[00:01:39]  My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
[00:01:43]  My dad gave me the best advice ever.
[00:01:46]  He goes, just give it a shot.
[00:01:48]  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.
[00:01:55]  If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
[00:01:57]  It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
[00:02:04]  Yeah, it would not be.
[00:02:06]  Right, it wouldn't be that.
[00:02:07]  There's a lot of life.
[00:02:09]  Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

=== Violence as a Way of Life (10:22) ===

[00:02:18]  Spain!
[00:02:20]  I'm Robert Evans.
[00:02:21]  This is Behind the Bastards.
[00:02:23]  I like that.
[00:02:24]  It's yeah, Spain.
[00:02:25]  That's what I got.
[00:02:27]  This is Behind the Bastards.
[00:02:28]  It's actually Behind the Insurrections, a special Behind the Bastards miniseries talking about the history of fascist attempts to seize power from democracies.
[00:02:36]  Yes.
[00:02:38]  We started our first opening of this episode with me shouting, What's Bombing Mike Wernicas?
[00:02:44]  But then we decided that would get me canceled and was a bad idea.
[00:02:48]  Yeah.
[00:02:49]  So we won't be able to do that.
[00:02:50]  We will be talking about Guernix.
[00:02:51]  I would have just gone.
[00:02:52]  Yeah, I just shouted the name Spain.
[00:02:54]  Alternate alternative.
[00:02:56]  Prop, alternate pitch.
[00:02:58]  What about Gasol?
[00:03:01]  Yeah, there we go.
[00:03:01]  There we go.
[00:03:02]  That's a better.
[00:03:03]  There we go.
[00:03:03]  Paul.
[00:03:05]  Unfortunately, my knowledge of Spanish is mostly limited to buying drugs.
[00:03:09]  That's an NBA player from that.
[00:03:11]  That was a really great Laker, but you know.
[00:03:13]  Has really good seafood.
[00:03:14]  You can say that about Spain.
[00:03:16]  I can, yeah, oh my God.
[00:03:18]  Yes.
[00:03:18]  I have had some amazing paella.
[00:03:21]  One of the paellas I had was partly responsible for me vomiting on the limousine of the King of Spain, but that's amazing.
[00:03:28]  That's a story for another day.
[00:03:31]  So, best friend, my best friend died in Spain.
[00:03:34]  I don't know.
[00:03:34]  No, no, that's a great thing to say.
[00:03:36]  That's hard.
[00:03:36]  A few years ago, my old DJ flew to Spain.
[00:03:39]  He was actually doing a, he was doing a master chef class with this paeus.
[00:03:42]  He's a Filipino dude.
[00:03:43]  He was going to do this like paella adobo.
[00:03:46]  It was this crazy Filipino Spanish feature.
[00:03:49]  He sounds amazing, yeah.
[00:03:50]  Yeah.
[00:03:50]  And he had like, and he just, his blood pressure dropped to zero.
[00:03:54]  Oh, shit.
[00:03:55]  Died in his Airbnb.
[00:03:56]  Fuck.
[00:03:57]  That's horrible.
[00:03:58]  That's horrible.
[00:03:59]  Anyway, I'm just kidding.
[00:04:01]  We are going to talk about a lot of people dying in Spain today.
[00:04:04]  So it's the peace DJ effect though.
[00:04:07]  Love you, dog.
[00:04:09]  This is actually going to be a very sad episode in a lot of ways.
[00:04:12]  So that's an appropriate emotional tone to start it off with.
[00:04:15]  Yeah.
[00:04:15]  So at the end of the day, fuck Spain.
[00:04:18]  Sorry, Spain.
[00:04:19]  Throws down his current Spain is not your fault.
[00:04:25]  So we're going to be talking about the Spanish Civil War today.
[00:04:28]  And we left off last time with the establishment of an actual like real organized fascist party in Spain, the Phalangists.
[00:04:36]  They weren't the first, but they were the first to kind of like, I don't know, get it right is a weird phrase to apply to fascism, but they were the Spanish fascists who would become kind of the watchword for Spanish fascism.
[00:04:48]  When people talk about the fascists in Spain, they're talking about the phalangists, you know?
[00:04:52]  The phalangists.
[00:04:54]  Yeah, the phalangists.
[00:04:56]  Phalanxes, which kind of also is, I think, I think phalanges comes from phalanx because it's that word for that Greek military unit where you have a shitload of dudes standing in like a series of lines all supporting each other in kind of like a hand.
[00:05:09]  I don't know.
[00:05:10]  That'd be my guess.
[00:05:11]  I'm not a worder.
[00:05:13]  So the oddest thing about the phalangists is that alone among fascists of pretty much any period I'm aware of, they well, except for maybe the modern period, they were giant wusses to start out with.
[00:05:25]  And this may be due to the fact we've talked a lot about how like World War I is why the Italian and German fascists were terrifying people because they, you know, were very comfortable killing people.
[00:05:37]  Spain stayed out of World War I. Most of the early fascists were like more on the like fascist intellectuals than street fighters.
[00:05:45]  And they weren't initially very willing to use force.
[00:05:48]  Now, they talked about violence a lot.
[00:05:50]  And Jose Antonio, their leader, was definitely a fascist, but he was very uncomfortable with physical violence.
[00:05:56]  Even when it was directed at him, and it was repeatedly, he was loath to actually organize retaliatory violence.
[00:06:03]  During a speech he gave after his party's unification with the Jansistas, a leftist gunman opened fire, intending to kill Jose Antonio, and instead killing a spectator and wounding four other people.
[00:06:13]  The fascists launched no reprisals against the left in response, which is like you look at Germany or Italy's is very strange.
[00:06:21]  Yeah, very different than it was elsewhere.
[00:06:23]  And the kind of unwillingness in this period of the fascists to use violence led one columnist for a right-wing newspaper to note sarcastically, so that everything will be incongruous.
[00:06:35]  Here it is that the fascists who were made to swallow castor oil, which is referring to the fact that in Italy, the fascists would force castor oil down the throats of their enemies to make them shit themselves, sometimes to death.
[00:06:46]  Like it was a horrible torture.
[00:06:48]  Like they thought it was funny, but it killed people.
[00:06:50]  And this guy's being like, in Italy, the fascists make their enemies drink castor oil.
[00:06:55]  Here, we have to drink the castor oil, right?
[00:06:57]  Because we're not willing to use violence.
[00:06:59]  That's weird.
[00:07:00]  Yeah, it is very odd.
[00:07:01]  It does not last, but this is a period of time early in the fascist.
[00:07:06]  Also, every black person's grandma made them drink castor oil at some point.
[00:07:11]  Which sucks.
[00:07:13]  One of those.
[00:07:15]  You know that image macro from the movie Predator where those two guys are shaking hands and meeting in the middle.
[00:07:23]  Yeah.
[00:07:24]  Italian fascists and black grandma.
[00:07:28]  Feeding people castor oil.
[00:07:30]  Yes.
[00:07:32]  God dang it, grandma.
[00:07:34]  My stomach was fine.
[00:07:35]  That's fine.
[00:07:36]  Look, it'd have been fine.
[00:07:37]  Just let me drink some water.
[00:07:38]  Gotta drink this castor oil.
[00:07:40]  Can't tell her no either.
[00:07:42]  Tell a black woman no, I dare you.
[00:07:44]  And they were, you know, the Italians were giving people much larger, like it killed people sometimes.
[00:07:49]  Yeah.
[00:07:50]  Other phalangist leaders were happier to endorse physical violence than Jose Antonio was.
[00:07:54]  But for a little while, initially, a number of them kind of felt like it was good to have some of their members gunned down by the left.
[00:08:01]  When one phalangist was killed in the movement's first street fight, it was thought that the brawl had been a successful baptism of fire.
[00:08:07]  Basically, we're trying to ramp these people up to violence, so it's good that we're like, it's positive for us that we're being tested with like deadly force.
[00:08:16]  This was some people's attitude initially, but the deaths kept coming, and for a while, they were entirely caused by leftists.
[00:08:23]  Most of this violence occurred between 1934 and 1936, during a period of escalating political violence that historians call the militarization of politics during the Second Republic.
[00:08:34]  And when you're talking about at least the violence that was between fascists and the left, it was pretty one-sided for a while.
[00:08:39]  While fascists, being fascists, always talked about violence, Jose Antonio particularly resisted putting the party on a militant footing.
[00:08:47]  Now, this was unpopular within the movement.
[00:08:50]  In one internal meeting, Jose Antonio expressed his desire to engage the left in the dialectic of fists and pistols.
[00:08:57]  But he was kind of being more metaphorical than anything, right?
[00:09:00]  Like, we're going to have like the verbal equivalent of war.
[00:09:02]  And he was kind of hemming and hawing around it because he wasn't really willing to commit fully at this point.
[00:09:08]  Meanwhile, one of his colleagues in the same meeting expressed a desire to treat leftists as enemies in a state of war.
[00:09:14]  Now, there were discussions within the party of overthrowing Jose Antonio and replacing him with a more violent fascist because he just wasn't willing to kill fast enough.
[00:09:23]  And these suggestions were shot down because they couldn't really exist without him at this point.
[00:09:28]  The police kept shutting down their party offices, so the only place they could gather was Jose Antonio's law offices.
[00:09:34]  He was also like the one who had money.
[00:09:36]  And so like they couldn't, a lot of people were angry at him, but they couldn't really exist without him.
[00:09:41]  Onesimo Redondo, who was another Falangist leader and probably the one who urged violence most openly, around the same time was very willing to kind of go against Jose Antonio and say, people, like we should be, we should be ready to kill people in the streets.
[00:09:56]  In December of 1933, he promised his followers a situation of absolute violence is approaching.
[00:10:02]  And I'm going to quote now from a speech he gave to Falangist youth.
[00:10:05]  Young workers, young Spaniards, prepare your weapons, get used to the crack of the pistol, caress your dagger, be inseparable from your vindictive club.
[00:10:13]  Young people must be trained in physical combat, must love violence as a system, must arm themselves with whatever they can, and must be prepared to finish off by whatever means a few dozen Marxist impostors.
[00:10:26]  There's a lot in there.
[00:10:27]  Yeah.
[00:10:27]  I'm really, and when he's saying there, especially when he says they must love violence as a system, he's kind of Spanishifying the concept the Italians had and that the Germans developed of like the cult of action for action's sake, this almost worship of violence as an end in and of itself.
[00:10:46]  You're seeing that start to percolate into Spanish fascist culture in this period.
[00:10:52]  Now, more than a dozen phalangists and other fascists were killed by anarchists and communists before the fascist right properly organized itself for violence, but organized themselves for violence they did.
[00:11:02]  And I'm going to quote now from the book Fascism in Spain.
[00:11:06]  The point of inflection in the political violence took place on Sunday, June 10th.
[00:11:10]  The Chibiris of the young socialists had been prohibited by authorities from marching in the streets of Madrid, but during the warm weather organized regular weekend outings to the Casa de Campo recreation area on the west side of Madrid.
[00:11:22]  On the 10th, a group of phalangists intercepted them, and the usual fight took place.
[00:11:26]  An 18-year-old phalangist, Juan Cueller, son of a police inspector, was killed, and his corpse was subsequently mutilated, his head apparently crushed with rocks.
[00:11:35]  One of Ansaldo's squads was quick to respond, allegedly without obtaining approval from the triumvirs who directed the party, the fascist party.
[00:11:42]  Later that evening, as a bus transporting the young socialist excursionists unloaded some of them in Madrid, a car full of phalangist pistoliros, personally led by Ansaldo, who's a fascist militant, was waiting.
[00:11:52]  It slowly passed the young couple on the sidewalk, spraying them with bullets.
[00:11:56]  A 20-year-old shop clerk, Juanita Rico, was killed.
[00:11:59]  The phalangist claimed she had been involved in desecrating the corpse.
[00:12:02]  Her 21-year-old brother was left permanently disabled, and several others were wounded.
[00:12:06]  Four days earlier, a phalangist smallholder in Torre Perogil, Jane province, had been killed during a farm worker's strike.
[00:12:13]  So that Queller was the 15th or 16th Jon Sista or Falangist killed since a John Sista teenager had been slain by assault guards, which are like socialist militants, in May of 1932.
[00:12:24]  All the others had been killed by the left.
[00:12:26]  Though numerous leftists had been injured by phalangists and street affrays and university assaults, Rico was the first leftist fatality at their hands.
[00:12:34]  For years, she would be commemorated as the first victim of fascism in Spain.
[00:12:38]  So that's really the start of.

=== Militarization of Politics (06:55) ===

[00:12:41]  Yeah.
[00:12:42]  Yeah, there's so much there, man.
[00:12:44]  Like, first of all, I'm still dangling at the phrase dialectic of fists and pencils.
[00:12:49]  I'm like, that's a wrap-up.
[00:12:52]  That's fists and pistols.
[00:12:53]  Yeah.
[00:12:53]  Oh, I thought it was fist and pencils.
[00:12:54]  No, no, no, fists, dialectic of fists, like a conversation that involves fists and pistols.
[00:12:59]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:13:00]  No, I actually, yeah, yours is better.
[00:13:02]  He tried to get a lot of people.
[00:13:02]  Yeah, I was like, yeah, I was like, yo, those are bars, man.
[00:13:08]  Okay.
[00:13:09]  And then also, you know, there's there's a part of like, you know, and it's a strange like survival tactic or just just a byproduct of like just being around like inner city or just kind of like gang violence that like you the desensitization of it,
[00:13:37]  like where you're just like, you know, people die daily.
[00:13:39]  You know, I'm saying like you, just kind of like get used to and used to such a bad word to explain what I'm trying to say.
[00:13:46]  But no no no you, but you get it.
[00:13:48]  It's like violence is just a part of life.
[00:13:50]  Yeah, you know absolutely, and um and it, but it's still like, even knowing that.
[00:13:56]  You know I'm an adult, you know I done moved out.
[00:13:58]  We didn't, you know, done so many different things now and it's not like I still don't live in an active community, but like, at the same time though, like you, like I, it was crazy like okay, so that shooting the the the, the shooting at that Walmart in Texas yeah no, Paso.
[00:14:16]  Yeah yeah, the eight channel shooting.
[00:14:18]  Yeah yeah, the eight channel shooting.
[00:14:20]  Yeah like, I watched a video of like, a cell phone video of like, you know, like a hood dude that was at the Walmart that when the shooting started he was just like dang, that's crazy fool shooting.
[00:14:32]  We probably better slide out.
[00:14:33]  How calm he was is because of how we grew up.
[00:14:38]  You know I'm saying so you're just like somebody got a tech.
[00:14:40]  Oh, they should, that's a tech.
[00:14:41]  I know what that is.
[00:14:42]  You know I'm saying and it's like it's so weird because it's just a weird thing.
[00:14:48]  So so when I hear this, when I hear y'all talk, when you know we talk about this like moment of this, like political upheaval I, there's still part of me that goes I, but I still don't understand why you're killing each other.
[00:15:03]  You know I'm saying And then, and then the idea of how I gave that whole preference to say it's still jolting to hear the type of like mutilation.
[00:15:18]  Now you hear somebody with a rock and then like, God dog, like you know how like crazy you got to be to blunt force trauma kill a person.
[00:15:28]  Like that's.
[00:15:29]  It's just, I don't know.
[00:15:32]  Anyway, it's just still jolting to me.
[00:15:35]  Going on here.
[00:15:35]  I think it's very important to point out the desensitization that occurs during this.
[00:15:40]  That's why the phrase is used that like the militarization of politics.
[00:15:47]  It's a process that starts in 31 and doesn't really reach its hypothesis until 1936 when the Civil War starts.
[00:15:54]  But it's a process of getting people ready to that, of escalating street violence.
[00:15:58]  And you see that just within the fascist party, where initially the fascists are willing to fight.
[00:16:03]  There's brawls in the street from day one, right?
[00:16:05]  As soon as there's fascists before the John Zistas merge with Jose Antonio's group, there's street fighting and stuff.
[00:16:13]  But when the killing starts, a lot of these fascists, because these are not, and again, when we get to the civil war, a significant chunk of the fascist military are combat veterans and able, and these are the guys who come up from Africa.
[00:16:25]  But these dudes who are actually in Iberia, they don't have experience killing people, not by and large.
[00:16:31]  And it takes, number one, it takes time of them being killed before they really start responding with deadly violence as a matter of course.
[00:16:40]  And once you have that on both sides, once you have anarchists and communists and other kinds of like left socialists killing fascists in the streets and fascists committing murder right back and vice versa, then you have this, it starts to ramp up the whole kind of level of comfort with deadly violence in society up to a level that you can have the kind of war that we're about to talk about.
[00:17:02]  But you're right, it is a process.
[00:17:04]  And I think in terms of like how people would justify like bashing a kid's head in with a rock and desecrating his corpse, it's less about that guy.
[00:17:12]  It's not that individual dude they were probably angry with.
[00:17:15]  They're looking at what's happening in Spain and in Germany and what fashion, the concentration camps that have already been set up, the mass executions of leftists in Italy and in Germany, the thousands who are already dead.
[00:17:26]  And they're going, the only way to stop that here is to kill as many.
[00:17:29]  And you can argue that was that was the wrong tactic.
[00:17:33]  You could argue that.
[00:17:34]  You could argue that it actually raised the level of violence to a point where you were able to have this open conflict that the left doesn't win.
[00:17:41]  But at the time, all they know is they see what's happening in Germany and in Italy and they think, I don't know what else to do but be violent.
[00:17:51]  Yeah, it's fucked.
[00:17:52]  Like the whole situation fucked.
[00:17:54]  Yeah, it's like, yeah, that's the thing where you're like, okay, they, you know, the street shit that's like, you know, they take one, we take four.
[00:18:01]  You know what I'm saying?
[00:18:02]  Exactly.
[00:18:02]  One of ours, we kill four of yours.
[00:18:05]  And it's supposed to be a deterrent.
[00:18:08]  And that means like, okay, so I'm saying this to say don't kill ours.
[00:18:12]  You know what I'm saying?
[00:18:12]  Yeah.
[00:18:13]  And you call it, I mean, it is street shit, but it's also like U.S. military policy, massive retaliation, right?
[00:18:19]  And this is what politics.
[00:18:22]  And speaking of like U.S. history, recent history and the history of like terrorism on the right, Tim McVeigh, when he blew up the Mura building, was very consciously being like, this is the kind of reaction.
[00:18:34]  This is like, I am attacking the government because they killed all these people in Waco.
[00:18:38]  And I learned that this is an acceptable, his argument was, I learned this was an acceptable way to respond to violence because that's how the military trained me, right?
[00:18:46]  You can quibble with how honest McVay was being there, but like, hard not to see some through lines.
[00:18:51]  You know, you look at the first Iraq war or the more recent, like, right, it is, it's the way everything works, right?
[00:18:57]  Yeah, how, how the idea of, how the idea of Pearl Harbor is equivalent to Hiroshima.
[00:19:03]  And then we then bomb Hiroshi and Nagasaki, right?
[00:19:05]  Yeah.
[00:19:06]  You take out a base, we take out an island.
[00:19:08]  Yeah.
[00:19:09]  It's like, damn, cuz, yeah, yeah, and collective punishment.
[00:19:13]  There's a lot to say about all of that.
[00:19:14]  Yeah, we need to move on to the rest of the story.
[00:19:16]  Yeah, this is because I'm pretty sure you wrote 72,000 pages for this.
[00:19:19]  Yeah, more or less.
[00:19:20]  Now, while all of this was happening, while the phalangists were starting to commit murder and stuff, and the street fighting between left and right is escalating in Spain, while all this is happening on the ground, the political situation and like the actual elected politics and stuff is continuing to unravel.

=== Rich People Join the Revolution (14:22) ===

[00:19:37]  And this is due in large part to the fact that the Afrikanistas, who are again the members of the Spanish military who had fought in Morocco, were increasingly frustrated with the Republic.
[00:19:46]  In 1932, so just like a year after the Republic starts, one general, a guy named Sanjuro, launches a coup that fails.
[00:19:53]  But rather than wonder if the Afrikanistas weren't a problem and a threat to democracy, the government brought in Franco and his Foreign Legion to massacre anarchists and communists during their 1934 uprising, where the Foreign Legion executes more than a thousand people.
[00:20:08]  So the Republic knows that the military, these African veterans are a problem and also uses them to crush the left when the left rises up because, you know, government's generally not smart.
[00:20:20]  So a gap begins to form during the Republican period between the juntas, officers in the peninsula who supported the Republic, and the Afrikanistas, who the Juntas called stormtroopers.
[00:20:33]  Now, by 1936, the political situation, which had simmered for years, broke out into an open boil.
[00:20:40]  The explanation as to why starts with the popular front.
[00:20:43]  In 1934, the USSR announced that, given the worldwide advance of fascism, it was now acceptable for good communists to make political alliances with other left-wing groups.
[00:20:53]  This included both moderate liberals and people like anarchists, and even in some cases, like Trotskyists, which communists, I mean, Trotskyists are communists too.
[00:21:00]  They don't like each other, right?
[00:21:02]  And this is a real big change.
[00:21:04]  Now, we talk about in our non-Nazi bastards who made Hitler, one of the reasons why the left failed to stop the Nazis is that the Communist Party in Germany, which was generally under orders from Moscow, called the Social Democrats social fascists.
[00:21:22]  And I'll admit right now, we weren't entirely fair to the communists in that episode.
[00:21:26]  The Social Democrats did some really fucked up stuff to the communists that we will talk about later in this very series.
[00:21:31]  They had good reasons to distrust the Social Democrats.
[00:21:34]  That said, the failure to work with them to stop Hitler was very clearly a mistake by 1934.
[00:21:40]  And the USSR admits that it's like, you know what?
[00:21:43]  Maybe it's necessary in countries facing fascism for there to be for us to allow communists, our kind of communists at least, to have a broad popular front with other people in the left.
[00:21:54]  And this is a very successful idea politically.
[00:21:56]  And in fact, there was also a popular front in France that succeeded in pushing some major reforms.
[00:22:01]  And we will talk about that later too.
[00:22:03]  The tactic worked very well politically, electorally in Spain.
[00:22:07]  The Popular Front swept the 1936 elections.
[00:22:11]  But in a way that will be familiar to everyone listening, they did so in a way that enraged the right wing.
[00:22:17]  And it's not hard to see why the right felt like they'd been cheated.
[00:22:21]  Right-wing parties polled 4,505,524 votes and gained 124 seats in the 1936 election.
[00:22:29]  Now, the Popular Front only got about 160,000 more votes, but they gained 278 seats.
[00:22:36]  So they get 160,000 more votes in an election with like 9 or 10 million votes and twice as many seats.
[00:22:42]  You can see why people on the right would be like kind of pissed about this, right?
[00:22:44]  Yeah.
[00:22:45]  And there may have been cheating.
[00:22:47]  I don't really know.
[00:22:47]  Like, it's, I'm not going to get into whether or not there was cheating.
[00:22:50]  What's important is that the right felt that they had been cheated, right?
[00:22:53]  That's what actually matters, as opposed to whether or not there was any kind of electoral malfeasance.
[00:22:59]  And of course, the CEDA, that Catholic kind of right-wing party that's the dominant right-wing party, and the Falangists, the fascists, absolutely would have cheated themselves in this election.
[00:23:09]  And they actually, they probably did.
[00:23:11]  And as a matter of fact, when Robles, the head of the CEDA, realized that he wasn't going to be appointed prime minister after the 1936 election, he started negotiating with Africanista generals to try to convince them to do a coup to force it, like to put him into power as a dictator, basically.
[00:23:27]  And he failed, but there was a lot of sympathy for the idea.
[00:23:31]  While the left looked at the Falanges and the CEDA and saw Hitler and Mussolini, the right looked at the Popular Front and saw it as the inevitable prelude to Soviet-style state communism.
[00:23:41]  And I'm going to quote from a write-up in Lumen.uk right now.
[00:23:46]  When this coalition came to power, popular unrest in the countryside exploded into land seizures, encouraged by radical anarchists.
[00:23:52]  So as soon as the Popular Front wins the election, the anarchists are like, We're going to do our thing now.
[00:23:57]  Like it's time to take power for the people.
[00:24:00]  There was little attempt by the anarchists to moderate their behavior and no demands to allow the Popular Front to reassure moderate elements in Spain.
[00:24:07]  A CNT, which is an anarchist party conference held in May 1936, was full of revolutionary language.
[00:24:13]  It seemed that the new republic had not been able to control the major revolutionary group.
[00:24:17]  The murder of a former finance minister, Jose Calvo Sotelo, on 13th July 1936, was the trigger for the war in much the same way as the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand had sparked the First World War.
[00:24:29]  Sotelo had been in exile from 1931 to 34, but had returned to become a leading right-wing figure associated with the Spanish fascists and a deputy for the Spanish revival group.
[00:24:39]  He clashed with the socialists in the assembly and was murdered by left-wing members of the civil guard.
[00:24:44]  So you have a couple of things happen.
[00:24:46]  The popular front wins election.
[00:24:47]  The anarchists just start seizing the shit out of land and saying, like, the revolution, we're doing a revolution.
[00:24:52]  It's happening.
[00:24:53]  It's happening.
[00:24:54]  And at the same time, another left-wing group of left-wing people murders a popular right-wing politician.
[00:25:01]  So this all kind of snowballs into the start of the civil war, you know?
[00:25:06]  Uh-huh.
[00:25:07]  Okay.
[00:25:07]  Now, when the CEDA lost the election, that was kind of it for them.
[00:25:12]  And most of the party, like after failing to win in 36, just kind of gets fully on board with authoritarianism.
[00:25:19]  One scholar writes that everyone got the message to quote abandon the ballot box and take up arms.
[00:25:25]  The CEDA's youth movement collapses.
[00:25:28]  Yeah.
[00:25:28]  Yeah, that's scary, dog.
[00:25:30]  So like the young Republicans basically collapse overnight and they all join the Falange.
[00:25:35]  So all of the young like conservatives who had been in the CEDA and trying to get out the vote immediately join the fascist party and start picking up guns.
[00:25:44]  And street fighting and political murders reach a fever pitch in this period.
[00:25:49]  Now, the quote I read earlier mentioned land seizures by the CNT and other groups of anarchists.
[00:25:55]  And it's actually true that in the trade unions' major strongholds, the areas where the anarchists, the anarchist trade union, was most powerful, Barcelona, Zaragoza, and Seville, there was actually very little in the way of like strikes or mass demonstrations in the lead up to the war.
[00:26:08]  The CNT tried to keep their people kind of calm, but there are a lot of anarchists, right?
[00:26:14]  A lot of them aren't part of the CNT.
[00:26:16]  And a bunch of them and a bunch of socialists occupy land in Barayos, which took over seven and like this land occupation.
[00:26:23]  I mentioned at the start of the Republic that they took about 10% of the undeveloped land and gave it to peasants.
[00:26:29]  This occupation of land and barayoz takes seven times that much land and starts redistributing it to like peasants.
[00:26:36]  And this fucking terrifies the rich people in Spain.
[00:26:40]  At this point, the anarchists have fucked with the money, right?
[00:26:43]  I've talked about the money.
[00:26:44]  He fucked up the money.
[00:26:46]  I talked about how like Trump, a big part of why on the day on the 6th, like all these fucking banks started coming out like Chase Bank and Chevron are like, yeah, like condemning President Trump.
[00:26:56]  It's because he fucked with the money.
[00:26:57]  You can't fuck up the money, Doc.
[00:26:59]  Yeah, fuck up the money.
[00:27:00]  And of course, anarchists are all about like they want to fuck up the money, which is one of the things I like about them.
[00:27:05]  Not saying that's wrong, but they fuck up the money.
[00:27:07]  And that gets a lot of the rich people, a lot of like the Spanish kind of like ruling class on board some sort of revolution against the left.
[00:27:17]  Now, in Spain, the seizure of Barayaz convinces a lot of these like rich people that the government can't guarantee stability anymore.
[00:27:26]  So while past coup attempts by generals had generally folded due to a lack of support from the dominant classes who didn't want to see a coup, right?
[00:27:32]  They didn't like the left, but I don't want to have like a coup again.
[00:27:36]  By 1936, a lot more of those folks are like, you know what?
[00:27:39]  It's either a coup or we don't get to be rich people anymore.
[00:27:43]  And they do what rich people do.
[00:27:45]  Coup it is.
[00:27:46]  Coup it is.
[00:27:47]  So the government had known that the Africanista generals weren't super trustworthy, which is why they tried to post the ringleaders, General Franco and a guy named General Mola, to the Canary Islands and Pamplona, respectively, right?
[00:27:59]  Keep them out of the center of shit.
[00:28:01]  But these guys were still collaborating with a cadre of other officers.
[00:28:04]  And on July 17th, under orders from Franco, troops in Morocco rebelled.
[00:28:08]  And obviously, the Foreign Legion are kind of like the core of this.
[00:28:12]  Over the next three days, military units and commanders all over Spain rose up against the legitimate government.
[00:28:18]  And the hope from Franco and his fellows had been that they would swiftly take control of major cities, jail their political opponents, and install a dictator like they'd done with Di Rivera, not all that long ago, right?
[00:28:28]  Di Rivera comes to power like a decade or so earlier.
[00:28:31]  So they were hoping it would follow that trend.
[00:28:34]  But the left was way more organized now, and it did not work out that way.
[00:28:38]  And I'm going to quote now from a write-up in the New Left Review.
[00:28:41]  Confidence in a rapid rebel victory was quickly dispelled when the insurrection in most major cities, notably Madrid and Barcelona, was crushed in the streets by a combination of loyal security forces and political and trade union militants.
[00:28:53]  Where this combination failed or the security forces went over to the rebels, the rising was almost immediately successful, as in Seville and Saragossa.
[00:29:01]  The fact that less than half the army and security forces united behind the rebellion was the principal reason why the coup failed in its principal objective and turned into a civil war.
[00:29:10]  Now, that's not the unified opinion on things, right?
[00:29:13]  The idea that yeah, there's significant debate over why the coup failed, right?
[00:29:18]  Because the coup does fail, right?
[00:29:20]  The fascists win in the end, but they don't succeed by coup.
[00:29:23]  They have to fight a war.
[00:29:24]  And a lot of scholars will actually argue, a lot of them will argue that, well, the security, because most of the security forces didn't go with the rebels, that's why the rebels didn't win immediately.
[00:29:36]  A lot of scholars will also argue that actually the bulk of the credit for halting rebel victory goes to local militias, which are kind of spontaneously organized just because a bunch of people started picking up guns.
[00:29:48]  The argument is that in the wake of the coup, the Spanish military and the Republican government lost basically all cohesion and credibility, which they did, right?
[00:29:56]  Like half of your military decides to overthrow the government.
[00:29:59]  Not a lot of people had to have faith in the government, right?
[00:30:02]  Yeah, there's nothing you can do.
[00:30:03]  And then the rest of y'all can't stop these people from taking my land from me.
[00:30:06]  So like, fuck y'all.
[00:30:08]  And the reason that Franco and his allies, these scholars who will kind of take this side of it, argue that the reason Franco and his allies didn't win immediately is that hundreds of thousands of civilians took to the streets.
[00:30:18]  And these, as a general rule, in the early days, these citizens' militias, these people were just like picking up their grandpa's hunting rifle or in a lot of cases, looting sporting goods stores, like busting, like busting into like a fucking sportsman warehouse and just taking all the guns.
[00:30:34]  Like, we need guns.
[00:30:35]  These guys have them.
[00:30:36]  Let's grab them.
[00:30:38]  And, you know, there's later, too, there's looting of like military barracks.
[00:30:41]  But like, yeah, they just get whatever guns they fucking can and they start fighting the Africanistas, who are at that point very experienced, disciplined, and well-equipped veterans.
[00:30:53]  So it's like this mix of you've got hundreds of thousands of men and women, because women are a part of the fighting forces briefly in this period, just picking up whatever guns they can get and going to war against one of the most veteran military units in all of Europe.
[00:31:07]  In his 1986 essay on the matter, Marae Bookchin writes, quote, to have stopped Franco's Army of Africa, composed of foreign legionnaires and Moorish mercenaries, perhaps the bloodthirstiest and certainly one of the most professionalized troops at the disposal of any European nation at the time, and its well-trained civil guards and political auxiliaries would have been nothing less than miraculous once it established a strong base on the Spanish mainland.
[00:31:30]  That hastily formed, untrained and virtually unequipped militiamen and women slowed Franco's army's advance on Madrid for four months and essentially stopped it on the outskirts of the capital is a feat for which they have rarely earned the proper tribute from writers on the civil war of the past century.
[00:31:46]  Wow.
[00:31:47]  Yeah.
[00:31:47]  Yeah.
[00:31:48]  Just everyone picking up their guns and being like, fuck these guys, right?
[00:31:53]  Yeah, I think there's like this, you know, yeah, the, the, the miracle that they was actually able to stop this fool or these dudes is like, yeah, it's, I mean, obviously, ultimately they don't, but like that, I, I think about like what we used to call like, like dad strong.
[00:32:17]  You know, like you, you just, you're, you don't, you know, your dad's strong, but you don't like, you don't really believe it.
[00:32:23]  You know what I'm saying?
[00:32:23]  And then you're like, then you're 16 and you want to like throw hands with him.
[00:32:27]  You know what I'm saying?
[00:32:29]  And then he just lays you out flat.
[00:32:31]  You know what I mean?
[00:32:32]  You're like, I don't ex, I, I didn't expect you to be this strong.
[00:32:37]  You know, that's to me, sometimes it's like, I feel like that with like military dudes that are like super trained to where it's like you think, you think you can take them.
[00:32:46]  Yeah.
[00:32:47]  And then you're like, oh, yeah, no, you're actually trained.
[00:32:50]  This is not a game.
[00:32:51]  So, so knowing that, but then the fact that just the, that these just untrained militias were still able to like pull this off.
[00:33:03]  You know, it's all four months of brutal fighting.
[00:33:06]  Yeah.
[00:33:06]  I mean, and they lose a fuckload of people.
[00:33:09]  Thousands of people.
[00:33:09]  Like, and it, and it is, it is a very lopsided kill ratio at this point, right?
[00:33:14]  Yeah.
[00:33:14]  Because you're, you are, these are some of the most veteran military units in all of Europe, right?
[00:33:19]  Yeah.
[00:33:19]  Um, going up against like fucking grandpa and grandma with hunting rifles, right?
[00:33:26]  Yeah.
[00:33:26]  It's, it's ugly.
[00:33:28]  It is ugly, but they slow, they stop Franco from winning in 36, you know?
[00:33:33]  That's crazy.
[00:33:34]  And there seems to be very little debate about that, that they were, some people argue how critical, but they were critical in stopping the nationalists, which is what the other thing the rebels are called at the gates of Madrid.
[00:33:45]  And they're not the only ones.
[00:33:46]  We'll talk a little bit about the, we're going to talk about the international brigades in a second.
[00:33:50]  But first, you have to take an ad break, sir.
[00:33:53]  You know who else would have stopped Franco at the gates of Madrid?
[00:33:56]  Sophie.
[00:33:58]  Sophie.

=== Thousands Die in Brutal Fighting (03:19) ===

[00:33:59]  Yeah.
[00:33:59]  Sophie would have.
[00:34:00]  Sophie would have.
[00:34:01]  Backed by the militant products and services that support this podcast.
[00:34:06]  Cool.
[00:34:06]  Yes.
[00:34:07]  Including Sportsman's Warehouse, where you too can steal guns to fight the fat.
[00:34:11]  Well, no.
[00:34:12]  Okay.
[00:34:13]  Maybe not.
[00:34:14]  That might be the wisest.
[00:34:15]  Okay.
[00:34:16]  Predox.
[00:34:22]  What's up, everyone?
[00:34:23]  I'm Ango Modem.
[00:34:24]  My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
[00:34:32]  It's Will Farrell.
[00:34:35]  My dad gave me the best advice ever.
[00:34:38]  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.
[00:34:43]  I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
[00:34:46]  I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place to come look for up and coming talent.
[00:34:50]  He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
[00:34:55]  Yeah.
[00:34:55]  He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
[00:34:58]  And he's like, just give it a shot.
[00:34:59]  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.
[00:35:08]  If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
[00:35:10]  It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
[00:35:18]  Yeah, it would not be.
[00:35:19]  Right, it wouldn't be that.
[00:35:21]  There's a lot of luck.
[00:35:22]  Listen to Thanks Stat on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:35:32]  10-10 shots fired.
[00:35:34]  City hall building.
[00:35:35]  A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
[00:35:39]  From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
[00:35:45]  How could this have happened in City Hall?
[00:35:47]  Somebody tell me that!
[00:35:48]  Jeffrey Hood did.
[00:35:50]  July 2003, Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
[00:35:56]  Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
[00:35:59]  And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
[00:36:08]  Everybody in the chamber's ducks.
[00:36:11]  A shocking public murder.
[00:36:12]  They scream, get down, get down.
[00:36:14]  Those are shots.
[00:36:15]  Those are shots.
[00:36:16]  Get down.
[00:36:16]  A charismatic politician.
[00:36:18]  You know, he just bent the rules all the time.
[00:36:20]  I still have a weapon.
[00:36:22]  And I could shoot you.
[00:36:25]  And an outsider with a secret.
[00:36:27]  He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
[00:36:30]  That may or may not have been political.
[00:36:32]  That may have been about sex.
[00:36:34]  Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:36:47]  There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
[00:36:51]  Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
[00:36:54]  You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
[00:36:57]  And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
[00:37:00]  We always say, trust your girlfriends.
[00:37:04]  I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends.
[00:37:08]  Oh my God, this is the same man.
[00:37:10]  A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
[00:37:15]  I felt like I got hit by a truck.
[00:37:17]  I thought, how could this happen to me?

=== Rapid Mobilization of People (16:26) ===

[00:37:19]  The cops didn't seem to care.
[00:37:21]  So they take matters into their own hands.
[00:37:23]  They said, oh, hell no.
[00:37:25]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[00:37:28]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[00:37:32]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[00:37:34]  Trust me, babe.
[00:37:35]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:37:45]  I'm Lori Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
[00:37:50]  This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
[00:37:57]  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.
[00:38:04]  From power to parenthood.
[00:38:06]  Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
[00:38:09]  This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
[00:38:11]  From addiction to acceleration.
[00:38:14]  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.
[00:38:18]  You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
[00:38:25]  And it's a multiplayer game.
[00:38:27]  What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
[00:38:34]  Find out on Mostly Human.
[00:38:35]  My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
[00:38:38]  Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
[00:38:49]  We're back.
[00:38:50]  Quebec.
[00:38:50]  And for a brief time in 1936, the Spanish Republican military was vastly dominated by, as opposed to like a kind of traditional military, a dizzying array of independent, interlocking, and largely democratic militias.
[00:39:04]  Most of the militias are either anarchist or Trotskyist.
[00:39:07]  So there's the CNT and the POUM, and then there's groups that aren't a part of those, but like largely they're either anarchist or kind of Trotskyist, and both are heavily democratic.
[00:39:16]  So men and women take up arms together.
[00:39:18]  They vote for their leaders.
[00:39:19]  So their officers are elected and recallable.
[00:39:23]  And yeah, it is, you know, there's critiques to make of the system.
[00:39:27]  We'll talk about that a bit.
[00:39:29]  But that's what the military is at this point in 1936.
[00:39:32]  It's largely just a fuckload of these militias because the actual military is not in a good way, you know, very chaotic and disorganized itself.
[00:39:40]  And in a lot of cases, because of the fact that a lot of the military had rebelled, soldiers will leave their units and join militias.
[00:39:48]  So it's very complicated.
[00:39:50]  Please do not take this as a comprehensive or particularly in-depth explanation of what happens with the Spanish militia system on the Republican.
[00:39:58]  Like it is incredibly complicated.
[00:40:00]  This is an overview.
[00:40:01]  This is all an overview.
[00:40:03]  The Spanish Civil War is very, very complex.
[00:40:07]  So, yeah.
[00:40:08]  And while this is happening, while all these democratic militias are rising up to fight the fascists, in the countryside, behind the lines, and sometimes right up to the lines, something equally interesting is happening.
[00:40:18]  I'm going to quote Marie Bookchin's article here again: The wave of collectivizations that swept over Spain in the summer and autumn of 1936 has been described in a recent BBC Granada documentary as the greatest experiment in workers' self-management Western Europe has ever seen.
[00:40:34]  A revolution more far-reaching than any which occurred in Russia during 1917 to 21 and the years before and after it.
[00:40:40]  In anarchist industrial areas like Catalonia, an estimated three-quarters of the economy was placed under workers' control, as it was in anarchist rural areas like Aragon.
[00:40:50]  The figure tapers downward, where the UGT, which is another group, shared power with the CNT or else predominated 50% in anarchist and socialist Valencia and 30% in socialist and liberal Madrid.
[00:41:01]  In more thoroughly anarchist areas, particularly among the agrarian collectives, money was eliminated and the material means of life were allocated strictly according to need rather than work, following the traditional concepts of a libertarian communist society.
[00:41:14]  As the BBC Granada television documentary puts it, the ancient dream of a collective society without profit or property was made reality in the villages of Aragon.
[00:41:22]  All forms of production were owned by the community, run by their workers.
[00:41:27]  And again, as Bookchin notes, this is not, you know, this is different everywhere in Republican Spain.
[00:41:32]  But in Catalonia, which has a lot of industrial areas, three-quarters of the industrial economy is directly controlled by the workers manning these factories, as opposed to them even having elected bosses and stuff.
[00:41:44]  Which is really interesting.
[00:41:47]  It's something that doesn't happen ever again.
[00:41:51]  Yeah.
[00:41:51]  Like, how long was it kind of working?
[00:41:55]  I don't know if that's the right thing.
[00:41:56]  There's debate as to how long it worked, but a couple of, yeah, generally speaking, a year or two.
[00:42:02]  You know, it's different in different regions.
[00:42:04]  We're going to talk about what happens there.
[00:42:06]  Bookchin continues.
[00:42:08]  The administrative apparatus of Republican Spain belonged almost entirely to the unions and their political organizations.
[00:42:14]  Police in many cities were replaced by armed workers' patrols.
[00:42:17]  Militia units were formed everywhere, in factories, on farms, and in socialist and anarchist community centers and union halls, initially including women as well as men.
[00:42:26]  A vast network of local revolutionary committees coordinated the feeding of the cities, the operations of the economy, and the meeting out of justice.
[00:42:33]  Indeed, almost every facet of Spanish life from production to culture, bringing the whole of Spanish society in the Republican zone into a well-organized and coherent whole.
[00:42:41]  This historically unprecedented appropriation of society by its most oppressed sectors, including women who were liberated from all the constraints of a highly traditional Catholic country, be it the prohibition of abortion and divorce or a degraded status in the economy, was the work of the Spanish proletariat and peasantry.
[00:42:57]  It was a movement from below that overwhelmed even the revolutionary organizations of the impressed, including the CNT.
[00:43:05]  Significantly, no left organization issued calls for revolutionary takeovers of factories, workplaces, or the land, observes Ronald Frazier in one of the most up-to-date accounts of the popular movement.
[00:43:15]  Indeed, the CNT leadership in Barcelona, epicenter of urban anarcho-syndicalism, went further.
[00:43:21]  Rejecting the offer of power presented to it by President Campanes, the head of the Catalan government, it decided that the libertarian revolution must stand aside for collaboration with the popular front forces to defeat the common enemy.
[00:43:33]  The revolution that transformed Barcelona in a matter of days into a city virtually run by the working class sprang initially from individual CNT unions, impelled by their most advanced militants.
[00:43:43]  And as their example spread, it was not only large enterprises, but small workshops and businesses that were being taken over.
[00:43:49]  So what Bookchin is saying there is this is a true bottom-up revolution.
[00:43:53]  And even in some cases, the anarchist trade union is like, don't do this.
[00:43:57]  We need to work with the government.
[00:43:59]  We're not calling for revolution.
[00:44:00]  And the individual groups of workers are like, no, we're just going to take over our office.
[00:44:04]  We're just taking over.
[00:44:05]  Yeah, it's fine.
[00:44:06]  It's fine.
[00:44:07]  It's fine.
[00:44:09]  And it proves to be a mixed bag.
[00:44:11]  Like, we'll talk about this.
[00:44:12]  There's fair critiques about what happens, but it is amazing and unprecedented.
[00:44:16]  And one of the great what-ifs of history is if there had not also been this massive civil war and this fascist invasion, might it have worked?
[00:44:23]  You know?
[00:44:23]  And they're under a pressure that is kind of impossible to overcome in this invasion.
[00:44:28]  But it is an interesting question.
[00:44:30]  What is, yeah, dude, what is strange, like, it was strange because we've just never seen it, but like, yeah, what was that year like?
[00:44:36]  You know what I'm saying?
[00:44:37]  Like, I wonder what the crime rates were.
[00:44:39]  Like, what was the petty crimes?
[00:44:41]  You know what I'm saying?
[00:44:42]  Like, one of these days, I will do, because I don't know nearly enough about this.
[00:44:48]  One of these days, I would like to do like a hardcore history length, like a 12-hour deep dive into the Spanish Civil War, where it's mostly focused on like, yeah, what are these like, what are these?
[00:44:58]  You replace the cops with like citizens' patrols.
[00:45:00]  How did that actually work?
[00:45:01]  What was that like?
[00:45:02]  What are kind of like the first person accounts we can have of those?
[00:45:06]  Obviously, we don't have the time to go into that much detail today.
[00:45:09]  Of course.
[00:45:12]  But it's definitely like, yeah, that would call for like a 12-hour.
[00:45:16]  Yes.
[00:45:16]  Yes.
[00:45:16]  It's very complicated.
[00:45:18]  And this is just, I'm hoping what this mostly does is whet people's appetite to read more themselves, right?
[00:45:23]  Which I am also going to do.
[00:45:24]  But it's a very interesting period of history.
[00:45:27]  Now, obviously, this system had a number of upsides, if you want to call it a system.
[00:45:30]  What happens in Spain in this period has a number of upsides.
[00:45:33]  It mobilizes a huge portion of the Republic's citizenry very quickly.
[00:45:38]  It brings a people into arms very rapidly, more rapidly probably than a central government could have done.
[00:45:44]  And these people were highly motivated to resist fascism.
[00:45:47]  But they also, in large part, weren't motivated to live under the Republic.
[00:45:51]  And coordination between all of these groups was very difficult and sometimes impossible.
[00:45:56]  Meanwhile, the rebels, the nationalists, had a strict military hierarchy.
[00:46:00]  And that's a benefit in a war sometimes, right?
[00:46:02]  It can also be, you know, you can look at the Germans in World War II.
[00:46:05]  It doesn't always work out.
[00:46:06]  But when you've got one side that's made up of a thousand different fractious people who agree on some things and disagree on a lot, that can deplete your ability to counterattack and to organize effectively.
[00:46:17]  Meanwhile, Franco winds up and, you know, there's a process.
[00:46:21]  He's not initially the only guy, but eventually he's the only dude whose opinion really matters.
[00:46:25]  He's the guy at the top.
[00:46:27]  And that happens fairly quickly.
[00:46:29]  And Franco is able to coordinate a centralized military in order to attack this very decentralized foe.
[00:46:39]  A sneaky motherfucker.
[00:46:41]  He's a sneaky guy.
[00:46:42]  There's also one of his fellow generals dies in a plane crash.
[00:46:45]  So some of it's just like dumb luck.
[00:46:48]  Now, since the CEDA had failed, he didn't, Franco didn't really want to wrap himself in the CEDA's flag because they'd gotten their asses kicked in the 36 elections.
[00:46:57]  And he kind of winds up embracing the Falangists.
[00:47:00]  And this is part of why people argue if Franco himself was really a fascist or if he was just kind of co-opting fascism.
[00:47:05]  I don't really see the point in getting involved in that.
[00:47:08]  Franco gets in, like, wraps himself in the Falange Party.
[00:47:11]  And like, they become kind of a dominant right-wing force in this nationalist cause.
[00:47:17]  Now, Jose Antonio, who'd been the leader of the Falangists, had been arrested by the Republic right at the start of the rebellion.
[00:47:23]  And he was almost immediately executed for sedition, even though he'd been incarcerated when the rebellion cooked off.
[00:47:28]  Like, if you want to argue how just it was, he didn't really have much to do with it, but they kill him.
[00:47:33]  And I'm not, I don't care.
[00:47:35]  He's a fascist.
[00:47:35]  Like, I'm not crying.
[00:47:36]  I'm not going to weep over him.
[00:47:38]  Don't cry for me, Argentina.
[00:47:39]  But Franco takes Jose Antonio and turns him into a martyr, right?
[00:47:44]  And he also imprisons the guy who takes over the Falangists after Jose Antonio so that he can turn the Falangists into his own basically like cult of personality.
[00:47:53]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:47:54]  And Franco co-opting the fascists had the side effect of making this war, which had started as a conflict between Spanish left and right and a conflict between the Africanist military and the Republic into the world's first open battleground between fascism and democracy.
[00:48:11]  And the first three months of the civil war were some of the bloodiest.
[00:48:14]  Both sides carried out a horrific series of assassinations.
[00:48:18]  It is a very the early period, there's this amazing rising up of the people to defend themselves.
[00:48:23]  And there's also a ton of fucking vigilante murders.
[00:48:26]  And it does occur on both sides.
[00:48:27]  It's really ugly.
[00:48:28]  And I'm going to read a quote from the New Left Review here.
[00:48:31]  Even so, there were significant differences between the massacres on the left and the right.
[00:48:35]  Many voices, unheard on the rebel side, were raised in the Republican zone against the slaughter.
[00:48:40]  By early September, a new government under Largo Cablero began to create a semblance of public order, which slowly put an end to the killings there, but not soon enough.
[00:48:49]  News of the anti-clerical violence, which included the disinternment of nuns' coffins, widespread burning of churches, and desecration of religious objects, was broadcast around the world, creating an extremely negative international image of the Republican zone.
[00:49:02]  Does not good optics, you know?
[00:49:04]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:49:05]  You can look, man.
[00:49:06]  Yeah.
[00:49:06]  You messing with the nuns, bro.
[00:49:08]  Like, we all like, yeah, that the nuns are fine, guys.
[00:49:11]  Yeah.
[00:49:12]  And we've talked earlier about how like you can, you know, there's arguments to be made about like, obviously there's a lot of problematic priests, but disinterring nuns' coffins.
[00:49:20]  There's really not a good argument that I know of there.
[00:49:23]  Like, come on.
[00:49:24]  Okay, guys.
[00:49:25]  It's a little unnecessary.
[00:49:27]  Yeah, and it is bad for the early rebel PR.
[00:49:32]  Now, on the rebel side, with occasional exception, tight censorship kept the assassinations out of the news.
[00:49:38]  The church, which would soon sanctify the insurgents' war as a religious crusade, turned a blind eye, though hundreds of clergy were witnessed to the repression, executed not only by the military, but by phalangists and normally law-abiding conservative Catholic citizens.
[00:49:51]  So, of course, the church is both victim and perpetrator in a lot of this.
[00:49:54]  And the death toll is much higher in terms of people killed by the right than people killed by the left.
[00:50:00]  And again, in the Republic, there's outcries against the vigilante violence.
[00:50:05]  And on the right, they're just like, don't talk about it.
[00:50:07]  Keep killing people.
[00:50:07]  Don't talk about it.
[00:50:08]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:50:10]  Just stop putting it on TV, fool.
[00:50:11]  Like, do what you got to do, but hey, yeah.
[00:50:14]  Now, on the Republican side, the two largest left-wing groups at the start of the war, because the communists are very small at the start of the war.
[00:50:21]  Again, because Spain doesn't industrialize until a lot later than a lot of the, it doesn't have a very powerful communist party at this period at the start of things.
[00:50:29]  The two largest left-wing groups are the anarchists and the Trotskyists.
[00:50:33]  And they were immediately torn between stopping fascism at all costs and, of course, fuck the state, right?
[00:50:39]  Yeah.
[00:50:39]  Like, this is a tough choice for them.
[00:50:42]  Now, the CNT, the largest anarchist organization, lands on the side of allying with the state to fight fascism.
[00:50:48]  But many local workers' councils were not on board.
[00:50:52]  Now, while this is happening in the early part of the war, the communists very quickly come to hold significant power within the confusing and fractious Republican military establishment.
[00:51:01]  Now, and they grow rapidly at this period, too.
[00:51:04]  And this is due to the pretty sensible fact that the communists had a communist state, the USSR, that they could go to and beg for aid, right?
[00:51:13]  Yeah.
[00:51:14]  Like the USSR provides aid, we'll talk about that a bit more, to the Republicans.
[00:51:18]  And so the communists very quickly gain a lot of power within the military establishment of the Republic.
[00:51:23]  Now, unfortunately, the fascists also had states they could go to for help, Italy and Germany.
[00:51:28]  And from the very beginning of this war, there are Italian and German troops fighting on the ground alongside the nationalist Spanish troops.
[00:51:35]  And unfortunately for everybody, the fascist states were way more willing to provide direct aid to their side than the communists were.
[00:51:42]  I'm going to quote again from the New Left Review here.
[00:51:45]  Without fascist aid, most of it provided on credit, the rebels would not long have been able to continue the war, let alone win it.
[00:51:51]  Aside from the Nazis' Condor Legion, Germany and Italy together provided tens of thousands of troops, mainly Italian, nearly 1,600 warplanes, thousands of armored vehicles, and hundreds of field guns.
[00:52:03]  Equally important were the 3.5 million tons of oil provided on credit by Texaco and Shell, double the amount imported by the Republic, without which Franco's army could not have maneuvered as rapidly as it did.
[00:52:14]  So yes, the victory of the fascists in Spain owes a great deal to our good friends Texaco and Shell.
[00:52:21]  Oh my God.
[00:52:23]  Texaco and Shell.
[00:52:25]  Should we back fascists or not fascists?
[00:52:27]  Fascists, of course.
[00:52:28]  We're Texaco.
[00:52:29]  Yeah.
[00:52:29]  Yeah.
[00:52:30]  Oh my God.
[00:52:31]  They don't talk about that no more.
[00:52:33]  No, let me tell you the last two names I thought you was going to say right now.
[00:52:39]  Yeah.
[00:52:40]  Texaco and Shell.
[00:52:41]  I was like, wait, wait, what?
[00:52:44]  That's crazy.
[00:52:45]  Yeah.
[00:52:48]  So not wanting to provoke Britain and France, with whom he was still seeking an anti-fascist alliance, Stalin initially held back.
[00:52:54]  But blatant Nazi and fascist intervention increasingly alarmed him, ensuring that all European powers were made aware that Soviet aid to the Republic was not in support of the advancing revolution.
[00:53:04]  In October 1936, the first Soviet shipment of arms and the first contingent of the international brigades reached Madrid in the nick of time to help prevent the capital's fall.
[00:53:12]  In all, the Soviet Union sent 700 warplanes and 400 armored vehicles, plus some 2,000 pilots, engineers, military advisors, and NKVD secret police.
[00:53:23]  Now, there's a lot, we are going to talk a lot about criticisms of Soviet aid and of Soviet policy in this, and there are a lot of valid ones to give, but it's also worth noting that Soviet aid was absolutely crucial in stopping Madrid from falling when Franco made his first advance, right?
[00:53:36]  The militia slowed it down, but without this hardcore military equipment, they probably don't stop Franco from taking Madrid in 1936.

=== Soviet Aid Arrives in Madrid (06:41) ===

[00:53:45]  You know, I was going to say, like, that like tradition of like communist Russia aid.
[00:53:57]  I've been thinking about that a little bit.
[00:53:59]  Like, you know, I'm stretching this as far as this, this idea that like the way that they exported aid in communist like block countries, like, you know, at that, like there was once upon a time, like North Korea was actually doing way better than South Korea, you know, because of this communist aid.
[00:54:20]  You know what I'm saying?
[00:54:21]  And a number of other reasons too, resulting from like the nature of the Japanese invasion.
[00:54:25]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:54:26]  Absolutely.
[00:54:26]  You know, and then when I think about like Cuba, and I got friends from like, you know, South Africa, Western African countries, Zambia, all these things.
[00:54:37]  And they're like, yo, you could say whatever you want.
[00:54:39]  But they're like, every, every nation in Africa got a Cuban doctor.
[00:54:45]  You know what I'm saying?
[00:54:46]  And just this idea that like, it was like, it just like when you, the more I traveled, the more I started going, dang, maybe they, they just think about aid.
[00:54:56]  And they, this is, you know what I'm saying?
[00:54:59]  Under Stalin, it's very, like, for one thing, the Cuban medical aid, which is incredible, the way that the Cuban government sends out doctors, what Cuban doctors do and have been doing for decades is absolutely amazing.
[00:55:10]  And as far as I know, it was done without any sort of hope of recompense.
[00:55:13]  The Soviets are getting paid very well to help.
[00:55:16]  So when Republican Spain happens, when there's this split, the Republic winds up with Spain's gold stockpile, which is the largest gold reserves on planet Earth at the time, about $805 million in that time's currency.
[00:55:31]  And while the fascists provided aid to Franco on credit, right?
[00:55:35]  Italy and Germany are like, you don't have to pay now.
[00:55:37]  We'll just give you stuff and you'll owe us, you'll pay us later, right?
[00:55:42]  Stalin's like, no, I'm going to need some cash up there.
[00:55:44]  I need my check.
[00:55:45]  Yeah, I'm going to need some cash up.
[00:55:48]  I'm Joseph Stalin.
[00:55:49]  Like, I don't just give people shit, you know?
[00:55:53]  Where my money.
[00:55:54]  He does later in the war a bit.
[00:55:56]  He gives them a loan.
[00:55:56]  But where my pesetas, you know what I'm saying?
[00:56:00]  So about $805 million is what Spain's gold reserves, the Republican Spain's gold reserves are at the start of the war.
[00:56:06]  They pour more than $500 million in gold into the Soviet Union by the end of the war.
[00:56:13]  And because...
[00:56:14]  That's a lot.
[00:56:15]  Yeah, and also they have to burn a bunch of money on shady arms dealers.
[00:56:20]  And it's very bad.
[00:56:22]  And a lot of the blame also goes to France, who makes it difficult to get shit through the border, which is why they have to go with arms smugglers as opposed to just getting weapons directly imported.
[00:56:31]  It's very messy.
[00:56:32]  The fascists also had the benefit of receiving much better guns.
[00:56:37]  And I don't know how much you can blame the Soviets for this.
[00:56:39]  The Germans had the best weaponry in the planet at this point in time.
[00:56:42]  So the quality of arms that Franco receives blows everything Soviet out of the water.
[00:56:47]  Now, a lot of the blame for the Republic's loss tends to go to Stalin and the USSR.
[00:56:52]  But if we're really being, and like when you read articles trying to like allay blame, a lot of people will put blame on Stalin and the USSR.
[00:57:00]  And there are very legitimate things to criticize them about.
[00:57:03]  But if we're truly being fair, the foreign nations most responsible for the victory of fascism in Spain were the United States, England, and France.
[00:57:11]  Because the entire free world basically engaged in a policy of non-intervention within the Spanish Civil War.
[00:57:18]  This was part of the appeasement policy that the British were doing with the Germans at the time.
[00:57:23]  And they were trying to get the Germans basically agree to neutrality in the war.
[00:57:26]  And Germany would put some lip service at this, but they didn't.
[00:57:29]  Like they sent soldiers and planes and arms in.
[00:57:32]  Both fascist states intervened directly, which meant that the Republic of Spain was standing on their own against the entire fascist international, fascist Spain, fascist Italy, fascist Germany.
[00:57:43]  And they have some backup from the Soviets.
[00:57:45]  And that's it.
[00:57:46]  Right.
[00:57:47]  Everyone else is like, fuck you.
[00:57:48]  The French closed the border.
[00:57:50]  We're not jumping in.
[00:57:51]  Yeah.
[00:57:52]  The Democrat.
[00:57:53]  And this is, again, part of why the communists, their criticisms of decisions made by communist advisors and communist leaders in the Spanish Republican cause, the reason the communists wind up in power largely in the Spanish Republican side is because the democracies are like, oh, we don't want any part in this shit.
[00:58:10]  Right.
[00:58:10]  Could have been different if, you know.
[00:58:12]  Damn.
[00:58:13]  Right.
[00:58:13]  Yeah.
[00:58:13]  So I can't fucking blame the USSR here, you know?
[00:58:16]  Yeah, that's good, dude.
[00:58:18]  Cause it's like, yeah, you getting, you see a homeboy getting like slept.
[00:58:21]  You know what I'm saying?
[00:58:22]  Like somebody just brought the Nyquil just knocking the homie out and then everybody jumping in to help and you like, well, I thought we all agreed we weren't going to jump in.
[00:58:30]  Yeah.
[00:58:30]  But like, if your friend who jumps in isn't good at throwing a haymaker, it's not really his fault.
[00:58:35]  He fucking tried.
[00:58:35]  You're the one who's not.
[00:58:36]  I channel the best.
[00:58:37]  Yeah, none of y'all was jumping in.
[00:58:38]  Yeah.
[00:58:39]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:58:41]  So the failure of the democratic world, so to speak, to get involved in any kind of organized way is one of the great tragedies and maybe one of the reasons World War II happens, right?
[00:58:53]  Maybe one of the reasons why.
[00:58:56]  No, no, no.
[00:58:56]  This is FDR.
[00:58:58]  FDR.
[00:58:59]  Yeah, because I watched a speech about this time of him explaining why he was like, we don't want no parts of this.
[00:59:08]  I don't remember exactly, but I remember being real interested in the fact that, like, yeah, like, you know, on some like, look, we like some isolation and stuff on some like, look, man, we got our own problems here, man.
[00:59:20]  We look, we just, we can't even feed ourselves.
[00:59:23]  Like, I'm not going to like send people.
[00:59:25]  Maybe we should stay out of this one.
[00:59:27]  Yeah.
[00:59:27]  Yeah.
[00:59:27]  That's that.
[00:59:28]  That is very much the attitude.
[00:59:30]  Yeah.
[00:59:30]  And the fascists use Spain, particularly Germany, use Spain as a testing ground for new weapons and tactics, particularly their new air force.
[00:59:38]  Because the concept of an air force is very new.
[00:59:41]  There had been air forces in World War I, but they'd mostly just shot at each other and like spotted, right, for artillery and shit.
[00:59:48]  Now you've got bombers, right?
[00:59:49]  Now you have air tactical air support that can destroy armor and stuff.
[00:59:54]  And the Spanish Civil War is the first time this really comes together in an organized way.
[00:59:58]  And it provides the Luftwaffe, the Nazi Air Force, with a way to test out its tactics and bombs on Spanish cities and civilians in many cases.
[01:00:07]  And we'll talk about that a little bit later in the episode, too.
[01:00:09]  But first.
[01:00:11]  But first, you know who won't attack Spanish cities and civilians with Stuka dive bombers.
[01:00:17]  Yeah, Sophie won't.
[01:00:18]  Sophie.
[01:00:19]  So Sophie.
[01:00:20]  Sophie might, though, if she started messing with her products and services.
[01:00:22]  I have been worried about Sophie's cache of Stuka Dive bombers.
[01:00:25]  I am confused.

=== Testing Bombs on Civilians (04:08) ===

[01:00:26]  You know what I'm saying?
[01:00:27]  Why you have so many?
[01:00:28]  Cut the check.
[01:00:29]  Where my contract.
[01:00:30]  That's Sophie.
[01:00:31]  So she might, if they don't, she might send a money.
[01:00:35]  She might bomb Spain.
[01:00:36]  You know?
[01:00:37]  Yeah.
[01:00:37]  I've always said that about Sophie.
[01:00:39]  Spain's lucky they gave us Palgasol or else things might be different.
[01:00:43]  Be on our way different.
[01:00:46]  All right.
[01:00:46]  Here's some products.
[01:00:50]  What's up, everyone?
[01:00:51]  I'm Ego Modem.
[01:00:52]  My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
[01:01:00]  It's Will Farrell.
[01:01:03]  My dad gave me the best advice ever.
[01:01:07]  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.
[01:01:12]  I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
[01:01:14]  I'm working my way up through it.
[01:01:16]  I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
[01:01:18]  He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
[01:01:23]  Yeah.
[01:01:24]  He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
[01:01:26]  And he's like, just give it a shot.
[01:01:28]  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.
[01:01:36]  If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
[01:01:39]  It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat.
[01:01:45]  Just hang in there.
[01:01:46]  Yeah, it would not be.
[01:01:48]  Right, it wouldn't be that.
[01:01:49]  There's a lot of luck.
[01:01:51]  Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:02:01]  10-10 shots fired, city hall building.
[01:02:04]  A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
[01:02:08]  From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach.
[01:02:13]  Murder at City Hall.
[01:02:14]  How could this have happened in City Hall?
[01:02:16]  Somebody tell me that, Jeffrey Hood.
[01:02:18]  July 2003, Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
[01:02:25]  Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
[01:02:28]  And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
[01:02:37]  Everybody in the chamber ducks.
[01:02:39]  A shocking public murder.
[01:02:41]  I scream, get down, get down.
[01:02:42]  Those are shots.
[01:02:43]  Those are shots.
[01:02:44]  Get down.
[01:02:45]  A charismatic politician.
[01:02:46]  You know, he just bent the rules all the time, man.
[01:02:49]  I still have a weapon, and I could shoot you.
[01:02:54]  And an outsider with a secret.
[01:02:56]  He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
[01:02:59]  That may or may not have been political.
[01:03:00]  That may have been about sex.
[01:03:02]  Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:03:15]  There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
[01:03:19]  Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
[01:03:23]  You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
[01:03:25]  And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
[01:03:29]  We always say that, trust your girlfriends.
[01:03:33]  I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends.
[01:03:36]  Oh my God, this is the same man.
[01:03:39]  A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
[01:03:43]  I felt like I got hit by a truck.
[01:03:45]  I thought, how could this happen to me?
[01:03:47]  The cops didn't seem to care.
[01:03:49]  So they take matters into their own hands.
[01:03:52]  I said, oh, hell no.
[01:03:54]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[01:03:56]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[01:04:01]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[01:04:02]  Trust me, babe.
[01:04:03]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:04:13]  I'm Laurie Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
[01:04:19]  This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
[01:04:26]  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.
[01:04:32]  From power to parenthood.

=== Irish Volunteers Fight Fascism (14:59) ===

[01:04:34]  Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
[01:04:38]  This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
[01:04:40]  From addiction to acceleration.
[01:04:42]  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.
[01:04:47]  You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
[01:04:53]  And it's a multiplayer game.
[01:04:56]  What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
[01:05:02]  Find out on Mostly Human.
[01:05:04]  My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
[01:05:07]  Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
[01:05:18]  All right, so we're back.
[01:05:20]  Now, while the Republic lacked official international support, so again, the governments of the democratic world, like, ah, fuck you guys.
[01:05:30]  Like, you're on your own, right?
[01:05:31]  I don't know.
[01:05:32]  But an awful lot of their citizens and citizens from like Poland is a huge number of these guys.
[01:05:37]  An awful lot of people from around the world, individual people, correctly see that, like, well, I don't live in Spain, but I don't like fascism.
[01:05:45]  And I think that whatever happens in Spain will probably directly impact my future.
[01:05:49]  So I'm going to go travel to Spain and try to get a hold of a rifle and shoot some fucking fascists.
[01:05:56]  A lot of people do this.
[01:05:58]  Movie.
[01:05:59]  There's a couple.
[01:06:00]  And there's one being worked on right now that I hope will wind up being good.
[01:06:04]  Yeah, there's this scene where Big Homie like gives this big speech about why he's still willing to like from America go volunteer in this war.
[01:06:14]  I forget the name of this movie, but it was like a interesting scene about this time that like, okay, the government's saying we're not going to do it, but that don't stop me.
[01:06:21]  I could fly out there and help.
[01:06:23]  Yeah.
[01:06:23]  Yeah.
[01:06:23]  You know, there's a lot of, these are the people who recognize what is a timeless truth, which is that fascism and authoritarianism in one part of the world is a threat to freedom everywhere in the world.
[01:06:36]  And that's the way it's always been.
[01:06:37]  And we can talk a lot about the fallout from what happened in Syria.
[01:06:42]  But, you know, there's a lot of, there's a lot of stories of that in history, you know?
[01:06:47]  Yeah.
[01:06:48]  So while the Republic lacked, yeah, so a fuckload of people, eventually something close to 40,000 people will wind up volunteering to fight in Spain.
[01:06:57]  And two of the first foreigners to volunteer to fight in Spain were a 21-year-old classics graduate from Cambridge named Bernard Knox and his friend John Cornford.
[01:07:06]  They took with them an old pistol that had belonged to John Cornford.
[01:07:09]  Yeah, it's a weird name.
[01:07:11]  They took with them an old pistol.
[01:07:13]  Yes, Cornford, Sophie.
[01:07:15]  They took with them.
[01:07:16]  He dies fighting fascists.
[01:07:17]  He's a good guy.
[01:07:18]  All right, but he's all right.
[01:07:21]  They took with them an old pistol.
[01:07:23]  Okay, Sophie.
[01:07:25]  Sorry.
[01:07:26]  So they traveled to Spain together with just like nothing but an old handgun that had belonged to John's dad in the First World War.
[01:07:33]  Knox had to carry a gun, the gun, because his friend had already been to Spain once before.
[01:07:37]  And the British policy of non-intervention mean they did everything, meant that Britain was trying to actively stop people from going to Spain to fight fascism.
[01:07:46]  But Cornford and his buddy join a militia, like get to Spain.
[01:07:49]  They join a militia as soon as they land, which is like at this point, one of the many groups that had taken up arms to fight against the military coup.
[01:07:58]  And as I'd said, the early days of this war, there's a lot of women who are fighting in the militias.
[01:08:02]  This ends at like the end of 1936 when Largo Caballero comes to power because he kind of argues that women are needed behind the lines.
[01:08:09]  So they're not really fighting in the front after this point.
[01:08:12]  It's a pretty brief period.
[01:08:13]  And that's again a criticism.
[01:08:16]  One of the good criticisms of the Spanish Republican government is like, well, lost out on a lot of soldiers, huh?
[01:08:22]  Yeah.
[01:08:24]  So you had people willing to shoot.
[01:08:26]  You told them to stay home.
[01:08:27]  In those early days of revolutionary ardor, though, when Cornford and his friend arrive in Spain, like Spain is kind of like overtaken by this feeling of revolution.
[01:08:37]  And this is swelled by the fact that the people of Republican Spain had literally taken to the streets to defend themselves en masse.
[01:08:44]  And it lent cities like Barcelona a revolutionary air that international volunteers noticed.
[01:08:50]  One of those volunteers was a young George Orwell.
[01:08:53]  And he described the atmosphere in Barcelona as startling and overwhelming in like a positive sense, just like so incredible, this like outpouring of liberty.
[01:09:03]  Now, the Communist International or Comintern quickly realized that volunteers like Cornford represented a massive opportunity.
[01:09:09]  So they devoted some of their resources to organizing what came to be known as the International Brigades.
[01:09:14]  So it's the communists who put together the international brigades, which are a huge factor in both why the Republic lasts so long and why it becomes so internationally famous.
[01:09:26]  Although a lot of these volunteers are anarchists and not communists, you know, it's a bunch of different kinds and Trotsky, like a bunch of different kinds of people volunteer.
[01:09:34]  And I'm going to quote from a write-up on the international brigades in The Guardian.
[01:09:38]  Another recruit, Winston Churchill's rebel nephew, Esmond Romilly, had cycled across France, fueled by coffee and cognac, before volunteering and declaring himself a member of that very large class of unskilled laborers with a public school accent.
[01:09:52]  He sailed on a boat from Marseille with watch duty split in two-hour shifts between French, German, Poles, Italians, Yugoslavs, Belgians, Flemish, and Russian speakers.
[01:10:01]  And it's key.
[01:10:02]  Yeah, it's very kind of dope, man.
[01:10:04]  Look at that.
[01:10:05]  Yeah.
[01:10:06]  It's, it's, we're going to talk mostly, it's very dope.
[01:10:08]  Yeah, Winston Churchill's nephew showing up.
[01:10:10]  Yeah, he was like coffee and cognac.
[01:10:13]  I'm out here with the homies.
[01:10:14]  Like, we on the streets right now.
[01:10:15]  I look, I went to public school, homie.
[01:10:17]  You get his accent?
[01:10:19]  I love it.
[01:10:20]  I was like, okay, okay.
[01:10:22]  And it's um and it's it's there's a couple things going on there.
[01:10:25]  Um one of them is that like by public school, that in England actually means like a fancy school.
[01:10:30]  Okay, never mind.
[01:10:30]  So he's like, I have I have a public school accent, but I too am like whatever you want to call it an unskilled laborer.
[01:10:37]  Like I identify that's actually even cooler then.
[01:10:40]  It is because I don't have to do this.
[01:10:42]  Okay.
[01:10:42]  It's the opposite of like, you know, the that common people thing where it's like, I want to be, you know, like a laborer.
[01:10:48]  It's like, well, I want to be like a laborer.
[01:10:50]  So I'm going to go stand with a rifle next to them and fight the fascists, which is like, yeah, yeah, I'm not going to, I'm not going to talk shit about you for doing that.
[01:10:59]  And it's also worth noting, we're going to talk mostly about American volunteers here.
[01:11:04]  One of the largest nations that a lot of people volunteer to fight in Spain from is Poland.
[01:11:10]  And obviously Poland becomes the first large national victim, at least, of Nazism.
[01:11:16]  So you, and you can see why, right?
[01:11:18]  Like a lot of Poles looking at Germany on their doorstep, agitating about taking back land given to them by Versailles.
[01:11:23]  And you're like, we should probably go try to stop this.
[01:11:25]  Yeah, So the invasion of Madrid was the first terrible battle of the Civil War.
[01:11:31]  The first like really massive and important one, I think.
[01:11:34]  And Franco's colonial army, including the Spanish Foreign Legion, were airlifted from Morocco to Seville by German planes in order to fight there in an operation that Hitler himself named Operation Magic Fire, which is based on part of a Wagner opera.
[01:11:49]  Now, Franco's fashion.
[01:11:50]  And again, the bulk of the nationalist troops don't get out of Africa to fight in Spain without Hitler's airlift.
[01:11:58]  They would have had, because the Navy doesn't go fascist.
[01:12:01]  The Spanish Navy, such as it is, stays loyal, in large part because there's actually a lot of Spanish naval officers who try to go against the Republic and then their crews kill them and stuff, you know?
[01:12:13]  So the only reason that Franco's army gets to Iberia is because the Nazis airlift them.
[01:12:20]  Now, Franco's fascist hordes tore through Republic territory on their way to Madrid.
[01:12:24]  They were slowed by the militias and eventually turned back by a significant amount of Soviet armored aid.
[01:12:32]  And, you know, a lot of people sacrificed to stop them.
[01:12:35]  But a lot of the credit for finally stopping the fascist advance on Madrid goes to the international brigades who turned back the fascists at a place called University City, which is like a college campus in a heroic defense that has become like very famous in history.
[01:12:51]  Now, most of the international brigade members at this point were untrained, inexperienced, and nearly all of them were poorly armed.
[01:12:58]  They found themselves confronting a battle-hardened army with cutting-edge German weaponry, and somehow they held the line.
[01:13:04]  Cornford's squad operated a machine gun nest in the philosophy faculty offices of the University City campus.
[01:13:11]  They built barricades out of books in order to stop fascist bullets.
[01:13:15]  The Guardian notes, okay.
[01:13:17]  Quote, enemy bullets gave up before reaching page 350, making them believe old tales of soldiers saved by Bibles in their breast pockets.
[01:13:26]  I think I killed a fascist, Kornford, a former pacifist, wrote excitedly to his girlfriend, Margot Heinemann, on 8th December.
[01:13:34]  15 or 16 of them were running from a bombardment.
[01:13:36]  If it is true, it's a fluke.
[01:13:39]  That's wow.
[01:13:41]  Yeah, yeah, building with this entire like building barricades out of philosophy books to stop fascist bullets.
[01:13:48]  Yeah, it's incredible.
[01:13:50]  Yes, that is punk rock.
[01:13:52]  He was like, yeah, let's stop that about page 360.
[01:13:55]  That's about as far as they can get.
[01:13:56]  Yeah.
[01:13:57]  Yes.
[01:14:00]  Now, the achievement of the international brigades at University City turned them into a symbol, both in Spain and worldwide, of resistance to fascism.
[01:14:08]  They also received more international attention because their numbers included men who spoke dozens of different languages.
[01:14:13]  There were like 54 nations represented eventually.
[01:14:16]  And this made it really easy for the foreign press to embed with people because they could find people that they could talk to.
[01:14:22]  You know, like just speaking of someone who's done warzone reporting, if there's a group of people like that that I can embed with, that's what I'm going to do because I'll meet other people who are English speakers and it's way easier to conduct interviews and stuff that totally.
[01:14:34]  And of course, the United States was well represented among the international volunteers.
[01:14:39]  Now, it was very illegal for U.S. citizens to join a foreign military force at this time.
[01:14:45]  But still, hundreds and hundreds joined what came to be known as the Abraham Lincoln Battalion.
[01:14:50]  These soldiers underwent two weeks of clandestine training near New York City before shipping out.
[01:14:55]  New York, by the way, was the source of a huge number of Lincoln Battalion troops.
[01:14:59]  It is worth noting that about one-tenth of foreign Spanish volunteers were Jewish.
[01:15:04]  So of all of the people who could like, and again, it's the same thing as the polls, a lot of Jewish folks are like looking at Nazi Germany and like, we should probably go do something about this, huh?
[01:15:12]  This is going to be a problem.
[01:15:13]  This is going to be a problem for us, I think.
[01:15:16]  And in fact, American historian and international veteran Albert Prago called the international brigades, quote, the vehicle through which Jews could offer the first armed resistance to European fascism.
[01:15:28]  And that's pretty rad.
[01:15:30]  Now, one of the most notable aspects of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion is that in an era in which racism was almost unbelievably present in American society, an era in which even the military was heavily segregated, the Abraham Lincoln Battalion was completely unsegregated.
[01:15:46]  Black men could not only join, they could become officers and command white troops in battle.
[01:15:51]  And this had never happened in U.S. history at this point that I am aware of.
[01:15:54]  This brings me to the incredible story of Elwood Luchel McDaniels.
[01:15:59]  And I'm going to quote from a write-up in the Smithsonian magazine here.
[01:16:03]  Elward Luchel McDaniels traveled across the Atlantic in 1937 to fight fascists in the Spanish Civil War, where he became known as El Fantastico for his prowess with a grenade.
[01:16:13]  As a platoon sergeant with the McKinsey Papineau Battalion of the International Brigades, the 25-year-old African American from Mississippi commanded white troops and led them into battle against the forces of General Franco, men who saw him as less than human.
[01:16:26]  It might seem strange for a black man to go to such lengths to fight in a white man's war so far from home.
[01:16:32]  Wasn't there enough racism to fight in the United States?
[01:16:34]  But McDaniels was convinced that anti-fascism and anti-racism were one and the same.
[01:16:39]  I saw the invaders of Spain were the same people I've been fighting all my life, McDaniels says.
[01:16:45]  I've seen lynching and starvation, and I know my people's enemies.
[01:16:49]  Let's go.
[01:16:50]  First of all, that poor man's last name is McDaniels, which already tells you something.
[01:16:55]  Yep.
[01:16:55]  You know what I'm saying?
[01:16:57]  So we know his family story.
[01:16:58]  You know what I'm saying?
[01:17:00]  And yeah, that just and the finesse of just the culture that you get there and get a nickname immediately.
[01:17:06]  You know what I'm saying?
[01:17:07]  Like El Fantastico.
[01:17:08]  Because you're really good at killing fascists with grenades.
[01:17:11]  Why?
[01:17:11]  Because I'm good at this shit, nigga.
[01:17:12]  You know what I'm saying?
[01:17:13]  Oh, dang, that's crazy.
[01:17:15]  I was going to say that, yeah, that like astute, like, you know, like the observation of just like, where we're just like, look, man, you got to trust us.
[01:17:26]  Like, I'm trying to tell you this is the same is It's Samesies.
[01:17:29]  Like, this is the same people.
[01:17:30]  This is the same people.
[01:17:32]  That's what I'm trying to tell you.
[01:17:33]  It's the same problem.
[01:17:34]  Yeah.
[01:17:36]  Now, the United States in this period also banned black men from serving as fighter pilots.
[01:17:40]  But three black pilots, James Peck, Patrick Roosevelt, and Paul Williams, served in Spain.
[01:17:46]  Knut Wilson, a black American volunteer, was the head mechanic for the International Garage, which maintained all of the brigade's fighting vehicles.
[01:17:53]  He wrote this of his reasons for volunteering to fight in Spain in a letter home to his family.
[01:17:59]  We are no longer an isolated minority group fighting hopelessly against an immense giant, because, my dear, we have joined with and become an active part of a great progressive force on whose soldiers rests the responsibility of saving human civilization from the planned destruction of a small group of degenerates gone mad in their lust for power.
[01:18:19]  Because if we crush fascism here, we'll save our people in America and in other parts of the world from the vicious persecution, wholesale imprisonment, and slaughter which the Jewish people suffered and are suffering under Hitler's fascist heels.
[01:18:33]  That is, that is sentence, dog.
[01:18:35]  That is, that is, sheesh.
[01:18:38]  I think there's like this, like, there's this part of this like longing, and I'm going to speak in like generalities, uh, but just this longing in that, like that African-American, like the black community, I think that's gone that goes very far back to say, surely not all white people are like this.
[01:18:56]  Yeah.
[01:18:56]  You know what I'm saying?
[01:18:57]  Like, you had, you're like, it can't be, it can't be all of y'all.
[01:19:02]  You know what I'm saying?
[01:19:03]  So, like, when you, when you find, like, I, I'm, I mean, obviously, I'm, I'm hearkening back to history, but when you like, like, when you see, when you see, uh, during like the, the Harlem Renaissance, you see black people going to going to France and being like, look, there's reasonable white people.
[01:19:20]  Like, I'm telling you, they're, they have to exist.
[01:19:23]  You know what I'm saying?
[01:19:24]  There has, it has to exist.
[01:19:27]  You know what I'm saying?
[01:19:27]  So, like, it's, it's almost like I hear that in this guy's statement.
[01:19:32]  It's like, look, dude, I found them.

=== The Undisciplined Militia Mob (05:44) ===

[01:19:34]  I found them.
[01:19:35]  Reasonable white people.
[01:19:36]  Yeah.
[01:19:37]  Well, and speaking about, you know, the fact that Elleward's last name is McDaniels, right?
[01:19:41]  That probably means that like an Irish person owned his ancestors.
[01:19:46]  Not all that far back.
[01:19:47]  We're talking about like 19, like let, like very, not all that long ago, like his grandpa.
[01:19:51]  Yeah.
[01:19:52]  Yeah.
[01:19:53]  Now, because of the realities of the war being what it were, there were a fuckload of Irish volunteers and Irish American volunteers, which means it's conceivable, like part of what probably happened here is he was leading Irish men, Irish descendant men into battle.
[01:20:09]  This man who had been enslaved by an Irish descendant leading them into combat, which is amazing shit happens in this world.
[01:20:15]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:20:16]  Yeah.
[01:20:17]  Now, during its brief, and yeah, it's it's amazing in some ways.
[01:20:22]  You know, yeah, yeah.
[01:20:23]  During its brief period of existence, wartime Republican Spain was in some ways almost impossibly progressive.
[01:20:29]  In 1936, Largo Caballero appointed Federica Montseni, a female anarchist, to be the nation's minister of health.
[01:20:37]  Federica immediately set to work focusing the embattled nation's health infrastructure to serve the needs of the poor and the working class.
[01:20:44]  She believed that healthcare should be decentralized, locally organized, and based around prevention rather than treatment.
[01:20:50]  She was also responsible for making Republican Spain the first nation on earth to legalize on-demand abortion.
[01:20:57]  Wow.
[01:20:57]  Yeah.
[01:20:58]  Now, yeah, a lot of really interesting shit is happening.
[01:21:02]  Yeah.
[01:21:03]  Now, Montseni was a controversial figure among anarchists, and she engaged in some pretty vicious arguments with Emma Goldman, who's another very famous anarchist in particular.
[01:21:12]  And the general focus of criticism on Montseni and other anarchists who take part in the Republican government is on the subject of whether or not it was ethical for anarchists to coordinate with governments and with Marxists.
[01:21:23]  Because obviously in the Soviet Union, they kill a fuckload of anarchists too, you know?
[01:21:27]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:21:28]  This is a recurring theme in anarchist history, and it's something that's very hotly debated to this day.
[01:21:33]  I could note here that Nestor Makhno, who we talked about in our Christmas episode, also had to thread this moral needle because he collaborated with the post-revolutionary government of Russia, which he didn't like, to fight against the white forces, which were worse.
[01:21:46]  You know, it's a debate that anarchists have had a number of times in history and is never really settled to a satisfactory degree, but it happens.
[01:21:54]  Now, a decent number of the anarchists who fought for Republican Spain would in fact come to regret their collaboration with the government and the communists.
[01:22:01]  And they had some good reasons to do that.
[01:22:03]  For one thing, Republican Spain lost the war.
[01:22:06]  For another thing, the broad left unity that characterized some of the early stages of the war did not last.
[01:22:13]  The government of Republican Spain, which did at one point include four anarchist ministers, as well as a number of communists and, of course, many more moderate Republicans, made a lot of tremendous errors.
[01:22:22]  For one thing, the government fled Madrid while Franco was advancing, something which hampered their ability to capitalize on the moral victory of halting the fascists, right?
[01:22:31]  Yeah.
[01:22:31]  You can't brag about it as much because you ran away, you know?
[01:22:34]  But you ran, though.
[01:22:35]  Yeah.
[01:22:36]  For another reason, starting in late 1936, the Republic's new government embarked on what they called militarization.
[01:22:42]  This involved integrating the hundreds of different militias into the formal Spanish military.
[01:22:47]  Now, on the surface, this was a sensible call, and it may have been the right one.
[01:22:50]  And it was one that was heavily backed by communist advisors the USSR had sent in.
[01:22:54]  Many historians will argue that it was necessary.
[01:22:58]  And some of the evidence for this is that like in February of 1937, Malaga fell due in part to the fact that it was defended by a patchwork of militias that were not well coordinated.
[01:23:08]  But these militias that are being inducted into the formal military establishment, a lot of them had been, again, anarchist and Trotskyist, and they'd been free democratic fighting units.
[01:23:17]  This led to problems.
[01:23:19]  And there were cases where, you know, like whole battalions would vote to leave combat zones while the fighting was happening.
[01:23:24]  This happened in the Battle of Madrid when a guy named Darudi gets killed with like his guys leave.
[01:23:30]  But it also meant, so it's not like obviously before militarization, they decide to militarize because there's a lot of problems with the fact that all these militias are so decentralized.
[01:23:39]  These militias are also very motivated and very resistant to the idea of losing their democratic rights and brought under military discipline.
[01:23:47]  So while a lot of militias were integrated to the Republican military, a significant number of fighters refused to join.
[01:23:54]  And whether or not this was a good idea is still hotly debated.
[01:23:58]  And George, a lot of people will argue that, because there's kind of a broad consensus, I would say, among a lot of historians I read that after the initial period where they were necessary, the militias kind of hindered things more than they helped because of how disorganized they were.
[01:24:11]  George Orwell himself argued against that and argued in his opinion, at least, and he was, you know, his opinion was as a ground-level soldier, that the shortcomings of the militia system had less to do with the fact that they were democratic and decentralized and more to do with the fact that they were inexperienced.
[01:24:28]  And I'm going to quote Orwell here.
[01:24:30]  It's a good argument.
[01:24:31]  Later, it became the fashion to decry the militias and therefore to pretend that the faults which were due to lack of training and weapons were the result of the equalitarian system.
[01:24:40]  Actually, a newly raised draft of militia was an undisciplined mob, not because the officers called the private comrade, but because raw troops are always an undisciplined mob.
[01:24:49]  In a workers' army, discipline is theoretically based on class loyalty, while the discipline of a bourgeoisie conscript army is based ultimately on fear.
[01:24:57]  The popular army that replaced the militias was midway between the two types.
[01:25:00]  When a man refused to obey an order, you did not immediately get him punished.
[01:25:04]  You first appealed to him in the name of comradeship.
[01:25:07]  Cynical people with no experience handling men will say instantly that this would never work, but as a matter of fact, it does work in the long run.
[01:25:14]  Revolutionary discipline depends on an understanding of why orders must be obeyed.

=== Discipline Based on Class Loyalty (03:03) ===

[01:25:19]  It takes time to diffuse this, but it also takes time to drill a man into an automaton on the barrack square.
[01:25:24]  And it is a tribute to the strength of the revolutionary discipline that the militia stayed in the field at all.
[01:25:29]  And Orwell has a good point here.
[01:25:32]  That's a, that's a whole, there's a whole like worldview philosophy in those two approaches.
[01:25:41]  I'm about to compare this to parenting.
[01:25:45]  No, yeah.
[01:25:45]  But yeah, because like there's parts of me that go, man, if I just parented the way I was parented, I see why my parents, it's quicker.
[01:25:57]  You know what I'm saying?
[01:25:58]  It's like, you know, you're just, it's like, it's less emotional work to just be like, hey, it's time to do the dishes.
[01:26:05]  Why?
[01:26:06]  What?
[01:26:07]  Yeah.
[01:26:08]  Why?
[01:26:09]  You understand what I'm saying?
[01:26:11]  Do this.
[01:26:12]  You got five seconds to get up and do the dishes.
[01:26:14]  You know what I'm saying?
[01:26:15]  Right.
[01:26:16]  So, and I'm like, y'all don't care if you scrunch up your face how you want to scrunch up your face.
[01:26:20]  You better hide your emotions.
[01:26:22]  I don't need to see it.
[01:26:22]  You know what I'm saying?
[01:26:23]  Like that you live here.
[01:26:26]  You washing dishes I bought.
[01:26:28]  I'm using using water.
[01:26:30]  I'm paying for.
[01:26:30]  I'm sorry.
[01:26:31]  I'm black dadding on you.
[01:26:32]  But like, that's the way we was raised.
[01:26:34]  You know what I'm saying?
[01:26:35]  So like, but it's just like, but I know the whole time I'm doing this, I'm just like, man, I can't wait to get out this house, man.
[01:26:42]  You always, you know what I'm saying?
[01:26:44]  Like, I'm just salty.
[01:26:45]  I'm going to do it.
[01:26:46]  And I'm not going to say nothing to it.
[01:26:48]  Yes, sir.
[01:26:48]  You know what I'm saying?
[01:26:49]  But like, I don't like you.
[01:26:52]  I don't respect this shit.
[01:26:53]  You understand what I'm saying?
[01:26:54]  I'm not doing this because I understand that the dishes are dirty.
[01:26:58]  I'm doing this because I don't want to hear your mouth.
[01:27:01]  You know what I'm saying?
[01:27:02]  I don't want the consequences.
[01:27:05]  With my child now, it's like, hey, we have budgeted the amount of money we have for our water bill, which means that we can run our dishwasher this many times.
[01:27:19]  We need it by, it needs to happen by two because when we start cooking dinner, since we in this quarantine, we need to have clean dishes to do this or it's going to pile up.
[01:27:28]  And now it's going to be two runs instead of one.
[01:27:30]  So like, you got to make sure you finish this by two so we can have plates to eat off when it's time for dinner.
[01:27:35]  She goes, all right.
[01:27:38]  And it's like, and so now it's like, I've included you into this.
[01:27:42]  So you have a stake into like, it's not me being a bully.
[01:27:46]  It's just, I mean, this is functional.
[01:27:49]  Like we need, we, we need plates to eat off and the dishes are your chore.
[01:27:54]  So just so do it.
[01:27:56]  Yeah.
[01:27:56]  So just do it.
[01:27:57]  You know what I'm saying?
[01:27:57]  And it, and when she tells me she don't feel like it, like now I'm not appealing to like, well, I'm your father.
[01:28:03]  You do it because I tell you to.
[01:28:05]  I'm appealing to like, yeah, you're right.
[01:28:07]  I don't feel like doing it either, but I also want something to eat off on dinner.
[01:28:10]  You know what I'm saying?
[01:28:11]  So she's like, all right, well, you know what I'm saying?
[01:28:13]  Like, so and I think, yeah, you can make an argument that like, you know, you get the dishes done faster if you're just the, if you don't do the dishes, there's fucking consequences.

=== Guernica and the Food Myth (15:18) ===

[01:28:22]  Yeah.
[01:28:22]  Then if you explain why it's necessary.
[01:28:24]  Yeah.
[01:28:25]  The long term results are probably better.
[01:28:28]  The long term is probably better.
[01:28:30]  So now it's like, now she actually, you know, if some drama going on with her little friends, she's actually willing to talk to me.
[01:28:38]  You know what I'm saying?
[01:28:39]  Rather than being like, this is just an authoritarian ruler that tells me what to do all the time.
[01:28:43]  Orwell's argument is that like the long term would have been better if they had stuck with a militia system, maybe with some reforms and stuff.
[01:28:50]  Now, and again, a lot of why a lot of historians will kind of just assume like, yeah, it was bad, like that the militia system like needed to be reformed.
[01:28:59]  It needed to be militarized.
[01:29:00]  It was the only way to do things.
[01:29:02]  It's what the communists felt.
[01:29:03]  It's what most of like the centrists and stuff felt.
[01:29:07]  And, you know, there's very strong arguments to be made that that's true just based on military history.
[01:29:14]  There's also strong arguments to be made that, like, well, you guys were just like, that's what all of you assumed because all of you are the kind of people who are in favor of some form of centralized state and in favor of thus why of a centralized military and that you're listening to like standard military people's attitudes, which aren't always right.
[01:29:33]  And maybe this could have worked.
[01:29:34]  And other things, systems like it have worked in other militaries for different periods of time.
[01:29:39]  I get interesting results when I bring up the idea of a democratically that votes democratically on its officers.
[01:29:48]  Wow.
[01:29:48]  When I talk, because that's how these militias worked.
[01:29:51]  And I've talked to some friends of mine who are veterans.
[01:29:53]  And it's interesting.
[01:29:54]  Some people say, I don't see how that could work.
[01:29:56]  I've had a good friend of mine who is a veteran say, oh, you know what?
[01:29:59]  That makes sense because when you've been in combat with a group of people, you know who you trust to give orders.
[01:30:06]  You know who you trust.
[01:30:07]  That's what I was going to say.
[01:30:08]  Yeah.
[01:30:08]  Yeah.
[01:30:09]  It's like, I know you got the ranks, but I'm listening to him because this guy kept me alive.
[01:30:14]  Yeah, exactly.
[01:30:15]  So sure, yes, sir.
[01:30:16]  I'm not going to.
[01:30:18]  I'm certainly not going to say I know more about this than a number of historians who will say that militarization was really the only option they had.
[01:30:25]  I'm just saying there's argument about that and it's something you should read about.
[01:30:28]  I'm not going to make a harsh stance on it because I'm not an expert on war or an expert on the Spanish Civil War.
[01:30:36]  There is something to be said at least to make sure that your militia knows what they're doing.
[01:30:40]  Yeah, absolutely.
[01:30:41]  Some level of fighting that needs to happen.
[01:30:43]  At least some level of cohesiveness of communication.
[01:30:46]  Seems like it has to be necessary.
[01:30:48]  There has to be.
[01:30:48]  There's some degree.
[01:30:49]  You at least need like a centralized communication network to make sure people know.
[01:30:52]  But I think anyway, one of the tragedies of the Spanish Civil War is that there's a lot of cool what-ifs that because there's this horrible war happening, nobody gets the time to really figure out, right?
[01:31:03]  Maybe this could have worked if they hadn't been at the edge of extermination, right?
[01:31:07]  Yeah, if we weren't facing imminent.
[01:31:09]  Yeah.
[01:31:10]  Now, the unrest between anarchists and Trotskyists and communists within Republican Spain eventually led to bloodshed in the streets of Barcelona as anarchist and Trotskyist militants fought in the streets against communists and socialists.
[01:31:22]  This write-up from the New Left Review does, I think, a fair job of explaining how this all got underway.
[01:31:28]  Quote: Under the revolutionary ferment, a struggle for power and control of scarce arms was being waged.
[01:31:33]  That was the real meaning of the Barcelona fighting.
[01:31:35]  The Communist Party's increasing influence in the army and political life and the growth of its membership due mainly to Soviet aid, direct government intervention finally stopped the fighting in the streets and shortly thereafter ended the revolution's consolidation.
[01:31:48]  That is, ended the anarchist and sort of Trotskyist, the far-left, like gaining of power, taking of businesses, all that sort of stuff.
[01:31:56]  The immediate beneficiary of the crisis was Juan Nigrin, a 45-year-old socialist physiologist, polyglot, and acknowledged expert in financial affairs.
[01:32:04]  As treasury minister, he organized the dispatch of gold to Moscow, whom President Azana appointed prime minister to put an end to the indiscipline and disarray in the rear guard, especially in Catalonia and Aragon.
[01:32:15]  The government took over public order in Catalonia, dissolved the anarchist-dominated Council of Aragon, and sent Enrique Lister's Communist Army Division to break up the rural Aragonese collectives.
[01:32:25]  More easily expedited, the POUM, Trotskyist, which is the Trotskyist militia, which they called Trotskyist provocateurs and fascist spies, clamored the Spanish Communist Party, was outlawed.
[01:32:35]  Its army division disbanded, and its leader, Andrew Nin, one of Trotsky's former secretaries, was disappeared.
[01:32:41]  In fact, kidnapped and murdered by the NKVD.
[01:32:44]  The affair further deepened the distrust between communists and the rest of the political organizations, especially the anarchists and left socialists.
[01:32:51]  And it made clear, too, the Republic's serious ongoing problems of internal political discord, which were a considerable stumbling block to winning the war.
[01:32:58]  On the other side of the lines, there was no such problem.
[01:33:01]  Franco, by now head of the so-called nationalist side, crushed dissent in the bud, forcibly uniting the Falange and Carlists, the only permitted civilian political organizations.
[01:33:12]  Now, and there's a lot of debate about what happens in Barcelona.
[01:33:15]  Orwell was there for most of this part.
[01:33:17]  He took part in the fighting in Barcelona, and he was with the POUM.
[01:33:21]  He was with the Strotskyist militia.
[01:33:22]  And his recollections of the purging of the POUM are available for free in his book Homage to Catalonia.
[01:33:29]  He reserves tremendous criticisms for the Communist Party, in large part because they murdered some of his friends.
[01:33:34]  There are, of course, very good critiques of Orwell's narrow perspective in this because he's on the ground.
[01:33:40]  And long after the war, he would admit himself that he was somewhat myopic and unfair to the Republican government and to the communists in this.
[01:33:47]  Critics will point out that the CNT and the POUM undermined coordination and unity in the Republic, and that the violence certain anarchists carried out against the clergy in particular helped dissuade foreign governments from wanting to help.
[01:33:58]  So, this is again a complicated issue, but the fact that the left is literally in fighting here is a big part of what undermines their ability to fight the fascists.
[01:34:08]  Although historians are very split as to how much of a factor the behavior of the Spanish communists, or which were directed by Moscow, played in the Republican defeat.
[01:34:18]  Julian Casanova directly credits the Republic's defeat mostly to the international situation.
[01:34:23]  So, he says you can talk about what the communists did wrong, what the anarchists did wrong.
[01:34:27]  The reason Republic and Spain lost is because nobody helped them out except for the communists a bit, whereas the fascists had two modern states throwing huge amounts of aid and military forces in, right?
[01:34:38]  That's why they lost.
[01:34:39]  It's like you could debate who made mistakes.
[01:34:42]  Everybody made mistakes.
[01:34:43]  They lost because nobody like almost only the communists helped them.
[01:34:47]  And, you know, you just outman.
[01:34:50]  Yeah, the fascists had a lot more help, you know?
[01:34:52]  Yeah.
[01:34:52]  Yeah.
[01:34:53]  Now, while I think it's fair to criticize the nature of the help the USSR sent, both in its reduced quantity relative to the fascists and the fact that it made the Republic pay up front, you have to be fair here and note that the Russian Civil War had not been over for all that long when the Spanish Civil War started.
[01:35:08]  And like 9 million people had died in that country after 9 million had died in World War I.
[01:35:12]  And it was fucking devastated.
[01:35:14]  Italy and Germany were in comparatively better shape and able to provide more aid.
[01:35:18]  Now, British military historian Anthony Beaver, however, does blame the Republic's high command, which was communist-dominated, and Soviet military advisors for their quote disastrous conduct of the war.
[01:35:30]  And he has some very fair critiques here.
[01:35:32]  He criticizes them for engaging in multiple disastrous conventional offensives, which were this happened a few times.
[01:35:37]  They'd get a huge number of soldiers together, most of which were not super well trained, and send them on these massive offensives that they would get mowed down.
[01:35:46]  And the purpose of this was for propaganda, to be able to show, look, we're advancing against the fascists.
[01:35:51]  And of course, the fascists are better armed and trained and would just dig in and massacre these people.
[01:35:56]  And Anthony Beaver will argue that this series of horrible, horrible decisions taken for mainly propaganda, quote, gradually destroyed the Republic's army and resistance.
[01:36:08]  Now, no matter what kind of leftist or liberal or whatever you happen to be, there are aspects of your ideology that should be challenged by observing the way the Spanish Civil War went.
[01:36:18]  Speaking as an anarchist, it is impossible to ignore the fact that the fascists had the great advantage of centralized control and particularly food distribution.
[01:36:27]  Meanwhile, Republican territories had more than 2,500 independent food collectives.
[01:36:32]  Workers in many of these collectives were hostile to the government because they were anarchists.
[01:36:36]  And in some areas, money had been entirely abolished.
[01:36:39]  And since money did exist in the rest of the Republic, that made cooperation difficult.
[01:36:44]  Food shortages were common in the republic, and this also contributed to their defeat.
[01:36:50]  And again, it's the kind of thing where like this system of local sort of food exchanges might have worked if they might have figured out how to make it work had there not been a war on it.
[01:36:58]  But it is hard to beta test an entire system of social organization while fighting a war of extermination.
[01:37:06]  Yeah, it's hard to get hungry people to fight for you.
[01:37:10]  You know what I'm saying?
[01:37:11]  Like, if we're hungry, it's like, well, I don't know who got the food.
[01:37:15]  And it's worth noting that of all the people fighting, you know, about half of the prisoners of war the fascists took wound up fighting for the fascists.
[01:37:23]  They were organized into fighting units.
[01:37:26]  And a significant number of the captured fascists wound up fighting in units for the Republic.
[01:37:31]  So, like, that happened on both sides.
[01:37:32]  A lot of these guys are just dudes, you know.
[01:37:35]  They're not all like the internet.
[01:37:36]  The international volunteers tend to be very ideological.
[01:37:39]  That's not the case with a lot of soldiers.
[01:37:41]  In early 1937, Franco's forces had recovered from their defeat outside of Madrid and they launched an invasion of the northern Basque territories of the Republic.
[01:37:49]  The success of this offensive is largely credited to the Condor Legion, a German-led air force that spent the Spanish Civil War experimenting with new techniques the Luftwaffe would later use.
[01:37:59]  This experimentation started in earnest with the bombing of Madrid in 1936, which killed and wounded a lot of civilians, like hundreds of people killed and wounded, but did nothing but harden Republican resistance.
[01:38:10]  And the Germans realize this.
[01:38:12]  Like the guys in charge of the Condor Legion are like, just bombing a bunch of civilian targets seems to piss them off and make them want to fight harder.
[01:38:19]  Perhaps that's not the best tactic.
[01:38:21]  Now, several cities were bombarded by the Condor Legion during the advance into Basque territory, leading to a lot of civilian casualties.
[01:38:28]  But none of these bombings were more famous than the city of Guernica.
[01:38:32]  And there's significant debate over Guernica as well.
[01:38:34]  Historians will note that the commander of the Condor Legion was more or less abiding by the rules of war, striking at bridges and roads and cities, like aiming primarily for targets of military value.
[01:38:46]  There were civilian casualties because precision bombing is a myth, but the goal was not what's called terror bombing, which they kind of rejected after Madrid.
[01:38:54]  And like this guy goes to trial in Nuremberg, and that is kind of the conclusion of the Allied military: his bombing of Guernica was part of a military action.
[01:39:03]  I'd like you to repeat the line that you said: precision bombing is a myth.
[01:39:08]  Precision bombing is absolutely a myth.
[01:39:10]  As someone who watched Mosul, it is a myth now.
[01:39:13]  It was even more of a myth than.
[01:39:16]  Yes, I have a friend who lives in Iraq and is like, yeah, no, there's no such thing.
[01:39:21]  No, no, you're just blowing up neighborhoods, guys.
[01:39:23]  Yes.
[01:39:23]  Yeah.
[01:39:24]  Yeah.
[01:39:25]  Now, how much of a difference it makes that their goal was not terror bombing?
[01:39:29]  You know, what they did, they killed a fuckload of civilians and leveled a lot of Guernica.
[01:39:33]  And it's horrible, a horrible, horrible thing.
[01:39:36]  I'm not trying to justify it.
[01:39:39]  But what's happened in Guernica, what actually happened and what is kind of like remembered about Guernica are sometimes two different things.
[01:39:45]  Because the bombing of Guernica, for whatever reason, horrifies the entire world.
[01:39:49]  It becomes, and there's what I say for whatever reason, because there are other cities that are bombed in a similar manner that don't get as famous in this period of time.
[01:39:57]  It's not the first time that a civilian population is bombed as a part of a war, but it becomes the most famous.
[01:40:03]  The Republicans made a lot out of it and used it for propaganda purposes.
[01:40:06]  They would claim that 1,600 people had died, a figure that's likely impossible.
[01:40:11]  Because they calculated basically, when you're looking at like civilian casualties, there are calculations you can do to estimate them by estimating the number of people killed per tonnage of bombs dropped.
[01:40:21]  And if 1,600 people died in Guernica, it would have meant that the Condor Legion were killing more civilians than the U.S. did during its bombings of like Dresden, like per tonnage dropped, you know, which is not possible, really.
[01:40:34]  Like, credible death counts range from as low as 150 to the low hundreds, which is terrible.
[01:40:40]  Like, that's hundreds of civilians killed by bombs from the sky.
[01:40:43]  It's horrible.
[01:40:44]  I'm not saying it's not.
[01:40:46]  But again, it's also seen the Republicans see this as a way to, like, oh, this is something we can use to get international support, which we desperately need.
[01:40:55]  And while Republican forces used Guernica to try to generate international sympathy, the fascists used it as a cudgel.
[01:41:01]  When Hitler met with the premier of Austria prior to the Anschluss, which is when they occupy Austria, he brings the commander of the Condor Legion with him as a not so subtle threat to Vienna because the image internationally is that Guernica has been wiped out by the Condor Legion.
[01:41:19]  So Hitler wants this guy sitting next to him so that when he meets with the premier of Austria, this guy's like, they're going to level Vienna if I don't agree to whatever Hitler wants.
[01:41:28]  So Hitler makes a lot of use out of the terrible reputation that the Condor Legion gets, regardless of how much that reputation may or may not be earned.
[01:41:38]  Now, the battle, and I mainly quibble on how terrible the Condor Legion was, because by any objective measure, the United States Air Force was a lot worse in World War II in terms of its willingness to kill civilians, not in terms of its goals, obviously.
[01:41:52]  To blast.
[01:41:53]  Yeah.
[01:41:53]  There's, yeah, I still can't, because I mean, I've never lived in like an actual active war zone, you know, but obviously more humans alive now have lived in active war zones than not.
[01:42:09]  You know what I'm saying?
[01:42:10]  So like, I know that I'm in the minority for that and it's a very privileged position, but I still can picture, or I'm having a hard time wrapping my mind around the idea that like death is coming from the sky.
[01:42:22]  It's fucked up.
[01:42:23]  You know what I'm saying?
[01:42:24]  Like that's a mindfulness.
[01:42:26]  It changes you.
[01:42:27]  I mean, it changes you just to have that experience for a few days.
[01:42:30]  Yeah.
[01:42:32]  It's something else, man.
[01:42:35]  Just like seeing, breathing in the dust that includes pulverized concrete and incinerated bodies from like an airstrike is unreal.
[01:42:46]  That like, yeah, it's a laser from space.
[01:42:48]  Like you can't.
[01:42:49]  Yeah, there's like it's the hammer of God, you know?
[01:42:52]  Yeah.
[01:42:52]  Yeah.
[01:42:53]  It's terrible.
[01:42:54]  Yeah.
[01:42:54]  Terrifying.
[01:42:55]  Yeah.
[01:42:56]  Yeah.
[01:42:56]  Now, the battle over Guernica was very consequential.
[01:43:00]  The city's fall helped enable Franco's forces to cut Republican-held territory in two, so to separate the two chunks of Republican territory, the north from the south.
[01:43:09]  Now, around the same time, the French, like Germany occupies Austria and the French start getting really scared of the Nazis.
[01:43:16]  And so they reopen their border, and this allows thousands of tons of war material to flow into the Republic freely for the first time.
[01:43:22]  And the Republic is able to like gin up a new Republican army made up in part of prisoners of war and conscripts as young as 16.
[01:43:31]  And this, what's known as the Army of the Ebro, launches what would come to be known as the last great Republican assault of the war.
[01:43:37]  And like their other great assaults, it was a fucking disaster.

=== Lessons from Spanish Civil War (10:55) ===

[01:43:40]  30,000 Republican fighters died to just 6,500 fascist casualties.
[01:43:46]  Just an absolute nightmare.
[01:43:48]  Now, the war officially ended in April of 1939 with the unconditional surrender of the Republicans to the fascist Francisco Franco.
[01:43:56]  In the areas the fascists retook, they were as brutal as you might expect.
[01:44:00]  The most egregious example of this happened in August of 1936 in Barayaz, which we talked about earlier.
[01:44:05]  That's where the anarchists and socialists take a huge amount of land and give it to the people.
[01:44:10]  Well, the fascists take back Barayaz and they just, they massacre everyone they can get their fucking hands on.
[01:44:15]  More than 4,000 people, mostly civilians and prisoners, gunned down, including hundreds of people who are dragged into the bull ring to the stadium where they hold bullfights and surrounded by machine guns and just massacred in a circle by the foreign legion.
[01:44:31]  God damn it.
[01:44:32]  Now, brutality knows no allegiance in war.
[01:44:35]  Somewhere around 50,000 civilians were killed in the Republican zone over the course of the war and acts of brutality that many in the Republican government deplored.
[01:44:44]  Federica Montseny described the slaughter as a lust for blood inconceivable in honest man before.
[01:44:50]  But Republic war crimes bore little resemblance to the crimes of the fascists, who in the same period of time murdered more than 130,000 civilians.
[01:44:59]  And those deaths, of course, occurred during the war.
[01:45:02]  During his decades in power, Franco's forced labor, concentration camps, torture, and execution of political enemies led to another 30 to 50,000 deaths.
[01:45:10]  And as we know, that would make Franco one of the less deadly fascist dictators in history.
[01:45:16]  God.
[01:45:17]  But yeah, you can compare the number of people killed.
[01:45:19]  Yeah.
[01:45:20]  What is it about just what?
[01:45:25]  What's the point of being in charge if you kill everybody you're supposed to be in charge of?
[01:45:28]  Because you're killing all the people you don't like that you're supposed to be in charge of.
[01:45:33]  That's easier than arguing.
[01:45:35]  Well, touche.
[01:45:36]  Yeah, I guess.
[01:45:37]  You're right.
[01:45:38]  That's who they're killing.
[01:45:39]  There's like, oh, we just kill people who disagree with us.
[01:45:41]  We just killed people who disagree with us.
[01:45:43]  Yeah.
[01:45:43]  Yeah.
[01:45:43]  Okay.
[01:45:45]  So my bad.
[01:45:45]  I understand your logic now.
[01:45:47]  Yeah.
[01:45:48]  Now, obviously, the Republicans lost their war.
[01:45:51]  But many of the more than 35,000 men who joined the international brigades, and something like 10,000 of them died in the Spanish Civil War, many of those guys would continue fighting fascism in World War II.
[01:46:04]  Some of them fought in the French resistance.
[01:46:06]  Some of them fought in the U.S. Army after being, by the way, when U.S. veterans like Elward come home, they get like spied on by the FBI because they're suspected of being communist sympathizers and stuff.
[01:46:18]  God damn, man.
[01:46:19]  And some of those people, some of that stops when the war starts.
[01:46:22]  People are like, ah, maybe you had a point.
[01:46:24]  It doesn't all stop, but a number of these guys continue fighting.
[01:46:29]  And while they failed in their ultimate goals, the battle cry of the Spanish anti-fascists, they shall not pass or no passeron, still rings loudly in anti-fascist rallies today.
[01:46:40]  And that's, you know, the fight isn't over.
[01:46:44]  They didn't win in Spain.
[01:46:45]  They didn't succeed in turning back fascism and bringing in a new golden age for humanity there.
[01:46:52]  But it didn't end in, the fight didn't end in Spain either, you know, and it continues to this day.
[01:47:00]  Yes, it does.
[01:47:02]  Oh, man.
[01:47:03]  Yeah, let's let that one breathe for a second.
[01:47:06]  Yeah.
[01:47:07]  Okay.
[01:47:09]  Everybody take a deep breath.
[01:47:12]  Yeah.
[01:47:13]  Take a nice deep breath.
[01:47:14]  Anyway, man.
[01:47:17]  So at some point, are we going to talk about when Spain stops being fascist?
[01:47:23]  Yeah, I'm going to do episodes on Franco at some point that will get into that history.
[01:47:28]  But this is also my story about vomiting on the king's limousine.
[01:47:31]  Yeah, this is about fascism.
[01:47:35]  I wanted to talk about how the fascists gained power in Spain.
[01:47:39]  It's a great story.
[01:47:40]  It's such a like, because of, like you said, because of the enormity of other fascist regimes, this guy gets so overlooked, but it's so such a pivotal moment in just even just the meta narrative of what we understand as like Western, modern Western civilization.
[01:48:01]  Like you have to have this moment, you know, if you're not talking about it, it's like you, the storyline, I feel like the storyline doesn't make sense if you're trying to get from World War I to World War II and why all the players are on the play or on the board game the way that they are if you don't include the Spanish Civil War.
[01:48:21]  And you can argue, and a lot of people, historians will, that had the Republic won, we might not have had a second world war because that might have been a check to fascist ambitions.
[01:48:32]  Now, I don't know how much I agree with that.
[01:48:34]  It's certainly arguable that had there been a concerted, had the democracies of the world been willing to take concerted action against the fascists in Spain, that probably would have meant they would have been willing to take concerted actions to stop Hitler from gaining, from taking over Czechoslovakia, Austria, eventually Poland.
[01:48:54]  And then the Nazi state would have collapsed because it was never based on anything but stealing land from other people.
[01:49:02]  And without the ability to do that, it would not have lasted.
[01:49:04]  The economy would have collapsed.
[01:49:06]  There would have been some sort of a revolution.
[01:49:08]  And maybe we would have not had World War II.
[01:49:11]  That's a pretty solid argument you can make.
[01:49:15]  Not obviously any historical debate like that is like, who knows what the truth is.
[01:49:20]  I wonder how the Cold War would have looked if we had at some point.
[01:49:24]  Yeah, or if it would have been.
[01:49:25]  If it happened, yeah.
[01:49:26]  If we'd have been like, I guess the communists aren't like, I mean, it's not that bad.
[01:49:29]  You know what I'm saying?
[01:49:30]  Because like, you know, Stalin, not a big fan of Stalin, but you can argue like, well, one of the best things that happened to Stalin's personal power was World War II.
[01:49:40]  If there's no World War II, and if there's less open conflict between, you know, fascism and communism, does Stalin stay in power?
[01:49:49]  Does the Soviet Union take a different path that maybe more resembles what a lot of the people who fought for it initially wanted?
[01:49:56]  How like, or yeah, I mean, who knows?
[01:49:59]  Or does all of the Western world go to war in Russia and as many people die in an even dumber war?
[01:50:04]  Like, who the fuck knows?
[01:50:06]  Nobody.
[01:50:06]  It's fanfiction right here.
[01:50:08]  Yeah.
[01:50:09]  But it's an interesting conversation to have.
[01:50:12]  And I think like, yeah, I'm always intrigued by some of these like counterfactuals.
[01:50:17]  But, you know, what we, what we know is what happened.
[01:50:19]  What happened is a very flawed alliance of a lot of brave people and a lot of messy people did their best and ultimately failed to stop fascism before the Holocaust.
[01:50:32]  But isn't that all of history?
[01:50:35]  A bunch of messy people and just trying to figure this shit out, man.
[01:50:40]  Damn.
[01:50:41]  Yeah.
[01:50:42]  Damn, Robert.
[01:50:44]  Yeah, there's a lot of lessons in here.
[01:50:45]  A lot of lessons in the story of the Spanish Civil War.
[01:50:48]  And obviously, I'm not, I hope no one takes this as like anything comprehensive or like anything but here's an overview of stuff you might want to read more about.
[01:50:58]  Yeah.
[01:50:59]  Nah, totally.
[01:50:59]  Because I have a lot more reading to do, you know?
[01:51:02]  Yeah.
[01:51:02]  It's, it's, it's, it's important that like, you know, the current American does we, yeah, that, that, like, that, you know, American exceptionalism is such a hell of a drug that like you, we think that all of our issues are unique, you know what I'm saying?
[01:51:22]  Because we're uniquely special.
[01:51:24]  We're God's little boy, you know what I'm saying?
[01:51:26]  So like this stuff is important to know.
[01:51:29]  Like, I mean, we, we hammer it all the time, but just to be like, man, look at all these different moments throughout history.
[01:51:34]  Like, this shit is not new.
[01:51:35]  You know what I'm saying?
[01:51:36]  Like, we are toddlers when it comes to the world scene, you know?
[01:51:40]  So, yeah.
[01:51:41]  Yep.
[01:51:42]  Yeah.
[01:51:43]  And that's, you know, Spain is going through a lot of the same as our colonial, as our power as a colonial nation ebbs as a result of horrible decisions we've made and the fact that colonialism is never a very stable platform.
[01:51:57]  We're dealing with a lot of the same issues that Spain was dealing with, you know, and the ramp up as fascism came to Spain.
[01:52:03]  Because fascism is, in part, a reaction to like fail, failures of colonialism fail like the like, like you need to have some sort of golden age.
[01:52:13]  You can harken back to right.
[01:52:14]  The Italians, the Germans, the Spanish all have that, and so do American fascists, and so, while you should never treat it all as if it's too similar, you also shouldn't ignore that there are some real similarities.
[01:52:26]  Yeah, love it anyway.
[01:52:29]  Anyway, you could.
[01:52:30]  You could follow Sophie at.
[01:52:31]  Why Sophie why hell?
[01:52:34]  Yeah, I threw that one in there.
[01:52:35]  That was a little curveball, you know.
[01:52:40]  Oh god yeah nah, prop hipfop.com.
[01:52:44]  I knew what you was gonna say.
[01:52:45]  Uh, follow me at PROP HIP HOP and I'll be Looking at all y'all's replies, because I tell you what, man, this pod's got some amazing fans and followers.
[01:52:59]  I like y'all.
[01:53:01]  The bestest of the best.
[01:53:03]  You're like, you're weird in the right ways.
[01:53:05]  You know what I'm saying?
[01:53:06]  Like, you know, you know, people like got like a thing.
[01:53:09]  You know, it's like, it's like, you want to, you want to be a little weird.
[01:53:12]  You know, y'all a little weird in the right ways.
[01:53:14]  And I feel like if you're not weird, I'm not a yeah, you know what I'm saying?
[01:53:18]  Like, can't be just, we don't need no like low-sodium, khaki, you know, beige fans.
[01:53:24]  You know what I'm saying?
[01:53:25]  Wonderbread.
[01:53:26]  Nah, man.
[01:53:27]  Y'all not wonderbread.
[01:53:28]  Y'all like brioche.
[01:53:32]  I don't know.
[01:53:33]  I think I'm done.
[01:53:34]  You done cooked my brain, boy.
[01:53:37]  Yeah.
[01:53:39]  I'm cooked and I'm ready to cook another meal for next week when we close out Behind the Insurrections with episodes on the fascists that failed and a retrospective of some anti-fascists throughout history where we'll talk about some fun shit.
[01:53:55]  But that's all for this week.
[01:53:57]  So go read about the international brigades and the anarchist militias of Spain.
[01:54:06]  Read George Orwell's homage to Catalonia.
[01:54:09]  But remember that it's a single dude's perspective who had no understanding of the broader tactical situation because he was just a dude fighting.
[01:54:15]  But there's a lot of great George Orwell talking about what grenades are best to kill people with.
[01:54:20]  George Orwell was very good with grenades.
[01:54:26]  Nobody told me when we were reading 1984 that George Orwell had extensively written about which grenades are best to kill fascists with.

=== George Orwell and Grenades (02:52) ===

[01:54:35]  I probably would have paid much more attention if I knew the man was like I would have paid more attention.
[01:54:40]  Man's good with grenades, you know.
[01:54:42]  Yeah.
[01:54:44]  It's the it's one of the coolest things you can be good with.
[01:54:46]  That's why they called that other date out fantastic.
[01:54:49]  Come on, you know, come on, Miss Yeah, you know, Mr. Williams.
[01:54:52]  Who was my who was my teacher?
[01:54:54]  Yeah, Mr. Palicki.
[01:54:55]  It was Mr. Palicki, Polish dude.
[01:54:56]  I was like, man, you should have led with that, man.
[01:54:58]  Lead with the fact that the guys gave a grenade.
[01:55:00]  Lead with the grenades.
[01:55:02]  Jesus.
[01:55:03]  All right.
[01:55:06]  Pod's over.
[01:55:07]  Bye.
[01:55:13]  When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
[01:55:21]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[01:55:24]  He is not going to get away with this.
[01:55:26]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[01:55:28]  We always say that: trust your girlfriends.
[01:55:32]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[01:55:34]  Trust me, babe.
[01:55:35]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:55:45]  I'm Lori Siegel, and this is Mostly Human, a tech podcast through a human lens.
[01:55:49]  This week, an interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
[01:55:53]  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.
[01:56:00]  An in-depth conversation with a man who's shaping our future.
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[01:56:20]  Check out my newest episode with Josh Groban.
[01:56:23]  You related to the Phantom at that point.
[01:56:26]  Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
[01:56:28]  That's so funny.
[01:56:30]  Share stay with me each night, each morning.
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[01:56:47]  My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
[01:56:52]  My dad gave me the best advice ever.
[01:56:55]  He goes, just give it a shot.
[01:56:56]  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.
[01:57:03]  If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
[01:57:05]  It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hanging in there.
[01:57:13]  Yeah, it would not be.
[01:57:15]  Right, it wouldn't be that.
[01:57:16]  There's a lot of life.
[01:57:17]  Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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