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Dec. 28, 2023 - Human Events Daily - Jack Posobiec

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EPISODE 636: CHRONICLES OF THE REVOLUTION — THE LAST CRUSADE

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	This is Human Events with your host, Jack Posobiec.
	Deliver us from evil!
	Alright, Jack Posobiec here, Human Events, special edition.
	We've been running through Chronicles of the Revolution, and this episode, this installment, is one of the most important ones, and one of the ones that I really wanted to get to because In many ways, this is something, a story where people have heard of it, conservatives may have heard of it, Americans may have heard of it, Westerners, and yet this specific story Is told completely backwards.
	Everything you know about this is wrong.
	Everything you were taught about this was wrong.
	And we are going to attempt today to correct the record.
	Because today's installment of Chronicles of the Revolution is The Last Crusade.
	The Spanish Civil War.
	And I'd like to read for you just from that book by Warren H. Carroll, The Last Crusade.
	I'll open with this.
	Crusade means a war for the sake of the cross, a war to protect Christian people from persecution and death on account of their faith in Jesus Christ.
	Everyone has heard of the Crusades of the Middle Ages, but few know of the Crusade in our time, which living men still remember, fought for the same purpose only, well, 60 years ago when it was published in Spain.
	In just six months of the year 1936, so from January to June 1936, 13 bishops and nearly 7,000 priests, seminarians, monks, and nuns were turned into bloodied martyrs in Spain by the communist enemies of Christianity.
	It was the greatest clerical bloodshed in so short a time since the persecutions of the Church of Ancient Rome.
	Already Pope John Paul II has beatified some 200 of these martyrs.
	Tens of thousands of churches, chapels, and shrines in Spain were pillaged and destroyed.
	Nuns were raped on alders in front of the priests.
	In response, faithful Spanish Catholics proclaimed a crusade.
	Against all odds, the crusaders triumphed, and the church and the faith in Spain were saved.
	This is a story of that crusade, now honored in no other book in print in the English language.
	Most people who know of the Spanish Civil War do not understand why it was fought or how it was really won.
	This book will tell you there is no story like it in the history of the 20th century.
	That's The Last Crusade, Warren H. Carroll, as recommended by today's co-host and also the co-host of ThoughtCrime, Blake Neff.
	Hey Jack, good to see you.
	Good to see you.
	Hey, so, you know, why is it that when I, and like, I'm Catholic, you know, so raised Catholic, family's Catholic, you know, we're Polish, we pretty much come in one flavor.
	Nobody talks about the Spanish Civil War like this.
	We were all forced to read For Whom the Bell Tolls by Hemingway in usually high school or maybe elementary school, grade school.
	Other people might know about the Orwell book on the Spanish Civil War.
	Emma Goldman, who's a well-known communist anarchist writer who was deported from the United States for Her, uh, for being a foreign anarchist, um, who, uh, certainly played a role, I'm not gonna say incited, but certainly played a role in the assassination of a U.S.
	President, President McKinley, uh, which I wrote about in my Antifa book, Stories from Inside the Black Block.
	Uh, she plays a massive role in the propaganda side of the communists here.
	And so why is it the Spanish Civil War is just so lied about and nobody would ever look at it as a war of Christianity versus communism in the West?
	It's really fascinating.
	You know, the line you'll hear is, history is written by the winners.
	And at a minimum, the Spanish Civil War is the exception that proves the rule, if it doesn't just smash the myth to pieces entirely.
	Because as far as wars go, it's hard to think of one Where the narrative is so heavily controlled by one side, and it's the side that lost, and to a substantial degree, the side that badly discredits itself in the act of losing.
	The Spanish Civil War, just as a general background for people who aren't super familiar with it, it's fought 1936 to 1939, and it's often best understood as sort of a prelude to World War II, and that's probably the biggest reason it doesn't get presented any other way.
	Has a lot of social turmoil in the 20s and 30s.
	It's split between a very radical left and a more conservative traditional right.
	And they have an election, I want to say in late 1935.
	And this conflict breaks out after an election where the left wins.
	And it's often as a result presented as between the forces of fascism and the forces of democracy.
	And it's such a dramatic oversimplification simply because The election itself that is supposedly democratic is this complete, you know, bleep show, as you were, about, you know, between, you know, the left essentially openly says if they don't win they're going to, you know, launch a violent revolution anyway.
	It's that sort of environment.
	You have an extremely anti-clerical government in Spain with very, very left-wing views.
	It's not simply like, oh, this is a fight for democracy.
	Like, you have a lot of communists.
	They want to do a red revolution in Spain.
	And actually to piggyback off of, if people are watching these in order, we talked about how at sort of the end of the Russian revolution, the common turn gets set up in communist Russia.
	And they say, hey, we did it here in Russia, we have all this power.
	Now we need to export this abroad.
	So they try to They try to get in Poland, Poland blocks them from coming in, but then here they are about, you know, 15 years after that, and suddenly, okay, let's go in and start funding the communist factions in Spain.
	And so you see a ton of communists funded from the Soviet Union, who again has this huge state apparatus behind them, funding intelligence, funding these factions, funding terrorist groups, all throughout Spain, in order to prop up this new, what they call the Republican government, But you really see it's just a hodgepodge of anarchists and communists and which attracts many of the western anarchists and communists that then go on later to write about this.
	The whole country is in a state of massive turmoil and so what stands out about it is the winning side, the right side, in the Spanish Civil War will be portrayed as fascist but one thing that's interesting about it is it's a successful counter-revolution and it's It's almost devoid of ideology.
	It's like everyone who just is against what's going on.
	It's a big tent military coup, essentially, that there's massive anarchy in the country after the election, and you get a collection in the Spanish army that just says, this country is out of control, we need to stop this.
	So they attempt a military coup in Spain, and this is how it starts.
	And the plan was just overthrow the government and have it, you know, a normal coup, take over the government, no civil war.
	And instead, It only halfway succeeds.
	They take about maybe a quarter to a third of the country.
	And then what they do is there's a Spanish army in Africa where they still have a lot of Morocco under their control.
	And they put all of these African soldiers on planes and they fly them into Spain and they're basically the only regular soldiers in Spain.
	And so a few thousand guys just sweep over half of the country and you end up in the battle lines of the Spanish Civil War, where it's sort of the Western parts of the country.
	The relatively conservative parts of Spain largely align with the anti-communist groups, and then the left controls Madrid, it controls Catalonia, it controls a lot of the big cities, and it eventually incorporates, yeah, all of these anarchists, all of these communist movements, and that ends up being what defines the Spanish Civil War as an interesting conflict to study.
	It's not just a war between left and right.
	It ultimately becomes a great example of how the left always ends up ripping itself apart, because the biggest reason they lose this war is the left can't agree on anything, and they're shooting each other constantly.
	You know, I've been recommending a book each time, and you mentioned George Orwell's book earlier.
	That book in question is right here, Homage to Catalonia.
	So Orwell was a left-wing British journalist.
	Excuse me.
	He's a left-wing British journalist and he goes to Spain and volunteers.
	A lot of international socialists volunteer to fight in this conflict.
	And he volunteers with one of the socialist militia groups.
	I think it was POUM is the group he happens to join.
	There's a ton of them.
	What does the M stand for, Blake?
	I actually can't remember.
	Marxism.
	Oh, Mark says, okay, I get it.
	Come on, throw me a vote.
	It's kind of a gimme.
	It's supposed to be a layup, brother.
	It's supposed to be a layup.
	Sorry, bro.
	Sorry, bro.
	I'm not, I'm not thinking straight these days.
	I'm kidding.
	And so he gets, uh, he, he endures a lot.
	He gets shot in the throat.
	There's a very interesting description of what it's like when you like, you think you're going to die, like what goes through his head.
	Uh, but he just describes he's in this POUM, uh, fighting for the revolution.
	And then he goes back after he gets shot, he's on, you know, recuperating.
	And then the group he's in gets declared – it gets prescribed by the left-wing government in Madrid, and they're arresting and shooting a bunch of the members of the militia that he's in.
	It gets banned even though they're the Marxists, but then the government Marxists say that they're against these Marxists, and now they're slaughtering – so a lot of these, by the way, you'll hear in the Spanish Civil War, they'll say, oh, the Franco – and we'll get to Franco and all of it.
	Don't worry, folks, we'll explain.
	But they'll say, oh, he was so repressive and so horrific.
	But you have to understand, the Spanish communists were even slaughtering other Spanish communists in addition to the priests, the nuns, and everything else you saw in the early stages of this.
	Constantly.
	So yeah, I looked it up.
	The Workers' Party of Marxist Unification was P.O.U.M.
	They were formed by the fusion of the Trotskyist Communists left of Spain with the Workers' and Peasants' Bloc against the will of Leon Trotsky, with whom they broke.
	So just all these layers of commies hating other commies.
	One of the, by the way, I do have to throw out there, one of the units that I talk about a lot, they called it the International Antifa Unit.
	This, of course, plays a role.
	And so I wrote a chapter on the Spanish Civil War in my Antifa book, because Antifa, even today, they are just enamored with the Spanish Civil War.
	They are constantly talking about it.
	They are constantly talking about reliving it.
	They're trying to sort of recreate it in northern, northwestern Syria right now, this place called Rojava, excuse me, northeastern Syria, Rojava.
	They call it the Rojava Revolution, which is probably a story for another day, folks.
	But they're traveling there to try to create a communist homeland, the way they were traveling to Spain in the 1930s to try to create it.
	And specifically, they actually called themselves the International Antifascist Brigade.
	And their moniker as well with the Ernst Talman Brigade.
	We talked about Ernst Talman in the last episode, because Ernst Talman was the name of the founder of Antifa, also the leader of the Communist Party of Deutschland at the time, who had believe at this point by 1936, because 1933 has already happened, he's been arrested because 1933 has already happened, he's been arrested by Hitler and thrown into one of the concentration camps.
	So, So, Ernst Thalmann becomes this cause célèbre for the international communists, and they even go so far as to refer to him as the name of their brigade in the Spanish Civil War.
	And so, the reason I bring it up in the nomenclature is to explain to people that there's a direct line through to all of these things if we just travel all the way back throughout history.
	And it's not like it's one separate thing here in the U.S., and then there's communism, and then there's Antifa.
	No.
	If you look at it from The communist lens of history, there is a direct line all the way back, really, to the French Revolution.
	Exactly.
	It's, you know, it's the whole war is so interesting just to look at.
	There's, there's an incident, this is what George Orwell gets caught up in, it's called the May events, because communists have weird names for everything that happens.
	And so in Catalonia, Catalonia was very aligned with the, with the left, but it was controlled.
	Spanish Marxism was a really strange beast.
	It was much more anarchist.
	It was what we'd call syndicalist, which is sort of decentralized.
	And so you have these decentralized anarchic groups, and they were in conflict with communists who were essentially just pro-Stalin.
	So the POUM, which Orwell was in, which by his own description, he seems to have just joined them almost randomly.
	Like that was the nearest office he could walk up to.
	But they were ones who were opposed to-- - That's how he joined the Navy. - Yeah, they were opposed to the Stalinist lines.
	They were independent communists.
	And then in Madrid, this pro-Stalin group is taking over and they care just as much about purging every member of the left who's not pro-Stalin as they care about winning this war.
	So in the May events, you just have members of the government going and shooting well over a thousand people.
	Uh, in these street battles because they're not aligned with the version of Marxism that they want.
	And in comparison, it's, you know, it stands out that the big tent of the right in this war is a lot more united and there's far fewer, you know, they aren't purging each other.
	And I think this is an important thing to get about the war is a lot of, you know, there is a white terror in this war, as well as a red terror.
	A lot of communists are shot, but Spain does.
	Remain intact afterwards.
	So Generalissimo Francisco Franco becomes the dictator of Spain after this war.
	And he is a dictator.
	They will call him a fascist.
	He's not really a fascist.
	Like in any way that you analyze fascism as an ideology, it just doesn't align with him.
	He is an authoritarian conservative.
	That is what he is.
	He's like, I'm just keeping things in order before Spain can go back to being this traditional Catholic monarchy.
	That's how Franco views himself.
	And what's important about that is once he wins and is in power, he doesn't just, he doesn't end up shooting thousands of his own followers like Stalin does, or Mao does, or essentially every left-wing government.
	He doesn't have these cyclical waves of purges.
	He doesn't reinvent all of Spanish society.
	There is no terror famine in Spain where they just starve to death a million people to show who's boss.
	He just, you know, runs Spain as an authoritarian government.
	And, you know, there's reasons to not like that, I'm sure, even if you are, you know, a Catholic conservative.
	But it really stands out that, you know, we mentioned the other day how Russia just gets massively screwed up because of the decades of Soviet control and all of the violence they inflict on their own people.
	And Spain doesn't really have that.
	You know, Franco dies, Spain transitions back to being a democracy.
	And a kind of annoying left-wing democracy, I think we'd agree, but the country isn't irrevocably broken.
	You don't look at Spain and have to go, oh yeah, we lost unlimited amounts of our nation's heritage and our society got irretrievably messed up because of this civil war that we fought, you know, a century ago.
	And I think that really illustrates the gap between left and right on these things.
	And if I could, could we very quickly just get a medical update on the current status of Generalissimo Francisco Franco?
	He is, he is still dead.
	Still dead as of right now, this moment?
	As of the moment.
	It could change at any time, but for now he does remain, remain deceased.
	It's an old SNL joke, folks.
	But as you say, there's this really idea that it was the revolutionaries, if there were revolutionaries here, these were on the left, whereas Franco comes in and certainly is quite brutal in many respects in fighting them.
	But when he does take power, it's doing much to restore or at least attempt to restore many of these aspects of Spanish culture.
	One of the chief examples of this, and chieftain, by the way, Caudillo, is what he refers to himself after taking power, is the restoration of the church.
	Of course, the Spanish church has always played an outside role to Spain, Spanish history, going all the way to the reconquest.
	And then, of course, the Spanish crown, in the same year, 1492, the reconquest, people understand that for 800 years, Spain was controlled, essentially, by various forms of Muslim leaders, except at one point, they had lost everything except for, like, one mountaintop in the north, and then eventually fight back they had lost everything except for, like, one mountaintop in the north, and then eventually fight back all the way to the Battle of And that's Francisco and Isabella, who, in the same year, because of their victory, they're sort of jubilant on their success.
	and they fund this uh this Italian explorer to go find this uh you know you know go go find this this passage with bad science he thinks he thinks the world is smaller than it is he thinks the world is smaller right he lucks out you know you have this general Franco who himself is Catholic although not a
	You know, not a priest or a member of the clergy himself, not a religious official in any sort, but he really takes it upon himself to restore the church.
	You see this with Napoleon in France as well.
	And so Juan Carlos, who became king after Afonso was restored, he's still alive, though I believe he stepped down recently, you know, a couple of years ago.
	Still alive and in favor of his son.
	So his son's the king.
	He's, I guess, you know, the King Emeritus at this point or something like that.
	It's for the best.
	I think monarchy starts losing its vitality when your king is always 85 years old.
	So we should, uh, we should just have Saudis.
	Kings should just be stepping down at 60 and have like the king always be this like, you know, attractive looking, you know, 35 year old guy with like a wife and a cute kid or something.
	Uh, monarchy would last so much longer if that was the case, but the, So they shove the king aside, they have this unhealthy republic, there's a lot of threats of violence on both sides, and it's that sense of escalating chaos.
	And you have people on the left just coming out and saying, like, we're gonna have a revolution, just like in Russia, just like in Mexico.
	We're going to change everything.
	And this is what everyone's hearing.
	It's super heated rhetoric, and it's super evenly divided on both sides.
	And people have to remember that in the 20 years since the Russian Revolution, right, the Russians are going around all over the world.
	The Russian communists are going all over, using the wealth of Russia to fund these potential communist uprisings.
	There's many failed uprisings.
	So in Spain, in some senses, you could call it a failed communist revolution.
	But there's a ton of these all over the world.
	Of course, we know about the successful ones, but this is something they're constantly attempting to do all over the world.
	They try it in Mexico.
	They try it in Spain.
	They really try it all over Europe.
	Yeah, there's a failed communist government in Hungary that was very famous in this time.
	It was led by this communist named Bela Kun.
	He, you know, he tries to do what we think of, you know, radical communist stuff, shoot priests, dictatorship of the proletariat.
	He lasts like six months and then the Romanians come in and kick him out.
	Romania's best contribution to humanity, I would say.
	And, you know, largely forgotten today.
	I think he might have been shot by Stalin eventually, which he richly deserved if so.
	And, but It's famous at this time.
	You have these fire-breathing left-wing revolutionaries who are like, yeah, I'm going to take power.
	I'm going to shoot the priests.
	I'm going to seize all of the farms.
	We're going to collectivize things.
	We're going to have a revolution.
	And that terrifies a lot of people.
	And it's what drives a lot of radicalism on the right, which was ultimately very destructive.
	Like we get fascism is substantially a reaction to communism.
	Not a good one, but it was that.
	And that also defines the Spanish Civil War. - Well, 'cause people have to remember too that there's all these, at the same time, there's all these World War I veterans that are in many cases, you know, like, you know, we're talking about Spain here, but you know, Weimar Republic, Weimar Germany has this as well.
	You have all these veterans that are just kind of out of work and yet very belligerent.
	The economy's not going well.
	And so in Bavaria, when they try this in Germany, the Freikorps just go in and basically take out everybody.
	And so you have this sort of, this milieu of veterans, a lot of militarism because of the, you know, again, we're talking about the aftermath of World War I here.
	And what leads to World War II are these massive communist, or not massive, but widespread communist revolutions and revolutionary attempts across Europe.
	Yeah.
	What you have is across Europe, you have democracy starts to fail because you have radicals on both sides and it becomes the sense of you either become communist or you end up with some sort of right-wing dictatorship that promises to stop the communists.
	And obviously we know about Hitler.
	We know about Mussolini.
	But it's happening in other countries, too.
	Like Poland is actually a dictatorship by the time they get invaded by Germany.
	And it's sort of this centrist dictatorship that's anti-communist, but also kind of hostile to the church.
	This happens in a lot of places.
	And so in Spain, what we get is a civil war.
	And notoriously, Franco's side, the right side of the revolution, they do get support from Hitler's Germany and from Mussolini's Italy, which is why it will always be framed that they are fascists.
	But the Republicans, they get a ton of military support from Stalin and the Soviet Union.
	So this is a proxy war between these two camps in Europe just before World War II.
	And it makes it a very interesting testing ground for World War II.
	This is one of the first, you know, this is where air power, close air support, this is where dive bombers start being a thing.
	It's an interesting conflict in that sense.
	And, you know, what does stand out is it is a very ideological war.
	It is a war between, yeah, fascism and communism, but it's ultimately fascism is not what's defining the Spanish right at this time.
	There is a fascist party in Spain called the Falange, the Phalanx, but they're not the leaders of the right.
	And in fact, they get very marginalized after the war is over.
	Uh, by Franco, which is why, you know, he doesn't join World War II because he's not actually allied to Nazi Germany to that degree.
	And it's very much shows the power of the left to push its narratives that this then gets framed as a fascism versus democracy thing, rather than just a communist versus everyone sort of thing, which is what the war actually devolved into.
	And.
	The memory of the conflict since then also has some important takeaways for us, because we've seen in the U.S.
	where they're knocking down Confederate statues or statues of the Founding Fathers, and Spain is a country that's had something very similar to this, because they built a lot of monuments to this conflict.
	There's a big area called the Valley of the Fallen, and it's a big cemetery for a lot of people who died fighting in Franco's army, and Franco himself was buried there.
	A short time ago, they literally just dug up Franco's body.
	The government intervened to do this.
	And they've done a lot to destroy monuments to this conflict that it's worth remembering, you know, until just about 10 years ago, a large number of people in Spain, you know, still had living memory of this.
	This is a, you know, this was, this war ended not even, you know, about 90 years ago.
	So into the 90s, you had a lot of people who had lived through this conflict.
	And yet it became this huge social fight that they had to blot out the memory of the people who actually won this war.
	And importantly, they clearly didn't shoot everyone who disagreed with them because there were still a bunch of left wingers available in Spain to take over when it was all over.
	There's a great article, and I have to give a huge shout out to someone who co-hosts and has guest hosted here on Human Events, Daily Evita Duffy Alfonso.
	Yes, the same Alfonso.
	She wrote, and what my family's bloody history in the Spanish Civil War, and she's talking about the FBI assault on Catholics, but this is up at TheFederalist.com.
	When she talks about the massacres of Catholics that go through, talking about how really the anti-religious radicals just take over the entire state apparatus and start banning religious schools, crucifixes are taken out, Bibles are taken out, religious marriage becomes declared invalid, anti-church propaganda is everywhere,
	All the land is stolen from the churches, etc.
	And so anyone who is considered an enemy to the revolution, right?
	How many times have we seen this again and again?
	An enemy of the revolution is taken out.
	She said that her great-grandfather, who was the subdirector of this large metal company, gets basically a kulak.
	Right, so a sub-director of the company, not like a vice president, not someone who's the owner or anything, but someone who's more well-off.
	He gets purged, he gets locked up, and there's a bit here that I wanted to get to where it says that, and of course, everyone's fleeing constantly.
	Here we go.
	One of my great-grandmother's extended family members was a priest during the war.
	He was captured by communists and was forced to dig his own grave.
	He stood before a firing squad on the edge of his self-dug grave.
	When the squad fired only his arm was grazed.
	The priest then begged the men to shoot It is.
	You know, there's a whole phase called the Red Terror, you know, that we mentioned.
	say, "Just put me out of my misery, let me die a martyr." Instead, the communists decide to throw him in the grave and bury him alive.
	So just like we see in France, just like we see in Russia, the level of brutality that you see unleashed in this civil war is really shocking. - It is.
	There's a whole phase called the Red Terror that we mentioned.
	That's where all of these priests are murdered.
	It's like the Civil War breaks out.
	And again, it's always like you're flipping a switch of some kind where, you know, oh, they're trying to military coup.
	It's time to kill tons of people.
	And there's this huge orgy of bloodletting across Spain.
	And that's where you get a lot of the worst atrocities.
	It's like a couple months long where they just are going and they're shooting everyone that they suspect.
	And if you know the left, you know that they are always suspecting everyone, especially people on their own side.
	So first you shoot priests, you shoot nuns, you shoot bishops, you shoot local landowners, and then eventually, you know, you're shooting the anarchists because they have a slightly different interpretation.
	So when we see all this, then how do you get a guy like Ernest Hemingway, which I mentioned before, and you get For Whom the Bell Tolls, and it's like this love story, and you know, the American has volunteered, and he's got to go blow up this bridge, and he meets this Spanish girl, and she's so wonderful, and the nationalists have treated her so poorly.
	How does Ernest Hemingway You know, participate in something like this and actually see it personally and then leave to write this story which seemingly bears no relation to the things that you and I are talking about.
	Well, the left has always had a great strength of being able to push its narratives.
	We talked yesterday how they would have spin on the Soviet Union, one of the truly intolerable regimes with basically nothing worth defending about it.
	And yet they got defended by the left In the West for, you know, about half a century before they were willing to even admit Stalin did anything wrong.
	And in Spain, it's even more complex than that, I would say, because I would even, you know, I would concede that, you know, Spain was a failing democracy, but it was a democracy and this war, it was begun by the right.
	You know, they attempted a military coup and I think that made it very easy if you're an American who's pro-democracy to see like, oh, Democracy is under attack.
	It's, you know, you're in a situation where it's easy to be propagandized.
	And you create this, you create this sort of romantic narrative where, and I'll just say it, when I was in Ukraine last year covering this, I actually met with some American reporters there, and I mean, they were just totally gassed to the point where, totally gaslighted to the point where you know, they were talking as if they were in some kind of romantic movie and they were fighting for freedom and the cause of the noble Ukrainian people against the Russians.
	And, you know, you ask some basic journalistic questions like, OK, that yeah, that's OK, that's great.
	But how does you know, how does Ukraine plan to win the war and aren't a lot of the Ukraine exactly killed?
	And there's just no there's no concept because they're wrapped up in sort of their own movie version of this.
	And by the way, I should also mention, not only Ernest Hemingway, but none other than John Lennon himself appears in a film depicting the Spanish Civil War.
	So it's not just, it's worse than Walter Durante.
	You've got Hemingway, you've got Orwell, you've got, though at least Orwell kind of, kind of comes away a little bit disillusioned.
	Today, you know, they talk about influences.
	These are influencers and they're friends of mine.
	Jack, where's Jack?
	Jack, he's done a great job. - Let's go! - This is where Orwell really gets his thing of seeing, wait, there's huge problems with socialism in practice that this is happening.
	'Cause he writes "The Road to Wigan Pier" as the book he writes right before heading off.
	That's a very pro-socialist book, but it also has the elements where You know, he's like a guy on Twitter saying that, you know, we're doing a bad job winning over the English working class and we're doing a bad job because they think we don't like them, essentially, is what he says.
	And then he goes here and he's like, oh, OK, we also shoot each other and have, you know, the Stalinists are all trying to kill everyone and this is bad.
	And this is really where he starts having his shift of still being essentially a man of the left, but being very put off by all the left wingers he meets.
	You know, tale as old as time.
	This is also a problem in the French Revolution, it's a problem in the Russian Revolution, and it's a problem with the left today.
	And I think, as we've said in all of our episodes so far, mendacity is at the core of Marxism.
	It appeals a lot to people who really hate those around them and therefore are easily won over to doing horrible things to them.
	But I think if you're going to understand it and assess it honestly, you do need to understand Why the left can provide a romantic narrative to people who feel like they are changing the world in a positive direction.
	And that existed in Spain as much as it existed anywhere.
	It was, it was a time where it was easy to get caught up in a romantic narrative.
	You know, we're stopping, we're bringing this backwards regime into modernity and we're overcoming these fascist killers who are, who want to, you know, destroy progress in its bed and kill all of these people.
	Especially if you're, you know, a foreign American.
	Americans aren't idealistic people.
	So, yeah, Herb Hemingway was the Ukrainian volunteer of his day.
	Well, and there's a great line from Homage to Catalonia that Orwell wrote that I'm familiar with, and I just love this.
	I pulled it up here.
	Early in life, I have noticed that no event is ever covered correctly in a newspaper.
	But in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie.
	I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed.
	I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as heroes of imaginary victories.
	And I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that never happened.
	I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened, There's a couple other lines I want to flag.
	Orwell could write incredibly well.
	And when I look at the news today, certainly the war in Ukraine, I mean, that passage to me is amazing.
	There's a couple other lines I want to flag.
	Orwell could write incredibly well.
	Another good one.
	One of the most horrible features of war is that all the propaganda, all the screaming, all the lies and hatred comes invariably from people who are not fighting.
	Precisely.
	And then, other great one, other great one.
	For some reason, all of the best matadors were fascists.
	For some reason.
	Right, because of course, you know, a communist would start to say, well, did the bull consent?
	Do I have the consent of the animal?
	You know, why does... and of course, they don't want to waive the The red flag because of course you have to protect the red flag at all times so that you know the communists don't want to do that but it really does become this sort of romantic cause for the international communists and I think it speaks to I would say the quality of George Orwell's character whereby in you know he leaves there and I think he later said that all of the things that he wrote throughout the remainder of his life
	were rooted in these experiences in the Spanish Civil War, where he just comes away very disillusioned.
	And, you know, he writes Animal Farm not too long after, then of course, we know 1984, you have many other things.
	And he talks about how it was his experiences on the ground there that made him realize, you know, just when he saw war finally up close and personal for the first time, he realized, wait a minute, everything I've read about these wars is completely wrong.
	And everyone is lying all the time.
	Exactly.
	It's a very good... I would even argue you could get more out of Homage to Catalonia than like out of 1984.
	1984 is obviously famous.
	It's very much worth reading, but it is a fantasy and it's a very extreme case.
	Whereas Homage to Catalonia, it's literally what happened.
	It is what he went through.
	It is a far more honest portrayal of what really does go on in a war and in one of these weird left-right conflicts or a conflict within the left.
	You will understand the left far better reading this than you will, you know, reading 1984, I think, because, precisely because That's such a simplified, raw version of what he's writing about.
	And... Yeah, I would say 1984 is better as more of your... Well, I mean, Animal Farm is your gateway drug, right?
	You know, 1984 is your next level.
	But when you really get, I would say, a little bit more mature, a little bit older, then you need to graduate to Homage de Catalonia.
	Because, as you say, it is more complicated, but it's also the true story that Allowed those other stories to flow forth in Orwell's career, because Homage to Catalonia is actually written first, and as you say, it's non-fiction as opposed to... Animal Farm, of course, is fiction, but it is fiction that is depicted in explanations.
	We probably should have mentioned this in the Russian Revolution, but yes, the Animal Farm novel, it's really a novella, it's so short, something about 100 pages, is a, you know, fantastical representation of the Russian Revolution.
	For sure, for sure, and I want to...
	Grab something you mentioned earlier, that this looms so large in left-wing memory, and I think it's worth picking at that a bit, because it's true.
	For decades, there's a lot of famous narratives of the Spanish Civil War, you mentioned for whom the bell tolls.
	There are ones that are not as cynical as Orwell's take.
	There are a lot of fond memories of fighting in the Spanish Civil War, and they look back on it as this great tragedy and such.
	And Orwell got shot, I believe.
	I think he actually got shot on the front line.
	He did, right through the throat.
	He nearly died.
	In the throat, like he actually could have been killed in this thing.
	Yeah.
	Which I think that probably, and of course that probably changed the way he viewed it.
	He said, am I dying for this, really?
	It might have, it might have.
	But I think what's interesting to pick out there is if you think of what memoirs or, you know, accounts that conservatives would like, I feel like we will mostly pick examples of crusades That succeeded.
	That we feel, we feel proud that, you know, we'll read a memoir of the American Civil War, of the American Revolution, and we'll appreciate it because they suffered so much to achieve this thing that produced so much good, that we like the outcome of.
	And with the left, you know, it's notable.
	They don't have, they can't write a fond memoir of the Russian Revolution.
	They can't write a fond memoir of the Nazi Revolution.
	You're right, there isn't one anywhere.
	Because every time they win, it's terrible.
	So they have to go, man, Spain, that's the one that would have been great if we'd won.
	Sadly, we didn't win it.
	What a tragedy.
	I feel so bad about this.
	And then, of course, the other cope of, well, that wasn't real communism.
	That was something else.
	That was Stalinism and Maoism and all these things.
	They were part of the left opposition.
	They should have been part of the center opposition against the right opposition.
	Right.
	Every time the Khmer Rouge, which, you know, I don't, we'll have to do another episode of the Khmer Rouge at some point, but it follows the same lines.
	You could make a seven hour documentary and call it like the search for real communism.
	And you just go from one communist country to the other.
	And it turns out, real communism wasn't here either.
	But we did find, you know, a million skulls piled up into a giant pyramid.
	But that wasn't real communism.
	Where did all the normal people go?
	Where did all the successful intellectuals go?
	Can we find them?
	Is anyone able to identify them?
	Just the other day, they released PISA scores.
	That's the international standardized test that we use to compare whose schools are doing well.
	Cambodia got an absolute dead last by a million miles, unfortunately.
	And all you can think is, you know, maybe it wasn't a good idea to have shot every single person who wore glasses.
	Right, so, and this is what Blake is saying, that when the Khmer Rouge took power, which was an extreme Marxist organization... Not real communism, though.
	They weren't real communists.
	Again, not real communists.
	Excuse me, extreme Maoist organization.
	That's why they'll even say Maoists.
	They're not really communists, they're just Maoists.
	And you're right, they just slaughter the intellectuals, just absolutely slaughter them.
	In fact, at one point, I remember they... and there's a little bit of a tie to Kissinger here, right?
	Because Kissinger's bombing Cambodia around this time, they're taking power.
	At one point, they go into the capital, Phnom Penh, and they tell everyone, uh, the capital's about to be bombed, the capital's about to be bombed, everyone needs to flee, and so all the, you know, the successful, rich, intellectual people, or not just rich, but well-off people, flee the capital.
	Well, the capital wasn't about to be bombed, and the communists just take all their houses and then take all the people and put them in concentration camps.
	And Jack, where is Jack?
	Where is Jack?
	Where is he?
	Jack, I want to see you.
	Great job, Jack.
	Thank you.
	What a job you do.
	You know, we have an incredible thing.
	We're always talking about the fake news and the bad, but we have guys, and these are the guys who'll be getting policies.
	This, I will say about the, about the Khmer Rouge, this is the one example where you do actually have like a serious movie that was made about this, The Killing Fields, this is the one example where you do actually have like a serious movie that was made about this, The Killing Fields, where I believe it won But I've said this for years.
	You'll never find a movie about the Communist Revolution in China, the Russian Revolution, the Chinese Cultural Revolution.
	You'll never see one on the Spanish Civil War from the perspective that we're giving you.
	Basically, everything that we're talking about throughout this entire series, you will never find depicted in Hollywood for some strange reason, Blake.
	I can't figure out what that is.
	It's even though, before we close, I want to tell this amazing story, just because it's an amazing story.
	So early in the war, There's an infamous moment in the Spanish Civil War.
	There's the city of Toledo.
	Not the one in Ohio, it's Toledo in Spain.
	And it's historically a major city.
	You don't say!
	Historically, it was a major city.
	It was one of the first places conquered in the Reconquista.
	It had a famous university there.
	Historically important, but in modern times, not an important city.
	It's a provincial town.
	And it has this fortress, this old castle in the middle of it called the Alcazar.
	It was a palace of the Spanish kings.
	Highly symbolic of the old regime and when the civil war begins it gets occupied by the local nationalist forces not a lot of them and again the city's not important, but they get holed up in the Alcazar and The Spanish Republicans the left start besieging the Alcazar Again, not an important military target at all, but it becomes hugely symbolically important.
	So Franco, who's leading the forces of the right, is like, we have to relieve the Alcazar.
	We should try to relieve them before the siege falls, which, you know, it really shows some of, it shows the old chivalrous spirit.
	Like Stalin would not expend a lot of effort to save people just because they were his fellow travelers.
	Or if he did, he'd, you know, frame them of something and shoot them afterwards.
	But Franco, he expends a lot of effort to save the Alcazar.
	And there's a moment early in the siege, the commander of the Alcazar, the general Jose Varela, I think is his name.
	And what they do is they capture the son of the commander.
	No, it's Muscardo.
	Jose Muscardo is the guy who's in command.
	And they capture his son, a 24-year-old, and they say, if you don't surrender, we will shoot your son.
	And Colonel Muscardo asks to speak to his son, and his son asks, you know, what should I do?
	His father replies, commend your soul to God and die like a patriot, shouting Viva Cristo Rey, Christ the King, and Viva España.
	The Alcazar does not surrender.
	That, answered the son, I can do.
	And he was shot immediately afterwards.
	And for the rest of his life, Franco allowed the commander to wear black in public in a sign of mourning for his son.
	You know, whatever else you think of the conflict, it's... I think you have to be moved by that to be willing to sacrifice your life for a principle like that in such a stark way.
	And this really goes to show you, I mean, and of course it's Spain, right?
	So anything the Spanish do, you know, they're going to be completely impassioned one way or completely impassioned the other way.
	The moderates don't do well in Spain, historically, or whatever.
	That is the Spanish blood.
	You're either full in for, again, and certainly to be sure, there's a lot of romance in monarchy, in the crown, of course, in the throne and the altar of the church, the passion of the Christ.
	These are very romantic stories and this is something that has carried them throughout the centuries, I believe, and even into the modern age in many cases.
	But, you know, they've created this idea of the romance of the Spanish Civil War where if you study, and the reason I say this and the reason that I became more interested in the Spanish Civil War is because as I was studying Antifa back in the days when I used to infiltrate their meetings before I was well known, and readily identifiable, or I would just lurk around on their websites, which obviously I still do.
	They are constantly making references to it, the same way that you and I would make references to, you know, or just normal people would make references to, like, a TV series, or quote something.
	They will make these obscure references to the Spanish Civil War all the time, and it very much is their modern currency within the movement.
	So it's something to them, which they're constantly refighting and trying to recreate.
	And again, it's because it's the one they lost badly.
	And so they can say, if we'd won that one, that would have been, that would have been real communism.
	That would have been the real one where everything would have been great.
	You know, other than all those people we killed.
	And it would have been true socialism, which otherwise has never been tried.
	They've never gotten around to trying it ever since.
	Such a tragedy.
	They should, they should work on that.
	They should work on making sure that they can try real socialism.
	Blake, incredible.
	Give the name of the book again.
	By the way, the other book that we have to throw out, I don't even think we've said it, is Mimer of Troubles by Paul Kemp, which is another, he was a volunteer for the Nationalists.
	Just an example of something that people could read that's not exactly biased the way that you were taught.
	Exactly.
	You know, this is such a propagandized conflict, it's worth reading the stuff that is largely ignored.
	Luckily, Homage to Catalonia, you can still find everywhere.
	They can't censor Orwell.
	And then the book that we mentioned off the top, which is The Last Crusade by Warren Carroll is his name.
	So check those out, learn the real story.
	For Christians out there who are interested in what a last stand looks like when your entire religion is about to be wiped out because they are under attack from the government Obviously something at a time when the FBI is wiretapping and infiltrating traditional Catholics in the United States going after pro-lifers.
	This Spanish Civil War is something you need to study.

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