Behind the Bastards - Behind the Insurrections - How Fascism Won The Spanish Civil War, Part 2

Episode Date: January 28, 2021

The incredible, heartbreaking story of the antifascist struggle in Spain. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Spain! I'm Robert Evans. This is Behind the Bastards. This is Behind the Bastards. It's actually Behind the Insurrections, a special Behind the Bastards miniseries. Talking about the history of fascist attempts to seize power from democracies. Yes, we started our first opening of this episode with me shouting, what's bombing my Guernicas?

But then we decided that would get me canceled and was a bad idea. But we were talking about Guernica. I would have just gotten it. Yeah, I just shouted the name Spain. Alternate Pitch. What about Gasol? Yeah, there we go, there we go. That's a better. There we go. Pow!

Fortunately, my knowledge of Spanish is mostly limited to buying drugs. That's an NBA player from that. That was a really great Laker, but you know. It has really good seafood. You can say that about Spain. Oh my God, yes. I have had some amazing paella. One of the paella's I had was partly responsible for me vomiting on the limousine of the King of Spain. That's amazing. That's a story for another day. My best friend died in Spain.

No, no. That's a great thing to say. That's horrible. Two years ago, my old DJ, he flew to Spain. He was doing a master chef class with his paella. He's a Filipino dude. He was going to do this paella adobo. It was this crazy Filipino Spanish fusion. That sounds amazing.

Yeah. And he had his blood pressure drop to zero. Oh shit. Died in his Airbnb. Fuck. That's horrible. That's horrible. Anyway, we are going to talk about a lot of people dying in Spain today.

Yeah. So that's the peace DJ effect though. Love you dog. There's actually, this is actually going to be a very sad episode in a lot of ways. So that's an appropriate emotional tone to start it off with. Yeah. So at the end of the day, fuck Spain. So our Spain is not your fault.

Current Spain is not your fault. So we're going to be talking about the Spanish Civil War today. And we left off last time with the establishment of an actual like real organized fascist party in Spain, the phalangists. 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, they were the Spanish fascists who would become kind of the watchword for Spanish fascism. When people talk about the fascists in Spain, they're talking about the phalangists, you

know? The phalanges. Yeah. The phalanges. The phalanges, which kind of also is, I think that I think phalanges comes from phalanges because it's that word for that Greek military, you know, where you have a shitload of dudes standing and like a series of lines all supporting each other and kind of like a hand. I don't know.

That'd be my guess. I'm not a worder. Okay. So the oddest thing about the phalangists is that alone among fascists of pretty much any period I'm aware of these, well, except for maybe the modern period, they were giant wooses to start out with. And this may be due to the fact we've talked a lot about how like World War One is why the Italian and German fascists were terrifying people because they, you know, were very comfortable

killing people. Spain stayed out of World War One. Most of the early fascists were like more on the like fascist intellectuals than street fighters. And they weren't initially very willing to use force. Now they talked about violence a lot. When Jose Antonio, their leader was definitely a fascist, but he was very uncomfortable with physical violence.

Even when it was directed at him, and it was repeatedly, he was loathed to actually organize retaliatory violence. During a speech he gave after his party's unification with the John Zistas, a leftist gunman opened fire intending to kill Jose Antonio and instead killing a spectator and wounding four other people. The fascists launched no reprisals against the left in response, which is like you look at Germany or Italy's is very strange, yeah, very different than it was elsewhere. 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. 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, like it was a horrible torture. Like they thought it was funny, but it killed people. And this guy's being like, in Italy, the fascists make their enemies drink castor oil. Here we have to drink the castor oil, right? Because we're not willing to use violence.

That's weird. Yeah, it is very odd. It does not last, but this is a period of time early in the fascists here. Also every black person's grandma made them drink castor oil at some point sucks. One of those, you know that image macro from the movie Predator, where those two guys are shaking hands in a meeting in the middle, Italian fascists and black grandmas feeding people castor oil? Yes.

God dang it, grandma. My stomach was fine. That's funny. Look, it had been fine. Just let me drink some water. God, drink this castor oil. Can't tell her no either. Tell a black woman no, I dare you.

And they were, you know, the Italians were giving people much larger, like it kills people sometimes. Yeah. Other phalanges leaders were happier to endorse physical violence than Jose Antonio was. But for a little while initially, a number of them kind of felt like it was good to have some of their members gunned down by the left. When one phalanges was killed in the movement's first street fight, it was thought that the brawl had been a successful baptism of fire.

Basically, we're trying to ramp these people up to violence. So it's good that we're like this. It's positive for us that we're being tested with like deadly force. This was some people's attitude initially, but the deaths kept coming. And for a while, they were entirely caused by leftists. Most of this violence occurred between 1934 and 1936 during a period of escalating political violence that historians call the militarization of politics during the Second Republic. And when you're talking about at least the violence that was between fascists and the

left, it was pretty one-sided for a while. While fascists, being fascists, always talked about violence, Jose Antonio particularly resisted putting the party on a militant footing. Now this was unpopular within the movement. In one internal meeting, Jose Antonio expressed his desire to engage the left in the dialectic of fists and pistols, but he was kind of being more metaphorical than anything, right? Like we're going to have like the verbal equivalent of war. He was kind of hemming and hawing around it because he wasn't really willing to commit

fully at this point. Meanwhile, one of his colleagues in the same meeting expressed a desire to treat leftists as enemies in a state of war. Now there were discussions within the party of overthrowing Jose Antonio and replacing him with a more violent fascist because he just wasn't willing to kill fast enough. Okay. And these suggestions were shot down because they couldn't really exist without him at this point.

The police kept shutting down their party offices, so the only place they could gather was Jose Antonio's law offices. He was also like the one who had money. So like they couldn't, a lot of people were angry at him, but they couldn't really exist without him. Onesimo Radondo, who was another phalanges 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.

In December of 1933, he promised his followers a situation of absolute violence is approaching. And I'm going to quote now from a speech he gave to phalanges youth. Young workers, young Spaniards, prepare your weapons, get used to the crack of the pistol, caress your dagger, be inseparable from your vindictive club. Young people must be trained in physical combat, must love violence as a system, must arm themselves with whatever they can, and must be prepared to finish off by whatever means a few dozen Marxist imposters. There's a lot that's in there.

Yeah. I'm really, and when he's saying there, especially when he says they must love violence as a system, he's kind of Spanish-ifying. The concept the Italians had and that the Germans developed of like the cult of action for action's sake, the almost worship of violence as an end in and of itself. You're seeing that start to percolate into Spanish fascist culture in this period. Now, more than a dozen phalanges and other fascists were killed by anarchists and communists before the fascist right properly organized itself for violence, but organized themselves

for violence, they did. And I'm going to quote now from the book, Fascism in Spain. The point of inflection in the political violence took place on Sunday, June 10th. 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. On the 10th, a group of phalangists intercepted them, and the usual fight took place. An 18-year-old phalangist, Juan Queller, son of a police inspector, was killed, and his

corpse was subsequently mutilated. His head apparently crushed with rocks. One of Ensaldo's squads was quick to respond, allegedly without obtaining approval from the triumvers who directed the party, the fascist party. Later that evening, as a bus transporting the young socialist excursionists unloaded some of them in Madrid, a car full of phalangist pistoleros, personally led by Ensaldo, who's a fascist militant, was waiting. It slowly passed the young couple on the sidewalk, spraying them with bullets.

A 20-year-old shop clerk, Juanita Rico, was killed. The phalangist claimed she had been involved in desecrating the corpse. Her 21-year-old brother was left permanently disabled, and several others were wounded. Four days earlier, a phalangist smallholder in Torre Perogil, Jane Province, had been killed during a farm worker's strike, so that Queller was the 15th or 16th John Sista or phalangist killed since a John Sista teenager had been slain by assault guards, which are like socialist militants, in May of 1932. All the others had been killed by the left, though numerous leftists had been injured

by phalangists and street offraise and university assaults. Rico was the first leftist fatality at their hands. For years, she would be commemorated as the first victim of fascism in Spain. So that's really the start of... Yeah. Yeah, there's so much there, man. Like, first of all, I'm still dangling at the phrase, dialectic of fists and pencils. I'm like, that's a rap album.

Fists and pistols. Yeah. Oh, I thought it was fists and pencils. No, no, no. Fists, dialectic of fists. Dang. Fists and pistols. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. No, I actually, yeah. Yours is better. You tried to propify it. Yeah. I was like, yo, those are bars, man. Okay.

And then also, you know, 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, like where you're just like, you know, people die daily. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. Like you just kind of like get used to, and used to such a bad word to explain what I'm trying to say.

No, no, no. But you get it. Yeah. It's like violence is just a part of life. Yeah. Absolutely. And it, but it's still like even knowing that, you know, I'm an adult, you know, I've moved out and you know, I've 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 know, like I was crazy like, okay, so that shooting, the, the, the, the shooting at that Walmart in Texas recently. Yeah. No. Passo. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. And it's just 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, damn, that's crazy. We were shooting. We probably better slide out. How calm he was is because of how we grew up. You know what I'm saying? So you're just like, somebody got a tech, oh, they should, that's a tech.

I don't know what that is. You know what I'm saying? And it's like, it's so weird because it's just a weird thing. So yeah. 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. You know what I'm saying?

And then, and then the idea of how I gave that whole preference to say it's still jolting to hear the type of like mutilation, you guys might want to rock and then like, like, God, Doug, like, you know, you know, like crazy, you got to be to blunt force trauma killer person. Like that's, it's just, I don't know. Anyway, all I have to say, it's still jolting to me. Going on here. I think you're, it's very important to point out the desensitization that occurs during

this. I, the phrase is used that like the militarization of politics, it's a process that starts in 31 and doesn't really reach its apotheosis until 1936 when the civil war starts. But it, it's a process of getting people ready to that of escalating street violence. And you see that just within the fascist party where initially the fascists are willing to fight. There's brawls in the street from day one, right, as soon as there's fascists before the, the, the John Zista's merge with, with, uh, Jose Antonio's group, there's street

fighting and stuff, but it, when the killing starts, a lot of these fascists, because these are not, and, and again, 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. Um, but these, these dudes who are actually in Iberia, they don't, they don't have experience killing people, not, not by and large. And it takes, number one, it takes time of, of them being killed before they really start responding with deadly violence as a matter of course. And once you have that on both sides, once you have anarchists and communists and, and

other kinds of like left socialists killing fascists in the street and fascists committing murder right back and vice versa, then you have this, it, 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. You're right. It is a process. Um, and, and I think in terms of like how people would justify like bashing the kids head in with Iraq and desecrating his corpse, it's less about that guy.

It's not that individual dude. They were probably angry, but they're looking at what's happening in Spain and in Germany and what fashion, the concentration camps that have already been set up, the mass executions of leftists in Italy and in Germany, the thousands who are already dead and they're going, the only way to stop that here is to kill as many of, and, and you can argue that was, that that was the wrong tactic that you could argue that you could argue that it actually raised the level of violence to a point where you were able to have this open conflict that the left doesn't win.

But yeah, 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, you know, and I, I, yeah, it's, it's fucked. Like the whole situation. Yeah, it's like, yeah, that's the thing where you're like, okay, they, you know, the street shit that's like, you know, they take one, we take four, one of ours, we kill four. You know, and it, and it's supposed to be a deterrent, like that means like, okay, so I'm saying this to say, don't kill ours.

You know what I'm saying? Yeah. And you call it, I mean, it is street shit, but it's also like U S military policy, massive retaliation, right? And this is what, yes, speaking of U S politics, yeah. 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 Murrah building was very consciously being like, I, this is the kind of reaction, this is like, I am attacking the government because of they killed all

these people in Waco. And I learned that this is an acceptable, his argument was, I learned this was an acceptable way to respond to violence because that's how the military trained me, right? You can quibble with how honest McVeigh was being there, but like, hard not to see some through lines. You can look at the, the first Iraq war or the more reason, like, right, it's, it is the way everything works, right? Yeah.

How, how the idea of, how the idea of Pearl Harbor is equivalent to Hiroshima. Yeah. Then we bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki, right? Yeah. Well, you take out a base. We take out an island. Yeah. It's like, yeah.

Because, yeah. Yeah. And collective punishment. There's a lot to say about all of that. Yeah. We need to move on to the rest of this. We're off track. Yeah.

This story. Because I'm pretty sure you wrote 72,000 pages for this. Yeah. Yeah. It was happening. Well, the phalanges were starting to commit murder and stuff and the street fighting between left and right is escalating in Spain. Well, all this is happening on the ground.

The political situation and like the actual like elected politics and stuff is continuing to unravel. And this is due in large part to the fact that the Africanistas who are again the members of the Spanish military who had fought in Morocco were increasingly frustrated with the Republic. In 1932, so just like a year after the Republic starts, one general, a guy named Sanjuro, launches a coup that fails. But rather than wonder if the Africanistas 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. So the Republic knows that the military, these African veterans are a problem and also uses them to crush the left when the left rises up because, you know, governments generally not smart. So a gap begins to form during the Republican period between the the the yuntas officers in the peninsula who supported the Republic and the Africanistas who the yuntas called stormtroopers.

Now by 1936, the political situation, which had simmered for years, broke out into an open boil. The explanation as to why starts with the popular front. In 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. This included both moderate liberals and people like anarchists and even in some cases like Trotskyists, which communists, I mean, Trotskyists are communists, too. They don't like each other, right?

And this is this is a real big change. And we talk about in our in our the the non Nazi bastards who made Hitler, one of the reasons why the left failed to stop the Nazis is that the the Communist Party in Germany, which was, you know, generally under orders from Moscow, called the Social Democrats, Social Fascists. And I'll admit right now, we weren't entirely fair to the communists in that episode. The Social Democrats did some really fucked up stuff for the communists that we will talk about later in this very series.

They had good reasons to distrust the Social Democrats. That said, the failure to work with them to stop Hitler was very clearly a mistake. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the USSR admits then is like, you know what, maybe 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. And this is a very successful idea politically. And in fact, there was also a popular front in France that that succeeded in pushing some

major reforms. And we will talk about that later, too. The tactic worked very well politically, electorally in Spain. The popular front swept the 1936 elections. But in a way that will be familiar to everyone listening, they did so in a way that enraged the right wing. And it's not hard to see why the right felt like they'd been cheated. Right wing parties polled 4,505,524 votes and gained 124 seats in the 1936 election.

Now the popular front only got about 160,000 more votes, but they gained 278 seats. So they get 160,000 more votes in an election with like 9 or 10 million votes, twice as many seats. You can see why people on the right would be like kind of pissed about this, right? And there may have been cheating. I'm not going to get into whether or not there was cheating. What's important is that the right felt that they had been cheated. That's what actually matters as opposed to whether or not there was any kind of electoral

malfeasance. And of course, the CEDA, that Catholic kind of right wing party that's the dominant right wing party, and the phalanges, the fascists, absolutely would have cheated themselves in this election, and they actually probably did. 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 African-East generals to try to convince them to do a coup, to force it, like to put him into power as a dictator, basically.

And he failed, but there was a lot of sympathy for the ideal. While the left looked at the phalanges 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. And I'm going to quote from a write-up in lumen.uk right now. When this coalition came to power, popular unrest in the countryside exploded into land seizures, encouraged by radical anarchists. So as soon as the popular front wins the election, the anarchists are like, we're going to do

our thing now. It's time to take power for the people. There was little attempt by the anarchists to moderate their behavior, and no demands to allow the popular front to reassure moderate elements in Spain. A CNT, which is an anarchist party conference held in May 1936, was full of revolutionary language. It seemed that the new republic had not been able to control the major revolutionary group. The murder of a former finance minister, José 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. Sotelo had been in exile from 1931 to 1934, but had returned to become a leading right wing figure associated with the Spanish fascists and a deputy for the Spanish revival group. He clashed with the socialists in the assembly and was murdered by left wing members of the Civil Guard. So you have a couple of things happen. The popular front wins election, the anarchists just start seizing the shit out of land and

saying like the revolution, we're doing a revolution. It's happening. Yeah. It's happening. And at the same time, another left wing group of left wing people murders a popular right wing politician. So this all kind of snowballs into the start of the Civil War, you know? Uh-huh.

Okay. Now, when the CEDA lost the election, that was kind of it for them. And most of the party, like after failing to win in 36, just kind of gets fully on board with authoritarianism. One scholar writes that everyone got the message to, quote, abandon the ballot box and take up arms. The CEDA youth movement collapses. Yeah.

Yeah, that's scary. So like the young Republicans basically, they collapse overnight and they all join the phalange. So all of the young like conservatives who had been in the CEDA and trying to get out the vote immediately joined the fascist party and start picking up guns and street fighting and political murders reach a fever pitch in this, in this period. Now the quote I read earlier mentioned land seizures by the C&T and other groups of anarchists. And it's actually true that in the trade union's 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. The C&T tried to keep their people kind of calm. But there are a lot of, they're anarchists, right? A lot of them aren't part of the C&T and a bunch of them and a bunch of socialists occupy land in Batayoz, which took over seven and like this land occupation, I mentioned at the start of the republic that they, they took about 10% of the undeveloped land and

gave it to peasants. This occupation of land in Batayoz takes seven times that much land and starts redistributing it to like peasants. And this fucking terrifies the rich people in Spain. Of course. You, you've, at this point, the anarchists have fucked with the money, right? Yeah, you fucked up the money. You fucked up the money.

Yeah. I talked about how like Trump, a big part of why on the day, on the sixth, like all these fucking banks started coming out of like Chase Bank and Chevron or like, like condemning President Trump. It's cause he fucked with the money. You can't fuck up the money doc. You can't fuck up the money. 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. Not saying that's wrong, but they fuck up the money and that, that gets a lot of the, a lot of rich people, a lot of like the Spanish kind of like ruling class on board some sort of revolution against the left. Now in Spain, the seizure of Batayoz convinces a lot of these like rich people that the government can't guarantee stability anymore. So while past coup attempts by generals had generally folded due to a lack of support from the dominant classes who didn't want to see a coup, right?

They didn't like the left, but I don't want to have like a coup again. By 1936, a lot more of those folks are like, you know what? It's either a coup or we don't get to be rich people anymore. And they, they do what rich people do. Yeah. Cool it is. Yeah. So the government had known that the African East to generals weren't super trustworthy,

which is why they tried to post the ring leaders, General Franco and a guy named General Mola to the Canary Islands and Pamplona respectively, right? Keep them out of the center of shit. But these guys were still collaborating with a cadre of other officers. And on July 17th, under orders from Franco, troops in Morocco rebelled. And obviously the, the, the foreign legion are kind of like the core of this. Over the next three days, military units and commanders all over Spain rose up against the legitimate government.

And the hope from Franco and his fellows had been that they would swiftly take control of major cities, jail their political opponents and install a dictator. Like they'd done with D. Rivera, not all that long ago, right? Yeah. D. Rivera comes to power like a decade or so earlier. So they were hoping it would follow that trend. But the left was way more organized now and it did not work out that way. And I'm going to quote now from a write up in the new left review.

Confidence in a rapid rebel victory was quickly dispelled when the insurrection in most major cities, notably Madrid and Barcelona, was crushed in the streets by a combination of loyal security forces and political and trade union militants. Where this combination failed or the security forces went over to the rebels, the rising was almost immediately successful as in Seville and Saragossa. The fact that less than half the army and security forces united behind the rebellion was the principal reason why the coup failed and its principal objective and turned into a civil war.

Now that's not the unified opinion on things, right? The idea that. Yeah. Yeah. There, there's significant debate over why the coup failed, right? Because who does fail, right? The stashes win in the end, but they don't get, they don't succeed by coup. They have to fight a war.

And a lot of scholars will actually argue, a lot of them will argue that well, the security, because most of the security forces didn't go with the rebels, that's why the rebels didn't win immediately. A lot of scholars will also argue that actually the bulk of the credit for halting rebel victory goes to local militias, which are kind of spontaneously organized just because a bunch of people started picking up guns. The argument is that in the wake of the coup, the Spanish military and the Republican government lost basically all cohesion and credibility, which they did, right?

Like half of your military like decides to overthrow the government. Not a lot of people had to have faith in the government, right? Yeah, yeah. It's nothing you do. And then the rest of y'all can't stop these people from taking my land from me. Yeah. Like fuck y'all. And the reason that Franco and his allies, these, the scholars who will kind of take

this out of it, argue that the reason Franco and his allies didn't win immediately is that hundreds of thousands of civilians took to the streets. And these, 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 into like a fucking a sportsman warehouse and just taking all the guns. Okay. Okay.

Like we need guns. These guys have them. Let's grab them. And you know, there's later too, there's looting of like military barracks, 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. 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. In his 1986 essay on the matter, Morey 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 exiliaries would have been nothing less than miraculous once it established a strong base on the Spanish mainland, that hastily formed untrained and virtually unequipped militiamen and women slowed Franco's army's

advance on Madrid for four months and essentially stopped it on the outskirts of the capital is a feat for which they have rarely earned the proper tribute from writers on the Civil War of the past century. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. Just everyone picking up their guns and being like, fuck these guys, right? Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Or these dudes is like, yeah.

I mean, obviously, ultimately they don't, but like that, I think about like what we used to call like dad strong. Mm-hmm. You know how like you, you just, you don't, you know your dad strong, but you don't like, you don't really believe it, you know what I'm saying? And then you're like, then you're 16 and you want to like throw hands with him, you know what I'm saying? And then he just lays you out flat, you know what I mean?

you're like, I didn't expect you to be this strong. You know, that to me sometimes it's like, I feel like that with like military dudes that are like super trained to where it's like, you think you can take them. And then you're like, oh yeah, no, you're actually trained. This is not a game. So knowing that, but then the fact that just the,

that these just untrained militias were still able to like, pull this off, four months of brutal fighting. And they lose a fuckload of thousands. And it is a very lopsided kill ratio at this point, right? Cause you are, these are some of the most veteran military units in all of Europe, right? Going up against like fucking grandpa and grandma with hunting rifles, right?

It's ugly. It is ugly, but they slow, they stopped Franco from winning in 36, you know? That's crazy. And there seems to be very little debate about that, that they were, some people argue how critical, but they were critical in stopping the nationalists, which is what the other thing the rebels are called

at the gates of Madrid. And they're not the only ones. We'll talk a little bit about the, we're gonna talk about the international brigades in a second. But first you have to take an ad break, sir. You know who else would have stopped Franco at the gates of Madrid?

Sophie. Sophie, yeah, Sophie would have. Sophie would have backed by the militant products and services that support this podcast. Cool. Yes. Including Sportsman's Warehouse, where you too can steal guns to fight the fat. Well, no.

No, no. Maybe not. I might be the wisest. Okay. Product. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations.

And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI, sometimes you gotta grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside

an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark.

And not in the good and bad ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI

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Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me. About a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down.

It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

We're back. 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. Most of the militias are either anarchist or trotskiest. So there's the C&T and the POUM,

and then there's groups that aren't a part of this. But largely they're either anarchist or kind of trotskiest. And both are heavily democratic. So men and women take up arms together. They vote for their leaders, so their officers are elected in recallable. And yeah, there's critiques to make of the system. We'll talk about that a bit.

But that's what the military is at this point in 1936. It's largely just a fuckload of these militias because the actual military is not in a good way. Very chaotic and disorganized itself. And in a lot of cases, because of the fact that a lot of the military had rebelled, soldiers will leave their units and join militias. So it's very complicated.

Please do not take this as a comprehensive or particularly in-depth explanation of what happens with the Spanish militia system on the Republican. It is incredibly complicated. This is an overview. This is all an overview. The Spanish Civil War is very, very complex. So yeah, 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. I'm going to quote Morey 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. A revolution more far-reaching than any which occurred in Russia during 1917 to 21 and the years before and after it. 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.

The figure of tapers downward where the UGT, which is another group, shared power with the C&T or else predominated 50% in anarchist and socialist Valencia and 30% in socialist and liberal Madrid. 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. As the BBC Granada television documentary puts it, the ancient dream of a collective society without profit or property was made reality in the villages of Aragon. All forms of production were owned by the community, run by their workers.

And again, as Bookchin notes, this is different everywhere in Republic and Spain, but in Catalonia, which has a lot of industrial areas, three-quarters of the industrial economy is directly controlled by the workers manning these factories as opposed to them like even having elected bosses and stuff, which is really interesting.

It's something that doesn't happen ever again. Yeah. How long was it working? I don't know if that's the right question. There's debate as to how long it worked, but generally speaking, a year or two, it's different in different regions. We're going to talk about what happens there.

Bookchin continues, the administrative apparatus of Republic in Spain belonged almost entirely to the unions and their political organizations. Police in many cities were replaced by armed workers patrols. Militia units were formed everywhere in factories, on farms, and in socialist and anarchist community centers and union halls,

initially including women as well as men. A vast network of local revolutionary committees coordinated the feeding of the cities, the operations of the economy, and the meeting out of justice. Indeed, almost every facet of Spanish life from production to culture, bringing the whole of Spanish society and the Republican zone into a well-organized and coherent whole.

This historically unprecedented appropriation of society by its most oppressed sectors, including women, who were liberated from all the constraints of a highly traditional Catholic country, be it the prohibition of abortion and divorce or a degraded status in the economy, was the work of the Spanish proletariat and peasantry. It was a movement from below that overwhelmed

even the revolutionary organizations of the oppressed, including the C&T. 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. Indeed, the C&T leadership in Barcelona, epicenter of urban anarcho-syndicalism,

went further, rejecting the offer of power presented to it by president-companies, the head of the Catalan government, it decided that the libertarian revolution must stand aside for collaboration with the popular front forces to defeat the common enemy. The revolution that transformed Barcelona in a matter of days into a city virtually run by the working class sprang initially from individual C&T unions,

impelled by their most advanced militants, and as their example spread, it was not only large enterprises but small workshops and businesses that were being taken over. So what Bookchin is saying there is, this is a true bottom-up revolution, and even in some cases, the anarchist trade union is like, don't do this, we need to work with the government, we're not calling for revolution,

and the individual groups of workers are like, no, we're just gonna take over or off it, we're just taking over. Yeah, it's fine, it's fine. And it proves to be a mixed bag, like we'll talk about this, there's fair critiques about what happens, but it is amazing and unprecedented, and one of the great what-ifs of history is if there had not also been this massive civil war

and this fascist invasion, might it have worked, you know? And they're under a pressure that is kind of impossible to overcome in this invasion, but it is an interesting question. What is, yeah, dude, what is strange, like it was strange because we've just never seen it, but like, yeah, what was that year like? You know what I'm saying, like I wonder what the crime rates were,

like what was the, you know what I'm saying, like petty crimes, you know what I'm saying, like... One of these days I will do, because I don't know nearly enough about this, one of these days I would like to do like a hardcore history link, 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,

you replace the cops with like citizens patrols, how did that actually work, what was that like, what are kind of like the first person accounts we can have of those. Obviously, we don't have the time to go into that much detail today. Yeah. But it's definitely like, yeah,

that would call for like a 12-hour... Yes, yes, it's a very complicated, and this is just, I'm hoping what this mostly does is wet people's appetite to read more themselves, right, which I am also going to do, but it's a very interesting period of history. Now, obviously, this system had a number of upsides, if you want to call it a system,

what happens in Spain in this period has a number of upsides. It mobilizes a huge portion of the Republic's citizenry very quickly. It brings a people into arms very rapidly, more rapidly probably than a central government could have done, and these people were highly motivated to resist fascism. But they also, in large part,

weren't motivated to live under the Republic, and coordination between all of these groups was very difficult and sometimes impossible. Meanwhile, the rebels, the nationalists, had a strict military hierarchy, and that's a benefit in a war sometimes, right? It can also be, you know, you can look at the Germans in World War II,

and they're not going to work out, but when you've got one side that's made up of a thousand different fractious people who agree on some things and disagree on a lot, that can deplete your ability to counterattack and to organize effectively. Meanwhile, Franco winds up, and, you know, there's a process.

He's not initially the only guy, but eventually he's the only dude whose opinion really matters. He's the guy at the top, and that happens fairly quickly, and he's the only guy who's not really a very centralized military in order to, like, attack this very decentralized foe.

He's such a sneaky motherfucker. He's a sneaky guy. There's also one of his fellow generals dies in a plane crash, so some of it's just, like, dumb luck, you know? So that helps. Now, since the CEDA had failed, Franco didn't really want to, like, wrap himself in the CEDA's flag

because they'd gotten their asses kicked because people argue if Franco himself was really a fascist, or if he was just kind of co-opting fascism, I don't really see the point in getting involved in that. Franco gets and, like, wraps himself in the phalange party, and, like, they become kind of a dominant right-wing force in this, in the nationalist cause. Now, Jose Antonio, who'd been the leader of the phalangists,

had been arrested by the Republic right at the start of the rebellion, and he was almost immediately executed for sedition, even though he'd been incarcerated when the rebellion cooked off. If you want to argue how just it was, he didn't really have much to do with it, but they kill him, and I'm not, I don't care, he's a fascist, like, I'm not gonna weep over him.

Don't cry for me, Argentina. But Franco takes Jose Antonio and turns him into a martyr, right? And he also imprisons the guy who takes over the phalangists after Jose Antonio so that he can turn the phalangists into his own, basically, like, cult of personality. Yeah, exactly.

And Franco, co-opting the fascists, the side effect of making this war, which had started as a conflict between Spanish left and right, and a conflict between, you know, the Africanist military and the Republic, into the world's first open battleground between fascism and democracy. And the first three months of the Civil War

were some of the bloodiest. Both sides carried out a horrific series of assassinations. It is a very, the early period, there's this amazing rising up of the people to defend themselves, and there's also a ton of fucking vigilante murders, and it does occur on both sides. It's really ugly.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You can't look, man. You mess with the nuns, bro. Like, we all, like, the nuns are fine, guys. Yeah, and we've talked earlier about how, like, you can, you know, there's arguments to be made about, like, obviously, there's a lot of problematic priests.

Of course. But disinterring nuns' coffins. There's really not a good occupant that I know of there. Like, come on. Okay, guys. That's a little unnecessary, huh? Yeah. And it is bad for the early rebel PR.

Yeah. Now, on the rebel side, with occasional exception, tight censorship kept the assassinations out of the news. The church, which would soon sanctify the insurgents' war as a religious crusade, turned a blind eye, though hundreds of clergy were witness to the repression, executed not only by the military,

but by phalangists and normally law-abiding conservative Catholic citizens. So, of course, the church is both victim and perpetrator in a lot of this. And the death toll lives on. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the death toll is much higher in terms of people killed by the right

than people killed by the left. And again, in the Republic, there's outcries against the vigilante violence. And on the right, there's, like, don't talk about it. Keep killing people, don't talk about it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just stop putting it on TV, people. Like, do what you gotta do, but, hey, oh, yeah.

Now, on the Republican side, the two largest left-wing groups at the start of the war, because the communists are very small because Spain doesn't industrialize until a lot later than a lot of the years. It doesn't have a very powerful communist party at the start of things. The two largest left-wing groups

are the anarchists and the Trotskyists. And they were immediately torn between stopping fascism at all costs and, of course, fuck the state, right? Yeah, yeah. This is a tough choice for them. Now, the CNT, the largest anarchist organization, lands on the side of outlying with the state

to fight fascism. The Communist Councils were not on board. Now, while this is happening in the early part of the war, the communists very quickly come to hold significant power within the confusing and fractious Republican military establishment. Now, and they grow rapidly at this period, too.

And this is due to the pretty sensible fact that the communists had a communist state, the USSR, that they could go to and beg for aid, right? Yeah, yeah. Like, the USSR provides aid, we'll talk about that a bit more, but, unfortunately, the fascists

also had states they could go to for help. Italy and Germany. And from the very beginning of this war, there are Italian and German troops fighting on the ground alongside the nationalist Spanish troops. And, unfortunately, for everybody, the fascist states were way more willing

to provide direct aid to their side than the communists were. I'm going to quote again from the New Left Review here. Without fascist aid, most of it provided on credit the rebels would not long have been able to continue the war, let alone win it. Aside from the Nazis' Condor Legion,

Germany and Italy together provided tens of thousands of troops, mainly Italian, nearly 1,600 warplanes, thousands of armored vehicles, and hundreds of field guns. 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. So, yes, the victory of the fascists in Spain owes a great deal to our good friends Texaco and Shell. Oh, my God.

Texaco and Shell, should we back fascists or not fascists? Fascists, of course. We're Texaco, yeah. Oh, my God. They don't talk about that no more. No, let me tell you the last two names. I thought you was going to say right now. Yeah.

Texaco and Shell. I was like, wait, wait, what? That was crazy. So, not wanting to provoke Britain in France, with whom he was still seeking an anti-fascist alliance, Stalin initially held back, but blatant Nazi and fascist intervention increasingly alarmed him,

ensuring that all European powers were made aware that Soviet aid to the Republic was not in support of the advancing revolution. 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. In all, the Soviet Union

sent 700 warplanes and 400 armored vehicles, plus some 2,000 pilots, engineers, military advisors, and NKVD secret police. Now, there's a lot. We're 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? The militias slowed it down, but without this hardcore military equipment, they probably don't stop Franco from taking Madrid in 1936. Now, you know, I was going to say,

like, that, like, tradition of, like, communist Russia aid, I've been thinking about that a little bit, like, you know,

I'm stretching this as far as this idea that, like, the way that they exported aid in communist, like, block countries, like, you know, at, like, there was, once upon a time, like, North Korea was actually doing way better than South Korea.

You know, because of this, like, communist aid. You know what I'm saying? And a number of other reasons, too. Yeah, yeah, totally. The nature of the Japanese invasion. Yeah, absolutely. You know, and then when I think about, like, Cuba and I got, I got friends from, like, you know, South Africa,

Western African countries, Zambia, all these things, and they're like, yo, you could say whatever you want, but they're like, every, every, every nation in Africa got a Cuban doctor. You know what I'm saying? 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 just think about aid. And they, this is, you know, 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, have been doing for decades, is absolutely amazing. And as far as I know, it's done without any sort of hope of recompense. The Soviets are getting paid very well to help. Oh, okay. So when Republican Spain happens, when there's the split, the Republic winds up

with Spain's gold stockpile, which is the largest gold reserves on planet Earth at the time, about $805 million in that, that time's currency. And while the fascists provided aid to Franco on credit, right, Italy and Germany are like, you don't have to pay now, we'll just give you

stuff, and you'll pay us later, right? You'll pay us later. Stalin's like, you know, I'm going to need some cash up for my check. I need my check. I'm going to need some cash up for my check. I'm Joseph Stalin, like, I don't just give people shit, you know? Where my money?

He does later in the war a bit. He gives them a loan, but... Where my pesetas? Yeah, I was saying... So about $805 million is what Spain's gold reserves, the Republican Spain's gold reserves are at the start of the war. They pour more than $500 million in gold

into the Soviet Union by the end of the war. And because... That's a lot. Yeah, and also they have to burn a bunch of money on, like, shady arms dealers and, like, it's a very bad... 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. It's very messy. The fascists also had the benefit of receiving much better guns. And I don't know how much you can blame the Soviets for this. The Germans had the best weaponry in the planet at this point in time.

So the quality of arms that Franco receives blows everything Soviet out of the water. Now, a lot of the blame for the Republic's loss tends to go to Stalin and the USSR, but if we're really being... And, like, when you read articles trying to, like, allay blame,

a lot of people will put blame on Stalin and the USSR. And there are very legitimate things to criticize them about. But if we're truly being fair, the foreign nation's most responsible for the victory of fascism in Spain were the United States, England, and France. Because the entire free world

basically engaged in a policy of non-intervention within the Spanish Civil War. This was part of the appeasement policy that the British were doing with the Germans at the time. And they were trying to get the Germans basically agreed a neutrality in the war. And Germany would put some lip service at this, but they didn't.

They sent soldiers and planes and arms in. Both fascist states intervened directly, which meant that the Republic of Spain was standing on their own against the entire fascist international, fascist Spain, fascist Italy, fascist Germany. And they have some backup from the Soviets.

And that's it, right? Everyone else is like, fuck you, the French closed the border. We're not jumping in. Yeah. 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. Right? Could have been different if, you know. Damn. Right? Yeah. So I can't fucking blame the USSR here, you know? Yeah, that's good, dude.

Because it's like, yeah, you get, you see a homeboy getting like slept, you know what I'm saying? 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. Yeah. But like. Yeah, and if your friend you jump in isn't good at throwing a haymaker.

It's not really his fault. He fucking tried. You're the one. I tried his best. Yeah. None of y'all was jumping in. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So the, the, like the failure of the democratic world, so to speak, to get involved in any kind of organized way is, is one of the great

tragedies and maybe one of the reasons World War Two happens, right? Maybe one of the reasons why. Was that true then? No, no, no. This is, this is FDR. FDR, yeah, because I watched the speech. Yeah. About this time of him explaining why he was like,

we don't want no part to this. I remember, I don't remember exactly, but I remember being really 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. We look, we just,

we can't even feed ourselves. Like, I'm not finna like, send people, maybe we should stay out of this one. Yeah, that's that, that is very much the attitude. Yeah. And the, the fascists use Spain, particularly Germany, use Spain as a testing ground for new weapons and tactics, particularly

their new air force, because the, and the concept of an air force is very new. There had been air forces in World War One, but they'd mostly just shot at each other and like, spotted, right? For artillery and shit. Now you've got bombers, right? Yeah. Now you have air, tactical air support that can destroy armor and stuff.

And the Spanish Civil War is the, the first time this really comes together in an organized way. 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. And we'll talk about that a little bit later in the episode too. But first.

But first, you know who won't attack Spanish cities and civilians? Sophie. With Stuka dive bombers. Yeah, Sophie won't. Sophie. Sophie might though, if she started messing with her products and services. I have been worried about Sophie's cash of Stuka dive bombers.

I am concerned. You know what I'm saying? Why you have so many dive bombers. Cut the check, wear my contract. That's Sophie. So she might, if they don't, she might, they don't say they money, you know what I'm saying? She might bomb Spain, you know? Yeah. She said that about Sophie. Spain's lucky they gave us power to solve or else

things might be different. Beyond our way. All right. Here's some products. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what?

They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series Alphabet Boys. As the FBI, sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside

an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar smoking man who drives a silver hearse.

And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good badass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast

or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal

system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly

Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they

realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass and you may know

me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23 I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there as you can imagine I heard some pretty wild stories.

But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit

when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent

in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast or wherever your podcasts. All right, so we're back. Now, while the Republic lacked

official international support so again, the governments of the democratic world like, ah, fuck you guys like you're on your own, right? But an awful lot of their citizens and citizens from like Poland is a huge number of these guys, an awful lot of people

from around the world, individual people correctly see that like, well, I don't live in Spain, but I don't like fascism, and I think that whatever happens in Spain will probably directly impact my future. So I'm going to go travel to Spain and try to get a hold of a rifle and shoot some fucking fascists.

A lot of people do this. There's a movie. There's a couple. And there's one being worked on right now that I hope will wind up being good. 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. I forget the name of this movie, but it was like an interesting scene about this time that like, okay, the government saying we're not going to do it but that don't stop me. I could fly out there and help. Yeah. Yeah, 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. And that's the way it's always been. And we can talk a lot about the fallout from what happened in Syria.

But, you know, there's a lot of there's a lot of stories of that in history, you know. Yeah. 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 and two of the first foreigners

to volunteer to fight in Spain where a 21 year old classics graduate from Cambridge named Bernard Knox and his friend, John Cornford. They took with them an old pistol that had belonged to John Cornford. Yeah, it's a weird name. They took with them an old pistol. Yes, Cornford, Sophie.

They took with them. He dies fighting fascists. He's a good guy. But he's a little guy. All right. Cornford. They took with them an old pistol. Okay, Sophie. Sorry. So they traveled to Spain together with just like nothing but an old handgun that

belonged to John's dad in the First World War. Knox had to carry a gun the gun because his friend had already been to Spain once before and the British policy of non-intervention mean they did everything meant that Britain like was trying to actively stop people from going to Spain to fight fascism.

But Cornford and his buddy join a militia like get to Spain. 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. And as I'd said the early days of this war of women who are fighting in the militias

this ends at like the end of 1936 when Largo Caballero comes to power because he kind of he argues that women are needed behind the lines so they're not really fighting in the front after this point. It's a pretty brief period and that's again a criticism. One of the good criticisms of the Spanish

Republican government is like well, yeah lost out on a lot of soldiers, huh? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, people willing to shoot. You told him stay home. He's a revolutionary art or though when Cornford and his friend arrive in Spain like Spain is kind of like

overtaken by this this feeling of revolution and this is swelled by the fact that the people of Republic and Spain had literally taken to the streets to defend themselves in mass and it lent cities like Barcelona a revolutionary air that international volunteers noticed.

One of those volunteers was a young George Orwell and he described the atmosphere in Barcelona as startling and overwhelming in like a positive sense just like so incredible this like outpouring of liberty. Now the communist international or common turn quickly realized that

volunteers like Cornford represented a massive opportunity so they devoted some of their resources to organizing what came to be known as the international brigades. 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 although a lot of these volunteers are anarchists and not communists you know it's a bunch of different kind and Trotsky like a bunch of different kinds of people volunteer. And I'm going to quote from a write up on the international brigades in the Guardian.

Another recruit Winston Churchill's rebel nephew Esmond Romaly 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. 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 and it's a key yeah it's very kind of dope man and yeah it's it's we're going to talk mostly is very dope yeah Winston Churchill's nephew show and

I'm like yeah it was like coffee and cognac I'm out here with the homies like we on the streets right now I look I went to public school homie you get this accent I love it I was like okay okay and it's um and it's it's it there's a couple things going on there one of them

is that like by public school that in England actually means like a fancy school okay never mind so he's like I have I have a public school accent but I too am like whatever okay what I call it an unskilled laborer like I identify that's okay that's actually even cooler than it is I don't have to do this okay 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 is like well I want to be like a laborer so I'm gonna go stand with a rifle next to them and fight the fascist yeah yeah I'm not gonna I'm not gonna talk shit about you for doing that

and it's also worth noting we're gonna talk mostly about American volunteers here one of the largest nations that that a lot of people volunteer to fight in Spain from is Poland and obviously Poland becomes the first one of the first large national victim at least

of Nazism so you can you can see why right like a lot of polls looking at Germany on their doorstep agitating about taking back land given to them by Versailles and you're like we should probably go try to stop this yeah yeah yeah yeah so the invasion of Madrid was the first

terrible battle of the Civil War the first like really massive and important one I think and Franco's colonial army including the Spanish Foreign Legion were airlifted from Morocco to Seville by German planes in order to fight there in an operation that Hitler himself named Operation Magic Fire which is

based on a part of a Wagner opera now Franco's fat so they and again the bulk of the nationalist troops don't get out of Africa to fight in Spain without Hitler's airlift they did they had they would have had because the navy doesn't go fascist the Spanish Navy such as it is

stays loyal in large part because like there's actually a lot of Spanish naval officers who try to go against the Republic and then their crews kill them and stuff you know so the only reason that Franco's army gets to Iberia is because the Nazis airlift them

now Franco's fascist hordes tore through Republic territory on their way to Madrid they were slowed by the militias and eventually turned back by a significant amount of Soviet armored aid and you know a lot of people sacrificed to

stop them but a lot of the credit for finally stopping the fascist advanced on Madrid goes to the international brigades who turned back the fascists at a place called university city which is like a college campus in a heroic defense that has become like very like famous

in history now most of the international brigade members at this point were untrained inexperienced and nearly all of them were poorly armed they found themselves confronting a battle hardened army with cutting edge German weaponry and somehow they held the line cornford squad operated

a machine gun nest in the philosophy faculty offices of the university city campus they built barricades out of books in order to stop fascist bullets the guardian notes yeah okay quote enemy bullets gave up before reaching page 350 making

them believe hails of soldiers saved by bibles in their breast pockets I think I killed a fascist cornford a former pacifist wrote excitedly to his girlfriend Margo Heinemann on 8th December 15 or 16 of them were running from a bombardment if it is true it's a fluke

that's I can't even with this entire like building barricades out of philosophy books to stop fascist bullets it's incredible yes that is punk rock he was like stop that about page

350 that's about as far as they can get yeah now the achievement of the international brigades at university city turned them into a symbol both in Spain and worldwide of resistance to fascism they also received more international attention because their numbers included

men who spoke dozens of different languages there were like 54 nations represented eventually and this made it really easy for the foreign press to embed with people because they could find people that they could talk to you know like it like just speaking of someone who's done war zone reporting if there's a group of people like that that I can embed with that's what I'm going to do

because I'll meet other people who are English speakers and it's way easier to talk to interviews and stuff that totally and of course the United States was well represented among the international volunteers now it was very illegal for us citizens to join a foreign military force at this

time but still hundreds and hundreds joined what came to be known as the Abraham Lincoln battalion these soldiers underwent two weeks of clandestine training near New York City before shipping out New York by the way was a the source of a huge number of Lincoln battalion troops it is worth

noting that about one-tenth of foreign Spanish volunteers were Jewish so of all of the people who like and again it's the same thing as the Poles a lot of Jewish folks are like looking at Nazi Germany like we should probably go do something about this this is gonna be a problem it's gonna be a problem for us I think

and in fact American historian and international veteran Albert Prego called the International Brigades quote the vehicle through which Jews could offer the first armed resistance to European fascism and that's pretty rad now one of the most notable aspects

of the Abraham Lincoln battalion is that in an era in which racism was almost unbelievably present in American society an era in which even the military was heavily segregated the Abraham Lincoln battalion was completely unsegregated black men could not only join

they could become officers and command white troops in battle and this had never happened in US history at this point that I am aware of this brings me to the incredible story of Ellward Luchel McDaniels and I am gonna quote from a write up in the Smithsonian magazine here Ellward Luchel McDaniels

traveled across the Atlantic in 1937 to fight fascists in the Spanish Civil War where he became known as El Fantástico for his prowess with a grenade as a platoon sergeant with the Mackenzie 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 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 was it there enough racism to fight in the United States but McDaniels was convinced that anti

fascism and anti-racism were one and the same I saw the invaders of Spain were the same people I've been fighting all my life McDaniels says I've seen lynching and starvation and I know my people's enemies let's go first of all that poor man's last name

is McDaniels which already tells you something you know what I'm saying so we know his family story you know what I'm saying and yeah that just and the finesse just the culture that you get there and get a nickname immediately you know what I'm saying like El Fantástico

cause you're just really good at killing fascists and he's like why cause I'm good at this shit you know what I'm saying oh dang that was crazy I was gonna say that you know like the observation of just like

where we're just like look man you gotta trust us like I'm trying to tell you this is the same same as these like this is the same people these are the same people yeah now the United States in this period also banned black men from serving as fighter pilots

but three black pilots James Peck Patrick Roosevelt and Paul Williams served in Spain Canute Wilson a black American volunteer was the head mechanic for the international garage which maintained all of the brigade's fighting vehicles he wrote this of his reasons for volunteering

to fight in Spain in a letter home to his family we are no longer an isolated minority group fighting hopelessly against an immense giant because my dear we have joined with and become an active part of a great progressive force on whose soldiers rests the responsibility of saving human

civilization from the planned destruction of a small group of degenerates gone mad in their lust for power because if we crush fascism here we'll save our people in America and in other parts of the world from the vicious persecution wholesale imprisonment and slaughter which the Jewish people suffered

and are suffering under Hitler's fascist heels that is that is a sentence dog that is I think there's like this like there's this part of this like longing and I'm gonna speak in like generalities

but just this longing in that 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 you know what I'm saying it can't be

it can't be all of y'all you know what I'm saying so like when you find I mean obviously I'm harkening back to history but when you like when you see during like the Harlem Renaissance you see black people going to France

and being like look there's reasonable white people like I'm telling you they have to exist you know what I'm saying it has to exist you know what I'm saying so like it's almost like I hear that in this guy's statement

it's like look dude no I found them I found them it's reasonable white people yeah and speaking about you know the fact that his last name is McDaniels right that probably means that like an Irish person owned his ancestors not all that far back we're talking about

like 19 like let like not all that long ago like his grandpa 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 into battles, men who had been enslaved by an Irish descendant leading them into combat amazing shit happens yeah during its brief

it's amazing in some ways during its brief period of existence wartime republic in Spain was in some ways almost impossibly progressive in 1936 Largo Caballero appointed Federica Montceny a female anarchist to be the nation's minister of health

Federica immediately set to work focusing the embattled nation's health infrastructure to serve the needs of the poor in the working class she believed that health care should be decentralized locally organized and based around prevention rather than treatment she was also responsible for making

republic in Spain the first nation on earth to legalize on demand abortion wow yeah a lot of really interesting shit is happening here now Montceny 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 and the general focus of criticism on Montceny 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 because obviously

in the Soviet Union they kill a fuckload of anarchists too you know this is a recurring theme in anarchist history and it's something that's very hotly debated to this day I could note here that Nester Machno who we talked about in our Christmas episode also had to thread this moral needle because he collaborated with the post

revolutionary government of Russia which he didn't like to fight against the white forces which were worse you know it's a debate that anarchists have had a number of times in history and is never really settled to a satisfactory degree but it happens now a decent number of the anarchists

who fought for republic in Spain would in fact come to regret their collaboration with the government and the communists and they had some good reasons to do that for one thing republican Spain's lost the war for another thing the broad left unity that characterized some of the early stages of the war did not last

the government of republic in 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 for one thing the government fled Madrid while Franco was advancing something which hampered their ability to capitalize on the moral

victory of halting the fascists right you can't brag about it as much because you ran away you know but you ran though yeah for another reason starting in late 1936 the republic's new government embarked on what they called militarization this involved integrating the hundreds

of different militias into the formal Spanish military now on the surface this was a sensible call and it may have been the right one and it was one that was heavily backed by communist advisors the USSR had sent in many historians will argue that it was military 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 but these militias that are being inducted into the formal military establishment a lot of them had been again anarchist and Trotskyist and they'd been free

democratic fighting units this led to problems and there were cases where like whole battalions would vote to leave combat zones while the fighting was happening this happened in the battle of Madrid when a guy named Darudia gets killed with like his guys leave but it also meant so it's not like obviously

before militarization they decided to militarize because there's a lot of problems with the fact that all these militias are so decentralized but these militias are also very motivated and very resistant to the idea of losing their democratic rights and bring brought under military discipline so while a lot

of militias were integrated to the republican military a significant number of fighters refused to join and whether or not this was a good idea is still hotly debated and George a lot of people will argue that because there's kind of a broad consensus I would say among a lot of historians

I read that after the initial period where they were necessary the militias kind of hindered things more than they helped because of how disorganized they were 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 and I'm going to quote Orwell here it's a good argument later it became the fashion to decry the militias and therefore to pretend that the faults which were due

to lack of training and weapons were the result of the equalitarian system actually a newly raised draft of militia was an undisciplined mob not because the officers called the private comrade but because raw troops are always an undisciplined mob in a workers army discipline is theoretically based on class

loyalty while the discipline of a bourgeoisie conscript army is based ultimately on fear the popular army that replaced the militias was midway between the two types when a man refused to obey an order you did not immediately get him punished you first appealed to him in the name of comradeship cynical people with

no experience handling men will say instantly that this would never work but as a matter of fact it does work in the long run revolutionary discipline depends on understanding of why orders must be obeyed it takes time to diffuse this but it also takes time to drill a man into an automaton on the barracks square

and it is a tribute to the strength of the revolutionary discipline that the militias stayed in the field at all and Orwell has a good point here that's a whole there's a whole like worldview philosophy in those two approaches

I'm about to compare this to parenting no 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

you know what I'm saying you know you're just it's like it's less emotional work to just be like eh it's time to do the dishes why what the hell do you mean why did you hear what I'm saying dude

you got five seconds to get up and do the dishes you know what I'm saying right so and I'm like y'all don't care if you scrunch up your face how you want to scrunch up your face you better hide your emotions I don't need to see it you know what I'm saying like that you live here you washing dishes I bought

you know what I'm using water I'm paying for I'm so I'm black dadding on you but like that's the way we was raised you know what I'm saying so like but it's just like but I know the whole time I'm doing this I'm just like man I can't wait to get out this house man you always you know what I'm saying like

I'm just salty I'ma do it and I'm not gonna say nothing to it yes sir you know what I'm saying but like I don't like you I don't respect this shit you know what I'm saying I'm not doing this because I understand that the dishes are dirty I'm doing this because I don't want to hear

your mouth you know what I'm saying I don't want the consequences with my child now it's like hey the we have we have budgeted the amount of money we have for our water bill

which means that we can run our dishwasher this many times 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 gonna pile up and now it's gonna be two runs instead of one so like you gotta make sure you finish this by two

so we can have plates to eat off when it's time for dinner she goes alright and it's like and so now it's like I've included you into this so you have a steak into like it's not me being a bully it's just

I mean this is functional like we need we need plates to eat off and the dishes are your chore so just do it so just do it you know what I'm saying and when she tell me she don't feel like it like now I'm not appealing to like why I'm your father you do it because I tell

you to I'm appealing to like yeah you I don't feel like doing it either but I also want something to eat off on dinner you know what I'm saying so she's like alright yeah you know what I'm saying and I think yeah you can make an argument that like you know you get the dishes done faster if you're just the if you don't do

the dishes there's fucking consequences then if you explain why it's necessary yeah it's a long term results are probably better the long term is probably better so now it's like now she actually if some drama going on with her little

friend she's actually willing to talk to me you know what I'm saying rather than being like this is just an authoritarian ruler that tells me what to do all the time you know what I'm saying Orwell's argument is that like the long term would have been better if they had stuck with a malicious system maybe with some reforms and stuff now and again a lot

of why a lot of historians will kind of just assume like yeah it was bad like that the malicious system like needed to be reformed it needed to characterize it was the only way to do things it's what the communists felt it's what most of like the centrists and stuff felt and you know

there's very strong arguments to be made that that's true just based on military history there's also strong arguments to be made that like well you guys were just like that's what all of you assume 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 and maybe this could have worked and other things systems like it have worked in other militaries for different periods of time I get interesting results

when I bring up the idea of a democratically of of a military that votes democratically on its officers when I talk because that's what how these malicious worked and I've talked to some friends of mine who are veterans and it's interesting some of some people say like I don't see how that could work

I've had a good friend of mine who is a veteran say oh you know what that makes sense because when you've been in combat with a group of people you know who you trust to give orders like right you know who you yeah it's like I know you got the ranks but I'm listening to him

because this kept me alive yeah exactly so yeah so sure yes sir I'm not gonna yeah I'm certainly not gonna say I know more about this than a number of historians who will say that militarization was really the only option they had I'm just saying there's argument about that and it's something you should read

about I'm not gonna make a harsh stance on it because like I'm not an expert on war or an expert on the Spanish war there's there's something to be said at least to like to make sure that your militia knows what they're doing yeah absolutely some of the level of training that needs to happen at least some level

of cohesiveness of communication seems like it has to be necessary there's some degree you at least need like a centralized communication network to make sure people know but I think anyway one of the tragedies of the Spanish Civil War is that there's a lot of cool what ifs that because there's this horrible war happening

nobody gets the time to really figure out right maybe this could have worked if they hadn't been at the edge of extermination right yeah we weren't facing yeah yeah now the unrest between anarchists and trotskyists and communists within republic and Spain eventually led to bloodshed in the streets

of Barcelona as anarchist and trotskyist militants fought in the streets against communists and socialists this right up from the new left review does I think a fair job of explaining how this all got underway quote under the revolutionary ferment a struggle for power and control of scarce arms was

being waged that was the real meaning of the Barcelona fighting the communist parties increasing influence in the army and political life and the growth of its membership do mainly to soviet aid direct government intervention stop finally stop the fighting in the streets and shortly thereafter ended the revolution's consolidation that is ended the

the anarchist and sort of trotskyist the far left take like consolidate like gaining of power taking of businesses all that sort of stuff the immediate beneficiary of the crisis was Juan Nigren a 45 year old socialist physiologist polyglot and acknowledged expert in financial affairs

as treasury minister he organized the dispatch of gold to Moscow whom president Azana appointed prime minister to put an end to the indiscipline and disarray in the rearguard especially in Catalonia and Aragon the government took over public order in Catalonia dissolved the anarchist dominated the council of Aragon

and sent Enrique Lister's communist army division to break up the rural Aragonese collectives 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 its army division

disbanded and its leader Andrew Nin one of trotsky's former secretaries was disappeared in fact kidnapped and murdered by the NKVD the affair further deepened the distrust between communists and the rest of the political organizations especially the anarchists and left socialists and it made clear to the

republic serious ongoing problems of internal political discord which were a considerable stumbling block to winning the war on the other side of the lines there was no such problem Franco by now head of the so-called nationalist side crushed dissent in the bud forcibly uniting the phalange and car lists the only permitted civilian

political organizations now and there's a lot of debate about what happens in Barcelona Orwell was there for most of this part he was he took part in the fighting in Barcelona and he was with the POUM he was with the trotskyist militia and his recollections of the purging of the POUM

are available for free in his book homage to Catalonia he reserves tremendous criticisms for the Communist Party in large part because they murdered some of his friends there are of course very good critiques of Orwell's narrow perspective in this because he's on the ground and long after the war he would

admit himself that he was somewhat my opaque and unfair to the republican government and the communists in this critics will point out that the C&T and the POUM undermined coordination in unity in the republic and that the violent certain anarchists carried out against the clergy in particular helped

dissuade foreign governments from wanting to help so this is again a complicated issue but you the fact that they left is literally in fighting here is a big part of what undermines their ability to fight the fascists although historians are very split as to how much of a factor the behavior of the Spanish

communists or which were directed by Moscow played in the republican defeat Julian Casanova directly credits the republics defeat mostly to the international situation so he says you can talk about what the communists did wrong with the anarchists did wrong the reason

republic in 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 in military forces right that's why they lost it's like you could debate who made mistakes everybody made mistakes they lost because

nobody like almost only the communists help them and you know you just outman yeah the fascists had a lot more help you know yeah yeah um now while I think it's fair to criticize the nature of the help the USSR sent both at 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 Spanish Civil War had not been over for all that long when the Spanish Civil War started and like nine million people had died in that country after nine million had died in World War one and it was fucking devastated Italy

and Germany were in comparatively better shape and able to provide more aid yeah now British military historian Anthony Beaver however does blame the republics high command which was communist dominated and Soviet military advisors for their quote disastrous conduct of the war and he has some very

well criticized them for engaging in multiple disastrous conventional offensives which were this happened a few times to get a huge number of soldiers together most of which were not super well trained and send them on these massive offensives that would they would get mowed down and the purpose of this

was for propaganda to be able to show look we're advancing against the fascists and of course the fascists are better armed and trained and would just dig in and massacre these people and and Anthony Beaver will argue that horrible horrible decisions taken for mainly propaganda quote

gradually destroyed the republic's army in resistance now no matter what kind of leftist or liberal or whatever you happen to be there are aspects of your ideology that should be challenged by observing the way the Spanish Civil War went speaking as an anarchist it is impossible

to ignore the fact that the fascists had the great advantage of centralized control and particularly food distribution meanwhile republican territories had more than 2,500 independent food collectives workers in many of these collectives were hostile to the government because they were anarchists

and in some areas money had been entirely abolished and since money did exist in the rest of the republic that made cooperation difficult food shortages were common in the republic and this also contributed to their defeat 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 but it's hard it is hard to beta test an entire system of social organization while fighting a war of extermination yeah it's hard

it's hard to get hungry people to fight for you you know what I'm saying like if we hungry it's like well I don't know who got the food yeah and it's it's worth noting that of all the people fighting you know about half of the prisoners of war the fascists took wound up fighting for the fascists they were organized

into fighting units and a significant number of the captured fascists wound up fighting in units for the republic so like that happened on both sides a lot of these guys are just dudes you know yeah they're not all like the internet the international volunteers tend to be very ideological that's not all the case with a lot of soldiers

in early 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 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 text leaks the Luftwaffe would later use 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 to but harden republican resistance and the Germans realize this like the

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 perhaps that's not the best tactic yeah now several cities were bombarded by the Condor Legion during the advance into Basque territory leading to a lot of civilian casualties

but none of these bombings were more famous than the city of Guernica and there's significant debate over Guernica as well 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 there were civilian casualties because precision bombing is a myth but the goal was not what's called terror bombing which they kind of rejected after Madrid and like this guy goes to trial in Nuremberg and that is kind of the conclusion of the allied military is like his bombing of

Guernica was part of a military action I'd like you to repeat the line that you said precision bombing is a myth precision bombing is absolutely a myth someone who watched Mosul it is a myth now even more of a myth then

I have a friend who lives in Iraq and is like there's no such thing you're just blowing up neighborhoods guys now how much of a difference it makes that their goal was not terror bombing what they did they killed a fuckload of civilians and leveled a lot

of Guernica and it's horrible a horrible horrible thing I'm not trying to justify it but what's happened what actually happened and what is kind of remembered about Guernica are sometimes two different things because the bombing of Guernica for whatever reason horrifies

the entire world it becomes and there's what I say 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 it's not the first time that a civilian population is bombed as a part of a war but it becomes the most famous the Republicans made

a lot out of it and used it for propaganda purposes they would claim that 1600 people had died a figure that's likely impossible 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 and if 1600 people died in Guernica it would have meant that the Condor Legion were killing more civilians than the US did during its bombings of like Dresden like per tonnage dropped which is not possible really credible death counts

range from as low as 150 to the low hundreds which is terrible hundreds of civilians killed by bombs from the sky it's horrible I'm not saying it's not 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 and while Republican forces used Guernica to try to generate international sympathy the fascists used it as a cudgel 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 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 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 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 to blast I still

can't because I've never lived in an actual active war zone but obviously more humans alive now have lived in active war zones than not you know what I'm saying 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 have a hard time wrapping my mind around the idea that like death is coming from the sky it's fucked up you know what I'm saying like that's a yeah that's a mine for it it changes you I mean it changes you just to have

that experience for a few days yeah it's something else man just like seeing breathing in the dust that includes pulverized concrete and incinerated bodies from like an airstrike is

is unreal yeah it's a laser from space like you can't it's the hammer of God yeah it's terrible yeah terrifying now the battle over Gornica was very consequential

the Nazis fall helped enable Franco's forces to cut Republican held territory into so to separate the two chunks of Republican territory the north from the south now around the same time the French like Germany occupies Austria and the French start getting really scared of the Nazis

and so they reopen their border and this allows thousands of tons of war material to flow into the Republic freely for the first time and the Republic is able to like gin up a new Republican army made up in part of prisoners of war conscripts as young as 16 and this what's known as

the army of the Ebro launches what would come to be known as the last great Republican assault of the war and like their other great assaults it was a fucking disaster 30,000 Republican fighters died to just 6500 fascist casualties just an absolute nightmare

now the war officially ended in April of 1939 with the unconditional surrender of the Republicans to the fascist Francisco Franco in the areas the fascist retook they were as brutal as you might expect the most egregious example of this happened in August of 1936 in Bataillaz

which we talked about earlier that's where the anarchists and socialists take a huge amount of land and give it to the people while the fascists take back Bataillaz and they just they massacre everyone they can get their fucking hands on 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 now, brutality knows no allegiance in war

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 Federica Monsonni described the slaughter as a lust for blood inconceivable and honest man before but Republic war crimes bore

resemblance to the crimes of the fascists who in the same period of time murdered more than 130,000 civilians and those deaths of course occurred during the war during his decades in power Franco's forced labor concentration camps torture and execution of political enemies led to another

30 to 50,000 deaths and as we know that would make Franco one of the less deadly fascist dictators in history but yeah you can compare the number of people killed what is it about just

what's the point of being in charge if you kill everybody you're supposed to be in charge of because you're killing all the people you don't like that you're supposed to be in charge of and that's easier than arguing that death well Touche yeah I guess you right that's who they're killing there's like

oh we just killed people who disagree with us we just killed people who disagree with us oh my bad I understand your logic now obviously the Republicans lost their war 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 some of them fought in the French resistance some of them fought in the US army after being by the way when US veterans like Ellward come home they get like

spied on by the FBI because they're suspected of being communist sympathizers and stuff like and some of those people some of that stops when the war starts people like ah maybe you had a point it doesn't all stop but a number of these guys continue fighting

and while they failed in their ultimate goals the battle cry of the Spanish anti-fascists they shall not pass or no pasaran still rings loudly in anti-fascist rallies today and it's you know the fight isn't over

they didn't end in Spain they didn't succeed in turning back fascism and bringing in a new golden age for humanity there but it didn't end in the fight didn't end in Spain either and it continues to this day yes it does

oh man yeah let's let that one breathe for a second yeah everybody take a deep breath yeah take a nice deep breath anyway man so

at some point are we going to talk about when Spain stops being fascists yeah I'm going to do episodes on Franco at some point that will get into that history but this is more of a story about vomiting on the king's limousine yeah this was this is about fascism

you know I wanted to talk about how the fascists gained power in Spain and this is that story it's such a like I 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 is like western modern western civilization like you have to have this moment you know if you're not talking about it it's like you the storyline

I feel like the storyline doesn't make sense if you're trying to get from World War 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 and you

you can argue in a lot of people historians will that had the republic one we might not have had a second world war because that might have been a check to fascist ambitions now I don't know how much I agree with that but 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

and then the Nazi state would have collapsed because it was never based on anything but stealing land from other people without the ability to do that it would not have lasted the economy would have collapsed through it would have been some sort of a revolution

and maybe we would have not had World War II that's a pretty solid argument you can make obviously any historical debate like that is like who knows what the truth is I wonder how the Cold War would have looked if we'd at some point if we'd have been like

I guess the communists are like I mean it's that bad 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 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 does the Soviet Union take a different path that maybe more resembles what a lot of the people who fought for it initially wanted like or

I mean who knows or does all of the western world go to war in Russia and as many people die in an even dumber war like who the fuck knows nobody thinks fan fiction right here yeah but it's an interesting conversation to have and I think like yeah

I'm always intrigued by some of these like counterfactuals but what we know is 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 you know but isn't that all of history a bunch of messy people and yeah just trying to figure this shit out damn damn Robert yeah there's a lot of lessons in here

a lot of lessons in the story of the Spanish Civil War and obviously I'm not I hope no one takes this as like anything comprehensive like anything but here's an overview of stuff you might want to read more about yeah not totally cause I have a lot more reading to do

yeah it's important that like the current American does that you know American exceptionalism is such a hell of a drug that

we think that all of our issues are unique because we're uniquely special we're God's little boy so like this stuff is important to know we hammer it all the time but just to be like man look at all these different moments

throughout history like this shit is not new we are toddlers when it comes to the world scene so yeah yeah and that's you know Spain is going through a lot of the same as our colonial as our power as a colonial nation

ebbs as the result of horrible decisions we've made and the fact that colonialism is never a very stable platform we're dealing with a lot of the same issues that Spain was dealing with you know and the ramp up as fascism came to Spain because it's fascism is in part a reaction to

like a failures of colonialism like the like you need to have some sort of golden age you can park it back to right 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 yeah love it anyway you could you could follow Sophie and why Sophie why hell yeah I threw that one in there that was a little curveball you know what I'm saying

yeah oh god yeah prophiphop.com I knew what you was going to say follow me at prophiphop and I'll be looking at all y'all's replies because I tell you what man this pod

got some amazing fans and followers I like y'all the bestest of the best you're like you're weird in the right ways you know what I'm saying you know people like got like a thing you know it's like you want to be a little weird

y'all a little weird in the right ways I feel like yeah you know what I'm saying we don't need no low sodium khaki beige fans you know what I'm saying y'all not wonder bread

y'all like brioche I don't know I think I'm done you cooked my brain boy yeah yeah I'm cooked and I'm ready to cook another meal 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 but that's all for this week so go read about the international brigades

and the anarchist militias of Spain read George Orwell's homage to Catalonia but remember that it's a single dude's perspective who had no understanding of the broader tactical situation because he was just a dude fighting but there's a lot of great George Orwell talking about

what grenades are best to kill people George Orwell was very good with grenades that's the thing nobody told me when we were reading 1984 that George Orwell had extensively written about which grenades are best to kill fascists with

I probably would have paid much more attention I would have paid more attention it's one of the coolest things you can be good with that's why they called that other dude El Fantastica Mr. Williams who was my teacher Mr. Policky

Polish dude lead with the fact that the guy killed a grenade lead with the grenades Jesus alright guys it's over bye did you know Lance Bass is a Russian

trained astronaut that he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow hoping to become the youngest person to go to space well I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass and I'm hosting a new podcast

that tells my crazy story and even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down with the Soviet Union collapsing around him

he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts what if I told you that much of the forensic

science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price two death sentences in a life without parole my youngest I was incarcerated two days after her first

birthday listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts