It Could Happen Here - Anarchist Infrastructure and Military Organization

Episode Date: May 4, 2022

Let's talk about how anarchist movements handled infrastructure and organization in the Spanish Civil War.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadowbride. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, yeah. Oh, that's a beautiful sound. This is It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart and sometimes putting them back together. could happen here. A podcast about things falling apart and sometimes putting them back together.

I'm Robert Evans. I'm here again with Dr. James Stout. James, say hello to the people. Hi, people. We are in an undisclosed location. Is that going to get you in trouble with your immigration stuff? Almost certainly, yes. Yeah, okay. Well, let's just bleep out the rest of that, but keep the thing with me asking if it's going to get him in trouble with this immigration officer. That'll be fine. This is a podcast that all too often, as Garrison and I say, winds up us being like, here's a problem, goodbye. And telling people about problems is important, but it's also important to talk about solutions.

on the Twitter, but on the subreddit for, it could happen here, repeatedly over the last few months of people talking about like, how would anarchists handle things like large scale distribution of food, an industrial base, you know, how would anarchists, how would an anarchist society handle infrastructure in any meaningful capacity? And I think there's kind of a widespread idea among some people that like, you have to intense centralization um to do that um now james you are i wasn't joking about the doctor thing you do have a phd and your specific area of specialty is the spanish civil war that's right yeah uh even more specific than that actually my uh my very specific area of uh a specialty is uh the second republic so a period before the civil war and really like the first week uh of the spanish civil war uh but yes uh catalonia specifically like revolutionary catalonia

and uh i guess my thing is the anti-fascist popular olympics in 1936 but more broadly catalonia and catalonia before and in the civil war yeah and one of the things that's interesting about this period is you did have one of the fairly rare times in history where a significant number of people were living in an industrialized-ish nation with anarchist, under anarchist principles, and a number of things were done in an anarchist fashion, including the production of armored vehicles, the maintenance of large amounts of agriculture, you know, power and whatnot. So yeah, how do? How do, James? Yeah, how do anarchism? Let me tell you. I should start by saying like, I'm not like a big, big theory guy. I'm more of a sort of doing things guy, person. But yeah, so if we look at

what we had in Catalonia, right, in 1936, the Spanish Civil War, if you're not familiar, starts on the 19th of July, 1936, with a coup, right? Some of this will sound familiar. Maybe you should listen to our podcast about Myanmar. But we have a military uprising against a leftist democratic government that has just been elected in 1936 after two two years of a right wing, it's called the Bienio Negro, like the black biennium that, you know, you've lived through the Trump

shit, you understand. So we have this coup that happens. And in cities across Spain, the coup is largely stopped. The differentiating factor is, we talked about this in our podcast, is where the people are armed, in our podcast, is where the people are armed, the coup is stopped. Where the people are not armed, where the government says, no, we won't release weapons to you, the coup succeeds, right? Now, in Barcelona, the coup is stopped almost entirely by the anarchists, with a little bit of help from the police, actually, oddly, right? The one classic allies, anarchists and the police fighting together. I mean, it is also a very different kind of situation with, I mean, yeah, culturally,

like, how does that happen? How does that happen? Well, in Spain, you have various police forces, right? And some of them are created by the Second Republic. So they are police that exist really to protect the Republic from things that would attack it. That does not mean that they do not attack workers. The Republic was often called the Republic of Order because they violently put down strikes and the anarchists killed them. But in this instance, they remained loyal to the cops. That's a pretty steady thing. But in this instance, the Republic was under attack from the right, right, from the military. And in some towns, the police split for the military.

But in Barcelona, they largely did not, right? We have various police guards, police groups in Spain, federal and local. But the assault guards and the civil guards in Barcelona largely remained with the Republic, right? And it's important to, maybe if we step back a second to explain the concept of a popular front, then we can understand that more easily, right? Yeah, and we do, for more detail on this, we talk about a decent amount of this in our Behind the Insurrections episodes on the Spanish Civil War and the popular fronts, which aren't just a Spanish thing. They exist in France. They exist in a number of other countries. It's the thing that gets tried on several occasions, often successfully, at least from

an electoral standpoint. Yeah, yeah, it's very successful at this time, right? And it's important to understand that the ERC, which translates as Catalan Republican Left, had more or less been a popular front since 1931. Yeah, and a popular front is basically this thing we keep talking about, where what if everybody on the left could get on the same page about stopping fascism? That's the basic idea, is like, you've got your libs, you've got your commies, you've got your anarchists, you've got other weird chunks of the left, and everybody agrees, let's all work together to deal with this specific right-wing threat right now. Yes, yeah, exactly. Like, we can put our differences aside and move forward. So that's

what you have in the Second Republic. It's explicitly called the Popular Front, right? And so that is why the police in Barcelona split with the anarchists. Now, what happens in Barcelona is that the military march into town from outside of town and just pretty much get their shit pushed back in by the anarchists, right? All around town, gunfights break out. In one instance,

the anarchists are able to persuade the soldiers manning a machine gun that their class solidarity is more important than their obedience to their officers, and then they turn the machine gun on their officers and kill their officers instead. Unbelievably based. Exceptionally fucking cool, right? The Spanish Civil War has all these amazing stories like that, but that's one of my favorites, right? Doesn't happen often, it's great when it does. So what we have by the end of the first week of the Spanish Civil War

is a situation where in Catalonia, the city is in the hands of the anarchists. There's this meeting that happens between the president of Catalonia and the anarchists. It may or may not be apocryphal, or the exact words may or may not be apocryphal. It doesn't really matter. What happens is that the anarchists go to the president of Catalonia, and he says to them, you're in control of the city. The city's in your hands. He actually, the president, he was liberal, but he'd been a lawyer for the anarchists when they kept getting fired. He said, if

you want me to be another foot soldier in the fire, I will. I'll quit my job. I'll just be another fighter. But if I can be useful to you as a politician, I will as well. So it's a submission from an elected bourgeois politician that like the city belongs to you now to the people and it's up to you what we do next right what they did was they founded this they didn't actually sort of go right it's all anarchist right the two salient anarchist groups of cnt and the fai uh the anarchist federation of iberia and the national confederation of labor um he didn't they didn't sort of be like okay we're under anarchist control they found it the people's committee of anti-fascist militias and they said this is an

anti-fascist catalonia right and then they began um to control the industries according to the principles of anarcho-syndicalism, which is the idea that the way to move towards a more libertarian society under or moving from industrial capitalism is through industrial unions. They were extremely effective. I see this discourse a lot on Twitter or on Reddit or on places where, I don't want to just dismiss people as tankies, but because maybe those people can listen and we can talk and we can understand each other, but where people go on the internet to talk about politics and say that it's impossible for anarchists to do supply chain.

It's impossible for anarchists to do logistics, right? to do supply chain. It's impossible for anarchists to do logistics, right? And sometimes I think they think of anarchism as like only able to work in groups of five people or something. Yeah, there's this broad spread attitude in part because of like some social attitudes among a lot of American anarchists,

certainly American anarchists who are very online that like anarchism is when you live on a farm with four of your friends, right? Like that it's very pastoral, it's anti-industrial. And a decent amount of American anarchists are, it's not uncommon to find people who are like anarcho-primitivist or whatever. But it is important to note

that there's a very long anarchist tradition, as we're talking about now, that's deeply industrial. Yes, and like the anarchist A, right? The anarchist symbol that we all see, that comes from America, right? The industrial workers of the world come from the united states the raised fist popular salute comes from the iww goes to spain right uh we have this long tradition but yeah i think a lot of american anarchists because it's easier to live and work cooperatively in a small group somewhat

detached but what we have in catalonia that we don't have here is the majority of the working class committed to anarcho-syndicalism, right? So people return to work and work very effectively when they're not also volunteering, also fighting in something like a Daruti column, right? These anarchist militias, which we can also talk about because I think they're very interesting. So for instance, one example that I like to cite

is the Hispano Suiza factory, right? Spain-Swiss, It's just an automobile manufacturer. It's like the GM factory. Within three days after the revolution, and bear in mind that most of them have been out shooting at soldiers for most of that time, right? Big thing they had to deal with was the soldiers often use the churches, they would burn the churches. So like it was an extremely vicious vicious urban battle they were they had converted their facility to go from producing automobiles for rich people at the time right 1936 when everyone had a car to producing technicals armored cars right and you can see them if you google cnt

technical cnt on the car it's amazing like uh hodgepodge technicals that they'd welded these things on. And they were able to turn those around and produce weapons for the front. Another good example is the Ascaso pistols. So Ascaso is a famous anarchist leader. And Ascaso was killed on the first day of the revolution when they were fighting the coup. So there wasn't much weapons manufacturing in Catalonia, right? And we're very familiar with that from our work on Myanmar. What they did was they set up a factory in Terrassa to make weapons. They made copies of Ruby pistols, actually, but then they named them after Ascasa.

So you can still buy them. I'm sure you can Google them. You can find them. But they set up a weapons factory, right? casso so you can still buy them i'm sure you can google them you can find them uh um but these they set up a weapons factory right and then under anarcho-syndicalist principles under the principles of sort of unions controlling this production system unions controlling the supply chain system which let's be honest they do largely anyway right like it's not tim apple who buys a circuit board for your phone it's someone else uh now this is a slightly more globalised system with Apple phones.

But the unions were able to set up and change their production, not just keep doing what they were doing, but also pivot without the need for people exercising authority over each other. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America.

From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Important understanding, because you asked me, like, how would anarchists continue industrial production? It's like, well, have you ever had a job that had you work in a factory or an assembly line or in some sort of other industrial way? Have you ever been a contractor and had a boss who sucked? Would it have worked better if that boss hadn't been there? That's the basic, that's like the, like, it's entirely possible for large groups of people to coordinate in a way that is not a capitalist system where you're all accountable to a shareholder, right? Like, there's a number of

different ways to do that, but there's a long tradition. And in fact, some corporations that are still around today and quite large, you can look up the Mondragon Corporation in Spain that have a lot of anarchist principles in their organizing. Not that, like, it's an anarchist company or whatever, but, like, there's significant amounts of anarchist theory in why that operates the way it does and has been significantly successful. There's some other examples, and I think it's Brazil. There's a large, like like steel corporation or whatnot um but yeah like there's there's it it's not there's nothing about anarchism that means you can't have a factory producing armored cars it just means you're not producing armored cars for the profit of the the lockheed martin corporation or whatever yeah you're producing armored cars because you are fighting in a conflict

that you hope will liberate other people, right? And that is arguably a more important motivation than wage labor. And certainly they, in some cases, increase productivity, but they were able to sustain all the functions of an industrial society. And Catalonia was very industrialized,

much more so than the rest of Spain, right? And that's perhaps why anarchism was so important there. And yeah, it doesn't require the arbitrary exercise of authority for that to happen. And like you say, there's plenty of examples of that. I think both of us really enjoyed David Graeber's book, but this idea that we move from one phase of society to another and that necessitates

a different form of political organization just isn't borne out by the historical record. And I think Catalonia is a really good example of that. Yeah, and a further example of that is in a pretty similar timeframe, you're talking an earlier, but maybe like less than 20 years earlier, you have Nestor Makhno and Makhnovia in Ukraine, this kind of independent, autonomous, anarchist society that is extremely successful in war, that the Soviet Union does not exist without Makhno fighting the whites as successfully as he did in stopping an advance on Moscow. And that's rural. They were not industrialized. And in fact, their anarchism was very much based in kind of the traditional methods of organizing rural societies in Ukraine. And you have that a lot in other – like you have a lot – there are a lot of areas in which anarchism is common in rural areas, and it's more of like a state history of industrialized anarchism. And it shows that there's a capability for anarchist principles to function with infrastructure. Yeah, and if you want to look for rural anarchism, you can look in southern Spain, right? If you want to look at a small case study, the anarchist of Casas Viejas is a great example of that, right?

People can find it. I'm sure it's free online. It's a PDF now. But yes, it doesn't have to just exist in urban or rural society or between the two right like um when the daruti column uh went south okay the daruti column is an anarchist column uh there were a number of other anarchist columns uh but this one is the sort of the preeminent one the one that was most successful because they tended not to get bogged down as much in fighting in rural environments where they were not skilled, but they were extremely skilled,

much more so than the military in fighting in urban environments. So they were very successful. They went to Zaragoza and then fought there. While they were there, they were collectivizing the farms. I'm sure some of that collectivization was forced. I don't want to be like everything was rainbows and unicorns yeah it's a war there's no side in a war whose hands stay clean right like that's not minimizing or ignoring it it's just stating that like you you have to sometimes talk about the broad strokes of what's going on with without pretending to

whitewash the fact that i'm certain ugly things happen there as well yeah yeah and like yeah as you say ugly things happen in war and i think if like yeah as you say ugly things happen in war and i think if you if you want that not to happen maybe i don't know you live on the internet um but like um the the rudy column then goes to to madrid right in the seat of madrid which was the also the first conflict with international brigades the first battle the international brigades 14 it was a very successful battle for the republic it was was a battle that allowed the Republic, if we look at the two battles that allow the Republic to exist, right, it's conflict in Barcelona, the battle for Barcelona on the first days of the Civil War, and it's a battle in Madrid, right? Now, Madrid is not as much of an anarchist city. It is a city

with anarchism, but it's also more salient other socialism. So when the Durruti column arrives and takes part in the combat there, because they have been successful, because they're very good at urban warfare, and a lot of the people in the Durruti column didn't want Durruti to go, but he decided it was important to go as part of this popular front, to fight this huge push of Spain's most professional soldiers, right? Yeah. And that's where Daruti, you can read,

uh, I know someone is working on it on like a graphic novel about him. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And you should give them your money if you have some, but,

um, Abel path, his book about Daruti is very good. Um, it's an amazing book because you turn over the line of notes and he's like, Oh yeah, this book has taken me a long time to write because I was involved in a resistance against Franco and spent 25 years in jail in solitary confinement. But what a Chad.

So you can read about Durruti there, right? And Durruti dies in the battle for Madrid. But it's also kind of important to look at Spain is effective. Anarchist Spain is effective in fighting fascism. What stops it being effective, to my mind, is not anarchist principles of military organization. The other thing that was impressive about the Ruti column was that they had embedded loyal army officers

and they listened to them and they learned from them. And they said, okay, we're good at some stuff, not good at other stuff. We will learn from you. other anarchists didn't and didn't tend to do as well yeah this is a common misconception because anarchists are very much against hierarchy um which doesn't mean being against uh professionalism or competence right like it's the idea that like the hierarchy for example that led several million young boys to get machine gun in world war one because the people who were in charge of them had not learned how machine guns functioned was a problem. But if you've got someone who has been training their entire life as a soldier and understands very effectively how artillery functions and how machine guns function and because they have professionalized in that, it's not against anarchist principles to listen to that person in a gunfight.

Yeah, yeah, expertise is not, yeah, it's not incompatible with liberty, right? And so, yeah, they were very willing to listen to that. And in the same way, they would be in a, like, yeah, again, these people have worked in factories, right? They understand that if you don't know how to use a lathe and you exert your liberty to use a lathe

and your hand's going to end up in the lathe. Yeah, when I go to a doctor and say, I have gotten this horrible infected wound, what do I do about it? I am not yielding to a hierarchy. I am accepting their expertise, you know? Yeah, yeah. I think sometimes people, I think your listeners are much better informed than this generally, but people confuse anarchism with a predilection for chaos and violence. And it isn't that, right?

It's just, it's a desire to be more free and to not be controlled. And I have a boot on your neck. But to wind up that thought, the reason that the Republican Spain starts to lose is not because there are anarchists, and you will definitely see this discourse on the internet. Many people will tell me that I'm mistaken about this it's my fucking degree uh but um yeah i would argue that it's because the whole western world that did quote unquote democracies abandoned them right yeah this is like there's there's this we talk about this a bit in the episodes we did on it but like there's this whole argument that i'm sure you get into more between like the socialists the the communists, you know, and the anarchists. But a huge part of it, probably most of it is that like, the fascists are getting guns from other fascists and tanks and aircraft, often flown by professional fascist pilots who are training for

what's going to become World War Two. Whereas Republican Spain has some old bulked action rifles that got smuggled in through France. yeah and some mosins that were sold by america to russia from russia to mexico and then from mexico back to spain right like um and and yeah these old mouses all world talks about that are rusted and they can't open the bolt after they fire them and they reload their ammunition and it's shit um but yeah the and on the other side right like the coup doesn't work if how does the army of africa get from africa to spain it doesn't work. How does the Army of Africa get from Africa to Spain? It doesn't swim, right? How do these generals get from Africa to Spain?

Airlifted by other fascist nations, right? We don't see that, right? Actually, France wanted to sell planes to the Republic in the early days of the war, but Britain pretty much put the kibosh on it. There's an interesting parallel with what you're seeing in Ukraine right now, because in Ukraine you have a Republican government and a military that has a fairly wide selection. Jake Hanrahan just posted like a vegan extremist who's fighting on the front lines of the country, because it's like, yeah, there's a whole bunch of different ideological tendencies

fighting on behalf of the broadly Ukrainian side there, including some very nasty ones. But you're kind of seeing what happens when a fascist power invades a country like that to stop a republic, and democratic powers send them the most advanced weapons on the planet. Right, which is all it would have taken to roll back fascism in Spain. And then perhaps, you know, there were a lot of German ItalianItalian exiles fighting in Spain, right? Because the Second Republic had relatively liberal asylum policies. And they knew the only way to stop fascism in Italy and Germany

was to roll it back in Spain and keep going, right? I often have this, and I've had this as we've reported on Myanmar, this weird thought of like, I'll be reading about the Spanish Civil War in my office and I'll look at my gun collection. If I could go back in time with everything I have in my house, all of the ammo and guns, there are a couple of battles that might've been

turned around by just that. Because, well, for one thing, because modern semi-automatic arms are much more effective than bolt action rifles. But just like the level of armament that those people had was not, there were 18th century armies better equipped for combat. Yeah. I mean, you see people with, uh, with muzzle loaders and stuff in the Spanish civil war. Right. Um, and then the only place they can turn for arms is the Soviet union. Right. And they don't just get arms. They also get these generals, right. Who are quote unquote advising. They're not, they're commanding units. Uh, there's a lot of soviet politicking at play right and as much as anything and you can read like um like uh peter carroll's book on the

abraham lincoln brigades or something a brigade uh uh battalion sorry they weren't actually brigade uh that will give you a better idea of like exactly how this strict authoritarian communist control really sapped the spirit out of the republic um and you can see this in may of 1937 right which is what george orwell writes about in his book right the may days 1937 when we see a conflict between the non-stalinist communists they weren't trotskyists the poom right um very often uh portrayed as trotsky himself like you can see the letters that he wrote to them where he had strong disagreements with them, if you care to look.

But we see this conflict, the shooting war, right? Between the anarchists and the non-Stalinist communists and the Stalinist communists. And what comes out of that is this idea among people on the libertarian left, right? It's a broad spectrum of libertarian leftism that we saw in Spain, that it's not really worth fighting

for the Republic or for the fascists, because either way, we're just going to have the boot on our neck, right? The secret police, as they were, the secret police spent far, far, far more time going after anarchists in the Republican army than they did after spies. Oh, no.

Really? Yes. The authoritarian left spent more of their time fighting anarchists than the fat. Wild. Crazy, isn't it? It's never happened again. We learned from it. We moved on. We've become better people. Yeah, it's great. We're fine now. We've fixed it.

Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures.

I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows in Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. For a lot of the people fighting for the Republic, right,

what are you fighting for? And I think that's important that, like, we remember that even in times when things are bad, right, you have to think about what things should be like. You have to try and model that in what you're doing now. On an economic level, when you're talking about, like, they come and they collectivize these farms, there's, like, anarch like the anarchists in large chunks and like in Catalonia in particular are kind of running what at the time is a fairly modern industrial economy. How does that how does that work? Like, do you have any kind of like overall state like during the period of time where, you know, they had reasonable control and also weren't completely overwhelmed with the fighting. How did it function? Yeah, you kind of have a state where you have this sort of people's committee of anti-fascist militias, but not really because things are somewhat chaotic. It's not a state as we would maybe understand it now. So what we have instead is anarcho-syndicalism, right?

These unions going to other unions and organizing among themselves, right? Like, you know, the steel workers need x from the miners right the the miners then then the uh the tube makers need x from the steel workers and the gun company need x from the from the uh tube makers right and so organizing along industrial union levels allows things to continue right allows the trains and trams to continue uh allows them to continue manufacturing munitions right so it's um it's anarcho-syndicalism it is it's a type of libertarian leftism and then uh we see these collective or sort of cooperative i should say farm farming arrangements right where again uh people people are farming people are sort of

joining together their industrial small holdings and then delivering those contributing those to to the city to the war effort and there's something as you see in ukraine right relatively um special that happens in these times of conflict where people are i think more willing to just step aside from like the the accum and i think that's always been that was a thing for the spanish working class for a long time but to step aside from like the the accum and i think that's always been that was a thing for the spanish working class for a long time but to step aside from the accumulation of stuff right from the accumulation of individual goods and wealth and to say like yeah well let's all get stuck in together and i think that helped to allow that to happen helped to allow it to

continue but yeah these organizations between unions and collectives worked right they functioned you can't argue that they didn't work. The Republican army didn't starve in a week or run out of fuel and things, right? These anarchist columns were able to travel from Barcelona to Zaragoza and from Zaragoza back to Madrid. That doesn't happen if you're incapable of organizing, right? So, yeah, in the factories, these people had already been organizing together, right? They were on strike often right they knew how to they had an existing system for organizing things because

they already organized to pay strike funds they already organized to look after other union other parts of the cnt when they were out right they organized to have policy statements on various things so they had these existing means to organize. They just didn't have authorities that told people what to do. They knew how to work together to decide what to do. Yeah, I had this beautiful moment during the 2020 uprisings where I was in a city and I was hanging out with members of a medical collective. And the building that they were in, there was a couple of thousand square feet of,

they were producing by assembly line, chem wipes for clearing mace out of your eyes. They were producing like IFACs, medical kits. They had racks of body armor that had been donated or purchased with donated funds. And it was all, it was a substantial amount of equipment that was being, and respirators and stuff that was being organized, assembled, put together, distributed, put in people's hands,

put in the hands of people who are going out and utilizing it on a regular basis. And it was being done like within the principles of kind of like, like a number of things can be organized that way. It is handling the collection, the distribution of equipment and the collection disbursement of funds for potentially thousands and thousands of people. That's perfectly doable under anarchist principles and anarchists have done that kind of thing a number of times in the world. anarchist principles and anarchists have done that kind of thing a number of times in the world yeah like if you look at the example of the the soup kitchens right the proletarian diners or restaurants they called them right so in uh in barcelona amador they took over the ritz right uh and and sourced food food from rural anarchists to to feed people right rather than saying like oh you know you have to buy food you have to buy food you have to buy food you come here and anyone can eat if you're hungry, right?

And, yeah, you see people doing that. Look at the unit that we spoke about in Myanmar, right? The Karenny Generation C Army. Those guys, they didn't have, like, you know, no one was wearing rank, right? No one was a general or a captain or a sergeant, right? They talked, and to our point before about expertise, some people...

We found out the person we were talking to, Zaw, who was killed, was seen as a commander by people because of what they wrote about him after he died, but he never talked about himself that way. No, in fact, he told us, right, that if some people knew more, if they'd been in the fight for longer,

they knew the terrain, and then we'd listen to them, and they have a bit more weight in that conversation. But we all just decide together what we want to do. And that works, right? Those guys were very well respected among the anti-coup forces in Myanmar because of their willingness to fight and their effectiveness. And those guys have a good battlefield record against the government troops. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And it wasn't't just again like it's not just five guys fighting right

it's also they were able and and in myanmar we still see this with like the underground i think they call them the development committee or something the people who are they were the people who fought it did the shield walls and that kind of thing and people will be familiar with the george floyd uprising for them they went underground and they're developing ways to make weapons now, right? So they're the people you'll see making 3D printed guns. They're the people you'll see making improvised explosive devices, fertilizer bombs,

working out how to make handmade tutu rifles we've seen, right? Like, again, they don't need someone in charge for that, right? And in times of difficulty, we revert to taking care of one another and getting things done we we don't contrary to i think what what we're led to believe sort of revert to we don't need like a strong leader dear leader we we are capable of looking after one another outside of authority in the state yeah and it also stands the point that like accepting the authority of someone with expertise it also stands to the point that like accepting the authority

of someone with expertise in certain situations, like the fundamental way in which effective militaries are organized tends to involve the existence of an NCO Corps, right? Every military that is good at fighting has an NCO Corps. Part of why Russia has acquitted itself so unbelievably poorly in the fighting in Ukraine is that that does not functionally exist in the Russian military. It is absolutely, and the basic idea of an NCO Corps is that with, among fighting units, there should be dudes whose job, and I say dudes in the non-gendered sense, there should be people whose job is to make the functioning of that fighting unit be their whole life, and they stay at that job for a long time they don't just like move up and shit they're just they're there to keep that unit functioning um and from the

perspective of like someone who is an anarchist i mean as an anarchist who's been shot at a number of times when i'm hanging out and there's like some grizzled ass fucking veteran in the unit i'm embedded with i'm gonna do whatever that fucker says, right? Absolutely, because you're crazy not to, because that's just good sense. It's the same thing as like, if you're in deep bush or whatever with somebody who knows wilderness survival, and they tell you don't eat that plant, or they tell you, you know, this is a bad place to camp for this reason, or whatever, you listen to them. Like that's, again, and you know, factories function the same way. Having been on building sites, they function the same way. Somebody tells you don't do that, it's a bad idea,

and they clearly have been doing it more than you. You listen to them. That's not accepting that you have a boss. That's accepting that you have people who are more experienced and competent in certain things. Yeah, and if you look at what ineffective armies sometimes have, it's in the officer corps. It's people who are in charge, but maybe ought not to be,

but it's because of their status or their wealth or something else, right? And you see, like, very effective fighting in the anarchist units, right, with men and women and actually people who were non-binary as well, or people who we'd call non-binary, didn't call themselves that then. But we see that because they were willing to elect officers, right? But then listen to them. And it was listen to, not obey, right? But that was an extremely effective way of doing things.

Yeah, I was having a conversation with a buddy of mine who was a Marine and saw some very heavy combat in Iraq years ago about the way in which certain anarchist units had worked over time and talked about the fact that they elected their leaders. And he was like, well, we didn't do that, obviously, but there were people you knew you shouldn't listen to and people you did. And you understood who you wanted calling the shots when bullets were flying, right? Like, regardless of what the actual hierarchy was, it's just like, you know, in the US military, you have a platoon leader who was an officer who's been to college, and you have a platoon leader who is an officer who's been to college and you have a platoon sergeant and they do somewhat different things but every reasonable person who has

interfaced with those units will agree that like any good platoon leader even though they're an officer and of higher rank is going to listen to whatever the fucking platoon sergeant says because they've been doing that job a lot longer yes yeah yeah yeah you're a fool and you're arrogant if you don't right and and that arrogance will find you out if you're a fool and you're arrogant if you don't. And that arrogance will find you out if you're in a difficult situation pretty quickly. So yeah, I think it's important to look at those anarchist militaries. And there are lots and lots of accounts of the anarchists in the Spanish Civil War. Julian Casanova's book is one of my favorites if people want to read one. Murray Bookchin, of course, has written the Spanish anarchists as

well. So there are a lot of books you can read about. And some of the micro case studies are really fun, right? If you want to look at what is it like to live on an anarchist farm in 1936 in rural Catalonia, Yale or something like that. And I would encourage people to read them with an open mind. I understand it looked like the world was different than it is today. But to look at those historical examples and realize that like what people were doing then was fundamentally the same right they were trying to take care of each other and make the world better for their children and they didn't want the boot on their neck and

they were all prepared to work together to do that and that was an extremely functional way and what didn't work for them was being being controlled by people from the Soviet Union who maybe didn't understand their struggle because they often felt it wasn't worth fighting anymore. And that's true for communists too, actually, right? Like if you look at the American communists who went and fought, and they were overwhelmingly communists who went and fought for the International Brigade. The International Brigades were not the Republic's army per se, they were the Comintern's army.

And if there is one group of people who was hated more than anyone else, it was Commissars, right? These people who were sort of there to enforce this very strict interpretation of what they saw as Marxist-Leninism. So even those people, right, who were Communists might have had a slightly more libertarian understanding, didn't really take that well to be bossed around and lost a lot of their wills, what they were fighting for because of that, right?

Cecil Albee's book is another really good book about that, if you want to read that. Well, I think that's going to bring us to an end here. James, you have a book about the Spanish Civil War that you should probably plug here. Yeah, yeah. It's called The Popular Front and the 1936 Barcelona Olympics. It's about the Antifa Olympics that were held as an alternative to the Barcelona Olympics. It explains how the Popular Front used sport to build an anti-fascist identity in Catalonia, and it used sport to bring together anti-fascists from around the world the popular olympics actually happened on the 19th of July which is the same day the civil war

started so they never they never occurred but many of the people who went to take part in the olympics decided to stay and fight um so that's what my book's about um it's quite expensive and it can I understand people can't afford it uh that's fine I'm I keep saying I'm working on another book but I'm not working very hard or very fast. Yeah, yeah, look it up. Someone's probably bootlegged it. Actually, the e-book is often free at universities and other libraries. So, yeah, just go to your library, and ask them to get it.

And where else can people find you? On the internet, at James Stout on Twitter. Same thing on Patreon. Those are my two main things. You can find my writing on muckrack just google my name yeah and again help us dan will please bleep that out for the sake of james immigration cases and uh yeah yeah that's good that's that's an episode it could happen here as a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us

out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trails, and step into the flames of right. An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturno on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.