It Could Happen Here - Franco’s Corpse Collection: Spooky Week #3

Episode Date: October 27, 2022

James, Shereen, Gare, and Mia discuss the Valle de los Caidos, Spain’s mass graves, and Franco’s last helicopter trip.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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The podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audio books while running errands or at the end of a busy day. From thought provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Listen to Black Lit on the Black Effect podcast network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. AT&T. Connecting changes everything. That's right, it's spooky week It can happen here Those were ghost noises if you haven't realized And that must mean that today we are doing

A podcast about mass graves What's going on? What the fuck's happening in the background? There's some noise We've summoned a fucking spirit Where's that coming from? what's going on what the fuck's happening in the background there's some noise the sound there's running water we've summoned a fucking spirit where's that coming from yeah what the i don't i don't i don't hear anything guys you're just you don't hear it no it's gone now right it's gone now it's the podcast where we convince garrison that there's a ghost in the uh

zoom machine it's okay i could i could like do. I could do a lesser banishing of the pentagram if we really want to. It's fine. I'm not worried. I like the pentagram. It's what I'm tattooing on my children. Oh, nice. Yeah, me too. Yeah.

You haven't done the forehead, though, like a coward you've done there. Yeah, no. I mean, elbow is the way to go. So, Garrison, what do you know about mass graves? Never been to one, to my knowledge. They seem like they're not great. Usually they're a signifier that something not great happened. A little bit of an oopsie.

Yeah. Can be a way to hide one's mistakes, certainly. Where would you, if you had to guess where the biggest mass grave in the world is, where would you go for it? Well, I know there's a lot of big ones in Canada, but if I'm going to guess... Yeah, they call those schools in Canada, don't they? They should, yeah.

I would say, like, Russia maybe has, like, a biggest mass grave. I don't know. That's just, like, off the top of my head. No, it's not. It's, uh... You got a guess, Shireen? Oh, no. I know where the biggest cemetery is, but I guess that's very different.

Where is the biggest cemetery? Iraq. Oh, really? Okay. Iraq has the world and it's supposed to be haunted. So, ooh. Oh, ooh. Well, this one is not haunted,

but as far as I can tell, it's the biggest mass grave in the world. About 34,000 people. And this is in Spain. Spain does not get enough credit for its mass graves, in fact. Second only to Cambodia in the number of mass graves that it has. Spain has about 115,000 people who were forcibly disappeared and are still buried in unidentified graves. But about 34,000 of them are buried in the place we're going to talk about

today, which is the Valle de los Caídos or the Valley of the Fallen. So the Valle de los Caídos is not only a mass grave, but it's also a Catholic basilica. It's also the largest basilica in the world. And it was built by one Francisco Franco, who was the dictator of Spain from 1939 until 1975. And it was also his own grave until 2019, when Spain dug him up, put him in a helicopter, flew him across the country so that no one could car bomb or protest or otherwise desecrate his corpse, and buried him in another grave. So that's what I want to talk about today. The Valle de los Caídos, it means Valley of the Fallen, right? Incidentally, there's a film called Valley of the Fallen right incidentally there's a film

called Valley of the Dead which has anyone else seen this or is it just me who's decided to curse himself okay just you

just me more the shame yeah many more people should be enjoying Spanish Civil War zombie fiction movies

in which both sides come together to fight against the greater foe of the undead. Not actually a thing that happened. So it's the Valley of the Undead. Yeah, it could be called the Valley of the Undead, but they didn't quite get that far.

Some of the least spectacular dubbing I've ever seen in a film. I'm used to watching English stuff dubbed in Spanish, but I don't think I've before seen something Spanish dubbed in like really cringe American English. It's not, it's, it's,

it's not great. No, it's not. But in a sense it is also great, but in, you know, in, in a sort of,

uh, enjoyably bad sense. But yeah, it is, it is very funny. It's on Netflix. It's free. Mal Naziros, I think it was. But yeah, it is, it is very funny. It's on Netflix. It's free. Mal Naziros,

I think it was called in Spanish, but, uh, Valley of the Dead in, in English. So yeah, people should check it out if they want a different spooky film to watch this Halloween. Uh,

so let's talk about, uh, the Valley of the Fallen. It was built under Franco's direction as kind of this national act of atonement for the Civil War. At first, he said it was going to be a memorial to both sides, the Slick Valley of the Fallen.

But at first, it was supposed to be a memorial to the martyrs of his glorious crusade against the Reds, against Stalinism, against Satanism, against all the things that are bad, according to Francoist. But it wasn't really, it was just a giant monument to Franco's national Catholic ideology,

which kind of fuses the nation and the church in this one massive ball of terrible shit. It's designed in the neoclassical style, which fascists love. Fascists love the neoclassical style because they can draw these direct lines between themselves and the empires of antiquity right and except without the fucking paint because they're cowards and fools yes look white because they're tiny babies this is true yeah yeah they uh they never did the thing where they like bedazzled their statues like the the greeks and the Romans did. More's to shame. Someone should bust in there with some glitter spray paint

and tart it up a bit. They haven't done that, unfortunately. Look, return to tradition. Make your statues look cringe. That's how they're supposed to look. Don't worry. The statues do look cringe. But unfortunately, they're not shiny,

which is disappointing. and it's built of granite though which i guess is kind of a return to tradition uh it was built very near uh the escorial which is like the resting place and palace of the kings of spain and that's because franco wants to draw a link between himself and Philip II, right? Philip II was the king of Spain, who at the time that he ruled, ruled every continent that was known to European people. Or ruled territory, which is great, which is not a problem, of course. It's in fact good. An inbred old Spanish dude was ruling over places that he couldn't really conceive of and had never visited.

And there are no problems with that. Okay, so work begins on Valladolid in 1940, right? It's a year after the end of the Spanish Civil War. And Franco decrees that he's going to make this memorial to the glorious National Crusade against the Reds. And unbelievably, he wanted work to be finished in a year, which obviously he's not operating in reality because he's a piece of shit.

But it took 20 years to build, right? So it was off by a big construction understander, Francisco Franco. And like King Philip, big construction understander francisco franco uh and like king philip he could have plundered the entire uh labor and capital of the americas to build his folly and instead he relied on the forced labor of about 20 000 prisoners of war these were former republicans right and they were forced to build a church. Obviously, many of them did not like the church

and were not really very fond of building what is now the biggest Catholic cathedral in the world, actually. And it has the biggest cross in the world, which it shocked me that the biggest cross in the world wasn't in the United States. But I'm sure Ted Cruz is actively working on it as we speak or joe yeah i feel like if you like walked around my hometown and told people that the biggest cross in the world was a catholic one they would immediately spend 20 trillion dollars

building a bigger one yeah like i mean the only thing that could convince them to defund the police would be we need a bigger cross. Yeah, owning the Catholic cross. Maybe we should put that, maybe we should enter that into the discourse on true social or something. Franco, of course, is not the only person buried there. Right next to Franco in the center of the Basilica is his friend, José Antonio Primo de Rivera.

Right next to Franco in the center of the Basilica is his friend, José Antonio Primo de Rivera. Primo died exactly 39 years before Franco on the 20th of November, 1936. And he died because he was killed by the Republicans, which is based in good. And he has this little gravestone there next to Franco, which of course has not created any problems after spain sort of began to transition to democracy when franco died right it's of course not a bad thing to build a giant monument to fascism and francoism and nobody is going to turn up there and do a

fascism in the years afterwards oh boy yeah it's a little bit unfortunate uh so there's every day at 11 o'clock a priest says a mass um and at that mass you can generally find old people who will sort of mill around for a while and then quietly start doing fascist salutes um which is not which is not great eventually they have to be comfortable first yeah

well you gotta you gotta get you gotta sample the vibes and then do a fascism and the vibes here are probably not great they also have a choir

it's only a choir of small children who sing why because of fucking what because everything about this is cursed uh there's a film

there's a film about these little children who go to a quote unquote traditional school at the basilica uh which i can imagine it's great and they learn all kinds of wonderful things about critical race theory yeah so the priest also says a prayer for the fate of Spain and the blessed martyrs, which really is wonderful and perhaps points in the direction of the complicity of the Catholic Church in lots of the war crimes that we're going to talk about today. Second consecutive episode where the Catholic Church is responsible for the whole thing.

Wow, I can't believe the Catholics did anything bad. No, it's shocking, isn't it it given their history of being kind and good and generally respectful towards people they disagree with so true james yeah no problems with the catholic church so this particular church is hewn it's just a giant hole in a granite ridge right it's again a giant hole cut by the forced labor prisoners of war uh it's called the valley of the fallen because today it houses the remains of about 33 000 people and this is what makes it the biggest mass grave in the world right the monuments register includes many of their names uh and it has the motto caídos por dios y españa so fallen for god in spain which conveniently overlooks the fact that most of the people there didn't like god very much and really didn't like the version of spain that's being presented here

either right because the vast majority of them were republicans people who had fought against franco's idea of spain in the civil war. And the bodies that came there really kind of came there in two distinct waves. And so, like I said, Spain has about 114,000 odd people who are buried in unidentified graves, right? The vast majority of these people are Republicans who were killed by Francoist forces, but some of them are not. Some of them are Francoists, Catholics, Carlists, other right-wing fascist-type people who were killed by the Republicans. Now, the bulk of those people were dug up and identified by the Francoist regime in the time that he was in power, and many of them were moved to the Valley of the Fallen, and they're identified there. But the majority of the people in the Valley of the Fallen were Republican people whose remains were taken

without their consent from mass graves where they were victims of Franco's terror, right? And they were moved to the Valley of the Fallen to be some kind of weird pyramid sacrifice ritual. I don't have a complete grasp of Catholicism, but I certainly don't understand this shit, to sort of, I don't know, make Franco's temple more like spectacular and it's very strange is it it's very cruel right uh i want to quote uh from the bbc article in 2011

that was written about one of these people jorge valrico so um So Jorge Valrico Canales was taken from his home in August 1936 in the middle of the night and shot by a fascist execution squad. His town had fallen to the uprising and he had been singled out as a socialist. In 1959, his remains were dug from a well and moved to the Valley of the Fallen. More than 30, 000 war dead from both sides are transferred there on francos orders for me it's excruciatingly painful that my father's remains are in a place built to the glory of the victors in a military coup says fausto canales it feels like a double crime first when he was executed then when they moved his body without our permission to a place which is totally inappropriate. So that experience, sadly, is far from uncommon, right? Between 1959 and 1983, like I said, about 30,000 of these

graves were dug up. Lots of these were like shallow road-sized graves. They were wells. Some people were buried in graveyards and they were transferred to the valley sometimes they weren't transferred in their entirety incidentally uh it's like they did these mass graves are not well organized um so like to to perhaps give some uh context here like these they began spain began exhuming these mass graves in 2007, right? There was a historical memory law passed. And they're often just jumbles of corpses and bones, right? Some of these mass graves contain like a thousand people.

Right. I don't imagine them being like, hey, we're going to do a mass grave now. You know what I mean? Like they're just kind of digging a hole and putting bodies in it. Yeah. Yeah. It's fair to say, say yeah no one made a good plan uh which is unfortunate isn't it but uh yeah they like they would well they would get all the

people who they identified as socialist or feminist or otherwise objectionable to their vision of spanishness and then kill them all yeah and then put them in a hole uh because they considered them to be less than human and they seemingly seem to have like dived into the hole and grabbed some bits and pieces and moved them to the valley of the fallen at some point wait so like howard did okay like what what actually like how are like the bodies in the valley of the fallen like held like what are they just like are they in like caskets they just dumped them in another hole no there are like there are like various it seems like there are various different like some of them are in these little stone there are like these little stone tomb looking things but i don't

think that those actually contain the remains i think they're in these various pits uh so they just it's another they moved them from one mass grave yeah another mass grave that they build a sacrifice temple over yeah so they're now beginning to exhume the already exhumed bodies front so they're now digging up the the valley of the fallen right uh to to identify these remains um catalonia has a dna registry so if you believe that you're it would be like people of our generation's grandparents if you believe that your grandparents are in a mass grave, that they've disappeared

then you can register your DNA and they test it against the mass graves that they're exhuming so that's how they identify people Chris, do you know what won't dig a mass grave and throw your grandparents in it i i cannot in exxon mobile that's right everybody yeah

black rifle coffee company well i was just gonna go with coca-cola but that works well that's three options three for three. Here's the ad. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter. Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows. Presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories. stories inspired by the legends of Latin America.

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That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. And we're back. Hopefully there was no reference to mass graves in those adverts, but we can't promise you that, sadly. We also can't promise you that there's mass graves they didn't talk about. Yeah, that's probably more likely, isn't it? Anyway, enjoy that advert for Nestle. Moving on.

Some of these mass graves have been identified by a Spanish nonprofit group called Innovation and Human Rights. And they actually have this incredible data set, specifically on the Valley of the Fallen, where you can look up the location of the corpses that are there, right? So like, where did these, of the remains that have been identified, from where did they come? 3,902 corpses.

That's about 70 busloads of dead people, if you want to imagine that. They came from this small town of Tarragona, which is where I used to live. That's not a big town. I was trying to think of a California town to contextualize it by, but I think most people wouldn't have heard of towns that small. that small. Despite being a pretty rural area, the Camp de Tarragona contributed about 20% of the corpses that remain in the valley. And that's probably because it's part of Catalonia. Spain is a multinational state. So there are lots of nations within Spain, Catalonia, the Basque country being the ones that people are most familiar with. Franco particularly hated Catalan separatists

and so as part of this ongoing punishment of Catalonia for like trying to leave Spain during the civil war, the Francoists dug up the remains of the people they'd already murdered and moved them to a long way from Catalonia, right? The Valladolid is near Madrid. Conditions for people who built the valley people they'd already murdered and moved them to a long way from Catalonia, right? The Valle de los Gailos is near Madrid. Conditions for people who built the valley were pretty appalling too. The workers and their families lived in these shacks, according to archaeologists who exhumed

them last year. Families lived in nine meter square shacks with no water or electricity. They made shoes out of old tires and they had no windows or no heating. Their beds were made of stone and they and their children suffered from malnutrition. It's not particularly rare for people to have suffered from malnutrition in Spain after the Civil War. This period was called the years of hunger. But even so it seems like there was particular cruelty uh applied to these people many of whom were serving sentences for things like forming unions or forming student political movements right like they weren't like they hadn't done anything wrong that they were the victims of a totalitarian state uh so one of those people is uholás Sánchez Albornoz. He was interviewed

being a Catalan newspaper, El Nacional, and he talks a lot about his memories there. And incidentally, he escaped after a few months with the help of Norman Mailer's sister. Hell yeah, base Normanan mailer sister she's incredibly based actually uh like yeah she she like helped him escape and then ferried him across the pyrenees to france uh where he escaped into exile in argentina and lived for decades and the only good well okay i was gonna i was gonna make an only good argentinian exile joke but i it probably is actually genuinely worth mentioning that a lot like a lot of people who were jews fled to argentina too like right before world war ii yeah and that's a huge thing

and you get people like calling them nazis because they're fucking dumb as shit and it's like guys come fucking on like you if you can't tell between a nazi and the people they were killing like please stop okay this has been my interlude about people doing this shit because oh my god yeah maybe maybe don't cast dispersions maybe uh do a little bit of reading first and so yeah a lot of people a lot of them end up in in argentine exile actually ironically argentina also claims universal jurisdiction so what we've seen in the last few years is like uh spanish historical memory groups trying to uh trying to get people who perpetrated crimes against humanity under franco extradited to argentina to be questioned which which is also very funny given that argentina has its own legacy

of crimes against humanity right uh and spain does this shit too actually spain claims universal jurisdiction and will try and like extradite people who have done crimes against humanity in formerly colonized countries without spain has not faced up to its own crimes against its own population you know i i will say i am entirely down for like intentionally starting some sort of like spain argentina like shit fest where both of them like get pissed off at each other and start trying each other's war criminals that seems really funny i would be but i would be even more impressed to see um are you familiar with who balthazar garthon is i see that weird prosecutor guy yeah yes yes yeah who tried to uh who tried to try u.s officials for crimes against humanity for the things they did at guantanamo bay

yeah it would be outstanding i would love to see like spain and the united states come to blows over like their respective crimes against humanity. It would be wonderful, sadly. And like in Iraq too, I think he like, what was it called? Did they call it enhanced interrogation techniques that they were using when they were like electrocuting people and such? Yeah.

So like he tried to prosecute people for that. Sadly, like everything else in Spain, he strayed a little bit too close to looking at the corruption of the spanish state and lost his position uh which is a shame uh he did some pretty chudly shit himself like he very clearly presided over trials where people had very clearly been tortured and was just like oh that's interesting to see you in the witness box giving this testimony i'm not gonna note the fact that you've like very clearly been beaten to shit with a nightstick uh she's yeah spain a country with no problems famously um so yeah uh albunoz escapes actually

there's a film called uh los años barbaros the barbarous years i guess uh the barbarian years uh which which um looks at his escape and he was one of only two people to have escaped but people died building the valley of the fallen right and then were buried there in this weird monument to uh to francoism. So like I said, Spain really hasn't dealt with its legacy of mass murder, right? And it never really had a truth and reconciliation commission. It never really dealt with the amount of people murdered after the war. And it's really only in the last 10 or 15 years that Spain has begun digging up these mass graves. So under Pedro Sanchez and the socialist government, they've begun doing more to deal with this. In 2007, an earlier Spanish socialist government passed this thing called the Law for Historical Memory. And the Law for Historical Memory funded the recovery of the memory of the Civil War, right?

And you can draw very obvious parallels between how Spain has dealt with its Civil War and its transition to democracy and how the United States has dealt with its Civil War, right? You will see, like, there is... Do you know what Vox is? Yeah, they're like the insane far-right party in Spain. Yes, and so fucking cringe, holy shit.

Even by the standards of far-right parties, like, oh my fucking god. Oh god, yeah. I fucking... Do they wear silly outfits? Yeah, I would imagine so. I don't think there's ever been a picture of them where they haven't been in the weirdest looking shit. Because occasionally some of the Spanish fascists

wear some pretty gay outfits, and it's really funny. Are you talking about the Foreign Legion? Yes, yes, yes. If Tom of Finland created a military unit. Yes, that is exactly who I'm referring to. Yeah, okay. They are not so much outright fascists as a fashy military unit. tom of finland created a military yes yes that is exactly who i'm referring to yeah okay yeah they they are not so much like outright fascist as a fashy military unit yeah yeah but yes uh yeah it's i know yeah absolute thirst trap and just like if people should google photos if they

haven't seen them it'll occasionally pop up on like uh twitter or something where people will find these incredibly butch dudes who like like it's not that they've unbuttoned their shirts just so you understand it's just that their pecs are ripping out of their shirts no it's their shirts are not equipped with buttons yeah yeah because it yeah like to be in that unit you have to be so incredibly buff that you uh you start buttoning your shirt from the navel down and which to be fair is more appropriate in spain i remember like uh i used to teach in spain and then i taught in the united states and like coming back and being like oh i really have to change the way i dress uh to be appropriate for an american audience yeah the to get back to mass graves and away from tactical thirst traps uh the what spain didn't have right

was like franco didn't get hung upside down from a gas station and beaten with sticks in the face right more is the shame uh there's still time right his body his body is still available for beating uh you know maybe maybe that wouldn't be the worst thing but uh it spain never really faced its past right so in 1977 an amnesty law was passed which prevented any criminal investigation into the crimes committed in the franco years um statues of franco some of them were not moved until like the last five or ten years and when they were removed um it was like the government just went in in the night and scooped them up and no one really said anything and then they were gone and so like spain has only really really recently entered into this period like that we call it

second transition and that's like its transition from... Spain began transitioning to democracy in 1978, right? But what we call the period after that, it's more of a post-dictatorship than like a complete democratic transition. And Spain was still processing, as you can see, many of its crimes under Franco. And it's really only begun to process those in the last few years.

So that gets us up to the 2017, or I think it's 2018 election of Pedro Sanchez, right in the socialist government and their decision to exhume Franco. Right. So Franco's, Franco's lying in this monument, right. It's the biggest mass grave in the world.

And on the day of his death, on the 20th of February every year, it's a gathering place for fascists, right? So Franco and Primo de Rivera both died on the same day. And fascists and Catholics both love this kind of weird spiritual magic shit. Oh, really. Oh, really? Oh, really? You don't say.

Yeah. I've, I've heard, I don't know. There are some books about it. Apparently. Uh-huh. Yeah.

Okay. So yeah, it, it said that both of them have a fondness for this stuff. So then both dying on the same day, it's an extremely fucking cursed thing uh that has led to that sucks it sucks if you if you ever have to go near this place on the 20th of november which i don't recommend oh god i can only imagine that must be that must be the worst

time yeah because it's all because it's all of the nerdiest nazis like it's yeah it's like yeah it's ah but i yeah it's like if if like nerdy like nazi internet people had a real life place to gather and just openly do fucking fascist salutes um god that sounds like it sounds horrible it's a fascist with a calendar like no yeah oh but a calendar who's like into praying it's like yeah yeah it's like really really into praying yeah i'm just i'm just gonna say this if the if the anarchists were in charge we wouldn't be having fucking stupid cringe prey fascist meetings this can be prevented the CNT can rise a third time sure

but it is the nerdiest thing ever to think about a fascist like updating their google calendar being like for all their spiritual holidays where their leaders died why do they always celebrate the day that their leaders died it's always the weirdest thing it should be a celebration for us

it's a death cult right like you're right yeah like their leader dying is this is the moment when they finally express the pure core of fascism that's true that that's actually a really good observation that actually is uh is more on the point than what it should be right yeah like immortalizing them on that day. Forever. Yeah. I mean, Viva la Muerte was the slogan of the... Fuck. Was it the African army? Yeah, I think it was Spain's foreign legion, actually. Like, long live death.

And they called themselves... Yes, yes. That is their slogan. They called themselves the... What's it called? The fiancés of death. Yeah. They're all gay because they're all married to death um which is pretty metal they're also kind of fashy but yeah that that does really showcase the whole uh death cult aspect of fascism yeah

you know you know what isn't a gay necromancer again we can't promise okay james i wish i wish we could advertise some more gay recommend gay necromancers i would i would be in my element ah yeah i've just done an ad read for a couple of them actually i should have should have let you know i am so jealous that's all that's all i want out of life yeah please enjoy these gay necromancy products and services of life yeah please enjoy these gay necromanty products and services welcome i'm daniel won't you join me at the fire and dare enter nocturnal 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 ¡Suscríbete al canal! Podcast Network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hola, mi gente. It's Honey German, and I'm bringing you Gracias, Come Again, the podcast where we dive deep into the world of Latin culture, musica, peliculas, and entertainment with some of the biggest names in the game. If you love hearing real conversations with your favorite Latin celebrities, artists, and culture shifters, this is the podcast for you.

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your podcasts check out better offline.com okay we're back i hope you enjoyed that as much as we did so the incredibly cringe and just boomery fascist celebration on Franco's death and Primo de Rivera's death on the 20th of November always happened at the Valle de los Caídos, right? They would turn up in 2010, Spain banned like fascist symbolism, but this hasn't really stopped fascists doing fascist symbolism, right? Including bringing their phalange flags, fascists doing fascist symbolism right including bringing their phalange flags giving it the fascist salute um marching uh and just generally doing like a cringe like where like uh rotc cosplay meets the catholic church stuff um on the 20th of november of a year at franco's grave uh and like there are always flowers on franco's grave. You can't go there on a given day and not find someone lamenting the fact that Franco is dead and they can no longer just disappear people they disagree with.

It's shit. And so, incidentally, an amusing sort of side effect of this. Do you remember the storm area 51 like facebook thing oh I sure do yeah yeah yeah the raid area 51 challenge from like last year or two years ago yeah

2019 three years ago I didn't realize it does it also feels like a very 2020 thing so the Spanish version of this was ago when you said it that way. It does. It also feels like a very 2020 thing. It does. Yeah, so the Spanish version of this was invade Valle de los Caídos. With the slogan that, like,

the state can't get him if we get him first. So true. So true. I don't think this was an anarchist attempt to steal his body but like massive respect if it was i think it was just some extremely online people doing something that they thought was and actually is funny uh which is yeah like unfortunately it didn't really come to much

uh because they planned to do this on the 20th of november 2019 and in october 2019 franco's body was removed from the valley of the fallen okay see this this is this is the thing with all of these things is the same thing with the fucking stop coney thing like the problem that all of these groups have if they want to do is they always set their date too far out like you gotta give it like at max it has to be like two weeks out because if it's any longer than that you the momentum momentum you can get fucking yeah you get scooped so look if you if you if you if you want to seize the body of a dead dictator and throw him into a canal you have to move fast and that's why i'm announcing that

for for for november 19th we're No, we probably should not go to Russia to have fun with Trotsky's body, should we? No, we're going after... Is Trotsky's body in Russia? Yeah. I thought so. I know I've seen... Did they take it back from Mexico?

I've had friends that have gone places to make fun of Trotsky's body. Where is his body? Lenin's body is up for grabs. Okay. It's just sitting there. Well, maybe we can go do Lenin's body. I think we should start small.

Let's encourage the fans of the podcast between now and what we got. But now on 11th of November, go after Papa Doc Duvalier. Get him. Start, you know? And then move on from there. Okay is it's in mexico i yeah you're right let me go closer to the sort of geographical heartland of our listener base

and we don't need to go into a war zone so yeah in the middle of november we're all going to be going going to mexico road trip yep field trip yep let's go you know i mean i will say there is something genuinely interesting here about the way that like okay so you you look at sort of fascism sorry you look at fascism's death drive in the way that it sort of like creates these monuments to death and then like you look at the way that every single sort of like like all of the say socialist regimes like it's not so much that they have a death drive but it's like they're like all of them like i learned this recently like i so i i knew that they didn't tune that they'd like embalmed stalin right and like well they embalmed lenin they embalmed mao i learned they also

yeah they they but i also learned they did it to ho chi minh too no yeah it's like they did it to like all of these people and it's like there's there's this sort of weird like almost inversion of it where it's like like fascism is based sort of on like you know like on the sort of totalizing worship of death whereas stalinism is like it has this kind of inversion of it where it's like it's based on like a kind of like eternal life for their leaders in this also incredibly bizarre way. I don't want to be like all of Europe is determined by its previous totalitarian religions, but there's something orthodox about the way they've done the dead Russian dudes.

So I want to talk about Franco's corpse a little bit, and then I want to end with something else because I don't want to just focus on Spanish fascists because they suck and I hate them. And I am sad that they are not all dead, but Franco is. So Franco's family weren't allowed to use the Spanish flag on his coffin.

Yeah, so instead they fucking got the Francoist flag, right, the old nationalist flag, which because they are filth, they did that instead. They carried his coffin onto a helicopter. They flew him by helicopter to madrid uh where the service is provided over by a priest who is the son of lieutenant colonel antonio tejero molina uh the man who led the failed 1981 coup that attempted to topple spain's young democracy so um great to see this continuation of these elites right like this is a this is a

country which has of course moved on completely from its civil war and dictatorship um on the positive side franco is now uh buried with his wife uh and he is very near to luis carlo blanco who people will remember as a podcast alumni in spain's first astronaut. So I was going to quote Vox, but I won't because they fucking suck. And no one should quote Vox. You should just like throw fruit at them. And I think that's like, that's not an actionable threat, right?

It's just fruit. Sure. Don't throw like any fruit that are potentially lethal, right? Like a large watermelon or something potentially fatal, like just a banana. Or if, you know, the Vox representative is like allergic to a fruit, you throw it at them, it gets on their face, then they die,

then it gets blamed on James. We all got taken into a years-long lawsuit and then we all lose our jobs. Don't do that. Don't do that, no. Blame someone else for that. If you are directing the police to me in Spain, and then we all lose our jobs. Don't do that. Don't do that, no. Blame someone else for that. You can, if you are directing the police to me in Spain,

they can contact me via Twitter DM. My Twitter is at... At Chapo Trap House. Yep, that's where you can find me. Yeah, I sell traps. Okay, so... Of course, Vox make exactly the same bullshit destroying history argument that neo-Confederates make in the United States.

It doesn't make them any more right, because they're in fact wrong. But incidentally, someone else died on November the 20th, and that is one Buenaventura Durruti, right? Unlike Franco, he's not buried in a monument made by fucking slaves. He's buried alongside other anarchists in Montjuic in Barcelona.

You can visit his grave there. It's very cool. You can always meet interesting people hanging around his grave. And if you're in Barcelona, you should do it. Durruti died in the middle of the Battle of Madrid.

Like so many other Spanish anarchists, he died. It's a little unclear, actually, if he died because someone negligently discharged their own weapon into his back, which seems to be the most likely case, or leading a frontal charge on a machine gun, which is how so many Spanish anarchists died, because they were so utterly convinced of their incredible... And they're not wrong they were right about most things uh but like you get their willingness to die for anarchism was perhaps a little bit problematic well i mean this is this is like a thing across the whole history of anarchism like part one of the reasons the russian revolution went the way that it did was

that like it like the the sort of like first crop of russian anarchists like the moment the white army formed immediately just went to the front lines and all got killed. And meanwhile, Lenin and Trotsky are fucking chilling, and Lenin, and fucking Petrograd being like, ahhh!

Yeah, which is exactly what happened in Spain, right? Like, Dorotias, Caso Ferrer, all these people get to the front lines and immediately start killing fascists. Meanwhile, tanky people, I was going to say something else, like spending their time plotting and scheming to,

from becoming a completely fucking irrelevant political force in Spain to taking over in a year and a half, because they are the only people willing to provide weapons. And then many of the anarchists are dead. What were you going to call tankies instead of people? I kept thinking about that. What were you going to call tankies instead of people, James? It makes me angry.

That is an evasive answer. Everything is correct, James. I was just going to say scum or filth or a British swear word that I can't use on the podcast because it offends American people, which is fine. Yeah, it's disappointing. I don't want to be canceled by a work mob. Okay.

You're not going to have a heated Australian moment. Yeah, exactly. I nearly went full australian um which like i've done it before on television and it just doesn't end well um all right uh in spanish not english uh which is also a spanish word 20th of november in spain this year it'll be like what three weeks when people are listening to this some fascist shithead, if you live in a town in Spain, will be walking around doing shitty fascist things. And people who live in Spain, of course, are very aware of this. But I wanted to finish, you said, with another thing that anti-fascists in Spain do in November.

So on the 15th of November this year, anti-fascists all over Spain will be gathering to remember 15 years without Carlos Palomino. People might not know who Carlos Palomino is, but I want to very briefly recap his story to finish up. So on the 11th of November 2007, Carlos Palomino and about 100 other anti-fascists got on the subway in Madrid to counter-protest a right-wing rally in Lucera, an immigrant neighborhood that's home to Madrid's Chinatown today. On the train on the way there, ran into a 24 year old spanish soldier jose jose estebanes uh estebanes was dressed in clothes uh i don't want to talk about the brand actually because we shouldn't hype market nazis but um the clothes showed that he was a far-right skinhead.

Carlos Palomino notes this. Estebanes takes offense at Carlos Palomino noting his Nazi clothes and stabs him with a machete. Jesus. Yeah. He stabbed someone else as well, but unfortunately, Carlos dies pretty quickly. He was 16 years old at the time of his death.

He was the only child of his mother, and he lived with his mom, who was separated from his dad and his grandmother. It affected his mother, as one can imagine, pretty terribly, the loss of her young son. And as a result, his mother has become a prominent anti-fascist activist in Spain. She founded the Association of the victims of

fascist racist and homophobic violence uh and 10 years after his death a thousand people turned out and a memorial to him um and ever like ever since he died every year uh you'll see these massive rallies in spain of anti-fascists um if you've ever seen, do you remember like a year or so ago, there was this video going around Twitter and there was a group of people chanting like, aquí están los antifascistas. Here are the antifascists. I see such videos on Twitter all the time.

So I don't know. It gained relevance among people who I've never seen engaging with Spain in any degree before. It was a huge rally. So in 2021, thousands of people came out to remember him. And I'm sure thousands of people will this year too. Spain's right for a long time tried to couch itself in terms of the the neoliberal center right yeah so like the partido popular would see itself in terms of like maybe the tories in britain although the tories are pretty uh

pretty mental uh but like this kind of neoliberal european right yeah and it it broadly uh sort of wanted to see itself as part of this like post-fascist European right. But in recent years, it's just taken this swing towards the hard right. Vox has emerged, and even the Partido Popular, which would have seen itself as neoliberal right, has tried to out-Vox Vox, and they're now just openly standing Francoism again.

And in this climate, anti-fascism has also seen seen itself resurgent i guess or an anti-fascist identities in spain are more relevant or more common than they would have been uh 10 15 20 years ago something like that and as a result these memorials for carlos have become bigger and bigger every year um so i wanted to end with a letter his mom wrote to global anti-fascist collectives in 2011. In our memories, all the anti-fascist victims will always exist, who fighting for a world of equality, dignity, freedom, and social rights

were killed by the ideas of intolerance and fascism. The memory will exist for all those victims who, due to their different cultures, religions, or sexual orientations were murdered by the same murdering hands who hate those who are different now it's time to continue working against hate that is the best tribute we can offer their struggles were not in vain we will continue the path although they are no longer with us in every action of anti-fascist struggle they're inside and in each and every one of our

hearts which i thought was really poignant his mother is amazing yeah this whole thing fucking breaks me like i i was like this was a time when like i too was being a teenage anti-fascist in spain uh and this is someone who's like almost exactly my age uh age and obviously isn't alive anymore. And yeah, I'd encourage people to read more about him. I normally share these events on social media when they happen. And yeah, this is extremely sad and continues to be extremely sad because Spain refuses to face up to its past of dictatorship. You can look up where Franco's grave is

organize a protest and execute it within two weeks and toss him in the river if you want, I'd be very proud of you that is absolutely a legal thing to do and I would be prosecuted in Spain but yeah, incidentally Spain has prosecuted everyone from fucking clowns

to puppeteers uh okay now it's now it's serious when you start coming out for the clowns is when i i start getting personally insulted we need to do our episode on clown block soon don't we we do i i can put on i have clown block right behind me okay yeah and then the british police will send someone undercover in your clown movement for five years no who will marry one of you and let me let me be a silly jester leave me alone nope not in britain it's a crime all right uh okay that's been our podcast few crimes It's a crime. All right. Okay, that's been our podcast. Few crimes.

Aquí están los antifascistas! Aquí están los antifascistas! It Could Happen Here is 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 riot. 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.

Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search,

Better Offline is your unvarnished and at, unhinged look at the underbelly of tech, brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. On Thanksgiving Day 1999, five-year-old Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez was found off the coast of Florida. And the question was, should the boy go back to his father in Cuba? Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home, and he wanted to take his son with him. Or stay with his relatives in Miami? Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom.

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