The Pete Quiñones Show - A 'Spanish Civil War' Q&A w/ Karl Dahl

Episode Date: December 8, 2024

75 MinutesNSFWKarl Dahl is an author specializing in the Spanish Civil War and historical "fiction."Karl joined Pete for a Q&A Livestream.Faction: With the CrusadersKarl's SubstackKarl's MerchPete and Thomas777 'At the Movies'Support Pete on His WebsitePete's PatreonPete's SubstackPete's SubscribestarPete's GUMROADPete's VenmoPete's Buy Me a CoffeePete on FacebookPete on TwitterBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-pete-quinones-show--6071361/support.

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Thank you. And we're off. Carl, how are you doing? Doing well, Pete. Happy Sunday. Happy Sunday. How are you? Yeah, man.

Doing very well. All right. Yeah, yeah, I already asked you that. I'm retarded. That's funny. So, all right. So let's just, there's one question, all right, that's been thrown in on you. So you want to run to this?

This one would be easy for you to get. Where is it? Scroll up. Says, who are the best historians who write in Spanish on the Spanish Civil War, unbiased or with nationalist biases? Oh, gosh. That is, that's a challenge for me because I haven't, I haven't attacked the body of,

Spanish language material. What I'll I'll explain everyone kind of how I got where I'm at as far as what I ended up studying. Maybe that's a good baseline. What I'm I attacked the topic of the Spanish Civil War and research into it based on wanting to be able to write a fictional story of an American who goes there and eventually eventually becomes a belligerent, official belligerent, which led me down the pathways of, you know, what kind of units could you be in, you know, foreigners had to go into the Spanish Legion, et cetera. So my research, unless it was something of that I was just interested in,

if I wanted to tell stories about individual people in specific locations, I read English language material and then I ended up reviewing Spanish language material. So when I, most of my Spanish language material that I've delved into is more associated with the Carlists and the Navarre brigades than, or individual like tiny topics, like specific weaponry or stuff about specific campaigns. So I'm not really qualified to judge the Spanish, Spanish academia related. to that. There's a lot of really great material out of Navarre that's out there and historians who've been doing work. If you do local work, there's a lot of really great material that's still being done in Spain by Spanish people, kind of outside of academia or on the periphery

of it associated with specific localities. But I'm sorry, I can't. really address that, unfortunately. I would say, though, that if you look at my substack, I do have a bibliography in there, and there's some Spanish language material in there. And I, one of the big areas, honestly, and I'm revisiting this, Pete, related to our project for talking about kind of the tech tree of, of liberal ideas and the different political factions that formed in Spain, really 19th century as it relates to the 20th century. And so I spent a lot of time reading about the anarchist memoirs and stuff like that. So I read a lot of Catalonian anarchist memoirs as well, or Spaniards who ended up overseas and then came back for the war. because there were a lot of South American Spanish who came back because of their anarchism and their various activism because that's where the action was.

And they would also get executed in South America. So it's tough to talk about. But if you look at that bibliography, you'll see a number of sources. There's Navar. Oh, gosh, it's recatase. Yes. The page just went away. but I have a link to it in my substack,

Carldall.com, from material related to the Carlists, as well as in the bibliography that my, kind of my introduction to the novel is in there also, where I link out to an archive of the Navar Brigade kind of unofficial historians. That stuff's out there, but it's in an archive. And that's a great place to start.

if you want to see some really interesting, unbiased stuff that, that again, is very Carlist-centric, Navarrean-Bask-centric material. Okay. I just want to say, I want to thank Stephen Fox for sending some love through Venmo and remind people that Fox and Sons coffee, as I say every week, promo code Peter or promo code Pete Q is 18% off over $30 and free shipping over 40. So all right, I got a question for you. Are you familiar with beatified and canonized martyrs from the war?

I know of them, but I'm not fluent on the topic. I know that that did take place that they were formally beatified in Canada. canonized martyrs by the Catholic Church, but I don't know a whole bunch about that specifically, being non-Catholic just for transparency's sake. Yeah. And, you know, I guess I do want to say this because I guess it's the topic of the day, other than if we weren't talking about this. Yeah.

Yeah, there's a lot of, there's a lot of Christian, our Christian brothers and sisters and their children in Syria right now that we really need to be thinking about. and praying about because I'm not going to comment on what happened in Syria. Nobody knows. So if you want my speculation, I wrote, check my comments on Twitter. I had a couple comments, but that's all I'm doing until I know more. I just don't know. It's too hard to know what's going on over there and having had to watch it in that whole situation being, I feel like it's been fairly pivotal for me, like in the teens, to go from just being kind of a black-pilled, like, post-libertarian who's just like, I don't want to participate in paying attention to this horrific stuff, to actually turning on that and being like, no, I'm not going to be quiet

and afraid to talk about these kinds of topics because of what's going on, what has been going on in Syria since America did its thing. There's a lot of horrible information out there. There's a lot of people that just want to black pill you. They want you to feel defeated. I saw people who are supposedly on our side, and I'm not going to name any names, but pushing stuff from authors from Tablet Magazine,

which is a Jew for Jew publication, and the only non-Jews who read it are good goys and anti-Semites, It's like no one else. No one else reads it. But there are people pushing their stuff as like Netanyahu is this like great man of his. It's it's so retarded. Obama is in his friends in Iran. You know, it's the dumbest.

Almost everything being talked about on that topic is dumb. And it sucks. I mean, the way I look at it is I'm done with the faggots who, Yeah. If you have any hope whatsoever, if you put your faith in anything and it, they're, oh, oh, you're just coping. Oh, look, look, you were wrong. Yeah.

So what? So what? So, I mean, fucking seek Canadian health care if that's your life. Honestly, really. See Canadian health care. One thing I'll say. If your life, if your life is just blackpilling, if you're just, you know, this is what I said, this is what I said on Twitter this small.

morning. I said it is one of my comments was, because Thomas was talking about it, and I said, you know, you're coping, like, quote unquote, your coping is the favorite refrain of the dumer who believes it by either not taking sides or by changing with the wind. They are somehow above it all, and therefore they're smarter than you. They're too brilliant to be emotionally invested in outcomes. Therefore, everyone is either their op or everyone's a dupe. Well, go fuck yourself. and your mother. I mean, really, go fuck yourselves. I mean, honestly, I mean, take the easy way out. Do it. Sorry. No, it's no, absolutely. I agree. And there is one kind of parallel here, like with how everyone is feeling right now that comes up related to the Spanish Civil War. And it's, uh, it's that whole question around

why did Spain not formally become a part of the axis? And what we see with Russia's has been scaling back what they were doing in Syria because their focus is on Ukraine and Nova Russia and taking care of the highest priority for them. and it sucks, but there are times when you have to make choices based on what's best for your people and what you're able to influence. And losing two wars is worse than winning one war. It sucks. I don't like it, but sometimes you are in a situation where you can't win two wars. ESB transformed how the country powered itself once.

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Yeah. It's fine to laugh at me. It's fine. But just understand. Seek Canadian health care. That's my response to you. Okay, because there are whole families being slaughtered right now, and you're like online telling people, oh, you were wrong about this. Go fuck yourself.

All right. Now that I'm done with that. Do we know what year Russia started having a presence in Spain as far as spreading their, you know, spreading their version of communism and Bolshevism? So there is, if you look at the, in the 19th century, the international, so what became the communist international. There was an original international, and there were a couple international kind of communist slash socialist slash liberal groups. where the kind of the market, that was the marketplace of ideas for the, the left socialists for a very long time. And ultimately what happened is like, uh, but CUNin and Marx, their personal differences in falling outs led to splintering into different groups. And it, there were

these iterations of these international organizations that were pre-executive. Soviet, but it was like it was the development of what would ultimately become like an international Bolshevist movement. It took decades to mature over time. And so these ideas were going into Spain and they would have their own representatives that would go to various groups. Sometimes it would be, there was that international working men's organization, which was primarily anarchist, although they were really comfortable inviting other people in who were more different flavors of socialism to try to have greater influence in a broader base, although ultimately they wanted to push for an anarchist angle. And so there's that interchange of ideas in people, right, that was going on for a very long time. But formally Soviet doesn't really start happening until the very late.

But it's, there were, there were people who were going in the 20s during the Primo de Rivera dictatorship. There were some who were going to the Soviet Union from Spain. It happened more in the 30s under the Republic, where there was more of an interchange. The lead generals in the Republican army were all men who had come out of the various socialist and communist political parties who went to the Soviet Union and were trained in their international military academies in the Russian-slash-soviet method of war. And magically, when they start getting all the Soviet supplies and equipment and start putting red stars on the Republican Army uniforms and in their insignia and have, and communism takes over, these guys are in charge. So that was really where it really, really accelerated was in the 30s under the Republic. NKVD people were there during the 30s. Largo Caballero was a prime minister, I want to say, Pete, for a while, who had been a part of a, his party was a socialist party, but he personally became a Bolshevik communist, aligned with the Soviet Union.

kind of in secrecy, despite what his formal, the formal title and formal ideology of his party during the 1930s, through his reading when he was in prison especially for agitation under Primo de Rivera, and then also a little bleeding over a little bit into the, into the Republic. So it was these layers of the influence accelerating really formally in the 1930s to the point where by July 1936, it was people were learning that it was an entirely Soviet project at a certain point. the formal Republican government was indistinguishable from one being 100% Soviet control, accepting Catalonia, that I will add as a caveat, because that was pretty much almost entirely CNT FAI people running things over there. Okay. I was just going to say to the chat, if you guys have any questions about the Spanish Civil War, or put them in entropy. It doesn't mean you have to do a super chat.

You can just put them in entropy. If you guys want to discuss Syria in the chat, then I'm just going to close the chat and not look at it. Okay. Because I have plenty of questions here to keep this going for a while. Can I throw out one quick answer? Philip Blair asked a question in the chat about material originally written in Basque. Similar response, Philip, to what I had.

said before about where my focus was is I was, I spent most of my time digging into Spanish sources to fill gaps. And Basque material is tricky because Basque nationalism has retconned itself into being this like moderate Republican nonsense, which it never, which is a very an inaccurate way of describing it. There's a nascent, resurgent, recite, Carlos Requette-type movement going on in the Basque Country, which is totally their heritage and is very exciting. If you check out that any of my articles, I think any of my articles on the recetes in my substack, there's links out to that, Requitase.es.orgive that has some material. in Basque and then also some material in Spanish, Castilian Spanish, that talks about the Basque perspective. Navarre was largely Basque. Navarre is a really

interesting historical case study in the insane fragmented nature of the Spanish nation and the localism of it, But the Navarre brigades were hugely basque whether or not they portrayed themselves that way. Chris Young has a question. He says, is there any remnant of Carlism left today in Spain? So I don't know quite how to describe it. I think it's closer to our action. scenario where there are kind of traditionalist, possibly even reactionary people in our sphere who are using the symbolism as a representation of their historical ties to Spain and kind of

a conservative reactionary perspective on the direction the country is going in. I have a, there's a review of my novel, uh, faction with the Crusaders, um, that was written by a Spaniard who has a, uh, House of Bourbon, the, the Carlist, uh, their, their preferred, um, battle flag, which is the, the white banner with the, the red cross, the red jagged cross, um, as his avatar. And he said it was the best novel by a foreigner he'd read on his country's Civil War, which to me was like the highest compliment a person could pay to it. But anyway, I asked him about, you know, you're wrapping these colors. Is there a movement?

And he basically said it's nascent. But you will see there has been little bits of like street fighting against, you know, communists and Antifa types. in some areas and then also against the, you know, the migrant's swelling in Spain. And I've seen guys with Carlist face masks. Like it's the white mask with the red cross on it, which is pretty badass. So I don't know quite how to describe it. I think it's people using the symbology more than anything else, but like spiritually

being motivated by it, which is the most important thing, in my opinion, is that the feelings in the spirit are more important than the ideas in a lot of ways, especially in this kind of nascent, nascent time. I hope that answers the question. Discover five-star luxury at Trump Dunebeg. Unwind in our luxurious spa. Save her sumptuous farm-fresh dining. Relax in our exquisite accommodations. Step outside and be captivated by the Wild Atlantic Surounds. Your five-star getaway, where every detail is designed with you in mind.

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are vital in shaping these plans. Our consultation closes on the 25th of November. Have your say, online or in person. So together we can create a more reliable, sustainable electricity supply for your community. Find out more at airgrid.i. 4.n. Northwest. Employers, did you know, you can now reward you and your staff, with up to 1,500 euro and gift cards annually, completely tax-free. And even better, you can spread it over five different occasions.

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Yes, very few that we know about. and it's kind of tricky. So that's one of the themes in my novel is that if you look at like most of what we know in the English language about the Spanish Civil War is from a British perspective, right? There's Orwell who wrote about his experience with the, the UGT. He was with the UGT, right, which is a corny socialist movement. But he was all on board on the destruction of the churches and killing of priests and nuns. Like I despise Orwell with a passion. I think 1984 is way overblown.

It's a good book. It's exactly. I think it's something that you read as a kid. to understand the basics. But his problem was the fact that they were coming after him and not just going with, you know, it's this like, I want my, choose your own, choose your own communism, right? You know, it's like he aligned with, he didn't know what he was talking about

and what he was getting himself into and who he was aligning himself with when he went into that war. And he says it himself in homage to Catalonia. So anyway, so we have his perspective. We now have Peter Kemp's excellent perspective from Mine Were of Trouble, which is a great book. But the number one thing that should jump out to everyone when they read this book, and it's what jumped out to me, is that he had the permission of British intelligence to be there, and he became a British intelligence asset. Um, when, when you go into a foreign war, you, if you are, if people know about it in your government before you go, you will have be having chats. You don't, this isn't this rugged individual as crap. He, he was briefed before he went by people with connections to, uh, British intelligence who were operating for British intelligence. And then he was being debriefed every time. he went back to England and when he was talking to English people in business and government in England, he was an intelligence asset and then he went into the SOE in World War II.

That's what my character does in this book. He's part of this Anglo-American group that was around Donovan, Bill Donovan operating in Spain and all around the world, but it was kind of a loose, semi-unofficial intelligence organization, but Bill Donovan worked for the president. He worked for FDR. And the joke is, quote unquote, despite the differences in their political parties, because Donovan was a Republican. It's laughable in the current year when you see that as a caveat. So anyway, the long and the short of it is that Americans who were over there volunteering, we know about some pilots and we know about a handful of people who are in the Legion. And many of them became very persecuted when they came back to the United States

unless they played ball and went to work for, you know, whatever the big game was going to be. And so that's what my character does is through Bill Donovan because they, when I was writing the story, I was reading, I knew that Bill Donovan had been in and out of Spain at the tail end of the war and was involved in a lot of the negotiations with Franco's people. And then of course the British. Here's something I'll point out for people. The number one foreign investment and ownership of interests in Spanish mining and factories and everything was British. And they had a very close relationship for around 200 years between Britain and Spain, you know, including their, you know, quote unquote intervention against Napoleon. Like it goes back a very long time. There's a chapel in London that is a Spanish chapel that's been there since the mid-1700s for the

Spanish diet, not diaspora, but really ruling class and people doing business in Britain. They're intertwined. Their upper classes have been intertwined for a very long time. I have characters that demonstrate that. And it's very important to understand that when you talk about the British negotiating with Franco and everything. Franco was supplied trucks, like thousands, 10,000 trucks and fuel from American and British interests who stopped supporting the Republicans, because everyone knew the Republicans were Bolsheviks. It was the common knowledge, and then it stopped being common knowledge, you know, after 1945, golly.

So the Americans who were in this operation, you know, on the nationalist side, generally, if they came back to the United States, you know, our government knew about it. and they were told, you're going to play ball or you've got to get out of here. There was an Italian-American pilot who had fought for the nationalists, who was so agitated by the way that he was treated by the American government. He was born in the United States, what his parents were from Italy, that he went back to Italy and he fought for the Italians during World War II. because they because he didn't want to play ball with them.

So that's, there really weren't that many that we know about publicly. And my theory from what I've been able to find is that that's how it really worked out is most of them ended. A bunch of them would have died because they would have been in the Spanish Legion, which, who were shock troops. Or they would have plugged into the American system afterwards and just not been talking. about because you wouldn't have been talking about that in the 1950s and 60s. So just a couple super chats. Sean C over on entropy says pray for Syria. Absolutely. Screwed up rebellion over on Rumble says,

Blessed Lord's Day, Pete and Carl, God bless and thank you for everything you do. See you too. Thank you. My friend. Well, let's see what else we got here. Yeah, someone had mentioned here that in the new Oppenheimer movie. They, uh, they portrayed the Spanish Civil War as the current thing. And everybody was on the side of the Republicans. All the, the college kids, shit, which were on the side of the Republican. Yeah, no shit. Yeah. Yeah. That's true. My, uh, my alma mater has a, um,

a monument to the Spanish Civil War volunteers, um, from, from that university. And, and, and, and, And fortunately, a lot of them were killed. All right. Okay, let's see. Next one. What's the first official engagement conflict of the war from the National Assad? So it's hard because the day of the rising, I think, really counts. It wasn't because there were battles all over the whole country.

And sometimes it was a, they were able to play it off where a handful of people were able to go in and just like take control of a military base and then they would hold the city. Zaragoza, for example, we never hear anything about that because that was a almost 100% nationalist city where there was very little fighting. the libtards were dealt with very quickly. In Navarre, they basically rounded up all the libtards. There was a little bit of fighting. There's some images that you can find. If you look at Navar, July 1936, images of some libtards

who ended up getting stuck in towers and stuff and where it took a little bit of fighting to get rid of them. But it was taken care of in about two days. And so it was everywhere in the country during the uprising. As far as like rolling battles that happened after that is one of the big ones was within just a couple days. The Navarre brigades and the recitat militias began marching south from, Navar and a lot of them were in Oregon also to reinforce

units in Oregon because of the CNT anarchists who were going off and the after securing Barcelona and Catalonia in general and massacring people on their way the the

the CNT militants drove north into Oregon because they were trying to get to Zaragoza which is an industrial city that's way up there in a mountain plateau area. Very beautiful area, by the way. And there was some pretty gnarly battles to get through that, where the carolists absolutely crushed the anarchists up there.

And then steamrolled south, and then they ended up smacking into each other and creating lines that were fairly static after not very long in that area. So in reinforcing along those lines. One of the big things that you'll notice is that whenever you look at a map of Spain, you absolutely have to have topography turned on. And then all the lines that you see make sense because of mountains and rivers and everything like that,

especially the mountains. I'm trying to think of other battles that were rolling battles. But we talked a little bit the last time about a Karunya and that was kind of a rolling battle also with the local nationalist

garrison against the libtards from the start of the war so there were lots of pockets like that all over the country where there would be a nationalist garrison or like they would hold a city or a garrison and just hold

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that Tolkien supported Franco and the nationalists. Oh, yeah, absolutely. It was a very common perspective. And they, the press didn't even have the moment, have a pro-Republican momentum and outside of, you know, the usual suspect controlled press. That was entirely it. And then they always say Guernica was this pivotal point.

No, Guernica was a propaganda, like, coup for the, the Libthards. But that didn't change people's perspectives. It was just this, they had this data point. but when in reality it was just modern warfare like look at look at the way america prosecuted world war two you can't you can't say that you're better than the vermoct in in spain when you're when you're british or american it's get out of here moxiv over on rumble says i've read fashion with your crusaders and gave a detailed review on amazon five stars oh thanks thank you glad you enjoyed it

All right. Thanks for the review. I want to emphasize that. The review, authors live and die, like visibility and interest in our work lives and dies by these reviews. Thank you for the review. If there's anyone else out there who's bought and read my book and enjoyed it, your review would be very much appreciated. You're not going to get doxed because you read a book on a fictional book and review it on Amazon. So thank you very much.

I appreciate that a lot. Who are degenerate society? Ask who are some of the other popular, any popular figures or famous people at the time who supported the war or who were really bad on the war? I mean, I would assume a lot would have been bad on the war. A lot would have been bad. Yeah.

If you really want to get, as the girls say, the ick, check out the people. who write glowing reviews about the Spanish Republicans and the like Paul Robeson, who is this black communist singer, went to, went to Spain and would shuck and jive for the for the Abraham Lincoln Brigades and all the and the other groups. And like he, he sang a song in Yiddish because the, because the, um, the international brigades were so heavily Jewish. And he was, again, Paul Robeson was absolutely a creation of Jewish propagandists also. So, yeah, it's really, it's really yucky.

But from what I've been able to tell, like, so when Stormy and you have been talking a lot about the America first, like what was going on behind it, what was leading up to the, you know, the activities of America first and some of the kind of proactive attempts that they were discussing and attempting to make. And what I would say is, and I can speak authoritatively for this because that was a very big deal in my family. And like my family history was very much impacted by the America First Movement. I have a grandfather. I'll just be candid about it. I have I had two grandfathers from that generation, of course.

And one of them, his story is kind of told in a wink, wink way in my book where German surname. And he was named after a. a neighbor kid who was killed in the very first battle America participated in World War I. And he was the only child of this Greek couple who lived next to my great-grandparents. And he was killed like weeks before my grandfather was born. And they, of course, having lost their only child, are just going insane. and they begged and begged my great-grandmother to name her child after theirs if it was a boy. And it was a boy.

And so rather than getting the name that he would have expected to get, they put his father's name as his middle name and then gave him a Greek name as his Christian name, that he came to hate. because it was very odd in a like Nordic and German and English area and it was a very and at the time like everyone had the most Anglo version of what their name would be would be

how it was pronounced and the name that you would go under and so when he turned 18 he changed his name to by but he was respectful enough that he switched it around to where he then had the Greek middle name anyway so he was a little older because he was born in 1917. And as the war mania was being pushed in the press,

everyone's talking about it. And as we know from surveys from the time, you know, 80-some percent, up to 90 percent of the country wanted nothing to do with another war in Europe. And my my great-grandmother made her son's promise not to fall for what she knew was going to happen, is that there was going to be a war, and she made them promise, you know this is the right thing, promised to me that you will not join the military. And my grandfather promised, along with his brother, he was the only one who kept that promise. And you know what? he ate shit for the rest of his life because of it.

He was already a firefighter. He had been a firefighter for some time. So he was exempt from the draft because it was necessary critical operations. And he was about 25 years old when the war started. But he ate shit for the rest of his life, like professionally and personally, socially, because of he did what was the right thing and kept a promise. Because he knew that his, you know, to the people who wanted this war, the point was for him to go kill his cousins, go kill Christians.

And he knew not to do that. So I take that very seriously. And what I can say is there was plenty, if you look at America First, material that was out there, those newspapers, et cetera, those were pro-nationalists. They were also pro, let's not get involved, you know, let's stay out of this war, because they also saw it as a potential precursor. And so they were very much supporting the neutrality arrangement that America was a part of. to where they were selling trucks and fuel to the nationalists, but not providing weapons and not getting involved and not sending personnel.

And that was a very popular perspective in America. It was also seen as just horrific modern war. And everyone, think of all the World War I veterans in the United States. They talk. I had another grandfather. My other grandfather joined the army in early 1941 because as a steel worker,

he heard from all the World War I vets around him. They're like, there's going to be a war. Don't get drafted. But join early. You'll have rank and you'll have real training. And so that's what he did because he felt like it was inevitable. He was in Appalachia.

He's like, it's different. It's a different mentality. So, you know, we fight the war. And so he assumed, you know, well, that's what I do. Because I'm an American. So, yeah.

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Now's the perfect time to try Options Card. Options card is Ireland's brand new multi-choice employee gift card packed with unique features that your staff will love. It's simple to buy, easy to manage, and best of all, there are no extra fees or hidden catches. Visit OptionsCard.compt.I.E. today. Pardon my digression. No problem. Robert Reddy here says it, right? Father Coughlin's Social Justice magazine was definitely pro-Franco and pro-enact. Very, very. So Z-Man over here says Carl Dahl smells like feet.

Yeah. Inside joke from a group chat. You get a super chat over on Odyssey from the Geyser. Thanks, man. I don't. This is from the geyser over on Odyssey. Okay. Outside of official combatants sent by government channels,

do you know what nations, had the largest contribution of foreign volunteers to join the nationalists. I'm thinking, would Romania be one possibly? Romania is up there. Romania had thousands of members of the Iron Guard and associated nationalist groups in the Spanish Legion. There were a lot of, like we talked about before, there were a lot of Portuguese, because again, it was a originally going to be an official detachment, but because of all the nonsense and their own internal struggles, they ended up just directing them straight to, straight into the Foreign Legion from, unless they had already joined like the Navarre brigades or something, which many of

them did because of the Carlos militias. I'm trying to think there were quite a few. white Russians in the in the Spanish Legion also. And then you have people from all over that one of the big, big ones is that sometimes they refer to them as Americans, but it was the Latin American diaspora. Colonios is the terminology, is the people from the colonies who went back when they would, they would be generally they were going into the Spanish Legion, although accepting Spanish nationality was very easy for them. A lot of them were Spanish citizens, so that they could end up in regular army units, but most of the time, all the colonios went into the Spanish Legion if they were, if they still had their citizenship from Latin American countries. And there

were absolutely tens of thousands of those from what I'm able to tell. There were, there were, I shouldn't say tens of thousands. I should say there were possibly around 10,000 volunteers with the Spanish Legion from the colonies. And that actually predates the war, even in like the Rift War in the 20s in North Africa, Morocco. There were a lot of Spanish colonials. TKMau has super chat over on entropy, you said, thanks TKMO. The more I learned about the history of the last 200 years, the more no brother's wars make sense despite the differences between European-descended peoples. Yes, absolutely.

Let me get another question here. I think, did you just answer this? What was the Spanish-speaking world's reaction to the Civil War? I didn't. Central America. You know, it could, yeah, we didn't discuss that. It came down to your political persuasion. If you look at, and we talked about this a little bit last time, but Mexico, which was a basically a Bolshevik nation, deeply linked to the Soviets, they immediately went in with the Republican,

began sending arms. And so when you looked at the rest of Latin America, you know, the conservatives and the upper crusts and everything would support, would support the nationalists. But the Libthards and all the various other groups. absolutely supported the Republic. What do you have to say about Carl, what do you have to say, Carl, about Hemingway during the war? I'm not a fan. I love, as a writer and as an American male, when I was always happy to read

Hemingway in high school, because he had a very simple but evocative writing style, and it was portrayed. is masculine, right? But the thing with Hemingway is that he was an egomaniac and most likely a rapist just to throw out the R word there and not in the based way, but like he was a scumbag. The memes aside, rape is ungentlemanly. And, but he was also, he had mega cachet everywhere. But if you, if it really came down to it, here's an example illustrating his behavior. He loved hanging out with Italian nobles in the 1950s, but he endorsed the, the slaughter of

those same peoples in the 1930s in Spain. Why? Well, because that was like the cool thing. And so he supported the cool thing, which was the Republican cause and he did a tremendous amount of propaganda for them. Total Bolshevik nonsense. But he enjoyed the finer things in life. So when it came to like going, doing bird hunting and stuff, you know, he enjoyed the nice, you know, traditional European comforts of doing the you know, mass, mass bird hunts and hand-released bird shooting and everything like that.

And he loved hanging out and doing that while at the same time just unknowingly advocating or knowingly advocating for the destruction of that way of life when it was the cool thing to do. So I despise Hemingway ultimately. And he would, you know, he wasn't, he wasn't as cool as people say he was. And it's very amusing because when you hear about a lot of his tough guy stuff, like wanting to box people and stuff, it's my understanding is a lot of that was like him, like basically being like, I'm going to beat up like a little guy and tough guy shit like that, which I despise. So this week, someone points it out that, um,

somebody assassinating a CEO on the street is equivalent to the Republicans and the anarchists and the communist murdering nuns and priests. And yeah, you were quick to point out that they weren't the only side that was doing that in the Spanish Civil War. Can you give some examples or talk a little bit about that? Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So the car lists and the Falange, which is the Spanish word for the phalanx, someone had a question about that on X. And so anyway, they were killing people in the streets as well, and they had been for a while. very early innovators of the drive-by shooting, carlist youth militias in the teens.

They did a drive-by on some anarchists, which is pretty cool. But yeah, this whole thing that political violence is inherently leftist is an insane, insane, retarded gatekeeping perspective. It just is inexplicably stupid and so obviously enemy action to me for someone to make that statement. I just have nothing good to say about that. Bill Bikes over on Rumble says Franco was based when I lived in Spain. Only the Jays hated him. He goes, it was before I was J-pilled.

I 100% believe that. And I will say that a long time ago when I read a lot about, because I considered myself a libertarian like in the 90s and into some point in the odds. And so because of the word and, you know, a lot of people saying, well, it's basically, you know, anarcho-capitalism type arguments and everything. I read a lot of anarchist material. And most of the time it was stuff written in the like 60s and 70s by Americans talking about it. And there would be really strange biases. Like, and this was before I grew up around a lot of Jews, but I wasn't really jap. other than knowing that they were different, right?

And it was really strange because they would always talk about how Bakunin was an anti-Semite. And a lot of it was this, was that the struggle in scapegoating around the loss of the Spanish Civil War and the atrocities that were committed. Because, like, Pete, you and Stormy were talking, and I think you both pointed out that, like, they just blamed each other for the losses. The anarchists or the communists would blame each other for the various atrocities when really they were both committing them. Yeah, the communists, like, digging up disinterring the nuns and stuff like that. It was like, oh, no, that was the anarchist. Oh, no, that was a communist. It's like, shut up.

You both get the blame. They both did it. Yeah, exactly. So, and they actually had, um, internationales, a group of Eastern European internationals, if you, it doesn't take much thinking to realize that that means Jews. Um, were involved in, uh, raping and killing some, some nuns in, um, the, the northern campaign. And the, what, what, what happened to them?

Well, their whole unit was lined up and executed and left in a ravine, which is pretty merciful, if you think about it. So, you know, I'm never going to apologize for anyone killing people like that. Lawfully, legally. Knock on wood, right? Yeah. Air grid. Operator of Ireland's electricity grid is powering up the northwest. We're planning to upgrade the electric.

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Let's see. what were the size of the forces, what were roughly the size of each side at the beginning of the war? We talked a little bit about this last time. I'm going to pull that document up real quickly. I should have had it handy. Sure.

Anyway. So the best way to describe the forces is that you have official forces under arms out of the gate. And then you have the militias that were extant, and then all the people clamoring to join the side because of their various orientations. So on the nationalist side,

they had the whole Spanish Legion and then also the Army of Africa, which was the Moroccan, basically local forces under Spanish Army command. Total between the Army of Africa, which included the Spanish Legion, was about 35,000 men. And then they had about half of the Spanish Territorial Army, which is about 60,000 men. So that's, you know, Iberian-based forces. And then they had just under half of Spain's civil guards and Carboneros, which were in the, which would put it in the teens and 20s of thousands between those two. I want to say like collectively it would be around 20,000-ish. And then the Carlos Recutay militias had 30,000 men under arms at the time of the uprising, and that which grew to 85,000 by the end of 1936. The, Falange had about 20,000 men in total at the time of the uprising, but they weren't nearly as well armed.

They had machine guns and some machine guns and grenades and stuff like that, but they weren't as like fully rounded out and equipped and regulated as the Carlos Reckettase. The Republicans, so again, use some of those same figures, you know, about 60,000 in the territorial army. A lot less of the heavy weapons, though, from the Nationalists. They had about a third of the machine guns and artillery and about half of the rifles. They had the assault, almost all of the assault guards, which was that subset of the civil guards, which there weren't tons of them. There were only like one or two thousand of them, but they were like the republics. It's kind of like the FBI, what would be a good way to describe them. kind of like the FBI slash FBI hostage rescue team, which is their little like urban assault unit.

The workers militias were huge because they came out of the organized labor unions. And so like the CNTFAI, for example, put 10,000 armed men into Barcelona, the day. of the Rising. CNT had over a million people as members. So when you read about the workers' militias or the people debating in the Republic to arm the workers, they're talking about literally millions of people around the whole country in total. But they weren't trained.

They didn't know what they were doing with rifles most of the time. There were exceptions, of course. All right. Let me see whether there was something else here. To what extent, Jim Bowden asked, to what extent as a Spanish Civil War and extension of Trotsky's internationalism? So there were Trotskyist or labeled as Trotskyist. Because if you think about it, the Soviet Union would lay. label any of their allies who weren't going along with the program as Trotskyists at that time.

So they would call anarchists stratskists and stuff like that. So it would be like you're an international, you're an international communist, but you're not with our program. Therefore, you're an enemy or a Trotskyist. So he was influential with a lot of these groups. And he was very influential, but not relevant, other than as it related to kind of the struggle for power. Because all of the, I think there were leaders among all the different left factions. who it didn't take them very long to realize what was up. They always knew what they were getting themselves into and the risk of Soviet domination.

And so that was always a running part of the arguments and debates over who would have control over the Republic during the war. And so the Trotskyists were definitely influential in terms of them knowing, because I mean the Soviet Union was a thing like everyone knew what the what the kind of the tail of the tape had been for the previous couple of decades

so they knew what was up and what was in play okay next question here he's saying what side did the actual Spanish army fight for meaning if you were in the actual army, what side were you fighting for once the war started?

It entirely depended upon the direction of your leadership and the individual soldiers, to a lesser degree. So if your unit said we are with the uprising, there seems to have been very little change in that regard. unless you wanted to get shot, maybe, or at least arrested. So, yeah, absolutely, it came down to that. There were places where it took a little longer to settle, settle that out, but in general, it was up to the officers and kind of the mood.

So here's an example of that. The, the, in the Navy, the naval officers, and the Spanish Navy at the time was very weak. It was very small. It was not much better than a Coast Guard, really, except they had coastal guns, you know. They had, they had, they had some stuff, but they were very much depleted from, from where they had been. And there weren't, there weren't a lot of people who had a lot of respect for the Spanish Navy at that time in terms of like the quality of the leadership and their mission and everything. A lot of it was people getting sinecures and, and just sucking money out of the system. That's something that's really important to understand at the time is that there were, like,

the ratio of officer to enlisted man in, in the Spanish territory. military at the time was one officer to seven enlisted men, if you can believe that. This is people parasiting off the system. So the quality of the territorial army was quite poor. The Army of Africa and the Spanish Legion are totally different. The Spanish Legion was absolutely like a real fighting force. And they were there, I would put them on par with like the Rangers and the special forces depending, like with the caveat that like the United States special forces are technically a, a training and like, you know, like force magnification effort. Uh, whereas the Rangers are just pure light infantry. Um, they were more like pure light infantry and shock troops than anything else. And they were serious. But the Spanish Navy was so corrupt and sought and sotted, I should say, that the enlisted men who were mostly socialist.

Because it was, you know, where are Navy units and Navy forces and Navy bases, and where does everyone live? They live in port cities. The port cities in Spain were extremely socialist and anarchists. at the time. That was the spirit of the age. And so it didn't take very much for the enlisted men to take over the naval vessels. They couldn't really crew them and lead them, though, because they weren't competent leaders and officers, and they had no idea what they were doing. So they had the forces, but they were useless. So they performed very, very, very poorly. There were some naval vessels that were the officers sided with the uprising that stayed under their command,

who performed much better because they were serious people. So I hope that answers the question. We've got a comment here from Justice Karp over on Rumble. He says, Carl, I like your first book looking forward to the second. Don't you have two books out? Yes. Yeah. So my first book is faction, and it's where I get this icon. That's Doug Shea, which is Joseph Shea's grandson.

Joseph Shea is the fellow who goes into the Spanish Civil War and gets involved in the espionage business related to that. One of the running jokes is that so, you know who matters. Bracken is, right, Pete? Yes. Okay. So I was actually heavily inspired in my first book by Matt Bracken's style of writing, where I have a, I have more of like a literary writing background, but what I like about his stuff is that he can write a novel that is kind of like a guide

or a mini manual to certain kinds of scenarios. So I wrote my first book faction kind of in that style where they have this. It's a faction that of related to the intelligence organizations and unofficial intelligence organizations associated with with U.S. government and private industry basically cut out companies to do things, whether it's logistics or training or whatever around the world based on the mission. And the guys who've made their bones can kind of pick and choose a little more, which groups they want to side with, as long as it comports with U.S. foreign policy.

And so they end up having a clash domestically because of these competing interests in the in the 90s in the U.S. and Canada. And so a lot of people have made comments about how that relates to the street pew-poo of that CEO. Because a lot of, he follows, he followed almost exactly scenarios laid out in my first book, which I disavow theoretically. Got a question over here from Panda Daddy 23. Hi Pete and Carl, did Portugal play a significant part in the war? Yeah.

The biggest thing for Portugal is they served in the very early days of the war that they allowed material to flow through their ports. So the Italians came in largely through. Portugal and a lot of German and Italian weapons and ammunition and equipment flowed through Portugal. And it made it easy for the army marching north. You'll notice that they stayed, they basically wanted to, they secured the border with Portugal very quickly. and then that allowed the material to flow through to the Caralists militias and the Navarre brigades in the north and equipment to go wherever they wanted to.

And the Italians had massive operations very early in the war, ground operations up in the northern campaign. The Condor Legion had a lot of aerial campaigns in the north, and they had observers and stuff, but they weren't doing as much on the ground in the northern campaign. They did later, but the Italians almost immediately were operating up there, and that was hugely made possible by Portugal. So Portugal, good friend. Yeah. This is a good question. Oh, there's one more. I think there was a comment over here.

Mok Siv, who said to let you know that he did his review under the name Clayton Barnett, he says your style of writing present tense is a bit jarring. Based. No, I know that. I know that. It's, but it's something that I've done. And the reason that I settled on it a long time ago is that when you're writing action, it has an urgency to it. That when it's, when other things are playing out and you're telling a story in in present tense that isn't like immediately action oriented, it, it can it can be a struggle because you have to be very close. conscientious of not commingling um tenses um because there's a bunch of

there's numerous present tenses that can you can end up tripping over but um I always found that when I would write like an action scene or something and people read it if I did a past tense and a present tense version people would say that the present tense version was much more immediate and so that's what I've and and exciting so That's what I've stuck with. And if it's just my thing, it will be my thing.

And maybe it'll be something that will stand out. Do you know if Commandant Mascardo or any of the survivors of the Alcazar have ever written memoirs? So there were interviews with Mascardo. I don't know anything about memoirs, but I know that there were interviews with him that you can find that were in Spanish. and are written. And so there is some material related to that,

but I don't believe that he, I'm not aware of him having written anything himself, but there are interviews out there. And that was, you know, for decades under, bless you, under Franco, for decades that they were still held as the heroes that they were. Let's end on this one. Did Franco ever write or do interviews giving an apology for the war and everything that happened afterwards? Apology, no.

He, there are. When I say, when I say apology, I'm saying Apoloia, Apoloia. Apoloia. Yes. I realize that after I said that. So there are interviews. with him, but he was very private. He didn't give a lot of interviews,

but there are people that have written memoirs. If you read, is it Payne's book on Franco? They talk a lot about that kind of stuff. There's a couple good Franco books, not Preston. Paul Preston is a scumbag and frankly,

you just make shit up. But there's quite a few books where they talk a little bit about Franco, but he was very private. He didn't, he never, he's not known for being very verbose and, and, you know, wanting people to center upon his thoughts and his ideas on things. He was very straightforward. guy and pretty private and went to church every single day and basically wanted, wanted things to just run out the clock, but while also getting people, you know, getting the country back on its feet. And so mostly he talked about the nation and the health of the nation and the state of the nation. He didn't talk about himself very much. Maxiv says Christopher Buckley,

equipped that Franco wanted to sit on the 20th century until it went away. Based. All right, man. I'll end this right now. Thank everybody for tuning in. Be back next week with the normal live stream interaction. But Carl, please tell everybody where they can find your work. And I'll make sure to include all of that in the show notes.

Great. Thank you. Carl Dahl.substack.com. That's Carl with a K-R-L-D-A-H-L. That substack.com. I also have two books under the authors named Carl Dahl on Amazon, Faction and Faction with the Crusaders.

Faction with the Crusaders is the Spanish Civil War story. And I'm on Twitter, which I hate or act. or whatever we call it. I'm not the biggest fan of the platform and stuff, but there's great people to interact with there. So that's why I'm still there. So thank you very much.

Right. Appreciate it. Thank you.