The Pete Quiñones Show - Episode 1065: Correcting the Narrative on the Spanish Civil War w/ Karl Dahl

Episode Date: June 11, 2024

73 MinutesPG-13Karl Dahl is an author specializing in the Spanish Civil War and historical "fiction."Karl joins Pete to talk about themes in his historical fiction work based around events in the Spanish Civil War, "Faction: With the Crusaders," and to begin to dismantle the mainstream narrative surrounding the war.Faction: With the CrusadersKarl's SubstackKarl's MerchVIP Summit 3-Truth To Freedom - Autonomy w/ Richard GroveSupport Pete on His WebsitePete's PatreonPete's Substack Pete'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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With next day delivery in Greater Dublin. Appliances Delivered.com, part of expert electrical. See it, buy it, get it tomorrow. Or you know, fight Brenda. If you want to support the show and get the episodes early and ad free, head on over to freemambionthewall.com forward slash support. There's a few ways you can support me there. One, there's a direct link to my website. two, there's subscribe star, three, there's Patreon, four, there's substack, and now I've introduced

Gumroad, because I know that a lot of our guys are on Gumroad, and they are against censorship. So if you head over to Gumroad and you subscribe through there, you'll get the episodes early and ad-free, and you'll get an invite into the Telegram group. So I really appreciate all the support everyone's giving me, and I hope to expand the show even more than it already has. Thank you so much. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekignano show. I'm here with Carl Dahl.

How are you doing, Carl? Doing all, thanks, Pete. I assume Dahl is the proper pronunciation, right? That is correct, yeah. Yep. Okay, yeah, it doesn't, it's not specifically D-O-L-L, but it's going to sound that way to people anyway, so.

All right, tell everybody a little bit about yourself. Sure, I am an author and shitposter. I'm the author of faction and faction with the Crusaders, the latter being my most recent novel that came out a couple months ago, which is about, you know, fictional events within the reality of the Spanish Civil War from an American perspective, because as an American, it's much easier to tell stories that are informative and interesting from a point of view that you yourself can relate to.

Yeah, that's interesting because I think the first book I read about the Spanish Civil War was mine were of trouble. Yeah. And that's coming from a British standpoint. And then there's, really, the most famous books out there are pretty much from British standpoints, the ones that are in English, the ones that are, you know, Spanish. The most challenging thing with this topic is just the lack of material in English, or it's super, super laser focused on, you know, certain aspects of it. You have, you know, you have good old George Orwell who, frankly, in homage to Catalonia,

explains that he knows nothing about Spain and nothing about what's going on there and nothing about the political parties. But he's, you know, a lib-tart. So he stumbles in and manages to not die when a Carlos Rekete shoots him in the throat. and stumbles out and, you know, escapes from the NKVD in Barcelona. So, yeah, it's kind of fraught with that. And the material is also very limited that we're exposed to a lot of the good stuff. I've heard your whole series that you did with Thomas 777, and you make references to some really good source material.

that's a little bit older, you know, beyond the kind of Hugh Thomas, Hugh Thomas is of the world. And it's really important to kind of, you know, expand and not just take what the current, like, supposed authoritative material is off of the shelf so that you can get some insights into a topic that's a lot more complicated. Stanley Payne specifically, I know that you've been. mentioned and he's like the the English language specialist on this topic and very few people have read Stanley Payne, which is a shame. Yeah, a bevore, even though he has obvious leanings towards

the left and especially the libertarian left in Spain, he does a really good job of laying out the facts of what happened. And then obviously pain is the, pain is the guy. Yeah, and it's funny. Have you ever seen any of the interviews that are online from students of his, you know, especially as time went by later into the aughts? They're really funny because you have these, you know, basically libtards who know nothing, who are college age, who assume that because he is a professor in good standing at University of Chicago. and, you know, it's talking about, he's like one of the biggest experts on 20th century fascism, right, as well as the Spanish Civil War. And they're just befuddled because he's like correcting them on. No, I don't really think that, you know, Franco was a, you know, according to Hoyle, fascist. And they just lose their minds when people who are actually informed on these things talk.

And, you know, what does the average person know about the Spanish Civil War? They're like, Franco worked with Scary Mustache Man, and they got rid of a republic, which is bad, and something, something George Orwell. And they haven't actually read George Orwell. Yeah, or Ernest Hemingway, and everything basically comes out of the left. And if you want to try to find a copy of Kemp's book, and if it wasn't for Mystery Grove and places like that, republishing them. We wouldn't, you know, you're paying two, three, four hundred dollars for them. The nice thing is a fair bit of the old Spanish material is becoming available online or you can order it for pretty cheap. The problem is most people don't speak Spanish or read Spanish.

I do not super well. I'm a lot better at it than I was, you know, five years ago because a little timeline for how I ended up writing this. I've been working on, I've been writing for a long time, but I had to kind of go through the crucible, as it were personally, and grow up so that I could write anything that meant anything that I felt was worth putting out there. And I had a project that had been sitting there forever, which is my first book faction, which is, it takes place in the 90s, it's about a essentially a family involved in

the peripheral world of espionage, you know, semi-unificial CIA cut-out type. The people that are, you know, ex-CIA who administer the things from like private companies and stuff like that, you know, all the

dirty tricks and in black off books things. And the kind of the sion of the family who started this whole deal got a start in the Spanish Civil War. And I kind of came up with that a long time ago and I don't know why. And in reality, I didn't know that much about the Spanish Civil War other than like one or two general histories and, you know, Orwell and that BBC documentary series, which is very, very, good I definitely recommend that people watch that it's out on YouTube as a as a you know initial tow wedding or if they're just not familiar with it at all and then after I

published that book and I was thinking about what I was going to do next I was like I really want to do a prequel but I and I think it'll be about you know Joseph Shea in the Spanish Civil War and so I had to get to you know get to work research and Minor of Trouble was just re-released by Mystery Grove in 2019, I think. I got the book in 2019 and it was pretty new. And when I read it, it helped me connect emotionally with the story, or personally, rather, with characters and, you know, local color and people. whereas most of the material is pretty, you know, pretty dry when you're looking at histories and everything like that. And it's interesting to people like us, but how do you create a story,

a compelling story out of that? And what I figured out for myself is if I don't have something compelling behind what I'm writing, if there isn't some big things that I'm trying to convey, I'm just not going to be successful at doing so. And so that's... that's what I really needed. That helped me connect. And what it really did is get me diving into the Carlos Reketees, who I feel like we're the most interesting faction of the war and their history. And most importantly, how they kind of survived as a movement over time, you know, failures. And let's try it again. Let's try another, you know, another war. Failure. Let's try it again. you know, partial success, and then everyone goes into the 20th century and it's kind of stumbling around. And it's just so analogous for our current situation, very different in a lot of

ways. And part of what I ended up doing when I was writing this is leaning into those elements where, you know, unfortunately, as it is right now, you know, people on the right, especially online and say, oh, well, we would just automatically win a civil war because we have all the guns, because Franco won. And it's like, well, the right was extremely organized. And they had been trying for, they had been doing this for a really long time by the time the civil war kicked off. And, you know, it's anathema for the right to organize in America now, like in their DNA. You look at libertarians and such.

And like you, I'm a former libertarian, although I was former. earlier than you were. And yeah, it's just like they're completely allergic to it in a fundamental fashion. And even the anarchists of Spain, there's any successes that they had in Catalonia, which they were very successful, in my opinion, at least in getting going before their beliefs kind of put the brakes on any success they might have. they basically said let's throw elements of our ideology out the window and let's organize and let's have a hierarchy and because the um basically they used to always try to do the old uh you know we'll start a general revolt and then the people will rise up and then we'll win and that just didn't work um and they finally kind of admitted that to themselves and um put into work a very serious effort.

And so I have a couple articles about that, actually, that are on my substack as well as in the appendix of this book. One is about how they created the Phi Bomb, the FI hand grenade, that shows up a lot in Orwell's work. They had like 35,000 of them when the anarchist, the Derrude column went up to, defend Madrid from from Franco's you know oncoming forces because they had spent so much time and effort and money into building as many of these as they could for their pending revolution which

they used the military uprising to kick that off there's also information about their organizational structure because I found some really good books on the subject that are very obscure because they're, you know, anarchist books. And people on the right don't read their enemy's works. And it would behoove people to do so because there's some really great information in there that would be particularly relevant to the current age. And that's all I'll say. You catch them in the corner of your eye.

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Like, proper mad. Brenda wants a television and she's prepared to fight for it, if you ask me. It's the fastest way to a meltdown. Me, I just prepare the fastest way to get stuff, and it doesn't get faster than Appliances Delivered.i. Top brand appliances, top brand electricals, and if it's online, it's in stock,

with next day delivery in Greater Dublin. Appliances delivered.com. Part of Expert Electrical. See it, buy it, get it tomorrow. Or you know, fight Branda. Oh, question. The interest in the Carlos, are you Catholic? Are you Catholic? I am Christian, but I am not Catholic. Oh, okay. I was just wondering. Yeah, I, let's just say this awakens some, some interest in things. and I was when I looked my German side of the family, I found were Catholic right up into the 1800s and then became Prots along with so much of America in the mid-1800s. Yeah, for those who are Catholic, a really good book on it.

I don't know, did you read The Last Crusade by Carol? Yeah, it's in my bibliography that's on my. substack as well as in the appendix of amazing book is so moving yeah it just because it was yeah there were there were times when I was reading it where I got emotional yeah I had to put it down quite a bit I lent it to my mother which wasn't probably the greatest idea because she just said it made me so sad and I was like well that's you know the reason I gave it to you is because she had the whole, well, they overthrew a republic. And that's bad.

And I'm like, nope, they killed 10,000, you know, clergy, nuns, monks, and lay people in the first three months of the war. And that was what they were all about, the la revolution social and the social revolution. that was the anarchists, that was the communists. You know, when you read the why we failed, the anarchists actually, there's a huge body of work of the Spanish anarchists who went into exile afterwards. The people that were involved in all kinds of levels of leadership. And it's really interesting stuff. And they talk about why they failed. And other times they'll refer to it as the nest.

defeat of May 1937, or is it possibly July 37, when the, basically the communist central government, the army especially, took over Catalonia from the anarchists and the CNTFAI decided that they would purge all the various socialist and anarchist groups that weren't going to cooperate with the central focus of the war. They've written reams of material on this. And it's never the problem. The ideology is never the problem. It's always,

well, we wanted the social revolution, which was what it was really all about, and it was overthrown by those mean Stalinists, whereas the Stalinists were like, we needed to actually win the war, or it wasn't going to go anywhere. And both of those things are true.

But they were also horrible, evil people. and deserved everything they got and more. Yeah, that's one thing that people don't want to hear is when you, one of the reasons why I believe that so much propaganda around making the Republicans and their faction into the victims of all this is really to just cover up their crimes. A hundred percent. Yeah, on the right, there were some really. really, there were some, there were crimes that definitely needed to be dealt with, especially

from some of the folks from Morocco and Northern Africa. Yeah. Yeah. But when you come, but when you really compare, I mean, right from the beginning, I mean, I think we talked about this in our series that in the span of three months, they killed three times more just Catholic clergy and laity. and seminarians then were killed in were executed in the Inquisition over the span of 350 years. Yeah.

And, you know, the counter to that is because they talk about the red terror, right? And then there's, and I show some of the red terror in the book, like one of the main characters before everyone knows what's up with him. He has to make a choice when he's on the front with the anarchist. in Oregon. And they're basically going to execute an American volunteer who ended up on the line because he went to Barcelona for the People's Olympiad, which was scheduled to start the day of the military uprising. It was the, you know, there's this whole thing where, you know, the 1936 Olympics, you know that was when you know jesse owens like defeated hitler according to television which is silly because that you know hitler didn't disrespect him or anything like that it's all this this post post-war cope but anyway there was an alternative because the ussr boycotted the the olympics and they hosted a communist international uh you know, alternative in Barcelona that, and there was instantly like a whole bunch of

international fighters that were anarchists and socialists and communists in Barcelona because of this event. And a whole bunch of them ended up on the line, you know, because after capturing Barcelona and Catalonia around it, they started pushing north to Oregon, because they wanted to fight the carolists out in the countryside as well as to just terrorize, you know, all the locals wherever they could. And the carolists stopped them in kind of southern Oregon. And so this American volunteer who goes there and because it's an adventure and, you know, doesn't really know much in this kind of a political. is going to get executed because some of the communists taking over the front. You know, they have the army.

They have the, they don't have the numbers because at the time, all the little local militias were running things. And, but the, the central government's army was being communized. They had the red star on their uniforms for officers. And they had commissars and everything like that. And it was being basically managed by the NKVD as well as a huge Soviet international group. This is independent of the international brigades. But there were a whole bunch of internationals involved as quote unquote advisors with the Spanish army.

And so they're going to execute this guy because he wears his grandfather's crucifix. And he's an American and he doesn't really understand what's going on because they're like, oh, well, we're fighting fascists. So I made him kind of a naive college student. Right. And so the main character has to make a decision because he's going to get executed. There's a sham trial. The anarchists support him because they were with him.

You know, he came to the front with them and they like him and everything like that. But the hardliners want to kill him. And so during a carolist attack on their mostly crappy position, he dips out with the guy. He rescues him in a in a fun little violent bloodbath and ends up, tries to like go back to being a reporter, you know, which is kind of his cover, ends up in Madrid and it's taken to a checka as soon as the Derutie column gets up into that area and start spreading information about, you know, their various suspects in all these areas. And so at that point, he has to make a choice like, I can't be undercover anymore.

I have to do something different. And it's crazy because when you look into the realities of what was going on, the red terror was horrific. And it was going on for a very long time. And the cope is always, oh, well, it was at the very beginning. and all these disparate groups got out of hand, and then the central government tried to rein it in and get control of it. And the truth is, there was a fair bit of that on the right as well, but it wasn't nearly as bad.

And the big numbers that they bring to the table from the rightest groups committing atrocities are, like you said, the Moroccan Army of Africa troops, So there are some atrocities, but that was nipped in the bud. And you'll notice that there isn't a great deal of information about how it was nipped in the bud. Essentially, when you dig into it, some examples where high profile examples were made, that this was not going to be tolerated. They did a lot of looting also. And so that got rained in.

And basically, after the drive to Madrid and that, the front's kind of stabilized. And Franco, you know, things really centralized and Franco really got control over everyone. Because beforehand it was, you know, you were under your general and that was it. And because they didn't really know exactly who was going to be running things at any given point. It was just a rampage. And then as they consolidated the, you know, Franco side of things, they had actual standards of behavior. You catch them in the corner of your eye. Distinctive, by design, they move you even before you drive.

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and I show this in the book as well, the general rule was when they captured the internationals, they would just execute them. Whereas the Spaniards would be. triaged, put into camps where maybe they were going to go into a labor battalion, maybe they were going to stay in a prison camp because of atrocities that they committed, they would be investigated. A decent number of them were executed, like rightfully so. But the vast majority of the people that were captured as POWs by the nationalists actually spent very little time in prison camps and in labor battalion.

aliens. By the end of World War II, they were pretty much all out. And in fact, the vast majority of them were out by the early 40s because the general policy was if you were, if you were just a volunteer or you were just a libtard, but you didn't commit atrocities, you know, your service was over in a couple years. You were basically, they guaranteed that you didn't by investigation that you didn't involve yourself in atrocities. And they just put you to work because they needed to bring the country back. They needed to dig themselves out of the huge hole that they were in. And they weren't, you know, there's plenty of people now who will criticize that and say that,

you know, Franco didn't do enough because look at Spain now. But he wasn't really in a position to do that because of the nature of the types of diplomatic conversations that were taking place with the Americans and the British. There's actually a really good book on the subject that's mostly focused on World War II and the British kind of maneuvering. Oh, here it is. It's called a balancing act, British intelligence in Spain during the Second World War. But one of the things that comes out of that is a lot of these conversations happened

early in the actual Spanish Civil War because people might forget this, but the nationalists were receiving American trucks and fuel from American and British companies on credit. And so there was a wink and a nod by the governments of the UK and the U.S. because the British essentially figured out very early that it would be better to have the nationalists in charge than communist country in Western Europe. And the other aspect of that is that American intelligence operations were joined at the hip with the British for a very long time, as shown by Bill Duff. Donovan who created the OSS who shows up in this story because coincidentally, he was in the same town for conferences as my character when I was doing some research. And I was like, holy shit. So I make some things happen there because Bill Donovan was, I wouldn't say that basically the OSS as it came to be would not have existed.

if it wasn't for British intelligence people that he had been working with for years and years, because there was no American civilian intelligence organization. The Secret Service did a fair bit of foreign intelligence, but Bill Donovan worked with FDR because they had both, they were college classmates, and he trusted him, And he was a World War I vet. He was an international business. He had gone to,

um, gone to Russia during the Russian revolution, uh, to, to do intelligence and had been traveling around. And in fact, Mussolini liked him and respected him and allowed him to go to, um,

Ethiopia to check out what the Italians were up to there. And so he was literally just like filing these reports for, you know, the U.S. government, um, with, you know, Mussolini's blessing, essentially, because he thought he was, you know, a cool guy with a firm grip

and who looked you in the eyes. It's all very interesting how, how personality driven that stuff was. But, yeah, they had been negotiating with Franco's people forever. And so there was going to be no situation where there was some, you know, insane bloodbath. that it was, and I don't think that that was like in the character of Franco either when you look at what they actually did. I think you mentioned Bevor's book where he has a lot of great numbers and he has the updated kind of Spanish academic official position on a lot of things where they've gone back and they've said, oh, well, we figured out that Aguarnica wasn't 1,200 who died. There were maybe like a hundred and some.

And, you know, but it was also really bad. But it wasn't as bad as we think it was because now we know that there was a combat operations taking place. And so, you know, it's all this really interesting stuff where every time you look at something that the right does that is vilified and you examine it, there's all these qualifiers that make it look like stuff that's, well, this, you know, yeah, sure. there were some situations where, you know, they, a phelon just executed a poet who was a communist, a gay communist or something like that. But does that make up for the fact that they were slaughtering people over here? Or yeah, we know that there was this atrocity in literal combat situation where they shot like the nationalists shot like 1,300 people in a bull, ring over time because they didn't know what to do with all these POWs. And it's like, that's bad, but is that worse than going around and murdering priests and destroying a third of the churches in Spain and, you know, starving people out and, you know, raping nuns and stuff like that? So it's, I mean, I was just, I was just recorded the other night with Jay Otto poll. I don't know if you're,

if you're familiar with Jonathan, uh, with Otto. And he's, his, The specialty is on basically persecution of Germans in Soviet Russia. Ah, interesting. And, I mean, you don't have to be in wartime. I mean, this is stuff that happens in wartime. I mean, during the terror, they were like 40,000 Germans who just were diaspora Germans who were in the Soviet Union. They just put bullets in the back of their head.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. So it's, you know, reminder, you know, what side was the Soviet Union on in this, in this fight in Spain? Obviously, you know, one thing I like to talk about is I call this, I call the Spanish Civil War World War I half. Yeah. Because, yeah, it's just so obvious that if Spain, if the, if the nationalist lose that war, basically the the bottom half of the peninsula belongs to Soviet Russia. Yeah, exactly.

So, I mean, you're going to do anything you can to win. And it's always the, you know, I mean, we can call this. Oh, imagine if the rules were reversed or, you know, pointing out hypocrisy. but it's because of who controls the press. Exactly. Exactly. Whose crimes are magnified more than any other. You know, it's interesting that you mention that because you're reading Blockade right now,

which is outstanding. And I just want to compliment you on what you're doing, reading all these old works that address things that people just don't think about. millions of people died of starvation for no reason. Well, not for no reason. We know why they died of starvation. It was because they had been targeted for death because of who they were, not anything that they did. And, you know, that's not cool, man. I mentioned Guernica. I mentioned Guernica, And this plays out in the book a little bit. Kemp talks about it.

I take a different position than Kemp. My position on Guernica was that it was a combat operation that, you know, yeah, there was a lot of confusion, but it was a combat operation that was exploited for propaganda. and it was literally just the very first time something that became basically old hat to the whole world was employed, which was the bombing of a civilian population in wartime. And in fact, it's far more justifiable because of the nature of what actually happened. Yes, there's evidence, there was evidence in testimony. from eyewitnesses that the retreating Republican forces, particularly the more far-left ones who were not Basque, were involved in, you know, doing what they do, which is demolishing buildings and stuff on the approach,

to, you know, leave rubble to slow the nationalist advance because they were moving towards that position and were on the ground within a couple days. And so, yeah, it was exploited. It was actual combat. Yes, it's bad when aviation is used to, you know, bomb an area where there's a civilian population. But it was literally just the first time something that became totally normal happened. And so by vilifying someone for it and then you just World War II,

firebomb, you know, capitals that it only serves to wipe out the and terrorize the civilian population of a place. It's just that whole, you know, accuse the enemy of doing what you're doing, kind of a situation. And in fact, there's another aspect of this that you don't see talked about in English language material. There's a great website called recatase.com. It's all Spanish language, but it's basically hardcore traditionalist Catholic guys in, I think Navarre is that the main guy was in Navarre. And I've archived it because it's been up for a long time and there isn't that much new stuff that happens to it. So I'm concerned that it'll go away, but it has thousands and thousands of pages of personal testimonies of people who are involved in the carlist

recettés and the war in general. And I found a couple books through there that I was able to track down. And one of them was from the guy that was essentially the founder of the recetatat militias and the Navarre brigades. He created essentially their secret army, their first militia that was built out in the early 30s, because during the Primo de Rivera dictatorship, you absolutely were not going to be getting away with, nor was there a need to get away with creating an

illegal mass militia for a right winger. But that was something that was reactivated under the Republic because the Republic was so sometimes they'll use the term openly secular and which is really anti-religious right because they were they were passing laws that were that outlawed the church essentially that nationalized all church buildings and then they had to start paying taxes to the state and rent to the state they banned um religious education um in a country where pretty much all of the education for the masses was religious in nature. So you would have to basically shut down every school. And if you got a school after that, you would have communist teachers. Looks familiar. And the other aspect of it also is no public expression of religion, no, you know, no parades.

They're doing something similar in Poland. Didn't they ban public display of the cross? or something like that recently, which is insane. Yeah. In a, what is it, 95% Catholic country? Yeah, exactly. So, so the, you know, they spun up up in the north. And one of the things that isn't talked about that much is that the, it was easy for the, the carlist recetes to recruit conservative Basques to join the nationalist forces.

There were quite a few that were under arms in the Republican militias, well, the Basque militias, not the super hardcore lefty basques like the escutie, and I'm probably mispronouncing that. But a whole bunch of the people that were essentially conscripted went over to the nationalists, including the guys who designed the iron belt, the defenses of Bill Bow. they just went right over to the nationalists and handed the plans over here you go but one of the one of the decisions that was made after the the bombing was that because of the fact that not only civilian populations but a lot of their Basque heritage was being destroyed in the war the Navarre brigades essentially established a policy where they would not tolerate aerial bombing of populated areas.

And so they made themselves shock troops and they essentially sacrificed themselves to save the civilian, to reduce casualties against the civilian population. They took massive, massive, massive casualties in the war in the north. And yeah, sure, there was still aviation bombing, but it was much more coordinated to where they were essentially only approving certain kinds of targets. And there's actually a decent amount of evidence for this. And in the testimony in these books, the Navarre Brigade Car, Carlists went into Guernica and established a line around the, what do they call it, the tree of Guernica, which it was outside of their hall and was very important to them. They had been essentially giving the law and the kings of the Basque regions would be crowned under the tree.

and any time their legislature, which had been went back a very, very long time under their, their old Fueros, their old rights and privileges, and the legal code that they had in place for themselves, which is the whole reason that they had a kind of separatist movement anyway. They guarded it with their lives, and there was, there's a story of some phalanjists from other parts of the country going up there with axes to cut down the tree of Guernica. And basically the colonel from the Navar Brigade had a fist fight with another officer in front of it after calling his mother a whore. And just like beating each other in front of this, this tree to stop them from destroying Basque heritage. And, you know, it's just not something that's talked about because it was supposedly this thing where, well, the Basque were, you know, with the Republic.

And it's like, no, the Basque were hugely carolist. The Northgoing Republic is because they thought that they would get some autonomy out of it. And they had some element of limited autonomy under the Republic after the war started. But most of the people pushing this were local libtard politicians. And in fact, there's a fellow. And let's see if I can, instead of stumbling over my words, I'm going to pull it up myself. But essentially, there was a Republican politician, aka communist, who had always opposed any of the autonomy movements that were going on there.

And there was, so his name was Prieto. So Indoletio Prieto, he was the finance minister and a Basque member of the Socialist Workers Party. And his position was, and I quote, well, I quote a translation, is that the Basque Navarre country autonomy campaign underway in the early 30. was merely a front for sedition by Alphanists, hymists, which is the Carlists, nationalists and Jesuits against the Republic. And then he essentially dictated that they shut down

almost every single Catholic newspaper in northern Spain and any right winger who was, you know, had ever written a quote unquote intemperate editorial. So it's like this was a clash of, It was a fight for their civilization. And, you know, it wasn't some, you know, dictatorship, you know, with a capital D that was imposed. The dictatorship happened because it was a fight to the death.

And then it immediately, you know, what happened immediately at the end of the war, World War II happened. So a lot of the things that, you know, when they're when they're bad jacketing Franco and, and, you know, the Spanish nationalists, they say, oh, well, look at the fact that they had food rationing, you know, well into the 1940s. And it's like Britain had food rationing until 1954. Are you kidding me? Like, look at what the rest of Europe looked like. So it was, you know, it's just one of those things where, you know, you put your time into researching it, and it's so obvious what the truth is. And so here I was thinking, I'm going to write something fictional. It has to be focused on, yeah, sure, there's adventure, and there's interesting historical elements to it, but there's a greater capital T truth. And so if I'm not addressing that in a way that, you know, not necessarily a polemic, you don't want to beat people over the head with it, but you want them to come to the same

conclusion as you, as if it was their thing that they arrived at themselves, right? It's propaganda, let's be honest. But, you know, I feel like that's what we have to be doing. There's this great, the earliest reference to recetase to reference a Karlist militia is in the early 1990. hundreds and they wrote fame propaganda, which is Caudillon for let's do propaganda. And I just loved that so much. I'm like, if I say femme propaganda, it looks like femme, right? So English speakers are going to be like, what the hell is that? But I'll talk about it, but I'm not writing it because people immediately say that sounds gay.

One of the things I wanted to go back to is you talked about Prieto and talking about the the autonomous zones. Yeah. I've always had this idea about Spanish history that one of the main reasons why you, having autonomous zones and not centralizing power always just seemed like a really bad idea. Make it easy for subversives to go in there. Easy for subversives to start working in different areas. is and, you know, I just don't, you know, after, and still, you know, you look at Spain and it's like,

okay, this is still autonomous over here, autonomous over there. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I just, as much as I would love to see, like, as much as the idea of decentralization sounds good to me, when I look at someplace like Spain, I'm just like, they should have centralized the power there centuries ago, and a lot of this could have been avoided. Do you agree with me on that? You know, it's, I think it's more, I think it's complicated because there's this really cool book from the 60s called A Society Organized for War Medieval Spain. And I think you can, I think I downloaded it for free online. But it's, what it addresses is the fact that medieval Spain,

because of the reconquista, and Thomas talked about this a little bit in one of the episodes that you were, you guys were discussing, their overall thing was that they, it was a, it was a coalition, right, of all these different, you know, Visigothic lords, frankly, who were feeding, the whole system got organized into fighting against the Muslims, right? And so when you look at the history of Spain, it's hard to talk about this topic without putting on your Putin hat and saying, you know, we have to go back to the time before the oceans drank Atlantis and the rise of the sons of Arias, right? It's, you have to go back. And if you look at the settlement of Spain, you'll see essentially that there was a, the under, under, it was a bunch of different ethnic groups,

right, in different areas. And under the Romans, and the Romans, it took some time for the Romans to conquer all of the Iberian Peninsula. I, here it is. I have some maps that I've found that are super interesting about this topic. But essentially what happened was there was this old kind of Carthaginian area along the Mediterranean coast that was the first area that the Romans took over. And it was a it was a much more cohesive kind of frankly slave plantation area without mincing words. The Romans directed all kinds of Visigothic groups, the Swebys, and brought them in as Federati to govern Hispania, right?

And also to get them out of the areas where they were causing trouble. So by kind of the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, there was a Swebian region, there was the Basque region in the north. There was a big Visigothic region that there was a huge sweep of like the central part of the country from east, from west to east. And then down in the southern areas, which is like Hadith and Malaga and Cartagena and out into the Balearic Islands, that remained part of the east. That was controlled by the Eastern Empire. And down in that area, they had the basically slave plantations. And one of the biggest problems, one of the biggest social problems was that in the north, they ruled under kind of Germanic legal structure and governing theory that was codified in the Fueros, you know, during the first millennia, AD, which has nobles obf, right? not down in the far southern areas, which were then conquered by the Moors and stayed under the Moors for 700, almost 800 years in some places.

They never had nobles oblige down there. And so you had this huge propaganda issue in the 19th and 20th century of the landless peasants down in the southern areas who, were essentially treated as slaves. Let's not kid ourselves. It was not very pleasant for them. And the thing is, the rest of the country could be traditionalists. Like the Carlos could be traditionalists because they had the old rights and privileges that their lords had going back you know, 1,500 years because, and they could all kind of be semi-independent because for conquering the whole country, you didn't want to alienate your allies. And if the Lord from the northwestern, you know, old Swebby provinces, you know, holds his line against the Moors and sends you

treasure and troops for your incursions to, you know, move the conquest farther south, you don't really care that they have these old ways of doing things. So, you know, it did shift a little bit over time, but you had these different traditions and they didn't really care as long as they were accomplishing their main goal, like the central government, well, even before they had a full central government under, you know, oh, my brain is blanking out right now. What's her name? 1492 people. You know what I'm talking about. My brain is blanking. Thank you very much. They didn't really care. And so there was a certain level of. independence and then after 1492 they kick the moors out they start going overseas um they start

spreading and because of you know the the nature of who they you know the royal family married into and the various holdings that they had um they had people all over the whole world they were very influential in europe so you have this heat sink at this point where you're not too worried about public uprisings in Spain for a couple hundred years if people have issues they can go overseas so it's this big heat sink where people can raise themselves up you don't really worry about social problems so much because you can just send people to the new world they can engage in wars in Europe they can go to Asia there there's all kinds of outlets for these sorts of things

until the empire collapses. And then when the empire collapses, to your point, you have this precedent that everyone really likes, right? That, you know, they like to have their own independence and their own way of doing things. And you don't have a tradition of anything else. So that when you go to the nobles and you try to, you know, impose a little bit of some restrictions on them, they fall back on tradition and say that there's no precedent

for that and I've always been loyal and et cetera. You know, you get to the 19th century and the central government becomes liberal, right? You have that whole succession crisis because of the fact that they put Queen Isabella on the throne instead of Infante Carlos. And the people who supported in Fonte Carlos did it because they were traditionalists. They see France next door and they say, if we liberalize, if we move towards atheism, if we move away from like the system we have, our heads are on the chopping block, they're destroying our religion, they're slaughtering anyone who goes against them. So of course they're going to have uprisings against the central government. It's it's one of those things where you know, when you look at what would have been

better, the problem is as you go back, you understand how it arrived at that point and almost how it would have been impossible or it makes sense why it ended up that way. And it almost to me almost seems like an inevitability. Like Spain becoming a disaster makes sense to me because of the nature of what was going on. Like look at America. There's been no attention paid to domestic, the domestic situation. You know, they'll talk about it a little bit in political campaigns, but it's to their like client groups, right? And mass immigration, etc. So they just undermine, you know, the native stock to the point where they have no standing with us anymore. They can't get us to do anything, even if they, you know, decide that they're going to allow Trump to be president to have a big digression in this conversation.

That's not going to change people's minds. He's not going to be able to be like, oh, yeah, we're going to have a war and it's going to be great. I just don't think that's going to happen for the people that are the target demographic for that kind of a talk. you know, in their teens and 20s, it's just, it's just not going to happen. Even if on paper it would make sense to do it and it would have been better to do it, it's easy to understand. The easiest choice is always the path of least resistance at any given point in time, right? Yeah, I don't know.

It's something I think about because in studying this, you know, I really go back all the way to to 7-Eleven and just see the progression and see how things work. Oh, yeah. And then you have the golden age. Golden ages are going to end, and you know they're going to end. So what do you do? How do you set it up? Everything seems to be working perfectly fine.

They get rid of the Inquisition. As soon as they get rid of the Inquisition, you have the three, you have the three Carless Wars almost in a row. Yep. And it just built and built up to it and built up to it. And it's just, you know, you try to look and you're like, okay, so what could they have done? I don't know if there's anything they could have done because it just, it seemed like an inevitability, especially when like in 1868, Finnelli shows up, you know, bringing Bakunin and,

bringing Bakunin, Bakuninist Marxism with him. And, you know, Andalus, Andalus, you know, just open arms. just adopts. Absolutely. You're just like, okay, well, we know what's going to happen. And within what, from 68, you're looking at, there's 60 years? Yeah. And Asturius, like Asturius, the Austurian miners were some of the best paid people, you know, who are non-nobles, right?

There were some of the best paid working people in Europe for quite a long time. And they completely embraced anarchism. They were the most feared sappers and forces in general on the Republican side in the Civil War because they understood explosives and tunneling and everything like that. They were organized and they would organize to accomplish things. And they had just, they had shed religion and gone all in on this seething anarchism in the night. 19th century and they just kept at it and kept at it and kept at it and kept at it. And that's where that 1930 was it 32 was the failed uprising there or was it 34. I'm trying to remember. I think it might have been 34, but or there are multiple ones actually. Yeah, just just it it plants the seeds and

they they go bananas. That's another element is like in in Basque country. The people in the countryside and the small towns were, and the wealthier people, of course, were going to be more conservative. And there was a huge amount, like the big push for anarchists and socialists in Basque country were from people who emigrated from other provinces into the cities to work in the cities, to work in industry. Because people say, you know, Spain never industrialized. And it's like, no, they were, they just industrialized. in pockets like Barcelona and coastal Catalonia had a fair bit of industry. And up in the Basque country, there was a great deal. And then Asturias, there was a lot because of the mines up there and the ironworks in Oviedo and Gihon.

Yeah, it's one of these things where you see the patterns that show up elsewhere. And it's just so tough because it's kind of they had to go through it themselves. just like everyone else. And sometimes you just end up in a situation where this, it just explodes because of the, it was just unreconcilable at a certain point. There's this great, I can't remember what book I read it in, but there was a great observation by a guy after the war

who he was either on a train or a tram, or he was a tram conductor. I can't remember. And he said that it was springtime in like 1935. And he said this absolutely beautiful like 20-year-old upper middle class gal gets on the tram. And he said she was just jaw-droppingly beautiful. And this worker sitting next to him was just seething, looking at her, saying that disgusting rich pig.

And he said, if a guy cannot just sit back and appreciate, you know, a beautiful woman like that, it means you have major, major social problems. Well, you know, people don't want to hear this because, you know, people in Europe knew what these communists did during the Spanish Civil War. Yep. people in Europe knew about the red terror, knew what was going on there, knew that Germans were being killed, that Latvians were being killed, that Poles were being killed by the tens of thousands. They knew this was happening. When I say people, I'm talking about leadership. Yeah, yes. How do you react to that? How do you react to that when you know it's coming for you?

What do you do? What do you do you do? Well, the, you know, conservative elements within the army had been organizing for a long time since before the establishment of the Republic. Because there had been coups, quite a few coups in Spanish history. As you know, 19th century was just like war coup, war coup, and military. dictatorship you know in the 20s you know Primo de Verre Primo de Rivera is essentially appointed dictator with the blessing of the king because the you know the the Cortes and everything are just a disaster just they just needed there was street fighting all the

time between socialists anarchists and especially the flange but also the the Carlists and a lot of these kind of like Carlist youth groups ended up serving as essentially self-defense forces for, you know, Catholic traditionalist events. They would be patrolling the areas around, you know, traditionalist events to protect them from attacks from anarchists and communists. Sounds familiar. And the, in the, I forgot exactly, but as soon as the Republic became a thing, which is, kind of, it's pretty illegitimate the way that it was arrived at. Essentially, there was, there were local elections where it was framed as a mandate in the press for the establishment of a Republican, the tossing out of the old system. And so it just kind of happened. And it, and there's,

there's sort of a parallel when you look at what happened in Russia where people just lost confidence in the old system and so they waited too long before the white army like asserted itself again that the advances of the of the reds were were massive because a lot of people kind of bought the propaganda that they were going against the failure of the old system instead of it actually having a very clear goal right um when you look at the memoirs of the people in the republic the people in most of the political parties, they didn't believe in a republic. The conservative certainly did not. The traditionalist commune or however you want to translate it, the Carlist political party and parties, because there were a bunch that kind of fell under that bucket. They never ever,

communion traditionalista, they never ever believed in the the republic because they felt that it was a race to the bottom, right? Like most people's opinions, they don't belong in determining how you govern and you can be manipulated too easily. And so they only ever, like in their own language and terms, they always say, oh, well, we're participating in parliament as a means of political mobilization and to maintain momentum and visibility and to organize ourselves to prepare ourselves for when there's going to be violence, whether we start it or someone else starts it. There was a Carlos politician who said the principal carless tool when striving for political power has always

been a rifle and not a ballot paper. And it's just, you know, it's just charming with how direct it is. But the socialists and communists that talk about the republic, they were insane. They were bloodthirsty lunatics. And it shows through and everything. And like you said, the leadership of Europe knew what was going on. And for quite a while, like the very beginning of the war, especially, that was the message even in the American press. I mean, there was, of course, you know, there was a big sea change as we went into World War II.

and essentially what happened there where a huge falling away of kind of traditionalist right-wing viewpoints because of just the nature of the coup that happened during World War II and the quiet overthrow. But there was a lot of very candid talk about what was going on there. And even, you know, the British government knew that they were better off. working with the nationalists than the Republic, although they would later use the whole Hitler thing, to their advantage when talking about and negotiating with Spain for their own purposes. But yeah, it was absolutely people, plenty of people knew what was going to happen.

There was no scenario where had they won, it wouldn't have been Russia all over again and establishing a strong foothold in Western Europe. And might I add, might I add that at the time of the Civil War, the French government was under Bloom and his socialists. And they, too, achieved their electoral, quote-unquote, victory by using the popular front model, which is exactly what the so-called Republicans did in 36, early 36, before they went nuts and just started, you know, rounding up politicians and having government officials execute them and stuff like that, which caused, you know, the jump off of the army revolt to happen. Well, let's cut it right there, and I invite you to come back anytime. Let's continue this conversation, because this needs to go on. This is, am I wrong in saying that what we see happening in the United States could be, especially in certain regions, would be closer to the Spanish Civil War than anything else? Yeah, I agree with you with that. I know that Matt Bracken, who, who I respect has said Yugoslavia times Rwanda.

But, and there's a lot to say about that. But I honestly think that the Spanish Civil War model is closest to it. And again, everything that I write an article about, either on my substack or that's in the appendix of the book, and any story that happens in the book, you know, even though it's a fictional, a fictional telling in a real setting is there for a reason and that main reason is I think that this is coming and we have to be ready for it. And we have to stop fooling ourselves because I honestly think that this is happening sooner rather than later. Well, that's a good warning.

All right. Tell everybody where they can get the book, you bought your substack and everything and we'll on this. Great. Faction with the Crusaders available at Amazon. You can check out my substack at Carl Dahl, K-A-R-L-D-H-L dot substack.com. I sell silly t-shirts. Like I have a Franco-Franco-Franco t-shirt on there that I just dropped last week trying to do some more cheeky stuff, but it keeps getting banned by producers. So I'm trying to work through that.

But thus far, Franco, Franco, Franco is staying up. I'm on Twitter. I do a very bad job of engaging with Twitter because, frankly, I don't like Twitter. Tired of shadow banning and stuff like that. Nobody likes Twitter. If you look for Carl Dahl there, I won't give you the name because I had Caudillo doll and then it got scrambled. by Twitter's account name setup.

So just look for me there also. All right, Carl. I'll talk to you again soon. Thank you. All right. Thanks a lot.