The Pete Quiñones Show - Pete Reads 'The Last Crusade' by Warren H Carroll Part 7 w/ Guest Karl Dahl
Episode Date: July 13, 202474 MinutesPG-13Pete continues a reading of Warren H. Carroll's 1996 book, "The Last Crusade: 1936." In this episode, he begins the September 1936 chapter. He is joined by special guest, Karl Dahl.Ante...lope Hill - Promo code "peteq" for 5% off - https://antelopehillpublishing.com/FoxnSons Coffee - Promo code "peter" for 18% off - https://www.foxnsons.com/The Last CrusadeFaction: With the CrusadersKarl's SubstackKarl's MerchPete and Thomas777 'At the Movies'VIP 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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Thank you so much. I want to welcome everyone to part seven of my reading of Warren H. Carol's
The Last Crusade. And for the first reading of this series that I've been doing, my sixth book,
I have a guest. Carl Dahl. How you doing, Carl? Doing well, Pete. Thank you.
When I had you on recently, your knowledge of the war, the fact that you learned a lot of Spanish so you can read books that aren't available in English.
I think that that impresses me. It's impressing a lot of people. And as I said in a substack that I did this week, I think that we really need to study this topic for numerous reasons.
one that I will just throw out there right off is that the good guys won.
And the good guys really only won twice in the 20th century.
And the other one you don't hear about because it happened in Finland.
Yes.
No, that's a really good point.
And you're talking about the first time around.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
So, all right.
Yeah, let's get this going.
If you've heard any of my read-alongs with other people, you know that
jump in and stop me any time.
You got it.
See, we're going to spoil people with this one.
I want people to know.
My readings, the readings I've been doing are literally me just because I have an hour somewhere
and I have nothing and I have nothing to do.
And it's me jumping in and saying, hey, let's read this.
Let's get this done.
I don't plan these at all.
This is actually the first one of these six.
books that I've read in a row that I planned and I wanted to have someone on because,
well, first of all, like I said, your knowledge of the, is as far beyond mine.
And it's just, I think it would help a lot of people.
I think it's that important that people, other people could come on and comment.
But right up front, Carl knows more about this than I do.
Right now, I'm going to ask him to give some background.
on Largo Caballero, don't get spoiled. This isn't going to happen all the time. All right, people?
So Carl, the first two letters of this chapter, the first two words of this chapter are the name Largo Caballero.
What do you know about Largo Caballero? So his name, it's funny, his name translates as Long Night.
Like, Caballero is a knight. Cabo is a horse, so, you know, horseman. And it's kind of interesting because the,
the old culture of Spain was largely rotated around the nobility, the caballeros.
And all over the Western Hemisphere, a caballero, it's a respectful way to refer to a friend or something, calling him a gentleman or sir or something like that, right?
Largo Caballero was a piece of garbage. He was a, well, his party,
Um, he was more radical than his party position. So, so his party and, and sometimes I don't get the, all the different kind of like sub-communist non-Bolshevik, you know, uh, national communist groups, uh, nailed perfectly. But he worked very closely with common turn. Um, he was essentially a stalking horse for the communist party. When he was in, uh, prison, um, trying to remember if it was under, um, he was under. Um, he was essentially, um, he was in, um, trying to remember if it was under.
under the, it may have been in the 20s.
He was in prison for a bit under the,
the excellent dictatorship of Primo de Rivera.
And he read Lenin and got extremely radicalized.
So he would say completely insane things about like wanting to
eradicate the religion of Christianity and the church.
You know, so one, it's, as you keep reiterating something that I always reiterate,
which is that the republic was not, you know, lowercase are, well, we're supposed to be a
republic, not a democracy that people say in the United States all the time.
It was a, it was a frame up to get rid of the old system, the monarchy, to through,
basically throughout the Cortes and have people's revolution in whichever flavor the various
parties wanted, the various left parties wanted, I should say, you know, anarchists,
rabid socialists, you know, all kinds of communists, whether they be national or non.
Largo Caballero essentially handed over his government to the most insane people,
and he was one of the most rabid, um, uh, enjoyers of, of violence, um, that there was.
So, uh, they'll talk about it here, uh, in his relationship with asagna and, and all the,
the various flavors of things that, that they, um, do. And so, yeah, he was the first to include,
like, literal communists in his cabinet because he was technically, again, not a Bolshevik
communist party member.
But that's really what he was.
All right.
Here we go.
Largo Caballero set up his new government on September 4th.
Azania gave his full consent, even after Largo Caballero had set as a non-negotiable
condition of accepting the position of prime minister that he be permitted to include
communists in his cabinet, which no country other than the Soviet Union and communist ruled
Mongolia had ever done.
one of the communist ministries was most significantly education.
The minister was Jesus Hernandez.
The other was agriculture under Vincente Uribe.
But there was also a third communist in Lago Caballero's government
in the highly important position of foreign secretary,
Julio Alvda, excuse me, sorry,
yes.
Julio Alvarez Delvayo, a close and obedient collaborator with a common turn,
though not a listed member of the Communist Party.
Can you pause really quickly?
Yep, go ahead.
All right.
So I want to point something about all these different ministries that were handed directly to the communists.
So there are elements when you read the more detailed histories where the anarchists are involved in, you know, some of the other parties.
A lot of times while they're anti-Christian and stuff, they're a little less psychotic.
But when you look at the ones that the communists were in charge of this education, and as you pointed out, Pete, before this, education was basically delivered to anybody who wanted it via the church.
So if kids in remote villages were getting any education, it's because the church was providing it to them.
If people were getting any kind of charity, it was generally through the church.
there were almost no one else was doing anything of that nature. So education handed to the communists.
Agriculture. What do we know about the Soviet Union? Collectivization of agriculture. The
the Kulaks were eliminated. You know, you have the Holodomor in Ukraine. Again, that was all under the
auspices of agricultural departments. And then finally, the Foreign Secretary. The Foreign Secretary,
Alvarez del Vio is the one who handed control of the military essentially to the common turn, aka the Soviet Union.
I'll hand it back to you.
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PST.
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Yeah, and I want to make a point because a lot of conservatives and Republicans and libertarians
we'll talk about the failure of communism,
how they can't feed their people.
They don't talk about how that's done on purpose.
Yeah, exactly.
How certain groups are targeted to not get food.
These crazy liberals?
Yeah.
What are they thinking? They're so stupid.
Don't you know that if you control prices,
you're going to have shortages?
Yeah, that's the idea.
Salvador de Mariaga calls his appointment a clear sign of the rising power of Moscow in Spanish affairs.
Communist Party members Hernandez and Eribe accepted their two ministries from Lago Caballero only after being specifically instructed from Moscow to do so.
From the time of its establishment, the Lago Caballero government was committed to, quote,
exaction of revolutionary justice, and recognition of, quote, people's courts.
In other words, to a continuation of the massacres and martyrdoms that had reddened the six
weeks in Republican Spain since the military uprising.
Other important cabinet appointments were Prieto as Minister of Navy and Air, and Juan Negren
as Minister of Finance.
Largo Caballetto had tried to persuade the anarchist to join his government also,
not so absurd in ideas as at first it appeared,
for a substantial section of the anarchist led by Juan Garcia Oliver,
now advocated such participation, however, contrary to their theoretical position.
At this time, the majority of Spanish anarchists and their leaders were not quite ready to do it.
But on September 26, anarchist led by Garcia Oliver accepted the ministries of war, economics, supply, and public health, and a new local government in Catalonia set up by the supple Luis Campinas.
How do you know how to pronounce his name properly?
Companies.
Yeah.
And sometimes you can put a little spin on it because it's a Catalan name.
that's what that's one of the things that you'll find um is the really wacky names are
katalan or basque generally the ones that are hard to pronounce harder to pronounce okay that's
where um basque is where you know when you do the DNA test and shows up and they give you the first
like the first section of the country that you're yeah like the you most yeah mine is basque
i'm not i'm not terribly surprised by that um but i i've i've i've i've
I've had too many conversations about racial purity with Latin American wheros.
One super quick thing, Pete, that I want to point out.
And I'll try not to too much because otherwise it'll take us an eternity to get through this.
No, well, here's the thing.
Here's the thing about this.
Remember what you're going to say.
This can do a lot.
This one episode can do a lot.
We can cover a lot of the background of a lot of people.
and then I can just go on with the reading from here.
Awesome.
So there's really subtle things in here that it takes a lot of reading, a lot of it, not in English, to get, like, good details on.
You can have a general, you can catch it from general histories like Bivore.
You know, I'll add one more thing.
If you're reading general histories about the war, ignore Preston.
He sucks.
He's a commie. He's a piece of garbage. And everything that he does is he makes excuses. He makes excuse after excuse. Here you've just read in just a couple paragraphs, the all these ministers of the government where they essentially sanctified, you know, in a communist sanctification, you know, blasphemous definition, of course, the check us. So all of the crazy revolutionary people's courts, you know, and a communist sanctification, you know, blasphemous definition, of course, the Czechos. So all of the crazy revolutionary people's courts,
where they're running around Madrid and blasting people, that's official policy, where they're
just executing people in these prisons. I want to say it was, what was it, 6,000 in the first couple
months in Madrid that they just had summary executions of, like, minimum. That was official
government policy of the republic. So when these apologists make excuses for these people,
that I mean, that's that's what the thing is. The last time we talked, we talked about Prieto a little bit because he was a, I mistakenly called him a Basque socialist politician. He was actually, his family was from Asturius and they had settled in Basque country to work in industry there. And so that was when I was talking about how most of the time the socialists and leftists that were in Basque country had migrated to the cities to the,
be the working poor from other parts of Spain, whereas the locals generally tended to remain
traditionalist Catholics, even if they were like pro-separatist Basques versus the Nationalist
Line car lists. And a lot of the former were incorporated into the car list units very smoothly.
So they had a huge amount of recruiting out of the Basque traditionalists who had started out
as Republicans under arms.
So Navy and Air.
So again, that is just a conduit with the Soviets and the French to a lesser degree.
They always downplay the French supplies by their socialist government.
Juan Negreen as Minister of Finance, he shipped all of Spain's gold and silver reserves
to France and the Soviet Union.
Three quarters of it, I think, went to the Soviet Union.
Yeah, three quarters went to the Soviet Union.
Yeah, a quarter went to France.
And so, very important.
So they drained the coffers in exchange for military aid.
And it was actually one of the worst deals in human history
because they went from the country.
They were among the top countries in terms.
of gold reserves held by the national banks to having nothing. So they went full fiat currency
with no monetary, no, you know, hard currency backing it. It's only literally whatever the
Republic said that they have. And so like immediately became valueless currency outside of Republican
controlled areas where they were issuing script and stuff like that. People were still using the
old currencies because they had precious metals in them. So they were inherently valuable. And you could
take them to foreign countries if you were a refugee or if you wanted to buy hard goods, weapons,
whatever. That's that relationship that happens there. So you've gone through people who
completely betrayed the country of Spain and handed it over to outside forces basically immediately.
I'll stop.
Well, and, you know, I mean, we're in that situation now.
Yeah.
Oh, of course.
Yeah.
Yeah.
A friend had contacted me today and asked me about,
do you have an opinion, a quick opinion on Jose Maria Guadonella?
The Cypresses believe in God, Spain, and the eve of the Civil War.
Are you familiar?
Oh, gosh.
I haven't read it.
I haven't read it because what I do is whenever.
I'm writing, I don't read fiction of any kind. So I haven't read literally any fiction about the Spanish
Civil War because I don't want it in my brain when I'm writing. Because you're writing fiction
about Spanish Civil War. Yes, exactly. I get it. Yeah. Yep. I get it. All right, onward.
Largo Caballiotto called his new regime a government of victory and named himself a minister of war
as well as prime minister.
He immediately replaced the exhausted and ineffective general Riquelme.
I believe that's how that's pronounced.
Is that close enough?
Yeah.
In command, yeah, I'm the one here with the Spanish last name and I'm asking you.
I took it for four years and Latin, so I should be better than I am.
So did I.
I took Latin too.
All right.
He immediately replaced the exhausted and ineffective general general
Rikalme in command of the Central Front, the approaches to Madrid, with Jose Asencio, just promoted by
Largo Caballero's general. The young 44 brilliant Asencio was one of the few regular army officers
who had served in Morocco to stay with the Republic. Largo Caballero sent him to meet Yagwe
and his nationalist striking column in the Tagus Valley near Talavera de la Rene, which the nationalists had just taken.
Asencio's force was supported by the first foreign volunteers to go into the battle for the Republic, Italians and French.
After a hand-fought battle, Yagway broke Asencio's men and the inadequately trained volunteers, and they fled the field.
But Yagwe's men had suffered significant losses and needed some rest to recover from the rigors of their tremendous march under the summer sun of southern Spain.
So the nationalist advance halted for the time being, though Yagway did send a detachment north to firm up a link with General Mola's men at Arenas de San Pedro in the Gritos Mountains.
Over the next two weeks, the main column advanced only 25 miles.
Yeah, so a huge difference compared to their pace before.
Think how worn out they would be.
Think how much of a problem water would be, because those mountains and that, those mountains and
part of Spain are very arid. In the summer, there's just, there's very little water. If you've ever
seen the area around Madrid, it's like north, north of those mountains, you know, it can, it's greener.
You know, it's Espania Verde, like farther up once you get past the high plains. But down in that
area, it is extremely arid. So that's, that's not surprising. They won, but they were super
worn out and that's something that
kind of shows
the relevance of the
militias who
were able to capture and hold territory
and take
huge casualties.
You were reading last time about the
recetes and the advances that they made
in capturing territory
but it's a huge
logistical effort to actually make
strong advances
especially
with this thing called weather.
So anyone who's been in the mountains
knows how much water that you drink
when you're hiking.
And that's not even like digging in
and engaging in combat or anything.
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On the nationalist side, the crusade was more than ever a reality.
Just as communist volunteers from other nations
were now arriving to fight for the Republic.
Catholic foreign volunteers were arriving to fight for the Catholic nationalists.
The Irish were first in the field on the Catholic side.
It's funny, they said out so many wars, but, you know, just...
Yeah.
Yeah.
The leader of the first Irish volunteer battalion, Francis McCullough, I believe that should be pronounced.
It looks like McCullough to me, wrote during September to President Amon,
the de Valera of Ireland.
Quoting, I am in Spain.
I see Spain all around me.
Excuse me a second.
Sorry.
I am in Spain. I see Spain all around me.
I live and move and breathe in the shadow of the greatest horror that has befallen Europe
since Sivaski drove the Turk from the gates of Vienna.
Not a Spaniard in my company has not had a sister outraged, a father murdered under circumstances
of indescribable barbarity, or a brother butchered because he was a priest or a novice.
in some monastery. A very striking feature is the number of religious emblems the officers and soldiers
wear. Pins to their breasts are little red cloth badges of the sacred heart of a kind very common in Ireland
and holy medals, while around the necks of many hang rosary beads, scampuilers of the Virgin del Pilar,
and that cross wear on the reds delight to trample. Never since De Moors were driven from Spain,
has there been such a Catholic army in this country, as there
is today. There is not an, this is not an army. It is the church militant on the march. It is
Catholic action personified. This is not a civil war. It is a holy war, a crusade. These are not
soldiers. They are fighting monks, knights Templars. And like all good monks, they are cheerful.
Never was there such a singing army. Whenever one wakes up at night, one hears the singing soldiers
go past. What then has caused this extraordinary outburst of piety? In my opinion, the principal
cause is the sacrilegious fury of the Reds and their diabolical hatred of the cross of Christ.
That fury and that hatred convinced the Catholics of Spain that they had to deal with the
forces of hell itself. The Spanish Catholics were not frightened by the foul and cruel murders,
which deprived them of their wisest and gentlest counselors. On the contrary, they were strengthened.
those victims died like veritable saints of God, and the Catholic army now seized them standing
outside the limits of space and time, immortal, invulnerable, far more potent than they were on
earth, interceding, assisting, encouraging from the courts of infinite wisdom and infinite strength.
End quote. On September 14th, speaking to a group of several hundred Spanish refugees,
Pope Pius the 11th, that Pope Pius, the 11th, Pope Pius the 11th, Pope Pope Pius the 11th,
declared that a truly satanic hatred of God had been displayed in the Spanish Republic.
What had happened to so many of the Spanish clergy was what was he said, quoting,
martyrdom in the full, sacred and glorious meaning in the word,
martyrdoms in which were sacrificed the most innocent lives,
the lives of old and venerable men, youthful lives still in their flower,
martyrdoms of which the victims, in their generous heroism,
have gone so far as to ask for a place in the,
the vehicle, along with those whom their executioner is taking to their death. But then he went on,
as it is ever a post duty to do, to caution the defenders of God and religion in Spain, never to forget
that their enemies were still their brothers whom they must still try to love and not to give away
to vengeful fury. He may already have heard of the massacres inflicted on helpless prisoners
on the Spanish Balaric island of Majorca by the man who curiously emerged as his governor
after a nationalist force took the island from the Republic on September 3rd,
an Italian fascist officer named Arcanovado Bonacorsi.
That sounds German to me.
Well, how's that Italian?
Whose bloody reprisals turned the profoundly Catholic French writer Bernanos,
against the Spanish Crusade in his sad book
The Great Cemetery is under the moon.
He was in Mayorka at this time
and never saw any other part of Spain
during the Civil War.
So the Pope said, quoting,
It is only too easy for the very ardor
and difficulty of defense to go to excess.
Intentions less pure, selfish interests,
and mere party feeling
may easily enter into cloud
and change the morality and responsibility
for what is being done.
What is to be said of all these others who are so near and never cease to be our sons,
in spite of the deeds and methods of persecution, so odious and cruel, against persons and things to us so dear and sacred?
We must love them with a special love, born of mercy, and of compassion.
And the non-Catholics, non-Christians will fixate on stuff like this and say,
well, you're just creating the conditions for the future.
matter. You cannot, there's, there's no scenario, well, let me rephrase. The, the path that the Spanish
took is very understandable, given their religion. Unfortunately, you know, but I'll add, but I'll add
the unfortunate outcomes that we see in the present. Doesn't, you know, that religious sentiment doesn't
preclude working harder than they did to establish the conditions to maintain what they created.
It was a failure of imagination and looking to the future and still giving people,
quote-unquote, choices when they could have directed them better to make better choices,
just an observation.
At the end of the month, in a pastoral letter entitled, the two cities,
Bishop Playae, Daniel of Salamanca, in the heart of the nationalist zone glorified the recent martyrdoms of bishops, priests, monks, virgins, and children, and declared that Christian civilization and its bases, religion, fatherhood, fatherland, and family must be defended against those without God and against God, and specifically called the war crusade, as Bishop Olegia of Pamplona had done the previous, the previous.
month. The Carlos above all had seen the war from the beginning as a crusade and essentially
nothing else. Their commitment to it remained so complete as to be a marvel to all who
observe them, not for them the disquiet and even exasperation with which some Spanish nationalists
greeted Pope Pius XIus the 11th caution against excess and hatred of the enemy in his September
14th, allocution to the Spanish refugees. On September 10th, the Carlos Nationalist War
junta issued a statement firmly asserting Carlos' opposition to every form of totalitarianism,
including fascism. The new state to be established in Spain, they said, should be limited
to essential functions that would not interfere with the just and necessary freedom of the people.
And where people get confused about that is that they're still talking about a
essentially a
thousand-year-old
system with which they were happy, which would be
called fascism today, which was essentially
you know, the white male
patriarchs are the only people who have a say.
You have an appeal through your social groups
to justice based on their old foeros.
It's much like you'll find
in the Magna Carta in terms of just class-oriented,
class-oriented rights and privileges,
duties and privileges actually is more like it.
And so, you know, you have it,
you have arbiters of justice through courts,
as well as the church managing everything.
So again, that would be fascism.
They were specifically talking about a secular system as well as any kind of system that was unspanish and un-Catholic.
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In the course of the month of September, the Carlos Ricketts secured the Basque border town of Irun on the 4th,
where heroic General Beorg Legi fell mortally wounded in a last engagement with French communist machine gunners on International Bridge.
13th, they took nearby San Sebastian, where they learned that their leading writer and
theoretician, Victor Perdera, had just been murdered by his revolutionary captors.
On the 16th, another Rickete force commanded by Luis Redondo, took Ronda at the opposite end of
Spain in Andalusia.
Bringing his victorious Terccio to Sevia a few days later, Redondo dedicated it to the Blessed
Virgin Mary in a striking ceremony in the
plaza before the residents of Cardinal Segura, who blessed the men and urged them to carry on the
crusade. Afterwards, the Tertio entered the great cathedral of Sevilla to venerate the image of the
Blessed Virgin carried on the saddle of the canonized crusader King of Castile, San Fernando III,
when he completed the reconquest of Sevilla from the Moors in the year 1248.
At the Alcazar of Toledo, the relentless bombardment by the besiegers, 155-millimeter six-inch guns,
began to show substantial effect by the early days of September.
With the north wall collapsing into rubble, the cannon were turned in force upon the northwest tower on the second.
Two days later, it came crashing down, with its crowning spire pointing east from an enormous heap of stones
toward the gorge of the Tagus, like a giant spear.
Now the cannon were turned on the northwest tower,
while attackers from the Santa Cruz Museum set fire
to the already badly damaged Gobierno building,
which finally burned down that day.
The revolutionary militia occupied it, but in small numbers,
it was hardly a safe place to lodge in.
Late the following afternoon, the fifth,
A brilliant counterattack from the Alcazar, led by Captain Vela, regained the ruined building,
now little more than large pile of ash-covered debris.
On Sunday the 6th, another nationalist airplane appeared overhead dropping aluminum containers.
Two fell into the city and were picked up by the militia, but the third reached the Alcazar.
It contained a letter from General Mola, stating that the nationalists were advancing in both the north and south,
and the Jaguay's column had just taken Talvera de la Rane.
But this heartening news soon met a grim counterpart.
After an hour of listening at the floor of the Alcazar's lower cellar with a stethoscope, engineer, Lieutenant Barber, reported to Muscadero that the enemy was digging not one tunnel into the fortress but two.
The excavation was making rapid progress, and both tunnels must be expected to reach points directly under the Alcazar in about eight days.
Largo Caballero had not lost confidence in his newly appointed General Asencio, despite his defeat near Talavera.
He sent him to Toledo to take command of the siege of Alcazar with the instruction, once and for all, the Tollay the nightmare must be ended.
Asencio's first task was to establish better discipline.
So far, the siege had mostly been conducted by militia, ardent and brutal, but largely untrained.
The only Republican general involved had been Rikilme for a few days at the outset of the siege in July,
before he went up to the Guadarama passes,
and then again for a few days at the beginning of August,
before he went south to fight Yagwe.
Asencio was a man of determination and ability,
though widely suspected of lack of sympathy for the kind of men he mostly had to command this war.
an attitude he later firmly disavowed, though one would wish for the sake of a brave man's reputation that it were true.
In any case, Asencio was a formidable opponent, resolved to gain victory at last for the Republic in the last fight at the Alcazar.
The day after his arrival, the Northwest Tower fell under the incessant cannon fire,
leaving only two of the lofty structures at each corner of the square fortress still standing.
horns brayed in triumph in the city and the immense cloud of dust arising from the ruin covered the sun and coated every exposed surface in the fortress.
At 10.30 in the evening of the 8th, Major Vincente Rojo, an officer serving the government of the Republic, who had taught military history at the Alcazar Academy, and so was personally known to Moscargo, hailed the Alcazar on a megaphone from the Plaza de
Capuchinos. It's so funny that that's the way that's pronounced, actually.
Yeah, yeah. Blase de Capucinos on the opposite side of the fortress from the ruins of the
Gobierno and the two wrecked towers. He asked for an hour's ceasefire at 9 o'clock the following
morning so that he might meet with Moscardo. After five minutes of consideration and
consultation, Mascardo agreed. And do you guarantee my personal safety, Rojo asked.
Mascardo's inner fire blazed up. Did this man, did, did he? Did,
this man question his word of honor. We are gentlemen here, he answered heatedly. Not like
your Republican trash. You may have an hour. Largo Caballiotto had ordered Major Rojo to undertake
these first negotiations with the defenders since the siege began, because the worldwide press
attention now being given to the siege and the growing admiration for the magnificent courage of
the defenders, even among many supporters of the Republic, made it desirable at least to try to get the
women and children out before the mines were exploded in the tunnels and as nearly everyone
believed they would totally destroy the al-hazar. In the morning of the ninth, Major Rojo presented terms
in writing, signed by the Defense Committee of Toledo, but obviously authorized by the communist
premier. Freedom for the women and children, trial by the people's court for all the fighting
men in the garrison. The wives and children at the Alcazar were literally to purchase their lives with the
lives of their husbands and fathers, for at this point, no reasonable man could doubt for a moment
what the verdict of the people's court on its defenders would be. The dark eyes burned
than Muscaro's haggard face as he received this proposal. Quote, we are willing to let the Alcazar
become a cemetery, he said, between his teeth, but not a dung heap. Then he wrote out his official
answer on a scrap of paper. Quoting, concerning the conditions for the surrender of the Alcazar
presented by the committee.
It gives me great pleasure to inform you that from the last soldiers as a commander,
they reject said conditions and will continue to defend the Al-Qazar and the dignity of Spain to the end.
How great is it that the basically the medieval style honor culture?
they would have never behaved this way in the old days, you know, in terms of the way they threatened to treat, you know, an honorably defeated enemy.
You know, even a foreigner that's hated, like, there was always room for, you know, a gentlemanly, you know, surrender and letting people go.
But in a quote-unquote democracy, you know, it's slaughter to the last man.
And here are these traditionalists saying, you know, with great diction and poetic language that they would rather die.
I mean, we would prefer that it be a cemetery than a dung heap by giving you your conditions.
major roho which means red which was their term for the for the the communists so yeah great stuff yeah
major roho felt a surge of sympathy and admiration for his old comrade in arms
rise up and grip his throat when he entered moscardo had refused to shake his hand now he
had turned his back on him and was walking toward the door of the office of the superintendent of the academy
where they had met.
Suddenly Rojo cried out,
Is there anything I can do for you?
Mascardo turned back, his expression unchanged,
his voice unsoftened, utterly unyielding.
He was a crusader who had lost his son
and watched the blood of a hundred martyred priests
red in the cobblestones of Toledo,
the city of saints and the Catholic kings.
Yes, he said, yes, he said like steel on iron.
You can send us a priest.
We want nothing else from you.
And he walked out of the room and closed the door behind.
him look at this this is the kind of competent person in in the military that will be doing the
things in a in a theoretical future event knowing like feeling shame and knowing that he's doing
the wrong thing but he took the coward's way of saying well you know because of my normalcy
bias I'll stick with the government and probably cowardice as
well because he wasn't willing to stand up and assert himself, you know, like a man when the
uprising happened.
Because again, normalcy bias, he's like, that's not normal.
His government isn't behaving in a normal fashion.
He probably thinks of himself as the only sane person there.
And then this happens.
Some men who are in leadership position are just followers.
These are the choices that we have to make, will have to make.
And we do every day. You make small compromises. The earlier you stop making small compromises,
the better your chances of not making big compromises. Some of the officers of the garrison now crowded around Rojo,
with whom most of them knew because he had taught there, trying to draw information from him
about the plans of the procedures and the prospects for relief. He told them little, but they sensed his sympathy.
finally one of them asked him to join them rojo cast down his eyes and did not answer immediately he made no indignant repudiation of the suggestion no declaration of loyalty to the republic eventually he said if i did this very night my wife and children in madrid would be killed and he probably just realized that yeah he left his pouch full of fine tobacco for them and as he blindfolded and as he was blindfolded preparatory to
be let out, he suddenly cried, Viva Espagna.
When he reached the outer gate and the blindfold was removed, his escort saw that there were tears
in his eyes. At that last moment before his departure, he bent over and murmured to Captain
Alamon standing beside him, for the love of God, keep hunting for the entrance to the mines.
Inside, Muscardo was pacing a corridor, an aide at his side. For a long time, he was silent,
but then he said, I just can't understand why a man of Major Rojo's integrity did not remain with us.
The aide said nothing.
Minutes later, Muscollo burst out again.
Do you think it would have been proper if I had shaken his hand?
I wanted to do it, but I couldn't.
At the post office, Rojo handed over to Major Luis Barcello, head of the defense committee,
the scrap of paper containing Mascardo's defiant reply to the surrender terms.
Barcelona was a maximal revolutionary.
He had been in charge of the execution of the nationalist officers captured at the Carabankal barracks in Madrid in July, and at the end of the war, was to fight his own commander, Colonel Sigismundo Casado, for days when ordered to surrender Madrid, until Casado captured and shot him.
Flushing with anger as he read Mascardo's words, Barcelona lunged for the nearest telephone.
Artillery batteries? Good. This is Major Barcelo. Fire night and day on the Alcazar. Erase it. Leave no stone longer than my little finger.
At 1045 in the morning, the artillery fire resumed. At almost that very moment, the wife of one of the soldiers of the garrison named Valero gave birth to his first child on a table in the electrician's workshop in the north cellar. He was named Restituto Alcazar Valero, the castle restored.
How great is that?
Yeah.
The next evening, at 10 o'clock, the besiegers of the Alcazar sent another message by megaphone to the defenders.
Major Rojo had arranged to honor Colonel Mascardo's one request.
The next morning, a priest would visit them as they had asked.
Cannon and Adike Vasquez Camarasa was no ordinary priest, formerly attached to the cathedral in Madrid, once his title of canon.
His reputation as one of the most progressive clergyman in Spain.
had saved him from the fate of hundreds of his brother priests,
from the fate of hundreds of his brother priests in the capital city.
If he ever helped or interceded for any of them
or expressed any regret for their fate,
history has not recorded it.
Approaching the Alcazar, where he was met by Major Barcelo,
he exchanged a revolutionary clenched fist salute with the militia on the battle lines.
I prefer the open hand, personally.
His instructions were to take advantage of every possible opportunity to persuade the garrison to surrender.
At the Biza Gagra gate of the fortress, Cannon-Camara was met by Captain Sons de Diego,
who had been acting in the place of a priest for the garrison since they had none.
He had lost an eye to a shrapnel wound suffered while conducting a funeral service.
He conveyed Colonel Mascardo's word that Camerosa would not be harmed
and would be allowed to leave within three hours.
Then he blindfolded him and led him inside the building,
where he took him roughly by the shoulders, shook him a little, and said,
Can you say mass?
Frightened by the physical contact, Kamarasa muttered,
All right, if you wish.
Sensing his fear, one of the men standing nearby said with a twist of his lips,
don't worry.
It's only the crowd out there that murders priests.
He's not a priest.
Since I can't say that.
Rainbow flag outside.
Yeah, I'm not allowed. I'm not allowed to say that. Oh, I am. I'm a prod. I'm not allowed to say that officially.
Since Kamarasa had just hailed, had just been hailed by that crowd out there, that thrust struck home.
The defenders of the Alcazar of Toledo were not fools. They knew very well what kind of priest would be the only priests allowed by the besiegers to visit them. Some of them surely recalled for Spaniards new,
know their own extraordinary history vividly, how more than a thousand years before King
Pileo, standing at Covondonga, with his back literally to the wall, a giant rock wall hundreds
of feet high, ruling a realm 20 miles by 20, facing an empire that stretched from his valley to the
borders of China, was urged by a bishop named Opas to surrender because his prospects were
hopeless and he would enjoy many benefits alongside the moors, and how Pileo had answered him
our hope is in Christ.
This little mountain will be the salvation of Spain.
Which it was.
Here was the new bishop, opus, and they intended to give him the same name Paloio had given opus.
The same answer Paloio had given Opus, but it was not for this that they had brought a priest into their stronghold.
Kamarasso was taken to meet Colonel Mascardo in his office.
Major Rojo had known.
what manner of man he was dealing with. Kamarasa did not. He began a monologue about the happy life
in Madrid. Yes, it was true that all the churches were closed, but at least they were no longer being
burnt down. Priests loyal to the government were quite safe, why his own house was protected by an anarchist
guard. There was plenty of food and water. It's hilarious that he thinks this is going to appeal to them.
I know. I mean,
This is just how clueless leftists always have been when it comes to, when it comes to partisans.
I'm not affected by it.
The contempt Mascardo felt must have been almost tangible, but it was contempt for the man
combined as only a true Catholic can combine it with reverence for the office and the powers he
held from Christ, despite collaborating with his enemies.
Soon the crusader commander had had more than enough of Kamadaos,
talk. Did you come prepared to confess us and celebrate Holy Mass? Muscaro demanded. That's all we want.
Camarasana nodded dumbly. At the southeast corner of the cellar, an altar had been prepared, its platform
covered with a rich carpet upon which the royal arms were stitched in purple and gold. The only light
came from the dim and flickering animal fat lamps. The homily was Kamaras's opportunity. He
expounded at length on the hopelessness of their struggle.
in a few days if they did not surrender the alchazar would be blown to bits and all of them with it
god would judge the men who allowed this to happen as the murderers of women and children who would die in the explosion
you hear this i mean this is just but this right here i mean right wingers pick up on this yes exactly
we'll say shit like this and let yeah yeah because they're because they're libtards for trump
He went on and on in this vein.
Some of the women began to sob.
Some of the men were shaken.
He talked so long that he had no time to hear individual confessions,
but could only give a general absolution.
But he did finally say the mass, baptized Restituto Alcazar Valero,
and brought holy communions to the seriously wounded lying in the infirmary.
Then he went again to Mascardo's office, asking to speak with him privately.
He pressed the argument that he was sacrificing the women in children,
to his own stubbornness and vanity.
Even if he would not surrender himself,
he should let the women and children go.
Surely they wanted to.
No, Signor, Muscaro said.
Then his voice rising as Camerasa went on.
No, signor.
No, signor.
Unable to penetrate the crusader's armor,
Kamarasa now began implying
that he was keeping the women and children
in the Alcazar by force.
Muscardo called in Carmen Romero de Salamanca,
daughter of one of the principal officers and wives
of a civil guard lieutenant of the and wife of a civil guard lieutenant of the garrison and told her this priest
was saying that women of the al-Qasar were being held there against their will all the fires of the
mothers and wives of men who fought seven hundred and twenty-two years to reconquer spain for the infidel was her
answer held here that's a lie i've talked with every woman in the al-qazar and all of them think as i do
either we will leave here free with our men and children or else we will die here
hear with him in the ruins.
She's more manly than the priest.
The Libtard priest.
Yeah.
After that, there was nothing more to be said.
Muscardo coldly ordered Kamadausa escorted out.
Two weeks later, Ken and Vasquez Kamarasa left Spain forever and showed up in France,
where he told the newspaper reporter that he had played no part in Spanish politics.
Six months later in Paris, he wrote an article stating that his proposal to Muscaro to evacuate the women and children from the Al-Qazar was entirely his own idea.
Since Largo Cabieto was known to have been trying hard to get the women and children out, this self-serving declaration was, to say the least, opens a serious doubt.
Kamarasa also said he admired the heroism of the defenders of the Al-Qa-Zar.
He survived the war in Nazi-occupied France and died in 1946,
despised by both sides, the ancient fate of traitors.
But he had said the only mass celebrated in the Alcazar of Salado
during all the days of its siege, and that is what men remembered.
For many years, yeah, yeah.
I mean, people have a lot to say, like, people, Catholics, look at your Pope.
You don't think we know.
Oh, yeah, for sure.
Yeah, absolutely.
We'll get a history.
I mean, there've been bad popes.
We know.
That's not the point.
Let's see, where was I?
And the Al-Qazard will be remembered for a thousand years.
Yeah.
Let me see.
But he said the only mass celebrated,
but he said the only mass celebrated in the Al-Qazar up till they, though,
during all the days of its siege.
and that is what men remembered.
For many years, so long as General Franco lived and ruled,
the site was marked by a plaque in the cellar corner
where the mass was said, reading,
Here the divine king visited our heroes.
On September 13th, the Chilean ambassador
obtained permission from the government to make a last attempt
to persuade the defenders of the Alcazar to surrender.
After five hours of argument,
he induced Major Barcello and his defense committee
to guarantee the lives of all the garrison
if they surrendered for whatever their reluctant promise was worth,
for whatever their reluctant promise was worth.
It did not matter because Colonel Mascardo refused to receive the ambassador,
believing that any further peace negotiations at this critical moment
would break the morale of the garrison shaken by the steady approach of the tunnels,
which they had no way to stop.
The next day, the two tunnels reached the walls of the Alcazar,
and the sounds of the miners could be heard by everyone beneath the cellar.
No longer did Lieutenant Barrow.
Arborneed his stethoscope.
Muscardo moved everything away from this part of the cellar.
Strung barbed wire around it and set up a small chapel with the statue of the Blessed
Virgin Mary at the edge of the wire.
Outside the militia chanted over and over.
Send out the women.
Send out the women.
It will soon be too late.
On the 15th, a four-hour bombardment of the Alcazar produced a long vertical split in the east
wall.
Five of the garrison were killed and four women.
bringing its total casualties to more than 40 killed and over 200 wounded. During the bombardment,
the defenders could clearly hear the miners enlarging the tunnels below them. Lieutenant Barber tried
to make a countermine, but his men were too debilitated by the poor food and lack of sleep for nearly two
months to be able to make significant progress into the hard rock with no miners' explosive charges
available. Through the day of the 16th, small detonations continued in one of the mines, but none were heard from the
other, causing Lieutenant Barber to conclude that it had been completed. About noon, nationalist
bombers struck the city, showing the defenders they were not forgotten. That night under the shadow
of the impending detonation of the mines, Lieutenant Fernando Barientos deserted. He was the only
officer to desert the Alcazar during the siege. It did him no good. A militia patrol in the city
picked him up, tried him on the spot, and shot him. Good. By sundown, September 17,
all sounds of movement and activity under the al-Qasar had ceased the mines were ready each of the two tunnels packed at its head with two and a half tons of tn t
newsmen from all over the world encouraged to come by lago caballero's government had gathered to see the explosion which would bring down the battered fortress isn't that insane
yeah think about it there's no strategic value in capturing the al-qazar for the
Republican government, it's strictly to just impose their will on them. They bring in, like,
media from around the world to watch it get destroyed. It's just a symbol. Yeah, exactly.
That's what communists do. That's what radicals do. They have to destroy all your symbols.
This is your symbol. We're going to destroy it and destroy you. And this is what you get for defying us.
Yeah. Major Barcelo, fearing that a large part of the city might be damaged when the Alcazar was destroyed, was trying to evacuate all the remaining inhabitants, but many refused to go. Two attack columns were designated to strike the Alcazar ten minutes after the explosion and overwhelm any surviving defenders. It was still summer on the high plains of Castile, and the night was warm, especially in the cellars of the Alcazar, into which the day's heat had penetrated through the gaping holes left by the constant shell fire.
In his windowless room in the center, Colonel Mascardo bent over his daily log of the siege,
barely able to see it by the faint flickering light of the little lamp fed only by the stinking
fat of the horse they had killed that day from meat.
Mascardo's tall, gaunt, bearded figure could have sat for one of the world-famous portraits
of Toledo's supreme artist El Greco with his strange elongated faces and forms.
the guttering light
threw the shadow of Mascardo's head and shoulders
on the wall like some dying giant.
He was totally alone.
The Akhazar was deathly of silent.
Beneath his feet, five tons of high explosive
waited for detonation.
Miscardo had finished his entry in the log.
His pen hovered above over the paper,
and he lowered it to write one last sentence.
All things possible having been done,
we now commend ourselves to God.
It was what he had told his son.
on Louise to do in the face of certain death under the word he drew a thick black line.
And Carol is such an excellent writer, but all this stuff is extremely well documented as having
taken place. I just can't point that out. Yeah. Having done all to stand, St. Paul had written to the
Ephesians. 830 years before the siege of the Alcazar of Toledo in 1936, Raymond of Toulouse
The Supreme Crusader, who led his men to Jerusalem when all others had given up and took the holy city for Christ, his Lord, and King by storm in the year 1099, had suffered mortal wounds when a burning roof fell on him in Castle Pilgrim, which he had built under siege by the Muslims.
Pursuming he reached the heaven he sought, perhaps Raymond of Toulouse asked God that night for the lives of Jose Mascardo and his crusaders.
At 6.18 in the morning, all firing on the Alcazar stopped. Everyone inside and outside, it knew what that meant. The next 13 minutes crawled by it on leaden feet. At 631, the mine on the southwest side of the Alcazar exploded with a thunderous roar heard in Madrid, 40 miles away. The southwest tower, 100 feet high, rose up toward the sky like a rocket, then crashed to Earth in a gigantic stone avalan.
A nearby truck was hurled 500 feet into the air.
Its engine tore loose from the truck body and fell through the roof of a house half a mile away.
The whole city of Toledo disappeared from view in an enormous rolling cloud of black smoke.
At 645, the main attack column headed by 600 picked assault guards charged from Zokodovar Square,
shouting, We've killed the dogs at them.
where the long-defended walls had been, they found great mounds and masses of rubble.
Looking for ways through them, sure of their victory, suddenly they heard a totally unexpected sound ahead of them.
The high, clear notes of a bugle.
The 15-year-old trumpeter of the Algasar was sounding a call to arms.
Within the shock and deafening roar must have been for the first minute or two totally paralyzing.
But then, in every part of the cellars, where the defenders said,
had stayed that terrible night, they opened their eyes, looked around them, and saw that they were still alive.
And so were almost all of their companions and even a newcomer, a baby girl delivered immediately
after the explosion and named Josefah de Milagra.
Josefa of the miracle.
The enormous adamantine crag upon which Toledo was built had proved tougher than anyone had imagined,
confining the effects of the explosion to the area of
immediately above the mine. A later count showed that only five of the garrison died in the
explosion, and the second mine in the northeast quadrant never did go off. First scattered,
then growing to a crescendo, came shouts of Viva Christo re. Hail Christ the king. The officers,
knowing an attack must come quickly, ordered the bugler to blow and sent them into their posts,
or to where their posts had been since no one yet knew what was left outside. Rushing through
the courtyard, some of the defenders stopped in shock and horror at the sight of what appeared to be
two severed heads in the middle of it. But they were not severed. They belonged to Teresa Gonzalez,
to meet dresser and her husband, buried up to their necks in Rebel, but Mirabell, but miraculously,
only slightly injured. Teresa cried heroically to them, don't bother with me, the Reds are
attacking. And so that's, I mean, this is all footnoted. Yeah. And so the defenders ran past her to their posts.
Below in the cellars, next to the smoking crater, where the mine had exploded,
several of the women hurried to the shrine of the Blessed Virgin Mary,
where Colonel Mascardo had put there.
Her statue had been blown over, but was only slightly chipped.
They knelt in prayer to thank her for their deliverance.
Soon Mascardo himself joined them there.
Above the Revolutionary Assault Force, still struggling to penetrate the piles of rebels,
saw the defenders appear above them,
citing and firing their rifles with deadly accuracy,
hurling grenades down the jumbled slope of stone.
Amazed by their survival,
the attackers hesitated and fell back,
waiting for reinforcements,
while the defenders swiftly began building barricades.
Nothing was easier, with rock fragments everywhere,
to cover the openings in the rubble.
When a tank emerged from behind the Santa Cruz Museum,
rumbled across Zucadovor Square,
and smashed the iron gate of the Alcazar,
knocking over a truck beyond loaded with stones,
the defenders responded with one of their few bombs.
The tank was undamaged, but its startled crew backed it away. In any case, it was not clear that there was room for it to get through the rubble.
Meanwhile, the other column of attackers was ambushed by three defenders with a machine gun and stopped in its tracks.
But a group of about a dozen men found a blind spot and entered the Al-Qasar on the second floor from outside and opened fire on the defenders below, raising a red banner on a girder.
The effects of the explosion had left the defenders no access to the second floor,
but if they could somehow dislodge these men from their apparently impregnable position,
the Alcazar was doomed.
Lieutenant Benito Gomez Olivares, commanding in the room below, took charge.
Its ceiling, which was the floor of the second story,
had several large holes in it due to shellfire and the mine explosion,
but they were 25 feet above him.
The longest ladders in the Alcazar were barely.
half that length. Gomez Alavarez alabares. Lash sets of two ladders together set them against several of the holes and led his men in climbing them.
The ladders never designed for such use twisting and bending under their weight. But they stayed up.
Gomez Alavares and his men emerged shooting on the second floor, killed all but two of the attackers, and tore down the red flag from the girder.
It was 10.20 in the morning of September 18th and the Alcazar of
Toledo still held out. In their fury, the besiegers fired 272 shells during the rest of that day.
The most of any day in the siege. The cannonade continued on into the night.
Muscardo and Lieutenant Barber surveyed the damage. The explosion had been concentrated in one place
and most of the fall of stones had been in the west away from the interior.
There was little damage underground outside the area directly over the end of the tunnel,
which Mascardo had been closed in barbed wire.
That night the defenders were served a special festive meal,
luxurious for them, of rice, beans, and sausage.
It was much cooler.
There was a touch of autumn in the air.
Maybe we should stop right there.
What a crazy story, huh?
It's, when you read the general histories and they talk about it,
they kind of, a lot of times they kind of make light of how long,
legendary the Al-Kazara is to the right and how much of a big deal they make about it.
But when you actually go and tell the story, you see how heroic it was.
And you see it's the perfect illustration of what the struggle is over.
It's people who 100% believe in what they're doing from a faith perspective.
And people who 100% believe in what they're doing from a hatred.
perspective.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know, and, you know, it's, it's like historians have said, there's no way you
survive a reconquista.
You don't fight it for 700 years unless something holds you together.
Yeah.
And what holds you together is your Catholicism and, you know, your faith and your, you know,
in your family and your people and um willingness to die like a martyr uh to move that line
three feet to the south so that in 20 years your children can move it three miles to the south and so
on yeah yeah that people just don't think about that anymore and that's how we have to start thinking
Yeah. Yeah, it's, you know, when you talk about like localism, people just don't get it. Yeah. People don't get what you're saying when you start, where you're talking about that. You know, they didn't try to take back the country all at once. It was little by little, you know, province by province. You have to secure those toll holds.
or you have nothing.
And it's great to network with people around the country.
It's great to have those connections while you have them,
but it doesn't really mean anything unless you secure your local area.
And you do that by being pro-social,
being in a place where you can move the needle,
networking with people like you,
and even times that's people that don't think they're like you or you might think they're not like you
but they're like enough you don't have to be a spurge and tell them all your wildest fantasies
you know just it you can you can get a lot done by just being a good neighbor and building from there
and turning it into real things yeah yeah um social capital concern is a civil like civilizational capital
really quick.
And at this point,
at this point,
it has to.
All right,
well,
I appreciate you doing this
with me.
Let people know where they can find your stuff.
I hear you have a really nice,
like,
cool t-shirt that you just came out.
Oh,
yeah,
yeah.
So,
Carl doll.
dot substack.com is my main headquarters.
Um,
even though I post in various areas.
I'm on,
I'm on Twitter.
I,
you know what?
I think I need to reconnect my Twitter account to my sub-stack
stack so people can see that there because that's for shit posting but the the substack is where
I do most of my my real my real writing I'm trying to put articles of interest mostly still focused
on the Spanish Civil War up I have a link to my little um shirt spread store from there
via an article I have a nice uh there's this there's this famous quote that uh general francisco franco repeated several
times in various forms. But I was I was puzzling on how to how to describe it. And it's,
you've seen the meme where it says there will be no communism. And the real quote is,
all I know is, wherever I am, there will be no communism. So I have the original, I'm basically
made like a fash wave edit where he's wearing, you know, razor sunglasses or whatever. They
call them pit vipers uh generic non-branded non-patent and uh trademark violating images um
with the original spanish uh quote with a nice uh nice logo there and it's uh it's already
people are already buying it and i'm like i got to order some for myself so and my son so yeah it's
pretty spicy but yeah that's the main thing um author of faction with the crusaders i have a the sample
The first chapter of the book pinned on my substack also.
You can get it on Amazon.
It's as you as you can tell the autism required to write a nearly 500 page novel, large,
you know, pretty big, pretty big book with to the level of detail required to be accurate historically and such,
to years of research.
Last Crusade, the way I always put it, is,
What unlocked the door for me for having a personal connection to the Spanish Civil War so that I could write about real characters was Peter Kemp's minor of trouble.
But the last crusade by Warren Carroll is where I took the most spiritual inspiration from it and told as many of those kinds of stories as I could.
Because to me, that's where everything is.
it's you know you go in as a naive adventurer you become a crusader when you see the crusaders around you and what motivates them so the sacred heart of jesus patch is on mine and my son's plate carriers for for a good reason because that's what the uh the recatets would do their mothers and sweethearts and grandmothers and sisters would embroider them um on their shirts uh that they bought themselves to prepare for
war and marched into almost certain death because of this spirit which animated them.
So I would just urge everyone here.
You know, like Pete said, the Spanish Civil War is the real story of the 20th century.
It is also, you know, elevator pitch-wise, probably the most analogous situation.
to what we face, at least in a way that you can wrap your head around.
Yugoslavia times Rwanda is very scary, but honestly, I feel like that's the Spanish
Civil War is where it's at.
And like Pete said, the good guys won.
So you have to understand that to understand the 20th century and, you know, all the lies
that were told about that or the misunderstandings or the spins and, you know, really
what's going on. As people are awakening to these things, you need to know these real histories,
and you need to realize what we're facing. And then my final point in my elevator pitch for why
the Spanish Civil War is important is because it tells you about how the right actually won.
It was no individual monolithic thing that did it. It was the fall on gay. They played an important part,
not nearly as big a one as they're credited with.
The Carlos Recuttais played a massive role in it,
and that was literally a civilian militia spun up in just a couple of years.
And then, of course, the military elements in their uprising.
And what it was was it was a coalition of people who really focused on what connected them
more than what differentiated them from other people in terms of what they wanted for a future for their country and their people.
And it's really important that we think that way instead of spurging out.
It's important to be accurate.
It's important to have correct information and to make sure that people have that correct information.
But there's a certain time when you have to let bygones be got bygones and focus on what you have in common and unite.
so thanks a lot Pete thanks for what you're doing here it's it's a great series folks listen to all
of them share it with friends it's the way Pete is doing this is very accessible for people
and I think it's really important so thanks for what you're doing Pete I appreciate it Carl
thank you and yeah until the next time thanks man
