The Pete Quiñones Show - The Spanish Civil War Episodes on Targeted Subjects (Updated) w/ Karl Dahl

Episode Date: October 22, 2025

7 Hours and 53 MinutesPG-13These are the episodes concentrating on specific aspects of the Spanish Civil War plus the episode reading chapter 7 of The Last Crusdae.Correcting the Narrative on the Spanish Civil WarRight-Wing Factional Unity in the Spanish Civil WarThe Weaponry of the Spanish Civil WarPete Reads Warren H Carroll's 'The Last Crusade' Part 7The 'Left' Factions of the Spanish Civil War Faction: With the CrusadersKarl's SubstackKarl's MerchPete and Thomas777 'At the Movies'Support Pete on His WebsitePete's PatreonPete's SubstackPete's SubscribestarPete's GUMROADPete's VenmoPete's Buy Me a CoffeePete on FacebookPete on TwitterBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-pete-quinones-show--6071361/support.

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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 shit poster. 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 write 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 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 a, you know, a libtard. 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 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 it and it's funny have you ever seen any of the the interviews that are online from students of his, you know, especially as time went by later into the, 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 uh something something george orwell and they haven't actually read george orwell yeah ornest hemingway and everything basically comes out of the left and you know if you want to try to find a copy of kemp's book and you know 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, uh, 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, you know, CIA cutout 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, 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, is very good. I definitely recommend that people watch that. It's out on YouTube as a, as a, you know, initial toe 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. researching and minor of trouble was just re-released by mystery grove in 2019 i think um i got the book in 2019 and it was pretty new and when i read it it helped me connect emotionally with the story um or

personally rather uh with characters and um 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 what I really needed. That helped me connect. And what it really did is get me diving into the Carlos Requette's, 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 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. Because the, basically they used to always try to do the old, 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. And they finally kind of admitted that to themselves and 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, the FI

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They had like 35,000 of them when the anarchist, the Derrude column, went up to defend Madrid from Franco's 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 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. Oh, question. The interest in the Carlos, 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 where were Catholic right up into the 1800s and then became Prots along with so much of America in, 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 that's on my substack as well as in the appendix. Of amazing book. 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's that was the anarchists that was the communists uh you know that when you when you read the

why we failed that the anarchists actually there's a huge body of work of the spanish anarchists who went into exile afterwards um the the people that were involved in all kinds of levels of leadership um and it's really interesting stuff and they talk about why they failed um and other times they'll refer to it as the necessary 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.

Because... 100%. 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 anarchists in Oregon. And they're basically going to execute a 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-war cope. But anyway, there was an alternative because the USSR boycotted the, the Olympics and the, the, the Olympics.

they hosted a communist international, 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 Carlists out in the countryside as well as to just terrorize

all the locals wherever they could. And the Carlists 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 you know 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. 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, on their mostly crappy positions, 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 Derrude 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 ESB transformed how the country powered itself once and now we're doing it again working with businesses all across ireland helping them reduce their energy costs, reach their sustainability goals, and future-proof their operations. Because this is not just for us. It's for future us. To find out more, contact our Smart Energy Services team at ESB.aE forward slash smart energy. You catch them in the corner of your eye. Distinctive, by design. They move you, even before you drive.

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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 were 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, no, 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 that people would be held to. And they, you know, they had trials for these people. Now, in fairness, and I show this in the book as well, the general rule was when they captured the, 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 national, actually spent very little time in prison camps and in labor battalions. 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 of 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 there was a wink and a nod by the governments of the UK and the US because the British essentially figured out very early that, you know, it would be better to have the nationalists in charge than communist country, you know, 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 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, you know, he trusted him. And he was a World War I vet. He was an international business.

He had gone to, gone to Russia during the Russian Revolution to do intelligence. had been traveling around and in fact musulini 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 musilini's blessing essentially because he thought he was you know a cool guy with a firm grip and who looked you in the eyes and it's it's it's it's all very interesting how how personality driven that stuff was but yeah that 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 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 um i think you mentioned bivore's book um 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, it wasn't 1,200 who died. There were maybe like a hundred and some, 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, a phalan 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 crazy. I was just, I was just recorded the other night with Jay Otto Poll. I don't know if you're familiar with Jonathan, with Otto.

And he's, his specialty is on basically persecution of Germans in Soviet Russia. Ah, interesting. And, I mean, you don't have to be in war time. 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, and, you know, reminder, what side was the Soviet Union on in this fight in Spain?

obviously, one thing I like to talk about is I call this, I call the Spanish Civil War World War I and a half. Yeah. Because, yeah, it's just so obvious that if Spain, if the nationalist lose that war, basically 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 role's reversed or, you know, pointing out hypocrisy. But it's because of who controls the press. Exactly. Exactly. Who, whose crimes are, who, whose crimes are magnified more than any other. You know, it's, it's interesting that you mentioned that, because you're really.

blockade right now, which is outstanding. And I just want to, I 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. 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. Ready for huge savings? We'll mark your calendars from November 28 to 30th because the Liddle Newbridge Warehouse sale is back. We're talking thousands of your favourite Liddle items all reduced

to clear. From home essentials to seasonal must-habs, when the doors open the deals go fast. Come see for yourself. The Lidl Newbridge Warehouse Sale, 28th to 30th of November. Lidl, more to value. You catch them in the corner of your eye.

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Finance provided by way of higher purchase agreement from Volkswagen Financial Services Arland Limited, subject to lending criteria. Terms and conditions apply. Volkswagen Financial Services Ireland Limited, trading as Cooper Financial Services is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland. 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. You know, 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, you 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 recetes.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.

var 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 Carlos Requette's 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, the Requette 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, which is really anti-religious, right? Because they were passing laws 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 religious education 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, 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 carless recetes to recruit, um, conservative Basques to join the nationalist forces. Um, there were quite a few that were underarmes. you know, in the in the Republican militias, well, the Basque militias, not the super

hardcore lefty basques like the escutie. And I'm probably mispronouncing that. But, but a whole bunch of the people that were essentially conscripted went over to, to the nationalists, including the guys who designed the iron belt, the defenses of Bilbao. 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 the the Navajo the bar 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 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,

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 Navarre 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 supposed to. 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 is a, 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, Preeto, 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 30s 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

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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, 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 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 element. 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 be 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 is this great, the earliest reference to recetes to reference a Carlist militia is in the early 1900s, and they wrote fame propaganda, which is Cotelon 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 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 seem like a really bad idea. Make it easy for subversives to go in there. Easy for subversives to start working in different areas. And 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, you know, as much as I would love to, see like as much as the idea of decentralization sounds good to me when i look at some place 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 um i think it's it's complicated because um 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 had 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 um their overall thing was that they it was a it was a coalition right of uh all these different you know visigothic lords frankly who were feeding the the whole system got organized into fighting against the moslems right and so when when you look at the history of spain um i it's hard 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, you know, 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 that one of the biggest problems one of the biggest social problems was that in the north they they ruled under kind of germanic legal structure and governing theory that was codified in the foeros um you know during the you know the first millennia a d um which has nobles oblives right um 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 noblesse oblige down there. And so you had this huge propaganda issue in the 19th and 20th century of the landless peasants,

you know, 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 Sweby 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 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 um you know oh my brain is blanking out right now uh what's her name 1492 people you know what i'm talking about my brain is about thank you very much um they 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'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 etc. Ready for huge savings?

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is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland. 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 Infante 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 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, et cetera. 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. Like, 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 setting this, I really go back all the way to 7-Eleven and just see the progression and see how things work. Oh, yeah. And then you have the Golden Age. Golden Age is they're 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 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 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, Bakunin Marxism with him.

and, you know, Andalus, and the Lusia, you know, just open arms. Yeah. Adops. Absolutely. You're just like, okay, well, we know what's going to happen. And within what, from 68, you're looking at, um, there's a, what, 60 years? Yeah. And, 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 19th century. And they just kept at it and kept at it and kept at it. And that's where that, 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 it plants the seeds and they go bananas. That's another element is like in Basque country, the people in the countryside and the small towns were in 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, 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 Guijon. Yeah, it's it's one of these things where you see that you see the patterns that show up elsewhere. And it's 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 unrecisible 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, like, 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 polls 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, you know, how do you react to that when you know it's coming for you? What do you do? What do you? 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. In the 20s, you know, Primo de Rivera is essentially appointed dictator, with the blessing of the king because the you know the 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 that 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 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 the advances of the...

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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 the traditionalist commune or or however you want to translate it the the the carlist political party and parties because there were a bunch that kind of fell under that bucket um they never ever communion traditionalista they never ever believed in the republic because they felt that it was a race to the bottom right like most people's opinions they don't belong and determining how you 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 carless 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. use, you know, the whole Hitler thing, you know, to their advantage when talking about, you know, 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? 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 I respect has said

Yugoslavia times Rwanda. 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, about your substack and everything, and we'll end 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. substack.com. I sell silly t-shirts. 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 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. Yeah. 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 set up. So just look for me there also. All right, Carl, I'll talk to you again soon. Thank you. All right.

Thanks a lot. I want to welcome everyone back to the Picanueno show. He is back. and we're going to talk more about the Spanish Civil War. Carl, Carl. How are you doing, Carl? Doing well, Pete. Thanks.

How are you doing? Doing good, man. You reached out. You said, I even have materials to share with people. Talking about the, I guess we talked the last time, and I guess one of the biggest points you tried to make was that this is what was happening before the war closely resembles the kind of tensions, the kind of situation we have now. And then you said, well, maybe it's a good idea to talk about how the right factions came together

because justice in this country, the right factions are split, some hate each other. Yeah. I have that. I have people are quoting me now saying the left gets their radicals elected. The right gets their rat, the right cancels their radicals. Yeah. So, so, yeah, where do you want to start? You know, let's, I think we can take it from the top with my little slideshow, so it's not just a little speech.

Thank you, sir. Yeah, just to reiterate, I have a lot of material that I'm going to be talking about or referring to out of my substack, which is carl doll.com. You can see me on Twitter also. I have two books that are published. One is Faction, which is Adventure Story in the 90s that pertains to. to the prequel, which I released this year, which is faction with the Crusaders, where the elder statesman of the Shea family gets involved in the espionage business during the Spanish Civil War. So, you know, I was working in my elevator pitch for why we talk about the Spanish Civil War, right? and you already alluded to a couple of these details here.

One is that it's the conflict. You know, again, as they say, history doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes. It rhymes the closest, I think, to what we're likely to face here in the United States. I'm also fond of Matt Brackens, Yugoslavia times Rwanda, although external intervention is a big detail there. It's a big detail in the Spanish Civil War. but I think in terms of the way things play out, it's pretty similar. And let's be honest, one of the reasons, one of the key reasons why it's the Spanish Civil War and not, for example, the Bolshevik revolution. And it could be wishful thinking. But I don't think that that's the case. I believe pretty strongly in, you know, a lot of the population here acting and reacting.

instead of just passively watching the communists get all the, you know, get the, get the ball rolling. You know, in the Bolshevik revolution, the, one of the biggest problems was that the establishment were so much like the GOPE in terms of like just letting everything happen and they were completely just controlled opposition. That was absolutely not the case in the lead up to the Spanish Civil War. and we'll talk. Airgrid, operator of Ireland's electricity grid, is powering up the Northwest. We're planning to upgrade the electricity grid in your area,

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And the final point being, you know, we've heard the death rattle of the myth of the 20th century, deliberate, you know, illusion there. But the lesser-known battles of the inner war period are back on the table for study. People have not studied the Spanish Civil War in English. hardly at all. They typically have like a very basic meme level understanding of it. You know, the English, I've talked about it incessantly. You've talked about it. Thomas has talked

about it. The English language material, there aren't that many good sources for it. But there are good sources and we want to point you guys towards that. So when we talk about why the Spanish Civil War, in the United States, you know, stuff happening, rhymes or could rhyme, what those parallels are. So in Spain, the empire collapsed. America, we're still, you know, in that kind of height of empire as things are crumbling around us, right? So like the empire is seems invincible or has seemed invincible, but the cracks are everywhere. And in fact, I would say the past two years we've seen the cracks more than to the point that it's undeniable, especially when you look overseas. People were really, really worried in 2020, like, we're in this like invincible empire.

Our enemies are implacable. we're going to have to, you know, just go underground. You know, every fight is generational. You know, there's no final victory except in Christ. But politically in the world, there's no final victory. It's a constant effort. But I think we're seeing that the empire is much weaker. And in fact, the consensus has broken.

I think you've talked about it a lot. 2020, 2021, a huge percentage of the population sees our system is completely illegitimate at this point. So I have this bullet point down below, delegitimize political systems. We'll talk about the Spanish experience here in a few minutes because it's different. It's different than ours. but it relates to the deep divisions inherent to the population, which we'll touch on shortly, and we've talked about extensively. One of your key points is Spain was so decentralized, and it was just because of the nature of what was needed during the Reconquista.

And then post-Reconquista, that was the tradition. The easiest thing to do is to do nothing. there were attempts at centralization in the 19th century that were really more clashes between liberalism and tradition than a centralization of people who are on common ground. So, you know, the centralization based on common ground is a big struggle, but we will talk about that in more detail here shortly because that's a really important thing to understand about. about how the Spanish dealt with it because again that's the main thing I want to talk about here the Spanish right united constantly at every turn and I think we'll see some very clear parallels I will be specific about parallels and observations that I have about like current discourse as it relates to that you know Pete hop in at any time to to share your thoughts on that as well and then

Finally, a tradition of violence. Yes, sir. Yeah, I think it's interesting that Paul Fahrenheit and I are doing a Spain, Golden Age of Spain, and we were recording last night. And it's one of the things that we brought up last night was that the decentralized nature of Spain during the Reconquista, it was almost necessary because then you could build up certain areas. and then you can come together finally, and really, it was only really Castile and Aragon that came together to do it. Yep.

But then after the golden age, after everything starts to fall apart in the late 1600s, then you have the divisions again, and you have the autonomous zones. And I've come to the conclusion that the only way that Spain can survive as the Catholic nation it's supposed to be is as an imperium. It can't be these. autonomous areas.

Yes. Yeah. Absolutely. And I, you know, one of the big themes in America that we talk about and you, I mean, I heard you talking about it yesterday when I was listening to, oh, gosh, it's been so many episodes lately is there's the decentralization, there's the independence movements, there's, or just kind of a soft breaking away. You know, if the state is weakened or if the state is hostile to you, you create parallel institutions. And so that's how you deal with it. We will talk about that here as well.

And because the Spanish did exactly that. And again, this is about not just a historical, a thing of historical interest. We all love history. but we are talking about history because it's so relevant to our current experience, whether it's in America, it's in the UK, it's in Ireland, you know, our cousins are fighting it out, and I will have some editorials about the not very accurate observations people are making about what's going on over there and its implications.

So the final point, you know, talking about violence is that, Spain and the U.S. have, they're founded on struggle and conquest. The niceties of political debate, there's, I would say, for example, if you were to talk about the Netherlands right now, the people, and this isn't an insult, and it could be inaccurate, this is me observing as a dumb American who's been there. But the Netherlands is a nice country based on, you know, that has a very vibrant military history. But there is a cooperative, monocultural element to it that makes it a little less inherently dedicated to, you know, violence.

That's not the case with America. That's not the case with Spain. things are more likely to go hot in places that don't have hundreds of years of peace. Like the UK, for example, there wasn't a battle fought on the British Isles for hundreds of years, if you really think about it. It's been a very, very long time since there were actual battles fought there. And you can talk about, you know, the IRA doing bombings in London and stuff like that. I think that's a little different. It's still important to think about, but that's a big thing in America, is that we had a civil war not that long ago.

Anything that happens now is going to be different than that, but we also have, you know, we're filled with veterans of the global war on terror, Vietnam, et cetera. and so and as well as just general crime has been at the point where there's a huge percentage of the population that is just completely assuming that they're probably going to have to kill people to survive, especially now as things are ramping up. So very, very important to understand. So again, we're here to talk about three keys to the Spanish rights success. This is a big one and it's really important. and I think a lot of people when they talk about getting red-pilled is you have to understand your situation and you have to become resolved to how to deal with it. We talk about the red pill and we talk about the black pill. We don't want people black-pilling. My opinion, having gone through it, is that you have to get black-pilled on the current system and then come through it, kind of like the litany against fear. You have to emerge from the fear and the black pill. to be like, okay, what are the ramifications of the situation?

And then there's people who just dwell in the hopelessness, nothing ever happens, et cetera. Other people are like, well, actually, now that I understand the situation that we're all in, what do I have to do in my life to make my situation better and then build on top of that? And you have to start at your house and your household before you can go to your street, before you can go to your neighborhood, before you can go to your town or city or county, and go up from there. So you have to understand your situation and then you have to be resolved to deal with it. And the Spanish right was always...

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They prepared for war with the same degree of commitment and effort as the left did. This is different than individuals having lots of guns. Individuals and their own guns are important, but it's less important than a massive individuals who are friends working together and having guns and logistics. and plan and training and discipline and leadership. And then finally, which is the key focus here, although the above pieces will be talked about pretty extensively, the Spanish right set aside their factional differences

before the war had even begun and unified at every turn. I started to say the Spanish left. The Spanish left was fragmenting pretty much. right away between the anarchists and the other groups and then the communists asserted in themselves and became dominant and started snuffing out anyone who opposed them. So you were always afraid of the people that you were associated with on the left, whereas the right, that was not literally not a problem beyond people who were, you know, huge problems. that had to be dealt with. We'll talk about that here shortly. So, yeah, I hope people get that from the reading of Last Crusade that yes. The left, the left was, they were not unified.

The anarchists, the anarchists wouldn't obviously want to do their own thing. The communists, the Republicans, the ones who were basically statists. I mean, they, all three of them were constantly, constantly in battle against each other. And yeah, I mean, the right, they figured it out right away. If we're going to beat this evil, we're going to have to come together and just put all this crap aside. And one of the things that makes it a little challenging in retrospect for people is that these groups seem really different. You know, the carolists, it seems really weird because there's this whole royal succession argument. and it seems so quaint and weird to people in the current age.

That almost doesn't matter. The Carlists, that line of the Bourbons, the House of Bourbon, they were the leadership. They were a symbol for the hardcore traditionalists who preferred the old deal, which was basically pre-medieval about you had duties. and privileges in this stated charter and there were defined class relations and the church and the local legal system were joined at the hip and any issues that you had, you had support from your class, from your family, from your community, from the church to negotiate these things, whereas under democracy, you're on your own, right? And again, then democracy versus republic.

It was a republic through which democracy was enacted. That whole, we're supposed to be a Republican. The democracy is bullshit. Stop. All right. Okay. So, key point.

This is a image from Navarre in 1936 in Pompulana, which was the heart of the Carlist. uprising and organization. This is a scene where if you look closely, and it's going to be hard for a lot of people, but if you kind of squint, you'll be able to see what I'm talking about.

You'll notice over here that these guys have flags that appear black. These guys have white flags that have it's actually a red bars, kind of like the stars and bars, but it's just a solid, kind of a jagged red. That is the carlist flag

of the House of Bourbon. Um, over here, these are the, uh, Falungae, um, the,

the Spanish phalanx. And they're typically referred to as fascist. And these guys are traditionalist royalists who are also called fascists by the Spanish left and uh, Libtards.

everywhere. And you will notice there aren't that many of these guys, but they're sure are a heck of a lot of these guys. They didn't care that they were mustering under these separate units. They mustered side by side. They were plugged into the military uprising and the logistics provided by the army barracks in Pampalona under General Mola. They didn't really care because they had all been talking to each other for a while and they were fighting the same enemy. So heck, why would I care if this guy likes slightly different optics and talking points than me? Very key understanding here. They unified. They set aside their differences.

People make so much of their differences. And they unified. Didn't matter. Now, they did have. have some challenges and some struggles for power later. Who cares? Let's talk about before the war. So this will be really familiar to people who,

especially people who are around, you know, mine and Pete's ages. If you were ever observing anything related to the Irish Republican army in Sinn Fenn or however they pronounce it, I'm not Irish. I don't speak Gaelic. Every political party, when you study this period, if they survived, they had multiple elements and structures. And I've written some articles about this.

I have an article about the C&T FAI and their structure and the way they organized. We'll talk about that in a little more detail later. But the long story made short is there's an electoral party. They have newspapers that are associated with that party or faction. They're tied into labor unions because, again, this is about organizing and mobilizing people socially and on the ground. And also that feeds into financing them. There's also student and youth organizations. And that's where a lot of the energy comes from these groups.

one thing that will be very interesting is anyone who was in Boy Scouts of America is going to be familiar with this concept. The Boy Scouts of America, when you achieved the rank of Eagle Scout, if you joined the military, you automatically became a corporal when you finished boot camp because you already had this paramilitary training and, leadership training. And typically what would happen is like in boot camp, you would assert that, right? Like you have these organizational skills and this basic knowledge of, you know, rucking and all this stuff. And so this is where you get the energy. Old guys, you know, with beerbellies at the range shooting their $1,700 22s are not the core of a militia. and they won't make up the core of a militia, but they can train the like 17-year-olds,

your Kyle Rittenhouses of the world, to become radicalized and become the militant underground. So to become a paramilitary or a street fighting force or a self-defense force that will go out and defend your faction when you're attacked by these other groups. We'll talk more about who all these parties are in a second, but I want you to kind of familiarize with these, with the optics on display here. It's pretty obvious what's going on here.

So there's, it's really important to understand that I, oh my goodness, I corrected the, the content of the slide, but not the title. It's the second Spanish Republic. My apologies, everyone. Spain is now in the current, in the third Spanish Republic. There were attempts at republics. Only one succeeded officially in the 19th century for not very long period of time. So 1931 was when the second Spanish Republic was proclaimed. Essentially, they had been trying really hard. The Liptards had been trying really hard and pushing really hard in the 19th century to establish a republic. Airgrid, operator of Ireland's electricity grid, is powering up the Northwest. We're planning to upgrade the electricity grid in your area,

and your input and local knowledge are vital in shaping these plans. Our consultation closes on the 25th of November. Have your say, online or in-person, so together we can create a more reliable, sustainable electricity supply for your community. Find out more at airgrid.i.4.Northwest. Inflation pushes up building costs, so it's important to review your home insurance cover to make sure you have the right cover for your needs. Underinsurance happens where there's a difference between the value of your cover and the cost of repairing damage or replacing contents. It's a risk you can avoid.

Review your home insurance policy regularly. For more, visit Understandinginsurance.I.E. forward slash underinsurance. Brought to you by Insurance Ireland. in Spain and there were three wars by the traditionalist groups against the various factions that were involved. One of the key factions being a liberalized, like, constitutional monarchy and a parliament that was representing the like public, political, orderly fight between the traditionalist, royalists,

and the everyone else, the basically liberals, whatever you might want to try to call them. The street fighting in and general uprisings because of the failures of all these things, because of all the social turmoil that took place in the early 20th century,

it got to the point where there was a dictatorship, that was a military dictatorship that was established with the blessing of the king, in which a military general Miguel Primo de Rivera was appointed dictator for a period of seven years, and a bunch of the kind of right-wing factions or what would eventually become the right-wing factions in the Spanish Civil War were working with the establishment to tamp things down through officially or through local militias that were semi-legal, etc. The essentially there, but the overall mood got to the point where there were elections in 1931 where the the Republican elements, which were these vast coalitions of communists, anarchists, socialists,

and various types of supposedly moderate Republican, anti-monarchists, won so much in these local elections. And most importantly, the press had been saying, and again, the press is associated with political parties and people with lots of money, the press declared, oh, well, this is essentially a peaceful legal uprising against the monarchy. We all want the republic. The king fled the country and the second Spanish Republic was proclaimed. I am hand-waving slightly.

it's not really worth diving into extreme levels of detail here. So you're like, oh, a republic, that's great, just like America. It's more like the quote-unquote Republic of France. And that's not even quote-unquote, I should say. Think of the murderous uprisings in the French Revolution and the Republic that was proclaimed there. It was anti-monarchist. It was anti-church. It was anti-tradition.

Basically, long story short, is the leftists went wild, burning churches, murdering right-wingers, like crazy. When you see, again, this is according to the Lib Tards that there was religious and land reform. Well, what that meant was they essentially overnight said, well, you don't own. more than like 32 acres of land. And so the idea there was like small holders, you know, like the middle classes and peasants theoretically wouldn't be impacted by this and only the large landholders. In fairness, and I always add this caveat because I agree

with the Falunge and the, a lot of the Carlists, which is that there was a system, especially in Andalusia, where there was essentially a landless peasant slave labor situation on the Latifundia, which was a system of vast estates that went all the way back to at least the Romans and probably predated the Romans, that had never really been reformed even after the reconquista. There was never a root of noblese oblige. There was never the Fueros, as you saw in the north, where all the different classes had these clearly defined rights. It was this kind of tragic situation that wasn't addressed after the reconquista.

Call me a libtard if you want. I don't care. I'm in good standing with some of the hardest core motherfuckers out there, including Francisco Franco on the subject. Francisco Franco did away with this system. They removed that because it was not morally cool. And it also took away a weapon from the future left. So, as you can imagine, people don't like having their land taken away. They don't like having the chaos that comes with that.

And keep in mind, it didn't mean that this happened overnight because people would still have to go out, take the land, take over it, start running it, kick people off, whatever. It was a lot of conflict. The religious one was even worse, and the religious one is what really radicalized, quote-unquote, or made people wake up on the right. And that's where they basically banned the church. And Spain is Catholic. Spain, there were no schools or almost no schools that were given to people by the church. There was almost no education, there was almost no charity, there was almost no distribution of resources for the poor that wasn't associated with the church doing it. The church is very important. They didn't have counselors at the time. They didn't have psychology and psychiatry outside of the cities. You talked to your priest. The priest helped with

everything. Remember me talking about the Fueros and how the church intervened in legal disputes and helping settle on what's appropriate punishment for people and sentences and, you know, resolving local situations between great landholders and poor people and working people. The church and the libtard said, nope, no more church, bye, bye. You couldn't even have a religious procession in public. In fact, in many cases it was interpreted as you couldn't even have the cross displayed outside. The churches were nationalized, the beautiful cathedrals of Spain, of which there are many, and they are awe-inspiring and moving, were nationalized and had to start paying rent to the state. They started killing.

killing people. You couldn't have a school unless you had an approved Libtard teaching you, which meant that you had a communist. Yeah, people did not like this at all. So in 1933, lawfully legally, the right wing won electorally like crazy. Now here's the important thing to keep in mind. public would not appoint the, they would not follow their own rules as it related to the way that they should have behaved during this election. Because the conservative Catholic Party, SEDA, CEDA, won a majority of House seats, or, or parliamentary seats, but the president of the republic, Azania, refused to appoint the head of Seda, Jose Maria Gil Robles, or anyone from Seda as a prime minister. You know, they had a majority.

Refused to do it. So he appointed this guy, Alejandro Leroux, who was a old-school political operator. from this party all the way over here at the right that's in a box, the radical Republicans. They're important to understand because they were a thing for quite a long time and they essentially disappear by 1935, end of 1935, I should say. So here's the head of the government, essentially, whose own party and who is assembling, you know, a coalition government with as many leftists and quote-unquote moderists and centrist conservatives as he can, trying to deny the right-wingers, Ceda, communion traditionalista, etc., from having actual party.

party power, excuse me. So one of the concessions is that the head of Seda, Gil Robles, was Minister of War, so he was connected to the military, which was actually convenient. They kind of thought that that was a joke because they're like, well, we're going to be doing the social revolution and all these other parties. So who cares what the military does because the military is this decrepit organization in mainland in Spain and all the hardcore right-wing fighters are across the water. Air Grid, operator of Ireland's electricity grid, is powering up the northwest.

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difference between the value of your cover and the cost of repairing damage or replacing contents. It's a risk you can avoid. Review your home insurance policy regularly. For more, visit Understanding insurance. I.E. forward slash under insurance. Brought to you by Insurance Ireland. In Morocco and the Canary Islands. So who cares, right? Pretty funny. That bites them because they're arrogant lip-tarts.

So anyway, 1934, there is a quote-unquote response, a reaction to the reactionaries getting all this oppressive power. And they're so worried that fascism is rising, right? So there are general strikes and uprisings. There's a big revolt in Asturius with the miners where the army has to go in, including Francisco Franco. The Republic sends the army in to deal with this stuff because these guys are out of control. And then they're like, oh, crap, we got to send the army like militants off somewhere. So they send Franco to the Canary Islands where he can't bother anyone, they think. And then they send Mola to Pampalona because they're like, that's a backwater.

No one cares about Pompona, the Carlos Heartland. Anyway, so you'll see that I have the words at the polls and in the streets here. So the parties at bottom, there's the Republican left, which is Azanya's party. and they are basically like the Democrats now, where they are very radical, but they have all these trappings of the processes and everything. And then you'll see there's Republican left of Catalonia, which is associated with them,

kind of like DSA types, but Catalonian, so separatist in Catalan. The Republican Union is their national group. It's a, again, a bunch of, libtards. The P.O. UM are Trotskyist communists, so less international or at least not Soviet aligned. And then there's the PCE, which is the Communist Party of Spain, which is 100% aligned slash controlled by the Soviet Union. They're rising in the streets. They're getting people riled up.

End of 1935, LaRue's coalition, government coalition collapses. New elections are called for Azanya still, the president. What happens? All these parties on the left, the Republican left of

Catalonia, the Republican Union, P-O-U-M, PCE, and a bunch of other parties, not the anarchists. I'll point out the anarchists are like, we don't want to have anything to do with the electoral process. We don't want to give our consent to this oppressive system. They unify in a popular front. The popular front is a electoral strategy that was created by the communist international as a tactic in the 1930s and saw pretty great success. in Spain and in France. France had a Jewish left-wing socialist president Leon Bloom right about this time. So the popular front fortifies the election, which means they stole the election, just like in 2020. The radical Republicans aren't radical enough, so they go away. They cease to be a power. This is not taken well.

by the right wingers who see this continuous escalation. They see the Republic is attacking them and their way of life and their religion and everything that they believe. And when they go out to vote, they are suppressed ruthlessly at the polls, ballot stuffing, ballot harvesting all the tricks. And so they're like, this system is illegitimate. So let me step back a touch and talk about. how we got to this point. This here is the Seda symbol. And again, this is the mainstream right-wing, mostly monarchist political party. This is the Carlist. They were represented by the communion traditionalist, which was their electoral party. But,

but they were never about voting. Their whole thing was, we will participate in elections to improve our position for the inevitable war to come because we know what's coming. And then right here is the symbol of the phalanche. And the important thing to understand is the creator of the phalanche was General Miguel Primo de Rivera's son.

And when from the moment the second Spanish Republic is proclaimed, you need to understand that the right-wing parties were not pro-republic because they saw democracy as a deterioration of authority. They felt that their old deal was better. There was the situation, particularly in the cities, whereas the cities grew in industry, especially in Catalonia and up in the north and Basque country, and you had these deracinated elements leaving where they were from to work in the cities, and they became de-rassanated because they were in an alien environment. You had in the north non-Basque from all over kind of the areas of ringing Basque, who would feel alienated in the cities working in industry. Very similar story to what you see in the U.S. in the 19th century with like how the Irish responded.

You know, the perfidious Irish who became left-wingers. That's me slightly teasing. I love my Irish brothers and sisters. But you know what I'm talking about? The left-wingers, because you live in the fucking cities. So they fall for all the trips. but you can also understand it because you're essentially deracinated and weakened. You're a weak individual serving as labor for the capitalist classes.

So the Fallingay was an attempt to mitigate that in the kind of in the tradition of the fascists and the national socialists, which is like, we need to have a system that considers like all classes and brings them together, whereas the traditionalists are like, we have that system. It's the old system. It didn't really work out that way, though, because these aliens would pop in, and they were like almost classless labor class. So anyway, November 1931, it doesn't take long for the anarchists and the communists. to say, hey, under this supposed Spanish Republic, there's not a lot of authority.

There's no one putting their boot in our face, as we so rightly deserve. Let's have general strikes and attack our political enemies. Violence skyrockets. Just from this point on, it's completely bananas. December 1931, the Spanish Republic passes the radical anti-Catholic constitution. As I was talking about before, essentially banned. the church as much as they could. And the right wing says, forget it.

The carolists form their own political party. Yes. Even though it was pretty much written down, it was more of a de facto. Yes, that's a very good point, Pete. Yeah, it wasn't DeJure. It was de facto. It was like,

are you still going to church? And they probably wouldn't say anything to grandmothers. You know, grandmothers, it's fine. They're not a danger to anyone. Let them go and do their thing. Yaddi-y-a-da. They're going to die soon anyway. But you're going to get pressure at this point upon the youth.

Yes. And that's the most important thing to take away from this anti-Catholic constitution. Not only that is, well, you can see five years before 1936, July to December of 1936, that this this Catholic hate and the murder the murder of clergy and the burning down of churches this wasn't something that just came up yeah very good way to put it let me read something very briefly that is from the at the time a moderate Republican when Leroux in 1906 he remember at this point in the 1934 he becomes the kind of reactionary

coalition creator for the Republic to tamper the Seda victory. So this is the moderate, the future moderate, Leroux speaking in 1906. Quote, young barbarians of today, enter and sack the decadent civilization

of this unhappy country, destroy its temples, finish off its gods, tear the veil from its novices, raise them up to be mothers, to virilize the species. Think about what that means. Air Grid, operator of Ireland's electricity grid, is powering up the Northwest.

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house.com. Get the facts be drinkaware, visit drinkaware.com. Break into the records of property, make bonfires of its papers. The fire may purify the infamous social organization. Enter its humble hearts and raise the lesions of proletarians that the world may tremble before their awakened judges. Do not be stopped by altars, nor by tombs, fight, kill, die. That's the republic. So the concerns. are like, we don't want anything to do with this. Do you know the fascists in 1936, all they did was overthrow a republic? I know, exactly.

So here's a really important thing to understand that happens at this point. So think about it. Unlike, this is very unlike today. Unlike today, there aren't people, there aren't old people remembering fondly a republic. and the orderly nature of things. That is something that is very different. So the, the,

the olds were always, they were either super libtards who had been like, you know, think of the old libtards that you know, who are seething with hatred. I'm not talking about the grandma in Iowa, who's like nice and votes Democrat, because that's what her family's always done.

You know, I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about the seething, gross, old communists that you knew. I mean, I knew them. I had some teachers that were like that. The other, like, normal people were not like that at all. They were always opposed to this. So when their sons would say, you know, I really hate this system.

I want to oppose it. They would be much more inclined to be like, I think it's a wonderful idea that you're joining the recitat militia, my son. So what happened at this point is that the political, like the electoral political parties, especially Seda, they start having a lot of their energy go into these underground militias that they're associated with Seda. And they had a youth movement that was very radical. They used a lot of very aggressive language. The Carlists had their recetes, which they started, like, or really seriously arming and organizing at this point in time, although they don't really go fully ham with the weaponry until 1934. And then the Falange appear.

So in August 1932, General Sanjurho, which is a wonderful name to pronounce, when you look at it and don't speak Spanish, the Sanhurhada coup. I like it. He attempts kind of a quiet coup where the military is like some of the military goes in and says, eh, we're not cool with this. They get sentenced to death and then it gets commuted to like life in prison. And then San Jorge just gets exiled and he goes to Portugal because the, the Republic is kind of like, we want to like new terms. this and we don't want him to be able to do another coup, but we don't want to kill him and have like half the country rise up. So we're going to, we're going to moderate. Like they were willing to moderate. They weren't,

they were still allowing like their street fighters, like their, their, uh, Antifa troops to like go crazy in the streets. But they weren't going to publicly do something that would radicalize the, they, they're, opponents. They wanted to take their time. So in 1934, remember I mentioned that, say, the electoral victory, but I call it here Pyrrhic, because it's like it was the end of their party. They won and then they were completely ignored. And maybe that's not like the most appropriate use of the term Pyrrhic, but I still feel like spiritually it is because they win this electoral victory, they get nothing. And then their, especially their youth movement and their future growth just ends because all those people who actually believed in it radicalized. And their youth movement,

in particular, starts going over to Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera and his Spanish phalanx. And then the, with the uprisings among the Asturians and the general strikes across the country by the anarchists, those don't do very well. And that leads the anarchists to learn that they need to actually organize. They also begin to see themselves as somewhat, as more at odds with the Republic. And they're like, let's not cooperate as much as we thought might be tactically sound early, especially pre-Republic. The Carlists basically and say the both say,

all right, it's time to put most of the money that we collect for dues and memberships and donations and everything into arming and training, the recetes, and arranging a real, to prepare for a real military coup. So the conservative electoral parties are basically, you have people hanging out in parliament but at this point they're like only violence is going to be the way forward so that's where we need to focus. So in 1935, the carless and the Falange start training militarily in Italy.

They start doing a lot more stuff that, again, it's underground, but they start taking a lot of risks, acquiring like thousands and thousands of weapons. the street violence goes parabolic, as I say here. There's way more street violence of leftists attacking right-wingers and the Falunch start, like, assassinating people and stuff like that. So there's that February 1936 election that the Libtards just blatantly steal. And then July 13, 1936, Dolores Ibaruri announces, in the Cortez while Jose Calvo Soelho was giving a speech,

this is your last speech, um, officials from the republics, um, uh, my brain is blanking, sorry, that basically,

their assault guards, excuse me, go out arrest Jose Calvo Soelho. They attempted to arrest a Falongist who wasn't there. Um, and then they also attempted to arrest another politician. Jose Salvo Covello was at home. They take him for a ride.

He basically tells his wife that he knows he's going to his death. They kill him. That is the thing that clinches the nationalist uprising. So this is a view of the three key right-wing factions that are left over. So remember, I was talking about those political organizations. The Falunge is small, but grows like crazy during the war. They kind of represent that fusion where they're trying to get people whose sympathies might be more left-wing that are more working class.

They're popular with the urban middle class, on the other hand. In the middle are the Carlists. We'll look at them in detail here in a second. They're hardcore Catholic traditionalists. mostly rural, but of all classes. And then at the right, there's the army. And this is the organizer of the coup, that one of the chief planners, which is General Mola,

notice that it is not Francisco Franco. So again, let's talk about the Carlist Requetees a little bit. They are my favorite. They are the heirs to the Carlist. uprisings of the 19th century, which mostly took place in the north and the east. That's Catalonia, that's Navar, that's Basque country, that's Aragon. They're anti-liberal, anti-democratic, Catholic traditionalists. They prefer those old class relations. Their terminology was the Fueros. You had duties and privileges. It's a lot like the Magna Carta. Read the Magna Carta. It is a

totally different deal. It's a better deal in so many ways than gay shit like the Constitution. Their electoral representation was in the communion traditionista, but they never believed that this was their path to getting what they wanted. They always knew that it would be war. They're spread all over the country. Like I said, they're really focused, kind of in the north and more rural areas, but they also were very important in Cordova, Sevilla, and Cadiz. And what they did is they were able to help the army and working with Falunjus also secure these cities so that there were towholds when the army came.

We'll talk about that more later. Their preparation resulted in having a... Air grid, operator of Ireland's electricity grid, is powering up the Northwest. We're planning to upgrade the electricity grid in your area and your input and local knowledge are vital in shaping these plans. Our consultation closes on the 25th of November. Have your say, online or in person.

So together we can create a more reliable, sustainable electricity supply for your community. Find out more at airgrid.i.4 slash Northwest. On the many nights of Christmas, the Guinness Storehouse brings to thee, Christmas nights at Gravity. This Christmas, enjoy a truly unique night out at the Gravity Bar. Savour festive bites from Big Fan Bell, expertly crafted seasonal cocktails, and dance the night away with DJs from Love Tempo.

Brett take infuse, amazing atmosphere, incredible food and drink. My goodness, it's Christmas at the Guinness Storehouse. Book now at giddlestorhouse.com. Get the facts be drinkaware, visit drinkaware. com. Frontline 10,000 man. well-armed, well-trained citizen militia by spring 1936.

They had 20,000 auxiliaries, which meant that, like, July 1936, they had 30,000 men ready to go. They were at 85,000 recruits by the end of 1936. This uprising never would have happened if the Carlist Requotets did not organize their militia. If it was just the army, it would not have happened. Take that as you choose to. Organizing and training in 1932. The Carlos had these youth and social organizations that they named in various terms. I have an article about it on my substack.

Highly recommend it. But the youth auxiliary, using the old name for an old military unit, I have to revise an article because I found the real origin of the term recete. The Juventud hymista, they were organized community defense and street fighting against leftists, when they would have their religious marches, when they would have funerals for their people, when they would have church, and they were getting, people were getting harassed, like you said Pete, to not participate in church events. The Juventhuid Haimista were the ones killing people or beating them.

They were fliring. They were posturing. They were doing marches in uniforms, wearing masks. 1933, 1934, an army officer who had been a Mustang, a very accomplished guy who was basically a spec ops dude. Jose Enrique Varela gets the alias Don Pepe, hence Pepe there. He was sneaking around in the north, organizing, training, and arming the recetes into 10-man de courius. So that's a non-military, like, local defense organization, because again, it's they were thinking defensively at that point late 1934 they shift after the historian

uprisings and all the violence to say we are going to become a military unit we're going to be trained militarily we're going to have military rank we're going to think militarily we're going to send people to italy to learn to use automatic weapons and mortars and grenades and not just rifles. They are heavily armed by July 1936. The Spanish military's conspirators, the coup planners, described the recetes as the only genuine citizen army that's capable of coordinated tactical military operations. Everyone else, their militant wings, were street fighters and assassins. He still need street fighters and assassins. So the Falange Española de la Sions is, that's Jose Antonio up there in the corner.

It's really hard to talk about them because they went through so many iterations in a couple of years. They had so many writers. They incorporated other groups. A lot of them were way more radical. You'll notice I have anti-clericalism strike through down there. One of the first things that they did is when Jose Antonio went to work with monarchists and other people, as they said, you got to get rid of some of these guys, or we're not going to work with you. We're not going to finance you anymore.

So that was a constant struggle, as a lot of their modernist, futurist people were anti-Christian from that whole, like, it's exactly what you would expect these days where they're like, oh, Christians are weak and like, we need to, you know, whatever. They had to get rid of those people because of, or at least those people had to shut up and it had to not be part of their core platform. So that took place. Their goal, though, was not to just be reactionaries. And they wanted to appeal to the, they wanted to appeal to the people. that the left were appealing to. They wanted the communists and the anarchists to be in a nationalist pro-family, pro-future, non-Bulshivist. Airgrid, operator of Ireland's electricity grid is

powering up the northwest. We're planning to upgrade the electricity grid in your area, and your input and local knowledge are vital in shaping these plans. Our consultation closes on the 25th of November. Have your say. online or in person. So together we can create a more reliable, sustainable electricity supply for your community. Find out more at airgrid.com. On the many nights of Christmas, the Guinness Storehouse brings to thee Christmas nights at gravity. This Christmas, enjoy a truly unique night out at the Gravity Bar.

Savour festive bites from Big Fan Bell, expertly crafted seasonal cocktails and dance the night away with DJs from Love Tempo. Brett take infuse, amazing atmosphere, incredible food and drink. My goodness, it's Christmas at the Guinness Storehouse. Book now at giddlestorhouse.com. Get the facts be drinkaware, visit drinkaware.com. System. And that actually attracted the urban middle class,

the people that were right-wingers, that were voters, who were radicalized by the Republican leftist violence. People get bogged down in the details. You'll see people blogging about how Jose Antonio betrayed the revolution and all this stuff. But it's a bunch of crap. They were guys who wanted to find a spot, and they became a fusion of a bunch of different things. And they had all kinds of people writing for them, and none of those visions were going to win out in Spain. because Spain is Catholic.

Seida's youth wing, the Juventus de Acheon Popular, they funneled into the Falange in 1936, like crazy after the elections. So they were never very big. They were like maybe 10,000 of them up to 1935. They exploded in growth in 1936. They were outlawed.

early 1936, most of the leaders were rounded up and arrested. Most of them were martyred, like within a couple months. One of the really interesting things is that one of their kind of nerdier writers and theorists, Rafael Sanchez Amadas, the guy who wrote Kara All Soul, facing the sun, their song, which is an absolute banger. He actually is one of the only members of the old shirts who survived the war through all kinds of luck and blessings from on high. So one of the more tricky groups to talk about, because they were, let's be honest, they were incorporated and used for their optics and their ideas, but were not as influential as nerds, some nerds like, who cares? That's not the point.

The point is that they survived and they saved their country. So, last faction to talk about, a nationalist army. And again, this isn't the whole nationalist army. This is primarily officers of the army, some people in the Navy, of course, immediately start having informal, casual discussions about, hey, what if we had a coup? Like, what are the conditions of that? Who would be involved? So remember I pointed out in 1932, there was a coup. In the 20s, there was a very successful coup that had Prima de Rivera in charge. So this is not like a new thing. Like in Spanish-speaking countries, coups are not a shocking development.

So the key thing in bold, right there in the middle, is that General Francisco Franco, who was cooling his heels down in the Canary Islands, he did not join that conspiracy until after Jose Calvo Sothello was assassinated by the Republic's assault guards. He was also reassured of how many people were ready to roll all over the country. If the militias had not been organized, Franco almost certainly would not have joined the rising, and it would have failed like the 1932 attempt. Very important. Franco does not show up as a savior. He becomes the natural leader. several months into the war because he's an elite,

hardcore guy who trained an awful lot of the younger officers who were hardcore, who were involved in the conspiracy. People trusted him. And he was an incredibly shrewd guy. He was not elected. He was not chosen in advance. There wasn't an uprising underfron. there was a general uprising under people's individual factions.

Well, and let's face, let's face the fact that he, um, is the archetype Spanish Catholic. Yes, yes. I mean, there was reports that he would go to mass every day. He would take the Eucharist every day. Intensely devout. And I did not mean to stop sharing. Go right ahead and share it again. I'll get it up there.

My bad. So, yeah, devout, devout Catholic. So here we go. Also, he had the, he was well known in the army. He was, he had the respect of many. Many, many. Yeah, so it's, it was going to come down to him. It was going to come down to him.

I don't think there was, I don't think there was anybody else. And I think anybody else who would have been chosen, we would have seen a different outcome. Yes, I agree completely. I agree completely. So we have all these factions. What happens in war? What's one of the, what is the important thing that people always talk about in, who are military veterans? Well, there are shoot, move, communicate with communicate being very, very, very, very important.

But then there's also an old term or old saying, if you don't have logistics, you don't have nothing. And so these various factions who rise up that are part of this general conspiracy, logistics are a challenge. You can capture weapons, but the army has control of all of the logistics. So the militias plug into the army logistical chain. The Carls had a slight advantage in some ways because they were associated, or many of them were associated with the Navar brigades up in the north under Mola. So they're plugged into that military chain of command through that channel in the Army of the North. But it's a little chaotic. their own officers and things like that. And that is a challenge in and of itself. But the,

what happened was, you know, shrewd old General Franco basically says, here's what we're going to do. All of these various parties, all of these various groups, um, are, you know, plugged in, They're now consolidated down to where you're in the army already. You couldn't like join the army January 1936 and go to boot camp. Like it took them a while to, one, have control over military bases on the peninsula. But you could join the militias immediately like that. And good luck. You know, learn on the job, right?

So what Franco and the state did was they said, well, we have two political parties that are part of this fighting force and they're already plugged into the military logistical system. And we're going to unify them under our command. what will do is we'll make allowances for their symbols. And, you know, so their flags and some of their rank stuff, although what they did is they incorporated elements of both into the army. But like the carless could keep their berets. They could keep their flags. You know, the Falunge could keep their blue shirts.

And then we'll make sure that you have, you know, your 7mm Spanish Mouser rifles instead of a hodgepodge of stuff that you acquired before the war, and we'll plug you into this whole system. Another thing I like to point out is that the nationalists had American trucks and fuel and tires from American companies on credit. and the British had signed off on this. Huge advantage. And you don't get that if you're in the militia on your own and not plugged into the army. So because the state spoke for Spain and the carlists or the Falunge were not the state.

So April 19th, interesting date, 1937. one party, one army, one state. So there's one official political party left in it as the Falungei Española traditionalista and de las juntae offensive national syndicalista. So that is a mouthful, but what that does is it combines. Air grid, operator of Ireland's electricity grid, is powering up the northwest.

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A visit filled with festivity. Experience a story of Ireland's most iconic beer in a stunning Christmas setting at the Guinness Storehouse. enjoy seven floors of interactive exhibitions and finish your visit with brett taken views of Dublin city from the home of Guinness. Live entertainment, great memories and the gravity bar. My goodness is Christmas at the Guinness Storehouse. Book now at Guinness Storehouse.com. Get the facts. Be drinkaware.

Visit drinkaware. com. The Falun gate and the carlists into the one political party. The head of it was Franco. you know, he had people in the state. He had people in the junta who were from both parties. These units still fought under the command of their own officers. They generally maintain their preexisting like organizational structure, but they were always under the primary leaders of the army and under the authority of the army from this point in time. So why slash how did the consolidation work? And like I said, post-war struggles are excluded from this commentary. Ideology is excluded.

The time for politics. Talk with the enemies and petty differences between factions was completely over. And everyone believed that. They believed that it was time for war. They joined the units that they could join if they wanted to fight or if they felt They had to fight. The most extreme parties established large, well-organized, and relatively well-equipped parallel institutions. So they could not count on the institutions of the republic.

So they created their own. They had their own political and local organizational groups, and they created militias to defend themselves and to prepare to fight. The future belongs to those who. show up. The other rightest faction, which is the nationalist officers, they were either already associated with one of those factions, like the Seida went away. So you were either Falunge or, you know, part of the carless or you didn't care. You're like, I'm part of the state, I'm part of this operation. This is a non-political thing. So who cares? I feel like that is going to be one of those things that's going to catch people by surprise.

And when you look at the debates that take place now in our space, that's one of the hardest things for people to settle on is they want to hold on to their old beliefs. And a lot of those are legitimate. I'm not going to tell anyone to vote or not to vote. I'm not going to tell anyone who to support or not to support. but my general thinking is like the time for like differences are over and if you're essentially allied allied with one another like why not just become a one bundle of sticks with an axe head sticking out of the top of it right yeah 100% yeah you know you know people are Yeah, exactly. But, you know, when bullets start flying, you know, the talking stops. So anyway, a couple of quick slides here. And I'm not going to spend a ton of time talking about like the political and, you know, tactical and strategic system here. But I'm showing this because I want to show you the territory that was held primarily by the militias.

everyone's militias, including the leftists. Kadiv and Sevilla, especially, and Cordova, yeah. Army barracks were important, but the militias, the Falunay and the Carlist militias helped secure these areas. All that swathed territory up in the north, that is because of, the militias, citizen militias. Another element to this is that the military uprising, the success of the military uprising in specific units and barracks often came up to the individual courage of an

individual officer who would walk in and basically say you're under arrest to, or he'd say, you're joining us or you're under arrest. Um, that is. Ballsy and, um, that's how that happened. Way less official, um, you know, involvement in, in claiming the land and the land that's being controlled here. So very important thing to understand. The rising was most successful in the conservative parts of Spain and a couple

military strongholds. and often squashed in street fighting by leftist militias, as in Barcelona, Santander, Toledo, and Madrid. Toledo with a big asterix except for the Alcazar, the heroic Alcazar. And so with those holdings, this is March 1937, but an awful lot of this was by more like October, November of 1936. because of the land held by the militias or by these individual garrisons or whatever, especially the containment around Madrid by the Carlist militias largely. The Army of Africa and the Spanish Legion coming across the Med was able to expand these territorial holdings, again, because of the militias.

Another key thing is that the Republicans had quote-unquote secured military support from the Soviet Union. The Soviets had huge shipments of weapons going to Spain within days. And the international volunteers under the international brigades, that was arranged by the social.

Soviet International, which meant that those were communists. The vast majority of them were communists, something like 40% Jewish, just as a note, up to, I should say. There's in my appendix of my book, and then I have a note, an article with the source material, there's a very interesting article in there about the legwork a Jewish communist did in proving how important that Jews were to the international brigades. At the very least, it was like the majority of their officers were Jewish. Big surprise. Almost all of the, there was 3,000 volunteers from the United States and almost. to a man and woman. They were all. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. In my book, one of the first things is they, in the first chapter, they take out a

couple positions of international brigades and our guy who's an intelligence officer is going through all their documents. And it's like Little David from Brooklyn and stuff like that. It's it's it is what it is man. It's I if someone writes this down, I believe it. So yeah. All right. So a very brief notes on a successful leftist organization, which is the CNT FAI. And I am sharing this because it's educational. There's an article about it on my substack. I got this material from by reading a first I read it in Spanish and then I found an English translation. Anarchist sites have they're one of the anarchist websites are a key source of really good information especially about the the real anarchist stuff. What was actually going on in Catalonia. They have trans. They have trans. translations of all of these books written by these anarchist leaders who ran away after the war talking about what they were actually doing and a lot of their organization. But other Spanish folks have helped crack the code like some weapons collectors cracked the code on where the the fie bomb, the grenade that the FAAI created, where that

that came from through a untranslated memoir of a Spanish-slash-Argentian anarchist who was involved. I think we talked about him a little bit last time, but there's all kinds of material that's coming to light. When you read the Lib-Tard summary of this stuff, they always leave out what the true believers will tell you completely openly. So I completely advocate reading communist and anarchist material on any subject touching on them because they will just tell you what their goals were. Whereas if you read a summary, you read a academic analysis of something, they will not do that. So, Air Grid, operator of Ireland's electricity grid is powering up the Northwest.

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Get the facts. Be drinkaware. Visit drinkaware.com. The FAA was the militant wing. of the CNT. The CNT was an anarchist labor union slash political party. I mean, they're anarchists. Obviously, you know, you're going to have a labor union that people join because they kind of feel like they have to or, you know, social pressure or whatever.

But then the true believers are ripe for joining, you know, more militant organizations who actually want to see anarchism. you know, in in their lifetime. And after the 1934 Asturian uprising and when the Spanish Republic cracked down on that uprising, because you have to when people are just being murdered in the streets, like, aggressively, the FAA organized and they said, you know what? And I don't have the quote handy. There's a quote in this article, but it's basically the same thing.

that an anarchist Antifa guy told me in a I will not be specific about what city it was in in a thing they were doing in a city when I happened to be

working downtown and kind of naive and considering myself a libertarian with theoretical anarchist leanings that if they start smashing windows and then the cops attack

peaceful protesters that the people will rise up and overthrow the government just like spontaneously. And the FAA said, you know what, you can't spontaneously be competent. It's like anything else. You rise to the level of training that you have so you don't rise to the occasion, right? And be good. So anyway, so what they did is they created a cellular structure because they were illegal and outlawed, and for their own protection, they operated in cells. And the idea was that they would

have a six-man team, a six-man cell founded by and led by, not really led, but organized and coordinated by the secretary. So the secretary works with other people in the hierarchy. He organizes the cadre. He communicates and coordinates their training and their operations. and the intelligence that they gather. And the secretaries try to create as many cadres as they can eventually once they're up to the task. And then they also have a person. And again, this is just a group of people who decide they want to be part of an organization and to do something. So like maybe lawfully legally, let's say you have a community watch, you know, in your neighborhood.

Just think about how this might be helpful. fur so you can call the police about stuff. And then you have a person who's what they call the police, the people investigator. And so he identifies and documents basically enemies and what you can find out about them. So the people in their assigned precinct, names, addresses, ideological affiliations, personal habits, details, their danger level. This would apply to military, police clergy, officials, capitalists, politicians, you know, et cetera. And then there's a person who's a building investigator. And so their job is to go check out and learn about buildings that are in their zone.

And that's for tactical purposes. That's for, well, the people investigator determines that someone lives in this building. The building investigator will go check the building out. because maybe the people investigator will have been seen following the guy or whatever, right? So what they then do is they write up like, who lives there, what stuff is in there, where's a military barracks, where's a police station, where jails, where churches and monasteries, where employers, where's fortifications, things of that nature. And then they have a team member who gets trained in identifying and developing basically

strategic areas in the zone and how you would fight there if you had to. Bridges, street intersections, underground passages, drains sewers, which of these houses have flat roofs according to the building investigator? How do you get from place to place to place without being on the street, etc? And then you have a team member who checks out public works like electricity, water, where garages, you know, where's tram depots, where's the metro, like check out the metro, transport routes, vulnerability to sabotage your seizure. And then finally, you have a team member whose main job is money, weapons, and equipment, stealing it, buying it, trading for it, private homes with weapons, banks, loan offices, food and clothing, warehouses, et cetera. And again, this is

from the point of view of anarchists in Spain in the 1930s. But at the same time, it's interesting. So the idea is these people get together and they train, they get trained by other people in the organization who are specialists in these areas, who will they will never interact with again in person because that's a security, you know, risk. And then they get together with their group to train in hand-to-hand combat, group tactics, weapons, propaganda, learning, about special equipment, learning medicine. When they start out, they learn about the basic strategies and priorities for how they do their jobs and how they work together.

And then moving forward, they share the information that they discover. Sometimes they'll work together on certain jobs. And then they collect all that intelligence. They send it up the chain. You don't leave it lying around, written in maps. You have to stash all that stuff. And their job is to gather that intelligence to help grow the organization with people who are reliable that they can recommend to the secretary who will then arrange it for everyone.

And then they won't be a part of it so that there's less security risk there. And then their real job is that when something kicks off, they control their assigned district in the uprising. And that is how they secured Barcelona. is how they secured Valencia. That's how they secured so many areas is that they had trained and planned in advance. The car lists who were in those hardcore, heavily trained units, did essentially the same thing, but there was less of, we don't have documented evidence of exactly how they thought about it, but yes, they secured their immediate areas. First, they dealt with anarchists and communists in their immediate areas first in the same fashion. And I guarantee

you, especially if you live in a heavily leftist area, there are people thinking this way right now, especially if you're in an unfortunate situation and you have like a bunch of Antifa around you because you're near a college or something like that. So be aware of that. Um, that completes my TED talk. Yeah, the, uh, the, I love that you ended on this because it really goes to show that there, there were people on the left who were, who were planning, who were, uh, who were organized. It's, and because most of the anarchists were, I mean, you could see it that through the books you read. Yep. I mean, they're anarchists. They called, I mean,

I mean, they really lean into that, didn't they? They very much did, yes. It's like, okay, well, it's like, and it's like Lalbert, it's like so Lalbert, where it's like, okay, can't you guys just realize what's going on here? You have to organize. You have to, if we do this, we can have, you know, we can have this. But no, no, they have to, they have to hold to their principal. and thank God they did.

Yes, exactly, because they were extremely successful because this was a compromise that they made in the uprising. And then the next compromise that was made is that like the Derutie column who were the, they came up out of this FAA group. They were the hardened killers. They were the shock troops who went up to Oregon to confront. the Carlist, uh, recetes, um, because up by like Zaragoza and stuff where there were, there were a fair amount of, um, anarchist CNT and CNT FAA guys up in some of these like slightly industrial areas and some of these larger cities in Oregon in the, in the interior.

Um, and they were rushing up there because the, the carolists were cracking down and taking out. because they knew who everybody was, right? So they, the Derruti column, were the first group of the anarchists to say, and their terminology is always interesting, is that they would say, we have to put the revolution on hold. And that was their thinking, is that you think that the fighting would be the revolution.

To them, the revolution was going around and murdering the like regular people and destroying the churches and like restructuring the way you know work happens and stuff like that to them that was the revolution but they air grid operator of ireland's electricity grid is powering up the northwest we're planning to upgrade the electricity grid in your area and your input and local knowledge are vital in shaping these plans our consultation closes on the 25th of november Have your say online or in person So together we can create a more reliable, sustainable electricity supply for your community

Find out more at airgrid.i.4 slash northwest On the many days of Christmas the Guinness Storehouse brings to thee A visit filled with festivity Experience the story of Ireland's most iconic beer in a stunning Christmas setting at the Guinness Storehouse Enjoy seven floors of interactive exhibitions and finish your visit with Brett taking views of Dublin City from the home of Guinness. Live entertainment, great memories, and the Gravity Burr. My goodness is Christmas at the Guinness Storehouse.

Book now at ginnestorehouse.com. Get the facts. Be drinkaware. Visit drinkaware.org. Put the revolution on hold to fight the war. And they allied with the communists and ultimately came under the leadership of the communists. they most of them so derutti actually got got killed in the defense of Madrid in 1936 um because they they went up to aragon that front stabilized and after like two months when the army of africa and the legion you know franco were headed that way they made a mad dash to get to Madrid to defend

it and Derutie got killed. They have these conspiracies about it, but the long and the short is, is he said, we're going to work with the communists until the war is over. And what did the communists do is they killed the hardcore political, the best leaders from among the anarchists so that they could consolidate their own control over the republic. So, wow. What a shock. They couldn't have learned that from 1917, right? Yeah, that's exactly what they did. That's exactly what they did.

And these quote-unquote people, you can't ally with someone who wants to kill you. And that's the difference. The right-wingers, they had ideas that were different, but they didn't hate each other. And this is something you have talked about a lot, which I think is probably like one of the most important points that you have made is, okay, you don't have to agree with someone in power about everything. But if they don't hate you, they're much better than someone who hates you. And so to to not look at the landscape and say, here's my choices. And if I go with group A, I have a chance to have a say. And in fact, as things radicalize, as everybody gets, as everything gets crazier,

I'm going to seem pretty reasonable to people who right now, like, they certainly wouldn't agree with me on these things, but they don't hate me fundamentally. You have options there. You don't have options with people who want to destroy you, who want to torture you, who want you to suffer, who want you to be humiliated. You cannot negotiate with those people and you can't work with them. And there's nothing that you get. Like you don't get, like, Hitler doesn't come back if you support the guy who, you blows horses or whatever his name is. I can't think of his name.

He's going to be gone in a couple of weeks anyway. I can't, I mean, I don't know that they might just be throwing in the towel on this one, but like this is going to be hilarious when they go to Chicago. Yeah, it's wild. You know,

Charles Haywood said something the other night on, um, he was on with Buck Johnson. He was on Buck Johnson's show. And Buck was talking to him about the PayPal mafia and everything, stuff that I've been talking about. Yeah. You know, and I've said, you know, they're not our guys.

And, you know, but they, they don't hate us. And I really like a lot of what Haywood says. I've met him. He's a good, I think he's a good man. He said, if they are serious about defeating this enemy that they want to take on, they're going to have to become our guys. Yes. Yes.

If they don't become our guys, they're going to lose. Yes. And then what does that mean about me, you know, saying that, hey, maybe we should look at these guys and maybe we shouldn't counter signal them. Yeah. I'll just say I was wrong. I was wrong. Yeah. They tried.

They didn't know what they were in for. I was wrong. I still told you to build locally. I still told you to, you know, make your income mobile. I still told you to plant a garden. I never told you that they were coming to save us. Yeah. But if they want to defeat the enemy that they're talking about defeating, they're going to have to become our guys.

If you want to, yeah, you have to go to war with the army you have to defeat an enemy. Yeah, so, you know, someone said a long time ago, may you live in interesting times? Yes. We unfortunately certainly do. But we know it comes after interesting times. Yes. let's cut this and uh you're to come back soon and we'll talk about something new but remind remind people where they can find everything including i had somebody on facebook who was asking for

your merch the other day so if you had any merch sales it may have been coming from facebook and me sharing your links cool yeah so um yeah carl doll dot substack.com is where you can see most of my writing I have a sample, the first chapter of my newest book Faction with Crusaders. I'm going to appease my friends in the firearms autist community, I'm going to do an article pretty soon about the books, excuse me, the guns of my, the weapons of my first book faction. And I think I owe Twitter a thread on that. My old social media manager got his account banned in January of 2021 for some reason. So I have to put a fresh thing up there now that I myself am in control of my own account.

Yeah, books are on Amazon, but I also have links to those extensively from all those articles and everything in my substack. and then also to my merch, my spicy shirts and stuff like that. Main thing is I, the only way that this is really monetized for me is through book sales and the, and the shirts and stuff. I was thinking of monetizing my substack. I've had like six or seven people offer to pay for that. And I'm like, just, just buy book, give book to friend, things like that. That's my main thing.

Maybe I should expand it, but that's how I'm doing it. and thanks again. I'll include all the links like I did last time. Thanks a lot, Carl. Appreciate it. Thanks, Pete. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pete Cagnonez show. Carl Dahl's back.

We're going to keep talking about the Spanish Civil War. How you doing, Carl? Doing well, thanks, Pete. All right, so I thought we should follow up the last episode we did, which was much talked about how the right-wing factions came together. but maybe a little less serious this time and like something that I really enjoy talking about. So I reached out to you and said, hey, I know that you're obsessed with the guns of the Spanish Civil War. So why don't we talk about them?

So yeah, when you started going down the Spanish Civil War route, were you, had you already looked into the guns? just stuff you picked up as you went along? I'd looked into it a fair bit. I'm an old, and so in the 90s, there were Astra 400s all over the place. And, you know, Spanish firearms were very affordable well into the 90s. And then all the companies folded, all the, I should say, all the commercial manufacturers that were exporting to the U.S., which were generally high quality, although there was some, you know, cheap, you know, minimal quality required stuff as well. And so I was always interested in guns and

small arms. And so I was well aware of that without having, you know, really gotten into the meat and potatoes of the war. And, and, you know, other stuff would percolate up. So a lot of it comes through in the work that I've done and that I've published. But I also enjoy writing little articles and threads on on the topic as well so um yeah i put my you know thinking cap on and said let's focus as much as we can on small arms of the the spanish civil war and really talking about um you know really focusing on the spanish like domestic weapons but also the fact that like how the militias got weapons and then the the post july 19th 36 arm packages of the left. So the stuff that came from the Soviet Union and France and then

their commercial, commercial areas, mostly focusing, like almost entirely on individual weapons, but I did throw on some notes about some game changers. So, cool. All right. You have something on the screen you want me to share or, where do you want to? Yeah. It's ready to go. Oh, there you go. Boom. Thank you, sir. So just reiterating Carl Dahl, substack, two book by book. Middle one, I had some people notice and say,

hey, is that Owen Broadcast? And yes, Owen Broadcast did do the cover of my first novel faction. And then Bradley Burris is a very talented painter who did the portrait of the main character on the right hand side, a looking war-weary by the time he's with the Spanish Legion. in faction with the Crusaders. Ireland's largest award-winning light show experience is back.

Wonderlights is now open in three spectacular locations, Malahide Castle and Gardens, and Marley Park in Dublin and Photo House in Cork. Follow the enchanting walking trail that will captivate all ages as the night comes alive with dazzling displays and unforgettable moments. Who will you Wonderlights with? For dates and bookings, visit wonderlites. I'm going to kind of take this from a couple angles.

First of all, this is an overview of the basic presentation. So the weaponry of the Spanish Civil War falls into a couple of buckets. And those buckets are Spanish military or national law enforcement arms, militia acquisitions, and then post-July 1936 arms packages. And again, like I said, we'll focus on what came in via the Soviet Union in France, which includes kind of like commercial transfers from arms dealers. I'm kind of light on text in this one, and I'm going to be referring to some notes off screen because if we tried to cover everything, it would be just exhausting.

So in the background is a beautiful Astra 900 broom handle copy made to an extremely high standard of finish. So we'll be able to talk a little more about that weapon. There weren't tons in the war, but there were thousands of them utilized, but it wasn't like a primary issue weapon. We'll get into some of the details on that here shortly. So I'm going to start out with a very, very, very simple high-level overview of the Spanish domestic arms industry, specifically excluding military arsenals here. We'll talk about the military issue weapons later and the government, also including law enforcement weapons as well. But we're really going to dive into like the Basque country,

arms manufacturers because they were a huge player in this war and then the artisanal weapons. So again, this is fairly high level. There's a ton of information online on this stuff, but it's dispersed. I talk a lot about it in faction with the Crusaders as part of the narrative, the way that it flows nicely. But there's some good material. I'll do a thread today with some links to interesting information. So the, sorry? I said, cool.

Okay, cool. So the Spanish arms industry is very interesting. This is a photograph from Bestigui Hermannos, which was a manufacturer and Ibar. and if you look closely, you'll see that these all look like broom handle Mousers. So the Spanish arms industry has been around for a very long time, especially up in the Basque country, centered in Ibar and Wernica for many centuries. They were largely export focused. Of course, there's a domestic industry, you know, arming people locally. The carolists got a lot of their arms through like sneaky diversions of weapons coming out of these factories for a long time and right before the Spanish Civil War.

But largely export focused. So it's really common for late 19th century, especially in the United States. There's some older stuff. Most of it went to Europe and over in like Asia and Central America. But in America and Canada and the UK, you will find a lot of Spanish copies of different weapons. And a lot of times they were made on contract for, say, the British government or the French government. There's also just straight commercial stuff. And so the idea is all this is kind of like a cottage industry model where a whole bunch of different suppliers and manufacturers all over Bass Country, but mostly concentrated in these river valleys where they had a lot of power and steel was coming out of the mines or it was being brought over from the northwest of Spain.

like Asturius over into Basque Country for manufacturing. And so huge industry for a really long time. I'll throw out some names, Yama and Star, Astra. Those are separate one company named Star, one called Astra. I know, go figure. Astra means Star in Spanish. But anyway, and lots of little family companies

that would just be building weapons, copying weapons, doing some original design, some of it very innovative, and just putting them out there. And generally, their commercial stuff would be available for offer for less than, you know, the commonly manufactured stuff from like, say, FN or, you know, American manufacturers, what have you. So that was their niche. They would also make whatever was popular. and they would be able to turn it around really quickly.

We'll get into some examples of that here shortly. But one of the really kind of big influences on the relevance of the Basque Country manufacturers in Spain as it came to arms was a deal that went down in 1950 between the French government and an Ibar arms company, Gabilondo I Uresti, which, became Yama or Lama to produce a 32 ACP pistol for trench warfare. So there's an image of it behind here and you'll notice that proportionally it

looks more like something that you're starting to see now with modern weapons where you'll have a full-size grip and a slightly shorter muzzle for conceal carry purposes or just ease of carry while giving a full grip, right? So a lot of times these 32 automatics will, you know, you'll have two fingers on it and your pinky will be kind of hanging off and you'll have a little pinky extension on a magazine or something like that. These guys, these brothers and friends,

who only employed a couple dozen people at the time, made this design that the French government who were desperately needing handguns for World War I, because in trench warfare, the old model where you would have your, your armies and officers and maybe NCOs would have handguns, and it was mostly a symbol of rank and authority as well as to enforce discipline, right? The handgun was as much for using it on your own troops or like putting down horses and stuff as it was for actual combat. So they really needed everything that they could get their hands on for World War I. And so the French began ordering in mass numbers.

So the first deal with Gabilando e Uresti was 10,000 pistols a month. And then it became 20,000. And then it became 50,000. And so they kind of threw their hands up and came back with an amendment to this deal and said, as long as we are doing quality control, you know, our plan is to meet this is to farm out the manufacturer of these weapons to subcontractors. Okay. So they started out, you know, with this acceptance with like five subcontractors. And then it eventually became dozens because what happened was these individual,

uh, subcontractors would sub out like, you know, trigger action components, uh, you know, while they focused on the slide in the frame or they would have different people doing the barrels or they would do the barrels and then do the rest. So it became dozens and dozens and dozens of variants. of these weapons. These were all in the days of hand-fitted weapons, and one of the problems with that is that a pistol might be perfectly reliable with its issue magazine, or at least the magazine that was made for it. But once it gets into the military system, you have all these different pieces. And one of the old issues with reliability of semi-automatic handguns, as well as semi-automatics in general was the magazine, right? Like the number one thing that you'll find with older guns is that the gun might be great, but like you have issues with magazines and like aftermarket magazines don't really work,

or you have to hand-fit every magazine, you know, adjust the feed lips, all this stuff to get it to be completely reliable. So that's where some of the reputation, issues came with these pistols. And then there were also some things like problems with the steel, you know, specifically around the metallurgy. They wouldn't be hardened properly. They were using cheap materials because they're just like, hey, these are all going overseas. And we get paid the same. So let's see what we can get away with. So anyway, they eventually, you know, through this system, over 750,000 of these were made specifically to this Ruby.

format and shipped to France. Some of them went to Finland too, and I think the Russians got some as well. And at this point, Spain is like flooded with not only 32 ACP handguns, 765 millimeter, but also people who can make these. So when the war ends, you know, this boom kind of comes to an end and then all these manufacturers are like, what are we going to do? We have all these now highly skilled and makers and then, you know, these factories. So like, let's look at this picture again. That's a lot of guys. They're making stuff to a very high standard. They have all this equipment for making stocks and doing barrels and all the sub-components

and all that. They need jobs. They need a market, right? The market will find a way. So China, China is in its warlord era in the 1920s, right? So I'm not going to do charts and graphs of the whole story behind this, but China is entering this period of struggle where between their nationalists and all the kind of countryside little warlords,

And a lot of it is, it's not only regional, but it's kind of ethnic. If you really know anything about China, they'll have this big bucket where they call everyone Han. But when you drink, excuse me, when you speak different languages, when you're scattered all over this vast country, you come from different kind of ethnic stuff because of history. and you have these supposed ethnic minorities, but it's like literally, you know, 30 million people.

They're sub-nations, right? They're all kind of vying for autonomy. You know, there's that whole autonomy discussion again, Pete, as well as just kind of control over their areas and, you know, really their

futures. So this is a huge market for the Spanish arms manufacturers as well as, you know, the rest of the world, right? So in this picture, you'll see in the bottom left, you'll see these guys, they have these pouches that are for Mouser broom handles for stripper clips or magazines. At this point, it's going to be stripper clips. You'll see almost all these guys have a Mouser broom handle in its wooden holster on their, on their belt. And then down here, this is really interesting. You'll notice these light machine guns. These are Swiss light machine guns that were very, very advanced for the time. They make the BAR, you know, the American BAR light machine gun or automatic rifle, rather, look kind of simple and not super robust. So the industry of the world is cranking out.

advanced weapons in this lull after World War I where, you know, some European countries are starting to arm up, and European countries are starting to think in terms of having like next generation weapons after World War I. And basically China and its insatiable appetite for advanced weapons are giving them a huge market, as well as, you know, an area to, to, to try. all these out and see what works. You'll also notice here on the right hand side, this is actually from World War II, but you'll see all these Chinese fellows with broom handle Mauser's, some of them are semi-auto, some of them are machine pistols. We don't really have a way of knowing, but looking at their gear in the pouches, those appear

to be removable magazines of 20 rounds, plus some other. stuff, they can top off their one or two magazines they have with stripper clips through the stripper clip guide and the bolt, you know, on top of the weapon. They're guarding these Japanese fellows who have surrendered. And at this point, so that's decades of familiarity with the broom handle pistols and machine pistols. Up here, you'll see an Astra with Chinese markings on it on a machine pistol, a copy of the broom handle that was made in Spain. So the Spanish are sending, because here's the key thing to keep in mind. You're seeing a lot of advanced weapons down here. Japan is controlling access to the Chinese market. And so they're trying to keep,

you know, on-paper military weapons away from the country. but there's a loophole. And this was also something that Germany exploited. Germany was restricted due to the Versailles Treaty to certain sizes of weapons and types of weapons, which is where you get the Bolo-Mouser, the broom handle with a slightly shortened grip and barrel that was extremely popular with the Russians and communists in general, as well as in China, et cetera, because it was compliant with the Treaty of Versailles, but still a very capable weapon, and then not in, you know,

9mm because of caliber restrictions. It was 762 by 25 Mauser, or maybe it was 763, excuse me. anyway, so the same thing is happening in China. The Japanese are not letting or restricting, you know, arms of specific types. Automatic rifles, heavy machine guns, bolt action rifles, et cetera, to restrict them to only certain government organs. But handguns are okay. So there's tons of 32 caliber handguns flooding from the Spanish factory. into China and also these broom handles. Astra and some other folks went out because China's consuming all these weapons. They went on a trade mission and saw that the broom handle Mousers were incredibly popular there because it was a light carbine, semi-automatic light carving pretty good out to like 150 yards or so. and they were just gobbling them up. So the copies began fast and furious and almost immediately.

Within like a year, Astra had developed a copy and then other people in the Ibar area were copying them. So 32 ACP out to 150 yards? 32 ACP as a handgun, 763, a massive. Mauser in the broom handle out to 150 yards. And they often had very, uh, very confident site markings on these things, you know,

going out to like 500 yards. So it's like you have a woodstock on a pistol with like a seven inch barrel, but it's a pretty hot cartridge, 763 Mouser, right? It's like the Tokrev cartridge. Pretty good submachine gun cartridge out to, I'd say 150 to 200.

You can do it. It starts losing energy and stuff. at that point, but short range, it's incredible. Great for street fighting and stuff. Cool. Keep going. Yeah, all right. So, Somatines and Cine de Calistas.

So the Basque arms manufacturers start doing their own thing and copying different designs and trying to, again, still trying to find markets because you have all these people that are really skilled and they're like, we have a domestic industry, although there's, you know, gun control or regulations for access in Spain. A lot of stuff going to China, but they're also trying to capture contracts in Spain and then, you know, in Europe, elsewhere, etc., And so all these 32 automatics become really popular with the syndicalistas, the kind of the communist and anarchist extremists who are assassinating people in Spain. And that results under the 1920s dictatorship of General Primo de Rivera of some harsher. restrictions on access. So all the way here on the right hand side, there's an advertisement for somatennis. And you might remember this. The somateng was a, essentially a citizen militia that was under the control or guidance of the, the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, the military dictatorship, and the military government.

that allowed citizens who were, you know, vetted and, like, politically reliable, usually people who are, you know, established parts of their communities to own certain kinds of firearms, bolt action rifles, shotguns, you know, handguns. And so this is an ad for an Astra Model 400 pistol, and this ad is from the 1920s appealing to the Somaten militiamen in one of their own, you know, magazines or newspapers and talking about how, hey, in 1921, in

22, and 1923, the, you know, the army, the Carboneri, the prison corps, the civil guard, and the Navy, the Civil Guard, and the Navy adopted this pistol or accepted it, right? as one of the weapons that you can own because a lot of times the officers would have an approved weapons that they would acquire privately as kind of a traditional European thing. So anyway, so they were advertising this specific 9mm largo pistol. We'll look at it a little more detail soon. commercially again to this kind of restricted population. I saw one in a gun show recently. Yeah, they're great, actually.

He had the old boxes. He had the old boxes to the ones that are stamped on the bottom. Yeah, that's really cool. There's a lot of these in the United States. And like I was saying before, a lot of them came in in the 80s and 90s. They were really cheap at the time. A lot of times the ammunition wasn't that common.

9mm largo, it's 9 by 23, but it's like a, it's not like a 9 by 23 Winchester, which is pretty hot. It's like a 38 super, a rimless 38 super. It's not that pressure. It's like the old 38 ACP, lower pressure. And so people thought they were unreliable because they didn't have the correct cartridges for it. They would try to shoot 9 by 19 in it, which is a little too hot and it's short. You know, it wasn't calibrated for the right springs.

Spring tension. There was a 9 by 19 parabellum version made for the Germans and the Bulgarians during World War II. They sold a lot of those. That's the model 600. Perfectly reliable pistols. Straight blowback. Really, really heavy spring. And they have a really low.

bore axis, so they shoot really nicely. Again, if you have the right cartridges for it, you could get conversion barrels for a 9mm luger feeds out of the same magazines just fine, although the German ones had a spacer. I should say that the 9mm luger proper ones had a spacer in the magazine just for optimal feeding, but really nice pistols. Made to a very high standard. Kind of weird, ergonomically, but there's some really neat ergonomics as well. Like the grip angle's great. So the middle commercial reflects a under the Spanish Republic. It makes reference to the second decree of the 13th of July 1934, which restricted people from being able to buy pistols of any kind of any caliber under the Republic,

because things are getting out of control. So it's a little more modern star pistol. It has a barrel length restriction. It has to be a little longer. You see this in like Canada and Europe a lot. And the specific, it's the, The specific information about the arms restriction is that you have to have authority, you know, for self-defense weapons issued by a competent authority. So like a chauffeur for people in government can have a pistol, city, like municipal agents.

This sounds like New York City. Exactly, exactly. guards and people transporting prisoners and stuff, commercial guards, or like guarding a store or a bank or industry. So it's restricted to individuals who go through screening or these individuals are screened and then like a company can have a certain amount of pistols, you know, that only certain people have access to. So there are still this kind of industry for these weapons in here, but it's like more restricted. But what's important is that while a lot of this is for overseas, use, the factories are still there. So that'll come into play. Yep. During the war. All right. And then the other category of the weapons in the small arms in the Spanish Civil War are artisanal weapons and

artisanal means in Spanish and French use the same as the way we use it, which is boutique, small batch, locally source, handcrafted items made by highly skilled artisans with love. And so these are some, a great example of like a very sophisticated version of this is in this picture here. this is where you get grenades and stuff. So when you read about the extremist attacks in the teens and the 20s and the 30s in Spain with grenades, they're making these themselves. And a lot of them are literally just like a tin can filled with explosives and maybe some nails in it with like a wick that you light. But some of them are very sophisticated.

This is the fie bomb. We talked about this a little bit. Um, the last time we chit chatted. Um, this is what Orwell talks about. So the CNTF AI militia and then the bottom right corner, uh, these fellows here, um, are the, some of the hardcore guys in the Derutie column. Um, they're just terrorists and, and assassins, basically. Uh, they're a, they're a, they're a strike force heavily armed with these grenades. and then small arms. When we were talking about the FAA cellular organization structure, do you remember me talking about the people who are responsible for sourcing equipment,

including weapons? Well, they had whole groups of these cells that were just making these grenades. So they had a, it was first built. I have an article on my substack about it. really interesting. It was first designed. Well, they got the outline of the design from Ramon Franco. Is it Ramon or Raoul? I think it's Ramon Franco, who was a pilot in an anti-monarchist, but not like an anarchist, but he felt like we need to move forward in the in the 20s when they were,

when these anarchists and other people were plotting, this one guy went undercover and claimed to be kind of like a, kind of a semi-conservative, like middle-of-the-road, anti-monarchist. And he was saying, you know, he goes to Ramon and he's like, hey, you're in aviation. You know, I know that you're an anti-monarchist. So-and-so, you know, made the,

the introduction for us to chat, could you help us, like, using your knowledge about, like, aerial bombs and stuff to create a, they call it a hand bomb, Bulmus de Mano, aka a grenade. And based on, you know, what you know about aerial bombs. So he created an impact, fuse, detonated, hand grenade. He kind of sketched the basics out. He let these guys inspect an aerial bomb and a design for an aerial bomb. And then this anarchist organizer, who was the publisher of this, Tierra and Libertad, Libertad, you know, land and freedom, anarchist magazine to design this weapon. He got an assigne. He got an Asturian miner, who was an explosives expert, who was a member of the F-A-I, C-N-T-F-A-I, like extremist group, to do the actual converting this kind of bomb, aerial bomb into like something that they could actually produce that would be useful. Now, you can see in this picture, it doesn't look huge, but it's, it's on the big side for like what a hand grenade would be now and it's blocky because it's it's a it's cylindrical and although it has these cast kind of cells in it that wasn't originally intended necessarily because they thought that it would fragment like a pineapple grenade design that was actually to make it easy to grip we we know for

from analysis and the reason you see the smooth looking fragmentation grenades now, those perforations are on the inside, the way the explosive works, like it actually fragments better that way. They didn't know that at the time. And part of it was just to make it easier to grip because it's big. So anyway, this puppy weighed a kilo and they were like, this will be a good compromise. And what they found was, the problem with a big fat hand grenade like this is that a kilo is 2.2 pounds. And it's really hard to throw this, the kind of distances that you need to throw where you don't have fragments going through your head.

It also has this spring-loaded impact fuse that if you know anything about like springs and inertia and inertially activated items. the act of throwing it alone can cause enough inertia for the firing pin to hit the detonator. So this became known as La Parcial because it was like impartial as far as who it would kill. It would maybe kill the thrower. It would maybe kill the people in his crew because he couldn't throw it far enough to be outside of the lethal range of the shrapnel. This is what we call a defensive style of grenade in military terminology, which means that you throw it from behind cover and take cover because the fragments are going to get you if you don't do that. Still hell on wheels in street fighting and for assassinations, like incredibly effective weapon.

One thing I'll also point out, Pete, is that you'll see this band here that's wrapped around it. they would wrap a cloth streamer around it. And the idea was that it was an extra form of safety to hold down the lever. And you'll see that this is like a pin, like a cotter pin like you have in like an American-style hand grenade. This would make sure that the safety lever didn't fly off accidentally because like a pin got worked loose or whatever. And so that was an extra safety measure. That came from their Lafitte hand grenade, which I'll show you later. But it would also have this streamer effect so that when you threw it,

it would orient this firing pin in kind of inertial system so that when it hit the ground, it would land on the firing mechanism. It didn't always work out that way, but it was a very effective weapon, especially at the beginning when they needed anything that they could get. And they made tens of thousands of these things, like even before the war kicked off. And then they were manufacturing them in factories that the anarchist like local council took over in Catalonia. And I think I told you this. They had 35,000 of them in trucks when the Derrude column went up from,

the Aragon front as well as Catalonia up to Madrid to defend the city against Franco's oncoming army of Africa. So very, very interesting and effective weapon, although again, not something that lasted. They phased it out in spring or summer-ish, 1937, with a more kind of traditional style of grenade that I actually didn't do much dive into. I'll just show the kind of military issue ones, but you get the idea. It's a crazy but pretty sophisticated shopmade weapon that was very influential, especially at the beginning. beginning of the war, especially right at the uprising. Because if you have, you know, hundreds of hand grenades in your crew of, you know, 50 guys, you can do a lot in street fighting, even if you're not super well equipped otherwise.

Imagine knowing how sensitive those are and being the guy that they're like, hey, climbing the truck and drive that, you know, 200 miles up to Madrid. Yeah, there's design elements in the Lafitte that like take that into account that I'll cover in a second. But yeah, I think I mentioned this too. So this was first like refined in Argentina. So a crew of anarchists in Argentina were building them and they were working. They were going back and forth between Argentina and Uruguay. And they were involved in local. shenanigans in Argentina attempted uprisings there. So there was a bomb factory there and the main manufacturer crippled himself. And of course, you know, because a bomb went off basically, or he was testing it and got hit by it. He wasn't killed, but he had to sit there because, again, you can't take a guy during a military government, you know, dealing with an anarchist uprising who has, like, grenade injuries. You can't take him to the hospital. So this poor guy is just like, you know, scumbag, but still, you know, my Christian love is feeling compassion for all living things. This scumbag is lying there, like, wrapped up, you know, explaining people to people who are. less experienced how to make these things these incredibly dangerous grenades with with injuries from

it that's that's dedication you have to you have to you know tip your hat to that level of dedication oh my good yeah that's yeah that's um i immediately think to myself well he's an anarchist yes too bad he didn't get taken out yeah um yeah i that's my cat that's my catholic side saying die fucking commie scum yes of course um the the other the other famous self-own with uh la impartial was um this guy named braulio um who was again when they went back to barcelona and they were manufacturing these in earnest because again you have to get out of you have to get out of south america when they're on to you and um you know the all these weapons there i believe there was a failed uprising, a bunch of the weapons got captured, and then the factory got captured. I found the

original article in Spanish, of course. And so it got captured along with the main bomb maker who was all crippled, and they're describing the scene, you know, these low-level people, but then the masterminds got out of there and went back to Spain. So they're in Barcelona making these things, and one of the main manufacturers, one of the main makers of this, blew himself up during testing when they're out in the mountains northwest of Barcelona. If you've been to Barcelona, it's like coastline and then it immediately becomes mountainous. You know, low mountains, like high hills, but they're back in the forest there. And so they just buried him there.

And yeah, this fellow Brawlio. So, yeah, it was very famous for killing the people making and using them. good times so who's the who's the tall drink of water next to franco oh that's um oh my gosh why is my brain not working um general uh uh the the crippled guy general crippled guy uh are you orio is it ariel orio yeah yeah i believe it's oriel yeah i think it's ariel yeah i think it's are you all yeah so he's in it he's in a movie um about oh like right when the uprising happens and they um gosh i'll have to i had someone ask me about movies about the spanish civil war um and it was a very unsympathetic um portrayal because he was really just a military man who

was all about order like he co-founded the uh spanish legion with franco they were best pals and yeah very very interesting fellow but a key ringleader in the in the in the uprising so So we're going to look at... It wasn't Jose Milan-Austrey, was it? It was Austria, yes, I'm sorry. Yeah, Austria. Yeah. Okay, no problem.

Yeah. Thank you for that. So the superlative Spanish Mouser, 7mm Mouser is such a nice little sweet spot. And a lot of, like, heavier weapons are coming back to this kind of 6.5 millimeter to 7-millimeter. meter sweet spot that was figured out like at the end of the 19th century with the first this is a first generation smokeless cartridge and it's a very very nice cartridge the rim size is the same as 30 a 30-0 6 and 308 it's you know dimensionally it fits right into that you know nice you know nice middle range cartridge um high vol modesty, modest recoil, flat trajectory. They started out with kind of the long, round bullet of like 170-ish grains. No metric, sorry euros. 139 grain spitzer bullet at 2,800 FPS, about 2,400 foot pounds of energy. Plenty, plenty powerful flat shooting. This is the 1916 short model,

which became their standard, carbon like 23-inch barrel-ish, 22-23-inch, about six inches less tube out front than the original longer variants, which were still used very heavily in the war. During the Boer War, the Boer Republic employed similar Mousers, 1893s and 1895s and 7-millimeter Mouser. they rocked the British so well that the British in the late 1890s that the British military like re-evaluated their small arms theory and you know really amped up next generation iteration of the 303 to meet that kind of capability because it was so flat shooting and so easy to hit and so easy to operate that they, figured out like we're behind the times like we need to we need to get with it um the u.s military also went toe to toe against the spanish uh in Cuba and in the Philippines um and then later in the war in Mexico 1914 so in the Mexican Civil War the US intervened a little bit and they if I recall they called it the Spanish Hornet um because it was high velocity and

would just rock you uh they were used using the 1873 Remington's in 4570 as well as like the 3040 crag. And after they went up against the Spanish with the crag, they were like, yeah, we got to, we got to do something different here, which is why we went to the 1903 Springfield, which if I recall correctly as a Mauser pattern action, or am I thinking of the end field? but I'm pretty confident.

It's very Mouser action-esque in 30-0-6. So very, this was the main weapon. There were like 500,000 of them in Spain at the time of the war. You know, when they were first, when Maozer, Paul Mouser developed this rifle, and he actually got a military, Spanish military medal of merit. a medal award for for developing this weapon because the Spanish felt that it was such a like a next generation

piece of equipment for their military. Yeah, so they were actually manufactured in Oviedo, up in Asturias, for decades. And that was like the main arsenal that was producing these rifles, although during the war that was kind of redistributed as needed based on what was under control. The La Corunia, also far up in the northwest of Spain, the La Corunia

arsenal became a weapons manufacturer as well because the nationalists controlled it. Funny story, funny story. So in Asturias, I was just talking about an Austurian miner that made this grenade design, right? So Asturias was the center of the militant anarchist miners who were sappers and, you know, dynamiters, Dina Menteros. And so they were really crucial shock troops for the anarchists in all of their attempted uprisings, et cetera, well, as well as resistance to the army uprising in 1936. So funny story, I'll write about it sometime soon, but funny story is that the military governor in the area, again, under the republic, but still a military governor. because of the Oviedo factory and everything like that, swore up and down that he was loyal to the Republic. And, you know, so when the uprising happened, this colonel said to these Austrian miners,

hey guys, here's, you know, you can take some weapons, but I think you need to go to Madrid because the government needs to be protected if the city falls, you know we lose to these these horrible fascists so like 4,000 Austerian minors like most of the the left militants in and around Oviedo left and headed southeast they got they got blocked at the passes like going into Castile leon and got stymied there and then the colonel said psych were with the we're with the nationalist uprising and so they were able to hold the city and keep the the factory even though most of the areas around them were captured by republicans and anarchists so good times all right so that looks like yeah i've seen yeah the those are the exact boxes that this guy had at uh at a show that's awesome because it was that was the that was the main way you could get this cartridge until like the i know there was some commercial manufacturer but it was it was like well into the 2000s i think before you could find anything other than this um you know spanish flag you know military arsenal produced ammunition which is great ammunition so um astra 400 9

millimeter Largo. Astra is a Basque Country Arms manufacturer. They won this contract to make the pistol for the Army, for the Navy, for a bunch of government law enforcement organizations, you know, carbunary equivalents, etc. Straight blowback, extremely heavy spring, long barrel, very low boraxus, a very nice shooting pistol, very accurate because it the barrel, it's not fixed like where it's pinned into the frame like on like an FN 1922, but it fits in with grooves into the receiver. And so you can pop it out and clean it really easily, but it's like fixed in place. So very, very accurate pistol with a nice recoil operation. It's kind of weird because it's this long heavy spring thing.

Really interesting ergonomics. It has this kind of like raised here on the, the grooves for the cocking grooves. It kind of swells out so that it fits your finger for like a pinch grip. It's really, really neat pistol. Down here on the right hand side, there's a comparison shot. This is 9mm. Largo. So it's 23 millimeters long.

It uses, it's basically the equivalent of a 9 by 19 millimeter in pressure. It's slightly lower pressure because it's an older cartridge. It has this crazy, crazy, like long groove. Some things I've read about it is that some of this is based on a theory of cartridge layout to work with a blowback pistol. And again, lower pressure than like 9 by 19. which requires a locked breach, although they were able to adapt this pistol just fine

to use 9 by 19. Over on the right-hand side is we have more modern cartridges. I believe the one right here is 9x23, Winchester, which is very high pressure and very modern. And I believe that this is a 38 super rimless, which is basically the 38 super, but with a recessed rim. So these are very hot, way hotter than 9x23 Largo, which is an early 20th century, you know, standard pressure kind of pistol.

So very cool pistol, very basic. And it was the primary handgun just because, again, they made so many of them for government use. They were also available commercially. So plenty were privately owned commercially, et cetera. And it was the main, it was the standard military issue handgun. The Republic made copies of them in Valencia and Barcelona. Was it Valencia? Yeah, Valencia in Barcelona.

I think Valencia. Again, at these old arsenals, they were able to, government arsenals, they were able to reproduce them using the factories there. So I'm keeping this like platoon slash company level in terms of the weaponry. So these are very interesting and strange looking to us, but this is a tonalete hand grenade. It was a Spanish Army issue hand grenade. They had a little wire loop for sliding it into your belt or mounting it on a belt or hanging it on a bandalier or something like that. It was a cast iron, very small, like very throwable hand grenade.

They had a rubber cap over the top, and you would pop the rubber cap off, and there was a little recessed area in this kind of whole top end here, because there is essentially like a wall here. It was black powder. So it was a very old basic design that had Rosen in it, I think, to, to, make it a little more weatherproof and less shockproof. So it was essentially a casting. It was liquid and then they would pour it in and it would harden while still maintaining its explosiveness.

So like a low order explosive because it's black powder based. But it actually worked very well. It was a defensive grenade, but it had a small blast radius because it was black powder. And so it was actually very popular for that reason. They made this like in through the civil war and there were so there were copies of it. And it was lit with a wick. So it was a, a wire. So if you if you've ever seen like on a on a zippo,

lighter there's like wire structure. Yeah, I've taken it apart and put it back. Yeah, exactly. I've taken them apart and put it back together. So so that it can it can kind of hold and. and be a little more robust. And then there was a piece of a, like a little shard of like Flint or something like that to be used as a striker. So flint and steel, right?

So you would strike it on the body of the grenade itself to light it. And it was actually very popular because it was very safe and it was reliable. Like it would light in rain and stuff like that if you didn't like soak it and puddle. and stuff like that. And it was not super dangerous for the user. Now, it's slow. Like, obviously that became very obsolete. But this design was copied extensively throughout the whole country in all these little small, again, artisanal shops or like naval arsenals were a big builder of this kind of weaponry all throughout the country. They would retool to copy these weapons. And this one is actually a variant that was made in Madrid.

Again, during the siege of Madrid, it became, you know, they started making these in their particular style. So you saw these with militias and you saw it with the Republic and with the nationalists. This here is a really weird-looking grenade called a Lafitte. It was originally a French design, but it was a Spanish issue offensive grenade, meaning that it has a cast, not a cast, but like a sheet metal body, so that it doesn't fragment that much. Like, of course, when it explodes, the mec and all the pieces will go flying. But the idea is an offensive grenade is you can throw it and a salt into it.

So like the German potato masher is an offensive grenade, they made them later where you could put a sleeve, like a fragmenting sleeve over it. But the idea was that this one also has a really weird fire control mechanism and it had a streamer to orient because it was also an impact fuse. But it was more like inertial. So there's this percussion system in here. and then the detonator and the safety, like it had to be jostled with enough pressure with the safety mechanism removed that the spring would be able to hit the detonator.

And then it was filled with like a liquid, a liquid or sludgy plastic explosive. So a high explosive. So again, offensive grenade used for, you know, you can throw it and it'll have like a three to four, meter blast radius so you can charge into it. Like it's great for trench warfare and urban fighting, but kind of odd.

It also had that streamer effect. And again, the streamer would retain this weird sheet metal pressure plate that held down that like safety mechanism. And you would pull, you would pull this pin system and it would have to pull all the way out so like three and a half four inches before this plate would be loose so that it could you could then throw it. And so like you would have it still be partially wrapped with the streamer so that you threw it before the whole thing fell off. So you couldn't cook it like a percussion style grenade with a spoon like the American style. You couldn't cook it off because there's no timer.

You just threw it. So. And then over here is a 50 millimeter. trench mortar called the Valero that was manufactured by Esperanza Ithea. So Esperanza and company up in Basque Country in a smaller town, but they've been making these based on like World War I, like little like platoon level mortars and stuff. This is the precursor to like grenade launchers and stuff. So this was something that you saw like the Japanese knee mortar is really well known.

It's basically most of the time you see it with just the body and you put it down on the ground and you don't fire it off your knee. You kneel and you you lay it down and then aim it. But this one was done. You would lay this one of the heaviest parts was the base. You'd put it into the ground and then aim with it lying down on your stomach while someone else loaded it and stuff like that. So very, very interesting and typical of the interwar period. That kind of weapon stuck around into World War II, but then it very rapidly went away with kind of miniaturization,

like you could move up to a 60 millimeter mortar or have grenade launchers and rifle grenades and stuff. All right. Speaking of rifle grenades, I don't have anything in this here, but by 1938, there was some use of rifle grenades by the nationalists using German rifles in 8mm using rifle grenades. Because the Germans had used those in World War I, and then they kind of redid them for World War II. And so some of the testing of these weapons was done in Spain. So it is not me making stuff up when I have people using those in my book.

again at the very end of the war. All right. So again, keeping this mostly small arms, but I'm about to diverge from that in a second, just because it's interesting. But Spanish medium and light machine guns. The Spanish had military liked the Hotchkiss, so French design.

And they used these stripper clips to feed from. So not belt fired. They went towards belt fed weapons later, but in the war, they really modernized. You'll see this slash 38. They really modernized as the war went on

because they had to ramp up the manufacturer because they didn't have that many machine guns. They had the medium, Hotchkiss over here, the 1914, that had proved itself in the RIF war. They used the 1922, which they adopted and made themselves under license beginning in 1925. That one also used these stripper clips. So here's the thing to keep in mind, you know, World War I to World War II, there were still a lot of these kind of old style. of weapons that phased out because we found things that worked better.

Militaries tend to be really conservative. And so if you think about it, particularly like a good example is the Spanish Rift War. So they're running around in North Africa in horrible conditions and the supply lines are really long. And these stripper clips are easy to keep. clean and dry and, you know, you don't have cloth getting wet and rotting and you don't have these super complex links that get all clogged up and everything like that. Like logistically, like you can carry these stripper clips in bags and boxes and everything

like that. And these are crew served weapons. They would have a seigne of six men, right? that's like your fire team level. But it's also, and like half of them to make a, you know, they make a full squad, a squadra of 12 men. But you would have six men supporting each of these weapons. Later in the war, the light machine guns, they reduced the number of guys supporting it a little bit. And part of that was in 1938 when they started building this weapon at La Corunia. they went towards the top magazine fed style. Only the Spanish and the British acquired the Hotchkiss and license for elements of the design of the Hotchkiss with the Top Magazine feed.

The British used it for their trials where they ultimately adopted the Brengun, which is CZ. right? So it's a it's a check design, but they really liked this style and the the Spanish nationalists move towards this top magazine fed version eventually. All right. So those were reusable, you know, link systems are an issue because you know, the links are everywhere. This way, it's really easy to keep things like logistically simple, they last longer, etc. So very conservative thinking. But it also kept the rate of fire down, which meant the barrels lasted longer. You know, you kept your ammunition around more, et cetera. So anyway, just a basic philosophy. This was the beginning of the end for these kinds of designs, that this was one of the last

usages of them anywhere. All right. And my only departure from small arms here, is around armor. So the Spanish army had a handful of these Renaul light tanks, which were from 1917 or 1918, I think, was the design. They liked them. It took like two men to operate them, plus, you know, your support team, you have the driver and the gunner. And it, they had variants with a light gun, like a 37 millimeter.

and then another one with, you know, the same light machine gun we were just looking at. The idea was, is that it would be fairly fast to get around but be protected from small arms fire. It was completely obsolete by the time the war started. But it did, the reason I bring it up is because we're going to look at some stuff that they got, that the Republic got from the Soviets that's just super next generation. So anyway, wrapping it up there, they only had a handful of these things. They were imported. They had factories that were making some types of armored cars and stuff like that and tanks and repairing these.

But there weren't that many. It was pretty new. So when you hear people talk about how Spain was the testing ground for a lot of the weapons used in World War II, it's kind of true. but in a lot of ways it was just because Spain didn't have much of this sort of thing. So when the Italians and Germans and Soviets brought them in, they would use them. But to be candid, the nationalists captured and used a huge amount of the Soviet weapons as well, just because they never had many of these rentals and they didn't last long in the war.

all right so um i mentioned so that was the army and now i'm going to talk about like the guardia seville and then like one of their subgroups which is the quesopo de seguerida and assault guards um the assault guards were a um specialist crew that were selected uh because they were very hardcore pro republic zealots that were very loyal to the government. When the war kicked off, the Guardia Seville as a whole split almost 50-50 between the nationalists and the Republicans. A lot of it depended on where you're at, or it come down to individual officers,

but also like as things split up, they tended to stick with whoever the local authorities were. But again, the assault guards were arch-libs. So they all very long time ago, they started acquiring 4440 Winchester 1873s and 76s that were copied up in Basque Country. And then they had this very popular copy of the 1892 that was adopted in 1915 for the Guardia Seville and some like forestry officers and stuff. And they were very popular in civilian use. over a million of them were made by the time the war started. A lot of those were shipped to like Central and South America. But there were a lot of them in the war.

So you'll see, especially at the beginning of the war, you'll see a lot of pictures of militiamen with this rifle or carbine. They also used, you know, the Hotchkiss 1914 and 1920. Again, this is military-style police. They have heavy weapons. They also used the Mousser rifles. They had approved the Astra 400, but they also adopted the Model A, which is very 1911 style and layout and look and feel in 9mmar Largo. So they didn't, they authorized usage and purchase.

of the 400, but they issued the Model A in large numbers. And then in 1934, the assault guards needed a new weapon. They had trials for machine pistols because they wanted to take advantage of this big industry up in the north, where they were making copies of the Mouser-Broom handle with automatic fire and removable magazines. And so they had 9 millimeter. They adopted the Astro Model F and 9 millimeter Largo in 1934. The arms factories up in the north were captured by the Basque authorities who were aligned with the Republic. And Astra alone contributed several thousand machine pistols.

and semi-automatic broom handles to the war. A lot of them were in 763, and so they ran into logistics issues. The nationalists as they captured them. They were trying to stay on top of and stay resupplied through commercial arms dealers, bringing ammunition in and stuff like that, and they had some of that. but the nationalists actually used a whole bunch of them in 763 because they would just order from, they would get the ammo from the Germans. So, right, it makes sense. All right. So that covers the official government. Most of those weapons that you saw were the core weapons used during the war.

militia acquisitions were different. This is a picture of Carlist militia in late, like December 1936, kind of in that Oregon front up in the mountains there. You'll see some interesting weapons. They have Spanish Mousers, but then this is a Solithorn light machine gun. And they acquired a couple hundred of these. before the war started, specifically financed by their own acquisition group and brought in in Europe, or from Europe, I should say. So they had some decent weapons, and this was kind of the model for all the different militias. So the key focus, like pre-war jump off, they were. they would typically have commercially available weapons, and that would mean either they purchase it legally. It came from seizure of weapons that were purchased legally from individual owners or raiding depots or gun shops, you know, warehouses, or another thing that they would do is they would be redirected from exports.

So again, the commercial manufacturer was mostly focused for the export market. And there were a lot of shenanigans where they would like do the old switcheroo with shipping manifests. Again, with a wink and a nod from people who were sympathetic to this. Or, you know, they would, these big industrial concern guys would arrange a order through an arms dealer in like, Belgium of Mouser broom handle copies. And then at the same time, they would order a shipment from Ibar of like hardware to Navarre or something like that. This is a specific example that happened. They switched around the shipping manifests and then shipped all the Mouser broom handles to Navarre and all the hardware went to their complicit

arms dealer in Belgium. Clandestine purchased overseas and smuggled in. Up at the very top is an Arasaka rifle that was captured by the Russians in the Russo-Japanese war. And a bunch of them got dumped onto the commercial market by the Soviet Union, selling them after the Civil War kind of settled out because they were kind of useless to them. they didn't always keep everything that they acquired for redistribution of their own, but they tended to use these obsolete weapons to arm different groups that they wanted to support.

But a lot of that stuff was smuggled in in various ways, again, through various trickery or just brought over the borders. Okay, so I'm not going to – I was thinking. about this and this could have gotten too broad, we would have been looking at like, you know, German and Italian small arms and tanks and everything like that until our eyes bled. Oh yeah, there's there's tons. There's too much. Yeah. So I decided to focus on what the Republic was getting. The shorthand of it is the Soviet Union supplied a large force of modern vehicles and advisors, along with small arms. And the small arms were a mixed bag. We're going to, we're going to look at that in a little more detail. Those began to arrive. Have you ever looked

into the list of names of the advisors? Yes. Have you ever gone to their Wikipedia? Yes. Did I ever look at their early life? Yeah. How like almost every single one of them. Yes. Yes. And also isn't it isn't an interesting how when most of the them got back home, um, they were no longer Soviets or alive. Yes. Yes. It's very strange. It's it. I think it's it I should do a deep dive on the subject. Um, because it's, I think it's very important to understand that like Stalin was, I'm, I'm not going to do the whole, um, gosh, what's the, what's the term the nickname that people have, uh, Nasbole. I'm not going to do the whole nationalist, national socialist Bolshevik thing.

Like, it's retarded. But it is really interesting how these kind of internationalist shock troops very much were sent out to agitate elsewhere and not, you know, not be around the Soviet Union as much as possible, right? I think that's the briefest way to describe it. Yeah, and one thing that I didn't realize until I had, Joel out of poll on, was that he, Stalin really wasn't extremely, he really didn't care about that one certain group too much. Yeah. He cared more about the groups that were, like, Diaspora groups.

like Poles or Germans who were in there who could who could collude with their home countries. Yes. Those are the ones he went and executed. It wasn't until Israel started to exist that there was a certain focus because what is it? Now this is the Diaspora group. Yep. That can be a threat to the Soviet Union. Yeah, because he could control or direct their energy.

Again, just like you said, send them in the international. or as quote-unquote advisors out into the world to do their thing. Again, they're their own kind of group, but as long as they're doing the work that he wants them to do, they're like not a threat, right? And but at the same time, the whole cleanup that took place is very interesting and it seems very nuanced. Like could these people, these people kind of have an a spree decor and it's it's its own thing and then they come back and they could be a separate faction and i don't want a separate faction going on in in my country so it's interesting or there could be you know the thing of well you lost yes that's true that's true i mean and i'm not

saying that what you were talking about was uh i'm saying all of it you know why not both yes yes why not Yeah. Yeah. Why not both? Porque no los dos. So it's really interesting because so when in July 1936, when the military uprising happens and it takes a little, you know, it has its fits and starts.

The Soviet Union already had international like internationals lined up and organizing and they had all these weapons ready to go. And they were arriving almost instantly. And so, you know, for there to be a reaction and for something to spin up from nothing, like it really shows and goes to emphasize the fact that the Soviet international

had plans and had connections with all these different, you know, people in government and all these other countries and they they expected this to happen at any point because they had ships loaded with weapons and ammunition and vehicles and fuel headed straight to Spain like right away. They were they were landing the turnaround time for this like you never would have for you to believe that this they just reacted to this is hilarious. And you see this all the time in the in the lefty writeups on the subject. It's so obvious that they were ready to go that now in fairness to get the international volunteers spun up. Logistically, that took a while, but they were arriving at the same time.

So, you know, there were a lot of people that didn't volunteer until like a couple weeks after the uprising happened and the civil war began. And they already had systems to plug into to get to Spain. How coincidental. And a lot of that came through France. Paris was the headquarters for the Soviet international that was managing the international brigades officially. Like most of the the brigades were going through France. So France was, France downplayed. its participation. Their big thing was administering armed shipments and people and aircraft and fuel. They were providing a lot of their Air Force's aircraft and fuel and bombs and ammunition and stuff like that. But their most important role was just facilitating the flow through. They would open it up and close it off and there's all this stuff in, you know, Lib Tar.

and, you know, even Bivore, Bivore talks a lot about like the party line of like, oh, France, you should have helped the Republic more. But they were getting a huge amount of pressure. There was this whole non-intervention pact element and stuff like that. France was breaking the rules, you know, that everyone had agreed on Soviets were, the Germans and Italians were, right? Like, the Americans and British were allowing, you know, trucks and tires and fuel to go to the nationalists. So it's everyone lying and pretending that they're following the rules,

just like happened so often in the 20th century. So let's talk very briefly. Soviet armor. Huge game changer happens. And like a lot of firsts happen in 1936 in Spain, or at least supposed firsts. So the up at the top is a B.A. 3 slash 6. It's a it's a Soviet armored car that has a turret, the same turret as the T-26 tank, turret and gun, I should say, and the same turret as the BT5 down below, which is a light tank. So if everyone remembers correctly, so under the Treaty of Versailles, Germany couldn't develop certain kinds of vehicles and military weapons or build them. And so you may or may not know that they were doing a lot of development work in the Soviet Union because the Soviet Union was also under certain types of sanctions and restrictions at the same time.

So the funny mustache man and even people before funny mustache man in their military were doing these secret, the secret work in a quote unquote tractor factory in the Soviet Union. So a lot of the development of these weapons was kind of collaborative between those countries. But they ended up going in some pretty different directions. The armored car up at the top was based on, I believe it was a Ford a Ford design that was being manufactured. They provided it as aid, and then it was turned into an armored car. Anyway, the Soviets built a lot of these things.

And so between the two, it's like the tank is the most flexible in terms of the terrain it can go over. The armored car is best on roads, but it can go a lot faster, lighter armor. while still having a fair bit of firepower. So these in the battle, like right before they got to Madrid, so north of, north of, you know, the battle of the Alcazar, they start, the army of Africa starts running into these tanks and armored cars, the kind of the southern periphery of the plane

sits on in the very middle of the country. And so you get the first, supposedly the first Molotov cocktail deployment by nationalists, you know, fire bottle style. I'm skeptical that that was the first time. But the name Molotov cocktail came out because General Molotov was, you know, said, hey, we need to have this be like kind of a standard plan for urban warfare and anti-tank stuff. The general idea was that if you throw burning fuel on top of the, uh, kind of the air intakes for the engines for these tanks, you can, uh,

slow them down or disable them. So lots of crazy tank battles. Uh, they don't have good anti-armor weapons. They eventually get the Germans and the Soviets, um, make them available and it's literally just these like tank guns, 37 and 40,

45 millimeter, I think. on the German one. But, and then the Germans, of course, go full retard with like exotic optics. And the Soviets just use basic iron sites that are fine for the ranges that are involved. So the general decision that the nationalists came to was that in general, the Soviet ones were better because they were simpler. And they were just as good. So important thing to think about it. think so anyway i that was the only departure that i really wanted to have with small arms um the other thing that the that the republic gets is cast-offs from the red army so the red army if if we go back to world war one um again i'm not going to put on the putt in hat but if we go

back to world war one there were a couple things that were going on as the as the russians the imperial russian army was gearing up again massive army they were going all over the place to acquire as much as they could get in terms of firearms for their army and any equipment as was as could be had um this is an interesting picture because we have here a modern check or polish frag egg style fragmentation grenade that this guy's throwing and he's using a French like really crappy obsolete single shot eight millimeter rifle from the previous century. And I think that's a Polish helmet. So that the Red Army had this thing where as they went through all this World War I weaponry, some of it was stuff they had captured. Some of it. was stuff that they captured in the in the 20s, right? In the late teens in the 20s as they were running around Eastern Europe.

Others were these old weapons that the Imperial Russian Army acquired to gear up just to have anything. The left-hand side here is one of my favorites and one of my characters uses this rifle. So this is a Winchester 1895. The Imperial Russian Army, went to America, like went up into like Connecticut in during the war and said, we need 762 by 54 rifles. Like Westinghouse and Remington were building the Mosinigant for them to their standard. A whole bunch of those got surplus because they were rejected by the Russian, imperial inspectors because like the wood wasn't pretty enough and stuff like that. It's totally

bizarre. But they got several hundred thousand of these 1895 lever actions in 760 by 54. They're fed by a stripper clip through the top. Beautiful, long, cool rifles. Very nice. But the Soviet Army was focused on standardization and modernizing. They didn't want to use old worn out rifles. So what happened was kind of people on the outskirts of the Soviet Union were getting these rifles. So they were using them in uprisings in Finland and in the Balkans and the Baltics, especially. And they sent like 34,000 of them to Spain. And there's a whole bunch that the Spanish government release. in like the 60s and 70s, I want to say, onto the U.S. market through inter-arms.

So some of the best, we have intelligence documents and photographs that are available online that I'll put a link to that the nationalists did during and especially after the war where they were accounting for like everywhere all these weapons came from because what they wanted to do is figure out where these weapons were coming from, who was supplying them, because they were appealing to like the British and Americans and plus these non-intervention groups, you know, these governmental organizations that are multinational organizations to monitor this stuff because they wanted to cut down on the amount of weapons that were coming in. So anyway, so they were documenting where all this stuff was coming from.

So we know that this came from the Soviets. We know these Lebel rifles and stuff were coming from the Soviets from, from again these old World War I stockpiles. They also had arms dealers who were sending Polish BARs to the Republic in 1936, Enfield rifles that had been captured by the Germans that had ended up in weird spots. with arms dealers somehow, like the Germans and maybe unloaded them or put them in warehouses and they weren't found until later, like Ross rifles from Canada from World War II, or excuse me, World War I, that somehow ended up in Belgium or in France.

They had LeBelle rifles. They had Bergman light machine guns coming in in 792. They had 8mm manlature, like all this. Austro-Hungarian stuff was floating around. And so they were shipping it there, like all kinds of crazy calibers. And then so the Berthier, 8mmabels, all this crap that no one wants. And they're getting ammunition with it, but that's like all the ammunition that's available.

So, you know, Pete, when, you know, there isn't much like World War I and World War II stuff that still shows up on the market commercially. But when it comes in, like, it usually comes in with, like, all the ammunition they have in that caliber, and then it stops. Like, you never see it again. So you have to order it from, you know, these European small manufacturers for like $30 a box for 20 rounds and stuff like that. That was what logistically was taking place with all these old random weapons except 762 by 54 mosenagant and maxim machine guns like this old worn-out stuff it was obsolescent but still good quality stuff the red army had moved on they were focusing on building new stuff and going in different directions so the old stuff was going to spain these

pictures are from the battle of the ebro or around the time of the Battle of the Ebro. And at this point, all those old weapons had in all their ammunition, like all the weird French stuff, all the weird Austrian stuff, like most of that stuff had been used up by the time of this battle or it was being held in reserves. They were really logistically like the 762 by 54 Soviet stuff was the big focus in that war, or that part of the war. Additionally, with that commercial, acquisition and aid. So this is a check, a check mouser in eight millimeter. There was a bunch of that too. And then our friend, the FN 1922, 32 automatic, the international brigades and a lot of the Republican

forces that you'll see in this Battle of Ebro, they have eight millimeter. for the main guys on the offensive they have eight millimeter mauser's and uh eight millimeter b a rs and eight millimeter breng guns um you know the the check ones um the you know all the all this kind of like random stuff where they have the logistics for it they kind of dial it in to where they're by unit the units are using the same weapons um and they're they're is standardized as much as they can, but they have to use what they have. And you'll see tons and tons and tons of the officers, whether they're international units or they're the, the Republic's officers with FN 1922 pistols because of huge acquisitions of those that were all

down there hanging out in like Catalonia ready to go. So again, And another weird thing that happened is like Mexico, which had a socialist government at the time, sent a whole bunch of Mosin Nagantz. They had acquired, they had bought a bunch of those, the American-made Mosin-Nagans and used it themselves like during their civil war. And, you know, in the 20s and then they shipped a ton of them over. They sent a whole bunch of 7mm Mouser rifles because they were. kind of going in a different direction. There were sanitized Polish mousers, so the poles were selling them just for money and sanitizing them by like milling out the markings and the crests that showed that they were Polish.

And then again, like I said, those Czech commercial weapons and stuff like that. So it's this crazy time. There's all this World War I surplus. There's all this other even pre-World War I surplus. plus all the stuff captured in World War I flows through different arms dealers. And a lot of it is the Russians are doing, the Soviets are doing an awful lot of that. Like the real bulk, huge orders of stuff were coming from the Soviets. But there was some interesting, like pretty high-end new stuff coming from Poland and the Czech Republic as well.

So that brings us to, you know, like let's cement this in time. We're done with my gun autism. And you've seen me share this map before. But here I have a slightly different talk track. So as you'll remember, the military uprising. So the nationalist uprising is most successful in the conservative parts of Spain, and as well as like military certain military strongholds. It was often squashed in street fighting by leftist militias.

So like Barcelona, Santander, Toledo, and Madrid, control of the arsenals and factories, absolutely critical. So if you have control of those domestic sources of those weapons, that makes the difference between being able to field people for actual fighting. as well as continued production. So that logistical nightmare, the nationalists did a much better job of securing the arsenals and the factories. And so the Republic was left on the back foot where they ended up, you know, like I showed, they had like small and local manufacturer stuff. But like Barcelona, like two million cartridges being produced was this big deal. Like two million cartridges is nothing in a real world.

war. That was like the best they could do. So they were super dependent on imports. And again, so that's why I emphasized the Republic's imported weapons. So again, the left militias were largely equipped by what they brought, what they could bring to the fight, all those random like small weapons or stuff that was smuggled over, handguns, grenades they made, unless they could capture arsenals or persuade the Republic to a little. release weapons. Like in Madrid, there's this whole drama of the back and forth for like months before the, at least a month before, um, Azanya releases, um, the arsenal, uh, to the leftist militias. And then they're able to actually fight at that point. Um, so yeah, that wraps up what I had prepared. Hail Franco. Hail Victor. Yeah, it's, I think the most, the carlists having been so organized before the war even kicked off. Yes.

Really stands out. And then the Republicans having everything ready to go. You know, it's almost like the, it's almost like the Carless, the Carless knew before and were better equipped for what was coming than any of the other groups on the right 100% yeah even the military in a lot of places like the the military's weaponry it was so dispersed and the car list just came loaded for bear with do you remember me talking about their military advisor don pepe who was running around and equipping them he had been he was basically a spec ops guy who was uh who was who was running around Europe for during the 20s and in the 30s, even under the Republic,

learning about state of the art, military organization, structured, employment, and then advanced weaponry. So he was advising and helping direct that, which is why the car lists had the latest stuff. They had old stuff too. They have in a lot of cases like RSI. Saka's and stuff. But they also had tons of light machine guns to start off, you know, relative to everyone else. So yeah, they were ready to go. And again, going back to that map, which I will go back to here, that's how they secured this huge swath. They split the key Republican zones because this is where so many of the weapons were manufactured. You'll see Akarunia. And then Oviedo is an exception. It's in blue because it's nationalist. Yeah. So very, very important thing to think about.

Again, as we look at the theoretical like nothing ever happens type people, like you have to have plans and you have to think at what's been done in the past and what's worked in the past. and think about logistics. It's not just fun with autism, although I love that stuff. I would also say again, I highly recommend that people check out my article on the the commercial or military and artisanal hand grenades of the Spanish Civil War on my substack. It goes into detail about the CNTFAI production, and that whole, history there, there's almost nothing in English on that subject until, like, very recently, I've seen some translations of Spanish stuff go into like wikis, like little tiny blurbs,

but that's another thing to think about when you're thinking of lawfully legal, fun, theoretical, educational activities. Well, awesome, Carl. of course I'm going to include the links but remind everybody else where they can find. You've already mentioned the substack, give them the address and everything. Yes, Carl Dahl, K-A-L-D-A-H-L dot substack.com. I'm also on Twitter, but just look for Carl Dahl and you'll be able to find me that way. I have one of those unfortunate names because Twitter is evil.

I appreciate it. Thank you. Thanks, Pete. I want to welcome everyone to part seven of my reading of Warren H. Carroll'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 are you doing, Carl? Doing well, Pete. Thank you. When I had John 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, I have an hour somewhere, 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, horsemen. And it's kind of interesting because the old culture of Spain was largely rotated around the, ability, 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, he was more radical than his party position. So his party, and and sometimes I don't get all the different kind of like sub-communist non-Bolshevik, you know, national communist groups nailed perfectly. But he worked very closely with the common turn. He was essentially a stalking horse for the Communist Party when he was in prison. I'm trying to remember if it was under the, it may have been in the 20s. He was imprisoned for a bit under the excellent dictatorship of Primo de Rivera. And he read Lenin and got extremely radicalized.

So he would say completely insane things about wanting to eradicate the religion of Christianity and the church. you know so one it 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 um it was a it was a frame up to get rid of the old system the monarchy um to basically throw out the cortes and have uh 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 enjoyers of violence. that there was. So they'll talk about it here in his relationship with asagna and all the various flavors of things that they 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. Lager 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 Hesuz-Herndos. The other was agriculture under Vincente Uribe. But there was also a third communist in Lago Caballetto's government in the highly important position of Foreign Secretary, Julio Alvada,

excuse me, sorry, guess. 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 and, 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, you know, 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

of the military, essentially, to the common turn, aka the Soviet Union. I'll hand it back to you. Yeah, and I want to make a point because, you know, a lot of conservatives and Republicans and libertarians will 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. 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 circumstances. 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 Caballero had tried to persuade the anarchist to join his government

also, not so absurd in ideas as at first, as at first it appeared, for a substantial section of the anarchists 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, anarchists 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.

Okay. Yeah. And sometimes you can put a little spin on it because it's a Catalan name. That's one of the things that you'll find is the really wacky names are Catalan or Basque generally, the ones that are hard 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, like, that you most, yeah, mine is Basque. I'm not, I'm not terribly surprised by that. Um, but I've, I've had too many, um, conversations about racial purity with, um, with, with, uh, Latin American Hueros. Um, um, 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 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, um, you can catch it from general, um, histories like, um, Bivore, um, you know, I'll add one more thing. If you're reading, um, general histories about the war ignore Preston, he sucks. He's, he's a commie. He's a, 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, all these ministers of the government where they essentially sanctified, you know, in a communist sanctification, you know, blasphemous definition, of course, the Chequess. 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, I mean, 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 policy. politician. He was actually, his family was from Asturias 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 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 Align Car Lists. And a lot of the former were incorporated into the Carlist 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 Negrein 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 of it. 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, 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 Guernela? 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. Yeah, yeah. Yep. Yeah, 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 effective General Rekelemé 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, Jaguay broke Asencio's men

and the inadequately trained volunteers, and they fled the field. But Yagway'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 Yagwe 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 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 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, you know, 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 in, you know, 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 that's not even like digging in and engaging in combat or anything. 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, they set out so many wars, but, you know,

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 de Valera of Ireland, quoting, I am in Spain. I see Spain all around me. Excuse me for 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 Savesky 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 a number of religious emblems the officers and soldiers wear. Pinned 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, scapulars 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 whole war. 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, for many of 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 X.11th, that 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, and their generous heroism, have gone so far as to ask for a place in 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 its 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 Arcanolado Bonacquino, Orsi. That sounds German to me. 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. It doesn't matter. You cannot. There's no scenario, well, let me rephrase. 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, 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, Danielle 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 a crusade, as Bishop Olegia of Pamplona had done 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 nationalist greeted Pope Pius 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 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, through courts,

as well as the church managing everything. So again, that would be fascism. They were specifically talking about a secular, a secular system as well as any kind of system that was unspanish and un-Catholic. 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 Ligie fell mortally wounded in a last engagement with French communist machine gunners on International Bridge. On the 13th, they took nearby San Sebastian, where they learned that their leading writer and theoretician, Victor Pradera, 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 Tersio entered the Great Cathedral of the 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 Alcazard of Toledo, the relentless bombardment by the besiegers, 155-millimeter six-inch guns, began to show substantial effort 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 down.

damaged Gobiano 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 Yagway's column had just taken Talvera de la Rena. 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 in 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. Asenio's first 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

Rikilne for a few days at the outset of the siege in July, before he went up to the Guadorama passes, and then again for a few days at the beginning of August, before he went south to fight Jagu. 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 Capucinos.

It's so funny that that's the way that's pronounced, actually. Plaza 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.

Escardo's inner fire blazed up. 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 to, 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 9th, 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 Al-Qasar become a cemetery, he said, between his teeth, but not a dung-keep. 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 such said conditions and will continue to defend the Alcazar and the dignity of Spain to the end. How great is it that the basically the medieval style honor culture? they would they would have never behaved this way in the old days you know in terms of the way they threatened to treat um you know a honorably defeated enemy you know even a foreigner that's hated like there there was always room for you know a gentlemanly uh you know surrender and letting people go um 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're, that they would rather die. I mean, we were, we would prefer that it be a cemetery than a dung heap by giving you your conditions. Major Rojo, which means red, which was their term for the for the communists. So, yeah, great stuff. Yeah. Major Rojo felt a surge of sympathy and admiration for his old comrade in arms rise up and grip his throat. When he entered, Muscaro 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? Muscaro 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 at Toledo, the city of saints and 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 the military. that will be doing the things 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 chance.

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 was blindfolded,

preparatory to be led out, he suddenly cried, Viva Espania. 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,

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, Muscoe 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 Muscardo's defiant reply to the surrender terms. Barcelo 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 command. 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, Barcelo lunge 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 10.45 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 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 Al-Qazar, 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 Gate of the fortress, Canon Camerasa was met by Captain Sondon. 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 Kamarasa 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. 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 that thrust struck home the defenders of the alcazar of delato 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 knew know their own extraordinary history vividly how more than a thousand years before king palo 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 Palo 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 Opas. and they intended to give him the same name Palayo had given Opas, the same answer Palo had given Opas, but it was not for this that they had brought a priest into their stronghold. Camarasa was taken to meet Colonel Mascardo in his office. Major Rojo had known what manner of man he was dealing with. Camerasa 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 are always have been. Oh, yeah. When it comes to partisans. I'm not affected by it. The contempt, Muscardo 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 Camaras's talk. Did you come prepared to confess us and celebrate Holy Mass?

Muscardo demanded. That's all we want. Kamarasana 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 Kamadas's opportunity. He expounded at length on the hopelessness of their struggle. In a few days, if they did not surrender, the Alcazar 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. Yeah, yeah, quote-unquote, right-win. 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 of the. 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 Muscaro's office, asking to speak with him privately. He pressed the argument that he was sacrificing the women and 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 Camarasa 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 and wife of a civil guard lieutenant of the garrison, and told her this priest was saying that women of the Alcazar were being held there against their will. All the fires are the mothers and wives of men who fought 722 years to reconquer Spain for the infidel was her answer.

Held here? That's a lie. I've talked with every woman in the Alcazar 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 with them into ruins. She's more manly than the priest. the Libtar priest. After that, there was nothing more to be said. Moscaro coldly ordered Kamarasa 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 Muscardo to evacuate the women and children from the Aracazar was entirely, 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 Al-Qa-Qaeda. Pizarro of Saldado 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. Look at the history. I mean, there have been bad popes. We know. That's not the point.

Let's see, where was I? And the Al-Qazar will be remembered for a thousand years. Yeah. Let me see. But he said the only mass celebrated in the Al-Qazard 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 Alpazar 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 Barber need 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. It will soon be too late. 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 wounded, bringing its total casualties to more then 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 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 Berdientos 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 17th, 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 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 alcazar 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. Yeah. 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 shellfire. 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. Muscardo'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 in form. The guttering light threw the shadow of Mascardo's head and shoulders on the wall like some dying giant. He was totally alone. The Akhasaar was deathly as silent.

Beneath his feet, five tons of high explosive waited for detonation. Mascardo 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 him. his son Luis 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 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. Presuming 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 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 avalanche. 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 Zokadovar 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

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 Josefa 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 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 rubble, 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 rubble, saw the defenders appear above them, sighting 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, entered the Alcazar 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 long ladders in the Alcazar were barely half that length. Gomez Alavarez lashed 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 18. 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 legendary the Al-Qazara 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, you know, your faith and your, you know, in your family and your people. And 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. Yeah. 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, when 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. You know, 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 spurr and tell them all your wildest fantasies um 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 yeah and at this point it this point it has to all right well i appreciate you doing this with me um let people know where they can find your stuff i hear you have a really nice like cool t-shirt that you just came oh yeah yeah so um 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'm on twitter i'm on twitter i'm on twitter i'm on twitter i'm on twitter i'm on twitter

count to my substack so people can see that there because that's for shit posting. But the substack is where I do most of 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 shirt spread store from there via an article. I have a nice, there's this, there's this famous quote that General Francisco Franco repeated several times in various forms. But I was puzzling on how to describe it. And 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 basically made like a fash wave edit where he's wearing. you know, razor sunglasses or whatever. They call them pit vipers, generic, non-branded, non-patent and trademark violating images. With the original Spanish quote with a nice, nice logo there. And it's already, people are already buying it. And I'm like, I've got to order some for myself and my son. So, yeah, it's pretty spicy. but yeah that's the main thing

author of faction with the Crusaders I have a 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, took 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, like, spiritual inspiration from it and told us 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 a good reason because that's what the, uh, the recittes would do. Their mothers and sweethearts and grandmothers and sisters would embroider them on their shirts 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. you know, all the lies that we're 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, but not nearly as big a one as they're credited with. The Carlos Requetes 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, you know. And what it was 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 a great series. Folks listen to all of them, share it with friends.

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 until the next time. Thanks, man.