Speaker 1: I want to welcome everyone back to the Peakingana Show.
I'm here with Carl Doll. How are you doing, Carl
doing all?
Speaker 2: Thanks?
Speaker 1: Pete? Is I assume doll is properly the proper pronunciation, right.
Speaker 2: That is correct?
Speaker 1: 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.
Speaker 2: Sure. I am an author and ship poster. I'm the
author of Faction and Faction with the Crusaders, the latter
being my most recent novel that came out a couple
of months ago, which is about, uh, you know, fictional
events within the reality of the Spanish Civil War from
an American perspective, because as as an American, Uh, it's
much easier to tell stories, uh that are informative and
interesting from a point of view that you yourself can
can relate to.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's interesting because I think the first book I
read about the Spanish Civil War was mine wre of Trouble. Yeah,
and that's yeah, that's coming from a British standpoint. And
then there's really the the most famous books out there
are pretty much from British standpoints, the ones that are
in English, the ones that are Spanish.
Speaker 2: 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
lib tard. So he stumbles in and manages to uh
not die when a Carlo Strekete shoots him in the
throat and stumbles out and you know, escapes from the
n k VD in Barcelona. So yeah, it's a it's
it's kind of fraught with that, and the the material
is also very limited that we're exposed to a lot
of the good stuff I heard, I've heard your whole
series that you did with Thomas seven seven seven, 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 Thomases of the world. And and that's
where it's really important to kind of you know, expand
and and not just take what the current like supposed
authoritative material is off of the the shelf, so that
you can get some insights into a topic that's a
lot more complicated. Stanley Paine specifically, I know that you've mentioned,
and he's like the English language specialist on this topic,
and very few people have read Stanley Paine, which is
a shame.
Speaker 1: Yeah, bevar, even though he has obvious leanings towards the
left and especially the libertarian left in Spain, he does
a really good job of laying out the facts of
what happened, and then obviously pain is the pain is
the guy.
Speaker 2: Yeah, 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 assumed 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 twentieth
century fascism, right as well as the Spanish Civil War,
And they're just befuddled because he's like correcting them on no,
I don't really think that, you know, Franco was a
you know, according to Hoyle fascist, And they just lose
their minds when people who are actually informed on these
things talk, and you know, what does the average person
know about the Spanish Civil War? They're like, Franco worked
with scary mustache man and they got rid of a
republic which is bad and something something George Orwell and
they haven't actually read George.
Speaker 1: Orwell, yeah, or Ernest Hemingway and everything based comes out
of the left. And if you want to try to
find a copy of Kemp's book, and you know, if
it wasn't for Mystery Grove in places like that republishing,
we wouldn't. You know, you're paying two three four hundred
dollars for him.
Speaker 2: So the nice thing is a fair bit of the
old Spanish material is becoming available online or you can
order it for pretty cheap. The problem is most people
don't speak Spanish or read Spanish. I do not, super well.
I'm a lot better at it than I was, you know,
five years ago. Because 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 you know, worth putting out there.
And I had a project that been there forever, which
is my first book, Faction, which is it takes place
in the nineties. It's about essentially a family involved in
the peripheral world of espionage, you know, semi unofficial you know,
CIA cut out type, the people that are you know
x x CIA who administer the things from like private
companies and stuff like that, you know, the all the
dirty tricks and in black black off books things, and
the kind of the scion 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,
or Well and that BBC documentary series, which 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 mister Grove
in twenty nineteen. I think I got the book in
twenty nineteen and it was pretty new, and when I
read it, it helped me connect emotionally with the story,
or personally rather with characters and you know, lowal 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 carlist recutees 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 as a movement
over time. You know, failures and let's try it again,
Let's try another you know another war failure, Well, let's
try it again, you know, partial success, and then everyone
goes into the twentieth 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, well,
we'll start a general revolt and then the people will
rise up and then will 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 of 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 five bomb,
the Fai hand grenade that shows up a lot in
Orwell's work. They had like thirty five thousand of them.
When the anarchists the Drudi column went up to defend
Madrid from from Franco's you know, oncoming forces, because they
had spent so much time and effort and money into
building as many of these as they could for their
pending revolution, which uh they used the military uprising to
kick that off. There's also information about their organizational structure
because I found some really good books on the subject
that are very obscure because they're you know, anarchist books,
and people on the write don't read their enemies 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.
Speaker 1: I'll say. A question the interest in the Carlos. Are
you Catholic?
Speaker 2: I am? I am Christian, but I am not Catholic.
Speaker 1: Oh okay, I was just wondering.
Speaker 2: Yeah, let's just say this awakens some interest in things,
and I was when I looked my German side of
the family, I found we're Catholic right up into the
eighteen hundreds and then became prats along with so much
of America in the mid eighteen hundreds.
Speaker 1: Yeah. The for those who are Catholic a really good
book on I don't know, did you read The Last
Crusade by Carol?
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's in my bibliography. That's that's on my substack,
as well as in the appendix. An amazing book of
so moving.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it just because it was Yeah, I was. There
were there were times when I was reading it where
I got emotional.
Speaker 2: 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 ten thousand, 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 Revolucion social and the social revolution. That's that
was the anarchists. That was the communists. You know, 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, the people that were
involved in all kinds of levels of leadership, and it's
really interesting stuff and they talk about why they failed
and other times they'll refer to it as the necessary
defeat of May nineteen thirty seven, or is it possibly
July thirty seven, when the basically the communist central government,
the army especially took over Catalonia from the the anarchists
and the CNTFAI decided that they would purge all the
all the various you know, socialist and anarchist groups that
weren't going to cooperate with the central focus of the war.
They've written ream of material on this, and it's never
the problem that 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 means 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.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's one thing that people don't want to hear
is when you know. One of the reasons why I
believe that the so much propaganda around making the Republicans
and their faction into the victims of all of this
is really to just cover up their crimes, because yeah,
on the right, there were some, 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 came, 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 than were killed and were executed
in the Inquisition over the span of three hundred and
fifty years.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and you know they're 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 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
nineteen thirty six Olympics, you know, that was when you know,
Jesse Owens like defeated Hitler according to television, which is
silly because that you know, Hitler didn't disrespect him or
anything like that. It's all this this post post war hope.
But anyway, there was an alternative because the USSR boycotted
the Olympics and they hosted a communist international you know
alternative in Barcelona that and there was instantly like a
whole 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 Aragon because they wanted to
fight the Carlists out in the countryside as well as
to just terrorize, you know, all the all the locals
wherever they could, and the Carlists stopped them in kind
of southern Aragon. And so this volunt this American volunteer
who goes there and because it's an adventure and you know,
doesn't really know much and as kind of a political
is going to get executed because some of the the
communists taking over the front. You know, they have the army,
they don't have the numbers because at the time all
the little local militias were running things, but the central
government's army was being communized. They had the red star
on their uniforms for officers, and they had commissars and
everything like that, and it was being basically managed by
the NKVD as well as a huge Soviet international group.
This is independent of the international brigades, but there were
a whole bunch of internationals involved as quote unquote advisors
with the Spanish army. And so they're going to execute
this guy because he wears his grandfather's crucifix and he's
an American and he doesn't really understand what's going on
because they're like, oh, well, we're fighting fascists. So I
made him kind of a naive college student, right, And
so the main character has to make a decision because
he's going to get executed. There's a sham t The
anarchists support him because they were with him, you know,
he 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 carlist attack on
their on their mostly crappy positions, he 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 is taken
to a cheka as soon as the de Rudi column
gets up into that area and starts spreading information about,
you know, their various suspects in all these areas, and
so at that point he has to make a make
a choice, like I can't be undercover anymore. I have
to do something different. And it's crazy because and 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. In the cope is always
oh well, it was at the very beginning, and all
these disparate groups got out of hand, and then the
central government tried to rein it in and get control
of it. And the truth is there was a fair
bit of that on the right as well, but it
wasn't nearly as bad. And the big numbers that they
bring to the table from the rightist groups committing atrocities
are like you said, the Moroccan Army of Africa troops.
So there's 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 exactly who was going to be running things at
any given point, it was just a rampage. And then
as they consolidated the 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 internationals, they would just execute them, whereas the
Spaniards would be triaged, put into camps where maybe they
were going to go into a labor battalion, maybe they
were going to stay in a prison camp. Because of
atrocities that they committed, they would be investigated. A decent
number of them were executed, like rightfully so, but the
vast majority of the people that were captured as POWs
by the nationalists spent actually spent very little time in
prison camps and in labor battalions. By the end of
World War Two, they were pretty much all out, and
in fact, the vast majority of them were out by
the early forties 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
you 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 a there's actually a really good
book on the subject that's mostly focused on World War
Two 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 may I make I make some things happen there,
because uh, 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 uh, 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 class
college classmates, and uh, you know, he trusted him, and
he was a World War One vet, he was an
international business He had gone to gone to Russia during
the Russian Revolution, uh to do intelligence and had been
traveling around and in fact, Mussolini liked him and respected
him and allowed him to go to 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 US government with you know, Mussolini's blessing essentially because
he thought he was, you know, a cool guy with
a firm grip and who looked you in the eyes.
And 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 gonna
be no situation where there was some you know, insane
blood bath. It was, and I don't think that that
was like in the character of Franco either, when you
look at what they actually did. I think you mentioned
Bevor's book where he has a lot of great number
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 Aguernica,
it wasn't twelve hundred who died. There were maybe like
one hundred and some and you know, but it was
also really bad, but it wasn't as bad as we
think it was, because now we know that there was
a combat operations taking place, and so you know, it's
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 phalangeist
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 thirteen
hundred 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
it's crazy.
Speaker 1: I was just I was just recorded the other night
with Jay out O pol. I don't know if you
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 wartime. I mean, oh yea, this is stuff that
happens in wartime. I mean during the terror they were
like forty thousand 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 yeah,
and you know, reminder, you know what side, what side
was the Soviet Union on in in this in this
fight in Spain. And obviously, you know, one thing I
like to talk about is I call this I call
the Spanish Civil War World War one and a half. Yeah,
because yeah, it's just so obvious that if if Spain,
if the if the nationalists lose that war, basically the
bottom half of the peninsula belongs to Soviet Russia.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly, So I.
Speaker 1: Mean you're going to do anything you can to win.
And yeah, it's it's always the.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: I mean we can call this, oh imagine if the
roles were reversed or you know, pointing out hypocrisy, But
it's because of who controls the press exactly exactly, who
whose crimes are whose crimes are magnified more than any other.
You know.
Speaker 2: It's it's interesting that you mentioned that because you're reading
Blockade right now, which is outstanding, and I just want
to I want to compliment you on on what you're
doing reading all these old works that address things that
people just don't think about. Millions of people died of
starvation for no reason. Well not for no reason. We
know why they died of starvation. It was because they
had been targeted for death because of who they were,
not anything that they did. And you know, that's that's
not cool. Man. The I mentioned Guernica. I mentioned Guernica,
and this plays out in the book a little bit.
Kemp talks about it. I take a I take a
different position than Kemp. My position on Guernica was that
it was a combat operation that you know, yeah, there
was a lot of confusion, but it was a combat
operation that was exploited for propaganda. And it was literally
just the very first time something that became basically old
hat to the whole world was employed, which was the
bombing of a civilian population in wartime. And in fact,
it's far more justifiable because of the nature of what
actually happened. 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 of days, and so yeah, it was exploited.
It was 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 two 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 recataz dot com. It's all Spanish language,
but it's basically hardcore traditionalist Catholic guys in I think
Navarre is that the main guy was in Navarre. And
I've archived it because it's been up for a long
time and there isn't that much new stuff that happens
to it, so I'm concerned that it'll go away. But
it has thousands and thousands of pages of personal testimonies
of people who are involved in the Carlist, Recitees, and
the war in general. And I found a couple of
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 recite militias and the
Navarre Brigades UH. He created the essentially their secret army,
their their first militia that was built out in the
early thirties because during the Primo de Rivera dictatorship, you
absolutely were not going to be getting away with nor
was there need to get away with creating an illegal
mass militia for a right winger. But that was something
that was reactivated under the Republic because the Republic was
so sometimes they'll use the term openly secular and which
is really anti religious right because they were they were
passing laws that were that outlawed the church, essentially that
nationalized all church buildings and then they had to start
paying taxes to the state and rent to the state.
They banned 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?
Speaker 1: Yeah, what is it Catholic?
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. So, so the you know, they they spun
up up in the north. And one of the things
that hasn't talked about that much is that the it
was easy for the the Carlist Recutees to recruit conservative
Basques to join the nationalist forces. There were quite a
few that were under arms, you know, in the in
the Republican militias, well the Basque militias, not the super
hardcore lefty basques like the Ascutee and then 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 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 bombing was that because of the fact that
not only civilian populations, but a lot of their Basque
heritage was being destroyed in the war, the Navarre Brigades
essentially established a policy where they would not tolerate aerial
bombing of populated areas, and so they made themselves shock
troops and they essentially sacrificed themselves to save the civilian
to reduce the 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.
Speaker 1: It was.
Speaker 2: 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 was outside of their
their hall and was very important to them. They had
been essentially giving the law and they the 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 that the legal code
that that they had in place for themselves, which is
the whole reason that they had a kind of separatist movement. Anyway,
they they guarded it with their lives, and there was
there's a story of some some philogists from other parts
of the country going up there with it with axes
to cut down the Tree of Guernica and the basically
the colonel from the No Barbara Gate had a fistfight
with another officer in front of it after calling his
mother a whore and just like beating each other in
front of this, uh this tree to stop them from
destroying Basque heritage. And you know, it's it's just not
something that's talked about because it was supposedly this thing
where well the Basque were, you know, with the Republic,
and it's like, no that the the Basque were hugely
carlists that the North Going Republic is because they thought
that they would get some autonomy out of it, and
they had had some element of limited autonomy under the
Republic after the war started, but most of the people
pushing this were 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 gonna
I'm gonna pull it up myself. But essentially there was
a Republican politician, a ka communist who had always opposed
any of the autonomy movements that were going on there,
and there was so his name was Preeto so Indarethio Prieto.
Speaker 1: He was the.
Speaker 2: Finance minister and a and a Basque member of the
Socialist Workers Party, and his position was and I quote,
well I quote a translation is that the bass Nevarre
country autonomy campaign underway in the early thirties was merely
a front for sedition by Alphonsists, Hymists, which is the Carlists,
Nationalists and Jesuits against the republic. And then he essentially
dictated that they shut down almost every single Catholic newspaper
in northern Spain, and any right winger who was you know,
had ever written a quote unquote intemperate editorial. So it's
like this was a clash of it was a fight
for their civilization and uh, you know, it wasn't some
you know dictatorship, you know with a capital D that
was imposed. The dictatorship happened because it was a fight
to the death and then it immediately you know what
happened meately at the end of the war, World War
two happened. So a lot of the things that you know,
when they're bad jacketing Franco and and you know, the
Spanish nationalists, they say, oh, well, look at the fact
that they had food rationing, you know, well into the
nineteen forties. And it's like Britain had food rationing until
nineteen fifty four, 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
elements to it, but there's a greater capital T truth.
And so if I'm not addressing that in a way
that you know, not necessarily a polemic, you don't want
to 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 that's what we have to be doing. There's
this great The earliest reference to Recuteze to reference a
Carlist militia is in the early nineteen hundreds and they
wrote fame propaganda, which is caught Alan for let's do propaganda.
And I just love that so much. I'm like, if
I say fem propaganda, it looks like fem 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.
Speaker 1: One of the things I wanted to go back to
is you talked about Prieto and talk about the the
autonomous zones. I've always had this 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 and make it easy for subversives
to go to go in there, easy for subversives to
start working in different areas. And you know, I just
don't after and still you you know, you look at
Spain and it's like, Okay, this is still autonomous over here,
autonomous over there.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean I just as much as I would
love to see, like, as much as the idea of
decentralization sounds good to me, when I look at someplace
like Spain, I'm just like, they should have centralized the
power there centuries ago, and a lot of this could
have been avoided. Do you agree with me on that?
Speaker 2: You know, it's I think it's more. I think it's
it's complicated because there's this really cool book from the
sixties 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, uh. What it addresses is
the fact that medieval Spain, because of the Reconquista, and
and Thomas talked about this a little bit in one
of the episodes that you were you guys were discussing.
Their overall thing was that they it was a it
was a coalition, right of all these different you know,
Visigothic lords frankly who were feeding the whole system, got
organized into fighting against the Moslems, right and so when
when you look at the history of Spain, it's hard
to talk about this topic without putting on your putin
hat and saying, you know, we have to go back
to the time before the oceans drank Atlantis and the
rise of the Sons of Arius. 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 then
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. I
have some maps that 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 the Romans directed all kinds of Visigothic groups, the Swebbyes,
the and brought them in as federati to to govern
Hispania right and also to get them out of the
areas where they were causing trouble, so by kind of
the the collapse of you know, the Western Roman Empire.
There there were, uh 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 Kadiz and Malaga and Cartagena and out
into the Balaric islands that remained part of the east
that was controlled by the Eastern Empire. And down in
that area there they had the basically slave plantations and
one of the 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 governing theory
that was codified in the Fueros, you know, during the
you know, the first millennia AD, which has no bless
oblieves right not down in the far southern areas which
were then conquered by the Moors and stayed under the
Moors for seven hundred almost eight hundred years. In some
places they never had no bless obliege down there, and
so you had this huge propaganda issue in the nineteenth
and twentieth 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, fifteen hundred years because and they
could all kind of be semi independent because for conquering
the whole country, you didn't want to alienate your allies.
And if the lord from the northwestern you know, old
Swebby provinces, you know, holds his line against the moors
and sends you treasure and troops for your incursions to
you know, move the conquest farther south, you don't really
care that they have these old ways of doing things. So,
you know, it did shift a little bit over time,
but you had these different traditions and they didn't really
care as long as they were accomplishing their main goal.
Like the central government, well even before they had a
full central government under you know, oh my brain is
blanking out right, now, what's her name? Fourteen ninety two people,
you know what I'm talking about my brain about, thank
you very much. They didn't really care, and so there
was a certain level of independence. And then after fourteen
ninety two they kick the moors out, they start going overseas,
they start spreading, and because of you know, the nature
of who they you know, the royal family married into
and the various holdings that they had, 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, and tell the empire collapses.
And then when the empire collapses, to your point, you
have this precedent that everyone really likes, right that you know,
they like to have their own independence and their own
way of doing things, and you don't have a tradition
of anything else, so that when you go to the
nobles and you try to, you know, impose a little
bit of some restrictions on them, they fall back on
tradition and say that there's no precedent for that, and
I've always been loyal and et cetera. You know, you
get to the nineteenth century and the central government is
becomes liberal, right that you have that whole s Session
crisis because of the fact that they put Queen Isabella
on the throne instead of Infante Carlos, and the people
who had 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
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 a little bit in political campaigns, but
it's to their like client groups, right and mass immigration,
et cetera. So they they just undermine, you know, the
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 gonna 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 twenties. It's
just it's just not going to happen. Even 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.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't know, it's it's something I think about
because in settying this, you know, I really go back
all the way to to seven eleven and just see
the progression and see how things work. Oh yeah, then
you have you have the Golden Age. Golden Ages are
going to end, and you know they're going to end,
So what do you do? How do you set it up?
Everything seems to be working perfectly fun. They get rid
of the Inquisition. As soon as they get rid of
the Inquisition, you have three you have the three Carlist
wars almost in a row, and it's it just built
and built up to it and built up to it,
and it's just yeah. 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 eighteen sixty eight,
Finelle shows up, you know, bringing Bakunin, and yeah, bringing
Bacon and Bacuon and Marxism with him, and you know
it and Andalucia, see, you know, just open arms, just
adopts absolutely, you're just like, okay, well, we know what's
going to happen, and within what from sixty eight you're
looking at there's a sixty years.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and Astorias, Like Astorias, the Austorian miners were some
of the best paid people, you know, who were 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
in the 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 nineteenth century.
And they just kept at it and kept at it
and kept at it. And that's where that nineteen thirty
was it thirty two? Was the failed uprising there? Or
was it thirty four? I'm trying to remember. I think
it might have been thirty four. But or there were
multiple ones. Actually, yeah, just just it plants the seeds
and they go bananas. It's another element is like in
in Basque Country, the people in the countryside and the
small towns were in the wealthier people of course, we're
going to be more conservative, and there was a huge
amount like that. The big push for anarchists and socialists
in Basque Country were from people who emigrated from other
provinces into the cities to work in the cities, to
work in industry. Because people say, you know that 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 Austurias there was
a lot because of the mines up there and the
in the iron works in Oviedo and Guiehone. Yeah, it's
it's one of these things where you see that, you
see the patterns that show up elsewhere.
Speaker 3: 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.
Speaker 2: Just unreconcilable at a certain point. There's this great I
can't remember what book I read it in, but there
was a great observation by a guy after the war
who he was either on a train or a tram,
or he was a tram conductor, I can't remember. And
he said that it was springtime in like nineteen thirty five,
and he said, this absolutely beautiful, like twenty year old
upper middle class gal gets on the tram and he
said she was just drapp jaw droppingly beautiful. And this
worker sitting next to him was just seeing looking at
her as 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.
Speaker 1: 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, a Latvians were being killed,
that Poles were being killed by the tens of thousands.
They knew this was happening. When I say, people, I'm
talking about leadership. Yeah, yes, How do you react to that?
How do you react? You know, how do you react
to that when you know it's coming for you? What
do you do? What do you what do you do?
Speaker 2: Well? The you know, conservative elements within the army had
been organizing for a long time since before the establishment
of the the Republic, because there had been coups, quite
a few coups in Spanish history, as you know, nineteenth
century was just like war coup, war coup and military dictatorship,
you know, in the twenties, you know, Primo Primo de
Rivera is essentially appointed dictator with the blessing of the
king because the you know, the Cortesse 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 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 forget 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 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 it and there's there's sort of a parallel when
you look at what happened in Russia, where people just
lost confidence in the old system and so they waited
too long before the White Army like asserted itself again.
The advances of the Reds were massive because a lot
of people kind of bought the propaganda that they were
going against the failure of the old system instead of
it actually having a very clear goal. Right 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 Conservatives certainly did not, the
Traditionalist Commune or however you want to translate it, the
Carlist political party and parties, because there were a bunch
that kind of fell under that bucket. They never ever
communion Traditionalista, They never ever believed in the Republic because
they felt that it was a race to the bottom.
Right like most people's opinions, they don't belong in determining
how you how you govern, and you can be manipulated
too easily, and so they only ever like in their
own language in terms is 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. That
the Carlis. There was a Carlist politician who said, the
principal Carlos 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 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 two, and and you know,
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 two
and the quiet overthrow. But there was a lot of
very canid 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 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 thirty six early thirty six 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 of
the army revolt to happen.
Speaker 1: Well, let's cut it right there, and I invite you
to come back anytime. Let's continue this conversation because this
needs to go on. This is am I wrong in
saying that what we see happening in the United States
could be, especially in certain regions, would be closer to
the Spanish Civil War than anything else.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I agree with you with that. I know that
Matt Bracken, who who I respect, has has said Yugoslavia
times Rwanda, but and there's a lot to say about that,
but I honestly think that the Spanish Civil War model
is closest to it. And again, uh, 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.
Speaker 1: Well that's a good warning, all right. Tell everybody where
they can get the book. You got your substack and everything,
and we'll end this great.
Speaker 2: Faction with the Crusaders. Available at Amazon. You can check
out my substack at Carl Doll k A R L
D A h L dot substack dot com. I sell
silly t shirts like I have a Franco Franco Franco
t shirt on there that I just dropped last week.
Trying to do some more cheeky stuff, but it keeps
getting banned by producers, so trying to work through that,
but thus far, Franco Franco Franco's 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.
Speaker 1: But nobody likes Twitter.
Speaker 2: Yeah, if you look for Carl Doll there, I won't
give you the name because I had cowdo doll and
then it got scrambled by Twitter's account name setup, so
just look for me there also.
Speaker 1: All right, Carl, I'll talk to you against soim.
Speaker 2: Thank you, all right, thanks a lot.
Speaker 1: I want to welcome everyone back to the Pecingana show.
He is back and we're gonna talk about the Spanish
Civil War. Carl Dahl, you don't.
Speaker 2: Call doing well, Pete. Thanks?
Speaker 1: 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 how
the right factions came together, because just as in this country,
right factions are split, some hate each other. You know,
I have that. I have. People are quoting me now
saying the left gets their radicals elected, the right gets
the the right cancels their radicals. Yeah. So yeah, where
do you want to start?
Speaker 2: You know, 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 a referring to out of my substack, which
is Carldall dot substack dot com. You can see me
on Twitter. Also, I have two books that are published.
One is Faction, which is adventure story in the nineties
that pertains to the prequel which I released this year,
which is Faction with the Crusaders, where the elder statesman
of the Shay family gets involved in the espionage business
during the Spanish Civil War. So the 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 get the ball rolling.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: 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 in the lead up to the Spanish
Civil War. And we'll talk in detailed fashion about that
here in just a minute, and the final point being,
you know, we've heard the death rattle of the myth
of the twentieth 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 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 that 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 overseas. People were really really worried in
twenty twenty, 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 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 twenty twenty twenty twenty one.
A huge percentage of the population sees our system as
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. Like 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. You know,
the easiest thing to do is to do nothing. There
was there were attempts at centralization in the nineteenth century
that were really more clashes between liberalism and tradition than
a centralization of people who were 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 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 in observations that I have about like
current discourse as it relates to that. You know, Pete
hop in it at any time to share your thoughts
on that as well. And then finally, a tradition of violence, yes, sir, yeah, I.
Speaker 1: Think it's interesting that Paul Fahrenheit and I are doing
a a Spain Golden Asi of Spain, and we were
recording last night, and is 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 in areas and then you
can come together finally, and really it was only really
Castile and Aragon that came together to do it. But
then after the Golden Age, after everything starts to fall
apart in the late sixteen hundreds, 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
as an imperium, it can't be these autonomous areas.
Speaker 2: 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 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 an Ireland. You know, our cousins are
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 US have they're founded on ruggle and conquest.
The the niceties of political debate, there's there's I would say,
for example, if you 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 that
has a very vibrant military history, but there's 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 was 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 war not that long ago.
Are you know, 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 Rite's 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 ready for that because they were
anti Republican. We'll talk more about that shortly. They were
opposed to the system that was being forced on them.
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 are 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 a 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.
Speaker 1: 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 if we're going to beat this evil,
we're going to have to come together and just put
all this crap aside.
Speaker 2: And one of the things that makes it a little
challenging in retrospect for people is that these groups seem
really different. Uh, you know, the the Carlists. 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 Bourbon's 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. Under democracy, you're on your own right. And
again democracy versus republic. It was a republic through which
democracy was enacted. That whole with opposed to be a republic,
and the democracy is bullshit, stop all right? Okay, So
key point. This is a image from Navarre in nineteen
thirty six in Pomplona, which was the heart of the
Carlist Uprising, an 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 a it's a
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 Burbon.
Over here, these are the Falange, 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 lib herds 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 by the army barracks in Pamplona
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 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 we're ever
observing anything related to the Irish Republican Army in Shinfin
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 cnt FAI and their structure and the way
they organize. We'll talk about that 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.
There's 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 join the military, you automatically became
a corporal when you finish 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 beer bellies at the range shooting their
seventeen hundred dollars twenty two's are not the core of
a militia, and they won't they won't make up the
core of a militia, but they can train the like
seventeen year olds your you're 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. I will
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.
Speaker 1: So.
Speaker 2: There's it's really important to understand that. I oh, my goodness,
I corrected 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 sixth succeeded officially in
the nineteenth century for not very long period of time,
So nineteen thirty one was when the Second Spanish Republic
was proclaimed. Essentially, they had been trying really hard, the
Libtards had been trying really hard and pushing really hard
in the nineteenth century to establish a republic 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 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 twentieth 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 War,
were working with the establishment to tamp things down through
officially or through local militias that were semi legal, et cetera.
The essentially there, the but the overall mood got to
the point where there were elections in nineteen thirty one
where the the Republican elements, which was where these vast
coalitions of communists anarchists, socialists, and various types of supposedly
moderate republican anti anti monarchists won so much in these
local elections, and the most importantly, the press had been saying,
and again the presses associated with political parties and people
with lots of money. The press declared, oh, well, this
is a 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 handwaving slightly.
It's not really worth diving into extreme levels of detail here.
So you're like, oh, 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 you know, the French Revolution and
the republic that was proclaimed there. It was anti monarchist,
it was anti church, it was anti tradition. Basically, longstre
short is, the leftists went wild, burning churches, murdering right
wingers like crazy. When you see again, this is the
according to the libtards, that there was religious and land reform.
Well what that meant was they essentially overnight said well,
you don't own more more than like thirty two 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 Phalangay and the a lot of the carlists, which
is that there was a system, especially in Andalusia, where
there was essentially a landless peasants slave labor situation on
the lat to India, 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 route of no bless 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 hardestcore 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, 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 weren't 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. 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 no, no more church, bye bye. You
couldn't even have a religious procession in public. In fact,
in many cases it was interpreted 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 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 nineteen
thirty three, loffully legally the right wing one electorally like crazy.
Now here's the important thing to keep in mind. The
Republic would not appoint 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
Seeda Ceda, won a majority of House seats or parliamentary seats.
But the President of the republic Asagnya refused to appoint
the head of SEEDA, Jose Maria guil Roblis, or anyone
from SEEDA as a prime minister. You know, they they
they had a majority, refused to do it. So he
appointed this guy, Alejandro Leroue, 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 nineteen
thirty five. End of nineteen thirty five, I should say, So,
here's the head of the government, essentially whose own party
is and who is assembling, you know, a coalition government
with as many leftists and quote unquote moderists and centrist
conservatives of as he can trying to deny the right wingers,
say the Communion Tradicionalista, et cetera, from having actual party
party power. Excuse me. So the one of the concessions
is that the head of say that gil Roebliss 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 other parties,
So who cares what the military does because the military
is this decrepit organization in mainland Spain and all the
hardcore right wing fighters are across the water in Morocco
and the Canary Islands, so who cares? Right, Pretty funny
that bites them because they're arrogant liptards. So anyway, nineteen
thirty four 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 Austurias
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 gotta send the
army like militants off somewhere, So they send Franco to
the Canary Islands where you can't bother anyone, they think,
and then they send Mola to Pamplona, because they're like,
that's a backwater. No one cares about Pomplona, the Carlist
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 a
Zagna'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 a Republican Left of Catalonia which is associated with them,
kind of like DSA types, but Catalonians so separatist in Catalan.
The Republican Union is their national group. It's a it's
a again a bunch of libtards. The POUM are Trotskyist communists,
so less international or at least not Soviet aligned. And
then there's the PCEE, which is the Communist Party of Spain,
which is one hundred percent aligned slash controlled by the
Soviet Union. They're rising in the streets, they're getting people
riled up. End of nineteen thirty five, Laruez coalition government
coalition collapses, new elections are called for Asagna still the president.
What happens all these parties on the left, the Republican Left,
the Republican Left of Catalonia, the Republican Union POUM PCE,
and a bunch of other parties. Not the anarchists, though
I will 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 the suppressive 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 nineteen thirties 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 twenty twenty. 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 say, the symbol,
and again this is the mainstream right wing mostly monarchist
political party. This is the Carlist. They were represented by
the Communion Tradis Traditionionalista, which was their electoral party, but
they were never about voting. Their whole thing was we
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 Phalange. And the
important thing to understand is the creator of the phalange
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, where as the cities grew,
an industry developed, especially in Catalonia and up in the
north and Basque Country, and you had these deracinated elements
leaving you know where they were from to work in
the cities, and they became deracinated because they were in
an alien environment. You had in the north non Basque
from you know, all over kind of the areas, ringing, ringing,
Basque country, who would feel alienated in the cities working
in industry. Very similar story to what you see in
the US in the in the nineteenth 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 tricks. 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 Falling Gay 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 nineteen
thirty one, 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
nineteen thirty one, the Spanish Republic passes the radical anti
Catholic Constitution as I was talking about before, essentially banning
the church as much as they could, and the right
wing says forget it. The Carlists form their own political party.
Speaker 1: Yes, even though it was pretty much written down, it
was more of a.
Speaker 2: De facto Yes, that's a very good point.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it wasn't dejure, it was it was to facto.
It was like, wait, you know, are you still going
to church? You know, And they probably wouldn't say anything
to grandmothers. Yeah, grandmothers, it's fine. They're they're not a
dangerous to anyone. Let them go and do their thing. Yeah. Yeah,
they're going to die soon anyway. But you're going to
get pressure at this point upon the youth. Yes, And
that's that's the most important thing to take away from
this anci Catholic constitution. Not only that is well, you
can see five years before nineteen thirty six, July to
December of nineteen thirty six, 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.
Speaker 2: Yeah, very good way to put it. Let me read
something very briefly, that is from the at the time
a moderate Republican when LaRue in nineteen oh six, he
remember at this point in the nineteen thirty four he
becomes the kind of reactionary coalition creator for the republic
to tamper the say, the victory. So this is the
moderate the future. Moderate LaRue speaking in nineteen oh six, 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,
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 they're awakened. Judges do not be
stopped by altars nor by tombs. Fight, kill, die. That's
the republic. So the conservatives are like, we don't want
anything to do with this.
Speaker 1: Do you know the fascists in nineteen thirty six, they
all they did was overthrow a republic.
Speaker 2: 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 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 our famili'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 they would be much more
inclined to be like, I think it's a wonderful idea
that you're joining the Recuitae militia, my son. So what
happened at this point is that the political like the
electoral political parties especially, say that they start having a
lot of their energy go into these underground militias that
they're associated with. Seeda and they had a youth movement
that was very radical. They used a lot of very
aggressive language. The Carlists had their Recutees 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 nineteenth thirty four and then the Falonge appear.
So in August nineteen thirty two, General sun Juro, which
is a wonderful name to pronounce when you look at
it and don't speak Spanish the sun Horjada coup. I
like it. He attempts kind of a quiet coup where
the military is like some of the military goes in
and says, ah, we're not cool with this. They get
sentenced to death and then it gets commuted to like
life in prison, and then sun Juro just gets exiled
and he goes to Portugal because the Republic is kind
of like, we want to like neutralize 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 gonna we're going
to moderate. Like they were willing to moderate. They weren't
that there. There were still they were still allowing like
their street fights, like their Antifa troops to go crazy
in the streets, but they weren't going to publicly do
something that would radicalize their opponents. They wanted to take
their time. So in nineteen thirty four, remember I mentioned that, say,
the electoral victory, but I call it here pyic 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 pyic.
But I still feel like spiritually it is because they
win this electoral victory, they get nothing, and then they're
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 historians 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 recutees and arranging a real to prepare
for real military coup. So the canard of electoral parties
are basically you have people hanging out in parliament, but
at this point, they're like, only violence is gonna be
the way forward. So that's where we need to focus.
So in nineteen thirty five, the Carlists 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 Falange start like assassinating people and stuff like that.
So there's that February nineteen thirty six election that the
libtards just blatantly steal. And then July thirteenth, nineteen thirty six,
Dolores Iberuri announces in the Cortes, well, Jose Calvos Sotelo
is giving a speech. This is your last speech, officials
from the republics. My brain is blinking. Sorry that basically,
their assault guards excuse me, go out arrest Jose Calvos Sotelo.
They attempted to arrest a phalongist who wasn't there, and
then they also attempted to arrest another politician. Jose Calvo
Sotelo 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.
I was talking about those political organizations. The Falling Gay
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. Noticed that it is
not Francisco Franco. So again, let's talk about the Carla
directas a little bit. They are my favorite. They are
the heirs to the Carlist uprisings of the nineteenth century,
which mostly took place in the north. In the east,
that's Catalonia, that's Navarre, 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 Geish. It
like the constitution. Their electoral representation was in the Communion
tradision Nista. 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 and more rural areas. But they also
were very important in Cordoba, Sevilla and Kadiz. And what
they did is they were able to help the army
and working with Falanjas, also secure these cities so that
there were toe holds when the army came. We'll talk
about that more later. Their preparation resulted in having a
front line ten thousand men, well armed, well trained citizen militia.
By spring nineteen thirty six, they had twenty thousand auxiliaries,
which meant that like July nineteen thirty six, they had
thirty thousand men ready to go. They were at eighty
five thousand recruits by the end of nineteen thirty six.
This uprising never would have happened if the Carlist Recutas
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 nineteen thirty two, the Carlist
said had these like youth and social organizations that they
named in various terms. I have an article about it
on my sub stack. 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 Recutee the juventud Haimita. 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 huven who Hymista
were the ones killing people or beating them. They were flyering,
they were postering, they were doing marches in uniforms. Wearing masks.
Nineteen thirty three nineteen thirty four, an army officer who
had been a Mustang, a very accomplished guy who is
basically a specop's dude, Jose Enrique Varela, gets the alias
Don Pepe, hence Pepe. There he was sneaking around in
the north organizing training and arming the Recutes into ten
man decurias. So that's a non military like local defense organization.
Because again it's they were thinking defensively at that point
late nineteen thirty one, for they shift after the historian
uprisings and all the violence to say, we're 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 nineteen thirty six, the
Spanish militaries conspirators the coup planners, described the Recutes as
the only genuine citizen army that's capable of coordinated tactical
military operations. Everyone else. Their militant wings were street fighters
and assassins. We still need street fighters and assassins. So
the Falange Espanola de Lasons is that's jose Antonio up
there on 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
Josey Antonio went to work with monarchists and other people,
is 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. Is a lot of their like 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
Bolshevist 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 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. Say Tho's youth wing, the juven who they
axion popular. They funneled into the Foilongate in nineteen thirty
six like crazy after the elections. So they were never
very big. They were like maybe ten thousand of them
up to nineteen thirty five. They exploded in growth in
nineteen thirty six. They were outlawed in early nineteen thirty six,
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 Alsol 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 we're not
as influential as 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 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 nineteen thirty two, there was a coup
in the twenties, there was a very successful coup that
had Primo 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 Calvos
Othello was assassinated by the Republics Soul 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 nineteen thirty two 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 are
involved in the conspiracy. People trusted him and he was
a incredibly shrewd guy. He was not elected, he was
not chosen in advance. There wasn't an uprise under FRONTCO.
There was a general uprising under people's individual factions.
Speaker 1: Well, and let's let's face, let's face the fact that
he is the archetype Spanish Catholic. Yes, yes, me. There's
reports that he would go to Mass every day.
Speaker 2: He was intensely devout and I did not mean to
stop sharing.
Speaker 1: Go right ahead and share it again.
Speaker 2: I'll get it at my bad. So yeah, devout, devout Catholic.
So here we go.
Speaker 1: Also, he had the he was well known in the army.
Speaker 2: He was.
Speaker 1: He had the respect of 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.
Speaker 2: 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, their shoot move
communicate with communicat 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
Carlists 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.
They all have their own officers and things like that,
and that is a challenge in and of itself. But
what happened was, you know, shrewd old General Franco basically says,
here's what we're gonna do. All of these various parties,
all of these various groups are you know, plugged, and
they're now consolidated down to where you're in the army already.
You couldn't like join the army January nineteen thirty six
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
we'll do is we'll make allowances for their symbols and
you know, so they're flags and some of their rank stuff.
Although what they did is they incorporated elements of both
into the army. But like the Carlists could keep their berets,
they could keep their flags, you know, the Foalonga could
keep their blue shirts. And then we'll make sure that
you have, you know, your seven millimeter Spanish Mouser rifles
instead of a hodgepodge of stuff that you acquired before
the war, and you know, 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, you know, on your own
and not plugged into the army. So because the state
spoke for Spain and the Carlists or the Falloay were
not the state. So April nineteenth, interesting date, nineteen thirty seven,
one party, one army, one state. So there's one official
political party left in it is the Falling Gay Espanola
Tradicionalista e de las Junta State Fenciva Calista. So that
is a mouthful, but what that does is it combines
the Falling Gay 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 on
or the command of their own officers. They generally maintained
their pre existing 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
Institute 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
rightist faction, which is the nationalist officers. They were either
already associated with one of those factions like the say
that went away, so you were either Fologae or you know,
part of the Carlists, 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 say 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.
Speaker 1: Right, Yeah, yeah, you're know, you know, people.
Speaker 2: 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 in Cordova. Yeah, army barracks were important,
but the militias, the Volangay and the Carlist militias helped
secure these areas, all that swath of territory up in
the north, that is because of the militias, the 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 you know, or he'd say you're joining us,
or you're under arrest. That is ballsy, and that's how
that happened. Way less official, you know, involvement in in
claiming the land and the land that's being controlled here,
so very important thing to understand. The rising is most
successful in the conservative parts of Spain and a couple
of military strongholds and often squashed in street fighting by
leftist militias, as in Barcelona, Santander, Toledo and Madrid Toledo
with a big asterisk except for the Alkazar, the heroic Alkazar,
and so with those holdings this is March nineteen thirty seven,
but an awful lot of this was like by more
like October November of nineteen thirty six 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 you know,
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
the international volunteers under the International Brigades that was arranged
by the Soviet International, which meant that those were Communists.
The vast majority of them were Communists, something like forty
percent 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 improving how important that Jews were to
the International Brigades. At the very least, it was like
the majority of their officers were Jewish.
Speaker 1: Big surprise, almost all of the there was three thousand
volunteers from the United States, and almost to a man
and woman, they were all yes. Yeah.
Speaker 2: In my book, one of the first things is they
in the first chapter they take out a 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
is what it is, man, it's if someone writes this down,
I believe it. So yeah, all right, so 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 the real
anarchist stuff, what was actually going on in Catalonia. They
have 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 Spanish, other Spanish folks have helped crack the code,
like some weapons collectors cracked the code on where the
five bomb, the grenade that the FAI created, where that
came from through a untranslated memoir of a Spanish slash
Argentinian anarchist who was involved. I think we talked about
him a little bit last time, but there's all kinds
of material that's that's coming to light. When you read
the libtard 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 you know, a academic analysis of something,
they will not do that. So the FAI 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 nineteen thirty four
Storian 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 the FAI
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 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 FAI 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 and 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.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 2: 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 in your neighborhood. Just
think about how this might be helpful for 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 which is
and monasteries where you know, employers, wears, 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, drain 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 you know, on the street, etc. And then
you have a team member who checks out public works
like electricity, water where garages, you know, wears, tram depots,
wears the metro like check out the metro transport routes,
vulnerability to sabotage or 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 nineteen thirties, 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 and then they collect all that intelligence, they
send it up the chain. You don't leave it lying around,
you know, 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 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 and the uprising. And that
is how they secured Barcelona, that is how they secured Valencia.
That's how they secured so many areas. Is that they
had trained and planned in advance. The Carlists 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 and 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.
That completes my ted talk.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the uh. 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 who were organized. It's and because most of the
anarchists were. I mean you could see it 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.
Speaker 2: They very much did. Yes.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's like okay, well it's like and it's like Larbert,
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 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 principles.
And thank god they did.
Speaker 2: Yes exactly because they were extreme. Like I said, 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 d Rudy column, who
were the the they came up out of this FAI group. Uh,
they were the hardened killers. They were the shock troops
who went up to Oregon to confront the carlist recutees.
Because up by like Zaragoza and stuff, where there were
there were a fair amount of anarchists CNT and cn
T f AI guys up in some of these like
slightly industrial areas and some of these larger cities and
Aragon in the in the interior, and they were rushing
up there because the Carlists were cracking down and taking
out because they knew who everybody was, right, So they
the Druti 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 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 Deruti actually got killed in the defense
of Madrid in nineteen thirty six because they went up
to Oregon. 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 Derudy got killed.
They have these conspiracies about it. But the long and
the short is is he said, we're gonna 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 republics.
Speaker 1: So but wow, what a shot learned that. Yeah, they
couldn't have learned that from nineteen seventeen, right now, Yeah,
that's exactly what they did. That's exactly what they did.
Speaker 2: And these quote unquote people, you can't allie 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
they certainly wouldn't agree with me on these things, but
they don't hate me fund mentally. 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. Yeah, and
there's nothing that you get, like you don't get like
Hitler doesn't come back. If you support the guy who
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.
Speaker 1: That's wild. You know. Charles Haywood said something the other
night on he was on with Buck Johnson. He was
on Buck Johnson's show, and Uck was talking to him
about the PayPal mafia and everything stuff that I've been
talking about, you know, and I've said and I've said,
you know, they're not our guys, and you know, but
they don't hate us. And I really like a lot
a lot of what Heywood 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, yeah, they're gonna have to They're
gonna have to become our guys. Yes, yes, If they
don't become our guys, they're going to lose. And then
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. I'll just say
I was wrong. I was wrong. Yeah, they you know,
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. But
if they are, if they want to defeat the enemy
that that they're talking about defeating, they're going to have
to become our guys.
Speaker 2: If you want to, Yeah, you have to go to
war with the army. You have to defeat an enemy.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so yeah, someone said a long time ago, may
you live in interesting times? And yes, we unfortunately certainly do,
but we know what comes after interesting times. So yes,
let's let's cut this and uh, you know, 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 merchant the
other day. So if you had any merch sales, it
may have been coming from Facebook and you sharing your links. Cool?
Speaker 2: Yeah, so yeah, Carl Doll dot substack dot com is
where you can see most of my writing. I have
a sample the first chapter of my newest book, Faction
with the Crusaders. I'm gonna 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
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 twenty
twenty one 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 sub stack, and then
also to my merch, my spicy shirts and stuff like that.
Main thing is I the only way that this is
only 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 by book,
give book two friend, things like that. That's my main thing.
Maybe I should expand it, but that's that's how I'm
doing it. And thanks again.
Speaker 1: I'll include all the links like I did last time.
Thanks a lot, Carl appreciate it.
Speaker 2: Thanks Pete.
Speaker 1: I want to welcome everyone back to the Peak cononas show.
Carl Dolls back. We're going to keep talking about the
Spanish Civil War. Hey doing, Carl doing well?
Speaker 2: Thanks Pete.
Speaker 1: 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
enjoyed 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, well, why
don't we talk about them? So yeah, when you, uh,
when you started going down the Spanish Civil War route,
where you had you already looked into the guns or
was this just stuff you picked up as you went along.
Speaker 2: I'd looked into it a fair bit. I'm an old
and so in the nineties there were Astra four hundreds
all over the place, and you know, Spanish firearms were
very affordable well into the nineties, and then all the
companies folded, all the I should say, all the commercial
manufacturers that were exporting to the US, which were generally
high quality, although there was some you know, cheap, you know,
minim 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 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 the topic as well. So yeah,
I put my you know, thinking cap on and said,
let's focus as much as we can on small arms
of the Spanish Civil War and really talking about you know,
really focusing on the Spanish like domestic weapons, but also
the fact that like how the militias got weapons, and
then the post July nineteen thirty six arm packages of
the left, so the stuff that came from the Soviet
Union in 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.
Speaker 1: So cool. All right, you have something on the screen
you want me to share or do you want to
It's ready, It's ready to go both there you go. Boom,
Thank you, sir.
Speaker 2: So just reiterating Carl dol uh sub Stack 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 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. So uh, I'm
gonna 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 nineteen thirty six arms packages, and again, like I said,
we'll focus on what came in via the Soviet Union
in France and which includes kind of like commercial transfer
from arms dealers. I'm kind of light on text in
this one, and I'm gonna be referring to some notes
off screen because if we tried to cover everything would
be just exhausting. So in the background is a beautiful
Astra nine hundred 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 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.
Speaker 1: Here.
Speaker 2: We'll talk about the military issue weapons later, and the
government also you know, 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 put some I'll do a thread
today with with some links to interesting information. So the sorry,
that's that cool? Oh okay, cool. So the Spanish arms
industry is very interesting. This is a photograph from Vestigui Edmanos,
which was a manufacturer and Eyebar 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 the Carlists 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 nineteenth 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 car on tract for
say the British government or the French government. There's also
just straight commercial stuff, and so the idea is all
this kind of like a cottage industry model, where a
whole bunch of different suppliers and manufactures all over Basque 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 Asturias, 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 designs, 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 or 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
nineteen fifty between the French government and an Eyebar arms company,
Gabilondo e Uresti, which became Yama or Lama, to produce
a thirty two 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
sized grip and a slightly shorter muzzle for concealed carry
purposes or just ease of carry while giving a full grip, right,
So a lot of times these thirty two 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 One, because in trench warfare, the old model where
you would have 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 One,
and so the French began ordering in mass numbers. So
the first deal with Gabelando e Ust was ten thousand
pistols a month, and then it became twenty thousand, and
then it became fifty thousand, 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, and you know, our plan is to
meet this is to farm out the manufacture of these
weapons to subcontractors. Okay. So they started out, you know,
with this acceptance, with like five subcontractors, and it eventually
became dozens because what happened was these individual subcontractors would
sub out like you know, trigger action components, 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 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 auomatic 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 handfit every magazine, you 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 seven hundred and fifty thousand of
these were made specifically to this ruby format and shipped
to France. Some of them went to Finland too, and
I think the Russian the Russians got some as well.
And at this point Spain is like flooded with not
only thirty two ACP handguns seven sixty five 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 let you know makers, and then you know these factories.
So like let's 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 subcomponents and all that. They need jobs, they
need market, right, the market will find a way. So China,
China is in its warlord era in the nineteen twenties, right,
So I'm not gonna do charts and graphs of the
whole story behind this, but China is entering this period
of you know struggle where between the their nationalists and
all the kind of countryside little warlords and 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, thirty million people, they're sub nations, right, they're
all kind of vying for autonomy. You know, there's there's
that whole autonomy discussion again Pete, as well as just
kind of control over their areas and you know, really
they're they're futures. So this is a huge market for
the Spanish arms manufacturers as well as you know, the
rest of the world.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: 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
it's wooden holster 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 baar, you know,
the American bar light machine gun or automatic rifle rather
look kind of simple and not not super robust. So
the industry of the world is cranking out advanced weapons
in this lull after World War One, 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 One, and basically China
and its insatiable appetite for advanced weapons are giving them
a huge market as well as you know, an area
to try all these out and see see what works.
You'll also notice here on the right hand side, this
is actually from World War two, but you'll see all
these Chinese fellows with broom handle mousers. Some of them
are semi ato, 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 twenty rounds plus some other stuff. They can
top off their one or two magazines they have with
stripper clips through the stripper clip guide in 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 copy of the
broom handle that was that was made in Spain. So
the Spanish are sending because here's 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 this was also something that Germany exploited. Germany
was restricted due to the Versailles Treaty to certain like
sizes of weapons and types of weapons, which is where
you get the bowld low Mauser, 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 would it was compliant
with the Treaty of Versailles, but still a very capable weapon.
And then not in you know, nine millimeter because of
caliber restrictions. It was seven sixty two by twenty five Mauser,
or maybe it was seven sixty three, excuse me, and 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 thirty two caliber handguns
flooding from the Spanish factories 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 carbing, semi automatic
light carbing pretty good out to like one hundred and
fifty 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 Eyebar area were copying them.
Speaker 1: So so thirty two acp out to one hundred and fifty.
Speaker 2: Yards, thirty two acp as a handgun, seven sixty three
a mouser in the broom handle out to one hundred
and fifty yards, and they often had very very confident
site markings on these things, you know, going out to
like five hundred 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. Seven sixty three Mauser
right it's like the Tokhrev cartridge. Pretty good submachine gun
cartridge out to i'd say one hundred and fifty to
two hundred. 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.
Speaker 1: Hm cool, keep going, yeah, all.
Speaker 2: Right, So Soma tennis e sinte calistas.
Speaker 1: So the.
Speaker 2: 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, et cetera. And so all
these thirty two automatics become really popular with the Sindacalistas,
the kind of the communist and anarchist extremists who are
assassinating people in Spain, and that results under the the
nineteen twenties dictatorship of General Primo de Rivera of some
harsh restrictions on access. So all the way. Here on
the right hand side, there's an advertisement for Soma Tennis.
And you might remember this. The Soma ten was a
essentially a citizen militia that was under the control or
guidance of 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
were you know, established parts of their communities to own
certain kinds of firearms bullt action rifles, shotguns and handguns.
And so this is an ad for an Astra model
four hundred pistol. And this ad is from the nineteen twenties,
appealing to the Soma ten militiamen in one of their
own you know, magazines or newspapers and talking about how
hey in nineteen twenty one, in nineteen twenty two, in
nineteen twenty three, the you know, the army, the Carbonary,
the prison Corps, the Civil Guard, and the Navy adopted
this pistol or accepted it right as as one of
the weapons that you can own, because a lot of
times the officers would haven't approved weapons that they would
acquire privately. As kind of a traditional European thing. So anyway,
so they were advertising this specific nine milimeter largo pistol.
We'll look at it a little more details soon. Commercially
again to this kind of restricted population.
Speaker 1: I saw I wanted a gun show recently. Yeah, they're
they're great. Actually had the old boxes. He had the
old boxes too, the ones that are stamped on the bottom.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's really cool. Uh, there's a lot of these
in the United States, And like I was saying before,
a lot of them came in in the eighties and nineties.
They were really cheap at the time. A lot of
times there there wasn't the ammunition wasn't that common. Nine
millimeters largo. It's nine by twenty three, but it's like
a it's not like a nine x twenty three Winchester,
which is pretty hot. It's like which is it's like
a thirty eight Super, a rimless thirty eight Super. It's
not that pressure. It's like the old thirty eight 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 nine by nineteen in it, which is
a little too hot and it's short. You know that
it wasn't calibrated for the right springs spring tension. There
was a nine x nineteen parabellum version made for the
Germans and the Bulgarians during World War Two. They sold
a lot of those. That's the Model six hundred. 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 nine milimeter luger feeds out
of the same magazines just fine, although the German ones
had a spacer, and I should say that the nine
millimeter 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.
Uh It makes reference to the second Decree of the
thirteenth of July nineteen thirty four, which restricted people from
being able to buy pistols of any kind of any
caliber under the Republic because things were 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 specific information about the arms
restriction is that you have to have authority, you know,
for for self defense. Weapons is issued by a competent authority,
so like a chauffeur for people in government can have
a pistol. City like municipal agents. It sounds like New
York City exactly exactly. Guards and people transporting prisoners and stuff,
commercial guards so like, or like guarding a store or
a bank or industry. So it's restricted to individuals who
go through you know, 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's still this kind of industry for these 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 arteasonal weapons and arteasonal
means in Spanish and French use the same as the
way we use it, which is boutique, small batch, locally sourced,
hand crafted items made by highly skilled artisans with love
and so these there's some 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 twenties and the thirties in Spain with grenades, they're
making these themselves. And a lot of them are literally
just like a tin you know, 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 five bomb. We talked about
this a little bit the last time we chit chatted.
This is what Orwell talks about. So the c n
t FAI militia and in the bottom right corner, uh,
these fellows here are the some of the hardcore guys
in the de Rudy column. They're just terrorists and assassins. Basically,
they're a they're a strike force heavily armed with these
grenades and then small arms. When we were talking about
the FAI cellular organization structure, do you remember me talking
about the people who were responsible for sourcing equipment, Yes,
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. It's really interesting. It was first designed. Well,
they got the outline of the design from Ramone Franco.
Is it Ramona Raoul? I think it's Ramone Franco, who
was a pilot and an anti monarchist, but not like
an anarchist, but he was He felt like, we need
to move forward in the in the twenties when they
were when these anarchists and other people were plotting a
lot of 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 an aviation. You know, I know that you're an
anti monarchist. So and so, you know, made 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 bolmus de mono
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 the basics out.
He let these guys inspect an aerial bomb and a
design for an aerial bomb, and then this anarchist organizer
who what the publisher of this Tierra e Liberta libert
a you know, Land and Freedom, anarchist magazine, to design
this weapon. He got an Asturian miner who was an
explosives expert who was a member of the the FAI
c nt FAI 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 know from analysis and the reason you
see the smooth looking fragmentation grenades now that 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 ki low 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 you know, a kilo is two point
two 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. 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 parsial because it was like impartial as far as
who it would kill. It would maybe kill the thrower
it would maybe kill the people and 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 like you throw it from behind cover and
take cover because the fragments are gonna get you if
you don't do that. Still hell on wheels in straight
fire 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 this firing pin in kind of inertial system.
So that it would when it hit the ground, it
would land on the firing mechanism. It didn't always work
out that way, but it was a 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 thirty five thousand
of them in trucks when the Drudi column went up
from Aragon 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 nineteen thirty seven 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 once, but you get the idea. It's a
crazy but pretty sophisticated shot made weapon that was very influential,
especially at the 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, fifty guys,
you can do a lot in street fighting even if
you're not super well equipped otherwise.
Speaker 1: Imagine knowing how sensitive those are and being the guy
that they're like, hey, climb in the truck and drive that,
you know, two hundred miles up to Madrid.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's 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 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
anarchist uprising who has like grenade injuries, you can't take
him to the hospital. So this poor guy is just lying,
you know, scumbag. But still, you know, my my Christian
love is feeling compassion for all living things. This scumbag
is lying there like wrapped up, you know, uh, 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.
Speaker 1: Oh my goodness, that's yeah, that's I immediately think to myself,
well he's an anarchist. Yes, too bad he didn't get
taken out. Yeah, yeah, that's my that's my Catholic side
saying die fucking commy scum.
Speaker 2: Yes, of course. The the other the other famous self
own with La on Parsil was this guy named Braulio,
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 you know
that all these weapons there. I believe there was a
failed uprising. A bunch of the weapons got captured and
then the 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 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 brow Leo. So yeah,
it was very famous for killing the people making and
using them. Good times.
Speaker 1: So who's the who's the tall drink of water next
to Franco?
Speaker 2: Oh that's oh my gosh, why is my brain not working? General? Uh?
The crippled guy. General, crippled guy? Uh? Areol?
Speaker 1: Is it? Yeah? Yeah, I believe it's Ore.
Speaker 2: I think I think it's Arioll. Yeah. So he's in
a he's in a movie about like right when the
uprising happens, and they gosh, i'll have to I had
someone ask me about movies about the Spanish Civil War,
and it was a very unsympathetic portrayal because he was
really just a military man who was all about order,
Like he co founded the Spanish Legion with Franco. They
were best pals, and yeah, very very interesting fellow, but
a key ring leader in the in the in the uprising.
So we're gonna look at it.
Speaker 1: Wasn't it wasn't j Milan AUSTRAI was it?
Speaker 2: It was Austra. Yes, I'm sorry, Yeah, Austra. Yeah, okay,
no problem, Yeah, thank you for that. So the superlative
Spanish Mauser seven millimeter Mauser is such a nice little
sweet spot and a lot of like heavier weapons are
coming back to this kind of six point five millimeter
to seven millimeter sweet spot that was figured out like
at the end of the nineteenth 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 thirty odd six and three h eight. It's you know, dimensionally,
it fits right into that you know, nice, you know,
nice middle range cartridge, high velocity, modesty, coil flat trajectory.
They started out with kind of the long round bullet
of like one hundred and seventy ish grains no metrics sorry,
euros one hundred and thirty nine grains spitzer bullet at
twenty one hundred fps, about twenty four hundred foot pounds
of energy, plenty plenty, powerful flat shooting. This is the
nineteen sixteen short model which became their standard carving like
twenty three inch barrel ish twenty twenty three inch about
six inches less tube out front than the original longer variants,
which were still used very heavily in the war that
during the Boer War, the Boer Republic employed similar mousers
eighteen ninety threes and eighteen ninety fives and seven millimeter mouser.
They rocked the British so well that the British in
the in the eighteen late eighteen nineties that the British
military like reevaluated their small arms theory and you know,
really amped up next generation iteration of the three h
three UH 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. The US military also went toe to
toe against the Spanish in Cuba and in the Philippines
and then later in the war in Mexico nineteen fourteen,
So in the Mexican Civil War, the US intervened a
little bit. And if I recall, they called it the
Spanish hornet because it was high velocity and would just
rock you. They were using the eighteen seventy three Remington's
in forty five seventy as well as like the thirty
forty Crag, And after they went up against the Spanish
with the Crag, they were like, yeah, we gotta we
gotta do something different here, which is why we went
to the nineteen oh three Springfield, which, if I recall correctly,
is a Mauser pattern action or am I thinking to
the end field, But I'm pretty I'm pretty oftident it's
it's very Mauser action esque in thirty odd six, so
very this was the main weapon. There were like five
hundred thousand of them in Spain at the time of
the war. You know, when they were first when Mauser
Paul Mauser developed this rifle and he actually got a
military Spanish military Medal of Merit right and 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.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: 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 or that
was kind of redistributed as needed based on you know,
what was under control. Uh, the La Coruna also far
up in the northwest of Spain, the La Coruna Arsenal
became a weapons manufacturer as well because the nationalists controlled it.
Funny story. Funny story. So in Asturias, you know, I
was just talking about the Austurian Austurian miner that made
this grenade design, right. So, Uh, Asturias was the center
of the the militant anarchist miners who were sappers and
you know, dynamiters dinam Intero's and so they were really
crucial shock troops for the the the anarchists in all
of their attempted uprisings et cetera. Well as well as
resistance to the Army uprising in nineteen thirty six. So
funny story. I'll right 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 this colonel said to
these Austurian 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, like you know, we lose to these
these horrible fascists. So like four thousand and Austrurian miners,
like most of the the left militants in and around Ovielo,
left and headed southeast. They got they got blocked at
the passes, like going into Castilli Leon and got steimied there.
And then the colonel said, psych we're with the We're
with the nationalist uprising. And so they were able to
hold the city and keep the factory, even though most
of the areas around them were captured by Republicans and anarchists,
So good times.
Speaker 1: All right, So that looks like yeah, I've seen Yeah,
those are the exact boxes that this guy had at
UH at a show.
Speaker 2: That's awesome because it was that was the that was
the main way you could get this cartridge intel like
the I know there was some commercial manufacture, but it
was it was like well into the two thousands, I think,
before you could find anything other than this, you know,
Spanish flag. You know, military arsenal produced ammunition, which is
great ammunition. So Astra four hundred and nine millimeters 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 you know, government law enforcement organizations,
you know Carbinari equivalents, et cetera. Straight blowback, extremely heavy spring,
long barrel, very low bore axis, 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 nineteen twenty two, 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.
I'm down here on the right hand side, there's a
comparison shot. This is nine millimeter largo, so it's twenty
three millimeters long. It uses it's basically the equivalent of
a nine by nineteen millimeter in pressure. Maybe 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 nine by nineteen which requires
a locked breach, although they were able to adapt this
pistol just fine to use nine by nineteen. Over on
the right hand side is we have more modern cartridges.
I believe the one right here is nine x twenty
three Winchester, which is very high pressure and very modern,
and I believe that this is a thirty eight Super Rimless,
which is basically the thirty eight Super but with a
recessed rim. So these are very hot, way hotter than
nine x twenty three largo, which is an early twentieth
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?
Yea 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 lette hand grenade. It is.
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 on a belt or hanging
it on a bandelier 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 the rubber cap off and there was
a little recessed area in this kind of whole top
end here because there was 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 weather proof and less
shock proof. 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 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 like on
a on a Zippo lighter, there's like wire structure together
so so that it can it can kind of hold
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 in puddles 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, and 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 there 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 mech
and all the pieces will go flying. But the idea
is an offensive grenade as you can throw it and
assault 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 it's 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 debtonator and this safety like
it had to be jostled with enough pressure with the
safety mechanism removed that the spring would be able to
hit the debtonator and then it was filled with like
a liquid, a liquid or sludgy plastic explosives, 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 a 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.
Speaker 1: You just threw it.
Speaker 2: So and then over here is a fifty millimeter trench
mortar called the Valero that was manufactured by Esperantha Ethea
so Esperanza and company up in Basque Country in a
smaller town. But they've been making these based on like
World War One, 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 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 interesting
and typical of the interwar period. That kind of weapon
stuck around into World War Two, but then it very
rapidly went away with kind of miniaturization, like you could
move up to a sixty millimeter mortar or have grenade
launchers and rifle grenades stuff. All right, speaking of rifle grenades,
I don't have anything in this here, but by nineteen
thirty eight there were there was some use of rifle
grenades by the nationalists, using German rifles in eight millimeters,
using rifle grenades because the you know, the Germans had
used those in World War One and then they kind
of redid them for World War Two, and so some
of the testing of the 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 thirty eight.
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 nineteen fourteen that had proved itself in the Riff War.
They used the nineteen twenty two, which they adopted and
made themselves under license beginning in nineteen twenty five. That
one also used these stripper clips. So here's the thing
to keep in mind. You know, World War One to
World War Two, there was 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 as
particularly like a good example is the Spanish Riff 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 sex session of six men, right, that's like
your fire team level, but it's also in like half
of them to make a you know, they make a
full squad esquadra of twelve men, but you would have
six men supporting each of these weapons. Later in the war,
the light machine guns, they reduced the number guys supporting
it a little bit. And part of that was in
nineteen thirty eight when they started building this weapon at
La Coruna, they went towards the top magazine fed style.
Only the Spanish and the British acquired the hotch Kiss
and license for elements of the design of the Hotchkiss
with a top magazine feed that the British used it
for their where they ultimately adopted the bren gun, which
is a CZ right, so it's a it's a check design.
But they really liked this style and that the Spanish
nationalists moved towards this top magazine fed version eventually, all right,
So those were reusable. You know, link systems are an
issue because you you know, the links are everywhere. This way,
it's really easy to keep things like logistically simple, they
last longer, et cetera. So very conservative thinking it. 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 just a basic philosophy.
This was the beginning of the end for this 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 Renol light tanks, which
were from nineteen seventeen or nineteen eighteen, I think was
the design. They liked them. They you know, it took
like two men to operate them, plus you know your
support team. You have the driver and the gunner. And
they had variants with a light gun like a thirty
seven 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 gun 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 Two, 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 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 Querpo de Segurida, the
eas Aalto, which is the Assault Guards. The Assault Guards
were a specialist crew that were selected because they were
very hardcore pro republic zelots that were very loyal to
the government. When the war kicked off, the Guardia Seville
as a whole split almost fifty to fifty between the
Nationalists and the Republicans. A lot of it depended on
where you were at where it come down to individual officers,
but also like as things split up, they tended to
stick with whoever the local authorities were. So but again
the Assault Guards were arch libtards, so they a very
long time ago they started acquiring forty four forty Winchester
eighteen seventy threes and seventy six is that were copied
up in Basque country, and then they had this very
popular copy of the eighteen ninety two that was adopted
in nineteen fifteen 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 carbing.
They also used, you know, the Hotchkiss nineteen fourteen, nineteen
twenty two. Again this is military style police. They have
heavy weapons. They also used the Mouser rifles. They had
approved the Astra four hundred, but they also adopted the
Model A, which was very nineteen eleven style in layout
and look and feel in nine milimeters largo, so they
didn't they authorized usage and purchase of the four hundred,
but they issued the Model A in large numbers. And
then in nineteen thirty four 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 magazine, and so
they had nine millimeter. They adopted the Astra model F
in nine millimeter Largo. In nineteen thirty four. 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 seven
sixty three, 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 and stuff like that, and they had some
of that, but the the Nationalists actually used a whole
bunch of them in seven sixty three 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 December nineteen thirty six, kind of in that Aragon
front up in the mountains. There you'll see some interesting
weapons they have. They have Spanish mausers, but then this
is a Solothorn light machine gun and they acquired a
couple hundred of these before the war started, specifically financed
by their own acquisition group in Broaden 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 militious so the key focus, like pre war
jump off, 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 rating 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 man manifests again with a wink and
a nod from from people who were sympathetic to this
and or you know, they would these big industrial concern
guys would arrange a or order through an arms dealer
in like Belgium of Mauser broom Handle copies and then
at the same time they would order a shipment from
Eyebar of like hardware to you know, Navar or something
like that. This is a specific example that happened. They
shipped 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. But the very top is an
Arisaka rifle that was captured by the Russians in Russo
Japanese War, and the a bunch of them got dumped
onto the commercial market by the 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 they tended to use these obsolete weapons to
to arm armed 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 gonna 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.
Speaker 1: There's tons, there's two.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So I decided to focus on what the Republic
was getting. The 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 gonna we're gonna look at that in
a little more detail. Those began.
Speaker 1: Have you ever looked at have you ever looked into
the list of the names of the advisors? Yes? Have
you ever gone to their Wikipedia? Yes? Did I ever
look at their early life how like almost every single
one of them? Yes? Yes? And also, isn't isn't it
interesting how when most of them got back home they
were no longer Soviets or alive.
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, it's very strange. It's it. I think it's it.
I should do a deep dive on this object, because
it's I think it's very important to understand that. Like
Stalin was, I'm not going to do the whole gosh,
what's the what's the term the nickname that people have
nas ball. 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.
Speaker 1: And one thing that I didn't realize until I had
jol out of paul On was that he was Stalin
really wasn't extremely He really didn't care about that one
certain group too much. He cared more about groups that
were like diaspora groups like Poles or Germans, who were
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 became starting to exist
that he was that there was a certain focus because
what is it now, this is the di Ospar group yep,
that that can be a threat to the Soviet Union.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because he could he could control or direct their energy. Again,
just like you said, send them in the international brigades
or as quote unquote advisors out into the world to
do their thing. Again. They're 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.
But at the same time, the whole cleanup that took
place is very interesting and it seems very nuanced, like
could could these people these people kind of having a
spree de corps 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
my country.
Speaker 1: So it's interesting, or there could be you know, the
thing of well you're lost.
Speaker 2: Yes, that's true. That's true.
Speaker 1: I mean, and I'm not saying that what you were
talking about was, I'm saying all of it. You know,
why not both?
Speaker 2: Yes? Yes? Why not? Yeah? Yeah, why not both porque nolostos.
So it's really interesting because so when in July nineteen
thirty six, when the military uprising happens and it takes
a little you know, it has its fits and starts.
Speaker 1: The.
Speaker 2: 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 they the Soviet International, had plans
and had connections with all of these different you know,
people in government and all these other countries, and 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 right ups 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 of weeks after the uprising happened. In this in
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 the Soviet International that was managing the international
brigades officially, like most of the brigades were going through France.
So France was France down and played its participation. Their
big thing was administering arm 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,
Libtard and you know, even Bevor 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
packed element and stuff like that. France is breaking the rules.
You know that everyone had agreed on Soviets where 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 twentieth century. So let's talk very briefly Soviet armor,
huge game changer happens, and like a lot of firsts
happen in nineteen thirty six in Spain, or at least
supposed firsts. So the up at the top is b
A three slash six. It's a it's a Soviet armored
car that has a turret, the same turret as the
T twenty six tank turret and gun, I should say,
and the same turret as the BT five down below,
which is a light tank. So if 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 they then it turned was turned
into an armored car. Anyway, the Soviets built a lot
of these things, and so between the two, it's like
the the tank is the most flexible in terms of
the terrain. It can go over uh. 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 al Kazar, they start that the Army
of Africa starts running into these these tanks and armored cars. Uh,
the kind of the southern periphery of the plane that
Madrid 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 what 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 the if you throw burning
fuel on top of the kind of the air intakes
for the engines for these tanks, you can slow them
down or disable them. So lots of crazy tank battles.
They don't have good anti armor weapons. They eventually get
the Germans and the Soviets make them available, and it's
literally just these like hank guns thirty seven and forty
forty five 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
sights 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, I think. So anyway, that was
the only departure that I really wanted to have with
small arms. The other thing that the Republic gets is
cast offs from the Red Army. So the Red Army
if we go back to World War One again, I'm
not going to put on the Putin hat, but if
we go back to World War one, there were a
couple of things that were going on that 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.
This is an interesting picture because we have here a
modern check or Polish egg style fragmentation grenade that this
guy's throwing, and he's using a French like, really crappy,
obsolete single shot eight millimeters 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 One weapon weaponry, some of it
was stuff they had captured, Some of it was stuff
that they captured the in the twenties, right in the
late teens in the twenties as they were running around
Eastern Europe. Others were 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 eighteen ninety five. The Imperial Russian Army
went to America, like went up into like Connecticut in
during the war and said we need seven sixty two
by fifty four rifles, like Westinghouse and Remington were building
the Mosa Negant for them to their standard. A whole
bunch of those got surplused because they were rejected by
the and 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 eighteen ninety five lever
actions in seven sixty by fifty four. 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 in Finland and in
the Balkans and the Baltics especially, and they sent like
thirty four thousand of them to Spain. And there's a
whole bunch that the Spanish government were least in like
the sixties and seventies, I want to say, onto the
US market through inter arms. So some of the best
we have intelligence documents in 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 that
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 LaBelle rifles and
stuff were coming from the Soviets from again these old
war World War One stockpiles. They also had arms dealers
who were sending Polish baars to the Republic. In nineteen
thirty six Enfield rifles that had been captured by the
Germans that had ended up like in weird 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 two or excuse me, world War one that somehow
ended up in Belgium or in France. They had LaBelle rifles.
They had Bergmann light machine guns coming in in seven
ninety two. They had eight millimeter manlature like all this
Austrio Hungarian stuff was floating around, and so they were
shipping it there like all kinds of crazy calibers. And
then so the Berth the a eight millimeter Lebel's 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 one and World War two 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 thirty dollars a box for twenty rounds and
stuff like that. That was what logistically was taking place
with all these old random weapons except seven sixty two
by fifty four Mosa Negant 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 seven sixty
two x fifty four 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 Mauser in eight millimeter. There was a
bunch of that too, and then our friend the FN
nineteen twenty two thirty two 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 Mausers
and eight millimeter bars and eight millimeter brend guns, you know,
the check ones, the you know, 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 and 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 of the officers, whether they're international units or they're
the uh, the Republic's officers with f N nineteen twenty
two pistols because of huge acquisitions of those that were
all down there hanging out in like Catalonia ready to go.
So again, another weird thing that happened is like Mexico,
which had a socialist government at the time, sent a
whole bunch of Mozen negants that they had acquired. They
had bought a bunch of those the American made Mosa
negants and used it themselves like during their civil war
and you know, in the twenties, and then they shipped
a ton of them over. They sent a whole bunch
of seven millimeter Mauser rifles because they were kind of
going in a different direction, there were sanitized Polish mausers.
So the Poles, we're selling them just from 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
One surplus, there's all this other even pre World War
one surplus. All this stuff captured in World War One
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 we're coming from the Soviets. But there was
some interesting, like pretty high end new stuff coming from
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 on 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 Squashington street fighting by leftist militias.
So like Barcelonas and Tander, 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
that the Nationalists did a much better job of securing
the arsenals and the factories, and so there were public
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 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 for 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 Asagna
releases the arsenal to the leftist militias, and then they're
able to actually fight at that point. So, yeah, that
wraps up what I had prepared. Hail Franco, haile victory.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's uh, 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 Carliss The Carlists knew before and were better
equipped for what was coming than any of the other
groups on the right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, even the military in a lot of places, like
the military's weaponry, it was so dispersed, and the Carlists
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 running around Europe for
during the twenties and in the thirties, 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 Carlists had the latest stuff.
They had old stuff too, like they have art in
a lot of cases like arisakas and stuff. But they
also had tons of light machine guns to start off,
you know, relative 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 a Karunya and then Oviedo is is an exception.
It's in blue because it's nationalist. Yeah, so very very important,
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 and you have to
think at what's been done in the past and what's
worked in the past, and and think think about logistics.
It's not just 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 the c nt f AI 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 lowfully legal, fun theoretical educational activities.
Speaker 1: 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.
Speaker 2: Yes, Carl Dahl k A R L d A h
L dot s stack dot 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, so.
Speaker 1: I appreciate it.
Speaker 2: Thank you, Thanks Pete.
Speaker 1: 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
you doing? Call doing well, Pete.
Speaker 2: Thank you.
Speaker 1: 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 subject that I did
this week, I think that we really need to study
this 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 one twice
in the twentieth century, and the other one you don't
hear about because it happened in Finland.
Speaker 2: Yes, well 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. You've if you've
heard any of my read alongs with other people, you
know that jump in and stop me anytime you got it.
Speaker 1: 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 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 your 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 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 of this chapter, the first two words of this chapter,
or the name Largo Caballero. What do you know about
Largo cabaatto.
Speaker 2: So his name, it's funny, his name translates his long night,
like Caballero is a is a night, Cabyo is a horse,
so you know, horseman. And and it's kind of interesting
because the old culture of Spain was largely rotated around
the nobility, the kabairos and all all over the Western hemisphere.
A kabaliro it's a respectful way to refer to a
friend or something calling him a gentleman or sir or
something like that. Right, Largo Kaballeiro was a piece of garbage.
He was a well his party. He was more radical
than his party position. So so his party and sometimes
I don't get the all the different kind of like
sub communist, non Bolshevik, you know, national communist groups. Uh
nailed perfectly. But he worked very closely with commontern. He
was essentially a stocking horse for the Communist Party when
he was in prison. Trying to remember if it was
under the it may it may have been in the twenties.
He was imprisoned for a bit under the UH, the
the excellent dictatorship of Prima der Rivera, and he read
Lenin and got extremely radicalized. So he he would say
completely insane things about like wanting to eradicate the religion
of Christianity and the church. You know. So one of
it's as you keep reiterating something that I always reiterate,
which is that the republic was not you know, lowercase
are well, we're supposed to be a republic, not a democracy.
That people say in the United States all the time,
it was a it was a frame up to get
rid of the old system, the anarchy to basically throughout
the quartes and have people's revolution in whichever flavor the
various parties wanted, the various left parties wanted, I should say,
you know, anarchists, rabbid socialists, you know, all kinds of communists,
whether they be national or non. Largo Cabierro 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 Asagnya and and all the various flavors of
things that 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.
Speaker 1: All right, here we go. Lago Cabao set up his
new government on September fourth, Asagna gave his full consent,
even after Lago Cabao had set as a non negotiable
condition of accepting the position of Prime Minister that he'd
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 hayeslu Hernandez. The other was
agriculture under vincente Udibe. But there was also a third
Communist in Logo Cabedo's government, in the highly important position
of Foreign Secretary, j al Julio alved excuse me, sargez
Julio Alvarez Delvallo, a close and obedient collaborator with the
common tern, though not a listed member of the Communist party.
Speaker 2: All right, So I want to point something about about
all these different ministries that were handed directly to the Communists.
So there are elements when you read the more detailed
histories where the anarchists are involved in, you know, some
of the other parties, a lot of times while they're
they're anti anti Christian and stuff, they're 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 Holadamoor in Ukraine. Again, that was all under
the auspices of agricultural departments. And then finally the Foreign secretary.
The Foreign Secretary Alvares del Vao is the one who
handed control of the military essentially to the common tern
aka the Soviet Union. I'll hand it back to you.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I want to make a point because you know,
a lot of conservatives and Republicans and libertarians, well talk
about the failure of communism, how they can't feed their people.
They don't talk about how that's done on purpose. Yeah, exactly,
how certain groups are targeted to not get food. All
these crazy liberals. Yeah, what are they thinking, They're so stupid. No,
don't you know that if you control prices, you're gonna
have shortages.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's the idea.
Speaker 1: Salvador de Mariaga calls his appointment a clear sign of
the rising power of Moscow in Spanish affairs. Communist Party
members Hernandez and Ribe accepted their two ministries from Logo
Caabaetto only after being specifically instructed from Moscow to do so.
From the time of its establishment, the Logo Caabaedo government
was committed to quote exaction of revolutionary justice and recognition
of quote people's courts, in other words, to a continuation
of the massacres and martyrdoms that had reddened the six
weeks in Republican Spain since the military uprising. Other important
cabinet appointments were Prieto as Minister of Navy and Air
Navy and Air, and Juan Negrin as Minister of Finance.
Largo Caabierto had tried to persuade the anarchists to join
his government, also not so absurd in ideas at first
had 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 Spain Spanish anarchists and
their leaders were not quite ready to do it. But
on September twenty sixth anarchists led by Garcia Oliver accepted
the ministries of war, Economics, supply and public health in
a new local government in Catalonia set up by the
supple Luis Compinas. You had to pronounce his name properly, companies, Okay.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and sometimes you can put a little spin on
it because it's a it's a Catalan name, that's what.
That's one of the things that you'll find is the
really wacky names are are Cattilean or Basque, generally the
ones that are hard to pronounce, harder to pronounce.
Speaker 1: Okay, that's where basque is where you know, when you
do the DNA test and shows up and they give
you the first like the first section of the country
that you're yeah, like that you most yet minus Basque.
Speaker 2: I'm not I'm not terribly surprised by that. But I've
I've had too many conversations about racial purity with with
Latin American huiros. One one super quick thing, Pete that
I want to point out, and I'll try not to
doo much because otherwise it'll take us an eternity to
get through that. No.
Speaker 1: Well, here's the thing. Here's the thing about this remember
what you're gonna 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.
Speaker 2: 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 you can catch it from general
histories like Bevar. You know, I'll add one more thing.
If you're reading general histories about the war, ignore Preston.
He sucks. He's he's a comedy, 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 of paragraphs the all these
ministers of the government where they essentially sanctified, you know,
in a communist sanctification, you know, blasphemous definition of course,
the check 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 six thousand in
the first couple months in Madrid that they just had
Stummary executions of like minimum that that was official government
policy of the republic. So when these apologists make excuses
for these people that, I mean, that's that's what the
thing is. The last time we talked, we talked about
Preeto a little bit because he was a I mistakenly
called him a Basque socialist politician. He was actually his
family was from a storious 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 my graded 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 the nationalist aligned Carlists and
a lot of the former were incorporated into the Carlist
units very smoothly. So they had a huge, a huge
amount of recruiting out of the Basque traditionalists who had
started out as Republican Republicans under arms so navy and air.
So again that's 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. One Negreen,
as Minister of Finance, he shipped all of Spain's gold
and silver reserves to France and the Soviet Union. Three
quarters of it I think went to the Soviet Union,
a quarter went to France, and so very important. So
they drained the coffers in exchange for a 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 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 current 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.
Speaker 1: Well and yeah, I'm we're in that situation.
Speaker 2: Uh yeah, oh of course, yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah. A friend had contact to me today and asked
me about do you have an opinion a quick opinion
on Jose Maria Gironella, the Cypruses, believe in God, Spain
and the eve of the Civil War. Are you familiar?
Speaker 2: 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.
Speaker 1: Because you're writing fiction about spanishil war.
Speaker 2: Yes, exactly, yeah, yeah, yep.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I get it all right. Onward. Arco Caabaoto 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 rikel Me. I
believe that's how that's pronounced. Is close enough? Yeah? In command? Yeah,
I'm the one here with the Spanish last name, and
I'm asking it.
Speaker 2: I took it for four years and Latin, so I
should be better than I am.
Speaker 1: So did I? I took Latin too, all right. He
immediately replaced the exhausted and an effective General rikel May
in command of the Central Front the approaches to Madrid,
with Jose Asensio just promoted by Largo Caabaoto to general.
The young forty four brilliant Assensio was one of the
few regular army officers who had served in Morocco to
stay with the Republic. Largo Caabaoto sent him to meet
Yague and his Nationalists striking column in the Tagus Valley
near Talavera de la Rena, which the Nationalists had just taken.
Assensio's force was supported by the first foreign volunteers to
go into the battle for the Republic Italians in French.
After a hand fought battle, Yague broke Assensio's men and
the inadequately trained volunteers and they fled the field. But
Yague'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. The Yaghue did send a
detachment north to firm up a link with General Mola's
men at an an Nst. San Pedro in the Greatos Mountains.
Over the next two weeks, the main column advanced only
twenty five miles.
Speaker 2: 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 that those mountains
in 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 nor north of the mountains,
you know, it can it's greener, you know, it's Espana
Verde like farther up once you get past the high plains.
But down in that area it is extremely arid. So
that's that's not surprising. They they won, but they were
super worn out, and that's something that kind of shows
the relevance of the militias who who were able to
capture and hold territory and and take you know, h casualties.
You were reading last time about the recutees in the
advances that they made in capturing territory. But it's 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 when you're hiking, and that's that's
not even like digging in and engaging in combat or anything.
Speaker 1: 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 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 sat out so many wars,
but you know, just yeah, yeah. The leader of the
first Irish Volunteer Battalion, Francis McCullough, I believe that should
be pronounced. It looks like mccallough to me wrote during
September it's a president Amen and de Valera of Ireland,
quoting I am in Spain. I see Spain all around me.
Excuse me a second, sorry, I am in Sipain. I
see Spain all around me. I live and move and
breathe in the shadow of the greatest horror that has
befallen Europe. Since Sevisky 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. Pins of 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 of many hang rosary beads scapulars of the Virgin
Pilar and that cross whereon the Red's 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 an This is not an army,
It is the Church militant on the march. It is
Catholic action personified. This is not a civil war. It
is a holy war a crusade. These are not soldiers.
They are fighting monks, knights, templars, and like all good monks,
they are cheerful. Never was there such a singing army.
Whenever one wakes up at night, one hears the singing
soldiers go past. What then, has caused this extraordinary outburst
of piety? In my opinion, their principle causes 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 deprive them of
their wisest and gentilest counselors. On the contrary, they were strengthened,
for many of those victims died like veritable saints of God,
and the Catholic army now sees 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 fourteenth, speaking to a group of several hundred Spanish refugees,
Pope Pious the eleventh, that Pope Pious the eleventh 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 opposed duty to do, to caution,
to caution the defenders of God in religion in Spain,
never to forget that their enemies were still their brothers,
whom they must still try to love, and not to
give away to vengeful fury. He may already have heard
of the massacres inflicted on helpless prisoners on the Spanish
Balaric island of Majorca by the man who curiously emerged
as its governor after a nationalist force took the island
from the Republic on September third, an Italian Fascist officer
officer named Arca Novaldo bona Coursi. That sounds German to me.
How's that Italian whose bloody reprisals turned the profoundly Catholic
French writer Bernonos against the Spanish crusade and his sad
book The Great Cemeteries Under the Moon. He was in
Majorca 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, 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 compassion Catholics, non Christians will
fixate on stuff like this, say.
Speaker 2: Well, you're just creating the conditions for the future. It
doesn't matter. You cannot there, there's there's no scenario. Well,
let me rephrase. The path that the Spanish took is
very understandable given their religion. Unfortunately, you know, but 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. Uh, to make better choices. Just
just an observation at.
Speaker 1: The end of the month and a pastoral letter entitled
the Two Cities, Bishop play 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 Olechia of Pamplona had done
the first 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 observed them,
not for them the disquiet and even exasperation with which
some Spanish nationalists greeted Pious the Eleventh's caution against excess
and hatred of the enemy in his September fourteenth allocution
to the Spanish refugees. On September tenth, the Carlist nationalist
War Huntsa 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.
Speaker 2: 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 fueros. 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 Uncatholic.
Speaker 1: In the course of the month of September, the Carlos
Katis secured the Basque border town of Run on the fourth,
where heroic General Leggy felt mortally wounded in a last
engagement with French communist machine gunners on International Bridge. On
the thirteenth, they took nearby San Sebasta, where they learned
that their leading writer and theoretician, Victor Prideeria, had just
been murdered by the revolutionary by his revolutionary captors. On
the sixteenth, and other Riquette force commanded by Luis Rodondo
took Ronda at the opposite end of Spain in Ando Lucia,
bringing his victorious Tercio to Sevilla. A few days later,
Redondo dedicated it to the Blessed Virgin Mary in a
striking ceremony in the Plaza before the residents of Cardinal Segurda,
who blessed the men and urged them to carry on
the crusade. Afterwards, to Cercio entered the Great Cathedral of
Sevilla to venerate the image of the Blessed Virgin carried
on the saddle of the canonized crusader King of Castile,
San Fernando the Third, when he completed the reconquest of
Sevilla from the Moors in the year twelve forty eight
at the Alcazard of Tola. Though the relentless bombardment by
the besiegers one hundred and fifty five millimeters six inch
guns began to show substantial effort effect by the early
days of September, with the north wall collapsing into rubble
the cannon where 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
Tegas like a giant's spear. Now the cannon. Now the
cannon were turned on the northwest tower, while attackers from
the Santa Cruz Museum set fire to the already badly
damaged Gobierno building, which finally burned down that day. The
revolutionary militia occupied it, but in small numbers it was
hardly a safe place to lodge in. Late the following afternoon,
the fifth, a brilliant counter attack from the Alcazar, led
by Captain Vela, regained the ruined building, now little more
than large pile of ash covered debris. On Sunday, the sixth,
another Nationalist airplane appeared overhead, dropping aluminum containers. Two fell
into the city and were picked up by the militia,
but the third reached to Alcazar. It contained a letter
from General Mola stating that the Nationalists were advancing in
both the north and south and the Yagus column had
just taken Talveda de la Rena. But disheartening news soon
met a grim counterpart. After an hour of listening at
the floor of the Alcazar's lower cellar with his stethoscope,
Engineer Lieutenant Barber reported to Muscadero that the enemy was
digging not one tunnel into the fortress, but two. The
excavation was making rapid progress, and both tunnels must be
expected to reach points directly under the Alcazar in about
eight days. Largo Cabaoto had not lost confidence in his
newly appointed general Asensio, despite his defeat near Teal. He
sent him to Toley, though, to take command of the
siege of Alcazar, with the instruction once and for all
that Tolay the nightmare must be ended. Asensio's first task
was to establish better discipline. So far, the siege had
mostly been conducted by militia, ardent and brutal, but largely untrained.
The only Republican general involved had been Riguelne for a
few days at the outset of the siege in July
before he went up to the Guadama passes, and then
again for a few days at the beginning of August
before he went south to fight Yaghue. Ascensio 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, Asensio
was a formidable opponent, resolved to gain victory at last
asked 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 ten
point thirty in the evening of the eighth 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 Mosca Moscardo, hailed the Alcazar on a
megaphone from the Plaza de Cappuccinos. It's so funny that
that's the way that's pronounced. Actually, Blaza de Cappuccinos, on
the opposite side of the fortress, from the ruins of
the Gobierno and the two wrecked towers. He asked for
an hour ceasefire at nine o'clock the following more so
that he might meet with Muscargo. After five minutes of
consideration and consultation, Mascargo agreed. And do you guarantee my
personal safety? Rojo asked. Moscardo'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 Caabaoto had ordered Major Rojo to
undertake these first negotiations with the defenders since the siege began,
because the worldwide press attention now being given to the
siege and the growing admiration for the magnificent courage of
the defenders, even among many supporters of the Republic, made
it desirable at least to try to get the women
and children out before the mines were exploded in the tunnels,
and as nearly everyone believed they would totally destroy the Alkhazar.
In the morning of the ninth Major Rojo presented terms
in writing signed by the Defense Committee of Taledo, but
obviously author authorized by the Communist premier freedom for the
women and children, trial by the People's Court, for all
the fighting men and 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 in Muscado's haggard face as you
receive this proposal quote. We are willing to let the
al Kazar 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.
Speaker 2: 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
what the way they threatened to treat you know, an
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. 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, giving
you your conditions, Major Rojo, which means red, which was
their term for the communists. So yeah, great stuff.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Major Roho felt a surge of sympathy and admiration
for his old comrade in arms, rise up and grip
his throat. When he entered Muscardo 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 Academy where they had met. Suddenly, Roho cried out,
is there anything I can do for you? Moscardo turned back,
his expression unchanged, his voice unsoftened, utterly unyielding. He was
a crusader who had lost his son and watched the
blood of one hundred martyred priests read in the cobblestones
at Toil though the city of Saints and the Catholic kings. Yes,
he said, yes, He said, like steel on iron, you
can send us a priest. We want nothing else from you.
And he walked out of the room and closed the
door behind him.
Speaker 2: 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.
Speaker 1: Some men who are in leadership position or just followers.
Speaker 2: 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 stopped making small compromises, the
better your chances of not making big compromises.
Speaker 1: 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 he sensed, 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 loyalties for
the republic. Eventually, he said, if I did this very night,
my wife and children in Madrid would be killed.
Speaker 2: And he probably just realized that. Yeah.
Speaker 1: He left his pouch full of fine tobacco for them,
and as he blindfolded, and as he was blindfolded preparatory
to be led out, he suddenly cried Viva Espagna. When
he reached the outer gate and the blindfold was removed,
his escorts saw that there were tears in his eyes.
At that last moment before his departure, he bent over
and murmured to Captain Alamann standing beside him, for the
love of God, keep hunting for the entrance to the mines. Inside,
Muscardo was pacing a corridor an aisle at an aid
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
aid said nothing. Minutes later Muscolo 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 Barcelo,
head of the Defense Committee, the scrap of paper containing
Muscardo's defiant replied to the surrender terms. Barcello was a
maximal revolutionary. He had been in charge of the execution
of the Nationalists officers captured at the Carabanco barracks in
Madrid in July, and at the end of the war
was to fight his own commander, Colonel Sigis sigis Mundo Casado,
for days when ordered to surrender Madrid, until Cassado captured
and shot him. Flushing with anger as he read Muscado'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 ten forty five 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 berts to
his first child on a table in the electricians who
workshop in the north cellar. He was named Restituto Alcazar Valero.
The castle restored. How great is that? Yeah. The next evening,
at ten o'clock, the besiegers of the Alcazar sent another
message by megaphone to the defenders. Major Rojo had arranged
to honor Colonel Muscado's one request. The next morning a
priest would visit them, as they had asked. Canon and
Adique Vasquez Camarasa was no ordinary priest, formally attached to
the cathedral in Madrid. Once the title of Canon, his
reputation as one of the most progressive clergymen in Spain
had saved him from the fate of hundreds of his
brother priests, from the fate of hundreds of his brother
priests in the capital city. If he ever helped or
interceded for any of them, or expressed any regret for
their fate, history has not recorded it. Approaching the Alcazar,
where he was met by Major Barcelo, he exchanged a
revolutionary clenched fist salute with the militia on the battle lines.
Speaker 2: I prefer the open hand personally.
Speaker 1: Instructions were to take advantage of every possible opportunity to
persuade the garrison to surrender. At the Bizagara gate of
the fortress, Canon Kamarasa was met by Captain Sons de Diego,
who had been acting in the place of a priest
for the garrison since they had none. He had lost
an eye to a shop and a wound suffered while
conducting a funeral service. He conveyed Colonel Muscardo's word that
Kamadasso would not be harmed and would be allowed to
leave within three hours. Then he blindfolded him and let
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, Cammarasso 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.
Speaker 2: Since I rainbow flag outside, I'm not allowed to say,
Oh I am, I'm a prat.
Speaker 1: I'm not allowed to say that officially, since Camarasa had
just hailed, had just been hailed by that crowd out
thereruck that thrust struck home. The defenders of the Alcazar
of Toledo were not fools. They knew very well what
kind of priests would be the only priests allowed by
the besiegers to visit them. Some of them, surely recalled
for Spaniards knew not their own extraordinary history. Vividly how
more than a thousand years before, King Paleo, standing at
Covendonga with his back literally to the wall, a giant
rock wall hundreds of feet high, ruling a realm twenty
miles by twenty, facing an empire the stretch 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 Paleo had answered him, Our hope is in Christ
little mountain will be the salvation of Spain, which it was.
Here was yeah, yeah, here was the new bishop Opas,
and they intended to give him the same name Palo
had given Opus, the same answer Palo had given Opus.
But it was not for this that they had brought
a priest into their stronghold. Tamaraso was taken to meet
Colonel Muscardo in his office. Major Rojo had known what
manner of man he was dealing with. Camarasa 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 that
this is going to appeal to it. I know, I mean,
this is the this is just how clueless leftists are
always have been. Oh yeah, it comes to when it
comes to partisans.
Speaker 2: I'm not affected by it.
Speaker 1: 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 Camadasa's talk. Did you come prepared to confess
us and celebrate Holy Mass? Muscardo demanded, that's all we want.
Camarasa 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 homili was Comados'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, like this.
Speaker 2: Because there, because they're libtards for Trump.
Speaker 1: He went on and on in this vein. Some of
the women began to sob, some of the men were shaken.
He talked so long that he had no time to
hear individual confessions, but could only give a general absolution.
But he did finally say the mass, baptized as Tuto
Alcazar Valerro, and brought holy communions to the seriously wounded
lying in the infirmary. Then he went again to Moscado'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, Moscado said, then, his voice rising
as Camaraso went on, no signor, no signor. Unable to
penetrate the crusader's armor, Camadasa now began implying that he
was keeping the women and children in the alcazar by force.
Moscardo called in Carmen Romero de Salamanca, daughter of one
of the principal officers, and wives of a civil guard
lieutenant of the and wife of a civil guard lieutenant
of the garrison, and told her this priest was saying
that women of the Alcazar were being held there against
their will, all the fires of the mothers and wives
of men who fought seven hundred and twenty two years
to reconquer Spain for the infidel. Was her answer, held here,
that's a lie. I've talked with every woman in the 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.
Speaker 2: She's more manly than the priest, the libtard priest. Yeah.
Speaker 1: After that there was nothing more to be said. Moscardo
coldly ordered Camadausa escorted out. Two weeks later, Canon Vasquez
Comdasa left Spain forever and shut 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 Arcazar was totally
was entirely his own idea. Since Largo Capieto 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. Commadasa also said he admired the
heroism of the defenders of the Alcazar. He survived the
war and Nazi occupied France and died in nineteen forty six,
despised by both sides. The ancient fate of traders. But
he had said, the only mass celebrated in the Alcazar
of Toledo 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,
I'm sure.
Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely, look at the history.
Speaker 1: I mean, there have been bad popes.
Speaker 2: We know.
Speaker 1: That's not the point.
Speaker 2: Let's see where was I and will be remembered for
a thousand years?
Speaker 1: Yeah, let me see. But he said the only mass celebrated.
But he said, the only mass celebrated in the Alcazar
of today 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 thirteenth, the Chilean ambassador obtained permission from the
government to make a last attempt to persuade the defenders
of the Alcazar to surrender. After five hours of argument,
he induced Major Barcelo 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 Muscardo
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 floor. No longer did Lieutenant Barbarer 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 fifteenth, 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 than forty
killed and over two hundred 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 neurably two months to be able to make
significant progress into the hard rock. With no miner's explosive
charges available. Through the day of the sixteenth, small detonations
continued in one of the mines, but none were heard
from the other, causing Lieutenant Barbara to conclude that it
had been completed. About new 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 Badiantos 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 seventeenth, all sounds of movement and activity the Alcazar
had ceased. The mines were ready, each of the two
tunnels packed at its head with two and a half
tons of TNT. Newsmen from all over the world encouraged
to come by Largo. Cabajiro's government had gathered to see
the explosion which would bring down the battered fortress.
Speaker 2: Isn't that.
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Good, 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 media from
around the world to watch it get destroyed.
Speaker 1: 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.
Speaker 2: This is your symbol. We're going to destroy it and
destroy you. And this is what you get for defying us. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Major of Barcelo, fearing that a large part of the
city might be damaged when the Alcazar was destroyed, was
trying to evacuate all the remainding inhabitants, but many refused
to go to attack. Columns were designated to strike the
Alcazar ten minutes after the explosion and overwhelm any surviving defenders.
It was still somewhere on the high plains of Castile,
and the night was warm, especially in the cellars of
the Alcazar, into which the day's heat had penetrated through
the gaping holes left by the constant shell fire. In
his windowless room in the center, Colonel Muscardo 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. Mouscardo's tall, gaunt bearded
figure could have sat for one of the world famous
portraits of Toledo's supreme artist, El Greco, with his strange
elongated faces and forms. The guttering light through the shadow
of Muscardo's head and shoulders on the wall, like some
dying giant. He was totally alone. The Alcazar was deathly
as silent. Beneath his feet five tons of high explosive
waited for detonation. Muscardo had finished his entry in the log.
His pen hovered above over the paper, and he lowered
it to write one last sentence, all things possible having
been done, we now commend ourselves to God. It was
what he had told his son Louise to do in
the face of certain death. Under the word he drew
a thick black line and it.
Speaker 2: Carol is such an excellent writer. But all this stuff
is extremely well documented as having taken place. I just
can't point that out.
Speaker 1: Yeah, having done all to Stan, Saint Paul had written
to the Ephesians eight hundred and thirty years before the
siege of the Alcazars Toledo in nineteen thirty six. 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 ten ninety nine, had suffered mortal wounds
when a burning roof fell on him in Castile 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
Muscardo and his crusaders. Seen in the morning, all firing
on the Alcazar stopped everyone inside and outside it knew
what that meant. The next thirteen minutes crawled by unleaden feet.
At six point thirty one, the mine on the southwest
side of the Alcazar exploded, with a thunderous roar heard
in Madrid forty miles away. The southwest tower, one hundred
feet high, rose up toward the sky like a rocket,
then crashed to earth in a gigantic stone avalanche. A
nearby truck was hurled five hundred 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 Taledo disappeared from view in an
enormous rolling cloud of black smoke. At six forty five,
the main attack column, headed by six hundred picked assault guards,
charged from Zokodovar Square, shouting, We've killed the dogs. At them,
where the long defended walls had been, they found great
mounds and masses of rubble, looking for ways through them,
sure of their victory, suddenly they heard, suddenly, they heard
a totally unexpected sound ahead of them, the high, clear
notes of a bugle. The fifteen year old trumpeter of
the Algazar was sounding the 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 campagnatos, and even a newcomer, a baby girl, delivered
immediately after the explosion and named hose Josefa de Milagra,
Josefa of the Miracle. The enormous adamantine crag upon which
Salaedo 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 Cristoree,
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 meat dresser
and her husband, buried up to their necks in rebel, rebbel,
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 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 Muscardo had which Colonel Muscardo 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 Muscardo 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, curling grenades down the
jumbled slope of stone. Amazed by their survival, the attackers
hesitated and fell back, waiting for reinforcements, while the defender
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
zuccadov Or 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
undone dmage started, but it 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
open 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 which was
the floor of the second story, had several large holes
in it due to shell fire and the mine explosion,
but they were twenty five feet above him. The longest
ladders in the alcazar were barely half that length. Gomez
Alverde a Lavaras a Lavares 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 Alvades 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 ten to
twenty in the morning of September eighteenth, and the Alcazar
of Toledo still held out. In their fury, the besiegers
fired two hundred and seventy two 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 Muscardo had been closed in barbed wire.
That night, the defenders were served a special festive meal
luxurious for them, beans and sausage. It was much cooler,
there was a touch of autumn in the air. Maybe
we should stop right there.
Speaker 2: What a crazy story, huh. It's it's when you read
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 all Khazar 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 it's people who one hundred percent believe in what
they're doing from a faith perspective, and people who one
hundred percent believe in what they're doing from a hatred perspective.
Speaker 1: 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 seven hundred years unless something
holds you together. Yeah, and what holds you together is
your Catholicism and you know, your faith in your you know,
and your family and your people.
Speaker 2: And willingness to die like a martyr to move that
line three feet to the south so that in twenty
years your children can move it three miles to the
south and so on.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, people just don't think about that anymore.
Speaker 2: And that's how we need to start thinking.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, it's when you talk about like localism, people
just don't get it. Yeah, people don't get what you're
saying when you start what you're talking about that. Yeah,
they didn't try to take back the country all at once.
It was little by little. Yeah, province by province.
Speaker 2: 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 sperg and tell them
all your wildest fantasies, you know, just it. You can.
You can get a lot done by just being a
good neighbor and building from there and turning it into
real things.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well social capital, concern and civil civilizational capital really quick. Yeah,
and at this point, at this point, it has to
all right, well, I appreciate you doing this with me.
Let people know where they can find your stuff. I
hear you have a really nice, like cool T shirt
that you just can't.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, yeah, So Carl Doll dot substack dot com
is my main headquarters, even though I post in various areas.
I'm on I'm on Twitter. You know what I think
I need to reconnect my Twitter account to my substack
so people can see that there, because that's for ship posting.
But the substack is where I do most of my
my real, my real writing. I'm trying to put articles
of interest, mostly still focused on the Spanish Civil War. Up.
I have a link to my little 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 I was puzzling
on how to how to describe it, and it's you've
seen the meme where it says there will be no communism,
and the real quote is all I know is wherever
I am, there will be no communism. So I have
the original I'm basically made like a fash wave edit
where he's wearing you know, razor sunglasses or whatever they
call them, pit vipers, generic non branded, non patent and
trademark violating images with the original Spanish quote with a nice,
nice logo there, and it's it's already people are already
buying it. And I'm like, I got to order some
for myself, so and my sons. 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 the autism required to write a nearly five hundred
page novel, a large, you know, pretty big, pretty big book,
with to the level of detail required to be accurate
historically and such two 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 characters was
Peter Kemp's mind were of trouble. But the Last Crusade
by Warren Carroll is where I took the most like
spiritual inspiration from it and told as many of those
kinds of stories as I could, because to me, that's
where everything is. It's you know, you go in as
a naive adventurer. You become a crusader when you see
the crusaders around you and what motivates them. So the
Sacred Heart of Jesus patches on mine and my son's
plate carriers for a good reason, because that's what the
recatas 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
twentieth 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 twentieth century, and
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 fallen Gay. They played an
important part, but not nearly as big a one as
they're credited with. The Carlist Recortees played a massive.
Speaker 1: Role in it.
Speaker 2: And that was literally a civilian militia spun up in
just a couple of years, and then of course the
the military elements in their uprising, you know. And what
it was was it was a coalition of people who
really focused on what connected them more than what differentiated
them from other people, in terms of what they wanted
for a future for their country and their people. And
it's really important that we think that way instead of
spurging out. It's important to be accurate. It's important to
have correct information and to make sure that people have
that correct information. But there's a certain time when you
have to let bygones, be got bygones and focus on
what you have in common and unite. So thanks a lot, Pete,
Thanks for what you're doing here. It's it's a great series. Folks,
listen to all of them, share it with friends. It's
the way Pete is doing this is very accessible for people,
and I think it's really important, so thanks for what
you're doing Pete.
Speaker 1: I appreciate it. Carl, thank you, and yeah till the
next time.
Speaker 2: Thanks man,