Behind the Insurrections - The Birth of Spanish Fascism, Part 1 - Behind the Bastards

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
What's Francisco and my franco Robert Yeah, fuzz, there we go.
We introduced it. It's not as not as big a
name as Hitler. Like I'm gonna be honest with you,
not not doesn't have the kind of star power like
if Hitler. Hitler's like like Ben Affleck, right uh and

(00:23):
and we're doing like the Matt Damon of fascism today.
He's just just not the same. That is not accurate.
You are completely wrong. You just like his tattoo. Come on,
I love I love his trashy, gigantic, fullback phoenix tattoo.
Pretty funny, It's right, Okay, we gotta think of somebody.
It's like a Deep He's more famous than that. Affleck

(00:43):
will say, it's more like a Scottie Pippen, you know
what I'm saying, Like Scottie Pippen. To Hitler's the Michael
Jordans of fascism. It is like Scott Pippen. We're talking
to Scottie Pippen, and like Scottie Pippen, Francisco, yeah, he's
a yeah, yeah, Francisco is underrated. You know, he's good,
He's like not good. He's a monster at a shoe

(01:03):
exactly exactly Pippin's like we're talking about like like Franco's,
which would be Jack boots almost as tall as the
Hitler Jack boots and not quite as shiny coast, but
still Jack boots. Yeah, and they're little sheep Jack. Yeah
for the fascist on a budget. You know. Um, we're
trying to talk about the tattoo again. I did. I
always want to talk And how hilarious and how sad

(01:26):
Ben Affleck looks every time he's captured in the wild.
Just looks like he's been dying for the last twenty
straight years. And I'm here for it. Love Jack in
the box. It's incredible. He's just so miserable all the time.
It just feels like he spent so much time being
attractive that he just got tired of it. It was
just like, oh, speaking of fascism, you've heard of the

(01:48):
fewer principle, the idea that like a single man can
embody the spirit of a people, which is you know
what Hitler used to rise to power. I never believed
in it until Ben Affleck. Because Ben Affleck is the
spiritual embodiment of Boston. He's yeah, he's perfect. Yeah, he's
really really is. I yeah, like, if the Southeast weren't

(02:10):
so damn racist, I would really like that area, you
know what I'm saying. But yeah, oh yeah about the Celtics.
But I know a bit about fascism, and proper fascism
is a little bit different in every country. It's kind
of like, um, kind of like skittles, you know, different
flavors hips, Yeah, yeah, yeah, milk chocolate as opposed to

(02:33):
be dark. You know, this is part of why scholars
and theorists have such a damnable time defining what fascism is.
In the first place. There's a dictionary definition, right, There's
gonna be a dictionary definition in any dictionary you open.
But it's not really useful, in part because a lot
of dictionary definitions of fascism apply almost as well to
like communist regimes, any any authoritarian regime, which is, you know,

(02:55):
there's there's some points there, which is that whenever you
have a totalitarian system, similar bad things often do happen.
But fascism is unique for a number of reasons, including
its ability to subvert healthy democracies. Um. And so when
you have historians of fascism, people whose whole life is
studying this thing, this amorphous thing that we're still kind
of getting grips on. All of them kind of tend

(03:16):
to have their own definitions of it um, and often
those definitions don't contrast that just different ways of kind
of wording the same things. I tend to be feel
confident that Umberto Echo has done the best job of
defining it in his his essay on Earth Fascism. I'm
a big fan of the way Echo talked about fascism,
and I think that Echo would have named Trump as
a fascist straight away. Um in part because in the

(03:38):
mid nineties, when he wrote his essay on Earth Fascism,
he predicted that the Internet and like the way that
it allowed would allow people to spread messages and crowdsource activism,
would lead to the rise of a of a unique
kind of fascists. And I think that Trump embodied that
in a lot of ways, and I think Echo would
have seen it right away. Now, on the other hand,
I think I may know where you're where Echoes going out.
Haven't read the thing, But like, I have this theory

(03:59):
about a type of fascist that Trump is, But I'd
love to hear what this guy says. Yeah, I mean
Echo Echo kind of outlined a number of different things
that are like that are when you have a mix
of these things and sort of a constellation that is
what fascism is. So there's a mix of like you know,
popular resentment against the left, like a sense of machinesm
of of misogyny, um, a cult of action for actions sake, uh, syncretism,

(04:24):
the ability to like pull other things in and kind
of attached them to itself under like aspects of spirituality
and whatnot. Um, there were a bunch of different things
that that Echo noted as kind of key aspects of fascism. Um. Okay,
so sorry, you know what we're saying, no, because I
was gonna say, well, so interesting about like what I
feel like what we're gonna hear as history nerds for

(04:47):
the next you know, a hundred years, about the unique
the what Trump symbolizes and it might just be a
new type of fascism for the rest of our life.
But just this fascism that doesn't have a foreseeable goal,
like except for just being in power. Saying that was
so that's what was so interesting to me about the

(05:07):
uniqueness about Trump's fascism is like, yeah, but what's your
end game here, like what do you what are you doing?
You know what I'm saying, Whereas like we knew what
Mussolini was doing, we know what you know definitely and
we knew yeah he did it, Like we knew what
you were doing. This was your goal, you know what
I'm saying. And I'm just like what you're like, Yeah,

(05:28):
what are you doing? Dude? You know his lack of
a plan, right dot com? Yeah, apparently Trump saying that,
And you know, because I think that did I think
threw some people off is that he clearly didn't have
as much of it like Mussolini. I do think it's
more similar to Trump than Hitler's and the kind of
fascist that he was and in his goals. But Mussolini

(05:48):
had a plan to take and hold power, and I
guess one of the things that's been revealed is that
like Trump definitely wanted to take and hold power, but
he did not have much of a plan. Not yeah,
I was like, your goal is to reach a goal,
when yeah, yeah, your goal was just almost like yeah,
He's there's a lot to be said, and I don't know,

(06:09):
you just wanted to keep being right, you know, I'm
like about what Yeah. Anyway, it's interesting and a number
of like, there are other scholars of fascism who took
a lot longer to kind of decide that that Trump
fit their definition of fascism. I'm thinking about Robert Paxton here.
And Paxton is a very well respected scholar of fascism.
He wrote a book called The Anatomy of Fascism. That's
a very good book. Um. And he only felt comfortable

(06:30):
declaring Trump a fascist after January six, and he was like,
that was the line, Like it was. Paxton has been
consistent he's an authoritarian, there's fascist elements and what he does,
but he didn't kind of name him a fascist until
after the six And like, I'm not slamming Paxton. I
think there's a room for intellectual debate on total and
I understand kind of why he, like, like you said,
Trump's a different kind of one, right, and where fascism

(06:52):
changes based on the country and based on the time period,
you know, um, And I do think kind of one
of the things that Echo was was sort of peering
around the edges of when he was talking about how
he thought we were going to see an internet based
fascism in the future, was the idea that like another
aspect of fascism, and he didn't define this as a
key aspect of fascism, but I think that it is
is the fascist is the ability to find a way

(07:15):
to utilize new media technology in a way that no
one else understands yet, which Trump did right. No other
politician understood how to use social media in the way
that Trump did when Trump came onto the scene. Um,
it's a big part of his success anyway. So there's
a lot of debate over what is a fascist, And
as a result of this debate, there's actually quite a
lot of argument on whether or not the regime of

(07:37):
Francisco Franco in Spain was truly fascist. And you'll find
a lot of argument about this about whether or not
Franco was a fascist. There were fascists in Spain, absolutely,
whether or not Franco and his regime really counts, um.
And what's not up for debate is that many elements
of the Spanish right leading up to enduring the Spanish
Civil War, we're fascists in that Fascist powers Italy and

(08:00):
in Germany intervened in that civil war because they saw
what was happening there as a battle between fascism and
socialism largely um and more to the point, whatever you
can say about Franco himself, and we'll talk about him
more in Part two. The Battle over Spain in the
late nineteen thirties absolutely ranks as the first open military
conflict between fascism and democracy and fascism and socialism. To

(08:22):
write like all of that was kind of in the mix.
And on the Spanish side, the Republican side, you had
like the Spanish Republic who were you know, liberals more
or less people who supported like a constitutional democracy, and
you had anarchists and communists and socialists, Severian kind of
lesser strains. Trotsky Is too, who were It's a very
complicated civil war. It's more like Syria than than a

(08:44):
lot of other conflicts because there's so much going on,
so many different different kind of corners to it. It's
interesting real quick before you get into this is like
you know, in a past life, I was like a
history and social science like high school teacher, and I
went through the entire credentialing process all the way up
to masters, and at no point in any of our

(09:07):
California standards was it ever required to talk about this
and which is so interesting to me to win, especially
when I'm trying to set up, you know, because since
I wasn't a direct history I was more like a
social science teacher trying to set up how cultures get
where they get and like why it was so weird

(09:28):
around World War two and why we got so like
we was already itchy. Why a lot of a lot
of us was like, man, we really don't want to
go over there. It's because we was. I was like, well,
because of the Spanish Civil War, like we kind of
you know, who's kind of going back and forth about
sending troops over there like it was. And the students
were like, wait what and I'm like, yeah, the space. Yes,
Spain had a civil war, like this happened, like you

(09:50):
know what I'm saying. This was like it was right
before World War Two, Like this happened. It was like
this whole big thing. That's like it's a big thing,
and we were involved, like we almost saying but just
like that's like no, thousands of Americans volunteered. Yeah yes,
And I'm like it's not required to talk about and
I'm like, oh my god, this is You're missing this.
You're missing a lot of the story if you don't

(10:11):
understand why even World War Two is so touchy for us. Yeah,
and part of it was this anyway, going, one of
the reasons people don't like to talk about this is
that it is it's very complicated, and it is not
as much of a cut and dried story as makes
it easy to sort of summarize. Right, once the fighting starts,
once the Civil War starts, it is a bit easier.
But even then, it's a very fucking messy war. And

(10:33):
there are really shitty people um on on the good
guys side too, right, Like there's a lot of like
very ugly stuff that happens because it's a war. You know.
The same is true of World War Two. It's just
been heavily whitewashed, and the Nazis were so fucking bad
that it makes it a lot easier to make your
side seem like the good dudes. Um Now, in some ways,
like because of how complicated it is, And we're going

(10:55):
this whole episode is about the birth of Spanish fascism,
and we're gonna do some pretty deep history here, um
and in in some ways, the story of how fascism
evolves in Spain bears a lot less resemblance to what's
happened in America than either of the two stories we've
discussed so far. But while they're the similarities are a
lot less direct. I actually think there's a lot here
that's valuable because we're going to kind of lay out

(11:15):
how this evolved over time and how the birth of
fascism in Spain was woven into the birth of democracy itself.
And I think that's a really important story. Um, but
we're gonna need a lot of context. So Spain is unique,
fairly unique among European nations, and that it has not
had a sense of nationalism from most of modern history. Um,
not in nearly the same way that you got with England,

(11:37):
or with France or with Germany once you know, eighteen
seventy whatever rolls around. Um, the Spanish state does go
back very far to fourteen seventy eight when Ferdinand and Isabella,
you know, the Columbus folks, right when they decided to
yeah South America, Yeah yeah, yeah. And before that they
were the ones, like Spain they kick out the More's,

(11:59):
you know, the the Muslims who had kind of taken
over a chunk of Iberia as a result of the
counter into anyway they take back Spain for Christendom, that
would be the way they would have framed it. Um.
But they don't actually make a nation, not in any
modern sense. Spain is a bunch of independent kingdoms, and
those independent kingdoms up until fairly recently never really melded together.

(12:19):
You've got the Aragonese, and you've got Catalans, and you've
got the Basque and they all of their and there's
there's more than that, right this, But don't pretend I'm
not going to pretend this is Spanish history is incredibly complicated.
I am very far from an expert um. And there
are still issues with like a lot of Catalans and
a lot of Basque still want like some at least
some degree of independence from the Spanish state, yeah, recognition

(12:41):
from yeah, and they all of their own languages and
cultural traditions. And one of the things that I learned
that's interesting actually is that um, the the the like Spanish,
what we know is Spanish comes from the chunk of
like the the language group that was kind of most
dominant in Iberia. But they actually he stole the word
for the country from I think it was the Catalan

(13:03):
so like it's it's it's very anyway, very complicated history.
Um and from most of Spanish history, the only unifying
factors of all these very disparate groups of people were
the crown, the king, and the Catholic Church um and
mainly the Catholic Church. Right Now, in the eighteen hundred,
Spain was dominated by a revolution, or Spain was kind

(13:24):
of overtaken. Spanish thought was overtaken by a revolution in
classical liberalism, right, that sort of takes over a lot
of parts of Europe at this point in time. In
Spain is is is included in that. But in Spain,
this kind of new liberal wave largely failed to push
for any kind of mass Spanish identity. It didn't like
and this is where you start to get like French identity,
right and like, but you don't really get that, um.

(13:47):
I mean in France it starts earlier than the eight hundreds,
but like, you don't really get that in a big
way in Spain. And part of the reason is that
kind of the cultural elites failed to institute any meaningful
education reforms for the majority of the population ation UM
Like France in the same period establishes a functional education system,
and by contrast, Spain's failure to do this means that
education remained the purview of the Catholic Church. They do

(14:10):
most of the educating and it's only for the wealthy.
Um and the country would deal with widespread illiteracy well
into the nineteen hundreds. And when you don't have mass
public education, one of the things you don't have is
a widespread idea of the history and like what your
nation is. And like right, that's part of why anyway,
there's not Nationalism is not really much of a thing
in Spain, um as a result of this too busy

(14:33):
killing off. And they're absolutely that's one of the things.
That's where they're a huge imperial power and someone's there
the first world power, um, like the first power that's
like on on a level of like what the US
was earlier in our lifetimes. Yeah, yeah, knowing like being
being a Californian married to a Mexican woman, like you know,
you you have to somehow kind of know a little

(14:55):
Spanish history as to why these why these Mayans are
speaking spanning you know what I'm saying, and like and uh,
you know because the part of Mexico she's from there
from southern Mexican Mexico, so like they're they're kind of Mayan,
you know what I mean. And um, but yeah, this
like weird, like how they exported this like colorism and

(15:17):
just this weird el Yeah. But at the same time,
kan nobody in your country read you know, So it's
just this weird like thing happening with Spain. Yeah, it's
it's very weird. And like, if we're going to be
completely fair, like if you look at the system of
sort of slavery that was instituted in what we now
call Latin America, Um, it's it's one of the few

(15:38):
systems of slavery and history that's like on the same
level as what we had in the American South, like
absolutely and and and and genocides. So I'm not trying
to like whitewash Spanish history, you know what I'm saying.
They don't have nationalism. It's just not it's not the
same as it is with all and that's what I'm
saying that that's I'm adding to it, like that it's
peculiar that they had such an imperialistic power without this

(15:58):
like national idea. Yeah, it is. It's uty odd like
Spain is an interesting country to study. Now, the Catholic
Church was a major force in Spain for pushing against
the development of a modern liberal state. Right in the
eighteen hundreds. You don't really have nations anywhere up until
like it started, like that concept kind of starts like
in the seventeen hundreds, Like things shifts a lot less.

(16:21):
The idea of like a nation, the way that we
conceive of one is kind of born in this period
seventeen eight hundreds, and the Catholic Church in Spain really
pushes against the modern liberal state. Um. This was largely
due to the fact that liberalism had an anti clerical bias. Right.
The Catholic Church for the medieval period is like the
most the big power in the world. Right, they had
influence everywhere in Christendom, and they start to lose it

(16:44):
in this period because governments are like, well, where are
we gonna let a church in Italy tell our government
like we're England. I don't like, I don't give a
ship what you said, yeah, um? And the you know,
Catholic Catholicisms huge in Spain and the church is like,
we don't want any of this ship going on. So Spain,
the Church pushes against kind of a lot of modernizing ideas,

(17:06):
and one of those things is that Spain fails to
develop a modern military system. And while it was again
a massive military power, they never do like what France does,
where you you start this idea of a nation under
arms and a modern professional style of the military, that
takes a lot longer to develop in Spain, and it's
part of why they don't do so well when everyone

(17:26):
else develops a modern military right, and they start losing
their empire, both to a combination of European powers taking
their ship from them and from a lot of revolutions
in places they had controlled that overthrows them. Um. And
so the seventeen hundreds and eighteen hundreds see a rapid
decline in Spanish power, and it had been declining before then,
but yeah, now the ultimate collapse of Spanish imperialism um

(17:47):
really comes in eighteen ninety eight when the United States
goes to war with Spain for no reason really and
takes over Cuba just because like it's a just m
just like you want to do imperial power, we could
be that ya, And there you know, Spain is an
unbelievably brutal particularly in the Philippines and then we take
over and we're unbelievably brutal in the Philippines and the

(18:09):
people they are like, oh you guys, so are we
going to have a democracy now? And we're like no, no, no, no,
no no, we want your ship, like we want your ship.
You know, she's setting you free so we can own you.
I mean, don't that kind of freedom. It's that kind
of you. It's that kind of freedom. Yeah, Like we
don't even let women in our country vote. You think

(18:30):
we're gonna let you vote? What are you? What are
you talking about? It's motherfucker's so interesting. Nothing changes, No,
it's just your leaders speak English now. I mean, our
guns are better. Our guns are a lot better than
Spanish guns. They're guns sucked. That's why we're in charge now.

(18:52):
Colonialism So so one of the things that's interesting about
Spain is lady late eighties, early nine, that's like the
height of colonialism, right before World War One starts like
like murders a lot of the great powers that controlled
the whole world. So like they are the they are
writing high Africa has just been like, you know, murdered,
like in a lot of ways, like colonize, the scramble

(19:14):
for Africa's like at its height. You know, Belgium owns
the Congo. It's that period. So everyone else who's doing
imperialism is doing gang busters. In Spain's empire collapses. So
what happens to everyone else in like the fifties, sixties, seventies, UM,
really happens to Spain like sixty, a couple of generations earlier.
So they actually go through the color There an empire

(19:36):
who goes through the collapse of colonialism while everyone else
is doing great at colonialism, which is one of the
things that makes them very interesting. So some of the
things that happen in colonial powers when their empires collapse,
these things that we've seen in Germany and France and
England and that we're seeing now in the United States
happen in Spain in the late eighteen nineties, because it's
just the stuff that happens when you're an empire that fails.

(19:58):
I find that really interesting. The story, and Stanley pain
Uh calls eight the first modern postcolonial trauma in Western
Europe UM, and I think you do have to view
it as a trauma for the people in Spain, and
probably the best equivalent to our own society would be
the ongoing trauma that a lot of Americans have faced
in Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan. And I'm not trying
to minimize the trauma's faced in those countries as a

(20:20):
result of US action, which are commensurately greater. But we've
seen in the Maga movement, right and all of these
like that, it's that have come home and stormed the
capital and ship like it is a trauma. It's a trauma.
We were an empire that fails. It fox people up
who were used to being the empire. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
that yeah, that's that's that. I'll find that part, like,

(20:40):
you know, as being a black dude being like, you know,
we the saying you know that like a qualities oppression
if all you know is privileged, you know what I'm saying.
So like when if you're just you're so used to
the system working for you, the second it doesn't, you're
like something must be broken. You're like, well, no, it
was broke. That's why it worked for you, you know

(21:00):
what I'm saying. Yeah, yeah, it was always broken. It
was always one of the people it worked for. So yeah,
Spain deals with this post colonial trauma very early, right
before the rest, before the rest of the Western world.
Right really does because it fails for them. They were
the first for it to work, and they were the
first that it failed for which I guess makes sense now.

(21:21):
Like in the US, all those failing colonial ventures that
we had flooded the United States with disaffected veterans debt,
and it fueled the rise of a resentful right wing
as well as feeling the rise of a dissident left
wing right. Both of all of that stuff was really
um incited in a lot of ways by UH. And
obviously I'm not calling the dissident left a bad thing,
um But like those horrible colonial wars, we had really

(21:46):
fueled a lot of that. And the situation in Spain
after EE is not all that different. Now, with her
years as a great power seemingly behind her, Spanish intellectuals
begin to wonder if the sense of exceptionalism that they
had always taken for granted had been based on false premises.
And I'm gonna quote from historian Stanley pain here. I know, right, interesting, Yeah.
Symptomatic of the dismay of the nationalist military was an

(22:08):
editorial in El Haraldo Militar on twenty three November nineteen
o eight, entitled worse than anywhere, It declared, wherever we look,
we find greater virility than in our own people. In Turkey, Persia, China,
the Balkan States, everywhere we find life and energy, even
in Russia. In Spain there was only apathy and submission.
How sad it is to think about the situation in Spain. Yeah,

(22:33):
it kind of feels like us in the coronavirus. We're like, yeah,
I think Americans can identify with a lot of wait
they're hearing here, even if you don't feel it bad you,
you know the intellectuals in our own society who are
saying the same ship right, yes, yes, Now. The Spanish
political system was not at all stable domestically during the

(22:54):
period after like while her empire was in free fall,
and that's part of why the empire didn't last. Eighteen
o three to the early nineteen hundreds. There were more
than a dozen military coups. Between eighteen thirty three and
eighteen seventy six, Spain was racked by three civil wars,
the car List Wars, which were not battles against everybody's
favorite tertiary Simpson's character, but were instead members of a conservative,

(23:15):
pro church political movement. The car Lists were the violent,
armed wing of Catholics right. There were the embodiment of
clerical resentment against liberal Spain. They were religious extremists who
didn't want the country to modernize. Um and I found
a very detailed right up for students on a Lyman
dot uk that notes the car List wars quote where
fought with a fervor and brutality derived from deep divisions

(23:38):
within Spain. They also lasted longer than national wars and
were more difficult to resolve. They anticipated the Spanish Civil
War in a number of respects. There was a strong
element of different and conflicting beliefs within the country, profound
traditional Catholicism against modern liberal thought, regional independence against traditional
central control, political liberalism against deep conservative monarchism. So this

(24:00):
is all the stuff that's been cooking up in the
background of Spanish politics at the turn of the twentieth century.
Now partly as a result of the Carlist wars, Spain
had a relatively underdeveloped right wing in this period because
you know, a lot of them gotten killed in wars
um and they've been very tied to the Church, so
there wasn't as much like a nationalist right wing. It
was a Catholic right wing. Now, Spanish nationalism, as I said,

(24:21):
was kind of nascent and didn't really start to erupt
into the street until after World War One. In Spain
was neutral in World War One, so you think they
might be in a better position because they don't really
get involved in this ship um, and it does delay
a lot of political extremism in the country. It's why
they don't have, like, you know, a communist movement that's
really a big deal until after the war. The first
big street fight in Spain between radical political groups actually

(24:44):
happened between two opposed groups of nationalists in nineteen nineteen.
Radical Catalanists, which are like big like advocates of Catalan separatism,
had been holding peaceful nightly demonstrations in favor of independence
throughout nineteen eighteen. In January of nineteen nineteen, a group
of right wing Espaniolistas, who are like nationalists violence Spanish
nationalists assaulted this gathering of peaceful Catalanists. Both groups battled

(25:08):
it out in the streets of Barcelona, and what would
soon become a familiar display the Espaniolistas were a mix
of local army officers and men from a group calling
itself the Lega Patriotica Espaniola. This violence was soon superseded
by a spree of organized political murders by a narco
syndicalists from a labor federation called the C and T.
And this is like unrelated to the national separatism. There's

(25:29):
also and we'll talk about anarchism in a second, but
a bunch of anarchists extremists start murdering people based on
like like, based on class really, um, and that brings
us a temporary stop to all the street fighting, because
the murders bring the cops out against all sorts of
what are considered to be political extremists. And it briefly
claims it's what we're about to see in the United States,

(25:49):
and it briefly clamps down on all political organization in
the streets. Yeah. Now, in most of Western Europe, anarchists
tended to be smaller, Like, they weren't really rare for
anarchists to make a large percentage of political radicals in
the European country. Um. And it's much more common for
like socialists and communists to be a significant like force,

(26:10):
a significant like sized force. Ukraine would be an east
An exception to that. We talked about Nestor mcnow on
our our Christmas episodes UM And part of why Ukraine
had a large and organized anarchist movement is that Ukraine
was largely agrarian. And one of the things we see
in in like Europe in this period of time is
that nations that have a large industrial base and a

(26:30):
lot of industrial workers have a huge communist movement. Nations
that are primarily rural and agricultural have a large anarchist
movement because anarchists are more common kind of come out
of agrarian, rural communities more often than common, because communism
is a workers movement. Marks early on in his career
was very much like you like kind of wrote off

(26:50):
for a long time rural people. Was like, no, it's
all about the workers. It's about industrial like them. You
can organize and you can use them to take you know,
take over the system basically, and like rural people are
kind of a lost cause. And he did change on
that later in his life and staff, but like, that's
part of why you don't really see communism erupt out
of rural areas in this period, you see anarchism when

(27:12):
you see left wing extreme Yeah. Yeah, so I'm gonna
quote it. Yeah, it's it's interesting, right, I didn't actually
thought of that. Yeah, And that's part of why when
I think about ways in which to pull people in
rural America away from right wing extremism, I think of
more systems like democratic confederalism or libertary municipalism like book

(27:32):
chin Um that are kind of more of an out
of a more anarchist view because like a lot of
these libertarians, I do think you can pull into a
more reasonable system that's not right wing extremism, because a
lot of their basic ideology is I want to be
left alone. And I think you could be like, well,
we we want to leave you alone. We just also
would like to be left alone. Can we figure out
a way to like yes, yes, yeah. Um. So I'm

(27:55):
gonna quote from Lemon dot Uk again on kind of
politics and Spain in this period. Quote capitalist industry had
not developed in the same ways that had in Germany,
Britain and America, and Spain had little in the way
of organized labor after small scale beginnings in eighteen sixty eight.
Anarchism came to be a major revolutionary influence of the
twentieth century and was more widely embraced in Spain than
other left wing ideas. The movement first gained notice in

(28:17):
the eighteen seventies after a violent incident at the town
of Alcoy in eighteen seventy three, when anarchists took advantage
of a strike to spread radical ideas, causing the police
to fire on the gathered populace. A clampdown was enforced
that sent the movement underground. Consequently, it became largely based
in rural areas, which were more difficult to police. Anarchism
was reduced to individual acts of terrorism, which in turn

(28:38):
were met by repression and torture by the state throughout
the eighteen eighties and eighteen nineties. By the early twentieth century,
terrorism had given way to a belief in anarcho syndicalism.
This was the theory that the state could be challenged
by cooperative action by the workers and strikes. The Federation
of Workers Societies and the of the Spanish Region was
formed in nineteen hundred. This movement organized strikes to exercise
political power and was again suppressed wage cuts and closures

(29:01):
of factories in Barcelona in nineteen o nine, together with
the call up of men for a colonial war in Morocco,
led to a general strike in the city on twenty
six of July. This turned out to be a major event,
with seventeen hundred arrests, attacks on railway lines, and anti
clericalism hostility to the church. Eighty churches and monasteries were attacked.
The government response was swift and merciless, and five leaders

(29:21):
were executed. And this is a big thing with like
a particularly the anarchist in Spain. They burned a lot
of churches down, and they kill a lot of Catholic priests,
um and some of that, a lot of that is
them murdering people who didn't deserve it, and a lot
of them that is them murdering people who did because
the Catholic Church is also terrible, like kind of why yeah,

(29:43):
if you're looking for like a pure good guy or
a peer victim, you will rarely find it in this
Like there are right like obviously I'm not saying like
like there's nuns and ship they get murdered, that's not chill.
The Catholic Church is also responsible for horrible repression it's
very messy. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, they're yeah, they
you know, they have their own you know, both versions

(30:05):
of like bastard episode of like the like the good
Christmas one that's like oh we or vianages, you know,
I'm saying, it's like, oh, that's actually great, you know, yeah,
and then there's then there's this and the Catholic Church
is so big because you can also you could obviously
we could do multiple episodes and we probably will at
some point about the massive and pervasive sexual abuse of
children that was enabled by the Catholic Church. We could

(30:28):
could and should also do a Christmas episode on the
significant number of priests and nuns in Latin America who
were like dogged and constant enemies of US imperialism and
writing extremism during like the period when the US was
doing most of its fucking around Latin America. All of
that's part of the church is history that like aup
of our hospital bids are actually Catholic, Like you know, yeah,

(30:49):
there's like weird mixed Yeah. I I'm not a person
who wants to like simplify all this. It's very messy
and this is a messy episode. Messy boy by this point,
when you've got these anarcho syndicalists organizing and like and
and in some cases carrying out not all of them,
but some of them carrying out terrorist attacks. And some
of those attacks are on shitty people, and some of

(31:10):
those attacks are on people who don't deserve it. Like,
It's very messy. And at the same period of time,
you've got Gabrielle de Nunzio in Italy occupying well, I guess,
in Yugoslavia occupying the city of Fume. And you've got
Mussolini in the early stages of forming his black Shirts
and sicking them on left wing newspapers. This is happening
contemporaneously to that. You're gonna to like, you're gonna have
to release with this one a vocabulary list. You've introduced

(31:34):
some new names, some new words. We talked about de
Nunzio and few and I'm not talking about him. I'm
talking about the different factions in Spain. Yeah, you said,
you said a Narco syndicalism. Yeah, anarco. So you know
what I'm saying, darn O claydo master this bug. Anarco cyndicalists.
The basic idea is that workers need workers who work

(31:56):
for like different factories or whatever, who work and farms
were and even need to form syndicates together to organize
kind of like unions, to organize and have syndicates that
work together against the state and against capital in order
to in some cases just gain better wages for workers,
in some cases in order to revolt against the system.
But like it's this idea that different or groups of

(32:18):
workers need to organize themselves and then work with other
organizations of workers rather than having bosses in a strict hierarchy.
And they totally need to sell drugs. That's why they
call a narcos. Yeah. The good thing about this period
is that drugs are all legal everywhere. Um So, by
this point, like I said, de Nunzio is occupying Fume

(32:39):
and Mussolini's in the early stages of like forming the
black Shirts. Fascism is getting started in Italy um and
in Spain, though anarchists are by far the largest and
best organized group of political radicals in the country, the
communists aren't really a big factor, and the right wing
isn't really a big factor. It's just kind of the
anarchist fighting the government. A lot of the time. And
the Catholic Church, you know, is kind of a lot

(32:59):
of their like supporters are kind of taking the part
of right wing organizing. But the car List wars kind
of drained them, so it's not a big deal there. Um.
And this is not really the case anywhere else that
you could think of it. It's part of why I
find Spain so interesting. Fascism, by contrast, had a much
slower time starting off in Spain. Portugal actually beat Spain
to the punch when it came to like having fascists, um.

(33:21):
And it was because a proto nationalist group called Nationalismo
Lusitano was formed in Lisbon in nineteen three and it
was directly inspired by Mussolini's Italian fascism. Now a number
of other Mussolini want to be sprang up in Europe.
During this period. You could even call Hitler at the
time of the Beer Hall Putch kind of like a
Mussolini imitator. Um. But the idea didn't really catch on
in Spain, not yet. Uh. Spanish intellectuals were however, watching

(33:45):
Vincent Italy, and one of them, a guy named Fua,
suggested that this new political system might just be the
thing to help rebuild Spain's failing empire. He wrote a
fascism as a social movement. It gave voice to a
vein of mysticism and idealism that ext to the concept
of the patria and it's full realization the concept of
the fatherland. H Coffee shop in Compton. Yeah, with some troubling. Yeah.

(34:10):
So the name of the game for FUA was National restoration.
But Mussolini's fun idea was popular outside of right wing
circles too. There was actually a left wing cattle and
separatist movement that found themselves drawn to Italian fascism, particularly
it's emphasis on militia based direct action. And they weren't fascists.
They didn't embrace, for example, Mussolini's doctrine of therapeutic violence,

(34:32):
you know, the cult of violence for violence's sake. Um.
They just liked, number one, the imagery of this non
state group of armed people marching in order to take
power for themselves, and they wanted to do that. So,
like the left is when we talked about this in
our first episode, a lot of folks who are just
kind of hate the system play with both fascist and
anarchist and left and right wing ideas throughout this period

(34:53):
of time. Um. Also, I like that you brought up
Portugal because I feel like they always fly on it
a radar. They do. They just everybody just not noticing
they could just exist in the shadows. That was the
first in Africa, you know what I'm saying. So yeah,
like nobody like how talking about Portugal. And they're also
the case of a country that was incredibly powerful and

(35:14):
colonized a funckload of the world and then collapsed before
the rest of colonialism did. And you see the same
thing happened in Portugal where all these authoritarians start coming
into power because there's the sense of like, we need
a strong man and this is like intellectuals and Spain
will be like we have to or in Portugal will
be like, we can't have a republic for a while,
we have to have basically a dictator come in because
he needs to fix everything, Like we have all these problems,

(35:35):
we can't argue, we just need one visionary to come
And it's not quite fascism, but it's it has a
lot of elements of that, right, So, um, Robert, can
you hit ad Rick real quickly? You know what else
has elements of fascism? Sophie, no no capitalism aspects. Yeah,

(35:57):
here's we're back. We're back from sorry if by strong
man you mean a strong Sophie that keeps us in
placed in Yes, these ads have elements of fascism, but

(36:18):
it's a good fascism. It's a fast it's a fast
shit fashion fashion, fashionist word, which is fine. Fine, it's fine,
it's fine. And we because yeah, we appreciate our podcast dictators,
sofi our podcast trus with an iron fist. Uh. It

(36:40):
does operate a system of political re education camps, but
that is a story for another episode. So in late nine,
Spain gained its first real fascist party, the Tresistas. They
wore a blue uniform because blue is the color of
the working class for the right wing, red as the
colors the working class for the left wing. Like, I know,

(37:00):
I know, it's yeah. Uh and we got it backwards here,
which is weird, right. Um. Yeah, there were a blue
uniform and they hope to spread throughout the country, but
the organization fizzled. There just wasn't any real interest in
fascism in Spain in this period. Now, while political fascism
failed to gain meaningful purchase in Spain during this time,
fascist thought and inclinations were spreading among a lot of

(37:22):
influential Spanish thought leaders, and particularly within the military and
military officers. Much of this had to do with the
rise of the revolutionary left in the eighteen nineties, these
anarchists that I was talking about. In his landmark book
Fascism in Spain, scholar Stanley Pain notes that the military
resistance to the left had less to do with politics
than you might expect. Officers largely accepted moderate left wing

(37:44):
social and economic aims, and there was even a strong
strain of anti capitalist thought among Spanish military leaders. Despite this,
Pain rights army officers demanded suppression of the left, disorder, violence,
and subversion of national unity. Again, it's this the military's
being problem with the left is they're disordered right there,
trying to tear down this system, and we're we're doing

(38:06):
pretty well in this system. And it's the thing that
is always the case, right um. The military itself was
also heavily divided in this time, not along political lines,
but between bureaucratic officers on the peninsula itself and combat
officers who had spent time fighting in Spain's last colonial possession,
Northern Morocco. So Spain's most of its empires has collapsed

(38:27):
right now, but they have northern Morocco. And Spain had
gotten Morocco basically during the last stages of the scramble
for Africa, and it was it was given to them
by France and England, who you might notice don't have
the right to give Morocco to any but they did,
and it was due to like diplomatic support that Spain
gave them. Like it was literally like it was them

(38:48):
the way that like a normal person be like, hey man,
I'll help you move if you help me set up
my sound system this week. Like that's how Spain got Morocco.
It's very yeah, it's you know, it's it's a bullshit.
It's also a beautiful country, gorgeous yeah. Um. Now, so
they were given the right to occupy the land by
France and England in nineteen o six and exchange for

(39:09):
diplomatic support, and Spain's conquest of Morocco was kind of
like the first one night stand you have after a breakup.
They just had like a big you know, they needed
something to boost their confidence after losing to the United States.
Um and Spain turned out to be pretty bad at
conquering Morocco. Their control never amounted to much more than
a few towns, cities, and roads on the coast. Much

(39:31):
of the territory and its people refused to yield, and
in nineteen one, a charismatic Moroccan leader named Abdul Kareem
rose an army and launched what became known as the
Riffy Insurrection. For a time, it was the strongest rebellion
against colonialism anywhere in the Afro Asian world. Like, these
guys actually do great um for a while, you know,

(39:52):
uh Now, The war attracted ambitious young Spanish officers eager
to make a name for themselves. One of these guys
was a fellow named Francisco Franco, who rose to the
rank of colonel fighting the insurgents. Now, Francisco and a
lot of young officers were very frustrated by the corrupt
and bureaucratic nature of the military, which had not seen
a major reorganization or modernization in decades. It was a lot,

(40:13):
in a lot of ways like an Napoleonic army with
you know, somewhat better guns, which is why part of
the way they're getting their asses kicked now Franco and
a number of other officers formed military councils of like
minded officers and lobbied for reforms, and some of those
reforms were successful, but nothing they did was enough to
write the inertia. In early nineteen one, the Spanish army
launched an offensive into northern Morocco from the coastal territories

(40:35):
they held. Now, because the people in charge were idiots,
they didn't properly prepare lines of communication, and they almost
immediately advanced beyond their supply lines. No defensible forts were
left behind to secure supply routes or water, and on
July twenty, after five days of skirmish is, a force
of five thousand Spanish troops were attacked by three thousand
Riff fighters. This should have been an easy win for

(40:56):
European military, but the Spanish had poor organization and we're
basically out of AMMO because they'd outrun their supply lines.
So the riffs. The riff eat like overrun the Spanish
army and they advanced like several hundred miles, slaughtering Spanish soldiers,
taking over supply depots and positions as they go. The
Spanish army shatters entirely. They lose more than thirteen thousand

(41:18):
men wounded in a matter of days, and the Riffs
suffer around eight hundred casualties. This is like a like
one of the worst defeats suffered by any colonial power
in Africa. It is they get their assets handed to
mm hmm. The defeat was so extensive and so shameful
that the Spanish general committed suicide in the field and

(41:39):
his remains were never found. Um, like it is they
it is yeah, and the Riff. This whole instruction is
fascinating to read about because like these guys fucking have
it on lockdown, you know. Um, it is hard to
imagine how shattering this was to the people of Spain
and their image of themselves, and how much it disrupted
Spanish politics. The military it was, of course, enraged, and

(42:01):
even though the failures were entirely their own, they blame
their failures on the support of the civilian government. It's
y'all's fault. Yeah, well we're bad at war. Wrong with
my cheese? Mo? Yeah, well I didn't lose this war.
Yeah yeah. I mean you see it on the right
here where it's like it was the liberals and like

(42:22):
the left that lost us the wars and no, you
were we suck at this. We're at it. Look man,
take it on it shi, Okay, we're bad at it
and it's bad. It was you shouldn't have been at
the first place. Yeah, if we fucking stopped this ship
in like I don't know, nineteen forty five, we'd still
be like, you know, what we're good at is war.
Don't have to do it often, you're good at it

(42:43):
when we show uh now again. Yeah, it really fox
up a lot in Spain at this period of time. Um,
And obviously the Liberal government is also enraged, largely at
the cost in Spanish life and treasure in this colonial adventure.
And in early September nine, three Liberal ministers resign in

(43:05):
protests because the military draws up plans for a new
offensive and Morocco and they're like, come on, guys, like
you just got your asses kicked. This isn't terrible ideas.
Fellas can not take the message. It's bad. Bad catalysts

(43:26):
who didn't even really want to be part of Spain,
let alone send their sons to die and fucking Morocco.
For Spain held a huge rally in Barcelona where the
Spanish flag was dragged through the ground. This really pisses
off the military, and it pisses off a bunch of
senior generals, most prominently a career military man from a
career military family named Miguel Primo de Rivera, now as

(43:48):
the Captain General of Barcelona, the guy in charge of
the military in Barcelona. De Rivera was a desk officer,
not an African veteran, and that's kind of like the
break between the army. But he sides with the Africa
and veterans, and he sees this liberal government as having
failed his illustrious Spanish army. He also had seen Mussolini's
March on Rome in nineteen two, and while he is

(44:08):
not a fascist, he really likes Mussolini and the BArch
on Rome convinces him that with the army behind him,
he could force an into the parliamentary politics that he
that felt were holding the military back. And I'm gonna
quote now from a book called Fascism in Spain about
like this revolt that de Riveria leads. The revolt began
in Barcelona as a classic pronunca meento, I'm sorry spain

(44:31):
um with a local takeover in the Catalan capital by
its Captain General, who called upon the rest of the
army and other patriotic Spaniards to rally round. In fact,
also in the traditional style, all but one of the
other captains general at first sat on their fence. The
pronunca miento succeeded above all because the Liberal government did
almost nothing to defend itself. The issue was finally decided
two days later by the crown as Alfonso the Eight,

(44:54):
without invoking constitutional limits or procedures, transferred power to what
would become the first direct military dictator leadership in Spanish history.
Primo de Rivera gave no evidence of any explicit theory
or plan. His assumption of power was at first predicated
on a ninety day emergency military directory to deal with
such problems as attempted subversion, the stalemate, and Morocco administrative

(45:14):
corruption and political reform. In fact, his only professed ideology
was constitutional liberalism. He insisted that the Constitution of eighteen
seventy six remained the law of the land, and initially
denied that he was a dictator in any genuine sense,
insisting in his first public statement, no one can with
justice apply that term to me of course everyone since
has called him a dictator. Yeah, the years of Yeah,

(45:38):
what is it about? I have two questions about this,
Like I forget what figure? What what history? And I
heard to say it, but he was just talking about
like just generals, like they all kind of have this
like diva gene, like just just kind of Diva's you
know what I'm saying. Like it's kind of hard to
like what is that? So that's like my first thing.

(46:00):
It's very deep in in Western civilization particularly right, Like
you have to look back to Rome at this stuff.
So the way generals in Rome were treated. Number one,
if you were general in Rome and you had a
major military victory, the Senate would vote for you to
have what was called a triumph, which is where you
were all but in all but named king for a
day of Rome, and there was the whole city had

(46:21):
this huge party for you, and all of your trophies
of war were dragged through the streets and like because
you were so powerful and so like basically worshiped that day.
It was one guy's whole job to stand next to
you the whole time and throughout the day whisper to
you you will die at one point, like you're going
to die some day like that was like like that that,
like and Rome constantly had civil wars that were the

(46:44):
result of generals taking their armies and taking power. It
happened all of the fucking time. It's why you got Caesar,
It's why it stopped being a republic. You know. One
of the reasons why the United States military is organized
the way it is and why there's such if you
look at like some of the ship that you the
military was saying at the end of Trump's time, like
why they had so many statements about the military having

(47:04):
no role in the elections is because from the beginning,
the founders of this country were like, that's going to
be a problems. We're going to have a military. That's
gonna be And at first a lot of them were like,
we shouldn't have a military. Why would you, like it
always is a problem, Let's just have a bunch of militias,
you know, which there's something to be said for that, yeah, anyway,
but yeah, yeah, they are diva's like, if you're going

(47:24):
to take the responsibility for the lives of tens of
thousands of men into your own personal control, you've got
to be a little bit of a diva. Yeah it
seemed like yeah, yeah, so obviously everyone today calls Primoti
Rivera a dictatorship. The years of his leadership are generally
known in Spanish history as la dictadura. Uh and this
was meant like his His coming to power was met

(47:47):
by a lot less resistance than you might guess. Spain
was exhausted by years of political bickering, foreign policy setbacks,
in economic frustration. Several years earlier, political theorists in Portugal
had talked about the need to bring in a temporary dictator,
what it called an iron surgeon, to solve intractable problems.
And Primo de Rivere was one of a lot of
strongmen who came to power throughout Europe in this period

(48:07):
who weren't fascists, although they often admired fascist and took
some ideas from them. Um. But de Rivera doesn't really
have an ideology. He's just wants to like fix things
and figures is enough of a narcissist that he's like,
I know how to do this. Um. And while de
Rivera wasn't a fascist, his brief reign would help further
lay the groundwork for fascism in Spain. And the war

(48:28):
that he brought to Morocco was in many ways a
prelude of fascist wars of extermination to come, only it
was waged with the help of his allies, the French.
Oh yeah, after the Spanish army broke an annual which
is that big battle where they lose thirteen thousand dudes.
The Abdel Kareem, who was the guy in charge of

(48:49):
the reef Um and his his his like, I don't
know what you want to call them, I'll call them
revolutionaries established a republic. Now. France, who just fought a
whole war, you know, World War One was the right
of national self determination and who were a republic themselves,
did not like that Abdel Creem and his riff had
established a republican Morocco because they're afraid they own a

(49:11):
bunch of Africa. They own a bunch of Africa near Morocco.
People are going to hear that there's a republic that
isn't run by Europe and they're gonna they're they're not
gonna want to have us in charge anymore. Like wait,
option yeah, option yeah, yeah, we can't have a democracy

(49:31):
and not you. Yeah kind of like that, Yeah, France
is like, No, that's not that's not gonna happen. Not
an option, Not an option. So they decided to enter
the war against the Riff on Spain's side to crush
the rebels. In nineteen twenty five, France and de Rivera's
reformed Spanish army begin a counter offensive against the Riff.
Now leading things on the French side was a fello

(49:53):
named Marshall Patain, hero of the Battle of verdund during
World War One and the guy who would become the
leader of v Ants during World War Two. He's the
guy who collaborates with the Nazis. Um now, but tell
you at this point, yeah, I know, he's a real
piece of Shitmpkins didn't kill this guy. He's a He's
a war hero at this point too, though, because he
he led France through the battle. Ever, Dunn is, if

(50:14):
you're making a shortlist of the very worst battles in
the entire history of human warfare, for Done might be
number one. You know, Stred. There's a couple of other like,
but it's it is, it's in, it's in the running.
You know, it's horrible, Like a million people die, It's
a terrible, terrible battle. So he's a big war hero,
and when he decides he wants to go to Morocco,
the French government is going to give him everything he

(50:36):
asks for. So he puts together a force of a
hundred and fifty thousand men to face Abdel Kareem's tribesmen,
who were very well organized and good fighters, but they
numbered just twenty thousand. The offensive started with one of
the first Yeah, amphibious landings. Yeah, there's no like Gandalf
showing up and helping. No, we don't, we don't. We

(50:56):
don't get a Gandolf in this story. So you are
outgunned and out man. Yeah, you guys are just like
you're fucked. It's it's a bummer, um. And this amphibious
landing is started spearheaded by young colonel named Francisco Franco,
who led the soldiers of the Spanish Foreign Legion into battle.
Now you have seen the Spanish Foreign Legion. Um. Everyone

(51:16):
in America pretty much did, because at the start of
the coronavirus lockdown, when Spain had a lockdown and brought
in the military to help, there were pictures of a
bunch of very jacked and very handsome Spanish soldiers and
incredibly tight fitting uniforms marching down the streets of Barcelona,
and a bunch of US liberals were like, oh my god,
they're so hot. Why can't we have those soldiers here.
I'm gonna tell you the backstory of those soldiers because

(51:38):
those were the men of the Spanish Foreign Legion, and
it's not a great back story. So it was crazy.
It was crazy about like the geography right now, I
don't notice backstory that you're about to say, but I'm
just picture in the geography because off of Costa del
Soul at the edge of of the edge of Spain

(51:59):
to the put Tangiers in Morocco, it's just the Mereditraneans.
It's a ninety minute boat ride. Yeah, it's it's not far.
It's almost like you could sit in Morocco and watch him, like, yeah,
you come to Spanish. You can get to Spain, Spain
to Africa in the time you would get a quarter
of the way across Texas, right, Like it's nothing, it
really is. Yeah, do they know who designed the uniforms?

(52:24):
We're going to talk about white uniforms. Look the way
they do. Yeah. So the Spanish Foreign Legion were founded Sophie,
he's not a pointy motherfucker. No, No, they're hot. They're hot.
They're hot. They're they're uniforms, they're like a nice they
are they are, but they are, they are hot. Nobody's

(52:45):
arguing that they're not hot subjectively way too tight. Yeah, no,
one is arguing that they're not good looking. Man, We're
not going to disagree about this, but problematic, So they're found.
The Spanish Foreign Legion was founded in nineteen nineteen and
member cree of the French Foreign Legion, since Spain was
also mimicking French ambitions in North Africa at this point.

(53:05):
The founder of the Legion was a guy named Milan Astray,
a veteran of Spain's brutal war in the Philippines and
of the fighting in Morocco, and he wanted to create
a colonial army for Spain that they could use to
regain some of their lost glory. He created an interlocking
series as he founded, like when he founded the Foreign Legion,
he wanted them to be brutal, because if you're going

(53:25):
to keep a colonial possession, you have to murder a
lot of people, right, That's how colonial ism, where you
have to kill a lot of people, and so your
soldiers have to be soulless, broken men in order to
gun down the proper number of children to keep an empire. Um,
these he wanted his shock troops. And yeah, I mean
in fine as hell. Um she just sent that. Good God, God,

(53:48):
I know, I know. Like the reaction is like the
Spanish foreign Legion today look like characters in like, they
look like characters in a pornoch GRapi. They don't look
like soldiers. They look like fake soldiers from a sleazy
porn es. Um. Yes, yeah, and they kind of did. Then,
Solana Stray in order to make sure these guys are

(54:11):
as brutal as possible, creates for them an interlocking series
of hazing rituals with the goal of like shattering these
men's souls. And he wants to explicitly is like, I
want to separate these men from their past lives and
unify them in quote brotherhood and death. Now, Milana STRAI
was a big fan of the Bushido code of the Samurai. Yeah,

(54:32):
I know, I know all of these fucking guys, and
he cribs from Bushito um to write his own legionary creed.
What's emphasized tireless duty, bodily hardness which is why they're
all jacked, unconditional brotherhood, and fighting to the death. And
I'm gonna quote from a write up and Prospect magazine
on the Foreign Legion here. Many of these themes were

(54:53):
common across fascist movements and the military's they influenced, but
others were distinct to the Legion. Legionary swore to become
bright grooms of death from the title of a popular
song about a legionnaire's sacrifice in the reef, renouncing familial
and romantic bonds and sublimating them into loyalty to each other,
and the Legion's flag. You are married to death. Death
is your wife. She's like, I'm married to the streets.

(55:17):
You're not married to the game. You're married to death.
So if you think these guys are a hot, I
have bad news for you. They're fucking the Grim Reaper. Yeah,
they're sorry. You don't. You don't attract him. You are
to a laugh for me. That's not my type. Yeah. Um,
so these these guys, the reason why they have these
shirts with like really open weird necklines, Um, is that. Sorry,

(55:42):
I'm gonna need you to rephrase that. What's about that,
it's they're showing it off. They are showing it off.
It's also meant to emphasize their willingness to fight in
the hot desert air um and the green is from
like the color it's like a camouflage. Yeah, this is

(56:04):
what I wish was normal, Sophie. They are married to
the concept of murdering children. I'm sorry, I mean, I'm
not here for that, but right said, the pants are
subjectively too tight. But like, go ahead, this is not functional.

(56:25):
It's a nice pastel mint color. You know. No, today
this uniform is like functional. Yea. Not you have to
be married to death because nothing about this says you
ready to survive, Like kind of like if the tin
Man from The Wizard of Oz worked at Baskin Robbins

(56:45):
and had to go do a porno shoot later. So
Franco and Franco and his foreign legionment were the tip
of the spear of the French and Spanish governments thrust
into the heart of Morocco. Yeah, I know, I know, Sophie,
but we're about to talk about genocide. Okay, okay, but

(57:08):
you don't know what you just did that. You know
what we need to take a break. The spear doesn't
just mean did Alright, we're gonna go to ads. We're
gonna go to ads, and then we're going to talk
about a colonial genocide. Yes, alright, alright, we're back, and

(57:30):
we are no longer talking about hot guys. We're talking
about the genocide those hot guys helped commit. Well kind
of brought it up like that. You know what you're doing, bro,
I don't. I'm trying to emphasize that sometimes things that
look nice are also fashy as hell, and sometimes sometimes

(57:50):
the good looks will stick it to you. So the
overwhelming force, well, overwhelming force, No, that's anyway. Yeah, they
just rust their Okay, goddamn, okay, Okay, I know I'm
trying to talk about the use of chemical war weapons
upon civilians. But I've never wished Jamie Loftus was here more.

(58:13):
I am very glad she completely She's a professional at this, Chris,
the French in the Spanish have so many soldiers in
so much high grade military hardware that there is no
chance the Riff are going to actually win. Victory was

(58:34):
only a matter of time. But de Rivera and Marshall
Pataine were not willing to wait, and so they started
using chemical weapons to slaughter tribes people in mass and
they're not using them on military forces. They first started
bombarding the city of Tangier with fos gene gas, which
is a deadly chemical weapon. It's what they used in
the trenches. It chokes people to death on their own,
rotting lungs um. It's horrific stuff. The Spanish army began

(58:58):
pounding the outskirts of the town uh and as soon
as Spanish forces started gassing tribespeople, other commanders in the
country begged to be able to do the same. One
Spanish general wrote of his desire to use them, them
being chemical weapons with delight. This was all very good
for France, who profited not just from stability in Northern Africa,
but because they were willing they were selling Spain the gas.

(59:19):
They also profited financially. I'm gonna quote from an article
on the website r S twenty one here. It was
in fact a French business Schneider, which in nineteen twenty
two helped to open a plant for the production of
toxic shells in Malila, and indeed the French made an
official request. One French General leot Lee made an official
request to his supervisors for provisions of chemical weapons in

(59:39):
June ninet, justifying that the use of these munitions with
their toxic power, allows us to spare human lives during
our attacks. In face of these bombs dropped in the
most populated regions of the territories controlled by Abdel Cream,
the Riffians tried to fight back with non explosive projectiles
as well as making shells charged with pepper power, with
little success. Right up to the end of the Riff War,

(01:00:01):
the Spanish army would continue to use these lethal gases
with the support of the French forces with martial Pataine
at their head. In Morocco, so spare human life, they
attacked civilian targets with chemical weapons. They're like, so, look
hear me out. I didn't shoot him, I gassed him
and his family. He just he died from the air. Yeah,

(01:00:22):
it's some real We had to destroy the village to
save it. Vibes yea. So victory and Morocco started the
dictator's time and power off. We're talking about de Rivera here.
With widespread popular support, he created a political party, the
up the Patriotic Union, whose motto was monarchy, fatherland, and religion.
His mouthpieces at the UP declared that the De Riveri

(01:00:42):
dictatorship was only a transitional thing, and that the military
dictatorship would eventually be replaced with a civil dictatorship. So
just military dictatorship, just temporary. We got a civil dictator
It's gonna be fine. It's great to be a good,
totally reasonable kind of dictatorships. It's cool, it's cool. Yeah. Yeah,
Now this would be difficult. Yeah. So the Patriotic Union

(01:01:05):
or the UP, was mostly composed of middle class, conservative
Catholic Spaniards, and historian Stanley Pain notes that in some
provinces sectors of the old political elite did join and dominate,
but the organization also incorporated ordinary middle class people who
had not previously been politically active. So, in spite of
the fact that electoral politics didn't exist during De Riverious dictatorship,

(01:01:26):
it served a purpose of rallying and in some ways
activating the middle class as a political entity. The up's
goal was to ensure some form of right wing dictatorship
remained the permanent government of Spain, and much of their
support came from their victory in Morocco and their success
in for the first time, igniting widespread nationalism among the
Spanish population. The UP held the country's first mass rallies,

(01:01:48):
and for a while De Rivera and his party were popular,
but by nineteen twenty nine, the worldwide economic crash had
started to hit Spain as well. The wealthy financiers who
backed his regime started to sour on him and some
of his interventionalist economic policies. At the same time, De
Rivera faced growing resistance from students, who were a political
factor for the first time in Spain due to the

(01:02:08):
fact that the dictatorship had reformed the education system. In
his last year's in power, Rivera sought to stay dictator
by taking a leaf from the book of a man
he idolized, Benito Mussolini. And this is the first time
de Rivera actually kind of goes fascist. I'm gonna quote
from the history of Spanish fascism here. Italian diplomatic correspondence
from Madrid in the final days of nineteen twenty nine

(01:02:29):
reported that Primo de Rivera was indicating that he would
soon begin a fundamental reorganization of the UP along the
lines of the Fascist Party. This reorganization never got started
as Javier to Sell and Ismael Sas have written with
the Spanish dictator felt for Mussolini was considerably more than
platonic admiration. He was pathetically incapable of transferring Italian institutions
to Spain and was often infantile in his effusive expressions

(01:02:51):
to Mussolini. So he wants to be a fascist by
this point, and he's like, he's kind of simping on
on Mussolini. He being, yeah, just like you're so good.
I just want to do what you do. Why can't
I be as cool as you? Um, It's it's kind
of sad. He's an old man too at this point.
He's not doing great. Um, it is very weird. He's

(01:03:14):
a Mussolini stand hardcore, but he just doesn't have what
it takes to be a fascist dictator. He just he's
only a normal dictator. You know, you hate to see it.
In January of nineteen thirty, this dictator was ship canned
by his king, who followed him out the door about
a year or so later. Because popular support for the
monarchy collapsed as a result of the dictatorship, for a
brief awkward period, Spain lacked any kind of legitimate government.

(01:03:37):
It's king in Parliament were gone. A short succession of
strong men held powers that national political elite struggled to
cobble together some kind of functional government. The whole experience
further radicalized the middle class, this time activating large numbers
of Spanish liberals who advocated in the streets for a
republican government. In nineteen thirty one, the Spanish Republic was born. Now,

(01:03:58):
this did not thrill a lot of people, like it
throw people a lot of people, but it also kind
of piste off a lot of people, particularly young military
officers who had supported the dictatorship. Um Francisco Franco was
one of these frustrated men. He'd been a close student
of Primo de Rivera and had liked his unofficial title
of national boss, like hefe nacionalism, yeah, that's yeah, yeah,

(01:04:20):
hefe nacionale is kind of what they and he was like,
I like that idea, I like me and everybody's boss. Yeah.
The years of dictatorship proved to Franco that a strong
man could unify Spain, bring law and order in military victory.
The only error that de Rivera had made in Franco's
mind was that he didn't have any kind of ideology.
Franco didn't really believe in anything other than like, I'm

(01:04:42):
the guy who can fix Spain. And when you don't
have that concerted kind of ideology, you can't hold together
a dictatorship very long unless you're willing to be brutal
and promote. You know, he was not a great guy,
very brutal in Morocco, but was not willing to be
brutal in Spain. Not really not paired to any other dictator.
You know, Franco, Franco was with him in Spain, I

(01:05:04):
mean was with him in Morocco, right, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Franco was like he was a colonel in Morocco and
so and one of the people will say that like
de Rivera was a bloodless dictator, which again, looking at
what happened in Morocco, not true. But if you're living
in Spain, he's not mass executing people, he's not even
mass imprisoning people. He's not hosting huge executions of his

(01:05:26):
political enemies. He's a pretty if you're in Spain, a
pretty mild dictator, about as mild as they get this century,
you know, which is not to like whitewash him. Ready.
I think it's just like part of why he doesn't
stay in power along. You know, you've gotta be more
brutal than he is if you're going to hold power
as a dictator. Now, Primo de Rivera's fall from power
was also a lesson to Benito Mussolini. It convinced him

(01:05:48):
that his regime could not afford to compromise its power
at all with an elected parliament. This was in Musolin.
He saw basically like, ah, the only option I have
to become so authoritarian that no one can push me out.
And as a result, De rivere As fall was a
major It pushes Mussolini to spring towards more radical authoritarian
policy in nineteen thirty two. Um, all of this stuff

(01:06:08):
is interconnected, you know, just like everything, just like just
like the Syrian Civil War is directly connected to why
President Donald Trump became the president, you know, like it's
all everything always is connected. That's the way the world works.
The Spanish Republic would have just five years of pre
war existence. For its first two years, the socialists dominated
the government, so not like hardcore communists, but definitely like

(01:06:30):
left wing. Um. The first two years the left is
dominating the Republic for the next to a center right
counter reformation pushes back against the gains of the left.
The tug of war was largely in politics between socialists,
Republican centrists, and Catholic conservatives, and the Catholic Conservatives, starting
in nineteen thirty three, were represented by Spain's first mass

(01:06:50):
Catholic political party and first really powerful right wing political party,
the c E d A. And I'm not even gonna
try to tell you what it stands when we call
him SEDA. You know, that's the that's the that's the
birth of like the organized political right in Spain in
a way that actually is able to take some power.
The SIDA was the primary home for the conservative middle
class who had been radicalized first by Primo de Rivera's

(01:07:12):
dictatorship and next by the early years of left wing
power in the Republic. And they're being radicalized both by
the fact that the socialists or in power and they're
doing the things socialists do, which is in part to
say the church is not going to have power, like
we're not going to like let the Catholic Church run things,
but also by the like the anarchists who are still
fucking up churches and stuff in this period of time.
So it's it's the same it is here. You've got

(01:07:33):
kind of these more moderate people on the left, and
then you've got people on the left in the streets
doing things that scare these religious conservatives and make them
decide like we have to take back our country. That
happens in Spain too. It's a familiar story again to
everyone listening. Um. Now, a number of socialist laws were
passed that clamped down on the power and prestige of
the church in this period, and obviously they were again widespread,

(01:07:55):
like there were anarchists attacked fifty convicts in Madrid in
nineteen thirty one, and again this helps energize the right.
It's also if you're a Spanish anarchist who grew up
living under a Catholic church that did all of the
kind of fucked up ship we know the Catholic Church
to do. Nobody's again, nobody is a monster here. While
there are sponsors, we're about to talk about them, um.

(01:08:16):
But yeah, this enraged fundamentalists and the c e d
a like because of how angry they were at the left.
The SITA is never a party that accepts the necessity
of democracy, right, they want to take power and institute
a Catholic state. They don't believe the Republic that they're
participating in is legitimate, which also sounds familiar to her dominions.

(01:08:37):
Yeah the dominionists. Okay, yeah, yeah, Now again, while this
is all going on, the radical left in Spain tried
several times to carry out insurrections against the Republic. So
the anarchists, because they're anarchists, do try to overthrow the
Republic because they don't like the Republic either for different
reasons than the c e d a UM. In some
cases they even fought alongside communists. Communists and anarchists are

(01:08:58):
pretty good at working together in this period compared to
how they'll be later. Uh. They attack police stations in
nineteen thirty four, they succeed in taking over large chunks
of the state of a sturious. This insurrection got far
enough that the Republic called in their Imperial shock troops
the Foreign Legion, who brutally suppressed the revolt by massacring
basically everybody they could, um, just gunning people down in

(01:09:20):
huge numbers. The thing the only thing that they do,
you know, that's why you have these guys to murder everybody,
to put everybody down. Everybody shut up when I get there,
everybody air by sitting down. We do not have machine
guns because we're good at being like a discriminating with
our violence. We have machine guns because it makes it faster.

(01:09:41):
You know. It sounds like Stephanie, she just come in
and everything. I'm not asking who did what? Whtess is broke?
Everybody sitting down? Your aunt who comes in with the
fucking sandal and just started like you need to call saying,
she come in with the check blast air by getting it.
I've got no, I don't want to hear nothing. Everybody

(01:10:01):
getting Yeah. The CNT, who's that anarcho syndicalist party launches
constant strikes in this period, largely because they're angry that
the Republic had failed to rest it. So when the
Republic comes to power, the far left is like, because
the far left our anarchists, and they're agricultural right there,

(01:10:22):
primarily in rural areas, and most of Spain's agricultural land
like more is owned by just like rich assholes who
make the people who are actually farming it pay them
unreasonable rent, and it like keeps them impoverished, and the
radical left is like, we should the land should belong
to the people who farm it. Yeah, maybe, why why
don't we do that? But I understand we got a

(01:10:42):
lot of radical thoughts. This don't feel radical though, Yeah,
it doesn't like it isn't the time, It shouldn't be. Yeah,
this really shouldn't be a radicaln't be. Um. The republic
being a republic, gave them some of what they want,
but not much. They redistribute about ten per scent of
Spain's uncultivated land of the peasants, and that really pisses

(01:11:03):
off the anarchists, so they launch a bunch of in
addition to these insurrections that other anarchists are doing, the
C and T is doing like strikes and stuff in
this period as protests. In nineteen thirty three, a peasant
protest was suppressed by Republican police who shot nineteen of
them dead. Um. So this government, which is broadly speaking,
we'll call it a liberal government, is a government they

(01:11:23):
still you know, gunn people down when you funk up, right,
Like yeah, Now, the constant unrest damaged the left, middle
class support, and the in fighting between communists anarchists and Republicans,
hurt the broadly speaking liberal and left ability to keep
control of the government from the right. In nineteen thirty four,
the c E d A, led by Jose Marie gil Robles,

(01:11:44):
became the dominant power in government um or at least
gained a lot of power in government. This provoked outrage
from the span like they weren't in control or anything,
but they had power for the first time. This really
piste off the Spanish left because in the rest of
Europe at the same time, Hitler has just solidated all
of his power and destroyed by our democracy. Italy is
completely fascist now, um and there's dictators all throughout Europe.

(01:12:06):
So the left sees the c E d A gain
some power and they're like, this is the start of
what we're seeing happen. The fascists are going to take over.
They're not wrong to be terrified that way, because it
is what happens, you know, like like it's happening. That's
because it's going to happen. It's happening here, they say,
and they're not wrong. Yeah. Um. So again the left

(01:12:28):
in Spain, and when I say the left in this sense,
I mean both like the liberals the anarchists, the communists,
the socialists, like all of them start to get really panicked.
And this fear is reinforced by the fact that gil
Roblez consistently gave speeches ranting against democracy and in favor
of what he called a totalitarian concept of the state.
Uh Stanley payin rights quote, it seems fairly clear that

(01:12:50):
the c e d a's basic intentions were to win
decisive political power through legal means, the exception being an
ill defined emergency situation, and then to enact fundamental revision
to the new Republican Constitution, which restricted Catholic rights, in
order to protect religion and property and alter the basic
political system. So again, they're not out of line to
be afraid of what is going to happen by the

(01:13:12):
c e d A gaining power. Left Wing fears that
the c e d A would be bring fascism to
Spain were further stoked by the fact that c e
d A magazines kelpt running huge, loving articles about how
good fascism was. They would have like these huge spreads
about fascist itadily and what a perfect state it was.
There were articles about the Nazi regime in Germany now
Broadly speaking, the Spanish far right is more Italian fascists

(01:13:34):
than German. For one thing, they don't really get the
anti semitism, like like everyone in Europe. They're kind of
anti Semitic, but it's not organizing principle for them. Um
and the Nazis they see. It's like kind of weird,
but like still, you know, they're they're they're better than
the left, but like yeah, it's like I get what
y'all going for. I really want to stand this part,
but I do this. But yeah, I've been with you.

(01:13:56):
We kicked out the Muslims. I mean, I guess just
the same, but I don't know anyway. Yeah, so Robles
even visited. The guy in charge of the c e
d A even visited Germany in nineteen thirty three to
attend the annual Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg. So again,
the c e d A is not entirely a fascist party,

(01:14:16):
but the left in Spain and this time calls them
objectively fascist, and you can see why now. For his part,
Robs only really rejected fascism because he saw it as foreign.
During a speech in nineteen thirty three, he said, we
want a totalitarian Patria. But it is strange that we're
invited to look for novelties abroad when we find a
unitary in totalitarian policy in our own tradition. So he's

(01:14:38):
like fascism, like I like it, but it's foreign, and
we in Spain have our own totalitarian tradition that we
should be embracing. And when he said this, he was
actually referencing Ferdinand and Isabella, the first Spanish monarchs who
were not totalitarian. It wasn't you couldn't be back then,
you just like, yeah, didn't exist. But yeah, it's very
silly and very a historical um. In the same speech,

(01:15:01):
Roblest continued for US power must be integral for the
realization of our ideal. We shall not be held back
by archaic forms when the time comes Parliament where I
will either submit or disappear. Democracy must be a means,
not an end. We are going to liquidate the revolution, liquidate, liquidate.
So yeah, in addition to the c D E D A.

(01:15:23):
Who if you don't want to call them fascists, they're
at least pretty close. Yeah, yeah, low sodium fascist. They're
like they're like diet mountain dew, Like you don't want
to go all the way, but on the spectrum. Now,
Spain also had its own explicitly fascist political parties. And
when I don't call the c e D a fascist,

(01:15:43):
it's because I do want to differentiate between the people
who are like, we're fascists, you know, like it is
important to do that. Um that grew involved throughout the
yearly nineteen thirties. Now, the founding father of Spanish fascism
was a guy named Ramiro Ledesmo Ramos Ramos, and like
most fascist and a actuals, he wanted to be a
novelist before he got into politics, and he wrote a

(01:16:04):
fake memoir of it, like he's it's very been Shapiro. Okay, Yeah,
he wrote a fiction novel which was a fake memoir
about a depressed intellectual who commits suicide um, which seems
like it was very self pitying and nobody will he
writes it when he's eighteen, nobody's willing to take it,
and his rich uncle pays to publish it, which tells
you all you need to know about the Desma, the fascist,

(01:16:26):
the father of Spanish fascism. So as the pseudo intellectual,
the Desma's greatest concern was that Spanish culture had not
given the world a truly dominant political ideology. He complained,
we are the only great people who have still not
borne the philosophical scepter, and who therefore have not projected
in an intellectual dictatorship over the world. And so as

(01:16:48):
a result of this, he decided to steal a political
system from Italy and become a fascist. He eventually formed
the Junta's Deal Fensiva Nacional Sinte Calista or John's and
his followers are called the john Sistas, which is silly,
but that's pretty what they're called. Yeah. Lydsma and his
fellow john Cistas refused to call themselves fascists, but they were.

(01:17:09):
They talked lovingly of Italian fascism, and they wanted the
same things. One of le Desma's first followers was the
first Spanish translator for Hitler's mind comp But to his credit,
Leedsma did try to find ways to make Spanish fascism unique.
In part, he attempted to do this by marrying it
to Spanish anarcho syndicalism. Le Desma adopted syndicalism, the idea
of worker councils governing themselves and striking to make their demands.

(01:17:31):
Mets or adopted aspects of that, and he kind of
awkwardly welded it to Spanish revolutionary nationalism. And one of
the things that is odd that characterizes Spanish fascists in
this period is they really reach out to the anarchists.
They're trying to convert anarchists, um in part because the
anarchists are like the most vital anti government movement in
this period. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it was reading the tea

(01:17:54):
leaves of being like, you know, I think you don't
like the same ship we don't like. Yeah, maybe I
can a way to make it fast. And it happens
for some of them, right, Like that is a story
that's very uncomfortable about anarchist history is that during the
period of time when fascism rises and a number of
anarchists in different countries, and an uncomfortable number of them decide, now,

(01:18:15):
you know what, I'm a fascist, which is not. Yeah,
and it's it's important, you know whatever whatever you believe
to be honest about its history, and that includes the
ugly parts um so Ledesma and his fellow John Ceasta
has refused to call them. And also, we're going to
talk in part two about the fact that a funkload
of anarchists died fighting fascism in Spain. And we're a
lot of the very first people who were willing to

(01:18:37):
put their lives on the line to fight global fascism
before the United States was willing to fight the Nazis.
A funkload of anarchists died fighting fascism, and I like,
I'm not trying to to say that that like, and
that's much more dominant a part of anarchist history totally
than the ones who went fashion, but a number of
them do go fascists, and it's something the fascists directly
try to encourage. Um, it's like the like the like

(01:19:00):
the black Trump Yeah exactly, exactly. Look, there's there's still
that's still un and it doesn't erase the fact that
Biden only won the election because of a funkload of
organized black voters, you know, yes, yes, yeah, So, like
the left wing of the Nazi Party had done, Ledesma
sought to make fascism collectivists, stressing that the individual has

(01:19:23):
died and that the collectivest state is all that matters.
This was not an initially successful line of propaganda. And
by the end of nineteen thirty two they were barely
in e John Ceasta's Uh, Spanish fascism might not have
taken off at all if it had not been for
a fellow named Jose Antonio de Rivera, the son of
the now dead dictator um So de Rivera's kid becomes

(01:19:44):
like really the first prominent Spanish fascist, and one of
the things, this guy is such a figure in Spanish
history that he's one of the only people from this
period of Spanish history who's known by his first names.
He's Jose Antonio. They don't call like they call his
dad de Rivera. He's Jose Antonio, which is like kind
of a mark of how significant this guy was. Now,
Jose was a weird fascist, and we'll talk more about

(01:20:06):
him in part two. He is not like other he's
not nearly For one thing, he doesn't really like violence
in the same way that a lot of fascists do.
And he's like weirdly friendly with a lot of socialists,
like in government, like like he's he's like like and
not in a I don't know, he's a He's a
very weird fascist. His background, though, makes complete sense. He's
the rich son of a military family whose father took

(01:20:27):
almost absolute power in order to murder foreigners and steal
their ship. So it's not weird that he becomes a fascist. Yeah,
I'm like, yeah, just you know, it's like representation matters,
Like you have to see something to believe that it's possible.
So he's yeah, my dad took over the country. Yeah,
I mean I bet I can too. Yeah. Yeah, And
you could see him as like kind of what I'm
sure one of the Trump kids will try to do,
although I would argue he's a better personality of the

(01:20:48):
Trump kids. Yea. So he creates his own fascist party
based on the idea of bringing in another dictator like
his dad, but not sucking at it this time, right,
Like we need a dictator. My dad had the right idea,
but he didn't have an ideology. I'm going to bring
in an ideology. And both Jose Antonio's party and the
john Sistas receive a shot in the arm. On January

(01:21:10):
ninety three, when Hitler takes power in Germany, a magazine
El Fascio, which is a very subtle name. Yeah, dug it.
So Hitler takes power in Germany and El Fascio gets

(01:21:30):
launched in Spain, and the government shuts that ship down
right away and bands publication the future editions, which is
like when in doubtlook you want to you need you
need your brand to be clear. Yeah, you need to
be clear. Com. We're talking a lot in the United
States now about the value of d platforming fascists, about
the and I'm an advocate for aspects of that, about

(01:21:51):
the value of of taking away these people's ability to
reach a mass audience. They do a harder, much harder
core version of that in Spain. You get in One
of the things that's unique about Spain is the police
in this period cracked down on the fascists more than
they do on the left. Um, which is weird. Um.
It's a unique historically everywhere else it is the opposite, um.

(01:22:11):
And part of why is because the republic is very
scared of these fascists for good reason. And if we're
looking at like the effectiveness of the platforming to what
extent it works, Spain shows us that it doesn't necessarily
stop them from gaining power. Because they d platform the fascists.
They try hard to d platform the fascist in the
Spanish Republic. It doesn't do the trick um. So again,

(01:22:33):
useful historical context here, which is not to say there's
no value in d platforming, but we should be paying
attention to what happened in Spain. Um, and the d
platform against Spain is being done by the government, you know, um,
by cops and ship. Now, the Law for the Defense
of the Republic gave the Spanish Republic power to ban
anything that threatened the Republic's existence. Banning fascist propaganda, though,

(01:22:54):
was not enough to stop the contagious excitement over fascism
and the broader right wing reaction against the recent victims
of the left, the john Sistas and Jose Antonio's movement grew.
Jose Antonio was noted as not being particularly charismatic, but
he was good with words, and he was a successful lawyer,
so he had money. He entered into frequent public debates
with left wing intellectuals where he would say stuff like this.

(01:23:15):
So again, he's a big like kind of like Richard Spencer.
I will go down and sit down and talk with
all of your I'll be very nice, we'll be very polite,
and I'll talk about fascism in that way. He's that
kind of fascist. Um quote, this is uh This is
Jose Antonio from a debate he had with kind of
a more liberal guy. The liberal state believes in nothing,
not even in itself. It watches with folded arms as

(01:23:36):
all sorts of experiments, even those aimed at the destruction
of the state itself. Fascism was born to light of faith.
Neither of the right, which at the bottom aspires to
preserve everything, even the unjust, nor of the left, which
at the bottom aspires to destroy everything, even the just,
but a collective, integral, national faith. And you can see
why people would be appealed to as four things like

(01:23:56):
we're not right when we're not left wing, they're both bad.
Were something different. And he also the thing that all
fascists have to do in order to succeed is point
out things that are true and problems with the system,
and he does. The liberal state believes in nothing, not
even in itself. You know, that's a good that's a
true state. But it's good. That's good. Yeah, yeah, And

(01:24:18):
that's part of why again, that's part of why he
does succeed in bringing in some people from the left
to the fascists and converting people um and at least
in getting a lot of them to be like, well
he's not that, he's not as bad as the state.
You know, a lot of people will say that in
July of night, and a lot of people don't. By
the way, anarchists murder eight we'll talk about this part
to murder a funkload of fascists in this period. So
when I say a number of people on the left
are like, well, he's not as bad as the state,

(01:24:39):
a lot of people on nothing like, no, they're bad
and we have to start shooting them to death now.
So like, yeah, let's not. It's a lot lots going on. Um,
you said in beginning, this is messy. Yeah. In July
of nineteen thirty four, the John Ceast has launched an
attack on the Madrid offices of the Friends of the
USS are damaging the offices and threatening people with pistols.

(01:25:01):
This caused a government crackdown both on the fascists and
on the anarchists, arresting some three thousand people nationwide. Again,
like we'll probably about to see this is what the
government does, like you know, I mean, in fairness, like
right now, the anarchists are not doing much other than
standing outside of buildings and breaking windows, and this they
were gunning people down. So yeah, yeah, um, it's yeah.

(01:25:24):
I don't want to like try to make the case
that Spanish history is exactly, but like you, I think
there are useful parallels. So one of the things, again,
Spanish police did arrest more fascists and more willing, were
more willing to um than other members of the left
or the members of the left at this point. Um.
And in fact, the first two years of Jose Antonio's movement,
anarchists assassinated and gunned down and stabbed a funkload of

(01:25:45):
fascists and brawls and outside of speeches, um. Now, Jose
Antonio was fairly unique among fascists, both in that he
had genuinely warm and respectful relationships with a lot of
left wing politicians and that he seemed to a poor violence. Uh.
This was a problem for his young party, and we'll
talk about that more in part two. Now. In October
of nineteen thirty four, Jose Antonio traveled to Spain for

(01:26:07):
a brief meeting with Mussolini and to tour a fascist state.
He found it inspiring, and he wrote, Fascism is not
just an Italian movement, it is a total universal sense
of life. Italy was the first to apply it. But
it is not the concept of the state as an
instrument in the service of a permanent historical mission valid
outside of Italy. Who can say that such goals are
only valuable for Italians. He returned from Italy eager to

(01:26:31):
make and so again the John Ceased is the other
chunk of the fascist movement. Are like, we don't want
to do with a fascism Italian fascism because we were
Spanish Spain. Yeah. Jose Antonio is like, no, no, no.
Fascism is a global thing and it appeals to all
of us. And he returns from Spain eager to make
a deal with the Jones Ceistas in order to emerge
both movements. He recognizes, your propaganda is better. I have
more people. I've got I'm better at like organizing the

(01:26:53):
street movement. If we work together, we can bring fascism
to Spain. In early November, both groups of ashes came
to an agreement. They initially wanted to use the name
Fascismo Espanol, but decided to change this to Falange Espaniola,
which means Spanish fee links. The Phalanges would in time
go on to earn a terrible and bloody reputation in

(01:27:15):
Spanish history. But that it's going to be in Part two,
a lot of history of Oh man, this is dumpee one.
It's like for every uh I love the like for
every kid that you know either it's set next to her.
Was the little stoner kid that was like drawing the

(01:27:35):
anarchist A on their folder in high school that was
just like no rules, Like no, it's a it's a
real thing. It's a Yeah, it's an ideology. It's not
just you not getting suspended for you know, slapping a kid.
It's a real thing. It's a way to organize the
world in society. That in a bunch of different ideas, right,

(01:27:58):
the anarchis syndicalists have one, there's a lot had a
different added and there are also anarchists like anarcho primitivists
and stuff who don't want to orgon, who like want
to go back to them more like there's a bunch
of ship within anarchy. Yeah, but it's not you with
your little drawing your little A on your skateboard, you know,
a little ship. There's more. That's how it starts. And
I will say I've seen a lot of people in

(01:28:19):
Portland do very interesting things with skateboards. A lot of
teenage anarchists this year. That's that's how it starts for
some people, you know. Okay, okay, okay, that's that's if
that's the entry. It's deeper than that. There's a lot
going on, you know. It just like doesn't mean that
you never have to read again, Chad, You have to.
You have to read a lot. Okay, there's you know, yeah, yeah,

(01:28:42):
I named him Chad. I'm sorry, yeah, yeah, that's yeah.
I think I think we could stand to convert more
of the Chad's um. Anyway. This has been part one,
the birth of Spanish Fascism. In part two, we're going
to talk about the Spanish Civil War, which is one
of the most fascinating and important pieces of history. Almost
no one knows a goddamn thing about um trusting. It's

(01:29:04):
very so frustrating people don't know about this, you know,
so many few people know that, like the author of
George Orwell traveled to Spain on the premise that every
single decent person should kill one fascist, and then it
killed a bunch of fascists with grenades. George Orwell was
incredible with grenades. He knew all the different kinds of grenades.

(01:29:24):
He killed a lot of people with grenades. He got
shot in the throat. Oh my god. Yeah, I'm gonna
give you this as another piece of trivia that has
to do with the another hip hop trivia. Um that
you this good Easter egg for your listener and then
for you just I think you might find this interesting
and pull this out one day when you're drinking with friends.

(01:29:46):
Um iced tea, the not the drink, but yeah, yeah yeah.
Rapper became the actor in Law and Order, the guy
that made an album called cop Killer Yes and became
a cop on TV. Yeah you know, rateistussoever. Anyway, there's
this story he tells that about when he was getting

(01:30:07):
his record deal and he the as as the legend goes,
he never played one song for the people he that
signed him for his first record deal, right, and they
were like, how are you going to do this? How
are we gonna Why would you sign if we haven't
heard any music? He goes, Hey, if you're selling a
box of grenades, if I blow up a grenade, I

(01:30:31):
need to blow up a grenade for you to see,
for you to know that they're good. Like, I can't
blow it up because then you won't buy him. They
already done. And then the guy was like, man, that's
a yeah, so I see. And the guy was like,
it's actually a good point. And then he goes, what
made you think of that? He goes, why I used
to sell grenades? And I totally believe that he was

(01:30:58):
around South Central your nates. I would never call iced
Tea a liar for saying that he sold grenades. No,
absolutely not. He comes from a you know, you've got
your eras of gangster rap where they're just talking and
then you've got your era of gangster Rapp was like, no,
you did all of the things you're talking about. This.
This is why you're not in jails, because there was

(01:31:21):
a period of time for you where you were like,
it was a good day because I didn't have to
use my These are stories, y'all. Yeah, yeah, that's why
most of them didn't make it very long. Yes, all right, Well,
in preparation for the Spanish Civil War, which is pretty gangster, listen,

(01:31:46):
listen to some old school Iced Tea, you know, and
then watch the Law and Order, you know, really embrace
the hypocrisy that we all embody at some point. At
some point, you don't need to watch the iced tea
and cocoa reality show. I am not recommending that, don know,
but a little bit of law in order. You know,
it's whatever it's on literally at all times. Yeah, it's

(01:32:08):
a lot like it's a lot like Heroin. You know, Um,
it's probably not going to kill you, um, but it's
bad for you. Every episode of Laundered, Sue, I'm not
ashamed at all. Every believe every episode because it's on
at any given time of a day. Yeah, exactly. My
mom's nospel. We watched every episode because it was always

(01:32:31):
on every episode. There's a belief in some Aboriginal Australian
cultures and this is kind of where the um, what
is the long tube that they blow? Ever? No, no, no,
the the did you red that the dig red ties
into this that like you always have to be someone
always has to be playing music because you sing the

(01:32:52):
world into being and if the music stops, the world ends.
And I have adopted is a religious belief that with
law and Order SVU where it's playing somewhere, the world
can continue. I think that's how we ended up with
trump Man. Everybody turned off the TV one day in
order to stop playing one hour without law and order
and everything. Which ship all right, Well, this this has

(01:33:18):
been part one of our two partner of Behind the
Insurrections on the Spanish Fascist Franko Civil War. We're we'll
talk about Spanish Civil War in part two, and then
next week we're going to talk about the fascists who
failed UM, and we're gonna talk about we're gonna get
a little overview of some anti fascist history you might
not know. We're gonna close out with antifa UM and

(01:33:40):
some fun stuff like the idolist pirates UM, which were
little kids who murdered Nazis. It was great fucking rad.
Here we go listen to some iced tea. That's the
episode

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Behind the Insurrections - The Birth of Spanish Fascism, Part 1

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