Margaret talks with Gare about how the people of Spain fought back against Franco, crippling his economy, killing his soldiers, and almost blowing him up directly.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hello, and welcome to cool People did cool stuff. You're
a weekly reminder that we can choose to do noble
and wonderful things with our brief lives that do earnest,
that earnest.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Just earnest enough, in my opinion.
Speaker 1 (00:13):
Okay, I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy. Today's guest it's Garrison. Hi, Garrison.
Speaker 3 (00:19):
Hello, I'm about to take the sincerity pill.
Speaker 1 (00:23):
Oh no, I'm sorry you allergic?
Speaker 3 (00:29):
Uh No, I don't think I'm allergic to any medication.
Speaker 1 (00:32):
Oh okay, that's that's that's how I phrase it. Whenever
I go into the doctor, they're like, you allergic to anything,
and I'm like, I don't know. I hope not. I
hope it's not whatever you're about to give me, right.
Garrison Davis is a podcaster.
Speaker 3 (00:46):
I have. I have made a few podcasts now.
Speaker 1 (00:50):
Yeah. Our producer is Sophie, who also makes podcasts like.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
So fucking many, so fucking many some with Garrison, which
is nice.
Speaker 3 (01:03):
It's true.
Speaker 1 (01:04):
And you know who else makes podcasts. It's Ian are
our audio engineer.
Speaker 2 (01:09):
Ian and I have made some beautiful podcasts together.
Speaker 1 (01:11):
This is true, Yeah, including this one you're listening to. Hi, Hi, hyen.
Speaker 2 (01:18):
Garrison Garretson.
Speaker 3 (01:20):
Oh hi, Ian, Yes, sorry, I forgot that I'm involved
and I'm included in that.
Speaker 1 (01:24):
Yes, yeah, you are in everyone's.
Speaker 3 (01:27):
I'm so happy Garrets here.
Speaker 1 (01:32):
And our theme music was written for us by Unwoman.
So this week the cool people are Garrison. Have you
ever heard of.
Speaker 3 (01:39):
People like the concept?
Speaker 1 (01:42):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (01:43):
I have, I have heard of it. I don't think
I believe in it, but I have. I am aware
of the concept.
Speaker 1 (01:48):
Yes, okay, okay, what about the people of Spain?
Speaker 3 (01:54):
Is this gonna be a is this okay? Is this
gonna be like a Spanish Civil War thing?
Speaker 1 (02:00):
You know? For once, We're actually not talking about the
Spanish Civil War?
Speaker 3 (02:03):
Okay, I just know it's it's come up so much
on this on this show.
Speaker 1 (02:07):
Oh yeah, no, now it's what happened after the Spanish
Civil War adjacent yeah yeah, the sequels post.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
Same same, same like universe, different season.
Speaker 1 (02:20):
Yeah, same antagonists and protagonists. Today's protagonists, though, well, this
week's protagonists are basically the people of Spain who fought
against their fascist dictator Franco after he became their fascist dictator.
Usually we talked about them before he became their fascist dictator,
but last week and this week we're talking about what
(02:41):
heck time after we've talked about this guy Franco a
bunch before. I assume you've heard of him at this point.
Speaker 3 (02:48):
Yeah, I'm familiar with mister Franco.
Speaker 1 (02:51):
Yeah, he's the guy who invaded Spain overthrew a democratic
republic and said quote I'm it is a paraphrase quote
because I forgot to look up the actual quote. It's
basically this, I'm willing to kill half of Spain to
rule the other half. And then he lived up to
that quote, while the quote unquote great powers of democracy
not only stood by and let it happen, but, as
we're going to explore this week, actively enabled it. Last
(03:14):
week we talked about an anarchist bank robber named al
Kiko who funded militias, and okay, during that I suggested
that Kiko might be a pun. It's short for Francisco
if it's spelled a different way Kiko, but his name
was spelled q u I CEO has pronounced the same
and I was like, I think this is a pun,
(03:35):
and an astute listener told me it is, and Eli
Kiko means the cute. So he was a bank robber
who was the cute. He would show up to people
and say so Aliqiko, and then they would have to
give him all of their money because he showed up
and said I am the cute.
Speaker 3 (03:52):
That's pretty funny.
Speaker 4 (03:53):
I know.
Speaker 2 (03:55):
I was going to say that's super cute, but.
Speaker 1 (03:59):
That is, yeah, super cute. I don't don't know cattalan
to say super cute. Okay, so before we talk about
the people fought Franco, we're gonna talk a little bit
about Franco. This isn't like a like, we're not gonna
talk about where he was born.
Speaker 2 (04:16):
We need the context, Magpie, That's.
Speaker 1 (04:19):
What exactly needed, I know. So Franco is often painted
as the nice fasci fascist dictator of Europe. You know,
it's like he's the good one. Yeah, exactly, exactly. He
hasn't been spoiled by the bad apples of Mussolini and Hitler.
Speaker 3 (04:38):
He made the fascists wear gay little outfits.
Speaker 1 (04:41):
Oh they did have the best outfits they did.
Speaker 3 (04:44):
Which is honestly hard because all of the fascists paid
a lot of attention to fascism. So sorry, get a
lot of attention to fashion fashion fascism. But yeah, that'll
be the Spanish ones definitely went went pretty hard.
Speaker 1 (04:58):
Yeah, although I was I was reading this historian and
by that I mean twitter person talking about how actually
the average fascist just looked like a tool with like
sure of course, you know, like but anyway, they were
capable of some good fashion and the idea.
Speaker 3 (05:15):
Of aesthetics that is a big part of fascism. It
doesn't like, like you say, like most American fascists look
like shit. They look like, they do not look good,
but there is like an ideal of fashion that that
that they do that they do go towards right.
Speaker 1 (05:30):
And Franco he ends up being the sort of like
we'll talk about this more, I think in the next
half of this, but he ends up the like national
Catholic and so it's like very like trad wifey a
lot of what folks are doing, which is a shame
because tradwife is a nice aesthetic and a terrible concept. Okay, anyway,
so Franco, we're not talking about his clothing choice for
(05:52):
other people. We're talking about how he murdered a lot
of people. He was a fucking monster. He was not
the nice fascist. He was a bad fascist who lived
longer than the other fascists. Author Murray Bukchin estimated that
he systematically slaughtered between seven hundred thousand and eight hundred
and eighty thousand people during and after the Spanish Civil War,
so like the nineteen thirty six to early nineteen forties era,
(06:15):
and reduced the executions only once Hitler started losing World
War Two. Basically at that point Franco was like, oh,
we should look good, because before that he was like
trying to look good to Hitler, and then he was like, actually, oh.
Speaker 3 (06:29):
Hitler's gonna be kind of going out of style. I
now have to appeal to the liberal democracies. Yeah, yeah,
that is that's Franco in a fucking nutshell. So he
stopped mass executing quite as much in like nineteen forty
three or so. More conservative estimates say that he only
systematically murdered like two hundred thousand people. But he was
(06:52):
a dictator for decades who put an incredible amount of
effort into covering up his crimes. That's like one of
the things that he's actually like, really it at like
Stalin does this too, right, But Stalin's sort of it's
like almost the joke where it's like everyone's like disappearing
out of the.
Speaker 1 (07:06):
Photos or the pictures. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Franco was really
fucking good at covering up crime in Madrid. He had
five permanent courts after the Civil War, he had five
permanent courts trying and executing people in batches of twenty
five to thirty or trying and sentencing to death people
in batches of twenty five to thirty. Basically anyone who
(07:27):
is accused of being involved in a leftist organization or Freemasonry.
You really hated Freemasonry.
Speaker 3 (07:34):
A lot of the fascists do. It's weird because the
Freemasons aren't like sometimes they're kind of fasci I know.
Speaker 1 (07:42):
It is a politically neutral thing to be a Freemason.
There are people on the right and the left who
are Freemasons, but not in fascist Spain, then there's just
no Freemasons because you just get murdered. Prisons were filled
the fourteen times capacity, which is impressive of coming from
the United States, which is notoriously full of overfilled, overcrowded prisons.
(08:07):
People spent years on death row and they were executed
in bashes of at least three hundred at a time.
And this is some like national Catholic bullshit. They spent
their last night in the prison chapel on like a
stone floor, just like forced to sit in this chapel
before they die at dawn. They were bound and gagged
so no one could hear their last words lest people
revolt when they hear people saying Viva anarchy or whatever
(08:29):
the fuck you know. Yeah, they were marched single file
across a gang plank I believe, like over a mass grave.
But just like in a graveyard where they would be killed,
they were executed by machine gun officers with revolvers finished
off any survivors. It was not nice to be in
Spain under Franco's rule.
Speaker 3 (08:49):
And.
Speaker 1 (08:51):
A lot of them were A lot of people were
killed were sort of random, right, like the Freemasons. I
don't know, maybe maybe by the time, maybe I'm going
to be doing a whole episode about like how Freemasons
like brought down Franco or something. I don't know, but
but a lot of the people that he killed were
fighting back. Because the thing is, and the more I
do this research, a lot of people fought back against
(09:13):
this guy, right, A lot of people from different parts
of Spain and different like ideological backgrounds, were like, actually,
we don't like having a fascist dictatorship. Resistance in these
first years of his rule. In the words of Frank,
one of Franco's right hand man, it quote disrupted communications,
demoralized folk, wrecked our economy, shattered our unity, and discredited
(09:36):
us in the eyes of the outside world. And it
didn't kill Franco. And so people tend to like think
of it as like not successful. And that's like the
main that's my thesis.
Speaker 3 (09:51):
Of this.
Speaker 1 (09:53):
Is this show that I totally didn't really go to college.
That is my thesis statement is that the people brought
down Franco cheologically.
Speaker 3 (10:02):
Thank you to you.
Speaker 1 (10:04):
I had this nightmare the other day, or I was
sort of a regular dream, but I had this nightmare
where I decided I was going to get a doctorate.
Oh scary, yeah, I know. And in the dream I
was like, I don't have an undergrad degree. Why am
I doing this? And the only reason I came up
with was then people would have to call me doctor.
Speaker 3 (10:24):
Many such cases.
Speaker 2 (10:28):
Listen, all the cool people I know that have doctor
degrees don't want to be called doctor and like only
bring it up when absolutely necessary. It's very funny.
Speaker 1 (10:40):
Yeah, no, I I woke up without that desire anyway.
That's what we're here to talk about is Margaret goes
to school. It's possible that this resistance not to Margaret
going to college, but this resistance to Franco's fascist regime
is part of why Franco later had to open up
the economy, which led to the death spiral of Spanish fascism.
(11:03):
So it was actually very effective. So the fighting really
started in earnest in nineteen forty three, when gorillas in
the hills were like, oh shit, maybe Hitler's going to lose,
and everyone got really excited. It will not Franco. Franco
didn't really get excited by Franco's own admission, and he
had every reason and the capacity to downplay this. There
(11:24):
were at least two thousand battles between the Civil Guard
his cops or whatever, his stormtroopers, and the resistance between
nineteen forty three and nineteen fifty two. So there's two
thousand battles during that time period. At least, I didn't
know it went on that hard for so long.
Speaker 3 (11:40):
Yeah, that's.
Speaker 1 (11:43):
That's one of the things that really I get really
excited about. Tens of thousands of people this part isn't exciting.
I mean, the good guys lost, right. This is like
Star Wars, only Empire wins for a very long time.
But tens of thousand people were arrested during this for
connection to the resistance. At least one thousand civil guards
died on active active duty during that time. There's like
(12:05):
not really good records like Franco's like, oh, they killed
like a hundred of us or something, and then like
historians later have to sit there and be like, there's
like a thousand extra deaths here. We think that this
is you know, civil guards who died. Yeah, fascists whatever.
Fascists would never lie about their numbers. No, that they're
(12:25):
very upstanding, honest, fourth right people. They've told me that themselves,
Third Right people.
Speaker 3 (12:32):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (12:33):
So nineteen forty three, it kicks off with the gorillas
in the Hill, but there's like tens of thousands of
anarchists and communists and other Spanish refugees in France who
are busy fighting for France's liberation from the Nazis. Then
in nineteen forty four, the anarchists liberated Paris and the
Spanish exiles came back to Spain ready to function up.
Speaker 3 (12:57):
That is one big difference. Whenever I'm i I have
a few friends in the European continent region, and I'm
always shocked at how close everything is together, Like oh,
you can just like go to other countries in like
a day, or like you like multiple countries in a day.
And here I am like planning a cross country road trip.
I'm like, I'm crossing so much more territory that like
(13:21):
ednyone would ever cross in Europe.
Speaker 1 (13:23):
Oh totally, yeah, no, this is like people can walk
these distances.
Speaker 3 (13:27):
Yeah, you know, no, it's wild, like there's there's so
much more options for like like cross pollination. Yeah, that
just there's always it always surprises me being like, oh,
you could take the train to five different countries in
like two hours. Yeah. Oh wow.
Speaker 1 (13:40):
You live in Connecticut and New York is at war,
so you're like, well, I guess I'm gonna go to
New York.
Speaker 3 (13:45):
Down in New York. I'll just bike over and kill
some fascists and bike back.
Speaker 1 (13:49):
Yeah, totally. There is a mountain range in the way,
but like you know, people can move through it. So
the first thing that they did or one of the
first things that they did in nineteen four before is
that the Communist Party, the exiled Spanish Communist Party in France.
They organized three thousand guerrillas to invade Fascist Spain and
(14:12):
the attack was repulsed. But it was actually and I
think we talked about this a little bit last week,
but the plan was actually really good and it was
two attacks. In my mind when I first read this,
I was like, they thought they were going to take
Spain with three thousand people. They just like lost it
with like substantially more than three thousand people. But their
whole goal, their whole strategy, was, well, fascism is losing.
(14:34):
There is no way that the Western powers are going
to allow fascism in Western Europe. All we have to
do is go put in a like basically build a
beachhead into Spain that invaded two different areas, will set
up a government in exile and will recreate the republic.
Speaker 3 (14:51):
Right, and then they'll get backing from other liberal democracies
and they'll be able to take over the country.
Speaker 1 (14:55):
Yeah, okay, And unfortunately Franco was ready for them, and
so they did not even succeed at stage one of
setting up a successful beachhead and a government in exile.
But more than that, the other governments were like, we
don't fucking care. Fuck you, we're tired.
Speaker 3 (15:19):
Just yeah, that makes sense.
Speaker 1 (15:21):
And I don't know whether it's I don't know what
to agree, it's they're tired into what degree they're like,
we don't care. Franco is sort of neutral, and that
was like, and everyone's a little bit starting to cozy
up to him. It's like kind of blurry. We'll talk
about this over the course of like basically, the Western
powers slowly start accepting him, but more in the fifties
than the forties.
Speaker 3 (15:38):
As long as he keeps the machinery of capital going,
then it's it's mostly fine, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (15:42):
As long as people in Spain are buying TVs and
show who fucking cares and well and also increasingly making
the TVs. But okay, so these attacks fail, but the
people who do that, they bolster the gorillas who are
in the hills and have been there and have been
fighting since nineteen forty three. They took like a four
year break to not get murdered, and they start fucking
(16:03):
shit up as the Spanish monkey, as we talked about
last time. And so you know, Western powers don't help.
I want to quote an anarchist political prisoner from this
time period about this. His name is Miguel Garcia. Garcia quote.
When we lost the war, those who fought on became
the resistance. But to the world, the resistance had become criminals,
(16:24):
for Franco made the laws, even if when dealing with
political opponents he chose to break the laws established by
the constitution, and the world still regards us as criminals.
When we are imprisoned, liberals are not interested, for we
are quote terrorists.
Speaker 3 (16:41):
Yeah, well, good thing we learned our lesson there.
Speaker 1 (16:44):
I know, I know, everyone is aware that laws are
written by the victors and have no relevance to morality.
They're entirely unrelated. Crime is not inherently good. Following the
law is not inherently good. Everyone knows that.
Speaker 3 (17:00):
So true, Just me and all my friends agree.
Speaker 1 (17:05):
So the Western world wasn't going to help end Spanish fascism.
It took the Spanish people, plus some French and Italian
comrades here and there to bring him down. In the end. Okay,
in the end, it took Parkinson's disease to bring down Franco.
Speaker 3 (17:18):
Comrade disease. Yeah, support to Parkinson's disease. So I almost
wrote that.
Speaker 1 (17:23):
And then I was like, oh, my granddad died like
a couple of years ago, parkins and stuff. No, no,
I mean like, but I still I was trying to
figure out with Yeah, anyway, surprised there wasn't TV.
Speaker 3 (17:34):
I'll take the hit. I'll take the hit for you there,
all right, all right?
Speaker 1 (17:37):
Thanks.
Speaker 2 (17:37):
Usually usually it's comrade tuberculosis.
Speaker 3 (17:41):
I know.
Speaker 1 (17:43):
But you know, one hundred years, one hundred years earlier,
he would have gone out from TV. But okay, So
the people paved the way for the end of the dictatorship,
and they did a damn fine job of it. This time,
we're going to focus a little less on the bank
robberies and the fundraising, because we talked about that last
week with the Francisco Sabote fascists. We're gonna talk about
(18:05):
some other folks instead. Fascists gave no fucks about morality,
and the counter operations against the gorillas were brutal. By
nineteen forty seven, you get counter gorilla bands who dressed
like gorillas and murdered the gorillas and also went around
doing like false flagshit like murdering random people and blaming
it on the gorillas. By nineteen fifty two, the gorilla
(18:26):
portion of the resistance was mostly done, with just tons
and tons of dead resistance fighters. The last gorilla standing
was Jose Castro Viega el Pilato, the pilot I believe,
who died in combat against fascism in March nineteen sixty five.
Speaker 3 (18:42):
But night.
Speaker 1 (18:42):
By nineteen fifty three, the US signed a military and
economic assistance treaty with Franco. By nineteen fifty five, franco
Is welcomed Franco as Spain was welcomed into the United Nations.
And it's a good thing. Gorilla fighting wasn't the only
thing that happened.
Speaker 3 (19:00):
Yeah, it's it's I it was interesting you were talking
about the the the counter gorilla forces and like the
and like the gorilla psyops. Yeah, which is I know,
people of people have like there's always like sometimes like
conspiracies about like this person in block is a secret
infiltrating the person's matching these windows is actually of blah
(19:21):
blah blah blah whatever, which is usually all take a nonsense. Yeah,
but it has been has been interesting. There are there
are certain like there are certain white white power groups
that are that that have been adopting more black block
like clothing, not to like impersonate Antifa, but just because
it's a good taxtic.
Speaker 1 (19:37):
Yeah, it's a very good tactic.
Speaker 3 (19:38):
Yeah. So we're seeing like Nazis in there, like Nazi
Block versus versus like anti fascists in black bloc. Yeah,
I think Rubbert Rundo's groups and some I mean some
of Patriot Front, but there's there's there's is a bit
more dorky. But some of some of the more like
Fight Club Rubber Rundo sque groups have been have been
using stuff that's more more similar just to like black
(19:59):
block or gray block. There was another group like a
month ago that was doing a drag protest in all
all black, but they had like they had like red
masks on.
Speaker 1 (20:10):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (20:12):
Yes, it's interesting after after you know, years of coverage
of black block being pretty pretty popular in like national news,
we're seeing some of the right adopt some of those
tactics right now.
Speaker 1 (20:21):
Yeah, it's a very effective tactic. And you know, I
guess if you if if the government figures out that
if you like live in the hills, you can hide
and shoot people effectively, then at some point some people
in the government or me, be like, we can hide
in the hills and shoot people effectively too, you know.
But if you want to hide in the hills, run
(20:43):
and shoot run the.
Speaker 3 (20:44):
Door salesman who's going to sell you these products and
services the chance, so you don't need to shoot him. Instead,
you can just listen here, Yeah, thus thus de escalating
any future conflict with solicitors coming to your door.
Speaker 2 (20:57):
Yeah, unless you subscribed to the Apple Premium version of
the show, then there.
Speaker 1 (21:02):
Is no hope for you. Yeah, because if you listen
to the Apple Premium version of the show where you
don't get ads, you're still gonna get ad transitions.
Speaker 3 (21:15):
One day the Casper mattress man's gonna walk up to
your house. You're like, nope, I'm paying to avoid those ads. Sorry, mister,
you're just gonna blast a shotgun through the door, and
they're good at prison for like fifteen years.
Speaker 1 (21:28):
Except that Casper mattresses are bullet I don't think I
can say that.
Speaker 3 (21:37):
Just make sure holding it over your vital regions when
you're carrying the box to the door. As long as
you have a turn a kit, you can save your libs.
But as long as you have your tour so covered.
Yeah Jesus Christ. Okay, your ads or not ads.
Speaker 1 (21:53):
Depending on your preference. And we're back and we're talking
very seriously. Okay, So speaking about people's vital organs and
their continued existence.
Speaker 2 (22:07):
Wow, what a podcast transition today.
Speaker 1 (22:11):
Let's talk about let's talk about some assassination attempts.
Speaker 3 (22:14):
Oh, I am always down to talk about assassination attempts.
I always One of the things that I think about
more often than I should is why is it there're
more political assassinations? Because it seems I don't know how
much solid question, but like I am not on this,
it seems to be a pretty effective tactic.
Speaker 1 (22:35):
So okay, I will say historically and again, historically, political
assassinations attend tots, as I sometimes get called, are a
roll of the dice.
Speaker 3 (22:49):
Yes, yes it is.
Speaker 1 (22:50):
It is a complete crapshoot about whether what comes after
is better or worse.
Speaker 3 (22:55):
You're introducing a chaos variant, you don't know, like it's yeah, yeah,
but when you have Franco shoot the Archduke Fransford to Dad,
I don't know what's gonna happen next.
Speaker 1 (23:07):
Yeah, that one didn't go great?
Speaker 3 (23:09):
Worst second, what's the worst that could happen.
Speaker 1 (23:11):
That one didn't go great. Later this week we're going
to talk about one that goes really well. But first
we're gonna talk about someones that didn't make things worse.
They just didn't succeed because yeah, spoiler or alert, only
Parkinson's assassinates Franco successfully. So let's talk about the anarchist
(23:33):
air Force of nineteen forty eight. This is not the
most successful thing that anarchists have ever done, but it's interesting.
Speaker 3 (23:41):
I mean, if you told me there was an anarchist
air force, I wouldn't immediately think, oh, yeah, that's gonna
go well, that's good, that's gonna hey.
Speaker 1 (23:49):
I think my main reason we didn't have an anarchist
air force in the Spanish Civil War is that the
Soviets were the only people who were providing planes and
like training pilots. And actually read about some anarchists who
were like, can I can I just like join the
Communist Party for a minute, just learn how to fly
in Soviet Union and then come back. But oh god,
(24:11):
that's actually probably how the well, let's just tell the story.
So there are tens of thousands of anarchists in exile
in France. They said up a bunch of organizations. These
are very much the organization type of anarchist. Half of
the history books about this are like basically reading the
meeting notes of these fucking organizations, where they're like, of course,
(24:31):
oh well, this three letter acronym didn't really like the
thing that the committee of the such and such of
the other three letter acronym did, and I'm like, I
do not care about that.
Speaker 3 (24:39):
Oh. Imagine if all of like the anarchist org signal
chats just got turned into these like fifty years and
someone started like sort through and decipher what these meeting
notes are, yeah, and then decides to present it as
if that's what's interesting instead of I'm gonna tell you
about some people who got a plane and try to
blow up Franco. That's interesting or interesting.
Speaker 1 (24:59):
Yeah. So one of these organizations they set up a
quote conspiratorial commission, which is the commission.
Speaker 3 (25:07):
Okay, all right, that sounds.
Speaker 1 (25:11):
Right now. Mostly apparently this group, and this might have
just been some some ship, some shade that was being
thrown by the historian who I think knew these people.
Mostly they set around at coffee and were like, hmm,
we should have a revolution don't you think that's also
what I do in my conspiratorial coalition.
Speaker 4 (25:29):
I know.
Speaker 1 (25:31):
And then these people have also like seen thousands of
their comrades die and have personally charged at machine gun nests.
So they can sit around at coffee and talk some bullshit.
I feel that way, and I've been like shot with
less lethals and spent a couple of nights in jail.
Speaker 3 (25:49):
You know, they're not going to get hit with the
armchair anarchist allegations.
Speaker 1 (25:53):
No, no, except by some of the historians who have
also charged a machine gun nests. But I am not
in a place to say such. Okay, So there is
one guy in the group, and his name is Lariano
Serata Santos, and he's cool. He was in his forties
at this point, and he had a plan, and he
was his old working class anarchist. He'd spent his life
(26:14):
working on the railroad and fementing anarchist revolution and at
this point, at least after the fall of the Spanish Republic,
he's a forger and that's his like main deal, like
a like metal forging. No, no, like during the Nazi occupation,
he printed hundreds of official documents for juice cool. Yeah,
he've printed money, printed ideas, he printed whatever you needed.
(26:38):
This guy's providing it and so probably more impactful than
anything else he did in his life. But like something
that's like a lot of the anarchists participation in the
resistance is like less documented, right, But he printed hundreds
of hundreds official documents for Jews and France. He altered
their racial identity on their legal papers and saved their lives.
(27:00):
So already he's like in into the cool people heaven.
Speaker 3 (27:04):
Absolutely.
Speaker 1 (27:06):
But now it's nineteen forty eight. World War two has
been over for a bit. Franco hasn't yet legitimized his
authority over Spain, right, because everything is still very much
in play. So Sonata comes up with a plan. His
plan's very simple. You get an airplane and you drop
a bunch of bombs on Franco. Step one, yeah, get
(27:27):
an airplane, right, So step one is getting airplane in
a pilot, and so they pick this tiny little plane
because they figure there's this boat race, this fancy regatta.
I had to look up regatta and it means fancy
boat race, which is what I thought, but I wasn't sure.
Not a regular part of my daily life.
Speaker 3 (27:47):
Yoh, you don't hang out at the regatta every weekend.
Speaker 1 (27:51):
No, not as much, not anymore, okay, not since I'm
an immortal vampire and I went to this one.
Speaker 3 (27:59):
You don't hot hoist the black flag at the regatta.
Speaker 1 (28:05):
And so they get this like fancy bougie tiny plane, right,
or that's their plan. They're like, we want this fancy
bougie tiny plane because it'll fit in with all the
other like tiny planes hanging out among the boats at
the regatta that Franco Is gonna officiate. Sure, they picked
a pilot named Primativo Perez Gomez who'd been a fighter
pilot during the Civil War, so there was anarchists thank
(28:29):
you flying okay anyway, yeah, yeah, sure. They picked a
plane that they could buy in Paris, and for a
tiny little plane, it was very modern. It could land
in only one hundred and sixty meters, which is fucking ridiculous,
Like currently the runway for a small plane, like a
tiny plane is two thousand meters. And wow, now it's
not to say that this plane is like designed to
(28:50):
land in one hundred and sixty meters. Sure, sure, sure,
Why when they go on like a test flight. They're like, hey,
h could you just We're like totally not sketchy when
we're buying this, but could you just like land it
really really short, just as short as you can. I
just want to see how short it's coming fun for fun. Yeah,
And the guy's like that's illegal, and they're like, we
won't buy it unless you do it, and he's like okay, okay,
(29:12):
based based yeah, and uh so they're like, all right,
now we have a plane that is a perfect plane
for doing a murder and then ditching in a field
because you can land in a fucking field. They get
one more person along for the ride El Valencia. This
(29:33):
was not a small conspiracy. At least twenty people knew
what was happening. No snitches, this entire plan.
Speaker 3 (29:40):
Whoof for twenty people, that's pretty solid, and there's like okay,
So they bring in a French guy as the buyer,
since they need a French citizen to be the one
to buy the plane.
Speaker 1 (29:50):
They spent one point six million francs on the plane.
I did not successfully find the value of this old money,
but it's not a small amount of money. The anarchists
have a fair I mean they were running a good
chunk of a country immediately before this. Right, they're all
like working class and working. It's like ironmongers and shit,
(30:10):
but they like have access to some money. There's also
bank robbers and shit like that funding them. Right, So
they buy the plane. A pilot at the local airfield
when they go and buy it, recognize the Spanish anarchists
from their bravery or during the French resistance, because the
guy who's just like flying around in the bougie little
airfield plane place where the pilots hang out, and.
Speaker 3 (30:30):
Then you see then someone recognizes you, which idea which
was probably a nightmare scenario.
Speaker 1 (30:35):
Oh yeah, and he takes them aside. He's like, hey,
I want to talk to you really quick. And he's like, hey,
you might want to be careful flying over the Pyrenees
into Spain. They're watching the shit out of that and
I'll shoot you down. And they're like, whoa, why would
we clearly a bunch of Spanish anarchists be planning on
taking this plane to Spain. We would never never do
(30:56):
such a thing. Still, no snitches, everyone knows what they're doing.
Speaker 3 (31:01):
That's pretty cool.
Speaker 1 (31:02):
Yeah, they refitted the plane with bomb doors by involving
yet another guy a mechanic, and I guess fabricator. They
have a whole bunch of bombs because they'd fought in
the French resistance and the whole time with the French
resistance is happening, especially I think a lot of these
bombs come when the Italians retreated, but then also when
the Germans would retreat, the anarchists would be like and mine,
(31:24):
and mine and mine, and just go pick up all
the bombs, just like go dumbstirring for spare boss. Yeah,
and like machine guns and shit. They decide in the
end not to bring the machine gun. You know, they're
like looking through and picking which bombs to bring. The
morning of three anarchists, four incendiary bombs and twenty shrapnel
bombs get on the plane. One of the rebels flying
(31:47):
one of the anarchists was the propagandist whose job was
to drop handbills over the crowd. And also it just
said camera. I don't know whether it was film or photograph,
but they were going to photograph or film them blowing
up Franco based journalist.
Speaker 3 (32:01):
Yeah, based journalists piloting the ball plane. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (32:07):
And then there's another guy whose job is to have
binoculars and like look out for everything. And then there's
the pilot that's pretty funny. And in the morning they're like,
all right, we're gonna cover up the French flag on
the plane so we better fit in with the small
planes that we're expected to mingle with. But they don't
have time and they're running late, so they don't cover
This saves their lives.
Speaker 3 (32:28):
What this could be such? This could be such a
good like suspense thriller, like no with the guy at
the airfield recognizes you and you're like, oh no, we're
we're we're about to get gone, and then you could
give it a piece of crucial advice. Yeah, and then
you're like, we don't have enough time to paint over
the French flag, and then it turns out to actually
be the thing that saves you.
Speaker 4 (32:46):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (32:47):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (32:47):
And they don't fly over the Pyrenees, and I don't
know whether it was because that guy's advice or not.
They fly over the water and partly because they're trying
to go to the north coast of Spain. Anyway, it's
a pretty logical way to do it. They approach Spain
over the water and there's two battleships standing guard over
the regatta and they're tracking the plane with their guns,
their anti aircraft guns. And then there's no small planes
(33:11):
over the race at all, and instead there's a ton
of fighter pilots everywhere, like circling the sky to make
sure no one tries to blow up Franco.
Speaker 3 (33:21):
Yeah, pretty freaky.
Speaker 1 (33:22):
And the reason that they know there were no snitches
is that, well, say that they don't get shot down.
Speaker 3 (33:28):
Sure, yeah, no one knows exactly what they're up to,
it seems.
Speaker 4 (33:31):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (33:31):
So the fighter pilots come for the anarchists to get
a closer look. And if they hadn't had the French
flag on the plane, they probably would have just opened fire.
But instead they're like, oh, we shouldn't open fire on
these random French people, right.
Speaker 3 (33:46):
They're just flying. They don't know what they're doing.
Speaker 1 (33:48):
Yeah French, Yeah totally, that's a white flag, the classic
French flag. And so the pilot just dives at the water,
dives to within a few feet of the water, and
just gets the fuck out of there, just like fucking runs.
Speaker 3 (34:05):
Yeah, which is the right spot? It is too hot?
The spot's too hot jack b Yeah, they.
Speaker 1 (34:11):
Like keep going for a while, they're like, oh, the
battleships are after us, and they're like, oh, there's a
couple of fighter pilots. And then there's like it's all
fighter pilots, no small planes. Gotta go. So they make
it back to France and they're like all right, you
want to go back tomorrow. They're like, yeah, let's go
back tomorrow.
Speaker 3 (34:29):
They try the same thing the next day.
Speaker 1 (34:31):
Well, they have a new plan. The new plan is
we know what hotel he's in. Let's just bomb hotel.
Speaker 3 (34:36):
Oh okay, there's like there's like other people at the hotel.
Speaker 1 (34:40):
Yeah, I don't know, but like probably fascist. Yeah, I
don't know. I I'm not a big like collateral damages.
Fine person, but I don't fucking know.
Speaker 3 (34:50):
But frank. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (34:54):
So then they, uh, they go out at four in
the morning and they have a new plan. They're going
fly low to the water in the middle of the night,
hugging the coast, which is like the most dangerous way
to fly this kind of plane, apparently. Yeah, they plate
full of balls, yeah, and some pamphlets. Oh good, rain
(35:16):
keeps them from going it. The airfield is completely mud
when they go out at four in the morning, and
they just flee.
Speaker 3 (35:24):
Abandoned the plane.
Speaker 1 (35:27):
Interesting, and a few years later, as best as I can,
peace out the rest of this saga, the pilot was arrested.
He later died a freeman. No one else was arrested.
I actually don't know if he was arrested for this,
for his arrested for something else. Some other folks were investigated, but.
Speaker 3 (35:45):
It certainly sounds like he could have been arrested doing
other things.
Speaker 1 (35:48):
Yeah, yeah, all of these people liked crime. Yeah, Serata
the forger I was talking about, he went back to forging.
Speaker 4 (35:57):
He was.
Speaker 1 (35:57):
He was pretty good at that. He got caught a
bunch of time, once with like just a ton of
fake money, and like another time for printing IDs and shit.
His last arrest was in nineteen seventy, when he was
sixty seven years old. He was held for a few months,
and he was all set to like die in bed,
an old man. He's like he made his seventy you
know whatever seventy four when a fucking police informant in
(36:22):
the anarchist movement murdered him in the street.
Speaker 3 (36:27):
Weird.
Speaker 1 (36:27):
That sucks, probably because he was going to reveal that
the guy was a police informant. Interesting, So then the
police smuggled that guy to Canada, where he probably lived
out happily the rest of his fucking days.
Speaker 3 (36:42):
The murderer not our finest moment.
Speaker 1 (36:45):
Yeah, Sarada had a quote about his attempt on Franco's life,
and I think it actually nails the moral question we
were talking about. Quote personal attentats. Assassinations are effective to
a degree determined by powers wielded by the victim. To
take the life of a constitutional king through conspiracy and
not through revolution is to change nothing except for his air.
(37:08):
But if someone had eliminated, say Adolf Hitler in nineteen
thirty nine, which of us can say that his death
would not have been of benefit to Europe. When we
tried to liquidate Franco back in nineteen forty eight, we
were persuaded that in doing so we would be changing
the course of Spanish history utterly.
Speaker 3 (37:25):
Yeah, No, I mean, it's a certainly, it's certainly an
interesting thing in terms of like what if the next
guy that comes in is just as bad or worse,
or you'd you can'tate fate is weird? You can't, you
can't you can't defnate these things very easily.
Speaker 1 (37:41):
No, totally and we're going to talk about one more
wacky failed anarchist bombing of Franco that I think I
already said failed, it did not succeed, that almost changed
the world.
Speaker 4 (37:53):
See.
Speaker 3 (37:54):
The thing I love about these stories, Margaret, is the
suspense of knowing if it's going to succeed or not.
Speaker 1 (38:00):
Yeah, did Franco die in the seventies or what we
did die in the seventies. Did Franco die in the sixties, fifties?
I'll get to that part in the script. I think
it's the sixties.
Speaker 3 (38:10):
I think there could also be a good Tarantina movie
here where it's like an alternate history of them actually
succeeding and killing Franco. Yeah. And then and then we
get a get a look at what Spain could have
been been, like like an exaggerated lens.
Speaker 2 (38:24):
But still, and we find out that that Parkinson's bit
was actually just somebody's code name.
Speaker 3 (38:30):
Oh nice. Yeah, yeah, So, Sophy, do not say anything else.
Screenwriters are going to be snatch your ideas from you.
You got to keep your lips sealed until you have
the full pitch ready.
Speaker 1 (38:40):
Yeah, good to know no one's listening to us. It's
just us here. But if either of you two want
great deals, have I got some great deals for you
the advertisers. Even though no one listens to the show
it's private recording. Don't worry.
Speaker 3 (38:59):
You can say whatever you It still has advertisers. I actually,
Margaret just plays four minutes of ads for us. We
have to sit here and listen to them with you. Actually,
I know. We don't get to skip forward ten seconds.
We have to sit here as Margaret plays them and
waiting for it to be over so we can continue
talking about Yeah.
Speaker 1 (39:14):
Uh, Franco and I make like a funny face, just
Robert Evans on a loop going mid mobile, mid mobile,
over and over again for four minutes, and then Margaret apologizing.
And I do this when I talk to my friends
on the phone. If I talk to my friends more
than twenty minutes, I run an ad break.
Speaker 3 (39:31):
See I actually do this sometimes, not joking. What I
actually do these types of bits in real life?
Speaker 1 (39:41):
You do? Oh yeah, no, that makes sense because I
mean we spend a lot of our time anyway. Here's
some ads that support us eating food or not.
Speaker 2 (39:50):
If you've subscribed to the previous figures, here's us coming back.
Speaker 1 (39:54):
Right away, and we're back we're going to talk about
a Scottish anarchist with a kilt and bombs. A Scottish anarchist. Yeah, okay,
We're going to talk about Stuart Christie. Stuart Christie was
(40:14):
an anarchist, historian and author and translator, and would be
assassin of Franco. He died in twenty twenty. I never
actually had a pleasure of knowing him. I've like a
lot of the people I've worked with him, worked with
through publishing, know him because he stayed engaged his entire life.
Spoiler alert. He grew up in Scotland and became an
anarchist when he was sixteen. He says his grandma's good
(40:36):
influence made him an anarchist. He wrote a book quote
or quote. The name of the book is Granny made
Me an anarchist?
Speaker 3 (40:44):
Pretty solid title.
Speaker 1 (40:45):
Yeah, no, totally. As he put it, quote basically, what
she did was provide a moral barometer which married almost
exactly with that of libertarian socialism and anarchism. And she
provided the star which I followed. And then this other
part that was a quote from his grandmother that I
just really like, which is just we are not bystanders
in life.
Speaker 3 (41:05):
Nice, nice, that's a solid one.
Speaker 1 (41:07):
Yeah. So in nineteen sixty two, when he was sixteen
years old, he joined the Anarchist Federation in Glasgow. In
nineteen sixty four, he was eighteen years old, he had
moved to London. He was doing sheet metal work and
iron mongerie, the other kind of forgery for gene, I guess. Yeah,
he met a bunch of Spanish anarchists in exile and
(41:28):
he was like, oh shit, I could probably help. I
bet a random Scottish kid he can get through some
borders more easily than some Spanish anarchist exiles. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (41:40):
Maybe he was right about all right.
Speaker 1 (41:43):
He got himself over to Paris. He told his family
he was off to go pick some grapes. So true,
he did not pick any grapes. He also didn't speak
any French.
Speaker 3 (41:54):
I mean it's barely intelligible as a language anyway.
Speaker 1 (41:58):
Yeah, and the French are famous for not minding that
people don't speak French when they're there. So he met
up with some anarchists in a group called Defensa Interior
and I have a feeling the French anarchists weren't like, oh,
you don't speak French. He's like, I'm Scottish and I'm
willing to carry some bombs. They were like yeah, fuck.
Speaker 3 (42:15):
Yeah, okay, sure, yeah, yes, let's fucking go.
Speaker 1 (42:18):
Yeah. They gave him some plastic explosives and his job.
Speaker 3 (42:22):
I like it. You just go to France to be
given some plastic explosively. Yeah, here, take these, have fun. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (42:29):
His job was to ferry them into Madrid and give
them to a forty year old anarchist carpenter whose job
was to turn Spain's fascist dictator from a regular guy
into an exploded guy with a regular guy, but in
a lot more pieces. Yeah, using one neat trick that
they don't want you to know about. And the way
that Christy Uh was going to signal to his conspirator
(42:53):
who he was was that he wore a bandage on
his hand, like oh, I fucked up my hand, and
that was like his like like one Spanish phrase he
learned was like my hand it is hurt or whatever.
And he knew even less Spanish than he knew French. Okay,
so he's off to transport bombs. He strapped them to
his body and he threw on a hand Knitz sweater.
I think that his grandma made. But I'm not entirely sure.
Speaker 3 (43:15):
That's adorable.
Speaker 1 (43:16):
Yeah, he also wore a kilt. I've heard that he
wore the kilt to help him catch rides while he
was hitchhiking. I don't know exactly, yeah, basically.
Speaker 3 (43:26):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (43:27):
So later the press said that the assassin was quote
a Scottish transvestite. Holy shit based Yeah, yeah, they're just
like me.
Speaker 3 (43:36):
That's crazy, I know.
Speaker 1 (43:37):
Except according to another source, the kilt thing was a
francoist police fabrication to say, oh no, it's not that
we had an infiltrator. It's that he drew attention to
himself by wearing a kilt. Who's to say, there's no
way to know whose word to take here? Well, what's
a kind of an annoying as If I've done this
(43:58):
couple of years ago, I would have been like, dear
Stuart Christie, did you wear a kilt? Also, he's probably
written this. I don't have time to read every fucking
book before I like, you know, it is a better
story if he wore a kilt and I have more sources.
It's like two to one the sources that I've got,
(44:19):
and he wore a kilt. There's only one problem unlike
the airplane conspiracy of nineteen forty eight, this group had
been infiltrated, and Stuart Christie was arrested in Madrid and
forced to watch his carpenter would be friend be tortured. Ah,
what's funny is I mean it hadn't been infiltrated, they
(44:42):
might have exploded. Who knows, Franco might have gone out
eleven years early. So Stuart Christie is forced to sign
a confession and is convicted of quote banditry and terrorism
because all of the anti Franco rebels were called bandits.
This is like their main method of delegitimize unrest. It's
like the outside agitators for Spain. Yeah, it didn't matter
(45:04):
that he literally didn't rob anyone.
Speaker 3 (45:08):
That's it's just like a colloquial term, meaning this is
not like a real person that you need to care about.
Speaker 1 (45:14):
Yeah, exactly exactly. He could have been executed. He was
facing execution. He would have been garroted, garroted whatever choked
or the story did Yeah, garrotted.
Speaker 3 (45:26):
I don't know either. I'm just saying that. So one
of us probably got it right.
Speaker 1 (45:29):
Yeah, probably. And and if you're listening and you know
the answer.
Speaker 3 (45:34):
Dm me at I write okay on Twitter, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (45:38):
Yeah, exactly with a voice memo. Indeed anyway, Ah, they
gave him twenty years instead, probably because he was like
a nice Scottish boy or whatever. So true, he goes
to prison, his co conspiratus thirty years I think, or
maybe ends up serving thirty years. What year does he
go to prison sixty four two? So in prison he's
(46:04):
a hero. There's plenty of anarchists still in Spanish prison.
They like him, and then an international campaign gets underway
to free our our poor young Scottish boy is as
far as I could tell, it's like the equivalent of like,
like everyone involved in this story is white, but it's
still somehow like the it's like, well, you're like Western European,
(46:24):
you're uke in you're like actually white. Yeah, And so
there's international campaign underweight of or because he's just like young,
and like his defense in court is like I thought
I was just transporting flyers or whatever.
Speaker 3 (46:38):
Me too, me too, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (46:41):
And also his confession had been tortured out of him.
Speaker 3 (46:44):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (46:45):
The campaign involved bretand Russell, a famous public intellectual guy,
and Jean Paul Sart, a famous existentialist author and most
importantly his mom.
Speaker 3 (46:55):
That's nice.
Speaker 1 (46:56):
And after three years he was released.
Speaker 3 (46:59):
That I assumed he was going to wait until Franco
was gone.
Speaker 1 (47:02):
No, he Yeah, the international campaign gets a lot of
steam and Franco is like, oh, I couldn't say no
to a mom who's worried about her kid. But it's
like Franco was kind of scared, I think, yeah, yeah, yeah,
interesting his co defendant wasn't released until nineteen seventy six
and supposedly was Franco's last political prisoner.
Speaker 3 (47:24):
That kind of makes sense.
Speaker 1 (47:26):
Yeah. Stuart has a quote about what he accomplished through
the failed attempt, which was that quote, the most beneficial
thing was that my arrest provided a focus for what
Franco was doing. He was trying to pass himself off
as an old, avuncular gentleman on a white charger, while
in fact he had all these political prisoners, thousands of
whom were tortured and some killed. And yeah, I mean
(47:50):
it's like it's basically it's like Western Ice start seeing
what's happening.
Speaker 3 (47:54):
You know.
Speaker 1 (47:55):
Stuart gets out, he goes back to the UK. He
becomes a gas fitter, which means a plumber for gas
and I like that because Savat last week's protagonist was
also a plumber, because plumbers hate Franco. Because here's my theory.
I think Franco is a Bowser.
Speaker 3 (48:14):
Does this makes sense?
Speaker 4 (48:15):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (48:15):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean there are definitely some Francoist
elements in modern depictions of Bowser. That yeah, that certainly tracks.
Speaker 1 (48:23):
Yeah, so.
Speaker 3 (48:26):
Stuart.
Speaker 1 (48:27):
Later he gets arrested when the UK government cracks down
on the probably future friends of the Pod. The Angry Brigade.
The Angry Brigade was, and I'm not going to go
into them super detail. They were an anarchist communist gorilla
group who never killed anyone, but they like blowing up
symbols of power in the early seventies in the UK.
Speaker 3 (48:44):
Wait, isn't Mario a monarchist though.
Speaker 1 (48:48):
Well, they made an adaptation. They took real, real people's
stories and turned them into monarchist propaganda.
Speaker 3 (48:57):
Yep, hmmm yeah. I don't know, Margaret, I don't know
if I can support pro monarchist propaganda. Oh no, that's
not true. I like Lord of the Rings anyway.
Speaker 1 (49:11):
Continue, all right, so the Angry Brigade they like blowing
stuff up, they never kill anyone, Okay, huh.
Speaker 3 (49:19):
Do they do? They successfully blow things up though, yeah, yeah, okay, okay,
the Angry Brigade spends a while blowing stuff up in
the UK.
Speaker 1 (49:26):
They're like, we're angry and they blow stuff up, like
fuck you thing. I clearly haven't read the book about it. Yeah,
he pretty much got arrested because they were like, well,
some anarchists blew some stuff up. We know an anarchist
who once tried to blow some stuff up.
Speaker 3 (49:41):
I mean yeah, that is like, that is definitely like
an OPSEEC concern being like, well he was a brigade.
Speaker 1 (49:50):
Oh okay, oh he was all right, but he was
friends with them all. So the other reason he got arrested, yeah,
is that after they arrested them, he like showed up
at their house and so they arrested him. But he
was like, well, he's just friends of them, because they're
the anarchists in the UK, like the Clash only anyway
sex pistols I know, punk I swear anyway. So there's
(50:13):
a six month trial for the Angry Brigade. It gets
called the longest trial trial in UK history. This is
not true.
Speaker 3 (50:20):
Also six months, I mean yeah, I'm used to like
American trials which are like, I know, he's oh wow,
the six months trial. That's so convenient.
Speaker 4 (50:29):
I know.
Speaker 1 (50:30):
I read that and I was like, holy shit, they're
really fast over there. I thought one of our whole
things was right to a speedy trial. And I like
Google like longest trial and there's like just a lot
of answers that aren't the Angry Brigade. Sure whatever, there's
a long trial and during it eight thousand people bought
in war pins that said I'm in the Angry Brigade.
Speaker 3 (50:51):
Amazing. Yeah, that's great, that's that's fun.
Speaker 4 (50:54):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (50:55):
Stuart Christie stayed involved in anarchism his whole life. He
helped restart an old an organization, the Anarchist Black Cross,
which is more than one hundred years old. Now it's
a prisoner support organization. He campaigned for the release of
other Spanish anarchists prisoners and got a bunch of them
out to London, organizing with them there. He married another comrade.
They had a kid. He lived on a tiny island
for a while and they ran that island's newspaper. In
(51:19):
twenty twenty. He died of lung cancer at the age
of seventy four, and I'll end this chunk with a
quote from him that I like, without freedom there would
be no equality, and without equality, no freedom, and without
struggle there would be neither. And so I don't know,
rest in peace to it, Christie.
Speaker 3 (51:37):
It sounds like he lived kind of like an ideal
anarchist life almost like he did he got to do,
He got to be involved in a lot of really
cool things to try out, a lot of pretty cool things.
Didn't spend that much time in prison altogether. Yeah, it
got to like die of like relatively like natural causes
at age, like seventy four, seventy two, seventy four, seventy four,
(51:58):
Like that's yeah, that's pretty good. Like what more can
you hope for?
Speaker 1 (52:02):
Yeah? Now, he he did a fucking ton of stuff too,
like his writings, his translations. He actually did the translation
of the book Sabote that I was the main source
for last weeks.
Speaker 3 (52:15):
So I guessing he eventually learned other way.
Speaker 1 (52:16):
Yeah, I'm willing to bet the three years in Spanish
prison maybe taught him a little bit of it Spanish
and Codzalan.
Speaker 3 (52:24):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (52:24):
Yeah, but there is an award for best assassination during
the Franco regime. It might win the award for best
assassination period and it goes This award goes to the
Boss Separatists and specifically it goes to the Bosque Space
Program And I'm going to tell you about them on
(52:47):
Wednesday on.
Speaker 3 (52:48):
The next episode. Oh wow, yeah see. And now I
have to sit here for like a day and a
half just in this chair. Yeah, well, Margaret, watch is
me al via my video feed here until we can
talk about it again. So I know, I have to
just wait as long as you guys have to.
Speaker 1 (53:03):
Yeah, So if you'll be here keeping his company, we'll
order in always we'll use do we have an advertiser
who's like, a, we'll just use our gold coins? Yeah?
Speaker 3 (53:14):
I bet, I bet? I bet it can trade my
ranking coin for for currency with the you know, like
door ash will calm be like, hey, can I can
use this as a tip, And he'll be like, what
are you doing? Get away from me, and then that'll
be a nice exchange.
Speaker 1 (53:25):
Yeah, and you'll just walk towards the door going chut
chut chut chumba. I don't know if I'm allowed to
do that. I guess I did. We'll find out, but
we know what else we'll find out, Garrison Davis, We'll
find out your plugs.
Speaker 3 (53:45):
Oh well. As people probably know, I work on a
podcast called it Could Happen Here. I've been the past
few months have been covering the happenings in Atlanta related
to the Stop Coop City movement, so so that that
is still ongoing as a time of recording, as the
time of publishing, probably a lot has actually changed because
(54:05):
there's the city council gooes to a proof funding on
the fifth, So who knows what I'll be there, but
I'll keep I'll keep keep giving updates on the cauld
Happen Here podcast in these next few months as that develops.
And then also you can find me posting mostly mostly
not very good jokes on Twitter at Hungry bow Tie.
Speaker 1 (54:29):
Sophie. What do you got ah?
Speaker 2 (54:32):
If you did not know, we now have an AD
pre version available of all of our cool Zone Media podcasts.
It's exclusively on Apple podcasts. It is called Cooler Zone Media.
It'll be linked on social media, maybe episode description or
just search cooler Zone Media on Apple Podcasts if you
(54:54):
would like to subscribe. Free version still available everywhere with ads.
Speaker 1 (55:01):
I know what I want to plug. I want to
plug the number city. How have you already been hearing?
Speaker 3 (55:06):
Absolutely?
Speaker 1 (55:07):
But this very month, I'm kickstarting a tabletop role playing game,
and as of this recording, we met our kickstarter goal
and have exceeded it within like three hours of posting
it this morning.
Speaker 3 (55:21):
And but Margaret, do you have any stretch goals? We
do have stretch goals. Oh boy. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (55:27):
If we reach twenty thousand dollars, which we probably will
by the time that I go to bed tonight, we'll
add three new character classes to the tabletop role playing game.
Do you want to play a Clacker?
Speaker 4 (55:41):
Wait?
Speaker 1 (55:41):
Actually, don't remember which classes we're going to add. I
don't have my notes in front of me.
Speaker 4 (55:44):
I never do.
Speaker 1 (55:46):
But if we reach forty thousand dollars, I have to
write a novella based in the world. So if you
like tabletop role playing games and you like trying and
failing to turn dictators into multiple smaller pieces, you might
like this game. Because you can't go to prison for
(56:08):
playing it. You can probably play it in prison.
Speaker 3 (56:12):
I don't know about that, Margaret. They are they are
pretty strict on on what books can be let in.
Speaker 1 (56:19):
Yeah, a lot of people do play role playing games
in prison, But it might involve making a different version
of it for it anyway, that's what I have to.
Just google the number city Kickstarter and you'll find it
and we'll see you on Wednesday when we talk about
the Space program.
Speaker 4 (56:38):
They Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production
of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts and cool Zone Media,
visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com or check us out
on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
your podcasts.
Speaker 3 (57:01):
You'll have been
Hello, and welcome to cool People did cool stuff. You're
a weekly reminder that we can choose to do noble
and wonderful things with our brief lives that do earnest,
that earnest.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Just earnest enough, in my opinion.
Speaker 1 (00:13):
Okay, I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy. Today's guest it's Garrison. Hi, Garrison.
Speaker 3 (00:19):
Hello, I'm about to take the sincerity pill.
Speaker 1 (00:23):
Oh no, I'm sorry you allergic?
Speaker 3 (00:29):
Uh No, I don't think I'm allergic to any medication.
Speaker 1 (00:32):
Oh okay, that's that's that's how I phrase it. Whenever
I go into the doctor, they're like, you allergic to anything,
and I'm like, I don't know. I hope not. I
hope it's not whatever you're about to give me, right.
Garrison Davis is a podcaster.
Speaker 3 (00:46):
I have. I have made a few podcasts now.
Speaker 1 (00:50):
Yeah. Our producer is Sophie, who also makes podcasts like.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
So fucking many, so fucking many some with Garrison, which
is nice.
Speaker 3 (01:03):
It's true.
Speaker 1 (01:04):
And you know who else makes podcasts. It's Ian are
our audio engineer.
Speaker 2 (01:09):
Ian and I have made some beautiful podcasts together.
Speaker 1 (01:11):
This is true, Yeah, including this one you're listening to. Hi, Hi, hyen.
Speaker 2 (01:18):
Garrison Garretson.
Speaker 3 (01:20):
Oh hi, Ian, Yes, sorry, I forgot that I'm involved
and I'm included in that.
Speaker 1 (01:24):
Yes, yeah, you are in everyone's.
Speaker 3 (01:27):
I'm so happy Garrets here.
Speaker 1 (01:32):
And our theme music was written for us by Unwoman.
So this week the cool people are Garrison. Have you
ever heard of.
Speaker 3 (01:39):
People like the concept?
Speaker 1 (01:42):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (01:43):
I have, I have heard of it. I don't think
I believe in it, but I have. I am aware
of the concept.
Speaker 1 (01:48):
Yes, okay, okay, what about the people of Spain?
Speaker 3 (01:54):
Is this gonna be a is this okay? Is this
gonna be like a Spanish Civil War thing?
Speaker 1 (02:00):
You know? For once, We're actually not talking about the
Spanish Civil War?
Speaker 3 (02:03):
Okay, I just know it's it's come up so much
on this on this show.
Speaker 1 (02:07):
Oh yeah, no, now it's what happened after the Spanish
Civil War adjacent yeah yeah, the sequels post.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
Same same, same like universe, different season.
Speaker 1 (02:20):
Yeah, same antagonists and protagonists. Today's protagonists, though, well, this
week's protagonists are basically the people of Spain who fought
against their fascist dictator Franco after he became their fascist dictator.
Usually we talked about them before he became their fascist dictator,
but last week and this week we're talking about what
(02:41):
heck time after we've talked about this guy Franco a
bunch before. I assume you've heard of him at this point.
Speaker 3 (02:48):
Yeah, I'm familiar with mister Franco.
Speaker 1 (02:51):
Yeah, he's the guy who invaded Spain overthrew a democratic
republic and said quote I'm it is a paraphrase quote
because I forgot to look up the actual quote. It's
basically this, I'm willing to kill half of Spain to
rule the other half. And then he lived up to
that quote, while the quote unquote great powers of democracy
not only stood by and let it happen, but, as
we're going to explore this week, actively enabled it. Last
(03:14):
week we talked about an anarchist bank robber named al
Kiko who funded militias, and okay, during that I suggested
that Kiko might be a pun. It's short for Francisco
if it's spelled a different way Kiko, but his name
was spelled q u I CEO has pronounced the same
and I was like, I think this is a pun,
(03:35):
and an astute listener told me it is, and Eli
Kiko means the cute. So he was a bank robber
who was the cute. He would show up to people
and say so Aliqiko, and then they would have to
give him all of their money because he showed up
and said I am the cute.
Speaker 3 (03:52):
That's pretty funny.
Speaker 4 (03:53):
I know.
Speaker 2 (03:55):
I was going to say that's super cute, but.
Speaker 1 (03:59):
That is, yeah, super cute. I don't don't know cattalan
to say super cute. Okay, so before we talk about
the people fought Franco, we're gonna talk a little bit
about Franco. This isn't like a like, we're not gonna
talk about where he was born.
Speaker 2 (04:16):
We need the context, Magpie, That's.
Speaker 1 (04:19):
What exactly needed, I know. So Franco is often painted
as the nice fasci fascist dictator of Europe. You know,
it's like he's the good one. Yeah, exactly, exactly. He
hasn't been spoiled by the bad apples of Mussolini and Hitler.
Speaker 3 (04:38):
He made the fascists wear gay little outfits.
Speaker 1 (04:41):
Oh they did have the best outfits they did.
Speaker 3 (04:44):
Which is honestly hard because all of the fascists paid
a lot of attention to fascism. So sorry, get a
lot of attention to fashion fashion fascism. But yeah, that'll
be the Spanish ones definitely went went pretty hard.
Speaker 1 (04:58):
Yeah, although I was I was reading this historian and
by that I mean twitter person talking about how actually
the average fascist just looked like a tool with like
sure of course, you know, like but anyway, they were
capable of some good fashion and the idea.
Speaker 3 (05:15):
Of aesthetics that is a big part of fascism. It
doesn't like, like you say, like most American fascists look
like shit. They look like, they do not look good,
but there is like an ideal of fashion that that
that they do that they do go towards right.
Speaker 1 (05:30):
And Franco he ends up being the sort of like
we'll talk about this more, I think in the next
half of this, but he ends up the like national
Catholic and so it's like very like trad wifey a
lot of what folks are doing, which is a shame
because tradwife is a nice aesthetic and a terrible concept. Okay, anyway,
so Franco, we're not talking about his clothing choice for
(05:52):
other people. We're talking about how he murdered a lot
of people. He was a fucking monster. He was not
the nice fascist. He was a bad fascist who lived
longer than the other fascists. Author Murray Bukchin estimated that
he systematically slaughtered between seven hundred thousand and eight hundred
and eighty thousand people during and after the Spanish Civil War,
so like the nineteen thirty six to early nineteen forties era,
(06:15):
and reduced the executions only once Hitler started losing World
War Two. Basically at that point Franco was like, oh,
we should look good, because before that he was like
trying to look good to Hitler, and then he was like, actually, oh.
Speaker 3 (06:29):
Hitler's gonna be kind of going out of style. I
now have to appeal to the liberal democracies. Yeah, yeah,
that is that's Franco in a fucking nutshell. So he
stopped mass executing quite as much in like nineteen forty
three or so. More conservative estimates say that he only
systematically murdered like two hundred thousand people. But he was
(06:52):
a dictator for decades who put an incredible amount of
effort into covering up his crimes. That's like one of
the things that he's actually like, really it at like
Stalin does this too, right, But Stalin's sort of it's
like almost the joke where it's like everyone's like disappearing
out of the.
Speaker 1 (07:06):
Photos or the pictures. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Franco was really
fucking good at covering up crime in Madrid. He had
five permanent courts after the Civil War, he had five
permanent courts trying and executing people in batches of twenty
five to thirty or trying and sentencing to death people
in batches of twenty five to thirty. Basically anyone who
(07:27):
is accused of being involved in a leftist organization or Freemasonry.
You really hated Freemasonry.
Speaker 3 (07:34):
A lot of the fascists do. It's weird because the
Freemasons aren't like sometimes they're kind of fasci I know.
Speaker 1 (07:42):
It is a politically neutral thing to be a Freemason.
There are people on the right and the left who
are Freemasons, but not in fascist Spain, then there's just
no Freemasons because you just get murdered. Prisons were filled
the fourteen times capacity, which is impressive of coming from
the United States, which is notoriously full of overfilled, overcrowded prisons.
(08:07):
People spent years on death row and they were executed
in bashes of at least three hundred at a time.
And this is some like national Catholic bullshit. They spent
their last night in the prison chapel on like a
stone floor, just like forced to sit in this chapel
before they die at dawn. They were bound and gagged
so no one could hear their last words lest people
revolt when they hear people saying Viva anarchy or whatever
(08:29):
the fuck you know. Yeah, they were marched single file
across a gang plank I believe, like over a mass grave.
But just like in a graveyard where they would be killed,
they were executed by machine gun officers with revolvers finished
off any survivors. It was not nice to be in
Spain under Franco's rule.
Speaker 3 (08:49):
And.
Speaker 1 (08:51):
A lot of them were A lot of people were
killed were sort of random, right, like the Freemasons. I
don't know, maybe maybe by the time, maybe I'm going
to be doing a whole episode about like how Freemasons
like brought down Franco or something. I don't know, but
but a lot of the people that he killed were
fighting back. Because the thing is, and the more I
do this research, a lot of people fought back against
(09:13):
this guy, right, A lot of people from different parts
of Spain and different like ideological backgrounds, were like, actually,
we don't like having a fascist dictatorship. Resistance in these
first years of his rule. In the words of Frank,
one of Franco's right hand man, it quote disrupted communications,
demoralized folk, wrecked our economy, shattered our unity, and discredited
(09:36):
us in the eyes of the outside world. And it
didn't kill Franco. And so people tend to like think
of it as like not successful. And that's like the
main that's my thesis.
Speaker 3 (09:51):
Of this.
Speaker 1 (09:53):
Is this show that I totally didn't really go to college.
That is my thesis statement is that the people brought
down Franco cheologically.
Speaker 3 (10:02):
Thank you to you.
Speaker 1 (10:04):
I had this nightmare the other day, or I was
sort of a regular dream, but I had this nightmare
where I decided I was going to get a doctorate.
Oh scary, yeah, I know. And in the dream I
was like, I don't have an undergrad degree. Why am
I doing this? And the only reason I came up
with was then people would have to call me doctor.
Speaker 3 (10:24):
Many such cases.
Speaker 2 (10:28):
Listen, all the cool people I know that have doctor
degrees don't want to be called doctor and like only
bring it up when absolutely necessary. It's very funny.
Speaker 1 (10:40):
Yeah, no, I I woke up without that desire anyway.
That's what we're here to talk about is Margaret goes
to school. It's possible that this resistance not to Margaret
going to college, but this resistance to Franco's fascist regime
is part of why Franco later had to open up
the economy, which led to the death spiral of Spanish fascism.
(11:03):
So it was actually very effective. So the fighting really
started in earnest in nineteen forty three, when gorillas in
the hills were like, oh shit, maybe Hitler's going to lose,
and everyone got really excited. It will not Franco. Franco
didn't really get excited by Franco's own admission, and he
had every reason and the capacity to downplay this. There
(11:24):
were at least two thousand battles between the Civil Guard
his cops or whatever, his stormtroopers, and the resistance between
nineteen forty three and nineteen fifty two. So there's two
thousand battles during that time period. At least, I didn't
know it went on that hard for so long.
Speaker 3 (11:40):
Yeah, that's.
Speaker 1 (11:43):
That's one of the things that really I get really
excited about. Tens of thousands of people this part isn't exciting.
I mean, the good guys lost, right. This is like
Star Wars, only Empire wins for a very long time.
But tens of thousand people were arrested during this for
connection to the resistance. At least one thousand civil guards
died on active active duty during that time. There's like
(12:05):
not really good records like Franco's like, oh, they killed
like a hundred of us or something, and then like
historians later have to sit there and be like, there's
like a thousand extra deaths here. We think that this
is you know, civil guards who died. Yeah, fascists whatever.
Fascists would never lie about their numbers. No, that they're
(12:25):
very upstanding, honest, fourth right people. They've told me that themselves,
Third Right people.
Speaker 3 (12:32):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (12:33):
So nineteen forty three, it kicks off with the gorillas
in the Hill, but there's like tens of thousands of
anarchists and communists and other Spanish refugees in France who
are busy fighting for France's liberation from the Nazis. Then
in nineteen forty four, the anarchists liberated Paris and the
Spanish exiles came back to Spain ready to function up.
Speaker 3 (12:57):
That is one big difference. Whenever I'm i I have
a few friends in the European continent region, and I'm
always shocked at how close everything is together, Like oh,
you can just like go to other countries in like
a day, or like you like multiple countries in a day.
And here I am like planning a cross country road trip.
I'm like, I'm crossing so much more territory that like
(13:21):
ednyone would ever cross in Europe.
Speaker 1 (13:23):
Oh totally, yeah, no, this is like people can walk
these distances.
Speaker 3 (13:27):
Yeah, you know, no, it's wild, like there's there's so
much more options for like like cross pollination. Yeah, that
just there's always it always surprises me being like, oh,
you could take the train to five different countries in
like two hours. Yeah. Oh wow.
Speaker 1 (13:40):
You live in Connecticut and New York is at war,
so you're like, well, I guess I'm gonna go to
New York.
Speaker 3 (13:45):
Down in New York. I'll just bike over and kill
some fascists and bike back.
Speaker 1 (13:49):
Yeah, totally. There is a mountain range in the way,
but like you know, people can move through it. So
the first thing that they did or one of the
first things that they did in nineteen four before is
that the Communist Party, the exiled Spanish Communist Party in France.
They organized three thousand guerrillas to invade Fascist Spain and
(14:12):
the attack was repulsed. But it was actually and I
think we talked about this a little bit last week,
but the plan was actually really good and it was
two attacks. In my mind when I first read this,
I was like, they thought they were going to take
Spain with three thousand people. They just like lost it
with like substantially more than three thousand people. But their
whole goal, their whole strategy, was, well, fascism is losing.
(14:34):
There is no way that the Western powers are going
to allow fascism in Western Europe. All we have to
do is go put in a like basically build a
beachhead into Spain that invaded two different areas, will set
up a government in exile and will recreate the republic.
Speaker 3 (14:51):
Right, and then they'll get backing from other liberal democracies
and they'll be able to take over the country.
Speaker 1 (14:55):
Yeah, okay, And unfortunately Franco was ready for them, and
so they did not even succeed at stage one of
setting up a successful beachhead and a government in exile.
But more than that, the other governments were like, we
don't fucking care. Fuck you, we're tired.
Speaker 3 (15:19):
Just yeah, that makes sense.
Speaker 1 (15:21):
And I don't know whether it's I don't know what
to agree, it's they're tired into what degree they're like,
we don't care. Franco is sort of neutral, and that
was like, and everyone's a little bit starting to cozy
up to him. It's like kind of blurry. We'll talk
about this over the course of like basically, the Western
powers slowly start accepting him, but more in the fifties
than the forties.
Speaker 3 (15:38):
As long as he keeps the machinery of capital going,
then it's it's mostly fine, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (15:42):
As long as people in Spain are buying TVs and
show who fucking cares and well and also increasingly making
the TVs. But okay, so these attacks fail, but the
people who do that, they bolster the gorillas who are
in the hills and have been there and have been
fighting since nineteen forty three. They took like a four
year break to not get murdered, and they start fucking
(16:03):
shit up as the Spanish monkey, as we talked about
last time. And so you know, Western powers don't help.
I want to quote an anarchist political prisoner from this
time period about this. His name is Miguel Garcia. Garcia quote.
When we lost the war, those who fought on became
the resistance. But to the world, the resistance had become criminals,
(16:24):
for Franco made the laws, even if when dealing with
political opponents he chose to break the laws established by
the constitution, and the world still regards us as criminals.
When we are imprisoned, liberals are not interested, for we
are quote terrorists.
Speaker 3 (16:41):
Yeah, well, good thing we learned our lesson there.
Speaker 1 (16:44):
I know, I know, everyone is aware that laws are
written by the victors and have no relevance to morality.
They're entirely unrelated. Crime is not inherently good. Following the
law is not inherently good. Everyone knows that.
Speaker 3 (17:00):
So true, Just me and all my friends agree.
Speaker 1 (17:05):
So the Western world wasn't going to help end Spanish fascism.
It took the Spanish people, plus some French and Italian
comrades here and there to bring him down. In the end. Okay,
in the end, it took Parkinson's disease to bring down Franco.
Speaker 3 (17:18):
Comrade disease. Yeah, support to Parkinson's disease. So I almost
wrote that.
Speaker 1 (17:23):
And then I was like, oh, my granddad died like
a couple of years ago, parkins and stuff. No, no,
I mean like, but I still I was trying to
figure out with Yeah, anyway, surprised there wasn't TV.
Speaker 3 (17:34):
I'll take the hit. I'll take the hit for you there,
all right, all right?
Speaker 1 (17:37):
Thanks.
Speaker 2 (17:37):
Usually usually it's comrade tuberculosis.
Speaker 3 (17:41):
I know.
Speaker 1 (17:43):
But you know, one hundred years, one hundred years earlier,
he would have gone out from TV. But okay, So
the people paved the way for the end of the dictatorship,
and they did a damn fine job of it. This time,
we're going to focus a little less on the bank
robberies and the fundraising, because we talked about that last
week with the Francisco Sabote fascists. We're gonna talk about
(18:05):
some other folks instead. Fascists gave no fucks about morality,
and the counter operations against the gorillas were brutal. By
nineteen forty seven, you get counter gorilla bands who dressed
like gorillas and murdered the gorillas and also went around
doing like false flagshit like murdering random people and blaming
it on the gorillas. By nineteen fifty two, the gorilla
(18:26):
portion of the resistance was mostly done, with just tons
and tons of dead resistance fighters. The last gorilla standing
was Jose Castro Viega el Pilato, the pilot I believe,
who died in combat against fascism in March nineteen sixty five.
Speaker 3 (18:42):
But night.
Speaker 1 (18:42):
By nineteen fifty three, the US signed a military and
economic assistance treaty with Franco. By nineteen fifty five, franco
Is welcomed Franco as Spain was welcomed into the United Nations.
And it's a good thing. Gorilla fighting wasn't the only
thing that happened.
Speaker 3 (19:00):
Yeah, it's it's I it was interesting you were talking
about the the the counter gorilla forces and like the
and like the gorilla psyops. Yeah, which is I know,
people of people have like there's always like sometimes like
conspiracies about like this person in block is a secret
infiltrating the person's matching these windows is actually of blah
(19:21):
blah blah blah whatever, which is usually all take a nonsense. Yeah,
but it has been has been interesting. There are there
are certain like there are certain white white power groups
that are that that have been adopting more black block
like clothing, not to like impersonate Antifa, but just because
it's a good taxtic.
Speaker 1 (19:37):
Yeah, it's a very good tactic.
Speaker 3 (19:38):
Yeah. So we're seeing like Nazis in there, like Nazi
Block versus versus like anti fascists in black bloc. Yeah,
I think Rubbert Rundo's groups and some I mean some
of Patriot Front, but there's there's there's is a bit
more dorky. But some of some of the more like
Fight Club Rubber Rundo sque groups have been have been
using stuff that's more more similar just to like black
(19:59):
block or gray block. There was another group like a
month ago that was doing a drag protest in all
all black, but they had like they had like red
masks on.
Speaker 1 (20:10):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (20:12):
Yes, it's interesting after after you know, years of coverage
of black block being pretty pretty popular in like national news,
we're seeing some of the right adopt some of those
tactics right now.
Speaker 1 (20:21):
Yeah, it's a very effective tactic. And you know, I
guess if you if if the government figures out that
if you like live in the hills, you can hide
and shoot people effectively, then at some point some people
in the government or me, be like, we can hide
in the hills and shoot people effectively too, you know.
But if you want to hide in the hills, run
(20:43):
and shoot run the.
Speaker 3 (20:44):
Door salesman who's going to sell you these products and
services the chance, so you don't need to shoot him. Instead,
you can just listen here, Yeah, thus thus de escalating
any future conflict with solicitors coming to your door.
Speaker 2 (20:57):
Yeah, unless you subscribed to the Apple Premium version of
the show, then there.
Speaker 1 (21:02):
Is no hope for you. Yeah, because if you listen
to the Apple Premium version of the show where you
don't get ads, you're still gonna get ad transitions.
Speaker 3 (21:15):
One day the Casper mattress man's gonna walk up to
your house. You're like, nope, I'm paying to avoid those ads. Sorry, mister,
you're just gonna blast a shotgun through the door, and
they're good at prison for like fifteen years.
Speaker 1 (21:28):
Except that Casper mattresses are bullet I don't think I
can say that.
Speaker 3 (21:37):
Just make sure holding it over your vital regions when
you're carrying the box to the door. As long as
you have a turn a kit, you can save your libs.
But as long as you have your tour so covered.
Yeah Jesus Christ. Okay, your ads or not ads.
Speaker 1 (21:53):
Depending on your preference. And we're back and we're talking
very seriously. Okay, So speaking about people's vital organs and
their continued existence.
Speaker 2 (22:07):
Wow, what a podcast transition today.
Speaker 1 (22:11):
Let's talk about let's talk about some assassination attempts.
Speaker 3 (22:14):
Oh, I am always down to talk about assassination attempts.
I always One of the things that I think about
more often than I should is why is it there're
more political assassinations? Because it seems I don't know how
much solid question, but like I am not on this,
it seems to be a pretty effective tactic.
Speaker 1 (22:35):
So okay, I will say historically and again, historically, political
assassinations attend tots, as I sometimes get called, are a
roll of the dice.
Speaker 3 (22:49):
Yes, yes it is.
Speaker 1 (22:50):
It is a complete crapshoot about whether what comes after
is better or worse.
Speaker 3 (22:55):
You're introducing a chaos variant, you don't know, like it's yeah, yeah,
but when you have Franco shoot the Archduke Fransford to Dad,
I don't know what's gonna happen next.
Speaker 1 (23:07):
Yeah, that one didn't go great?
Speaker 3 (23:09):
Worst second, what's the worst that could happen.
Speaker 1 (23:11):
That one didn't go great. Later this week we're going
to talk about one that goes really well. But first
we're gonna talk about someones that didn't make things worse.
They just didn't succeed because yeah, spoiler or alert, only
Parkinson's assassinates Franco successfully. So let's talk about the anarchist
(23:33):
air Force of nineteen forty eight. This is not the
most successful thing that anarchists have ever done, but it's interesting.
Speaker 3 (23:41):
I mean, if you told me there was an anarchist
air force, I wouldn't immediately think, oh, yeah, that's gonna
go well, that's good, that's gonna hey.
Speaker 1 (23:49):
I think my main reason we didn't have an anarchist
air force in the Spanish Civil War is that the
Soviets were the only people who were providing planes and
like training pilots. And actually read about some anarchists who
were like, can I can I just like join the
Communist Party for a minute, just learn how to fly
in Soviet Union and then come back. But oh god,
(24:11):
that's actually probably how the well, let's just tell the story.
So there are tens of thousands of anarchists in exile
in France. They said up a bunch of organizations. These
are very much the organization type of anarchist. Half of
the history books about this are like basically reading the
meeting notes of these fucking organizations, where they're like, of course,
(24:31):
oh well, this three letter acronym didn't really like the
thing that the committee of the such and such of
the other three letter acronym did, and I'm like, I
do not care about that.
Speaker 3 (24:39):
Oh. Imagine if all of like the anarchist org signal
chats just got turned into these like fifty years and
someone started like sort through and decipher what these meeting
notes are, yeah, and then decides to present it as
if that's what's interesting instead of I'm gonna tell you
about some people who got a plane and try to
blow up Franco. That's interesting or interesting.
Speaker 1 (24:59):
Yeah. So one of these organizations they set up a
quote conspiratorial commission, which is the commission.
Speaker 3 (25:07):
Okay, all right, that sounds.
Speaker 1 (25:11):
Right now. Mostly apparently this group, and this might have
just been some some ship, some shade that was being
thrown by the historian who I think knew these people.
Mostly they set around at coffee and were like, hmm,
we should have a revolution don't you think that's also
what I do in my conspiratorial coalition.
Speaker 4 (25:29):
I know.
Speaker 1 (25:31):
And then these people have also like seen thousands of
their comrades die and have personally charged at machine gun nests.
So they can sit around at coffee and talk some bullshit.
I feel that way, and I've been like shot with
less lethals and spent a couple of nights in jail.
Speaker 3 (25:49):
You know, they're not going to get hit with the
armchair anarchist allegations.
Speaker 1 (25:53):
No, no, except by some of the historians who have
also charged a machine gun nests. But I am not
in a place to say such. Okay, So there is
one guy in the group, and his name is Lariano
Serata Santos, and he's cool. He was in his forties
at this point, and he had a plan, and he
was his old working class anarchist. He'd spent his life
(26:14):
working on the railroad and fementing anarchist revolution and at
this point, at least after the fall of the Spanish Republic,
he's a forger and that's his like main deal, like
a like metal forging. No, no, like during the Nazi occupation,
he printed hundreds of official documents for juice cool. Yeah,
he've printed money, printed ideas, he printed whatever you needed.
(26:38):
This guy's providing it and so probably more impactful than
anything else he did in his life. But like something
that's like a lot of the anarchists participation in the
resistance is like less documented, right, But he printed hundreds
of hundreds official documents for Jews and France. He altered
their racial identity on their legal papers and saved their lives.
(27:00):
So already he's like in into the cool people heaven.
Speaker 3 (27:04):
Absolutely.
Speaker 1 (27:06):
But now it's nineteen forty eight. World War two has
been over for a bit. Franco hasn't yet legitimized his
authority over Spain, right, because everything is still very much
in play. So Sonata comes up with a plan. His
plan's very simple. You get an airplane and you drop
a bunch of bombs on Franco. Step one, yeah, get
(27:27):
an airplane, right, So step one is getting airplane in
a pilot, and so they pick this tiny little plane
because they figure there's this boat race, this fancy regatta.
I had to look up regatta and it means fancy
boat race, which is what I thought, but I wasn't sure.
Not a regular part of my daily life.
Speaker 3 (27:47):
Yoh, you don't hang out at the regatta every weekend.
Speaker 1 (27:51):
No, not as much, not anymore, okay, not since I'm
an immortal vampire and I went to this one.
Speaker 3 (27:59):
You don't hot hoist the black flag at the regatta.
Speaker 1 (28:05):
And so they get this like fancy bougie tiny plane, right,
or that's their plan. They're like, we want this fancy
bougie tiny plane because it'll fit in with all the
other like tiny planes hanging out among the boats at
the regatta that Franco Is gonna officiate. Sure, they picked
a pilot named Primativo Perez Gomez who'd been a fighter
pilot during the Civil War, so there was anarchists thank
(28:29):
you flying okay anyway, yeah, yeah, sure. They picked a
plane that they could buy in Paris, and for a
tiny little plane, it was very modern. It could land
in only one hundred and sixty meters, which is fucking ridiculous,
Like currently the runway for a small plane, like a
tiny plane is two thousand meters. And wow, now it's
not to say that this plane is like designed to
(28:50):
land in one hundred and sixty meters. Sure, sure, sure,
Why when they go on like a test flight. They're like, hey,
h could you just We're like totally not sketchy when
we're buying this, but could you just like land it
really really short, just as short as you can. I
just want to see how short it's coming fun for fun. Yeah,
And the guy's like that's illegal, and they're like, we
won't buy it unless you do it, and he's like okay, okay,
(29:12):
based based yeah, and uh so they're like, all right,
now we have a plane that is a perfect plane
for doing a murder and then ditching in a field
because you can land in a fucking field. They get
one more person along for the ride El Valencia. This
(29:33):
was not a small conspiracy. At least twenty people knew
what was happening. No snitches, this entire plan.
Speaker 3 (29:40):
Whoof for twenty people, that's pretty solid, and there's like okay,
So they bring in a French guy as the buyer,
since they need a French citizen to be the one
to buy the plane.
Speaker 1 (29:50):
They spent one point six million francs on the plane.
I did not successfully find the value of this old money,
but it's not a small amount of money. The anarchists
have a fair I mean they were running a good
chunk of a country immediately before this. Right, they're all
like working class and working. It's like ironmongers and shit,
(30:10):
but they like have access to some money. There's also
bank robbers and shit like that funding them. Right, So
they buy the plane. A pilot at the local airfield
when they go and buy it, recognize the Spanish anarchists
from their bravery or during the French resistance, because the
guy who's just like flying around in the bougie little
airfield plane place where the pilots hang out, and.
Speaker 3 (30:30):
Then you see then someone recognizes you, which idea which
was probably a nightmare scenario.
Speaker 1 (30:35):
Oh yeah, and he takes them aside. He's like, hey,
I want to talk to you really quick. And he's like, hey,
you might want to be careful flying over the Pyrenees
into Spain. They're watching the shit out of that and
I'll shoot you down. And they're like, whoa, why would
we clearly a bunch of Spanish anarchists be planning on
taking this plane to Spain. We would never never do
(30:56):
such a thing. Still, no snitches, everyone knows what they're doing.
Speaker 3 (31:01):
That's pretty cool.
Speaker 1 (31:02):
Yeah, they refitted the plane with bomb doors by involving
yet another guy a mechanic, and I guess fabricator. They
have a whole bunch of bombs because they'd fought in
the French resistance and the whole time with the French
resistance is happening, especially I think a lot of these
bombs come when the Italians retreated, but then also when
the Germans would retreat, the anarchists would be like and mine,
(31:24):
and mine and mine, and just go pick up all
the bombs, just like go dumbstirring for spare boss. Yeah,
and like machine guns and shit. They decide in the
end not to bring the machine gun. You know, they're
like looking through and picking which bombs to bring. The
morning of three anarchists, four incendiary bombs and twenty shrapnel
bombs get on the plane. One of the rebels flying
(31:47):
one of the anarchists was the propagandist whose job was
to drop handbills over the crowd. And also it just
said camera. I don't know whether it was film or photograph,
but they were going to photograph or film them blowing
up Franco based journalist.
Speaker 3 (32:01):
Yeah, based journalists piloting the ball plane. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (32:07):
And then there's another guy whose job is to have
binoculars and like look out for everything. And then there's
the pilot that's pretty funny. And in the morning they're like,
all right, we're gonna cover up the French flag on
the plane so we better fit in with the small
planes that we're expected to mingle with. But they don't
have time and they're running late, so they don't cover
This saves their lives.
Speaker 3 (32:28):
What this could be such? This could be such a
good like suspense thriller, like no with the guy at
the airfield recognizes you and you're like, oh no, we're
we're we're about to get gone, and then you could
give it a piece of crucial advice. Yeah, and then
you're like, we don't have enough time to paint over
the French flag, and then it turns out to actually
be the thing that saves you.
Speaker 4 (32:46):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (32:47):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (32:47):
And they don't fly over the Pyrenees, and I don't
know whether it was because that guy's advice or not.
They fly over the water and partly because they're trying
to go to the north coast of Spain. Anyway, it's
a pretty logical way to do it. They approach Spain
over the water and there's two battleships standing guard over
the regatta and they're tracking the plane with their guns,
their anti aircraft guns. And then there's no small planes
(33:11):
over the race at all, and instead there's a ton
of fighter pilots everywhere, like circling the sky to make
sure no one tries to blow up Franco.
Speaker 3 (33:21):
Yeah, pretty freaky.
Speaker 1 (33:22):
And the reason that they know there were no snitches
is that, well, say that they don't get shot down.
Speaker 3 (33:28):
Sure, yeah, no one knows exactly what they're up to,
it seems.
Speaker 4 (33:31):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (33:31):
So the fighter pilots come for the anarchists to get
a closer look. And if they hadn't had the French
flag on the plane, they probably would have just opened fire.
But instead they're like, oh, we shouldn't open fire on
these random French people, right.
Speaker 3 (33:46):
They're just flying. They don't know what they're doing.
Speaker 1 (33:48):
Yeah French, Yeah totally, that's a white flag, the classic
French flag. And so the pilot just dives at the water,
dives to within a few feet of the water, and
just gets the fuck out of there, just like fucking runs.
Speaker 3 (34:05):
Yeah, which is the right spot? It is too hot?
The spot's too hot jack b Yeah, they.
Speaker 1 (34:11):
Like keep going for a while, they're like, oh, the
battleships are after us, and they're like, oh, there's a
couple of fighter pilots. And then there's like it's all
fighter pilots, no small planes. Gotta go. So they make
it back to France and they're like all right, you
want to go back tomorrow. They're like, yeah, let's go
back tomorrow.
Speaker 3 (34:29):
They try the same thing the next day.
Speaker 1 (34:31):
Well, they have a new plan. The new plan is
we know what hotel he's in. Let's just bomb hotel.
Speaker 3 (34:36):
Oh okay, there's like there's like other people at the hotel.
Speaker 1 (34:40):
Yeah, I don't know, but like probably fascist. Yeah, I
don't know. I I'm not a big like collateral damages.
Fine person, but I don't fucking know.
Speaker 3 (34:50):
But frank. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (34:54):
So then they, uh, they go out at four in
the morning and they have a new plan. They're going
fly low to the water in the middle of the night,
hugging the coast, which is like the most dangerous way
to fly this kind of plane, apparently. Yeah, they plate
full of balls, yeah, and some pamphlets. Oh good, rain
(35:16):
keeps them from going it. The airfield is completely mud
when they go out at four in the morning, and
they just flee.
Speaker 3 (35:24):
Abandoned the plane.
Speaker 1 (35:27):
Interesting, and a few years later, as best as I can,
peace out the rest of this saga, the pilot was arrested.
He later died a freeman. No one else was arrested.
I actually don't know if he was arrested for this,
for his arrested for something else. Some other folks were investigated, but.
Speaker 3 (35:45):
It certainly sounds like he could have been arrested doing
other things.
Speaker 1 (35:48):
Yeah, yeah, all of these people liked crime. Yeah, Serata
the forger I was talking about, he went back to forging.
Speaker 4 (35:57):
He was.
Speaker 1 (35:57):
He was pretty good at that. He got caught a
bunch of time, once with like just a ton of
fake money, and like another time for printing IDs and shit.
His last arrest was in nineteen seventy, when he was
sixty seven years old. He was held for a few months,
and he was all set to like die in bed,
an old man. He's like he made his seventy you
know whatever seventy four when a fucking police informant in
(36:22):
the anarchist movement murdered him in the street.
Speaker 3 (36:27):
Weird.
Speaker 1 (36:27):
That sucks, probably because he was going to reveal that
the guy was a police informant. Interesting, So then the
police smuggled that guy to Canada, where he probably lived
out happily the rest of his fucking days.
Speaker 3 (36:42):
The murderer not our finest moment.
Speaker 1 (36:45):
Yeah, Sarada had a quote about his attempt on Franco's life,
and I think it actually nails the moral question we
were talking about. Quote personal attentats. Assassinations are effective to
a degree determined by powers wielded by the victim. To
take the life of a constitutional king through conspiracy and
not through revolution is to change nothing except for his air.
(37:08):
But if someone had eliminated, say Adolf Hitler in nineteen
thirty nine, which of us can say that his death
would not have been of benefit to Europe. When we
tried to liquidate Franco back in nineteen forty eight, we
were persuaded that in doing so we would be changing
the course of Spanish history utterly.
Speaker 3 (37:25):
Yeah, No, I mean, it's a certainly, it's certainly an
interesting thing in terms of like what if the next
guy that comes in is just as bad or worse,
or you'd you can'tate fate is weird? You can't, you
can't you can't defnate these things very easily.
Speaker 1 (37:41):
No, totally and we're going to talk about one more
wacky failed anarchist bombing of Franco that I think I
already said failed, it did not succeed, that almost changed
the world.
Speaker 4 (37:53):
See.
Speaker 3 (37:54):
The thing I love about these stories, Margaret, is the
suspense of knowing if it's going to succeed or not.
Speaker 1 (38:00):
Yeah, did Franco die in the seventies or what we
did die in the seventies. Did Franco die in the sixties, fifties?
I'll get to that part in the script. I think
it's the sixties.
Speaker 3 (38:10):
I think there could also be a good Tarantina movie
here where it's like an alternate history of them actually
succeeding and killing Franco. Yeah. And then and then we
get a get a look at what Spain could have
been been, like like an exaggerated lens.
Speaker 2 (38:24):
But still, and we find out that that Parkinson's bit
was actually just somebody's code name.
Speaker 3 (38:30):
Oh nice. Yeah, yeah, So, Sophy, do not say anything else.
Screenwriters are going to be snatch your ideas from you.
You got to keep your lips sealed until you have
the full pitch ready.
Speaker 1 (38:40):
Yeah, good to know no one's listening to us. It's
just us here. But if either of you two want
great deals, have I got some great deals for you
the advertisers. Even though no one listens to the show
it's private recording. Don't worry.
Speaker 3 (38:59):
You can say whatever you It still has advertisers. I actually,
Margaret just plays four minutes of ads for us. We
have to sit here and listen to them with you. Actually,
I know. We don't get to skip forward ten seconds.
We have to sit here as Margaret plays them and
waiting for it to be over so we can continue
talking about Yeah.
Speaker 1 (39:14):
Uh, Franco and I make like a funny face, just
Robert Evans on a loop going mid mobile, mid mobile,
over and over again for four minutes, and then Margaret apologizing.
And I do this when I talk to my friends
on the phone. If I talk to my friends more
than twenty minutes, I run an ad break.
Speaker 3 (39:31):
See I actually do this sometimes, not joking. What I
actually do these types of bits in real life?
Speaker 1 (39:41):
You do? Oh yeah, no, that makes sense because I
mean we spend a lot of our time anyway. Here's
some ads that support us eating food or not.
Speaker 2 (39:50):
If you've subscribed to the previous figures, here's us coming back.
Speaker 1 (39:54):
Right away, and we're back we're going to talk about
a Scottish anarchist with a kilt and bombs. A Scottish anarchist. Yeah, okay,
We're going to talk about Stuart Christie. Stuart Christie was
(40:14):
an anarchist, historian and author and translator, and would be
assassin of Franco. He died in twenty twenty. I never
actually had a pleasure of knowing him. I've like a
lot of the people I've worked with him, worked with
through publishing, know him because he stayed engaged his entire life.
Spoiler alert. He grew up in Scotland and became an
anarchist when he was sixteen. He says his grandma's good
(40:36):
influence made him an anarchist. He wrote a book quote
or quote. The name of the book is Granny made
Me an anarchist?
Speaker 3 (40:44):
Pretty solid title.
Speaker 1 (40:45):
Yeah, no, totally. As he put it, quote basically, what
she did was provide a moral barometer which married almost
exactly with that of libertarian socialism and anarchism. And she
provided the star which I followed. And then this other
part that was a quote from his grandmother that I
just really like, which is just we are not bystanders
in life.
Speaker 3 (41:05):
Nice, nice, that's a solid one.
Speaker 1 (41:07):
Yeah. So in nineteen sixty two, when he was sixteen
years old, he joined the Anarchist Federation in Glasgow. In
nineteen sixty four, he was eighteen years old, he had
moved to London. He was doing sheet metal work and
iron mongerie, the other kind of forgery for gene, I guess. Yeah,
he met a bunch of Spanish anarchists in exile and
(41:28):
he was like, oh shit, I could probably help. I
bet a random Scottish kid he can get through some
borders more easily than some Spanish anarchist exiles. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (41:40):
Maybe he was right about all right.
Speaker 1 (41:43):
He got himself over to Paris. He told his family
he was off to go pick some grapes. So true,
he did not pick any grapes. He also didn't speak
any French.
Speaker 3 (41:54):
I mean it's barely intelligible as a language anyway.
Speaker 1 (41:58):
Yeah, and the French are famous for not minding that
people don't speak French when they're there. So he met
up with some anarchists in a group called Defensa Interior
and I have a feeling the French anarchists weren't like, oh,
you don't speak French. He's like, I'm Scottish and I'm
willing to carry some bombs. They were like yeah, fuck.
Speaker 3 (42:15):
Yeah, okay, sure, yeah, yes, let's fucking go.
Speaker 1 (42:18):
Yeah. They gave him some plastic explosives and his job.
Speaker 3 (42:22):
I like it. You just go to France to be
given some plastic explosively. Yeah, here, take these, have fun. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (42:29):
His job was to ferry them into Madrid and give
them to a forty year old anarchist carpenter whose job
was to turn Spain's fascist dictator from a regular guy
into an exploded guy with a regular guy, but in
a lot more pieces. Yeah, using one neat trick that
they don't want you to know about. And the way
that Christy Uh was going to signal to his conspirator
(42:53):
who he was was that he wore a bandage on
his hand, like oh, I fucked up my hand, and
that was like his like like one Spanish phrase he
learned was like my hand it is hurt or whatever.
And he knew even less Spanish than he knew French. Okay,
so he's off to transport bombs. He strapped them to
his body and he threw on a hand Knitz sweater.
I think that his grandma made. But I'm not entirely sure.
Speaker 3 (43:15):
That's adorable.
Speaker 1 (43:16):
Yeah, he also wore a kilt. I've heard that he
wore the kilt to help him catch rides while he
was hitchhiking. I don't know exactly, yeah, basically.
Speaker 3 (43:26):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (43:27):
So later the press said that the assassin was quote
a Scottish transvestite. Holy shit based Yeah, yeah, they're just
like me.
Speaker 3 (43:36):
That's crazy, I know.
Speaker 1 (43:37):
Except according to another source, the kilt thing was a
francoist police fabrication to say, oh no, it's not that
we had an infiltrator. It's that he drew attention to
himself by wearing a kilt. Who's to say, there's no
way to know whose word to take here? Well, what's
a kind of an annoying as If I've done this
(43:58):
couple of years ago, I would have been like, dear
Stuart Christie, did you wear a kilt? Also, he's probably
written this. I don't have time to read every fucking
book before I like, you know, it is a better
story if he wore a kilt and I have more sources.
It's like two to one the sources that I've got,
(44:19):
and he wore a kilt. There's only one problem unlike
the airplane conspiracy of nineteen forty eight, this group had
been infiltrated, and Stuart Christie was arrested in Madrid and
forced to watch his carpenter would be friend be tortured. Ah,
what's funny is I mean it hadn't been infiltrated, they
(44:42):
might have exploded. Who knows, Franco might have gone out
eleven years early. So Stuart Christie is forced to sign
a confession and is convicted of quote banditry and terrorism
because all of the anti Franco rebels were called bandits.
This is like their main method of delegitimize unrest. It's
like the outside agitators for Spain. Yeah, it didn't matter
(45:04):
that he literally didn't rob anyone.
Speaker 3 (45:08):
That's it's just like a colloquial term, meaning this is
not like a real person that you need to care about.
Speaker 1 (45:14):
Yeah, exactly exactly. He could have been executed. He was
facing execution. He would have been garroted, garroted whatever choked
or the story did Yeah, garrotted.
Speaker 3 (45:26):
I don't know either. I'm just saying that. So one
of us probably got it right.
Speaker 1 (45:29):
Yeah, probably. And and if you're listening and you know
the answer.
Speaker 3 (45:34):
Dm me at I write okay on Twitter, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (45:38):
Yeah, exactly with a voice memo. Indeed anyway, Ah, they
gave him twenty years instead, probably because he was like
a nice Scottish boy or whatever. So true, he goes
to prison, his co conspiratus thirty years I think, or
maybe ends up serving thirty years. What year does he
go to prison sixty four two? So in prison he's
(46:04):
a hero. There's plenty of anarchists still in Spanish prison.
They like him, and then an international campaign gets underway
to free our our poor young Scottish boy is as
far as I could tell, it's like the equivalent of like,
like everyone involved in this story is white, but it's
still somehow like the it's like, well, you're like Western European,
(46:24):
you're uke in you're like actually white. Yeah, And so
there's international campaign underweight of or because he's just like young,
and like his defense in court is like I thought
I was just transporting flyers or whatever.
Speaker 3 (46:38):
Me too, me too, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (46:41):
And also his confession had been tortured out of him.
Speaker 3 (46:44):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (46:45):
The campaign involved bretand Russell, a famous public intellectual guy,
and Jean Paul Sart, a famous existentialist author and most
importantly his mom.
Speaker 3 (46:55):
That's nice.
Speaker 1 (46:56):
And after three years he was released.
Speaker 3 (46:59):
That I assumed he was going to wait until Franco
was gone.
Speaker 1 (47:02):
No, he Yeah, the international campaign gets a lot of
steam and Franco is like, oh, I couldn't say no
to a mom who's worried about her kid. But it's
like Franco was kind of scared, I think, yeah, yeah, yeah,
interesting his co defendant wasn't released until nineteen seventy six
and supposedly was Franco's last political prisoner.
Speaker 3 (47:24):
That kind of makes sense.
Speaker 1 (47:26):
Yeah. Stuart has a quote about what he accomplished through
the failed attempt, which was that quote, the most beneficial
thing was that my arrest provided a focus for what
Franco was doing. He was trying to pass himself off
as an old, avuncular gentleman on a white charger, while
in fact he had all these political prisoners, thousands of
whom were tortured and some killed. And yeah, I mean
(47:50):
it's like it's basically it's like Western Ice start seeing
what's happening.
Speaker 3 (47:54):
You know.
Speaker 1 (47:55):
Stuart gets out, he goes back to the UK. He
becomes a gas fitter, which means a plumber for gas
and I like that because Savat last week's protagonist was
also a plumber, because plumbers hate Franco. Because here's my theory.
I think Franco is a Bowser.
Speaker 3 (48:14):
Does this makes sense?
Speaker 4 (48:15):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (48:15):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean there are definitely some Francoist
elements in modern depictions of Bowser. That yeah, that certainly tracks.
Speaker 1 (48:23):
Yeah, so.
Speaker 3 (48:26):
Stuart.
Speaker 1 (48:27):
Later he gets arrested when the UK government cracks down
on the probably future friends of the Pod. The Angry Brigade.
The Angry Brigade was, and I'm not going to go
into them super detail. They were an anarchist communist gorilla
group who never killed anyone, but they like blowing up
symbols of power in the early seventies in the UK.
Speaker 3 (48:44):
Wait, isn't Mario a monarchist though.
Speaker 1 (48:48):
Well, they made an adaptation. They took real, real people's
stories and turned them into monarchist propaganda.
Speaker 3 (48:57):
Yep, hmmm yeah. I don't know, Margaret, I don't know
if I can support pro monarchist propaganda. Oh no, that's
not true. I like Lord of the Rings anyway.
Speaker 1 (49:11):
Continue, all right, so the Angry Brigade they like blowing
stuff up, they never kill anyone, Okay, huh.
Speaker 3 (49:19):
Do they do? They successfully blow things up though, yeah, yeah, okay, okay,
the Angry Brigade spends a while blowing stuff up in
the UK.
Speaker 1 (49:26):
They're like, we're angry and they blow stuff up, like
fuck you thing. I clearly haven't read the book about it. Yeah,
he pretty much got arrested because they were like, well,
some anarchists blew some stuff up. We know an anarchist
who once tried to blow some stuff up.
Speaker 3 (49:41):
I mean yeah, that is like, that is definitely like
an OPSEEC concern being like, well he was a brigade.
Speaker 1 (49:50):
Oh okay, oh he was all right, but he was
friends with them all. So the other reason he got arrested, yeah,
is that after they arrested them, he like showed up
at their house and so they arrested him. But he
was like, well, he's just friends of them, because they're
the anarchists in the UK, like the Clash only anyway
sex pistols I know, punk I swear anyway. So there's
(50:13):
a six month trial for the Angry Brigade. It gets
called the longest trial trial in UK history. This is
not true.
Speaker 3 (50:20):
Also six months, I mean yeah, I'm used to like
American trials which are like, I know, he's oh wow,
the six months trial. That's so convenient.
Speaker 4 (50:29):
I know.
Speaker 1 (50:30):
I read that and I was like, holy shit, they're
really fast over there. I thought one of our whole
things was right to a speedy trial. And I like
Google like longest trial and there's like just a lot
of answers that aren't the Angry Brigade. Sure whatever, there's
a long trial and during it eight thousand people bought
in war pins that said I'm in the Angry Brigade.
Speaker 3 (50:51):
Amazing. Yeah, that's great, that's that's fun.
Speaker 4 (50:54):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (50:55):
Stuart Christie stayed involved in anarchism his whole life. He
helped restart an old an organization, the Anarchist Black Cross,
which is more than one hundred years old. Now it's
a prisoner support organization. He campaigned for the release of
other Spanish anarchists prisoners and got a bunch of them
out to London, organizing with them there. He married another comrade.
They had a kid. He lived on a tiny island
for a while and they ran that island's newspaper. In
(51:19):
twenty twenty. He died of lung cancer at the age
of seventy four, and I'll end this chunk with a
quote from him that I like, without freedom there would
be no equality, and without equality, no freedom, and without
struggle there would be neither. And so I don't know,
rest in peace to it, Christie.
Speaker 3 (51:37):
It sounds like he lived kind of like an ideal
anarchist life almost like he did he got to do,
He got to be involved in a lot of really
cool things to try out, a lot of pretty cool things.
Didn't spend that much time in prison altogether. Yeah, it
got to like die of like relatively like natural causes
at age, like seventy four, seventy two, seventy four, seventy four,
(51:58):
Like that's yeah, that's pretty good. Like what more can
you hope for?
Speaker 1 (52:02):
Yeah? Now, he he did a fucking ton of stuff too,
like his writings, his translations. He actually did the translation
of the book Sabote that I was the main source
for last weeks.
Speaker 3 (52:15):
So I guessing he eventually learned other way.
Speaker 1 (52:16):
Yeah, I'm willing to bet the three years in Spanish
prison maybe taught him a little bit of it Spanish
and Codzalan.
Speaker 3 (52:24):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (52:24):
Yeah, but there is an award for best assassination during
the Franco regime. It might win the award for best
assassination period and it goes This award goes to the
Boss Separatists and specifically it goes to the Bosque Space
Program And I'm going to tell you about them on
(52:47):
Wednesday on.
Speaker 3 (52:48):
The next episode. Oh wow, yeah see. And now I
have to sit here for like a day and a
half just in this chair. Yeah, well, Margaret, watch is
me al via my video feed here until we can
talk about it again. So I know, I have to
just wait as long as you guys have to.
Speaker 1 (53:03):
Yeah, So if you'll be here keeping his company, we'll
order in always we'll use do we have an advertiser
who's like, a, we'll just use our gold coins? Yeah?
Speaker 3 (53:14):
I bet, I bet? I bet it can trade my
ranking coin for for currency with the you know, like
door ash will calm be like, hey, can I can
use this as a tip, And he'll be like, what
are you doing? Get away from me, and then that'll
be a nice exchange.
Speaker 1 (53:25):
Yeah, and you'll just walk towards the door going chut
chut chut chumba. I don't know if I'm allowed to
do that. I guess I did. We'll find out, but
we know what else we'll find out, Garrison Davis, We'll
find out your plugs.
Speaker 3 (53:45):
Oh well. As people probably know, I work on a
podcast called it Could Happen Here. I've been the past
few months have been covering the happenings in Atlanta related
to the Stop Coop City movement, so so that that
is still ongoing as a time of recording, as the
time of publishing, probably a lot has actually changed because
(54:05):
there's the city council gooes to a proof funding on
the fifth, So who knows what I'll be there, but
I'll keep I'll keep keep giving updates on the cauld
Happen Here podcast in these next few months as that develops.
And then also you can find me posting mostly mostly
not very good jokes on Twitter at Hungry bow Tie.
Speaker 1 (54:29):
Sophie. What do you got ah?
Speaker 2 (54:32):
If you did not know, we now have an AD
pre version available of all of our cool Zone Media podcasts.
It's exclusively on Apple podcasts. It is called Cooler Zone Media.
It'll be linked on social media, maybe episode description or
just search cooler Zone Media on Apple Podcasts if you
(54:54):
would like to subscribe. Free version still available everywhere with ads.
Speaker 1 (55:01):
I know what I want to plug. I want to
plug the number city. How have you already been hearing?
Speaker 3 (55:06):
Absolutely?
Speaker 1 (55:07):
But this very month, I'm kickstarting a tabletop role playing game,
and as of this recording, we met our kickstarter goal
and have exceeded it within like three hours of posting
it this morning.
Speaker 3 (55:21):
And but Margaret, do you have any stretch goals? We
do have stretch goals. Oh boy. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (55:27):
If we reach twenty thousand dollars, which we probably will
by the time that I go to bed tonight, we'll
add three new character classes to the tabletop role playing game.
Do you want to play a Clacker?
Speaker 4 (55:41):
Wait?
Speaker 1 (55:41):
Actually, don't remember which classes we're going to add. I
don't have my notes in front of me.
Speaker 4 (55:44):
I never do.
Speaker 1 (55:46):
But if we reach forty thousand dollars, I have to
write a novella based in the world. So if you
like tabletop role playing games and you like trying and
failing to turn dictators into multiple smaller pieces, you might
like this game. Because you can't go to prison for
(56:08):
playing it. You can probably play it in prison.
Speaker 3 (56:12):
I don't know about that, Margaret. They are they are
pretty strict on on what books can be let in.
Speaker 1 (56:19):
Yeah, a lot of people do play role playing games
in prison, But it might involve making a different version
of it for it anyway, that's what I have to.
Just google the number city Kickstarter and you'll find it
and we'll see you on Wednesday when we talk about
the Space program.
Speaker 4 (56:38):
They Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production
of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts and cool Zone Media,
visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com or check us out
on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
your podcasts.
Speaker 3 (57:01):
You'll have been
Host
Margaret Killjoy
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