Franco’s Corpse Collection: Spooky Week #3

James, Shereen, Gare, and Mia discuss the Valle de los Caidos, Spain’s mass graves, and Franco’s last helicopter trip.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:15):
That's right. It's spooky weak. It can happen here. Those
were ghost noises if you haven't realized, and that must
mean that today we are doing a podcast about mass graves.
What's going on? What is happening in aboutground, running sounds,
running water? We've summoned a fucking spirit. Where's that coming from?

(00:36):
I don't hear it. I don't. I don't hear anything. Guys,
you're just you don't hear it. It's gone, now, it's gone.
It's the podcast where we convince Garrison there's a ghost
in the zoom machine. It's okay, I could I could
like do a I could do a lesser bad as
you go to the pentagram? Who really want to? It's fine,
I'm not worried. I like the pentagram. That's what I'm

(00:58):
tattooing on my children. Oh nice me too. Yeah, you
haven't done the forehead though, Like a coward, you've done there.
Yeah no, I mean elbow. Elbow is the way to go. So, Garrison,
what do you know about mass graves? Um never been
to one to my knowledge. They seem like they're not great.

(01:20):
Usually they're a signifier that something something not great happened.
A little bit of a noopsie. Uh yeah, yeah, can
be a way to hide one's mistakes, certainly. Yeah, where
would you if you have to guess where the biggest
mass grave in the world is? Where where would you go? For? Well,
I know there's a lot of big ones in Canada.
But if I'm going to guess, they call those schools

(01:42):
in Canada, and yeah, I would say, like Russia, maybe
he has the biggest mass grave. I don't know. That's
just like off the top of my head. No, it's not.
It's you got a guest sharing. Oh no, I know
where the biggest cemetery is, but I guess that's very different.
Where is the biggest cemetery? Rock? Really? Okay? Iraq has
the world and it's supposed to be haunted, so okay,

(02:08):
this one is not haunted. But as far as I
can tell, it's the biggest mass grave in the world.
About thirty four thousand people. Um, And this is in Spain.
Spain does not get enough credit for it its mass graves.
In fact, second only to Cambodia in the number of
mass graves that it has. Spain has about a hundred

(02:28):
and fifteen thousand people who were forcibly disappeared and are
still buried in unidentified graves, but about thirty five four
thousands of them are buried in the place we're going
to talk about today, which is the Vadi los Cailos
or the Valley of the Fallen. So the Calros is
not only a mass grave, but it's also a Catholic basilica.

(02:50):
It's also the largest basilica in the world. And it
was built by one Francisco Franco, who was the dictator
of Spain from the nineteen from nine till and it
was also his own grave until when Spain dug him up,
put him in a helicopter, flew him across the country

(03:12):
so that no one could like car bomb or protest
or otherwise desecrate his corpse, and buried him in another grave.
So that's what I want to talk about today, the
Va los cao It means Valley of the Fallen. Right. Incidentally,
there's a film called Valley of the Dead, which I said,

(03:33):
anyone else seen? This? Was it just me who decided
to curse himself? Okay, just me? More of the shame. Yeah,
many more people should be enjoying Spanish Civil War zombie
fiction movies in which both sides come together to fight
against the greater foe of the undead, and not actually

(03:54):
a thing that happened. It's the value of the undead. Yeah,
it could be called the value of the undead. But
they didn't. They didn't quite get that far. Some of
the least spectacular dubbing I've ever seen in a film,
like like, I'm used to watching like English stuff dubbed
in Spanish, but I don't think I've before seen something

(04:14):
Spanish dubbed in like really cringe American English. It's not
it's it's not great. No it's not, but in a
sense it is also great, but in you know, in
in a sort of enjoyably bad sense. But yeah it is.
It is very funny. It's on Netflix. It's free malon Nazis.
I think it was called in Spanish, but Valley of

(04:37):
the Dead in in English. People should check it out
if they want a different spooky film towards this Halloween.
So let's talk about the value of the fallen. It
was built under Francos direction as kind of this national
act of atonement for the Civil War, and at first
he said it was going to be memorial to both sides,

(04:58):
so that's like value of the all in. But well, first,
it was supposed to be a memorial to the martyrs
of his glorious crusade against the Reds, against Adonism, against Satanism,
against all the things that are bad according to Franco's
but it wasn't. Really. It was just a giant monument
of Franco's national Catholic ideology, which kind of fuses the

(05:20):
Nah and the Church in this one massive ball of
terrible shit. It's designed in the neoclassical style, which fascists love.
Fascist loves the neoclassical style because they can like draw
these direct lines between themselves and the empires of antiquity,
right and except without the fucking paint because their cowards
and fools look white because they're tiny babies. This is true. Yeah, yeah,

(05:44):
they never did the thing where they like bedazzled their
statues like the Greeks and the Romans did. Most of shame,
someone should bust in there with some glit of spray
paint and tarted up a bit. I haven't done that, unfortunately,
returned to tradition. Make your stat who look cringe yeh,
that's how they're supposed look, don't worry that the statues

(06:06):
do look cringe, but unfortunately they're not shiny, which is disappointing.
It's built of granite, though, which I guess is kind
of a return for tradition. It was built very near
the Escorial, which is like the resting place and palace
of the Kings of Spain. And that's because Franco wants

(06:27):
to draw a link between himself and Philip the Second. Right.
Philip the Second was the King of Spain who, at
the time that he ruled, ruled every continent that was
known to European people, or rule territory, and which is great,
which is not a problem, of course, it's in fact good,
and an inbred old Spanish dude was ruling over places

(06:50):
that he couldn't really conceive of and had never visited,
and there are no problems with that. Okay. So work
begins on Vils Cairos in ninety forty. Right, it's a
year after the end of the Spanish Civil War, and
Franco decrees that he's going to make this memorial to
the glorious national crusade against the Reds, and unbelievably, he
wanted work to be finished in a year, which obviously

(07:15):
he's not operating in like reality because he's a piece
of ship. But it took twenty years to build, right,
so it was off by yeah, big construction, understand, Francisco Franco.
And like King Philip, he could have plunder the entire

(07:35):
labor and capital of the America's to build his folly,
and instead he relied on the forced labor of about
twenty thousand prisoners of war. These were former Republicans, right,
and they were forced to build a church. Obviously many
of them did not like the church, and we're not

(07:56):
really very fond of building what is now the biggest
Catholic cathedra in the world, actually, and it has the
biggest cross in the world, which it shocked me that
the biggest cross in the world wasn't in the United States,
but I'm sure Ted Cruz is actively working on it
as we speak. Yeah. I feel like if you like
walked around my hometown and told people at the biggest

(08:18):
cross in the world was a Catholic one, they would
immediately spent twenty trillion dollars building a bigger one. Yeah,
I mean, the only thing that could convince them to
defund the police would be yeah, yeah, owning the Catholic cross.
Maybe we should put that, Maybe we should enter that
into the discourse on true social or something. That Franco,

(08:42):
of course, is not the only person buried there. Right
right next to Franco in the center of the basica
is his friend Jossi Antonio Primo de dri Veda um
Primo died exactly thirty nine years before Franco on the
twenty November, and he because he was killed by the Republicans,
which is based on good and and he has just

(09:06):
little gravestone there next to Franco, which of course has
not created any problems. After Spain it sort of began
to transition to democracy and Franco died. It's of course
not a bad thing to put a giant monument to
fascism and Francoism, and nobody is going to turn up
there and do a fascism in the years afterwards. Oh yeah,

(09:30):
it's a little bit unfortunate. So there's every day at
eleven o'clock a priest sas a mass, and at that
mass you can generally find old people who will sort
of mill around for a while and then quietly start
doing fascist salute, which is not, which is not great. Yeah,

(09:53):
to be comfortable first, yeah, well you got yeah, you
gotta get like you've got to sample the vibes and
then do a fascist and the vibes here are probably
not great. They also have acquired to any acquire of
small children who sing why because of fucking what? Because
everything about this is cursed. There's a film, there's a

(10:15):
film about these old children who go to a quote
unquote traditional school at the Basilica, which I can imagine
it's great, and they learn all kinds of wonderful things
about critical race theory. Yes. So the priests also says
a prayer for the fate of Spain and the blessed
blessed martyrs, which really really is wonderful and perhaps points

(10:37):
in the direction of the complicity of the Catholic Church
in looks of the war crimes that we're going to
talk about today. Second consecutive episode where the Catholic Church
possible for the whole thing. Wow, I can't believe the
Catholics did anything bad. No, it's shocking, isn't it, given
their history of being kind and good and generally respectful
towards people they disagree with. So true James. Yeah, no

(11:01):
problems with the Catholic Church. So this particular church is
hun It's just a giant hole in a granite ridge,
right again, a giant hole cup by the Fourth labor
of Prisoners of War. It's called the Value the Fallen
because today it houses the remains of about thirty three
thousand people, and this is what makes it the biggest

(11:24):
mass grave in the world. Right. The monuments Register includes
many of their names, and it has the motto kaidos
portiosi Espana, so fallen for God in Spain, which conveniently
overlooks the fact that most of the people there didn't
like God very much and really didn't like the version
of Spain that's being presented here either, right, because the

(11:45):
vast majority of them were Republicans, people who would fought
against Franco's idea of Spain and the civil war, and
the bodies that came there really kind of came there
in two distinct waves. And so, like I said, Spain
has about underd and fourteen thousand odd people who are
buried in unidentified graves. Right. The vast majority of these

(12:07):
people are Republicans who were killed by Francois forces. But
some of them are not. Some of them are Francoists, Catholics,
Carlist other like right wing fascist type people who were
killed by the Republicans right now, the bulk of those
people were dug up and identified by the Franco Wish

(12:30):
regime in the time that he was in power, and
many of them were moved to the Value of the
Fallen and they're identified there. But the majority of the
people in the Valley of the Fallen were Republican people
whose remains were taken without their consent from mass graves
where they were victims of Franco's terror right and they

(12:53):
were moved to the Valley of the Fallen to be
some kind of like weird pyramid sacrificed ritual. I don't
have a complete grasp of Catholicism, but I certainly don't
understand this ship too sort of I don't know, make
make Franco's temple more like spectacular and it's very strange,

(13:17):
it's it's it's very cruel, right. I want to quote
from the BBC article in two thousand and eleven that
was written about one of these people, Jorge Valdrico so Um,
Joe Vadrico Canales was taken from his home in August
six in the middle of the night and shot by
a Fascist execution squad. His town had fallen to the

(13:38):
uprising and he had been singled out as a socialist.
In ninety nine. His remains were dug from a well
and moved to the valley of the fallen More than
thirty thousand warded from both sides of transferred there on
Franco's orders. For me, it's excruciatingly painful that my father's
remained from a place built to the glory of the
victors in the military coup, the Fausto Annales. It feels

(14:01):
like a double crime, first when he was executed, then
when they moved his body without our permission to a
place which is totally inappropriate. H So that experienced, sadly,
is far from uncommon. Right between three, Like I said
about thirty these graves were dug up. Lots of these

(14:23):
were like shallow roadside graves. They were wells. Some people
were buried in graveyards and they were transferred to the value.
Sometimes they weren't transferred in their entirety. Incidentally, that like
they did. These mass graves are not well organized, so
like to perhaps give some context here, like these they

(14:46):
began in Spain, began exhuming these mass graves in two
thousand seven, Right, there was a historical memory law past,
and they're often just just jumbles of corpses and bones. Right,
some of these mass graves contained like a thousand and people.
I don't imagine them being like, hey, we're going to
do a mass grave, now, you know what I mean?
Like there's kind of digging a hole putting bodies in it. Yeah, yeah,

(15:10):
it's fair to say, yeah, no one made a good plan,
which is unfortunate, isn't it. But yeah, they like they
would were they would get all the people who they
identified as socialist or or feminist or otherwise objectionable to
their vision of spanishness and then kill them all. Yeah,
and then put them in a hole because they consider
them to be less than human. And they seemingly seemed

(15:32):
to have dived into the hole and grab some bits
and pieces and move them to the value of the
fallen at some point. Wait, so wait, we like how
are did okay? Like Like what what actually? Like? How
are like the bodies in the valley of the Fallen?
Like held? Like what are are they just like, are
they in like caskets? They just dumped them in another hole? No,
there are like there are like various it seems like

(15:54):
there are various different Like some of them are in
these little stone there are like these little stone tomb
looking things. But I don't think that those actually contain
the remains. I think they're in these various pits. So
they just it's another they moved from one mass grade.
It's another mass grave that they build a sacrifice temple over. Yeah,

(16:14):
so they're now beginning to exhume the already exhumed bodies
front that. So they're now digging up the valley of
the fallen right to to identify these remains. And Catalonia
has a d n A registry, So if you believe
that you're it would be like people of our generations grandparents.
If you believe that your grandparents are in a mass

(16:37):
grade that they would disappeared, then you can register your
DNA And they tested against the mass graves that they're excuming. Well,
so that's how they that's how they identify people. And Christie,
do you know what won't dig a mass grave and
throw your grandparents in it? I cannot Yeah, Black Rifle

(17:01):
Coffee company. Well, I was just gonna go with Coca Cola.
But that's three options and we're back. Hopefully. There was

(17:22):
no reference to mass graves in those adverts, but we
can't promise you that. Sadly, they also can't promise you
that there's mass graves they didn't talk about. Yeah, that's
probably more likely, isn't it. Anyway, enjoy that advert for Nestley.
Moving on, some of these mass graves have been identified
by a Spanish nonprofit group called Innovation and Human Rights,

(17:44):
and they actually have this incredible data set specifically on
the Valley of the Fallen, where you can look up
the location of the corpses that are there, right, so
like where did these where the of the remains that
have been identified from where they come? And three thousand,
nine d and two corpses. That's about seventy bus loads

(18:06):
of dead people. If you want to imagine that they
came from this small town of Taigona, which is where
I used to live. That's that's not a big town.
I was trying to think of like a California town
to contextualize it by it, but I think most people
would have heard of towns that's more. I this, despite
being a pretty rural area, the camp to Tarragon that

(18:30):
can take contributed about the corpses that remain in the valley,
and that's probably because it's part of Catalonia. Catalonia was.
Spain is a is a multi national state, so there
are lots of nations within Spain, like Catalonia and the
bas Country being the ones that people are most familiar with.
Franco particularly hated Catalan separatists, and so as part of

(18:52):
this ongoing punishment of Catalonia for like trying to leave
Spain during the Civil War, the Francois dug up the
remains of the people they'd already murdered and moved them
to a long way from Catalonia right the Vadlos Gilos
is near Madrid. Conditions for people who built the valley
were pretty appalling to the workers and their families lived

(19:15):
in these shacks. According to archaeologists who exsume them last year,
families lived in nine meter square shacks with no water electricity.
They made shoes out of old tires, and they had
no windows or no heating. Their beds were made of stone,
and they and their children suffered from malnutrition. It's it's
not particularly rare for people to have suffered from malnutrition

(19:39):
in Spain after the Civil War, this period was called
the Years of Hunger. But even so, it seems like
there was particular cruelty applied to these people, many of
whom were serving sentences for things like forming unions or
forming student political movements right like that. They were like
they hadn't done anything wrong, that they were the victims

(20:01):
of a totalitarian state. So one of those people is
Nicolas Sanchez al Bognosum. He was interviewed being a Catline
newspaper and Nathionale, and he talks a lot about his
memories there, and incidentally, he escaped after a few months
with the help of Norman Mailer's sister. Yeah yeah, oh yeah,

(20:25):
based Norman. She's incredibly based actually, like yeah, she she
like helped him escape and then ferried him across the
Pyrenees to France, where he escaped into exile and Argentina
and lived for decades. And the only good well, okay,
I was gonna I was gonna make an only good
Argentini and exile joke, but I probably probably is actually

(20:50):
genuinely worth mentioning that a lot like a lot of
people who were Jews fled to Argentina to like right
before wor War two. Yeah, and that's a huge thing.
And you get people like calling them Nazis because they're
fucking dumb as ship and it's like, guys, come fucking
like if you can't tell between the Nazi and the
people they were killing, like please stop. Okay, this has
been my interlude about people doing this ship because oh

(21:12):
my god, yeah, maybe maybe don't cast his persons, maybe
do a little bit of reading first. So yeah, a
lot of people, a lot of them end up in
in Argentine exile. Actually, ironically, Argentina also claims universal jurisdiction.
So what we've seen in the last few years it's
like Spanish historical memory groups trying to trying to get

(21:37):
people who perpetrated crimes against humanity under Franco extradited to
Argentina to be questioned, which which is also very funny
given that Argentina has its own legacy of crimes against humanity, right,
and Spain does his ship too. Actually, Spain claims universal
jurisdiction and we'll try and like extradite people who have

(21:57):
done crimes against humanity in formerly colonized countries without Spain
has not faced up to its own crimes against his
own population. You know, I will say I am entirely
down for like intentionally starting some sort of like Spain
Argentina like ship fast where both of them like get
piste off with each other and start trying each other's
war criminals. That's really funny. I would be better. I

(22:18):
would be even more impressed to see, Um, are you
familiar with who Balfa Gathon is? See that weird prosecutor guys? Yes? Yes, yes, yeah,
who tried to who tried to try US officials for
crimes against humanity for the things they didn't guantanamobey. Yeah,

(22:38):
it would be outstanding. I would love to see like
Spain and the United States come to blows over like
their respective crimes against humanity. It would be wonderful, Sandy,
And like in Iraq too, I think he like, um,
what was it called that? The do they call it
enhanced interrogation techniques that they were using when they were
like elextrocuting people in search? Yeah, so like he tried

(23:01):
to prosecute people for that, sadly, like everything else in Spain.
He strayed a little bit too close to looking at
the corruption of the Spanish state and lost his position,
which is a shame. He did some pretty chuddly ship himself,
like he very clearly presided at betrials where people had
very clearly been tortured and was just like, oh, that's

(23:23):
interesting to see you in the witness box giving this testimony.
I'm not going to note the fact that you've like
very clearly been beaten to ship with a night stick. Yeah,
Spain a country with no problems, famously, and so yeah,
Albunos escapes. Actually, there's a film called the Los Angeles Barbaras,
the Barbara's Years, I guess the Barbarian Years, which which

(23:50):
looks at his escape, and he was one of only
two people to be escaped. But people died building the
Valley of the Fallen right and then were buried there
in this weird monument to to Francoism. So, like I said,
Spain really hasn't dealt with its legacy of of mass

(24:11):
murder right. Um. And it never really had a Truth
and Reconciliation commission, never really dealt with the amount of
people murdered after the war. Um. And it's really only
in the last like ten or fifteen years at Spain
has begun digging up these mass graves. So um and
the pedroal Sanchez and the Socialist government, they've they've begun

(24:34):
doing more to deal with this. In two thousand and
seven and earlier, Spanish Socialist government passes thing called the
Law for Historical Memory, and the Law for Historical Memory
funded the recovery of the memory of the Civil War right.
And you can draw very obvious parallels between how Spain
has dealt with its civil war and its tradition to democracy,

(24:55):
and how the United States has dealt with its Civil
war right. And you will see like that there is
um do you got do you know what voxes? Yeah,
they're they're like the insane for the right party in Spain, yes,
and so fucking cringe, holy shit, even for the standards
of far right parties, like oh my fucking god, oh god, yeah,

(25:18):
do they wear silly outfits? Oh yeah, I would imagine,
So I don't I don't think. I don't think there's
ever been a picture of them like where they haven't
been in like the weirdest looking ship. Because occasionally some
of the like Spanish fascists were some pretty gay outfits,
and it's really funny. Are you talking about the phone Legion,

(25:39):
the ones who were like if Tom of Finland created
a military Yes, yes, that is exactly who I'm referring to. Yeah, okay, yeah,
they are not so much outright fascists as a fashy
military unit. Yeah, but yes, uh yeah, it's I know, yeah,
absolute first trap. Just like if people should google photos

(26:00):
if they haven't seen them, it'll occasionally pop up on
like Twitter or something where people will find these incredibly
butch dudes who like, like, it's not that they've unbuttoned
their shirts just so just that their pecks are ripping
out of their shoes. No, it's their shirts are not
equipped with buttons, because it ye like, to be in
that unit, you have to be so incredibly buff that

(26:22):
you you start buttoning your shirt from the navel down,
and which, to be fair, is more appropriate in Spain.
I remember, like I used to teach in Spain and
then I taught in the United States and coming back
and being like, oh, I really have to change the
way I dress to be appropriate for an American audience. Yeah.
The to get back to mass graves and away from

(26:44):
tactical first traps. The what Spain didn't have right was
like Franco didn't get hung upside down from a gas
station and beaten with sticks in the face. Right, more
is the shame. There's still time, right body, his body
is still available for beating. You know, maybe maybe they

(27:04):
would be the worst thing. But Spain never really faced
its past. Right, So in seven and amnesty law was
passed which prevented any criminal investigation into the crimes committed
in the Franco years. Um statues of Franco, some of
them were not moved until like the last five or
ten years, and when they were removed, it was like

(27:26):
the government just went in in the night and scooped
them up and no one really said anything and then
they were gone. And so like Spain has only really
really recently entered into this period like that we call
it second transition, and that's like it's transition from Spain

(27:47):
began transitioning to democracy in right, but what we call
the period after that, it's more of a post dictatorship then,
like a complete democratic transition in Spain was still processing.
As you can see, right, many of its crimes under Franco,
and it's it's really only begun to process those in
the last few years. So that gets us up to

(28:12):
the oh that I think election of Pedro Sanchez right
in the Socialist government, and um, their decision to exhume Franco. Alright,
so Franco's Franco's lying in this monument. Right, it's the
biggest mass grave in the world, and on the day
of his death, on the twenty February every year, it's

(28:33):
it's a gathering place for fascists. Right, So, Franco and
Primo de la Vera both died on the same day,
and fascists and castalist both love this this kind of
weird spiritual magic shit and really really yeah, yeah, I've heard,
I know there are some books about it apparently, huh yeah, okay,

(28:58):
So yeah, it's it's said that both of them have
a funnest for this stuff. So then both dying on
the same day, it's an extremely fucking cursed thing that
has led to sucks. M hmm. It sucks if you
if you ever have to go near this place on
the twenty November, which I don't recommend. Oh god, I
could only imagine that must be that must be the

(29:20):
worst time. Yeah, because it's all because it's all of
the nerdiest Nazis like yeah, it's like yeah, yeah. It's
like if if like nerdy like Nazi internet people had
a real life place to gather and just openly do
fucking fascist salutes, that sounds like it sounds horrible. The

(29:42):
fascist with a calendar, like no, yeah, the calendar who's
like into praying. It's like yeah, yeah, really really really
into praying. I'm just I'm just gonna say this, if
the if the anarchists were in charge of it wouldn't
be having fucking stupid, cringe prey fascist meetings. This can

(30:04):
be prevented, then can rise a third time. Sure, but
it is the nerdiest thing ever to think about a
fascist like updating their Google calendar being like, yeah, for
all their spiritual holidays where their leaders died, why do
they always celebrate the day that their leaders died. It's
always the weirdest for us. It's a death cult, right, like, like,

(30:29):
like their leader dying is this is the moment when
they finally expressed the pure core of fascism. That's true,
that that's actually a really good observation that actually is
is more on the point than what it should be, right, Yeah,
like immortalizing them on that day? Yeah, I mean was
the slogan of the did the African the African Army

(30:55):
like yeah, I think it spains for a legion actually
like long lived death and they called themselves se yes,
that is their slogan. They called themselves the um what's
it called, the Fiances of Death. Yeah, they're they're they're
they're all gay because they're all married to death, which
is pretty metal. They're also kind of fashy. But yeah,
that that that does really showcase the whole death cult

(31:17):
aspect of fascism. Yeah, you know, you know what, he
isn't a gay neckcromancer. Again, we can't promise. I wish,
I wish we could advertise some more recollect I would
I would be in my element. Yeah. I've just done
an ad read for a couple of them, as I
should have should have. Let you know, I am the

(31:39):
so jealous. That's all that's all I want out of life. Yeah,
please enjoy these gay necromancy products and services. Okay, we're back.
I hope you enjoyed that as much as we did,
so I think credibly cringe and just Boomerie fascist cerevation

(32:04):
on Franco's death and primer der Rivera's death on November
always happened at the videos Caidos right, they would turn
up in two thousand and ten Spain band like fascist symbolism.
But this hasn't really stopped fascist doing fascist symbolism right,
including bringing their for land flags, giving it the fascist salute,
marching and just generally doing like cringe like where where

(32:29):
like r OTC cosplay meet meets the Catholic Church stuff
on the twenty November of a year at Franco's grave,
and its like there are always flowers on Franco's grave,
like you can't go there on a given day and
not find someone like lamenting the fact that Franco is
dead and they can no longer just disappear people they

(32:51):
disagree with. Right, It's ship and so incidentally an amusing
sort of side effective. Do you remember the storm area
fifty one like Facebook thing? Yeah, the right area challenge
like last year or two years ago, yea three years ago,

(33:16):
a lot longer ago. It does it also it also
feels like a very thing. Yeah. So the Spanish version
of this was Invade via los Calos with the slogan
that like if the state, the state can't get him,
if we get him first. I don't think this was

(33:42):
an anarchist attempt to steal his body, but like massive
respect of it was. I think it was just some
extremely online people doing something that they thought was and
actually is funny, which was yeah, like unfortunately it didn't
really come too much because they planned to do this
on a twenty November and in October Franco's body was

(34:05):
removed from the Valley of the Fallen. Okay, see this
this is this is the thing with all of these things.
That's the same thing with the fucking stop Coney thing.
Like the problem that all of these groups have if
they want to is they always set their date too
far out, Like you gotta give it like max. It
has to be like two weeks out, because if it's
any longer than that, you moment momentum, Yeah, you get scooped.

(34:27):
So look, if if you, if you, if you, if
you want to seize the body of a dead dictator
and throw them into a canal, you have to move fast.
And that's why I'm announcing that for for November nineteenth,
we're all now we probably should not go to Russia
to have fun with Trotsky's body. Should be Yeah, we're
going Trotsky's body in Russia. Yeah, I thought so. I know,

(34:51):
I've seen back from Mexico. I have had I've had
friends that have gone places to make fun of Trotsky's body,
um lenning his body, lending his bodies up for grabs,
like okay, it's just sitting there. Well, maybe get I
think we should start small. Let's encourage the fans of
the podcast between now and what we got right, but

(35:14):
now in eleventh of November, right, go after Papa doctor Valier.
Get get him start you know that, and then move
on from there. Okay, it is it's a Mexico. Yeah,
you're right closer to the sort of geographical heartland, and
we don't need to go into a war zone. So yeah,
and the middle of November, we're all going to be

(35:35):
going going to Mexico road trip, yep, field trip. Yeah,
let's go. You know, I will say, there is something
genuinely interesting here about the way that like, okay, so
you look at sort of fascism, sorry, you look at
fascism's death drive and the way that it sort of
like treats his money means to death. And then like
you look at the way that every single sort of

(35:55):
like like all this day socialist regimes, like it's not
so much that they have a death drive, but it's
like they're like all of them, Like I learned this recently,
Like so I knew that they didn't too, that they'd
like embalmed Stalin, right, and like, well they involved Lenin,
they inbalved mao. Yeah, they also learned they did it
to Ho Chi Minh too. Yeah, it's just like they

(36:17):
did it to like all of these people, and it's
like there there's there's this sort of weird like almost
in version of it where it's like like fascism is
based sort of on like you know, like on on
the sort of totalizing worship of death, whereas stalism is
like it has this kind of inversion of it where
it's like it's based on like a kind of like
eternal life for their leaders in this also incredibly bizarre way.

(36:42):
And don't want to be like all of Europe is
determined by its previous like totalitarian religions. But there's there's
something there's something orthodox about the way they've done the
dead Russian dudes so I'm wanna talk about Franco's corps
a little bit, and then I want to end with
something else, because I don't want to just focus on
Spanish fact ships because they suck and I hate them
and I am sad that they are not all dead.

(37:05):
But Franco is. So Franco's family weren't allowed to use
the Spanish flag on his coffin. Yeah, so in staid,
they fucking got the Franco with flag, right, the old
nationalist flag, which because they have filth, they did that. Instead,
they carried his coffin onto a helicopter. They flew in
by helicopter to Madrid, where the services provided over by

(37:28):
a priest who is the son of Lieutenant Colonel Antonio
to head on Molina, the man who led the failed
one coup that attempted to topple Spain's young democracy. And
great to see this continuation of these elites right like,
this is a this is a country which has of
course moved on completely from its civil war and dictatorship

(37:49):
on the post of side. Franco is now buried with
his wife and he is very near to Luis Carlo Blanco,
who people will remember as a podcast alumni in Spain's
first astronaut and so I was going to quote Vox,
but I won't because they fucking suck. And now I
want you quote Box. You should just like throw fruit

(38:11):
at them, and I think that's like, that's not an
actionable threat, right, just uh sure, don't throw like any
fruit sort of potentially lethal, right, like like a large
watermelon or something potentially fatal like just to banana or
if you know the Vox representatives like allergic to a fruit,
you throw it at them and gets on their face
and they die and it gets blamed on James. We

(38:34):
all get taken into a year's long lawsuit and then
we all lose their jobs. Don't do that. Don't do that.
No blame someone else for that. You can if you
are directing the police to me in Spain, they can
contact me by Twitter DM by Twitter is at at
Chopped at Chappo Trappers. Yep, that's where you can find me.
Yeah yeah, sell traps. Okay. So of course Fox make

(39:02):
exactly the same bullshit destroying history argument that the Confederates
making in the United States. It doesn't make them anymore
right because they're in fact wrong. But incidentally, someone else
died on November and that is one boilivant order duty right.
Unlike Franco, he's not buried in a monument made both
fucking slaves. He's buried alongside other anarchists in mow in Barcelona.

(39:28):
You can visit his grave there. It's very cool. You
can always meet interesting people hanging around his grave. And
if you're in Bathonia, you should do it. Drutti died
in the middle of the Battle of Madrid, like so
many other Spanish anarchists. He died. It's lunclear actually, if
he died because someone negligently discharged their own weapon into

(39:49):
his back, and which seems to be the most likely case,
or leading a frontal charge on a machine gun, which
which is how so many Spanish anarchists died because they
were so utterly con vinced if they're incredible, like and
they're not wrong either, they were right about most things,
but like you get, their willingness to die for anarchism
was perhaps a little bit problematic. Well, I mean this

(40:11):
is this is like a thing across the whole history
of anarchism, Like like like one of the reasons the Russian
Revolution went the way they did was that like it's
like the sort of like first crop of Russian anarchists,
like the moment the White are formed, immediately just went
to the front lines and all got killed, and like
Lenning and meanwhile learning the Trotsky are like fucking Chilling
and Lenning like fucking Patrick Grading, Like yeah, which exactly

(40:32):
what happened in Spain, right, like Ferrara, all these people
like get to the front lines and immediately start killing fascists. Meanwhile,
tanky people, I was gonna say something else, um like
spending their time plotting and scheming to from becoming a
completely fucking irrelevant political force in Spain to taking over

(40:52):
in a year and a half because they are the
only people are willing to provide weapons and many of
the anarchists have it. What were you going to call
take people? What were you going to call take it?
Just it makes me angry. I know, it's just gonna

(41:14):
just that's that is that is an ovisive answer. Yeah,
I was just gonna say scum or filth or British
swear word I can't use on the podcast because of
fans American people, which is fine. Yeah, it's disappointing. I
don't want to be canceled by work mob. Okay, yeah

(41:38):
he did Australian moments. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, I nearly
went full of Australian which, like I've done it before
on television and it just doesn't end well, all right,
uh in Spanish not English, which also a Spanish word.
Twenty November in Spain this year it will be like
what three weeks when people are listening to this, some

(41:59):
fascion ship head if you live in a town in Spain,
will be walking around doing shitty fascist things. And people
who live in Spain of course very aware of this.
But I wanted to finish it said with another thing
that anti fascists in Spain doing November. So in the
fifte November this year, anti fascists all over Spain will
be gathering to remember fifteen years without Carlos Palomino. People

(42:22):
might not know who Carlos Palomino is, but I want
to very briefly recap his story to finish up. So
on the eleventh of November two thousand and seven, Carlos
Palomino and about a hundred other anti fascists got on
the subway in Madrid to counter protest a right wing
rally and Luca, an immigrant neighborhood that's home to mcgrid's
Chinatown today. On the train on the way there, he

(42:44):
ran into a twenty four year old spanage soldier, or
says wait Este banners. Uh. Estebanez was dressed in clothes.
I mean, I don't want to talk about the brand actually,
because we shouldn't hype market Nazis. But the clothes showed
he was a far right skinhead. Right. Carlos Palomino notes
is Estebanez takes offense at Carlos Palomino, noting his Nazi

(43:09):
clothes and stabs him with a machette. Yeah, he stabbed
someone else as well, but unfortunately Carlos dies pretty quickly.
He was sixteen years old at the time of his death.
He was the only child of his mother, and he
lived with his mom, who was separated from his dad
and his grandmother. And it affected his mother, as one

(43:30):
can imagine, pretty terribly right the loss of loss of
her young son, and as a result, his mother has
become a prominent anti fascist activist in Spain. She founded
the Association of the Victims of Fascist, racist and Homophobic Violence,
and ten years after his death, a thousand people turned
out and a memorial to him, and ever like, ever

(43:53):
since he died, every year you'll see these massive rallies
in Spain of anti fascists And if you've ever seen,
do you remember, like a year or so ago, there
was this video going around Tricher and there was a
group of people chanting like a kiss anti fascist us,
here are the anti fascists. I see such videos on

(44:14):
Twitter all the time, so I don't, I don't, I
don't know, okay, it like it gained relevance among people
who I've never seen engaging with Spain in any thing before.
It was a huge rally one thousands of people came
out to remember him, and I'm sure thousands of people
will this year too. Like it with Spain's like Spain's

(44:35):
right for a long time tried to couch itself in
terms of the neoliberal center right. Yes, so like the
Partido Popular would see itself in terms of like maybe
the Tories in Britain or Editories are pretty uh pretty mental,
but like this this kind of neoliberal European right. Yeah,
and it it broadly sort of wanted to see itself

(44:57):
as part of this like post fascist European right. But
in recent years it's just taken this disk swing towards
the hard right like Vox has emerged, and even the
Partido Popular, which would have seen itself as like neoliberal right,
have tried to like outbox Vox and they're now like
just openly standing Francoism again. And in this climate, anti

(45:21):
fancism has also seen itself resurgent. I guess we're an
anti fascist. Identities in Spain are more relevant or more
common than they would have been ten, fifteen, twenty years ago,
something like that. And as a result, these memorials for
Carlos have become bigger and bigger for a year, and
so I wanted to end with a letter his mum

(45:41):
rate to global anti fascist collectives in two and eleven.
In our memories, all the anti fascist victims will always
exist who fighting for a world of equality, dignity, freedom
and social rights were killed by the ideas of intolerance
and fascism. The memory will exist for all those victims who,
due to their different cultures, religions or sexual orientations, were

(46:03):
murdered by the same murdering hands who hate those who
are different. Now it's time to continue working against hate
that it is the best tribute we can offer. Their
struggles were not in vain. We will continue the path,
although they are no longer with us in every action
of anti Fascy struggle. They're inside and in each and
every one of our hearts, which I thought was really poignant.

(46:25):
His mother is amazing. Yeah, this whole thing fucking breaks me.
Like I was. This was a time when, like I too,
was being a teenage anti fascist in Spain, and this
is someone who's like almost exactly my age, and obviously
it isn't alive anymore. And yeah, I'd encourage people to

(46:46):
read more about him. I'd normally share these events on
social media when they happen. And yeah, this is extremely
sad and continues to be extremely sad because Spain refuses
to face up to it past the dictatorship. You can
look at where Franco's grave is, organized a protest and
executed within two weeks and toss him in the river

(47:08):
if you want to be very proud of you. That
is absolutely illegal thing to do, and I would be
prosecuting in Spain, but yeah it did. Any Spain has
prosecuted everyone from sucking clowns to puppeteers. Now it's now.
It's serious. When you start coming out of the clowns

(47:29):
is when I I started getting personally consulted. We need
to do our episode on clown Block soon, don't we
we do. I can put on I have clown Block
right behind me. Okay, yeah yeah, And then the British
police will send someone undercover in your clown movement for
five years who will marry one of you and let

(47:53):
maybe a silly gesture, leave me alone. No, not in Britain.
It's a crime, all right. Uh, okay, that's been a podcast.
Few crimes. Okay. It could happen here as a production

(48:18):
of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media,
visit our website cool zone media dot com, or check
us out on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources
for It could Happen here, updated monthly at cool zone
Media dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.