Could 'English Socialism' save the Labour Party?

Notice the change in your hearing? Well then, get a hearing check from Specks Avers. Oh, not sure where to start. Well, we're very flexible. Book one online on the phone, on your launch break on Saturdays, on the same day if you're lucky. Oh, you only miss the odd word. But what if the odd words you're missing are nice ones like Love You or Important ones like "Doc!" Oh, too expensive is it? Hmm. Alright, we like you. We'll do it for nothing. For free hearing checks, should've gone to Specks Avers. With NovyBet, it's time to take a spin with the future of online casinos. Unluck a world of entertainment with the best value and highest or teepee in the industry on all your favourite slots and table games. And for Blockbuster value, you can't be guaranteed rewards on our free-to-play game Gift Wheel, where you'll get a daily bonus just for playing. Nice one. So, download NovyBet today and play your way. NovyBet, more parody. This universe is bad. Book one online, on the phone, on your launch break on Saturdays, on the same day if you're lucky. Hmm. Well, that's a nice surprise. We like you. For free hearing checks, should have gone to Specks Avers. Welcome everyone back to the Picanana Show. Carl Dahl is back. How you doing, Carl? Doing great, Pete. Hell Victory. Hell Victory. We doing this about 12 hours after we found out that Donald Trump is going to be the 47th president of the United States. I literally just woke up a little while ago. I don't think you've slept at all. I'm exhausted, but it's good. A caffeine and a nice cocktail will keep me moving. Great. All right. Well, the episodes we've done on the Spanish Civil War before are going to be a little different than this one because in this, and this is going to take more than one episode, we are going to go through the causes, the lead up, the war itself, and the aftermath. And we're going to do it all following, following an outline. So I think this is something we can put together and will be a nice resource for people so that they can get a history on it and be able to tell people about an event that happened in the last century that is basically 98% of the people who talk about it or lying about it. Yeah. And you know what just popped into my mind, Pete, hyperlinks. We can make it a hyperlink document and we can just link to all kinds of sources that are all online because one of the key points is it's a very high level treatment. It's bullet points, any bullet point, there are scholars who've devoted their lives to individual bullet points to explain them. So we're going to go super high level. I really recommend the shows that Pete has done with Paul Farron, how you're talking about Spanish Empire and all that. That's the level of deep dive you need to really understand. But we hope that this at least gets people started in comprehending kind of the scale of the scenario that we're talking about here, which is the history of Spain, how it led, you know, how that led to the Spanish Civil War, et cetera. So all right. So I'm going to start going through the document. I'll just start. You have a nice preface here. And then I'll start reading and you stop me when I mean, I'm sure I'll know the natural place to stop is right through this. Yeah. And yeah, we'll let you comment on it. All right. Awesome. This is the preface. What follows is the highest level distillation of detail possible for such a presentation. Almost every bullet point below could easily drive a lifetime of study. Special language material in Spanish Civil War proper is very much lacking estimate. There are less than 100 books in the subject. Most of them obscure or focused upon a narrow subject almost all are long at a print. Quote unquote Republicans rule the roots of the Spanish Academy and the vast literature of the nationalist cries out to be translated. Starting causes and conditions of the Spanish Civil War. The causes and conditions which led to the Spanish Civil War to understand them. We must know that between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities and the rise of the sons of Arias. There was an age under him. When shining kingdoms lay spread across the world like blue mantles beneath the sea to to poet right this. Robert E Howard. All right. First bullet point. The conditions relating to settlement patterns predating the reconquista. Broadly tradition in northern Spain meant pre-medieval rights and privileges codified for all social classes per the old Fledos. In southern Spain the landless peasants saw little change in their circumstances under the Carthaginians, Romans, Moors and Spanish. Many parts of Spain, particularly under Lusia, maintain large persistent bandit outlaw cultures developed during the reconquista which never went away. This tendency fused with the radical ideologies of the 19th century. Yeah, that's actually a really important point because and think of this when you think about the kind of outlaw cultures that have developed in America when you're thinking about our own situation. All of those little outlaw cultures, whether it's drug culture, hippie culture, you know, sub-ethnic groups, etc. When things come in that are like ideological and lend a like intellectual bent to this like already radical and violent sub-culture, it gives it like legitimacy and also in that culture then has a lot of influence and cachet with like the middle class who and you know upper class and scholarly types and etc. for whom those ideologies resonate. So that drives like real radicalization. And then you mix, yeah. And then when you have that kind of and I think we've talked about this before how what Spain's main problem is is that it was always sort of decentralized with all the different provinces and they could be autonomous and then you introduce a radical ideology in the 19th century and that's when you're basically throwing a match into a, you know, throwing a match into a parakek. Absolutely. All right. Next bullet point. The lack of investment in and development of Spain during the empire comparison English colonial model as seen in the Americas ignores India. surplus population flows to the colonies to conquer and settle raw materials flowed from the colonies to the homeland, finished products from the homeland, flowed to the colonies and trading partners. Spanish colonial model. Exploration conquest and settlement of territory with small populations of chartered foreigners, IE the genuine Columbus or elite, primarily Castilian Spanish nobles following the same pattern as the Spanish Ricanquista. And that's really important because when and this is kind of closer to, you know, I mentioned that India model with the English empire, the British empire, that's basically parallel with the Spanish model is you actually have elites and you know, you have some other folks go out and conquer these territories, but they create a new like cultural hierarchy there. And then they exist there and it's about that place. So it's about developing that place with a tiny sliver of Spanish who remain Spanish. Okay. Exploration and conquest took place well into the 18th century which was expensive. Very expensive, yeah. The Encomienda Commission granted colonists the right to contribute and force labor from the native population. The Consolado de Mercaderas or merchant guild monopolized trade goods in the Indies via the port of Seville later Cadiz until about 1763. Overflowed via the Spanish treasure fleet to the port which paid for trade goods in Spain. However, most of the goods came from the rest of Europe, although eventually Catalonia came to dominate domestic production for the colonial trade. So that vast treasure flowing in goes largely to the rest of the continent other than the cut that like the merchant guild and the royal family get. So I'll let you follow up with specific numbers that put that into perspective. Yeah, we have some statistics here. In 1520, 23 years before the merchant guild was founded in 1543, the total silver export of Spanish America was valued at around 500,000 pesos with the royal family getting 400,000 pesos of the silver profit. In 1596, the peak year of silver production in Spanish America, the total silver export was valued at around 7 million pesos of which the royal family gained only 1.5, 550,000 and the rest going to Casa de Concelado. Yeah, so almost all the money, if you look at it, is flowing out of the country and why, you know, it's not only that merchant trade, but we'll start talking about the rest of it. So it wasn't that money. I mean, it was going to some development. There's a lot of beautiful cathedrals and stuff that date from that time, but it wasn't not huge amounts of it were going to improve the infrastructure and developing the country of Spain itself. It was this system that was layered on top and staying and flowing through in that direction rather than trickling down. The next point is the huge cost of maintaining a vast empire against incursions by European competitors. The Habsburg rulers of Spain, 1506 to UPS was at 17.0. I think it was like 17.03 or something like that. Yeah. Left domestic policy up to the established order in Spain. It's the bell of the first and for now the second's daughter, Joanna married Philip the handsome son of Maximilian the first Holy Roman emperor in 1496. Philip became king of Castile, jur, how do you pronounce it? Juré Yusaurus, which is like proper, like instead of it, you know, Dejure. It's like de facto, but he was formally made king of Castile in 1506. Yeah. And there's no problem. I needed to know that. And their focus was war to drive the Ottoman Turks out of Europe, war to maintain Habsburg control over the Holy Roman Empire, war to defend the Roman Catholic church against a Protestant Reformation. Yeah. So most of their, the Habsburg tenure, there was massive upheaval taking place in Europe, all through that period. There was essentially a reconquista taking place against the Turks and then just the religious wars, you know, war constantly. And so that was also very expensive and required a big focus for the Habsburg rulers. It wasn't worth the trouble to metal too much in the affairs of Spain. There were lots of little uprisings. You know, when they came in because here are these outsiders that are running things, they developed a kind of a buffer and let the, the nobles kind of keep things the way they were and doing things the way that they wanted to. And then there was a broad split, you know, near universally atheist liberalism and traditional Catholicism, which festored into revolutionary atheistic anarchism and Marxism. Yeah. It really accelerated during the 19th century. If you, Pete, you just put out a series of readings on the kind of a lot of the Marxist literature and Stalinist literature. I think people don't understand very well like the degree to which Marx was commenting on what was taking place during the middle of the 19th century. And, you know, in America, we had a revolution kind of before this and established our country before this, but Europe was in massive upheaval. And if you look at the example of France and the bloody revolution when you see the Republic of France, it's not a good thing. The Republic is horrific when it comes to how they handled the religious and traditionalists, not just the upper classes. Just took us, we just got delayed by about 200 years. Yeah, exactly. All right. 19th century. Spain hemorrhages its overseas colonies between 18th and 1898. Between 1807 and 1814, the Republic of France invades Spain to impose the revolution. Britain intercedes resulting in a bloody war of all against all. Yeah, you'll see that in British, you know, the British will acknowledge that they were basically engaging in atrocities because their supply lines were disrupted so they would go into villages and take all the food and shoot anyone who resisted. You know, it was not a pleasant time. It was a very brutal war. But what that did was it gave all these little factions combat experience. And so as they assert themselves, it's very easy for them to go to guns. 1833, the old secession switcherue places Queen Isabella on the throne rather than enfante Carlos. Traditionalist support Carlos and his descendants call, "A Hence the Carlists in three armed risings this century." The first Carlos War, 1833 to 1840, the second Carlos War, 1846 to 1849, and the third Carlos War, 1872 to 1876. 1873 to 1874, the first Spanish Republic lasts 11 months, ends in a military coup, and then the Bourbon Restoration. With Novi Bet, it's time to take a spin with the future of online casinos. Unluck a world of entertainment with the best value and highest or Tp in the industry, on all your favorite slots and table games. Nice one. So download Novi Bet today and play your way. Novi Bet, more parody. This universe is fun. Well then, get a hearing check from specs-avers. But what if the odd words are missing or nice ones like Love You or important ones like Doc? Oh, too expensive, is it? Hmm, all right, we like you. For free hearing checks, should've gone to specs-avers. [MUSIC PLAYING] With Novi Bet, it's time to take a spin with the future of online casinos. Unluck a world of entertainment with the best value and highest or teepee in the industry on all your favorite slots and table games. Nice one. Novi Bet. More power to you. Yeah, so they went through this whole process kind of from a top-down perspective, where the liberalizing influence was put into kind of a constitutional monarchy situation, just to transition into liberalism, all the different uprisings and fights and everything meant that you had extreme push pull from the left and the right on the kind of monarchist constitutional liberal monarchists. It stuck in the middle. All these different groups kind of trying to pull away and establish what they wanted. And then the bourbon restoration reappointed a non-liberal royal to kind of bring things back to normal because that's literally what the people who are willing to fight wanted. All right, let's move up to the 20th century. Spain maintains a large rural population while select industrial cities rapidly urbanize. Neutral Spain's economy, both agricultural and industrial, boom, during World War I. The left fractures into disparate radical factions with large swaths of the urban working classes, joining Marxists and anarchist labor unions. And I'll point out like P.U., you're knowledgeable because you've read enough about it of the kind of 19th century anarchist movements, so Bacunin influenced people and all that. I feel like that's something we should do a dive into someday because-- because I did a thread on X about this fairly recently. And it's actually really interesting because you see that a lot of the times that the opinions on anarchism versus Marxism came down to people's impressions of like Bacunin and Marx themselves, like the man. And I think there's something really interesting there that would be worth talking about. But when it really comes down to it, you see how they allie with one another during the lead up to the Spanish Civil War, but then it fractures because of the, you know, a couple of distinct ideological differences. The main one being like the like international Bolshevik tendencies of the hardcore communists and the support that they get from the Soviet Union, whereas the kind of ideological purists who kind of want to do, you know, socialism in one country or anarchism in one country, they want to get to the revolution which to them is not war, right? So just a thought for future reference. Yeah, I was gonna ask you, was there a specific reason in the 19th century you left out Giuseppe Finnelli? - I just didn't get into the details, but Finnelli's super interesting, especially because of the influence that he had. The anarchist CNTFAI is completely in the inheritors of Finnelli and his, you know, force of personality. And his influence internally again, because of just the way it was so driven by individual personalities. But yeah, I think it would be great to dive into talking about some of those personalities sometime because of how telling it really is to look at that. - Mm-hmm. And one thing about Spain is, no one ever hid what their beliefs were. - No, you know, that's actually a really interesting point. Yeah, they were very open about it. - All right, political instability driven by street violence results in a coup d'état led by Miguel Primo de la Veda in 1923 with the approval of King Alfonso XIII. The dictatorship collapses, the king abdicates and the second Spanish rebel republic is born in 1931. From May 10th through May 13th, anarchist and communist are in down over 100 religious buildings, including the primary Jesuit monastery in Madrid. Countless and valuable historical works have destroyed a many clergymen are killed. The republic headed by fervent anti-Christians refuses to intervene. - And that develops the pattern that we see that leads to the radicalization of the right, which is that the left goes nuts. And then the supposedly like legitimate authority just sits back and there's even a quote, I forget who said it. It may have been a zanya who said in the very early days that not one of those people is worth the life of a single republican. - The republican poses desjury, social revolution, nationalizing church properties, banning religious instruction and public processions and instituting land seizures in 1932. - There's some, - Michael Jones talks about how a lot of the Protestant reformation was about. - Yes. - Getting church, stealing church properties and stealing land. - The history in Britain is very interesting on that subject as well. Yeah, it's all over the Protestant countries that was done, absolutely. In 1932, Carlos form communion tradition, Lisa and requete defense militias. - Yeah, so they have a party, which is the face, the political face of the organization for electoral purposes and to mobilize people like legally above board. And then they have the youth organizations and the radical militias who are preparing for war. Just like the IRA, like the Sinn Fein as the political front and then you have the actual IRA behind them. - There was something else happening very similar to that in another country in Europe at the same time. - Very much so. - Yeah. August 1932, a bloodless military coup intended to reign in the excesses under the Republic headed by general San Jura, the San Jura, San Jura Haba fails. The conspirators are sentenced to death, though for most this is downgraded to imprisonment then exile. - And that was done because they didn't want to provoke, the republic did not want to provoke the right wing to violence. Or further political mobilization I should add, which they failed at. So. - Conservative and reactionary elements win the 1933 elections, which triggers mass left wing violence and church burnings. - Yeah, so it's basically antifa gets called out because they weren't able to do fraud in 2016. They were totally taken aback by the actual turnout. They're fraud failed and so they chimped out. 1934, the status victory at the polls doesn't materialize into power due to suppression by moderate Republicans under Ezzania. General strikes and an historian and anarchist up rising hint at the war to come when 34 priests, six seminarians and several businessmen and civil guardsmen are executed by the Revolutionary Committee. 58 religious buildings are destroyed. The rising of 30,000 revolutionaries is snuffed out by General Franco on order of the Republic at a total cost of up to 2000 lives. - And mass incarceration of prisoners. So in 1936 when they talk about the left opening up the prisons, it was supposedly because of all the revolutionaries between now and 1936 that end up in there. A lot of them are just like psycho criminals, but they put something like 10,000 CNT people into prison alone. - The state of youth movement flocks to the carlest and felongest militant organizations. - And that's because the electoral party, like they saw the failure of electoral politics to do anything. They already understood what was going on. So they said we're gonna organize with the established militant organizations that are in our milieu. - Carlest commit most of their financial resources to arming and training the Riquetis. Jose Enrique Varela, all aliased on Pepe, transitions Riquetis from 10 men, de Curias, a local defensive structure into a variation on the traditional Spanish infantry structure. So the idea here is that you would have small groups of people that would organize and so they would put them into this 10 man. It was a Roman kind of structure. And then they would have individual officers that can contact that meaning there aren't that many of them. But at this point, there's so many people and they're getting so organized. They just start preparing them to be a separate, basically a separate army that they can plug into army and is that they control when the time is right, which comes very soon. - General Franco is exiled to the Canary Islands. While Jamieest General Mola is sent to Carlest Heartland of backwater, Nevada, because the Republican government couldn't imagine right winged factional alliances. - Yeah, so the High Maests were the-- - I was gonna say I'd do that. - Yeah. - Yes, but what are High Maests? - So High Maests were the, they were just the royalists who supported the old King, King Alfonso, the 13th and his line, which was like King Jaime. So they were called High Maests. So if you go all the way back when there's that split with the Carlest and the others, they're still following Bourbon line people. It's just the lib tards couldn't imagine that these people could reconcile with one another because they were like, oh well, they're these silly, like, unsophisticated primitives who worry about the succession nonsense. So there's no way that they would come together because they hate each other wrong. - The militant anarchists of the CNT FA, FAI or is that FAI? - FAI. - FAI, yeah. Learning from the failure of their improvised spontaneous uprisings as in Asturias and develop the cellular defense cadre structure. They begin organizing and preparing for revolution. By 1936, one-third of the CNT unions budget will be devoted to manufacture of the FAI bomb hand grenade in Barcelona. We covered that in, I think, in the last episode we did. Yeah, and I have an article about it out of my sub-stack if people are interested in it. 1935, Falunge and Riccete leaders are sent it Italy to train in light infantry tactics. The artificial governing coalition under PM Leroux collapses in December 1935. New elections are called for. 1936, mass ballot fraud and voter suppression results in a popular front victory in the 1936 election. The Falunge is outlawed by the Republic. They go underground, though many leaders and activists are rounded up. By spring 1936, the car list or a Catus are a 10,000 strong armed and trained citizen militia with 20,000 auxiliaries. Yeah, and the thing to keep in mind there is that, and I've mentioned this before, but of all the different armed groups that the recatays were the only ones that Spanish military professionals said were capable of actual infantry combat operations. So they became, they became incredibly important for what you're going to talk about next. The uprising July 17, 1936. Prominent conservative parliamentarian Jose Calvo Satello is arrested by Republican political police assault guards and executed July 13, 1936 after Stalinist parliament, parliament woman, parliament woman Dolores. Ibaruria announces while at while he is at the podium in the court says, this is your last speech. So he's, he's, let's say he's in Congress. He's a congressman. He's giving a speech. Someone in the other party says, this is your last speech. And then they kill him that night. Like just think of how brazen that is. Yeah, July 13. Something else happened on July 16. Yes. It's here. Huh. Interesting. Well, you know, it's funny is if you go back, if you look at September 11th in history, it's remarkable. How many things have been on September? History is so interesting that way. Yeah. I think the Pinochet in Chile, they try to assassinate, they try to assassinate Mussolini on on September 11th. There was, I mean, there's a bunch of you, if you like, Google September 11th, like historical events, there's just a list and you're like, the going back centuries. It's like, oh, my son, he probably knows all of them. 9/11 is like a joke to to zoomers at this point. It's crazy. Fongue units begin assassinating prominent assault guards. A large portion of army officers coordinating in secret for many years. Okay, Frank, pack it up. Keep coming. Lord's a room. Lord's a room. Frank just got himself a new Kia EV2. He loves everything about the car. How it looks, how it drives, its class leading range and its highly impressive spec. In fact, the only thing Frank can't get used to is how much bigger it feels than it actually is. Discover the EV2 for yourself at your nearest Kia dealer, Kia. Movement that inspires. Rebellt across the country in the Canaries and Spanish Morocco working with Carlos Dinfolange militias with a goal of conducting a bloodless coup. How do you have a bloodless coup against monsters? Yeah, well, you can't, obviously. The rising is carried out by officers taking command of military forces arresting those who oppose them, securing their bases and immediately consolidating control over territory. In many areas such as Navarre, Castile and Leone, and Northern Eragon, the civilian government is in alliance and the relatively few leftist political agitators are immediately squashed. Pupu! One odd case is that of Ovea, the capital of Asterius, the location of key government arsenals as well as the center of the 1934 anarchist uprising and a bastion of revolutionary activity. The town's garrison commander, Colonel Antonio Arranda Matta, was considered by the nationalist conspirators as a free Mason and Republican. Free Mason can also be, um, yes, for something else. Yes. With the news of the uprising on July 17th, Arranda declared to the civil government and leftist union leaders that he would remain loyal to the republic and that the city was secure, satisfied 4,000 militants departed to spread the revolution, taking advantage of access to relatively vast munitions. Arranda then secured the town and surrounding strategic positions with his force, Falangas and allied civil guard and assault guard forces and held that against a brutal siege until being relieved by a relief column from Galicia. Republican forces cut off power and water while shelling and bombing the city, relentlessly causing civilian casualties far beyond those seen at Guernaca, yet there has never been a global propaganda campaign about Ovea though. And there's never been a global propaganda campaign because it was a heroic stand by right wing forces against brutal communists and anarchists and global propaganda is only done on behalf of brutal communists and anarchists. They did aerial bombing, they just shelled the city indiscriminately. What ultimately happened is a lot of people who were lib tards ended up defending the city and siding with the defenders of the city because they were just being killed indiscriminately and their families were so. Is this a scenario laid out in the last crusade where he calls in the bombing on his own location? No, because they survive. Yeah, 38 actually. Yeah, exactly. The cool thing about it though is because they secured the arsenals there, they immediately begin manufacturing like next gen iterations of small arms for the for the nationalist army as soon as they they get relieved. The rising is successful in the most conservative parts of Spain and in military strongholds but it's squashed in street fighting in leftist strongholds such as Barcelona, Sanzadir, Tardeiro and Madrid. The Spanish Civil War has begun. Cool leader general San Huro returning from exile in Portugal parishes in a plain crash July 20th. Nationals command the split between Franco and the south and Moelah in the north. And an important thing to point out is that there are conspiracy theories about this that like Franco had this happened because he was like Hitler to electric Bougaloo. But it's nonsense. San Huero wanted to bring I might be confusing him with the other guy who will be coming up who will pass away soon but oh no no no he had tons of luggage and he was the he was the older cool leader who had envisioned the original coup. You know there had been the son Huerta that had failed and so he overloaded a very small plane that crashed upon take off. So this is in an era when aviation was very dangerous. So it was you know any people talking about you know conspiracies related to Franco there it's nonsense it's just fortuitous for Franco. Yeah I think before describes it as he was trying to the plane was too weighted they tried to often tried to clear a wall and a clip. Yes and he was an older gentleman and the pilot survived. Yeah but San Huero passed away. Right. Also on July 20th Spanish Legion forces landed cadets to reinforce local carlist and Falon game militias and secure the port city and much of the province. Navarbre Gades and carless fricates militias. Brickete militias under the command of General Mola in the north fan out and secure the French border to the east established a front with Republican aligned. Bass country to the north and northwest and approach midrids northern flank. In South Central Eragon they stopped northbound they stopped northbound CNT F.A.I. anarchist militias and it's incredibly impressive how professional and squared away they were for being amateurs for being an amateur militia but The important thing to keep in mind is that they plugged into an existing military structure and military logistics. So it was a militia. They started out with a lot of weapons that were secured internationally that weren't necessarily like military standard. You recall when we looked at the small arms, they had some very advanced stuff like machine guns from Switzerland and stuff. But they moved very, very quickly and fought very, very well even though they weren't. They weren't exactly using a lot of the, you know, as the newer volunteers were coming on, they weren't using the most sophisticated, sophisticated tactics and stuff. But it didn't matter. They were incredibly brave. And my position is that the upright, like the war would have been lost very likely if it wasn't for the carless, racquetay militias. That's my position based on how much territory they were able to secure and hold. Nationalists and Republican factions immediately correct down upon internal enemies in the areas they control. Thousands are killed due to violence from all sides. In Navar, for example, Carlos and Falangas arrest subdue, subdue in combat or simply assassinate execute prominent opposition and militant leftists in Republican controlled areas. Class enemies are killed in huge numbers, whether extraditionally or in combat. The Church is a primary target with between one third and one half of all church buildings in Spain destroyed. Many dioceses see all or nearly, or nearly all of their buildings wipe from the face of the earth. By the end of 1936, nearly 7,000 priests, nuns, monks and seminarians are murdered along with several more thousand attendant laypeople, along with many thousands more by revolutionary Republicans. Most of the non-combat extraditional killings are eventually reigned in by both sides by 1936. But the Republicans in particular continue the practice of executing non-combat, combatant enemies with the illusions, with the illusion of trials. Yeah. So the, when you look at the like beaver style numbers, and when I was working on this Pete, I was thinking about the numbers. You'll remember I told you, I'm going to do a revision where I'm going to talk more about the numbers instead of just like the events. What you'll see is that the mainstream, the mainstream position is that like the Republican, you know, mass killings were anomalous and it was out of the control of the central government, whereas the nationalist did it because they were, they were bad guys. And it's just absurd. And the narrative about the Republican factions has changed multiple times, you know, in sense the war. There was a period, especially during and immediately after the war, like late 1937 and on, where the, the Nash, excuse me, the Republicans were blaming like the anarchists and, and the like for excesses. And that was because of the kind of the communist directed propaganda campaign. And then later, they shifted it to say, well, the Soviet lead communists were the bad guys and like the moderate Republicans and the anarchists were just kind of like, this stuff was just happening. And like they never, they never would have wanted anything like this to happen. And you look at the memoirs of the anarchists and such, they, they're, so they act like, you know, they're innocent angels and, and you know, this was all done by just like people who were just criminals. So it was incidental. But when the nationalists execute people who commit atrocities, for example, I'm not saying that there weren't excesses on the national side, like there was some, there were executions of people, for example, that supported the, the republic and get, were harmless, were non-combatants essentially that they just murdered or it, you know, individual people murdered. It wasn't like the leadership of the military was saying they should do this. But it, but it's always, it's mischaracterized. But when you actually look at what the numbers are like and when you look at the, they, they have essentially a truth and reconciliation committee that's underway now. And whenever they investigate these individual excesses, the, they always find that the nationalist supposed atrocities of like a thousand end up being like 13 people were killed and possibly it was a combat situation or something like that. So those numbers get revised downward. But still like Bivore 15 years ago, I think he published his book, maybe a little more. Yeah, yeah, 15, 18 years ago. The numbers are really high on the national side and low on the republican side. But now that they're investigating them, they're kind of flip-flopping. So it's, it's just something to keep in mind. And it's just classic. It's, it's what you would expect from what you know anytime you examine anything that the media talks about nowadays, right? Yeah. No, it's really books in English were only written from the, from the republican side for exactly. Exactly. Those numbers got embedded in people's brains. And then when you, now they have excavations and all sorts of things. And it's like, we're going to, we're going to find a thousand people in this pit. Oh, there's nine people. Yeah, exactly. And so this is where when you go back and you look at a lot of the books that were written in the 60s with the cooperation of the Spanish Academy, the numbers are lining up. The new numbers are going back to those old numbers that were like Franco approved because they're real. They're accurate. All right. The factions, the nationalists represent themselves as true Spaniards. Nationalists, nationalists, the defenders of Christian civilization against the Red Hords. Territory, a large swath of northern Spain, the cities of Cordova and Seville, the city and a portion of the province of Cadeez, the Canary Islands, Spanish Maraco, and the Baleric. Is that it? Is that right? Baleric. Yeah. Baleric Islands, accepting Menorca and Forman Thera. Currently government forces roughly half 60,000 of the Spanish territorial army, the army of Africa, including the Spanish Legion, 35,000. And just in your half of Spain's civil guards in Caba, Cárabeñeros, approximately two thirds of the Spanish armies, heavy weapons are in the hands of the nationalists, along with half of the rifles. The Carlos Requete, the Carlos Requete, Requete, a militia has approximately 30,000 men under arms at the uprising, going to 85,000 by the end of 1936. The Falangue militia has approximately 20,000 men at the time of the uprising. And the thing to keep in mind there is remember when a civil war breaks out and people have to fight, you attach yourself to the organizations that are existing. You can't join the army and go straight into combat, but you can join the militias. Especially if time is of the essence. Exactly. The Republicans represent themselves to the world as a legitimately elected government of Spain, championing freedom and progress against tyranny. Internal divisions are significant. Socialists and Communists generally supported the Republican government, though immediate divisions appeared, such as the debate regarding arming the workers' militias in the very early days of the uprising. anarchists broadly sought to form their own institutions separate from the Republican government, and were most successful at this in Catalonia and initially focused upon the social revolution. The Basque Country, strongly Catholic and conservative, mostly sided with the Republican Republic due to the promise of autonomy, although this coalition saw a rapid schism. Government forces, roughly half 60,000 of the Spanish territorial army, possess one-third of the machine guns and artillery plus half of the rifles from military armories. A bit over half of Spain's kind of Beneros and civil guards, along with most of the assault guards, stay with the Republic. The assault guards were kind of like the equivalent of the FBI, but more like light infantry oriented, that were a rapid reaction force formed only at the time of the actual republic. So the Carbon Arrows and Civil Guards were existing law enforcement organizations across the country. It's very different than America because they have these national forces that have very specific responsibilities. The assault guards were like the rapid response units. And when you think FBI think like FBI at Mount Carmel, you know, O'Waiko, because they had like heavy weaponry. So. The workers militias did not arise spontaneously, but rather out of established party militias, and are difficult to fully quantify, say, for certain well-documented cases. For example, we know from extensive material later published by members of the highly prepared and organized anarchist CNT FAAI that they put they put 10,000 armed men into Barcelona within hours of the uprising, though most of their weapons were hand guns and surprisingly sophisticated craft made grenades. Yeah. So they had been preparing in a very robust fashion, whereas the other militias, they were relying on this spontaneous uprising. The CNT FAAI have an article about them on my sub-stack and their militias. They learned from the failure of the 1934 a storyous uprising and the losses that they took that they that there's no spontaneous uprising. I'll just tell a story that's true. And this is more than I've talked about in the past, but I was in Seattle during the WTO riots in 1999 protests/riots. The anarchists who caused the police to attack the protesters because the anarchists came up from Eugene and did a during the parade of like 100,000 like just regular people protesting the WTO, whether they were in firemenalists, whether they were leftists, whether they were like American labor oriented people. They did a big U around where the conference actually took took place and where there were protesters with permits peacefully sitting there protesting and smashed windows in a big U. And one of them told me when I was hollering at him with it my hand on a pistol in my pocket because I was like, oh, there's only about 40 of them. I was young. Anyway, the police didn't have rapid reaction squads and I saw police like looking and like radioing. And one of these older guys and they were all just like junkies and shit said, well, well, our strategy is that by doing this we will get the police to attack the innocent people and then the people of the country will rise up and then we will have an anarchist revolution. That's the same thing that unread once a free and Moscow promised Lenin would happen in the United States and the United States is just not fucking made for that. No, not at all. And that was what the communists and the anarchists thought they could do and every time they just got their teeth kicked in after they murdered a bunch of innocent people. And so they gave this a whirl and you know, and the and the F.A.I anarchist said this doesn't work. We have to actually plan. So they were one of the few like actually organized groups. And they were critical to the success of everything that the loyalist republic, republican troops and police and stuff around Madrid. Because again, if you'll remember they sent Mola like out into Navar that they made sure that only lib tards were around Madrid is whenever they could so that the right wing rising just completely failed in a bunch of areas because the republic had been preparing for this. So when the leftists, you know, needed to come out into the street, they were just not ready and they were not trained or anything like that. All right, here we go. The march on Madrid, July 21, 1936 to march 1937. The rebel army secures German and Italian supports a conduct an airlift of infantry from Spanish Morocco to Seville in southwestern Spain, avoiding a naval blockade by the mostly republican control navy. Representing the nationalist faction General Franco immediately engages the international community for support, though most of the world opts to remain neutral. July 26, nationalist secured German commitment to provide their forces with transport aircraft, fighter bombers, anti aircraft guns and other equipment. The first shipment arrives August 1st and there's a note here, the condor legion, the famed German volunteer quote unquote volunteer force is formally organized until November. The Italians go all in on supporting the nationalists and provide 48 aircraft in the first month, along with an increasing flow of small arms company level weapons vehicles advisors observers, technical experts and combat personnel. U.S. and British companies provide technically non-military supports to the nationalists, which passes the muster under the future neutrality agreement. Texaco formerly the provider of oil to the Spanish government shifts its support to Franco, furnished entirely on credit upon hearing news of the uprising. Ford's due to Baker and General Motors supplies 12,000 trucks parts and tires on credit to the nationalists. And this is a very old entry, a very old bullet point in that really dumb, Alex Jones attached himself to all the garments run by secret Nazis. This is one of the first entries in that ledger per the lib tarts, which is that like, oh, America sided with the fascism's man. And it's like, you know, the truth is that they knew that this was, they were siding against the Bolsheviks period. It was as simple as that. And then what did they do a few years later? All right, let's keep going. The republic secures military support and international volunteers from the Soviet Union and the and the intermittent support of France. France transfers 48 aircraft along with trainers in some weaponry in July and August, despite having agreed to the non-intervention pact. This pattern always downplayed by republican apologists will continue throughout the war. And I have to interject there. It's impossible to overstate how much people lie about the support that they got from Bloom's socialist government in France. And yes, when you say Bloom BLUM, yes. Yeah. That there was essentially a, there was street fighting in France at the time between traditionalists and a bunch of those folks ended up going to Spain to fight with the nationalists as volunteers. They ended up getting plugged into the Spanish Legion in great numbers. Spanish Catholic, excuse me, French Catholics who were, you know, later when Germany invaded France, they were more than happy to basically hand this one third of the French population essentially control of the government, the Vichy government. It was not this like tiny sliver of French culture. It was the French traditionalists who wanted that support that was handed to them. So Mexico provides a substantial amount of small arms and ammunition. And I cannot talk enough and express enough to people that at that time, Mexico was an arm of the Soviet Union. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. There's, they had their own like Viva Cristo Rey was a huge thing in Mexico as well because they, the Mexican government, the forefathers of the existing sole political party in Mexico were essentially Bolsheviks who were trying to eliminate Christianity from Mexico. And they put up with Trotsky living there for only so long. Yes. Spanish gold reserve transfers. This is so remarkable. I mean, the first time I write about this, I was, it's appalling. I mean, I was mad. First transfer to Eurobank Paris authorized by the Republic July 24th, a total of 174 tons, 27.4% of Spanish reserves sent through March 1937. These funds are used for purchases of fuel and arms from a variety of arms dealers from the Netherlands, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, and Poland. The Republic's Council of Ministers authorized a transfer of remaining gold and silver reserves, 500 tons to Moscow. September 13th, 1936. The original excuse was that per minister of finance, Juan Negan, it would be secure there, although the Soviets claimed it in payment for arms. I think anyone who knows and has read deep enough knows that Stalin was laughing at them. You know, the anarchist memoirs on this topic are incredibly interesting, because they were furious, because this is the point. I mean, look, October, we're talking September, October, 1936. The anarchist, you know, collective government, whatever you want to call it, you know, in Catalonia is like, what the fuck is happening? Because they realize what is taking place in their country. They realize that it's a Bolshevik takeover, because there's even stories about the CNT guys planning to capture the gold reserves and then holding them in Catalonia so that they can actually pay for things that the country needs. October 14th, 1936. The first international brigade trainees organized by the Communist International arrive in Abacete via France. The first shipment of arms from the Soviet Union reaches Cartagena, October 4th. It includes both modern and obsolete small arms and ammunition, mostly, most meaningfully, the latest T-26 tanks, B-T-3 armored cars, and, quote unquote, volunteers. So there's a lot of, like if you'll remember from our small arms of the Spanish Civil War episode, there's a lot of obsolete, like World War One and pre-World War One, small arms, and like odd stuff. But there's tons of maximum machine guns. And then in the T-26s and the B-T-3s, they're fully outfitted with, what are they? Is it the T-P-28 light machine guns? The Pan-Fed ones. I know I'm getting those. It's T-28, whatever it is. So there's actually a fair amount of like sophisticated brand new stuff. And they start also bringing anti-tank guns over. But but again, like they took every bit of their gold and silver reserves that were left, like three quarters of it. And they were absolutely not delivering that level of material to them. You know, they certainly overpaid. Yeah, I mean, it's clear when you study it that what what Germany and Italy were providing to the nationalist was far superior as far as far as superior. Yes. And then, well, what would you expect? The Republican passetsas value collapses almost immediately. September 28th, Alfonso Carlos, 87-year-old Carlos leader in claimant to the throne of Spain, dies in Austria with no air. October, the Republic's somewhat moderate government under Rizania quits and hands the reins to a communist socialist coalition under Lago Caballero. The Caballero government implements universal conscription of all Spanish males between 20 and 45 in the territory they control. Sounds like you, Korean. Yeah. The the various party militias begin to be integrated into the Republican Army command structure, which is primarily controlled by the communists. Communists, red stars, were incorporated into the rank insignia, and political commas are as were installed at the company level and up, which also means that the the other parties, the other political parties are essentially suppressed in the formal government, including assassination of up to people. Like, it's completely counter to the the supposed goal, which is to have as many people as possible fighting against their enemies, but it's communist. That's what they do. The previously autonomous anarchist CNT FAI chooses to put the revolution on hold and submit to the Republican Army in the field. Yeah. And actually the the crazy thing is that the the deru-ty column, which are the hard core, well, we'll talk about it in a second. The hard core. Well, anybody wants to talk about how, oh, like Kamala Harris or like ANT for her communists. I'm sorry. Yeah. Go back and try to compare them to some of these people. Yeah. The most hard core anarchist killers, which was the deru-ty column that had been heading into Argonne and got stopped by the the carlists, were the very first to submit to the National Army because they said this is what we have to do. And to be honest, they were they were right because you know, from their perspective, not morally right, they deserved everything that they got deru-ty was killed very soon after. But they they were correct in that like they needed to focus on fighting the war, but the war was not prosecuted sensibly by the communists. So, ha ha, that's what they get. Nationalist forces race toward, yeah, it's so funny, you know, the communists and the anarchists, these, they've the stupid religion people with their friggin' mythology and everything, these dumb people really fucking how smart do they ever prove themselves to be. I'm going to say something Pete. The word libertarian is a Spanish word. It represents the non-Bolshevik oriented anarchists in Spain. Do not call yourself that. If you read this history, you will not want to call yourself that when you read what these people actually were. If you do and you study it and you continue to call yourself that, you deserve what's coming to you, which is to be thrown into a very large hole with a big pile of people just like you in it. The, oh, I just wanted to warn people, Bivore's Battle for Spain is a great book for facts. Yeah, the death tolls we've already talked about. But know this if you're going in, Bivore is his sympathy's lie with the libertarians. You know, Pete, I've seen a bunch of interviews with him. I did I did a thread on it. My interpretation is that his capability in Spanish is about what mine is, which is not very good. You can read it. You can prepare a statement and pronounce things almost entirely correctly. If you're reading it and reciting it and you can interact like in a day-to-day basis. But he was very dependent upon the Spanish Academy and his editors to hand him all the material. And in 1990s and 2000s Spain, like that's who ruled the roost. I mean, I'm sure like looking at him, he's English, he, like he cares a lot about Ukraine. So he's a fucking lib tard. I'm not having any more to drink, Pete. I will try to reign in the profanity. But it, it enrages me because you're, I'm trying to counter your point, but I can't. That's where his, because, because what is it? Oh, well, we know communism is bad. And so now what do we do? Oh, well, it's a line with this group, but it's imaginary. It's, it's a completely imaginary. It's like, you know, there's choose your own Holocaust where people create their own Holocaust, like, you know, hypotheticals and stuff. And it's like, no, you don't get to do that. You get to go based on the, you know, the formal official Holocaust definition and you either agree with it or you disagree with it. You either say that's factual or not. That's the same thing with this situation. And it's true, it's choose your own Spanish civil war. And that's what Bivore does. And he doesn't, I wouldn't say he does it explicitly. He's not making anything up, but he does it like in, in, like a sympathizing fashion where he's like choosing a theoretical where he's like, if only this had happened, these would be the good guys, but that's not how it happened. So I, that was me looping back around to, and ultimately agreeing with you, you're, you're correct. He's, but it's choose your own Spanish civil war. Yeah, it's like, I, he could never choose the national side. So he tries to pick the least, the least worst of the, of the elliptar. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Nationalist forces race toward Madrid with a goal of toppling the Republican government and ending the war quickly. Soviet forces, the international Brigades and the state. CNT FAI's 6,000-man-derudy column speed toward Madrid to intercept them. After securing Toledo, now maybe we can talk about this before we talk about the Alcazar. A lot of people make the argument that by choosing to go and help them at the Alcazar until they though that if they would have went directly to Madrid, they could have saved the battle for Madrid. It wouldn't have happened. I don't buy it. The other thing too is that they were moving so rapidly that they had to periodically stop and consolidate and get reinforcements. They hook up farther north with the carlists and everything. It's a valid argument that I suspect just doesn't play out. Because what would have happened is they would have been stuck in urban combat when the Soviet forces, the international brigades, and the derudy column arrived. It would have been a meat grinder and they could have lost all of their forces that were there. I just don't buy it when you look at it in terms of the manpower involved, the equipment, the different units that are maneuvering around it. It's like a criticism that comes from people who are like, "Well, you would have gotten there before all these other people." It's like, "Yeah, but then they just would have had a bloodier combat there and very easily have been cut off, which is worse than not getting there." I just don't see it. At very best, maybe they could have taken Madrid, but they wouldn't have captured the enemy leadership because it's urban combat. Urban combat is not fast. It's the opposite of fast and they found that out when they got there. They couldn't even get through a college fucking campus in a couple of weeks. It just grounds to a halt. I just don't buy it. It's something that people say, but when you actually step back, you're like, "This is just an accusation that's being repeated." Soleno is about 45 miles southwestish of Madrid. Yeah. 72 kilometers. When you look at the actual terrain, there's a huge. Madrid is in a huge. The north end of a huge valley, bordered to almost like in an archway around it of mountain ranges. Toledo is due south and a little southwest, and it's kind of hilly around it too, so that it's not fully in that plane, but it's real close to it. It's really easy to say that, but there was still grinding combat before they could even get to that plane. They got to that plane and those other units had arrived, so they had to fight their way through that. It was not easy. When people do this, it's an easy thing to say. It's an easy thing to say if they had bypassed Toledo, but I just don't see how you bypass Toledo. I just don't see it. Yeah. Then you have enemy at your back and. Exactly. Like a lot. So it would be really easy for them to cut their lines. This became the successful strategy, which is you go in these less guarded directions and then you grind up these smaller units. That was the successful nationalist strategy. They did that there and then they tried for a knockout blow on Madrid and failed at. Sorry. I'll stop. No. I just want to let people know if they. You can go in Google pictures of the Alcasar and there are some amazing pictures of the destruction that was done and you just have to wonder how they survived. Let me read this. After securing Toledo, 45 miles, 72 kilometers from Madrid and rescuing the besieged heroes of the Alcasar on September 28th, the advancing nationalist forces split into three prongs to encircle Madrid and establish ties with territories secured by allied forces. For more on the battle of the siege of the Alcasar, listen to my reading of the last crusade. If you can make it through that without crying, you're better man than me. That's the episode we did together and it's. Well, that was only one of them. That was the successful end of it. Yeah, the whole. listen to the whole thing. That's the like the soul of the Spanish of war, in my opinion. The last crusade explains the soul and the spirit of the Spanish of war. The advanced arrived October 1st, the first aerial bombardment of Madrid takes place October 23rd. On October 28th, 15 T-26 tanks engaged in the first Soviet combat operation of the war. After heading a mixed brigade commanded by Russian train general Lister, the unit. Sometime look up all of the Russian officers that were sent to help in the Spanish Civil War and do an early life check on them. Yes. The unit attacks. The unit attacks nationalist held Sassania 25 miles, 40 kilometers, do south of Central Madrid. The tankers acquit themselves well, but outrun their infantry and three tanks are knocked out with petrol bottled bombs, prepared by nationalist defenders. The first documented use of what is later dubbed by the Finns as the Molotov cocktail for Stalin's Minister of Foreign Affairs. The engagement establishes that armor is vulnerable in urban fighting, as well as to traditional artillery. The tanks armoured cars and Soviet and French aircraft flowing into Madrid slow the rush of the nationalist and their ownership of the skies. Yes. I really want to emphasize French aircraft. Again, BIVO are also. Everyone. Oh, the pro-Republic position is. Oh, the French could have done more. They were just like. They were siding with this ridiculous capitalist, bourgeois, neutrality thing. It's like, no, the French gave them tons of weapons. A lot of it was that they were obsolete. The thing to keep in mind is that an aircraft made in 1927 was obsolete by 1936, compared to the latest stuff, because technology was advancing so quickly. It could be useful, but it was not very good. They didn't last very long. Maintenance was a nightmare. Their capabilities were really poor. But the French poured tons of equipment into there, and the Soviet and French aircraft were dog fighting over Madrid in October, November, 1936. They did slow them down there, but my position, per earlier conversation, is that I don't think they would have been able to. If they ignored Toledo, it would have only gained them like a day or two. It wouldn't have given them any further impetus to accomplish anything once they hit Madrid. Nationalist forces begin their assault on the city of Madrid proper. November 5th, with probing attacks through the old royal hunting ground of Casa de Compote to the West. On November 6th, the Republican government flees to their new capital, Valencia. Nationalist forces delay their attack until November 8th. On November 7th, militia forces find the battle plan for the following day in the pocket of a captain killed in Casa de Compote. Forces are redistributed accordingly, just in time for the arrival of the 11th International Brigade who rushed to the front and held hold the city while taking 50% casualties. Is that less than or is that roughly? Roughly. Yeah. More international brigade units arrive in the next few days and enable Republican forces to turn the battle from Madrid into a 28-month siege. Yeah. These units just arrived at this point, but there's no indication that the militias and military and because there were tanks on the ground, there were like half of the tanks that the Republic had were around Madrid. There were only like one or two in Barcelona, one or two in Valencia. Most of them were around Madrid by the time, you know, a week before the Nationalist would have gotten there. Yeah, the international brigade is celebrated. for keeping them out of the city, but I just don't buy it when you look at what urban warfare is actually like. It's not a fast process. - All right, we got a little more here, and then we're gonna break for part one. - Perfect. - Break part one. - All right. A note on the makeup of the international brigades. The international brigades were organized by the communist international, also known as commonsurrent. While membership was international, the commonsurrent was an organ of the Soviet Union, under Soviet command and the interests of Soviet strategic purposes. The estimated size of the force varies with Wikipedia stating from 40,000 to 59,000. The more authoritative estimates calculated by, is IB veterans? - Yeah, IB, so international brigade. - International brigade veteran organizations are in the 30 to 45,000 range. Reportedly, there were never more than 14,000 international brigade volunteers in Spain at any given time. - Yeah, that's where the number calculation comes from and where the complicating factor is. But I think that the veteran organizations were very organized, and there were good records, and there were also Soviet archival records and stuff. So I think their numbers are better. It's not as many as the Wikipedia figure states. It's theoretically possible that a lot of the volunteer international volunteer forces are being inflated by numbers of people who came through like the, what was the, oh gosh, the people's Olympiad that was in Barcelona at the same time as the uprising, where there were quite a few people who were volunteering and just like joining these groups on their own that weren't going through the IB that are inflating some of those numbers, but also communist-level inflating numbers, don't they? - The communist international claim that fully 50% of international brigade volunteers were members of the Communist Party. Are there sources estimate as low as 25% though officers were exclusively communist party members? - Exclusively. Jewish sources, Prego 1979, Sugarmin 1998, state that approximately 25% of the international brigade members were provably Jewish, with Jews making up 38% of American volunteers, 45% of polls, and virtually all of the remains. The vast majority of officers and commissaries in the international brigade were undoubtedly Jewish as were the leaders of the Soviet mission system. - Hey, I believe them. Yeah, I choose to believe when they brag about stuff. - I think it's the, oh gosh, is it the Jewish encyclopedia? There's a whole bunch of sources online where they document, where they literally look at the names of all the people that are put together by these IB veterans organizations and they list them and they tell where all this comes from and they talk about it. And they say, oh, it's so bad and so anti-Semitic that the contribution of Jews to the international brigades are so downplayed because people are afraid and it's like, you may have a high verbal IQ, but I don't think you're, you know, yet to continue, continue, please keep telling us what you are actually doing. - Not very good strategically when it comes to problem. - Horrible. It's like, it's a total lack of understanding of humanity. - A note on the volunteer, foreign volunteer forces supporting the nationalists. Italy, the Italian Royal Air Force, Aviazione Legioneria, provided 12 Savoya, Marquetti, 81 transport aircraft supported by Fiat CR32 fighters for the July 1936 air lift operation, which carried the Army of Africa and foreign Legion across the straight-age of Bralchard to Spain. All told, the AV supplied 660 aircraft and thousands of men before the end of the war. Mussolini Italian minister of foreign affairs, Siano and General Rhoetta launched an expeditionary force December 12, 1936 with Rada as commander in chief of what was later named the Corpo Turepe Valentade. They furnished 50,000 men at the peak of operations in a total of 150 tanks and 800 artillery pieces in addition to small arms and ammunition. - Their contribution cannot be understated, or overstated, I should say, the in terms of numbers and dead, the Italian contribution to the war was massive. - The Italian Royal Navy engaged in blockade breaking submarine operations, troop transportation and naval bombardments of Republican-held coastal cities. The Luftwaffe furnished 20 Luftwaffe, nominally commercial junkers, 52 transport aircraft supported by Luftwaffe, is that Henkel? It's Henkel, right? - Yeah, Henkel. Henkel, age 51 fighters for the July 1936 airlift operation, which carried the Army of Africa and foreign Legion across the Strait of Gibraltar to Spain. Germany's initial commitment was only the operation magic fire, feudal-zabbed transport mission, which was then followed by an effort to train Spanish air crews, then was expanded September 30th, 1936 into a full military expedition, soon to be dubbed the Condor Legion. In addition to an expanded air wing, German ground forces were soon added to the mission, including machine gun batteries, a tank division, and anti-aircraft guns, and anti-aircraft guns. Over time, older aircraft would be transitioned to the Spanish nationals' Air Force, while German pilots brought the latest aircraft into the fight. The Kriegs Marine engaged in convoy escort escort, blockade-breaking naval bombardment, and U-boat operations. Portugal. In the first weeks of the war, the Portuguese military attempted to form a Variatos Legion with their own army, named for the historic Lucitanyan leader, Variatos Variatos to aid the nationalist cause. Due to internal political and revolutionary struggles with their own left, the Salazar government allowed back the effort into an assistance program for volunteers for Falongue and at a Quetzay militias or the Spanish Foreign Legion. Under pressure from the International Non-Intervention Committee in February 1937, the Salazar government published a decree prohibiting the enlistment of volunteers on either side of the conflict. A Portuguese military observation mission was established in March 1937 to both study the conflict militarily, as well as to covertly assist the 8-12,000 volunteers in navigating their service and post-war return home. Most critically, Portugal supplied Kesey ports in the early days of the war, funneling armaments from abroad to the nationalist across the border, which the nationalist has secured its entirety by the end of 1936. - Yeah, so the Portuguese contribution is there those men, and I don't wanna downplay the contribution of 8,000 to 12,000 men. It's just for political reasons, the Portuguese government. And we see how far left the Portuguese government becomes like in the 60s and 70s, right? They were dealing with a very similar situation. Very small country, poor country, collapsed in many ways like Spain. Never had the huge empire that Spain had, but it was still, you know, they're fingerprints, were all over the world, and they had risen and fallen very sharply as well. - Isn't that mostly because a lot of the great men of Portugal would just hop over the border and go and join the Spanish so that they could go overseas. And then many of them were motivated to leadership. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the Spanish system had an allowance for that. Like, you know, okay, you have a charter. But the big thing was that they're seaports, because as you'll recall, when you look at the map of the seaports that the nationalist controlled, there weren't that many. You know, there was the landing at Cadeve, and then Sevilla that they had, but when it came to like getting supplies up to the carlists in the north, that stuff was going through Portugal, because, and then as the, you know, my theory is part of the reason that it was so easy for the nationalists to move up the western side of Spain bordering Portugal is because the Portuguese government were facilitating the movement of international armaments and fuel and everything through their borders. So it was very critical for them to secure all those points. And when you read the individual stories about the battles for the cities along there, there's a lot of bitching about the Portuguese because by the lib tarts, because the Portuguese, they don't want to come in as country right on their border and Portugal and Spain, you know, that is a struggle that goes back for their whole history, right? So it's a really important contribution that the government did, but they had to dial it back. Like I said, it was an internal thing, but a lot of it was international. And, you know, they bitch about the Salazar government as much as they bitch about the Franco government and the lib tarte press. So it's very, it was a very critical contribution that the Portuguese made. - We got to stop right there because, - Really? - Yeah, because really 1936 to 1937 is, when there's a huge shift in the war. So this is almost a perfect place to stop. This is like the jump off. - Yeah. - Yeah. - All right, remind everybody where they can find your stuff. - I am on Twitter, Kaudille, if you just look for Carl doll, you'll be able to find me. And also I have a substack, Carldall.substack.com. By book, I have a fictional novel about the Spanish Civil War that required like five years of research. And I had to relearn Spanish to read like good source material. So I have a ton of articles about the stuff that I found out that when you Google it, a lot of times my substack is the number one result in the English language for a lot of these topics. Because like I said, you know, this stuff cries out to be translated into English. So thanks Pete, appreciate it. Thanks for having me here. - Hail victory. - Help me until part two. - Yes. - I want to welcome everyone back to the Picanana Show. Part two of the Spanish Civil War with Carldall. What's going on, Carl? - Hey Pete, happy Monday. - Happy Monday, man. Let's do this. It's going to really set us tomorrow. So this will be nice and fresh for people. - Awesome. - Not like we're going to sit on it for a while. So yeah, let's pick up right where we left off. And the bullet points came to, we just talked about Portugal. And now, let's just pick right up where we left off. The North Falls, 1937. Madrid and its northeastern flank in Guadalajara hold against relentless assault. Franco's strategic focus, the capture of Madrid leads to a grinding struggle over several months, which sees no improvement in the nationalist situation. After failed nationalist offensives in Yarrama and Guadalajara cause heavy Spanish and Italian casualties, successes elsewhere, such as the taking of Maraga, and a large swath of territory in southern Spain encouraged nationalist forces to look elsewhere for more vulnerable threats. The nationalist strategy shifts mostly away from fixation upon prestige targets and toward attrition warfare. - And I'll point out one thing there, Pete. This is often with a asterisk like to the great frustration of his allies and commentators because you'll see the reference in Guadalajara, there were heavy Spanish and Italian casualties across those two battles. The Italians and the Germans wanted to smash this passive Guadalajara and Franco after initial struggles didn't think it was gonna pan out. And the Italians kind of went for it anyway, dictating what the strategy would be. I should say the Italians and the Germans who were supporting in the air. And this really pissed off Franco and there's debates on whether he had committed to provide forces and didn't, or if he originally said, "I don't think there's an operation there," and they expected to come save them. And it was more of a, he brought enough of a force so that they could have a controlled retreat and the Italians took heavy casualties. So not only was it a change in their strategy, but it was one of the times that it was one of the first visible instances where his foreign allies tried to push strategic and operational moves that Franco didn't agree with. And he rained them in and he very successfully rained them in pretty much for the rest of the war. It's a sore spot with the folks that look at the Spanish Civil War from a non-Spanish focus if their orientation is towards these allies and all out of caveat that we should and do respect their sacrifices. It's still a Spanish war being run by the Spanish. So that was a very interesting thing that is a big sticking point in pretty much all of the histories that you'll read. And it's pretty clear that it was Franco asserting himself there. It wasn't the strategy wasn't working. And so he changed his strategy accordingly, which was highly successful after long periods of trying to do what they were kind of telling him to do and then not really working. - Okay. All right, the war in the North, Republican forces in Basque Country cut off by land with little resupply and reinforcement coming by sea due to blockade are slowly whittled down by Riquete Malicious, the Navar Brigade, and later nationalist army columns and Italian troops in the West. Entire units of Catholic Basque conscripts are rendered to then join their cousins in the nationalist Riquetis. - Yeah, small point there is that the kind of retrospective Basque nationalist position is that, you know, oh, they were so put upon by Franco and actually the early Riqueteis were largely Basque and they made quick converts because you could be in a labor battalion or prison camp or dead or you could hang out with your fellow traditionalist Catholics. And the Basque were the kind of Basque national peace up in Basque Country was very divided between these kind of traditionalists and the socialists who were part of the real Republican orientation. That was a big division between the two. And so it was an easy move to move over and away from the kind of, there weren't as many indignities and atrocities in the north by the Republic because they were tempered by this kind of traditionalist Catholic Basque, you know, the bulk of the population. But they still weren't big fans of those people. And especially as you pointed out the last time we talked, Pete, like they would just tell you what they thought, right? Like nobody was missing words. And so the Catholics very quickly saw the light and came over to the the recatase and the Navarra Brigade because it was a much better deal for them than persisting in the delusion that they could win. - All right, combined arms operations, coordination between ground troops, armor and aviation are born, enabled by improvements in and availability of mobile radios. One of the Republic's greatest errors in the north is reliance upon press ganged monarchist engineers in the development of defensive fortifications around Basque Country. Captain Pablo Murga is executed in November 19th, 1936 for providing plans for the fortifications to an Austrian consul will helm the Wokaneeg who is himself arrested and executed by the Republic. On February 27th, 1937, Captain Alejandro Guaico Eheia. Guaico Eheia. - Good job. - Who, yeah, well, you put the pronunciation there. - Yeah. - Who, who, who, who, who, who only wants to work on trains crosses the front with a group of Carlos sympathizers in a pre-arranged surrender of the fourth brigade of Navar. He delivers detailed plans on the fortifications around Bilbao known alternately as the iron belts in Spanish, the iron ring in English and the iron fringe offense in Basque. Iron belt hits hardest, sorry guys, including the locations of vulnerabilities he deliberately engineered into its construction. - Yeah, so it's a, it's, this is a story that like, you'll just get this little brief thing that he went over in your, kind of English language summary histories, but the Spanish material that Goeko Aeha was like a big wheel in Spain for decades and a major player in transportation and the like. His innovations are everywhere today and a lot of them are becoming fulfilled as technology and metallurgy and stuff advances. I have a fun little article about him on my sub stack for anyone who's interested, but he literally just wanted to work on trains and they wouldn't let him. He would say this like up to his death, total autist, and all anyone wants to talk about in interview, the rare interview with him in Spanish television in the 60s and 70s is about this period in history and all he wants to talk about his trains. He's so delightful. That's really cool. Someone who knows what his strength that is just like and just this is this is my lane. I'm standing in it. He called himself an enemy of war and so the fact that they tried to make him participate in a war that he opposed. He's just wore eternal hostility to them, but he also just set it out of his mind. Now freed from distraction. Go wait. Go echo. Aeha is set loose to work on transportation infrastructure projects for the nascent nationalist government. He goes on to revolutionize real transportation with his Tolgo trains and his innovations still see fruition as technology catches up to his brilliant mind. Go ahead was given a great deal of leeway by Francisco Franco who saw him in his inventions as exemplars of Spanish science and industry. While aerial bombings of urban areas are carried out by both the nationalist and republican forces throughout Spain, atrocity propaganda reaches its 20th century pinnacle when military targets in the historic vast city of Gornarca. Is it pronounced where Nica? Yeah. Yeah. Are bombed by German and Italian aircraft. In addition to republican soldiers, many civilians are killed and much of the town destroyed. Red journalist George Stier passes on and is reporting from the scene in the inflated figure of 1654 killed in 889 wounded. Although current consensus driven by thorough post Franco and investigators is a mere 153 deaths. Nationalist press liaisons reveal their ineptitude by first blowing off the claims of having bombed the city at all, blaming the destruction entirely upon retreating republican forces, standard forces, a standard tactic of demolishing corridors as both a delaying tactic and a temper tantrum when in fact the Luftwaffe document to their bombing operation in great detail. Yeah. It's a it's a this is one of the most complicated elements of the war overall and so I it it's really unfortunate that the nationalists like just completely denied it or I should say the nationalist press liaisons completely denied it but it did happen but again a lot of it was very clearly republican a lot of the damage was republican behavior as well if it was their mo. All right side note Pablo Picasso's now famous painting where Nica said to have shook up the world at the 1937 Paris's world fair as a protest against the senseless bombings of the historic Basque city for no reason by evil mustashman had actually been a flop disdain by the global public the Spanish and the Basque a heavy prop again the campaign persisted with the peace touring Great Britain in 1938 a little fanfare and 1939 tour the United States with the Spanish relief campaign saw critics continue to dismiss it only during a wildly successful touring show of a large Picasso collection begun in New York in November 1939 as war-raged in Europe that the propaganda campaign finally succeed in elevating this piece to its now historically relevant position it is alleged an older piece is that where Nica was originally inspired by the peninsula war as a general commentary on war and repurposed by Spanish republican propaganda after the bombing and I'm trying to find exactly where I've seen that I've seen it in multiple places I know Kemp makes a reference to it I've seen it in other written records but I'm having trouble finding it right now which is the joy of having read so many pieces so that's something I'm going to correct and once I find it I think I'll have an article on my sub stack about all these kind of controversies and arguments about Guernica and just the fact that the propaganda campaign finally succeeded once World War II was kicking off but that was hugely due to just like media promotion of it because they tried and tried and tried as you've explained and it and it finally took when World War II had already started and it's typically courageous and honorable move where Ketze forces from the Tersio Tersio of Bagonia first to capture Guernica two days after the bombing encircle the historic tree of Guernica and protect it from Falangas from other parts of Spain who wished to fell the symbol of Baskinationalism under which the lords of Biscay swore their oaths to the Fueros for 500 years yeah so it's actually a fun story in a true story that came out of written records from veterans of the Navar Brigades that this happened and a nice little fist fight between officers ensued so yeah it's it's it's one of these very interesting source spots where the the kind of the respect for the various expressions of locality as long as they didn't actually undermine the collective nationalism were kind of settled during the war the decreto April 1937 the Falangue and Carlos for Ketze are formally unified into the Falangue Espanola traditional traditional Nolista Idelos Idelas Junta stay offensive a national nation national Sindic Alista yeah it's it's a brutal mouthful but it's literally just they take the the the traditionalist group and then smoosh around it like envelop the traditionalist party name with Falangue and then it was the Falangue de los Yones right and so they just crammed everything together and it's everyone like laughs about it but the real point of it is what what follows one party one army one state for longest and Carlos unit still fight under the command of their own officers and are allowed to use their own symbols through the end of the war but the militias are fully incorporated into the nationalist army's command and logistics structure and post-war they're able to use those symbols as well you know and then from then on so the veterans organizations can you know where those colors but after the war the military is stand Spanish military is standardized where it's strictly the symbols that the leadership selects so it was a tip of the hat to you know how they got there and rather than trying to suppress one or the other it was you know a pretty small a small pretty small move to to allow people to keep their symbols because keep in mind Franco was non-ideological these groups may have been ideological although I would guess that most of the actual fighters weren't particularly ideological other than like the outcomes that they were trying to get so it's just it's a very big thing for us all to think about as we go into this new world the Maydays in Catalonia fighting between the more libertarian anarchists the communists and the benton the CNT FAFAA is that FAI right FAI yeah ends in Republican consolidation of power over Catalonia and a renewed focus upon the collective fight against the nationalists as this tradition this translates into the communist forces forcing the less radical and libertarian elements to submit or die the decree to unify the militias went out in 1936 but the rule became de facto during the course of 1937 with the Brighi and Daz mixed up mixed brigades combining militias and the remains of international brigades with regular army troops the last of the whole doubts are liquidated by commissars and and for the average for the average person in one of these militias, like they're just gonna get with the program, but it was the commissars were going after the, particularly the anarchists did not have commissars per se, but they had kind of natural leaders who would, you know, spit game as it were regarding what their ideology was. And those people were just eliminated if they didn't just shut up and get with the program. So you see the comparison where under the nationalists, you're allowed to keep your symbols and your, you know, your songs and your talking points as long as you're part of the operation, whereas with the Republicans, like the ideology is the important thing. The symbols are the important thing. Right. June 3rd, 1937, General Mola commander, the armies of the North and champion of the carless traditionalists, parishes in an airplane accident. June 19th, Bill, Bill Bowe, the capital of Biscayia, falls to the nationalists after months of heavy fighting. July 6th, in an attempt to seize nationalist territory and divert their forces in the North, the Republican Army launches an offensive west of Madrid, forced upon Brunette. Republican forces are ultimately routed at a loss of 25,000 men. And this will become a pattern when the Republicans attempt an offensive. August 24th to the Eastern Aragon, Republican forces conceive of an offensive internationalist territory in the direction of Zaragoza, the provinces capital. In a grinding battle against heavy resistance, the offensive stalls. For propaganda purposes, the Republican, their tame gay, retard journalist Ernest Hemingway, dubbed the failed offensive, the Battle of Bill, set the Bells Sheete. Bells Sheete, yeah. Bells Sheete, Bells Sheete being the destroyed town that they finally capture on September 6th, despite the resistance of both nationalist and civilian defenders. The Republican price for a bit of strategically useless territory is nearly 9,000 casualties and a heavy loss in equipment. August 26th, the city of Santander, falls to nationalist troops supported by a substantial force of Italians, 60,000 Republican soldiers are captured. October 21st, Gihon, Astorias, the last toehold of the Republican in the North falls to the nationalists. The Nationalist Army fresh from victory in the North, retools and reorganizes with new equipment and tactical capabilities. The Republican Army fresh from getting wrecked, retools and reorganizes under its ideological, ideologically pure communist officers trained in Russia. So if you look at the timeline, just to kind of summarize what brought us here, when the war kicks off at the very beginning, you know, the nationalists only hold the territory that they hold. There's that kind of band in the northern areas, not counting, you know, bask country, and then little toeholds. And then towards the end of 1936 and 1937, it's consolidation of these holdings, kind of in a westward flank and slowly, slowly whittling away and making gains. All the kind of militias had to do before the nationalist, you know, the bulk of nationalist forces coming from the Army of Africa is hold these territories. And then what do they do? They continue to hold them. The army continues to hold these territories and then they just grind out the North. A lot of that though, again, like I made reference to was a lot of it is large bask forces going over and basically, you know, continuing to wear the red beret just as recites and nationalist troops. So it's a big focus. The rest of the Republican forces are kind of just trying to hold on to what they have and consolidate into a single force. And just failing anytime they tried to do any kind of offensive operations. - Terrell, December 37th, through February 1938, the Republican Army desperate for a successful battle and needing to secure the nationalist most obvious gateways of the South, drove into the remote capital during heavy snowfall. Nationalist forces prudently withdraw into the most defenseful part of town, but general Franco orders that it be retaken. No provincial capital can fall to the Republicans. To the coldest with winter in 20 years, the nationalist response stalls and a relief force is not able to attack until December 29th. Worsening weather, the temperature drops to zero degrees Fahrenheit, minus 18 Celsius and four feet, 120 centimeters of snow falls, keeps aviation largely grounded and prevents the nationalist from retaking the city. The besieged nationalist defenders surrender on January 8th, which allows the civilian populations to be evacuated through nationalist lines. The weather eases up and the nationalist now 100,000 strong in the immediate area, begins to capture territory around the city where Republican forces are weakest. On February 7th, one of the last mass cavalry charges in the history of warfare breaks the Republican defenses to the north of the town and scatters them. The nationalist take thousands of prisoners and massive stocks of weapons and equipment. They slow the encircle terrible over the following weeks when they take the city on February 22nd. They capture 14,500 men and some of the best weapons left in the Republican arsenal. While both sides take similarly heavy casualties from combat, illness and the cold, the defeat breaks the back of the Republican army while the nationalists immediately launch a new offensive. - Yeah, the other thing here too, focusing on the weapons and equipment that are captured, this is like armor. So the nationalists really enjoyed taking captured Soviet tanks and armored cars and the like guns, anti-tank guns, et cetera. They preferred them in a lot of cases 'cause they were so simple and easy to train with, whereas like a lot of the German stuff, they'd have complicated optics that were more complicated than necessary from when you're talking about the ranges that are involved in an effective range for like an anti-tank gun, right? So it's really interesting because the nationalists immediately put this, these weapons to use. They have fuel and they have people to operate them. Whereas the Republic is, they have to get things delivered by sea or coming over the border from France. And the Soviets are pretty stingy after their initial deliveries of armor and a lot of more modern stuff. So it just becomes this grind where this becomes the repeated pattern that you just continue to see for the rest of the year. - Let me ask you a question. In the middle of the paragraph, it says, "The besieged nationalist defenders surrender on January 8th, which allows a civilian population to be evacuated through the nationalist lines." What do you mean by surrender there? - Okay, so they gave up the last of their toehold in the city. So what they did is they held a position. They held positions and allowed the population to retreat 'cause they had a connection to their own lines. By having, because remember, they secured all this territory around the outskirts of the city. So they just pulled out of the city. These just completely annihilated remnants of the town. You can see images of it online. And then the last of them that ended up being trapped, farther into and encircled within the town, they surrendered. And then retaking the town happened because what would take place is that the Republicans were so focused on. We have to take the town, whereas the nationalists had this more long-term strategic view of what do we actually get? So they did have a lot of holdouts that were captured or killed. They wanted the population to be able to get out through channels that they had established with the contact that the nationalists had made with them. They didn't have enough forces to rush in and it wasn't worth it to try to hold more of the town or fight when they could withdraw and then isolate those people. It's interesting. There's great Wikipedia articles on it with good maps. - Oh, cool. All right, note, in February 1939, one of the last. official acts of the Republican government is the execution of the commander of the nationalist defenders of terroel radar court along with the bishop of terroel and 41 other heroic prisoners who held out for so long man yeah they just they they fucking love killing people there that's all they are yeah so you you hold out and so what do they do they hold them as prisoners for a while and then and it was literally the reput the leadership of the republican government said to execute them in our democracy yeah yeah when it comes down to it these are the these are the people that um the spiritual brothers and sisters of the ones at one world war two yeah and um yeah we um been so fucking brainwashed into well you know Hitler was worse than them so you know it's a good thing they did it it's a good thing you know we have to choose we have to choose one apparently so let's take you know let's take the ones that um brought us trans kids and um you know all the fucking shit that we put up with now yeah exactly these are the spiritual forefathers of everything that we're dealing with now but hey hey you know germany had a problem with one group it gets worse the shift of focus into arrogant underscores frankos intent to ignore midrida for the time being and instead smashed to spanish republican army through attrition rather than attempt a knockout blow which frustrates his german and italian allies that would start though it better serves franko's goal of cleansing spain because you need a lasting victory you need a lasting victory yeah the oh it's funny is um i was listening to um john harris on the conversations that matter podcasts christian podcast me was interviewing paul godfried today and you understand why paul godfried is ignored i mean hated by the left but also ignored by the right when he starts talking about solutions yeah and he says you know the only way forward is the left in this country has to be utterly defeated yeah there can't be a trace of them left there can't be a trace of whatever that it is that they're pushing and they believe left and there's on the right can't hear that there's an interesting thing that takes place nowadays when you talk about the spanish civil war is there's people that are upset that franco didn't just like murder all of them um which he wasn't going to do anyway um because of his religious convictions this is as close as you're going to get um i remember you and i were talking oh gosh sometime ago and you made a reference to a quote that had been attributed to franco where he said something like he was willing to shoot like 20% of the country or have 20% of the country shot something like that and what it was a reference to is the percentile of hardcore revolutionaries that were in the country and so when you see what happened with the war when they turned it into oh well you know we can resolve this through combat operations it's this great heat sink where all the zealots are going to be fighting the people who were you know just kind of a long because that's the you know the thing or because they get drafted or you know they're told that it's the norm um you know they're not really going to be a problem in the future um and can just be dealt with they can they'll get back to work and so on and so forth um but those real enemies were the ones that were annihilated um you know through through combat and so you know it the main thing with spain is that it's you know no man is an island no country is completely isolated you know the external world moved on uh you know the United States State Department sure will a little way on the franco government and the like so it's one of those criticisms where they did pretty much the best that they could there was no scenario where you get a um a great cleansing that the same people will also accurately state did not happen in Germany but somehow we'll wish that they had done it or as a critique right of spain and it's like there was no scenario where that was going to happen the ex the outside world wouldn't have allowed it either it's particularly the British on March 7th and nationalist launched the arrogant offensive and steamroll south through arrogant eastern Valencia province and western Catalonia and no small part due to strong support from German Italian and Spanish ground attack aircraft the beleaguered republicans are slowly mopped up and the nationalist reached a Mediterranean Sea on April 14th by April 19th they control 37 miles 60 kilometers of coastland and Catalonia has been isolated from the rest of the republic and I made that reference to combined arms operations before and they were born before but they really become polished and the arrogant offensive it's there's really very interesting write-ups from the German perspective on how they kind of established the doctrine that we saw a lot of in world war two by the Germans it was just it was really impressive and it comes down to having more portable radios and communications between forward air controller aircraft I mean the United States uses the same doctrine today I'm not exactly the same but you know what I mean Francis government reopens the Spanish frontier March 17th and sends 18,000 tons of war material into Catalonia with a new round of conscription for males age 16 and up and retreating forces consolidated Catalonia's remaining man powers organized into the Ebro army May the republican government defended in Valencia behind the impressive XYZ or Maseyana line fortifications ringing the city and surrounding Iberian system mountain range sues for peace general franko declines and demands unconditional surrender so they were very impressive defensive fortifications and they sued for peace because they knew what a you know what a nightmare it would be for the nationalists to try to grind through it and they were trying they were trying but that wasn't that wasn't going to happen there was not it was not going to be a split country the battle of the Ebro the fall of the republic the nationalist focused upon Valencia hold the Catalonian front along the Ebro river with a light complement of units and little fortification condor legion reconnaissance flights and Spanish legion scouts on the ground alert nationalist forces to a republican troop build up along the Ebro river the standard English language historians take is the warning went unheated but some military analysts and Spanish sources claim that the resulting assault was permitted the night of July 4th the night of July 24 through 25th while the moon is down the Ebro army consisting of the fifth and 15th army core cross the Ebro river at low points or via assault boats pontoon bridges and some established crossings along the rivers eastern bulge where arrogant and Catalonia meet a natural border defined by the river in surrounding mountains at amposta to the south near the river and near the sea where the river is wider and swifter a secondary assault by the 14th international brigade fails after 18 hours of combat by July 26 the northern assault advances three miles west and at the great eastward bulge 21 miles northwest deep into mountainous territory nationalist reinforcements sweep in with eight divisions and more than 240 aircraft to encircle and hold the oncoming republican troops drive the them off the navigable roads and destroying their vehicles republican infantry and tanks arrive via the northern route on the outskirts of their target the town of gandesa a great crossroads by which they hope to break through the narrow nationalest salient and reach republican territory to the west their ultimate delusion you comment delusional goal yeah is to either is to either secure concessions by forcing the surrender of trap nationalist forces along the coastline or to reinforce Madrid and hold that for for international support yeah completely delusional they were they were cut off from the Valencia Valencia was not quite encircled but the eastern eastern and northern areas were were very heavily fortified not fortified but surrounded by nationalist troops who were attacking the breakout was very ill conceived and so what looking at a map. There's essentially this bulge that I described where you could see at the farthest westernmost point they made it about three miles and then going up, if you count going up through the bulge, 21 miles northwest. So again, they're trapped in the mountains in this little tiny point with hundreds of thousands of men there. And it's just a horrifically idiotic attempt, last attempt for an assault. People should understand books have written just about this. Yeah. The action in my novel, like one of the most pivotal points takes place during this operation, just because it's so incredibly interesting and it's very scenic and beautiful too, down there. They are too late. General Franco orders the Ebro River dams at Tremp and Kamarasa open. The Deleuch takes the Republican pontoon boats out of action for four days and the bridges, supply lines and truck deep osalon the river are bombed and strafe by nationalist aviation. While trucks make it across the bridges, telling artillery and transporting troops, they are not able to establish supply lines back across the river and are destroying great numbers. As are the supporting gun batteries and supply depots on the eastern side of the river. Only 22 tanks on a small number of artillery pieces had crossed the Ebro and nearly 80,000 Republican troops now trapped west of the river have only the supplies they can carry to survive in the heat of the Spanish summer. Republican engineers focus upon restoring their pontoon bridges every night, only for them to be destroyed the next day and within a few days. Republican forces are completely trapped within the pocket and cut off from their supply lines across the river, not that they would have been permitted to retreat. To the Communist leadership desperate for the propaganda value of a decisive victory, only attack was permitted. And you put LOL. Well, I mean, it's insane, but they were basically like, do not come back or will shoot at you. There were several points where that was made. They relaxed that later on after they got spanked so badly, but it was, it's really just insane and shows who you're talking about. There was no strategic value or chance of this succeeding, just completely delusional. And that's where the argument about it, the attack probably being somewhat allowed to happen, versus it being such a big surprise, because I mean, it's one of those things that people will debate forever, but it just seems so such an obviously stupid operation. But they, thanks to aviation surveillance and the like, plenty knew that it was going to happen. Republican forces never break through incident, Gendessa, and suffer heavy casualties as its outskirts and hills, immediately overlooking the town thanks to the season nationalist militaries combined arms attack. By August, most of the republic's aircraft are swept from the sky and the nationalists achieve total air superiority. The first nationalist counteroffensive is launched against a small, northernmost pocket near Fion, which drives entrenched Republicans across the river at a loss of 900 men and 200 precious brand new machine guns. The next day, August 11th, the nationalists drive into the Pondols, mountain range, and capture much of the high ground. The Ebro dams are open again, destroying the remaining Pond-tune bridges and six nationalist divisions sweep into the heights of Gaeta over five days of fighting. At this point, Franco's ally Mussolini, fingers clenched no doubt in a rude gesture, staced to Franco, does not know how to make war and doesn't want to. Unlike Mussolini, you put too soon, Franco's strategy secures peace in this country for nearly 40 years as the enemies of Spain are blasted and machined under the mountains over the next three months. On September 21st, the international brigades, so those who are still alive, throw their hands up informally with draw from Spain, having sustained 25% fatalities in their two years in Spain. Is that S for Spit? Yes. That was the operation. The international brigades were always used as shock troops. If you'll recall in the very first two days of one of their units getting to Madrid, they had something like 25% fatalities or casualties in two days. They were always the ones thrown into the assault because they were under basically under command of Soviet fanatics, communist commissars and officers who saw them as completely disposable. It was international bullshavism just taking their lives and throwing them into this fight. The very end of them was the Battle of the Ebro and they just, the leadership, they were completely broken by this. There was no way that they could get more people to volunteer. They couldn't get people to go back. If you read any of the records written in the memoirs, written by those people who I do not speak of in high esteem, they were just completely shattered by this. It was stupid and they just got annihilated. By November 16, the last Republican forces on the right bank of the Ebro escape at Flix. Both sides suffer massive casualties in the Battle of Ebro, although the failures are difficult to estimate. It's likely that the Republican casualties number 75,000 with 30,000 dead. Additionally, the majority of the military relevant arms and Catalonia are lost in the Battle. The Nationalists too take approximately 60,000 casualties, though almost certainly fewer than 10,000 dead. But among them are their very best frontline officers and their armor and trucks are severely worn out from the tempo of Mountain Manoeuvre and combat. Yeah, that can't be understated just because again, these are hardened veterans that had mastered these combined arms operations, rapid response. They were just worn out. So things get quiet for a while while everyone kind of retools. The Condor Legion withdraws most of its ground forces from the field and shifts a significant portion of their air crews to Germany due to tensions in Czechoslovakia. There we go. German aid is paused in mid-September as Germany and Spain negotiate compensation. They settle upon granting Germany an interest in the output of Spanish mines. New aircraft, BF109, EES, 111 EES and Jays and HS126A reinforce the Legion and enable it to close out the war in a primary aviation role. And the older equipment is sold to Spain during the Legion before the Legion returns to Germany in May 1939. Yeah, so all of the most modern German equipment is being proven in combat but is then handed off to the Spanish, sold to the Spanish because again, there's more coming out of German factories and the latest and greatest is always coming and they're iterating based on their operational observations in Spain. After rest, repair and restructuring, fresh troops are brought in for the invasion of Catalonia in late December 1939. Catalonia is captured against hardly any resistance by early February, hundreds of thousands of Spanish refugees crowd the camps in southern France. February 27, the UK and France formally recognized the Franco government. March 5, the Republican Army rises against the Prime Minister Negan and forms the National Defense Council to negotiate peace with Franco. Communist troops and Madrid attempts to continue the war are squashed in street fighting by their former allies. March 26, the Nationalist advance from all sides towards Madrid. March 28, Madrid surrenders almost bloodlessly. March 31, the Nationalist control all Spanish territory. April 1st, Franco proclaims La Guerra es Alfino, the wars at its end after accepting the surrender of the last Republican forces. The cost, combat dead, figures vary but range between 150 and 200,000 killed in action on both sides. Ramón Salas, La Ranzabaos, authoritative 1977 study calculates 165,367 total combat dead. Yeah, Lorenzo Ball is very interesting. There's several websites online with his records and methodology in them, his sources for everything. He used every source that he could find and went through Spanish records just in exhausting minutia. And he also compared it to pre-war and post-war numbers where he wasn't like 100% sure. So when you talk about the cost of the war, it's a big topic. And so he's pretty much the best source that I've seen and what keeps happening. And I think we talked about this a little bit last time is that during this Truth and Reconciliation regime that's taking place in Spain, they'll say, oh, well, we think that these are, we're gonna lean on what the Republican numbers were. And then as they actually go through and reconcile it, it just squares up with the numbers that Lorenzo Ball put together almost 50 years ago. So. - I think most people would be, if you look at that number 165,000 in just a civil war in Spain, - Yeah. - In Europe, in Europe, in the 20th century. That's, I mean, World War II obviously, we don't, could be 40 million, could be 20 million. - Yeah. - It's impossible to tell. But this warm up, I mean, this is basically, what I like to refer to as World War I and a half is just absolute insanity. - And the total population from zero to 100 right of Spain at the time was about 25 million. - Executions and murders. Salas Lorenzo Ball calculated that from 1936 to 1939, that were 72,344 non-combat executions and murders in Republicans territory. In national Spain from 1936 to 1950, the figure was 57,662, with 16,763 judicially governed executions in the first two years of the war and 58,778 more over the next 10 years, non-historical academics such as Bevor use these figures. - Yeah. It's very important because, like you notice I made a distinction, the nationalists there were just like, executions and murders, with no judicial procedure and then there were pretty severe judicial procedure numbers that followed. But again, these are being carried out against the people that largely committed these atrocities on the other side. So it's like if you find someone that murdered 10 people and you shoot him after a fair trial, that's a number that's here but like good, right? - Yeah, yeah. Additional civilian dead. Again, Per Salas Leranzabal, taking into account demographic comparisons over long stretches of time to exclude projected death, due to natural causes, accidents, typical losses from disease, et cetera, and verified against documents and wartime records. He arrives at an excess loss of 300,000 civilian lives, due to disease, hunger, lack of medicine, et cetera, which would have been avoidable in peacetime. Interestingly, 1935, under the Republic had significantly elevated death due to hunger and disease in southern Spain, likely related to the disruption caused by land reform and resulting poor harvests. Interestingly, Salas Leranzabal notes that the otherwise expected 557,185 children calculated to not having been born during the war years, hurt Spanish demographics far worse than the losses from all other causes. - And so if you think about what that means when you talk about unjust, like look at our situation, demographically in America right now, you have crime, elevated crime and murder, right? You have massive suicide, drug overdoses, deaths related to that, deaths of despair, right? Think of all the people that are not having children right now because of the hell that a certain group of people are pushing on us and what that does to us and our strength. So when you get revenge, theoretically, lawfully, legally, keep that in mind as well. We should have double the numbers that we have. Refugees, excluding those who fled Spain at their own accord before or during the war, about 500,000 Spanish became refugees in the final days of the war, with 450,000 fleeing Catalonia for France in February 1939. The French separated military age men from the civilians and established open air internment camps. Over time, refugees were redistributed to different facilities. About 300,000 refugees returned to Spain within a few months where they were sorted by the Franco regime between innocent civilians and those destined for internment camps, labor battalions or prisons. These returninges were handled according to their role in the war, with those who committed atrocities executed while mere participants in the war, Draftees and Generic leftists saw their sentences quickly commuted. About 30,000 of the refugees who remained in France soon emigrated to Latin America with most going to Mexico, 160 to 180,000 remained in France and labor battalions. Thousands of communists and anarchist militants enjoyed the hospitality of the concentration camps of the Vichy and German governments. The Soviet Union accepted a few thousand prominent Republican communists, but not the Hoy Paloy. - Yeah, so I remember you were talking about Mexico last time. - Yep, that's that Mexican government brought in quite a few of these refugees. And most of the anarchists from Catalonia ended up in Mexico. I mean, take that with a grain of salt, but of the ones who wrote memoirs and awful lot of them ended up coming back to France, after World War II or just stayed in Mexico, but huge numbers of those kind of apparatchics and members of the government and talking heads who could not go back to Spain under Franco ended up in Mexico. - Yeah, I wonder how many of them went and said, "Hello to Mr. Trotsky." - Probably an awful lot of them. April 14th, Pope Pius XII addresses a Spanish faithful with immense joy. With great joy, we address you most dear children of Catholic Spain. To address to you our fatherly congratulations for the gift of peace and a victory with which God is deemed worthy to crown the Christian heroism of your faith and charity, tried in so many and so generous sufferings. Our predecessor, our eventable memory, expected with longing and trust this providential peace, which is undoubtedly the fruit of that copious blessing which he sent in the very beginning of the struggle. To all those who have devoted themselves to the difficult and dangerous task of defending and restoring the rights and honor of God in religion. And we do not doubt that this space shall be the one that he himself foretold since then the sign of a future of tranquility and order and of honor and prosperity. The designs of providence most beloved children have once again dawned over heroic Spain. The nation chosen by God as the main instrument of the evangelization of the new world and as an impregnable fortress of the Catholic faith has just shown to the apostles of materialistic atheism. Of our century, the greatest evidence that the eternal values of religion and of the spirits stand above all things. The tenacious propaganda and the constant efforts of the enemies of Jesus Christ seem to have desired to try in Spain a supreme experiment of the dissolving forces which they have at their disposal throughout the world. And even though it is true that the Almighty has for now not allowed them to achieve their goal, he has at least tolerated some of their terrible effects so that the world could see how religious persecution undermining the very basis of justice and charity, which are love for God and respect for his holy law, may drag modern societies unthinkable the basis of evil destruction and passionate discord. The midst of this truth, the same Spanish people with the two Marx characteristic of their most noble spirit, which are generosity and frankness, rose up determinately in defense of the ideals of Christian faith and civilization deeply rooted in the Spanish soil and aided by God who does not abandon those who hope in him. Could resist the push as Judah 13 and 17, sorry, Protestants. Could resist the push for those who deceived by what they believed to be a humanitarian item. deal of the exultation of the meek truly fought only for atheism. Yes. The primordial meaning of your victory makes us dwell in the most promising hopes that God and his mercy will dain will dain lead Spain from the safe path through the safe path of its traditional and Catholic ranger which will be the point that will guide all Spaniards who love their religion and their fatherland in an effort to organize the life of the nation in perfect harmony with its most noble history of Catholic faith, piety and civilization. We thus exhort the authorities and shepherds of Catholic Spain to enlighten the mind of those who were deceived, showing them lovingly the roots of materialism and secularism from which their errors and wrongful acts came forth and from which they could spring forth again. Proposed to them the principles of individual and social justice without which the peace and prosperity of nations as might as they may be cannot subsist and which are those contained in the Holy Gospel and in the doctrine of the Church. We do not doubt that it will happen thus and the basis for our firm hope are the most noble and Christian sentiments of which the chief of state and so many gentlemen his faithful collaborators have given unequivocal evidence with the legal protection which they have granted to the supreme religious and social interests according to the teachings of the apostolic C. The same hope is also founded upon the enlightened zeal and ab-ab-ab-ab-negation of your bishops and priests tempered by pain and also in the faith, piety and spirit of sacrifice of which, in terrible hours, all classes of Spanish society gave heroic proof. And now before the remembrance of the mountain ruins of the bloodiest civil war recorded in the history of modern times, we with prized regard, power ahead above all to the holy memory of the bishops, priests, religious of both sexes and faithful of all ages and conditions who in such an elevated number sealed with blood their faith in Jesus Christ and their love for the Catholic religion. Majora Mahak, delixion, I haven't taken a lot of time. We also acknowledge our debt of gratitude towards all those who sacrificed themselves, even under heroism and defense of the unalienable rights of God and of religion, either in the battlefields or devoted to the sublime work of Christian charity in prisons and hospitals. We cannot hide the bitter sorrow that the remembrance of so many innocent children who, having been ripped from their homes, were taken to faraway lands, often in danger of apostasy and perversion. We desire nothing more ardently than to see them return to the bosom of their families, where they will once again find the warm and Christian tenderness of their own. And those others who, as prodigal sons wish to return to the house of the Father, we doubt not they will be welcomed with goodwill and love. It falls upon you, venerable brothers of the Episcopate, to advise all so that in their policy of pacification, all will follow the principles taught by the church and proclaim with such nobility by the generalissimo, generalissimo of justice for crime and of lenient generosity for the mistaken. Our solicitude also as a Father cannot forget these deceived ones whom a deceitful and perverse propaganda succeeded in enticing with praise and promises. Your pastoral solicitude should be targeted at them with patience and meekness, pray for them, seek them, lead them again to the regenerative bosom of the church and to the warmth of the Fatherland, and lead them to the merciful Father who awaits them with open arms. Therefore, most dear children, since the rainbow of peace has returned to brighten the heavens of Spain, let us come together heartily and affirmant him of thanksgiving to the God of peace and in a prayer of forgiveness and mercy for all those who perished at an order that this peace be fruitful and long lasting. We exhort you with all the fervor of our heart to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bonds of peace, Ephesians 4 through 3. Thus united an obedient to your venerable Episcopate, Episcopate, devote yourselves joyfully and with no delay to the urgent work of reconstruction which God and the Fatherland expect from you. As a pledge of the copious graces which the Immaculate Virgin and St. James the Apostle, patrons of Spain shall obtain for you and which the great Spanish saints have merited for you. We bestow upon you our dear children of Catholic Spain upon the chief of state and his illustrious government upon the zealous Episcopate and their selfless clergy upon the heroic combatants and upon all the faithful our apostolic blessing. Pius XII, Paxing Cree Stavic Toria Eternah Amen. And I had to close it with that because after you look at all the numbers, after you hear about just brutal combat all over the whole country, Spain was a smoking hole in the ground. Spain wasn't in a position to do anything other than what they did which is to buckle down and dig their way out. You know, establish or continue relationships with countries that they had good relationships with. And you know, do what they could. They weren't in a position to, you know, get involved in another war. Nor was there an appetite for it. There were volunteers, there were quite heroic volunteers for the blue division, but they were volunteers. They were permitted to go and they came home and lived safely and in peace and many other veterans of the Waffen SS and other groups were permitted to live peacefully in Spain by the Spanish government. But they stayed out of the next war because Franco removed his sort of victory from his belt and placed it on the altar on the victory celebration day and vowed never to pick it up again unless Spain was threatened. And people can say, "Well, look at Spain now, look at the west now, Yadayata." Okay, well, Spain was in peace and governed under his dictates and the church flourished and still flourished in Spain. And that was his primary duty. There's an argument out there that the logical conclusion of is that Germany lost the war because Spain wasn't on their side, which is a very strange thing to say. But that's kind of the logical conclusion of many of the things that are said about, you know, what Spain did collectively as a nation after the war, which was to, you know, continue to send steel to, and other minerals to Germany and make some weapons for them and other than that, you know, and allow certainly way with things, but also not go totally under the thumb of the British or anyone else and just kind of ride it out and enjoy some peace. So I just wanted to point out the stakes and you can't, a fervent Catholic cannot go against that heavy blessing with a, you know, now we know how to behave ourselves, don't we? According to the precepts of the religion that you follow. So hence the way I wanted that to wrap up. And remember, there were more than a few people who fought the war valiantly, who would have faced the rope and Franco brought them in and protect them and let them live out their lives in Spain. Yeah, absolutely. And it was a sticking point with the allies, but he didn't care because they didn't, they didn't have, you know, the leverage to do anything about it. And it wasn't worth stirring up. So, and they're very nice blessings. It's, it makes a, someone, a silly, like myself, like look at our tradition, which is schism and people with a lot of goo in their hair and in jeans with embroidery on the pockets and guitars apparently. And then you hear that just heavy, like laden with emotion, prayer/congratulatory speech, it's just something else. Yeah. And calls for reconciliation, calls for forgiveness and mercy. Yeah. Yeah. All right, let's wrap this up. Please do your, your plugs tell people where they can find your stuff and I'll make sure make sure to include them in the show notes. - Great, thank you. CarlDull.substack.com is where most of my writing is. I have many narrative essays, and I have some of my fiction there. You can buy book "Faction with the Crusaders", which is a story about a American who ends up volunteering for the Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War. You can get that on Amazon. There's links in my substack to that. There's a sample first chapter as well, which actually is in the drive to the south as part of the Argon Offensive. That's the first chapter and that story's in there. Lots of fun combined arms operations. - Yeah, I'm on Twitter too, although I'm not a Twitter enthusiast. "CodeoDull", you'll be able to find me. There are some numbers in there. It sucks, but you'll be able to find me under CarlDull. "CodeoDull" on Twitter, or excuse me. X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, stupidly renamed X. - Thanks Pete. - All right, man, thank you. Have a good evening. - Thanks, you too. And we're off. Carl, how are you doing? - Doing well, Pete. Happy Sunday? - Happy Sunday. How are you? Yeah, man. - Doing very well. - All right. Yeah, yeah, I already asked you that. I'm retarded. (laughing) So, all right, so let's just, there's one question or eight that's been thrown in on YouTube. So you want to run to this one, be easy for you to get. Where is it? - It's gonna scroll up. Says, "Who are the best historians who write in Spanish on the Spanish Civil War, unbiased or with nationalist biases?" - Oh gosh. That's a challenge for me because I haven't, I haven't attacked the body of Spanish language material. What, I'll explain everyone kind of how I got where I'm at as far as what I ended up studying. Maybe that's a good baseline. What I, I attacked the topic of the Spanish Civil War and research into it based on wanting to be able to write a fictional story of an American who goes there and eventually becomes a belligerent, official belligerent, which led me down the pathways of, what kind of units could you be in? Foreigners had to go into the Spanish Legion, et cetera. So my research, unless it was something of that, I was just interested in. If I wanted to tell stories about individual people in specific locations, I read English language material and then I ended up reviewing Spanish language materials. So when I, most of my Spanish language material that I've delved into is more associated with the carlists and the Navar brigades than, or individual like tiny topics, like specific weaponry or stuff about specific campaigns. So I'm not really qualified to judge the Spanish, but I'm not really qualified to judge the Spanish academia related to that. There's a lot of really great material out of Navar that's out there in historians who've been doing work. If you do local work, there's a lot of really great material that's still being done in Spain by Spanish people, related with specific localities, but I'm sorry, I can't really address that, unfortunately. I would say, though, that if you look at my sub-stack, I do have a bibliography in there, and there's some Spanish language material in there. And I, one of the big areas, honestly, and I'm revisiting this piece related to our project for talking about kind of the tech tree of liberal ideas and the different political factions that formed in Spain, really 19th century as it relates to the 20th century. And so I spent a lot of time reading about the anarchist memoirs and stuff like that. So I read a lot of Catalonian anarchist memoirs as well or Spaniards who ended up overseas and then came back for the war, because there were a lot of South American Spanish who came back because of their anarchism and their various activism, because that's where the action was, and they would also get executed in South America. So it's tough to talk about, but if you look at that bibliography, you'll see a number of sources. There's Navar, oh gosh, it's recatase.es. The page just went away, but I have a link to it in my substack, CarlDal.substack.com, from material related to the carlists, as well as in the bibliography that might kind of my introduction to the novel is in there also, where I link out to an archive of the Navar Brigade kind of unofficial historians. That stuff's out there, but it's in an archive. And that's a great place to start, if you want to see some really interesting unbiased stuff that again is very carlist-centric, Navar and Basque-centric material. I just want to say, I want to thank Stephen Fox for sending some love through Venmo and remind people that Fox and Sun's coffee as I say every week, promo code Peter or promo code PQ is 18% off over $30 and free shipping over 40. So, all right, I got a question for you. Are you familiar with Beattified and Canonized martyrs from the war? I know of them, but I'm not fluent on the topic. I know that that did take place that they were formally beattified and canonized martyrs by the Catholic Church, but I don't know a whole bunch about that specifically. Being non-Catholic just for transparency's sake. Yeah, and I guess I do want to say this because I guess it's the topic of the day other than if we were if we weren't talking about this. Yeah, there's a lot of Christian brothers and sisters and their children in Syria right now that really need to be thinking about and praying about because I'm not going to comment on what happened in Syria. Nobody knows. So, if you want my speculation, I wrote, check my comments on Twitter. I had a couple comments, but that's all I'm doing until I know more. Yeah, I just don't know. It's too hard to know what's going on over there and having had to watch it in that whole situation being. I feel like it's been fairly pivotal for me, like in the teens to go from just being kind of a kind of a blackpilled post-libertarian who's just like I don't want to participate in paying attention to this horrific stuff to actually turning on that and being like, "No, I'm not going to be quiet and afraid to talk about these kinds of topics because of what's going on." It has been going on in Syria since America did its thing. There's a lot of horrible information out there. There's a lot of people that just want to blackpill you. They want you to feel defeated. I saw people who were supposedly on our side, and I'm not going to name any names, but like pushing stuff from authors of Tablet Magazine, which is a Jew for Jew publication and the only non-Jews who read it are good boys and anti-Semites, like no one else reads it. But there are people pushing their stuff as like Netanyahu who is this great man of his. It's so retarded. Obama is in his friends in Iran. It's the dumbest. Almost everything being talked about on that topic is dumb. And it sucks. I mean, the way I look at it is I'm done with the faggits who, if you have any hope whatsoever, if you put your faith in anything and they're, oh, you're just coping. Oh, look, look, you were wrong. So what? So what? So I mean, if I can see Canadian healthcare, if that's your life, honestly, really. the Canadian health care. One thing else, if your life is just blackpilling, if you're just, you know, this is what I said, this is what I said on Twitter this morning. I said it is one of my comments was, because Thomas was talking about it and I said, you're coping, like quote unquote, you're coping is the favorite refrain of the doomer who believes it by either not taking sides or by changing with the wind. They are somehow above it all and therefore they're smarter than you. They're too brilliant to be emotionally invested in outcomes. Therefore, everyone is either their op or everyone's adieu. Well, go fuck yourself and your mother. I mean, really, go fuck yourselves. I mean, honestly, I mean, take the easy way out. Do it. Sorry. No, it's no, absolutely. I agree. There is one kind of parallel here, like with how everyone is feeling right now, that comes up related to the Spanish Civil War and it's that whole question around why did Spain not formally become a part of the axis? And what we see with Russia's has been scaling back what they were doing in Syria because their focus is on Ukraine and Nova Russia and taking care of the highest priority for them. And it sucks. But there are times when you have to make choices based on what's best for your people and what you're able to influence. And losing two wars is worse than winning one war. It sucks. I don't like it, but sometimes you are in a situation where you can't win two wars. Yeah, I just don't get the people who like if you say, if I say, I hope this is what happens. And then it doesn't happen. They like laugh at you. Yeah, it's fine to laugh at me. It's fine, but just understand. Seek Canadian health care. That's my response to you. Okay, because there are whole families being slaughtered right now and you're like online telling people, oh, you were wrong about this. The fuck yourself. All right. Now that I'm done with that. Do we know what year Russia started having a presence in Spain as far as spreading their version of communism and Bolshevism? So there is, if you look at the, in the 19th century, the international, so what became the communist international, there was an original international. And there were a couple international kind of communist slash socialists, slash liberal groups where the kind of the market, that was the marketplace of ideas for the left socialists for a very long time. And ultimately what happened is like a pecunin and marks their personal differences and falling outs led to splintering into different groups. And there were these iterations of these international organizations that were pre-Soviet, but it was like that it was the development of what would ultimately become like an international Bolshevist movement. It took decades to mature over time. And so these ideas were going into Spain and they would have their own representatives that would go to various groups. Sometimes there was that international working men's organization which was primarily anarchist, although they were really comfortable inviting other people in who were more different flavors of socialism to try to have greater influence in a broader pace, although ultimately they wanted to push for an anarchist angle. And so there's that interchange of ideas in people that was going on for a very long time. But formally Soviet doesn't really start happening until the very late, but there were people who were going in the 20s during the Primo de Rivera dictatorship. There were some who were going to the Soviet Union from Spain. It happened more in the 30s under the Republic where there was more of an interchange. The lead generals in the Republican army were all men who had come out of the various socialist and communist political parties who went to the Soviet Union and were trained in their international military academies. Or in the Russian/Soviet method of war. And magically when they start getting all the Soviet supplies and equipment and start putting red stars on the Republican army uniforms and in their insignia and have, and communism takes over, these guys are in charge. So that was really where it really, really accelerated was in the 30s under the Republic. NKVD people were there during the 30s. Largo Caballero was a prime minister, I want to say, Pete, for a while who had been a part of a, his party was a socialist party, but he personally became a Bolshevik communist aligned with the Soviet Union. Kind of in secrecy, despite what his formal, the formal title and formal ideology of his party during the 1930s through his reading when he was in prison, especially for agitation under Primo de Rivera, and then also a little bleeding over a little bit into the, into the Republic. So it was the, it was these layers of the influence accelerating really formally in the 1930s to the point where by, by July 1936, it was, people were learning that it was an entirely Soviet project at a certain point. The formal Republican government was indistinguishable from one being 100% Soviet control, accepting Catalonia that I will add as a caveat because that was pretty much almost entirely CNT, FAI people running things over there. Okay. I'm just going to say to the chat, if you guys, if you guys have any questions about the Spanish Civil War, put them in entropy, it doesn't mean you have to do a, a super chat, you can just put it in entropy. If you guys want to discuss Syria in the chat, then I'm just going to close the chat and not look at it. Okay. Because I have plenty of questions here to keep this going for a while. So can I throw out one quick answer? Philip Blair asked the question in the chat about material originally written in BASC. Similar, similar response, Philip, to what I had said before about where my focus was, I was, I spent most of my time digging into Spanish sources to fill gaps. And BASC material is tricky because BASC nationalism has retconned itself into being this, like, moderate Republican nonsense, which it never, which is a very inaccurate way of describing it. There's a nascent research and a recate, a carless recate type movement going on in the BASC country, which is totally their heritage and is very exciting. If you check out that my, any of my articles, I think any of my articles on the recatees in my substack, there's links out to that recatees.es archive that has some material in BASC. And then also some material in Spanish, Castilian, Castilian, Spanish that talks about the BASC perspective. Navar was largely BASC. Navar is a really interesting historical case study in the insane fragmented nature of the Spanish nation and the localism of it. And the Navar brigades were hugely BASC, whether or not they portrayed themselves that way. Chris Young has a question. He says, "I'm going to have a question." Is there any remnant of carlism left in today in Spain? So I don't know quite how to describe it. I think it's closer to our actual scenario where there are traditionalist, possibly even reactionary people in our sphere who are using the symbolism as a representation of their historical ties to Spain and kind of a conservative reactionary perspective on the direction the country is going in. I have a, there's a review of my novel, "Faction with the Crusaders" that was written by a spaniard who has a house of bourbon, the carlist, their preferred battle flag, which is the white banner with the red cross, the red jagged cross as his avatar. And he said it was the best novel by a foreigner. He'd read on his country's Civil War, which to me was like the highest compliment a person could pay to it. But anyway, I asked him about, you know, you're wrapping these colors. Is there a movement? He basically said it's nascent, but you will see there has been little bits of like street fighting against, you know, communists and antifatypes in some areas and then also against the, you know, the migrant, migrants swelling in Spain. And I've seen guys with carlist face masks, like it's the white mask with the red cross on it, which is pretty badass. So I want, I don't know quite how to describe it. I think it's people using the symbology more than anything else, but like spiritually being motivated by it, which is the most important thing in my opinion is that the feelings in the spirit are more important than the ideas in a lot of ways, especially in this kind of nascent time. I hope that answers the question. This is a good question. Were there Americans who fought for the national side? Yes, very, very few that we know about. And it's kind of, it's kind of tricky. So that's one of the, one of the themes in my novel is that if you look at like, most of what we know in the English language about the Spanish Civil Wars from a British perspective, right, there's Orwell who wrote about his experience with the UGT. He was with the UGT, right, which is a, a corny, a corny socialist movement, but he was just all on board on the destruction of the churches and killing of priests and nuns. Like I despise Orwell with a passion. I think 1984 is way overblown as a good book. It's exactly. I think it's something that you read as a kid to understand the basics, but his problem was the fact that they were coming after him and not just going with, you know, it's this like, I want my choose your own, choose your own communism, right? You know, it's like he aligned with, he didn't know what he was talking about and what he was getting himself into and who he was aligning himself with when he went into that war. And he says it himself in homage to Catalonia. So anyway, so we have his perspective. We now have Peter Kemp's excellent perspective from "Mine Were of Trouble," which is a great book. But the number one thing that should jump out to everyone when they read this book and it's what jumped out to me is that he had the permission of British intelligence to be there and he became a British intelligence asset. When you go into a foreign war, if people know about it in your government before you go, you will be having chats. This isn't this rugged, individualist crap. He was briefed before he went by people with connections to British intelligence who were operating for British intelligence. And then he was being debriefed every time he went back to England and when he was talking to English people in business and government in England, he was an intelligence asset and then he went into the SOE in World War II. That's what my character does in this book. He's part of this Anglo-American group that was around Donovan, Bill Donovan, operating in Spain and around the world. But it was kind of a loose semi-unificial intelligence organization, but Bill Donovan worked for the president. He worked for FDR and the joke is, quote unquote, "despite the differences in their political parties because Donovan was a Republican." It's laughable. In the current year, when you see that as a caveat. Anyway, the long and the short of it is that Americans who were over their volunteering, we know about some pilots and we know about a handful of people who are in the Legion. And many of them became very persecuted when they came back to the United States unless they played ball and went to work for whatever the big game was going to be. And so that's what my character does is through Bill Donovan because they. When I was writing the story, I knew that Bill Donovan had been in and out of Spain at the tail end of the war and was involved in a lot of the negotiations with Franco's people. And then of course the British. Here's something I'll point out for people. The number one foreign investment and ownership of interests in Spanish mining and factories and everything was British. They had a very close relationship for around 200 years between Britain and Spain, including their "intervention" against Napoleon. It goes back a very long time. There's a chapel in London that is a Spanish chapel that's been there since the mid-1700s for the Spanish, not diaspora, but really ruling class and people doing business in Britain. They're intertwined. Their upper classes have been intertwined for a very long time. I have characters that demonstrate that. And it's very important to understand that when you talk about the British negotiating with Franco and everything. Franco was supplied trucks, like a 10,000 trucks and fuel from American and British interests who stopped supporting the Republicans because they everyone knew the Republicans were Bolsheviks. It was common knowledge and then it stopped being common knowledge after 1945, Goli. So the Americans who were in this operation on the nationalist side, generally if they came back to the United States, our government knew about it and they were told, "You're going to play ball or you've got to get out of here." There was an Italian American pilot who had fought for the nationalists who was so agitated by the way that he was treated by the American government. He was born in the United States, what his parents were from Italy, that he went back to Italy and he fought for the Italians during World War II because he didn't want to play ball with them. So that's, there really weren't that many that we know about publicly and my theory from what I've been able to find is that that's how it really worked out is most of them ended. A bunch of them would have died because they would have been in the Spanish Legion which were shock troops or they would have plugged into the American system afterwards and just not been talked about because he wouldn't have been talking about that in the 1950s and '60s. just a couple of super chats. Sean C over on entropy says pray for Syria. Absolutely. Scrared up rebellion over on Rumble says, "Blessed Lord's Day, Pete and Carl, God bless and thank you for everything you do." See you too. Thank you. My friend. Well, let's see what else we got here. Someone had mentioned here that in the new Oppenheimer movie, they portrayed the Spanish Civil War as the current thing and everybody was on the side of the Republicans. All the college sheds were on the side of the Republican. Yeah, no shit. Yeah. That's just true. My alma mater has a monument to the Spanish Civil War volunteers from that university. Fortunately, a lot of them were killed. All right. Okay. Let's see. Next one. What's the first official engagement conflict of the war from the Nationalist's side? So it's hard because the day of the rising, I think, really counts. It wasn't because there were battles all over the whole country. And sometimes it was a. They were able to play it off where a handful of people were able to go in and just like take control of a military base and then they would hold the city. Zaragosa, for example, we never hear anything about that because that was a almost 100% nationalist city where there was very little fighting. The Lib Tards were dealt with very quickly. In Navar, there were. They basically rounded up all the Lib Tards. There was a little bit of fighting. There are some images that you can find if you look at Navar, July 1936 images of some Lib Tards who ended up getting stuck in towers and stuff and where it took a little bit of fighting to get rid of them. But it was taken care of in about two days. And so it was everywhere in the country during the uprising. As far as rolling battles that happened after that is one of the big ones was within just a couple days. The Navar brigades and the the Rekitay militias began marching south from Navar. A lot of them were in Aragon also to reinforce units in Aragon because of the CNT anarchists who were going off. And the after securing Barcelona and Catalonia in general and massacring people on their way, the CNT militants drove north into Aragon because they were trying to get to Zaragosa, which is an industrial city that's way up there in a mountain plateau area. Very beautiful area, by the way. And there was a pretty some pretty gnarly battles to get through that where they the the carless absolutely crushed the anarchists up there. And then steamrolled south and then they ended up smacking into each other and creating lines that were fairly static after not very long in that area. So in reinforcing along those lines. One of the big things that you'll notice is that whenever you look at a map of Spain, you absolutely have to have topography turned on. And then all the lines these see makes sense because of mountains and rivers and everything like that, especially the mountains. I'm trying to think of other battles that were rolling battles, but I we we we talked a little bit the last time about a coruña and that was kind of a rolling battle also with the local nationalist garrison against the the lib tards from the start of the war. So there were there are lots of pockets like that all over the country where there would be a nationalist garrison or like they would hold a city or a garrison and just hold. So. Scored up Texas over here mentions that um you know what happens every couple of years happened this week. Redditors were freaking out because they found out that Tolkien supported Franco and the nationalists. Oh yeah, absolutely. It was it was a very common perspective. Um and they the press didn't even have the moment have a pro republican momentum and outside of you know the usual suspect controlled press. That that was entirely it. And then they always say Guernica was this pivotal point. No, Guernica was a propaganda like coup for for the the lib tards. Um but that didn't change people's perspectives. It was just this they had this data point. But it went in reality. It was just modern warfare. Like look at look at the way America prosecuted World War two. You can't you can't say that you're better than the Fair Mox in Spain when you're when you're British or American it's get out of here. Moxib over on rumble says I've read fashion with her state or is and gave a detailed review on Amazon five stars. Oh thanks. Thank you. Glad you enjoyed it. All right. So thanks for the review. I want to emphasize that the review authors live and die like like visibility and interest in our work lives and dies by these reviews. Thank you for the review. If there's anyone else out there who's bought and read my book and enjoyed it. Your review would be very much appreciated. You're not going to get doxed because you read a book on a fictional book and review it on Amazon. So thank you very much. I appreciate that a lot. What who are degenerate society asks who are some of the other popular any popular figures are famous people at the time who supported the war or who are really bad on the war. I mean I would assume a lot would have been bad on the war. A lot would have been bad. Yeah. If you really want to get as as the girls say the Ick check out the people who write glowing reviews about the Spanish Republicans and the like Paul Robison who is this black communist singer went to went to Spain and would Chuck and Jive for the for the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and all the and the other groups and like he he's saying a song in Yiddish because because the the international brigades were so heavily Jewish and he was again Paul Robison was absolutely a creation of Jewish propagandists also. So yeah it's really it's really yucky but from what I've been able to tell like so when stormy and you have been talking a lot about the America first like what was going on behind it what was leading up to the you know the the activities of America first and some of the kind of proactive attempts that that they were discussing and attempting to make and what I would say is and I can speak authoritatively for this because that was a very big deal in my family and like my family history was very much impacted by the America first movement I have a grandfather I'll just be candid about it I have I had two grandfather's from that generation of course and one of them his his story is kind of told in a wink wink way in my book where German surname and he was named after a neighbor kid who was killed in the very first battle America participated in a World War One and he was the the only child of this Greek couple who lived next to my great-grandparents and he was killed like weeks before my grandfather was born and they of course having lost their only child are just going insane and they begged and begged my great-grandmother to name her child after theirs if it was a boy and it was a boy and so rather than getting the name that he would have expected to get they put his father name as his middle name and then gave him a Greek name that he as his Christian name that he came to hate because it was very odd in a like Nordic in German and English area and it was a very and at the time like everyone had the most Anglo version of what their name would be would be would how it was pronounced and the name that you would go under and so when he turned 18 he changed his name to vice but he was respectful enough that he switched it around to where he then had the Greek middle name anyway so he was a little older because he was born in 1917 and as the war Mania was being pushed in the press everyone's talking about it and as we know from surveys from the time you know 80 some percent up to 90% of the country wanted nothing to do with another war in Europe and my my great-grandmother made her son's promise not to fall for what she knew was going to happen is that there was going to be a war and she made them promise you know this is the right thing promised to me that you will not join the military and my grandfather promised along with his brother he was the only one who kept that promise and you know what he ate shit for the rest of his life because of it he he was already a firefighter he had been a firefighter for some time so he was exempt and from the draft because it was necessary you know critical critical operations and he was about 25 years old when the war started but he ate shit for the rest of his life like professionally and personally socially because of he did what was the right thing and kept a promise because he knew that his you know to the people who wanted who wanted this war the point was for him to go kill his cousins go kill Christians and he knew not to do that so I take that very seriously and what I can say is there was plenty if you look at America first material that was out there those newspapers etc those were pro nationalist they were also pro let's not get involved you know let's stay out of this war because they also saw it as a potential precursor and so they were very much supporting the neutrality arrangement that that America was a part of to where they were you know selling trucks and fuel to the nationalists but not providing weapons and not getting involved and not sending personnel and that was a very popular perspective in America I was also seen as it was it was also seen as just horrific modern war and everyone think of all the world war one veterans in the United States they talk I had another grandfather my other grandfather joined the army in early 1941 because as a steel worker he heard from all the world war one vets around him they're like there's going to be a war don't get drafted but join early you'll have rank and you'll have real training and so that's what he did because he felt like it was inevitable he was in Appalachia he's like it's different it's a different mentality so you know we're going to we fight the war and so he he assumed you know well that's what I do because I'm an American so yeah part in my digression yeah problem Robert Reddy here says it right father Kotlin social justice magazine was definitely pro Franco and pro pro now very very so Zeman over here says Carl doll smells like feet yeah inside joke from a group chat you got a super chat over an Odyssey from the Geeser thanks man I see man I don't yeah this is from the Geeser over on Odyssey okay outside of a outside of official combatants sent by government channels do you know what nations had the largest contribution of foreign volunteers from to join the nationalist I'm thinking would Romania be one possibly Romania is up there Romania it had thousands of members of the iron guard and associated nationalist groups in in the Spanish Legion there were a lot of like we talked about before there were a lot of Portuguese because again it was originally going to be an official detachment but because of all the all the nonsense and their own internal struggles they ended up just directing them straight to straight into the the foreign Legion from from unless they had already joined like the Novarbrogates or something which many of them did because the because of the Carlos militias I'm trying to think there were quite a few white Russians in the in this Spanish Legion also and then you have people from all over that one of the big big ones is that sometimes they refer to them as Americans but it was the Latin American diaspora Colonios is the terminology is the people from the colonies who went back when they would they would be generally they were going into the Spanish Legion although accepting Spanish nationality was very easy for them a lot of a lot of more Spanish citizens but so that they could end up in regular army units but most of the time all the Colonios went into the Spanish Legion if they weren't if they would still have their citizenship from from Latin American countries so there and there were absolutely tens of thousands of those from what I'm able to tell there were I shouldn't say tens of thousands I should say there were possibly around 10,000 volunteers with the Spanish Legion from the colonies and that actually predates the war even in like the riff war in the 20s in in North Africa Morocco there were a lot of Spanish Colonials. TKMO has super chat over an entropy said thanks to KMO the more I learned about the history of last 200 years the more no brothers wars make sense despite the differences between European descended peoples yes absolutely let me get another question here um I think did you just answer this uh what was the Spanish speaking world's reaction to the Civil War I did or Central America you know it it could yeah we didn't discuss that um it came down to your political persuasion um if you look at and we talked about this a little bit last time but Mexico at which was a basically a Bolshevik nation uh deeply linked to uh the Soviets um they immediately went in with the Republic and began sending arms um and so when you looked at the rest of the of Latin America um you know the the conservatives and the you know the the upper crusts and everything would support would support the nationalists but um the the lib tards and all the the various the various other groups absolutely supported the Republic um what do you have to say about car what do you have to say carl about um having weighed during the war I'm not a fan um I I love as a writer and as as an American male when I was always happy to read Hemingway uh in like high school because he had a very simple but evocative writing style and and it was portrayed as masculine right but the thing with Hemingway is that he was um he was an egomaniac and uh most likely a rapist just to throughout the r-word there and not in the based way but like he was at scumbag um that memes aside rapist is not ungentlemanly um and but he was also he had mega cachet um everywhere but if you if it really came down to it here's here's an example illustrating his behavior He loved hanging out with Italian nobles in the 1950s, but he endorsed the slaughter of those same peoples in the 1930s in Spain. Why? Well, because that was like the cool thing. And so he supported the cool thing, which was the Republican cause, and he did a tremendous amount of propaganda for them. Total Bolshevik nonsense, but he enjoyed the finer things in life. So when it came to like going, doing bird hunting and stuff, you know, he enjoyed the nice, you know, traditional European comforts of doing the, you know, mass, mass bird hunts and hand-released bird shooting and everything like that. And he loved hanging out and doing that while at the same time, just unknowingly advocating for the destruction of that way of life when it was the cool thing to do. So I despise Hemingway, ultimately, and he would, you know, he wasn't as cool as people say he was. And it's very amusing because when you hear about a lot of his tough guy stuff, like wanting to box people and stuff, it's my understanding is a lot of that was like him, like basically being like, I'm going to beat up like a little guy. And tough guy shit like that, which I despise. So, so this week, someone points it out that somebody assassinating a CEO on the street was equivalent to the Republicans and the anarchists and the communist murdering, murdering nuns and priests. And yeah, you were quick to point out that they weren't the only side that was doing that in the Spanish Civil War. Can you give some examples or talk a little bit about that? Yeah, absolutely. So the the carlists and the Falange, which is the Spanish word for the Falanx, someone had a question about that on on X. And so anyway, they were killing people in the streets as well. And they had been for a while. Very early innovators of the drive by shooting carlist youth militias in the in the teens. They did a drive by on some anarchists, which is, you know, pretty cool. But yeah, that there this whole thing that like like political violence is inherently leftist is an insane insane retarded gatekeeping perspective. The I it just is inexplicably stupid and so so obviously enemy action to me for someone to make that statement. I just I just have nothing good to say about that. Bill Bikes over on rumble says, Franco was based when I lived in Spain, only the J's hated him because it was before I was J. Pilled. I 100% believe that and I will say that a long time ago when I I read a lot about because I considered myself a libertarian like in the in the 90s and into some point in the odds. And so because of the the word and you know a lot of people saying, well, it's basically an or you know, anarcho capitalism type arguments and everything. I read a lot of anarchist material. And most of the time it was stuff written in the like 60s and 70s by Americans talking about it. And and there would be really strange biases like in this was before I grew up around a lot of Jews, but I wasn't really J. Pilled other than knowing that they were different, right. And it it was really strange because they they would always talk about how Bacunin was an anti-Semite and like and and and a lot of it was this was that the struggle in scapegoating around the loss of the Spanish Civil War and the atrocities that were committed because like P you you and Stormy were talking and I think you both pointed out that like they just blamed each other for the losses the anarchists or the communists would blame each other for the the various atrocities when really they were both committing them. Yeah, the communists like digging up just just interning disintering the the nuns and stuff like that it was like oh no that was the anarchist oh no that was a communist it's like shut up you both did the blame. They both did it yeah exactly. So and they and they actually had internationals a group of Eastern European internationals if you it doesn't take much thinking to realize that that means Jews. We're involved in raping and killing some some nuns in the the northern campaign and the what what what happened to them well they were their whole unit was lined up and executed and left in a left in a ravine which is pretty merciful if you think about it so you know I'm never gonna apologize for anyone killing people like that. Loftly, legally knock on wood right yeah yeah let's see what were the size of the forces both or roughly the size of each side at the beginning of the war. We talked a little bit about this last time I'm gonna pull that document up real quickly I should have had it handy. Sure. Anyway so the the best way to describe the the forces is that you have official forces under arms out of the gate and then you have the the militias that were extant and then all the people clamoring to join the side because of their their various orientations so on the nationalist side they had the whole Spanish Legion and then also the army of Africa which was the the Moroccan basically local forces under under Spanish army command total between the army of Africa and which included the Spanish Legion was about 35,000 men and then they had about half of the Spanish territorial army which is about 60,000 men so that's you know Iberian based forces and then they had just under half of Spain's civil guards and carbon arrows which were in the which would put it in the teens and 20s of thousands between between those two I want to say like collectively it would be around 20,000 ish and then the carless racquetay militias had 30,000 men under arms at the time of the uprising and then which grew to 85,000 by the end of 1936 the Falange had about 20,000 men in total at the time of of the uprising but they weren't nearly as well armed they had machine guns and some machine guns and grenades and stuff like that but they weren't as like fully rounded out and equipped and regulated as the as the carless racquetays the Republicans so again use some of those same figures you know about 60,000 in the territorial army a lot less of the heavy weapons though from the nationalists they had about a third of the machine guns and artillery and about half of the rifles they had the assault almost all of the assault guards which was that subset of the civil guards which there weren't tons of them there were only like one or two thousand of them but they were like the republics it's kind of like the FBI what would be a good way to describe them kind of like the the FBI/FBI hostage rescue team which is their little like urban assault unit the workers militias were huge because they came out of the organized labor unions and so like the CNTF AI for example put 10,000 armed men into Barcelona the day of the rising that they're the CNTF had over a million people as members so when you read about the workers militias or the the people debating in the republic to to arm the workers they're talking about like literally millions of people around the whole country in total but they weren't trained that they they didn't know what they were doing with rifles. most of the time. There were exceptions, of course. All right. Let me see if there was something else here. To what extent, Jim Bowden asked to what extent, as a Spanish Civil War and extension of Trotsky's internationalism? So there were Trotskyist or labeled as Trotskyist, because if you think about it, the Soviet Union would label any of their allies who weren't going along with the program as Trotskyists at that time. So they would call anarchist Trotskyists and stuff like that. So it would be like, you're an international communist, but you're not with our program, therefore you're an enemy or a Trotskyist. So he was influential with a lot of these groups, and he was very influential, but not relevant. Other than, as it related to the struggle for power, because there were leaders among all the different left factions, who it didn't take them very long to realize what was up. They always knew what they were getting themselves into and the risk of Soviet domination. And so that was always a running part of the arguments and debates over who would have control over the republic during the war. And so the Trotskyistists were definitely influential in terms of them knowing, because I mean, the Soviet Union was a thing, like everyone knew what the tail of the tape had been for the previous couple of decades. So they knew it was up and what was in what was in play. Okay, next question here. You say, what side did the actual Spanish army fight for? Meaning, if you were in the actual army, what side were you fighting for once the war started? It entirely depended upon the direction of your leadership and the individual soldiers to a lesser degree. So if your unit said we are with the uprising, like there seems to have been very little, very little change in that regard, unless you wanted to get shot or at least arrested. So yeah, absolutely, it came down to that. There were places where it took a little longer to settle that out, but in general, it was up to the officers and kind of the mood. So here's an example of that. In the Navy, the naval officers in the Spanish Navy at the time was very weak. It was very small. It was not much better than a Coast Guard, really, except they had coastal guns. You know, they had, they had some stuff, but they were very much depleted from where they had been. And there weren't a lot of people who had a lot of respect for the Spanish Navy at that time in terms of the quality of the leadership and their mission and everything. A lot of it was people getting sinecures and just sucking money out of the system. That's something that's really important to understand at the time is that there were like the ratio of officer to enlisted man in the Spanish territorial military at the time was one officer to seven enlisted men if you can believe that. This is people parasiting off the system. So the quality of the territorial army was quite poor. The Army of Africa and the Spanish Legion are totally different. The Spanish Legion was absolutely like a real fighting force. And they were, they, I would put them on par with like the Rangers and the Special Forces depending like with the caveat that like the United States Special Forces are technically a training and like, you know, like force magnification effort. Whereas the Rangers are just pure light infantry. They were more like pure light infantry and shock troops than anything else. And they were serious. But the Spanish Navy was so corrupt and sought and and sotted, I should say, that the enlisted men who were mostly socialists because it was, you know, where are, where are Navy, Navy units and Navy forces and Navy bases and where does everyone live? They live in port cities where the port cities in Spain were almost, were extremely socialist and anarchist at the time. That was the spirit of the age. And so it didn't take very much from the enlisted men to take over the naval vessels. They couldn't really crew them and lead them though because they weren't competent leaders and officers and they had no idea what they were doing. So they had the forces, but they were useless. Like so they performed very, very, very poorly. There were some naval vessels that were the officers sited with the uprising that stayed under their command who were who performed much better because they were serious people. So I hope that answers the question. Got a comment here from just a car over on Rumble. He says, Carl, I like your first book looking forward to the second. Don't you have two books out? Yes. Yeah. So my first book is Faction and it's where I get this icon. That's Doug Shea, which is Joseph Shea's grandson. Joseph Shea is the fellow who goes into the Spanish Civil War and gets involved in the espionage business related to that. One of the running jokes is that so you know who Matt Bracken is, right Pete? Yes. Okay. So I was actually heavily inspired in my first book by Matt Bracken's style of writing where I have a, I have more of like a literary writing background, but what I like about his stuff is that he can write a novel that is kind of like a guide or a mini manual to certain kinds of scenarios. So I wrote my first book Faction kind of in that style where they have this, it's a faction that of related to the intelligence organizations and unofficial intelligence organizations associated with US government and private industry basically cut out companies to do things, whether it's logistics or training or whatever around the world based on the mission. And the guys who've made their bones can kind of pick and choose a little more, which groups they want to side with that as long as it comports with US foreign policy. And so they end up having a clash domestically because of these competing interests in the in the 90s in the US and Canada. And so a lot of people have made comments about how that relates to the street pew pew of that CEO because a lot of, he follows, he followed almost exactly scenarios laid out in my first book, which I disavow theoretically. Got a question over here from Panda Daddy 23. Hi Pete and Carl did Portugal play a significant part in the war? Yeah, the biggest thing for Portugal is they served in the very early days of the war as they allowed material to flow through their ports. So the Italians came in largely through Portugal and and a lot of German and Italian weapons and ammunition and equipment flowed through Portugal and it made it easy for the army marching north. You'll notice that they stayed, they basically wanted they secured the the border with Portugal very quickly. And then that allowed those, the material to flow through to the the carolists, militias, and the Navarbrigades in the north and equipment to go wherever they wanted to. And the Italians had massive, massive operations very early in the work, ground operations, up in the northern campaign. The Condor Legion had a lot of aerial campaigns in the north and they had observers and stuff, but they weren't doing as much on the ground in the northern campaign. They did later, but the Italians almost immediately were operating up there, and that was hugely made possible by Portugal. So Portugal, good friend. Yeah. This is a, this is a good question. Oh, there's one more. I think there was a comment over here. Moxiv, who said to let you know that he did his review under the name Clayton Barnett, he says your style of writing present tense is a bit jarring. Based. No, I know that. I know that. It's, it's, but it's something that I've done. And the reason that I settled on it a long time ago is that when you're writing action, it has an urgency to it that when it's when other things are playing out and you're telling a story in, in present tense, that isn't like immediately action oriented, it can, it can be a struggle because you have to be very conscientious of not combingling tenses because there's a bunch of, there's numerous present tenses that can, you can end up tripping over, but I always found that when I would write like an action scene or something and people read it, if I did a past tense and a present tense version, people would say that the present tense version was much more immediate. And so that's what I've, and, and exciting. So that's what I've stuck with. And if it, if it's just my thing, it will be my thing. And maybe it'll be something that, that will stand out. So you know, if coming down to Muscardo or any of the survivors of the Alcazar, I've ever written memoirs. So there were interviews with Muscardo. I don't know anything about memoirs, but I know that there were interviews with him that, that you can find that were in Spanish. And, and are written. And so there are some material related to that, but I don't believe that he, I'm not aware of him having written anything himself, but there are, there are interviews out there. And that was, you know, for decades under bless you, under Franco for decades, that they were still held as, as the heroes that they were. Let's end on this one. Um, did Franco ever write or do interviews, giving an apology for the war and everything that happened afterwards? Apology, no. Um, he, there are, when I say, what, when I say apology, you mean in the war, up, like an up, like an up, like an up, like an - Yeah, I realized that after I said that. So there are interviews with him, but he was very private. He didn't give a lot of interviews. But there are people that have written memoirs. If you read, is it Payne's book on Franco, they talk a lot about that kind of stuff. There's a couple of good Franco books, not Preston. Paul Preston is a scumbag. And frankly, you just make shit up. But there's quite a few, quite a few books where they talk a little bit about Franco, but he was very private. He never, he's not known for being very verbose. And wanting people to center upon his thoughts and his ideas on things. He was very straightforward guy and pretty private and went to church every single day. And basically wanted things to just run out the clock and but well also getting people, getting the country back on its feet. And so mostly he talked about the nation and the health of the nation and the state of the nation. He didn't talk about himself very much. - Maxive says Christopher Buckley equipped that Franco wanted to sit on the 20th century until it went away. - Based. (laughing) - All right, Matt. I'll end this right now. Thank everybody for tuning in. We'll be back next week with the normal live stream interaction, but Carl, please tell everybody where they can find your work and I'll make sure to include all of that in the show notes. - Great, thank you. CarlDall.substac.com, that's Carl with a K, K-A-R-L-D-A-H-L. Thatsubstac.com. I also have two books under the name, author's name, CarlDall on Amazon, faction and faction with the Crusaders. Faction with the Crusaders is the Spanish Civil War story. And I'm on Twitter, which I hate or X or whatever we call it. I'm not the biggest fan of the platform and stuff, but there's great people to interact with there. So that's why I'm still there. - Right. Appreciate it. Thank you.