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Hey, Robert here. It's been like two months since I had LASIK and I'm still seeing 2020. All I had to do was go in for a consultation, then go in for a maybe 10 minute procedure and then my eyes have been great ever since. You know, I healed up wonderfully. It was very simple, couldn't have been a better experience. So if you want to explore LASIK plus I can't recommend it enough. They have over 20 years experience in the industry and they performed more than two million treatments right now if you want to try getting LASIK plus you can get $1000 off of your surgery when you're treated in September, that's $500. Of per eye, just visitmylasikoffer.com to schedule your free consultation. Hello, I'm Erica Kelly from the podcast Southern Fried true crime. And if you want to go from podcast fan to podcast host, do what I did and check out spreaker from iheart. I was working in accounting and hating it. Then after just 18 months of podcasting with Spreaker, I was able to quit my day job. Follow your podcasting dreams. Let's breaker handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. Want to say I don't know less? Listen to stuff you should know more. Join host Josh and Chuck on the podcast packed with fascinating discussions about science, history, pop culture, and more episodes. Dive into topics like was the lost, city of Atlantis Real? And how does pizza work? Say goodbye to I don't know, because after listening to stuff you should know. You will listen to stuff you should know on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's Francisco? In my frank goes. This is Robert Evans. Yeah. Farting fuzz. Yeah. There we go. We introduced it. It's not as not as big a name as Hitler. Like, I'm gonna be honest with you. Not, not doesn't have the kind of star power like if Hitler Hitler's like, like Ben Affleck, right. Yeah. And and we're doing like the Matt Damon of Fascism today. Like, it's just just not the same. Accurate. You are completely wrong. You just like his tattoo. Come on. I love. I love his trashy, gigantic fullback Phoenix tattoo. Pretty funny. It's rad. Let me. OK, we gotta think of somebody's like a deep. He's like his more famous than Ben Affleck. It's more like a Scotty Pippin, you know? I'm saying, like Scottie Pippen to Hitler's the Michael Jordan of fascism. It is like Scottie Pippen. We're talking the Scottie Pippen. And like Scotty Pippin. Yeah. Francisco. Frankie. Yeah, he said. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Francisco's underrated, you know, he's a good. He's like, not good. He's a monster. Yeah. Shoot. Quite a Pippin at a shoe. Exactly. Exactly. Pippens, like we're talking about, like, like, Francos, which would be Jack boots. Almost as tall as the Hitler Jack boots and not quite as shiny, but still Jack boots. Yeah. And they're little cheaper. Jack boots. Yeah. For the fascist on a budget, you know? We're going to talk about the tattoo again. I did. I always want to talk. And how and how hilarious and how sad Ben Affleck looks every time he's captured in the wild. Just looks like he's been dying for the last twenty straight years and I'm here for it. I love jack-in-the-box. It's incredible. He's just so miserable all the time. It just feels like he spent so much time being attractive that he just got tired of it and was just like, Oh my God, Speaking of fascism. You've heard of the fewer principle, the idea that, like, a single man can embody the spirit of a people, which is, you know what Hitler used to rise to power. I never believed in it until Ben Affleck, because Ben Affleck is the spiritual embodiment of Boston. He really he's yeah, he's perfect. Yeah. He's really basic. He has. Really is I yeah. Like, if if the Southeast weren't so damn racist, I would really like that area. You know what I'm saying? Celtics, but yeah. Oh yeah, all day. I don't know anything about the Celtics, but I know a bit about fascism and prop. Fascism is a little bit different in every country. It's kind of like, kind of like Skittles, you know? Yeah, different flavors. Chocolate chips. Yeah. Yeah. Chips. Yeah. Milk chocolate as opposed to the dark. You know, this is part of why scholars and theorists have such a damnable time defining what fascism is in the 1st place. There's a dictionary definition, right? There's gonna be a dictionary definition in any dictionary you open, but it's not really useful, in part because. A lot of dictionary definitions of fascism apply almost as well to like communist regimes. Any, any authoritarian regime. Yeah. Which is, you know, there's there's some points there, which is that whenever you have a totalitarian system, similar bad things often do happen. But fascism is is unique for a number of reasons, including its ability to subvert healthy democracies. And so when you have historians of fascism, people whose whole life is studying this thing, this amorphous thing that we're still kind of getting grips on, all of them, kind of tend to have. Their own definitions of it, and often those definitions don't contrast that, just different ways of kind of wording, the same things. I tend to be feel confident that Umberto Eco has done the best job of defining it in his essay on Earth fascism. I'm a big fan of of the way Echo talked about fascism. And I think that ECHO would have named Trump as a fascist straight away, in part because in the mid 90s when he wrote his essay on Earth fascism, he predicted that the Internet and like the way that it allowed would allow people to spread messages and Crowdsource activism would lead to the rise of. Have a unique kind of fascist. And I I think that Trump embodied that in a lot of ways, and I think ECHO would have seen it right away. Now, on the other hand, I think I may know where you're where echoes going. I haven't read the thing, but like, I have this theory about the type of fascist that Trump is, but I'd love to hear what this guy says. Yeah. I mean, EE kind of outlined a number of different things that are like that are when you have a a mix of these things and sort of a constellation, that is what fascism is. So there's a mix of like, you know, popular resentment against the left, like a sense of machismo. Of of misogyny, a cult of action for actions sake, syncretism the ability to, like, pull other things in and kind of attach them to itself under like aspects of spirituality and whatnot. Umm, there were a bunch of different things that that ECHO noted as kind of key aspects of fascism. Now, OK, sorry, no, what we're saying because I was gonna say, well, so interesting about like, what I feel like what we're gonna hear as history nerds for the next, you know, 100 years about the unique, this, the what Trump symbolizes. And it might just be a new type of fascism for the rest of our life, but just this fascism that doesn't have a foreseeable goal like except for just being in power, you know, I'm saying like that was. So that's what was so interesting to me about the uniqueness about Trump's. Racism is like, yeah, but what's your end game here? Like, what do you what are you doing? You know, I'm saying, whereas, like, you knew what Mussolini was doing. We know what? You know what? They're definitely, we knew. Yeah, he did it. Like, we knew what you were doing. This was your goal. You know what I'm saying? And I'm just like, what you're like, yeah, what are you doing, dude? You know his lack of a plan, right? Yeah, apparently Trump said that selling stakes in schools and universities. I think that did. I think through some people off is that he clearly didn't have as much of like, Mussolini I do think is more similar to Trump than Hitler is in the kind of fascist that he was in, in his goals. But Mussolini had a plan to, like, take and hold power. And I guess one of the things that's been revealed is that, like, Trump definitely wanted to take and hold power, but he did not have much of a plan. Not a plan. Yeah. I was like, yeah, your goal is to reach a goal, which is? Yeah. Yeah. Your goal was just almost like, yeah, he's. There's a lot to be said. I don't know. You just want to keep being right, you know? And I'm like, about what? Yeah. Anyway, let's go on. It's interesting. And a number of, like, there are other scholars of fascism who took a lot longer to kind of decide that that Trump fit their definition of fascism. I'm thinking about Robert Paxton here in Paxton is a a very well respected scholar of fascism. He wrote a book called The Anatomy of Fascism. That's a very good book. And he only felt comfortable declaring Trump a fascist after January. 6 and he was like, that was the line, like it was Paxton consistent. He's an authoritarian. There's fascist elements and what he does. But he didn't kind of name him a fascist until after the 6th. And I, like, I'm not slamming packs. And I think there's a room for intellectual debate on total. And I understand kind of why he like, like you said, Trump's a different kind of 1, right. And where it fascism changes based on the country and based on the time period, you know, and I do think kind of one of the things that ECHO was was sort of peering around the edges of when he was talking about how he thought we were going to see an Internet. Based fascism in the future was the idea that like another aspect of fascism, and he didn't define this as a key aspect of fascism, but I think that it is is the fashion is the ability to find a way to utilize new media technology in a way that no one else understands yet, which Trump did right. No other politician understood how to use social media in the way that Trump did when Trump came on to the scene, and it's a big part of his success anyway. So there's a lot of debate over what is a fascist and as a result of this debate. There's actually quite a lot of argument on whether or not the regime of Francisco Franco in Spain was truly fascist, and you'll find a lot of argument about this, about whether or not Franco was a fascist. There were fascists in Spain, absolutely whether or not Franco and his regime really counts. And what's not up for debate is that many elements of the Spanish right leading up to and during the Spanish Civil War were fascists in that fascist powers Italy and in Germany intervened in that civil war because they saw what was happening there as a battle. Between fascism and socialism, largely, and more to the point, whatever you can say about Franco himself, and we'll talk about him more in Part 2, the battle over Spain in the late 1930s absolutely ranks as the first open military conflict between fascism and democracy in fascism and socialism too, right? Like all of that was kind of in the mix. And on the Spanish side, the Republican side, you had, like, the Spanish Republic, who were, you know, liberals, more or less people who supported it like a constitutional democracy. And you had anarchists. And communists and socialists avarian kind of lesser strains, Trotskyists 2, who were it's a very complicated civil war. It's more like Syria than than a lot of other conflicts because there's so much going on, so many different, different kind of corners to it. That's interesting. Real quick before you get into this is like, you know, in a past life I was like a history and social science, like high school teacher and I went through the entire credentialing process all the way up to masters and at no point. In any of our California standards, was it ever required to talk about this? And which is so interesting to me to win, especially when I'm trying to set up, you know, because I since I wasn't a direct history, I was more like a social science teacher trying to set up how cultures get where they get and, like, why it was so weird around World War Two and why we got so, like, we was already itchy, why a lot of a lot of us was like, man, we really don't want to go over there. It's because. It was. I was like, well, because of the Spanish Civil war, like, we kind of, you know, was kind of going back and forth about sending troops over there like it was. And the students were like, wait, what? And I'm like, yeah. The Spain. Yes. Spain had a civil war. Like, yeah, this happened like, you know, I'm saying this was like, it was right before World War Two. Like, this happened. There was this whole big thing that was like, it's a big thing. And we were involved. Like, we almost you upset. But just like, that's like in no, thousands of Americans volunteered. Yeah. Yes. And I'm like, it's not required to talk about. And I'm like. Oh my God, this is you're missing. This you're missing a lot of the story if you don't understand why even World War Two is so touchy for us. Yeah, and part of it was this anyway going one of the reasons people don't like to talk about this is that it is. It's very complicated and it is not as much of a cut and dried story as makes it easy to sort of summarize, right. Once the fighting starts, once the civil War starts, it is a bit easier. But even then, it's a very ******* messy war. Yeah, and there are really ****** people on on the good guys side too, right? Like, there's a lot of like, very. Ugly stuff that happens because it's a war, you know? The same is true of World War Two. It's just been heavily whitewashed. And the Nazis were so ******* bad that it makes it a lot easier to, yeah, make your side seem like the good dudes now in some ways, like, because of how complicated it is. And we're going this whole episode is about the birth of Spanish fascism, and we're going to do some pretty deep history here and in in some ways, the story of how fascism evolves in Spain bears a lot less resemblance to what's happened in America than either of the two stories we've discussed so far. But while there, the similarities are a lot less direct, I actually think there's a lot here that's valuable because we're going to kind of lay out how this evolved over time and how the birth of fascism in Spain was woven into the birth of democracy itself. And I think that's a really important story, but we're going to need a lot of context. So Spain is unique, fairly unique among European nations, and that it has not had a sense of nationalism for most of modern history, not in nearly the same way that you got with England or with France or with Germany, once you know. 1970 whatever rolls around. The Spanish state does go back very far to 1478 when Ferdinand and Isabella, you know the the Columbus folks, right? Yeah, when they decided to. Yeah. Of America, yeah, yeah, yeah. And before that, they were the ones like Spain. They kick out the yeah, the, the, the, the Moors, you know, the, the, the Muslims who had kind of taken over a chunk of Iberia as a result of the counter to anyway they take back Spain for Christendom. That would be the way they would have framed it, but they don't actually make a nation, not in any modern sense. Spain is a bunch of independent kingdoms, and those independent kingdoms, up until fairly recently, never really melded together. You've got the Aragonese and you've got Catalans and you've got the Basque. And they have there. And there's, there's more than that. Right. I don't pretend. I'm not going to pretend. This is good. Spanish history is incredibly complicated. It's crazy. I am very far from an expert. And there are still issues with, like, a lot of Catalans and a lot of Basque still want, like, some, at least some degree of independence from the Spanish state. Yeah. Recognition from the nation. Yeah. Yeah. And they all have their own languages and cultural traditions. And one of the things that I learned that's interesting, actually, is that the, the, the like Spanish what we know. Spanish comes from the chunk of, uh, like the the language group that was kind of most dominant in Iberia, but they actually stole the word for the country from, I think it was the Catalan. So like it, it's it's very anyway very complicated history. And for most of Spanish history, the only unifying factors of all these very disparate groups of people were the crown, the king and the Catholic Church, and mainly the Catholic Church right now. In the 1800s, Spain was dominated. By a review or Spain was kind of overtaken Spanish thought was overtaken by a revolution in classical liberalism. Right. That sort of takes over a lot of parts of Europe at this point in time. Yeah, in Spain is, is, is, is included in that. But in Spain, this kind of new liberal wave largely failed to push for any kind of mass Spanish identity it didn't like. And you, this is where you start to get like French identity, right? And like, but you you don't really get that. I mean, in France it starts earlier than the 1800s, but like, you don't really get that in a big way in Spain. And part of the reason is that kind of the cultural elites fail to institute any meaningful education reforms for the majority of the population. Like France in the same. Establishes a functional education system. And by contrast, Spain's failure to do this means that education remains the purview of the Catholic Church. They do most of the educating, and it's only for the wealthy. And the country would deal with widespread illiteracy well into the 1900s and when you don't have. Mass public education. One of the things you don't have is a widespread idea of the history and like, what your nation is and like. Right. That's part of why. Yeah. Anyway, there's not nationalism is not really much of a thing in Spain as a result of this. They're too busy killing off meso Americans. And they're absolutely, that's one of the things we're a huge imperial power. And sometimes they're the first world power. Like the first power that's like on and on a level of, like, what the US was earlier in our lifetimes. Yeah. Yeah. Knowing like be being a Californian married to a Mexican woman like you know you you have to somehow kind of know a little Spanish history as to why these why these Mayans are speaking Spanish, you know, I'm saying and like and and you know, because the part of Mexico, she's from there, from southern Mexican Mexico. So like they're they're kind of Maya, you know? I mean and but yeah this like weird, like. How they exported this, like, colorism and just, yeah, weird eliteness and yeah, but at the same time, can't nobody in your country read, you know, so it was just this weird, like, thing happening with Spain. Yeah, it's it's very weird. And like, if we're going to be completely fair, like if you look at the system of sort of slavery that was instituted in what we now call Latin America, it's it's one of the few systems of slavery in history that's like on the same level as what we had in the American S like. Absolutely. And and and and genocides. So I'm not trying to, like, whitewash Spanish history. No, not saying they don't have nationalism. It's just not. It's not the same as it is with a lot. That's what I'm saying. But that's I'm adding to it like that. It's peculiar that they had such an imperialistic power without this, like, national identity. Yeah, it is. It's very odd. Like Spain is an interesting country to study. Now, the Catholic Church was a major force in Spain for pushing against the development of a modern liberal state right in the 1800s. You don't really have nations. Anywhere up until like start, like that concept kind of starts like in the 1700s, you like think ***** a lot less. The idea of like a nation, the way that we conceive of one is kind of born in this. Seventeen, 1800s and the Catholic Church in Spain really pushes against the modern liberal state. This was largely due to the fact that liberalism had a an anticlerical bias, right? The Catholic Church for the medieval period is like the most power, the big power in the world, right? They have influence everywhere in Christendom and they start to lose it in this. Because governments are like, well, where are we going to let it church in Italy? Tell our government, like, we're England. I don't like, I don't give a **** what you said. Yeah, yeah. And the, you know, Catholic Catholicism is huge in Spain, and the church is like, you know, we don't want any of this **** going on. So yeah, Spain, the church pushes against kind of a lot of of modernizing ideas. And one of those things is that Spain fails to develop a modern military system. And while it was, again, a massive military power, they never do like what France does where you, you start this idea of a nation under arms and of a modern professional style of the military that takes a lot longer to develop in Spain. And it's part of why they don't do so well. Than everyone else develops a modern military right? And they start losing their empire, both to a combination of European powers taking their **** from them and from a lot of revolutions in places they had controlled. That overthrows them. And so the 1700s and 1800s, a rapid decline in Spanish power, it had been declining before then, but yeah, now the ultimate collapse of Spanish imperialism really comes in 1898, when the United States goes to war with Spain for no reason really, and takes over Cuba and the Philippines. Cuba just because. It's a Jessica randomly, just like, hey, you wanna new Imperial power? We could be that, yeah. And there, you know, Spain is an unbelievably brutal, particularly in the Philippines. And then we take over and we're unbelievably brutal in the Philippines. And the people there are like, oh, you guys. So are we going to have a democracy now? And we're like, no, no, no, no, no, no. We want your ****. Like, we want your ****. You know? We're going to take your, we're setting you free so we can own you. Yeah. I mean. I don't have that kind of freedom. It's that kind of freedom. It's that kind of freedom. Yeah, like we don't even let women in our country vote. You think we're going to let you vote? What are you what are you talking about? It's 1898, *************. Yeah. So interesting. Yeah. Nothing changes. No, it's just your leaders speak English now. Yeah, that's. I mean, our guns are better. Our guns are a lot better than Spanish guns. Oh, they're guns. Sucked. That's why we're in charge now. Yeah, colonialism. So, so one of the things that's interesting about Spain is lady late 1800s, you know, 1890s, early 1900. That's like the height of of colonialism right before World War One starts. Like like murders, a lot of the great powers that controlled the whole world. So, like they are the they are riding high. Africa's just been like, you know, murdered, like in a lot of ways, like colonize the scramble for Africa is like at its height. You know, Belgium owns the Congo. It's that. So everyone else. Is doing imperialism is doing gangbusters and Spain's empire collapses. So what happens to everyone else in like the 50s, sixties, 70s? Really happens to Spain like 60, a couple of generations earlier. So they actually go through the they're an empire who goes through the collapse of colonialism while everyone else is doing great at colonialism, which is one of the things that makes them very interesting. So some of the things that happen in colonial powers when their empires collapse, these things that we've seen in Germany and France and England and that we're seeing now in the United States happen in Spain in the late 1890s because it's just the stuff that happens when you're an empire that fails. I find that really interesting, historians. Stanley Payne calls 1898 the first modern post, colonial trauma in Western Europe. And I think you do have to view it as a trauma for the people in Spain. And probably the best equivalent to our own society would be the ongoing trauma that a lot of Americans have faced in Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan. And I'm not trying to minimize the traumas faced in those countries as a result of US action, which are commensurately greater. But we've seen in the MAGA movement, right, and all of these like that have come home and stormed the capital and **** like it. It is a trauma. It's a trauma. You're an empire that fails. It ***** people up who were used to being the empire. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That yeah, that's that's that. I I find that part, like, you know, as again, being a black dude, being like, you know, we the, the, the saying, you know that, like, equality is oppression if all you know is privilege, you know? I'm saying so like when if you just, you're so used to the system working for you the second it doesn't, you're like something must be broken. You're like, Oh no, it was broke. That's why it only worked for you, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was always broke. It was always one of the people that worked for. So yeah, Spain deals with this post colonial trauma very early, right before the rest, before the rest of the Western world, right? Really does because it fails for them. They were the first for it to work and they were the 1st that it failed for, which I guess makes sense. Yeah. Now, like in the US, all those failing colonial ventures that we had flooded the United States with disaffected veterans debt and it fueled the rise of a resentful right wing as well as feeling the rise of a dissident left wing, right? Like both of all of that stuff was really. Incited in a lot of ways by, and obviously I'm not calling the dissident left a bad thing, but like the the those horrible colonial wars we had really fueled a lot of that. And the situation in Spain after 1898 is not all that different now. With her years as a great power seemingly behind her Spanish intellectuals begin to wonder if the sense of exceptionalism that they've always taken for granted had been based on false premises. And I'm going to quote from historian Stanley Payne here. I know, right. Interesting. Yeah. Symptomatic. Of the dismay of the nationalist military was an editorial in El Heraldo Militar on 23rd November 1908, entitled Worse Than Anywhere, it declared. Wherever we look we find greater virility than in our own people. In Turkey, Persia, China, the Balkan states, everywhere we find life and energy, even in Russia. In Spain there is only apathy and submission. How sad it is to think about the situation in Spain. Damn. Yeah. Yeah. Kind of feels like a US and the coronavirus. We're like, yeah, I think Americans can identify with a lot of which is like, wait, they're hearing here. Even if you don't, like, feel it because Claudia's bad. You, you know, the intellectuals in our own society who are saying the same **** right? Yes. Yes. Now, the Spanish political system was not at all stable domestically during the period after, like, while her empire was in freefall. And that's part of why the Empire didn't last from 1803 to the early 1900s. There are more than a dozen military coups. Between 1833 and 1876, Spain was racked by three civil wars, the Carlist Wars, which were not battles against everybody's favorite Tertiary Simpsons character, but were instead members of a Conservative Pro church political movement. The Carlists were the violent armed wing of Catholics, right? They were the the the embodiment of clerical resentment against liberal Spain. They were religious extremists who didn't want the country to modernize. And I found a very detailed write up for students on a Lyman. Dot UK that notes the Carlist Wars quote, were fought with the fervor and brutality derived from deep divisions within Spain. They also lasted longer than national wars and were more difficult to resolve. They anticipated the Spanish Civil War in a number of respects. There was a strong element of different and conflicting beliefs within the country's profound traditional Catholicism against modern liberal thought, regional independence against traditional central control, political liberalism against deep conservative monarchism. So this is all the stuff that's been cooking up in the background of Spanish politics at the turn of the 20th century. Now, partly as a result of the Carlist wars, Spain had a relatively underdeveloped right wing in this. Because, you know, a lot of them getting gotten killed in wars and they've been very tied to the church. So there wasn't as much like a nationalist right wing, it was a Catholic right wing. Now, Spanish nationalism, as I said, was kind of nascent and didn't really start to erupt into the street until after World War One in Spain was neutral in World War One. So you think they might be in a better position? Because I don't really get involved in this. And it does delay a lot of political extremism in the country. It's why they don't have like, you know, a communist movement that's really a big deal. Until after the war, the first Big street fight in Spain between radical political groups actually happened between two opposed groups of nationalists in 1919. Radical catalysts, which are like big, like advocates of Catalan separatism, had been holding peaceful nightly demonstrations in favor of independence throughout 1918. In January of 1919, a group of right wing Espanola. Those who are like nationalists, violence, Spanish nationalists, assaulted this gathering of peaceful catalysts. Both groups battled it out in the streets of Barcelona and what would soon become a familiar display, the Espanol Listas, were a mix of local army officers in mind from a group calling itself the Liga Patriotica Espanola. This violence was soon superseded by a spree of organized political murders by Anarcho, syndicalist from a labor federation called the CNT. And this is, like, unrelated to the the national separatism. There's also, and we'll talk about anarchism in a second. A bunch of anarchist extremists start murdering people based on like, like, based on class. Really? Yeah. And that brings us a temporary stop to all of the street fighting because the murders bring the cops out against all sorts of what are considered to be political extremists. And it briefly, it's what we're about to see in the United States. Yeah. And it briefly clamps down on all political organization in the streets. Yeah. Now in most of Western Europe anarchists tended to be smaller, like they weren't fairly rare for anarchists to make a large percentage of political radicals in the European country. And it's much more common for like socialists and communists to be a significant like forces, significant like sized force. Ukraine would be an an exception to that. We talked about Nestor Machno on our Christmas episodes and part of why Ukraine had a large and organized anarchist movement is that Ukraine was largely agrarian and one of the things we see. In in like Europe in this period of time is that nations that have a large industrial base and a lot of industrial workers have a huge communist movement. Nations that are primarily rural and agricultural have a large anarchist movement because anarchists are more common come and kind of come out of agrarian rural communities more often than comedy because communism is a workers movement. Marks early on in his career was very much like you like kind of wrote off for a long time rural people was like, no, it's all about the workers, it's about industrial. Like them, you can organize and you can use them to take, you know, take over the system, basically. And, like, rural people are kind of a lost cause. And he did change on that later in his life and stuff. But like, that's part of why you don't really see Communism erupt out of rural areas in this. You see anarchism when you see left wing extreme. Yeah. Yeah. OK yeah. So I'm going to quote it. Yeah. It's. It's interesting. Right. I didn't actually know. Thought of that. Yeah. And that's part of why when I think about ways in which to pull people in rural America away from right wing extremism, I think of more systems like democratic confederalism or libertarian municipalise like Bookchin that are kind of more of an out of a more anarchist view. Because like a lot of these libertarians, I do think you can pull into a more reasonable system that's not right wing extremism. Because a lot of their basic ideology is I want to be left alone. And I think, yeah, you could be like, well, we we want to leave you alone. We just also would like to be left alone. And we figure out a way to like, yes, yes, yeah. So I'm going to quote from lehman.uk again on kind of politics in Spain. In this. Quote, capitalist industry had not developed in the same way as it had in Germany, Britain and America, and Spain had little in the way of organized labor. After small scale beginnings in 1868, anarchism came to be a major revolutionary influence of the 20th century and was more widely embraced in Spain than other left wing ideas. The movement first gained notice in the 1870s after a violent incident at the town of Alcoy in 1873 when anarchists took advantage of a strike to spread radical ideas. Causing the police to fire on the gathered populace. A clampdown was enforced that sent the movement underground. Consequently, it became largely based in rural areas which were more difficult to police. Anarchism was reduced to individual acts of terrorism, which in turn were met by repression and torture by the state throughout the 1880s and 1890s. By the early 20th century terrorism had given way to a belief in Anarcho syndicalism. This was the theory that the state could be challenged by cooperative action by the workers and strikes. The Federation of Worker Societies and the of the Spanish region was formed in 1900. This movement organized strikes to exercise political power and was again suppressed. Wage cuts and closures of factories in Barcelona in 1909, together with the callup of men for a colonial war in Morocco led to a general strike in the city on 26th of July. This turned out to be a major event with 1700 arrests attacks on railway lines. Anticlericalism hostility to the church, 80 churches and monasteries were attacked, the government response was swift and merciless, and five leaders were executed. And this is a big thing with, like, a, particularly the anarchists in Spain, they burn a lot of churches down and they kill a lot of Catholic priests and some of that. A lot of that is them murdering people who didn't deserve it. And a lot of them is that is them murdering people who did. Because the Catholic Church is also terrible. Like, yeah, they're pretty out of pocket. There's not, there's not, there's not this. If you're looking for like, a pure good guy or a pure victim, you will rarely find it in this. Like, there are, right. Like, obviously I'm not saying like, like, there's nuns and ****. You get murdered. That's not. Yeah. Chill. Yeah. The Catholic Church is also responsible for horrible repression. It's very messy, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. They're yeah. They, you know, they have their own. You know. Both versions of, like, ******* episode of like, the, like, The Good Christmas one, that's like, oh, we invented orphanages. You know, saying it's like, oh, that's actually great, you know? Yeah. And then there's then there's this. Yeah. And the Catholic Church is so big because you can also, you could obviously, we could do multiple episodes and we probably will at some point about the massive and pervasive sexual abuse of children that was enabled by the Catholic Church. We could, could and should also do a Christmas episode on the significant number of priests and nuns in Latin America who were like. Doggett and constant enemies of US imperialism and right wing extremism during, like, the period when the US was doing most of its ******* around in Latin America. All of that's part of the Church's history of it's true. They're like half of our hospital beds are actually Catholic. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. There's like weird mix. Yeah, yeah. I I'm not a person who wants to, like, simplify all this. It's very messy. And this is a messy episode. Messy boy by this point when you've got these anarcho syndicalist organizing and like and and in some cases. Carrying out not all of them, but some of them carrying out terrorist attacks, and some of those attacks are on ****** people, and some of those attacks are on people who don't deserve it, like it's very messy. And at the same period of time you've got Gabriel de Nunzio in Italy occupying, well, I guess in Yugoslavia, occupying the city of fume, and you've got Mussolini in the early stages of forming his black shirts and sticking them on left wing newspapers. This is happening contemporaneously to that you're going to like, you're going to have to release with this one a a vocabulary list because this is you've introduced some new names. New words to what we talked about denunzio and few. No, no, I'm not talking about him. I'm talking about the different factions in Spain. Yeah, you said it. You said a narco syndicalism. Yeah, narco. So you know, said sternocleidomastoid out this bug and anarchist syndicalist. The basic idea is that workers need workers who work for in like different factories or whatever, who work in and farms wouldn't even need to form syndicates together to organize. Kind of like unions to organize. And. Of syndicates that work together against the state and against capital in order to, in some cases, just gain better wages for workers. In some cases in order to revolt against the system. But like, it's this idea that different organized groups of workers need to organize themselves and then work with other organizations of workers, rather than having bosses in a strict hierarchy. And they totally need to sell drugs. That's why they call Narcos, yeah. The good thing about this. Is that drugs are all legal everywhere. So by this point, like I said, de Nunzio's occupying fume and Mussolini is in the early stages of like forming the Blackshirts. Fascism is getting started in Italy and in Spain, though anarchists are by far the largest and best organized group of political radicals in the country. The communists aren't really a big factor and the right wing isn't really a big factor. It's just kind of the anarchists fighting the government a lot of the time. And the Catholic Church, you know, is is kind of a lot of their like supporters are kind of taking the part of right. Being organizing, but the Carlist wars kind of drained them, so it's not a big deal there and this is not really the case anywhere else that you could think of. And it's part of why I find Spain so interesting. Fascism, by contrast, had a much slower time starting off in Spain. Portugal actually beat Spain to the punch when it came to like having fascists, and it was because of proto nationalist group called Nacionalismo. Lusitano was formed in Lisbon in 1923 and it was directly inspired by Mussolini's Italian Fascism. Now a number of other Mussolini. Wanna be sprang up in Europe during this. You could even call Hitler at the time of the beer hall putch, kind of like a Mussolini imitator. Yeah, but the idea didn't really catch on in Spain, not yet. Spanish intellectuals were, however, watching events in Italy. And one of them, a guy named FWAA, suggested that this new political system might just be the thing to help rebuild Spain's failing empire. He rode a fascism as a social movement. It gave voice to a vein of mysticism and idealism that exalted the concept of the Patria in its full realization, the concept of the Fatherland. Yeah, yeah, patria. There's a patria coffee shop in Compton. Yeah. Name with some troubling. Yeah. So the the name of the game for foil was national restoration. But Mussolini's fun idea was popular outside of right wing circles, too. There was actually a left wing Catalan separatist movement that found themselves drawn to Italian fascism, particularly its emphasis on militia based direct action. And they weren't fascists. They didn't embrace, for example, Mussolini's doctrine of therapeutic violence. You know, the cult of violence, for violence's sake. They just liked #1 the imagery of this non state group of armed people marching in order to take power for themselves and they wanted to do that. So like the left is when we talked about this in our first episode, a lot of folks who are just kind of hate the system play with both fascist and anarchist and left and right wing ideas throughout this period of time. Also, I like that you brought up Portugal because I feel like they always fly under the radar they do. They're just everybody just not noticing they could just exist in the shadows. They was the 1st in Africa. You know, I'm saying, yeah. So yeah. Like, nobody, like, how come nobody ever talked about Portugal? And they're also the case of a country that was incredibly powerful and colonized a ******** of the world and then collapsed before the rest of colonialism did. Yeah. And you see, the same thing happened in Portugal, where all these authoritarians start coming into power because there's this sense of, like, we need a strong man. And this is like, intellectuals in Spain will be like we have to, or in Portugal will be like, we can't have a Republic for a while. We have to have basically a dictator come in because he needs to fix everything. Like we have all these problems. Can't argue. We just need 1 visionary to come in. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's not quite fascism, but it's it has a lot of elements of that. Yeah. Right. Yeah. So Robert, can you hit add Rick real quick? You know what else has elements of fascism, Sophie? No, no, no. Don't capitalism aspects. Yeah, here's. The. Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one. Mint Mobile just has premium wireless from 15 bucks a month. There's no trapping you into a two year contract. 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Better help calm behind. Hey, Robert Evans here. It's been like two months since I got LASIK laser eye surgery and my vision still 2020. So many things about my daily life has changed. I don't have to worry about putting on a mask in my glasses fogging up and have to take out contacts at night or put them in the day. I don't have to like, worry all the time when I'm traveling. Like, how many contacts do I have by go swimming at the lake during the summer? Something I like to do, go to the beach or whatever. I don't have to worry about losing a contact or, you know, bringing swimming glasses or something with me. Everything is just easier. And getting it done was easy too. You know. I went in, I had my consultation. They told me I was a good candidate. And then I went back in a couple of days later about a Bing bada boom. You know, my eyes were perfect. So LASIK Plus is a leader in laser vision correction in the United States. They have over 20 years in the industry and more than two million treatments performed. If you want to start your LASIK plus journey, you can get $1000 off when treated in September. That's 500 per eye. So visit my LASIK offer. Dot com to schedule your free consultation now. We're back. We're back from sorry. If by strongman you mean a strong Sophie that keeps us in in place, then yes, these ads have elements of fascism, but it's a good fascism. It's a it's a fashion, fashion, fashion fashionista word. Which is fine. Fine. It's fine, it's fine. And we. Yeah, we appreciate our podcast dictator. So yes, our podcast tickles with an iron fist. It does operate a system of political reeducation camps, but that is a story for another episode. So in late 1923, Spain gained its first real Fascist party, the transistors. They wore a blue uniform because blue is the color of the working class for the right wing. Red is the color of the working class for the left wing, right. Like, I know, I know. It's yeah. And it we got it backwards here. Which is weird, right? Yeah, yeah, there were a blue uniform and they hope to spread throughout the country, but the organization fizzled. There just wasn't any real interest in fascism in Spain in this period. Now, while political fascism failed to gain meaningful purchase in Spain during this time, fascist thought and inclinations were spreading among a lot of influential Spanish thought leaders, and particularly within the military and military officers. Much of this had to do with the rise of the revolutionary left in the 1890s, these anarchists that I was talking about. In his landmark book fascism in Spain, scholar Stanley Payne notes that the military resistance to the left had less to do with politics than you might expect. Officers largely accepted moderate left wing social and economic aims, and there was even a strong strain of anti capitalist thought among Spanish military leaders. Despite this pain rights, Army officers demanded suppression of the left's disorder, violence, and subversion of national unity. So again it's this. The military's big problem with the left is their disordered right. They're trying to tear down this system. And we're we're doing pretty well in this system. It's the thing that is always the case, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Now, because the military itself was also heavily divided at this time, not along political lines, but between bureaucratic officers on the peninsula itself and combat officers who'd spent time fighting in Spain's last colonial possession, northern Morocco. So Spain's most of its empires has collapsed right now. But they have northern Morocco, and Spain had gotten Morocco. Basically during the last stages of the scramble for Africa, and it was, it was given to them by France and England, who, you might notice, don't have the right to give Morocco to anyone. But they did. Yeah. And it was due to, like, diplomatic support that Spain gave them. Like, it was literally like it was them the way that, like a normal person to be like, hey, man, I'll help you move if you help me set up my sound system this week. Like that's how Spain got Morocco. It's very crazy. Yeah. It's, you know, it's ********. It's also a beautiful country. Gorgeous. Yeah, yeah. Now, so they were given the right to occupy the land by France and England in 1906 in exchange for diplomatic support. And Spain's conquest of Morocco was kind of like the first one night stand you have after a breakup. They they just had like a big, you know, they they they needed something to boost their confidence after losing to the United States and Spain turned out to be pretty bad at conquering Morocco. Their control never amounted to much more than a few towns, cities and roads on the coast. Much of the territory and its people refuse to yield. And in 1921? Charismatic Moroccan leader named Abdul Karim Rose an army and launched what became known as the Riffi insurrection. For a time, it was the strongest rebellion against colonialism in anywhere in the Afro Asian world. Like these guys actually do great for a while, you know? Now. The war attracted ambitious young Spanish officers eager to make a name for themselves. One of these guys was a fellow named Francisco Franco, who rose to the rank of Colonel fighting the insurgents. Now Francisco and a lot of young officers were very frustrated by the corrupt and bureaucratic nature of the military, which had not seen a major reorganization or modernization in decades. It was a lot in a lot of ways, like a Napoleonic army with, you know, somewhat better guns. Which is why partway getting their ***** kicked. Now Franco and a number of other officers formed military councils of like minded officers and lobbied for reforms. And some of those reforms were successful, but nothing they did was enough to write the inertia. In early 1921, the Spanish Army launched an offensive into northern Morocco. From the coastal territories they held now because the people in charge were idiots, they didn't properly prepare lines of communication, and they almost immediately advanced beyond their supply lines. They no defensible forts were left behind to secure supply routes or water. And on July 22nd, after 5 days of skirmishes, a force of 5000 Spanish troops were attacked by 3000 Rift fighters. This should have been an easy win for a European military, but the Spanish had poor organization and we're basically out of ammo because they outrun their supply lines. So the rifts, the riffy. Like overrun the Spanish army and they advanced like several 100 miles, slaughtering Spanish soldiers, taking over supply depots and positions as they go, the Spanish army shatters entirely. They lose more than 13,000 men wounded in a matter of days, and the rift suffer around 800 casualties. This is like a like one of the worst defeats suffered by annual colonial power in Africa. It is they get their ***** handed to them. The defeat was so extensive and so shameful that the Spanish general committed suicide in the field and his remains were never found. Like it is they it is out there out there, yeah. And the riff, this whole instruction is fascinating to read about because, like, these guys ******* have it on lockdown. You know, man, it is hard to imagine how shattering this was to the people of Spain and their image of themselves and how much it disrupted Spanish politics. The military was, of course enraged and even though the failures. They're entirely their own, yeah. They blame their failures on the support of the civilian government. It's y'all's fault. Tiara Sport, we're bad at war. That's what's wrong with my cheese. No, you know, I'm saying it's like, well, I didn't lose this war. Yeah, I mean, you see it on the right here where it's like it was the liberals and, like, the left that lost us the wars, and like, no, you we're we suck at this. We're bad at it. You look, man, take it on the chin, OK? We're bad at it, and it's bad. It was. You shouldn't have been there in the 1st place. Yeah. If we ******* stopped this **** and, like, I don't know, 1945, we'd still be like. You know, we're good at is war. Don't have to do it often you're good at it. But when we show up is we show up, yeah. Uh, now? Again, yeah. Really ***** up a lot in Spain at this period of time. And obviously the liberal government is also enraged largely at the cost in Spanish life and treasure in this colonial adventure. And in early September 1923, three liberal ministers resigned in protest because the military draws up plans for a new offensive in Morocco. And they're like, come on, guys like you just got your ***** kicked. This isn't terrible idea. Fellas. Fellas, can you not take the message? Yeah, it's been out there. It's bad. Yeah, bad dog catalysts who didn't even really want to be part of Spain, let alone send their sons to die in ******* Morocco for Spain held a huge rally in Barcelona where the Spanish flag was dragged through the ground. This really ****** off the military, and it ****** off a bunch of senior generals, most prominently a career military man from a career military family named Miguel Primo de Rivera, now as the Captain general of Barcelona. The guy in charge of the military in Barcelona, de Rivera, was a desk officer, not an African veteran, and that's kind of like the the the break between the army. But he sides with the African veterans and he sees this liberal government as having failed his illustrious Spanish army. He also had seen Mussolini's March on Rome in 1922, and while he is not a fascist, he really likes Mussolini. And the March on Rome convinces him that with the army behind him, he could force an end to the parliamentary politics that he felt were holding the military back. And I'm going to quote now from a book called Fascism in Spain. About like this revolt that Derivera leads. The revolt began in Barcelona as a classic pronounce samiento I'm sorry spade with a local takeover in the Catalan capital by its captain General, who called upon the rest of the army and other patriotic Spaniards to rally round. In fact, also in the traditional style, all but one of the other captains general at first sat on their fence. The pronouncement into yeah, succeeded above all because the liberal government did almost nothing to defend itself. The issue was finally decided two days later by the crown as Alfonso the. 8th without invoking constitutional limits or procedures, transferred power to what would become the first direct military dictatorship in Spanish history, Primo de Rivera gave no evidence of any explicit theory or plan. His assumption of power was at first predicated on a 90 day emergency military directory to deal with such problems as attempted subversion, the stalemate in Morocco, administrative corruption, and political reform. In fact, his only professed ideology was constitutional liberalism. He insisted that the Constitution of 1876 remained the law of the land. And initially denied that he was a dictator in any genuine sense insisting in his first public statement no one can with justice apply that term to me. Of course everyone sense has called him a dictator. Yeah the years of yeah. What is it about is I have two questions about this like I forget what I forget what what historian I heard saying but he just talking about like just generals like they all kind of have this like diva gene like they just they just kind of Divas you know what I'm saying? Yes. It's kind of hard to like, what is that? So that's like, my first thing. It's very deep in in Western civilization particularly. Right. Like, you have to look back to Rome at this stuff. So the way generals in Rome were were treated #1, if you were a general in Rome and you had a major military victory, the Senate would vote for you to have what was called a triumph, which is where you were all but in, in all but name King for a day of Rome. And there was this, the whole city had this huge party for you, and all of your trophies of war were dragged through the streets and like. Because you were so powerful and so, like, basically worshipped that day. It was one guy's whole job to stand next to you the whole time and throughout the day. Whisper to you, your will die at one point. Like, you're going to die someday. Yeah. Like, that was like, yeah, like that. That like to remember. And Rome constantly had civil wars that were the result of generals taking their armies and taking power. It happened all of the ******* time. Yeah. It's why you got Caesar. It's why it stopped being a Republic. You know, one of the reasons why the United States military is organized. The way it is and why there's such if you look at, like, some of the **** that the military was saying at the end of Trump's time, like, why they had so many statements about the military having no role in the elections is because from the beginning, the founders of this country were like, that's going to be a problem. It's like we're going to have a military that's going to be. And at first, a lot of them were like, we shouldn't have a military. Why would you like it? Always is a problem. Let's just have a bunch of militias. Yeah. You know which there's something to be said for that. Yeah, yeah. Anyway. But like, yeah, they are Divas. Like, if you're going to take the responsibility for the lives of 10s, of thousands of men. To your own personal control. You gotta be a little bit of a diva, right? Kind of, yeah, it seemed like it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, so obviously everyone today calls Primo de Rivera a dictatorship. The years of his leadership are generally known in Spanish history as La Dictadura. And this was met like his. His coming to power was met by a lot less resistance than you might guess. Spain was exhausted by years of political bickering, foreign policy setbacks and economic frustration. Several years earlier, political theorists in Portugal had talked about the need to bring in a temporary. Dictator what they called an iron surgeon to solve intractable problems. And Primo de Rivera was one of a lot of strong men who came to power throughout Europe in this. Who weren't fascists, although they often admired fascists and took some ideas from them. But de Rivera doesn't really have an ideology. He's just wants to, like, fix things and figures is enough of a narcissist that he's like, I know how to do this. And while De Rivera wasn't a fascist, his brief reign would help further lay the groundwork for fascism in Spain and the war that he brought to Morocco. It was in many ways a prelude of fascist wars, of extermination to come, only it was waged with the help of his allies, the French. Oh yeah. See, after the Spanish army broke at annual, which is that big battle where they lose like 13,000 dudes. The Abdel Karim who was the the guy in charge of the reef and his his his like, I don't know what you want to call them. Revolutionaries, yeah. Established a Republic, now France, who just fought a whole war, you know, World War One over. What they claimed was was the right of national self-determination and who were a Republic themselves did not like that Abdul Karim and his wife. Established a Republican Morocco because they're afraid they own a bunch of Africa. They own a bunch of Africa near Morocco. Very close. Yeah. People are gonna hear that there's a Republic that isn't run by Europe and they're going to, they're they're not going to want to have us in charge anymore. Like, wait, this is an option? Yeah. Option. Yeah. Yeah. We can have a democracy and not you. Yeah. And it's like, yeah, kind of like that. Yeah, yeah. France is like, no, that's not, that's not gonna happen. No, not an option. Not an option. Not an option. So they decide to enter the war against the riff on Spain side to crush the rebels. In 1925, France and de Riveras reformed Spanish army begin a counter offensive against the riff. Now, leading things on the French side was a fellow named Marshall Petain, Hero of the Battle of Verdun during World War One. And the guy who would become the leader of Vichy France during World War Two. He's the guy who collaborates with the Nazis now. Potato at this point, yeah, I know. He's a real ***** ** ****. Rockets didn't kill this guy. He's a he's a war hero at this point, too, though, because he he led France through the battle over done is if you're making a short list of the very worst battles in the entire history of human warfare, Verdun might be #1, you know, Stalingrad. There's a couple of other like, but it's it is, it's in, it's in the running, you know, it's horrible. Like a million people. It's a terrible, terrible battle. So he's a big war hero. And when he decides he wants to go to Morocco, the French Government is going to give him everything he asks for. So he puts together a force of 150,000 men to face Abdel Karim's tribesmen who were very well organized and good fighters, but they numbered just 20,000. The offensive started with one of the first, yeah, amphibious landings. Yeah. There's no like Gandalf showing up and helping. No, no, we don't. We don't get a Gandalf in this story. I'm sorry. Outgunned and outmanned. Yeah, you guys are just like you're ******. It's it's a bummer. Yeah, and this amphibious landing is started, spearheaded by young Colonel named Francisco Franco, who led the soldiers of the Spanish Foreign Legion into battle. Now you have seen the Spanish Foreign Legion. Everyone in America pretty much did. Because at the start of the coronavirus lockdown, when Spain had a lockdown, we brought in the military to help. There were pictures of a bunch of very jacked and very handsome Spanish soldiers in incredibly tight fitting. Uniforms marching down the streets of Barcelona and a bunch of US liberals were like, Oh my God, they're so hot. Why can't we have those soldiers here? Yeah, I'm gonna tell you the back story of those soldiers, because those were the men of the Spanish Foreign Legion, and it's not a great back story. No. So it was crazy. Was crazy about like the the, the, the geography right now, like, I don't know this back story that you about to say, but I'm just picturing the geography because OFA Costa del Sol at the edge of of the edge of Spain to the tip of Tangiers in Morocco. It's just the Mediterranean Sea. It's a 90 minute boat ride. Yeah, it's so far right. It's not far you. It's almost like you could sit in Morocco and watch it. Like, yeah, you come to Spanish, you can get your band. Been to Africa in the time you would get 1/4 of the way across Texas, right? Like, it's nothing. It's it really is. Yeah. Do we know who designed the uniforms? We're going to talk about why the uniforms look the way they do. Yeah. So the Spanish Foreign Legion were founded by Sophie. He's not a pointy ************. They're hot. They're hot. Like they're they're hot *************. You know, forms. They're like a nice. They are like, they are fashion good. Hell, but they are. They are hot. Nobody's arguing that they're not hot. Like, effectively, way too tight. Yeah. No one is arguing that they're not good looking men. Agree about this, but problematic. So yeah, they're found. The Spanish Foreign Legion was founded in 1919 in mimicry of the French Foreign Legion, since Spain was also mimicking French ambitions in North Africa. At this point, the founder of the Legion was a guy named Milan astray, a veteran of Spain's brutal war in the Philippines and of the fighting in Morocco, and he wanted to create a colonial army for Spain that they could use to regain some of their lost glory. He created an interlocking series as he founded, like when he founded the the The Foreign Legion. He wanted them to be brutal. Because if you're going to keep a colonial possession, you have to murder a lot of people, right? Sheesh. That's how colonialism you have to kill a lot of people, God. And so your soldiers have to be soulless, broken men in order to gun down the proper number of children to keep an empire. These are he wanted to shock troops and you know, I mean and fine as hell. You just send me the picture. That's why I was like, good God, God, I know, I know. Nobody's arguing. Like, yeah, I get why the reaction was what it is. Like the Spanish Foreign Legion today look like characters in like, they look like characters in a ***********. Like, they don't look like real soldiers. They look like fake soldiers from a sleazy ****. Yes, yes. Yeah. And they kind of did then. So Milana stray in order to make sure these guys are as brutal as possible, creates for them and interlocking series of hazing rituals. With the goal of, like, shattering these men's souls. And he wants to explicitly. He's like, I want to separate these men from their past lives in unify them in quote brotherhood and death. Now, Milan astray was a big fan of the Bushido code of the Samurai. Here we go. Yeah, I know, I know. All of these ******* guys. And he cribs from Bushido to write his own legionary creed. What's emphasized tireless duty, bodily hardness. Which is why they're all jacked unconditional. Brotherhood and fighting to the death, and I'm going to quote from a write up and Prospect magazine on the Foreign Legion here. Many of these themes were common across fascist movements and the militaries they influenced, but others were distinct to the Legion. Legionary swore to become bridegrooms of death from the title of a popular song about a legionnaire sacrifice in the riff, renouncing familial and romantic bonds and sublimating them into loyalty to each other and the legions flag. You are married to death. Death is your wife. She's not married to the streets. You're not married to the game, you married to death. So if you think these guys are hot. They have bad news for you. They're ******* the grim Reaper. Yeah. Yeah. They sorry. You don't you don't attract them. Yeah, you are too alive for me. That's not my type. Yeah. So these these guys, the reason why they have these shirts with, like, really open weird necklines is that I'm going to need you to rephrase that. What's weird about that? It's it's they're showing it off. Why they are showing it off. It's also meant to emphasize their willingness to fight in the hot desert air. And the green is from like, the color. It's like early camouflage, yeah. Sadie, this is what I wish was normal. Sophie, they are married to the concept of murdering children. I'm sorry, I mean, I'm not here for that, but the David guy bulges don't like, I know they have both dudes, right? Said the pants are subjectively too tight. But, like, go ahead, this is not functional. Pastel mint color. You know, none of that you this beautiful is a functional y'all or not, you have to be married to death because nothing about this says you ready to survive. It kind of looks like it kind of looks like it's the tin man from the Wizard of Oz. Worked at baskin-robbins and had to go do a ***** shoot later. So Franco and his Foreign Legion men. Franco and his Foreign Legion men were the tip of the spear of the French and Spanish governments thrust into the heart of Morocco. OK, overwhelming. You just did that. Nice. Are you nice? Yeah, I know. I know, Sophie, but we're about to talk about genocide. OK, OK, but you know what you just did there? You know what we need to take a break for? The tip of the spear doesn't just mean * **** a break. Robert did. Alright, we're gonna go to ads. We're gonna go to ads, and then we're going to talk about. Colonial genocide, yes. Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one. Mint Mobile just has premium wireless from 15 bucks a month. There's no trapping you into a two year contract. You're opening the bill to find all these nuts fees. There's no luring you in with free subscriptions or streaming services that you'll forget to cancel and then be charged full price for none of that. For anyone who hates their phone Bill, Mint Mobile offers premium wireless for just $15.00 a month. Mint Mobile will give you the best rate whether you're buying one or for a family and at Mint. Family start at 2 lines. All plans come with unlimited talk and text, plus high speed data delivered on the nation's largest 5G network. 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I don't have to worry about losing a contact or, you know, bringing swimming glasses or something. With me, everything is just easier. And getting it done was easy too. You know, I went in, I had my consultation, they told me I was a good candidate and then I went back in couple of days later about it being about a boom. You know, my eyes were perfect. So LASIK Plus is a leader in laser vision correction in the United States. They have over 20 years in the industry and more than two million treatments performed. If you want to start your LASIK plus journey, you can get $1000 off when treated in September. That's 500 per eye. So visitmylasikoffer.com to schedule your free. Consultation now. Alright, alright, we're back and we are no longer talking about hot guys. We're talking about the genocide those hot guys helped commit. Well, kind of brought it up like that. You know what you're doing bro? I don't. I I'm trying to emphasize that sometimes things that look nice are also fascie as hell and people sometimes sometimes the good looks. So stick it to you. So the overwhelming force too. But with overwhelming force. No, that's anyway. Yeah, they just thrust their differential. OK. *** **** it. Damn it. OK. What? You're doing OK. I know I'm trying to talk about the use of chemical war weapons upon civilians, but I've never wished Jamie Loftus was here more than I am. Very glad. She would have completely lost in the double entendres. She's she's a professional at this. Jesus Christ. I love you, too. The French in the Spanish have so many soldiers and so much high grade military hardware that there is no chance the Rift are going to actually win. Victory was only a matter of time, but de Rivera and Marshall Petain were not willing to wait. And so they started using chemical weapons to slaughter tribes people in mass, and they're not using them on military forces. They first start bombarding the city of Tangier with phosgene gas, which is a deadly chemical weapon. It's what they used in the trenches. It chokes people to death on their own rotting. Once, yeah, it's horrific stuff. The Spanish army began pounding the outskirts of the town, and as soon as Spanish forces started gassing tribes, people, other commanders in the country begged to be able to do the same. One Spanish general wrote of his desire to use them, them being chemical weapons with delight. This is all very good for France, who profited not just from stability and northern Africa, but because they were willing. They were selling Spain the gas. They also profited financially. I'm going to quote from an article on the website Rs 21 here. It was in fact a French business, Schneider, which in 1922 helped to open a plant for the production of toxic shells in Melilla. And indeed the French made an official request. One French General, Lee Outley, made an official request to his supervisors for provisions of chemical weapons in June 1925, justifying that the use of these munitions with their toxic power allows us to spare human lives during our attacks. In face of these bombs, dropped in the most populated regions of the territories controlled by Abdul Karim, the Riffians tried to fight back with non explosive. Projectiles as well as making shells charred with pepper power with little success right up to the end of the Rift war. The Spanish army would continue to use these lethal gases with the support of the French forces, with Marshall Petain at their head in Morocco. So to spare human life, they attack civilian targets with chemical weapons. They're like. So, look, hear me out. I didn't shoot him. I gassed him and his family, he just he died from the air. Yeah, it's some real. We had to destroy the village to save it. Vibes. Yeah. Yeah. So victory in Morocco started the dictator's time in power off. We're talking about De Rivera here. With widespread popular support, he created a political party. The UP, the Patriotic Union, whose motto was monarchy. Fatherland. And religion, his mouthpiece is at the UP, declared that the D Rivera dictatorship was only a transitional thing and that the military dictatorship would eventually be replaced with a civil dictatorship. So this military dictatorship, just temporary. We got a civil dictator. It's going to be fine. It's going to be a good, totally reasonable kind of dictatorship. It's like a dictator without the goods. Like, it's cool. It's cool. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This would be difficult. Yeah. So the the Patriotic Union or the UP was mostly composed of middle class conservative Catholics. Spaniards and historian Stanley Payne notes that in some provinces, sectors of the old political elite did join in dominate. But the organization also incorporated ordinary middle class people who had not previously been politically active. So in spite of the fact that electoral politics didn't exist during the Riveras dictatorship, it served a purpose of rallying and in some ways activating the middle class as a political entity. The EU's goal was to ensure some form of right wing dictatorship remained the permanent government of Spain, and much of their support came from their victory in Morocco. And their success in for the first time igniting widespread nationalism among the Spanish population. The UPS held the country's first mass rallies, and for a while de Rivera and his party were popular. But by 1929, the worldwide economic crash had started to hit Spain as well. The wealthy financiers who backed his regime started to sour on him and some of his interventionalists economic policies. At the same time, De Rivera faced growing resistance from students who were a political factor for the first time in Spain due to the fact that the dictatorship had reformed. The education system. In his last years in power, Rivera sought to stay dictator by taking a leaf from the book of a man he idolized, Benito Mussolini, and this is the first time did Rivera actually kind of goes fascist. OK, but I'm going to quote from the history of Spanish fascism here. Italian diplomatic correspondence from Madrid in the final days of 1929 reported that Primo de Rivera was indicating that he would soon begin a fundamental reorganization of the UP, along the lines of the Fascist party. This reorganization never got started, as Javier Tusell and Ismael Salas have written with the Spanish dictator, felt for Mussolini was considerably more than platonic admiration. He was pathetically incapable of transferring Italian institutions to Spain and was often infantile in his effusive expressions to Mussolini. So he wants to be a fascist by this point. And he's like, he's kind of simping on on, uh, Mussolini. Yeah, yeah. Just like, you're so good. I just want to do what you do. Why can't I be as cool as you? It's kind of sad, my country. He's an old man too. At this point. He's not doing great. Yeah, it is very weird. He's a Mussolini Stan ******** but he just doesn't have what it takes to be a fascist dictator. He just, he's only a normal dictator, you know? You hate to see it. In January of 1930, this dictator was **** canned by his king, who followed him out the door about a year or so later because popular support for the monarchy collapsed as a result of the dictatorship. For a brief, awkward. Spain lacked any kind of legitimate government. Its king and Parliament were gone. A short succession of strong men held powers that national political elite struggled to cobble together some kind of functional government. The whole experience further radicalized the middle class, this time activating large numbers of Spanish liberals who advocated in the streets for a Republican. Government. In 1931, the Spanish Republic was born. Now, this did not thrill a lot of people like it thrilled people, a lot of people. But it also kind of ****** *** a lot of people, particularly young military officers who supported the dictatorship of Francisco. Franco was one of these frustrated men. He'd been a close student of Primo de Rivera and had liked his unofficial title of national boss like Hefe National or something. Yeah, that's yeah. Yeah. Hefe Nacionale is kind of what they and he was like. That idea I like being everybody's boss, yeah. Now, the years of dictatorship proved to Franco that a strong man could unify Spain, bring law and order and military victory. The only error that De Rivera had made in Franco's mind was that he didn't have any kind of ideology. Franco didn't really believe in anything other than, like, I'm the guy who can fix Spain. And when you don't have that, that concerted kind of ideology, you can't hope together a dictatorship very long unless you're willing to be brutal and Primo. You know, he was not a great guy, very brutal in Morocco, but was not willing to be brutal. In Spain, not really. Not compared to any other dictator, you know. And Franco, Franco was with him in Spain. I mean, was with him in Morocco, right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Franco was like, he was a Colonel in Morocco. Yeah. OK and so and one of, like, people will say that, like, De Rivera was a bloodless dictator, which, again, looking at what happened in Morocco, not true. But if you're living in Spain, he's not mass executing people. He's not even mass imprisoning people. He's not hosting huge executions of his political enemies. He's a pretty if you're in Spain. A pretty mild dictator, about as mild as they get this century, you know, which is not to, like, whitewash him anything. It's just like part of why he doesn't stay in power along. You know, you got to be more brutal than he is if you're going to hold power as a dictator. Yeah. Now, Primo de Rivera's fall from power was also a lesson to Benito Mussolini. It convinced him that his regime could not afford to compromise its power at all with an elected parliament. This was in Mussolini saw basically like, oh, the only option I have to become so authoritarian that no one can push me out. And as a result? De Rivera's fall was a major it pushes Mussolini to spring towards more radical, authoritarian policy in 1932. All of this stuff is interconnected, you know, just like everything. Just like just like the Syrian civil war is directly connected to why President Donald Trump became the president, you know? Yeah, like it's all. Everything always is connected. That's the way the ******* world works. Yeah. The Spanish Republic would have just five years of pre war existence. For its first two years the Socialists dominated the government. So not like ******** communists, but definitely like left wing. First two years the left is dominating the Republic for the next two. A center right counter Reformation pushes back against the gains of the left. The tug of war was largely in politics between Socialists, Republican centrists, and Catholic conservatives. And the Catholic Conservatives, starting in 1933 were represented by Spain's first mass Catholic political party and first really powerful right wing political party, the CEDA. And I'm even going to try to tell you what it stands for. We call them Seda, you know, that's the, that's the, that's the, the birth of like, the organized political right in Spain in a way that actually is able to take some power now. The Seda was the primary home for the conservative middle class. They've been radicalized first by Primo de Rivera's dictatorship and next by the early years of left wing power in the Republic. And they're being radicalized both by the fact that the Socialists are in power and they're doing the things socialists do, which is in part to say the church is not going to have power. Like, we're not going to like, let the Catholic Church run things, but also by the like, the anarchists who are still ******* up churches and stuff in this period of time. So it's it's the same it is here. You've got kind of these more moderate people on the left, and then you've got people on the left in the streets doing things that scare these religious conservatives. And make them decide like we have to take back our country. That happens in Spain too. It's a familiar story again to everyone listening. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, a number of socialist laws were passed that clamped down on the power and prestige of the church in this. And obviously there were again widespread, like there were anarchists attacked 50 convents in Madrid in 1931. And again, this helps energize the right. It's also if you're a Spanish anarchist who grew up living under a Catholic Church that did all of the kind of ****** ** **** we know the Catholic Church to do. Nobody's again. Nobody, nobody. Nobody's a monster here. Well, there are some monsters. We're about to talk about them, but yeah, this enraged fundamentalists and the CEDA. Like, because of how angry they were at the left. The SITA is never a party that accepts the necessity of democracy, right? They want to take power and institute a Catholic state. They don't believe the Republic that they're participating in is legitimate. Which also sounds familiar to her public dominions. Yeah, the dominionists. OK, yeah, yeah. Now again, while this is all going on, the radical left in Spain tried several times to carry out insurrections against the Republic. So the anarchists, because they're anarchists, do try to overthrow the Republic. They don't like the Republic either, for different reasons than the CEDA in some cases they even fought alongside communists. Communists and anarchists are pretty good at working together in this. Compared to how they'll be later. They attacked police stations, and in 1934 they succeeded in taking over large chunks of the state of asterius. This insurrection got far enough that the Republic called in their Imperial shock troops, the Foreign Legion, who brutally suppressed their revolt by massacring basically everybody they could just gunning people down in huge numbers. The thing, the only thing that they do, you know, that's why you have these guys to murder everybody to put everybody down. Everybody shut up when I get there. Yeah, everybody. Yeah, everybody sitting down. We do not have machine guns because we're good at being like, at discriminating with our violence. We have machine guns because it makes it faster, you know? Sounds like a Stephanie. She just come in and every. I'm not asking who did what or why. This is broke. Everybody sit down. Just your aunt who comes in with the. ******* sandal. And just starts. Yeah, like you don't need to call. Yeah, yeah. We in Spain. Yeah. She come here with the champ like she's just air air by getting it. I don't got. No, I don't wanna hear nothing. Everybody getting it. Yeah, well, Stephanie, the CNT, who's that anarcho syndicalist party, launches constant strikes in this. Largely because they're angry that the Republic had failed to restart. So when the Republic comes to power, the far left is like because the far left are anarchists and they're agricultural, right? They're primarily in rural areas, and most of Spain's agricultural land, like 70% or more, is owned by just like rich ******** who make the people who are actually farming it pay them unreasonable rent, and it like keeps them impoverished. And the radical left is like we should. The land should belong to the people who farm it. Yeah, maybe. Why don't we do that? Like, yeah, I understand we got a lot of radical thoughts. This don't feel radical, though. Yeah, it doesn't. It's not like it isn't the time. It shouldn't be. Yeah. This really shouldn't be around. It shouldn't be. They were glance. They should own it. Let's see. Yeah. The Republic being a Republic gave them some of what they want, but not much. They redistribute about 10% of Spain's uncultivated land of the peasants. And that really ****** off the anarchists. So they launched a bunch of, in addition to these insurrections that other anarchists are doing, the CNT is doing like strikes and stuff in this. This protests. In 1933, a peasant protest was suppressed by Republican police who shot 19 of them dead. So this government, which is broadly speaking, we'll call it a liberal government, is, is a government they still, you know, gun people down when you **** ** right? Like, yeah. Yeah. Now, the constant unrest damage the left middle class support and the infighting between communists, anarchists and Republicans hurt the. Broadly speaking, liberal and left ability to keep control of the government from the right. In 1934 the CEDA led by Jose Marie Gil Robles became the dominant power in government, or at least gained a lot of power in government. This provoked outrage from the spam, like they weren't in control or anything, but they had power for the first time. This really ****** *** the Spanish left because in the rest of Europe at the same time Hitler has just consolidated all of his power and destroyed vimar democracy. Italy is completely fascist now. And there's dictators all throughout Europe. So the left sees the CEDA gains some power and they're like, this is the start of what we're seeing happen. The fascists are going to take over. They're not wrong to be terrified that way because it is what happens, you know? Like, yeah, I was like, it's happening. That's because it's going to happen. It's happening here. They say, yeah. And they're not wrong. Yeah. So again, the left in Spain. And when I say the left in this sense, I mean both, like the Liberals, the anarchists, the communists, socialists, like all of them. Start to get really panicked and this fear is reinforced by the fact that Gil Robles consistently gave speeches ranting against democracy and in favor of what he called a totalitarian concept of the state, Stanley Payne writes. Quote it seems fairly clear that the CEDA's basic intentions were to win decisive political power through legal means, the exception being an ill defined emergency situation, and then to enact fundamental revisions to the new Republican constitution which restricted Catholic rights in order to protect religion and property and alter the basic political system. So again, they're not out of line to be afraid of what is going to happen by the CDA gaining power. Left wing fears that the CEDA would bring bring fascism to Spain were further stoked by the fact that CEDA magazines kept running huge loving articles about how good fascism was. They would have like these huge spreads about fascist Italy and what a perfect state it was. There were articles about the Nazi regime in Germany. Now Bradley speaking the Spanish far right is more Italian fascist than German. For one thing, they don't really get the anti-Semitism. Like, yeah, like everyone in Europe, they're kind of anti-Semitic, but it's not an organizing principle for them. Yeah. The Nazis they see is, like, kind of weird, but, like, still, you know, they're they're they're better than the left. But yeah, it's like, I get what y'all going for. I really don't understand this part, but I don't. I don't know why you would do this, but yeah, I've been with you. You just we kicked out the Muslims. I mean, I guess it's the same, but I don't know. Anyway, you'll say, right? Yeah. So Robles even visited the guy in charge of the CDA, even visited Germany in 1933 to attend the annual Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg. So again, the CEDA is not. Entirely a fascist party, but the left in Spain in this time calls them objectively fascist, and you can see why now, for his part, Robles only really rejected fascism because he saw it as foreign. During a speech in 1933, he said we want a totalitarian patria, but it is strange that we're invited to look for novelties abroad when we find a unitary and totalitarian policy in our own tradition. So he's like fascism, like I like it. But it's foreign, and we in Spain have our own totalitarian tradition that we should be embracing. And when he said this, he was actually referencing Ferdinand and Isabella, the first Spanish monarchs who were not totalitarian. It wasn't. You couldn't be back then. You just like, yeah, did exist, but yeah. Thank you. Yeah, it it's very silly and very ahistorical. Yeah. In the same speech, Roblez continued. For us, power must be integral for the realization of our ideal. We shall not be held back by our archaic forms when the time comes, Parliament, where I will either submit or disappear. Democracy must be a means, not an end we are going to liquidate. Revolution, liquidate, liquidate. So, damn. Yeah. In addition to the CDA, who if you don't want to call them fascists, they're at least pretty close. Fast is low sodium. Yeah, yeah, low sodium. Fascist. They're like, they're like diet Mountain Dew, gluten free, fascist. Like, you don't want to go all the way, but you're on the on the spectrum now. Spain also had its own explicitly fascist political parties, and when I don't call the CDA Fascist, it's because I do want to differentiate between the people who are like, They're fascists, you know, like it. It is important to do that. That grew and evolved throughout the early 1930s. Now, the founding father of Spanish Fascism was a guy named Ramiro Ledesma Ramos a Ramos. And like most fascist intellectuals, he wanted to be a novelist before he got into politics. And he wrote a fake memoir of it, like it's it's very big. Shapiro. OK. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yeah. He wrote a fiction novel, which was a fake memoir about a depressed intellectual who commits suicide, which seems like it was. 3 self pitying and nobody is well, he writes it. When he's 18, nobody's willing to take it, and his rich uncle pays to publish it. Which tells you all you need to know about the desma, the fascist, the father of Spanish fascism. So as the a pseudo intellectual, ledesma's greatest concern was that Spanish culture had not given the world a truly dominant political ideology, he complained. We are the only great people who have still not born the philosophical septer, and who therefore have not projected an intellectual dictatorship over the world. And so, as a result of this, he decided to steal a political system from Italy and become a fascist. He eventually formed the Juntas de Ofensiva nationale. Cindy Calista, or Johns, and his followers are called the John Cistus, which is silly, but that's pretty silly. They're called. Yeah. Ledesma and his fellow John Cyst has refused to call themselves fascists, but they were they talked lovingly of Italian fascism, and they wanted the same things. One of Ledesma's first followers was the first Spanish translator for Hitler's Mein Kampf. But to his credit, Ledesma did try to find ways to make Spanish fascism unique. In part, he attempted to do this by marrying it to Spanish anarcho syndicalism. Ledesma adopted syndicalism, the idea of worker councils governing themselves and striking to make their demands met or adopted aspects of that, and he kind of awkwardly welded it to Spanish revolutionary nationalism. And one of the things that is odd that characterize the Spanish fascists in this. Is they really reach out to the anarchists. They're trying to convert anarchists, in part because the anarchists are like. The most vital anti government movement in this. Yeah, it is. It's a weird. Yeah. Yeah. It was reading the tea leaves of being like, you know, I think you don't like the same **** we don't like. Yeah, maybe I can convince you to be fascist. Yeah. And it happens for some of them, right. Like that is a story that's very uncomfortable about anarchist history is that during the period of time when fascism rises, a number of anarchists in different countries and an uncomfortable number of them decide now you know what? I'm a fascist, which is not. Just do that. Yeah. And it's, it's important, you know, whatever, whatever you believe to be honest about its history. And that includes the ugly parts. So Ledesma and his fellow John sisters refused to call them. And also we're going to talk in Part 2 about the fact that a ******** of anarchists died fighting fascism in Spain. And where a lot of the very first people who were willing to put their lives on the line to fight global fascism before the United States was willing to fight the Nazis, a ******** of anarchists died fighting fascism. And I like I'm not trying to to say. That that like. And that's much more dominant a part of anarchist history totally, than the ones who went fashion. But a number of them do go fascists, and that's something the fascists directly try to encourage. Yeah. It's like the. Yeah. Like the like the black Trump. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Look, man, there's there's still a dog that's you can't lie. That's still my uncle. Yeah. And it doesn't erase the fact that Biden only won the election. It because of a ******** of organized black voters, you know? Yes. Yes. Yeah. So like the left wing of the Nazi party. You've done Ladesma sought to make fascism collectivists, stressing that the individual has died and that the collectivist state is all that matters. This was not an initially successful line of propaganda, and by the end of 1932 there were barely any John Sistas Spanish Fascism might not have taken off at all if it had not been for a fellow named Jose Antonio de Rivera, the son of the now dead dictator. So de Rivera's kid becomes like, really the the first prominent Spanish fascist, and one of the things this guy is such a figure in Spanish. History, that he's one of the only people from this period of Spanish history who's known by his first names. He's Jose Antonio. They don't call like, they call his dad Rivera. He's Jose Antonio, which is like kind of a mark of how significant this guy was. Yeah. Now Jose was a weird fascist, and we'll talk more about him in Part 2. He is not like other he's not nearly. For one thing, he doesn't really like violence in the same way that a lot of fascists do. And he's like weirdly friendly with a lot of socialists, like in government, like, like he's he's like like and not in a I don't know, he's a, he's a very weird. Fascist. His background, though, makes complete sense. He's the rich son of a military family whose father took almost absolute power in order to murder foreigners and steal their ****. So it's not weird that he becomes a fascist. Yeah. He's like, yeah. Just, you know, it's like representation matters. Like, you have to see something to believe that it's possible. So he's like, my dad took over the country. I mean, I bet I can, too. Yeah. Yeah. And you could see him as, like, kind of what I'm sure one of the Trump kids will try to do. Although I would argue he's a better person than any of the Trump kids. Wow. You did this. Wow. Highbar, yeah. So he creates his own fascist party based on the idea of bringing in another dictator like his dad, but not sucking at it this time, right? Like we need a dictator. My dad had the right idea, but he didn't have an ideology. I'm gonna bring in an ideology. Yeah. And both Jose Antonio's party and the John Sistas receive a shot in the arm on January 30th, 1933, when Hitler takes power in Germany. A magazine, El Fascio, which is a very subtle name. I peaked my both my vocal peak right there. Fashion. Turn her red fashion. Yeah yeah. Dug it. So so Hitler takes power in Germany and El Fascio gets launched in Spain and the government shuts that **** down right away and bans publication of future editions. We just like when in doubt. Look, you wanna you when you need your brand to be clear. Yeah, you need to be clearsotheres.com Trump. We're talking a lot in the United States now about the value of D platforming fascists. About the and I I'm an advocate for aspects of that, about the value of, of taking away these people's ability to reach a mass audience. They do a harder, much harder core version of that. In Spain you get in. One of the things that's unique about Spain is the police in this. Crackdown on the fascists more than they do on the left, which is weird. It's a unique historically, everywhere else it is the opposite. And that part of why is because the Republic is very scared of these fascists for good reason. And if we're looking at, like, the effectiveness of deep platforming, to what extent it works, Spain shows us that it doesn't necessarily stop them from gaining power because they D platform the fascists. They try hard to deep platform the fascists in the Spanish Republic. It doesn't do the trick. So again, useful historical context here, which is not to say there's no value in deep platforming, but we should be paying attention to what happened in Spain and the D platform. It's been as being done by the government, you know, by cops and **** now. The law for the defense of the Republic gave the Spanish Republic power to ban anything that threatened the republic's existence. Banning fascist propaganda, though, was not enough to stop the contagious excitement over fascism and the broader right wing reaction. Against the recent victories of the left, the John Sistas and Jose Antonio's movement grew. Jose Antonio was noted as not being particularly charismatic, but he was good with words and he was a successful lawyer, so he had money he entered into frequent. Public debates with left wing intellectuals where he would say stuff like this. So again, he's a big like, kind of like Richard Spencer. I will go down and sit down and talk with all of you. I'll be very nice, I'll be very polite and I'll talk about fascism in that way. He's that kind of fascist. OK, quote, This is a this is Jose Antonio from a debate he had with kind of a a more liberal guy. The Liberal state believes in nothing, not even in itself. It watches with folded arms as all sorts of experiments, even those aimed at the destruction of the state itself. Fascism was born to light a faith. Neither of the right, which at the bottom aspires to preserve everything, even the unjust, nor of the left, which at the bottom does, aspires to destroy everything, even the just, but a collective, integral national faith. And you can see why people would be appealed to us for things like we're not right when we're not left wing. They're both bad. We're something different. And he also the thing that all fascists have to do in order to succeed is point out things that are true and problems with the system. And it does. The Liberal state believes in nothing, not even in itself. You know, that's a good. That's a true statement. It's good. That's good. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And that's part of why, again, that's part of why he does succeed in bringing in some people from the left to the fascists and converting people and at least in getting a lot of them to be like, well, he's not that. He's not as bad as the state. You know, a lot of people say that in July of 19. A lot of people don't. By the way, anarchists murder a we'll talk about this Part 2, murder a ******** of fascists in this. So when I say a number of people on the left are like, well, he's not as bad as the state, a lot of people. And they're like, no, they're bad. And we have to start shooting them to death now. Yeah. So, like, yeah, let's not. It's a lot, a lots going on. You said in the beginning, this is messy. Yeah, show is. Yeah. And July of 1934, the John Cestas launched an attack on the Madrid offices of the Friends of the USSR, damaging the offices and threatening people with pistols. OK. This caused a government crackdown both on the fascists and on the anarchists, arresting some 3000 people nationwide. Again, like, we're probably about to see this is what the government does like, yeah, you know, I mean, in fairness, like right now, the anarchists are not doing much other than standing outside of buildings and breaking windows. And this, they were gunning. People, dad. So. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. It's yeah. I don't want to, like, try to make the case that Spanish history is exactly. But like you, I think there are useful parallels. Yeah. So one of the things, again, Spanish police did arrest more fascists and more were more willing to than other members of the left or the members of the left at this point. And in fact, the first two years of Jose Antonio's movement, anarchists assassinated and gunned down and stabbed a ******** of fascists and brawls and outside of speeches. Now, Jose Antonio was fairly unique. Among fascists, both in that he had genuinely warm and respectful relationships with a lot of left wing politicians and that he seemed to abhor violence. This was a problem for his young party, and we'll talk about that more in part too now. In October of 1934, Jose Antonio traveled to Spain for a brief meeting with Mussolini and to tour a fascist state. He found it inspiring. And he wrote fascism is not just an Italian movement, it is a total, universal sense of life. Italy was the first to apply it, but it is not the concept of the state as an instrument. The service of a permanent historical mission valid outside of Italy. Who can say that such goals are only valuable for Italians? He returned from Italy eager to make and so again, the John Sisters, the other chunk of the Fascist people, are like, we don't want to do it, a fascism, Italian fascism. Because we we're we're Spanish, we're Spain. Yeah. Jose Antonio is like, no, no, fascism is a global thing, and it it appeals to all of us. And he returns from Spain, eager to make a deal with the Jones Sisters in order to merge both movements. He recognizes your propaganda is better. I have more people I've got, I'm better at like organizing the street movement. If we work together, we can bring fascism to Spain in early November, both groups of fascists. Came to an agreement they initially wanted to use the name Fascismo Espanol, but decided to change this to Falange Espanola, which means Spanish phalanx. The phalanges would in time go on to earn a terrible and bloody reputation in Spanish history, but that is going to be in Part 2. Lot of history of this oh man, this is due ohope one. It's like for every uh, I love the like. For every kid that you know, either sat next to or was the little Stoner kid that was like drawing the anarchist a yeah. On their folder in high school, that was just like, no rules. Like, no, it's a it's a real thing. It's it's yeah, it's an ideology. It's not just you not getting suspended for, you know, slapping a kid. It's a real thing. It's a way to organize the world and society. That and and a bunch of different ideas, right? The Anarcho syndicalist have one there's a lot of. Different, yeah. Add it in. There are also anarchists like Anarcho, primitivists and stuff who don't want to or who who like, want to go back to a more like, there's a bunch of **** within anarchy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But it's not you with your little drawing, your little a on your skateboard, you know, your little ****. Like, there's more to how it starts. And I I will say I've seen a lot of people in Portland do very interesting things with skateboards, a lot of teenage anarchists this year. That's that's how it starts for some people, you know. OK, OK, OK, that's if that's if that's the entry. But it'll give you that. It's deeper than that. There's a lot going on, you know, it's just like, doesn't mean that you never have to read again, Chad, you have to read. You have to read a lot. OK. Like there's a there's a thought, you know? Yeah. Yeah. I don't know why I named him. Chad. I'm sorry. Yeah. Yeah, that's yeah. I I think, I think we could stand to convert more of the chads. The way. This has been part one, the birth of Spanish fascism. In Part 2 we're going to talk about the Spanish Civil War, which is one of the most fascinating and important pieces of history that almost no one knows a *** **** thing about, and we're going to talk illustrating. It's very frustrating. So frustrating. People don't know about this. No, so many, few people know that. Like the author of 1984, George Orwell, traveled to Spain on the premise that every single decent person should kill 1 fascist and then I killed a bunch of fascists with grenades. George Orwell. Was incredible with grenades. He knew all the different kinds of grenades. He killed a lot of people with grenades. He got shot in the throat like he's. Oh my God. Ohhh yeah man. I'm gonna give you this as another piece of trivia that has to do with the another hip hop trivia that she this good Easter egg for your listener and then for you. Just I think you might find this interesting and pull this out one day when you're drinking with friends. Iced tea. The not the drink, but yeah, yeah, yeah. The rapper Guy came. The actor in law and order. The guy that made an album called Cop Killer. Yes. And became a cop on TV. Yeah. You know, greatest hustle ever, right? Yeah. Anyway, there's this story tells. That about when he was getting his record deal and he the the as, as the legend goes, he never played one song for the people he that signed him for his first record deal, right? And they were like, how are you going to do this? How are we gonna why would you say if we haven't heard any music? He goes, hey, if you're selling a box of grenades, if I blow up a grenade? I need to blow up or grenade for you to, for you to know that they're good. Like, I can't blow it up because then you won't buy them. They already done. And then the guy was like, man, that's a thing I've ever. Yeah. So I see. And the guy was like, oh, it's actually a good point. And then he goes. What made you think of that? He goes well. I used to sell grenades. I see. And I totally believe that he was running around South Central selling grenades, I believe. I I would never call ice tea liar for saying that he sold grenades. No, no, no, absolutely not. He comes from a you know, you've got your eras of gangster rap where they're just talking and then you've got your era of gangster rap was like, no, you did all of the things you're talking about. Yeah. This is This is why you not in jail because you're right there. Like, there was a period of time for you where you were like, it was a good day because I didn't have to use my AK. These are true stories, y'all. Yeah, yeah. That's why most of them didn't make it very long. Yes, yes. Alright, well, in preparation for the Spanish Civil War, which is pretty gangster, yes. Listen, listen to some old school ice T, you know, and then watch some law and order, you know, really embrace the hypocrisy that we all embody at some point today. At some point you don't need to watch the ice T and Coco reality show, though. I am not recommending that. No, please don't watch that. No, but a little bit of law and order, you know, it's whatever. It's on literally at all times. Yeah, it's a lot. Like, it's a lot like heroin, you know? It's probably not gonna kill you, but it's bad for you. But every episode of laundry SU, I'm not ashamed at all. Every I believe it every episode because it's on at any given time of the day. Yeah, exactly. When my mom was in the hospital, we watched every episode because it was always on. I've seen every episode. There's a belief in some Aboriginal Australian cultures and this is kind of where the. What is the the, the long tube that they, they they blow thing that's ever. No, no, no. The the the didgeridoo. The didgeridoo ties into this that like you always have to be. Someone always has to be playing music because you sing the world into being. And if the music stops, the world ends. And I have adopted as a religious belief that with law and order SVU, where as long as it's playing somewhere the world can continue. I think that's how we ended up with Trump, man. Say everybody turned off their TV one day and law and order stopped playing. One hour without law and order and everything which is shipped. Alright well this this has been a part one of our our two parter of behind the insurrections on the Spanish fashion Frank Spanish Civil War. We'll talk about Spanish Civil war in Part 2 and then next week we're going to talk about the fascists who failed and we're going to talk about we're going to give a little overview of some anti fascist history you might not know. We're going to close out with Antifa and some fun stuff like the the idea of this pirates. Which were little kids who murdered Nazis. It was great. ******* rad. Alright, here we go. Listen to some ice tea. That's the episode. Hello, I'm Erica Kelly from the podcast Southern Fried True crime, and if you want to go from podcast fan to podcast host, do what I did and check out spreaker from iheart. I was working in accounting and hating it. Then after just 18 months of podcasting with Spreaker, I was able to quit my day job. Follow your podcasting dreams, let's break her handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. If you could completely remove one phrase from your vocabulary, which phrase would you choose? I don't know. Correct answer. No, I meant I don't know which phrase, and the best way to banish I don't know from your life is by cramming your brain full of stuff you should know. 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