Human Events Daily with Jack Posobiec - December 28, 2023


EPISODE 636： CHRONICLES OF THE REVOLUTION — THE LAST CRUSADE


Episode Stats

Length

47 minutes

Words per Minute

180.40768

Word Count

8,523

Sentence Count

561

Hate Speech Sentences

23


Summary

In this episode of Chronicles of the Revolution, Jack Posobiec takes a deep dive into the Spanish Civil War, the story of how it was won and lost, and how it changed the course of history. He begins by reading from Warren H. Carroll's The Last Crusade, a book that tells the story from the perspective of a communist perspective.


Transcript

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00:00:25.820 The Poso Daily Brief.
00:00:30.000 A commentator, international social media sensation, and former Navy intelligence veteran.
00:00:36.900 This is Human Events with your host, Jack Posobiec.
00:00:39.760 Deliver us from evil.
00:00:41.760 All right, Jack Posobiec here, Human Events Special Edition.
00:00:45.620 We've been running through the Chronicles of the Revolution.
00:00:49.260 And this episode, this installment is one of the most important ones and one of the ones that I really wanted to get to
00:00:56.640 because in many ways, this is something, a story where people have heard of it.
00:01:01.960 Conservatives may have heard of it.
00:01:03.180 Americans may have heard of it.
00:01:04.160 Westerners.
00:01:05.220 And yet this specific story is told completely backwards.
00:01:13.000 Everything you know about this is wrong.
00:01:15.920 Everything you were taught about this was wrong.
00:01:17.660 And we are going to attempt today to correct the record because today's installment of Chronicles of the Revolution is
00:01:26.200 The Last Crusade, the Spanish Civil War.
00:01:32.220 And I'd like to read for you just from that book by Warren H. Carroll, The Last Crusade.
00:01:38.460 I'll open with this.
00:01:39.540 So from January to June 1936.
00:02:09.540 13 bishops and nearly 7,000 priests, seminarians, monks, and nuns were turned into bloodied martyrs in Spain by the communist enemies of Christianity.
00:02:24.680 It was the greatest clerical bloodshed in so short a time since the persecutions of the Church of ancient Rome.
00:02:32.600 Already, Pope John Paul II has beatified some 200 of these martyrs.
00:02:38.180 Tens of thousands of churches, chapels, and shrines in Spain were pillaged and destroyed.
00:02:43.600 Nuns were raped on alders in front of the priests.
00:02:47.200 In response, faithful Spanish Catholics proclaimed a crusade.
00:02:51.900 Against all odds, the crusaders triumphed.
00:02:54.600 And the Church and the faith in Spain were saved.
00:02:58.880 This is a story of that crusade, now honored in no other book in print in the English language.
00:03:04.440 Most people who know of the Spanish Civil War do not understand why it was fought or how it was really won.
00:03:10.420 This book will tell you there is no story like it in the history of the 20th century.
00:03:14.980 That's The Last Crusade, Warren H. Carroll, as recommended by today's co-host and also the co-host of Thought Crime, Blake Neff.
00:03:25.080 Hey, Jack. Good to see you. Good to see you.
00:03:27.880 Hey, so, you know, why is it that when I—and, like, I'm Catholic, you know?
00:03:31.880 So, raised Catholic, family's Catholic, you know, we're Polish, we're pretty much common one flavor.
00:03:38.020 Nobody talks about the Spanish Civil War like this.
00:03:40.400 We were all forced to read For Whom the Bell Tolls by Hemingway in usually high school or maybe, you know, elementary school, grade school.
00:03:49.340 Other people might know about the Orwell book on the Spanish Civil War.
00:03:53.460 Emma Goldman, who's a well-known communist anarchist writer who was deported from the United States for her—for being a foreign anarchist,
00:04:02.420 who certainly played a role—I'm not going to say incited, but certainly played a role—in the assassination of a U.S. president, President McKinley,
00:04:11.080 which I wrote about in my Antifa book, Stories from Inside the Black Bloc.
00:04:15.480 She plays a massive role in the propaganda side of the communists here.
00:04:19.020 And so why is it the Spanish Civil War is just so lied about and nobody would ever look at it as a war of Christianity versus communism in the West?
00:04:30.780 It's really fascinating.
00:04:33.860 You know, the line you'll hear is, history is written by the winners.
00:04:37.380 And at a minimum, the Spanish Civil War is the exception that proves the rule,
00:04:41.600 if it doesn't just smash the myth to pieces entirely.
00:04:44.660 Because as far as wars go, it's hard to think of one where the narrative is so heavily controlled by one side,
00:04:52.520 and it's the side that lost and, to a substantial degree, the side that badly discredits itself in the act of losing.
00:04:59.040 The Spanish Civil War, just as a general background for people who aren't super familiar with it,
00:05:04.440 it's fought 1936 to 1939, and it's often best understood as sort of a prelude to World War II.
00:05:12.040 And that's probably the biggest reason it doesn't get presented any other way.
00:05:16.140 So Spain has a lot of social turmoil in the 20s and 30s.
00:05:20.160 It's split between a very radical left and a more conservative, traditional right.
00:05:26.040 And they have an election, I want to say, in late 1935.
00:05:30.260 And this conflict breaks out after an election where the left wins.
00:05:36.220 And it's often, as a result, presented as between the forces of fascism and the forces of democracy.
00:05:41.540 And it's such a dramatic oversimplification, simply because the election itself that is supposedly democratic is this complete, you know, bleep show, as you were,
00:05:54.320 about, you know, between the left essentially openly says if they don't win, they're going to, you know, launch a violent revolution anyway.
00:06:01.460 It's that sort of environment.
00:06:02.680 You have an extremely anti-clerical government in Spain with very, very left-wing views.
00:06:09.500 It's not simply like, oh, this is a fight for democracy.
00:06:12.640 Like, you have a lot of communists.
00:06:13.780 They want to do a red revolution in Spain.
00:06:16.020 And actually, to piggyback off of, if people are watching these in order, we talked about how, at sort of the end of the Russian revolution,
00:06:29.120 the common turn gets set up in communist Russia.
00:06:32.280 And they say, hey, we did it here in Russia.
00:06:34.320 We have all this power.
00:06:35.700 Now we need to export this abroad.
00:06:37.840 So they try to get in Poland.
00:06:40.420 Poland blocks them from coming in.
00:06:42.220 But then here they are about, you know, 15 years after that, and suddenly, okay, let's go in and start funding the communist factions in Spain.
00:06:51.520 And so you see a ton of communist funded from the Soviet Union, who, again, has this huge state apparatus behind them,
00:06:59.480 funding intelligence, funding these factions, funding terrorist groups all throughout Spain in order to prop up this new,
00:07:06.220 what they call the Republican government.
00:07:07.780 But you really see it's just a hodgepodge of anarchists and communists, and which attracts many of the Western anarchists and communists that then go on later to write about this.
00:07:17.680 The whole country is in a state of massive turmoil.
00:07:20.520 And so what stands out about it is the winning side, the right side in the Spanish Civil War will be portrayed as fascist.
00:07:28.000 But one thing that's interesting about it is it's a successful counterrevolution, and it's very – it's almost devoid of ideology.
00:07:35.480 It's like everyone who just is against what's going on.
00:07:38.000 It's a big tent military coup, essentially, that there's massive anarchy in the country after the election,
00:07:43.700 and you get a collection in the Spanish army that just says this country is out of control.
00:07:48.160 We need to stop this.
00:07:49.500 So they attempt a military coup in Spain, and this is how it starts.
00:07:53.240 And the plan was just overthrow the government and have a normal coup, take over the government, no civil war.
00:08:00.200 And instead, it only halfway succeeds.
00:08:02.900 They take about maybe a quarter to a third of the country.
00:08:06.800 And then what they do is there's a Spanish army in Africa where they still have a lot of Morocco under their control.
00:08:12.680 And they put all of these African soldiers on planes, and they fly them into Spain, and they're basically the only regular soldiers in Spain.
00:08:19.900 And so a few thousand guys just sweep over half of the country, and you end up in the battle lines of the Spanish Civil War,
00:08:26.460 where it's sort of the western parts of the country, the northwest, the relatively conservative parts of Spain,
00:08:32.780 largely align with the anti-communist groups.
00:08:36.600 And then the left controls Madrid, it controls Catalonia, it controls a lot of the big cities,
00:08:42.700 and it eventually incorporates, yeah, all of these anarchists, all of these communist movements.
00:08:47.640 And that ends up being what defines the Spanish Civil War as an interesting conflict to study.
00:08:52.600 It's not just a war between left and right.
00:08:55.300 It ultimately becomes a great example of how the left always ends up ripping itself apart,
00:08:59.420 because the biggest reason they lose this war is the left can't agree on anything,
00:09:05.520 and they're shooting each other constantly.
00:09:08.580 You know, I've been recommending a book each time, and you mentioned George Orwell's book earlier.
00:09:13.760 That book in question is right here, Homage to Catalonia.
00:09:18.360 So Orwell was a left-wing British journalist.
00:09:21.020 Excuse me.
00:09:23.300 He's a left-wing British journalist, and he goes to Spain and volunteers.
00:09:27.480 A lot of international socialists volunteer to fight in this conflict.
00:09:31.280 And he volunteers with one of the socialist militia groups.
00:09:35.680 I think it was POUM is the group he happens to join.
00:09:38.420 There's a ton of them.
00:09:40.140 What does the M stand for, Blake?
00:09:42.860 I actually can't remember.
00:09:45.360 Marxism.
00:09:46.500 Oh, Marxism.
00:09:47.180 Okay, come on.
00:09:49.400 Throw me a vote.
00:09:50.040 It's kind of a gimme.
00:09:50.740 It's supposed to be a layup, brother.
00:09:51.960 It's supposed to be a layup.
00:09:52.800 Sorry, bro.
00:09:53.360 Sorry, bro.
00:09:53.940 I'm not thinking straight these days.
00:09:55.700 I'm kidding.
00:09:56.260 And so he gets – he endures a lot.
00:09:59.000 He gets shot in the throat.
00:10:00.000 There's a very interesting description of what it's like when you think you're going to die,
00:10:04.040 like what goes through his head.
00:10:05.920 But he just describes he's in this POUM fighting for the revolution,
00:10:10.220 and then he goes back after he gets shot.
00:10:12.200 He's on, you know, recuperating.
00:10:14.600 And then the group he's in gets declared – it gets prescribed by the left-wing government in Madrid
00:10:20.020 and they're arresting and shooting a bunch of the members of the militia that he's in.
00:10:24.260 This group gets banned even though they're the Marxists,
00:10:26.620 but then the government Marxists say that they're against these Marxists,
00:10:29.920 and now they're slaughtering – so a lot of these, by the way, you'll hear in the Spanish Civil War,
00:10:35.880 they'll say, oh, you know, the Franco – Franco – and we'll get to Franco and all of it.
00:10:39.280 Don't worry, folks.
00:10:39.800 We'll explain.
00:10:40.540 But they'll say, oh, he was so repressive and so horrific.
00:10:43.000 But you have to understand the Spanish communists were even slaughtering other Spanish communists
00:10:47.440 in addition to the priests, the nuns, and everything else you saw in the early stages of this.
00:10:53.920 Constantly.
00:10:54.560 So I looked it up.
00:10:55.360 The Workers' Party of Marxist Unification was POUM.
00:10:58.700 They were formed by the fusion of the Trotskyist communist left of Spain
00:11:03.040 with the Workers' and Peasants bloc against the will of Leon Trotsky, with whom they broke –
00:11:09.420 so just all these layers of commies hating other commies.
00:11:13.220 One of the – by the way, I do have to throw out there one of the units that I talk about a lot.
00:11:18.360 They called it the International Antifa Unit.
00:11:21.560 This, of course, plays a role.
00:11:22.980 And so I wrote a chapter on the Spanish Civil War in my Antifa book because Antifa, even today,
00:11:28.680 they are just enamored with the Spanish Civil War.
00:11:31.960 They are constantly talking about it.
00:11:33.620 They are constantly talking about reliving it.
00:11:35.920 They're trying to sort of recreate it in northwestern Syria right now, this place called Rojava –
00:11:41.840 excuse me, northeastern Syria, Rojava.
00:11:43.780 They call it the Rojava Revolution, which is probably a story for another day, folks.
00:11:47.560 But they're traveling there to try to create a communist homeland the way they were traveling to Spain in the 1930s to try to create it.
00:11:55.780 And specifically, they actually called themselves the International Anti-Fascist Brigade.
00:12:01.020 And their moniker as well was the Ernst Talman Brigade.
00:12:05.980 We talked about Ernst Talman in the last episode because Ernst Talman was the name of the founder of Antifa,
00:12:13.120 also the leader of the Communist Party of Deutschland at the time, who had believed at this point by 1936,
00:12:20.380 because 1933 has already happened, he's been arrested by Hitler and thrown into one of the concentration camps.
00:12:27.720 So Ernst Talman becomes this cause celeb for the international communists,
00:12:32.700 and they even go so far as to refer to him as the name of their brigade in the Spanish Civil War.
00:12:37.300 And so the reason I bring it up in the nomenclature is to explain to people that there's a direct line through to all of these things
00:12:44.340 if we just travel all the way back throughout history.
00:12:46.960 And it's not like it's one separate thing here in the U.S., and then there's communism, and then there's Antifa.
00:12:53.740 No, if you look at it from the communist lens of history, there is a direct line all the way back, really, to the French Revolution.
00:13:00.300 Exactly. It's, you know, it's the whole war is so interesting just to look at.
00:13:07.580 There's an incident, this is what George Orwell gets caught up in, it's called the May events,
00:13:12.320 because communists have weird names for everything that happens.
00:13:15.140 And so in Catalonia, Catalonia was very aligned with the left, but it was controlled.
00:13:22.400 Spanish Marxism was a really strange beast.
00:13:24.540 It was much more anarchist.
00:13:28.220 It was what we'd call syndicalist, which is sort of decentralized.
00:13:32.440 And so you have these decentralized anarchic groups, and they were in conflict with communists who were essentially just pro-Stalin.
00:13:39.180 And so the POUM, which Orwell was in, which by his own description, he seems to have just joined them almost randomly,
00:13:46.620 like that was the nearest office he could walk up to.
00:13:49.520 But they were ones who were opposed to...
00:13:51.540 That's how I joined the Navy.
00:13:51.800 Yeah, they were opposed to the Stalinist line.
00:13:54.440 They were independent communists.
00:13:55.920 And then in Madrid, this pro-Stalin group is taking over, and they care just as much about purging every member of the left who's not pro-Stalin as they care about winning this war.
00:14:06.960 So in the May events, you just have members of the government going and shooting well over a thousand people in these street battles
00:14:15.580 because they're not aligned with the version of Marxism that they want.
00:14:18.800 And in comparison, it's, you know, it stands out that the big tent of the right in this war is a lot more united,
00:14:26.400 and there's far fewer, you know, they aren't purging each other.
00:14:29.520 And I think this is an important thing to get about the war is a lot of, you know,
00:14:33.440 there is a white terror in this war as well as a red terror.
00:14:36.340 A lot of communists are shot.
00:14:37.900 But Spain does remain intact afterwards.
00:14:42.700 So Generalissimo Francisco Franco becomes the dictator of Spain after this war.
00:14:48.280 And he is a dictator.
00:14:49.480 They will call him a fascist.
00:14:50.740 He's not really a fascist.
00:14:52.320 Like, in any way that you analyze fascism as an ideology, it just doesn't align with him.
00:14:57.840 He is an authoritarian conservative.
00:15:00.760 That is what he is.
00:15:01.400 He's like, I'm keeping these, I'm just keeping things in order before Spain can go back to being this traditional Catholic monarchy.
00:15:08.700 That's how Franco views himself.
00:15:10.560 And what's important about that is once he wins and is in power, he doesn't just,
00:15:16.340 he doesn't end up shooting thousands of his own followers like Stalin does or Mao does or essentially every left-wing government.
00:15:23.020 He doesn't have these cyclical waves of purges.
00:15:26.240 He doesn't reinvent all of Spanish society.
00:15:29.280 There is no terror famine in Spain where they just starve to death a million people to show who's boss.
00:15:36.480 He just, you know, runs Spain as an authoritarian government.
00:15:40.140 And, you know, there's reasons to not like that, I'm sure, even if you are, you know, a Catholic conservative.
00:15:45.000 But it really stands out that, you know, we mentioned the other day how Russia just gets massively screwed up because of the decades of Soviet control and all of the violence they inflict on their own people.
00:15:56.700 And Spain doesn't really have that.
00:15:58.000 You know, Franco dies, Spain transitions back to being a democracy and a kind of annoying left-wing democracy, I think we'd agree.
00:16:04.440 But the country isn't irrevocably broken.
00:16:07.140 You don't look at Spain and have to go, oh, yeah, we lost unlimited amounts of our nation's heritage and our society got irretrievably messed up because of this civil war that we fought, you know, a century ago.
00:16:20.080 And I think that really illustrates the gap between left and right on these things.
00:16:25.900 And if I could, could we very quickly just get a medical update on the current status of Generalissimo Francisco Franco?
00:16:32.080 He is, he is still dead.
00:16:35.960 Still dead as of right now, this moment.
00:16:38.480 As of the moment.
00:16:39.280 It could change at any time.
00:16:40.960 But for now, he does remain, remain deceased.
00:16:45.300 It's an old SNL joke, folks.
00:16:46.860 But if, if, as you say, there's, there's this really idea that it was the revolutionaries, if there were revolutionaries here, these were on the left, whereas Franco comes in and certainly is quite brutal in many respects in fighting them.
00:17:04.860 But when he does take power, it's, it's doing much to restore or at least attempt to restore many of these aspects of Spanish culture.
00:17:12.880 One of the chief, you know, examples of this and chieftain, by the way, Caudillo, is what he refers to himself after taking power, is the restoration of the church.
00:17:22.860 Of course, the Spanish church has always been, played a, just outside role to Spain, Spanish history, going all the way to the reconquest.
00:17:34.260 And then, of course, the, the Spanish crown in the same year, 1492 fund, you know, the reconquest, people understand that for 800 years, Spain was controlled essentially by, by various forms of Muslim leaders, except at one point, they had lost everything except for like one mountaintop in the north.
00:17:51.300 And then eventually fight back all the way to the Battle of Grenada in 1492 in the south, when, and that's Francisco and Isabella, who in the same year, because of their victory, they're sort of jubilant on their success.
00:18:01.080 And they fund this, this Italian explorer to go find this, you know, you know, go, go find this, this passage to the Indies.
00:18:08.500 He thinks, he thinks the world is smaller than it is.
00:18:11.200 He thinks the world is smaller, right.
00:18:13.280 He lucks out.
00:18:14.000 You know, you have this general Franco who himself is Catholic, although not a, you know, not a priest or member of the clergy himself, not a, not a religious official in any sort, but he, he really takes upon himself to restore the church.
00:18:31.380 You see this with Napoleon in, in France as well.
00:18:33.980 And so Juan Carlos, who became king after, after Alfonso was restored, he's still alive, though.
00:18:41.920 I believe he stepped down recently, you know, a couple of years ago, still alive and his, in favor of his son.
00:18:48.580 So his son's the king.
00:18:49.560 He's, I guess, you know, the, the King Emeritus at this point or something like that.
00:18:52.720 It's for the best.
00:18:53.760 I think a monarchy starts losing its vitality when your king is always 85 years old.
00:18:58.260 So we should, we should have, we should just have, kings should just be stepping down at 60 and have, like, the king always be this, like, you know, attractive looking, you know, 35-year-old guy with, like, a wife and a cute kid or something.
00:19:11.600 Monarchy would last so much longer if that was the case.
00:19:14.060 But the, so they shove the king aside.
00:19:18.180 They have this unhealthy republic.
00:19:19.680 There's a lot of threats of violence on both sides.
00:19:21.780 And it's that sense of escalating chaos.
00:19:24.720 And you have people on the left just coming out and saying, like, we're going to have a revolution, just like in Russia, just like in Mexico, we're going to change everything.
00:19:33.180 And this is what everyone's hearing.
00:19:34.960 It's superheated rhetoric.
00:19:36.460 And it's super evenly divided on both sides.
00:19:39.720 And people have to remember that in, in, in the 20 years since the Russian revolution, right, the Russians are going around all over the world.
00:19:45.400 The Russian communists are going all over, using the, the wealth of Russia to fund these potential communist uprising.
00:19:51.500 There's many failed uprisings.
00:19:53.180 So in Spain, in some senses, you could call it a failed communist revolution.
00:19:57.860 But there's a ton of these all over the world.
00:20:00.480 Of course, we know about the successful ones.
00:20:02.460 But this is something they're constantly attempting to do all over the world.
00:20:05.860 They try it in Mexico.
00:20:06.780 They try it in Spain.
00:20:07.640 They really try it all over Europe.
00:20:09.440 Yeah.
00:20:09.740 I think Bavaria and southern Germany.
00:20:11.940 There's a failed communist government in Hungary that was very famous in this time.
00:20:16.180 It was led by this communist named Bella Kuhn.
00:20:19.200 He, you know, he tries to do what we think of, you know, radical communist stuff.
00:20:22.760 Shoot priests, dictatorship of the proletariat.
00:20:24.740 He lasts like six months.
00:20:26.880 And then the Romanians come in and kick him out.
00:20:29.440 Romania's best contribution to humanity, I would say.
00:20:32.620 And, you know, largely forgotten today.
00:20:35.460 I think he might have been shot by Stalin eventually, which he richly deserved, if so.
00:20:39.620 And, but it's famous at this time.
00:20:42.780 And you have these fire-breathing left-wing revolutionaries who are like, yeah, I'm going
00:20:47.240 to take power.
00:20:47.960 I'm going to shoot the priests.
00:20:49.200 I'm going to seize all of the farms.
00:20:51.920 We're going to collectivize things.
00:20:53.080 We're going to have a revolution.
00:20:54.960 And, you know, that terrifies a lot of people.
00:20:57.340 And it's what drives a lot of radicalism on the right, which was ultimately very destructive.
00:21:01.400 Like we get fascism is substantially a reaction to communism.
00:21:05.180 Not a good one, but it was that.
00:21:06.860 And that also defines the Spanish Civil War.
00:21:09.120 Well, because people have to remember, too, that there's all these, at the same time,
00:21:12.760 there's all these World War I veterans that are, in many cases, you know, like, you know,
00:21:18.300 we're talking about Spain here, but, you know, Weimar Republic, Weimar Germany has this as well.
00:21:21.780 You have all these veterans that are just kind of out of work and yet very belligerent.
00:21:25.640 The economy's not going well.
00:21:27.540 And so in Bavaria, when they try this in Germany, the Freikorps just go in and basically
00:21:33.540 take out everybody.
00:21:34.640 And so you have this sort of this milieu of veterans, a lot of militarism because of the,
00:21:41.480 you know, again, we're talking about the aftermath of World War I here and what leads
00:21:45.880 to World War II are these massive communists, or not massive, but widespread communist
00:21:49.900 revolutions and revolutionary attempts across Europe.
00:21:53.780 Yeah, what you have is across Europe, you have democracy starts to fail because you have
00:21:58.980 radicals on both sides.
00:22:00.400 And it becomes the sense of you either become communist or you end up with some sort of
00:22:05.600 right-wing dictatorship that promises to stop the communists.
00:22:09.060 And obviously we know about Hitler, we know about Mussolini, but it's happening in other
00:22:13.320 countries too.
00:22:14.060 Like, like Poland is actually a dictatorship by the time they get invaded by, by Germany.
00:22:18.860 And it's sort of a, like, it's sort of this centrist dictatorship that's anti-communist,
00:22:24.560 but also kind of hostile to the church.
00:22:26.760 This happens in a lot of places.
00:22:28.220 And so in Spain, what we get is a civil war.
00:22:31.520 And notoriously, Franco's side, the right side of the revolution, they do get support from
00:22:38.060 Hitler's Germany and from Mussolini's Italy, which is why it will always be framed that they
00:22:43.780 are fascists.
00:22:44.480 But the Republicans, they get a ton of military support from Stalin and the Soviet Union.
00:22:49.480 So this is a proxy war between these two camps in Europe just before World War II.
00:22:55.980 And it makes it a very interesting testing ground for World War II.
00:23:00.460 This is one of the first, you know, this is where air power, close air support, this is
00:23:04.720 where dive bombers start being a thing.
00:23:06.660 Uh, it's, it's an interesting conflict in that sense.
00:23:11.220 And, you know, what does stand out is it is a very ideological war.
00:23:15.280 It is a war between, yeah, fascism and communism, but it's ultimately fascism is not what's defining
00:23:22.420 the, uh, the Spanish right at this time.
00:23:25.580 There is a fascist party in Spain called the Falange, the, the phalanx, but they're not the
00:23:30.740 leaders of the right.
00:23:31.680 And in fact, they get very marginalized after the war is over, uh, by Franco, which is why,
00:23:36.420 you know, he doesn't join World War II because he's not actually allied to Nazi Germany to
00:23:41.060 that degree.
00:23:42.460 And it's very much shows the power of the left to push its narratives that this then gets
00:23:50.180 framed as a fascism versus democracy thing rather than just a communist versus everyone
00:23:56.480 sort of thing, which is what the war actually devolved into.
00:24:00.460 And the memory of the conflict since then has also has some important takeaways for us
00:24:05.540 because we've seen in the U S where, you know, they're knocking down Confederate statues or
00:24:10.480 statues of the founding fathers.
00:24:11.820 And Spain is a country that's had something very similar to this because they built a lot
00:24:17.140 of monuments to, to this conflict.
00:24:18.900 Uh, there is a big area called like the Valley of the Fallen, and it's a big cemetery for a lot
00:24:24.180 of people who died fighting in Franco's army and Franco himself was buried there.
00:24:29.180 And a short time ago, they literally just dug up Franco's body.
00:24:32.880 The government intervened to do this.
00:24:34.860 And they've done a lot to destroy monuments to this conflict that it's worth remembering,
00:24:40.300 you know, until just about 10 years ago, a large number of people in Spain, you know,
00:24:45.780 still had living memory of this.
00:24:47.480 This is a, you know, this was, this war ended not even, you know, about 90 years ago.
00:24:51.860 So into the nineties, you had a lot of people who had lived through this conflict and yet
00:24:56.600 it became this huge social fight that they had to blot out the memory of the people who
00:25:01.600 actually won this war.
00:25:03.060 And importantly, they clearly didn't shoot everyone who disagreed with them because there
00:25:06.900 were still a bunch of left wingers available in Spain to take over when it was all over.
00:25:11.860 Uh, there's a great, um, there's a great article and I have to give a huge shout out to someone
00:25:18.060 who co-hosts and has guest hosted here on human events, uh, daily Evita Duffy Alfonso.
00:25:23.700 Yes, the same Alfonso.
00:25:25.320 Um, she wrote and what my family's bloody history in the Spanish civil war.
00:25:30.740 And she's talking about the FBI assault on Catholics, but this is up at the federalist.com.
00:25:36.660 And she talks about these, the massacres of communists, uh, excuse me, the massacres of
00:25:41.620 Catholics that go through, um, talking about how these, the, really the anti-religious radicals
00:25:47.180 just take over the entire, uh, the entire state apparatus and start banning religious
00:25:52.860 schools, crucifixes are taken out, Bibles are taking out, religious marriage becomes declared
00:25:58.620 invalid, anti-church, um, propaganda is everywhere.
00:26:03.060 Um, all the land is stolen from the churches, et cetera.
00:26:06.880 And so anyone who is considered a, uh, an enemy to the revolution, right?
00:26:11.720 How many times have we seen this again and again, an enemy of the revolution is, is taken
00:26:16.400 out.
00:26:16.780 Um, she said that her great grandfather, who was the subdirector of this large metal company
00:26:21.680 gets, um, you know, basically a Kulak, right?
00:26:24.880 So a subdirector of the company, not like a vice president, not someone who's the owner or
00:26:29.460 anything, but someone who's more well off.
00:26:31.440 Uh, he gets purged, he gets locked up.
00:26:33.800 And there's a bit here that I wanted to get to where it says that, uh, and of course there
00:26:40.760 are the, everyone's fleeing constantly.
00:26:42.980 Here we go.
00:26:44.300 One of my great grandmother's extended family members was a priest during the war.
00:26:49.400 He was captured by communists and was forced to dig his own grave.
00:26:53.720 He stood before a firing squad on the edge of his self dug grave.
00:26:58.740 When the squad fired, only his arm was grazed.
00:27:02.020 The priest then begged the men to shoot, to shoot him.
00:27:08.820 So he's begging the men to shoot him, say, just put me out of my misery.
00:27:12.540 Let me die a martyr.
00:27:14.040 Instead, the communists decide to throw him in the grave and bury him alive.
00:27:20.020 So just like we see in, in France, just like we see in Russia, uh, the level of brutality
00:27:26.900 that you see unleashed in this civil war is, is, is really shocking.
00:27:31.900 It is, you know, there's a whole fairy phase called the red terror, you know, that we mentioned.
00:27:36.700 That's where all of these priests are murdered.
00:27:38.920 It's like the civil war breaks out.
00:27:41.460 And again, it's always like you're flipping a switch of some kind where, you know, oh,
00:27:46.540 they're trying to military coup.
00:27:47.760 It's time to kill tons of people.
00:27:49.180 And there's just this huge orgy of bloodletting across Spain.
00:27:52.740 And that's where you get a lot of the worst atrocities.
00:27:55.320 It's like a couple months long where they just are going and they're shooting everyone
00:27:59.340 that they suspect.
00:28:00.360 And if you know the left, you know that they are always suspecting everyone, especially
00:28:03.840 people on their own side.
00:28:05.180 So first you shoot priests, you shoot nuns, you shoot bishops, you shoot local landowners.
00:28:11.040 And then eventually, you know, you're shooting the anarchists because they have a slightly
00:28:14.560 different interpretation of, you know, Gramsci or whatever thinkers in vogue at the time.
00:28:21.240 So when we, when we see all this, then how do you get a guy like Ernest Hemingway, which
00:28:26.020 I mentioned before, and you get for whom the bell tolls.
00:28:28.340 And it's like this love story and, you know, the American is volunteered and he's got to
00:28:32.880 go blow up this bridge and he meets the Spanish girl and she's so wonderful.
00:28:36.680 And the nationalists have treated her so poorly.
00:28:39.380 How does Ernest Hemingway, you know, participate in something like this and actually see it
00:28:44.720 personally and then leave to write this story, which seemingly bears no relation to the things
00:28:50.280 that you and I are talking about?
00:28:52.160 Well, the left has always had a great strength of being able to push its narratives that we
00:28:57.960 talked yesterday, how they would have spin on the Soviet Union, one of the truly intolerable
00:29:03.380 regimes with basically nothing worth defending about it.
00:29:07.100 And yet they got defended by the left in the West for, you know, about half a century before
00:29:12.360 they were willing to even admit Stalin did anything wrong.
00:29:15.860 And in Spain, it's even more complex than that, I would say, because I would even, you know,
00:29:21.100 I would concede that, you know, Spain was a failing democracy, but it was a democracy.
00:29:27.520 And this war, it was begun by the right, you know, they attempted a military coup.
00:29:33.500 And I think that made it very easy if you're an American who's pro-democracy to see like,
00:29:37.700 oh, democracy is under attack.
00:29:39.920 It's, you know, you're in a situation where it's easy to be propagandized.
00:29:43.540 And you create this, you create this sort of romantic narrative where, and I'll just say it,
00:29:48.440 when I was in Ukraine last year covering this, I actually met with some American reporters there.
00:29:54.340 And I mean, they were just totally gassed to the point where, totally gaslighted to the
00:29:59.720 point where, you know, they were talking as if they were in some kind of romantic movie
00:30:04.360 and they were fighting for freedom and the cause of the noble Ukrainian people against
00:30:09.400 the Russians.
00:30:09.920 And, you know, you ask some basic journalistic questions like, okay, that, yeah, that's okay,
00:30:13.800 that's great.
00:30:14.200 But how does, you know, how does Ukraine plan to, you know, win the war?
00:30:17.340 And aren't a lot of the Ukrainian men being killed?
00:30:20.720 And there's just no, there's no concept because they're wrapped up in sort of their own movie
00:30:26.120 version of this.
00:30:27.060 And by the way, I should also mention, not only Ernest Hemingway, but none other than
00:30:31.240 John Lennon himself appears in a film depicting the Spanish Civil War.
00:30:36.600 So it's not just worse than Walter Durante.
00:30:38.360 You've got Hemingway, you've got Orwell, you've got, though, at least Orwell kind of,
00:30:42.640 kind of comes away a little bit disillusioned.
00:30:44.340 Today, you know, they talk about influences.
00:30:48.200 These are influences.
00:30:50.120 And they're friends of mine.
00:30:52.440 Jack Persovic.
00:30:53.960 Where's Jack?
00:30:54.900 Jack.
00:30:55.880 He's done a great job.
00:30:59.200 This is where Orwell really gets his thing of seeing, wait, there's huge problems with
00:31:04.880 socialism in practice that this is happening.
00:31:07.680 Because he writes The Road to Wigan Pier, as the book he writes right before heading off.
00:31:11.840 That's a very pro-socialist book, but it also has the elements where, you know, he's like
00:31:18.160 a guy on Twitter saying, you know, we're doing a bad job winning over the English working
00:31:21.880 class.
00:31:22.360 And we're doing a bad job because they think we don't like them, essentially, is what
00:31:25.340 he says.
00:31:25.940 And then he goes here and he's like, oh, okay.
00:31:29.140 We also shoot each other and have, you know, the Stalinists are all trying to kill everyone.
00:31:33.520 And this is bad.
00:31:34.160 And this is really where he starts having his shift of still being essentially a man
00:31:39.200 of the left, but being very put off by all the left-wingers he meets.
00:31:44.680 And, you know, tale as old as time.
00:31:46.800 This is also a problem in the French Revolution.
00:31:49.920 It's a problem in the Russian Revolution.
00:31:51.600 And it's a problem with the left today.
00:31:53.300 And I think, as we've said in all of our episodes so far, mendacity is at the core of
00:31:58.820 at the core of Marxism.
00:32:00.520 It appeals a lot to people who really hate those around them and therefore are easily
00:32:06.580 won over to doing horrible things to them.
00:32:09.380 But I think if you're going to understand it and assess it honestly, you do need to understand
00:32:14.280 why the left can provide a romantic narrative to people who feel like they are changing the
00:32:20.060 world in a positive direction.
00:32:22.260 And that existed in Spain as much as it existed anywhere.
00:32:25.440 It was a time where it was easy to get caught up in a romantic narrative.
00:32:29.800 You know, we're stopping, we're bringing this backwards regime into modernity and we're
00:32:34.460 overcoming these fascist killers who want to, you know, destroy progress in its bed and
00:32:40.860 kill all of these people.
00:32:42.340 And especially if you're, you know, a foreign American, Americans are an idealistic people.
00:32:47.700 So there's, yeah, Hemingway was the Ukrainian volunteer of his day.
00:32:51.900 Well, and there's a great line from Homage to Catalonia that Orwell wrote that I'm familiar
00:32:59.740 with.
00:33:00.120 And I just love this.
00:33:01.000 I pulled it up here.
00:33:02.400 Early in life, I have noticed that no event is ever covered correctly in a newspaper.
00:33:07.640 But in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the
00:33:12.900 facts, not even the relationship which is applied in an ordinary lie.
00:33:16.660 I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting and complete silence where
00:33:21.600 hundreds of men had been killed.
00:33:23.480 I saw troops who had fought bravely, denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had
00:33:28.060 never seen a shot fired, hailed as heroes of imaginary victories.
00:33:32.620 And I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional
00:33:37.500 superstructures over events that never happened.
00:33:40.380 I saw, in fact, history being written, not in terms of what happened, but of what ought
00:33:45.340 to have happened according to various party lines.
00:33:49.120 And when I look at the news today, certainly the war in Ukraine, I mean, that passage to
00:33:55.080 me is amazing.
00:33:56.020 There's a couple other lines I want to flag.
00:33:58.060 Orwell could write incredibly well.
00:33:59.900 Another good one.
00:34:00.940 One of the most horrible features of war is that all the propaganda, all the screaming,
00:34:05.980 all the lies and hatred comes invariably from people who are not fighting.
00:34:12.040 And then other great one, other great one.
00:34:15.080 For some reason, all of the best matadors were fascists.
00:34:22.220 For some reason.
00:34:24.080 Right.
00:34:24.340 Because, of course, you know, a communist would start to say, well, did the bull consent?
00:34:29.960 Do I have the consent of the animal?
00:34:31.920 Well, you know, why does and of course and of course, they don't want to wave the the
00:34:37.080 red flag because, of course, you have to protect the red flag at all times so that, you know,
00:34:40.860 the communists don't want to do that.
00:34:41.980 But it really does become this sort of romantic cause for the international communists.
00:34:47.660 And I think it speaks to, I would say, the quality of George Orwell's character whereby
00:34:52.200 in, you know, he leaves there.
00:34:54.180 And I think he later said that all of the things that he wrote throughout the remainder of
00:34:58.760 his life were rooted in these experiences in the Spanish Civil War, where he just comes
00:35:03.820 away very disillusioned.
00:35:06.380 And, you know, he writes Animal Farm not too long after.
00:35:09.860 Then, of course, we know 1984.
00:35:11.420 You wrote many other things.
00:35:12.720 And he talks about how it was his experiences on the ground there that made him realize,
00:35:18.280 you know, just when he saw a war finally up close and personal for the first time,
00:35:21.540 he realized, wait a minute, everything I've read about these wars is completely wrong.
00:35:26.060 And everyone is lying all the time.
00:35:29.060 Exactly.
00:35:29.720 It's a very good...
00:35:30.840 I would even argue you could get more out of Homage to Catalonia than, like, out of 1984.
00:35:35.780 1984 is obviously famous.
00:35:39.200 It's very much worth reading.
00:35:40.380 But it is a fantasy, and it's a very extreme case.
00:35:43.520 Whereas Homage to Catalonia, it's literally what happened.
00:35:46.800 It is what he went through.
00:35:48.280 It is a far more honest portrayal of what really does go on in a war and in one of these weird
00:35:54.460 left-right conflicts or a conflict within the left.
00:35:57.080 So you will understand the left far better reading this than you will, you know, reading
00:36:02.480 1984, I think, precisely because that's such a simplified, raw version of what he's writing
00:36:08.460 about.
00:36:10.120 And...
00:36:10.460 Yeah, I would say 1984 is better as more of your...
00:36:13.080 Well, I mean, Animal Farm is your gateway drug, right?
00:36:15.880 You know, 1984 is your next level.
00:36:18.440 But when you really get...
00:36:19.940 I would say a little bit more mature, a little bit older, then you need to graduate to Homage
00:36:24.080 to Catalonia.
00:36:24.880 Because as you say, it is more complicated, but it's also the true story that allowed those
00:36:31.560 other stories to flow forth in Orwell's career.
00:36:34.900 Because Homage to Catalonia is actually written first.
00:36:37.200 And as you say, it's nonfiction as opposed to...
00:36:39.720 Animal Farm, of course, is fiction, but it is fiction that is depicted in explanation.
00:36:44.460 We probably should have mentioned this in the Russian Revolution.
00:36:46.700 But yes, the Animal Farm novel, it's really a novella, it's so short, it's only about
00:36:50.680 100 pages, is a, you know, fantastical representation of the Russian Revolution.
00:36:57.260 For sure, for sure.
00:36:58.060 And I want to grab at something you mentioned earlier, that this looms so large in left-wing
00:37:03.760 memory.
00:37:04.420 And I think it's worth picking at that a bit, because it's true.
00:37:07.380 For decades, there's a lot of famous narratives of the Spanish Civil War.
00:37:11.580 You mentioned For Whom the Bell Tolls.
00:37:13.200 There are ones that are not as cynical as Orwell's take.
00:37:17.220 There are a lot of fond memories of fighting in the Spanish Civil War.
00:37:21.000 And they look back on it as this great tragedy and such.
00:37:24.340 And Orwell got shot, I believe.
00:37:26.040 I think he actually got shot on the front lines.
00:37:27.460 He did, right through the throat.
00:37:27.860 He nearly died.
00:37:28.960 In the throat.
00:37:29.440 Like, he actually could have been killed in this thing.
00:37:32.040 Which I think that probably...
00:37:33.800 And of course, that probably changed the way he viewed it.
00:37:36.060 He said, am I dying for this, really?
00:37:38.380 It might have.
00:37:39.060 It might have.
00:37:39.540 But I think what's interesting to pick out there is, if you think of what memoirs or
00:37:46.340 accounts that conservatives would like, I feel like we will mostly pick examples of crusades
00:37:52.260 that succeeded.
00:37:54.020 That we feel proud that we'll read a memoir of the American Civil War, of the American Revolution,
00:38:00.120 and we'll appreciate it because they suffered so much to achieve this thing that produced
00:38:04.840 so much good that we like the outcome of.
00:38:06.860 And with the left, you know, it's notable.
00:38:09.380 They don't have...
00:38:10.260 They can't write a fond memoir of the Russian Revolution.
00:38:13.800 They can't write a fond memoir of the mass revolution.
00:38:15.820 You're right.
00:38:16.560 There isn't one anywhere.
00:38:17.680 Because every time they win, it's terrible.
00:38:21.120 So they have to go, man, Spain, that's the one that would have been great if we'd won.
00:38:26.260 Sadly, we didn't win it.
00:38:27.540 What a tragedy.
00:38:28.320 I feel so bad about this.
00:38:31.100 And that's how it happened.
00:38:31.600 And then, of course, the other cope, the other cope of, well, that wasn't real communism.
00:38:35.920 It wasn't real communism.
00:38:36.700 That was, you know, that was something else.
00:38:38.740 That was Stalinism.
00:38:40.540 They were part of the left opposition.
00:38:42.280 They should have been part of the center opposition against the right opposition.
00:38:47.160 Right.
00:38:47.440 Every time that Khmer Rouge, which, you know, I don't...
00:38:50.060 We'll have to do another episode of the Khmer Rouge at some point.
00:38:52.460 But it follows the same lines.
00:38:54.220 It's probably...
00:38:54.700 You could make a seven-hour documentary and call it, like, The Search for Real Communism.
00:39:00.380 And you just go from one communist country to the other.
00:39:03.160 And it turns out real communism wasn't here either.
00:39:06.580 But we did find, you know, a million skulls piled up into a giant pyramid.
00:39:10.320 But that wasn't real communism.
00:39:11.120 Where did all the normal people go?
00:39:13.420 Where did all the successful intellectuals go?
00:39:16.780 Can we find them?
00:39:18.200 You know, just the other day.
00:39:19.440 Just the other day.
00:39:20.200 Identify them.
00:39:21.720 Just the other day, they released PISA scores.
00:39:23.540 That's the international standardized test that we used to compare whose schools are
00:39:27.960 doing well.
00:39:28.620 And Cambodia got an absolute dead last by a million miles, unfortunately.
00:39:34.100 And all you can think is, you know, maybe it wasn't a good idea to have shot every single
00:39:37.920 person who wore glasses.
00:39:40.280 Right.
00:39:40.860 So, and this is what Blake is saying, that when the Khmer Rouge took power, which was an extreme
00:39:47.040 Marxist organization...
00:39:49.220 Not real communism, though.
00:39:50.600 They weren't real communists.
00:39:51.420 Again, not real communists.
00:39:51.860 Excuse me, extreme Maoist organization.
00:39:53.900 That's why they'll even say Maoists.
00:39:54.880 They're not really communists.
00:39:55.580 They're just Maoists.
00:39:56.860 And you're right.
00:39:57.460 They just slaughter the intellectuals.
00:40:00.120 Just absolutely slaughter them.
00:40:01.660 In fact, at one point, I remember they...
00:40:04.400 And there's a little bit of a tie to Kissinger here, right?
00:40:07.060 Because they are, you know, Kissinger's bombing Cambodia around this time.
00:40:09.700 They're taking power.
00:40:10.280 At one point, they go into the capital, Phnom Penh, and they tell everyone, the capital's
00:40:16.100 about to be bombed.
00:40:16.880 The capital's about to be bombed.
00:40:18.180 Everyone needs to flee.
00:40:19.200 And so all the, you know, the successful, rich, intellectual people, or not just rich,
00:40:24.360 but well-off people, flee the capital.
00:40:26.680 Well, the capital wasn't about to be bombed.
00:40:28.560 And the communists just take all their houses and then take all the people and put them in
00:40:32.300 concentration camps.
00:40:33.160 And Jack, where is Jack?
00:40:38.320 Where is Jack?
00:40:40.640 Where is he?
00:40:41.900 Jack, I want to see you.
00:40:45.560 Great job, Jack.
00:40:47.000 Thank you.
00:40:47.760 What a job you do.
00:40:49.180 You know, we have an incredible thing.
00:40:50.560 We're always talking about the fake news and the bad, but we have guys, and these are the
00:40:55.040 guys who'll be getting Pulisic.
00:40:56.360 This, I will say about the, about the Khmer Rouge, this is the, the one example where you
00:41:09.260 do actually have like a serious movie that was made about this, The Killing Fields, where
00:41:15.020 I believe it won an Academy Award and actually goes through and documents the communist atrocities.
00:41:20.400 But I've said this for years, you'll never find a movie about the communist revolution
00:41:24.800 in China, the Russian Revolution, the Chinese Cultural Revolution.
00:41:29.180 You'll never see one on the Spanish Civil War from the perspective that we're giving
00:41:31.960 you.
00:41:32.420 Basically, everything that we're talking about throughout this entire series, you will never
00:41:36.960 find depicted in Hollywood for some strange reason, Blake.
00:41:40.520 I can't figure out what that is.
00:41:42.000 It's even though, before we close, I want to tell this amazing story, just because it's
00:41:46.200 an amazing story.
00:41:47.300 So early in the war, there's an infamous moment in the Spanish Civil War.
00:41:52.060 There's the city of Toledo, not the one in Ohio.
00:41:54.460 It's Toledo in Spain.
00:41:56.640 And it's historically-
00:41:58.640 You don't say.
00:42:00.140 Historically, it was a major city, an important, it was one of the first places conquered in
00:42:04.240 the Reconquista, it had a famous university there.
00:42:07.360 Historically important, but in modern times, not an important city.
00:42:10.440 It's a provincial town.
00:42:11.520 And it has this fortress, this old castle in the middle of it called the Alcazar.
00:42:15.480 It was a palace of the Spanish kings, highly symbolic of the old regime.
00:42:19.880 And when the civil war begins, it gets occupied by the local nationalist forces, not a lot
00:42:25.880 of them.
00:42:26.260 And again, the city's not important, but they get holed up in the Alcazar and the Spanish
00:42:31.060 Republicans, the left, start besieging the Alcazar.
00:42:34.060 Again, not an important military target at all, but it becomes hugely symbolically important.
00:42:39.280 So Franco, who's leading the forces of the right, is like, we have to relieve the Alcazar.
00:42:45.560 We should try to relieve them before the siege falls, which, you know, it really shows some
00:42:49.580 of, it shows the old chivalrous spirit.
00:42:51.740 Like, Stalin would not expend a lot of effort to save people just because they were his fellow
00:42:56.500 travelers.
00:42:57.020 Or if he did, he'd, you know, frame them of something and shoot them afterwards.
00:43:00.600 But Franco, he expends a lot of effort to save the Alcazar.
00:43:04.880 And there's a moment early in the siege, the commander of the Alcazar, the general, Jose
00:43:12.280 Varela, I think is his name.
00:43:15.220 And what they do is they capture the son of the commander.
00:43:21.020 No, it's Moscardo.
00:43:21.740 Jose Moscardo is the guy who's in command.
00:43:23.580 And they capture his son, a 24-year-old, and they just say, if you don't surrender, we
00:43:31.180 will shoot your son.
00:43:33.060 And the Colonel Moscardo asks to speak to his son.
00:43:36.640 And his son asks, you know, what should I do?
00:43:39.760 And his father replies, commend your soul to God and die like a patriot, shouting, Viva
00:43:45.960 Cristo Rey, Christ the King, and Viva España.
00:43:49.760 The Alcazar does not surrender.
00:43:51.900 That, answered the son, I can do.
00:43:56.960 And he was shot immediately afterwards.
00:44:00.960 And for the rest of his life, Franco allowed the commander to wear black in public in a
00:44:06.240 sign of mourning for his son.
00:44:08.300 And, you know, whatever else you think of the conflict, it's, I think you have to be
00:44:14.860 moved by that, to be willing to sacrifice your life for a principle like that in such a stark
00:44:21.880 way.
00:44:22.180 And this really goes to show you, I mean, and of course, it's Spain, right?
00:44:27.460 So anything the Spanish do, you know, they're going to be completely impassioned one way
00:44:31.180 or completely impassioned the other way.
00:44:33.140 The moderates don't do well in Spain historically or wherever.
00:44:37.520 That's the, that is the Spanish blood.
00:44:39.460 You're either, you're either full in for, again, and certainly to be sure, there's a
00:44:43.780 lot of romance in, in monarchy, in the crown, of course, in the throne and the altar of the
00:44:50.700 church, the Passion of the Christ.
00:44:52.540 These are very romantic stories.
00:44:54.720 And this is something that has carried them throughout the centuries, I believe, and, and
00:44:59.140 even into the modern age in many cases.
00:45:00.800 But, you know, they've created this, this idea of the romance of the Spanish civil war,
00:45:06.760 where if you study, and the reason I say this, and the reason that I became more interested
00:45:10.840 in the Spanish civil war is because as I was studying Antifa back in the days when I used
00:45:15.080 to infiltrate their meetings before I was well known and readily identifiable, or I would
00:45:20.300 just lurk around on their websites, which obviously I still do.
00:45:22.860 So they are constantly making references to it the same way that you and I would make
00:45:26.840 references to, you know, or just normal people would make reference to like a TV series or
00:45:30.960 a quote, something they will make these obscure references to the Spanish civil war all the
00:45:36.240 time.
00:45:36.460 And it very much is their modern currency within the movement.
00:45:40.240 So it's something to them, which they're, they're constantly refighting and trying to
00:45:45.020 recreate.
00:45:45.920 And again, it's because it's the one they lost badly.
00:45:49.300 And so they can say, if we'd won that one, that would have been, that would have been
00:45:52.700 real communism.
00:45:53.600 That would have been the real one where everything would have been great, you know, other than
00:45:56.700 all those people we killed.
00:45:57.900 And then it would have been true socialism, which otherwise has never been tried.
00:46:01.300 They've never gotten around to trying it ever since.
00:46:03.520 Such a tragedy.
00:46:04.380 They should, they should work on that.
00:46:05.780 They should work on making sure that they can try a real socialism.
00:46:10.480 Blake, incredible.
00:46:11.800 Give that, give the name of the book again.
00:46:13.280 By the way, the other book that we have to, we have to throw out, I don't even think we've
00:46:16.840 said it, is My War of Troubles by, by Paul Kemp, which is another, he was a volunteer
00:46:21.860 for the nationalists.
00:46:23.220 Just an example of something that people could read that's not exactly biased for the way
00:46:27.260 that you were taught.
00:46:30.020 Exactly.
00:46:30.620 You know, this is such a propagandized conflict.
00:46:33.320 It's worth reading the stuff that is largely ignored.
00:46:36.140 Luckily, homage to Catalonia, you can still find everywhere.
00:46:38.460 They can't censor Orwell.
00:46:39.560 And then the book that we mentioned off the top, which is The Last Crusade by Warren Carroll
00:46:46.380 is his name.
00:46:48.320 So check those out, learn the real story.
00:46:51.520 For Christians out there who are interested in what a last stand looks like when your entire
00:46:56.880 religion is about to be wiped out because they are under attack from the government, obviously
00:47:01.480 something at a time when the FBI is wiretapping and infiltrating traditional Catholics in the
00:47:07.240 United States going after pro-lifers, this Spanish Civil War is something you need to study.
00:47:12.400 Ladies and gentlemen, as always, you have my permission to lay short.