Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to Beginner's Bagpipe with Margaret Kildre. I'm
Speaker 1: your host and Margaret Kildre and I don't know how
Speaker 1: to play bagpipes, but today you're gonna hear me Wait, no,
Speaker 1: hear me out? What if instead we have part two
Speaker 1: of the Popular Olympics with James Stout on cool People
Speaker 1: who did cool stuff? How does that sound? Everyone? Yeah,
Speaker 1: more than the bagpipe ideas, James and Margaret do bagpipe
Speaker 1: would be a good podcast, So I think we should
Speaker 1: probably pitch that. Yeah, yeah, exactly, all right, excellent, Well,
Speaker 1: we just got to get through this and then from
Speaker 1: now on we're only playing bagpipes and annoying my neighbors
Speaker 1: in the mountains. Because that's the fun thing about if
Speaker 1: I started playing bagpipes is that I live in the
Speaker 1: mountains and it will echo. Was going to expense it too,
Speaker 1: so we could move to Scotland. Yeah, raise highland cattle,
Speaker 1: Thanks Daddy, I heart big Daddy. We want to do
Speaker 1: yeah the I heart motto. That's why you have to
Speaker 1: listen to adverts sometimes. Yeah, so that we can raise cattle.
Speaker 1: Sacrifice you pentathlon kicking, Yeah, the sex sextathel on the
Speaker 1: sixth kicking see anarchist triathlons, shin kicking, bagpipes and cattle raising. Yeah, so,
Speaker 1: Margaret Killjoy, this is cool. People did cool stuff. My
Speaker 1: producer is Sophie Lichterman, the my guest is James Stout. James,
Speaker 1: how are you doing? Okay? Literally, I'm happy. We've had
Speaker 1: a break. We've bagpiped. Yeah, it's been. It's a whole
Speaker 1: separate day. What are you talking about? You know I
Speaker 1: bagpiped since then? Yeah, totally. And our audio production is
Speaker 1: done by Ian. The theme music was written by on Women.
Speaker 1: And this is part two of a thing. So if
Speaker 1: if this makes no sense to you, well what we
Speaker 1: said so far does it makes understand anybody, probably including us,
Speaker 1: But you should go back and listen to part one.
Speaker 1: If you don't go back and listen to part one,
Speaker 1: I can't tell you how how much I will never
Speaker 1: trust you. How could you trust someone who comes in
Speaker 1: to the second part of a two parter you could?
Speaker 1: If no, no, I just I don't. I don't. I
Speaker 1: don't get it. I don't get it. And you know,
Speaker 1: maybe everyone's different. You have your own way of doing things,
Speaker 1: and that's fine. James is actually the host today and
Speaker 1: I'm just rambling. James are doing where we at? What's happening? Good?
Speaker 1: I'm good. What's happening? All right? Well, we're just gonna
Speaker 1: kick off. What's happening. You've listened to the you listen
Speaker 1: to the last part, you know, the Spanish civil wards
Speaker 1: starting right So a five fifteen in the morning, the
Speaker 1: radio announced, people of Barcelona, the moment we feared has arrived.
Speaker 1: The army has betrayed it's worth and honor has written
Speaker 1: against the Republic. For this, Citizens of Barcelona, the time
Speaker 1: of great decisions and great sacrifices have arrived, destroyed this
Speaker 1: fascist army. Every citizen must live their duty. Long live
Speaker 1: the generality that, long live Catalonia, Long live the Republic,
Speaker 1: which is pretty cool thing for a radio to say. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So with this, the game slipped into hindsight and the
Speaker 1: war assumed disposition. The only thing that really mattered for
Speaker 1: the next three years, and what the Vivankos wrote much later,
Speaker 1: what could have been a great people's popular Olympics in Barcelona,
Speaker 1: prepared with vision and enthusiasm by people of great spirit
Speaker 1: who believed in Olympic and human ideals, was lost and
Speaker 1: for many of the athletes who had spent a few
Speaker 1: days before the Games enjoying the city's nightlife and meeting
Speaker 1: other anti fascist athletes. It wasn't a total surprise, right.
Speaker 1: They talked to their local translators, they talked to the
Speaker 1: people who are hosting them, and the rumors of this
Speaker 1: coup had been going around for a long time. M hmm.
Speaker 1: Many of these people had fought fashion in their own
Speaker 1: countries before. Right. There was a German sprinter. Do you
Speaker 1: know who Muriel Rockeiser is? No, he's a German sprinter.
Speaker 1: I don't know Muriel Rockiser. She is the the the
Speaker 1: love interest of the German sprinter. Okay, German sprinter is
Speaker 1: called Otto Bock, which Magpie tried though. Yeah, I was
Speaker 1: so proud of her sho and have shut that down.
Speaker 1: He's like he's a member of like Antifa with a
Speaker 1: capital A right, like like when Antifa was organized by
Speaker 1: the KPD. So lots of these people have But who
Speaker 1: is she? She's an American Jewish author who was sent
Speaker 1: to cover the games by Esquire. Okay, they end up
Speaker 1: stuck on a train just outside of Barcelona, and then
Speaker 1: they watched this village that they're stuck in go through
Speaker 1: its own tiny revolution, right, and it's suddenly run by
Speaker 1: the people. Suddenly it's an anarchist village. Now it's run
Speaker 1: by the people of the village, right. And then they
Speaker 1: go into Barcelona and he joins, and we'll talk about
Speaker 1: him a little bit later. Okay, it's it's this is
Speaker 1: all written in her book Savage Coast, which is a
Speaker 1: very good book that almost no one has read. But
Speaker 1: it's a fantastic book and everyone should read it. It's
Speaker 1: kind of a novelized version of her relationship with this
Speaker 1: guy O Cool. So Barcelona pretty much at this point
Speaker 1: becomes what George Will called a city where they're working
Speaker 1: class within the saddle, right, And some of the athletes
Speaker 1: took a liking to what they saw, and they didn't
Speaker 1: like fascism, so they decided that it was worth joining
Speaker 1: the fight that worked them out that morning. So the
Speaker 1: US team was led by thirty two year old Abraham
Speaker 1: Alfred chick Jacken. Everyone calls him Chick, right. So, like
Speaker 1: so many of the foreigners who had fled to Spain
Speaker 1: to fight, Jacob was Jewish. His parents had taken him
Speaker 1: and his two siblings out of Russia when he was
Speaker 1: just nine months old to look for a better life
Speaker 1: in the USA. They had another daughter after they arrived,
Speaker 1: and Chick grew up with two sisters and order brother.
Speaker 1: His parents had left Europe to for the anti Semitism
Speaker 1: and soon he would return to fight it. So I
Speaker 1: want to read a little bit here from this guy
Speaker 1: called Pierre Ackerman, who was another Jewish volunteer who fointed
Speaker 1: the span Civil War. That his exclamation of why around
Speaker 1: thirty percent of the Americans who fointed Spanish Civil War
Speaker 1: were Jewish? That makes sense, Yeah, and about ten percent
Speaker 1: ten all the foreign volunteers were Jewish. The pursuit of
Speaker 1: money is also the pursuit of power. Have the programs
Speaker 1: in the world been organized so as to distract attention
Speaker 1: from the misery of the people by provoking hatred towards
Speaker 1: the Jews? Well, those who are really responsible, the authors
Speaker 1: of misery, laugh in secret because instead of attacking their power,
Speaker 1: people slaughter the Jews. Your children, however, have not tolerated this.
Speaker 1: They have not stooped, and they will not stay silent.
Speaker 1: That rules. Yeah, Pierre Ackerman's incredibly based dude. Him and
Speaker 1: his brother both die early in on in the Spanish
Speaker 1: Civil War, but his his mother was very conservative and
Speaker 1: remained very sort of religiously conservative, and he was extremely
Speaker 1: radical right, but he by the end of his life
Speaker 1: was righting to his mother. She was destroyed by the
Speaker 1: fact that both her young sons went to fight and
Speaker 1: both died, and him right back being like, we're not
Speaker 1: so different, Like we're not it's different as you think.
Speaker 1: It's it's really like it literally like I remember reading
Speaker 1: those and it literally made me critic It's incredibly fucking
Speaker 1: sad and so human. Now that that's really interesting to
Speaker 1: me because you do get this like when we talk
Speaker 1: about different, um, different communities that are economically disenfranchised or
Speaker 1: different communities that are press in different ways, and I
Speaker 1: feel like, um, Jewish folks have to deal with us
Speaker 1: a lot is specifically the like what I saw about
Speaker 1: last time, about the like Schrodinger's you know, bad Guy,
Speaker 1: where you're communists or capitalist depending on whatever. But it is,
Speaker 1: it's it's systems of trying to have power within a
Speaker 1: system that has denied you that power. So I really
Speaker 1: like that that he's saying, like, look, we have a
Speaker 1: lot in common. We're trying to reclaim I mean I'm
Speaker 1: putting words this mouth. But that's interesting to me. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's interesting. The there are some amazing like Jewish socialists
Speaker 1: from Mandatory Palestine who or most of them been kicked
Speaker 1: out of Mandatory Palestine by the British actually mhm. And
Speaker 1: they and they're like anti Zionist some of them, and
Speaker 1: they end up fighting in the Spanish Civil War and
Speaker 1: they're like, it's amazing. People are the German work of
Speaker 1: the Yiddish. It's called the Yiddish are Biter Sports Club.
Speaker 1: Who heard all decamped on master to Paris by that time,
Speaker 1: like some really amazing stories. There are some good books
Speaker 1: about it too. So by nineteen six, i'll Jakin was
Speaker 1: an accomplished fighter. He'd wrested at Cornell and narrowly missed
Speaker 1: out an Olympic selection in the two US athletes who
Speaker 1: did go to Olympics one golden silver. After graduating on
Speaker 1: September twenty six with the bachelor's degree in education, he
Speaker 1: won the nineteen seven Amateur Athletic Union Niagara District Wrestling Championships.
Speaker 1: That was an Olympic qualifying game. Again, he got to
Speaker 1: try out and bis didn't quite make it. Despite his success,
Speaker 1: he didn't qualify for ninety eight games, perhaps because of
Speaker 1: his persistent knee injury, and he decided to peticide his
Speaker 1: Olympic dreams and up for a career in education. And
Speaker 1: nine and thirty one years old, and he began a
Speaker 1: master's degree, and he was teaching university in physical education
Speaker 1: at the City University of New York. And he was
Speaker 1: married to a woman named Jenny Berman. They actually hyphenated
Speaker 1: their names rather than her taking his name, which was
Speaker 1: pretty at ahead of their time. Yeah, they were very
Speaker 1: like they used the word progressive. Actually the word progressive,
Speaker 1: it would be the way they would use for themselves.
Speaker 1: And so, yeah, they were extremely progressive. She was a
Speaker 1: much more experienced activist than him. She was a social
Speaker 1: worker and a communist. She graduated from Syracuse in and
Speaker 1: headed directly to the city to begin organizing for the
Speaker 1: Communist Party. And in the year before they married, she
Speaker 1: made headlines which he left New York Jewish community social
Speaker 1: services agencies in a walk up for union recognition. She's
Speaker 1: she's pretty cool, pretty cool person. He was deeply influenced
Speaker 1: by her convictions, game active in his union and joined
Speaker 1: his campus Anti Fascist association in nineteen thirty five. His
Speaker 1: his union had voted for a complete boycott of the
Speaker 1: Berlin Games because they refused to send athletes to a
Speaker 1: country that had discrimination as a national policy. So by
Speaker 1: the time, yeah, it seems like a good goal, seems
Speaker 1: like everyone should listened to them. He was also very
Speaker 1: used to coaching people by the time the popular Olympics
Speaker 1: came around, right by both like teaching at the university
Speaker 1: and coaching wrestling, so he was the natural choice to
Speaker 1: lead the team, right, But that's have still been kind
Speaker 1: of nervous to him, like because he hadn't been wrestling
Speaker 1: for a while, he was out of shape, and he's
Speaker 1: going just like athlete and coach, he still got this
Speaker 1: neee issue. He has to like squat down and pull
Speaker 1: his knee back in. If you look at this dude,
Speaker 1: he is very clearly hard as fucking nails. Had a
Speaker 1: flat he knows he's yeah, He's send you a page
Speaker 1: of him later. But some of his teammates he would
Speaker 1: have known, right. Irving Jenkins, who was a heavyweight boxer,
Speaker 1: was still at Cornell when they left for the Games.
Speaker 1: As I said, the organizers placed a big emphasis and
Speaker 1: having black folks in the United States come and if
Speaker 1: you look at the posters for the games, there's one
Speaker 1: on my wall, but you can't see it. The posters
Speaker 1: feature like a people of different races walking together and
Speaker 1: carrying flags, but they're like Catalan flags and Popular Front
Speaker 1: flags into the stadium. And they were really invested in
Speaker 1: this idea of like different genders, different races or competing
Speaker 1: together as part of the Popular Front, which like, if
Speaker 1: you look at the Little Olympics, it's mostly naked white dude, right, like,
Speaker 1: like the whole propaganda is like it looks like the
Speaker 1: Chippendale's kind of yeah, it's buff white dude in buff
Speaker 1: white dude in thong. So some of the other folks
Speaker 1: were Dot Tucker. She was a sprinter and a union
Speaker 1: leader in Harlem. She was the only black woman on
Speaker 1: the team. She's joined by Frank Payton, who's also a
Speaker 1: sprinter and boxer, who with Charlie Burley. Charlie Burley is
Speaker 1: kind of an interesting guy. He was younger than everyone else, thirteen,
Speaker 1: younger than chicken, and he had a pretty difficult upbringing.
Speaker 1: He was a mixed day. He was a boxer. That's
Speaker 1: the perfect name for a boxer, Yeah, it is. I
Speaker 1: hadn't even thought of that anyway in a life. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: Burly Charlie. His dad was a black coal miner, his
Speaker 1: mother was an irishwoman from County Cork, and he began
Speaker 1: to box at the age of twelve. He won a
Speaker 1: junior national title in the Golden Gloves competition and he
Speaker 1: was seen as kind of the big hope for US boxing.
Speaker 1: He only narrowly lost the senior competition in but he
Speaker 1: refused to try out for the Berlin Games. He wasn't
Speaker 1: going to go to Berlin, racist sass country and compete,
Speaker 1: and so they invited him the last minute to Barcelona.
Speaker 1: Right They left on a ship called the Transylvania on
Speaker 1: the third of ju Line I, and another of the
Speaker 1: athletes was called Burly dan Chick. He was a gymnast, Bernie,
Speaker 1: not Burly, and he kept a diary. He writes about
Speaker 1: the food on board. He said, we've been treated very nicely,
Speaker 1: and he said, since we're on the road to fame,
Speaker 1: everyone's being very kind. Basically, they would start up checking,
Speaker 1: made him get up early every morning and run around
Speaker 1: the deck to stay fit while he like sits on
Speaker 1: a fucking like a chair the sun. He's like he
Speaker 1: would have seen this rom com. I like this rom com. Okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: it would be a good rom com. He and the
Speaker 1: two other earth Jenkins, Jarley Berlie and I'll Chack and
Speaker 1: would all fight on the deck. They and then Bernie
Speaker 1: Giant Chick was very piste off because there wasn't a
Speaker 1: high bar in the gym, so he just sunk around
Speaker 1: with the banisters and stuff. You can imagine. It's just
Speaker 1: like this kind of a bunch of crazies on the boat.
Speaker 1: They caused a lot of problem when they would go
Speaker 1: into dinner right because they they found that their table
Speaker 1: kept getting moved and normally on I guess on these
Speaker 1: long boat trips. I'm not a not a person who
Speaker 1: goes on long boat trips, but you have like an
Speaker 1: a sign table. You said it every day. But they
Speaker 1: kept moving the table for the Popua Olympics team, and
Speaker 1: they work because people are racists. Because people were racist,
Speaker 1: so you were the racism caused some rowdiness, so they
Speaker 1: refused to They refused to move their table anymore, and
Speaker 1: they refused to segregate their table. That worked out for them, unfortunately,
Speaker 1: they there's a ping pong tournament for everyone aboard the ship,
Speaker 1: I guess, and that the baly Gantic writes about this
Speaker 1: in the story. It's interesting to hear it from his perspective,
Speaker 1: or he's a Jewish guy from New York. The Communist
Speaker 1: Party in the United States and the nineteen thirties has
Speaker 1: thoroughly embraced the cause of black folks in the United States, right,
Speaker 1: it's genuinely invested in this, and he's read about it
Speaker 1: a lot, and like it's also invested in this. But
Speaker 1: they well, I guess. They're playing ping pong one night
Speaker 1: and he realizes that the like Frank Payton Charlie Berley
Speaker 1: team are gonna win. He's like, hell, yeah, we're gonna
Speaker 1: fucking show them, like they're going to be owned. And
Speaker 1: then they like throw the game and he's very upset.
Speaker 1: But this he's like, oh, I see what's happened, Like
Speaker 1: they don't want to win, they don't want to cause
Speaker 1: the first Like that's really sucked up. Like yeah, he
Speaker 1: writes it hurts, see what happened in his diary the
Speaker 1: the black athletes throw the game. Yeah, such that they
Speaker 1: don't like cause a deal with all the rich past
Speaker 1: because they've they've learned how to navigate life as a Yeah,
Speaker 1: they've learned that sort of code switching and things that
Speaker 1: they have to do. And Bernie danjecause this this Jewish
Speaker 1: guy from New York is like, damn, that's fucked up.
Speaker 1: So that when they got there, they made sure that
Speaker 1: they had all the black athletes standing at the front
Speaker 1: for all the photographs and like put them forward for
Speaker 1: interviews and such when they got to England because they
Speaker 1: look you can see him having his realization. I think
Speaker 1: it's really interesting because a sound like when things are
Speaker 1: when you present things, and that when you see things
Speaker 1: in the totally modern context, you could be like, Okay,
Speaker 1: this seems like also a lot of like tokenization and stuff,
Speaker 1: right you know, they're like, oh, we're going to make
Speaker 1: sure that everyone's marching together with the flags. And it's
Speaker 1: just like really interesting. You know, there's just like fine
Speaker 1: line and they're like living in this very different context
Speaker 1: where it seems like to me as a as a
Speaker 1: white girl, but this is a very positive thing that
Speaker 1: they're doing. Um that it's by having the black people
Speaker 1: in front and having you know, the games, having very
Speaker 1: intentionally like diverse photos and things like that. But it's
Speaker 1: like it seems like this is before it gets like
Speaker 1: all twisted into the current weird liberal heal version of that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because it's not just representation politics, right, it's also like, oh,
Speaker 1: like if someone wants to kill you because of the way,
Speaker 1: because who you are, then I will kill them first
Speaker 1: like that, which yeah they doing right, Like it's it's
Speaker 1: not they don't Yeah that is literally what do Yeah,
Speaker 1: they don't stop at the photograph, right, Like the response,
Speaker 1: it's I think interesting that he's like sees maybe for
Speaker 1: the first time ever, like like racism happening to his
Speaker 1: friend in his responses like how can I show solidarity
Speaker 1: with this person? And like what yeah, yeah, and so
Speaker 1: I think it. Yeah, it's interesting that them negotiating that
Speaker 1: space is really interesting in his diary. And I want
Speaker 1: to write another book about all of this. So I
Speaker 1: have a lot of sources here. Yeah, they'll be cool. Yeah,
Speaker 1: hopefully I want to do biographies of each of these people.
Speaker 1: So they arrived in Britain, they take a train through
Speaker 1: France and they have the best time in Barcelona, right
Speaker 1: that They're going out to bars, they're going out to clubs,
Speaker 1: they're meeting like you know how it is like when
Speaker 1: you're young, and you travel and you meet in a
Speaker 1: bunch of other people who believe in the shame ship
Speaker 1: you believe in. You're like, oh, that's amazing, Like and
Speaker 1: I kind of I literally can't imagine a better time
Speaker 1: in place to be alive than what you're describing. If
Speaker 1: you've been brought up being like our sport isn't for you.
Speaker 1: You're on the left sports and few you give a
Speaker 1: funk about things that on sport, And then like you're
Speaker 1: here are twenty thousand people You're in like Barcelona, which
Speaker 1: is you know, the revolutions in the air, and yeah,
Speaker 1: so I think they've checking sort of struggles to keep
Speaker 1: them training. You can see the sort of suck it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're gonna get drunk and fuck yes, they absolutely want
Speaker 1: to get drunk and funk. They are like because sex
Speaker 1: work is legal, right and unionized, and so they're going
Speaker 1: to the brothel or whatever the place where you can
Speaker 1: pay people for sex work and they're having your time
Speaker 1: and like there, yeah, they're enjoying it. About five fifteen,
Speaker 1: this radio announcement comes on, right and they start hearing
Speaker 1: shooting in the street and his Darry entry for his
Speaker 1: days comes the revolution with revolution in block capitals. So
Speaker 1: they all go and stand on the bars of their
Speaker 1: balcony and they watched their battle raging. They don't. He
Speaker 1: also wrote in his daries other things, that they don't
Speaker 1: do things by halves out here, and they that's true. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they weren't working around. Yeah, so progressive that we don't
Speaker 1: have a government. Okay, millions of people will fight for this. Yeah,
Speaker 1: people are, including some of you. So they kept looking
Speaker 1: at they were so fascinated by what was going on.
Speaker 1: They kept looking out the window, and then like snipers
Speaker 1: would think they were at the snipers and shoot at
Speaker 1: the window. So they go to another room and look
Speaker 1: out the windows. I would stop, some of us would stuff.
Speaker 1: They would be a one point, there's a lull in
Speaker 1: the firing, and they go out and somehow we're able
Speaker 1: to convey that they are athletes for the Olympics, and
Speaker 1: everybody stopped shooting so they could go and get some food.
Speaker 1: Both sides are, like he just wrote in his diary,
Speaker 1: they stopped the war so that we can pass the
Speaker 1: real like Moses moment. I guess. So once they've they've
Speaker 1: been out, they realized that like the situation, right, the
Speaker 1: barricades where things are happening. Charlie Bertie has been time
Speaker 1: about a week. It doesn't speak Spanish. Weapons are in
Speaker 1: very short supply. Most of people the barricades don't have them,
Speaker 1: and so he grabs a crowbar starts leaving up stones
Speaker 1: from the cobbled road and helping people build barricades. Hell yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's incredibly cool. So these guys are all drawn to help.
Speaker 1: You can look at pictures. It's really interesting. You look
Speaker 1: at pictures of July. You can see these barricades build
Speaker 1: and then pop your Olympics posters in the background, and
Speaker 1: people like there's there's one of people hiding behind the
Speaker 1: ticket booths, like firing their little mousers out. It's very cool.
Speaker 1: So by the evening co had been defeated. The next
Speaker 1: day the anarchists would finish a job storming the barracks
Speaker 1: and seezing thousands of rifles. This is when last for
Speaker 1: the anarchists died because their tactic was mainly to just
Speaker 1: run towards danger, which has like limited tactical prowess. Yeah mao,
Speaker 1: and yeah, we had another episode about this. It's some
Speaker 1: incredibly cool things happened, like they roll out rolls of
Speaker 1: news print from the newspaper factory and use them as
Speaker 1: an impromptu barricade to fire from behind, which is very cool.
Speaker 1: So you can actually see as well, like sometimes you
Speaker 1: can see at the barricade people are like that that
Speaker 1: newsprint that newspaper, right, would it would have printed newspapers
Speaker 1: that would have gone out. The newspapers went out the
Speaker 1: night before to be read that day, so you can
Speaker 1: see things which were written speculatively, being like, the opening
Speaker 1: ceremony was a great success. Yeah, opening ceremony was we
Speaker 1: stopped a bat. Yeah, they came there to do anti fascism,
Speaker 1: so I guess it was a great success. And so
Speaker 1: in the next few days industricual nationalized vehicles expropriated from
Speaker 1: the homes of the plotters, Militia columns were formed from
Speaker 1: the various unions, and the Popular Front took on a
Speaker 1: physical form as the columns marchshoft to Zada fight. The
Speaker 1: remaining athletes paraded through the city, singing the International in
Speaker 1: various languages, led by Scottish bag This that's our goal.
Speaker 1: We can play the International alright. So sadly not everyone
Speaker 1: was so lucky. French athlete had been shot in the
Speaker 1: first hours of the cue. The British wanted to leave
Speaker 1: immediately and offered the Americans a place on their ship
Speaker 1: the United States Continent. So they went to the continent
Speaker 1: to be like what should we do. The concert was
Speaker 1: like you leave today, or we're like we're washing our
Speaker 1: hands of you. Basically that's yeah. I guess, like, look,
Speaker 1: if you're trying to get out, you've got to get
Speaker 1: out right now. Otherwise there was a boat for them.
Speaker 1: Bernie Dan chicks. Darry is incredibly funny. He's like a
Speaker 1: kid who had to let go home from sound accomp Berlie.
Speaker 1: He writes, all of my Spanish pals have left, with
Speaker 1: Gossa and Valencia in the army, like he's sad. They
Speaker 1: went to one bar for a final time and then
Speaker 1: say goodbye to the city and the days of father.
Speaker 1: Not everyone left. About four hundred athletes side is take
Speaker 1: up arms and stay and fight for the Republic, And
Speaker 1: I want to talk about some of them for the
Speaker 1: rest of this episode. Okay, do you know who probably
Speaker 1: won't take up arms and kill fascists because they don't
Speaker 1: have arms, because they have a little turtle legs. Yeah, Oh,
Speaker 1: you're tell about the ads. The kinds of people who
Speaker 1: advertise on the show are on like you could mount
Speaker 1: It's a weapon on a turtle if you wanted to.
Speaker 1: They have a decently high armor class. But um on
Speaker 1: the table too. That's white bass. Yeah, that's true. Slow
Speaker 1: and steady wins the race. What they say, the turtle tank.
Speaker 1: We're brought to you by turtle Tank, genetically engineered monsters
Speaker 1: on our side. You ever want to see a turtle
Speaker 1: eat a Nazi turtle tank? It's right, Yeah, Boston Dynamics
Speaker 1: didn't know that was coming. No, that's the The other
Speaker 1: side uses the robots we have. Yeah, it's like red
Speaker 1: Wall meats I Warhammer. Okay, here's that. Alright, we're back.
Speaker 1: There was an advert for turtle tank, please buy one.
Speaker 1: So one of these guys is called Bill Scott. His
Speaker 1: actual name is Willoughby, which is a belting name, but
Speaker 1: he went by Bill for probably obvious reasons. He's a
Speaker 1: Protestant bricklayer whose father had fought in the Irish Citizen
Speaker 1: Army in the Eastern Rising. He himself had fought with
Speaker 1: the i RA, and he traveled to the to the
Speaker 1: Games to represent a free an independent island. So one
Speaker 1: of the one of the things about the Games with
Speaker 1: people competed as nations and not states. Yeah, so like
Speaker 1: the exiled Jews of Europe. Like, if you're a German
Speaker 1: Jewish person, you don't really want to be competing for
Speaker 1: Germany given the general vibes. Yeah, yeah, it's bad. Yeah,
Speaker 1: no one could quite pick up on it. But if
Speaker 1: bad ship was going down, so they decided to compete
Speaker 1: as the exiled Jews of Europe, right, Like as a group,
Speaker 1: the colonized people want to get to compete for their colonizer, right,
Speaker 1: So an island, it's colonized country, right, so they're not
Speaker 1: going to compete for the colonizer. He had presumably had
Speaker 1: his enough of repressive regimes and impression national identity after
Speaker 1: he was imprisoned by the British military, and so he
Speaker 1: decided he was going to stay in Spain. He's an
Speaker 1: experienced fighter, doesn't like fascists. Yeah, I mean that makes
Speaker 1: sense here an IRA fighter, like, yeah, a large number
Speaker 1: of Ira men for in the in the Spanish Civil War. Also,
Speaker 1: a number of Irish Catholics went to join Franco fashions.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, yeah. They actually also did a very good
Speaker 1: job of shooting fascists. I heard that they didn't mean to.
Speaker 1: It's a major difference, you know, you say they didn't
Speaker 1: mean to, but I like to believe, yeah, they had
Speaker 1: a moment on things, so we can we can have
Speaker 1: that one for ourselves and like, okay, and this is
Speaker 1: like an important thing to think about. It is because
Speaker 1: I think we oversimplify Irish struggle as like Catholic versus Protestant,
Speaker 1: which is like not fucking true. And so yeah, you're
Speaker 1: like this Protestant, I ra a fighter, went and fought
Speaker 1: for the republic, you know, versus like, go ahead, people
Speaker 1: of Catholic heritage also fought through republic and famously an
Speaker 1: institution which burned churches and disinterred nuns. Yeah, but which
Speaker 1: you know is based. But that's another one that gets
Speaker 1: me banned from Twitter quite a lot, actually, is the
Speaker 1: burned church with the disinterned nuns. And see, I I
Speaker 1: would actually hold that's like part of why we threw
Speaker 1: the twentieth century is that, um, by being like so
Speaker 1: obsessively materialist, I understand why people were being like fun
Speaker 1: the Spanish Catholic Church, right, it was like this oppressive
Speaker 1: institution or whatever. But like I think when it just
Speaker 1: became this like therefore only militant atheists need apply. Everyone
Speaker 1: is not a militant atheist is like Okay, I guess
Speaker 1: I gotta go fight on that other side. Yeah, that's fair.
Speaker 1: So interestingly, like if you look at the churches they burned,
Speaker 1: people very ready burnt churches in their village or neighborhood.
Speaker 1: They like went to the other church. The churches where
Speaker 1: the priests had been like genuinely like compassionate even though
Speaker 1: it didn't disagree, tended don't get burned. Also, lots of
Speaker 1: the churches in Barcelona we used a sniper's nest by
Speaker 1: the fascist so that that one's getting burned. No, and yeah,
Speaker 1: and a lot of the priests were like specifically working
Speaker 1: with the fascist regime. And then like I'm under the
Speaker 1: impression and you would know more about this that in
Speaker 1: the Basque country, Um, the like anti church stuff didn't
Speaker 1: really happen because the church wasn't on the fascist side
Speaker 1: as much. In the car the car Lists who were
Speaker 1: part of that were on the fascist side. Um okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: but they were like radical Catholics and we're talking about
Speaker 1: cards in the day they stuck Okay, like people whose
Speaker 1: whole thing is like some niche argument about royal lineage
Speaker 1: and a bit of prepared to die for that, which
Speaker 1: they did. Fortunately, everyone gets what they want. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: they get to meet the guy that they're so big into.
Speaker 1: So Bill's got fights in the tom Mann Cinturia. What
Speaker 1: happens is that in the days after the coup, these
Speaker 1: national groups organizing into what are called centuria, which are
Speaker 1: like it's it's it's a word from Roman legions, center
Speaker 1: and century. Yeah, a hundred people, which they weren't, but
Speaker 1: they're broadly based on like you have like the Botwin
Speaker 1: centurion who are allargedly Jewish. We have Gustavo stores, the Italians,
Speaker 1: tom Mann English speaking, so they're broadly based on language groups. Right.
Speaker 1: I think the Commune of Paris Centurio was the French one.
Speaker 1: Let's say, yeah, yeah, there was a Salomon which was
Speaker 1: German speaking, and Salmon was the like the leader of
Speaker 1: Antifa when it was a KPD organization. He spent a
Speaker 1: seven years in solitary confinement in a concentration camp, killed
Speaker 1: in yeah, his his, he got it fucking rough TV.
Speaker 1: The prelude to the popular Olympics, they did like a
Speaker 1: trial event, and it was called the Thalament Cup, like
Speaker 1: in sort of recognition of him. And so Bill Scott
Speaker 1: got shot in the throat and returned home to stand
Speaker 1: for election as a candidate for the Communist Party of Ireland.
Speaker 1: How many how many people because or what got shot
Speaker 1: in the throat? This is just like a throat shooting competition. Yeah, clearly,
Speaker 1: I don't know what for the throat? Yeah? Is that
Speaker 1: very effective? They always survived? Yeah, well yeah, they Well,
Speaker 1: I think we've got a skewed star boy here. A
Speaker 1: survivor's bias might be all right. And so he gets
Speaker 1: booted out for a Republican candidate, and so he returned
Speaker 1: to Spain it gets shot in the leg. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: again these people are fucking incredible. Don't never say that. Yeah.
Speaker 1: He goes back and then leaves the Communist Party because
Speaker 1: he's disgusted by the monitor of ribbon truck tract. Yeah.
Speaker 1: You see a lot of these people do exactly that,
Speaker 1: like them leaving forty one and from then until his
Speaker 1: death he gives writes letters to editors and gives interviews
Speaker 1: talking about how like we've forgotten the memory of what
Speaker 1: the popular friend was, what the Spanish civil war was
Speaker 1: what this moment was, which is really cool. Like another
Speaker 1: thing you see about these guys is they're dedicated to
Speaker 1: preserving their memory. Another person I want to talk about,
Speaker 1: and I think this is a woman you may have
Speaker 1: been confused with Marina Janesta, is called Fanny Schoenheit. Okay,
Speaker 1: Fanny is a Dutch woman. She kind of got bored
Speaker 1: of living there and moved to Barcelona because she I
Speaker 1: think she wanted to be a war correspondent, but she
Speaker 1: wasn't really having much luck. She game committed communists and
Speaker 1: she helped organize the games, right she was. She was
Speaker 1: one of the people who like helped put it on.
Speaker 1: They had lots of lots of They had a very
Speaker 1: liberal asylum policy in a republic, so you had a
Speaker 1: lot of anti fascist Germans Italians. So she probably stepped
Speaker 1: in the stadium the night before the games, like most
Speaker 1: of them did, which probably prevented her and thousands of others,
Speaker 1: hundreds of others from fascist turning up at their homes
Speaker 1: to kill them the next day. So instead she said
Speaker 1: about killing fascists. Asks of soldiers marked their barracks. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: she was good at this point. March of their barracks
Speaker 1: into Buslona and left us across the city. Grab guns
Speaker 1: had hidden away or picked up the weapons some soldiers
Speaker 1: who had no further use for them barricades because they
Speaker 1: were dead. Barricades sprang up across the streets, and snipers
Speaker 1: took up positions in rooftops and church towers. Somehow, at
Speaker 1: this point Fanny shoon hit manages to get a submachine gun.
Speaker 1: I don't know how unless she had anarchist friends, because
Speaker 1: the anarchists fucking loved a submachine gun. I love to
Speaker 1: drive by shooting like they really they'd watched the films
Speaker 1: about Chicago and they were into it, Like the Rutie
Speaker 1: talks a lot about his machine pistol and how cool
Speaker 1: it is. Of course, yeah yeah, yeah to bank, yeah yeah,
Speaker 1: well yeah, that's what they were trying to be. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I want to quote here from excellent article in The
Speaker 1: Volunteer by von Scholton, who's written a biography of Schoonheight.
Speaker 1: In a letter to a friend in Rotterdam, she later
Speaker 1: described her she and her comrades and to the military
Speaker 1: barracks from the roof and how they confiscated the arms
Speaker 1: found there. I wore a rather conspicuous yellow shirt. It's
Speaker 1: a miracle they didn't shoot me, she said. But perhaps
Speaker 1: they were supposed surprised to see me that they forgot
Speaker 1: it might have been surprised to see a lady in
Speaker 1: a yellow shirt with a submachine gun. But she was
Speaker 1: soon wearing a more conventional uniform in the militia. Like
Speaker 1: thousands of other people with little to know military experience,
Speaker 1: she joined the militia that day, and unlike many of them,
Speaker 1: she survived. Almost every newspaper in the city carried an
Speaker 1: interview with her, and and it's she became known as
Speaker 1: the Queen of the machine Gun in the Catalan press.
Speaker 1: I want to keep liking her. I like her right now. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you're gonna you just hold back on the Michie Well,
Speaker 1: I didn't look at she she was young. She was
Speaker 1: doing a thing. Yeah, Sandy shouldn't always use her queen
Speaker 1: of machine Gun powers for good. But seven she'd become
Speaker 1: an officer in the People's Army, and the malicious are
Speaker 1: gradually being regularized, made into a more militarized another word
Speaker 1: under Soviet influence. Right, a longstanding kidney. She brought her
Speaker 1: back from the front. And it's really fucking annoying actually
Speaker 1: to read about this in the Spanish press, where they're like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: her kidneys were bad and so she had to come
Speaker 1: back and to read about it. Sometimes it's written about
Speaker 1: like a Dutch press where they're like it was too
Speaker 1: much for her sensitive constitution. I mean, like, if I
Speaker 1: only once in my life dropped through the roof of
Speaker 1: a fascist place with not no uniform and just a
Speaker 1: submachine gun and submachine got a bunch of bunch of
Speaker 1: guys and take all their guns, if I do that
Speaker 1: once in my life and then I'm done forever, like
Speaker 1: one that, Yeah, that's enough for anyone's sensibility. That's enough. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Like like that's PTSD land. Even when you win, you know,
Speaker 1: like you'll be seeing them dead people for the rest
Speaker 1: of you. Yeah, yes, yeah, even if they were bad people. Yeah.
Speaker 1: One doesn't have to particularly sensitive to be impacted by that. Yeah. Anyway,
Speaker 1: So she becomes a machine gun instructor and teaching a
Speaker 1: bunch of other people to shoot machine guns. But in
Speaker 1: the event of May seven, which people will probably be
Speaker 1: familiar with as when communists and Nonstylinist communists and the
Speaker 1: non Stalinist comunists who joined by the anarchists for Industry
Speaker 1: of Barcelona. People will maybe have read Georgie was but
Speaker 1: commics to Catalonia. He did a good book, book three D.
Speaker 1: He mentions it. In the central Square Barcelona plub day Catalunia,
Speaker 1: there's a landmark which is the Hotel Colon, Alo writes.
Speaker 1: The Hotel Colon, the headquarters of the pursuit, dominated the
Speaker 1: plaza in a window near the last oh but one
Speaker 1: in the huge Hotel Colon that sprawled across its face.
Speaker 1: They had a machine gun that could sweep the entire
Speaker 1: square with deadly effect. Unfortunately, it was probably Fanny Schoenheight
Speaker 1: who was manning this machine gun, So she was machine
Speaker 1: gunning anarchist by and other Martias even yeah, yeah, the
Speaker 1: Marxist people who weren't trotsky As, despite what you might
Speaker 1: read on Twitter dot com. Yeah, it's rather sad, this split.
Speaker 1: It's it's something like we can't go into in death,
Speaker 1: but it's just split's very sad. It's at the beginning
Speaker 1: of the end of the Cathleen Revolution. She did, she
Speaker 1: did spend time after she was injured in a car
Speaker 1: crash in Tatraghana and what she was recovering. She had
Speaker 1: a brief relationship with Ramon Mercabert, who is famous for
Speaker 1: killing Trotsky with an ice axe. Huh so she she's
Speaker 1: she's lived alife. Yeah, she at some point, perhaps due
Speaker 1: to the fact that like international newspapers couldn't fathom that
Speaker 1: a lady was going around machine gunning people. Okay, wait
Speaker 1: to go back to the ice axe. Yeah see I
Speaker 1: always heard ice pick. And there is an object that
Speaker 1: is both of these things. Yeah see I said ice
Speaker 1: pick yesterday and and friend of the show Robert Evans
Speaker 1: told me it was an ice axe. Well, because there's
Speaker 1: something I imagine an ice axe with a pick. It
Speaker 1: could seem like a pick, right, But there's also an
Speaker 1: ice pick that's basically a screwdriver that you used to
Speaker 1: like clean ice out of something. And it makes so
Speaker 1: much more sense when you picture it with a handle
Speaker 1: and an ice It all makes more sense now. Yeah,
Speaker 1: look at like it like you would use for climbing,
Speaker 1: like you got a self arrest or whatever you Yeah,
Speaker 1: I was imagining like I got to get him in
Speaker 1: the ear or something, you know, like a little spike
Speaker 1: on a a handle like, yeah, like got to get
Speaker 1: in the eye or whatever, you know. I think it was.
Speaker 1: I think it was a fairly violent one thing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I didn't. I haven't. I don't know enough about Trotsky
Speaker 1: to have known how he does. It's that anyway, big
Speaker 1: understand it. And yeah, yeah, she just moved to the
Speaker 1: Dominican Republic, didn't tell anyone what she's been doing before,
Speaker 1: and just like had a different life. Okay, after this,
Speaker 1: I do want to thank Anna van Vellen for helping
Speaker 1: me translate some of the articles from Dutch about her.
Speaker 1: You know, what, do you know who won't drive an
Speaker 1: ice tool into your skull? I mean, see, this is
Speaker 1: the thing, is like when we're talking about the advertisers,
Speaker 1: I don't feel confident saying yeah it's not it's not
Speaker 1: a given. But yeah, I don't even know about I
Speaker 1: know about that. The turtle tank. They can't close their
Speaker 1: hands right because of their width to arm length ratios.
Speaker 1: An ice pick, No, that's pretty safe. But if you
Speaker 1: have a turtle tank and and I sacks, you could
Speaker 1: drive by ice as people by jumping from the back
Speaker 1: of the turtle tank. No phenomenal stuff. Yeah, and if
Speaker 1: you do it once GTSD for the rest of your life. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: you're killing people, probably actually fox you up. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: not We're not supposed to do it. No, but turtle
Speaker 1: tank will help you if you decide you want to
Speaker 1: be a pacifist by a turtle tank. Turned out that
Speaker 1: for I'll check, and leaving on that ship wasn't so
Speaker 1: much goodbye as esta pronto. He returned home to the
Speaker 1: home he shared with Jenny Berman. The second even gives
Speaker 1: you the dress if you want. It was one street
Speaker 1: over from the townhouse where Winston Churchill's grandparents lived at
Speaker 1: think of the area had taken a turn for the worst,
Speaker 1: and it certainly wasn't sort of place where rich British
Speaker 1: people live. They lived on a tall, skinny block of
Speaker 1: flat since an area dominated by clothing manufacturing. They were
Speaker 1: close to Madison Square Park and to Madison Square Guard.
Speaker 1: When he came home, he attended lots of Union rallies
Speaker 1: at Madison Square Garden. You can see evidence of that.
Speaker 1: When they came home, he obsessively followed news of Spain,
Speaker 1: but after a few months he still felt pulled back.
Speaker 1: Even though he was speaking at fundraisers, he didn't feel
Speaker 1: like he was doing enough, so a year later he
Speaker 1: decided to go back. He set sail on the seventh.
Speaker 1: Which guy is this again? I'm sorry, this is al
Speaker 1: Jake instance, dude with the flat nose. This is the
Speaker 1: the wrestling coach. The coach okay, the one who in
Speaker 1: my mind was sitting on the lawn chair watching everyone
Speaker 1: else run labs. But that is not actually the case.
Speaker 1: He was running laps with them. Yes, more hands are
Speaker 1: seemed to have been okay, yeah, more of a more
Speaker 1: of a leaded by doing guy. He's leaving on the
Speaker 1: seventh of July, which is like a year and four days.
Speaker 1: Alad he left the first time. He lands exactly a
Speaker 1: year after the uprising began, and from set casts he
Speaker 1: takes a train to a city. On the t rain
Speaker 1: you could read like these accounts of the International brigades
Speaker 1: coming down the train. People all along the route would
Speaker 1: come and like wave and be like super happy to
Speaker 1: see them, and try and try and trade oranges for
Speaker 1: cigarettes they couldn't get. And if they are all these
Speaker 1: very funny accounts of International brigadiers like just getting crippling
Speaker 1: like a diarrhea from eating too many oranges their first
Speaker 1: military experience. And they went to Albacette where they trained,
Speaker 1: he joined what was called the Mcenti Papino Battalion that
Speaker 1: was being stood up in July. They were better known
Speaker 1: as the mac Paps. Although at this time most of
Speaker 1: the volunteers were from the United States, it was officially
Speaker 1: a Canadian battalion, and most of them were working class
Speaker 1: men from areas like Nova Scotia, right. A lot of
Speaker 1: them Jewish as well, and most of them had lost
Speaker 1: jobs in depression, educated themselves about the left and decided
Speaker 1: to come and fight in International Brigades. Their traveled to
Speaker 1: Spain was illegal, but they felt the consequences of staying
Speaker 1: home were much worse. Yeah, they were, as International Brigades
Speaker 1: unions go, they're pretty old. Most of them were over
Speaker 1: thirty and highly motivated. So they're like people who are
Speaker 1: really in it to win it. They're not like there
Speaker 1: were definitely people in the International Brigades who are like,
Speaker 1: I'm twenty one, funckt why not? Right? Like, um, this
Speaker 1: wasn't one of those groups in the most parts, and
Speaker 1: they kind of this is my parents are afraid of fascism.
Speaker 1: I'm afraid of fascism. I will destroy fascism. I'm going
Speaker 1: to go do it. Yeah, yes, Yeah, I've spent my
Speaker 1: life fighting bears in Canada. Now I will come and
Speaker 1: fight fascists the Canadians and spancy of always fascinating. There
Speaker 1: was also like one of the first battlefield or like
Speaker 1: at least frontline blood transfusion set ups in the world,
Speaker 1: well set up by a Canadian doctor. He would drive
Speaker 1: around in a Renault two turned van. Yeah, like it
Speaker 1: was like literally set it was a milk truck inside, right,
Speaker 1: just an old timey milk truck would go and deliver blood,
Speaker 1: blood transfusions to save soldiers lives. And so. One of
Speaker 1: the articles that Jacken probably saw when he was in
Speaker 1: New York was George Steers account of the bombing of Guernica.
Speaker 1: Places I used to give tours to American kids. Jenny
Speaker 1: also probably read Steers report. It was really like one
Speaker 1: of the pieces of reporting that change people's perspective on
Speaker 1: the Spanish Civil War war than anything else, even though
Speaker 1: other cities have been bombed all around the world, Even
Speaker 1: though other cities were bombed in Spain, it was that
Speaker 1: those images of little children thrown around like rag dolls,
Speaker 1: or columns of refugees marching out of town were the
Speaker 1: one that's that really drove solidarity to Spain more than
Speaker 1: anything else. She probably also saw the poster featuring a
Speaker 1: feast ring, a picture of a dead child, and a
Speaker 1: squadron of flashes fascist planes flying overhead. That was there
Speaker 1: if you tolerate this, your children will be next poster,
Speaker 1: which is a pretty famous fantasy fool war face and
Speaker 1: just true, just really true, objectively true. It's also the
Speaker 1: name of a song about Man Street Preachers, which is
Speaker 1: a very good song. That song is why I really
Speaker 1: got into Spanish of the war stuff, and I was like,
Speaker 1: well that's cool. Yeah it was cool, but yeah, it
Speaker 1: remains true. It is true now, it was true then,
Speaker 1: and I think she definitely noticed the treuth of that.
Speaker 1: So she came to spend a month after our She
Speaker 1: she came in August. Women at that time weren't me
Speaker 1: taking as international volunteers, so she couldn't fight to defend
Speaker 1: those children, but what she could do was user skill.
Speaker 1: She had to help them because remember she was a
Speaker 1: social worker, right where. I have no functional memory for names. Okay,
Speaker 1: she's his wife, yes, okay, great, but they hyphenate their names.
Speaker 1: I'm just using the last name and chacking. So she
Speaker 1: comes months after him, and along with five other women
Speaker 1: from the Lowery Shide, she arrives in Spain and she's
Speaker 1: going to work with the two hundred thousand children who
Speaker 1: have been made orphaned by the war. Right these child refugees,
Speaker 1: she believed art was an important way for children to
Speaker 1: process their traumatic experiences, and so her and her friends
Speaker 1: start up creating the first ever art therapy program for
Speaker 1: children in wartime. Yeah, it's super cool. The children made
Speaker 1: thousands of drawings. Actually oldest Huxley wrote the there's a
Speaker 1: there's an exhibit of these drawings, and the The Cataler
Speaker 1: was written by alders Taxley. Yeah, who was actually pretty cool. Yeah,
Speaker 1: cool guy, good books. Maybe read it. And so the
Speaker 1: drawings are pretty pretty hard when you know what happened.
Speaker 1: Pretty a priot. You can see them actually there you
Speaker 1: see San Diego. There's an exhibit on the library website
Speaker 1: called they still draw pictures Like I used to go
Speaker 1: and look at these drawings all the time when I
Speaker 1: was there. But like her, they also have hope. There's
Speaker 1: one amazing picture which shows a Spanish peasant faith almost
Speaker 1: He's burying an axe deep in the head of a dragon,
Speaker 1: wearing a swastika. Yeah, it's yeah, it's like if your
Speaker 1: child comes home from school ho having drawn that today,
Speaker 1: you have absolutely fucking aced it as a parent. And
Speaker 1: it doesn't matter what the teachers are telling you. They're
Speaker 1: doing fine. Yeah, if you're in San Diego going special collections,
Speaker 1: lie very nicely and you can go and see the
Speaker 1: I want to see that picture. I gotta Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's on. It's on the Abraham Lincoln bring a Veterans
Speaker 1: to the over had Labor Gade website. I'm making a
Speaker 1: note for myself because yeah, yeah, it's my interests. Yes,
Speaker 1: it is. The when he left Spain, slogan had been
Speaker 1: no passavan right, they shall not pass, and the slogan
Speaker 1: changed to pass we shall passed. So at this point
Speaker 1: he wasn't really capable of doing that much passing. His
Speaker 1: knee was so bad that he had to squat down
Speaker 1: and wrench it back into place whenever it dislocated. His wife, Jenny,
Speaker 1: considered telling the recruiters about this, she decided not to.
Speaker 1: When he arrived, things are in a pretty bad state
Speaker 1: with the internet to brigade the increasing like regularization under
Speaker 1: mostly Soviet control. You have all these officers who are
Speaker 1: called Mexicans, they are not Mexicans. That they're from the
Speaker 1: Soviet Union, various parts of the Soviet Unions. Some of
Speaker 1: them are white Russians actually, So like the white Russians
Speaker 1: felt that if they volunteered to fight in the Spanish
Speaker 1: Civil War, they'd be allowed to return home. And so
Speaker 1: this odd thing of like white Russians dedicated, like Polish
Speaker 1: and Hungarian communists working together with Spanish anarchists to fight
Speaker 1: fascists and monarchist and that they seem to to have
Speaker 1: worked it out the like early in the war. Really
Speaker 1: like it was it was anarchists doing really brave shit
Speaker 1: that had been integral to the success of the second
Speaker 1: public military strategy. By this point that had stopped and
Speaker 1: for the most part, those sort of left libertarian people
Speaker 1: were being actively persecuted, right. There were still anarchist units,
Speaker 1: there was anarchist militia units, there were still anarchists in
Speaker 1: the International Brigade, but at the sort of the beginning
Speaker 1: of the end for the alliance between communist and annists
Speaker 1: been persecuted by the Communist that's what you're saying, that's correct. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Like the s I M. The Service in Talligentia militari
Speaker 1: of the Military intelligence Service probably interrogated more anarchists and
Speaker 1: it did fascists in fact core that's really good way
Speaker 1: to have a united front. Yeah, it's great. There were
Speaker 1: active fascist saboteurs in the headquarters of the like Andre
Speaker 1: Marti who ran the International Bargator. There were fascist saboteurs
Speaker 1: from this French group. Actually they were funded by the
Speaker 1: Laureal Cosmetics Empire. By that stuff. They they were actively
Speaker 1: sabotaging stuff, They put like sand into machine anserity and
Speaker 1: they never got caught because they were so busy looking
Speaker 1: for anarchists. Yeah, and then also finding out that like
Speaker 1: all of the fucking high up communists who were like
Speaker 1: behind a lot of the repression then also got purged
Speaker 1: and fucked over and sailed by Stalin. It's like Daddy's
Speaker 1: Stalin doesn't love you. He's going to kill all of you,
Speaker 1: like you'll get you to kill the anarchists, and then
Speaker 1: he's going to kill you because you were too close
Speaker 1: to them. Yes, they go ahead. No, the general who organizes,
Speaker 1: he's not really fair to say, he organizes to defense
Speaker 1: to Madrid, but he gets a credit for at the
Speaker 1: time and then he's called Claib. Claiber is not his
Speaker 1: real name, but that's the name that he They all
Speaker 1: use different names, and then suddenly like they make him
Speaker 1: up to this big thing, right like clai By the
Speaker 1: Savior of Madrid. And then two months later he's been
Speaker 1: accused of claiborism, which is like promoting oneself in the media.
Speaker 1: And I'm not saying he was blamed as because he
Speaker 1: was anyways deeply at fault, but yeah, maybe stop purging
Speaker 1: your own side. Yeah, and hot tip from cool people,
Speaker 1: cool tips. One of cool people did cool stuff. Purges
Speaker 1: generally speaking, not a positive verb. There's yeah anywhere you
Speaker 1: cut it. Yeah, wow fuck yeah, don't be purging. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I was going to say it, Yeah, don't do it.
Speaker 1: So the the MC perhaps first saw actually at point
Speaker 1: to Debro preparing for the assault was probably an absolute
Speaker 1: nightmare for Chicken because the fuel didn't arrive for the
Speaker 1: trucks to take them to the front, right, And as
Speaker 1: he's a quartermaster and later an armor us so g's
Speaker 1: his job to organize, like getting the people the stuff
Speaker 1: that they need. So when imagine that this was something
Speaker 1: of a bit of a below to him. So they
Speaker 1: instead had to march right, and they look like a
Speaker 1: wagon train from a Western movie, like they're they're marching
Speaker 1: across the dry plains, which is giant plume of dust.
Speaker 1: It's very obvious where they're going. And they end up
Speaker 1: fighting at bell Cheat, where they developed the innitiative, innovative
Speaker 1: tactic of U. So what would happen would be that
Speaker 1: generally they would hold up in the church right that
Speaker 1: the Francois troops because I had thick, old medieval walls,
Speaker 1: and so they developed the in detective of rolling their
Speaker 1: anti tank guns right up to the church, pressing them
Speaker 1: up against it and shooting through the walls that way.
Speaker 1: It can't be good for the hearing. No, yeah, it's incredible.
Speaker 1: They fought like house to house, room to room. This
Speaker 1: is their first introduction to combat. Right that the people
Speaker 1: who on the way to the battle, they pulled over
Speaker 1: got out of the truck and each got five rounds
Speaker 1: so they could learn to use the gun like this is.
Speaker 1: They're they're not like hugely professionally prepared so as they
Speaker 1: are the Americans, but then are like New York City.
Speaker 1: I guess, yeah, it took any Some of the guns
Speaker 1: they used were made in America, sold to Czarius Russia,
Speaker 1: sold by Zarius Russia to Mexico, and then imported by
Speaker 1: the Spanish Second Republic from Mexico. So they're really good
Speaker 1: modern weapons. Georgia will fucking love that. That's they were
Speaker 1: most ins Yeah, yeah, Georgia will absolutely love the most
Speaker 1: in the gun. Yeah, for the time they were finding
Speaker 1: they were very happy to have thin compared to some
Speaker 1: of the other stuff they had. It's fair enough. They
Speaker 1: you can also read if anyone's ever like bought an
Speaker 1: old military servile's gun. Often they come when cosmoline, which
Speaker 1: is like a thick goo um and you want to
Speaker 1: clean that off before you use it, and you can
Speaker 1: read in their accounts that they don't clean it off,
Speaker 1: and like they're all getting burnt from when they start
Speaker 1: used to get the barrel heats up and it leaks out.
Speaker 1: Oh Jesus was just burning oil coming and they're probably
Speaker 1: like slipping on it and then like dropping it and
Speaker 1: then like slipping in the fucking grease. Yeah, which is
Speaker 1: not what you want your first time being shot at.
Speaker 1: They also took part in like a very experimental vehicle
Speaker 1: born infantry attack. You still see the Russians doing this right,
Speaker 1: they'll sit on top of Hanks when this is just
Speaker 1: their doctrine that the first time that's happened was with
Speaker 1: the mac Paps. Unfortunately, tanks got stuck in the mud
Speaker 1: and so that went pretty badly for them. They also
Speaker 1: took part in the Battle of terry Well, which is
Speaker 1: battle begins actually with a scene that probably inspired Hemingway's
Speaker 1: book for him, The Bell Tolls. There are these two
Speaker 1: guys called Irving Golf and Bill Alto. Bill Alto was gay,
Speaker 1: and it does not seem to have been like computable
Speaker 1: for Hemingway, like he deceivesed, just like, no, not putting
Speaker 1: that in there. It's a short word. He should like. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's really sad to having to bill To actually like
Speaker 1: this guy. He trains to be a guerrilla in Moscow,
Speaker 1: comes back to Spain and does he's behind enemy lines
Speaker 1: blowing up bridges. M that's so yeah, it's very cool.
Speaker 1: And then he comes back and he's basically they one
Speaker 1: of his comrades to find out he's gay, and it
Speaker 1: gives him up to the Communist Party and they reject him.
Speaker 1: And it's fucking like, I don't know what the fund
Speaker 1: is wrong? With people. Fuck every part of that. Okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: like it did. What what then you're doing is, dude,
Speaker 1: it's literally like I was prepared to die next to
Speaker 1: you and kill for you, and here you are. And
Speaker 1: this was there were a lot of gay people in
Speaker 1: in the international gage right, The commander of one of
Speaker 1: the British battalions was gay people and it was known,
Speaker 1: like it wasn't a secret. Yeah, the common tern didn't
Speaker 1: like it, but like there was still that they weren't
Speaker 1: entirely controlled by the comment turn and like if people
Speaker 1: were good at what they were doing, and they were
Speaker 1: good at killing fascist and it wasn't a paramount concern. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So when in doubt why some centralized authority in Russia
Speaker 1: says you should do, isn't what you should do? Yeah,
Speaker 1: just don't do it, especially if they've already given you guns.
Speaker 1: They can't stop you. Yeah, you know, if that's what
Speaker 1: they guns for. Yeah. And actually another fine purjory. So
Speaker 1: like Christmas right just before the Battle of Terror, well,
Speaker 1: Paul Robeson visits themac paps and sing some a song
Speaker 1: on probably some songs, and then he goes back to
Speaker 1: Paris to perform a concert to raise funds for international brigades,
Speaker 1: and that's when the purchase of the old quote unquote
Speaker 1: old old Bolsheviks started. And he hears about it just
Speaker 1: before he goes on stage and he's like, fuck you,
Speaker 1: I'm not doing a concert, Like hell yeah, yeah, interesting guy,
Speaker 1: Paul Robinson a lot to read about him. His pain too. Uh.
Speaker 1: The next day after they raged, he had a concert
Speaker 1: and they all got drunk. Their commander got them up
Speaker 1: and made them march with the snow so they would
Speaker 1: wake up. Frank had adverted his troops from madridgit Well
Speaker 1: and that began a battle. There was every bit of
Speaker 1: freezing and every bit of terrible as Stalingrad, and it
Speaker 1: probably should have provided the world with the vision of
Speaker 1: what was happening, but the word wasn't paying attention. Franco
Speaker 1: reported when he he captured the city, he hadn't a
Speaker 1: British reporter Kim Philoby. Kim Philby was actually a spy
Speaker 1: who was actively trying to kill Franco at the time.
Speaker 1: It was reporting from the nationalist side, and he tried
Speaker 1: to go into tell a Well thinking that it had
Speaker 1: been liberated because Franco had just been bullshitting about this. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he's going in as a fascist. He's not a fascist.
Speaker 1: He's trying to kill Franco. He gets shot but survives,
Speaker 1: and it is given a medal by Franco for his bravery,
Speaker 1: which God plays off this medal to spy on fascists
Speaker 1: for decades. That's amazing. Yeah. Yeah, he managed to all
Speaker 1: this work in the UK because he's like this, this,
Speaker 1: this recognition by Franco allows him to be a communist
Speaker 1: spy in the United Kingdom for years. People are fucking wild. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's yeah, this guy's like ping pong ball, Like following
Speaker 1: his trajectory is just insane. So Chicken and his unit
Speaker 1: spent New Years, he was speaking, sleeping on the hillside
Speaker 1: above the town. Soon one in Tenethm would have frost bite.
Speaker 1: Local anarchists joined them and they taught the foreign volunteers
Speaker 1: taught the local anarchists how to clean their rifles and
Speaker 1: Phil Phil sam bags Apparently for some reason, the anarchists
Speaker 1: had not been taught and didn't know how to clean
Speaker 1: the rifles until this point. Like it's a major bonus
Speaker 1: to their operational capability. Yeah yeah, So they moved to
Speaker 1: this position like over watching the faster sort of fighting,
Speaker 1: and they watched this young unit of Catalan anarchists who
Speaker 1: have all arrived in Alpagatas, which are like rope sold sandals,
Speaker 1: and they watch these guys attack and allegedly like this
Speaker 1: is this incredibly brave thing where they're supposed to retreat
Speaker 1: and they refused to retreat. They're not going to leave
Speaker 1: their friends behind. And even the German common so the
Speaker 1: Germans had this idea of German Thalamon unit in the
Speaker 1: International Brigade type, this idea that they were very disciplined
Speaker 1: communists and superior to or the other units and superiority anarchists.
Speaker 1: And then these Germans like I don't want to say tankies,
Speaker 1: but like authoritarian communists, the applaud these anarchists for their
Speaker 1: battle in world like okay, So this gets into my
Speaker 1: theory that despite the anarchists being incredibly anti Catholic in Spain,
Speaker 1: um the fact that they were so die hard. Yes, yeah,
Speaker 1: it is not a coincidence that it was a Catholic country.
Speaker 1: It is not a coincidence that they all come from
Speaker 1: this Catholic heritage. Yeah, and like and even the like
Speaker 1: do what's right, not what's safe, you know, that is
Speaker 1: like part of the Catholic like, at least the cultural
Speaker 1: conception of Catholics is not necessarily church doctrine or whatever.
Speaker 1: So I like, I don't think it's a coincidence that
Speaker 1: the place where the anarchists are like sometimes not intelligently
Speaker 1: throwing themselves at machine gun nests, but you will not
Speaker 1: lack for courage space. Yeah. Yeah, it continually keeps happening
Speaker 1: that they'll just like keep doing these attacks and will
Speaker 1: be like what the fuck, bro, like no, and without
Speaker 1: stopping now Yeah, and it is comic and tragic, comic,
Speaker 1: but yet this idea of like propaganda of the deed
Speaker 1: and like its most political religion, it's it's hard not
Speaker 1: to see it. And some of this ship. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: so by the end of the battle when they end
Speaker 1: up fighting, like in the town house to house, nearly
Speaker 1: three hundred of Chicken's unit have died, right, Like it's
Speaker 1: an absolute fucking blood bath. Temperatures dropped to below minus
Speaker 1: twenty and his Celsius, Yeah, I think it isn't that
Speaker 1: roughly where they come together though, Like I don't know,
Speaker 1: Sophie's nodding, She's a big temperature understand it. Yeah, I'm
Speaker 1: like that sounds right. I trust you. I understand Celsius
Speaker 1: between zero and forty outside these extremes, I do not
Speaker 1: understand selsias anyway. Okay, it's cold as ship's everyone's getting
Speaker 1: for ust bite, everyone's sucking dying. Yeah, at some point
Speaker 1: I'll check and have started. He got a leather jacket
Speaker 1: from somewhere. You can see he does look stylish as
Speaker 1: fucking some of the pictures. He's got a beret, he's
Speaker 1: smoking a pipe. Jenny nitted him gloves in a scarf
Speaker 1: and sent them to him, and she'll cinema box of
Speaker 1: Fannie Farmer chocolates for Christmas apparently. Yeah. Uh. He spent
Speaker 1: hours trying to maintain their They had maximum guns, which
Speaker 1: are pretty unreliable, more unreliable when you have fucking fascists
Speaker 1: pouring sand into them because you're busy posing anarchists, and
Speaker 1: that the most in the Ganda rifles that we spoke about.
Speaker 1: He also issued them their rations. Found a list of
Speaker 1: their rations could interest me. They get a can of
Speaker 1: Argentine beef, three loaves of bread, one pack of French cigarettes,
Speaker 1: and a jar of apricot jam that was carried like
Speaker 1: as a squad. You shared the apricot jam, Yes, pretty
Speaker 1: cultured stuff. So they and there backup bell Cheat where
Speaker 1: they see the first ever like a blitz Creek style aqueque.
Speaker 1: They're basically attacked by like combined tanks, airplanes and infantry right,
Speaker 1: which is what becomes blitz Creek. But again because like
Speaker 1: the world isn't paying attention, the world continues to be
Speaker 1: fucking shocked by this in the and World War, right,
Speaker 1: so they end up more or less routed by this
Speaker 1: right that they don't know what. Then the world has
Speaker 1: never seen this before, and at one point two of
Speaker 1: their machine gun crews stranded completely by themselves and end
Speaker 1: up holding off thousands of soldiers like they're on top
Speaker 1: of the set of cliffs. So they're just like firing
Speaker 1: until they run out of ammunition, and then they're all
Speaker 1: captured and executed. And they don't keep retweet but they
Speaker 1: keep retreating. But they couldn't retreat faster than the tanks
Speaker 1: and airplanes could move forward to every time they try
Speaker 1: and set up to defend somewhere, they'd be overwhelmed and
Speaker 1: they'd have to retreat again. They were being basically had
Speaker 1: their backs to the sea right that they're being chased
Speaker 1: towards the ocean, and as this is all happening, they
Speaker 1: start to receive the news that Hitter's invaded Austria and
Speaker 1: the world still hasn't done anything. So it's got to
Speaker 1: have felt like a pretty pretty hopeless time. I've got
Speaker 1: a clip here from Tom Page describing what that felt like.
Speaker 1: This Tom Page, So Tom Page, sorry, it's it's another
Speaker 1: of it's another link. A brigade volunteer. He's interviewed for
Speaker 1: this film called The Good Fight, which is a fantastic film.
Speaker 1: It's on it's on YouTube for free. I want to
Speaker 1: play a little bit from him explaining how that felt.
Speaker 1: I know, people that want to win slept under a
Speaker 1: little bit of scraw no blanket over you, but you're know, no,
Speaker 1: when we're in a pair of overalls. It's cold in Spain.
Speaker 1: It is very cold Spain. But you want to win
Speaker 1: and you stay. So yeah, So they were cold, right.
Speaker 1: They didn't have anything to eat, didn't have anyone to sleep,
Speaker 1: and the nights would get cold in the days. Was
Speaker 1: to get up to triple digits, right, and every town
Speaker 1: they got to was captured before they arrived. Finally, the
Speaker 1: very few of them who survived arrived at this town
Speaker 1: called casp right, and Casper's supposed to organize a defense
Speaker 1: that I told them that they're not allowed to go
Speaker 1: back anything. And all of the machine guns that he'd
Speaker 1: spent forever trying to fix have been abandoned. And they
Speaker 1: were so sort of people who even abandoned their guns
Speaker 1: right as an effort to run away. What they started
Speaker 1: doing was picking up rocks, throwing them over a wall,
Speaker 1: and shouting grenade the shot putter re enters the chat. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: this is when the shot better returns. They were hoping
Speaker 1: that people would like think they were grenades and run away. Yeah.
Speaker 1: When I was six, I did the two. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: kind of sad that that's where they ended up doing.
Speaker 1: Some of his unit were actually injured and then deliberately
Speaker 1: run over by an Italian tank. So it really fun.
Speaker 1: Terrible ship happens at Cassidy and they end up all
Speaker 1: making a stand at the railway station, right, it's where
Speaker 1: the end where the last of the mag paps end up.
Speaker 1: When the railway station was captured, so was out chaken
Speaker 1: and it's probably shortly after that that he was executed.
Speaker 1: And so I want to talk a little bit about like,
Speaker 1: I guess after some of his comrades came back after
Speaker 1: the people who have seen this, the people who he
Speaker 1: had fought with in Spain came back, they were harassed,
Speaker 1: bully chased out of work. Many of them weren't allowed
Speaker 1: to fight in the Second World War because they were
Speaker 1: called premature anti fascist, right, Yeah, that's the best. That's
Speaker 1: the best, and it's the best example of how the
Speaker 1: United States is not an anti fascist nation. Yes, no,
Speaker 1: fu can we Yeah? Okay, yes, you're like the segregated
Speaker 1: army that fought the Second World War was not an
Speaker 1: anti fascist army, Like it isn't inherently not anti fascist
Speaker 1: to segregate your military like that, and like, yeah, there
Speaker 1: are example is actually a black folks who are extremely
Speaker 1: like tactically astute right there. The Abraham Lincoln Battalion, the
Speaker 1: American Battalion International Gates was led by a black officer,
Speaker 1: and they were like there were black people who were
Speaker 1: taken to like train military officers at Walter Garland was
Speaker 1: one of them, and he was training military officers in
Speaker 1: like how to oppose this it's creek stuff that he'd seen.
Speaker 1: One of them called him a slur, so he punched
Speaker 1: the officer and got like then, so then he got
Speaker 1: booted out of his job, right, like then he can't. Yeah,
Speaker 1: what's because it's more important to be racist than to
Speaker 1: learn how to stop a blitz creek. Yeah right, Like
Speaker 1: thousands of people probably die because we lost this knowledge,
Speaker 1: right because yeah, we have to be definitely short of pricks.
Speaker 1: I want to play another clip here where we I'm
Speaker 1: gonna let Bill. Bill Bailey, by the way, is a
Speaker 1: fantastic human being. He he climbed onto the front of
Speaker 1: a German boat that landed in New York, fought off
Speaker 1: the security guards, and then swipped down the swasticket from
Speaker 1: the front of the boat and tore it apart. Yeah,
Speaker 1: got the ship kicked into him by NYPD. Well, thousands
Speaker 1: of people cheered him a fucking course that also, Yeah,
Speaker 1: the fact is that are going to kick the ship
Speaker 1: out of you for like, well, you cat. The one
Speaker 1: thing that we've learned is that proper vious property is
Speaker 1: also property. I learned that on Twitter is also violence. Sorry,
Speaker 1: oh yeah, and it's the same. It's the same if
Speaker 1: someone burns down into Boston clinic or tears up as ustic. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so I want to pay a little click from Bill Bailey. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was well, it was a hard holding a job down.
Speaker 1: It was very difficult. In my particular case, we had
Speaker 1: been wiped out of the unions Seagulling Union. We couldn't
Speaker 1: sail on the ship, we couldn't get Siemens paper, our
Speaker 1: siemens papers. Uh Coast Guard. They denied us that on
Speaker 1: the basis that we're read had fought in Spain or
Speaker 1: something along that line. Every job you went to, no
Speaker 1: matter way where I wiped at last a week or
Speaker 1: two weeks the most, and then the FBI would hound
Speaker 1: you and you'd lose your job. And this went on
Speaker 1: and on and on and on and on for almost
Speaker 1: a period of ten years, really ten years of the stuff.
Speaker 1: So the revolutionary must expect all of this type of stuff,
Speaker 1: missing meal, losing a job, being checked out of your house,
Speaker 1: et cetera. I mean that's the way it is. You know,
Speaker 1: not always going to be like that. One day we
Speaker 1: may change everything we all. So for the last thing
Speaker 1: I wanna want to leave you with, I want to
Speaker 1: play a clip from Jenny Barman Chacken who was out
Speaker 1: chaking his wife, talking about it why he decided to
Speaker 1: go explain and how she felt about it. I was proud.
Speaker 1: I thought it was important from the goal. I was scared.
Speaker 1: I was ambivalent. I remember lying awake nights and thinking,
Speaker 1: is there any possible reason why maybe I could dig
Speaker 1: up a reason why he shouldn't go, you know, is
Speaker 1: there something wrong with him physically? Will it be dangerous
Speaker 1: for him to go? And so a matter of fact,
Speaker 1: he did have a disc problem in the knee and
Speaker 1: it would slip out and once in a while, you know,
Speaker 1: he really had would have to bend over and bring
Speaker 1: it back in the line, you know, And I thought
Speaker 1: to myself he had been a salmon. He went to
Speaker 1: a doctor because that was required of any of the
Speaker 1: men who were going to Spain. They really had to
Speaker 1: have a clean bill of health. And I remember when
Speaker 1: he came back and said, doctor said, I'm okay, and
Speaker 1: I'm going. And I remember thinking to myself, I wonder
Speaker 1: if the doctor knows about that meet me, and maybe
Speaker 1: I ought to go and tell the doctor about that me.
Speaker 1: And then I thought to myself, you know, if I
Speaker 1: do this, I won't live with myself and Chick would
Speaker 1: never forgive me, And so I didn't. So he went
Speaker 1: and we communicated with each other, and I met him
Speaker 1: some gloves and I led him a scarf and I
Speaker 1: sent them to Spain and he got it, and he
Speaker 1: got a box of Fannie Farmer candy, and we got
Speaker 1: letters back and forth, and we got some pictures. And
Speaker 1: when I was to Spain in August, that was a
Speaker 1: month after he went, I saw him, spent some time
Speaker 1: with him. Uh. And then beginning with January, there was
Speaker 1: no mail, and I used to visit the headquarters, you know,
Speaker 1: the office of the vets. Was there any information and
Speaker 1: there was no information, and uh, I was convinced that
Speaker 1: it couldn't happen to him, you know, I just couldn't
Speaker 1: happen to him. But it did happen, and it was
Speaker 1: a hard time for me, and it was hard time
Speaker 1: for anybody who lost people in Spain. At the same time,
Speaker 1: it was always always been a matter of pride, you know,
Speaker 1: we all have to die. And I've always thought that,
Speaker 1: you know, so you die younger, you die older, If
Speaker 1: you die for a good reason, then you know, it's
Speaker 1: not that bad. And I have always been able to
Speaker 1: live with that. That's so fucking good. Now she just
Speaker 1: she nails it. You know, Like it's hard because it's like, yeah,
Speaker 1: like she wants to stop him from going, but she
Speaker 1: she knows it's not right, you know, And that's so
Speaker 1: fucking human both. I don't I don't know that just
Speaker 1: that makes me kind of teary. Yeah, that one of
Speaker 1: that film makes me so sad because there are all
Speaker 1: these people who are just more or less right about
Speaker 1: everything and incredibly committed to being right and willing to
Speaker 1: die or kill for things that it should be universal
Speaker 1: but aren't, and so many of them just end up
Speaker 1: sucking dead. But none of them, none of them ever
Speaker 1: backed down from me, Like, no, we were right, it
Speaker 1: was right, yeah, and it was all worth it even
Speaker 1: if we didn't win. It's really cool. Has anyone as
Speaker 1: a tangent, Yeah, has anyone done the work of like
Speaker 1: because Spain right, like like they tried to have a coup,
Speaker 1: like we we lost the Spanish Civil War, right, and
Speaker 1: and Spain became fascist for decades. And but Spain also
Speaker 1: didn't really get involved too much in World War two
Speaker 1: mm hm. And it's to me, not a historian, it
Speaker 1: seems like those are related that they had to fight
Speaker 1: like crazy, like if the coup had just one had
Speaker 1: just worked, would Spain have been involved in World War two,
Speaker 1: you know, on the fascist side, And like, I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm always looking for I'm looking for a version of
Speaker 1: the world where like check sacrifice, like like changes the war.
Speaker 1: And I don't know if that's true or not, but
Speaker 1: I mean, yes, Spain was pretty crippled, so they weren't
Speaker 1: able to Also, what they would have given to the
Speaker 1: fascists would have been less than what it would have
Speaker 1: cost him to have another front kind of thing, because
Speaker 1: they were by the war. Right, Actually, some of his
Speaker 1: comrades came back and were trained of special forces in
Speaker 1: the US. And we're supposed to be inserted into Spain
Speaker 1: as guerrillas in the event that Spain did join the war.
Speaker 1: So in that center of Spain had in the U S,
Speaker 1: wouldn't have just acquiesced in Franco's dictatorship for decades right
Speaker 1: under this sort of fastical anti communism ship. And like
Speaker 1: you can read Peter Peter Carroll's book is really good
Speaker 1: about this, where he talks about like how the the
Speaker 1: volunteers who survived and come back to the United to
Speaker 1: dates spend the next until they die, all of them
Speaker 1: being like why the fund. Are you not doing anything
Speaker 1: about Spain? Why are you ignoring Franco's dictatorship? What do
Speaker 1: you think about the refugees? Like it defines nearly all
Speaker 1: of their lives, right like Alva Bessie, Who's who was
Speaker 1: a very successful screenwriter in Hollywood. It's still campaigning for this,
Speaker 1: like until until he dies. They almost all that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's really sad to see like a that it's
Speaker 1: not studied very much and it's largely forgotten and obviously
Speaker 1: be like the way the world kind of ignores their
Speaker 1: foresight and they're insert into this and like even in
Speaker 1: the nineteen fifties right there persecuted like under McCarthyism then
Speaker 1: being like now you guys kind of called this and
Speaker 1: we're sorry that we didn't listen to you. It can
Speaker 1: never be there wrong. Yeah, it's sad. They Yeah, they
Speaker 1: they're cool and interesting people and encourage folks to read
Speaker 1: more about them. That's about all I have for you that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: people should you should watch The Good Fight. It's free
Speaker 1: on YouTube. So do sports fight Nazis and let your
Speaker 1: loved ones take risks. Yeah, those are the lessons. Be cool.
Speaker 1: If that was like a trathnon you know, or a
Speaker 1: pentathlon check a bagpipe in there, and like you give
Speaker 1: four sports. See, I just think you should have to
Speaker 1: do them all at once, you know, like, oh yeah
Speaker 1: I should be mounted, you know women, Yeah, and the
Speaker 1: bagpipes yep, yeah, yeah, wow, that would be strenuous. You know.
Speaker 1: It's not for the faint of heart. No, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it doesn't have to be for everyone. Yeah, it just
Speaker 1: has to be for you. Listen, you know what is
Speaker 1: for everyone? Though? What's that, Sophie you? Oh yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know it's not for everyone. Actually it's my fucking
Speaker 1: book because it costs an obscene amount of money. I've
Speaker 1: got it written down somewhere here. It's a lot of dollars.
Speaker 1: So libraries are for everyone. I would love it if
Speaker 1: you would go to your library and asked him if
Speaker 1: they could maybe obtain a copy of my book about
Speaker 1: the Popu Olympics, which is called the Popular Front and
Speaker 1: the Barcelona Si Popular Olympics. Yeah, that's my plugable comparing
Speaker 1: and it as a hard to follow. That's the name
Speaker 1: of your book. And then then but I don't a
Speaker 1: bit his Escape from Insull Island. It's a similar vibe.
Speaker 1: It's a yeah in a way. Sure. Yeah, if the
Speaker 1: insults have been in Spain, we all know what fucking
Speaker 1: team they'd have been. On the other day, I was
Speaker 1: on the phone with James, and James literally says to
Speaker 1: me on the phone, were actually and I was doing
Speaker 1: a voice it was that. And that's my version of
Speaker 1: in a way And and and technically people can still
Speaker 1: pre order or if you're this is the future, order
Speaker 1: order the order your book. Yeah, you can either pre
Speaker 1: order or regular order it. Um. If it's pre order,
Speaker 1: you gotta get it on Tangled Wilderness dot work, which
Speaker 1: means if you're listening to this when it came out,
Speaker 1: you probably got to get it there. But if not,
Speaker 1: you can get it wherever books are sold. Probably. That's
Speaker 1: the fun thing about like small presses that work with
Speaker 1: major distributors is that it is available wherever books are sold.
Speaker 1: But that doesn't mean anyone will necessarily have it, So
Speaker 1: you can also go to a library. Um, because actually
Speaker 1: small press books are really expensive. Right now. It's a
Speaker 1: very short book. You can read it in an afternoon,
Speaker 1: but it is a twenty dollar book because the fucking
Speaker 1: economics and inflation and blah blah blah blah blah, that
Speaker 1: is totally what you all, okay, checked into this podcast
Speaker 1: to hear me talk about. Is the economic book publishing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: maybe if there's a coup and a subsequent revolution, you
Speaker 1: could get Margaret's book for free. That's it's true. You
Speaker 1: can also probably come up with the way my book
Speaker 1: for free, especially if certain places carry it. But you
Speaker 1: know whatever, um use your imagination, yea libraries. Cool People
Speaker 1: Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 1: For more podcasts on cool zone Media, visit our website
Speaker 1: cool zone media dot com, or check us out on
Speaker 1: the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
Speaker 1: get your podcasts.