In part two of this week's episode, Margaret continues her conversation with Gare about how the people of Spain fought back against Franco, crippling his economy, killing his soldiers, and almost blowing him up directly.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Cool People Who did cool Stuff. I'm your host,
Margaret Kildroy. Every week we talk about people who did
cool stuff. Sophie is here in zombie form as the producer,
and we're going to try and get you up to
it's more powerful than a zombie.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
And more powerful I.
Speaker 1 (00:23):
Don't know, and I mean we might not get you
all the way up to Lich. No, we're sticking with undead.
Lich is like jumping a little too high. You can
get to Lich eventually. I believe in you. It's just
a quick jump from.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
In miny Craft. It could be a zombie pig bin
for all, for all of the zoomers out there.
Speaker 1 (00:41):
I like how that just sounds like you're trying to
reference a crime, because that's the main thing I think
of when I think of Minecraft. So the other voice
you're hearing is Garrison Davis, today's guest. Hello, how are
you Garrison? I'm actually doing okay, excellent.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (00:56):
Today we're going to talk about some history that, obviously,
in the cool thing with history has no relevance to
the modern world.
Speaker 2 (01:04):
Yeah, it never does. That's the That's the great thing
about history is that it's only only in the past.
Speaker 1 (01:08):
Yeah, they already mentioned producers. Sophie, how are you doing, Sophie.
Speaker 3 (01:13):
Like I said, I died two days ago, but somehow
I'm here.
Speaker 1 (01:17):
Yeah, we'll get you. We'll get you up from from
zombie somehow. Our audio engineer is Ian. I don't know
what level of undead Ian is. Everyone say hi to Ian.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
Hi, Ian, Hello, Hello, Ian. I I remember it this time.
I remember that I included having everyone this time. That's
that's called character development. It's it's it's it's a little
mini arc I have here.
Speaker 3 (01:41):
Oh okay, I would like to be upgraded by the
end of this from zombie to like, I'm not going undead.
I'm switching the criterias here I would like to be
I would like to be tree Beard from Lord of the.
Speaker 2 (01:53):
That's also character Okay, well, yeah, you can try. We
can try to lay that groundwork over the course of
the next few ad breaks if you want.
Speaker 3 (02:01):
Yeah, ok, thank you so much.
Speaker 1 (02:02):
We're building you up to end so much like, Oh,
I don't think there's a Gandalf reference in this episode.
Speaker 2 (02:12):
Tragic's weird.
Speaker 1 (02:14):
Well, next week is gonna have a Gandalf reference because
I've already started writing the script. Much like the Motley
assortment of people who came together to fight fascism. In
the classic series of novels Lord of the Rings, the
people of Spain fought against Franco. This would be kind
of like if the people of Mordor fought against Mordor.
(02:37):
But unfortunately Tolkian wrote an oversimplified thing. That's not what
we're talking about today. If you want to hear the
first part, you should. You should go back and listen
to the first part. But today we're going to talk
about resistance to Franco, who was the dictator of Spain.
So after World War Two, Franco pivoted to being like
(02:57):
your friendly neighborhood fascist. That was his thing. Despite the
fact that apparently he was more successful than autocrat than
anybody on earth during his reign, Like he didn't even
have a rubber stamp parliament to approve his decisions. He
managed a more authoritarian control of Spain apparently than fucking
Hitler or Stalin.
Speaker 2 (03:19):
Huh, yeah, he was. He was. That's curious.
Speaker 1 (03:23):
He was good at being in charge, well, he was
good at being the one who was in charge. He
was good at being in charge. He eventually created the
position of Prime Minister because he wanted to open things
up a little bit and gave himself the position of
Prime Minister. Oh okay, that's so. So I don't think
(03:45):
that works quite the way that that he might have thought. Well,
I mean, I'm sure it works exactly the way that
he thought, but I don't think that that quite opens
up the democratic possibilities in the country. No, nor did
when he restore the monarchy without actually putting in a king.
Speaker 2 (04:04):
So this was like, there's no monarch.
Speaker 1 (04:07):
Yeah, he was just like, well, I'm in charge, but
ostensibly when I died, the monarchy will return or whatever.
Speaker 2 (04:13):
That's interesting, and.
Speaker 1 (04:14):
He managed to get like a bunch of sort of
titles that are only used for monarchs that I didn't
write into the script, like there by the Grace of
God or I don't know, some fucking weird mohit.
Speaker 2 (04:26):
Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (04:28):
But eventually he did pass off the prime ministership in
nineteen seventy three, right before he died because he was
getting sick. And we'll hear some fun news about the
second prime minister a little bit later. Okay. He declared
national Catholicism no other religion, including Protestants, and obviously Jews
were allowed to have public ceremonies. Franco spent a lot
of time complaining about the quote Judeo Bolsheviks who were
(04:52):
and this is like so fun because nothing changed, just
not fun at all. It's awful, and anti Semitism is
a terrible problem. These Bolsheviks were somehow aligned with both
American capitalism and Soviet communism at the same time.
Speaker 2 (05:05):
Yeah. Yeah, that tends to have been with those old Belsheviks.
Speaker 1 (05:09):
Yeah, and therefore they are the enemy of good old
fashioned fascism. A lot of times he was like more
moving towards not it was. He didn't always specifically call
himself a fascist, but I'm going to call him a
fascist the whole time.
Speaker 2 (05:24):
Yeah, because he's a fascist.
Speaker 1 (05:25):
Yeah, that's the reason I'm going to call him one. Yeah, totally.
So he's incredibly anti Semitic. But he actually didn't. Spain
did not deport its Jewish population during World War Two.
He created a list of them and he gave it
to Hitler, and he was like getting ready to he
was almost certainly getting ready to start doing this, but
things in the war changed and favor changed or whatever. Yeah,
(05:49):
And also tens of thousands of Jews did come from
Nazi controlled France into Spain and survived the war as
the result. So after the war, his propaganists went over
time being like Spain is the hero to the world's
Jews at the same time as they're like banned from
practicing their faith publicly.
Speaker 2 (06:07):
Sure, yeah, because he's he's tried to pony up to
all of the liberal democracies while still being a fascist.
Speaker 1 (06:13):
Yeah, and pretending to have saved Jews while being anti
Semitic is the way to pony up to the world's
Western democratic powers, because that's what they do too. So
he declares national Catholicism. I don't think he actually calls
it this. I think that's actually the name. National Catholicism
starts coming a little bit later, but it's basically like tradwife,
tradcaf thing, good old back to traditional values Catholicism, all
(06:38):
love for the Church. Except just kidding. He actually built
something that was in conflict with the Church and the pope.
He built his Catholicism, not Rome's Catholicism. It was still
called Roman Catholicism, but.
Speaker 2 (06:52):
It was its own actual like like did they have
their own like fake pope, but no, they they but
what they did is they would censor the pope if
the Pope would say something they didn't like.
Speaker 1 (07:06):
And they also negotiated with the church to have the
church no longer point the bishops in Spain, so Franco
and the Spanish fascist government were appointing all the bishops
in Spain. Franco was also like a hands on kind
of guy. He was signing the individual death warrants for like,
it's like all he did all day.
Speaker 3 (07:23):
I think it's like a micromanager.
Speaker 2 (07:26):
He was a micromanager to get up at Todd to
sign all these death war its. Yeah, what heart, what
a heart?
Speaker 1 (07:33):
I know that's where that's where Robert Evans does.
Speaker 2 (07:37):
Yeah. I had just imagine him like, oh god, it's
it's two pm. I've to sign all these death warrants,
so woe is me?
Speaker 1 (07:46):
Yeah, yeah, it's kind of creepy because they're actually for
people who don't even exist yet. It's it's a strange hobby.
I'm sure nothing batt'll come of it. So but Franco
distinct legally distinct from irate okay on Twitter. In nineteen
thirty seven, Pope Pious the eleventh proposed a third way
(08:09):
of neither communism nor fascism. And he basically was like
the churches against communism, the church is against fascism. And
he wrote statements about each their separate statements, one's like
anti fascism and ones like anti communism. And so Franco
being Franco, published the pope's anti communist one and then
banned his anti fascist one.
Speaker 2 (08:26):
That's pretty funny.
Speaker 1 (08:27):
I know, I'm sure somewhere there's like someone who did
the opposite, you know, yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway, so this
good Catholic censored the pope and the church did absolutely
fucking terrible things in Spain under Franco. Obviously, no more abortion, divorce,
or birth control, because why would anyone learn how to
(08:48):
control their own bodies. Women were forced to go to
a special like learn how to be a submissive wife
and good mother school for six months.
Speaker 2 (08:57):
Yeah that makes sense.
Speaker 1 (08:58):
Yeah, basically all schooling became Catholic school. And they also
started snatching up all the children of all the dead
anarchists and communists and Republicans and Catholic leftists because there
were Catholic leftists throughout.
Speaker 2 (09:10):
This whole time.
Speaker 3 (09:10):
That's kidnapping.
Speaker 1 (09:12):
Yeah, so they took all the orphans and they put
them in Catholic schools to teach them conservative values and
try to eradically.
Speaker 3 (09:19):
So did they put them in like Catholic the colorable
Catholic orphanages.
Speaker 1 (09:23):
Yeah, yeah, basically is not the only place in the
world the Catholic Church has done this kind of obviously.
Speaker 3 (09:30):
Yeah. No, that's that's one of their greatest, greatest worst hits.
Speaker 1 (09:34):
Yep, yeah, wo But people of any religion are never
a monolith. By the nineteen sixties, anti clericalism on the
left had waned for better or worse, and the Church
became one of the centers of anti Franco resistance in
some parts of the country, especially in Catalonia. By the
early nineteen seventies, the church was moving in a progressive direction.
(09:58):
In nineteen seventy one, the Council formally ask the Spanish
people their pardon for how they'd supported this fascists.
Speaker 2 (10:05):
So, so is the church like in Spain starting to
have like a distant faction.
Speaker 1 (10:10):
Or just the Church out of Spain. So the Church
out of Spain. Absolutely, the Church in Spain is starting
to also okay, all right, And by nineteen seventy three,
the Church out of Spain demands the separation of church
and state in Spain, which is like pretty wild for
them to be, like, we actually want the church to
(10:31):
be a separate thing than the state of Spain. And
you start getting active violent infighting in Catholicism in Spain.
Speaker 2 (10:38):
You have the.
Speaker 1 (10:40):
God it really feels like nothing's ever changed thing, right,
I see, this is the one thing I am pro
infighting for. I am pro Catholics infighting.
Speaker 2 (10:47):
All right, well that's what no, no, no, whatever Christians have
done infighting always horrible things have resulted.
Speaker 1 (10:57):
So actually, well yeah, okay, so this one you have
the quote Warriors of Christ the King is an organization
that goes around and like physically attacks all the progressive
priests and churches because all the churches, all these progressive
churches are pushing for democracy in Spain. And so then
you have this like, no, the reason we like being
Catholic is because you can do fascist shit with it,
(11:19):
much like you have whatever the United States. Yeah, exactly.
The Catholic left and the Catholic right could not be
a further apart group of ideologies. There's an academic named
Aurora G. Mortheo whose work influenced this part of the script.
She died in twenty twenty. She was born in Franco
times in Granada, Spain. In order to do her work,
she had to leave Spain, and she argued that national
(11:41):
Catholicism quote depended on well defined notions of gender and
the creation of an official discourse on femininity aka what
she called true Catholic womanhood.
Speaker 2 (11:54):
Huh.
Speaker 1 (11:55):
Yeah, it really was the tradwife thing. It's like a
really interesting I feel like this chunk of reading I've
done has given me some kind of wild insights into
the current right wing shit going on in the United States.
Speaker 2 (12:10):
Yeah, that sounds like it would be very popular on
tik shok.
Speaker 1 (12:13):
Yeah, Franco as Spain was, she suggests, and it seems
convincing built on this true Catholic womanhood. This was the
backbone of Franco. From this point of view, it was
changing gender politics in Spain that quote ease the transition
from patriarchal autarchy, which is when the country is like
entirely self contained, to a representational democracy. Because the new
(12:38):
I'm no longer quoting, because the new consumer society required
two income households. Women were starting to go to college, right, Yeah,
And to quote Aurora Mortheo again, by pivoting to the
West in the aftermath of the Second World War, Franco
ensured his relevancy to the outside world and protected his
regime's power from outside meddling. His new role as benign dictator,
(12:59):
open in his country to the west and fighting the
common communist enemy helped satisfy the conscience of his new
American partners, who saw Spain as having democratic possibilities.
Speaker 2 (13:10):
Possibilities, yeah, I mean fascist countries have democratic possibilities.
Speaker 1 (13:15):
Yeah, which they don't actually care about. They're like, hey,
can we sell you shit right now? You know, and
they're like yeah. He's like, they're like okay. Another thing
that helped ease this and authoritarianism, as even under Frank
authoritarianism started to wane.
Speaker 2 (13:33):
Right.
Speaker 1 (13:33):
Another thing helped that was as people ran to cities,
they formed shanty towns, right, Because the society goes from
agricultural to industrial like way later than most of Western Europe,
and so these shanty towns outside of the big cities,
they end up self governed in a lot of ways,
to quote her again, neighborhood associations with their ad hoc
governing councils sprang up and would later become legitimate political
(13:56):
voices for the labor movement. As the sixties wear on,
students start getting radical, especially into the two main places
that are doing the organizing, at least according to what
I read, because everything is biased towards whatever anyway. Uh,
they ended up in radical Christian movements and the Communist Party.
Speaker 2 (14:18):
Huge. Yeah, what an interesting little collection of like disparate cells.
Speaker 1 (14:24):
I know. And neither of these were political forces thirty
years earlier in Spain, right, Yeah, and so some women
helped end authoritarianism by rebelling against the tradwife nonsense. But
apparently there was also a kind of like feminist movement
that was also into embracing piety and motherhood, but turning
it against authoritarianism and like traditional Like I don't know,
(14:48):
it's like no radical track. Yeah, go ahead, we even
we see like a lot of the traadwavee stuff is
honestly done by more kind of like whether it's like
liberal or like lefty progressive types, Like a lot of
this stuff is done by people who are not fascists.
Then there is people who are fascists too, like kind
of like try to do like entryism via it because
it's very easy to do that totally. But like a
(15:10):
lot of people that that like popularized it and stuff
were like regular progressive libs or you know, they would
have been like Elizabeth Warren supporters or something right like
and and then and then you see the see the
fascist right trying to yeah, use there like twelve they're
like twelve egiral influencers trying to like push the discourse
(15:31):
in these little niche subcultures. Yeah. And I like when
we hold those grounds. I like when we be like, well, look,
feminism can be this or this. You know, no, absolutely
you should. You should never see territory that you don't
have to seed.
Speaker 2 (15:45):
Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (15:47):
And so all of this shit, all of this organizing,
all of this really intense social change. All of this
is why his system didn't survive his death. It did
not kill him, It did not end his reign, but
it ended the continuation of his reign. And I think
that is it's something that gets gets forgotten. But what
doesn't get forgotten. Garrison is a good earworm from a
(16:15):
jingle from an ad, much like how capitalism opened up
Spain to Okay, I got nothing.
Speaker 2 (16:24):
Here's some add democratic possibilities, so too, will we open
up your ears to democratic possibility?
Speaker 3 (16:30):
So what to do with me becoming tree Beard?
Speaker 2 (16:36):
Sore Bed is.
Speaker 3 (16:37):
An end an end and is a very old wise
tree that carries hobbits and then get sasas.
Speaker 1 (16:46):
Yeah, well, being understanding history gives you the reast of time.
Also non fascist, Catholic tokien. Yes, that's how it ties
together to But you're not there yet. You've got those
two ad breaks, so you're only you're up to Sapling
(17:09):
and Sapling. I'm halfway and we're back, and Sophie is
now wise and green.
Speaker 2 (17:20):
Most of what I know from this character well not no,
Like my first exposure to the to this character of
tree Beard was in the in the uh Veggie Tails
recreation of of Lord of the Rings where they had
a pretty a pretty scary seed with three with three
(17:43):
tree monsters. It always kind of freaked me out that
they were like they were basically like the in the
I googled it the picture, let me see, Oh no, I.
Speaker 3 (17:56):
Feel like this is this is offensive to tree Beard looks.
Speaker 1 (17:59):
Oh yeah, no, that's not what you look like.
Speaker 2 (18:01):
No, they kind of they kind of operated as like
guardians of the threshold. But yeah, they were. They were
pretty freaky. No I can, I can send a yeah, yeah,
it's there's some pretty pretty disturbing disturbing and I'll send
a picture to your markat here. All right, I really
(18:22):
appreciate we have reference, just so we all are aware
of the Veggie Tails, Lord of the Rings. That was
my first exposure to the the world of Middle Earth.
Speaker 1 (18:33):
So we're looking at I don't even know how to
describe it, but it definitely has jewelry.
Speaker 2 (18:38):
It does have a big amulet. That's the massive, massive
jewel in the front. Yea. And yeah, he has like
a he has a beard and a tree, a big nose,
really big eyebrows, gangly little branch arms.
Speaker 1 (18:56):
But you know what else had gangly little branches in Spain?
The Imunist Party, Eh, really it did.
Speaker 2 (19:03):
That's crazy.
Speaker 1 (19:04):
Did also have a picabulate with the red jewels of
it all. I am willing to bet that at some
point they rated something. They burned down a right wing
Catholic monastery and took such things. So the other people
resisting right the anarchists were there too, in a different form.
It was mostly communists at this point, most workers by
(19:26):
the end of Franco. If they were leftists, they were
in the Communist Party or they were in workers' commissions,
and the Communist Party was illegal there, and so it
was left with more anarchistic character than elsewhere around that
time because it couldn't be centralized. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah,
And a lot of the communists were literally the children
of anarchists. Right then. The workers' commissions carried with them
(19:47):
the sort of ghosts of the CNT, the like spirit
that cannot speak its name. These are the more decentralized things,
even more so than the Communist Party, right, But they're like,
can't call themselves the CNT because there's been well we've
talked about this at length. It was a bad idea
to call yourself the CNT.
Speaker 2 (20:05):
Yeah, it didn't seem to turn out very well.
Speaker 1 (20:07):
Yeah. The US backed Franco hard during the nineteen fifties.
They were the single greatest prop to his dictatorship, investment
in tourism and American military and bases, who the American
military bases in Spain literally, at one point later in
the story, provide bombs to fascist death squads, another American classic.
It is, it really is. It was not just for
(20:27):
Central America anymore. And that's kind of the larger picture
of how Franco's control slipped away. But it didn't end
with a whimper. It ended with a bang, because the
award for best assassination during the Franco regime goes to
the Bosque separatists, specifically the ETA. Have you ever you
(20:50):
ever heard of the Spanish space program? Don't google itimated
time of arrival now, but we'll go. It stands for boss,
Homeland and Liberty.
Speaker 2 (21:00):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (21:02):
The the E t A was sort of a as
a crude analogy, they were like kind of the Bosque
region's i ra uh. Bosque country is a region mostly
controlled by Spain that does not, generally speaking, believe it
should be controlled by Spain. They have their own language,
they have their own culture, they have their own bombs.
Speaker 2 (21:21):
Yeah. When I went to a went to like a
train like a I guess like trans writes protest roughly
and in Boise last year and there's there's a little
like mini Bosque like community, uh near the near the downtown. Yeah,
and it has like it has like little shops and
(21:41):
little like little like grocery stores. And I feel like
I feel like restaurants for like cafes, and it was
quite quite enjoyable. So I basically have been here because
I went to Boise, Idaho totally had got a Bosca
grocery store.
Speaker 1 (21:59):
I once went to a Bosque demonstration in Catalonia that's
slightly more legit than mine. Yeah, it still wasn't in
Bosque country anyway. So yeah, they have a long history
of we are not Spanish and yes, we're willing to
fight about that. The ETA, which stands for basically Bosque
Homeland and liberally, was a Marxist group that included those
(22:21):
paramilitaries willing to fight about it, and they were around
for a really long time. They started in nineteen fifty nine.
They didn't disband formally until twenty eighteen. Oh really, yeah,
that's wild. Yeah, they kept up shift for a really
long time. They did an awful lot of paramilitary stuff.
I am not really informed enough on the topic to
really opine about their later actions, which became increasingly less popular.
(22:44):
I will say that the most recent surveys of Bosque
people show that will most people prefer some kind of
autonomy or freedom from Spain, whether it's like being their
own state or being like fully an autonomous region. An
overwhelming majority said they're no longer interest in the ETA's violence,
and that might be because of long drawn out troubles,
you know, I don't sure, but most people want to
(23:08):
be free and we're not talking about this more contemporary
violence today, which we're talking about when they had a
fucking dictator. The ATA was really popular with Spaniards and
Bosque people when it was when they were fighting against
a fucking dictator. Franco wasn't big on Bosque independence. He
actually wasn't big on any He wasn't. Yeah, he's he
(23:32):
was a fascist, wasn't he. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (23:33):
I don't think he's big on independence period.
Speaker 1 (23:36):
Yeah, he's not big on rights or people. I think
he was big on Franco and big on tradwives, many
such cases, and there's like some other stuff. He like
kind of created a Spanish identity actually, and it was
funny because including out of parts that wouldn't have been
part of God, I didn't write this into the script,
(23:56):
but I read about how like I think Flamenco doesn't
I think it's Andalusia and like wouldn't have been part
of the Spanish identity as like a specific Spanish thing,
and like, so he kept pushing this like Spanish identity
or whatever.
Speaker 2 (24:11):
I mean, yeah, cultural identity is a big part of
like propping up fascism as well.
Speaker 1 (24:15):
Yeah, totally. And so he kind of created this, you know,
dradwave culture or whatever. It was extra shitty to the
Bosque people. He banned their language and culture. I mean,
to be very banned lots of languages and culture. But
it did not make him friends. The Bosque people overall
weren't like, man, there's our guy, you know, Rayco are dude. Yeah,
(24:37):
that quote that I think of every time I think
of Franco, which is just the I'm willing to kill
half of Spain to rule the other half. So in
the nineteen seventies, the ECA formed a space program and
tried to send a Spaniard into space, Spain's first astronaut,
a very specific Spaniard they picked to try to launch
into space. See it's the early nineteen seventies. Franco is
(25:00):
a dictator. Still, he's kind of on the right track
with his like personal life and his leadership style, which
is to say, he's dying, which is.
Speaker 2 (25:08):
Okay, okay, all right, that's I think where you were
going there for that success.
Speaker 1 (25:15):
He's trying to pick a successor, and you know, and
he's gonna name a king or whatever. Maybe he already
has at this point thing maybe his late sixties. He
like pisses off. I like refuse to keep track of
like which kings people like versus other kings, because there
shouldn't be monarchies. But he like pissed off either the
cauralists or the something else' or something anyway. In nineteen
(25:37):
seventy two, a Bosque separatist from the ETA named Jose
Miguel Benarin aka Argala, which is Bosque for thin, because
everyone gets to have cool nicknames when you're in the
resistance against Franco, that is cool. Argala went to Madrid
to start building contacts in the Spanish left, basically hoping
to be like, all right, we should get together with
the other resistance movements. Yeah, And also he was like,
(25:59):
if we a big attack somewhere else, it'll relieve pressure.
Speaker 2 (26:02):
Off the Bosque region, right, sure. Sure.
Speaker 1 (26:05):
His previous escapades including robbing a bank for ten million pisadas. Uh,
he held a businessman hostage, but instead of for money,
it was basically like a labor strike.
Speaker 3 (26:15):
Thing.
Speaker 1 (26:15):
It was like a I'm holding this businessman hostage until
this company treats their workers better.
Speaker 2 (26:23):
That's that's pretty cool. It's it worked conventional, but it's
it's yeah, it's pretty cool.
Speaker 1 (26:29):
Yeah, he's in Madrid now. He meets a communist woman
named Eva Forrest who was born to anarchists parents in Barcelona,
who became the local guide essentially for the ETA. And
she knew a really fun fact, like a piece of
trivia that you could use at a bar. There's a
really really important guy, Luis Carrero Blanco, who went to
mass the same time every day at the same church
(26:52):
in the city of Salamanca, which is about two hours
west of Madrid. And he only had one bodyguard when
he went to mass.
Speaker 2 (26:59):
Very cool tripha, I know was this one? Who is
this one guy?
Speaker 1 (27:02):
Well, I'm glad you asked Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco. He
was deputy Prime Minister at the time when they first
started planning this, and so see like number two kind
of yeah, and he he runs the day to day
in Spain. He's also sort of building this like state
within the state in Spain. He's setting up informants within
(27:23):
the government to report to him rite some Game of
Thrones shit. Yeah, and he is rabidly anti Semitic. Franco
was like, oh, I'm like, you know, I mean, I'm
only against the Judeo Bolsheviks and the Judeo Masons and
people celebrating in public. Blanco believed it was war to
the death between Christianity and Judaism. Okay, so this guy's
(27:47):
like bad bad news. Huh yeah, yeah, like the guy
that makes Franco seem moderate.
Speaker 2 (27:53):
Yeah, okay, that's that is that that is quite the problem.
Speaker 1 (27:56):
Yeah. Anyway, he goes around on a predictable schedule with
one bodyguard.
Speaker 2 (28:01):
OK.
Speaker 1 (28:01):
Cool, what a fun fact, I'm sure, Agala said, neat trivia.
That is that is great bar bar trivia. Yeah. So
the ETA talked it over and they were like, all right,
we're going to kidnap this guy and we'll probably be
able to exchange him for one hundred and fifty prisoners.
It's a good exchange rate. So they decided to kidnap him.
(28:22):
They plan on using three four member cells and then
ambushing him inside the church. They rented the mountselves out
some houses and also a clothing store where they figured
they could store their guy. Right, okay, while he's under
being kidnapped. It didn't go as planned. First, the clothing
store got broken into, and I don't entirely know why
(28:43):
this fucked everything up. I get it either like drew
too much heat or it was like too fucked up
to be a successful business or whatever. After that, they
couldn't use it anymore. Second, one of the people planning
all of this, his name was Texakia, which is Bosque
for short. He died in a shootout with cops in
the Bosque, in the Bosque region, so he wasn't as
useful anymore because he was dead, and their necromancy wasn't
(29:05):
on point. Eva Forest, whose name is a reference to
the end that Sophie is becoming nice, nice, thank you,
thank you. Eva Forest was like, well, all right, I'll
set you up an apartment and you can store guns
and the kidnap guy in the apartment. We'll like build
a little hidden thing. And so they're like, all right, chill,
(29:26):
And so some communist construction workers and Bosque separatists build
a hidden room for storing stuff in an apartment, which
is apparently like a big part of a lot of
the resistance to Franco At this point is you just
have like weird hidden caches and every apartment and stuff.
Speaker 2 (29:42):
I mean, I definitely appreciate a hidden room in an apartment.
Speaker 1 (29:46):
Frankly, one of the things that I have learned by
doing this history show is that everyone should have everyone
the hidden room. Well, they just become necessary sometimes, like
the amount of work that people had to do during
the Holocaust, right to try and help people survive. Like
you just like never know when like here's a place
(30:07):
you can store a passport or a person, you just
like never know, and that's gonna come up, right.
Speaker 2 (30:13):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (30:13):
Anyway, So Franco, there's a third problem. It's not really
a problem, a thing that happens Franco. He's getting old
as fuck, and so he names Blanco as the actual
prime minister, no longer the deputy prime minister. Oh interesting,
So he goes from running the day to day to
like kind of being in charge. Franco's still like in charge,
(30:34):
but he's like old and sick, but.
Speaker 2 (30:36):
He's like sitting in a bed like chilling where other
people are like actually do all this shit.
Speaker 1 (30:40):
Yeah, So he goes from like kind of second in
charge to like absolutely second in charge slash kind of
in charge. Yeah, and the ETA is like, oh, this
might this might complicate things. Let's figure this out, and
they like brainstorm for a while.
Speaker 2 (30:54):
They have the opportunity to do the funniest thing.
Speaker 1 (30:57):
Yeah, And so Ourgala he's like, you know what, there's
a ground floor space for rent on the street that
the Guide drives every day. So let's rent that and
do what radicals do best, dig a fucking tunnel. Ah,
the old, the old tunnel diggers. Tunnels are back.
Speaker 3 (31:18):
Tunnels are back.
Speaker 1 (31:20):
They call the whole thing operation Ogre, because if you're
going to do a cool, wild crime, you better give
yourself cool nicknames and call the crime something cool.
Speaker 2 (31:28):
That's true.
Speaker 1 (31:30):
And Ourgala is what's known on this show as a
tunnel guy. There are two main purposes for tunnels historically.
One is to plant explosives to blow up dictators. The
other is to escape prison. Ourgala has done both. He well,
he's dug tunnels for both. He dug a prison tunnel
and a failed attempt to free a bunch of ETA prisoners.
But so this is not his first tunnel rodeo. He
(31:54):
rents the space and he's like, hello, we are sculpture students,
and that will explain all the coming and going and
the noise and the mess and all.
Speaker 2 (32:04):
This dirt and clay and ground that we're going to
be yeah, pulling out yep.
Speaker 1 (32:09):
And they spent a week digging the tunnel. Everything I've
read was like and it was very complicated and hard.
I read one source that was like it they spent
six months digging it. But the more the sources I
trusted better were like, they spent a week digging it.
And at eight am on December twentieth, nineteen seventy three,
they place one hundred and fifty pounds of explosives in
(32:31):
a T shape in the tunnel underneath the street. By
nine am they're up on the street and two of
them are Gala and another guy named kiss Kerr Bosk
for short. They're dressed up like electricians. Our Gala is
up on the ladder with a detonator and his like
electrician outfit. Right, that's pretty funny.
Speaker 3 (32:50):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (32:51):
At nine point thirty six am, a black Dodge Dart.
I've run into multiple ideas of what the car was.
I don't know. I'm going with Dart.
Speaker 2 (33:00):
You're just gonna say it. It's a black Dotch start.
Speaker 1 (33:02):
Yeah, there was like a couple different models that I've
seen claimed, but a black Dodge fascists.
Speaker 2 (33:07):
Fascists do like driving black Dodgers these days.
Speaker 1 (33:10):
So it's coming down, driving down the road with that
Asso Blanco in it, and there's a car double park,
so the driver has to swerve. I think the bombers
put the car double park there, but i'm because it
has to serve on a specific part of the road
or something. That's the impression I get from what I'm reading.
But it's like translations and jog hisiscar signals to Argala,
(33:33):
who presses the button and the Spanish space program is born.
The car and its three occupants made a sixty five
feet into the air. That's pretty good for the first flight.
They cleared a five story church, landed on the other
side in a courtyard or on a second story balcony,
(33:53):
depending on the source. And that's how Prime Minister Luise
Cadeto Blanco becomes Spain's first astronaut. As a lot of
Spanish folks refer to him. Other good jokes include is
it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it's cut
at Oblanco.
Speaker 3 (34:09):
So incredibly based.
Speaker 2 (34:11):
Yeah, oh, man, So they launched it pretty high. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (34:18):
Yeah, I've also read one hundred feet. I've read like
thirty like thirty three meters, and I've read like, I
don't like twenty meters or whatever.
Speaker 2 (34:27):
But that's impressive because like they also had to like
it had to like go through a little bit of
the ground that they that they dug under as well.
Speaker 1 (34:34):
Yeah, and there's pictures of the pothole potholes and the
wrong word, the collapsed street and the timing. Imagine the timing.
Speaker 2 (34:45):
Yeah, like these types of these, these types of car
bombings are usually not this successful.
Speaker 1 (34:51):
Yeah, yeah, the average I mean, we went over some
failed bombings in last you know, on Monday, but we
we didn't go over well enough on Monday. Was how
once a tiny little Entish sprout, Sophie is now Eva
Forest the communist and who okay, I don't know, I'm
(35:16):
supposed to somehow turn this into Sophie becoming an end successfully.
Speaker 2 (35:20):
Is Sophie like like the baby Groot territory?
Speaker 1 (35:23):
Now no, that was before. Now that Washie's gone past
baby Groot and his regular grout, I'm regular pigular grout.
Speaker 2 (35:31):
Yeah all right, sure, big sprouts? Yeah, good, good for you, Sophie,
you looks so uh you look so gangly.
Speaker 3 (35:39):
Thank you so much.
Speaker 2 (35:40):
Yeah, to be fair, there is actually like one, two, three, four, five,
six plants behind Sophie on the frame, that's true, and
no plants behind either myself or Margaret.
Speaker 1 (35:52):
Can I tell you my favorite theory about ens. This
won't mean anything to Garrison. I think, Garrison, do you
know that the Ens the n y with all life? No,
the ants are the tree Beard's tree Beard is an
end and they talk very slowly and they have counsels
and they destroy damns and they're cool, right, but they're
all men because they can't find their wives. The ntwives
(36:15):
have gone missing. And my theory is that could you
imagine being man splained to by an end?
Speaker 3 (36:21):
Oh my god, no.
Speaker 1 (36:24):
Because it would just take so long, well it would
be it be insufferable. Yeah, no, wonder the N wives left.
Speaker 3 (36:34):
Huh ah.
Speaker 1 (36:36):
And that is the kind of content that all of
the ads that you're about to hear offer you.
Speaker 2 (36:48):
And we're back.
Speaker 1 (36:50):
So one fun and by fun, I mean on fun.
Fact about the jokes about Spain's first astronaut is that
in twenty seventeen, a Spanish trans woman named Cassandra Vera
was sentenced to a year in prison for making jokes
about Carrero Blanco on Twitter.
Speaker 2 (37:07):
What what are you serious?
Speaker 1 (37:10):
Yeah to spoiler alert, the Supreme Court overturned this conviction,
but it was like this like whole big fucking thing.
Her jokes included, did Carrero Blanco also go back to
future with the car? Back to the future with this car?
And there's a bunch of other jokes that all either did.
It's like very tame at like things to say. Yeah,
(37:33):
And some of the tweets that were like used against
her in court were like what, you can't even make
jokes about this in Spain anymore or whatever.
Speaker 2 (37:39):
You know.
Speaker 1 (37:41):
Blanco's own granddaughter was upset by the prosecution of Cassandra Vera,
saying quote, I'm scared of a society in which freedom
of expression, however regrettable it may be, can lead to
jail sentences.
Speaker 2 (37:55):
Yeah, I mean, yeah, that's that's good, I guess.
Speaker 1 (37:57):
Yeah. So back to the bask Space program. They're unwitting astronaut.
So the two fake electricians, right, they've pressed this thing,
they've sent the launch in.
Speaker 2 (38:07):
All of our guys are still on the ground.
Speaker 1 (38:08):
Yeah, yeah, they come running down and they're like gas
gas and start running away as if it was a
gas mane that blew that blewe Yeah. Yeah, and so
it adds to the chaos of the scene and it
makes them look less suspicious.
Speaker 2 (38:24):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (38:24):
They ran around the corner. They got picked up by
a third conspirator at Sulo or care in Bosque. They
drove away. They switched vehicles once and they made it
to their hideout. Carrero Blanco died of his wounds forty
five minutes later at the hospital. His companions joined him
in death shortly thereafter. Thus they all lived up to
(38:45):
their favorite fascist slogan, Viva lamorte long lived death. At
eleven PM, the ETA took credit for the action. It
took the press weeks to report the ETA communicy. I
guess either because the press wanted so like like didn't
believe it, or they were like waiting for like the
political dust to settle to know whether it was safe
(39:07):
to report it. Is kind of my biggest guess.
Speaker 2 (39:09):
Yeah, I mean, I think they live in a fascist country. Yeah,
you would want to like feel it out, I think
a little bit.
Speaker 1 (39:16):
Yeah. So the three conspirators wait about ten days in
the hideout and then their friend Eva drove them to
a border town in the Bosque Country. They crossed into
France over a river, and they lived underground and two
of the three of them made it to their natural
end of days. That's good for those two. What happened
to the other? Oh, I'll get to it. The assassination
(39:38):
is credited as hastening the liberalization, aka they move away
from fascism of Spain. The prime minister who placed this
guy was more open to change. I don't know whether
it was.
Speaker 2 (39:47):
Yeah, I would be too if the alast gay got yeah,
last guy got said thirty three meters over our church.
Speaker 1 (39:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (39:58):
Oh they all tried to some democracy. Yeah, totally.
Speaker 1 (40:04):
Launching dictators into space. It's never morally incorrect. Strategically, it's
a roll of the dice, sometimes better, sometimes worse. This
time it was better. Yeah, this was a more or
less perfect action. Right, They got their guys. It seems
the collateral was low. Yeah, they got their dude. Yeah,
(40:24):
none of them got well. So Eva Forrest got caught
nine months after the attack. She spent a few years
in prison, but fortunately with the death of fascism in Spain,
there was an amnesty and she gets out right and
during all of this she writes a fake tell all
about the action, and she peppers it with false clues
to help hide her still underground co conspirators.
Speaker 2 (40:47):
Great.
Speaker 1 (40:47):
Yeah, so she's like in her version of the story,
and you'll see people see people reporting this. Her version
of the story is like, oh, all the bombers immediately
fled to Portugal, right not. They waited for a week
and then went to France.
Speaker 2 (41:00):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (41:02):
And she went on to be part of the conversion
to democracy of Spain. She became a senator, She stayed
involved in Bosque separatism even though she was Catalan, and
she lived a long and happy life before dying in
two thousand and seven.
Speaker 2 (41:15):
What an arc, going from a political assassin to a senator.
I know.
Speaker 1 (41:19):
I wonder what her anarchist parents think of this.
Speaker 2 (41:22):
It might be like, whoa, you did good? Watch up? Honey? Yeah, no,
come on, honey, yeah, well you know what I mean,
Like ever they can up in the air. Yeah, I've
never blown up a prime minister, will exactly? He who
was blown up?
Speaker 1 (41:39):
A prime fascist prime minister cast the first stone at
Eva Forrest. Afterwards, the Bosque separatist stuff, the government sets
up right wing death squads in a Bosque country and
starts murdering separatists just like. They kill more than a
dozen activists, and in nineteen seventy eight, the kind of
(42:00):
like revenge kill Argala, who was probably the main conspirator.
In December nineteen seventy eight, they blow him up like
in his car yea, and they use explosives that were
given to them by soldiers at an American Army base,
which they like claim that it was like a rogue
(42:22):
soldier was just like, oh, I'm just giving my buddy
some bombs, you know. Sure, Kissker, for his part, survived
a right wing death squad attack and might still be alive.
It didn't I didn't find his death. Exula made it
to two thousand and eight before dying of cancer. So
overall they did really fucking good.
Speaker 2 (42:43):
Yeah, I mean, yeah, it sounds like Spade could be
a lot worse if this didn't happen at this specific time. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (42:52):
I mean, like probably the death of Franco would have
led to democratization, but I don't know if they had
a drawcist prime minister.
Speaker 2 (43:01):
Could Yeah it it may not have lasted like much longer,
but it still seems like there. It probably would have
would have been worse in a few ways. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (43:10):
Absolutely. What finally got Franco in the end was Parkinson's disease,
and November nineteen seventy five, after a month or so
on a coma, he died. Around Spain, people got drunken celebration.
Everyone was fucking obviously not everyone, but a whole lot
of people were fucking happy. The News asked some people
why they filed past his coffin, and the answer was
(43:32):
that we wanted to make sure the old fascist was
really dead. I mean, yeah, that's that makes sense. So
it was like probably like, oh, there's all these mortars here,
and it's people being like, oh, thank god.
Speaker 2 (43:43):
Oh god, Yeah, that's him.
Speaker 1 (43:44):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (43:46):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (43:47):
Meanwhile, Nixon praised Franco after his death, saying he unified Spain.
Classic classic Nixon move. Yeah. He was buried in the
Valley of the Fallen, which was a memorial built by
enslaved prisoners at the end of the Civil War to
throw all the bodies of dead people into and he
was the only person in the war who didn't die
(44:07):
in the war who was buried there. In twenty seventeen,
the Spanish government was like, you know what, fuck that guy,
and they exhumed him because it was disrespectful to bury
him alongside his victims, and he got reburied in the
same cemetery as his first astronaut. That's nice, yeah, Murray
Bookchin said about him in place of an obituary. Francisco
(44:30):
Franco was denied a place besides Hitler and Stalin as
one of history's most terrifying mass murderers. It was only
because of the demographic limitations imposed upon him by the
Iberian Peninsula. You know, was just there weren't that many
people for him to murder. In nineteen seventy seven, Spain
announced the Pact of Forgetting, which was an amnesty law
(44:53):
for the fascists and the anti fascist but mostly anti
fascists were dead and murdered, right, and it was a
way to try to mend the divisions in society by
being like, uh, no one's fault, you.
Speaker 2 (45:05):
Know, huh, you have a lot of a lot of
different feelings on that, and yeah.
Speaker 1 (45:14):
Thirty years later, in two thousand and seven, they passed
the Historical Memory Law, which was like, no, we remember, yeah,
we had a fascist dictator and it was bad. Yeah,
so here's the people who fought him and the people
blew up his prime minister.
Speaker 2 (45:36):
Yeah, that is next next time I've been boise Idaho.
I take my.
Speaker 1 (45:43):
Respects, Garson. You got anything to plug for.
Speaker 2 (45:52):
Pluggables, I would say, uh, check the I suppose just
check the Lantic Community Press Collective or Defend the Forest
accounts to see what the city council did on Monday
regarding the funding of cop City and then what steps
will be taken after that. I don't know what will
happen because we're recording this in the past, but I
(46:16):
would that is my main plug. I've been covering stuff
like that on It could happen here when I have
time to put together like a full scripted episode. So
there will be more of those in the future as well.
But yeah, let's uh, let's go see what the Atlanta
City Council voted to do and what people will then
choose to do in response.
Speaker 1 (46:38):
Yeah, I am currently kickstarting a tabletop role playing game.
It feels not as serious after that, so you should
do the things that Garrison said. I'm kickstarting a role
playing game called Pan Number City, and this time I
even blow brought up a little blurb about it. There's
a black fog that hangs over the city, and it's
not as metaphorical as you might hope. It's col dust
(46:59):
Somewhere up through them, there's a glorious silver city hovering
in the sunshine. But don't concern yourself much with the
floating quarter, because only the rich and the holy will
ever see it. Ground Side, orphans dig through rubble and
trash to scavenge the parts to fix their motorcycles. Street
poets self fungus and brawl over territory, and bureaucrats ride
black horses to midnight salons where they plot the death
of the god King. The graveyard's been squatted by immigrants
(47:22):
now for longer than you've been alive, and there's a
gang of nihilist x marines who seem intent on blowing
up half of everything. Welcome to Pannumber City. There's plenty
to do if you don't mind the dust or the smoke,
or the crime or the monsters. And so if that
sounds like fun to you, you can go back it
on Kickstarter. We've already succeeded at our goal, and we've
(47:46):
already reached our first stretch goal. Probably by the time
you hear this will reach a second stretch goal. But
the last stretch goal that may or may not have
been reached ever, I don't know, involves me reading a
book set in this world. So you should force me to.
Speaker 2 (48:02):
Do that work, force Margret to do more right here. Yeah,
that that has had very exciting. I'm always for conspiring
to kill the god gig.
Speaker 1 (48:12):
Yeah, only in fiction and history and there anyway.
Speaker 2 (48:18):
The demi urge them is kind of is kind of
it's kind of it's kind of like the god Gig sophy.
Speaker 1 (48:24):
You got anything you want to plug?
Speaker 3 (48:26):
Uh. If you enjoy cool Zone Media but you don't
enjoy ads, we now have an ad free subscription channel
exclusively on Apple podcasts called cooler Zone Media. Subscribe if
you want or don't.
Speaker 1 (48:39):
And we will talk to you all next Monday.
Speaker 3 (48:42):
Bye. Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production
of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts and cool Zone Media,
visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out
on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
your podcasts.
Welcome to Cool People Who did cool Stuff. I'm your host,
Margaret Kildroy. Every week we talk about people who did
cool stuff. Sophie is here in zombie form as the producer,
and we're going to try and get you up to
it's more powerful than a zombie.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
And more powerful I.
Speaker 1 (00:23):
Don't know, and I mean we might not get you
all the way up to Lich. No, we're sticking with undead.
Lich is like jumping a little too high. You can
get to Lich eventually. I believe in you. It's just
a quick jump from.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
In miny Craft. It could be a zombie pig bin
for all, for all of the zoomers out there.
Speaker 1 (00:41):
I like how that just sounds like you're trying to
reference a crime, because that's the main thing I think
of when I think of Minecraft. So the other voice
you're hearing is Garrison Davis, today's guest. Hello, how are
you Garrison? I'm actually doing okay, excellent.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (00:56):
Today we're going to talk about some history that, obviously,
in the cool thing with history has no relevance to
the modern world.
Speaker 2 (01:04):
Yeah, it never does. That's the That's the great thing
about history is that it's only only in the past.
Speaker 1 (01:08):
Yeah, they already mentioned producers. Sophie, how are you doing, Sophie.
Speaker 3 (01:13):
Like I said, I died two days ago, but somehow
I'm here.
Speaker 1 (01:17):
Yeah, we'll get you. We'll get you up from from
zombie somehow. Our audio engineer is Ian. I don't know
what level of undead Ian is. Everyone say hi to Ian.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
Hi, Ian, Hello, Hello, Ian. I I remember it this time.
I remember that I included having everyone this time. That's
that's called character development. It's it's it's it's a little
mini arc I have here.
Speaker 3 (01:41):
Oh okay, I would like to be upgraded by the
end of this from zombie to like, I'm not going undead.
I'm switching the criterias here I would like to be
I would like to be tree Beard from Lord of the.
Speaker 2 (01:53):
That's also character Okay, well, yeah, you can try. We
can try to lay that groundwork over the course of
the next few ad breaks if you want.
Speaker 3 (02:01):
Yeah, ok, thank you so much.
Speaker 1 (02:02):
We're building you up to end so much like, Oh,
I don't think there's a Gandalf reference in this episode.
Speaker 2 (02:12):
Tragic's weird.
Speaker 1 (02:14):
Well, next week is gonna have a Gandalf reference because
I've already started writing the script. Much like the Motley
assortment of people who came together to fight fascism. In
the classic series of novels Lord of the Rings, the
people of Spain fought against Franco. This would be kind
of like if the people of Mordor fought against Mordor.
(02:37):
But unfortunately Tolkian wrote an oversimplified thing. That's not what
we're talking about today. If you want to hear the
first part, you should. You should go back and listen
to the first part. But today we're going to talk
about resistance to Franco, who was the dictator of Spain.
So after World War Two, Franco pivoted to being like
(02:57):
your friendly neighborhood fascist. That was his thing. Despite the
fact that apparently he was more successful than autocrat than
anybody on earth during his reign, Like he didn't even
have a rubber stamp parliament to approve his decisions. He
managed a more authoritarian control of Spain apparently than fucking
Hitler or Stalin.
Speaker 2 (03:19):
Huh, yeah, he was. He was. That's curious.
Speaker 1 (03:23):
He was good at being in charge, well, he was
good at being the one who was in charge. He
was good at being in charge. He eventually created the
position of Prime Minister because he wanted to open things
up a little bit and gave himself the position of
Prime Minister. Oh okay, that's so. So I don't think
(03:45):
that works quite the way that that he might have thought. Well,
I mean, I'm sure it works exactly the way that
he thought, but I don't think that that quite opens
up the democratic possibilities in the country. No, nor did
when he restore the monarchy without actually putting in a king.
Speaker 2 (04:04):
So this was like, there's no monarch.
Speaker 1 (04:07):
Yeah, he was just like, well, I'm in charge, but
ostensibly when I died, the monarchy will return or whatever.
Speaker 2 (04:13):
That's interesting, and.
Speaker 1 (04:14):
He managed to get like a bunch of sort of
titles that are only used for monarchs that I didn't
write into the script, like there by the Grace of
God or I don't know, some fucking weird mohit.
Speaker 2 (04:26):
Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (04:28):
But eventually he did pass off the prime ministership in
nineteen seventy three, right before he died because he was
getting sick. And we'll hear some fun news about the
second prime minister a little bit later. Okay. He declared
national Catholicism no other religion, including Protestants, and obviously Jews
were allowed to have public ceremonies. Franco spent a lot
of time complaining about the quote Judeo Bolsheviks who were
(04:52):
and this is like so fun because nothing changed, just
not fun at all. It's awful, and anti Semitism is
a terrible problem. These Bolsheviks were somehow aligned with both
American capitalism and Soviet communism at the same time.
Speaker 2 (05:05):
Yeah. Yeah, that tends to have been with those old Belsheviks.
Speaker 1 (05:09):
Yeah, and therefore they are the enemy of good old
fashioned fascism. A lot of times he was like more
moving towards not it was. He didn't always specifically call
himself a fascist, but I'm going to call him a
fascist the whole time.
Speaker 2 (05:24):
Yeah, because he's a fascist.
Speaker 1 (05:25):
Yeah, that's the reason I'm going to call him one. Yeah, totally.
So he's incredibly anti Semitic. But he actually didn't. Spain
did not deport its Jewish population during World War Two.
He created a list of them and he gave it
to Hitler, and he was like getting ready to he
was almost certainly getting ready to start doing this, but
things in the war changed and favor changed or whatever. Yeah,
(05:49):
And also tens of thousands of Jews did come from
Nazi controlled France into Spain and survived the war as
the result. So after the war, his propaganists went over
time being like Spain is the hero to the world's
Jews at the same time as they're like banned from
practicing their faith publicly.
Speaker 2 (06:07):
Sure, yeah, because he's he's tried to pony up to
all of the liberal democracies while still being a fascist.
Speaker 1 (06:13):
Yeah, and pretending to have saved Jews while being anti
Semitic is the way to pony up to the world's
Western democratic powers, because that's what they do too. So
he declares national Catholicism. I don't think he actually calls
it this. I think that's actually the name. National Catholicism
starts coming a little bit later, but it's basically like tradwife,
tradcaf thing, good old back to traditional values Catholicism, all
(06:38):
love for the Church. Except just kidding. He actually built
something that was in conflict with the Church and the pope.
He built his Catholicism, not Rome's Catholicism. It was still
called Roman Catholicism, but.
Speaker 2 (06:52):
It was its own actual like like did they have
their own like fake pope, but no, they they but
what they did is they would censor the pope if
the Pope would say something they didn't like.
Speaker 1 (07:06):
And they also negotiated with the church to have the
church no longer point the bishops in Spain, so Franco
and the Spanish fascist government were appointing all the bishops
in Spain. Franco was also like a hands on kind
of guy. He was signing the individual death warrants for like,
it's like all he did all day.
Speaker 3 (07:23):
I think it's like a micromanager.
Speaker 2 (07:26):
He was a micromanager to get up at Todd to
sign all these death war its. Yeah, what heart, what
a heart?
Speaker 1 (07:33):
I know that's where that's where Robert Evans does.
Speaker 2 (07:37):
Yeah. I had just imagine him like, oh god, it's
it's two pm. I've to sign all these death warrants,
so woe is me?
Speaker 1 (07:46):
Yeah, yeah, it's kind of creepy because they're actually for
people who don't even exist yet. It's it's a strange hobby.
I'm sure nothing batt'll come of it. So but Franco
distinct legally distinct from irate okay on Twitter. In nineteen
thirty seven, Pope Pious the eleventh proposed a third way
(08:09):
of neither communism nor fascism. And he basically was like
the churches against communism, the church is against fascism. And
he wrote statements about each their separate statements, one's like
anti fascism and ones like anti communism. And so Franco
being Franco, published the pope's anti communist one and then
banned his anti fascist one.
Speaker 2 (08:26):
That's pretty funny.
Speaker 1 (08:27):
I know, I'm sure somewhere there's like someone who did
the opposite, you know, yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway, so this
good Catholic censored the pope and the church did absolutely
fucking terrible things in Spain under Franco. Obviously, no more abortion, divorce,
or birth control, because why would anyone learn how to
(08:48):
control their own bodies. Women were forced to go to
a special like learn how to be a submissive wife
and good mother school for six months.
Speaker 2 (08:57):
Yeah that makes sense.
Speaker 1 (08:58):
Yeah, basically all schooling became Catholic school. And they also
started snatching up all the children of all the dead
anarchists and communists and Republicans and Catholic leftists because there
were Catholic leftists throughout.
Speaker 2 (09:10):
This whole time.
Speaker 3 (09:10):
That's kidnapping.
Speaker 1 (09:12):
Yeah, so they took all the orphans and they put
them in Catholic schools to teach them conservative values and
try to eradically.
Speaker 3 (09:19):
So did they put them in like Catholic the colorable
Catholic orphanages.
Speaker 1 (09:23):
Yeah, yeah, basically is not the only place in the
world the Catholic Church has done this kind of obviously.
Speaker 3 (09:30):
Yeah. No, that's that's one of their greatest, greatest worst hits.
Speaker 1 (09:34):
Yep, yeah, wo But people of any religion are never
a monolith. By the nineteen sixties, anti clericalism on the
left had waned for better or worse, and the Church
became one of the centers of anti Franco resistance in
some parts of the country, especially in Catalonia. By the
early nineteen seventies, the church was moving in a progressive direction.
(09:58):
In nineteen seventy one, the Council formally ask the Spanish
people their pardon for how they'd supported this fascists.
Speaker 2 (10:05):
So, so is the church like in Spain starting to
have like a distant faction.
Speaker 1 (10:10):
Or just the Church out of Spain. So the Church
out of Spain. Absolutely, the Church in Spain is starting
to also okay, all right, And by nineteen seventy three,
the Church out of Spain demands the separation of church
and state in Spain, which is like pretty wild for
them to be, like, we actually want the church to
(10:31):
be a separate thing than the state of Spain. And
you start getting active violent infighting in Catholicism in Spain.
Speaker 2 (10:38):
You have the.
Speaker 1 (10:40):
God it really feels like nothing's ever changed thing, right,
I see, this is the one thing I am pro
infighting for. I am pro Catholics infighting.
Speaker 2 (10:47):
All right, well that's what no, no, no, whatever Christians have
done infighting always horrible things have resulted.
Speaker 1 (10:57):
So actually, well yeah, okay, so this one you have
the quote Warriors of Christ the King is an organization
that goes around and like physically attacks all the progressive
priests and churches because all the churches, all these progressive
churches are pushing for democracy in Spain. And so then
you have this like, no, the reason we like being
Catholic is because you can do fascist shit with it,
(11:19):
much like you have whatever the United States. Yeah, exactly.
The Catholic left and the Catholic right could not be
a further apart group of ideologies. There's an academic named
Aurora G. Mortheo whose work influenced this part of the script.
She died in twenty twenty. She was born in Franco
times in Granada, Spain. In order to do her work,
she had to leave Spain, and she argued that national
(11:41):
Catholicism quote depended on well defined notions of gender and
the creation of an official discourse on femininity aka what
she called true Catholic womanhood.
Speaker 2 (11:54):
Huh.
Speaker 1 (11:55):
Yeah, it really was the tradwife thing. It's like a
really interesting I feel like this chunk of reading I've
done has given me some kind of wild insights into
the current right wing shit going on in the United States.
Speaker 2 (12:10):
Yeah, that sounds like it would be very popular on
tik shok.
Speaker 1 (12:13):
Yeah, Franco as Spain was, she suggests, and it seems
convincing built on this true Catholic womanhood. This was the
backbone of Franco. From this point of view, it was
changing gender politics in Spain that quote ease the transition
from patriarchal autarchy, which is when the country is like
entirely self contained, to a representational democracy. Because the new
(12:38):
I'm no longer quoting, because the new consumer society required
two income households. Women were starting to go to college, right, Yeah,
And to quote Aurora Mortheo again, by pivoting to the
West in the aftermath of the Second World War, Franco
ensured his relevancy to the outside world and protected his
regime's power from outside meddling. His new role as benign dictator,
(12:59):
open in his country to the west and fighting the
common communist enemy helped satisfy the conscience of his new
American partners, who saw Spain as having democratic possibilities.
Speaker 2 (13:10):
Possibilities, yeah, I mean fascist countries have democratic possibilities.
Speaker 1 (13:15):
Yeah, which they don't actually care about. They're like, hey,
can we sell you shit right now? You know, and
they're like yeah. He's like, they're like okay. Another thing
that helped ease this and authoritarianism, as even under Frank
authoritarianism started to wane.
Speaker 2 (13:33):
Right.
Speaker 1 (13:33):
Another thing helped that was as people ran to cities,
they formed shanty towns, right, Because the society goes from
agricultural to industrial like way later than most of Western Europe,
and so these shanty towns outside of the big cities,
they end up self governed in a lot of ways,
to quote her again, neighborhood associations with their ad hoc
governing councils sprang up and would later become legitimate political
(13:56):
voices for the labor movement. As the sixties wear on,
students start getting radical, especially into the two main places
that are doing the organizing, at least according to what
I read, because everything is biased towards whatever anyway. Uh,
they ended up in radical Christian movements and the Communist Party.
Speaker 2 (14:18):
Huge. Yeah, what an interesting little collection of like disparate cells.
Speaker 1 (14:24):
I know. And neither of these were political forces thirty
years earlier in Spain, right, Yeah, and so some women
helped end authoritarianism by rebelling against the tradwife nonsense. But
apparently there was also a kind of like feminist movement
that was also into embracing piety and motherhood, but turning
it against authoritarianism and like traditional Like I don't know,
(14:48):
it's like no radical track. Yeah, go ahead, we even
we see like a lot of the traadwavee stuff is
honestly done by more kind of like whether it's like
liberal or like lefty progressive types, Like a lot of
this stuff is done by people who are not fascists.
Then there is people who are fascists too, like kind
of like try to do like entryism via it because
it's very easy to do that totally. But like a
(15:10):
lot of people that that like popularized it and stuff
were like regular progressive libs or you know, they would
have been like Elizabeth Warren supporters or something right like
and and then and then you see the see the
fascist right trying to yeah, use there like twelve they're
like twelve egiral influencers trying to like push the discourse
(15:31):
in these little niche subcultures. Yeah. And I like when
we hold those grounds. I like when we be like, well, look,
feminism can be this or this. You know, no, absolutely
you should. You should never see territory that you don't
have to seed.
Speaker 2 (15:45):
Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (15:47):
And so all of this shit, all of this organizing,
all of this really intense social change. All of this
is why his system didn't survive his death. It did
not kill him, It did not end his reign, but
it ended the continuation of his reign. And I think
that is it's something that gets gets forgotten. But what
doesn't get forgotten. Garrison is a good earworm from a
(16:15):
jingle from an ad, much like how capitalism opened up
Spain to Okay, I got nothing.
Speaker 2 (16:24):
Here's some add democratic possibilities, so too, will we open
up your ears to democratic possibility?
Speaker 3 (16:30):
So what to do with me becoming tree Beard?
Speaker 2 (16:36):
Sore Bed is.
Speaker 3 (16:37):
An end an end and is a very old wise
tree that carries hobbits and then get sasas.
Speaker 1 (16:46):
Yeah, well, being understanding history gives you the reast of time.
Also non fascist, Catholic tokien. Yes, that's how it ties
together to But you're not there yet. You've got those
two ad breaks, so you're only you're up to Sapling
(17:09):
and Sapling. I'm halfway and we're back, and Sophie is
now wise and green.
Speaker 2 (17:20):
Most of what I know from this character well not no,
Like my first exposure to the to this character of
tree Beard was in the in the uh Veggie Tails
recreation of of Lord of the Rings where they had
a pretty a pretty scary seed with three with three
(17:43):
tree monsters. It always kind of freaked me out that
they were like they were basically like the in the
I googled it the picture, let me see, Oh no, I.
Speaker 3 (17:56):
Feel like this is this is offensive to tree Beard looks.
Speaker 1 (17:59):
Oh yeah, no, that's not what you look like.
Speaker 2 (18:01):
No, they kind of they kind of operated as like
guardians of the threshold. But yeah, they were. They were
pretty freaky. No I can, I can send a yeah, yeah,
it's there's some pretty pretty disturbing disturbing and I'll send
a picture to your markat here. All right, I really
(18:22):
appreciate we have reference, just so we all are aware
of the Veggie Tails, Lord of the Rings. That was
my first exposure to the the world of Middle Earth.
Speaker 1 (18:33):
So we're looking at I don't even know how to
describe it, but it definitely has jewelry.
Speaker 2 (18:38):
It does have a big amulet. That's the massive, massive
jewel in the front. Yea. And yeah, he has like
a he has a beard and a tree, a big nose,
really big eyebrows, gangly little branch arms.
Speaker 1 (18:56):
But you know what else had gangly little branches in Spain?
The Imunist Party, Eh, really it did.
Speaker 2 (19:03):
That's crazy.
Speaker 1 (19:04):
Did also have a picabulate with the red jewels of
it all. I am willing to bet that at some
point they rated something. They burned down a right wing
Catholic monastery and took such things. So the other people
resisting right the anarchists were there too, in a different form.
It was mostly communists at this point, most workers by
(19:26):
the end of Franco. If they were leftists, they were
in the Communist Party or they were in workers' commissions,
and the Communist Party was illegal there, and so it
was left with more anarchistic character than elsewhere around that
time because it couldn't be centralized. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah,
And a lot of the communists were literally the children
of anarchists. Right then. The workers' commissions carried with them
(19:47):
the sort of ghosts of the CNT, the like spirit
that cannot speak its name. These are the more decentralized things,
even more so than the Communist Party, right, But they're like,
can't call themselves the CNT because there's been well we've
talked about this at length. It was a bad idea
to call yourself the CNT.
Speaker 2 (20:05):
Yeah, it didn't seem to turn out very well.
Speaker 1 (20:07):
Yeah. The US backed Franco hard during the nineteen fifties.
They were the single greatest prop to his dictatorship, investment
in tourism and American military and bases, who the American
military bases in Spain literally, at one point later in
the story, provide bombs to fascist death squads, another American classic.
It is, it really is. It was not just for
(20:27):
Central America anymore. And that's kind of the larger picture
of how Franco's control slipped away. But it didn't end
with a whimper. It ended with a bang, because the
award for best assassination during the Franco regime goes to
the Bosque separatists, specifically the ETA. Have you ever you
(20:50):
ever heard of the Spanish space program? Don't google itimated
time of arrival now, but we'll go. It stands for boss,
Homeland and Liberty.
Speaker 2 (21:00):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (21:02):
The the E t A was sort of a as
a crude analogy, they were like kind of the Bosque
region's i ra uh. Bosque country is a region mostly
controlled by Spain that does not, generally speaking, believe it
should be controlled by Spain. They have their own language,
they have their own culture, they have their own bombs.
Speaker 2 (21:21):
Yeah. When I went to a went to like a
train like a I guess like trans writes protest roughly
and in Boise last year and there's there's a little
like mini Bosque like community, uh near the near the downtown. Yeah,
and it has like it has like little shops and
(21:41):
little like little like grocery stores. And I feel like
I feel like restaurants for like cafes, and it was
quite quite enjoyable. So I basically have been here because
I went to Boise, Idaho totally had got a Bosca
grocery store.
Speaker 1 (21:59):
I once went to a Bosque demonstration in Catalonia that's
slightly more legit than mine. Yeah, it still wasn't in
Bosque country anyway. So yeah, they have a long history
of we are not Spanish and yes, we're willing to
fight about that. The ETA, which stands for basically Bosque
Homeland and liberally, was a Marxist group that included those
(22:21):
paramilitaries willing to fight about it, and they were around
for a really long time. They started in nineteen fifty nine.
They didn't disband formally until twenty eighteen. Oh really, yeah,
that's wild. Yeah, they kept up shift for a really
long time. They did an awful lot of paramilitary stuff.
I am not really informed enough on the topic to
really opine about their later actions, which became increasingly less popular.
(22:44):
I will say that the most recent surveys of Bosque
people show that will most people prefer some kind of
autonomy or freedom from Spain, whether it's like being their
own state or being like fully an autonomous region. An
overwhelming majority said they're no longer interest in the ETA's violence,
and that might be because of long drawn out troubles,
you know, I don't sure, but most people want to
(23:08):
be free and we're not talking about this more contemporary
violence today, which we're talking about when they had a
fucking dictator. The ATA was really popular with Spaniards and
Bosque people when it was when they were fighting against
a fucking dictator. Franco wasn't big on Bosque independence. He
actually wasn't big on any He wasn't. Yeah, he's he
(23:32):
was a fascist, wasn't he. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (23:33):
I don't think he's big on independence period.
Speaker 1 (23:36):
Yeah, he's not big on rights or people. I think
he was big on Franco and big on tradwives, many
such cases, and there's like some other stuff. He like
kind of created a Spanish identity actually, and it was
funny because including out of parts that wouldn't have been
part of God, I didn't write this into the script,
(23:56):
but I read about how like I think Flamenco doesn't
I think it's Andalusia and like wouldn't have been part
of the Spanish identity as like a specific Spanish thing,
and like, so he kept pushing this like Spanish identity
or whatever.
Speaker 2 (24:11):
I mean, yeah, cultural identity is a big part of
like propping up fascism as well.
Speaker 1 (24:15):
Yeah, totally. And so he kind of created this, you know,
dradwave culture or whatever. It was extra shitty to the
Bosque people. He banned their language and culture. I mean,
to be very banned lots of languages and culture. But
it did not make him friends. The Bosque people overall
weren't like, man, there's our guy, you know, Rayco are dude. Yeah,
(24:37):
that quote that I think of every time I think
of Franco, which is just the I'm willing to kill
half of Spain to rule the other half. So in
the nineteen seventies, the ECA formed a space program and
tried to send a Spaniard into space, Spain's first astronaut,
a very specific Spaniard they picked to try to launch
into space. See it's the early nineteen seventies. Franco is
(25:00):
a dictator. Still, he's kind of on the right track
with his like personal life and his leadership style, which
is to say, he's dying, which is.
Speaker 2 (25:08):
Okay, okay, all right, that's I think where you were
going there for that success.
Speaker 1 (25:15):
He's trying to pick a successor, and you know, and
he's gonna name a king or whatever. Maybe he already
has at this point thing maybe his late sixties. He
like pisses off. I like refuse to keep track of
like which kings people like versus other kings, because there
shouldn't be monarchies. But he like pissed off either the
cauralists or the something else' or something anyway. In nineteen
(25:37):
seventy two, a Bosque separatist from the ETA named Jose
Miguel Benarin aka Argala, which is Bosque for thin, because
everyone gets to have cool nicknames when you're in the
resistance against Franco, that is cool. Argala went to Madrid
to start building contacts in the Spanish left, basically hoping
to be like, all right, we should get together with
the other resistance movements. Yeah, And also he was like,
(25:59):
if we a big attack somewhere else, it'll relieve pressure.
Speaker 2 (26:02):
Off the Bosque region, right, sure. Sure.
Speaker 1 (26:05):
His previous escapades including robbing a bank for ten million pisadas. Uh,
he held a businessman hostage, but instead of for money,
it was basically like a labor strike.
Speaker 3 (26:15):
Thing.
Speaker 1 (26:15):
It was like a I'm holding this businessman hostage until
this company treats their workers better.
Speaker 2 (26:23):
That's that's pretty cool. It's it worked conventional, but it's
it's yeah, it's pretty cool.
Speaker 1 (26:29):
Yeah, he's in Madrid now. He meets a communist woman
named Eva Forrest who was born to anarchists parents in Barcelona,
who became the local guide essentially for the ETA. And
she knew a really fun fact, like a piece of
trivia that you could use at a bar. There's a
really really important guy, Luis Carrero Blanco, who went to
mass the same time every day at the same church
(26:52):
in the city of Salamanca, which is about two hours
west of Madrid. And he only had one bodyguard when
he went to mass.
Speaker 2 (26:59):
Very cool tripha, I know was this one? Who is
this one guy?
Speaker 1 (27:02):
Well, I'm glad you asked Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco. He
was deputy Prime Minister at the time when they first
started planning this, and so see like number two kind
of yeah, and he he runs the day to day
in Spain. He's also sort of building this like state
within the state in Spain. He's setting up informants within
(27:23):
the government to report to him rite some Game of
Thrones shit. Yeah, and he is rabidly anti Semitic. Franco
was like, oh, I'm like, you know, I mean, I'm
only against the Judeo Bolsheviks and the Judeo Masons and
people celebrating in public. Blanco believed it was war to
the death between Christianity and Judaism. Okay, so this guy's
(27:47):
like bad bad news. Huh yeah, yeah, like the guy
that makes Franco seem moderate.
Speaker 2 (27:53):
Yeah, okay, that's that is that that is quite the problem.
Speaker 1 (27:56):
Yeah. Anyway, he goes around on a predictable schedule with
one bodyguard.
Speaker 2 (28:01):
OK.
Speaker 1 (28:01):
Cool, what a fun fact, I'm sure, Agala said, neat trivia.
That is that is great bar bar trivia. Yeah. So
the ETA talked it over and they were like, all right,
we're going to kidnap this guy and we'll probably be
able to exchange him for one hundred and fifty prisoners.
It's a good exchange rate. So they decided to kidnap him.
(28:22):
They plan on using three four member cells and then
ambushing him inside the church. They rented the mountselves out
some houses and also a clothing store where they figured
they could store their guy. Right, okay, while he's under
being kidnapped. It didn't go as planned. First, the clothing
store got broken into, and I don't entirely know why
(28:43):
this fucked everything up. I get it either like drew
too much heat or it was like too fucked up
to be a successful business or whatever. After that, they
couldn't use it anymore. Second, one of the people planning
all of this, his name was Texakia, which is Bosque
for short. He died in a shootout with cops in
the Bosque, in the Bosque region, so he wasn't as
useful anymore because he was dead, and their necromancy wasn't
(29:05):
on point. Eva Forest, whose name is a reference to
the end that Sophie is becoming nice, nice, thank you,
thank you. Eva Forest was like, well, all right, I'll
set you up an apartment and you can store guns
and the kidnap guy in the apartment. We'll like build
a little hidden thing. And so they're like, all right, chill,
(29:26):
And so some communist construction workers and Bosque separatists build
a hidden room for storing stuff in an apartment, which
is apparently like a big part of a lot of
the resistance to Franco At this point is you just
have like weird hidden caches and every apartment and stuff.
Speaker 2 (29:42):
I mean, I definitely appreciate a hidden room in an apartment.
Speaker 1 (29:46):
Frankly, one of the things that I have learned by
doing this history show is that everyone should have everyone
the hidden room. Well, they just become necessary sometimes, like
the amount of work that people had to do during
the Holocaust, right to try and help people survive. Like
you just like never know when like here's a place
(30:07):
you can store a passport or a person, you just
like never know, and that's gonna come up, right.
Speaker 2 (30:13):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (30:13):
Anyway, So Franco, there's a third problem. It's not really
a problem, a thing that happens Franco. He's getting old
as fuck, and so he names Blanco as the actual
prime minister, no longer the deputy prime minister. Oh interesting,
So he goes from running the day to day to
like kind of being in charge. Franco's still like in charge,
(30:34):
but he's like old and sick, but.
Speaker 2 (30:36):
He's like sitting in a bed like chilling where other
people are like actually do all this shit.
Speaker 1 (30:40):
Yeah, So he goes from like kind of second in
charge to like absolutely second in charge slash kind of
in charge. Yeah, and the ETA is like, oh, this
might this might complicate things. Let's figure this out, and
they like brainstorm for a while.
Speaker 2 (30:54):
They have the opportunity to do the funniest thing.
Speaker 1 (30:57):
Yeah, And so Ourgala he's like, you know what, there's
a ground floor space for rent on the street that
the Guide drives every day. So let's rent that and
do what radicals do best, dig a fucking tunnel. Ah,
the old, the old tunnel diggers. Tunnels are back.
Speaker 3 (31:18):
Tunnels are back.
Speaker 1 (31:20):
They call the whole thing operation Ogre, because if you're
going to do a cool, wild crime, you better give
yourself cool nicknames and call the crime something cool.
Speaker 2 (31:28):
That's true.
Speaker 1 (31:30):
And Ourgala is what's known on this show as a
tunnel guy. There are two main purposes for tunnels historically.
One is to plant explosives to blow up dictators. The
other is to escape prison. Ourgala has done both. He well,
he's dug tunnels for both. He dug a prison tunnel
and a failed attempt to free a bunch of ETA prisoners.
But so this is not his first tunnel rodeo. He
(31:54):
rents the space and he's like, hello, we are sculpture students,
and that will explain all the coming and going and
the noise and the mess and all.
Speaker 2 (32:04):
This dirt and clay and ground that we're going to
be yeah, pulling out yep.
Speaker 1 (32:09):
And they spent a week digging the tunnel. Everything I've
read was like and it was very complicated and hard.
I read one source that was like it they spent
six months digging it. But the more the sources I
trusted better were like, they spent a week digging it.
And at eight am on December twentieth, nineteen seventy three,
they place one hundred and fifty pounds of explosives in
(32:31):
a T shape in the tunnel underneath the street. By
nine am they're up on the street and two of
them are Gala and another guy named kiss Kerr Bosk
for short. They're dressed up like electricians. Our Gala is
up on the ladder with a detonator and his like
electrician outfit. Right, that's pretty funny.
Speaker 3 (32:50):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (32:51):
At nine point thirty six am, a black Dodge Dart.
I've run into multiple ideas of what the car was.
I don't know. I'm going with Dart.
Speaker 2 (33:00):
You're just gonna say it. It's a black Dotch start.
Speaker 1 (33:02):
Yeah, there was like a couple different models that I've
seen claimed, but a black Dodge fascists.
Speaker 2 (33:07):
Fascists do like driving black Dodgers these days.
Speaker 1 (33:10):
So it's coming down, driving down the road with that
Asso Blanco in it, and there's a car double park,
so the driver has to swerve. I think the bombers
put the car double park there, but i'm because it
has to serve on a specific part of the road
or something. That's the impression I get from what I'm reading.
But it's like translations and jog hisiscar signals to Argala,
(33:33):
who presses the button and the Spanish space program is born.
The car and its three occupants made a sixty five
feet into the air. That's pretty good for the first flight.
They cleared a five story church, landed on the other
side in a courtyard or on a second story balcony,
(33:53):
depending on the source. And that's how Prime Minister Luise
Cadeto Blanco becomes Spain's first astronaut. As a lot of
Spanish folks refer to him. Other good jokes include is
it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it's cut
at Oblanco.
Speaker 3 (34:09):
So incredibly based.
Speaker 2 (34:11):
Yeah, oh, man, So they launched it pretty high. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (34:18):
Yeah, I've also read one hundred feet. I've read like
thirty like thirty three meters, and I've read like, I
don't like twenty meters or whatever.
Speaker 2 (34:27):
But that's impressive because like they also had to like
it had to like go through a little bit of
the ground that they that they dug under as well.
Speaker 1 (34:34):
Yeah, and there's pictures of the pothole potholes and the
wrong word, the collapsed street and the timing. Imagine the timing.
Speaker 2 (34:45):
Yeah, like these types of these, these types of car
bombings are usually not this successful.
Speaker 1 (34:51):
Yeah, yeah, the average I mean, we went over some
failed bombings in last you know, on Monday, but we
we didn't go over well enough on Monday. Was how
once a tiny little Entish sprout, Sophie is now Eva
Forest the communist and who okay, I don't know, I'm
(35:16):
supposed to somehow turn this into Sophie becoming an end successfully.
Speaker 2 (35:20):
Is Sophie like like the baby Groot territory?
Speaker 1 (35:23):
Now no, that was before. Now that Washie's gone past
baby Groot and his regular grout, I'm regular pigular grout.
Speaker 2 (35:31):
Yeah all right, sure, big sprouts? Yeah, good, good for you, Sophie,
you looks so uh you look so gangly.
Speaker 3 (35:39):
Thank you so much.
Speaker 2 (35:40):
Yeah, to be fair, there is actually like one, two, three, four, five,
six plants behind Sophie on the frame, that's true, and
no plants behind either myself or Margaret.
Speaker 1 (35:52):
Can I tell you my favorite theory about ens. This
won't mean anything to Garrison. I think, Garrison, do you
know that the Ens the n y with all life? No,
the ants are the tree Beard's tree Beard is an
end and they talk very slowly and they have counsels
and they destroy damns and they're cool, right, but they're
all men because they can't find their wives. The ntwives
(36:15):
have gone missing. And my theory is that could you
imagine being man splained to by an end?
Speaker 3 (36:21):
Oh my god, no.
Speaker 1 (36:24):
Because it would just take so long, well it would
be it be insufferable. Yeah, no, wonder the N wives left.
Speaker 3 (36:34):
Huh ah.
Speaker 1 (36:36):
And that is the kind of content that all of
the ads that you're about to hear offer you.
Speaker 2 (36:48):
And we're back.
Speaker 1 (36:50):
So one fun and by fun, I mean on fun.
Fact about the jokes about Spain's first astronaut is that
in twenty seventeen, a Spanish trans woman named Cassandra Vera
was sentenced to a year in prison for making jokes
about Carrero Blanco on Twitter.
Speaker 2 (37:07):
What what are you serious?
Speaker 1 (37:10):
Yeah to spoiler alert, the Supreme Court overturned this conviction,
but it was like this like whole big fucking thing.
Her jokes included, did Carrero Blanco also go back to
future with the car? Back to the future with this car?
And there's a bunch of other jokes that all either did.
It's like very tame at like things to say. Yeah,
(37:33):
And some of the tweets that were like used against
her in court were like what, you can't even make
jokes about this in Spain anymore or whatever.
Speaker 2 (37:39):
You know.
Speaker 1 (37:41):
Blanco's own granddaughter was upset by the prosecution of Cassandra Vera,
saying quote, I'm scared of a society in which freedom
of expression, however regrettable it may be, can lead to
jail sentences.
Speaker 2 (37:55):
Yeah, I mean, yeah, that's that's good, I guess.
Speaker 1 (37:57):
Yeah. So back to the bask Space program. They're unwitting astronaut.
So the two fake electricians, right, they've pressed this thing,
they've sent the launch in.
Speaker 2 (38:07):
All of our guys are still on the ground.
Speaker 1 (38:08):
Yeah, yeah, they come running down and they're like gas
gas and start running away as if it was a
gas mane that blew that blewe Yeah. Yeah, and so
it adds to the chaos of the scene and it
makes them look less suspicious.
Speaker 2 (38:24):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (38:24):
They ran around the corner. They got picked up by
a third conspirator at Sulo or care in Bosque. They
drove away. They switched vehicles once and they made it
to their hideout. Carrero Blanco died of his wounds forty
five minutes later at the hospital. His companions joined him
in death shortly thereafter. Thus they all lived up to
(38:45):
their favorite fascist slogan, Viva lamorte long lived death. At
eleven PM, the ETA took credit for the action. It
took the press weeks to report the ETA communicy. I
guess either because the press wanted so like like didn't
believe it, or they were like waiting for like the
political dust to settle to know whether it was safe
(39:07):
to report it. Is kind of my biggest guess.
Speaker 2 (39:09):
Yeah, I mean, I think they live in a fascist country. Yeah,
you would want to like feel it out, I think
a little bit.
Speaker 1 (39:16):
Yeah. So the three conspirators wait about ten days in
the hideout and then their friend Eva drove them to
a border town in the Bosque Country. They crossed into
France over a river, and they lived underground and two
of the three of them made it to their natural
end of days. That's good for those two. What happened
to the other? Oh, I'll get to it. The assassination
(39:38):
is credited as hastening the liberalization, aka they move away
from fascism of Spain. The prime minister who placed this
guy was more open to change. I don't know whether
it was.
Speaker 2 (39:47):
Yeah, I would be too if the alast gay got yeah,
last guy got said thirty three meters over our church.
Speaker 1 (39:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (39:58):
Oh they all tried to some democracy. Yeah, totally.
Speaker 1 (40:04):
Launching dictators into space. It's never morally incorrect. Strategically, it's
a roll of the dice, sometimes better, sometimes worse. This
time it was better. Yeah, this was a more or
less perfect action. Right, They got their guys. It seems
the collateral was low. Yeah, they got their dude. Yeah,
(40:24):
none of them got well. So Eva Forrest got caught
nine months after the attack. She spent a few years
in prison, but fortunately with the death of fascism in Spain,
there was an amnesty and she gets out right and
during all of this she writes a fake tell all
about the action, and she peppers it with false clues
to help hide her still underground co conspirators.
Speaker 2 (40:47):
Great.
Speaker 1 (40:47):
Yeah, so she's like in her version of the story,
and you'll see people see people reporting this. Her version
of the story is like, oh, all the bombers immediately
fled to Portugal, right not. They waited for a week
and then went to France.
Speaker 2 (41:00):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (41:02):
And she went on to be part of the conversion
to democracy of Spain. She became a senator, She stayed
involved in Bosque separatism even though she was Catalan, and
she lived a long and happy life before dying in
two thousand and seven.
Speaker 2 (41:15):
What an arc, going from a political assassin to a senator.
I know.
Speaker 1 (41:19):
I wonder what her anarchist parents think of this.
Speaker 2 (41:22):
It might be like, whoa, you did good? Watch up? Honey? Yeah, no,
come on, honey, yeah, well you know what I mean,
Like ever they can up in the air. Yeah, I've
never blown up a prime minister, will exactly? He who
was blown up?
Speaker 1 (41:39):
A prime fascist prime minister cast the first stone at
Eva Forrest. Afterwards, the Bosque separatist stuff, the government sets
up right wing death squads in a Bosque country and
starts murdering separatists just like. They kill more than a
dozen activists, and in nineteen seventy eight, the kind of
(42:00):
like revenge kill Argala, who was probably the main conspirator.
In December nineteen seventy eight, they blow him up like
in his car yea, and they use explosives that were
given to them by soldiers at an American Army base,
which they like claim that it was like a rogue
(42:22):
soldier was just like, oh, I'm just giving my buddy
some bombs, you know. Sure, Kissker, for his part, survived
a right wing death squad attack and might still be alive.
It didn't I didn't find his death. Exula made it
to two thousand and eight before dying of cancer. So
overall they did really fucking good.
Speaker 2 (42:43):
Yeah, I mean, yeah, it sounds like Spade could be
a lot worse if this didn't happen at this specific time. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (42:52):
I mean, like probably the death of Franco would have
led to democratization, but I don't know if they had
a drawcist prime minister.
Speaker 2 (43:01):
Could Yeah it it may not have lasted like much longer,
but it still seems like there. It probably would have
would have been worse in a few ways. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (43:10):
Absolutely. What finally got Franco in the end was Parkinson's disease,
and November nineteen seventy five, after a month or so
on a coma, he died. Around Spain, people got drunken celebration.
Everyone was fucking obviously not everyone, but a whole lot
of people were fucking happy. The News asked some people
why they filed past his coffin, and the answer was
(43:32):
that we wanted to make sure the old fascist was
really dead. I mean, yeah, that's that makes sense. So
it was like probably like, oh, there's all these mortars here,
and it's people being like, oh, thank god.
Speaker 2 (43:43):
Oh god, Yeah, that's him.
Speaker 1 (43:44):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (43:46):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (43:47):
Meanwhile, Nixon praised Franco after his death, saying he unified Spain.
Classic classic Nixon move. Yeah. He was buried in the
Valley of the Fallen, which was a memorial built by
enslaved prisoners at the end of the Civil War to
throw all the bodies of dead people into and he
was the only person in the war who didn't die
(44:07):
in the war who was buried there. In twenty seventeen,
the Spanish government was like, you know what, fuck that guy,
and they exhumed him because it was disrespectful to bury
him alongside his victims, and he got reburied in the
same cemetery as his first astronaut. That's nice, yeah, Murray
Bookchin said about him in place of an obituary. Francisco
(44:30):
Franco was denied a place besides Hitler and Stalin as
one of history's most terrifying mass murderers. It was only
because of the demographic limitations imposed upon him by the
Iberian Peninsula. You know, was just there weren't that many
people for him to murder. In nineteen seventy seven, Spain
announced the Pact of Forgetting, which was an amnesty law
(44:53):
for the fascists and the anti fascist but mostly anti
fascists were dead and murdered, right, and it was a
way to try to mend the divisions in society by
being like, uh, no one's fault, you.
Speaker 2 (45:05):
Know, huh, you have a lot of a lot of
different feelings on that, and yeah.
Speaker 1 (45:14):
Thirty years later, in two thousand and seven, they passed
the Historical Memory Law, which was like, no, we remember, yeah,
we had a fascist dictator and it was bad. Yeah,
so here's the people who fought him and the people
blew up his prime minister.
Speaker 2 (45:36):
Yeah, that is next next time I've been boise Idaho.
I take my.
Speaker 1 (45:43):
Respects, Garson. You got anything to plug for.
Speaker 2 (45:52):
Pluggables, I would say, uh, check the I suppose just
check the Lantic Community Press Collective or Defend the Forest
accounts to see what the city council did on Monday
regarding the funding of cop City and then what steps
will be taken after that. I don't know what will
happen because we're recording this in the past, but I
(46:16):
would that is my main plug. I've been covering stuff
like that on It could happen here when I have
time to put together like a full scripted episode. So
there will be more of those in the future as well.
But yeah, let's uh, let's go see what the Atlanta
City Council voted to do and what people will then
choose to do in response.
Speaker 1 (46:38):
Yeah, I am currently kickstarting a tabletop role playing game.
It feels not as serious after that, so you should
do the things that Garrison said. I'm kickstarting a role
playing game called Pan Number City, and this time I
even blow brought up a little blurb about it. There's
a black fog that hangs over the city, and it's
not as metaphorical as you might hope. It's col dust
(46:59):
Somewhere up through them, there's a glorious silver city hovering
in the sunshine. But don't concern yourself much with the
floating quarter, because only the rich and the holy will
ever see it. Ground Side, orphans dig through rubble and
trash to scavenge the parts to fix their motorcycles. Street
poets self fungus and brawl over territory, and bureaucrats ride
black horses to midnight salons where they plot the death
of the god King. The graveyard's been squatted by immigrants
(47:22):
now for longer than you've been alive, and there's a
gang of nihilist x marines who seem intent on blowing
up half of everything. Welcome to Pannumber City. There's plenty
to do if you don't mind the dust or the smoke,
or the crime or the monsters. And so if that
sounds like fun to you, you can go back it
on Kickstarter. We've already succeeded at our goal, and we've
(47:46):
already reached our first stretch goal. Probably by the time
you hear this will reach a second stretch goal. But
the last stretch goal that may or may not have
been reached ever, I don't know, involves me reading a
book set in this world. So you should force me to.
Speaker 2 (48:02):
Do that work, force Margret to do more right here. Yeah,
that that has had very exciting. I'm always for conspiring
to kill the god gig.
Speaker 1 (48:12):
Yeah, only in fiction and history and there anyway.
Speaker 2 (48:18):
The demi urge them is kind of is kind of
it's kind of it's kind of like the god Gig sophy.
Speaker 1 (48:24):
You got anything you want to plug?
Speaker 3 (48:26):
Uh. If you enjoy cool Zone Media but you don't
enjoy ads, we now have an ad free subscription channel
exclusively on Apple podcasts called cooler Zone Media. Subscribe if
you want or don't.
Speaker 1 (48:39):
And we will talk to you all next Monday.
Speaker 3 (48:42):
Bye. Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production
of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts and cool Zone Media,
visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out
on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
your podcasts.
Host
Margaret Killjoy
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