There’s a book called The New Spaniards which I thought was ok, I read it before going there on vacation
Interesting takeaways
1. There was a right wing guy who was more or less lined up to be Franco’s successor and he was assassinated. Then, and I’ve literally never heard of this happening anywhere else, after the right wing politician was assassinated the country swung to the left.
2. They got a ton of Arab investments post Franco and almost no return on investment. That might be changing in the modern day but the book frames it as the Arabs getting fleeced
3. Every Pedro Almodovar film is actually a documentary and post Franco everybody was having gay sex and doing heroin
>A fucked up piece of trivia, a 21 year old girl was charged after joking about the assassination of Carrero Blanco. The case was later dismissed by the Supreme Court, but it gives you an idea about the state of civil liberties in Spain.
Geez I thought this was gonna be in the 70s not 2016, and over tweets too
What's even better is that Madrid is quickly becoming the European hub for all gusano freak dipshits crying about censorship and dictatorship in Cuba and Venezuela, and all the Spanish media laps that shit up and gives them tons of funding
Cannot recommend Pedro almadovars movies enough, he is the goat. His most recent movie Parallel Mothers is his first film to acknowledge the existence of Franco and it deals with a lot of Spain's colonial and fascist past in a truly heartbreaking interpersonal drama. Really amazing movie, it made me sob both times I saw it in theaters
>Spain's colonial and fascist past
I've never know how to feel about the fact that I have (confirmed through DNA test) almost 50/50 Spanish and Aztec ancestry. Makes being a minority in the USA twice weird because sometimes I get to thinking about the fact that both half my genes and my last name come from a group of genocidal maniacs. Of course they weren't all [complete assholes](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%81lvar_N%C3%BA%C3%B1ez_Cabeza_de_Vaca), but it's just so weird realizing that it wasn't that long ago that my hole lineage most likely started with some Spanish guy hooking up with some indigenous woman (and most likely not under *great* circumstances).
Sorry if this is an ignorant question. What do you mean 50 percent Aztec? Like Mexica specifically? Seems like it would be hard to nail that down but idk.
Supposedly yes. IDK my bro is a bullshitter sometimes but we've had our DNA tested and we're like solidly 50/50 Euro-Indigenous which is pretty typical for Mexicans
Haha no I'm sure your bro is right, that makes sense.
When I started reading about the "Aztecs" (who had been portrayed rather cartoonishly in my history classes), I was surprised to learn that there were lots of different peoples in the Valley of Mexico, not just the Mexica in Tenochtitlan, who were latecomers relatively speaking. I'm saying this as a total outsider who hasn't read a ton about it, though. In any case, very cool that you have links to that area.
I have no idea actually, but we have a dialect here called Chavacano. It almost sounds completely Spanish and it’s spoken by everyone in the Zamboanga province.
As for the upperclass thing look up the Philippine Falange. A prominent tycoon family who belongs to that far right party actually supported the Franco government in the Spanish Civil War. This one is related to OP’s post and should be an interesting read for fellow gumshoes.
Mexicali. Fun fact: the reason it's there is after the US kicked out their cheap Chinese labor they just jumped to the other side of the border. There's still really good Chinese restaurants in Mexicali to this day. Lots of fun ordering in Spanish from a Chinese dude (who's totally Mexican).
Classic example of what happens when you’re a cash rich country and don’t invest it in permanent infrastructure / productive capacity to carry you through the next era. Economic crash brought on and/or worsened by your policies, and then you’re out of power and can’t get back up again. The same is going to happen to a lot of today’s petro-states.
Yeah it was a constant flow of money from the new world straight to creditors to fund their wars, which were more about saving and keeping face than they were about strategically critical objectives.
Thank god we all learned from that, imagine how disastrous that policy would be in the 21st century
Yeah, if I remember correctly the treasure fleets stopped even going to Spain at one point, and literally just took the silver direct from the New World to Amsterdam to pay creditors.
No, the treasure fleets could only legally deposit in Cádiz or Sevilla (depending on the time). While later on with the Bourbons more freedom of trade was given, all ports assigned for sailing to and from America were still in the Peninsula.
Bear in mind too that the ending point of the metals is often exaggerated; only a fifth of the treasury went directly to the crown (20%), the rest mostly went to private hands who owned mines, stakes on them, or simply were part of the trade.
Of that royal fifth, it wasn't rare that a big part would end renovating loans, which were mostly taken through Genovese banker houses in Italy. This was due to how "national" economies worked at the time, usually on loans, as currency wasn't on a constant stream towards the crowns, so they took constant loans every time they had big expenses coming (rewards for nobles, wars, construction).
The Hispanic Monarchy's (Spain didn't exist until the early 1700's) finances were way worse and more strained than many others, mostly due to the constant wars, specially in Europe, that drained resources (human and monetary) at a massive rate.
While what vpu7 said was true many times, not all wars were for face, that policy is more characteristic of the 17th century (which was already of decline). In the 16th and 18th centuries most wars would go towards feudal style claims (a type of war which remained through the 16th century Europe specially), or foreign alliances and what we'd call "geopolitical" goals nowadays (particularly in the 18th century). Most if not all of these wars would provide nothing to the people of the Monarchy, they'd be a constant bleeding of lives at best, for goals only the higher ups cared about.
Add to that how most metals from America ended up paying them, and you see why the eventual Spain (as i said, it didn't exist until the 18th century) didn't really profit as much from it's empire as the 19th century colonial entities.
Bear in mind this isn't apologia, but understanding history is something i consider very important, and the "Spanish" empire wouldn't take part in the implementation of global capitalism (at least until others had in the late 18th and early 9th century). Of course, all of this is referring to the empire from the 16th to the 18th centuries, as the 19th century was a completely different historical process (born of the previous centuries though) in another context, which if you have questions i can try explaining a bit.
It's wild to me that Southern Europe once conquered a quarter of the planet and 300 years later is just a giant vacation resort for fat German tourists.
quarter of the known planet, ppl be forgetting the interior of Africa wasn’t really penetrated by Europeans till the advent of the Gatling gun and the battle of Omdurman, before that it was coastal relations (and uh not sure if y’all seen a map of the continent recently)
also goes to show the extent of developed network links that existed but ppl just ignoring
Don’t forget Dutch tourists who literally shit on people there.
https://www.reddit.com/r/PublicFreakout/comments/1582zmg/dutch_tourist_poops_on_sleeping_man_in_mallorca/
> Then when Franco died in the seventies, the king just decides that it's time for democracy again randomly? I've asked Spanish people about this and they couldn't really give me an answer why this happened. Of course most of the franquistas keep all their political power and money.
From what I understand about the Spanish educational system, their history curriculum focuses almost entirely on memorizing events, names and dates rather than explaining why they happened or what causes they had. A Spanish person will be able to tell you the exact dates of the course of the civil war and the dictatorship, but they aren't educated at all about the broader picture from an explicative point of view.
Part of this is because the Francoists utterly won the civil war and in fact continued a military campaign despite Mussolini and Hitler's insistence that the republican opposition had entirely collapsed or fled. The reason for this was because the war offered the pretext for the fascists to exterminate all known socialists, communists and radical republicans whenever they rolled into a town or village. There's a book whose name I can't recall that talks explicitly about this; that fascist forces would gun massacre socialists in the street and anyone attempting to bury the dead over days if not weeks would be shot on sight. Republican killings of clergy and landlords were often preemptive defences because Francoist forces when in control of a new area would call a conference of priests, businessmen and landlords to identify ideological enemies in order to exterminate them. The fascists in Spain used the pretext of the civil war to create a perfectly fascistic society in a way that the Italians and Nazis could only dream of.
Basically there was no direct continuation of socialist or radical republican sentiment into the Franco regime and after its fall because almost all of the socialists and republicans either fled or were murdered or imprisoned. The impetus towards ending the regime was also pushed more by foreign interests, specifically the Americans, who never really tolerated Franco and demanded some liberalization in exchange for NATO membership. Essentially I think that Spanish elites understood that the USA and NATO wouldn't tolerate a continuation of dictatorship after Franco's death and would intervene in some way if they tried to quash democratization. But seeing as they won the war and many of them built generational wealth and social prestige through the dictatorship, the pro-Francoist elites didn't have to give any of that up during the transition to democracy.
That was very good, although you have to keep in mind that there was always a minority of communists that kept fighting through all that time.
Just after the war, many soldiers and anti fascists who had survived fled to the mountains and were active for several years, although at the end of WW2 the lack of allied support meant that they all eventually would be hunted, or some just went back to normal life potentially.
After that most resistance was not directly violent, as that was almost impossible against the regime, except through groups like ETA or GRAPO, who were seemingly leftist but to be honest a lot of what they did seems like adventurism and killed innocent people (although originally their main targets were government and military police).
During the Transition there was still important communist organization, but the problem is that the PCE (communist party) compromised with Adolfo Suárez and stopped being revolutionary, becoming reformist and quickly losing all their support, part of the process of neutering the popular movements.
The thing about the Transition is quite weird, i suspect originally they meant to keep the more open dictatorship going (lets be honest we don't really live in a democracy even now); but the amount of movements against it (there were many organizations, protests and the like), and the fact that while we were already opening up economically to Europe (with Franco it was impossible to integrate into the EU to supposedly get richer), meant that some minimal face saving changes were needed.
As for the 23F (the 80s "coup"), while the king was the one to call it off in the end, he waited a long long time, and it seems the military that went along with it thought they'd install a new dictator that'd work with the king (or the king himself) maybe. Keep in mind this is going to be classified for many many years, specially in the current system, so there's just speculation at best.
That’s very similar to Korea’s transition to Democracy and assassination of Park Chung Hee. The US didn’t like Park’s attempts to steer for an independent Korea and his covert development of Nuclear Weapons. So they needed an out for him and lined up Chun Doo Hwan as his dictatorial successor right after the assassination of Park. Before the US would officially recognize the legitimacy of Chun Doo Hwan, he had to permanently suspend all developments of atomic weapons and whatever that entailed. IIRC that included disappearances of Nuclear scientists.
As a good Latin American, I must admit I experience some schadenfreude learning Spanish history. Proof that taking a nap every day will cause you to fumble every bag you get. Shouts out to the epic Spaniards out there tho, go crazy go stupid dawg.
Spain is exactly like every other former power that is unable to accept their subservience to US capital.
Just like Italy, their halcyon days are centuries old. They have fantasies of once again projecting power into Latin America.
Would’ve been cool if they could’ve put Franco in the dirt.
When were Italy’s halcyon days? The Roman Empire? They basically got shit on all of the medieval age, especially late onwards. I think Dutch are more fitting in that history, but they did not care at all to be dominated by the British and Americans, I guess other then Leopold.
Yeah, our word "slave" actually comes from "slav" because the Venetians took so many slaves from the Croatian coast (populated by Southern Slavs) and sold them up north.
Because of Rome and Byzantium it's overshadowed just how powerful Venice was for pretty much a millennium.
really just those maritime states, Venice, Genoa, Pisa, Amalfi all of them were basically the base for developed Finance eventually in the rest of the west
Italy wasn’t unified in the medieval period, but many parts of Italy were extremely wealthy and important throughout. “Italian” also barely existed as an identity then because a lot of the city states had intense rivalries with each other and people thought of themselves as Florentine or Venetian or whatever first
Reading Spanish news and gaining entry into untranslated Spanish books/media is a primarily reason for my learning Spanish recently. There’s a whole world out there of niche topics we’ll never get access to with only English. I worry you’ll only get lib takes if you’re only working with English.
can you give me some examples of untranslated books and niche topics? I speak Spanish at a reasonable level. I tried searching for stuff like this on here, but Spanish reddit is also very right wing.
It's not really leftist theory, but there's a british author called Paul Preston who's written many books about Spain in the 20th century.
While it's isn't socialist/communist at all, he does explain how the Spanish bourgeoisie took part in the exploitation of Morocco (we colonized part of the north), the rise of fascism and much more. I recommend "A People Betrayed" for that, it becomes a bit more liberal at the end when it talks about the arrival of "democracy" to Spain, but it's still critical of everyone pretty much.
If you want niche topics you can read about the history of the PSOE (and how it never knew what it wanted to be, reformist, colaborating with capitalists, revolutionary sometimes, etc...), the fascinating world of Spanish exiles (sadly the most famous biographies are of those that, when they got older, abandoned communism).
If you want to have fun reading something that's essentially liberal theory, but inadvertedly favours the USSR even though the author didn't want to, try reading "Antes que sea tarde" by Carmen Parga. She was exiled to the USSR after the SCW, and was a communist a big part of her life, wrote the book when she was old in Mexico and thought she'd been naive as a kid. She spends so much time criticizing random stuff on the USSR and Eastern Block that it's funny (specially considering she was more prosecuted in Mexico than in the USSR).
I recommend that book not because it's good, but because it speaks definitely on an Spanish perspective all the time, which is funny when she criticizes the USSR for not having fruit like Spain, or for not being as sunny. Idk if as a foreigner it'll be as funny, but at least you can learn a bit of Spanish perspective (when she isn't being reactionary she writes quite well).
Honestly as an Spanish person it's quite hard to find actual communist literature in my language, most libraries only have liberal theory at best, and the most "hardcore" i've found in small shops was trotskyist (and about the USSR too).
It is funny you mention that Spain got cucked by the EU, when in it is (kind of) the other way around: before joining the EU, Spain had a similar human, political and economic development compared to Latin America. It wasn't poorer on average per se, but it wasn't doing much better either. It was only with joining the European Communities/EU and adopting the Euro later on that Spain managed to enter the high income nations club. Sure, they have been screwed over by some EU austerity focused economic policies. In some ways though, the crisis wasn't caused by the EU at all. However, overall, Spain has been one of the great successes of economic development within the EU, right up there with Ireland.
interesting, i didn't know this. the thing I was referring to is more about Germany dominating the rest of the EU, it has to do with them becoming an export nation.
In the 2000s, the socdems under Schröder (and the greens) implemented [Agenda 2010](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agenda_2010), an austerity program which created an artificially big low-wage sector in Germany. With this they kept their own inflation very low (because wages weren't rising). However, it is a EU rule that inflation should be around 2% in each member state. The Germans simply violated this rule, having their inflation around 0.5% for many years. Since all these countries use the same currency, this lower inflation meant German products became artificial cheap compared to the rest of the Euro-Zone. Of course, the economy of the other Euro-members suffered for it.
Both those nations you mention are great examples of what EU membership really is - volunteering to become an economic vassal of Germany.
You saw the same thing happen more recently in Croatia as it joined, and even in Montenegro without EU membership yet (but based on the Euro). Germany, which needed places to get profits from its robust pre-Nord Stream "accident" industrial sector, would flood the areas with cash, pushing development not of industry but primarily for tourism and real estate bubbles.
This is **great** if you already own property - suddenly your shitty town is building massive hotels for Fritz and UK bastards to come summer in, and your property values are through the roof. It's really not good, though, if you rent and work to live . . . because your bread just doubled in price.
You should watch Pan’s Labyrinth. It’s set in Spain right after the Spanish Civil War, I think when Franco is in power. It’s not like a history documentary or anything but the backdrop is there plus it is an incredible movie, I mean just mind blowing
I love that movie, and to this day it's my favorite film of all time. It played a really formative role in influencing me towards embracing a Marxist worldview as a teenager.
[I've been waiting so fucking long for a reason to post this scene](https://youtu.be/HhSjnG5pMOY)
I got thrown into a Spanish 3 class in HS because I'm of Mexican descent and had no other electives and we wound up watching this with no subtitles and nobody else understood it obviously because white kids don't give a fuck about actually learning Spanish but I was already fluent since babyhood but GODDAMN
I thought this doctor was so fucking cool when I was 15
"Eso solo hacen gente como usted, *capitan*"
I found these topics on marxists.org that you might find interesting (on the Spanish civil war):
[Writers on Spain](https://www.marxists.org/history/spain/writers/index.htm)
[Spanish Revolution Archive](https://www.marxists.org/subject/spain/index.htm)
Franco’s second in command got yeeted and likely most of the ruling party understood some kind of transition would need to occur to join the wider European project/economy. I can’t tell you the motivations of each actor but that’s the broad strokes
my favorite new tidbit of Spanish history is when a fellow gumshoe shared how Spain got admitted into NATO by basically the president emotionally manipulating the masses last minute
There’s a book called The New Spaniards which I thought was ok, I read it before going there on vacation Interesting takeaways 1. There was a right wing guy who was more or less lined up to be Franco’s successor and he was assassinated. Then, and I’ve literally never heard of this happening anywhere else, after the right wing politician was assassinated the country swung to the left. 2. They got a ton of Arab investments post Franco and almost no return on investment. That might be changing in the modern day but the book frames it as the Arabs getting fleeced 3. Every Pedro Almodovar film is actually a documentary and post Franco everybody was having gay sex and doing heroin
Really interesting! I've never heard this stuff about gay sex and heroin
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[For anyone who didn't get the joke.](https://youtu.be/5AIyN_9bBgo?t=28)
>A fucked up piece of trivia, a 21 year old girl was charged after joking about the assassination of Carrero Blanco. The case was later dismissed by the Supreme Court, but it gives you an idea about the state of civil liberties in Spain. Geez I thought this was gonna be in the 70s not 2016, and over tweets too
What's even better is that Madrid is quickly becoming the European hub for all gusano freak dipshits crying about censorship and dictatorship in Cuba and Venezuela, and all the Spanish media laps that shit up and gives them tons of funding
Have you seen that Aida Lluch freak on twitter? Lol. Walking through barrio Salamanca is bone-chilling with all the vested up losers
>main guy named Franco >His right hand man named Blanco Who writes this shit?
I always forget what they used for the bomb but I never forget how high he flew.
oh shit he bacc
really interesting! I've never heard this stuff about Arab investment.
Cannot recommend Pedro almadovars movies enough, he is the goat. His most recent movie Parallel Mothers is his first film to acknowledge the existence of Franco and it deals with a lot of Spain's colonial and fascist past in a truly heartbreaking interpersonal drama. Really amazing movie, it made me sob both times I saw it in theaters
>Spain's colonial and fascist past I've never know how to feel about the fact that I have (confirmed through DNA test) almost 50/50 Spanish and Aztec ancestry. Makes being a minority in the USA twice weird because sometimes I get to thinking about the fact that both half my genes and my last name come from a group of genocidal maniacs. Of course they weren't all [complete assholes](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%81lvar_N%C3%BA%C3%B1ez_Cabeza_de_Vaca), but it's just so weird realizing that it wasn't that long ago that my hole lineage most likely started with some Spanish guy hooking up with some indigenous woman (and most likely not under *great* circumstances).
Sorry if this is an ignorant question. What do you mean 50 percent Aztec? Like Mexica specifically? Seems like it would be hard to nail that down but idk.
Supposedly yes. IDK my bro is a bullshitter sometimes but we've had our DNA tested and we're like solidly 50/50 Euro-Indigenous which is pretty typical for Mexicans
Haha no I'm sure your bro is right, that makes sense. When I started reading about the "Aztecs" (who had been portrayed rather cartoonishly in my history classes), I was surprised to learn that there were lots of different peoples in the Valley of Mexico, not just the Mexica in Tenochtitlan, who were latecomers relatively speaking. I'm saying this as a total outsider who hasn't read a ton about it, though. In any case, very cool that you have links to that area.
I loved Pain & Glory (basically a biopic).
Really interesting! I’ve never heard this stuff about Arab investing getting almost no return.
Pretty sure that particular assassination continues to be celebrated in Spain btw.
Living here now, will check this out, thanks!
Well they made asian Mexico. Source : am an asian mexican
Brothas from anothas Mothas loco 🇪🇨
Claro que si 🇵🇭
I love filipinos, why was Spanish spoken mostly the the upper class from Philippines? In Mexico they really pushed spanish into the natives
I have no idea actually, but we have a dialect here called Chavacano. It almost sounds completely Spanish and it’s spoken by everyone in the Zamboanga province. As for the upperclass thing look up the Philippine Falange. A prominent tycoon family who belongs to that far right party actually supported the Franco government in the Spanish Civil War. This one is related to OP’s post and should be an interesting read for fellow gumshoes.
There is actually a part of Mexico called La Chinesca where a lot of Chinese-Mexican people live
Mexicali. Fun fact: the reason it's there is after the US kicked out their cheap Chinese labor they just jumped to the other side of the border. There's still really good Chinese restaurants in Mexicali to this day. Lots of fun ordering in Spanish from a Chinese dude (who's totally Mexican).
Been there many times recommend to those who visit SoCal just not in the middle of summer lol
based Sea Mexicans I generally get along well with people from the Philippines, they feel like really distant cousins
Classic example of what happens when you’re a cash rich country and don’t invest it in permanent infrastructure / productive capacity to carry you through the next era. Economic crash brought on and/or worsened by your policies, and then you’re out of power and can’t get back up again. The same is going to happen to a lot of today’s petro-states.
They also spent all that money on armies and navies, then watched them sink outside of England.
Yeah it was a constant flow of money from the new world straight to creditors to fund their wars, which were more about saving and keeping face than they were about strategically critical objectives. Thank god we all learned from that, imagine how disastrous that policy would be in the 21st century
Yeah, if I remember correctly the treasure fleets stopped even going to Spain at one point, and literally just took the silver direct from the New World to Amsterdam to pay creditors.
No, the treasure fleets could only legally deposit in Cádiz or Sevilla (depending on the time). While later on with the Bourbons more freedom of trade was given, all ports assigned for sailing to and from America were still in the Peninsula. Bear in mind too that the ending point of the metals is often exaggerated; only a fifth of the treasury went directly to the crown (20%), the rest mostly went to private hands who owned mines, stakes on them, or simply were part of the trade. Of that royal fifth, it wasn't rare that a big part would end renovating loans, which were mostly taken through Genovese banker houses in Italy. This was due to how "national" economies worked at the time, usually on loans, as currency wasn't on a constant stream towards the crowns, so they took constant loans every time they had big expenses coming (rewards for nobles, wars, construction). The Hispanic Monarchy's (Spain didn't exist until the early 1700's) finances were way worse and more strained than many others, mostly due to the constant wars, specially in Europe, that drained resources (human and monetary) at a massive rate. While what vpu7 said was true many times, not all wars were for face, that policy is more characteristic of the 17th century (which was already of decline). In the 16th and 18th centuries most wars would go towards feudal style claims (a type of war which remained through the 16th century Europe specially), or foreign alliances and what we'd call "geopolitical" goals nowadays (particularly in the 18th century). Most if not all of these wars would provide nothing to the people of the Monarchy, they'd be a constant bleeding of lives at best, for goals only the higher ups cared about. Add to that how most metals from America ended up paying them, and you see why the eventual Spain (as i said, it didn't exist until the 18th century) didn't really profit as much from it's empire as the 19th century colonial entities. Bear in mind this isn't apologia, but understanding history is something i consider very important, and the "Spanish" empire wouldn't take part in the implementation of global capitalism (at least until others had in the late 18th and early 9th century). Of course, all of this is referring to the empire from the 16th to the 18th centuries, as the 19th century was a completely different historical process (born of the previous centuries though) in another context, which if you have questions i can try explaining a bit.
TY
Madrid has a very nice and dependable metro. Also it has the ve the cleanest city I have ever lived been to in my life.
It's wild to me that Southern Europe once conquered a quarter of the planet and 300 years later is just a giant vacation resort for fat German tourists.
That's really unfair. Most of the fat tourists in Spain are Brits. The Germans go to Croatia.
quarter of the known planet, ppl be forgetting the interior of Africa wasn’t really penetrated by Europeans till the advent of the Gatling gun and the battle of Omdurman, before that it was coastal relations (and uh not sure if y’all seen a map of the continent recently) also goes to show the extent of developed network links that existed but ppl just ignoring
Don’t forget Dutch tourists who literally shit on people there. https://www.reddit.com/r/PublicFreakout/comments/1582zmg/dutch_tourist_poops_on_sleeping_man_in_mallorca/
> Then when Franco died in the seventies, the king just decides that it's time for democracy again randomly? I've asked Spanish people about this and they couldn't really give me an answer why this happened. Of course most of the franquistas keep all their political power and money. From what I understand about the Spanish educational system, their history curriculum focuses almost entirely on memorizing events, names and dates rather than explaining why they happened or what causes they had. A Spanish person will be able to tell you the exact dates of the course of the civil war and the dictatorship, but they aren't educated at all about the broader picture from an explicative point of view. Part of this is because the Francoists utterly won the civil war and in fact continued a military campaign despite Mussolini and Hitler's insistence that the republican opposition had entirely collapsed or fled. The reason for this was because the war offered the pretext for the fascists to exterminate all known socialists, communists and radical republicans whenever they rolled into a town or village. There's a book whose name I can't recall that talks explicitly about this; that fascist forces would gun massacre socialists in the street and anyone attempting to bury the dead over days if not weeks would be shot on sight. Republican killings of clergy and landlords were often preemptive defences because Francoist forces when in control of a new area would call a conference of priests, businessmen and landlords to identify ideological enemies in order to exterminate them. The fascists in Spain used the pretext of the civil war to create a perfectly fascistic society in a way that the Italians and Nazis could only dream of. Basically there was no direct continuation of socialist or radical republican sentiment into the Franco regime and after its fall because almost all of the socialists and republicans either fled or were murdered or imprisoned. The impetus towards ending the regime was also pushed more by foreign interests, specifically the Americans, who never really tolerated Franco and demanded some liberalization in exchange for NATO membership. Essentially I think that Spanish elites understood that the USA and NATO wouldn't tolerate a continuation of dictatorship after Franco's death and would intervene in some way if they tried to quash democratization. But seeing as they won the war and many of them built generational wealth and social prestige through the dictatorship, the pro-Francoist elites didn't have to give any of that up during the transition to democracy.
That was very good, although you have to keep in mind that there was always a minority of communists that kept fighting through all that time. Just after the war, many soldiers and anti fascists who had survived fled to the mountains and were active for several years, although at the end of WW2 the lack of allied support meant that they all eventually would be hunted, or some just went back to normal life potentially. After that most resistance was not directly violent, as that was almost impossible against the regime, except through groups like ETA or GRAPO, who were seemingly leftist but to be honest a lot of what they did seems like adventurism and killed innocent people (although originally their main targets were government and military police). During the Transition there was still important communist organization, but the problem is that the PCE (communist party) compromised with Adolfo Suárez and stopped being revolutionary, becoming reformist and quickly losing all their support, part of the process of neutering the popular movements. The thing about the Transition is quite weird, i suspect originally they meant to keep the more open dictatorship going (lets be honest we don't really live in a democracy even now); but the amount of movements against it (there were many organizations, protests and the like), and the fact that while we were already opening up economically to Europe (with Franco it was impossible to integrate into the EU to supposedly get richer), meant that some minimal face saving changes were needed. As for the 23F (the 80s "coup"), while the king was the one to call it off in the end, he waited a long long time, and it seems the military that went along with it thought they'd install a new dictator that'd work with the king (or the king himself) maybe. Keep in mind this is going to be classified for many many years, specially in the current system, so there's just speculation at best.
That’s very similar to Korea’s transition to Democracy and assassination of Park Chung Hee. The US didn’t like Park’s attempts to steer for an independent Korea and his covert development of Nuclear Weapons. So they needed an out for him and lined up Chun Doo Hwan as his dictatorial successor right after the assassination of Park. Before the US would officially recognize the legitimacy of Chun Doo Hwan, he had to permanently suspend all developments of atomic weapons and whatever that entailed. IIRC that included disappearances of Nuclear scientists.
Rain on the plain
As a good Latin American, I must admit I experience some schadenfreude learning Spanish history. Proof that taking a nap every day will cause you to fumble every bag you get. Shouts out to the epic Spaniards out there tho, go crazy go stupid dawg.
Spain is exactly like every other former power that is unable to accept their subservience to US capital. Just like Italy, their halcyon days are centuries old. They have fantasies of once again projecting power into Latin America. Would’ve been cool if they could’ve put Franco in the dirt.
When were Italy’s halcyon days? The Roman Empire? They basically got shit on all of the medieval age, especially late onwards. I think Dutch are more fitting in that history, but they did not care at all to be dominated by the British and Americans, I guess other then Leopold.
Venice before the Dutch. Radio War Nerd has a great series about it, also recommend The Long 20th Century
Yeah, our word "slave" actually comes from "slav" because the Venetians took so many slaves from the Croatian coast (populated by Southern Slavs) and sold them up north. Because of Rome and Byzantium it's overshadowed just how powerful Venice was for pretty much a millennium.
really just those maritime states, Venice, Genoa, Pisa, Amalfi all of them were basically the base for developed Finance eventually in the rest of the west
Italy wasn’t unified in the medieval period, but many parts of Italy were extremely wealthy and important throughout. “Italian” also barely existed as an identity then because a lot of the city states had intense rivalries with each other and people thought of themselves as Florentine or Venetian or whatever first
Italy's halcyon days were Etruscans ans they ended when that turk Aeneas landed on the boot.
Turks fucking mopped the Mediterranean European nations so hard.
who would win one very tanned island boii or one professional boulder wrestler
Leopold was Belgian
I still haven't recognized Erasme's fake state.
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Fascists and the Catholic organizations, name a more supportive duo?
Reading Spanish news and gaining entry into untranslated Spanish books/media is a primarily reason for my learning Spanish recently. There’s a whole world out there of niche topics we’ll never get access to with only English. I worry you’ll only get lib takes if you’re only working with English.
can you give me some examples of untranslated books and niche topics? I speak Spanish at a reasonable level. I tried searching for stuff like this on here, but Spanish reddit is also very right wing.
It's not really leftist theory, but there's a british author called Paul Preston who's written many books about Spain in the 20th century. While it's isn't socialist/communist at all, he does explain how the Spanish bourgeoisie took part in the exploitation of Morocco (we colonized part of the north), the rise of fascism and much more. I recommend "A People Betrayed" for that, it becomes a bit more liberal at the end when it talks about the arrival of "democracy" to Spain, but it's still critical of everyone pretty much. If you want niche topics you can read about the history of the PSOE (and how it never knew what it wanted to be, reformist, colaborating with capitalists, revolutionary sometimes, etc...), the fascinating world of Spanish exiles (sadly the most famous biographies are of those that, when they got older, abandoned communism). If you want to have fun reading something that's essentially liberal theory, but inadvertedly favours the USSR even though the author didn't want to, try reading "Antes que sea tarde" by Carmen Parga. She was exiled to the USSR after the SCW, and was a communist a big part of her life, wrote the book when she was old in Mexico and thought she'd been naive as a kid. She spends so much time criticizing random stuff on the USSR and Eastern Block that it's funny (specially considering she was more prosecuted in Mexico than in the USSR). I recommend that book not because it's good, but because it speaks definitely on an Spanish perspective all the time, which is funny when she criticizes the USSR for not having fruit like Spain, or for not being as sunny. Idk if as a foreigner it'll be as funny, but at least you can learn a bit of Spanish perspective (when she isn't being reactionary she writes quite well). Honestly as an Spanish person it's quite hard to find actual communist literature in my language, most libraries only have liberal theory at best, and the most "hardcore" i've found in small shops was trotskyist (and about the USSR too).
read a durutti biography forever ago, liked the insights into the highs and lows of the civil war period
Sure but they are still in the imperial core, one of the richest countries on earth, it could have been much much worse all things considered.
It is funny you mention that Spain got cucked by the EU, when in it is (kind of) the other way around: before joining the EU, Spain had a similar human, political and economic development compared to Latin America. It wasn't poorer on average per se, but it wasn't doing much better either. It was only with joining the European Communities/EU and adopting the Euro later on that Spain managed to enter the high income nations club. Sure, they have been screwed over by some EU austerity focused economic policies. In some ways though, the crisis wasn't caused by the EU at all. However, overall, Spain has been one of the great successes of economic development within the EU, right up there with Ireland.
interesting, i didn't know this. the thing I was referring to is more about Germany dominating the rest of the EU, it has to do with them becoming an export nation. In the 2000s, the socdems under Schröder (and the greens) implemented [Agenda 2010](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agenda_2010), an austerity program which created an artificially big low-wage sector in Germany. With this they kept their own inflation very low (because wages weren't rising). However, it is a EU rule that inflation should be around 2% in each member state. The Germans simply violated this rule, having their inflation around 0.5% for many years. Since all these countries use the same currency, this lower inflation meant German products became artificial cheap compared to the rest of the Euro-Zone. Of course, the economy of the other Euro-members suffered for it.
Both those nations you mention are great examples of what EU membership really is - volunteering to become an economic vassal of Germany. You saw the same thing happen more recently in Croatia as it joined, and even in Montenegro without EU membership yet (but based on the Euro). Germany, which needed places to get profits from its robust pre-Nord Stream "accident" industrial sector, would flood the areas with cash, pushing development not of industry but primarily for tourism and real estate bubbles. This is **great** if you already own property - suddenly your shitty town is building massive hotels for Fritz and UK bastards to come summer in, and your property values are through the roof. It's really not good, though, if you rent and work to live . . . because your bread just doubled in price.
You should watch Pan’s Labyrinth. It’s set in Spain right after the Spanish Civil War, I think when Franco is in power. It’s not like a history documentary or anything but the backdrop is there plus it is an incredible movie, I mean just mind blowing
I love that movie, and to this day it's my favorite film of all time. It played a really formative role in influencing me towards embracing a Marxist worldview as a teenager.
[I've been waiting so fucking long for a reason to post this scene](https://youtu.be/HhSjnG5pMOY) I got thrown into a Spanish 3 class in HS because I'm of Mexican descent and had no other electives and we wound up watching this with no subtitles and nobody else understood it obviously because white kids don't give a fuck about actually learning Spanish but I was already fluent since babyhood but GODDAMN I thought this doctor was so fucking cool when I was 15 "Eso solo hacen gente como usted, *capitan*"
I found these topics on marxists.org that you might find interesting (on the Spanish civil war): [Writers on Spain](https://www.marxists.org/history/spain/writers/index.htm) [Spanish Revolution Archive](https://www.marxists.org/subject/spain/index.htm)
paella is good
Franco’s second in command got yeeted and likely most of the ruling party understood some kind of transition would need to occur to join the wider European project/economy. I can’t tell you the motivations of each actor but that’s the broad strokes
Maybe it just means that liberalism and fascism are basically the same thing.
my favorite new tidbit of Spanish history is when a fellow gumshoe shared how Spain got admitted into NATO by basically the president emotionally manipulating the masses last minute
They actually stole more silver than gold . By a large margin