The Last Crusade: What They Don't Want You to Know About the Spanish Civil War

A 500-foot granite cross rises north of Madrid, and underneath it lies a story most of us were never taught to see straight. The Spanish Civil War is usually packaged as a clash between fascist generals and a democratic republic, with Hemingway and Orwell standing in for the whole moral picture. Today I walk through historian Warren Carroll’s counterclaim from The Last Crusade: that the core conflict is faith against revolution, and that once you follow the evidence, the familiar narrative starts to invert.

We trace the five-year runway to 1936: church burnings, anti-Catholic laws, and the Popular Front’s own revolutionary promises, followed by a country slipping into open political violence. Then we hit the moment that makes “normal politics” feel impossible: the murder of opposition leader José Calvo Sotelo by state security forces. From there the focus shifts to Navarre’s Carlists and the religious framing that turns a rising into what Carroll calls a crusade, complete with confession, Communion, hymns, and the Sacred Heart.

The hardest section is the one Carroll says the modern world prefers to minimize: the systematic persecution of the Catholic Church in Republican zones, the disappearance of public Mass, and the martyr stories, including Barbastro. We also look at the siege of the Alcazar of Toledo and why symbolic promises can outweigh tactical advantage, then follow Carroll’s documentation of Soviet influence, the NKVD presence, and Spain’s gold shipped to the Soviet Union. Finally, I deal directly with Nationalist abuses and Carroll’s argument about judging a war’s original cause versus the sins committed within it.

If you care about Spanish Civil War history, Catholic persecution in Spain, Franco-era memory, or how propaganda shapes what becomes “common knowledge,” this one will stick with you. Subscribe, share the episode with a friend who thinks they already know this war, and leave a review with the question you can’t stop turning over.

Transcript

The Cross Above A Forgotten Story

SPEAKER_02 0:06

North of Madrid, on the southern slope of the Guadarama Mountains, a granite cross 500 feet tall pierces the Spanish sky. It stands over a basilica carved directly into the living rock, where mass is still offered for the tens of thousands of dead who rest beneath the hill. The place is called the Valley of the Fallen. Most of the world has forgotten why it's there. Or worse, most of the world has been told a story about why it's there that leaves out the most important part. You've probably heard of the Spanish Civil War. You learned about it in school, you learned a simple story. In 1936, fascist generals rose up against a democratically elected republic. And idealists from all over the world, poets, workers, students, went to Spain to fight for freedom and lost. Hemingway wrote about it. Orwell wrote about it. It's remembered as the great romantic lost cause of the 20th century. The Catholic historian Warren Carroll spent his career arguing, arguing that this story is not just incomplete. It is almost exactly backwards. In his 1996 book, The Last Crusade, Carroll makes a claim that sounds outrageous to modern ears. The Spanish Civil War was, in the fullest and most literal sense of the word, a crusade. A war fought under the cross of Christ, by men wearing the sacred heart over their hearts, singing hymns as they marched, marched against a revolution that was attempting something no Western nation had seen since the Roman Emperor Diocletian. The physical extermination of the Catholic Church. Today we're going to walk through Carol's argument. We're going to go through the evidence he assembles, the martyrs he names, and the reason he believed that the giant cross in the Valley of the Fallen marks the graves of the last crusaders in the history of Christendom. Stay with me, because whatever you conclude at the end, you will never see this war the same way again.

Solo Setup And Sponsor Notes

SPEAKER_02 3:38

But it was too good not to use. Two, it is just me. I'm recording this to air while Anthony is on vacation. So it'll be just me here. We're going to be going over the Spanish Civil War. Not so much like the entire history of the Spanish Civil War. Contrary to the thumbnail, uh, it's not even going to be so much about uh Francisco Franco. Really, what this show is going to be about is trying to convince you to reframe the way you see the Spanish Civil War. Um if, you know, generally speaking, if anyone knows about the Spanish Civil War at all, they tend to have learned it from you know the framework uh that we often have here, you know, in America and really in the West in general, as you know, as I sit in the the cold open, um, you know, that it was uh a rising of fascist generals against democratically elected government. And we need to completely reframe that. And this this show is really the point of it is to convince you to to reframe that. It's not gonna be um super in-depth. Uh historically, you know, most of the people that mention that are going to be mentioned are gonna be mentioned very briefly. So if you enjoy it, you will need to go do more research to truly go in-depth if that's what you want. Um, so once again, this is gonna be very high level and really more about the Spanish Civil War as a story being told and less about in-depth, you know, cold hard uh history. But, anyways, to get a little shopkeeping out of the way here before we really get started. Um, if you have seen our show before, you know who our sponsors are. But if you have not, um, we are sponsored by um two amazing companies currently. Uh, the first is Nicknack. Nick Knack, uh, they are nicotine lozenges. Think think Zen or Alp, but instead of stupid pouches that you gotta throw away after, um, these are little almost mints, little lozenges. And um you can go to nicknack.com and use code AB25% for 25% off your first purchase. And for any subsequent purchase, use AB10 for 10% off. We are required to say that these are uh a nicotine product, and nicotine is an addictive chemical, but they are also addictively good. And uh both Anthony and I use them, um, use them daily. And then our second sponsor is Black Monk Rosaries. Um, they make the most amazing, rugged, hardcore rosaries in the world. I mine are spread throughout the house wherever I prayed them last, so I don't have one here to show you guys. But go to blackmonkrosary.com and use code AvoidingBabylon at checkout for 10% off. The best rosary you will ever ever see or ever have. And trust me, it is a rosary that Francisco Franco would have prayed on himself. So, anyways, with that out of the way, um, let's get going here. So, it is gonna be kind of uh, I'm gonna have a slideshow to have something for you guys to look at instead of just my face. I don't want just my face on the screen the whole time. No matter how long you do this, is there's something I don't know, I still get self-conscious about it. But, anyways, so we're gonna get started.

Warren Carroll’s Provocative Thesis

SPEAKER_02 7:34

Um, first talking about the author of so this this this episode is based on the book The Last Crusade by Warren Carroll. Um, it's really the whole episode is kind of a book report in a sense. Um but, anyways, let's get started by talking about Warren Carroll. So, first, a word about the author. Uh, Carroll, uh, he let me just just to be straight honest with you guys, he's not a neutral observer, and he never pretended to be. So, Carroll is an American historian, he's a convert to Catholicism, and he founded the Christendom College in Virginia. He has written a sweeping multi-volume history of Christendom, and uh he's got kind of a personal connection to the subject. He spent his summers in Spain in the early 1970s, and he came to know veterans of the the Carlist movement, which we'll talk about. So he came to know men who had actually fought in this war. The Last Crusade is a is a short, intense book, and it's focused almost entirely on just one year, it's focused really on the year 1936. And Carroll's method is simple. He believes that the record speaks for itself. You know, he believes that the speeches, the letters, the body counts, the testimony of the killers themselves. He thinks all these things, um, you know, is all that he needs. Um, and his thesis is that when you actually look at the record, the war reveals itself not as democracy versus fascism, but as what Spain's own uh Cardinal Goma called it at the time. Cardinal Goma called it a war of one concept of civilization against another. It was faith against revolution. And uh Carroll insists that we cannot understand July of 1936, which is when this all really kicked off, without first understanding the five years that led that led up to that. So that's where we're gonna begin.

The Republic Turns On Catholic Spain

SPEAKER_02 9:34

In April of 1931, King Alfonso the 13th left Spain rather than plunge his country into civil war over disputed elections. Like I said, there's a lot, there's a lot more history here behind all this. This is gonna be very, very brief on each individual subject, so just be aware. So Alfonso the 13th doesn't want to throw his country into civil war, ironically. So he he he leaves, and the second Spanish Republic is proclaimed. Now, here's the first fact that that the author wants us to sit with. Within one month, just one single month of the Republic's birth, roughly 100 churches, comments, and religious buildings across Spain are burned or ransacked by revolutionary mobs. Madrid, the Jesuit church on the Cale de la Flor, was burned to the ground. Also, you guys are gonna have to sit with me um as I struggle with Spanish pronunciations. I apologize. I am a uh you know a white Minnesotan Anglo, so this could get painful for any of you Spaniards out there. I apologize. Um, so what did the government do? So Manuel Azana, who is the intellectual leader of the new regime and soon to be prime minister, he opposed calling out the army to protect the churches. And his justification became infamous. He's he said that all the converts in Spain, or sorry, all the convents in Spain were not worth the life of a single Republican. In that same year, Azana stood before the nation and declared that Spain had ceased to be Catholic. The new constitution adopted at the end of 1931 put that hostility into law. Public funding of the church was prohibited, the Jesuits expelled from the country. And these aren't the Jesuits of today, guys. Religious processions, you know, the the traditions that Anthony loves to tweet out constantly and endlessly, endlessly to provoke the Protestants. But these, you know, processions who have gone back centuries were now subject to government permission. They needed to get government permission before they could practice these processions that were centuries old. In religious education in every school in Spain was to be abolished. Even when liberal newspapers ejected, Osana answered that this was not a question of liberty. It was, he said, a matter of public health. Think about that phrase. The Catholic faith of Spain, the nation of Isabella and Ferdinand, the nation of Saint Teresa of Avila, the nation of the 770-year com Reconquista. The the faith of that nation was reclassified as a disease. Carol's point in this opening chapter is crucial to everything that follows. The Spanish right did not radicalize at a vacuum. Catholic Spain watched its churches burn while its government joked about it. In the spring of 1936, when criticism of new church burnings reached the floor of Parliament, Azana, by then about to become president, was on record scoffing that he was scandalized if anyone found burning churches to be horrible. The flames he quipped were endemic to Spain, which had once burned heretics and now burned saints. A government that talks this way, Carol argues, has already told the faithful exactly what is coming. Spanish Catholics did try to fix their nation through the ballot box. In 1933, they actually did vote the left out. The left's answer came in October of 1934, when the socialists launched an armed revolutionary uprising in the mining province of Asturias.

Popular Front Promises Revolution

SPEAKER_02 14:05

It was crushed. Where the socialist chief, Francisco Largo Caballero, passed his time reading Lenin. And he was off on he was called proudly, he he was proud to be called the Spanish Lenin. So don't let people tell you that that someone like Caballero, who was officially a socialist, wasn't actually a communist, because he was, and he was proud of it. So this brings us to the figure Carol considers the single most dangerous man in Spain. And as I just said, uh Caballero. Largo Caballero was head of a union more than a million strong. And as Myers, like I said, called him the Spanish Lenin. He wore the title proudly. And uh Carol in his book simply just lets the you know lets the man speak. Um Carroll uh has a lot of um a lot of speeches uh in it from Caballero here in 1936, January of 1936, launching the campaign of the newly formed Popular Front, which was the Electoral Alliance of Socialists, Communists, and Left Republicans. Um also Popular Fronts were a common tactic used by the communists, um, specifically like on direction from the Soviet Comintern. Uh, that was a tactic used by them to gain power. They would they would ally, um, and it was actually a tactic that the Bolsheviks in Russia used. You know, they allied with similar uh leftist groups um to gain power, and then once they were in power, they would then completely take over. You know, you the Bolsheviks in Russia, um, you know, the the communists were separated between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks. Uh, the Mensheviks, which uh, if you know Russian, Mensheviks uh means like small party, a Bolsheviks means big party, and it was it's funny because the Mensheviks had actually had were the much larger components, and the Bolsheviks were much smaller. There's kind of some wordplay um propaganda going on there, but they allied with each other and gained power, and but once they had power, the Bolsheviks then liquidated the Mensheviks basically entirely. Um, so the popular front um was a common tactic used by communists. Anyway, so uh Largo Caballero told the crowd that his socialism was Marxist socialism, revolutionary socialism, and that the goal was the conquest of power by whatever method they were able to use. Days later, he described his aim as armed insurrection and the dictatorship of the proletariat. He wrote in his own party newspaper that he desired a republic without class war, but that for this, one class would have to disappear. And on the 1st of February of 1936, he declared himself plainly. Communism, he said, was simply socialism's final indefinitive set stage. His party's press printed the boast that what had been done in Russia would be done in Spain. Carol's verdict is blunt. Those who accused the Spanish right of overreacting to the Popular Front have simply never read what the Popular Front's dominant leader said he intended to do. The Popular Front won the 19 the February 1936 election. They won a majority of seats in Parliament. Though, as Carol notes, the right actually won a plurality of the popular vote. So basically, the right. Okay, sorry about that. I just had a just had one of my children come in and uh need something. So uh where were we? Uh so yeah, February 36th, Popular Front wins a majority of seats, but the right actually won a plurality of the popular vote. Uh what that means is basically there the right had was kind of spread out between multiple parties, and as a total, all those parties won a plurality of the vote. But the Popular Front being that alliance of different leftist groups, um, was that the Popular Front was the single largest party in a sense that that won votes in that election. So what follows the February of 1936 election is basically five months of national disintegration. Prisons were opened. They they let, you know, as leftists still love to do to this day, they let out as many criminals as they could. Francisco Franco, General Francisco Franco, the army's chief of staff, was exiled to the Canary Islands, which, while the Spanish possession is located quite a ways from Spain itself. Uh, peasants seized land, and the government ratified the seizures after the fact. And the burning resumed. In one week in March, churches burned in Cadiz, Granada, and Central Madrid, including one destroyed 200 paces from the interior ministry, while the authorities stood by under orders not to intervene. In Albachete, 17 churches went up in a matter of days. By mid-June, the Catholic parliamentary leader, Gil Robles, stood up in the Cortes, which is the parliament, and read the ledger into the record. 160 churches totally destroyed since the election, hundreds of political murders, over a thousand assaults. A country can live under monarchy or republic, he cried, under almost any system. But he said, no country can live in anarchy. A month later, he updated the count. Dozens more dead, more churches burned, more priest attacks. Even Miguel Mara, a founding father of the Republic itself, publicly admitted that the Republic had become a tool of violent revolutionary movement preparing the extermination of the middle class. That's not that's not Carol talking. That's Miguel Miguel Mara, a Republican talking. Spain, Carol writes, was approaching the first general persecution of Christians on European soil since ancient Rome. And everyone could feel it coming.

Calvo Sotelo And The Point Of No Return

SPEAKER_02 20:52

One man saw it most clearly, and paid first. A devout Catholic who had warned before the election that a Marxist triumph would tear down Spain's history, spirituality, and morality, and vowed before God that it would not be permitted. His life was threatened openly, on the floor of the Parliament by socialist deputies. In June, he told the chamber, quoting a Spanish saint, that his life could be taken from him, but nothing more, and asked whether it was not better to bet sorry and he asked whether it was not better to perish gloriously than live in contempt. He did not have long to wait. In the early hours of July thirteenth, nineteen thirty-six, the squad of state police, government security forces, led by a captain and including a socialist gunman, knocked on Calvo Sotello's door in Madrid. They told him he was being taken to headquarters. He calmly told his wife and daughter he would telephone them, unless he added, these gentlemen intended to blow out his brains. In the police truck, minutes later, that is precisely what one of them did. They dumped his body at the gate of a cemetery and drove away. Let the weight of this action land. The leader of the parliamentary opposition, murdered by the uniformed agents of the state. Carroll asks the question every honest observer must ask. At that moment, what legal recourse remained? The government's own police were assassinating its critics. Gil Robles predicted that Calvo Sotello's blood would drown the government. And within five days, the war began. The military rising began in Morocco on July 17th and spread to the mainland over the following days. Franco was flown from the Canaries to Morocco in a chartered British plane in an adventure worthy of the film. But Carroll is emphatic that the general's coup is not the heart of this story. Franco's first proclamation didn't even mention the church. The generals launched a rising, yeah. But it was somewhere else that a crusade was born.

Navarre’s Carlists Make It A Crusade

SPEAKER_02 23:35

That place was Navarre. Navarre was the heartland of Carlism. Carlism was a 100-year-old traditional movement whose motto was Dios, Patria, Queros, Re God, Fatherland, Local Liberties, King. In that order, with God first. The Carlists had been preparing for years, drilling a volunteer militia called the Riquete, whose men wore the famous red beret. Their aged claimant to the throne, Alfonso Carlos, who was at this point 87 years old, in exile since the 1870s. The photo I have on the screen is him as he was much younger in the 1870s, and he is actually a very interesting figure himself. He had uh in 1870 actually fought uh with the people of forces against the Italian conquest of Rome. Um, so he interesting character. Uh, but at this point, he's 87 years old in exile since the 1870s, and he had told told his followers that their destiny was another crusade to save the Catholic faith in Spain. When the moment came, the Carlist leadership refused to commit their men to a merely military coup. They extracted written terms. The movement must fly Spain's traditional red and gold flag, and the new state must be Catholic. Only then did the mobilization order go out, an order that told the Riquetes, where possible, to consecrate themselves to the sacred heart of Jesus and receive the sacraments before going to war. And then came the morning of July 19th in Pamplona, which was for Carol one of the great scenes of the 20th century. From every hill and valley of Navarre, they poured into the central square, six thousand red berade volunteers by early morning, more arriving by the hour, on farm carts and lorries, singing carless songs and Catholic hymns, lining up to go to confession and receive communion before battle. Eyewitnesses remembered a man leaping from a truck, shouting that they that here they came, confessed and communed, ready for whatever God demanded. Mothers hung crucifixes around their sons' necks. The town of Artoyona had 800 men of fighting age, and 775 of them marched. There were a family with three generations under arms. The war produced the famous story of a Rikete, who, when he was asked whom should be notified if he fell in battle, named his 65-year-old father who was in the same unit. And when he would ask what they should do if his father fell too, well, then they should notify his son, aged 15, in the same unit. When the government in Madrid telephoned General Mola that morning, offering him a cabinet post to call the whole thing off, Mola looked out his window at a square filled with red berets and answered that what they what they proposed had become impossible. If he made a deal now, the first head to roll would be his own. One young volunteer, Juan Jura Luceretta, whose memoirs Carol follows through the whole year, wrote that he had never known such joy as seized them that day. They did not know whether they would soon be victors or martyrs, but they knew that they were acting above all for God. Carol's judgment of the whole matter is that nothing like this had been seen in Europe since the Catholic peasants of the Venday rose against the French Revolution. This was not a Junta's push. It was a people's crusade. Twenty thousand Navarreese raquetes were under arms within four days. The rising, though, lost its intended leader almost immediately. General Senuro, the man who had pledged, who the man who had been the one to pledge to honor the Carlos terms, was killed on July 20th when a small plane failed to clear a stone wall on takeoff in Portugal. Carol pauses over that stone wall. An extra six inches of lift, he reflects, and the entire later history of Spain might have been different.

The Terror And The Martyrs Of 1936

SPEAKER_02 28:37

Now we come to the part of the story that Carol uh accuses the modern world of deliberately forgetting. Because in the territory that the revolution controlled, something began in July of 1936 that has no parallel in the modern history of the West. In Madrid, on the first night of the war, mobs armed by the Unions burned churches by the dozen and massacred priests and monks in the light of the flames. Within days, the government had handed out 65,000 rifles to the revolutionary militias and effectively ceded them the streets. Local committees sprang up to hunt down enemies of the revolution. Do you know what the Spanish people called those committees? Checkas. The Spanish spelling of Checa, Lenin's secret police. The people being hunted knew exactly what they were looking at. Carroll fills pages with what happened next, name by name, and I can really only give you a fraction. In Madrid on July 24th, three Carmelite nuns were recognized on the street and gunned down. One, dying in a hospital, echoed Christ's own words. My God, forgive them, for they know not what they do. The Bishop of Segwenza, 72 years old, was seized by a mob and shot beside a highway crying, Viva Christore, long live Christ the King. His body was burnt and thrown into a gully. Fourteen seminarians and their teacher were captured near Dlorita. The militiamen forced a crucifix into the priest's mouth until it drew blood, then shot every one of them at the cemetery at noon. Ten teaching brothers in a Madrid suburb were executed in front of their own chapel after their killer smashed the crucifixes and statues first, as if the images themselves were the enemy. In the last ten days of July alone, one hundred twenty-four priests were killed in Madrid. And after July 25th, 1936, hear this. With the exception of only the Basque Country, not one public mass was celebrated anywhere in Republican Spain until the war ended almost three years later. Carroll notes that not even the Soviet Union ever went quite that far. But if you remember one story, make it Barbastro. In that small Erganese town, an entire community of claritian missionaries, priests, brothers, and thirty-nine seminarians, most of them only in their twenties, were imprisoned in stifling summer heat and executed in batches through August. Before dying, the young men scrawled a farewell on the only paper they had, the wrapper of a chocolate bar. They wrote that they were about to join their martyred companions, that they forgave their killers, and that they offered their lives for the church, for the very working men in whose name they were being shot. They went to the killing ground singing. They were offered their lives at the last moment if they would join the militia. Every single one of them refused. They knelt, stretched out their arms in the form of a cross, and were shot. And here's the detail Carol treasures most. The testimony of one of the executioners, a man who complained afterward that nothing could shut them up. The more they were beaten, he said, the more they sang and shouted Viva Cristo Real The final tally, established by the church's meticulous documentation, and as Carol stresses, disputed by no serious historian of any political strife. Around twenty thousand churches were destroyed or wrecked. And beyond the clergy, thousands upon thousands of ordinary lay Catholics were murdered for nothing more than a scapula around the neck, a known habit of going to mass, or the act of hiding a priest. Carroll put Spain's martyrs of 1936 at 10,000 or more, the greatest slaughter of clergy in the entire history of the Christian Church, surpassing the French Revolution in Bolshevik Russia alike. In September of 1936, Pope Pius XI addressed Spanish refugees and gave this its true name, a truly satanic hatred of God. And these, Carol insists, are martyrdoms in the full, exact canonical sense. People offered life if they would deny Christ, who chose death instead. The church agrees. Pope John Paul II had beatified nearly 200 of them by the time Carroll wrote his book in 1996. The beatifications have continued ever since, with Spain's martyrs of the 20th century now numbered in the thousands.

The Alcazar Siege And A Father’s Choice

SPEAKER_02 35:00

So when Carroll calls the other side of this war godless, this is exactly what he means. It's not a rhetoric rhetorical flourish, it's a statistical description. Now, every crusade has its epoch. And the epoch of this one took place in Toledo, the ancient capital of Spain, the city of El Greco and the Reconquista. On Toledo's highest craig stands the Alcazar, a fortress academy with walls up to 12 feet thick. When the war broke out, its commander was Colonel Jose Muscardo. He was 60 years old, near retirement, and he was so unimportant that the coup's planners hadn't even bothered to include him. But, nonetheless, he declared for the rising anyway, and he gathered about a thousand fighting men, mostly civil guards, plus over 500 women and 200 children seeking protection. He hauled in ammunition from the Toledo arms factory and he shut the gates of the Alcazar. And 3,000 revolutionary militiamen arrived from Madrid to dig them out. On the siege's third day, the head of Toledo's Cheka, a lawyer, of course, imagine that, got a hold of something better than artillery. He got a hold of Muscardo's 24-year-old son Luis. He telephoned the colonel and told him he had ten minutes to surrender the Alcazar, or the boy would be shot. Then he put Luis on the line. The father and son spoke briefly. Muscardo told his boy that if it were true, he should commend his soul to God, to cry out for Spain, and to die like a hero. Luis answered with a goodbye and a very big kiss. And when the Czech chief came back on the line, Muscardo told him he could forget his ten minutes of grace. The Alcazar would never surrender. Luis was murdered. Carol reaches back six centuries for the only parallel. Guzman the Good, who in 1294 refused to trade the fortress of Tarifa for his captured son's life, and threw his own sword over the wall. So does the Christian present enlace the past, Carol writes, especially in Spain. For two months the siege became a world story. The defenders lived in the cellars. They ground wheat from a raided granary. They ate their horses, but they never missed their daily rosary. The attackers, having failed with artillery, air bombardment, and even a grotesque stunt in which they paraded a beloved statue of Christ before the walls and burned it, dug two mineshafts under the fortress and packed them with tons of TNT. The world's press was invited to watch the Alcazar die. On the morning of September 18th, the mine went off with the roar heard in Madrid over 40 miles away. The southwest tower rose into the sky and collapsed in an avalanche of stone. But then, out of the smoke and rubble, the attackers heard something impossible. A bugle. The Alcazar's fifteen-year-old trumpeter was sounding the call to arms. The rock of Toledo, the rock under the Alcazar, had absorbed the blast. The garrison came boiling out of the cellars to the barricades. And the assault broke against them. Somewhere below, a baby girl was born just minutes after the explosion and was given the name Josefa. Franco, who was marching on Madrid, like I said, 40 miles away, now faced the decision Carroll considers the most revealing of his life. His generals warned him plainly, if you turn aside for Toledo, you may lose Madrid and with it quick victory. So this is two months later. For those of you who know history, the war did not end until spring of 39. Franco answered that he had meditated on it long, that in civil wars the spiritual factors count to an extraordinary degree, and that he had given the garrison his word. He turned for Toledo. And on September 27th, the relief force fought its way in. And the next day, Moscardo greeted Franco amid the wreckage with words every Spanish school child would learn. The Alcazar may have been destroyed, but its honor was intact. Militarily, historians still argue whether this cost Franco Madrid. Carol's point is entirely different. It's only in a crusade that the honor of a promise and the rescue of the faithful outweigh the capture of the capital city. Days later, the assembled generals made Franco the head of state.

Soviet Influence And Spain’s Stolen Gold

SPEAKER_02 40:44

Now the other half of Carol's thesis, you know, it's not just that one side was Catholic. It's that the other side, whatever it called itself, even if it calls itself republican, was being devoured from within by Soviet communism. And Carol documents it relentlessly. The Republic's September 1936 government put communists in the cabinet. Something no country out on earth outside the Soviet Union, you know, outside of the Soviet orbit had ever done. Those so-called romantic volunteers of legend were recruited, transported, and commanded through the apparatus of Stalin's Communist International, and were trained at a base run by the Comintern. Soviet tanks, Soviet aircraft, and Soviet generals arrived that autumn. The NKVD, Stalin's secret police, who were really at the same time committing the holodomore in uh in the Ukraine, were setting up shop on Spanish soil. And then there's the gold. In October of 1936, the Republic's leaders secretly shipped the entire national gold reserve of Spain. 7,900 ingots, worth about $800 million then, billions today. I didn't look it up, but billions upon billions today. They were shipped to the Soviet Union, loaded onto Russian ships under the personal supervision of NKVD officers. When it reached Odessa, Stalin threw a party and joked that the Spaniards would never see their gold again. And he was right, they never did. By 1937, the pattern completed itself. When the socialist prime minister balked at liquidating a rival leftist party from Moscow, the communists simply removed him and installed a more obedient man. An American reporter walking through Valencia, the Republic's wartime capital, described streets renamed for Lenin in La Pasinaria. There were portraits of Stalin on every corner, and Soviet propaganda films played in the cinemas. Even Azana, the Republic's own president, privately despaired in his journal of a regime consumed by murder, theft, and revolutionary hysteria. This, Carroll argues, is what the poets and the textbooks called Spanish democracy. Whatever the republic had been in 1931, by the winter of 1936, the men of the rising were not fighting an elected liberal government. They were fighting the westernmost offensive of the Bolshevik Revolution. When the nationalists finally battered their way into Madrid's university city. In November of 1936, the soldiers stopping them weren't Spanish. They were German and French communist battalions singing the International. Anyone who doubts the war was against communism, Carol Sids, needs only to read an honest account of the Siege of Madrid. Meanwhile, in that besieged city, as the battle raged, the revolution emptied the prisons the old-fashioned way. Over 2,400 helpless prisoners, among them at least 200 priests and religious, were taken out in batches that November, shot, and then buried in trenches. Madrid held. Barely and only, Carol concedes, because the international brigades arrived in the nick of time. The quick war became a long one. But the crusaders, as he puts it, matched them man for man, and in the end, they won.

Nationalist Violence And The Just War Claim

SPEAKER_02 45:03

Now what about the supposed crimes of the nationalists? We need to be fair to the book, because Carroll is more honest here than his critics like to admit. Carroll doesn't pretend that the crusaders' hands were entirely clean, and they weren't. He condemns executions carried out in the South under General Quipo Delano, a man that Carroll bluntly describes as no crusader at all, whose cruelty, he says, betrayed the Catholic character of the cause. Carroll condemns the massacre of prisoners on Majorca under an Italian fascist adventurer nicknamed the Count. He calls the November bombing in Madrid unjust. He acknowledges in Salas Larzaval's figures that there were tens of thousands of executions in the nationalist zone during and after the war. His argument is that of a moral framework. And you can weigh the argument for yourself. The justice of a war, in you know, the traditional Catholic understanding is determined by the cause for what it is for which it is fought, not by the sins of individuals within it, because those occur in every war that has ever been raged. No cause, he writes, purifies everyone who fights in its name. Men are not angels. The question is whether taking up arms was justified originally. In faced with the documented program and practice of the revolution, Carroll answers without hesitation that it was. What was the alternative? Russia. Russia was the alternative. 74 years of totalitarian enslavement and 20 million dead. There are times, he writes, when a man must stand or die. Spain in July 1936 was one of those times. Scholars like Hugh Thomas, Paul Preston, and Anthony Beaver emphasize the rising as a coup against an elected government. The church's entanglement with wealth and power in old Spain, the help Franco took from Hitler and Mussolini, the harshness of the post-war repression. They resist the word crusade. Carroll knew all of this. He cites these very historians constantly and answers them on the ground where he believes no answer is possible. The persecution itself. Nearly 7,000 murdered clergy is not propaganda. It is a fact conceded on all sides, on all sides, and he observes acidly, a fact that an entire generation of writers managed to mention as little as possible. He calls Spain's crusade the hidden crusade, the only crusade in Christian history whose own existence was concealed from the world while it was being fought.

What The World Chooses To Remember

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Yes, read both sides, but make sure you read this side, because you were never taught it. Weeks later in Madrid Church, Franco laid his sword upon the altar and vowed before God never to draw it again except against invasion. A vow that he kept for 36 years. Whatever else may be said of his long rule, Carroll observed the results firsthand in the 1970s. A Spain at peace, where the faith that had been marked for extermination was practiced freely by all. She remembers them. Beatification after beatification, the men and women of 1936, the claritians of Barbastro singing on the road to the ravine, the bishop by the roadside, the nuns, the seminarians, the fathers of families shot for a medal around the neck, have been raised to the altars. The revolutionaries who killed them promised that Spain had ceased to be Catholic. Well, ninety years later, their victims have feast days celebrated throughout Spain. And that, ultimately, is Warren Carroll's answer to the century. The world remembers the Spanish Civil War through the eyes of its literary tourists. Carroll asks us to remember it through the eyes of the boy trumpeter of the Alcazar, sounding the call, the call to arms out of the sorry, sounding the call to arms out of the rubble. We should remember it through the mothers of Navarre hanging crucifixes on their sons. We should remember it through an old colonel telling his child over a telephone line to commend his soul to God. These men had every odd against them. A hostile world, a heedless press, the whole tide of the modern age. Against all of it, as Carroll writes in his final lines, they raised up the cross of Christ, proclaimed their crusade, and won it. Many crusades in history were lost. The first crusade triumphed, and so did the last. The giant cross still stands in the valley of the fallen. Too tall to hide. Too vast to ignore. Because only such a cross could rightly mark their sacrifice.