Faction: With the Crusaders AMA - ask away!

I’ve received a lot of questions about historical events, personalities, training, weaponry, etc. in Faction: With the Crusaders, and I figure this is the perfect opportunity for an AMA. So go ahead - Ask Me Anything in the comments!

Edit: I’ll provide responses to questions asked on other platforms directly into this article, expanding as I go.

I was asked to explain *why* the Spanish Civil War is worthy of study and interest. My response:

The Spanish Civil War is often described as a prelude to the Second World War, but I'm not convinced that is what makes it relevant. Rather, it's the rare example of a European nation defeating a Bolshevik uprising in the first half of the 20th century without being drawn into WWII. Most relevant for Americans, however, is that it rhymes with our current situation in many ways, but not exactly. There is a tendency in some areas of the American right to point to Spain and say, "see, that is why the right would win in an American civil war," but I don't think that's necessarily true, as there are major differences between Spain and America in the current year. In the 80s or 90s it may have been true, but not now.

The primary parallel is that the international media carried water for the Second Spanish Republic even though the government was not an actual liberal democracy and didn't believe their own propaganda. The Republic was always dominated by violent revolutionaries who acquired control of the government largely through fraud and intimidation of the fractious traditionalist right. They inaugurated the Republic by using the state to crack down on right wingers who defended themselves and their communities against the rampaging left. At the same time, in the lead up to the war, factions on the left often chimped out enough that they were cracked down on by the central government, which led to fracture points later. Look at the Team A / Team B fissures in America 2024 for parallels.

Finally, the biggest lesson of the Spanish Civil War is that the right won because they ORGANIZED. They created their own parallel institutions and secret societies within established institutions - ongoing conspiracies - despite the risk to themselves were they to be caught, and prepared. The weaponry they acquired was critical, but what made them effective fighters was their discipline and belief in hierarchy. Additionally, the fractious right set their differences aside and formed a coalition rather than debating about economic policy or the latest talking points so that they could physically combat the threat to them, their families, their nation and their Church. They used the established systems to jockey for position but understood that their enemies were enemies who didn't believe their own bullshit. Democracy was known to be a sham by at least 40% of the Spanish people, who declared, "No more."

Additionally, the Spanish Civil War is important because almost everything we are told formally about it is propaganda that doesn't hold up to the least scrutiny. The truth is much more interesting and inspiring, which illustrates how gay and retarded the mainstream talking points really are. We live under a libtarded oligarchy that is falling apart under the pressure of its own contradictions.

I was also asked: Why didn’t the Nationalists take the IO/propaganda war more seriously? The left clearly won that. My response:

This observation has been made constantly in adversarial, neutral and sympathetic material addressing the Spanish Civil War and was an eternal source of frustration among Nationalist-favoring journalists during the war, although it primarily created a problem for non-Spanish people after the war seeking balanced material on the conflict. Peter Kemp writes in Mine Were of Trouble that Lieutenant Colonel Gonzalo de Aguilera Munro, the (deranged) Nationalist press officer, was the worst possible representative for the Nationalist cause. Francisco Franco didn’t care one whit. His skills were warfare and diplomacy, which got him everything he cared about - a basic level of military (mostly-) neutrality among the Anglosphere, who didn’t prevent the flow of trucks and fuel to his forces from American businesses, and a negotiated neutrality after the war, followed by friendly relations by the 1950s.

All we see about the war in the Anglosphere is leftist propaganda because of who controlled the media then and now, which Franco had no control over; there were advocates for the Spanish traditionalists everywhere, particularly Catholics and conservatives, who were sufficiently influential to prevent the “liberal democracies” from doing more than a bit of blockading of weapons shipments from time to time, particularly early in the war. For better or for worse, the traditionalist Caudillo was unconcerned with the sentiment of media-consumers in America.

Another reader asks: Were there other youth groups besides the Carlist groups in the run-up to the festivities? Or was all the planning in the Army and the Requetés?

Spain was a highly political country in the early 20th century, and it seems that every, or nearly every, party or regional organization had women’s and youth auxiliaries, generally described as Organizaciones Juveniles or, more specifically, [Party] Juventud. Even not-technically-politically-aligned scouting organizations were politically segmented, with traditionalist versions having connections to the only-recently-libtarded international scouting orgs, others associated with socialist parties, and still others having regional or linguistic associations, which were inherently political divisions.

The Requetés under the Comunión Tradicionalista built upon the old youth Requeté organizations, which grew out of the Juventud Carlista, itself an evolution from the Batallones de la Juventud. The Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) had the Juventudes Socialistas de España, who were chief rivals to both the Carlist youth orgs and those of the Falange Balillas. The Unión de Juventudes Comunistas de España fed into the Communist Party of Spain (PCE) and so on. The youth organizations of these parties committed a great deal of the political street violence of this turbulent period, which should surprise nobody. These youth orgs reinforced the values and culture of their parties, trained and militarized the young men, and shaped their identities as the parties’ members and representatives.

As far as the planning, I’m comfortable making the blanket statement that upper echelons of nearly every political party of note in 1930s Spain were involved in some degree of planning - whether proactively or as a contingency - for a traditionalist confrontation with the Republic or leftist revolution. If they didn’t, given the conditions, they were fools.