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Something I was reminded today of, which may fit the bill as a historical fun fact, or at least a curious bit of trivia. During the Spanish Civil War, the Italians supported the fascist side with both men and equipment. They were really well equipped, at least when compared to the Spanish fascist army (which actually did have some German equipment; Spanish republicans were even worse off). Spain was at the time a rather poor country with a lacking industry, while Italy was riding the high of fascist industrialism. So the relatively modern trucks and weapons the Italian army employed became a point of attention amongst combatants of both sides. Apparently, the other thing Italian generals became famous for was their bravado. That must have been a tad grating to the Spanish, seeing that when the Italians were handled a really bad defeat at Guadalajara, by an inferior Republican army, that stopped short their attempt to take Madrid, Spanish soldiers from their own fascist side would sing this (roughly translated) to the recovering Italian soldiers, set to the tune of the black shirts hymn: "Guadalajara is not Abisinia Here the Reds (republican army) shoot bombs like pinecones Less words and more courage Cos some Italians found themselves at Badajoz" (which is to say, at like 500 km of where the battle actually took place) Another famous phrase of the time, also from the Spanish fascist side, said this: "Italians: the Reds, even if Reds, are Spanish. Less trucks, and more balls" And someone else still suggested adding an additional phrase to the insign of one of the beaten regiments. They had, amongst their titles, that of "Vincitori di Malaga" ("Malaga winners") indicating that they were amongst the divisions that participated in the successfull conquest of the Andalusian city a year back. The suggested phrase? "Culipatrás di Guadalajara" (roughly, and in false Italian, "Retreating asses of Guadalajara") Shellception has a new favorite as of 22:50 on Feb 6, 2021 |
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Feb 6, 2021 22:40
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darkwasthenight posted:I think every country must have a variation on this. In Northern England it's "looking for Huey". Spanish has "Calling Juan" for Spain (guess it's a northern thing, never heard it here) and some American countries get "Calling Hugo". Both are onomatopoeias.
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Mar 7, 2021 16:59
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That was an interesting reading on Scandinavian relationship dynamics and monarchies (for someone with no idea of Scandinavian history, anyway). The most unpopular king in Spain gave the contry to Napoleon, and self-exiled in France with his family. Then when the kingless armies (with English help) kicked the French out of the country, he came back, looked at the newly minted, war-time constitutional-monarchy Constitution and went "what did you do? well we can't have that", and declared himself an absolute monarch again. Fun fact about him, he had really bad problems trying to conceive a descendant. "Went through four wives without success" kinda problems. According to some studies, the guy had a deformity that essentially amounted to him having a gigantic, only half-functional penis, and his wives were recorded as dreading having intercourse with him (dude was probably not the smoothest man in town either). Last one came up with a solution in the form of a donut-shaped cushion that was used during the act to "shorten" the guy and lessen her pain. That way, they say, Isabel II of Spain was conceived. Who then went on to rule, got unwittingly married to a declared homosexual cousin, and got depicted in explicit satirical drawings as having sex with her generals and their horses at the same time. Ended up dethroned and exiled. Then we got a replacement king from Italy, who lasted all of a year before leaving after two separate attempts to kill him on the street. XIX Spain was wild.
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Mar 14, 2021 09:44
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drrockso20 posted:If he was so unpopular why the hell did they let him take back the throne, even if they had to continue having a king you'd think they would have had an easy time finding some other guy of noble descent to give the throne to He was unpopular, not stupid. When he came back he pretended to go along with the claims for a more modern monarchy, more freedom and less crown power, and he did so... for like five years, then when he felt cemented enough he went back to the old absolutist ways, but by then there was no way to get rid of him again. That's to say, he wasn't that loved before, but he got really unpopular when he was well secure in the throne. And he also used his military power to war against his cousin Carlos's claim to the throne, leading to a bunch of internal wars. The Carlists* were also absolute monarchists, and even less liked than this guy. Also, see that about poor Amadeus I of Saboya, a king brought from Italy to govern in place of dipshit king's daughter. He isn't even remembered as a bad guy, but he got fed up with people straight up trying to murder him. There really wasn't a long queue of people wanting to govern a backwards, rebellious country. *Random fun fact: a hundred years later, in 1936, an important Carlist general teamed up with Franco and the other rebellious generals during the civil war, with the aim to direct it towards restituting an absolute monarch in the throne. Alas, guy died in a not really well expained plane accident at the start of the war, and the Carlists were forcibly integrated into Falange, the fascist group that supported Franco, where they dissolved. There are some Carlist groups still around in 2021.
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Mar 14, 2021 13:16
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Mr. Belpit posted:Is he so hated that Spaniards refuse to write his name to this day? Not really, I figured he isn't really that known outside of here (unlike, say, Carlists who had a bit of a role in European politics) and didn't want to clutter things with a lot of names. I was referring to Fernando VII of Spain. Shellception has a new favorite as of 16:09 on Mar 14, 2021 |
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Mar 14, 2021 16:05
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Samovar posted:BACK TO THE TOPIC AT HAND - in England back in the 1700s there was an actor by the name of David Garrick, who hob-nobbed with the likes of Samuel Johnson and was renowned for being a great Shakesperean actor, who helped introduce it into the pre-Modern era of theatre with reformations to both audience interaction (as little as possible) along with standardising set direction and the like. This is great. Love the ingenuity of the idea.
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Mar 29, 2021 17:09
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Dapper_Swindler posted:
Not sure how much sense this will make or how well-known the names will be, but lately I have been reading about Vicente Aleixandre's (Spanish poet, who got a Literature Nobel Prize) life and boy, it was a trip. Dude was a big, blond, blue-eyed and apparently very calm andalusian born into the early 1900s and who got extremely bad luck in matters of health. At his 20s he got tuberculosis (apparently exhacerbated by a STD from the woman he was dating at the time), he was bedridden a lot, and by 1932 he had to have a kidney removed. During that time he'd been in contact with a lot of the literary circle at the time, and as he really couldn't do much for long periods of time, his house became a meeting point of sorts for all kind of writers. Amongst those writers there were poets Garcia Lorca and Luis Cernuda. The three of them would become good friends around that time. Now, both Lorca and Cernuda were homosexuals, and Aleixandre himself came out (as much as you could in the 30s, that is, to his friends) as bisexual during that period, and started dating a man. So in addition to a literary circle, the guy's house also became a bit of a safespace for them and their lovers. Homosexual relations weren't really well accepted at the time, so things outside the circle were kept silenced. Cue 1936. Civil war breaks up, Lorca is executed without a trial (the killer was later quoted as saying he 'shot that f***** in the rear end'), Cernuda has to go out to exile, never to return to Spain, and Aleixandre's lover, a socialist lawyer, also gets exiled. Aleixandre himself was a leftist and he would also think of exile, only for his illness to worsen. He will remain in bed for the last two years of war, during which he will be detained for 24 hours (and freed thanks to another poet, Pablo Neruda, Chilean consul in Spain at the time), he will survive a bombing in which his library and his piano will be lost, and he will lose his father, all in short order. So the guy, now nearing his 40s, having lost almost everything he cares for, alone under a Fascist dictatorship, goes into an existencial crisis. But, at the same time, he is still a reputed writer, and young Spanish poets look up to him as one of the very few remaining big figures from the 30s. He will write to them, and also to anyone who asks him for a poem, including school magazines. He gets accepted into the Spanish Academy of Language, a big honor, a bigger one for a guy who was antithesis to everything the Franco regime preached. So the house becomes a meeting point for poets again, only now it's a lot of young and aspiring kids instead of the big names. Another poet, Carmen Conde, moves there to live in the upper floor: she is a lesbian who has left his husband and is secretly dating a married woman at the time. And Aleixandre's place, again, becomes a safespace for queer youth: latter testimonies will recount how the place was known to be a space in which anyone could freely love anyone. It is worth mentioning that if homosexuality was frowned upon in the 30s, by the 50s-60s under the extreme Catholicism of Franco's regime, it was actually illegal, under jail sentence, to have same-sex relationships or divorce. The best queer people could hope for was to be as secret as possible and not get ratted out. So Aleixandre's story, apart from his poetical prowess, was that of a guy who not only accepted himself as queer at a time it was not socially accepted to do so, but he lived according to how he felt, and used his fame to help a lot of no-name kids (some of which would go on to become famous in turn) that would otherwise have been left resourceless, both from the literary and from the queer angle. I though that was a neat story, to be honest. Shellception has a new favorite as of 09:16 on Mar 30, 2021 |
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Mar 29, 2021 22:28
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3D Megadoodoo posted:I think you mean recount, not recant? Sure, sorry. Lateposting in there. Got confussed between recount and recall and ended up not writing either, typo fixed now. barbecue at the folks posted:I guess they hadn't heard yet that Generalissimo Fransisco Franco is still dead. Also, lol. Shellception has a new favorite as of 09:20 on Mar 30, 2021 |
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Mar 30, 2021 09:15
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Am I too late to grandpa chat? I'm Spanish. Great-grandpa on dad's side got drafted to fight in the Cuban independence war. Richer families would pay so their kids got exempted from service, while poorer families got to have their kids sent to fight for the very last shreds of the colonies, first Cuba and Philipphines, later Moroccan posessions. Poorly trained kids, coupled with a woefully inadequate and out of date equipment, caused several bloodbaths and would go on for decades, eventually crystallizing in a good number of bloody riots during the 1910's as people grew tired of having their kids die in useless overseas wars. This guy died in the 1950s, after having no less than nine kids in a tiny communal housing with no running water, only three of which survived childhood - two of them, my grandma and her one-year-older sister, would live on to be 100 years old. I don't think anyone was particularly proud of greatgrandpa's service years, but my grandma always kept this as a memento of him:  This was known as a backpack flag. They are linen and so cheaply made that they faded out very easily, and were handed to recruits so they'd have something to cover their backpack and other posessions with. But it had another use - if you were shot dead, you were supposed to be buried with it, so while very dead in the middle of nowhere, you'd have the Spanish flag on your tomb. Yay, patriotism! My grandpa, the one this grandma married, was military-age and drafted onto the Franco army at the start of the war. He was from an upper middle class, so his dad had influence to pull strings and have him sent to intendence instead of the frontlines - he spent the war carrying food supplies between garrisons in the Granada hills riding a donkey, but apparently managed to not have to shoot anyone. He never talked much about the war either apparently, and also left my grandma to live with another lady in the 60s (divorce wasn't legal, so he just up and left), so family didn't talk much about him, either.
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Apr 3, 2023 11:50
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