Georeactor Blog

I suddenly got a lot more books. But will my reading pace speed up to match? I cleared one book, and am a good way into a book on Guernica (the painting). My shelves now include:

• Wigs on the Green, a 1934 satire "unavailable for decades" where Nancy Mitford skewered her fascist and socialist sisters (and if the Outrageous TV series is to believed, was shocked by the fallout).
• HHhH: a meta-fiction translated from French, which blends a historical event and the author's research, hopefully this will be inspirational for my weird history posts
• Slow Poison: the latest academic book by the father of NYC mayor Mamdani, unraveling some Uganda + colonialism + political background which I was lacking in 2010.
• Leftist agriculture (Growing Papaya Trees and When Trees Testify)
• Mark Twain (which I've held onto for a while; I still haven't finished a book published in 2025!)

[Part 2] The International Brigades: Fascism, Freedom, and the Spanish Civil War (Giles Tremlett, 2020)

The first half of this book excelled at bringing up interesting concepts and dynamics. In this second half things are more repetitive: tactics in battles, disorganization, being eviscerated from the air, and stories of individual leaders. To be quite honest I might be inclined to recommend the Guernica book over this.

A theme which appeared earlier but was covered more at the halfway point, was the Brigades' attitude toward desertion. Men who had volunteered for 'adventure' or pure democracy, had to follow military orders. Though the prevailing rumor was that troublemakers got shot, it was much more common to get undesirable work or to be imprisoned for 6 months. Members of trade unions also found a cold reception if they returned home early.

There are chapters on two of the most famous veterans or observers of the war - Hemingway and Orwell. Neither was on the site of any particularly famous battles, except for Orwell taking part in street battles between POUM (a pro-Trotsky socialist group) and the Communists (backed by Stalin). The author acknowledges that the NKVD were recruiting and disappearing people in Barcelona, but at a much smaller scale (a few dozen people) compared to rumors.

The movement continued to fracture. As the war dragged on International Brigades often became less diverse, such as one being led by and mostly composed of Italian communists, and others becoming majority-Spaniard. The volunteers remained skeptical of their Spanish allies, who had a common language with Francoists, and there are reports of them breaking up trench conversations or shooting Spanish deserters. There would be rumors by anarchists that the Brigades had been held back from battle, or complaints that one country's soldiers had abandoned another.
As the movement failed, outside communist politicians' visits became tinged with out-of-touch speeches and misinterpreting soldiers' needs.

As the resistance was driven up into Catalonia (and Madrid), Hitler's troops were moving into Czechoslovakia. The Republic and diaspora held out a last hope that the escalating situation in Europe would lead the UK and France to drop their neutrality and include Spain in the war.

When the final battles were occurring outside Catalonia, PM Negrín ordered any remaining international troops to withdraw. Some finished their turn on the battlefield without hearing, or without heeding, those orders. After a parade and speeches in Barcelona, the soldiers went home to their home countries on the brink of war, and we get a quick coda about the fate of the soldiers, including taking on major roles in the French resistance, Italian partisans, Yugoslavia, and East Germany.

Notes

• The book mentions peeing into machine gun coolant multiple times. Looking into /r/AskHistorians, this was also documented during World War I, in Korea urine was used to unfreeze guns, and by Vietnam it was something people heard about but didn't generally practice.
• There's a reference to anarchist forces on a quiet frontline in Aragon playing a football match with the fascists, but it's unclear if this was a figure of speech or rumor. I did find researchers writing about Francoist Spain's subversion of sports, and FC Barcelona has a page on their website: https://www.fcbarcelona.com/en/card/643891/1930-39-struggling-against-history
• One section featured Chen Agen / Aking Chan. Throughout the book there have been mentions of Abyssinians and Asians in the Brigades, but not as many profiles. They were rare and there might not be detailed records. Some articles estimate 100 ethnically Chinese people were in the Brigades.
• Jawaharlal Nehru, who would become the first prime minister of India, was invited by other socialists to Barcelona, and he passed through in the war's final months.
• As part of neutrality agreements the French were obligated to block fighters from crossing into Spain. A Nationalist submarine sank the passenger ship MV Ciudad de Barcelona, killing 200+, and Republican artillery sank the troop ship SS Castillo de Olite, killing almost 1,500 in the final days of the war. I think I could do a video on the navy, blockade, and/or submarines active during the war.
• A post in AskHistorians asked if any of the German volunteers joined the Nazi military in World War II. The book reports a rumor of a Lithuanian volunteer spotted in a uniform, and a historical puzzle over an IRA member (Frank Ryan) who went to Germany and appears to have participated in planning spying or subverting the UK from Ireland.

In the present day - after an ominous slogan appeared on a DHS podium, one thread on BlueSky claimed that it was a Franco slogan. Replies would debate the authenticity of the image, or show [same-day] results from Google search and its AI summary, but struggled to grasp that their evidence pointed against it being an old Spanish slogan.
Later I saw a claim that it was from Nazis in Czechoslovakia, which was discredited on AskHistorians. It's odd that two mythologies appeared at once, and neither provided the phrase in the source language which would be googleable. 🤔

Pinball

I found the old Windows pinball game online and got back into it. This got me interested in researching whether there is a DIY pinball community. This is one of the weirder hobbies where you can get a $50 kid toy, or spend $10k on a full-sized fully-built machine. Usually people collect their favorites or restore a "project" machine.
There is a "pindev" Slack but reddit has only one pinball subreddit for gamers and devs.
P3 is the Android of pinball with a baseboard screen and a couple dozen top modules available. It's programmed in Unity / C#. Although this machine does have tactile components, it does look like a large part of the gameplay is the video screen? And even if price were no object and noise no concern, making a brand new module looks like it'd take a good workshop, and a 3D printer. I was expecting to find a Sparkfun / Adafruit type store with a variety of weird-looking bumpers and components, and the closest I found was PinballLife.

Previous Reads

The "Dead Eyes" podcast guy has a series of shows, "The Acting Class", in the past ~year which I would describe as improv show based on conversations with the audience about being an actor. This is an episode with D'Arcy Carden: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJaAY89ZIcM

In the final stretch of the Taiping video, I found some interesting info about Chen Yucheng (English wiki says only that he failed to take Wuhan and was executed by the Qing, the Chinese wiki says he was betrayed by Miao Peilin, a leader in the Nian Rebellion). And Li Xiucheng - whose reputation yo-yos between extremes in 20th-century China - part of that is from a Guangxi government historian finding old letters in 1944, in the family home of a Manchu general. A lot of this I wouldn't even know to look for, but some sketchy ebook sites have the text somewhere it can be read by Google.

(this is an older note, but could be interesting) Meta AI Translation appeared in some posts in my Instagram feed. Info says "This reel is translated into your default language using Meta AI to simulate the speaker's voice and sync their lips to match. You can choose to view the reel in other languages below". At first I thought it might have been convincingly translated, but the Spanish version didn't look right. On further review, the English script says "ventouse" (a type of vacuum / suction used to help deliver a baby) and the Spanish one says "forceps". Oops.

There are at least two people on BlueSky who use the Sark emoji for anything Royal Navy, even though that flag has a Union Jack in the top left. I also see some Japanese posts, but I don't know why they use it.

Suddenly spontaneously remembered The Littles book series, and a jingle from a kids movie.

The Moonies' Washington Times continues to post in favor of Republika Srpska independence.

Minneapolis Skywalk hours and access rules puzzling to residents https://www.reddit.com/r/Minneapolis/comments/1pcaqec/one_minute_tours_guy_being_kicked_out_of/

Study on "prebunking" misinformation https://misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu/article/prebunking-misinformation-techniques-in-social-media-feeds-results-from-an-instagram-field-study/

An art historian who helped restore Bosnian libraries has died https://sarajevotimes.com/andras-riedlmayer-voice-of-bosnias-destroyed-libraries-at-the-hague-has-passed-away/

AI role in medical diagnosis and reluctance to accept doctor's treatment: https://buildcognitiveresonance.substack.com/p/the-role-of-ai-in-the-death-of-my

I follow a subreddit called BrandNewSentence. After reading an ideal BrandNewSentence, you can tell was never uttered before because it is so absurd, ingenious phrasing, or something which could happen only in our futuristic hellscape. The top posts are a lovely mix of absurd and profound. But the subreddit inevitably attracts generic humor, news, and trends. Events are happening and new sentences made each day, so I have a conservative upvote/downvote for whether something is Brand New. I think that people are too quick to upvote dumb tweets, which are engagement bait and often just the same old racist sentences.