The Significant Owl Hoots in the Night

This was the beggining of the current form of the US fascist movement and it underpins the entire thing about it to this day. If you live in the US and Gamergate isn't familiar to you, you're missing critical history to understanding US fascism. I'm not joking even a little bit here, you will understand modern United States fascism so much better if you are familiar with Gamergate.

Well, one famous thing about the Spanish Civil War is the International Brigades: volunteers, largely in highly varied shades of leftism, from all over Europe and the world who showed up to fight the fascists. (Anglophone readers may recall Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls and Orwell's Homage to Catalonia.) So alongside the songs in Spanish and Catalan that came out of or get associated with the war, there are many International Brigades songs in English, German (yes, lots of German communists and other anti-fascists in the '30s went off to fight fascism where it seemed vulnerable), Italian (ditto), French, and this collection appears to have at least one each in Czech, Polish, Hungarian, and one that's attributed to "Yugoslavia" but I do not have the South Slavic expertise to tell you what language it is in. Not a song, but I have seen a poster specifically recruiting Esperantist volunteers. Very multilingual environment already.

And then... the Spanish Republic lost. The fascists won. The songs went pretty quiet in Spain. But the international volunteers that survived and went home kept singing them. And so did one of their sympathizers: Pete Seeger, whose recording Songs of the Lincoln Brigade introduced many of them to a broader audience. On that album you can hear Seeger singing songs in both English and Spanish:

Or how about the German communist volunteer and singer Ernst Busch doing the "Song of the United Front" in Spanish, English, French, and German:

(oh gosh my YouTube music recommendations are going to be so communist for a bit. That's all right, they've been quite Jacobite lately so that will balance it out.)

Of course, fascism in Spain didn't last forever, and today many singers and groups in Spain do perform and record the same songs. ... Including the International Brigade ones. (Unfortunately I can't track it down, so this may not be true to any extent at all, but I have read a remark somewhere [possibly in someone's liner notes?] that after the death of Franco, young people in Spain rediscovered these songs specifically through Pete Seeger's recordings...!)

So you can find the Catalan "Quartet Brossa" singing the Italian Bella Ciao:

Or the evidently Spanish-speaking "Coro Popular Jabalón" doing their best American English in the soldiers-complaint song "Quartermaster Store":

On the same album they have a song in Basque:

And so on and so on.

(You may have noticed Spain's minority languages, including Catalan and Basque, making a good showing here: that's no accident, those were evidently quite republican areas, as will not surprise you if you know anything about Franco's language policy.)

Anyway those are the main historical reasons I'm aware of why music from and about Spanish Civil War is so multilingual. Obviously my original claim that "almost nobody is ever singing in their native language" had an element of hyperbole - the Americans do sing songs in English (as do the Irish), the Spanish in Spanish, the Germans in German, and of course the Catalans in Catalan. But if you look for Spanish Civil War music, many of the "standards" you'll find are International Brigades songs, many others are Catalan as well as Spanish, so no matter what your native language is you will have plenty of songs that aren't in it.

And apparently you sing them anyway. Because, at least for the people making these records, it seems it's not about where you're from, or even whether your accent is any good, it's about standing side by side.

Heather flowers along the mountain stream - Isle of Skye, Scotland, August 2025

photo by: nature-hiking

Marjane Satrapi, Iranian-French author of graphic novel 'Persepolis', dies aged 56 - https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/marjane-satrapi-iranian-french-author-graphic-novel-persepolis-dies-aged-56-2026-06-04/

So ok look. The point is not the flared leg by itself. These cannot be yoga pants. These are, and you have to understand this if you are too young to have worn them, BLUE JEANS. And this was the last years before all jeans were 70% spandex.

They were denim, and they weren't bell bottoms. They hung loose from the knee in a way that would make a wizard envious. We all walked around like we were wearing hakama. And they dragged on the ground. That was important. Ragged cuffs. If your jeans weren't so long that they had ratty cuffs, they were embarrassingly short.

And the thing about denim is that it's a twill weave and it's cotton. So not only does it hold a lot of water, it wicks. Walking around in these suckers on a wet day could get you wet to the knees even if you never stepped in a puddle.

Then you'd go inside and take off your shoes and try to avoid letting your freezing, wet, filthy pant legs touch your skin.