Your children will be next: Bombing and propaganda in the Spanish Civil War 1936-1939 by Robert Stradling

Your childern will be next

This is a book I found out about through a review in Planet Magazine some time ago but it is particularly interesting to have read it just now while I am the middle of also reading a collection of Essays by George Orwell and to have followed it up by Arthur Koestler's Scum of the Earth. Orwell and Koestler both had personal experience of the Spanish War fighting for but ultimately disillusioned with the Spanish Republic who were the author of the Poster that gives Stradling his title and his starting point.

The Poster featuring a child killed, allegedly, at Getafe in an air raid bore the legend "If you tolerate this your children will be next", which Stradling an historian of the Spanish War began to investigate when the Manic Street Preachers took the phrase and turned it into a hit record.

What Stradling found was that the is no evidence of a raid at Getafe, and that after a brief interval the Republicans stopped mentioning and even explicitly denied it, in part because the phantom raid of Getafe could be replaced with the all to real raid on Gernika. This process of making and unmaking of an event is in strong accord with Orwell - reading his Essays (of which I will say more separately) you see that the focus of most people reading 1984 on Big Brother is perhaps a distraction.  I think for Orwell the real crime is the (re)writing of History.  Big Brother is just a symptom of the real Orwellian nightmare which is the abolition of truth - that it is a crime to state that 2 + 2 = 4 is the problem with in which the gaze of the telescreen is, almost, morally neutral.

The strange fact Stradling reveals is that in the case of the Spanish Civil War it is clear that history hasn't been written by the winners.  Not only has the non-event of the fascist air raid on Getafe remained a historical fact but the extensive use of air raids by the Republican side against civilian targets has become a non-fact - this is as true during the lifetime of Franco as it now decades after his death.  Because of Franco's links to Nazi Germany the Spanish Republic, the Allies of WWII did nothing to protect, was given (posthumously) hero's status.

We are part of this myth-making when we continue to see Nazi bombs on London and Coventry as criminal and Allied bombs on Dresden and Berlin as liberation - as if it were the case that bombs dropped by democracies could not possibly kill or main the righteous. Even our new words like collateral damage struggle to legitimise the relentless fire-stroms.

Stradling successfully kills the sacred cow of black and white readings of the Spanish Civil War - but that leaves us with the familiar task of deciding which shade of murky grey to favour.