"If You Tolerate This . . . " - The Spanish Civil War in the Age of Total War; .

large European city from the air, a milestone in the history of modern air warfare. And it also violates a strong taboo in the description of the consequences of military violence by providing a close-up image of a civilian victim, and even more so: the corpse of a child.
The slogan "And if you tolerate this..." is both a warning and a call, from the moment of horror to a call to mobilization, action and defense. In the Republican propaganda imagery associated with the bombing of Madrid in the fall and winter of 1936/37, this linking of shock and mobilization takes on an added dimension. Another poster of the Republic's Propaganda Ministry, showing a clearly agitated woman with a small boy beneath the silhouette of a bomber squadron and a towering, gaping ruin of a house, confronts the viewer with the question "What are you doing to prevent this?" The photo of mother and child included in the picture stems from the funeral for the anarchist militia leader Buenaventura Durruti, killed in November 1936 the greatest mass demonstration in Barcelona during the Civil War. While the original photo stressed sorrow and rage, picturing the sobbing mother and a phalanx of angry raised fists of adults and children, the fist of the small boy did not appear in the poster. Here, mother and child appear as totally passive victims. By contrast, the photo of the funeral procession portrayed the mobilization of the society in face of the enemy the mobilization of the entire people, encompassing adults and children, women and men.
From their respective perspectives, the posters of 1936/37 and the hit song by the Manic Street Preachers (1998) present the Spanish Civil War as a milestone in the employment of unbridled military force and its totalization in the 20th century, projecting it as a conflict of international dimensions and universal significance. They embody an interpretation of the Civil War in Spain that has its roots in the war itself, and still retains its attraction down to today. That reading can be found in popular culture and among groups and initiatives that identify with the tradition of anti-fascism, but it extends far beyond. It also shapes down to the present influential historiographical master narratives about the Guerra Civil Española and the 1930s in Europe. Eric J. Hobsbawm saw the war in Spain as the "quintessential expression" of the contemporaneous global conflict between democracy and social revolution on the one side, and the forces of reaction and counter-revolution on the other, which brought a "notoriously anomalous and self-contained country" at the periphery of Europe very directly into the center of history. Hobsbawm, one of the "survivors of the 30s", is, like the much younger Manics, a prominent representative of the interpretation of the struggle as a "good fight": "it remains the only political cause which, even in retrospect, appears as pure and compelling as it did in 1936". Aside from the question as to how one can understand and interpret the nexus Hobsbawm postulates between democracy and social revolution, this transposing reproduces the binary logic of the war years. And that logic also has an impact on the contrary side of the political spectrum, of course with an opposite political orientation, extending all the way to the revisionist neo-Francoist journalism of our own times.


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