Your children will be next

And if you tolerate this then your children will be next

The Manic Street Preacher’s lyric unbidden, strikes its melancholy tone in my mind. The song is a rock music lament about fascism. They penned it 30 odd years ago. It alludes to events another 60 odd years before that. It’s about Spanish fascism in the 1930’s.

Here’s another line from that song,

If I can shoot rabbits, I can shoot fascists.

That’s a hot statement in today’s political climate. Imagine a cover of this Preacher’s track released today. It would be dynamite in a nitroglycerine factory.

Anyone singing such a line would be accused of encouraging violence. We’d call it “hate speech”.

The line comes from oral testimony of volunteers from South Wales who fought in the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War.

A Welsh coal miner signed up to fight and when asked about his military background, shrugged and said, “Well if I can shoot rabbits, I can shoot fascists”.

If you were born at the start of the Spanish civil war, you would be 99 years old this year. The U.N. estimates there are about 573 000 people who are 100 years old or more.

So there are a little over half a million out of 8 and a half billion of us who were breathing when that coal miner gave the Preachers that line.

The coal miner himself is long dead. We don’t know if he had children or not.

Here’s someone else from that time who is also long dead.

The man getting shot in this image might be Federico Borrell García, a Spanish republican who was fighting on the same side as the Welsh miner who equated rabbits and fascists. It might also not be Frederico because there is disagreement about whether the photo was staged or taken in the middle of battle as Robert Capa claimed.

This is an early example of documentary footage of war recorded as it happened. It is also an early example of uncertainty about whether what we are seeing with our own eyes can be believed.

Hold on to your hats folks because the question “Is it real?” is going to be increasingly difficult to answer. Our children are going to have quite a time discerning real events from the staged fabrications that technologies a gazillion times more sophisticated than Robert Capa’s black and white film camera are going to be churning out.

---

It might be worth speculating as to what acts of intolerance the Manic Street Preachers might suggest to prevent our children from being next.

Federico Garcia didn’t have children. If it is him in that photograph, he was only 24 when a fascist’s bullet knocked him over like that so we don’t know whether his conviction that he couldn’t tolerate the fascists prevented his descendants from being next.

A lot of evidence suggests that picking up a gun and hunting a fascist doesn’t often save the children. Yet the message is clear, if you tolerate fascism, it will come for you, and your children.

What say the Preachers? Maybe the song offers a clue

Bullets for your brain today
But we’ll forget it all again

We’ll forget it all again. Is it remembering that will save the children? We often remind ourselves to remember once the madness of the flying bullets has passed.

Here’s one such exhortation from 420 years ago.

Remember, remember, the 5th of November,
Gunpowder, treason and plot.
I see no reason
Why gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot.
Guy Fawkes, Guy Fawkes, 'twas his intent
To blow up the King and the Parliament
Three score barrels of powder below
Poor old England to overthrow
By God's providence he was catch'd
With a dark lantern and burning match
Holler boys, holler boys, let the bells ring
Holler boys, holler boys
God save the King!

Guy Fawkes clearly decided not to tolerate Protestant rule and restrictions on Catholics in England and planted gunpowder kegs under parliament with the intent of overthrowing the government and freeing Catholics from oppressive rule. He was caught before he could blow the king and his lords sky high and leapt off the gallows at his public execution to avoid the worst part of his punishment. He was to be ripped apart by horses, a grisly affair called “quartering”.

The king certainly didn’t tolerate his rebellion.

Guy also didn’t have children so we don’t know if his intolerance prevented them from being next.

Now, 4 centuries of alternating cycles of peace and war, later, Guy Fawkes is occasionally celebrated as bonfire night on the 5th of November. It’s an excuse to let off largely harmless firecrackers. The children marvel at the bangs and sparkles. They are like noisy aides de memoire for our amnesiac minds. We can’t quite recall what memory they may be prompting.

“Oh I can’t forget, I can’t forget, I can’t forget
But I don’t remember what”
Leonard Cohen

---

Here’s another one about remembering, a punchy one-liner.

Lest we forget.

This is part of Armistice Day services. Armistice day is 11 November 1918 which was when world leaders agreed to stop sending all their young men to kill each other.

In coming to terms with the horror of what we had done to each other we borrowed one of Kipling’s lines and some lines from Laurence Binyon who witnessed those horrors. In Armistice Day commemorations and services these lines are spoken by the officiant.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.”

After this recitation, the congregation responds: “We will remember them.”

Then comes the officiant’s addition: “Lest we forget.”

---

Lest we forget indeed. In 2023, Woolworths South Africa launched an advertising campaign to celebrate 11th November. They called it singles day and it featured a display of all those 1’s lined up in a row. The byline reads “Spoil yourself today”. Here it is.

Talk about amnesia.

Here’s a reminder of what we wanted to remember.

World war one battle fatalities are estimated at 10 million. Civilian casualties are estimated at 7 million. There were an additional 20 million wounded.

There followed a global pandemic of influenza that lasted from 1918 to 1920. That killed an estimated 50 million people. One of its most compelling vectors of transmission was the marine and railway travel of soldiers returning home from the horrors of the war.

People born on Armistice Day 1918 would be 107 this November. There might be a dozen of those in the world and none of them would have any conscious memory of any of the events that killed those 70 or 80 million people.

Lest we forget.

---

While I’m reminded of World War One here’s the words of Wilfred Owen, one of those killed in that war. He died in the last week of the war. News of his death reached his family on the first armistice day, 11 November 1918.

Singles day.

He was single and he also had no children. He was 25, one year older than Federico who Robert Capa photographed in 1936, just before the next bout of amnesia gripped us in the second world war.

Here’s some of Wilfred’s words

I am the enemy you killed, my friend.
I knew you in this dark: for so you frowned
Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.
I parried; but my hands were loath and cold.
Let us sleep now. . . .

These beautiful words are exchanged between two souls who meet in hell.

I am the enemy you killed my friend.

It’s worth remembering that, as an act of intolerance of the amnesia that scours our present with such violence.

Here are the Preachers.