Mind-Munitions

The Bolshevik Revolution and the War of Ideologies
207
Coming as it did so rapidly after the crises in Europe, the Far
East, and Africa, many observers felt that the Spanish Civil War
could quite easily develop into a second world war. As in the case
of the Russian Civil War, the European powers became involved in
affairs that might at first appear to have had little to do with them.
But although the Second World War broke out in 1939, Poland,
not Spain, was the immediate cause. This was to some extent due
to the fact that Britain and France, at least, tried desperately to
limit the effects of the Spanish Civil War and prevent it from
spreading into a wider conflict by a non-intervention agreement.
Russia, Germany, and Italy, however, honoured the agreement
more in the breach. They exploited the conflict for their own
purposes and it became a major battleground in the international
propaganda war of the 1930s – a dress rehearsal for things to
come. By the late 1930s, in other words, propaganda had become
an established fact of everyday life. International broadcasting,
State-controlled cinemas and newspapers, public opinion polls,
mass rallies: all these were new features of an age characterized by
an ideological struggle with world-wide dimensions thanks to the
technology of the communications revolution. As such, truth was a
major casualty long before the actual fighting began.