Winning hearts and minds: propaganda of the Spanish Civil War
History, as the aphorism frequently attributed to Winston Churchill would have it, is written by the victors. This certainly holds true of the Bayeux Tapestry. However, there are of course exceptions – one of the most glaring examples being the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39. If British audiences know anything about the conflict at all, they will have likely come to it via supporters of the defeated Republicans, such as George Orwell or Ernest Hemingway, or having seen Ken Loach’s ‘story from the Spanish revolution’, Land and Freedom. As the German historian Reinhart Koelleck has pointed out: ‘While the victors impose their view of the past in the short term, it is the defeated who advance historical knowledge because they are forced to ask why they lost.
