Manic Street Preachers - ‘If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next’

It's a strange testament to the power of the Manics' anti-fascist No. 1 hit that the far right can't seem to get enough of it. It's been used not only by the EDL to promote a march, but by the BNP, as a stirring soundtrack to an article about the evils of multiculturalism. Except actually, the BNP claimed, it had just accidentally fallen there, and anyway, ”You can interpret the lyrics any way you want.” Except you really can’t, can you? You might not expect the average BNPer to pick up the snatches of workers' global solidarity anthem The Internationale being played on a music box at the video’s start and end, but there’s not much room for misinterpretation in, “If I can shoot rabbits, then I can shoot fascists”, other than for the sorts of people who, in both a literal and metaphorical sense, only ever listen to choruses. That line comes from Miners Against Fascism, a book about the Welshmen who joined the International Brigades in the fight against Franco’s fascists, during the Spanish civil war, written by historian and former Aberavon Labour MP Hywel Francis (his successor Stephen Kinnock, incidentally, shared an office with Jo Cox). ‘If You Tolerate This’ declares its colours proudly, a song about the courage it takes to make a stand, and whether we can still summon it. “It’s about standing up to any evil, and how people today don’t know how lucky they are,” Nicky Wire explained on the song’s release, but rather than hectoring, the band themselves are included in that critique. “I’ve walked La Rambla, but not with real intent”, sings JDB sadly. “It was a song that was dripping with loss,” he said later. “The sentiments were saying, ‘I want to feel like people used to feel, I want to have as much courage of my convictions as people four decades ago.’” The verse feels weighed down by its own inadequacy; those dry drums, that downbeat rhythm, that paranoid, chewed-up shiver of Wurlitzer. It makes the soaring reaffirmation of that irresistible chorus all the more poignant; doubt is buoyed up, not swept away, in a great breath of cold synth strings as the song’s title of the song, a slogan from a Republican recruiting poster, becomes not a rebuke, but a credo, one you’ve suddenly realised that you could, that you should live up to. It’s seriously rousing stuff. No wonder the fascists wanted it for themselves.
Emily Mackay