In 1938 Ernest Hemingway reported on the Spanish Civil War, which he saw as a chance for democracies to stop the spread of fascism before it engulfed the world in war. He published an article, ‘Dying, Well or Badly,’ accompanied by pictures of dead soldiers from that war. He wrote: ‘If the democratic nations allow Spain to be over-run by the fascists through their refusal to allow the legal Spanish government to buy and import arms to combat a military insurrection and fascist invasion, they will deserve whatever fate that brings them. […] But no matter what excuse the democratic countries may have for their ignorance of the necessity for beating the fascists in Spain, history will label their actions in 1936 and 1937, when they refused to allow Spain to arm herself to fight their enemies, as criminal stupidity. ‘Meantime all day, and all night, it goes on. The resistance of the republican government in Spain against the first combined fascist invasion is the great holding attack to save what we call civilization. If Italy could be beaten in Spain, as Napoleon was beaten there, the Berlin-Rome-Tokyo axis would be broken before it ever had a chance to make the war it threatens. But because it has gone on so long the people who do not have to go hungry, fight and die in it, get quite tired of the whole thing. They do not even want to hear about it. ‘Perhaps these pictures will make it seem a little more real. Because those pictures are what you will look like if we let the next war come.’