If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next (4:49)

“If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next” is a song by the Manic Street Preachers, released as the first single from their fifth studio album, This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours, with lyrics written by Nicky Wire (credited as Nick Jones), and music written by James Dean Bradfield and Sean Moore. It was released on August 24, 1998 and became the first of the band’s two number one singles in the United Kingdom to date. The song is in the Guinness World Records as the number one single with the longest title without brackets. It is the only Manic Street Preachers track ever to be released as a single in the United States, where it was a minor hit on Modern Rock radio.

The song was about the Spanish Civil War, and the idealism of volunteers from around the world who joined the International Brigade fighting Franco’s military rebels against the Spanish Republic.

The song takes its name from a Republican poster of the time. A photograph of a young child killed by Nationalist bombs is shown under a sky of bombers with the stark warning “If you tolerate this, your children will be next” written at the bottom.