The Red Plague

The Red Plague (La Peste rouge, 1938), made under the auspices of Jean-Marie Musy, member of the Federal Council of Switzerland between 1919 and 1934,  twice president of the Confederation, and founder of Swiss National Action Against Communism, is a propaganda initiative against the Third International by circles close to fascism. Its main argument is to affirm the defence of “Western civilization” in the face of the “Trojan horse” of Bolshevism in a number of countries which was the product of internationalization of Moscow’s revolutionary project.  The film starts with World War I and uses examples taken from a number of countries: Germany, Great Britain, Mexico, and France).

The Spanish Civil War is the subject of a short but very significant segment. It shows Spain, which is described as a traditional and Christian country, destroyed by the Comintern which lit the revolutionary spark there. The images that illustrate this strategy show the chaos, such as the burning of churches, caused by uncontrollable crowds of criminals who were let out of jail. When looked at closely, the shots used resemble those employed in other films made in Nazi Germany once Propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels realized the strategic importance of Spain for his national socialist crusade in the fall of 1936.

A comparison with Goebbels’ original project for the 1937 film Geißel der Welt (Scourge of the World), which was never shown on Hitler’s personal decision, or above all the various versions of Helden in Spanien (Heroic Spain), put together by the Berlin-based Falangist Joaquín Reig, show how images “stolen” from the enemy were a fundamental part of the Francoist propaganda strategy.

As it is a montage film, the inclusion of a sequence that was repeated ad nauseum in anti-communist propaganda is striking: the mummies of nuns found in the Las Salesas convent in Barcelona and then put on display in the atrium of the church for the anticlerical crowds. In enemy hands, these images, which had been shot by anarchist filmmakers during the anti-religious euphoria of the first days of the revolution in Barcelona and then quickly put together in Mateo Santos’ pioneering Report on the Revolutionary Movement in Barcelona (1936), were turned into a self-accusation.

Although the film reveals a lack of knowledge of the chronology of military events in Spain, it also ignores the libertarian movement, which was irrelevant at the international level, and points its accusing finger ay communism, as the shots of the arrival of Marcel Rosenberg as Soviet ambassador in Madrid demonstrate.

VSB