The Soviet Union, for its part, sided in 1936 with the Communist faction of the Popular Front then ruling the fledgling republic — again, for obvious reasons, Communism came to the rescue of its ideological kith and kin.

Today's equivalent in the Syrian theatre is the loose Sunni Islamic coalition of Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, whose funding and weaponry go to the 21st-century Syrian version of the International Brigades — the local jihadi chapters.

In 1936, Western democracies largely stood on the sidelines, paralysed by a prolonged and harsh economic crisis but also by, first, their delusional commitment to preserving the status quo and then, once the civil war began to take its toll, because they would eventually have to choose between bad and worse. 

With caveats, today's situation is not much better. Rather than helping more moderate forces organise and arm themselves under Western air cover, the West gave the role of choosing whom to support to a megalomaniac Islamist, Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The result — surprise! — is that Kurds and liberals were sidelined in favour of Muslim Brotherhood types.

Spanish Republicans, left to their own devices, relied heavily on Moscow's military aid and the enthusiastic influx of the International Brigades — a volunteer army raised chiefly, though not exclusively, by European Communist parties. Syria's beleaguered opposition is bleeding influence, similarly, to Jabhat-al-Nusra, the al-Qaeda loyalists who, with military and financial support from Gulf Wahhabis, are giving grief to loyalist forces.

If they win it will be ugly. If they lose it may be worse. Our early excuse for non-intervention — namely, that support for opposition forces would boost Sunni jihadis, an enemy even worse than Syria's dictatorship — turned out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.