FAR-RIGHT racist ideology is on the rise, militarism on the rampage and the drumbeat of world war grows louder.

All this would sound depressingly familiar to those men and women who, 90 years ago, first took up arms against fascism.

The signal was Spain. A revolt led by General Franco with backing from Hitler and Mussolini was attacking the country’s elected Popular Front government.

Anti-fascists from around the world rallied to Spain’s cause. The cry was “No pasaran!”

Behind the fig leaf of “non-intervention,” Britain and the Western powers helped Franco defeat the Spanish Republic. Appeasement and hatred of socialism and communism were the order of the day.

The volunteers who crossed the Pyrenees to join the fight warned there would be a world war unless fascism was stopped in Spain. They were proved right.

I remember my granddad in Bolton telling me about the brave men and women of the International Brigades and how the world should have listened to them.

Since then I’ve always been inspired by their story. I’m proud to be a patron of the International Brigade Memorial Trust and a vice-president of the Marx Memorial Library, where archives of the International Brigades and the Spanish civil war are held.

“If you tolerate this, your children will be next,” warned a Spanish Republican poster above a picture of a child killed in a fascist air-raid. Picasso’s Guernica was painted in response to these crimes.

That message, still unheeded, is just as powerful and relevant today as it was in Spain between 1936-39.

The world may not have listened to International Brigades. But their example lives on. And their warnings about the rise of militarism, fascism and the far right ring as true now as they did then.