THIS year sees the centenary of the Russian Revolution, but, in terms of our world today, this coming month features a more chilling anniversary. On the 26th of April, 1937, German Nazi and Italian Fascist planes bombed the Basque town of Guernica (Gernika), leading to at least one-and-a-half thousand deaths among a population of 6000.

Picasso’s painting of the attack has come to symbolise the horror of war in general. But, for me, it’s about a special type of war: the terrorism of the rich against the poor, or indiscriminate aerial bombing. Car bombs and suicide bombs are, famously, the favoured forms of poor people’s terrorism. However, if you want to control people with fear, nothing beats bombing an urban or civilian area from the air. That remains true today in our era of easily forgotten drone-bombing.

In Spain, there were other attacks, many of them. I have just returned from Barcelona, and like most tourists, I had never realised how comprehensively the city was bombed. Its beautiful gothic architecture is often only decades old, consisting of reproductions used by the Franco regime to hide evidence of mass destruction by Italian Fascist bombers.

Although you wouldn’t know it today, until the 1960s much of the southern part of el Raval, a working-class Republican neighbourhood, was left in ruins to serve as a warning against returning to left-wing ideas.

Aerial war wasn’t invented in Guernica, nor even in Spain. Indeed, Western nations led by Britain had used the tactics liberally for decades, with the caveat that these attacks never came to symbolise horror because they were conducted against “barbarian nations”, Africans, Asians and Arabs.

Arthur “Bomber” Harris, famous for his actions in World War II, once spoke of aerial bombing against Kurdish rebels in these terms. “They now know what real bombing means,” he gloated. “They now know that within 45 minutes a full-sized village can be practically wiped out and a third of its inhabitants killed or injured.” Indiscriminate terrorism requires us first to consider people as less than human. Hence, the colonies were an obvious starting point.

However, the potential of administering death from the sky caught the imagination of fascist leaders, and at Guernica they perfected it as a political tactic.

“The pilot really knows what it means to govern,” gushed Guido Mattioli in a 1936 propaganda book titled Mussolini Aviatore. “Hence there appears to be a necessary, even spiritual affinity between aviation and fascism. Every aviator is a born fascist.” The logical link to fascist thinking should be obvious. What better symbolises the glory of the racial “superman” than flying far above in the peace of the clouds and “surgically” applying destruction to helpless populations below?

Mussolini was obsessed with the terrorist potential of aerial bombardment. He understood it as a means of political control. Indeed, his air squad were known as the “terror arm” of Mussolini’s regime. Guernica was a sacred city of the Basques; Barcelona, in its own way, was a sacred city of the working class. Attacking these mostly defenceless, civilian areas was designed to weaken the morale of supporters of alternative ideologies.

Aerial terror, though, isn’t just a relic of the heyday of “big ideologies” like fascism and communism. Instead, Guernica marks the beginning of our 21-century style of war. It’s the end of warfare conducted in rural regions by large armies and the beginning of urban, aerial warfare by imperial powers designed to engineer civil wars to their advantage by inflicting surgical panic and confusion among civilians.

Last year, Obama’s final year in office, America air-dropped 26,171 bombs, or three every hour, every day. As The New York Times notes, all of this occurred under the regime of a liberal law professor who campaigned against the Iraq War and torture. Air strikes are now so banal that barely anyone seems to know or care. They aren’t even considered “warfare” anymore. Instead, drone attacks reflect America’s right to act as global policeman, a right never enshrined in law but largely tolerated under a regime of silence.

Since at least Hiroshima and Nagasaki, aerial terror has been the essence of American power. Technologically, it’s what allows the country to dominate continents thousands of miles away.

However, Russia’s recent strikes in Aleppo show that America now no longer holds the monopoly on aerial terror. Others are joining – or re-joining – the elite club of rich people’s terrorism. Moreover, America’s regular drone-bombs, far from demoralising Islamists, have replaced Guantanamo Bay as their most effective recruitment tool. Now, all Obama’s work legally justifying drones as continuing the post-9/11 mandate against al-Qaeda has landed in the small but capable hands of Donald Trump.

A famous Spanish Republican poster features a dead little girl, the victim of an aerial attack, with a squadron of Fascist aircraft lurking menacingly in the background. “The ‘military’ practice of the rebels”, it reads. The word “military” is used in inverted commas. The obvious implication is that aerial warfare involves none of the virtues and the heroism of war, and instead is the most craven form of cowardice, since it uses violent force against defenceless people.

And then, of course, the next line on the poster is immortalised by the Manic Street Preachers: “if you tolerate this your children will be next”. This refers to the consequences of moral indifference.

These lessons, I believe, apply in their own way to our era of mass, barely noticed drone-bombing. The cowardice of Western aerial power is more craven than ever. Three times an hour, every hour, every day, we administer death from thousands of miles away, as if playing a computer game in the comfort of our front room. This is now routine. We just go along with it.

But what are the consequences of moral indifference? Well, true, so far there’s little chance that our own children will be the victims of drone-bomb attacks. But this mode of warfare makes terrorist recruitment a simple process. Nothing better symbolises the decadence of the West than the image of a distant commander inflicting death on Muslim children with a Coke in one hand and a cheeseburger in the other. Such images guarantee that the War on Terror will never end.

In that sense, we make sure that our children will grow up in a state of fear, in a state of routine emergency, “security” checks and refugee panics. All we have to do is do nothing.