Guernica: 70 years of 'shock and awe'

[Dogmudgeon]

I usually post something each year to commemorate the saturation bombing of the town of Gernika -- Guernica in the Spanish orthography -- by the Nazi Luftwaffe's Condor Legion on April 26th, 1937. The bombing killed about one-third of the population of Guernica, as well as an undetermined number of people fleeing the Civil War and visiting from other towns who customarily shopped at the town's open-air markets on Mondays.

Today, Guernica is a popular tourist spot, not for partiers (Pamplona usually gets that "honor"), but for those with an interest in history. Guernica is not only the site of the first big, internationally-reported atrocity committed by the Nazis (and at the behest of Francisco Franco), but it is also the cultural capital of the Basque people. After Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA, and Athens, Greece, it is the place strongly associated with the development of democracy.

This op-ed piece, by polymath and fellow vascophile Mark Kurlansky (author of Salt; 1968: The Year That Changed The World; and The Basque History of the World), is a brief re-telling of that atrocity with a warning for our generation, whose weapons of mass destruction far (and often) outperform those of Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco. Today, Pablo Picasso's immortal Guernica still evokes pity and pangs of conscience.

The celebrated oak tree in Guernica town square, where European democracy was re-born (the Forua, which would later inspire John Adams, assembled there), survived the attack, and is still standing. Also still standing: the world's complacency to atrocity. Mass terror, especially when sanctified by the state, has become routine and unremarkable. Only a few weeks ago, we marked Yom ha-Shoah, Holocaust Commemoration Day; yesterday, it was an observance informally known as "Guernica Day". Every such atrocity has its own somber holiday, in the hopes that perhaps the lesson of past inhumanities will be learned.

SEVENTY YEARS AGO, on April 26, 1937, at 4:40 in the afternoon when the stone-walled, medieval Basque town of Guernica was packed with peasants, shoppers and refugees for its Monday afternoon market along the riverfront, a church bell rang out. The townspeople had heard the warning before. It meant that enemy planes were approaching.

Since ancient times, Basques had gathered in this town under an oak tree to reaffirm their laws. Even today, the elected head of the Basque government travels to Guernica to take his oath of office under an oak tree, "humble before God, standing on Basque soil, in remembrance of Basque ancestors, under the tree of Guernica…."

This tree, a few thousand residents, the people who had come to the market and thousands of refugees from other parts of the Basque provinces who had fled the ongoing Spanish Civil War were the only targets. Oddly, the oak tree survived.

...

(Read the rest at the LA Times)

--p!


(Image from Wikipedia.
Replace "%58" with ":" if link does not work.)

[Hissyspit]

1. I was going to post something on Guernica this week, but had forgotten, so thank you for this!

http://www.imgred.com/

Guernica after the bombing raids by the Condor Legion

[Hissyspit]

2. Contemporary poster showing child victims of Guernica bombing:

At eleven o'clock at night the whole town was in flames, not a single house standing. The streets and the square were crammed with goods and chattels snatched from the inferno. The people are still searching for missing relatives, for wives, daughters, husbands, sweethearts and children.

- Elizabeth Wilkinson, Secretary of the Spanish Women's Committee for Help to Spain

[July]

3. Bottom of poster says "children dead in Madrid." nt

[Hissyspit]

4. Thanks for noticing that. Same war, though. I have seen photos of the dead from Guernica

but that's all that came up when I google imaged. Don't know why I didn't notice it was mislabeled in the google search.

Here's a photo that IS of children in Guernica, although they are alive. This is town hall (to the best of my knowledge) and I believe it was used as a shelter during the air raids.

http://www.imgred.com/

[Hissyspit]

5. And here's a Toby Keith album cover...

He thinks Shock and Awe is punny.

http://www.imgred.com/

[Dogmudgeon]

6. I think they actually ARE pictures of children killed at Guernica

IIRC: That is a fairly famous poster, and it was composed by the Spanish Resistance. The Fascists had special enmity for both the Basques (mainly anarcho-socialists) and the Catalonians (mainly democratic (Marxian if not Moscow-dictated) socialists), so the attack on Guernica was often presented as an atrocity against the people of Spain -- and innocent people everywhere -- as a whole.

The irony of Spanish Fascism is how cannibalistic it was. Franco had no problem oppressing the Galicians, although he was himself a Galician. Aznar, not exactly a Fascist but formed in its crucible, is partly ethnically Basque himself, but became anti-Basque, although it must be noted that this was magnified by an ETA attempt on his life in 1996.

(In recent years, ETA -- Euzkadi ta Askatasuna -- is going the way of the Irish Republican Army. Its efforts are being taken up by the political party Batasuna -- "Unity" -- much as Ireland's Sinn Fein has replaced the IRA and has renounced violence, though Batasuna is still struggling for acceptance and may still be a prohibited organization.)

--p!