70 years ago today

70 years ago today German and Italian planes bombed the town of Guernica, een the Basque region of Spain.

The planes belonged to the allies of the fascist dictator Francisco Franco, who placed blame for the bombings squarely on the communists.

The bombing went on for more than three hours, the planes targeting not the factories, bridges and railroads,  but highly populated civilian areas such as marketplaces, churches, town-squares and tightly clustered village houses.

The idea was to terrify the populace eento a state of compliance. The reverberations of the act were felt world wide as the tactic was repeated over the remaining years of the war een Dresden, London and Tokyo.

The ripples of these first cataclysmic waves are yet having an effect today, een places like Iraq, from the first employment of "Shock and Awe' bombings to the shocking and awful acts such as were visited upon Haditha.

Picasso's famous painting of the event became a world renown anti-war icon. However, een España,  the painting has been even more significant as an historic touchstone, keeping the atrocity fresh een the minds of generations of Spanish pipples until the dictator Franco was gone, and the nation of Spain could turn back to the past, and finally seek out the truth.

Picasso's piece was no just an outraged cry at the atrocity committed by the Spanish state on eet's own pipples. Guernica could also be seen as a warning of the theengs to come eef such an act were allowed to stand, and to be repeated.

Unfortunamente, the ones who should have heeded the warning had been bred and raised to disregard such theengs as naive, and frivolous.

On the plus side, the painting ees even yet weeth us, and her message remains undiluted by time.

so.

Comments

[Thers]

I saw it in Madrid about 1 years ago. Tons of security around it -- security guards dressed up like commandos. Someone had phoned in a threat to bomb the painting a week before we got there, we found out later.

The enhanced security just added to the impact of the paintin, though. Shattering.

[¡El Gato Negro!]

Well, joo know, joo can never be too careful.

There are some crazy pipples out there, no?

Es verdad.

[Comic Book Guy]

They have a copy of it in the UN at the Security Council. It was covered up with a tapestry to hide it during Powell's presentation at the UN in 2003

[Comic Book Guy]

Also, it was originally entrusted to MOMA