Guernica
Pablo Picasso (1937), Guernica
Seventy years ago today, on the afternoon of April 26, 1937, a group of twenty-nine German and Italian airplanes, commanded by Wolfram Freiherr von Richthofen and acting on direct orders from the Spanish Command, attacked the Basque town of Gernika in northeastern Spain. Gernika (Spanish: Guernica), with a population of about 5,000 regular residents and a large number of refugees from the fighting elsewhere, was completely unarmed. The airplanes had been provided by the fascist powers to aid Francisco Franco’s Nationalist forces during the Spanish Civil War. The bombers dropped explosives and incendiary bombs in five waves of bombardment, while the fighters strafed the streets with machine gun fire. The incendiary bombs created a firestorm that destroyed three-quarters of the buildings in Guernica, with most of the rest heavily damaged. The Basque government estimated that about 1,600 civilians were killed in the attacks, and about 900 wounded.
May 24th, 2007 at 4:48 am
I want to start telling you I’m descendant of republican soldiers. My two grandfathers, their brothers, and the brothers of one of my grandmas, all they, fought for the republic. The other grandma was a single daughter. After the war one brother~in~law of one of my grandmas was an antifrancoist guerrillero and finally had to escape to france. Another member of my family was executed for being a ‘miliciano’. My family has been lefty for four generations, including myself.
So I`m not very suspicious of francoist supporting…
But I love truth. Specially in such a stereotyped and manipulated event like the Guernica aerial bombing, so propagandistically used over decades. And your staments reflect all the propaganda manipulations. It is not your fault; your are another victim.
“commanded by Wolfram Freiherr von Richthofen and acting on direct orders from the Spanish Command,”
May 28th, 2007 at 1:29 am
Guernica was long ago proven to be war time propaganda. Do you still believe in the rape of the Belgian nuns, too? It is normal and extremely common for each side to lie about the other.