Originally posted on sciy.org by Rich Carlson on Tue 25 Mar 2008 04:54 PM PDT
On the five year anniversary week of the Iraq war what can one say? Hundreds of thousands dead, millions of refugees, a nation in civil war, and no real end in sight. A war that even former head of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan concedes was fought over oil. One can only turn to images and here is Picasso whose depiction of the slaughter at Guernica Spain as a result of German bombing, is considered one of his most important paintings. I will post a link to U tube video by the same title which unfortunately subjects Guernica to the eternal return of the same.
Here is a bit of History
The German bombers appeared in the
skies over Guernica in the late afternoon of April 26, 1937 and
immediately transformed the sleepy Spanish market town into an
everlasting symbol of the atrocity of war. Unbeknownst to the residents
of Guernica, they had been slated by their attackers to become guinea
pigs in an experiment designed to determine just what it would take to
bomb a city into oblivion.
Hitler's support of Franco consisted of the Condor Legion, an adjunct of the Luftwaffe. The Condor Legion provided the Luftwaffe the opportunity to develop and perfect tactics of aerial warfare that would fuel Germany's blitzkrieg through Europe during 1939 and 1940. As German air chief Hermann Goering testified at his trial after World War II: "The Spanish Civil War gave me an opportunity to put my young air force to the test, and a means for my men to gain experience." Some of these experimental tactics were tested on that bright Spring day with devastating results - the town of Guernica was entirely destroyed with a loss of life estimated at 1,650. The world was shocked and the tragedy immortalized by Pablo Picasso in his painting Guernica:
Iraq/Guernica U tube
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