Seventy-one years ago, on April 26, 1937, the German Luftwaffe used the people of Guernica in northern Spain as laboratory animals in an experiment to see what it would take to bomb a city into oblivion. The head of the German air force, Herman Goering told the tribunal at Nuremburg during his war crimes trial: "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."
Goering's Nazi flyboys rained incendiary bombs on the center of the market town of some 5,000 residents. In five bombing raids, twenty-nine planes dropped 44,000 pounds of explosives. A firestorm engulfed the central plaza of the city, and biplanes strafed the fleeing civilians with machine guns. Most of the city's buildings were either completely destroyed or severely damaged. The bombing killed 1,650 people, and wounded 889, most of them older civilians, and women, and children. The Nazi bombing of the undefended town of Guernica became the first aerial destruction of a civilian center, and it shocked the world. President Franklin D. Roosevelt correctly called it an atrocity, and Pablo Picasso immortalized it with his anguished mural, Guernica.
But within a few short years the murder of innocents from the air at Guernica was dwarfed by the 45,000 civilians killed in Hamburg, the 100,000 civilians killed in Dresden, the 130,000 killed in Tokyo, and the 280,000 killed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In early February 2003, a few days before Secretary of State Colin Powell gave his power-point presentation to the United Nations making the case that Saddam Hussein possessed "weapons of mass destruction," American officials demanded that a curtain be draped over the U.N.'s reproduction of Picasso's Guernica. They believed it would be inappropriate for Powell to make his pitch for aggressive war while standing in front of the 20th Century's most iconic protest against the inhumanity of war.
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My comment:
Trite but too true, "Those who don't study history are doomed to repeat it". Did you pay attention in your history classes? Did they even teach you anything about Guernica?
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