From Guernica to Fallujah

[CHIMO]

The Fallujah offensive has virtually disappeared from the news cycle. But history - if written by Iraqis - may well enshrine it as the new Guernica. Paraphrasing Jean-Paul Sartre memorably writing about the Algerian War (1956-62), after Fallujah no two Americans shall meet without a corpse lying between them: the up to 500,000 victims of the sanctions in the 1990s, according to United Nations experts; the up to 100,000 victims since the beginning of the invasion of Iraq, according to the British medical paper The Lancet; and at least 6,000 victims, and counting, in Fallujah, according to the Iraqi Red Crescent.

The new Guernica
Fallujah is the new Guernica. The residents of the Basque capital in 1937 were resisting the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco. Fallujah in 2004 was resisting the dictator Iyad Allawi, the US-installed interim premier. Franco asked Nazi Germany - which supported him - to bomb Guernica, just as Allawi "asked" the Pentagon to bomb Fallujah. Guernica had no air force and no anti-aircraft guns to defend itself - just like Fallujah. In Guernica - as in Fallujah - there was no distinction between civilians and guerrillas: the order was to "kill them all". The Nazis shouted "Viva la muerte!" ("Long live death") along with their fascist Spanish

What Americans and US corporate media seem incapable of understanding is that counterinsurgency operations - however massive and deadly - simply are not enough to break the back of wars of national liberation. The Fallujah offensive was a typical demonstration of the power of which Washington "chicken hawks" are fond. But if they had read their Che Guevara (Episodes in the Cuban Revolutionary War) and their General Vo Nguyen Giap (Writings) of the Vietnam resistance correctly, they would have seen that instilling fear and terror is useless as a strategy of capturing hearts and minds. No wonder the majority of Sunnis (the "water") keep supporting the resistance (the "fish") with weapons, cash and shelter, and are inclined to boycott the elections.

Nothing? Not really. The iron-clad, not-so-hidden neo-conservative agenda for the Middle East is balkanization of the Arab world - serving the interests of their allies, the Likud Party in Israel. The neo-cons want the Middle East to fracture along ethnic and tribal lines. They want Sunni against Shi'ite. They want civil war in Iraq. They want chaos, as in "the empire of chaos" as formulated by stellar French scholar Alain Joxe. Israel Shahak's The Zionist Plan for the Middle East details that to survive, Israel must become an imperial regional power by balkanizing all existing Arab states. In this scenario, a major counterinsurgency operation like Fallujah, the new Guernica, may have been the first. It certainly won't be the last.


http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/FL02Ak02.html

[indigobusiness]

1. Guernica

Guernica after the bombing.

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Motivation of the attack
The Condor Legion was assigned aerial missions throughout Spain, as Nazi Germany's prime contribution to Francisco Franco's forces. It would appear that the motivation of this particular attack was simply to terrorize the civilian population and to demoralize the Republican side.



Franco and Hitler.

Basque books burned after the advance of Francoist troops.For the Luftwaffe, the bombardment was a test of what it would take to completely destroy a city. In a sense Guernica was an experiment that would come to fruition in the Blitzkriegs of World War II. At the Nuremberg Trials, the then-marshall of the Luftwaffe, Hermann Göring declared: "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."

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Consequences of the attack

Italian troops entering destroyed Guernica.The attacks created a firestorm and destroyed nearly the entire town. Three quarters of the city's buildings were completely destroyed, and most others were damaged. Among the few buildings spared were the arms factories of Unceta and Company and Talleres de Guernica and the Assembly House (Casa de Juntas) and the Oak. The bridge, the overt target of the early Italian attack, survived.

There are no generally accepted official figures as to the number of casualties. Estimates range from as few as 120 dead to as many as 10,000, with the consensus standing close to the 1,650 that the Basque government of the time gave as the miniumum number of dead. The dead appear to have been mostly old people, women, and children.




A question about the Guernica 'tapestry' at th UN was asked on another thread:

I believe that the original painting was returned to Spain(Barcelona?) and in its place, a facsimile was hung.

I'm curious about the tapestry reference, as well. It must be a woven image? That is fascinating.

It could be that they felt a painted reproduction would've been an insult to the original, and another medium more of an homage?

---Wikipedia

Guernica at the United Nations
A tapestry copy of Picasso's Guernica is displayed on the wall of the United Nations building in New York City, at the entrance to the Security Council room. It was placed there as a reminder of the horrors of war. On January 27, 2003, a large blue curtain was placed to cover this work, so that it would not be visible in the background when Colin Powell and John Negroponte gave press conferences at the United Nations. On the following day, it was claimed that the curtain was placed there at the request of television news crews, who had complained that the wild lines and screaming figures made for a bad backdrop, and that a horse's hindquarters appeared just above the faces of any speakers. Diplomats, however, told journalists that the Bush Administration leaned on UN officials to cover the tapestry, rather than have it in the background while Powell or other U.S. diplomats argued for war on Iraq.

(Seems they felt the need to lie about even this.)