Echoes of Guernica Past

 It happened on April 26, 1937:

". . . at this moment, Viscayan ruins still smoldered from the bombing raid that screaming  wehrmacht air-monsters had inflicted  three weeks ago at Guernica. Even now, the unholy cloud was  escalating to previously unknown heights of stratospheric iniquity, having been spewed from godless National Socialist bombers  as they dumped  metallic sacrilege upon the sacred Spanish earth and its people. Now the smoke spiraled high into Basque air; it drifted over the Pyrenees, defying all the better angels of modern man, and strewing blasphemous carnage beneath the warring winds of a fallen world.

      But over In Paris, a surreal bull's head was emerging from blank canvas. The unbridled  painter from Spanish Andalusia smote brushstrokes of black and white oils, revolutionary paint,  mournful black and gauzy white they were—to declare a pleading indictment soon to be slapped upon the face of clueless Europe, unveiled at the unlikely venue of a fashionable World Exposition in the French capital."

Excerpt from my historical fiction novel, Smoke, about what happened at Guernica, Spain, on April 26, 1937

Pablo Picasso's world-famous mural, Guernica, was originally unveiled at an international exposition in Paris in summer of 1937, only months after the actual bombing. Later, the mural was relocated, to be permanently displayed in  Picasso's native Spain. We saw it a few years ago at the Art Museum in Madrid.

Today. . . last week, the week before that, the week before that, the week before that, the destructive scene pictured artistically above is being reenacted in destructive reality across an entire nation, Ukraine.

But in today's version of airborne destruction, the bombers are not inflicting nationwide damage on a Guernica, Spain. Today's bombers are not launched, as they were in 1937, by Hitler's Third Reich  doing their first Wehrmacht practice run. No,

Now, the terrible droning and deadly payloads are being unloaded on Mariupol, Odesa, Kiev, Kharkiv and over many more  cities across Ukraine. They are dropped from Russian bombers, sent by their chief commander, the mad dictator Vladimir Putin.

These bombings today are real, present-day, haunting echoes of the earliest days of World War II. Let us hope and pray that we are not witnessing the start of another mad dictator's mass-murderous grudge in a multi-year--or even multi-month--reign/rain of destruction.

Smoke