Today in Labor History April 26, 1937: The Nazis and Italian fascists bombed Guernica, a town in the Basque region of Spain, at the request of Spanish fascist leader, Francisco Franco. Later that year, Picasso painted his famous painting, Guernica, in protest of the atrocity. This was during the Spanish Civil War. The Republicans, a coalition of anarchist, socialist and communist partisans, were fighting the fascists, led by Franco. They bombed Guernica for two hours, killing between 1,000 and 3,000 civilians, or 20-60% of the population.
Some of the most unforgettable images from the Guernica painting include dismembered bodies, a weeping woman, and a dead baby, images that we’ve seen repeated so often in the current Israeli genocide on Palestine. In December 2023, not long after the Genocide in Gaza began, the people of Guernica, dressed in red, black, white and green, formed a human mosaic of the Palestinian flag incorporated into an image from Picasso’s Guernica, while sirens blared in the background. If you go to almost any town in the Basque Country today, you’ll see lots of Palestinian flags hanging from apartment windows, in solidarity with the Palestinian people.
#workingclass #LaborHistory #fascism #antifascism #nazis #guernica #picasso #basque #spain #CivilWar #anarchism #socialism #communism #gaza #israel #genocide #freepalestine #euskadi
