What we see here is a painting which US Secretary of State Colin Powell does not want to be seen and photographed with. It is by Pablo Picasso and it is entitled Guernica.
Guernica is a small city in the Spanish Basque country which was bombed and strafed on April 27, 1937, by German war planes which Adolf Hitler had supplied (pilots included) to the rebel general Francisco Franco.
About 17 hundred civilians including women and children -- not to mention some bulls and horses, visible in the painting -- were blown up, burned and machine gunned from the air as they tried to escape. Some historians will say that this was the first time in history that innocent non-combattant civilians were victimized in this way from the air.
Guernica represents the sort of thing the United Nations was founded in order to prevent. The original painting finally went to its present home in Madrid in 1985, but the mural tapestry which had decorated the New York State House under the governorship of Norman Rockefeller was placed on permanent loan to the U.N. by his widow.
The following quote is from an essay by the artist Mark
Vallen, published on February 5, 2003, on the web. (Click here
to go to Mark
Vallen's essay.)
| Mark Vallen writes:
"On January 27, 2003, the Guernica reproduction hanging outside the entrance of the United Nations Security Council, was covered with a large blue curtain. Press Secretary of the U.N., Fred Eckhard, said the covering provided 'an appropriate background for the cameras.' "Obviously some were concerned that Picasso's antiwar masterwork would not make a good backdrop for speeches and press conferences advocating the bombing and invasion of Iraq. [...] Picasso's work is a chilling reminder of what such military operations would mean for civilian populations. "On Feb. 5th, 2003, U.S. Secretary of State, Colin Powell spoke before the United Nations to make his case for war against Iraq. Picasso's mural was completely covered and the flags of Security Council were placed before the censored artwork. As Maureen Dowd, writing for the New York Times, wrote, 'Mr. Powell can't very well seduce the world into bombing Iraq surrounded on camera by shrieking and mutilated women, men, children, bulls and horses.' " Click HERE
to go to Mark
Vallen's Essay
|
War is about people getting killed and dismembered. War is about losing a leg or a hand at the age of ten and living the rest of one's life with a handicap. War is about watching loved ones bleed to death or die in various other disgusting ways -- e.g. of dysentery because the sewage and water systems have been hit and because there is no electricity to do a simple thing like boil water to make it safe. War is trying to take care of third-degree burn victims without any antibiotics.
Some of the bombs may be "intelligent" and laser-guided and all that. But in the Kosovo and Afghanistan campaigns, there was also a widespread use of cluster bombs, dropped in large quantities from the air. These devices work like thousands of air-delivered anti-personnel landmines. They lie around unexploded until soldiers or military vehicles roll over them -- or until children find them. In the Afghanistan campaign, there was even an unfortunate similarity in size and appearance between these cluster bombs and the packages of emergeny food rations also dropped from the air. The worst thing about these nasty little packages is that they go on killing and maiming children and adults -- not to mention horses, bulls, cows, goats and dogs! -- month after month and year after year, long after the war is over and long after the reasons for it have been forgotten.
Has anyone heard of a campaign to clean this lethal garbage
up in Kosovo, or after the war in Afghanistan was over? Has anyone
in authority announced that weapons like these will not be used in the
future? Until such assurances are forthcoming, this is just one more
reason to withhold assent for any kind of military intervention against
Iraq at this time (February 2003). Armed forces engaged in the pursuit
of supposedly just causes have a particular obligation to scrupulously
avoid
unnecessary risk to innocent civilians.
For further analysis of Picasso's "Guernica," see Jenny Grenfell's pedagogical essay "Guernica by Picasso" on the site of the School of Social and Cultural Studies in Education, Faculty of Education, Deakin University Geelong, Australia.
For more essays on the "Guernica Cover-Up" go to The Artists
Network of Refuse and Resist at http://www.artistsnetwork.org/news8/news348.html
