La feina i uns quants projectes que algun dia potser explicaré fan que no tingui temps d'actualitzar el bloc, M'estic adonant que les darreres entrades tenen una freqüència gairebé mensual.
Però aquesta nit he tingut una estona per gaudir dels diaris d'altres paissos i he tingut una sorpresa: a la portada d'avui del TimesOnline hi ha un article sobre les bombes que van caure a Guernica, de com Picasso va crear la seva obra i de com Franco va intentar amagar la veritat.
Feia uns dies que volia comentar i penjar unes notícies recents de la BBC sobre Darfur, però ho deixaré per un dia que estigui prou inspirat per recordar a tothom el que ha passat i està passant a la zona de Darfur (del que ja he parlat moltes vegades en aquest bloc).
Per cert, alguns amics em tornen a demanar perquè no parlo de notícies molt més properes (el nostre país o el nostre municipi). Els amics saben el motiu i potser algun dia també ho explicarem a tothom.
Però recuperem l'article sobre Guernica, que realment m'ha encantat trobar i llegir al Times.
Revealed: Franco's desperate attempt to hide the truth about Guernica
Reports by Times journalist George Steer outraged the world and inspired Picasso's Guernica
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-->Graham Keeley, Madrid
General Franco launched a propaganda campaign to try to counter a report by The Times that exposed the attack on Guernica during the Spanish Civil War, according to original documents.
George Steer, who was covering the war for the newspaper, revealed how the Nazi Luftwaffe Condor squadron reduced the Basque market town to rubble and unleashed a firestorm that killed 1,600 unarmed civilians.
Mr Steer’s report outraged the world and inspired Picasso’s masterpiece Guernica.
Thousands of original telegrams sent by General Franco to the Duke of Alba, the Nationalist Ambassador in London, are to go on show to the public at a new archive in Spain shortly.
They reveal the four-year campaign, waged by the man who was to rule Spain for 36 years, to counter damaging reports in the British Press and prevent their readers from supporting the Spanish Republican Government.
Three days after the devastating attack on Guernica, on April 26, 1937, Franco sent a telegram from his military headquarters in Burgos, northern Spain.
It read: “Escaping Basques recount frightening tragedies of a town like Guernica, burnt and destroyed intentionally by the Reds when our troops were only 15 kilometres away. Indignation great among Nationalist troops for slanderous Red manoeuvres, after destroying their best cities, try to lay blame Nationalist air force when this only pursues military objectives.”
But Mr Steer had already revealed the truth.
He was covering the Spanish Civil War from the Republican side and was one of the first journalists to reach Guernica, hours after the massacre. He waited before filing his report to find proof that the Nazis were responsible: three small bomb cases stamped with the German Imperial Eagle.
At this point, Nazi Germany had signed the Non-Intervention Pact and their troops were officially playing no role in the war.
Mr Steer’s report read: “Guernica was not a military objective … the object of the bombardment was seemingly the demoralisation of the civil population and the destruction of the cradle of the Basque race.”
The report appeared in The Times, was syndicated to The New York Times and went around the world.
When Picasso, who was in exile in Paris, read it, he was outraged and changed a canvas that he was preparing for an exhibition. The result was Guernica, a stark black-and-white canvas, that has come to symbolise the horror of war.
As Franco’s Nationalists faced international condemnation for the attack on defenceless civilians, which was to herald the era of total war, he sent another telegram to London.
Dated May 3, 1937, it criticised lack of coverage of the “murder of thousands of innocents in Madrid under the Presidency of the Red Government”. The telegram claimed that these “murders” were the “deliberate work of Red dinamiters [sic]”.
The efforts of Franco to counter bad publicity in the international Press extended from 1936 to 1940, even after he had crushed the Republican forces in 1939.
In thousands of telegrams, Franco’s propaganda machine sought to remind the world of the outrages it claims the Republican side committed.
They include the alleged murder of “17,000 priests”, the “theft of gold from the Bank of Spain” to Russia and the “barbarity” of the Republican militias.
In reality, though hundreds of priests were killed in the Civil War, the figure of “17,000” appears wildly exaggerated. The Republican Government did send the Soviet Union gold worth $500 million to pay for arms and support.
The documents were carefully preserved by the Duke of Alba and later stored in the Institute Cervantes in London.
Under an initiative to preserve documents relating to the Civil War and the dictatorship, they were transferred to the Historical Memory Documentation Centre in Salamanca in western Spain.
In 2006, Mr Steer was honoured with a street named after him and a bronze bust in Guernica after a 25-year campaign.
