Decisive weekend for France and for Europe
They take on a sharpness, a pungency and almost scream warning. Despite that, they are all too often set aside to make room for today’s flights of fancy dressed as political possibilities that might improve people’s lives and lift all boats.
Next Wednesday marks the 80th anniversary of one of the milestone atrocities in human history. Guernica, a Basque town in northern Spain was razed by Nazi German and Fascist Italian warplanes at the request of Franco’s Nationalists. It was a first glimpse of the hell to come for so many other European and Russian towns. It was the first time an undefended town was so devastated by an attack from the air.
“Guernica, city with 5,000 residents,” the commander of Hitler’s Condor Legion, Wolfram von Richthofen, recorded, “has been literally razed to the ground. Bomb craters can be seen in the streets. Simply wonderful.” His celebratory tone was not shared by George L Steer writing in the London Times two days later. He reported the attackers’ strategy seemed clear. First, he wrote, came the heavy bombs and grenades to drive the population into panic. Then came the machine-gun strafing to drive them underground. Finally, came the incendiary bombs to destroy their hiding places.
Picasso immediately created one of the great anti-war works. His huge, searing Guernica was completed two months later and still screams with the outrage, the agony it expressed when unveiled.
Tomorrow, the first round of France’s presidential election takes place. It is deeply concerning that one of the front runners, the Front National’s Marine Le Pen, is, no matter how she might rebrand her party, far closer to Franco’s Nationalists and his fascist allies than any other post-war European politician to climb so high in the polls. Her anti-EU tirades, her racism, her suggestions that nationalism is the only way forward are far too close to the influences that made von Richthofen rejoice at Guernica’s destruction.
That she is in this position just a week after Turkey granted something pretty close to absolute power to the dictatorial President Erdogan, and days after British Prime Minister Theresa May called an election that may copper-fasten the Tory extreme right’s grip on power, is at least sobering. That it comes while Donald Trump rules from the White House, Vladimir Putin from the Kremlin and Kim Jong-un persists with North Korea’s nuclear tests challenges the most optimistic, the most determinedly positive outlook.
History teaches us that when momentum reaches a certain point it becomes a decisive factor, a player in events. Were Le Pen elected, and that is not by any means certain, that would be another step back towards the horrors of the past. Few nations have as many reasons to remember the lessons of bitter history as the French. Let us hope they understand them as well as they remember them, because they are the central players in another decisive weekend for Europe.
