Sharing Guernica
Do you ever question how the information we share is shaping not just our minds, but history? If you looked at the length of this post and thought “nope too many words”...maybe you should think more about that question. This painting is Guernica by Pablo Picasso. It’s been my favorite painting ever since I chose to write a paper on it in elementary school. I had no idea what it was about. I just thought it was a funny looking picture. Turns out it’s about a fascist massacre during the Spanish civil war. Perfectly normal content for a weird 5th grader.
Spain fell into civil war after the minority far right nationalist party staged a coup in 1936. Prior to the coup the country was so polarized it had fallen into factional anarchy with militia’s loyal to their political views warring in the streets. After the left won the 1936 election by a narrow 1% margin the right began to conspire to overthrow the Republic. Initially the intent of the coup was to restore democratic order, but it quickly fell into a military dictatorship under general Francisco Franco.
As the coup devolved into civil war both sides made deals with their greater devils. The nationalists under Franco sought help from Nazi Germany & Fascist Italy. Those loyal to the former democratic republic aligned themselves with communists and the Soviet Union. Both would help destroy Spain to pursue their own interests & Guernica is it's most famous scar.
Guernica is a small rural town in the northern Basque region of Spain. Franco had given approval to the German air force to bomb northern military targets. Unbeknownst to him, or the world, the German strategy didn’t involve bombing traditional military targets. It involved bombing strategic areas with a new tactic called "blitzkrieg."
Over a 3 hour period the German luftwaffe carpeted Guernica with bombs & incendiary explosives that under traditional military tactics would’ve been spread out over several days. There wasn’t a loyalist base or military installation in the city. There was a road & a bridge the Germans viewed as essential for loyalist retreat. They missed the bridge, but because most of the men from the town were on the front lines (many fighting for the nationalists) they did hit the town’s remaining citizens...mainly women and children. The families of their own soldiers.
Two days later English journalist George Steer broke news to the world about what occurred in Guernica. His story caused shock & outrage because it was one of the first reported bombings on a civilian population, and the world had never seen bombing on that scale. It offered the first glimpse of the brutality that was being carried out by the fascist regimes in Europe, and was an ominous warning of what was yet to come.
Backlash led to Franco and Berlin denying the bombing occured. Both claimed the loyalists had filled the sewers with dynamite & bombed their own people in retreat. They used flaws in Steers reporting to claim his entire report was a fraud. Steers piece was collaborated by other journalists with photos of German planes and bomb casings. Those loyal to the fascists claimed the journalists were communists conspiring with the Soviets. In the weeks that followed Spain fell to Franco and a fascist government was installed that lasted until Franco’s death in 1975. Franco denied involvement in the bombing of Guernica all the way to his death.
Picasso, a Spaniard who was in exile in Paris at the time, was so inspired by Steer’s story that he painted the now infamous Guernica for the 1937 Paris Exposition. The painting drew international attention to civilian suffering due to the violence of war, and helped push back on the nationalist narratives of civilian heroism pumped out as propaganda to bolster the lies of the fascists.
One of the things I love about Guernica is it’s such a simple painting, but if you don’t learn about the history of Guernica itself it’s just a funny looking picture. The picture is loaded with symbolism, but if you read into it too much, it also loses its meaning. When asked about the symbolism in the painting Picasso said “the horse is a horse. The bull is a bull. If you give a meaning to certain things in my paintings it may be true, but it may not be my idea to give this meaning. I make the painting for the painting. I paint the objects for what they are.” The point was to visually document an idea that transcends a moment in history, and of all the symbolism in this painting, the most obvious is the most overlooked. It’s in the medium itself. Picasso used a flat house paint without gloss, and he only used black, white, and light blue because he wanted it to look like the photos in a newspaper. He was using his medium (art) to expand the message and emotions of another medium (print) further.
Marshall McLuhan is known for coining the phrase “the medium is the message,” which means the medium by which a message is being communicated is more important than the meaning or content of the message because the medium itself introduces a new pattern of thinking and feeling into human behavior. For example, with Guernica, the content of Speers article was about a single event in a foriegn war, but the medium of print journalism allowed that story to be replicated across the globe and made the story about more than the people of Guernica. It changed the public attitude towards war and the fascist regimes growing in Europe because it brought that single event into the living rooms of people all over the world. The medium of the press communicated the brutality being inflicted on civilians. That attitude was then reflected further by Picasso’s painting, a new medium, that brought focus to how the brutality of war itself leads to the suffering of innocent civilians.
Guernica as an event was the result of a civil war of ideas where objective truth became so abstract human life lost meaning. Guernica as a painting is an abstract that pursues an objective truth about life by asking you to reconstruct the tragedy of death. Guernica is a symbol of that transmission of ideas from one medium to another. The message of Guernica appealed to our better angels. Is the same true of the messages in our mediums today?
All media is Guernica. Social media is Guernica. It’s all an imperfect rearrangement of information to create a message, that will then be rearranged further by other mediums, in a civil war for attention. It can help create atrocities, reveal them, or prevent them. But it’s up to us as the audience to reconstruct the truth by understanding the message in the medium. Otherwise the medium will determine which message we ingest.
Like Picasso’s Guernica, if we only focus on the message based on our own preconceived beliefs, we miss the larger picture behind the medium. If we over analyze the larger picture we become conspiratorial and objectivity loses all meaning. If the only question we ask when we see a social media post is whether or not we agree with it, and we don’t bother to learn the facts, the story behind the information, or how the medium itself is shaping our thoughts...we aren’t thinking. We are consuming thoughts that suit our polarized appetites as we’re being consumed by the medium itself. But we do have a choice. We can allow information to be curated for us so we can be our own fascist dictators censoring objective truths in favor of abstract lies to appease our socialized minds. Or we can admit the truth. We’re all just consuming fragments of ideas in a funny looking picture and its our responsibility to find, learn & accept the uncomfortable truths in the larger message in the medium.
Guernica is arguably the greatest war painting ever made, but it’s also a meme. It conveys an idea about suffering and war that has been relatable to every conflict since its creation. It’s success is not based on eliciting melodrama or because it tells us what to think & feel. What makes Guernica successful is it asks you to think about how you feel. It plucks the heart strings just enough to reverberate into cerebral action. But if you don’t bother to learn about the facts and history behind the meme, it’s just a funny picture you can only understand from the perspective of a 5th grader. If you approach what you consume online from that same perspective how long before the parallels in Guernica’s history are reconstructed into our own?
