The bombing of Gernika, the beginning of an era of terror that culminates in Mariupol

One of the streets of Gernika (Bizkaia) after the bombardment by the Condor Legion on April 26, 1937. Sabino Arana Foundation.

“The Second World War began in my town, Gernika”, wrote the journalist Manu Leguineche in the first sentence of his book about that conflict,

.

Then came all the other disasters, all the cities and countries leveled under bombs when they weren't even a military target: Conventry, Dresden, Hiroshima, Vietnam, Grozny, Aleppo, and now Mariupol, the southern Ukrainian city leveled during the Russian invasion. .

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Gernika does not want any more 'gernikas'

When he addressed the Congress of Deputies at the beginning of April, the Ukrainian president Volodímir Zelensky recalled that bombardment by the German Condor Legion, which took place on April 26, 1937, 85 years ago this Tuesday, over the town of Bizkaia.

The destruction of the city became a symbol of the barbarism of all wars thanks to Pablo Picasso's

—a painting whose arrival in Spain from New York in 1981 also embodied the definitive end of Francoism—.

But Zelensky's comparison goes beyond symbols.

Gernika was not the first indiscriminate bombardment against the civilian population, but it was the first time that an entire city was wiped off the map —90% of the buildings were damaged— in a few hours.

First location of Pablo Picasso's 'Guernica', in the Casón del Buen Retiro, in 1981. Manuel P. Barriopedro (Efe)

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Gernika, 80 years after the bombing

On the rue de Rivoli in Paris, a plaque still recalls the German artillery attacks during the First World War, when war and industrial power were first united.

Any Parisian could be the victim of an artillery attack at any time, just as any inhabitant of any city in Ukraine, no matter how far from the front, can become a victim of a Russian missile attack.

But Gernika meant one more step in that strategy of indiscriminate attacks against civilians: terror through the power of mass destruction became a war strategy, something that had begun in Madrid, the first European city constantly bombarded by aviation , with clear civilian objectives.

"The terror caused by the air and artillery bombardments guaranteed the progressive collapse of the Basque resistance," writes Paul Preston in

.

The coup generals Francisco Franco and Emilio Mola not only wanted to conquer, but also to destroy, terrify, subdue... Gernika, a city full of refugees, was the ideal place to rehearse the horror.

Preston remembers that a Carlist officer asked a Mola lieutenant if that barbarism was necessary.

"This is what has to be done with all of Vizcaya and with all of Catalonia," replied the military coup leader.

When he spoke of Gernika, Zelenski was not only referring to a symbol, but to a way of conceiving war, shared by Russian President Vladimir Putin, in which civilians are not collateral victims, but directly a target.

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