When Trigger-Happy Leaders Write History in Blood

Standing where fascists tested their cruelty for the world to come

This evening, I stood in Guernica, photographing a large replica of Picasso's famous painting mounted on a wall in the center of town. Over the past week, I have been walking the Camino del Norte from Irun, on the French border, toward Santiago de Compostela, keeping readers of my other newsletter, Daybreak Notes & Beans, informed of my progress along the way.

The rebuilt streets around me showed no noticeable scars from April 26, 1937, when Nazi Germany's Condor Legion, at Franco's request, bombed this Basque town for over three hours in what was essentially a rehearsal for the larger horrors to come. Walking this ancient pilgrim path had brought me here on a date that carries its own weight in history: June 28.

It was on this exact date in 1914 that Gavrilo Princip, a 19-year-old Bosnian Serb, shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie as they rode through Sarajevo. Hundreds died that day in Guernica compared to two people in Sarajevo. Yet Princip's two pistol shots in a Balkan city would ultimately unleash a war that killed millions across Europe.

Then, I thought about another date while I walked these peaceful streets. The First World War officially ended on June 28, 1919, exactly five years after the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, when the Treaty of Versailles was signed. History's cruel poetry: the same date that triggered the Great War also marked its formal conclusion.

While photographing the Guernica mural, I met two women from Vancouver whom I'd encountered earlier on the Camino in Deba. We were discussing what's happening in America right now, and how the current moment carries all the hallmarks of fascism - the trigger-happy rhetoric, the dehumanizing language, the echoes of the 1930s that led to the bombing of this very town. The conversation felt surreal against the backdrop of Picasso's stark images of screaming horses and fragmented bodies.

Nearby, I watched two visitors studying the massive photographs documenting Guernica's destruction, mounted prominently in the city center. They read the accompanying text carefully, as if trying to understand how such devastation was possible. I appreciated their quiet attention; memory requires witnesses.

The bombing of Guernica was conceived as what Nazi strategists called a "practice drill," a test of tactics that would later devastate London and Coventry. But Germany itself, especially in the second half of the Second World War, would experience these same horrors when Dresden and other German cities faced similar destruction but on a far larger scale. Franco's fascist forces had requested German help in breaking Republican resistance in the Basque Country. On April 26, 1937, German Heinkel and Junkers bombers, along with Italian aircraft, dropped 22 tonnes of bombs on a town that posed no military threat.

It was market day, and most of the men were away fighting, leaving the town populated mainly by women and children. The pilots knew this. The systematic destruction lasted for hours, with waves of aircraft returning to complete what the first had begun. One-third of Guernica's 5,000 inhabitants were killed or wounded.

In true fascist fashion, Franco immediately rewrote history. The official narrative blamed Republicans and Communists for burning their own city. You may recognize the deliberate architecture of authoritarianism, where truth becomes whatever serves power.

Pablo Picasso, living in Paris, read about the bombing in the newspapers and within days began work on what would become his most famous painting. The Spanish Republican government had commissioned him to create a work for the 1937 Paris International Exposition. What emerged was something entirely different from what anyone had expected: not patriotic propaganda but a universal cry against the brutality of modern warfare.

The painting itself became an act of resistance. When German officers visited Picasso's studio during the Nazi occupation of Paris and saw a photograph of Guernica, one allegedly asked: "Did you do that?" Picasso's response: "No, you did."

Standing here today, I think about how violence echoes across decades. In 1990, I visited the Theresienstadt concentration camp, where I learned that Gavrilo Princip himself had been imprisoned and died of tuberculosis in 1918. I had gone primarily to see the concentration camp, but only discovered there the cell where they kept this pivotal figure of history, the young man whose two shots had started so much. Franz Ferdinand's assassination didn't directly cause Guernica's bombing, but both events emerged from the same toxic mixture of nationalism, authoritarianism, and the belief that violence could solve political problems. The young man who shot the Archduke in Sarajevo and the pilots who bombed civilians in Guernica were separated by 23 years and hundreds of miles, yet they were part of the same story.

The rebuilt Guernica around me tells a different story than the one Franco tried to write. The town exists and thus proves that fascism failed, that memory persists, and that art can outlast the forces that try to destroy it. Picasso's painting, which he insisted should not return to Spain until democracy was restored, finally came home in 1981, six years after Franco's death.

In our current moment, when democracy again faces authoritarian challenges, the lessons from both Sarajevo and Guernica feel urgent. Political violence grows from years of dehumanizing rhetoric, from the normalization of extremism, from the erosion of shared truth. The distance between inflammatory speeches and exploding bombs is shorter than we like to believe, as we've seen with trigger-happy leaders who act first and think later.

Walking these streets this evening, I thought about the women I met from Vancouver, discussing America's current crisis. We agreed that the patterns feel familiar, even if the specifics differ. Authoritarianism has a recognizable architecture: it always starts by targeting the most vulnerable, always claims to represent "real" people against imagined enemies, always insists that violence is necessary for order.

But Guernica also teaches us about resilience. This town was rebuilt. Franco's version of history was rejected. Picasso's vision of truth proved more powerful than fascist propaganda. The oak tree that survived the bombing, which I saw on an earlier visit years ago, became a symbol of endurance.

The two shots fired in Sarajevo in 1914 and the bombs dropped on Guernica in 1937 show us that violence has consequences far beyond its immediate victims. But so does memory. So does art. So does the simple act of bearing witness.

Tomorrow, I will continue walking the Camino, and I will carry with me how the echoes of violence persist.

But so do the echoes of those who resist it.

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