Once upon a time, adjoining an independent nation that was undergoing a serious internal political rift (socialists versus hard-line, reactionary conservatives), there was a semi-autonomous region that was home to its own, internal independence movement.
As the forces of hard-line conservatism sought to consolidate their control over their country, their military leader made the decision to single out an important area of civilian settlement within the autonomous region for bombing. But lacking the military force to accomplish that on his own, the military leader appealed to a much larger, supporting power, with bigger and better weapons. The larger military power was interested in testing the effects of new bombs on civilian populations and readily agreed.
Over the course of one Monday market day, April 26, 1937, the Basque town of Guernica was flattened, in the name of taking out a bridge and an arms factory that, ironically were spared. Somewhere between 300 and 1600 people were killed; no one bothered to get an accurate count. Nazi Germany and Mussolini's Italy both provided the air power and the bombs to eliminate the town.
Within two weeks, Pablo Picasso was memorializing the terror and the carnage of civilians killed by bombs:
http://media.photobucket.com/...
Why is this relevant?
As the death-toll climbs past 1000 in Gaza, I read in Haaretz that not only has Israel been using white phosphorous weapons, despite the fact that the injures that these produce on civilians are horrific; but also that they have been using Gaza as a field to test new weapons as a proxy for the American government; GPS-guided mortars, GBU-39 bombs developed by the Boeing Corporation, and dense inert metal explosives that vaporize their victims. Franco chose Guernica to test the effects of aerial bombing on a civilian population; Truman chose Hiroshima to test the effects of nuclear bombing on a city with a mixture of factories and civilian homes. What are our "merchants of death" perhaps testing in Gaza?
"The Palestinians say, 'Oh, they use it on us, experiment with it for the Americans.' Experimenting has a different meaning for Americans. We think animal experimenting, but it is indeed a field test."
http://www.haaretz.com/...
The New York Times today notes that the war in Israel has passed the point of "diminishing returns"--admittedly an odd phrase to use. There never were any "returns" to the killing of civilians.
http://www.nytimes.com/...
Are the returns diminishing because the weapons are done being tested? Are we Germany to Israel's Civil-War-Era Spain? Does Guernica hold as a historical analogy?