The day after the bombing, the fascist general of the rebels, Francisco Franco, ordered the media of his propaganda to deny that the venerable villa of the Basques was destroyed by themselves, on the contrary, that from that moment on it was burned by the reds and separatists that would be the official version, “with fire and gasoline”.

The lie that has lasted for more than 40 years, the story against the truth that has been disseminated deliberately and consciously, today is presented to us sweetened through a historiography that bears some importance to what has happened. Historian Xabier Irujo has been investigating the bombing of Gernika for years and has recently published the book The Alternative Truth (Txertoa, 2017), in which he lists 30 lies derived from this great falsehood.

Herbert Southworth in 1977 Guernica! The Guernica! Although 40 years have passed since he wrote the pioneering work – the American writer paused the Francoist myths about the destruction of the city – Irujo has seen the need to continue along the same lines, in the face of the denial of the bombing: “The lie does not exist in itself,” he states in the preamble, “if the truth did not deform, and for that very reason, if there were not what we call ‘the real and verifiable fact’, there would be no deceit or fiction. From this point of view, lying is nothing more than a mirror of truth. But an aberrant mirror.”

In the book, the author dismantles some of the statements that have come to the bottom over time. For example, that Gernika was an important transport hub – despite the fact that the Gudaris retiring from the front did not pass through there, but through Zornotza – or that the Errenteria bridge that was on the outskirts of the city was the one that the planes intended to destroy, but that they were mistaken for fog and smoke… The bombing was never a strategic military objective, but for citizenship and destruction.

Painful dance of the dead

One of the main discussions has focused on the number of victims and people killed, as what matters most is the damage these bombs cause to people. Three days after the bombing, Gernika was left in the hands of the fascists and, shortly thereafter, a commission chaired by engineer Estanislao Herrán opened a Herrán report at the convenience of the Franco apparatus, a source that the deniers of the massacre would use on numerous occasions, according to which that day only a hundred people died in Gernika.

On the contrary, according to Irujo, the deaths could reach 2,000, mainly based on testimonies from witnesses and international journalists who have died. “Whole families disappeared,” the well-known correspondent George Steel-wrote later, and the bodies were beaten and bruised.” The Government of the Basque Country recorded 1,646 deaths, but the bodies of the victims were buried for a long time between buildings and shelters demolished, and since the remains of the destroyed houses were not completely removed until 1941 – the human remains they found were hidden without many miracles – Irujo has ended this last figure. Other researchers estimate it could be as high as 300.

But in order to do justice to these victims, it is necessary to know the exact number possible, not only in the case of Gernika, but also in the case of yesterday's Franco repression. In Navarre, for example, the oral history was fundamental to put numbers on the shot. History professor Emilio Majuelo, who recently appeared in the Parliament of Navarra to talk about “silent” pisoons in this territory, told the newspaper El Diario.es: “In the early 1980s there was a struggle in the press about the death toll. Now this issue of numbers, not of interpretation, but of numbers, is over. The interpretations are free, but the numbers are not.”

That's why that dance is so bitter that there is still the Gernika bombing. And that is that the obstacles that some of them put in the steps they intend to take to investigate what happened on that day of 1937, smell of the lie that Franco had promised them. PNV spokesman Jokin Bildarratz has not concealed his pain and recalled that we still do not know how many people died: “That alone fully justifies the holding of the congress.”

It is a constant tendency to underestimate or bleach crime, as when an “expert” in art says that when Picasso painted Guernica he cared a cucumber about what happened in the Vizcaine village and that it is nothing more than his autobiography, or when Citizens mistake the massacre of 81 years ago with the attack of ETA to prevent the work from being transferred to the Basque Country in the last Spanish Congress.

Gorka Bereziartua wrote in the previous issue of this Weekly the truth about what suits the war, we have learned with Syria: “Lying has long ceased to be a problem, because political decisions are not taken on the basis of what has happened, but on what should happen.” How will we deal with today’s beautiful and rapid missiles if we have not yet taken action for the bombs then?