Dear readers, listeners and fellow bloggers:
Good morning. Yesterday we watched in sheer horror the CNN reportage of the indiscriminate shelling of a Children’s and Maternity Hospital by the Russian invading forces in the besieged city of Mariupol; seeing the pregnant women laboriously make their way out of the rubble sickened us. A few days ago we saw how a mother with her two young children were killed while trying to cross over a bridge in the Kiev’s suburb of Irpin, together with a young volunteer; today an article in The New York Times put faces and history to that dramatic moment. Tetiana Peribyinis, 43 years old, was a cheerful accountant working for a global software company, who was trying to dash across the bridge with her daughter Alisa, 9 years old, and her son Mykyta, 18 years old, with the help of Mr. Berezhnyis, a church volunteer; just a few meters ahead of them, a shell exploded killing them all.
How can we remain silent facing this blatant Crime of War that should be punished by a court? How can we accept that in the 21st century there is a big army that disregards civilians completely?
These atrocities remind us of the savage bombardment of Guernica, the ancient capital of the Basque Homeland, by the Luftwaffe in 1936, which prodded Pablo Picasso to render all that unimaginable horror in the homonymous tableau, now at the Museo Reina Sofía of Madrid. for the Republican Pavilion of Paris in 1937. Pablo Picasso never fully explained the disquieting images of this cubist representation of a tragic day when almost a third of the population was massacred; he preferred viewers to get their own impressions and not receive any outside political influencing.
Note. This reproduction of Pablo Picasso’s Guernica was taken from Wikimedia Commons.
Now our new podcast Guernica is being shelled again is Live at anchor.fm/dr-mario-o-laplume.
We hope you appreciate our diligent work by listening to it and if you have any suggestions, please write us to email@drmolaplume.com We cannot remain silent because as Simone de Beauvoir said:
“Le plus scandaleux du scandale c’est de s’y habituer” (the most scandalous part of a scandal is to get used to it)
Stay distant. Stay safe. Stay beautiful.
What do you think? Please tell us.
Don’t leave me alone.