POLIARTICS AND LANGUAGE GAMES

Guernica

On the 26th April, 1937, the German Airforce (then under the Nazi regime of Adolph Hitler) and a section of the Italian Airforce raided the Basque town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War. It was the first use of the blitzkrieg style attack  by the Luftwaffe. A practice run, not only for the Luftwaffe's 'Condor Legion' but also for Mussolini's Italian Fascist Aviazione Legionaria. It was coded Operation Rügen. Many civilians were killed. The bombing, at the time viewed as one of the first raids in the history of modern military aviation on a defenceless civilian population, was denounced as a terrorist act. The town was devastated. Pablo Picasso took a view of the event,

Picasso's view

It is not unusual for artists to make political comment through their work, and many, particularly Spanish artists, seem to do so.

Francisco Goya, Spain


The Shootings of May 3rd in Madrid, 1814

Edouard Manet, France
Execution of Emperor Maximilian of Mexico, 1868

Nowadays it is the poster, collage and graffiti that seem to have taken the forefront of expression:

There was another political event which occurred on the 26th April 1998, the massacre of a single individual, Bishop Juan Jose Gerardi was bludgeoned to death in the garage of his home in Guatemala City. His assailants used a concrete slab, disfiguring him to the extent that his face was unrecognisable and identification of the corpse was made by means of his episcopal ring. In 1988 the Conference of Bishops assigned Gerardi and another to serve on the National Reconciliation Commission. This later led to the creation of the Office of Human Rights of the Archbishopric (Oficina de Derechos Humanos del Arzobispado, ODHA), which to date provides assistance for the victims of human rights violation. In that context work began on the Recovery of Historical Memory (REMHI) project. On April 24, 1998, REMHI presented the results of its work in the report Guatemala: Nunca Más.This report carried statements from thousands of witnesses and victims of repression during the Civil War and placed the blame for the vast majority of the violations on the government and the army.  The U.N. Truth Commission Report comes to very similar conclusions. The task of historical recovery that Gerardi and his team pursued was fundamental in the subsequent work of the UN-sponsored Historical Clarification Commission (CEH), set up within the framework of the 1996 peace process.

Two days after the publication of REMHI's report, on the 26th of April, 1998, Bishop Gerardi was bludgeoned to death. The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed Bishop Gerardi? 
by Francisco Goldman is an account of the battle to bring the bishop's murderers to justice. It is told from the inside, working with those in the archdiocesan human rights office who have made it their business to nail the culprits. It reads (and is categorised by its publishers) as "true crime", but in the hands of a subtle and fired-up author, this is a book that exposes the corrupt, brutal and ruthless political climate that the US has spent so many decades and so many millions of dollars maintaining in Central America.

Finally in 2006, the country's highest court upheld guilty verdicts against two military officers, a father and son, for the bishop's murder. As Goldman makes clear, there were many more who should have faced a court. The murder had been carefully planned and meticulously covered up. The fight for justice goes on.

It was also on the 26th April 1889 that Ludwig Wittgenstein was born. He left us with his Tractatus Logoco-Philosophicus (1921) and language games. He wrote to Bertrand Russell on 19th August of 1919:

Wittgenstein

"The main point is the theory of what can be expressed by prop[osition]s-i.e. by language-(and which comes to the same thing, what can be thought) and what can not be expressed by prop[osition]s, but only shown; which, I believe, is the cardinal problem of philosophy"

Jean-Francois Lyotard explicitly drew upon Wittgenstein's concept of language-games in developing his own notion of metanarratives. He said:

Lyotard

“Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives.. This incredulity is undoubtedly a product of progress in the sciences: but that progress in turn presupposes it. To the obsolescence of the metanarrative apparatus of legitimation corresponds, most notably, the crisis of metaphysical philosophy and of the university institution which in the past relied on it. The narrative function is losing its functors, its great hero, its great dangers, its great voyages, its great goal. It is being dispersed in clouds of narrative language elements--narrative, but also denotative, prescriptive, descriptive, and so on [...] Where, after the metanarratives, can legitimacy reside?”

A very good question indeed. I leave you today, after the language games with two politically inspired views by the artist Andy Thomas:

Republican Presidents playing poker

Democrats doing the same