A radio piece by Lydia Nibley broadcast internationally by the BBC

The story begins in front of Picasso’s great painting Guernica on September 11, 2001, and continues on a journey to the town of Gernika in Basque country in northern Spain, a town destroyed during the Spanish Civil War by a new kind of warfare, a strike from the sky against a symbolic target, with many innocent people dead as a means of terrorizing the civilian population.

When I asked the young Basque woman acting as my interpreter about current ETA terrorism, she offered comments sympathetic to their cause, repeating the phrase, “It’s complicated,” as if to assure me that if I understood more, I would see their violent acts as entirely justified. Masses for the dead in the U.S. were being said throughout Europe in the days after September 11th, and the piece uses ambient sound collected in public places and in churches to approach the subject of how complicated these events are both in the moment and historically.

Picasso said, “War’s end. Hostilities go on forever.” But in this story we find there is also an equal and enduring kinship shared by those who have suffered the violence that comes to the innocent. The ideologies and politics that perpetrate violence are sometimes forgotten and forgiven, and a deep connection links those who have survived terror—and their compassion for each other is enduring.