In 1814, reflecting the revolt of the Madrid population against the French occupying forces, the Spanish painter Francisco Goya completed one of his works of deepest human and historical significance, the painting “Third of May 1808 in Madrid”.
The canvas is revolutionary and arguably the most powerful work of art produced in Spain during the 19th century. It was, however, almost incomprehensible to anyone who saw it at the time, for the simple reason that it rejected all the usual conventions of Baroque history painting. and neoclassical.
In it, there are no heroes, only victims; there are no brave deeds we can be proud of, only the bloody execution of the innocent; and there is no noble cause being commemorated, only revolt, repression, and the sense of despair of men begging for their lives about to be shot.
Society remained intoxicated by social transformations and political conquests, by economic expansion and by scientific, cultural and technological innovations only possible after the end of the Napoleonic wars. It took more than a century — with the effects of two World Wars, the deaths of hundreds of millions of people, 225,000 civilians killed in seconds in Hiroshima and Nagasaki — for Goya’s symbolism to be understood and reinterpreted.
In 1958, feeling suffocated by the threat of a nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union, the British graphic artist and designer Gerald Holtom was inspired by the painting to create the symbol that became popular in the world as “peace and love”, to symbolize the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. “I was in despair. Deep despair. I drew myself: the representation of a desperate individual, with the palms of his hands extended out and down, in the manner of Goya’s peasant facing the firing squad. I formalized the drawing in a line and put a circle around it.”
That year, the Doomsday Clock — a metaphor created by the scientists who worked on the development of the first nuclear weapons, warning us how close humanity is to self-destruction — still gave us 7 minutes to rethink our actions.
Since then, the clock metaphor has continued to be used by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and 77 years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 33 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany, only 30 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, we are more closer than ever to this terrible warning. We only have a hundred seconds left.
We stopped fearing nuclear disaster and got used to fearing alien invasions, the impact of meteors, bearded terrorists and the environmental apocalypse. It is no wonder that leading experts on the threat of nuclear conflict have so drastically reduced the time we still have to reflect on our actions. For them, the most devastating threat is that of a nuclear war started not intentionally, but by accident or miscalculation.
The Ukraine crisis is the perfect environment for mistakes like this to happen. It brings us closer to a war with no heroes, only victims; a war with no courageous deeds we can be proud of, only the bloody execution of the innocent; with no noble cause to commemorate, only revolt, repression and the feeling of despair of men begging for their lives about to be shot.
We are repeating the past. We are intoxicated by the changes and achievements in politics, economics, science, culture and technology possible only after the end of the two World Wars and the Cold War. Our society cannot understand Holtom’s despair, let alone Goya’s symbolism.
