Ten Days that Changed the World

How much can change in a single day?
Some events change the political landscape so dramatically that when we look back, it's impossible to imagine where we'd be now if they hadn't happened.

The shooting dead of 13 unarmed civil rights demonstrators by the British Army Parachute Regiment on January 30, 1972 – Bloody Sunday – was one such event. Its significance has been cast into the spotlight again by the publication of the long-awaited report from the Saville Inquiry.
Writing in this magazine in the weeks leading up to the report's publication, Eamon McCann argued that Bloody Sunday, more than any other event, is the "pivotal plot-point in the narrative of the Troubles", an event which had a "dramatic effect on the trajectory of political events".
In the year following Bloody Sunday, nearly 500 lives were lost, making 1972 the most lethal year of the Troubles.
For moderate Catholics, Bloody Sunday shattered the illusion that the British Army was a neutral presence that could or would protect them from sectarian violence. The Provisional IRA was the obvious outlet for many radicalised and disaffected young Catholics, and membership soared. SDLP leader Gerry Fitt predicted as much in the House of Commons in the days following the Civil Rights march that turned into a massacre.
"Whether we like it or not, the British Army is no longer acceptable in Belfast, Derry or anywhere else in Northern Ireland. It is seen as acting in support of a discredited and corrupt Unionist government," he said.
"From massacres of innocent civilians grow dragon's teeth," is the reaction in a History Ireland editorial to be published next month. Historian and editor of the magazine, Tommy Graham, points out the startling parallels between Bloody Sunday and the British Army's massacre of Indian civilians at Amritsar in 1919. Both events had a radicalising effect. And in both cases, it was the immediate commander of the troops who took the rap, rather than the higher echelons of the army – who were of course responsible at the very least for the culture and the attitudes which gave rise to the bloody events
The knowledge that, as Graham argues, "We've been here before", is unsettling. It implies that we learn nothing from the past and that a tragedy like Bloody Sunday could happen again.
"It will happen again because that's the nature of State power: coercion," Graham proffers. "In a democracy, we elect the people who coerce us. The basic concept of a State is that it has the power to lock people up, in some cases execute them. In some cases, it goes beyond the bounds and massacres lots of people. That will always happen."

Snap Shots of the Past
In modern times, we seem to understand earth-shattering, seemingly transformative events like Bloody Sunday through images. Famous photographs – like that of Fr Eamon Daly waving a bloodstained white handkerchief while helping the mortally wounded Jackie Duddy (17) – are printed and reprinted again and again, beamed into our living rooms and, now, onto our computer screens, until they become part of our collective memory.
This is the argument presented by historian of photography Dr Justin Carville in his fascinating study of how images from Bloody Sunday – some of them transferred to gable end wall murals – have formed the basis of "a collective cultural memory of Bloody Sunday itself, as well as of the broader history of the civil rights movement in Northern Ireland."
But is there a danger that, by remembering through snapshots, we are tricked into an episodic view of the past, overestimating the importance of 'watershed' moments at the cost of a full understanding of the long term process of history?
Tommy Graham thinks history moves in both long cycles and short bursts. So the single, dramatic days we collectively remember almost certainly had a long process of gradual change behind them. It's just that you can't take a picture of a process.
"In Northern Ireland – and historians would pinpoint this all the time," Graham says, "the introduction of free education after the Second World War was a contributing factor to the Civil Rights movement in the '60s. For the first time you had an educated Catholic generation. Unionists, at the time, were quite happy to accept this free education because Westminster was paying for it. But in fact, it was a Trojan horse right in their midst."
Graham also gives the example of the execution of the leaders of the 1916 Rising. This is widely believed to have been a catastrophic mistake by the British authorities since it ignited huge public sympathy for the rebels' cause. But the event was only the spark – the tinder was already there.
"The thing is, those executions would have had no effect unless there had been some underlying sentiment for an independent Ireland," says Graham. "It's not an either/or situation. There is interaction between slow development and cataclysmic events. They're all part of the weave of history."

Ten Days of Change Since World War II

RESOLUTION 181 - On 29 November 1947, with the knowledge of the Holocaust fresh in everyone's minds, the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 181 by a large majority. The resolution recommended the partition of Palestine into two states, one Jewish, one Arab.
Within hours, fighting had broken out. Thousands died in the ensuing Civil War and around 700,000 Palestinians fled their homes, leaving entire towns and villages empty. British security forces, who were supposed to be acting as peacekeepers in the region, did almost nothing to intervene.
The nation state of Israel was born six months after Resolution 181 was passed. Attempts by Palestinian refugees to return home were squashed once and for all in 1954, when Israel enacted the Prevention of Infiltration Law.

MARCH ON WASHINGTON FOR JOBS AND FREEDOM - On August 28, 1963 an estimated 300,000 people, around 75% of them black, marched to Washington DC to demand economic and civil rights for African Americans. Standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, Martin Luther King delivered the famous speech we now know as "I Have a Dream". The march is widely credited with helping to bring about the Civil Rights Act, outlawing racial segregation, the following year. Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968.

TET - On 30 January 1968, the eve of the main Vietnamese national holiday, Tet, North Vietnam and its allies in the South, the Viet Cong rebels, launched a major offensive against US forces in the country. Militarily, the Tet Offensive was not a success for the Communists. Nevertheless, it was major turning point in the Vietnam War because news of heavy casualties caused American public opinion to swing against the American involvement in the war. 16,592 American soldiers were killed in Vietnam in 1968. However, Caitlín Patrick, a historian of photography based in UCD warns that we shouldn't overestimate the significance of Tet. "The written [news] coverage stayed very positive into the '70s. We have this retrospective position where people see the media coverage of Vietnam as being risky and causing controversy and causing dissent. But that's an after effect of the 1970s.
"Interestingly enough, the images we think of – like Napalm girl, a monk burning himself, the image of a soldier being shot in the head – weren't widely seen during the Vietnam War. At the time, there was less public dissent. It's just that we remember through key, graphic images that show, for the most part, the suffering of the Vietnamese people."

HUNGARIAN REVOLUTION - On the afternoon of October 23, 1956 thousands of students convened in Budapest to protest against Soviet-imposed policies and against restrictions on their freedom. By 6pm, the crowd had swelled by to 200,000. Fighting between protesters and authorities was followed by a ceasefire on October 28.
But it was the calm before the storm: on November 4, the Soviets launched a major attack on Budapest, with air strikes, artillery, tanks and infantry deployed. Around 2,500 Hungarians died in the fighting and 200,000 fled the country; thousands were rounded up for trial and hundreds executed.
Controversially, the Hungarian uprising received no support from the Western powers who claimed to be champions of democracy.

IRANIAN REVOLUTION - The revolution that took the world by surprise began with a demonstration by seminarians in the city of Qom on January 9, 1978 in support of Ayatollah Khomeini and against Iran's monarchy. It was violently suppressed by security forces, with at least 10 people killed.
As is traditional in Islam, a memorial service for the dead was held 40 days later, on February 18, and this became the occasion for further protests against the monarchy. This time, 100 demonstrators were killed in the city of Tabriz.
Forty days later, the memorial for Tabriz was held and there was more violence. The cycle was repeated again and again until, by September 1978, literally millions of Iranians were taking to the streets in memorial/protest marches. The Shah (emperor) left the country "on a holiday" in January 1979, never to return, and Ayatollah Khomeini became supreme leader of the new Islamic Republic of Iran, tilting the balance in the Islamic world towards religious fundamentalism and a religion-controlled State.

CHERNOBYL - On April 26, 1986 an engineering experiment at Chernobyl Power Plant in the Ukraine went horribly wrong when a power surge caused the nuclear reactor to overheat. The resulting explosions and fire, which raged for nine days, threw enormous quantities of radioactive debris – four hundred times the amount released by the atom bombing of Hiroshima – into the atmosphere. A plume of radioactive fallout drifted over Europe, with debris falling as far away as Ireland. 336,000 people from Belarus, Ukraine and Russia had to be resettled.
In 2006, on the 20th anniversary of the disaster, the findings of 50 scientific studies into the effects of the disaster were collated. The conclusion drawn was that half a million deaths from cancer, mutations and other conditions are directly attributable to Chernobyl.
The 17-mile exclusion zone surrounding the plant is still contaminated.

TIANANMEN SQUARE - In 1989, as Communist regimes collapsed around the world, students and intellectuals in China began to hold a series of protests in Beijing's Tiananmen Square, calling for democratic reform. In May, the situation escalated when students occupying the square went on hunger strike. The strike was in its fourth week when, on June 1, 1989 tanks and infantry entered Beijing and opened fire on the protesters. There was widespread international condemnation. However, Tommy Graham believes this event is the odd one out on our list. "The point is," he says, "it had no significance. The Chinese government went in, they massacred those people and it was as if it never happened. The regime is still there and the basic sentiment, as I pick it up, is that most people in China just want to forget about it. There is no popular support for dissidence in the way that there would be in the West. The Chinese went though generations of instability from the late 19th- and early 20th-century. It's almost as if the Chinese will favour any government as long as the trains run on time, as long as people can do business and lead a quiet life. That's a very understandable human trait."

BERLIN WALL - In the course of a routine press conference on the afternoon of November 9, 1989, Günter Schabowski, a spokesman for the East German Politburo, read out a memo he had been handed only moments before. It stated that the regulations for travel from East to West Germany were to be changed. Pressed for more information by journalists, Schabowski improvised, saying that the new regulations were effective immediately and included passage to West Berlin. When the news broke, East Berliners began to gather at the wall in their thousands. With no clear instructions from the authorities, the checkpoint guards had no option but to allow the people to stream into the West, in a moment of euphoria that would come to symbolise the collapse of Soviet-style communism. Germany was formally re-unified within a year.

THE RELEASE OF NELSON MANDELA - On February 2, 1990, Nelson Mandela was released from prison after 27 years. This momentous event, choreographed with the television cameras of the world watching, followed the reversal of the ban on his party, the ANC, by the then President Frederik Willem de Klerk. Aged 71, Mandela returned to lead the ANC and over the next three years he led the negotiations. which finally brought an end to the discredited apartheid regime. This precipitated the first multi-racial election in South Africa, in 1994, in which the ANC won in excess of 60% of the vote. Nelson Mandela became President of the new South Africa.

9/11 - Dr. Caitlín Patrick believes that if any one historical event can be described as truly pivotal, it's the attack on the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001 by al Qaeda terrorists. "If any event had that kind of significance, it's 9/11," she maintains. "The images were so graphic, that kind of attack on the US was unheard of. It changed the foreign policy of the US and Britain, led to a massive amount of spending and a huge change in public attitude within the US."
The death toll of the attack was nearly 3,000, almost all of them civilians. The subsequent offensive, styled the War on Terror by the administration of George "Dubya" Bush and launched by the US, with the support of the UK and NATO – and the associated War in Afghanistan – continues today, with vast numbers having been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan in particular.