Part V

The Part of Tens

In this part . . .

Time for some lists! Here you get the chance to lap up my own personal preferences and prejudices and try them out on your friends. You’ll find my nominations for the century’s greatest iconic moments, most illustrious international organisations, most important films, and absolutely worst ideas. Read and enjoy.

Two health warnings, though. First, remember these are just my ideas. You may disagree with every word I write here: That’s what freedom of opinion means. Just bear in mind that I’m not claiming any special insight: The most I’ll say is that I think each example I’ve included has a good case and is at the very least well worth considering.

Second, some of these examples will seem a bit ‘heavier’ than others. Totalitarian dictatorship might seem a rather weightier burden to carry than other people’s chewing gum habits. Not so fast. The little things in history, as in life, can have the greatest impact. No one ended up in therapy because they were worried about the future of constitutional government, but plenty of people get driven nuts by the noise from next door or the latest rise in interest rates. Politicians know this; the best historians know it too.

You’re in the hands of a historian who knows.

Chapter 21

In This Chapter

Viewing images of cruelty or folly

Many images can stay in the mind, but these iconic images have become a shorthand for the twentieth century itself.

The Titanic Goes Down, 1912

The fate of the British ship Titanic never loses its grip on our collective imagination. The ghastly sight of an enormous ship, which had seemed so powerful, so reassuringly safe, upending and disappearing into the sea leaving people alone in the vast ocean is enough to chill anyone’s blood. TheTitanic was a twentieth-century ship of fools, a floating microcosm of the class-bound society of the Western world, with its state ballroom and luxury cabins for the rich and cramped cabins for the plebs. Its owners arrogantly declared it ‘unsinkable’ and insisted that it race across the Atlantic brushing aside all warnings. The ancient Greeks used to say that those the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad. They’d have understood the Titanic story perfectly.

Find out more about the world of the Titanic in Chapter 1.

Your Country Needs YOU!

Mrs Asquith, wife of Britain’s prime minister in the First World War, once said that Lord Kitchener might not have been a great man but he made a great poster. The famous British World War I recruiting poster issued in 1914 has been reprinted and imitated in different versions around the world ever since. Kitchener’s staring eyes and pointing finger are a triumph of economy and for their time the poster was an astonishingly modern concept. But nowadays we also look at the poster with sombre hindsight. The young men who responded to its call were the same recruits who were sent over the top in the Battle of the Somme to be mown down by German machine guns. Kitchener didn’t live to see this tragic outcome of his recruiting drive: He drowned in June 1916 when the ship he was on hit a German mine. He died; his poster lived on.

Find out more about the First World War in Chapter 3.

The Empire State Building

Standing 1,250 feet and 102 storeys high, soaring into the heavens like a cathedral spire, the Empire State Building symbolised America: Big, beautiful, and anyone could climb to the top. Built in record time, the ESB opened in 1931 to general amazement: Thiswas what modern America could do! But even as the ESB went up, the Depression set in and many men who’d built it ended up living in shanty towns called Hoovervilles. In 1945 a US Army Air Corps plane crashed into the ESB, killing 14 people. Ironic, then, that when the ESB gave up its number 1 spot as the world’s tallest building it was to the twin towers of the World Trade Center. But that’s another story.

Find out more about America in the Depression in Chapter 8.

Auschwitz

Auschwitz’s sinister railway arch stands in our consciousness like the mouth of hell. That railway track linked Auschwitz to every corner of Europe: Trains came from within Poland and from Italy, France, Germany, Norway, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, the Greek islands and the Channel islands: A continental railway network with a death camp at its heart.

All ages like to pride themselves on how far they’ve advanced from the barbarism of the past. At Auschwitz the Nazis recreated slavery on a biblical scale, complementing it with industrial-age mass murder. Auschwitz stands as an icon of the appalling things humans once did, and can easily do again.

Find out more about the Holocaust in Chapter 9.

The Mushroom Cloud

Before the Enola Gay dropped its atomic bomb on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945 no one had any idea of what a nuclear explosion might look like. The smoke rose to an enormous height and formed a sort of mushroom shape: It quickly became a symbol of the horrors of nuclear war. The hydrogen bombs and nuclear warheads developed in the 1950s were thousands of times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb. Since then the world has lived in the shadow of the mushroom cloud. We’re still under it now.

Find out more about the bomb and the Cold War in Chapters 9 and 10.

Marilyn Monroe

Born Norma Jean Mortensen, though she took her mother’s name, Baker, she grew up fatherless, in and out of foster homes and orphanages. She married at sixteen, divorced, dyed her hair, and entered movies as Marilyn Monroe. But why did she touch the world so deeply? Perhaps it was her girl-next-door innocence alongside her anything-but-innocent sexuality. That image of her in The Seven-Year Itch, trying oh-so-demurely to hold her skirt down in the delicious updraft from an air vent, has it all. The press loved her looks, her teasing (‘It’s not true I had nothing on,’ she said of one notorious photoshoot, ‘I had the radio on’), her marriages (baseball player Joe DiMaggio and playwright Arthur Miller, of all people), and her lonely death, from an overdose (intentional? We still don’t know), aged 36. A true icon.

Find out more about post-war America in Chapter 15.

The Vietnam Girl

You know her photo. Kim Phuc was the young Vietnamese girl, naked and screaming after a US napalm attack, in Nick Ut’s 1972 Pulitzer prize-winning photo. That photo is the defining image of the Vietnam War. The sight of children suffering is shocking in any war, but she was in a SouthVietnamese village: The Americans were on their side. President Nixon angrily tried to denounce the photo as a fake, but its authenticity was confirmed by a British news camera team, who filmed the whole thing. Kim went on to become an international peace activist. The burns on her body eventually healed; the scars inside never did.

You can find out more about the Vietnam War in Chapters 14 and 15.

Che Guevara

Che Guevara is probably more famous as a poster than for anything he did in real life. Alberto Korda’s photograph of Che, rugged and unshaven in his revolutionary beret, is still showing on a student bedroom wall near you. He was more tubby and less good looking than his photo, but so what? That’s how a true revolutionary should look. Che helped Castro seize power in Cuba and sat in Castro’s cabinet for a time before setting off to lead the revolution in Bolivia. The Bolivians shot him and paraded his bullet-riddled body for the photographers. That image isn’t a pretty sight: Stick to the poster.

Find out more about Che Guevara in Chapter 13.

Neil Armstrong Walks on the Moon

Oh, yes he did.

When the Russians got the first satellites, the dog, man and woman into space (not all in the same ship, you understand) the Americans were badly shaken. John F. Kennedy reassured them that the US would send a man to the moon and back before the end of the decade. The Apollo programme built up through the decade until finally, on 20 July 1969, Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon. The communication technology failed on the big day, and the lines he’d carefully prepared for the occasion were transmitted all wrong: ‘That’s one small step for (oops – missed out ‘a’) man; one giant leap for mankind.’ The images of Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the surface of the moon seemed to embody hope and optimism for the future, but pretty soon moon landings became solast decade. Man on the moon was that rare thing – an icon that lost its power.

Find out more about post-war America and the space race in Chapter 15.

Tianenmen Square

As communist regimes toppled across Europe in 1989 students in China thought they too would be able to establish democracy. They flocked to Tianenmen Square in Beijing and set up a camp around a statue of the ‘spirit of democracy’. And then the tanks moved in. The democracy movement was crushed, but not before a remarkable moment. A young man stood in front of a line of four tanks and forced them to stop. The world’s press filmed it. When they tried to get past him, he got on his bike and stopped them again. It was a wonderful symbol of an individual standing up for freedom and stopping tyranny in its tracks. You won’t see pictures of this famous moment in China – the government has made sure of that – but no government can ever suppress the truth for ever. Man 1: Tanks 0.

Find out more about communist China in Chapter 16.