This week in history: February 8-14

25 years ago: The Irish Republican Army bombed the London Docklands in devastation after the bombing of the South Pier. (Wikimedia Commons)

On February 9, 1996, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) bombed the London Docklands, killing two people and wounding more than 100 others. In the incident also known as the South Pier bombing, the IRA sent warnings before detonating the truck bomb, but the area was not completely evacuated.

The blast occurred a few hundred meters from the Barkantin housing project on Dogs Island, one of London’s most persecuted working-class neighborhoods. Windows were smashed and residents were showered with glass. Thousands of children attending a basketball match at the nearby London Arena stadium missed serious injuries. That the bomb did not result in a massive loss of life was just a coincidence.

On February 18, a second bomb exploded on a bus in London traveling through the city’s theater district, killing the same bomber and seriously injuring others, including the driver.

The bombing campaign marked the end of the ceasefire that had lasted around 17 months. A ceasefire was agreed in 1994 with the understanding that Sinn Fein, the political arm of the IRA, would participate in the peace talks. However, as a precondition for formal talks, the British government demanded that the IRA be fully and unilaterally disarmed. The IRA rejected the ceasefire and eventually ended it.

The bombings, carried out with complete disregard for the lives of the innocent working class, were the work of a petty-bourgeois nationalist organization that was politically bankrupt. The IRA was trying, through indiscriminate violence, to regain its negotiating position at the imperial negotiating table. His goal was to pressure the Conservative government led by Prime Minister John Major.

The conflict was centered in Northern Ireland, which includes most of the county of Ulster, and remained in the British possession after the Irish War of Independence ended 75 years ago. Catholics, who are predominantly working-class and make up nearly 40 percent of the population, faced persecution in Northern Ireland at the hands of its right-wing unitary government and British imperial forces.

The Irish Republican Army’s targeting of the working class in Britain was no accident. While claiming to represent the “national interests” of the persecuted Catholic minority in Northern Ireland, the IRA / Sinn Fein was in fact a very thin class of the Catholic middle class who particularly feared the action of a united working class against the British government.

The violence was also directed at quelling any political challenge to the claim that the IRA alone represented the Catholic minority in the north. Just a few weeks ago, on January 30, the IRA assassinated Gino Gallagher, Chief of Staff of the Irish National Liberation Army, a rival nationalist group that refused to support the ceasefire.

50 years ago: San Fernando earthquake kills dozens in Southern California, collapsed buildings at San Fernando Veterans Hospital

On February 2, 1971, a massive earthquake shook the San Fernando Valley in Southern California, killing 64 people and severely damaging homes, hospitals, power lines, dams, and other structures. The 6.6-magnitude earthquake struck just after 6 a.m. and lasted for 12 seconds, making it the third-largest earthquake in California in history after the earthquakes in San Francisco in 1906 and Long Beach in 1933.

The deadliest building collapse was at the Veterans Administration (VA) hospitals in Olive View and San Fernando, which house hundreds of soldiers recovering from the US imperialist war in Vietnam.

The San Fernando Department of Veterans Affairs saw the largest number of deaths, with 44 fatalities. Twenty-six buildings on the hospital campus were built before 1933, when new building regulations were drawn up in the wake of the Long Beach disaster. Four hospital buildings collapsed completely. Nurse Betty Van Decar watched the earthquake after leaving the night shift. She spoke about the events in an interview with the Los Angeles Daily News on the 45th anniversary of the earthquake. “It collapsed,” Van Decker recalls. “The whole building collapsed.” “There was an awful sound – you can hear the rumble of the ground. I thought, ‘They won’t.”

In Olive View, where three died, most of the buildings in the hospital complex were built before 1933. The damage was concentrated in the basement and first floor, as well as many stairs. Two of the deaths were attributed to blackouts, which interrupted patients’ sustainable life support. A hospital worker was injured by falling debris while trying to evacuate the building.

Another structure that suffered severe damage is the Van Norman Dam. In the days following the earthquake, the 80,000 people living under the dam were forced to evacuate so that the water could be pumped. Engineers estimated that if the earthquake had occurred one year earlier when the dam filled with 6.5 billion gallons of water, as many as 100,000 people living in the San Fernando Valley would have died.

In the aftermath of the earthquake, engineers conducted investigations that concluded that current building codes for dams, bridges, highways, hospitals, and other large buildings were seriously inadequate to meet the risk of a major earthquake. Legislation was later passed that created new building laws, restricted development near fault areas, and created the California Strong Motion Devices program that allowed scientists to collect data needed to develop buildings that can withstand strong earthquakes.

75 years ago: The United States confiscated the Bikini Atoll for nuclear tests; Mushroom cloud and water column from Baker’s nuclear explosion on July 25, 1946, Bikini Atoll

On February 10, 1946, the U.S. governor of the Marshall Islands, in the central Pacific Ocean, informed all 167 residents of the Bikini Atoll that they would be permanently relocated as their former home became the scene of US military testing of nuclear weapons.

Over the following weeks, all civilian buildings, including homes and the church, were dismantled, and the villagers were permanently relocated to Rungrik Atoll, about 125 miles away. Rongirik was long uninhabited, due to lack of water and food supplies. Residents of Bikini Atoll were initially left with only a few weeks of supplies.

The US confiscation of Bikini Atoll took place in the context of an emerging nuclear arms race after World War II. In the final stages of the war in the Pacific, the United States dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in August 1945. In addition to terrorizing the Japanese population, the attack was a threat to US opponents among the old colonialists. Powers like Britain and France, but above all the Soviet Union.

At the conclusion of the war, President Harry Truman’s administration quickly prepared plans to expand nuclear weapons testing. Experiments in the Pacific have focused particularly on how the devices could be used as an aid in naval warfare.

Between 1946 and 1958, the US Army detonated 27 nuclear devices in and around Bikini Atoll, including on coral reefs, underwater, on land and in the air. One of the first experiments, in July 1946, involved the detonation of a massive nuclear bomb 95 feet underwater. An official at the Atomic Energy Agency described the operation, which he called “Baker”, as “the first nuclear disaster in the world” after it led to the spread of radioactive contamination. The tests will render Bikini Atoll uninhabitable.

The Soviet revolution in Menshevik-controlled Georgia begins, the Soviet Red Army military parade in Tbilisi, February 25, 1921.

On February 11, 1921, workers and peasants under the leadership of the Communists seized strategic locations in the Lori County of the Democratic Republic of Georgia, a capitalist state headed by the Social Democratic Party (Mensheviks). The Georgian army occupied Lori, a predominantly Armenian-speaking region claimed by Georgia, after the withdrawal of Turkish forces in November 1920.

The uprising formed a revolutionary committee in the town of Shulaveri, led by the veteran Georgian Bolshevik Philip Makharadze. The commission sought to extend its influence to the rest of Georgia. The Soviet government called for intervention and by February 14 the 11th Red Army was sent to Georgia. After heavy fighting, the Red Army entered the capital Tbilisi on February 25 and established the Georgian Soviet Republic.

The Menshevik-ruled Georgia, founded in 1918, became a foothold for European imperialism in the Caucasus. The system initially placed itself under German protection. It allowed German forces to occupy strategic areas and allowed Germany to unrestricted use of Georgian railways and ports. By June 1918, the German Army was roaming the main street in Tbilisi.

After the defeat of German imperialism in November 1918 at the hands of the Allies, Menshevik Georgia allowed British forces to enter the country in December.

The regime committed other crimes, including the suppression of the minority in South Ossetia. It opposed land reform in South Ossetia by supporting local Georgian landowners. In a conflict between South Ossetia and the Menshevik government in 1920, about 5,000 Ossetians were killed in a wave of ethnic cleansing.

Leon Trotsky summarized the Soviet experience with bourgeois Georgia in his famous work, Between Red and White (1922):

What happened was the result of a long preparation. This can only happen, due to the logic of events. The history of relations between Georgia and Soviet Russia is nothing but a chapter in the book The Siege of Russia, Military Interventions, French Gold, British Ships, and the Four Fronts where the best elements of the working class are present. Was sacrificed. This chapter cannot be deleted from the book. The Georgia that today was described by the defeated Menshevik leaders in the civil war never existed. There has never been a Georgia that is democratic, peaceful, independent, or neutral. There was a Georgian fortress in the general class struggle of Russia. That castle is today in the hands of the victorious proletariat.

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