A number of events mark the 21st February. Actors Alan Rickman and Anthony Daniels (C3PO) celebrate birthdays, as well as young singer Charlotte Church among many others in the entertainment world.
In politics this is the day Robert Gabriel Mugabe was born in 1924. There is not much that one can say these days about Mr Mugabe. Once regarded as a hero by many Africans as well as Europeans, he has become somewhat of a disappointment.
Having started out his government of Zimbabwe in 1980 with mainly socialist policies, he seems to have lost it completely with an appalling decline for the last 15 years. Not just with the economy, but with the civil liberties he had so long fought for, and spent eleven years in prison for. It is clearly time for him to go.
In the 1980's he was awarded a number of honorary degrees from international universities, a number of which have been revoked. The University of Massachusetts in 1986 awarded an Honorary LLD for:
"Your gentle firmness in the face of anger, and your intellectual approach to matters which inflame the emotions of others, are hallmarks to your quiet integrity…We salute you for your enduring and effective translation of a moral ethic into a strong,popular voice for freedom"
This Honour was revoked in June 2008:
"Mugabe's corrupt, repressive regime" was deemed "antithetical to the values and beliefs of the University of Massachusetts". It is the first time the board has revoked an honorary degree.
On another note, there was an assassination which took place on the 21st February 1919 in Munich. That of Kurt Eisner. He was a Bavarian politician and journalist. As a German socialist journalist and statesman, he organised the Socialist Revolution that overthrew the Wittelsbach monarchy in Bavaria in 1918. He was later assassinated on a Munich street when German nationalist Anton Graf von Atrco auf Valley shot him in the back. He was on his way to present his resignation to the Bavarian Parliament. In 1989 a monument at the site of his killing was built.
It reads (in English translation) "Kurt Eisner, who proclaimed the Bavarian Republic on 8 November 1918 -later Prime Minister of the Republic of Bavaria-was murdered here on 21 February 1919".
What seems somewhat strange is that at his funeral in Munich, Adolf Hitler walked behind his coffin in his role as head of a military unit, the Ersatz Battalion of the 2nd Infantry Regiment. Apparently surviving film footage of the funeral shows Hitler wearing two armbands: one the black band of mourning, the other a red armband of the socialist revolution. Hitler was only 29 at the time so might have been going through his youthful flirtation with the left by paying tribute to German Jewish Socialists.
1919 was quite a year for assassinations. Only the day before, on the 20th February 1919, Habibullah Khan the Emir of Afghanistan was murdered on a hunting trip.
Two months later that year, Emiliano Zapata was assassinated in Mexico.
He had been invited to a meeting by a Colonel Jesus Guajardo, who claimed he intended to defect from the Government to the revolutionaries. When Zapata arrived at the Hacienda de San Jaun, in Chinameca, Guajardo's men riddled him with bullets. They took his body to Cuautla to claim a bounty, where they are reputed to have been given only half of what was promised. How strange that a man named Jesus should so betray someone and thenrenege on payment.
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