November 17th, 1989 Memorial, Prague, CZ, 2009

Next to the Moebius Mural is the famous November 17th, or Velvet Revolution memorial, commemorating the sufferings and deaths of the dissidents who brought the Communist system down. It's located in an arcade through the front of a building on Narodni Trida, where it was said a student was murdered by police on November 17th, 1989. To this day, this has never been confirmed, and amazingly the most common explanation was that the StB (secret police) circulated the rumour in order to escalate the violence and hence justify disproportionate retaliation. If this is true, they failed spectacularly, as the enormous demonstrations and general strike which followed brought down the regime, with the police, largely sympathetic to the revolution, refused to fire a shot. Czechs call the incident in Narodni Trida a "massacre," even though there was only the one rumoured fatality, and the rest of the violence involved the police feebly clubbing protestors, who took a long time to disperse. Historian Howard Zinn calls the phenomenon of willful police inaction/ineffectiveness during the Velvet Revolution (and the other 1989 European anti-Communist revolutions) "The Revolt of the Guards," and many credit this principle with allowing the revolution to go ahead, as only five months earlier, Chinese soldiers and police put an end to pro-Democracy protests with a "real" massacre of 400-10,000 people, the very uncertainty of the numbers saying as much about the regime as anything, with such figures being a closely-guarded secret.