Modern Significance
As Brad y Cyllyll Hirion, the event had, and still has, a potent symbolism in Welsh national consciousness. In 19th-century Wales, the term Brad y Llyfrau Gleision ('The Treachery of the Blue Books') was coined to refer to the report of the English commissioners on education in Wales, published in parliamentary blue covers in 1847, which was widely seen as an attack on the Welsh language and a slur on the Welsh people. One of the effects of the report would be the exclusion of the Welsh language from Welsh schools for several generations and a consequent fall in the number of Welsh speakers.
The name Night of the Long Knives was later used for a violent political purge in Nazi Germany, as well as British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan's dismissal of seven members of his cabinet and also the assassination of Alexander Burnes in November 1841 in Kabul, Afghanistan.
In Canada the term was used by Quebec premiere René Lévesque in reference to the repatriation of the Canadian Constitution in 1981. (Before that time, the final constitutional authority for Canada resided in the United Kingdom). Initially eight of the 10 provincial premieres were opposed to repatriating the constitution. A compromise was hammered out in Lévesque's absence, and 9 of the 10 (only Quebec dissenting) agreed to it.
Read more about this topic: Night Of The Long Knives (Arthurian)
Famous quotes containing the words modern and/or significance:
“The great British Library—an immense collection of volumes of all ages and languages, many of which are now forgotten, and most of which are seldom read: one of these sequestered pools of obsolete literature to which modern authors repair, and draw buckets full of classic lore, or “pure English, undefiled” wherewith to swell their own scanty rills of thought.”
—Washington Irving (1783–1859)
“History is the interpretation of the significance that the past has for us.”
—Johan Huizinga (1872–1945)