Category: Military

Kent St. Shooting, The Berlin Wall, & More, in Peace & Justice History for 8/13

August 13, 1961
The city of Berlin was divided as East Germany sealed off the border between the city’s eastern (Soviet Union-controlled) and western (American-, British- and French-controlled) sectors in order to halt the flight of economic and political refugees to the West. Two days later, work began on the Berlin Wall.

The Wall, 155 km (96 miles) of barbed wire and concrete, completely surrounded West Berlin and had to be rebuilt three times.

The wall stood until November 9, 1989.
The Berlin Wall Online 
August 13, 1971

slain Kent State student 
U.S. Attorney General John Mitchell announced there would be no federal grand jury investigation into the May 4, 1970, shootings at Kent State University. Ohio National Guard troops had fired on unarmed anti-Vietnam-War demonstrators, killing four and wounding nine.
             
Atty General John Mitchell
Defenders of the National Guard said they were responding to a shot from the crowd though that was never verified. But in 2007 a tape was released through a freedom-of-information request to the FBI revealing a Guard officer issuing the command, “Right here! Get Set! Point! Fire!”
Kent State’s protest was part of massive spontaneous national outrage over Pres. Richard Nixon’s expansion of the war through his invading non-combatant Cambodia. Vice President Spiro Agnew had referred to the campus protesters as Nazi “brownshirts.”

Ohio National Guard troops firing on anti-war demonstrators at Kent State University
The day before, Ohio Govenor James Rhodes had referred to the student demonstrators as “the strongest, well-trained militant revolutionary group that has ever assembled in America. They’re worse than the brownshirts and the Communist element and the night riders and the vigilantes. They are the worst type of people that we harbor in America.”
August 13, 1992
President George H.W. Bush announced strong United States support for the draft Chemical Weapons Convention completed at the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva. The president stated that the U.S. was committed to the treaty, and called on all other nations to support the treaty and to pledge adherence to it. 
Chemical weapons treaty update (2001) 

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryaugust.htm#august13

Let’s talk about Trump’s DC move showing his golden age is gilded….

More clips From The Majority Report. News worth watching

Nukes & Mumia In Peace & Justice History for 8/12

August 12, 1953
The first Soviet hydrogen (thermonuclear or fusion) bomb, far more potentially damaging than those dropped on Japan, was exploded in the Kazakh desert, then part of the Soviet Union. Igor Vasziljevics Kurcsatov, head of the Soviet Uranium Committee, said to Josef Stalin at the time: “The atomic sword is in our hand. It is time to think about the peaceful use of nuclear energy.” 

The Soviet Nuclear Weapons Program 
August 12, 1982

Open missile tubes on Trident sub
Twelve were arrested in an attempted blockade of the first Trident submarine, the USS Ohio, entering the Hood Canal in the state of Washington. In motorboats, sailboats and small handmade wooden vessels, the demonstrators were objecting to the presence of nuclear weapons in Seattle. The Coast Guard overturned some of the vessels with water cannon.
August 12, 1995

Thousands demonstrated in Philadelphia and other cities in support of journalist and former Black Panther Mumia Abu-Jamal (on death row for murder since 1982) in the largest anti-death-penalty demonstrations in the U.S. to date.
All Out For Mumia Abu-Jamal

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryaugust.htm#august12

August 10th, Already! Moses Fleetwood Walker, & Harry Hay, Show Up For Equality, + More in Peace & Justice History For This Date

August 10, 1883
Adrian “Cap” Anson refused to field his visiting Chicago White Stockings team in an exhibition baseball game if the Toledo Mud Hens included star catcher Moses Fleetwood Walker in their lineup. Chicago’s Captain Anson, who grew up in slaveholding Iowa, said he wouldn’t share the diamond with a non-white player. After more than an hour’s delay, Charlie Morton, the Toledo manager, insisted that if Chicago forfeited the game, it would also lose its share of the gate receipts; Anson relented.

Moses Fleetwood Walker
Morton had not planned to have Walker catch due to injury, but insisted on putting him in at centerfield, despite Cap Anson’s objections.
August 10, 1948

Gay rights activist Harry Hay organized what later became the Mattachine Society (originally ~ Foundation), a groundbreaking 1950s gay rights organization. The group was named after the Mattachines, a medieval troupe of men who went village-to-village advocating social justice.
Mattachine: Radical Roots of Gay Liberation 
August 10, 1984
Two Plowshares activists, Barb Katt and John LaForge, damaged a guidance system for a Trident submarine with hammers at a Sperry plant in Minnesota. In sentencing them to six months’ probation, U.S. District Judge Miles W. Lord commented, “Why do we condemn and hang individual killers, while extolling the virtues of warmongers?”

Barb Katt
More on the Sperry Software Pair  
More plowshares actions 
August 10, 1988
President George H.W. Bush signed legislation apologizing and compensating for the World War II internment of Japanese Americans.
President Franklin Roosevelt had authorized the round-up of hundreds of thousands of Americans of Japanese ancestry, some of whom were American citizens, as security risks. Most lost all their property and were moved to relocation camps for the duration of the war (though not in Hawaii, then not yet a state, where public opposition would not allow it).
August 10, 1993
Ruth Bader Ginsburg is sworn in as the second woman and 107th Justice to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court. 
August 10, 2005
Mehmet Tarhan was sentenced to four years’ imprisonment on two charges of “insubordination before command” and “insubordination before command for trying to escape from military service” because he refused to serve in the Turkish Army.
He would not sign any paper, put on a uniform, nor allow his hair and beard to be cut. He went on two extended hunger strikes to protest his arrest and abuse while in Sivas Military Prison. War Resisters International has supported his efforts throughout his ordeal. He was released unexpectedly from prison after one year.

Read more

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryaugust.htm#august10

Austrian CO Executed, Fatman Dropped, Rocky Flats, & More in Peace & Justice History for 8/9

August 9, 1943

Franz Jägerstätter, an Austrian conscientious objector who reported for induction but refused to serve in the army of the Third Reich, was executed by guillotine at Brandenburg-Gorden prison. An American, Gordon Zahn, wrote about Jägerstätter while researching the subject of German Roman Catholics’ response to Hitler.
Zahn’s book, In Solitary Witness, influenced Daniel Ellsberg’s decision to stand against the Vietnam War by bringing the previously secret Pentagon Papers to public attention.
Against the Stream by Erna Putz, the story of the courage of Franz Jägerstätter
August 9, 1945
The second atomic bomb, “Fatman,” was dropped on the arms-manufacturing and key port city of Nagasaki. The plan to drop a second bomb was to test a different design rather than one of military necessity. The Hiroshima weapon was a gun type, the Nagasaki weapon an implosion type, and the War Department wanted to know which was the more effective design.
Responsibility for the timing of the second bombing had been delegated by President Harry Truman before the Hiroshima attack to Colonel Paul W. Tibbets, the commander of the 509th Composite Group on Tinian, one of the Northern Mariana Islands in the western Pacific.

Scheduled for August 11 against Kokura, the raid was moved forward to avoid a five-day period of bad weather forecast to begin on August 10. English translation of leaflet air-dropped over Japan after the first bomb [excerpt]: “We are in possession of the most destructive explosive ever devised by man. A single one of our newly developed atomic bombs is actually the equivalent in explosive power to what 2000 of our giant B-29s can carry on a single mission. This awful fact is one for you to ponder and we solemnly assure you it is grimly accurate.”
Of the 195,00 population of the city (many of its children had been evacuated due to bombing in the days just prior), 39,000 died and 25,000 were injured, and 40% of all residences were damaged or destroyed.“
What on earth has happened?” said my mother, holding her baby tightly in her arms. “Is it the end of the world?”
Hear an eyewitness account of this terrrible event
 Photographic exhibit of the aftermath
August 9, 1956

20,000 women demonstrated against the pass laws in Pretoria, South Africa. Pass laws required that Africans carry identity documents with them at all times. These books had to contain stamps providing official proof the person in question had permission to be in a particular town at a given time. Initially, only men were forced to carry these books, but soon the law also compelled women to carry the documents.
August 9, 1966
Two hundred people sat in at the New York City offices of Dow Chemical Company to protest the widespread use in Vietnam of Dow’s flammable defoliant Napalm
.
Napalm in use in Vietnam
Read more about Dow Chemical and the use of napalm 
August 9, 1987
Hundreds were arrested in an all-day blockade of the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant in Golden, Colorado. Protests at Rocky Flats had been going on for some years.

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryaugust.htm#august9

7 clips from The Majority Report. They cover everything from ICE staging photo ops to tRump’s lies being corrected on TV, to vote blue no …. not for Zohran Mamdani and then the genocide in Gaza

 

2 Anniversaries in Peace & Justice History for 8/7

August 8, 1974

President Richard M. Nixon resigned from office, the first U.S. president ever to do so. The House Judiciary Committee had, with bipartisan support (the Democrats and one-third of the Republican members), voted for three articles of impeachment: obstruction of justice, abuse of power, and contempt of Congress.A week later, one of the White House tapes was finally made public, showing the President’s direct involvement in the Watergate scandal cover-up:
“…call the FBI and say that we wish, for the country, don’t go any further into this case, period…” – Nixon to Chief of Staff Haldeman, June 23, 1972 (six days after the Watergate break-in)

He officially left office August 9, and was fully pardoned one month later by his successor, President Gerald Ford. Asked years later about some of his administration’s questionable activities, Nixon said, “Well, when the president does that, it isn’t illegal.”
The headlines in Washington that day 
August 8, 1999
A 53-mile peace walk commemorating the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended near Clam Lake, Wisconsin, at the site of the U.S. Navy’s Project Elf (extremely low frequency) submarine communications transmitter. Twelve of the demonstrators were arrested for trespassing, adding to the nearly 500 previously arrested for sit-ins, Citizen Inspections, blockades and disarmament actions at the transmitter site in Ashland County.

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryaugust.htm#august8

Peace & Justice History for 8/7

August 7, 1904
Ralph Bunche, born this day in Detroit, spent a remarkable life in vigorous service to academia, his community, the nation and the world.

Ralph Bunche
Head of the Howard University Political Science Department for over twenty years, he was one of the first African Americans to hold a key position at the U.S. State Department. He went on to the United Nations and served as its mediator on Palestine. He was the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating the 1948 armistice agreements between Israel and the Arab states. He worked with Martin Luther King in the civil rights struggles of the ‘50s and ’60s.
Succinct biography of Ralph Bunche
August 7, 1958
The D.C. Court of Appeals reversed playwright Arthur Miller’s conviction for contempt of Congress following a two-year legal battle. He had been charged for refusing to tell the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) the names of alleged Communist writers with whom he attended five or six meetings in New York in 1947.

Arthur Miller in front of HUAC
Read more 
August 7, 1964
After a reported U.S. confrontation with North Vietnamese forces that, it was later discovered, never occurred, the U.S. Congress nearly unanimously passed the Gulf of Tonkin resolution.The resolution gave President Lyndon Johnson broad powers in dealing with North Vietnam, including sending U.S. troops.
News coverage relied almost entirely on official U.S. government sources so Americans assumed the North had in fact launched an unprovoked attack. Two courageous senators, Wayne Morse (D-Oregon) and Ernest Gruening (D-Alaska), provided the only “no” votes.

“I rise to speak in opposition to the joint resolution. I do so with a very sad heart. But I consider the resolution . . . to be naught but a resolution which embodies a predated declaration of war . . . .” –Senator Wayne Morse
The media and the Gulf of Tonkin 
The facts of the incident uncovered by the National Security Archive
August 7, 1995
Four experienced Plowshares activists, Michele Naar-Obed, Erin Sieber and Rick Sieber, hammered and poured their blood on the U.S.S. Greenville, a fast-attack submarine in production at the Newport News, Virginia, shipyard.

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryaugust.htm#august7

Four clips from The Majority Report. One on Gaza war crimes committed by Israel, one on ICE, one on tRump’s attacks on schools, and one on the jobs numbers.