Category: Military

PATCO Crushed, & More, In Peace & Justice History for 8/5

August 5, 1963
The U.S., U.S.S.R. and U.K. signed the Limited Test Ban Treaty in Moscow, banning nuclear testing in the atmosphere, in space or underwater. Underground testing, however, was not prohibited. It has since been signed by more than 100 countries.
 
Text of the treaty, background and signatories
August 5, 1964
President Lyndon Johnson asked Congress ”for a resolution expressing the unity and determination of the United States in supporting freedom and in protecting peace in southeast Asia.” 
The president had already used the alleged incidents in the Gulf of Tonkin [see August 4, 1964 above] to mount major air strikes on the North Vietnamese navy. The resulting Congressional Resolution authorizing military force in Vietnam was the legal basis for the war there that lasted until 1975.
Only two members of the senate voted against the resolution: Ernest Greuning of Alaska and Wayne Morse of Oregon. …

“Let’s go back to the war in Vietnam. I was here. I was one of the Senators who voted for the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. Yes, I voted for the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. I am sorry for that. I am guilty of doing that. I should have been one of the two, or at least I should have made it three, Senators who voted against that Gulf of Tonkin resolution. But I am not wanting to commit that sin twice, and that is exactly what we are doing here.
This is another Gulf of Tonkin resolution.”
Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV) in debate on the resolution to authorize use of military force on Iraq, October 4, 2002

August 5, 1981
President Ronald Reagan, having ordered striking air traffic controllers back to work within 48 hours, fired 11,359 (more than 70%) who ignored the order, and permanently banned them from federal service (a ban later lifted by President Bill Clinton). The controllers, seeking a shorter workweek among other things, were concerned the long hours they were required to work performing their high-stress jobs were a danger to both their health and the public safety.
Lessons from When Reagan Crushed PATCO Union 

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryaugust.htm#august5

Whistleblower: 10-year-old Palestinian boy ‘gunned down’ after receiving food aid

Former US Green Beret says Israel committed war crimes at Gaza food distribution site | BBC News

Peace Ribbons & More, In Peace & Justice History For 8/4

August 4, 1964
The Pentagon reported a second attack on U.S. Navy ships in Vietnam’s Gulf of Tonkin [see August 2, 1964]. But there was no such activity reported at the time by the task force commander in the Gulf, Captain John J. Herrick.
One of the Navy pilots flying overhead that night was squadron commander James Stockdale, who was later captured and held as a POW by the North Vietnamese for more than seven years, and became Ross Perot’s vice-presidential candidate in 1992:
” I had the best seat in the house to watch that event and our destroyers were just shooting at phantom targets — there were no PT boats there . . . There was nothing there but black water and American firepower.”
Nearly three decades later during the Gulf War, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Sydney Schanberg warned journalists not to forget “our unquestioning chorus of agreeability when Lyndon Johnson bamboozled us with his fabrication of the Gulf of Tonkin incident.”
August 4, 1964
FBI agents discovered the bodies of three missing civil rights workers buried deep in an earthen dam near Philadelphia, Mississippi. James Chaney was a local African-American man who had joined the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner had traveled from New York to heavily segregated Mississippi that year to help register voters with the support of CORE.

Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman
At the time, fewer than 10% of eligible black Mississippians were registered to vote.
The three young men and many others were part of Freedom Summer, a massive voter registration and education project organized by the Council of Federated organizations (COFO), an umbrella group of major civil rights organizations.
Watch a video 
Here is a transcription of what was written on the chalkboard (photo below) this August day in 1964:
Yesterday – Negro woman arrested in Hattiesburg for refusing to give her bus seat to a white woman.
• 400 attended mass meeting in Marks.
• Tallahatchie Co. – 24 people tried to register to vote in Charleston; at least one man told he would lose his job as a result.
Today – 6 youths arrested in Greenwood while singing in front of a store. One boy reported beaten.
• Local girl missing since Sunday in Natchez
• $200 each bond paid by 2 SNCC workers arrested in Anguilla (Sharkey Co.) yesterday for passing out vote leaflets.

This is a close-up of the chalk-board beside the front door of the COFO headquarters building in Jackson, Mississippi. (Transcript just above.)
Read more 
August 4, 1985
Peace Ribbons made by thousands of women were wrapped around the U.S. Pentagon, the White House and the Capitol. Twenty thousand people participated, and the 27,000 panels making up the ribbon stretched for 15 miles.


Maggie Wade, who traveled to Washington, DC from Indiana with her daughter,
sitting at the Pentagon with her embroidery panel of the Ribbon Project.
Photo © Ellen Shub

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryaugust.htm#august4

In Gaza, hunger forces impossible choices as Hamas releases propaganda video of hostage

Doctor Gives Eyewitness Account Of Gaza Horrors| Dr. Ambereen Sleemi | TMR

Peace & Justice History for 8/2

August 2, 1931

Albert Einstein urged all scientists to refuse military work.
“I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.” – Albert Einstein (April-May 1949)
Book review of Einstein on Politics 
Other Einstein thoughts on the military
August 2, 1964
The U.S.S. Maddox, a destroyer conducting intelligence operations along North Vietnam’s coast, reported it had been attacked by some of the North’s torpedo boats in the Gulf of Tonkin. The day before, the North had been attacked by the South Vietnamese Navy and the Laotian Air Force under U.S. direction.
30-year perspective on reporting of the Tonkin Gulf Incident
Flawed Intelligence and the Decision for War in Vietnam (from official documents)

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryaugust.htm#august2

It’s August 1st! Peace&Justice History For Friday, 8/1

August 1, 1914
 
As World War I began, Harry Hodgkin, a British Quaker, and Friedrich Siegmund-Schulte, a German Lutheran pastor, attending a conference in Germany, pledged to continue sowing the “seeds of peace and love, no matter what the future might bring,” germinating the idea for the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR).

FOR’s Mission: FOR seeks to replace violence, war, racism, and economic injustice with nonviolence, peace, and justice. We are an interfaith organization committed to active nonviolence as a transforming way of life and as a means of radical change. We educate, train, build coalitions, and engage in nonviolent and compassionate actions locally, nationally, and globally.
History of the Fellowship of Reconciliation
August 1, 1920

Mohandas Gandhi began the movement of “non-violent non-cooperation” with the British Raj (ruling colonial authority) in India. The strategy was to bring the British administrative machine to a halt by the total withdrawal of Indian popular support, both Hindu and Muslim. British-made goods were boycotted, as were schools, courts of law, and elective offices.
More on the Non-Cooperation Movement 
August 1, 1944
The Polish underground army began its battle to liberate Warsaw, the first European city to have fallen to the Germans in World War II.
The heroic effort to rout the Germans 
August 1, 1975
The U.S. and the U.S.S.R, represented by President Gerald Ford and General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev, along with 33 other nations, signed the Helsinki Accords at the close of the Finland meeting of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe.

The agreement recognized the inherent relationship between respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, and the attainment of genuine peace and security. All signatories agreed to respect freedom of thought, freedom of conscience, as well as freedom of religion and belief, and to facilitate the free movement of people, ideas, and information between nations.
August 1, 1976
200 people, organized by the Clamshell Alliance, occupied the site of a new nuclear power plant in Seabrook, New Hampshire. They were attempting to halt construction the same day the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission had issued a construction license. Eighteen were arrested. Eventually, only one of two planned reactors was built.

Clamshell Alliance history 

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryaugust.htm#august1

Last Day Of July In Peace & Justice History

July 31, 1896
The National Association of Colored Women (NACW) was established in Washington, D.C. Its two leading members were Josephine Ruffin and Mary Church Terrell. Founders also included some of the most renowned African-American women educators, community leaders, and civil-rights activists in America, including Harriet Tubman, Frances E.W. Harper, Margaret Murray Washington, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett.

Mary Church Terrell
The original intention of the organization was “to furnish evidence of the moral, mental and material progress made by people of colour through the efforts of our women.” 
However, over the next ten years the NACW became involved in campaigns favoring women’s suffrage and opposing lynching and Jim Crow laws. By the time the United States entered the First World War, membership had reached 300,000.
The NACW and its founders  
July 31, 1986
25,000 people rallied in Namibia for freedom from South African colonial rule. In June, 1971 the International Court of Justice had ruled the South African presence in Namibia to be illegal. Eventually, open elections for a 72-member Constituent Assembly were held under U.N. supervision in November, 1989. Three months later Namibia gained its independence, and maintains it today.
More on Namibia’s independence 


Namibian flag
July 31, 1991
The United States and the Soviet Union, represented by President George H.W. Bush and General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, known as START I. It was the first agreement to actually reduce (by 25-35%) and verify both countries’ stockpiles of nuclear weapons at equal aggregate levels in strategic offensive arms.
The Soviet Union dissolved several months later, but Russia and the U.S. met their goals by December, 2001. Three other former republics of the U.S.S.R., Kazakhstan, Belarus and Ukraine, have eliminated these weapons from their territory altogether.
Comprehensive info from the Federation of American Scientists:

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryjuly.htm#july31

Four important clips from The Majority Report. Each video clip is a different subject

10 Women Disarm an F-16, & Torquemada’s Work in Spain, in Peace & Justice History for 7/30

July 30, 1492
The same month Christopher Columbus set sail from Spain for his “expedition of discovery to the Indies” [actually the Western Hemisphere], was the deadline for all “Jews and Jewesses of our kingdoms to depart and never to return . . .” lest they be executed. Under the influence of Fr. Tomas de Torquemada, the leader of the Spanish Inquisition, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella had ordered the expulsion of the entire Jewish community of 200,000 from Spain within four months. Spain’s Muslims, or Moors, were forced out as well within ten years.

The edict of expulsion from Spain signed by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella
All were forced to sell off their houses, businesses and possessions, were pressured to convert to Christianity, and to find a new country to live in. Those who left were known as Sephardim (Hebrew for Spain), settling in North Africa, Italy, and elsewhere in Europe and the Arab world.
Most went to Portugal, were allowed to stay just six months, and then were enslaved under orders of King John. Those who made it to Turkey were welcomed by Sultan Bajazet who asked, “How can you call Ferdinand of Aragon a wise king, the same Ferdinand who impoverished his own land and enriched ours?”
July 30, 1996
Four Ploughshares activists in Liverpool, England, were acquitted of all charges (illegal entry and criminal damage) on the basis of their having prevented a greater crime, after having extensively damaged an F-16 Hawk fighter jet to be sold to the Indonesian government for use in its genocidal occupation of East Timor.

Seeds of Hope-East Timor Ploughshares: the action and the aftermath

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryjuly.htm#july30