Tag: Peace

Peace & Justice History for 10/31:

October 31, 1929
George Henry Evans, an English-born printer and journalist, published the first issue of the Working Man’s Advocate, “edited by a Mechanic” for the “useful and industrious classes” of New York City. Evan covered the Workingmen’s Party (which he helped found) and the early trade union movement.
In his Prospectus, Evans focused on the inequities between the “portion of society living in luxury and idleness” and those “groaning under the oppressions and miseries imposed on them.” He advocated “a system of education which shall be equally open to all, as in a real republic it should be” and opposed “every thing which savors of a union of church and state.”
Evans became a U.S. citizen one week later.
October 31, 1950

Earl Lloyd became the first of three African Americans who began to play in the National Basketball Association (NBA) when he started with the Washington Capitols. He and Jim Tucker went on to become the first African Americans to play on a championship team in 1955 as members of the Syracuse Nationals, which is now the Philadelphia 76ers.

After retiring as a player, Lloyd was a Detroit Pistons assistant coach for two seasons, and a scout for five.
October 31, 1952
The U.S. successfully detonated “Mike,” the world’s first hydrogen (or fusion) bomb, in the atmosphere at the Eniwetok Proving Grounds on the Elugelab Atoll, part of the Marshall Islands in the southern Pacific.
The 10.4-megaton device was the first thermonuclear device built upon the Teller-Ulam principles of staged radiation implosion.
Mike’s Mushroom cloud

The incredible explosive force of Mike was apparent from the sheer magnitude of its mushroom cloud – within 90 seconds the mushroom cloud climbed to 57,000 feet and entered the stratosphere at a rate of 400 mph. One minute later it reached 108,000 feet, eventually stabilizing at a ceiling of 120,000 feet. Half an hour after the test, the mushroom stretched sixty miles across, with the base of the head joining the stem at 45,000 feet.The explosion wiped Elugelab off the face of the planet, leaving a crater more than 50 meters (175 feet) deep, and destroyed life on the surrounding islands.
The details and the results 
Early U.S.nuclear tests 
October 31, 1958
The U.S., the U.S.S.R. (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics aka Soviet Union) and Great Britain began negotiations in Geneva on whether to let the nuclear testing moratorium become a permanent test ban. General Secretary Nikita Kruschev had unilaterally declared a moratorium on Soviet testing earlier in the year, President Dwight Eisenhower and Prime Minister Harold MacMillan following suit in August.
There had been growing concern over the health effects of radioactive fallout in the atmosphere from the nuclear explosions. Nonetheless, all three nations did further last-minute tests before the moratorium took effect.
October 31, 1972
20-POINT POSITION PAPER

PREAMBLE
AN INDIAN MANIFESTO FOR RESTITUTION, REPARATIONS, RESTORATION OF LANDS FOR A RECONSTRUCTION OF AN INDIAN FUTURE IN AMERICA
THE TRAIL OF BROKEN TREATIES:

“We need not give another recitation of past complaints nor engage in redundant dialogue of discontent.  Our conditions and their cause for being should perhaps be best known by those who have written the record of America’s action against Indian people.  In 1832, Black Hawk correctly observed: You know the cause of our making war. It is known to all white men. They ought to be ashamed of it.
The government of the United States knows the reasons for our going to its capital city.  Unfortunately, they don’t know how to greet us. We go because America has been only too ready to express shame, and suffer none from the expression – while remaining wholly unwilling to change to allow life for Indian people.
We seek a new American majority – a majority that is not content merely to confirm itself by superiority in numbers, but which by conscience is committed toward prevailing upon the public will in ceasing wrongs and in doing right.  For our part, in words and deeds of coming days, we propose to produce a rational, reasoned manifesto for construction of an Indian future in America.  If America has maintained faith with its original spirit, or may recognize it now, we should not be denied.”
October 31, 1978
30,000 Iranian oil workers went on strike against the repressive rule of the U.S.-installed Shah and for democracy, civil and human rights.
Striking Iranian oil workers. Photo: December 1978 issue of Resistance. A publication of the Iranian Students Association in the U.S. (ISAUS)
Read more 
October 31, 1984
Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was shot to death by two Sikh members of her own security guard while walking in the garden of her New Delhi home. Gandhi’s son, Rajiv, a member of parliament and a leader in the Congress-I Party, was sworn in as Prime Minister following the assassination.

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryoctober.htm#october31

Peace & Justice History for 10/30:

October 30, 1967
Martin Luther King, Jr. and seven other clergymen were jailed for four days in Birmingham, Alabama. They were serving sentences on contempt-of-court charges stemming from Easter 1963 demonstrations they had led against discrimination.
The U.S. Supreme Court had upheld their convictions for violating a court order enjoining them from marching [Walker v. Birmingham]. Public Safety Commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor had twice denied them a parade permit. The law Connor used was declared unconstitutional two years later [Shuttlesworth v. City of Birmingham].
The constitutional issues
October 30, 1995

Over 80 people were arrested at Sugarloaf Mountain in southern Oregon during a massive direct action to prevent clear-cutting of old-growth forests on public land by private timber companies.
Sugarloaf protest 
October 30, 2000
George Mizo of the United States, Rosi Hohn-Mizo of Germany (his wife) and Georges Doussin of France were awarded Vietnam’s first-ever State Medal of Friendship by the President of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam for their work in building the Vietnam Friendship Village.

The Vietnam Friendship Village after five years; the medical clinic is in the foreground, other buildings are residences.

Mizo and the Vietnam Veterans Association built a residential facility for orphan children and elderly or disabled adults. George Mizo was a veteran of both the Vietnam War and the struggle to end U.S. support of the contra insurgency in Nicaragua, and repressive regimes elsewhere in Central America [see September 15, 1986].
General Vo Nguyen Giap, Vietnam’s senior military commander during both the French and American wars advised the Mizo’s 12-year-old son, Michael, “Never go to war.”
About the Vietnam Friendship Village Project 

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryoctober.htm#october30

Only The Decent People Can Save Us (Again) by Oliver Willis

Decency Is On The Ballot Read on Substack

(Plus Kal El bonus at the bottom.-A)

In the last few decades, we have been witness to systematic failures in American life. Time and time again the guardrails we believed existed turned out to be illusions, or at best, guardrails without any teeth. The courts, the financial institutions, the legislators, and especially the media – entrusted as the watchdogs of democracy – have absolutely failed.

There is only one group that, more often than not, has been up to the task: The people. The people keep showing up and at the very least, voting to put people in charge to clean up the messes. Of course, once those people are in office they too often respond with timidity and reluctance and don’t go as far as necessary to exercise the mandate they have been given, but the people did their jobs.

In every presidential election since 1988, with the exception of 2004, a plurality or majority of the public voted for the Democratic candidate. That is a data point you rarely see repeated and I am quite certain that if it was Republicans with such a popular vote winning streak both the party and the media would never shut up about it. That is a triumph of decency. It would be easy for voters to be snowed under by the right’s avalanche of lies and hate, ably amplified by their buck-chasing friends in the press, but the voters keep seeing through it.

To be certain, there are structural barriers. Neither Al Gore nor Hillary Clinton became president even though the will of the American people said they should have been. And the presidencies of Bill Clinton, Obama, and Biden have had too many missed opportunities to push the ball forward, even though all three of these men had mandates to go quite far.

But what matters is that enough voters saw through the haze of absolute bullshit to send a message to do the right thing.

Here we are again. The Republican Party has always glowed bright with a hateful intensity, but Trump has allowed them to move that hate from Mitt Romney’s “quiet rooms” to spotlights like Madison Square Garden. The press and the oligarchs that own it at institutions like The New York Times, the Washington Post, the L.A. Times, CNN and others, are quite happy to make billions of dollars from GOP fueled hate, as long as they can make a buck. They just don’t care about the consequences.

Voters still care. It may be naïve or cringe, or corny, but they believe. Voters have shown us that a majority of them are opposed to hate, opposed to racism, opposed to misogyny, opposed to treating people as second class based on their orientation. And a majority of them are pro-decency.

Yes, most of the pro-decency vote has a liberal ideology but it is more than that. There are people who just don’t like being crude bigots that spend all of their time shoving the faces of the vulnerable into the dirt. There are more of us than there are of them, and they have to effectively cheat or rig the rules to overcome our numbers.

Decency is on the march, but we are at a breaking point, again. Election day or week is not a “fever break” moment. No matter the outcome, but especially if decency is victorious again, we cannot go to sleep. The bad boss at the end of the game has not been defeated. 2004 showed us that. 2008 showed us that. 2012. 2016. 2020. The forces of darkness and depravity do not respect the will of the people and if you retreat, expecting that everyone will finally accept the supremacy of decency – the other side will see that as an opening.

The decent people need to stand up for what they believe in and then keep standing, keep pushing back, until the other people are broken – and then decency most continue to advance and remain forever vigilant.

I voted for decency, and I always will. I know I’m not alone.

If you like this newsletter, please consider becoming a paying subscriber by clicking here to join. I won’t be putting any of my regular columns behind a paywall and they will always be free. Thanks to everyone who has subscribed so far!

— Oliver

Follow me, Oliver Willis, on Threads @owillis1977

Exclusive Kal-El Photo

Kal once again shows how excited he is to work by my side.

Peace & Justice History for 10/29:

October 29, 1940
The first national lottery for drafting young men (21-35) was held after passage of the first compulsory peacetime draft in United States. At the time the U.S. Army was smaller than that of Poland.
What it was like
Recommended: Washington Goes to War by David Brinkley
October 29, 1966
National Organization for Women (NOW) was founded in Washington, D.C. The 30 attendees at that first meeting elected Betty Friedan, author of The Feminine Mystique, as NOW’s first president.
Read about NOW 
October 29, 1969
anti ROTC demo
One hundred demonstrators disrupted the University of Buffalo’s ROTC (Reserve Officer Training Corps) with “nonviolent ridicule.” The urgency of opposition to the Vietnam War made many military-related activities targets of anti-war activity that had previously seemed otherwise legitimate.
October 29, 1969
U.S. Federal Judge Julius Hoffman ordered a defendant in the courtroom gagged and chained to a chair during his trial after he repeatedly asserted his right to an attorney of his own choosing or to defend himself.
The defendant, Black Panther Party leader Bobby Seale, and seven others had been charged with conspiring to cross state lines
Bobby Seale
“with the intent to incite, organize, promote, encourage, participate in, and carry out a riot” by organizing the anti-war demonstrations in Chicago during the 1968 Democratic National Convention.
Chicago 10 by Brett Morgen, an animated film about the trial
watch trailer
The Chicago Eight included Seale, David Dellinger, Rennie Davis, Thomas Hayden, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Lee Weiner, and John Froines.
October 29, 1975
In “Alice Doesn’t Day,” tens of thousands of women in cities across the US took to the streets to demand equality. Defying mounted police, 50,000 marched down New York City’s 5th Avenue. Dutch women marched on the U.S. embassy in Amsterdam to show their support, while French feminists demonstrated at the Arc de Triomphe, carrying a banner that read: “More Unknown Than the Unknown Soldier: His Wife.”

More about Alice Doesn’t Day 
October 29, 1983
Because the U.S. planned to site 48 nuclear-tipped cruise missiles in their country, over 500,000 Dutch took part in a rally in the Netherlands’ capital city, The Hague. The numbers at the protest were swelled by anger over the U.S. invasion of Grenada, a small Caribbean island, earlier in the week.

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryoctober.htm#october29

Peace & Justice History for 10/28:

Things it’s important we remember, and things to Never Forget.

October 28, since 304
Catholics celebrate the feast of St. Fidelis of Como.  According to one legend, Fidelis deserted the Roman Army’s Theban Legion during Emperor Maximian’s persecution of Christians.  In another legend, he was assigned to guard Christian prisoners at Milan and secured freedom for five of them.
October 28, 1818
Abigail Adams, former First Lady of the United States, died. 
Many of her ideas, documented in her correspondance with her husband, John (later elected president), influenced the government of the United States.  She was politically active to the point where opponents referred to her as “Mrs. President” [see March 31, 1776]
Abigail Adams
More about Abigail Adams 
October 28, 1886

The Statue of Liberty, a gift of friendship from the people of France to the people of the United States, is dedicated in New York Harbor by President Grover Cleveland.
Originally known as “Liberty Enlightening the World,” the statue was proposed by the French historian Edouard de Laboulaye to commemorate the Franco-American alliance during the American Revolution. Designed by French sculptor Frederic-Auguste Bartholdi, the 151-foot statue was the form of a woman with an uplifted arm holding a torch.
In 1903, a bronze plaque mounted inside the pedestal’s lower level was inscribed with “The New Colossus,”a sonnet by American poet Emma Lazarus that welcomed immigrants to the United States with the declaration,“Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,/ The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. / Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me. / I lift my lamp beside the golden door.” 
Read more 
October 28, since 1940
In Greece, Ohi Day (meaning Day of No) marks the refusal of Greece to submit to the Axis Powers.
October 28, 1950

Birth of Sihem Bensedrine, Tunisian human rights activist and journalist.  In 2008, she was awarded the Danish Peace Fund Prize for her commitment to democracy and the rule of law in the Arab world.
About Sinem Bensefrine  
October 28, 1962
Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev announces the removal of Soviet missle bases in Cuba, ending the Cuban Missile Crisis.
October 28, 1984

Sandinista Daniel Ortega won the general election for president of Nicaragua, and later attempted to make peace with the United States. 
The United States replied by continuing to support the Contras.

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryoctober.htm#october28

Peace & Justice History for 10/27:

October 27, 1659
William Robinson and Marmaduke Stevenson, two Quakers (formally, members of the Society of Friends) who came from England in 1656 to escape religious persecution, were executed in the Massachusetts Bay Colony for their religious beliefs. The two had violated a law, passed by the Massachusetts General Court the year before, banning Quakers from the colony under penalty of death.

Quakers opposed central church authority, preferring to seek spiritual insight and consensus through egalitarian Quaker meetings. They advocated sexual equality and became some of the most outspoken opponents of slavery in early America.
October 27, 1967
Phillip Berrigan, artist Tom Lewis, poet David Eberhardt, and United Church of Christ minister James Mengel, members of the Baltimore Interfaith Peace Mission, entered the draft board at the United States Customs House and poured duck’s blood on several hundred draft records.
Phillip Berrigan pouring blood on draft files
The Baltimore Four, as they became known, were arrested and later tried and convicted for the action which they saw as a symbolic act of civil disobedience — a nonviolent attack on the machinery of war. This day later became known as Plowshare Action Remembrance Day.
Berrigan in his jail cell drawning by Tom Lewis
Read more about Phillip Berrigan 
October 27, 1967
120,000 marched against the Vietnam War in London. Violence erupted when a 6,000-strong Maoist splinter group broke away and charged the police outside the United States Embassy in Grosvenor Square.

Read more 
October 27, 1969
Ralph Nader set up a consumer organization with young lawyers and researchers (often called “Nader’s Raiders”) who produced systematic exposés of industrial hazards, pollution, unsafe products, and governmental neglect of consumer safety laws.
 Ralph Nader (center) 
Nader is widely recognized as the founder of the consumer rights movement. He played a key role in the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the Freedom of Information Act, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission.

Read more 
October 27, 2002
Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva
Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva was elected president of Brazil in a runoff, becoming the country’s first elected leftist leader.
Read more 

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryoctober.htm#october27

Peace & Justice History for 10/26:

October 26, 1916
Margaret Sanger and her sister were arrested for disseminating birth control information at her Brownsville Clinic in Brooklyn; she was arrested again a few weeks later for the same reason and the police shut the clinic down within 10 days.
Margaret Sanger

October 26, 1970
Garry Trudeau, 1976
“Doonesbury”, a cartoon series addressing political and social issues written by Garry Trudeau, and initially published in a the Yale Daily News when Trudeau was a student, debuted in 28 newspapers.
October 26, 1986
President Ronald Reagan vetoed a bill passed by the Congress that would have imposed trade sanctions on the racially separatist apartheid regime of South Africa.
October 26, 1994
Israeli Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin and Jordanian Prime Minister Abdelsalam al-Majali, with President Clinton in attendance, formally signed a peace treaty ending 46 years of war at a ceremony in the desert area of Wadi Araba on the Israeli-Jordanian border. President of Israel Ezer Weizman shook hands with Jordan’s King Hussein.

Read more 

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryoctober.htm#october26

Peace & Justice History for 10/25:

October 25, 1955
Sadako SasakiSadako Sasaki, following the Japanese custom of folding paper cranes – symbols of good fortune and longevity – persisted daily in folding cranes, hoping to create senbazuru (1000 paper cranes strung together) when a person’s dream is believed to come true, died.
The Sadako story    
Sadako was two years old when the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and at 12 was diagnosed with Leukemia, “the atom bomb” disease. 
Children’s Peace Monument in Hiroshima showing Sadako holding a golden crane  Photo: Mark Bledstein

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryoctober.htm#october241981

Peace & Justice History for 10/24:

October 24, 1935
Langston Hughes’s first play, “Mulatto,” opened on Broadway. It was the longest-running play (373 performances) by an African-American until Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun” which premiered in 1959.
Langston Hughes
First-rate bio of Langston Hughes 
October 24, 1940
The 40-hour workweek went into effect under the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, requiring employers to pay overtime and restricting the use of child labor.
Decades of labor agitation and a considerable number of lives made this change possible.

More on The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938: 
October 24, 1945

The United Nations World Security Organization came into being when the Soviet Union (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics or USSR) in mid-afternoon deposited its instrument of ratification of the U.N. Charter.
The USSR became the last of the five major powers and the 29th of 51 nations, the minimum necessary to bring this about. James F. Byrnes, U.S. Secretary of State, then signed the protocol formally attesting that the Charter of the United Nations had come into force.This is now considered United Nations Day.
Read more  (no paywall.)
October 24, 1970
Salvador Allende Gossens, an avowed Marxist and head of the Unidad Popular Party, became the president of Chile after being elected and confirmed by the Chilean Congress.For the next three years, the United States exerted tremendous pressure to destabilize and unseat the Allende government. In 1958, and again in 1964, Allende had run on a socialist /communist platform. In both elections, the United States government (as well as U.S. businesses such as International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT), which had significant investments in Chile) worked to defeat Allende by sending millions of dollars of assistance to his political opponents.

Allende and supporters
More on Allende 
October 24, 1981

More than 250,000 people, organized by the Committee for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), marched through London to protest the siting of American nuclear missiles in the United Kingdom.
More background and video

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryoctober.htm#october24

Starbox Dachshunds

The Black one looks just like our Chrissy, who lived to 21 yo before passing during April of 2020. This riff is so awful, yet so cute, and has the holiday spirit.