Tag: Peace

Good Sense

Armistice Sonnet | Abhijit Naskar | World War Human: 100 New Earthling Sonnets

“Armistice Sonnet

Ceasefire is a diplomatic gimmick,
They cease only to hit back harder.
Demilitarization is what we need,
We got no use for one more ceasefire.

Ceasefire only postpones war,
disarmament instills peace.
Armistice empowers armament,
demilitarization plants peace.

Tyrants don’t call truce to allow aid,
but only to rearm themselves,
so they can call in more ammunition,
from their apely imperialist friends.

One more ceasefire we could do without,
World is wailing for the final ceasefire.
Disown every statesman who prides military,
Builders of military are merchants of murder.”
― Abhijit Naskar, World War Human: 100 New Earthling Sonnets

Peace & Justice History 8/9

The subject of South African pass laws makes me think of the GOP’s Agenda 47, and Project 2025…

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: https://www.c3.hu/~bocs/jager-a.htm

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 195,000 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?”
Sachiko Yamaguchi (nine years old at the time of the bombing).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: https://thevietnamwar.info/napalm-vietnam-war/

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#august91943

Peace & Justice History 8/6:

August 6, 1890
At Auburn Prison in New York state, William Kemmler became the first person to be executed in the electric chair, developed by the Medico-Legal Society and Harold Brown, a colleague of Thomas Edison. William Kemmler received two applications of 1,300 volts of alternating current. The first lasted for only 17 seconds because a leather belt was about to fall off one of the second-hand Westinghouse generators. Kemmler was still alive. The second jolt lasted until the smell of burning flesh filled the room, about four minutes.

As soon as his charred body stopped smoldering, Kemmler was pronounced dead.

August 6th, 1945 – 8:15 AM
Anniversary of Hiroshima
The United States dropped the first atomic bomb
used in warfare on Hiroshima, Japan.
Hiroshima ruins
An estimated 140,000 died from the immediate effects of this bomb and tens of thousands more died in subsequent years from burns and other injuries, and radiation-related illnesses. President Harry Truman ordered the use of the weapon in hopes of avoiding an invasion of Japan to end the war, and the presumed casualties likely to be suffered by invading American troops.
The weapon, “Little Boy,” was delivered by a B-29 Superfortress nicknamed the Enola Gay, based on the island of Tinian, and piloted by Colonel Paul W. Tibbets.
Voices of the Hibakusha, those injured in the bombings: https://www.inicom.com/hibakusha/
  <Hiroshima survivor 

Found watch stopped at the time of explosion>
Documents related to the decision to drop the atomic bomb: https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/library/online-collections/decision-to-drop-atomic-bomb
On August 6, 1995 up to 50,000 people attended a memorial service commemorating Hiroshima Peace Day on the 50th anniversary of the first atomic bombing.

August 6, 1957
Eleven activists from the Committee for Nonviolent Action (CNVA) were arrested attempting to enter the atomic testing grounds at Camp Mercury, Nevada, the first of what eventually became many thousands of arrests at the Nevada test site.

August 6, 1965
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was signed by President Johnson, making illegal century-old practices aimed at preventing African Americans from exercising their constitutional right to vote.
It created federal oversight of election laws in six Southern states (Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Virginia) and in many counties of North Carolina where black voter turnout was very low. Black voter registration rates were as low as 7% in Mississippi prior to passage of the law; today voter registration rates are comparable for both blacks and whites in these states.
The laws has been re-authorized by Congress four times. Introduction to the Voting Rights Act: https://www.justice.gov/crt/introduction-federal-voting-rights-laws-0

August 6, 1990
George Galloway
The U.S. imposed trade sanctions on Iraq. As a result, the lack of much-needed medicines, water purification equipment and other items led to the death of many innocent Iraqis. According to British Member of Parliament George Galloway in his testimony to a committee of the U.S. Congress on May 17, 2005, these sanctions “ . . . killed one million Iraqis, most of them children, most of them died before they even knew that they were Iraqis, but they died for no other reason other than that they were Iraqis with the misfortune to be born at that time . . . .”When asked on U.S. television if she thought that the death of half a million Iraqi children (due to sanctions on Iraq) was a price worth paying, then U.S. Secretary of State Madeline Albright replied: “This is a very hard choice, but we think the price is worth it.” -60 Minutes (5/12/96) 

August 6, 1998
Nearly 50,000 people attended a memorial service commemorating Hiroshima Peace Day on the 50th anniversary of the first atomic bombing which killed nearly 200,000 Japanese with a single weapon.The headlines when it happened : http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/august/6/newsid_3602000/3602189.stm

August 6, 1998
Calling themselves the Minuteman III Plowshares, two peace activists, Daniel Sicken [pronounced seekin], 56, of Brattleboro, Vermont and Sachio Ko-Yin, 25, of Ridgewood, N.J entered silo N7 in Weld County [near Greeley] in Colorado operated by Warren AFB, Cheyenne, Wyoming. With hammers and their own blood, they symbolically disarmed structures on the launching pad of a Minuteman III nuclear missile silo.

Sachio Ko-Yin and Daniel Sicken Read about the Minuteman III Plowshares action: https://www.jonahhouse.org/archive/WMD

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryaugust.htm#august61965

Peace & Justice history 7/31:


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  https://spartacus-educational.com/USAnacw.htm , https://www.thirteen.org/wnet/jimcrow/stories_org_nacw.html
July 31, 198625,000 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  http://www.historyofwar.org/articles/wars_namibia.html
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://nuke.fas.org/control/start1/index.html

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

Peace and Justice History for 7/27:

July 27, 1919
A riot began in Chicago when police refused to arrest a white man who was responsible for the death of a young black man, Eugene Williams. The 29th Street Beach on Lake Michigan was used by both black and white Chicagoans. But the man had been throwing stones at the black boys swimming there before hitting Williams.
The Coroner’s report on the riot described the events as follows: “Five days of terrible hate and passion let loose, cost the people of Chicago 38 lives (15 white and 23 colored), wounded and maimed several hundred, destroyed property of untold value, filled thousands with fear, blemished the city and left in its wake fear and apprehension for the future . . . .”
The city’s booming economy, especially jobs in the stockyards, had drawn many blacks during the Great Migration from the South, more than doubling their population in just three years. Only one policeman died in the chaos, Patrolman John Simpson, 31, an African American working out of the Wabash Avenue Station. (Read more: https://www.newhistorian.com/2015/07/29/chicago-race-riot-1919/
July 27, 1953
After three years of bloody and frustrating war leading to stalemate, the United States, the People’s Republic of China and North Korea agreed to a truce, bringing the Korean War—and America’s first experiment with the Cold War concept of “limited war”—to an end (South Korean President Syngman Rhee opposed the truce and refused to sign). U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower had taken office six months earlier, and Soviet leader Josef Stalin had died that March.
Korean War Memorialphoto: Heather StanfieldThe armistice signed this day ended hostilities and created the 4000-meter-wide (2.5 miles) demilitarized zone (DMZ), a buffer between North and South Korean forces, but was not a permanent peace treaty. It also set up a system for exchanging prisoners of war: 12,000 held by the North, 75,000 by South Korea, the U.S. and the U.N. allied forces.
There were four million military and civilian casualties, including 16,000 from countries which were part of the U.N.-allied forces; 415,000 South and 520,000 North Koreans died.There were also an estimated 900,000 Chinese casualties. 36,516 died out of the nearly 1.8 million Americans who served in the conflict.
July 27, 1954
The democratically elected Guatemalan government of Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán, after receiving 65% of the vote, was overthrown by CIA-paid and -trained mercenaries. There followed a series of military dictatorships that waged a genocidal war against the indigenous Mayan Indians and against political opponents into the ’90s. Nearly 200,000 citizens died over the nearly four decades of civil war.
“They have used the pretext of anti-communism. The truth is very different. The truth is to be found in the financial interests of the fruit company [United Fruit, which controlled more land than any other individual or group in the country. It also owned the railway, the electric utilities, telegraph, and the country’s only port at Puerto Barrios on the Atlantic coast.] and the other U.S. monopolies which have invested great amounts of money in Latin America and fear that the example of Guatemala would be followed by other Latin countries . . . I took over the presidency with great faith in the democratic system, in liberty and the possibility of achieving economic independence for Guatemala.”Jacobo Arbenz
More about Arbenz  https://spartacus-educational.com/JFKarbenz.htmThe real coup story through official U.S. documents  https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB4/
July 27, 1996
Known as the “Weep for Children Plowshares,” four women were arrested for pouring their own blood on weaponry at the Naval Submarine Base at Groton, Connecticut, on the morning of the launch of the last-built Ohio-class submarine, the U.S.S. Louisiana. The 18 such submarines carry about half of the U.S. nuclear deterrent – 24 Trident I & II missiles with a range of 7400 km (4600 miles), each with several warheads known as MIRVs (multiple independently targeted re-entry vehicles).
Trident sub being loadedDetails of the action  https://www.jonahhouse.org/archive/weep.htm

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryjuly.htm#july27

Peace and Justice History for 7/15

I’ve received this newsletter since before the US bombed Afghanistan back in 2001. It’s a wealth of nice info, sent out daily with snippets about important bits of history of the date. Here is today’s. There’s a mixed bag today, sorta like the Republican Party platform which is sorta like Project 2025 which is sorta like the Don’s own Agenda 47. We are not doomed to repeat history if we remember it.

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July 15, 1834
The Spanish Inquisition, a centuries-long brutal effort by the Catholic Church to root out heresy, begun in 1481, was officially abolished by King Bonaparte. Spain’s King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella had chosen Catholicism as their religion and asked the pope to help purify the people of Spain. Many thousands were forced to convert, were tortured to encourage confession, or burned at the stake.Witch burning during the Inquisition
More on the Inquisition https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-inquisition

July 15, 1919
Following World War I, the U.S. War Department announced that it had classified more than 337,000 American men as “draft dodgers.
July 15, 1978
The Longest Walk, a peaceful transcontinental trek for Native American justice, which had begun with a few hundred departing Alcatraz Island, California, ended this day when they arrived in Washington, D.C. accompanied by 30,000 marchers.

They were calling attention to the ongoing problems plaguing Indian communities throughout the Americas: 
lack of jobs, housing, health care, as well as dozens of pieces of legislation before Congress canceling treaty obligations of the U.S. government toward various Indian tribes.

They submitted petitions signed by one-and-a-half million Americans
to President Jimmy Carter.

The Longest Walk Zinn Project