| August 16, 1953 Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the constitutional monarch of Iran, dismissed the elected prime minister, Dr. Mohammad Mosaddeq, without the approval of the parliament. In appointing Gen. Fazlollah Zahedi in his place, the Shah was following the coup plan, code-named TPAJAX, developed by the CIA under the direction of Kermit Roosevelt (grandson of President Theodore), and Great Britain’s intelligence service, MI6. About Mohammad Mosaddeq: https://www.iranchamber.com/history/mmosaddeq/mohammad_mosaddeq.php The real story according to CIA records: https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/ciacase/EXL.pdf ======================================================== August 16, 1963 Buddhists staged protests across South Vietnam against the government of President Ngo Dinh Diem, a Catholic who removed Buddhists from important government positions and replaced them with Catholics. Buddhist monks protested Diem’s intolerance of other religions and the methods he used to silence them. Several Buddhist monks immolated themselves in protest of the war being waged against insurgents in the south, and against North Vietnam.  The Buddist monk Quang Duc became the first to kill himself in an anti-government protest in Vietnam in June, 1963 20,000 Buddhists in silent march for peace, Hue, South Vietnam. 1966  |
Tag: Peace
Like a walk in the park
Peace & Justice History for 8/14
It’s a busy date, but 3 cheers for Social Security!
| August 14, 1935 President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act into law, creating unemployment compensation, old-age benefits and aid to dependent children.“We can never insure one hundred percent of the population against one hundred percent of the hazards and vicissitudes of life, but we have tried to frame a law which will give some measure of protection to the average citizen and to his family against the loss of a job and against poverty-ridden old age.” President Roosevelt signing Social Security Act of 1935 in the Cabinet Room of the White House. Library of Congress photo  A comprehensive history: https://www.ssa.gov/history/ |
| August 14, 1941 In the German Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz, a group of prisoners had been chosen by the camp’s commander for death by starvation. Roman Catholic Fr. Maximilian Maria Kolbe offered himself for death instead of one of the condemned because the man had a family he needed to be alive to support. Fr. Kolbe was put to death on this day by lethal injection following two weeks of starvation. Pope John Paul II declared him a Saint in 1982. |
| August 14, 1945 President Harry Truman announced that Japan, one week following the atomic bomb attacks on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, had surrendered unconditionally, ending World War II. |
| August 14, 1959 The U.S.-launched Explorer VI satellite recorded the first photograph of Earth taken from space, at an altitude of 17,000 miles (27,400 km) .  Read more: https://www.spaceanswers.com/solar-system/the-earth-from-afar-ten-incredible-images-of-our-planet-from-space/ |
| August 14, 1966 Twenty people were arrested for trying to attend services at the white First Baptist Church in Grenada, Mississippi. They were charged with “disturbing divine worship.” Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) field staff member Jim Bulloch was arrested and his car fire-bombed while he was in jail. |
| August 14, 1968 400 anti-apartheid students occupied the university in Cape Town, South Africa, to protest its refusal to hire a black professor.  |
| August 14, 1976 Majella O’Hare, a young Catholic girl, was shot dead by British soldiers while walking with other children to confession near her home in Ballymoyer, Whitecross, County Armagh.The soldiers, initially denying they had fired any weapons, claimed that the patrol had been fired upon by an unidentified gunman. But there were serious doubts about the army’s claim. Eyewitness reports failed to confirm it and, unofficially, police investigating the case referred to the army’s “phantom gunman.” The same day 10,000 Northern Irish gathered at a demonstration in Andersontown, organized by the Women’s Peace Movement (later known as Peace People).  Majella O’HareHow it happened from people who were there: https://cain.ulster.ac.uk/events/other/1976/murray76.htm |
August 14, 1980 After months of labor turmoil, more than 16,000 Polish workers seized control of the Lenin Shipyards in Gdansk. They helped form Solidarnos´c´ (Solidarity), the first independent labor union anywhere in the Soviet bloc, as the Warsaw Pact nations were known. Under the leadership of Lech Valensa [lek va wen´suh] and others, it helped unite the broad political, social and religious opposition to the Communist government. Long-range look at Solidarity: https://www.greenleft.org.au/node/21746 |
https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryaugust.htm#august141935
Peace & Justice History 8/12
https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryaugust.htm#august12
| 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: https://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Russia/Sovwpnprog.html |
August 12, 1982 Open missile tubes on Trident subTwelve 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. Who is Mumia Abu-Jamal? https://www.amnesty.org/en/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/amr510012000en.pdf |
Peace & Justice history for 8/10
https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryaugust.htm#august10
| 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 WalkerMorton 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: https://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=Mattachine:_Radical_Roots_of_the_Gay_Movement |
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 KattMore plowshares actions: https://coat.ncf.ca/our_magazine/links/issue42/articles/a_history_of_direct_disarmament.htm |
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://wri-irg.org/en/story/2005/turkey-conscientious-objector-mehmet-tarhan-hunger-strike-more-32-days |
Good Sense
“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 ruinsAn 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 GallowayThe 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:
| 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 Stanfield | The 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.htm | The 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 loaded | Details of the action https://www.jonahhouse.org/archive/weep.htm |
https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryjuly.htm#july27
Scottie's Playtime 