Happy 50th Birthday to the Peace Symbol!!

[proud2BlibKansan]

Peace Symbol Says Style, Not Hope

by Kevin Brooker

There is certainly symbolism to the fact that, this month, the peace symbol turns 50 years old. Slightly stooped and timeworn, alas, like humans of that age, it struggles to maintain relevance.

If you don’t count religious emblems, the peace symbol has become one of the world’s most enduring and recognizable of hieroglyphics. Quite a feat for an image which, instead of being based on some famous existing object, was designed precisely for the use that it has most often been made.

Its author was an English commercial artist and anti-nuclear activist named Gerald Holtom. He was one of many intellectuals in Britain during the 1950s who were deeply agitated first by having witnessed the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but then watching their own government, despite being in a time of postwar material hardship, race to join the nuclear club.

The sheer madness of that ambition was summarized, in the minds of activists, by an offhand remark by soon-to-be Prime Minister Alexander Douglas-Home: “The British people are prepared to be blown to atomic dust if necessary.”


more . . . http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/02/11/6990/

[dweller]

1. ...

http://www.uspeacememorial.org/


peace
dp

[Hamlette]

2. 50 year olds are stooped and timeworn?

what a wanker

and an idiot

Wanted to read what he had to say but couldn't get past the fact he is not a good observer of life or is an idiot in which case, this author is worth reading.

[proud2BlibKansan]

3. Whatever, Dude

[2008]

4. origin of the design...

"At its basic level, the design combined two letters from the semaphore alphabet of flag-signalling, N (flags at eight and four o’clock) and D (flags at six and 12 o’clock), to indicate nuclear disarmament. A circle signified the earth."

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/02/11/6990
(same link as o.p.)

I've known fundies who believed the design was an upside-down broken cross, and therefore Satanic in origin.

[Winterblues]

5. Wing Nuts used to call it the footprint of the American Chicken

Yet most of those saying that never served a single day in any branch of service. they sure are strong advocates for war though..

[proud2BlibKansan]

6. And I think it more closely resembles their brain xrays