The Peace Symbol Celebrates Its 57th Birthday, But Still No Peace
Gerald Holtom, an artist and conscientious objector, created the Peace Symbol on February 21,1958. According to Christopher Driver, author of The Disarmers: A Study in Protest, Holtom created the design and then brought it to an organizer of a local British peace group. After several revisions, it was unveiled publicly on Good Friday of that year, by anti-nuclear demonstrators -- the British Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) -- who marched 50 miles from London's Trafalgar Square to the weapons factory at Aldermaston. It was the first Ban-the-Bomb March.
"When Gerald Holtom, a British designer and former World War II conscientious objector, sat down at his drawing board fifty-five years ago, he was in almost total despair. He later told the editor of Peace News: 'I was in despair. Deep despair. I drew myself: the representative of an individual in despair, with hands palm outstretched outwards and downwards in the manner of Goya's peasant before the firing squad. I formalized the drawing into a line and put a circle round it.'"
Today we can mourn the loss of the fight as we acknowledge a state pf perpetual war; war among nations, war among peoples, war against the planet. Read on below for more.
In the 1960s I drove a VW bus with the symbol on it as did many in those days. Things have gone full circle for it was a democratic administration then too. The culprits then became the republicans and most democrats obtained short memories.
Before that and then along with that other symbols have been used.
The dove and olive branch was used symbolically by early Christians and then eventually became a secular peace symbol, popularized by Pablo Picasso after the Second World War.
I have been amused about the dove as a symbol of peace since my course in comparative psychology (Ethology) in grad school.
The Rats of War: Konrad Lorenz and the Anthropic Shift -
When a dove is trapped with another dove it has no phylogenetically derived compunction against gouging its peaceful neighbor to death. So it is with humans and their rapidly evolving capacity for mischief. We are like a dove that “suddenly acquired the beak of a raven”. We don’t know how to turn the killer off, because we’ve never really had to before.
I was trained to kill other humans in 1957 as a USMC officer in payment for my free NROTC college education. I became a pacifist and was in love with the peace symbol from its origins.