The BALL REPORTS

Nut balls beyond recognition

December 19, 2006

This was all sparked by an individual displaying a wreath that contained a peace symbol, an anti-nuke symbol!, for the very holidays that claim peace and goodwill to all as the foundation of modern civilization...

Its' hard to believe there are such nut balls out there. But....

Every time you have a nut ball going off the deep end in a spectacularly public fashion, there's some other nut ball out there to defend him. But first, an example of the majority opinion, from Dex in California: "If [HOA president] Kearns actually knew anything about the development of the peace sign, he'd know that far from being 'an upside-down, broken-armed cross' (whatever THAT is supposed to be), the peace sign originally stood for [The campaign for] Nuclear Disarmament, representing the semaphore flag signal positions for 'N' (straight up and down) and 'D' (left and right 45-degree down) superimposed together. Leave it to the Brits to reference something no one in America understands, and American Christians are just sure is 'satanic.'"

Certainly someone from the military would get the "N.D." bit, right? But here's Johnnie in Alabama, a veteran of the Vietnam war: "Maybe you are too young to remember, but the so-called 'peace' sign which you apparently support, was the symbol of draft-dodgers and hippies of the '60s, protesting our part in the [Vietnam] war mainly because they were too cowardly to participate, just as they considered themselves too good to be a functioning and productive part of society. They thought it made them wiser than everyone else to sit around fogging their minds with pot and LSD. The same thing is happening now with the Iraq invasion protestors. How quickly they forget that 3,000 Americans were killed in less than an hour in 1991, in an unprovoked attack on our own homeland. The links between that and our actions in Afghanistan and Iraq are undeniable if someone really wants to look at it. All civil people want peace, but the aggressors of this world will always make that an impossible dream. If we fail to act against them, they will certainly continue to act against us, with more and more boldness and power. The 'peace' sign's anti-Christian intent is obvious; why else would it be a broken cross, as the cross is the symbol of Jesus and nothing else that I know of? How can we celebrate His birthday by displaying an anti-Christ symbol? Satan is a deceiver, and he is certainly deceiving people like that ignorant woman -- and you."

Wow: ignorant indeed! Where do I begin? Yes, I'm old enough to remember the peaceniks of the 60s, and despite my tender age I knew even then that the "peace sign" was derived from the semaphore signals for N and D -- and what that stood for. (I'm also old enough to remember WHY that was a big deal, as we had "duck and cover" drills in school, which was somehow supposed to help us all survive attacks by nuclear weapons.) No, we haven't forgotten that, just as we haven't forgotten the (ahem!) *2001* attacks in New York, Washington D.C., and Pennsylvania (or the Beirut Marine barracks, or the USS Cole, or....)

Think of them how you wish, but the hippies were essentially right about Vietnam. The lesson this country supposedly learned from that conflict was to not engage in war unless our national security was at risk, and now we have a bipartisan committee agreeing with the vast majority of the population -- that invading Iraq was a spectacularly bad idea (to bring it back to the story at hand). To lump them all together as draft-dodging anti-social druggies is to massively miss the point -- you're not REALLY arguing that James Baker is some sort of commie, right?

So the hippies adopted a symbol begging for peace to ...yes... also beg for peace; so what? That doesn't degrade the symbol's meaning or intent, which is well documented. There is nothing "satanic" about the peace symbol, and there never has been. There are only two classes of people who think so: extremely gullible fools and manipulative, paranoid fundamentalists who have the ears of extremely gullible fools. And gee: wasn't it manipulative, paranoid fundamentalists who started this whole Islamic terrorist thing in the first place?

Dear Cecil:
   I need to know the origin of the peace symbol.

Members of the Alliance for Survival will be constructing what may be the world's largest peace symbol on Santa Monica beach, and we want our facts correct. We've heard some pretty strange rumors. Perhaps you can clear the air once and for all. --Jerry R., Santa Monica, California

Cecil replies: The pursuit of knowledge cannot be rushed.

Building a gigantic sand castle in La-La Land is sure to make world aggressors think twice. The design for the familiar crow's-foot-in-a-circle we know as the peace symbol was completed February 21, 1958, by British commercial artist Gerald Holtom.

Holtom had been commissioned by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. The CND, headed by philosopher Bertrand Russell, was planning an Easter march to Canterbury Cathedral to protest the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston.

After doodling around with several versions of the Christian cross set in a circle, Holtom hit on the crow's-foot idea. This had a couple things going for it.

First, it was a combination of the semaphore signals for N and D, standing for Nuclear Disarmament. N is two flags held in an upside-down V, and D is one flag pointed straight up and the other pointed straight down.

Second, the crow's-foot has an ancient history as a symbol of death and despair--it looks like somebody spreading his hands in a gesture of defeat. The symbol is shown in a 1955 tome called The Book of Signs by Rudolph Koch, a German calligrapher, although it's unclear whether Holtom saw it there.

The circle, finally, can mean "eternity," "the unborn child," and so on. From this you can no doubt cook up a suitably apocalyptic interpretation of the symbol as a whole.

During the heyday of the peace movement, other interpretations of the symbol were also offered. A national Republican newsletter noted that it looked a lot like an emblem used by the Nazis during World War II--an apparent coincidence.

Another interpretation, widely promoted by the John Birch Society and other right-wing groups, was that the symbol was really the "broken cross," sign of the Antichrist.

One Bircher wrote that the broken cross had originally been devised by the Roman emperor Nero, who had Saint Peter crucified upon it upside down. In the Middle Ages the symbol allegedly was used to signify the devil.

I have been unable to discover any good evidence for either of these contentions.

The Birchers, you may remember, also distributed bumper stickers featuring the peace symbol with the slogan, "Footprint of the American Chicken." The far-right crowd, I tell you, they are such a stitch.

December Guest Reporter

"Opinions unlimited"

Prior | Tell us what you think | Next

Add to Your Social Bookmarks: Del.icio.us Digg Furl Reddit Simpy Spurl Y! MyWeb - StumbleUpon