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The Peace symbol
by The Ovi Team
2010-02-21 10:17:35

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The internationally recognized symbol for peace was originally designed for the British nuclear disarmament movement. It was designed and completed on 21 February 1958 by Gerald Holtom, a professional designer and artist in Britain for the 4 April march planned by the Direct Action Committee Against Nuclear War (DAC) from Trafalgar Square, peace01_02

London to the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston in England. The symbol was later adopted by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). It was adopted by first the 1960s anti-war movement, then the counterculture, and finally the popular culture of the time.

The peace sign flag first became known in the United States in 1958 when Albert Bigelow, a pacifist protester, sailed his small boat outfitted with the CND banner into the vicinity of a nuclear test.

The peace sign button was imported into the United States in 1960 by Philip Altbach, a freshman at the University of Chicago, who travelled to England to meet with British peace groups as a delegate from the Student Peace Union (SPU). Altbach purchased a bag of the "chickentrack" buttons while he was in England, and brought them back to Chicago, where he convinced SPU to reprint the button and adopt it as its symbol. Over the next four years, SPU reproduced and sold thousands of the buttons on college campuses. By the late 1960s, the peace sign had become an international symbol adopted by anti-war protestors of the Baby Boomer generation.

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The symbol itself is a combination of the semaphoric signals for the letters "N" and "D," standing for Nuclear Disarmament. In semaphore the letter "N" is formed by a person holding two flags in an upside-down "V," and the letter "D" is formed by holding one flag pointed straight up and the other pointed straight down. Superimposing these two signs forms the shape of the centre of the peace symbol. In the first official CND version (which was preceded by a ceramic pin version that had straight lines, but was short lived) the spokes curved out to be wider at the edge of the circle, which was white on black.

Holtom later wrote to Hugh Brock, editor of Peace News, explaining the genesis of his idea in greater depth: "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 formalised the drawing into a line and put a circle round it." Ken Kolsbum, a correspondent of Holtom's, says that the designer came to regret the symbolism of despair, as he felt that peace was something to be celebrated and wanted the symbol to be inverted.

The original drawing by Gerald Holtom of the CND symbol is housed in the Peace Museum, U.K. in Bradford, England. In Unicode, the peace sign is U+262E: ☮, and can thus be generated in HTML by typing ☮ or ☮. However, internet browsers may not have a typeface that can display it. The gravestone of Ed Bishop, actor and anti-war campaigner, has a peace symbol prominently engraved on it.

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Emanuel Paparella	2010-02-21 17:19:22
There is another story on the peace symbol as narrated by Tom Wolfe in one of his books. He noticed that quite a few young people living in the poorer sections of New York wore the peace symbol around their neck. He investigated this intriguing phenomenon and what he came up with was that those peace symbols were nothing else than the brand sign of Mercedes Bens stolen from the rich on Wall Street. They could not own legitimately own the Mercedes but at least they could put the symbol of wealth and power around their neck, as a trophy of sort. On further reflection Wolfe came to the conclusion that there was actually something that both the thieves of upper Manhattan and the bankers of lower Manhattan on Wall Street had in common and that was the kind of language they both used. It was replete with unrepeatable profanities usually proffered while “working.” He further speculated that a sign of a decadent civilization is the decadence of its language on the part of both the poor and the rich. It was a prophecy of sort which we may be coming to pass as we speak.


Emanuel Paparella	2010-02-21 17:22:55
Errata: they could not legitimately own...; ...which may be coming to pass.