Talk:Peace symbols

anarchy symbol

it doesnt reseble the anarchy symbol to me and i would like to read the letter the hippie wrote

Moved from article until sourced

"Another interpretation of the peace symbol, in connection with the "Make Love, Not War" anti-war slogan, is that it represents a heterosexual couple engaged in the act of copulation (citation needed)."

Wow. Because that's what it represented for most hippies. Ask your forefather and foremothers and they will tell you. And they'll all tell you. This article is trash.

Fringe theories

I removed a long passage about the peace sign, which gives undue weight to the fringe theories of David E. Gumaer about Satanism, etc. Unfortunately they keep recurring, so it is necessary to deal with them in detail.

The peace symbol was designed in 1958 by Gerald Holtom, a commercial artist and a supporter of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). It is well documented that he based it on the semaphore signs for the letters N and D. For twelve years, nobody supposed the peace symbol meant anything other than the nuclear disarmament movement or, more generally, peace. Then, in 1970, the extreme right-wing John Birch Society, who thought that even President Eisenhower was a Communist, published an article by Gumaer, saying the peace symbol had Communist, Nazi and Satanic associations. (Gumaer, David E. Peace Symbols: The Truth About Those Strange Designs, American Opinion, June 1970) Gumaer's claims have spread among extreme conservatives and occultists, to the extent that some people now state as a fact that the "real" meaning of the peace symbol is Satanism, Communism or Nazism. Every such statement can be traced directly to Gumaer, even though those who put his theories forward are usually unaware of their origins.

What exactly did Gumaer say?

• The peace symbol was in existence before Holtom designed it in 1958.

In order to make his case, Gumaer includes a crude picture of Satan with CND symbols drawn all over it. This is supposed to be a 16th century woodcut but it is not a woodcut at all and was obviously drawn specially for Gumaer's article.

• The peace symbol was designed by Bertrand Russell, whom Gumaer describes as a Communist.

Bertrand Russell had nothing to do with the design and was never a Communist.

• The peace symbol is the so-called "Nero Cross", the inverted crucifix on which St Peter was martyred and which has become an anti-Christian symbol.

The peace symbol looks nothing like St Peter's cross. There is no record of any "Nero Cross" until Gumaer invented it in 1970.

• The peace symbol is the yr-rune.

Runes are letters in pre-Roman German alphabets. As you can make many shapes from lines and circles, some are bound to look similar. As it happens, the semaphore for N and D – the middle of the peace symbol without the circle – has the same shape as the yr-rune, but there is no other connection.

• The peace symbol is the ancient death rune.

Gumaer draws on The Book of Signs by Rudolf Koch (Das Zeichenbuch, 1923) which shows the yr-rune captioned "The man dies". This is supposed to prove the occult origins of the peace sign. But the death rune is a 20th century fabrication. From about 1880 to 1945, German writers on the occult began to say that runes were not merely letters in the pre-Roman alphabet but that they had a power of their own. Every writer said something different. Von List invented one system, Wiligut invented another, neither with any basis in history or philology. Koch made yet another interpretation, also unsupported by evidence. There is nothing to indicate that Holtom, the man who designed the peace symbol, knew anything about Koch or runes.

• The peace symbol's real and inner meaning is not peace as Holtom intended, but Satanism, Communism and Nazism.

Symbols have no "real" or "inner" meaning. They are conventions, like letters or road signs, and mean only what people say they mean. The peace sign means what Holtom and the peace movement said it means: anti H-bomb and pro-peace. It started to mean Satanism, Nazism and Communism only in 1970 when Gumaer said that's what it meant. -- 09:25, 28 March 2012‎ User:Marshall46

Most of this has been discussed in the archives... AnonMoos (talk) 16:51, 28 March 2012 (UTC)

Another idea that keeps cropping up (and which I have removed from the article) is that the peace sign was used by the SS and copied from them by CND. The earliest source for this alleged use is a drawing in Theodor Hartmann's Wehrmacht Divisional Signs, London: Almark Publishing Co., 1970 - again, after the peace sign had become well-known. You can see it here (p.40, No.60). Hartmann gives no source for the drawing and no photograph of the symbol in use by the SS has ever been produced. Theodor Hartmann is unknown apart from this book. For all these reasons he is an unreliable source. Marshall46 (talk) 13:01, 2 May 2012 (UTC)

Peace symbol origins

The following reference will supplement the evidence that Holtom got the CND symbol from Koch's work and corroborate Peggy Duff's statement on the runic origin of the symbol.

http://www.fpif.org/articles/a_sign_of_the_times Gerald Holtom explained to the meeting that...the broken cross could also mean the death of man,(which Peggy duff also stated) whereas the circle symbolized the unborn child.

This explanation of the symbolism comes from Rudoph Koch's The Book of Signs, which is almost certainly where Holtom got his inspiration. Koch's book, which contains almost 500 symbols from medieval Europe, was first published in Britain in 1930, but it was issued as a cheap paperback by Dover Publications in 1955 and became popular among art students at that time. As the director of a design studio, it is unlikely that Holtom did not have a copy. His explanation of the symbol for a dead man and the symbol for an unborn child match those of Koch precisely. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Boundarylayer (talk • contribs) 17:20, 16 January 2013 (UTC)