St Paul City Council 8/21 3:30. Proclamation of Kellogg Briand Peace Pact Day

[annm4peace]

PROCLAMATION OF KELLOGG BRIAND PEACE PACT DAY

PLACE..... St Paul City Hall , Room 300 15 W Kellogg
TIME........3:30
DATE........August 21, 2013
SUBJECT....PROCLAMATION OF KELLOGG BRIAND PEACE PACT DAY
CONTACT...Larry Johnson, President Mpls St Paul Chapter of Veterans for Peace 612 747 3904
Steve McKeown, Kellogg Briand Event Coordinator Veterans for Peace 612 869 2040
[e-mail] Veterans for Peace
1806 Riverside Ave.,#3a
Mpls.,Mn 55454

At 3:30 P.M. on Wednesday, August 21, a resolution will be introduced and voted on by the St Paul City Council. This resolution is being brought forward by Councilmember Dave Thune for the purpose of proclaiming August 27, 2013 as " Kellogg Briand Peace Pact Day " in celebration of the 85th anniversary of the Pact that was signed on this day in 1928 which outlawed war and is still recognized by 84 countries including our own. This Pact which is still U.S. and International Law was engineered by then U.S. Secretary of State Frank Kellogg and co authored by Aristide Briand the French Foreign Minister. Kellogg won the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts in 1928, and is the only Minnesotan to have done so, and for whom Kellogg Boulevard is named after. Briand won this same Prize in 1927 for his Peacemaking efforts.

Councilmember David Thune whose Ward the Kellogg House is in will be introducing this Proclamation at the request of several St Paul residents including members of the Mpls St Paul Veterans for Peace chapter. The Kellogg Briand Pact "renounces war as an instrument of National Policy " which is the exact wording of Veterans for Peace's Statement of Purpose. There will be a Press Conference immediately after the voting in a room next to the Council Chamber. Please come.

ADDENDUM
Frank Billings Kellogg (December 22, 1856-December 21, 1937), was a mostly self-educated farm boy who grew up near Rochester, Minnesota but rose to national and international preemince as a prominent attorney,trust-busting national prosecutor, president of the American Bar Association, U.S. Senator, U.S. Secretary of State, co-author of the Kellogg Briand Pact, associate judge on the Permanent Court of International Justice and the only Minnesotan to win the Nobel Peace Prize. He died in St Paul in the " Frank B. Kellogg House" ( Fairmount and Crocus) that he had made home since 1889 and which in 1976 was listed as a National Historic Landmark.

Although few residents of St Paul presently know much about the once famous Minnesotan, the compelling history behind the Pact bears remembering and honoring....a Pact that legally called for international disputes or conflicts to be settled by peaceful means only, and was the legal basis for prosecuting the Nazis at Nuremberg following World War 11.

This recognition is long overdue! Therefore, in hopes of encouraging awareness of the work of Frank B Kellogg and of the peace movement of the 1920's that moved him to action, the City of St Paul will be presented with the opportunity to officially proclaim August 27th as " Kellogg Briand Peace Pact Day ".

[annm4peace]

1. It passed today.

City of St Paul did good..

[dflprincess]

2. The Strib had an aricle about it today

mentioning that the pact made it "illegal to start a war"...No speculaiton in the article about why Bush, Cheney, etal had not been prosecuted for breaking the law.

[annm4peace]

3. I saw the article and posted a comment

I'm glad they announced it but I wished they wrote more about the Pact and the work to get it passed.

It was also written about in the WAMM (Women Against Military Maddness) news letter.


http://womenagainstmilitarymadness.org/newsletter/2013/0813/declares.html


The World Declares An End to War!
By Steve McKeown
It’s hard to imagine today, but the nations of the world once agreed to ban all war. Now it’s time to uncover the buried story and revive hope for humankind.

A favorite song among peace activists is one written by Ed McCurdy in 1950. It goes like this: “Last night I had the strangest dream I'd ever dreamed before. I dreamed the world had all agreed to put an end to war. I dreamed I saw a mighty room, and the room was filled with men. And the paper they were signing said they'd never fight again.”



Initially, 15 countries signed the pact and many more signed shortly thereafter. Within the U.S., the Senate ratified it in an 85 to 1 vote. President Coolidge then signed it, and it was recognized as a binding agreement as of July 24, 1929. It remains on the books to this day as part of what Article VI of the U.S. Constitution calls the “supreme law of the land.” Eighty-four countries are signatories.


Much more went into the treaty to ban war, of course, than the actions of the two leaders for whom it is named. Our culture is so militarized now that it’s necessary to understand how different the environment in the world and in the U.S. was in 1928 and 1929.

The movement to outlaw war arose as a result of the horrific World War I experience with poison gas, constant shelling, corpses, rats, mud and blood in trenches separated by barbed wire, sometimes not even miles apart; some battles resulted in rivers running with blood. Nearly ten million were killed and 20 million wounded in what was supposed to be “the war to end all war.” A staggering 100 million people also died due to influenza that is, of little doubt, attributable to the war, as the contagion spread among troops and civilians.

By and large, people were totally sick of war.

As the war was supposedly fought on the premise of being “the war to end all war,” many were angry in its aftermath that they had been deluded into believing that end could justify the means and they called for accountability; the expectation was that, in the future, countries signing the pact would be accountable to each other. Another very important factor conducive to the forming of the pact was that our military industrial complex was much smaller at that time.

Beyond political parties, he explains the enormous grassroots groundswell that was necessary to pressure those in power to ban war through the pact: “Senators who denounced it on the floor during the ratification debate voted for it out of fear of their constituents. Activists organized a flood of petitions and letters and press and meetings and lobbying.”

Grassroots movements in the Midwest, where the progressive populist movement was very strong, played a prominent role in the move to outlaw war. Salmon Oliver Levinson of Chicago led what was called “the Outlawry movement,” launching a national campaign organized to ban all wars.

Women who had organized through the suffragette movement became an active force in the peace movement. In 1925, Carrie Chapman Catt of Iowa, who had established the Women’s Peace Party, created the Committee on the Cause and Cure of War, which gathered five million members and became a force in lobbying for the Kellogg-Briand Pact. Twelve million women planned 48 state conferences to pressure the Senate to ratify the treaty. Women from many countries organized. Jane Addams of Chicago, renowned in the U.S. as a prominent reformer and advocate for women’s and children’s issues, was active in women’s international peace efforts uniting women at a conference in The Hague, Netherlands, in the wake of World War I. She became the first international president of the Women’s International League of Peace and Freedom, which was a strong supporter of the Kellogg-Briand Pact in the U.S. and Europe. Addams led a delegation delivering 30,000 signatures to the White House and also sent it to Briand in Paris.

These groups and individuals and many more saw in the Kellogg-Briand Pact a worldwide organizational effort to control aggression between nations in a way other than militarily in the hope of having nations work together instead of against each other.

The Kellogg-Briand Pact has never been revoked by either the U.S. or the UN despite the UN's increasing role in fighting wars. As to outlawing war, the Kellogg-Briand Pact was more direct and stronger than the United Nations Charter, which came into being in 1945 after World War II, and its predecessor, the League of Nations.

This is because it outlawed all war—not just aggressive war, which could be rationalized in all kinds of imaginable ways.

There are no loopholes in the Kellogg-Briand Pact. While it does not rule out self-defense, it does not claim self-defense as a justification for going to war. That’s because countries will always claim self-defense as a way to justify going to war.* If there is a weakness in it, it is that the arms merchants undermined it before the ink was dry, something that the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom was quick to point out.


Veterans for Peace, Chapter 27, has been active in acquiring signatures calling for a national holiday to be observed each August 27 on the anniversary of the signing of the Kellogg-Briand Pact in the hopes that this can begin to change our ideas about war. By reviving the history of the life and legacy of the man whom one of St. Paul’s most well-traveled streets was named after, we want to get people to think about the reason he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace and thus open up the very real possibility of further discussion about how this law came into being, why it did, and why it is important today.

We cannot match, on a case by case basis, all the scenarios that the Pentagon in Washington, D.C.—all its lobbyists—and all the war planners in the world conjure up. As peace advocates, our strength lies in maintaining the belief that it is possible to abolish war once and for all. We may find that outlawing war is in our deeper human nature more than any imagined determination that war is inevitable.