Commemorative Stamps

85th Anniversary of the Dandi March – March 12, 1930 – Gandhi & The Salt Satyagraha

Mar 11th, 2015

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Gandhi’s SALT MARCH – India 2005 Mini Sheet – 75 Anniversary of Dandi March (Salt March)

The Salt March, which took place from March to April 1930 in India, was an act of civil disobedience led by Mohandas Gandhi (1869-1948) to protest British rule in India. During the march, thousands of Indians followed Gandhi from his religious retreat near Ahmedabad to the Arabian Sea coast, a distance of some 240 miles. The march resulted in the arrest of nearly 60,000 people, including Gandhi himself. India finally was granted its independence in 1947.

SALT MARCH: BACKGROUND
Britain’s Salt Acts prohibited Indians from collecting or selling salt, a staple in the Indian diet. Citizens were forced to buy the vital mineral from the British, who, in addition to exercising a monopoly over the manufacture and sale of salt, also exerted a heavy salt tax. Although India’s poor suffered most under the tax, Indians required salt. Defying the Salt Acts, Mohandas Gandhi reasoned, would be an ingeniously simple way for many Indians to break a British law nonviolently. (British rule of India began in 1858. After living for two decades in South Africa, where he fought for the civil rights of Indians residing there, Gandhi returned to his native country in 1915 and soon began working for India’s independence.) Gandhi declared resistance to British salt policies to be the unifying theme for his new campaign of “satyagraha,” or mass civil disobedience. – The History Channel [www.history.com/topics/salt-march]

The Salt March Monument, New Delhi, India – CLICK FOR LARGER IMAGE

The Congress Seva Dal will celebrate the 85th anniversary of Dandi Yatra on March 12 by organising a yatra in Baroda. The Congress Seva Dal today said the yatra will start from Sardar Vallabhai Patel’s statue in the city and culminate at Mahatma Gandhi’s statue at Gandhinagar Guru hall. All India Congress Seva Dal secretary Pratap Narayan Mishra and Gujarat Congress Seva Dal chief Mangal Singh Solanki and a large number of activists will take part in the event. Father of the Nation Mahatama Gandhi in 1930 had led the Dandi March or Salt March from Sabarmati Ashram to the coastal village of Dandi. [news.webindia123.com/news/articles/India/20140310/2354790.html] – WEDNESDAY, MARCH 11, 2015 – Web India 123

Rwandan Genocide Commemorative Stamp – Another Clinton Blunder

Jun 11th, 2008

by fadingad.

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Photo credits:

James Nachtwey: Sunday Salon

Torture Update – U.S. Commemorative Stamps – Susan Sontag Quote

Mar 23rd, 2008

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Here is a Sontag quote forwarded to me by David Duckworth who is preparing for a coming lecture [the 2008 National Popular Culture & American Culture Associations Conference] in which Duckworth will “discuss gay artists and the themes of detention and torture in art. I am sharing with you an excerpt from Susan Sontag’s “Regarding the Pain of Others”:

“All memory is individual, unreproducible — it dies with each person. What is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulating: that this is important, and this is the story about how it happened, with the pictures that lock the story in our minds. Ideologies create substantiating archives of images, representative images, which encapsulate common ideas of significance and trigger predictable thoughts, feelings. Poster-ready photographs — the mushroom cloud of an A-bomb test, Martin Luther King, Jr., speaking at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., the astronaut walking on the moon — are the visual equivalent of sound bites. They commemorate, in no less blunt fashion than postage stamps, Important Historical Moments; indeed, the triumphalist ones (the picture of the A-bomb excepted) become postage stamps. Fortunately, there is no one signature picture of the Nazi death camps.”

When they (we) executed Saddam Hussein, I was compelled to do a U.S. Commemorative Stamp series on American Torture in the name of democracy and freedom. The stamp design was modeled after Nazi German Propaganda stamps from the 1930s and the images were culled from what was made available on the Internet by the news media. Since the fall of Hussein’s regime- gay and lesbian Iraqis have been systematically hunted down and executed in the streets, their homes and driven into secrecy. There was evidence of religious pluralism and gender tolerance during Hussein’s reign. Here is a glimpse of what is occurring now that Iraq has been “liberated.”

The body of Karar Oda, who was murdered in April 2006 because he was believed to have had an affair with another man. Murdered and set ablaze April 2006, Karar Oda is just one of the many Iraqis dragged from their homes by hooded militia and shot, set on fire or beheaded because they were believed to be gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender. – Gay Lesbian Times 2006

In June 2006, Karar Oda, a thirty-eight-year-old man from Sadr City, was kidnapped by the Badr Brigade—an informal armed wing of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq—and a part of the country’s government. The Ministry of Interior presented an arrest warrant to his family. It stated that Karar was accused of homosexuality—something considered extremely immoral—and deserved to be punished by death. Karar’s burnt and mutilated body was found ten days later. – Diana Y. Vitoshka from The Modern Face of Honor Killing: Factors, Legal Issues, and Policy Recommendations

Lesbian & Gay African-Americans – Tribute to Black History Month – U.S. Commemorative Stamps – Frank H. Jump

Feb 1st, 2008

by fadingad.

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Audre Lorde – Audrey Geraldine Lorde was born on February 18, 1934 in New York City. She decided to drop the “y” from the end of her name at a young age, setting a precedent in her life of self determination. She was the daughter of Caribbean immigrants who settled in Harlem. She graduated from Columbia University and Hunter College, where she later held the prestigious post of Thomas Hunter Chair of Literature. She was married for eight years in the 1960’s, and had two children — Elizabeth and Jonathan. Lorde was a self described “Black lesbian, mother, warrior, poet”. However, her life was one that could not be summed up in a phrase.¹

James Baldwin – James Arthur Baldwin (August 2, 1924 – November 30, 1987) was an American novelist, writer, playwright, poet, essayist, and civil rights activist. Most of Baldwin’s work deals with racial and sexual issues in the mid-20th century United States. His novels are notable for the personal way in which they explore questions of identity as well as for the way in which they mine complex social and psychological pressures related to being black and homosexual well before the social, cultural or political equality of these groups could be assumed.²

Bayard Rustin – (March 17, 1912 – August 24, 1987) was an American civil rights activist, important largely behind the scenes in the civil rights movement of the 1960s and earlier, and principal organizer of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. He counseled Martin Luther King, Jr. on the techniques of nonviolent resistance. Rustin was openly gay and advocated on behalf of gay and lesbian causes in the latter part of his career. A year before his death in 1987, Rustin said: “The barometer of where one is on human rights questions is no longer the black community, it’s the gay community. Because it is the community which is most easily mistreated.”³

Barbara Jordan – Barbara Charline Jordan (February 21, 1936 – January 17, 1996) was an American politician from Texas. She served as a congresswoman in the United States House of Representatives from 1973 to 1979. Jordan was a lesbian with a longtime companion of more than 20 years, Nancy Earl; Jordan never publicly acknowledged her sexual orientation, but in her obituary, the Houston Chronicle mentioned her longtime relationship with Earl. After Jordan’s initial unsuccessful statewide races, advisers warned her to become more discreet and not bring any female companions on the campaign trail.↑