I’ve long noticed there are few active, online peace sites or com­mu­ni­ties that have the grass­roots depth I see occur­ring else­where on the net. It’s a prob­lem for Non​vi​o​lence​.org, as it makes it harder to find a diver­sity of sto­ries.
I have two types of sources for “Nonviolence.org”:www.nonviolence.org.
h4. The first is main­stream news
I search through “Google News”:http://news.google.com, “Tech­no­rati cur­rent events”:http://www.technorati.com/cosmos/currentevents.html, then maybe “The New York Times”:www.nytimes.com, “The Guardian”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/, and “The Wash­ing­ton Post”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/.
There are lots of inter­est­ing arti­cles on the war in iraq, but there’s always a polit­i­cal spin some­where, espe­cially in tim­ing. Most big news sto­ries have bro­ken in one month, died down, and then become huge news three months later (e.g., Wilson’s CIA wife being exposed, which was first reported on Non​vi​o​lence​.org on July 22 but became head­lines in early Octo­ber). These news cycles are dri­ven by domes­tic party pol­i­tics, and at times I feel all my links make Non​vi​o​lence​.org sound like an appa­ratchik of the Demo­c­ra­tic Party USA.
But it’s not just the tone that makes main­stream news arti­cles a problem–it’s also the gen­eral sub­ject mat­ter. There’s a lot more to non­vi­o­lence than anti­war exposes, yet the news rarely cov­ers any­thing about the cul­ture of peace. “If it bleeds it leads” is an old news­pa­per slo­gan and you will never learn about the wider scope of non­vi­o­lence by read­ing the papers.
h4. My sec­ond source is peace move­ment web­sites
And these are, by-and-large, unin­ter­est­ing. Often they’re not updated fre­quently. But even when they are, the pieces on them can be shal­low. You’ll see the self-serving press release (“as a peace orga­ni­za­tion we protest war actions”) and you’ll see the exclam­a­tory all-caps screed (“eND THe OCCUPATION NOW!!!”). These are fine as long as you’re already a mem­ber of said orga­ni­za­tion or already have decided you’re against the war, but there’s lit­tle per­sua­sion or dia­logue pos­si­ble in this style of writ­ing and orga­niz­ing.
There are few peo­ple in the larger peace move­ment who reg­u­larly write pieces that are inter­est­ing to those out­side our nar­row cir­cles. “David McReynolds”:http://www.nonviolence.org/issues/philosophy-nonviolence.php and “Geov Parrish”:http://www.workingforchange.com/column_lst.cfm?AuthrId=25 are two of those excep­tions. It takes an abil­ity to some­times ques­tion your own group’s con­sen­sus and to acknowl­edge when non­vi­o­lence ortho­doxy some­times just doesn’t have an answer.
And what of peace blog­gers? I really admire “Joshua Micah Marshall”:http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/, but he’s not a paci­fist. There’s the excel­lent “Gut­less Pacifist”:http://www.gutlesspacifist.com/ (who’s led me to some very inter­est­ing web­sites over the last year), “Bill Connelly/Thoughts on the eve”:http://b-c.blogspot.com/, “Stand Down/No War Blog”:http://www.nowarblog.org/ and a new one for me, “The Picket Line”:http://www.sniggle.net/experiment/. But most of us are all point­ing to the same main­stream news arti­cles, with the same iraq War focus.
If the web had started in the early 1970s, there would have been lots of inter­est­ing pub­lish­ing projects and blogs grow­ing out the activist com­mu­ni­ties. Younger peo­ple today are using the inter­net to spon­sor inter­est­ing gath­er­ings and using sites like Meetup to build con­nec­tions, but I don’t see com­mu­ni­ties built around peace the way they did in the early 1970s. There are few peo­ple build­ing a life–hope, friends, work–around paci­fism.
Has “paci­fism” become ossi­fied as its own in-group dogma of a cer­tain gen­er­a­tion of activists? What links can we build with cur­rent move­ments? How can we deepen and expand what we mean by non­vi­o­lence so that it relates to the world out­side our tiny organizations