Mostly archives from Nonviolence.org, the groundbreaking peace portal started by Martin in 1995.
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One of the problems with the peace movement is that it rarely measures itself. There are few metrics that point to the effectiveness of our work. There are a couple of reasons for this:
Each peace movement group is an entity unto itself. But they are also all parts of networks with other groups. Sometimes these networks are given names and membership is formally listed. But more often the networks are informal associations of like-minded organizations who have shared history, staff and past movement organizing together.
The friendships behind these informal alliances can often be a strength to overworked staff people who can easily feel discouraged. But it also means they all turn to each other too much, and an effect which the military calls “incentuous amplification” can occur. The heads of established peace groups will all talk only to the heads of other peace groups to affirm each other’s importance. Meanwhile new groups are locked out of this buddy system.
Luckily the internet has given us a way to measure these networks. If each established peace group is thought of as a “node,” then its importance is a reflection of it’s connections to other networks and to other nodes. Web search engines can measure how many links each organization’s has with other organizations.
Here at the Nonviolence Web, we prefer to use Altavista for this measurement. A properly-constructed search query on Altavista will return the number of links to the site’s homepage and to all of it’s sub-pages while not including the site’s own links to itself. Here’s the search string:
link:www.domain.org ‑url:www.domain.org
The numbers reflect just how widely our organizations are linked to other organizations and where we fit in the larger networks. Here’s how I’ve translated it for peace movement groups:
Knowing where we all stand acts as a good reality check for our ambitions. Each organization is strongest when it knows its core reputation and bases its future work on a level-headed assessment of strengths, opportunities and weaknesses. We can be visionary and strategic —- indeed we must be to bring nonviolence to the world! —- but we must also be sure not to squander donors’ money.
One obvious caveat: most peace organizations don’t focus on the internet. A low ranking doesn’t mean that their work isn’t important or useful. Internet links are only one measurement, one that needs to be taken in context. Still: when an individual or group links to our pages it does represent a sort of endorsement, a indication that they identify with the work we’re doing. The linker is telling others that this is a peace group they think their visitors should know about. We ignore these endorsements at our own folly.
This just isn’t a good time to be George W. Bush. United Nations inspectors combing Iraq for weapons of mass destruction have come up empty handed. Saddam Hussein has allowing them relatively unfettered access but all they’ve uncovered is a few unused shells.
Bush is nothing if not persistent when it comes to perceived world bad guys. Just yesterday he told an audience in St. Louis that Hussein is “a dangerous, dangerous man with dangerous, dangerous weapons.” Despite the repeated use dangerous, the rest of the world is unconvinced. German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder still talks about “peaceful solutions” and Germany and France is putting the brakes on war in the U.N. Security Council, waiting for evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction to turn up.
It must frustrate our president to see that all these years of military sanctions against Iraq have been working. All the evidence uncovered by the U.N. inspectors prove that we can “win without war,” as one current slogan goes, and that we have in fact been winning. We’ve kept Saddam Hussein from rebuilding his military after the Gulf War. U.S. isolation of Iraq has been successful despite its numerous flaws. Saddam is not a threat.
Which brings us to real threats and to North Korea. President Bush and his team of war mongerers have been so busy looking at Iraq that they’ve given North Korea just sporadic attention. Recently-declassified reports show that the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency has known much more about North Korea’s nuclear bomb making over the last dozen years than anyone’s been admitting.
The C.I.A. has known that North Korea and Pakistan have been trading nuclear secrets. Pakistan has been showing its ally of convenience how to build the centrifuges that process weapons-grade uranium. North Korea in return has provided the missile technology that gives Pakistan the nuclear reach to destroy arch-rival India. Now that we know President Bush knew all about this history of what we might call “dangerous, dangerous” technology trade, why did he cozy up to Pakistan following September 11th? He so wanted wars with Afghanistan and Iraq that he normalized relations with a country far more dangerous. If a Pakistani or North Korean nuclear weapon goes off in New York City it will kill a whole lot more people than Osama bin Laden’s four hijacked airplanes. What happened on September 11th was terrible but it’s nothing compared to what a enemy with resources could do.
There are real threats to world peace, far more “dangerous, dangerous” than Iraq. The United States needs to drop its president’s obsessions and look squarely at the world and who we’re allied with. And when we reset our policies we wqcan use Iraq as our model. For as the U.N. inspectors have proven, we can create peace through diplomacy and we can isolate troublemakers through smart sanctions.
What a tough lesson for U.S. leaders bent on war.
National crises bring out both the best and worst in people. On September 11th, we saw ordinary Americans step up to the task at hand to become heroes. The thousands of stories of people helping people were a salve to a wounded nation. We have all rightly been proud of the New York fire-fighters and rescue workers who became heroes when their job needed heroes. We will always remember their bravery and their sacrifice as a shining moment of human history.
But crises can also bring out the worst in a people and a nation. Some of the most shameful episodes of U.S. history have arisen out of the panic of crisis, when opportunistic leaders have indulged fear and paranoia and used it to advance long-stifled agendas of political control and repression.
President George W. Bush and Attorney General John Ashcroft are just such opportunistic leaders. Under the cloak of fear and the blind of terrorism, they are trying to strip away civil liberties in this country.
It is true that we must review our privacy laws and security policies following the horrors of the airplane hijackings. We must see if some judicious re-balancing might create more security while keeping true to the spirit and traditions of American liberty.
But George W. Bush and John Ashcroft are not the men for careful, judicious review. With every day that goes by, with every press conference or speech, it is becoming clearer that they are using the times to grab power. The Attorney General in particular is sullying the heroism of those who died on September 11th trying to rescue their fellow Americans. He is a coward in the unfolding national drama.
MASS ARRESTS
Over 1,200 people have been arrested and detained since September 11th. Hundreds of them remain in jail. There is no evidence that any of them aided the September 11th hijackers. Only a handful of the detainees are suspected of having any connection with any terrorists. Attorney General Ashcroft has refused to give basic details about these people – including their names!. He has defended the secrecy by implying that jailing such large numbers of foreigners might maybe have prevented other terror plots, though he’s never provided any evidence or given us any details.
His is a legal standard based on the fear and paranoia level of he and his President are feeling. But we here in America do not lock up anyone based on our paranoia. We need evidence and the evidence of someone’s skin color or national origin is not enough.
The evidence of skin color and national origin was enough in one other time in American history: the shameful rounding up of Japanese-Americans in World War 2. Political opportunities saw the possibilities in American’s fear following the bombing of Pearl Harbor and we constructed concentration camps. Many of those sent there were full American citizens but they had no choice. There weren’t enough clear-headed, decent Americans then to say “enough,” to demand that the U.S. live by it’s birthright mandate to ensure freedom. The property of Japanese Americans was also taken and given to politically-connected landowners who had long coveted it. It was a dark moment in American history. Now, in 2001, we are once again locking up people based only on the country of their origin.
KANGAROO COURTS
President Bush has by sleight of hand declared that suspected terrorists can be tried by United States military tribunals. This is an extreme step. We have judicial processes that can try criminals and the United Nations does as well. The only reason to use the military tribunals is out of fear that other courts might be more fair and more just. They might be more deliberate and take longer to weigh and consider the evidence. They will surely be seen as less credible in the eyes of the world, however. We will have lost any moral leadership. But more importantly, we will have lost the true meaning of American liberty and justice.
DOMESTIC SPYING
Yesterday, November 30th, John Ashcroft announced a further grab of political power, another attempt to erode civil liberties. He is considering allowing the Federal Bureau of Investigation to begin spying on religious and political groups in the U.S.
The New York Times says: “The proposal would loosen one of the most fundamental restrictions on the conduct of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and would be another step by the Bush Administration to modify civil-liberties protections as a means of defending the country against terrorists.”
For those of you who don’t know the history. These restrictions against open spying were put into place in the 1970s when the extent and abuse of former spying became known. The F.B.I. had a widespread network that actively tried to suppress political groups.
Figures such as Martin Luther King, Jr., were not only under constant surveillance by the F.B.I. They were harassed, they were blackmailed. Often incriminating evidence would be placed on them and rumors spread to discredit them in their organization.
The federal government actively suppressed political dissent, free speech, and organizing. The regulations Ashcroft wants to overturn were put into place when the extent of this old spying and dirty-tricks campaigning was exposed.
President Bush and Attorney General Ashcroft are using the fear of terror to return us to an era when domestic spying and abrogation of liberties was the norm. When fear of foreigners and political dissent gave U.S. officials powers far beyond those that democracy and security require.
The words you read right now are a gift from the U.S. founding fathers and from generations of good Americas who have stood up boldly to demand continued liberty. Like the fire-fighters of September 11th, dissenters and free speech advocates are normal people who were called by the times to be heroes. Our country and are world needs mores heroes now. Speak out. Demand that our freedom not be another victim of September 11th.
Originally published at Nonviolence.org
The United States has today begun its war against terrorism in a very familiar way: by use of terror. Ignorant of thousands of years of violence in the Middle East, President George W. Bush thinks that the horror of September 11th can be exorcised and prevented by bombs and missiles. Today we can add more names to the long list of victims of the terrorist airplane attacks. Because today Afghanis have died in terror.
The deaths in New York City, Washington and Pennsylvania have shocked Americans and rightly so. We are all scared of our sudden vulnerability. We are all shocked at the level of anger that led nineteen suicide bombers to give up precious life to start such a literal and symbolic conflagration. What they did was horrible and without justification. But that is not to say that they didn’t have reasons.
The terrorists committed their atrocities because of a long list of grievances. They were shedding blood for blood, and we must understand that. Because to understand that is to understand that President Bush is unleashing his own terror campaign: that he is shedding more blood for more blood.
The United States has been sponsoring violence in Afghanistan for over a generation. Even before the Soviet invasion of that country, the U.S. was supporting radical Mujahadeen forces. We thought then that sponsorship of violence would lead to some sort of peace. As we all know now, it did not. We’ve been experimenting with violence in the region for many years. Our foreign policy has been a mish-mash of supporting one despotic regime after another against a shifting array of perceived enemies.
The Afghani forces the United States now bomb were once our allies, as was Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. We have rarely if ever acted on behalf of liberty and democracy in the region. We have time and again sold out our values and thrown our support behind the most heinous of despots. We have time and again thought that military adventurism in the region could keep terrorism and anti-Americanism in check. And each time we’ve only bred a new generation of radicals, bent on revenge.
There are those who have angrily denounced pacifists in the weeks since September 11th, angrily asking how peace can deal with terrorists. What these critics don’t understand is that wars don’t start when the bombs begin to explode. They begin years before, when the seeds of hatred are sewn. The times to stop this new war was ten and twenty years ago, when the U.S. broke it’s promises for democracy, and acted in its own self-interest (and often on behalf of the interests of our oil companies) to keep the cycles of violence going. The United States made choices that helped keep the peoples of the Middle East enslaved in despotism and poverty.
And so we come to 2001. And it’s time to stop a war. But it’s not necessarily this war that we can stop. It’s the next one. And the ones after that. It’s time to stop combat terrorism with terror. In the last few weeks the United States has been making new alliances with countries whose leaders subvert democracy. We are giving them free rein to continue to subject their people. Every weapon we sell these tyrants only kills and destabilizes more, just as every bomb we drop on Kabul feeds terror more.
And most of all: we are making new victims. Another generation of children are seeing their parents die, are seeing the rain of bombs fall on their cities from an uncaring America. They cry out to us in the name of peace and democracy and hear nothing but hatred and blood. And some of them will respond by turning against us in hatred. And will fight us in anger. They will learn our lesson of terror and use it against us. They cycle will repeat. History will continue to turn, with blood as it’s Middle Eastern lubricant. Unless we act. Unless we can stop the next war.
Here at Nonviolence Web, we’re experimenting with “blogging” and its potential to let a team of NVWeb editors collect links to the most interesting writing on nonviolence on the net. Check out the great Blogger software at www.blogger.com.
It’s a reflective time here at the Nonviolence Web. The initial vision of our work has pretty much exhausted itself in the four years we’ve been online. In internet time, that’s equivalent to twenty years so we’re pretty happy.
The Nonviolence Web grew out of downturn in activist publishing in the early 1990s. A lot of peace groups were very drained, emotionally and financially, by the aftermath of the Gulf War and were laying off staff. Small book and magazine publishers were also being pressured by rapidly-declining readership levels and increasing production costs. Although no one might have guessed it at the time, in retrospect it became clear that the 1980s were a golden age for small publishing and activist organizing.
But by the mid-90s the situation had changed. The demographic group that had bought so many books were now having babies and in general reading more books on spirituality and child-rearing. The books published didn’t appeal to the next generation — which was demographically smaller — anyway and the result was that the audience for activist publications was shrinking fast.
By the mid-1990s it was time to rethink the project of radical publishing. Luckily, the Web came along at that point. Just as printing presses opened the way to a flurry of political and religious tracts in mid-Seventeenth Century Europe, the web made possible a new form of publishing. The Nonviolence Web began in 1995 to be a part of that work.
Now that first flurry is over. In the U.S. at least, even the local pizza joint has a website and the importance of internet organizing is undisputed. The web has become a mass-phenomenon and new users continue to double it’s size every year. But I’m not sure most activists have really figured out how to use it. I’m not sure we have reinvented publishing. I think most of what we’ve done is taken the old forms and replicated them online. For example, during the recent U.S. bombing campaign in the Balkans, most Nonviolence Web member groups — major U.S. peace groups — put up extremely predictable and boring press releases (see my May 1999 essay, The Real Phantom Menace is Us).
Why haven’t we reinvented the form? Where is this work going in the next five, ten, twenty years?
The internet and publishing world is abuzz with the promise of the so-called New Media, website and organizations which create focal points for audiences and are pioneering the possibilities of the internet. The Nonviolence Web is one of the few activist New Media projects and with our recent decision to stop our free webmastering for other organization we’re plunging even deeper into the world of online organizing!
Over the next few months, the Nonviolence Web will embark on a project where we’ll introduce you to some of the pioneers of New Media. But we’ll do more. We want to blow open the concept of what a peace group does and how we do it. We’ll be talking with interesting people doing art, satire, local organizing and thinking. We look at the future of the internet, of the future of the peace movement, and of emerging opportunities like online video.
Being the home to a couple of dozen peace groups, the Nonviolence Web has published a lot of press releases calling for an end to bombing in Kosovo and Yugoslavia. They’re all very fine but also all very predictable.
But as we write, the U.S. government continues pursuing a war that has no clear realistic goals, has led to even more killing in the region, and has seriously disrupted post Cold-War relationships with Russia and China (See George Lakey’s “Cold War Returning? — A Chilling Russian Visit”).
At home, Americans just watch the pictures on TV as they go about living a glorious Spring. We laugh, cry, work and play; we make trips to the shore for Memorial Day weekend; and we obediently flock to a movie called Phantom Menace that tells the story of the start of cinema’s most famous Evil Empire.
A new empire is being shaped here. The United States has been able to claim the title of “empire” for at least a hundred years. But something new is at work here ( see my own War Time Again). We’re witnessing the birth of a new American order which is starting a new wars every three months. New kinds of wars, which barely touch American lives, even those of the bombers waging them from 20,000 feet. The Pentagon and State Department’s planners are building on lessons learned at the start of the decade in the Gulf War. They’re refined their missiles for accuracy but they’ve learned how to spin the media
Now every new villain is presented to the media as the new Hitler. Saddam Hussein. Osama bin Laden. Milosvic. Everyone calling for peace is painted as a neo-isolationist, a contemporary Chamberlain appeasing a tyrant. Afterwards it’s easy to see how overly-dramatic the propaganda was and how ineffectual all the American bombs were. But still, here we are in Kosovo, in another Nineties war and next year we’ll be in yet another. Unless we stop the zest for these Clinton wars now.
What do we have to do to end this war? And what do we need to do to stop the U.S.‘s newfound zest for cruise missiles? How can peace and antiwar activists start acting beyond the press releases and isolated vigils to think creatively about linking folks together to bring new people and ideas into the peace movement?
I don’t pretend to know what exactly we need. All I know is that I’m personally bored of the standard issue peace actions we’ve been engaging in and want to see something new. Some of it might look like clichés from the 60s and some might look like rip-offs of McDonald’s latest ad campaign. But we need to build an antiwar culture that will intrude upon a sunny spring and remind people that a war is on. The real phantom menace this summer is an American Empire that is retooling it’s military and re-conditioning its citizens to think of war as a normal course of affairs.