Yearly Archives ⇒ 1999

The Future is Now, Let’s Get Started

December 1, 1999
· Martin Kelley

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.

The Real Phantom Menace is Us

May 27, 1999
· Martin Kelley

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.

American Spies and Blood for Oil

January 15, 1999
· Martin Kelley

Sad­dam Hus­sein was right: the U.N. teams inspect­ing Iraq did con­tain U.S. spies. His expul­sion of the teams was legit­i­mate, and the U.S. bomb­ing that fol­lowed was farce.

Karl Marx once wrote: “Hegel remarks some­where that all facts and per­son­ages of great impor­tance in world his­to­ry occur, as it were, twice. He for­got to add: the first time as tragedy, the sec­ond as farce.” We’re see­ing that today, with each suc­ces­sive mil­i­tary action by the U.S. against Iraq becom­ing ever more trans­par­ent and ridiculous.

Per­haps you haven’t heard the news. It was con­ve­nient­ly released the day before Pres­i­dent Clin­ton’s Sen­ate impeach­ment tri­al was to begin and the major Amer­i­can news net­works did­n’t give it much atten­tion. They were too busy with seg­ments on how the U.S. Supreme Court Chief Jus­tice designed his own robes. With hooks like fash­ion and sex attend­ing the impeach­ment tri­al, how could they be blamed for under-reporting more Iraq news.

But on Jan­u­ary 7th, the New York Times con­firmed rumors that Unit­ed States plant­ed spies on the Unit­ed Nations: “Unit­ed States offi­cials said on Wednes­day that Amer­i­can spies had worked under­cov­er on teams of Unit­ed Nations arms inspec­tors fer­ret­ing out secret Iraqi weapons pro­grams.” The Wash­ing­ton Post and Boston Globe fur­ther report­ed that the oper­a­tion was aimed at Sad­dam Hus­sein him­self. NBC News report­ed that U.N. com­mu­ni­ca­tion equip­ment was used by U.S. intel­li­gence to pass along inter­cept­ed Iraqi messages.

This is exact­ly what Sad­dam Hus­sein has been charg­ing the U.N. teams with. He has long claimed that the teams, run by the Unit­ed Nations Spe­cial Com­mis­sion or UNSCOM, were full of “Amer­i­can spies and agents.” It was for this rea­son that he denied the inspec­tors access to sen­si­tive sites. And it was this refusal that prompt­ed Pres­i­dent Clin­ton to attack Iraq last month.

So what’s going on here? Senior U.S. offi­cials told NBC News that the main tar­gets of last mon­th’s attack weren’t mil­i­tary but eco­nom­ic. The cruise mis­siles weren’t aimed at any alleged nuclear or bio­log­i­cal weapons fac­to­ries but instead at the oil fields. Specif­i­cal­ly, one of the main tar­gets was the Bas­ra oil refin­ing facil­i­ties in south­ern Iraq.

In a sep­a­rate arti­cle, NBC quot­ed Fad­hil Cha­l­abi, an oil indus­try ana­lyst at the Cen­ter for Glob­al Ener­gy Stud­ies in Lon­don, as say­ing Iraq’s oil pro­duc­ing neight­bors are “hop­ing that Iraq’s oil instal­la­tions will be destroyed as a result of Amer­i­can air strikes. Then the [U.N.-mandated] oil-for food pro­gram would be par­a­lyzed and the mar­ket would improve by the dis­ap­pear­ance of Iraqi oil altogether.”

Since the start of the Gulf War, Iraq has pro­duced relatively-little oil because of a com­bi­na­tion of the U.N. sanc­tions and an infra­struc­ture destroyed by years of war. A report by the Unit­ed States Ener­gy Infor­ma­tion Admin­is­tra­tion back in the sum­mer of 1997 stat­ed Iraq’s per cap­i­tal Gross Nation­al Prod­uct was at lev­els not seen since the 1940s.

Sau­di Ara­bia and Kuwait have picked up this slack in pro­duc­tion and made out like ban­dits. Before the Gulf War, Sau­di Ara­bia was only allowed to pump 5.4 mil­lions bar­rels a day under it’s OPEC quo­ta. Today it pro­duces 8 mil­lion bar­rels a day, a fifty per­cent increase that trans­lates into bil­lions of dol­lars a year in prof­it. If the sanc­tions against Iraq were lift­ed, Sau­di pro­duc­tion would once more have to be lim­it­ed and the Anglo-American oil com­pa­nies run­ning the fields would lose ten bil­lion dol­lars a year in revenue.

t’s time to stop kid­ding our­selves. This is a war over mon­ey. The U.S. and Britain are get­ting rich off of Sau­di Ara­bi­a’s increased oil pro­duc­tion and don’t want any­one muscling in on their oil prof­its. It is in the eco­nom­ic inter­est of the U.S. and Britain to main­tain Iraqi sanc­tions indef­i­nite­ly and their for­eign pol­i­cy seems to be to set off peri­od­ic crises with Iraq. France and Rus­sia mean­while both stand to get lucra­tive oil con­tracts with a post-sanctions Iraq so they rou­tine­ly denounce any bomb­ing raids and just as rou­tine­ly call for a lift­ing of sanctions.

Sad­dam Hus­sein is also mak­ing out in the cur­rent state of affairs. A economically-healthy Iraqi pop­u­la­tion would­n’t put up with his tyran­ny. He cur­rent­ly rules Iraq like a mob boss, siphon­ing off what oil prof­its there are to pay for fan­cy cars and pres­i­den­tial palaces. He gets to look tough in front of the TV cam­eras and then retreats to safe under­ground bunkers when the bombs start falling on the Iraqi people.

It is time to stop all of the hypocrisy. It is esti­mat­ed that over a mil­lion Iraqis have died as a results of the post-Gulf War sanc­tions. These oil prof­its are blood mon­ey and it is long past time that they end.