Confessions of an Anti-Sactions Activist

July 30, 2003

There are a bunch of fas­ci­nat­ing rants against the con­tem­po­rary peace move­ment as the result of an arti­cle by Charles M. Brown, an anti-sanctions activist that has somewhat-unfairly chal­lenged his for­mer col­leagues at the Nonviolence.org-affiliated Voic­es in the Wilder­ness. Brown talks quite frankly about his feel­ings that Sad­dam Hus­sein used the peace group for pro­pa­gan­da pur­pos­es and he chal­lenges many of the cul­tur­al norms of the peace move­ment. I don’t know if Brown real­ized just how much the anti-peace move­ment crowd would jump at his arti­cle. It’s got­ten play in InstaPun­dit and In Con­text: None So Blind.
Brown’s cri­tique is inter­est­ing but not real­ly fair: he faults Voic­es for hav­ing a sin­gle focus (sanc­tions) and sin­gle goal (chang­ing U.S. pol­i­cy) but what else should be expect­ed of a small group with no sig­nif­i­cant bud­get? Over the course of his work against sanc­tions Brown start­ed study­ing Iraqi his­to­ry as an aca­d­e­m­ic and he began to wor­ry that Voic­es dis­re­gard­ed his­tor­i­cal analy­sis that “did not take … Desert Storm as their point of depar­ture.” But was he sur­prised? Of course an aca­d­e­m­ic is going to have a longer his­tor­i­cal view than an under­fund­ed peace group. The sharp focus of Voic­es made it a wel­come anom­aly in the peace move­ment and gave it a strength of a clear mes­sage. Yes it was a prophet­ic voice and yes it was a large­ly U.S.-centric voice but as I under­stand it, that was much of the point behind its work: We can do bet­ter in the world. It was Amer­i­cans tak­ing respon­si­bil­i­ty for our own peo­ple’s blind­ness and dis­re­gard for human life. That Iraq has prob­lems does­n’t let us off the hook of look­ing at our own cul­ture’s skeletons.
What I do find fas­ci­nat­ing is his behind-the-scenes descrip­tion of the cul­ture of the 1990s peace move­ment. He talks about the roots of the anti-sanctions activism in Catholic-Worker “dra­matur­gy.” He’s undoubt­ed­ly right that peace activists did­n’t chal­lenge Baathist par­ty pro­pa­gan­da enough, that we used the suf­fer­ing of Iraqi peo­ple for our own anti-war pro­pa­gan­da, and that our analy­sis was often too sim­plis­tic. That does­n’t change the fact that hun­dreds of thou­sands of Iraqi chil­dren died from sanc­tions that most Amer­i­cans knew lit­tle about.
The peace move­ment does­n’t chal­lenge its own assump­tions enough and I’m glad Brown is shar­ing a self-critique. I wish he were a bit gen­tler and sus­pect he’ll look back at his work with Voic­es with more char­i­ty in years to come. Did he know the fod­der his cri­tique would give to the hawk­ish groups? Rather than recant his past as per the neo-conservative play­book, he could had offered his reflec­tions and cri­tique with an acknowl­eg­ment that there are plen­ty of good moti­va­tions behind the work of many peace activists. I like a lot of what Brown has to say but I won­der if peace activists will be able to hear it now. I think Brown will even­tu­al­ly find his new hawk­ish friends are at least as caught up in group-think, his­tor­i­cal myopia, and pro­pa­gan­da prop­a­ga­tion as the peo­ple he critiques.
Voic­es in the Wilder­ness has done a lot of good edu­cat­ing Amer­i­cans about the effects of our poli­cies over­seas. It’s been hard and often-thankless work in a cli­mate that did­n’t sup­port peace work­ers either moral­ly or finan­cial­ly. The U.S. is a much bet­ter place because of Voic­es and the peace move­ment was cer­tain­ly invig­o­rat­ed by its breath of fresh air.

How Can We Measure the State of the Peace Movement?

June 10, 2003

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:

  • It’s hard to mea­sure, often our sucess­es will be invisible;
  • Mea­sur­ing might show donors that favorite orga­ni­za­tions aren’t that influential;
  • We might real­ize we need to re-vision our work to speak to today’s con­di­tions rather than con­tin­u­al­ly try to re-create a “gold­en age” of peace move­ments past;
  • We might have to real­ly broad­en our coali­tions and invite new orga­ni­za­tions in.

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:

  • Under 100 links: unknown group, prob­a­bly a sin­gle individual’s pet project;
  • 100 – 500 links: a small group, respect­ed by its lim­it­ed core audi­ence but lit­tle known out­side it;
  • 500‑5000 links: a well-respected group thought of as the most pri­ma­ry source for a par­tic­u­lar type of activism but lit­tle known out­side the estab­lished peace movement;
  • 5,000 – 8,000 links: an impor­tant peace orga­ni­za­tion, well known and respect­ed out­side it’s core community;
  • 8,000 – 15,000 links: a well-known group even out­side the peace move­ment, one wide­ly rec­og­nized as being a hub of information.
  • 15,000 links: a widely-known orga­ni­za­tion such as Amnesty Inter­na­tion­al or Greenpeace.

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.

A Look Back at the Peace Movement’s Response to the Gulf War

November 20, 1997

It is safe to say that the peace move­men­t’s largest cam­paign in the past decade took place around oppo­si­tion to the mil­i­tary build-up and con­flict in the Per­sian Gulf in 1990 – 1. New peo­ple became involved, old peaceniks became reac­ti­vat­ed and every peace group in the coun­try went into over­drive to orga­nize and edu­cate about the issues.

Recent­ly I have heard sev­er­al peo­ple bemoan the fail­ure of the peace move­ment dur­ing that peri­od, a fail­ure because the war was­n’t stopped. But there were suc­cess­es beyond any­one’s wildest dreams. The week the war start­ed saw two mas­sive protests in Wash­ing­ton. It took almost a decade of involve­ment in Viet­nam before protests that large were ever seen. The peace move­ment mobi­lized incred­i­bly quick­ly and (in ret­ro­spect) effi­cient­ly, and we sure­ly defined the options avail­able to U.S. Pres­i­dent Bush.

The after­math of the war brought a cri­sis to many orga­ni­za­tions. Their fundrais­ing efforts dried up and bud­get deficits led to cut­backs in staff and pro­gram out­reach. It was as if a sort of pub­lic amne­sia set in and no one want­ed to think about peace. This is a nat­ur­al human response per­haps, but it’s rever­ber­a­tions on the infra­struc­ture of the peace move­ment con­tin­ue to this day.

Let’s start a dia­logue about the peace move­ments response to the Gulf War. What were it’s effects on your lives and the orga­ni­za­tions you were a part of? Was the peace move­ment a suc­cess, a fail­ure, or some­thing in between?