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.
Quaker Ranter
A Weekly Newsletter and Blog from Martin Kelley
Tag Archives ⇒ peace movement
How Can We Measure the State of the Peace Movement?
June 10, 2003
By Martin Kelley. How can we use online tools to measure the state of the Peace Movement?
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.
The Peace Movement Between Wars
May 31, 2003
The War Resisters League’s excellent editorial about continuing as an anti-war activist throughout this Permanent War. From their magazine, the Nonviolent Activist.
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?