The Internet Is Fueling the New
Global Peace Movement

Internet gives peace a chance

The anti-war movement has been fuelled by counter-cultural online news
services, making it very different from its Vietnam predecessor, writes

by Duncan Campbell
Guardian (UK)
Wednesday September 26, 2001

Union Square in New York became over the last two weeks the unofficial
shrine and assembly point for people who had lost friends or relatives and
wanted to light a candle for them or to leave a message about them.
Many of the messages were calls for peace so it was interesting to see that
the CD on special offer in the neighbouring Barnes & Noble bookshop on the
square was Songs From the Divided House. It is a special compilation album
about the Vietnam war which includes both Country Joe McDonald's anti-war
anthem, I Feel Like I'm Fixin' To Die Rag and John Lennon's Give Peace A
Chance as well as speeches from both of the presidents who prosecuted the
war, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon.

What is already clear is that the anti-war movement evolving out of the
events of September 11 will be a very different one from that which
gradually emerged to oppose the Vietnam war in the 60s and 70s. Time
moves much more swiftly now and it was within hours of the terrible events
that ad hoc groups from New Yorkers Say No to War to campus
movements had formed.

Key to this speed has been the internet, which, of course, did not exist in
the 60s. Then, the anti-war troops were rallied through flyers, through the
old "underground press" from the Berkeley Barb to the Village Voice, through
the Pacifica network radio stations and by word of mouth.

Now, countless emails and counter-cultural online news services operate to
channel the movement. People seeking alternative views have only to click on
to commondreams.org, laweekly.com, thenation.com, alternet.org,
accuracy.org, nowarcollective.com or humanrightsnow.org to be presented with
an array of information and opinion that 30 years ago would have taken weeks
to assemble and disseminate.

This week's anti-war march in Washington, which will take place at noon on
Saturday, has been fuelled and publicised through the internet, on sites
like iacentre.org, as much as by any other method, not least because there
has not been much coverage in the mainstream media of its existence.

There are other ways in which the new anti-war movement differs. While the
anti-Vietnam campaigners included those who supported the North Vietnamese
as well as those who just opposed the way the war was being waged, no one in
the current anti-war movement supports the perpetrators of what took place
on September 11.

And this week such performers as Chris Rock, Jamie Foxx, the Pointer Sisters
and Aerosmith have offered to perform for any US troops who find themselves
stationed abroad in the coming weeks.

During the Vietnam war, such entertainment was undertaken by the
conservative wing of the industry - most notably in the form of Bob Hope. In
his recent collection of celebrity profiles, the writer John Lahr recalls
that, towards the end of the war, the GIs in Vietnam were deeply unimpressed
with Hope, even walking out of one of his shows and at one Long Binh concert
holding up signs that read "Peace not Hope" and "The Vietnam War is a Bob
Hope Joke".

They would rather have heard from Country Joe McDonald. Changed days indeed.