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EDITORIAL
The peace enterprise goes global
As men, women and children lit
candles in New Zealand, signaling the start of the worldwide vigil, organizers
at MoveOn.org flashed the early tally: 6,311 vigils scheduled in 135 nations.
In just a week’s time, the seeds of the unprecedented candlelight peace
vigil, crossing through every time zone, were coming to fruition.
By the time the demonstration ended, millions around the globe had
participated in a total of 8,000 candlelight vigils in 140 countries.
Such organizing speed for such a massive protest would have been
unimaginable just a few years ago. However with the development of the
Internet, the antiwar movement has gained an enormously powerful new tool. If
Vietnam was the first television war and the Gulf War made CNN a media power,
the attack on Iraq seems likely to be the first war of the Internet.
At 7 p.m. in each time zone on the evening of March 16, candles
were lit, symbolically joining together the aspirations and hopes of the entire
human family, in one last plea for peace. If the Internet has changed the way
we live, then part of that change has involved the birth of new and creative
peace actions that cross national, ethnic and religious lines.
This latest action came as a response to a cry from religious
leaders, including Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the Rev. Robert Edgar, general
secretary of the National Council of Churches. “On Sunday evening people
in every corner of the globe will shine beacons of light throughout the
world,” said Tutu. “May our candles rekindle the light of reason and
hope so that war will be averted in Iraq and peace will prevail in the
world.”
Tutu’s words were posted on MoveOn.org (moveon.org)
and Win Without War (winwithoutwarus.org), the electronic engines of the
worldwide peace movement. Win Without War is an international coalition of
church, feminist, human rights and environmental groups.
“It appears that the Bush administration will fail to win
Security Council support for war, and world public opinion has been a key part
of this. Help keep up the pressure by attending or scheduling a candlelight
vigil on Sunday in your area,” the MoveOn.org site stated. “Beginning
in New Zealand, this will be a rolling wave of candlelight gatherings that will
quickly cross the globe. It’s up to you to make this happen. Today we are
asking individuals, like you, to organize a vigil in each community.”
Visitors to the MoveOn.org site were directed to choose their
country and city. U.S. citizens were able to type in zip codes to locate or
initiate a local candlelight vigil. As the vigils took place, participants were
directed to take electronic photos and post them on the MoveOn.org Web site,
which quickly got inundated.
The candlelight protest was the third major peace action organized
by MoveOn.org and Win Without War in less than a month. In late February,
MoveOn.org brought countless peace voices to Washington, swamping Senate and
White House telephone switchboards, fax machines and e-mail boxes with hundreds
of thousands of messages opposing military action against Iraq. Win Without War
also collected and presented the United Nations with a petition of more than 1
million names taken from 200 countries urging the Security Council to choose
tough inspections over war.
MoveOn.org, meanwhile, has leveraged the Internet to create an
organization with the ability and credibility to raise hundreds of thousands of
dollars. It was originally set up in 1998 by two Silicon Valley entrepreneurs
who believed the impeachment of Bill Clinton over the Monica Lewinsky scandal
was damaging the political process. Joan Blades and her husband, Wes Boyd,
thought it was time to “move on” from the scandal and established the
site as a way of reaching people with similar views who would help them
coordinate protests and send their views to politicians and the media.
During the impeachment row, MoveOn.org generated more than a
million e-mails and 250,000 phone calls to Congress. After Sept. 11, the Web
site became involved with peace causes, and as the likelihood of war with Iraq
heightened last fall, MoveOn.org’s database of supporters expanded. Using
the estimated $15 million raised from backers, MoveOn.org went on the offensive
with a series of antiwar commercials launched during the Super Bowl broadcast
in late January. The ads, one of them featuring actor-activist Martin Sheen of
“West Wing” fame, urge President George W. Bush to “let the
inspections work.”
“We have over 750,000 people on our network in the United
States, and basically people go to our Web site, they sign up, and it’s
that easy,” Eli Pariser, 22, who runs MoveOn.org from his bedroom, told
one reporter. “They’re involved, they’re receiving e-mails from
us, they’re taking action. Our members are patriotic, mainstream
Americans. They come from all sorts of walks of life ... and they’re
basically getting together around this very simple message, which is [that]
this war in Iraq doesn’t make sense, let’s let the inspections work.
But beyond that, they don’t really have a lot in common.”
In the lead up to the war, the antiwar voices mobilized through
the Internet in the United States and elsewhere were loud enough to give the
Bush administration pause, but not noisy enough to keep it from plunging ahead
with plans to attack Iraq. Peace activists are now hoping other Internet sites
like ElectronicIraq.net, which has recruited a network of
“on-the-ground” Iraqis to submit photographs and written dispatches
of the war from inside Iraq, will chip in and eventually turn public opinion
away from the war. The hope is that, at the very least, a fuller picture of the
conflict will emerge than was able to squeeze past Defense Department censors
during the first Gulf War.
National Catholic Reporter, March 28,
2003
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