Electronic Civil Disobedience: Recently
Why War? spearheaded a
campaign to host internal memoranda from an electronic voting company. This company, Diebold Elections Systems, Inc., has contracts to count your votes in 37 states and portions of Canada. We believe the Diebold documents are akin to the Pentagon Papers in their potential to reveal systemic corruption within the American election process. As a result of our efforts the controversial documents are now being hosted on
servers around the world, California is
auditing the company and it is being
sued for abuse of copyright law. We are especially heartened at the response of students at universities worldwide, who constitute a significant portion of the
hosts. The task now at hand is to analyze the content of these documents and press for a
stock boycott; for ongoing work on this campaign see
why-vote.org.
Radical Empathy: Empathy as a word orginated with the philosophical school of Phenomenology in the early 20th century and literally means “feeling-into.” Today empathy is commonly used to connote the step beyond sympathy — the point where another’s struggle becomes our own.
Radical empathy is a phrase coined by
Why War? to describe living activism, a type of activism that immerses the individual in the struggle of another.
Why War? works on bridging the gap between “us” and “them” through unique life-experiments. Our first experiment was the production of two travel journals documenting different aspects of the global peace movement. The first journal was written by a
Why War? member as he traveled across America
documenting the anti-war network (PDF). The other was written by a member as he traveled in Jordan and then Palestine to experience life in the Middle East and to
engage in their nonviolent struggle (PDF).
Rachel Corrie, pictured at right, was recently killed while a member of the organization with whom the
Why War? member traveled, the
International Solidarity Movement.
Swarming: “Swarming,” the seemingly spontaneous appearance of anti-war crowds engaging in civil disobedience, is the future of protesting. We explore the use of swarming as a tactic and develop innovative techniques to facilitate the information networks necessary for swarming to move from theory to practice.
Analysis and Commentary: Jacques Ellul wrote in 1965, “as long as a large number of independent news agencies, newsreel producers, and diverse local papers function, no conscious and direct propaganda is possible.” The dispersal of news outside the mainstream of American rhetoric continues to be
Why War’s primary project. We have archived over 3,000 news articles that allow individuals to look back at how the reasons and objectives for war have subtlely changed — thereby making government propaganda ineffective.
Watching the Movement: E-mail serves as the informational backbone of the Internet. Hours before you’ll ever read about the DARPA military program on the Internet, mailing lists across the world will already be discussing it.
Why War? is developing new ways of harnessing the power of e-mail in order to distribute information and challenge the drive toward war. Currently, we've set up a central location where anyone can read what is being said on
over 80 different anti-war mailing lists across the world.
Despite our army of volunteers who create the content for this website,
Why War? still has maintenance costs. We direct all of our donations to our goal of educating the public about alternatives to war and working with existing groups to revitalize and expand the anti-war movement. We accept
donations through this website, and have openings for people able to donate their
time and talents. Thank you for your interest!
