Anti war Movement Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Anti war Movement - Essay Example The strength of the movement lay also in the fact that it moved past the politics of the Cold War despite being temporally located in the heyday of this ideological and military struggle between the two power blocs. The democratizing potential of this is apparent since it brought the world together in movement that was humanitarian and anti-authoritarian at the same time (Frey, 2008). In fact, the basic objective of the movement was to abstain from siding with the ideology of either superpower. It is perhaps also significant that this moment coincided with the era of decolonization across the world where erstwhile colonized nations unwilling to compromise their sovereignty by aligning with Euro-American powers voiced their support for the cause of nuclear disarmament. It is important to note that the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in Great Britain far from being a sporadic movement had firm roots in the origin of the Cold War where several â€Å"international pacifists† who had organized strategic protests against the atomic bomb (Klimke 2012). The movement in Great Britain may thus be viewed as a successful culmination of the many efforts aimed at disarmament. 2. What role has internet played in the anti-Iraq war protest? The protest against the Iraq War, much like its precedent, the Nuclear Disarmament movement, was based in international cooperation. The protest also witnessed the extensive of use an entirely new medium of expression-the internet. The internet had certain obvious advantages over the more traditional methods of voicing dissent-it could bring together people and their opinions on a common platform without necessitating physical movement over long distances and significantly, authoritarian censorship is more difficult to impose on the internet than in protest marches and demonstrations. Pickerill and Webster in their essay â€Å"The Anti-War/Peace Movement in Britain and the Conditions of Information War† discussing the idea of â€Å"Information War† which denotes both â€Å"weaponry† which makes use of computer technology for greater precision in combat and attack, as well as the â€Å"symbolic realm† where ideas and images are employed to convey specifically targeted meaning. While the intensity of casualties rose steadily in war propelled by the â€Å"microelectronics revolution,† this also meant that there was extensive media coverage of the war which in turn conferred onto people the knowledge hitherto denied them to generate anti-war sentiments (408-10, n.d.). It is interesting to note that unlike most of its predecessors, the anti-Iraq War movement did not cease to operate after the ostensible end of the war and continued to protest in the subsequent years against the insidious ways in which military occupation and economic depletion have perpetuated Western control over Iraq’s political freedom. This too was perhaps made possible because of the internet which kept the memory of the war through the many blogs and websites which advertise their cause in numerous pages that an average internet user is likely to visit. Pickerill and Webster however warn against the debilitating effects of using the internet for anti-war protest as well as they argue that the sweeping generalizations on the internet often assume a homogeneous readership, eliding thereby the