Blog Post #6 Antiwar Voices

Antiwar.com describes itself as coming from a libertarian perspective. Its opposition to war is rooted in the idea that wars are a way that countries increase their power over people and that centralized political power threatens individual liberty. Their “non-interventionist” agenda is to reach out to pacifists, leftists as well as others on the Right who oppose imperialism.  

The American Conservative describes its founding as a reaction to mainstream political positions, including the positions taken by politicians who described themselves as conservative, but who The American Conservative did not believe were holding true to many truly conservative values.  

Both these websites take positions that are contrary to what one usually finds in mainstream media and addressed by many politicians. There could be different reasons for this. One reason is that mainstream media is just reporting what it is told by mainstream politicians.  There is an unwillingness or inability to dig beneath the messages that they are getting. A more sinister explanation might be that they don’t want to rock the boat and threaten the establishment whether for financial or other reasons. Mainstream media is a big business and they may not want to take positions contrary to the people that support them, the government that regulates them and the companies that advertise with them. Similarly, war is an even bigger business. Billions of dollars are spent with defense contractors, including weapons that are bought for use in places such as Ukraine or Israel.  

Those within the mainstream might respond that the fringe perspectives of groups on the left and right are not credible and that they are powered by conspiracy theories and, therefore, not worth reporting. This may, in fact, be the case with some far left and far right groups who do seem to be driven by what seem to be conspiracy theories. 

One opinion piece in The American Conservative was particularly interesting. In discussing the recent Tucker Carlson interview of Putin, former congressman Ron Paul blames the mainstream media for unbalanced reporting, “The US media does not report this because they don’t want Americans to begin questioning our interventionist foreign policy. They don’t want Americans to see that our government meddling in the affairs of other countries … has real and deadly consequences to those on the receiving end of our foreign policy.”

 

I think that we have to search for more obscure sources to get a balanced view of almost any issue, including on war and foreign affairs. So much media seems to have a bias, whether supportive of the left and right. It can be challenging to find broader perspectives that might help someone reach their own conclusions about an issue, whether it is funding the war in Ukraine or who to support in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.