Unconventional Sources

In a quick survey of online activism in North Carolina, there are some worrying signs for those who work against war. Two groups, the North Carolina Peace Hub and the High Country Citizens for Peace and Justice, have abandoned their posts on the Internet over the last couple of years. The North Carolina groups Community for Peace and Duct Tape for Peace now also appear to be defunct. North Carolina Peace Action hasn’t put out a newsletter since March 2008. I wonder, do the people who once made up these organizations not care about peace so much when it ceases to be an easy campaign issue for the Democrats?

Is this a sign that North Carolina is less peace-loving today than it was just a few years ago? Not necessarily. Where these peace activist sites have faltered, two other activist sites have risen to take their place. The Charlotte Area Green Party and the Buncombe Greens are now online, and looking to support candidates for public office who will promote the politics of peace.

Of all the issues of military waste, the greatest is the issue of America’s nuclear weapons. There’s no real use for our thousands of nuclear weapons, yet we continue to hold them in our nations military stockpiles, spending huge amounts of money to maintain them, to keep them ready to blast some foreign city off the face of the planet.

The Union of Concerned Scientists has a worthwhile collection of articles on the problems with nuclear weapons and global security. If you care about the threat of this most deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, go take a look at what they have to say.

One of the most under-reported stories of the economic recession is the role of military waste. Trillions of dollars are poured into the creation of immense, elaborate weapons that fail to actually benefit the American people. If this amount of money had been put into areas such as sustainable energy development instead, our nation might not be in a recession today.

One site, entitled simply Military Waste, does a good job of organizing information about the immense financial, environmental and human waste organized by the Pentagon. From the outrageous out-of-date F-22 Raptor to the neglect in the weak-skinned Humvee, Military Waste pulls no punches.

Here at Unconventional Sources, we specialize in linking to actual sources of information that exist around the edges of the web. We aren’t concerned with the popular and the trendy. We’re concerned with the backwaters of merit.

However, we do actually limit ourselves to linking to places that really exist. Usually.

Today, I want to provide a link in honor of a place that ought to, but does not, exist: AntiMilitary.org.

I don’t like the military. I don’t like the ideas that it stands for, and I don’t like what it does in actualization of those ideas.

But, when I went searching for sites that oppose the military, I couldn’t really find any. On a search on Google for “anti military”, for example, all I could find were sites where the writers accused other people of being “anti military”.

The closest I could find to a genuine anti military site was the Quaker Agitator.

Why are people so afraid to simply state that they don’t like the military? Why doesn’t antimilitary.org exist? Why shouldn’t it?