The Hidden Voices of Anti-War

Anti-war protests have been a part of U.S. history since the nation's founding,
with Americans publicly opposing conflicts.

I was tasked with looking into two websites, encouraging the anti-war movement and it has me wondering, that as an anti-war personality myself, why have I never heard of these websites?

I believe that the generation I have grown with view war as a normalcy that was here in the U.S. before we were, so why should we question it? Personally, learning about how war is the main cause of human suffering and death, economic disruption, infrastructure demolition, environmental damage, political strain, and those are just a few that come to mind, I am against it, as most of Gen Z is (kind of feels like social proof as a persuasion tactic) 

Looking into Antiwar.com and The American Conservation you can clearly see that they are built around perspectives that challenge interventionist foreign policy. Antiwar.com dives explicitly into its mission as promoting non-interventionism and going against the justifications of military intervention. While The American Conservative started partly as an opposition to the Iraq War and to this day has published writers advocating for what they call "realism and restraint."

By contrast, mainstream news organizations generally aren't organized around a single foreign policy position, and their coverage is shaped by what is considered newsworthy, who journalist can interview, newsroom resources, deadlines, audience interests, and which sources are readily available. Government officials and other powerful institutional sources can have disproportionate influence over what becomes news.

I feel that doesn't mean antiwar arguments don't appear in mainstream media, but they may appear as one perspective within a larger debate, rather than as the organizing principle of the published.

A possible explanation for why these voices feel hidden for me is that people, myself included, often consume media through a relatively small number of large outlets, and those outlets have similar operational environments, journalistic wise. Following only these sources, give only a narrow range of foreign policy perspectives than what exists in the broader media ecosystem.

I will say that if something isn't mainstream, it doesn't make it any less biased or any more accurate. And the idea of 'antiwar' can be seen to a lot of people as only an opinion made by tree-huggers and not by patriotic Americans. The stereotype against it has a huge impact on why it isn't seen so often.

AI Disclosure: No AI was used in the making of this blog post.