Blog Post #6

 Antiwar Obscurity

During the progressive era around the time period of World War one, America had numerous anti-war voices around the country. This culminated in Woodrow Wilson's election where he stated he wasn't going to go to war, but then in reality we did. 

America is in a similar state today and has been for the past 20 years or so. Numerous voices have been made against war spanning from the ones in Afghanistan and Iraq to the most recent conflicts in Israel and Ukraine. 

That said, the progressive era had many of these voices persecuted and thrown in jail basically censoring the naysayers. Today on the other hand, they are not persecuted as they once were, but they are very obscure and hard to find in comparison to before, so why is this the case?

My take on this topic being so obscure now is that it is in response to the numerous changes that have happened since the progressive era, in order to accomplish a similar goal as before. 

Simply put, I believe those that once persecuted the antiwar voices are now not trying to persecute them, as they realize they would lose, but instead silencing them by popularizing other voices. Sites like Antiwar.com and The American Conservative, I had never heard of before this assignment, and the reason is because I think someone is trying to stop them from being widespread popular.

To add on to this, in the age we are in with social media and mass communication everywhere, it is a lot harder for the antiwar opinion to be heard.

For starters, news sources now focus on all the "dramatic, scary, or negative" stories, all of which can be an accurate description of conflicts or wars. As such, news sources cover these stories just like how they cover school shootings a lot for the same purpose. More dramatic, more views, and more revenue.

Social media, on the other hand, promotes a very big concept of polarization because of echo chambers. 

The basic definition of an echo chamber is where one person hears or sees only their opinion. In social media platforms like Facebook, this occurs because of the data that is gathered about the individual while using the site, and as a result of this data, opinions differing from their own are silently not shown to the individual while ones that agree with their sentiment are.

It is important to understand that these echo chambers exist, as without this understanding one can spiral into a circle of confirmation bias where they eventually could outright reject other opinions different from their own or even become more extreme in their stance.

So due to the mass communication present in news and social media, along with a possible influence behind the scenes that is trying to not popularize the opinion of anti-war, I believe this is why I had never heard of these sites before, especially since I never had antiwar in any of my echo chambers before.