Welcome to War Times 2.0

“Bringing a race, class, and gender perspective to issues of war and peace.”

Today War Times/Tiempo de Guerras launches our new website. In the summer of 2010, about a dozen new writers joined War Times, and we’re using our new site to bring you their voices. The site will offer some familiar features – and some new ones:
 
* Month in Review (analysis of the previous month’s developments internationally and in this country)
* Feature articles and interviews (like this one)
* Regular blogs by several of our new writers
* The Daily Feed (A collection of links to useful material around the internet)
* Integration with a War Times/Tiempo de Guerras page on Facebook which is dynamically updated whenever new material appears on our website
* Tools for sharing War Times content through Twitter, Digg, Facebook, and an RSS feed
 
We think that the new site represents the distinctive War Times point of view: a focus on the effects of these war times on the lives of ordinary people in the U.S. and around the world. We’ll also be publishing some of our features, like the “Month in Review,” in Spanish.
 
War Times will continue to provide information and analysis about events in the Middle East and other parts of the world confronting U.S. militarism. At the same time, we’ll be sharpening our focus on building grassroots movements here at home. We will be featuring on-the-ground reports, reflections on and assessment of different campaigns and organizing efforts. Take a look at Christine Ahn’s piece about how peace and racial and economic justice organizations came together to plan a national campaign to move the money from war spending to community needs.
 
“Bringing a race, class, and gender perspective to issues of war and peace.”
That’s our new tag line, and it describes what we plan to do. In these difficult economic times, we will be paying special attention to the connections between wars abroad and unemployment, crumbling infrastructure, struggling public education systems, and bankrupt towns, cities and states here at home. We’re concerned, too, about a rise in anti-Muslim rhetoric and violence. We are worried about a manipulating right-wing that encourages some folks in this country to make immigrants and people of color scapegoats for the government’s failure to deal with their very real and painful economic problems.
 
War Times is excited to be part of a new, reviving movement for peace and justice in this country. We look forward to building that movement with you, and would love to hear your ideas about how we can improve what we do. Visit the new site (the address is still http://www.war-times.org) and click on the “Contact Us” button to get in touch.
 
A little history…
Folks who have followed War Times/Tiempo de Guerras from our beginnings in early 2002 know that we started out as a free, bilingual, nationally-distributed tabloid. We published about 100,000 copies each of 19 issues between 2002 and 2004. We emphasized short articles with information unavailable in the mainstream press, written as much as possible from the point of view of the victims of the so-called “War on Terror.”
 
Then, in 2004 we suspended print publication, for a couple of reasons. First, we ran out of money. Many of the donors who had regularly supported War Times quite reasonably switched their attention to the 2004 presidential election. But just as importantly, the context that called for a project like War Times had changed.
 
During our three years of print publication, an information upheaval was going on all around us. People were changing how they used the internet. They didn’t need to wait six weeks for the next installment of War Times to find out what was happening in Afghanistan, Iraq or Guantánamo – or what many other people thought about it. More words and images than anyone could absorb had become instantaneously available. More and more people had broadband access. Now folks could see live video on their computers. They could access a bewildering range of text, images, and sound any time they wanted to.
 
That was War Times 1.0
Of course War Times had a web site. We knew that in the brave new internet world you’re not real if you’re not virtual. We designed the site to reproduce each print issue of War Times as accurately as possible. That made sense in 2002, but not in 2010. While the internet changed all around us the War Times site remained its original static self.
 
Until now. Welcome to War Times 2.0. Please let us know what you think of it.