Dear Readers:
Ten years and four weeks ago, we launched the first edition [1] of what would become World War 4 Report [2]—initially as an e-mail list. The Bush White House was preparing for war in Afghanistan, and the air of my neighborhood in Lower Manhattan still carried the taint of devastation and death. We began as a sort of watchdog on media coverage and Internet rumors concerning the emergent Global War on Terrorism. We quickly evolved into a weekly news digest, launched a website, and changed our name from the original "World War 3 Report"—in recognition of analysis on the right and left alike that the GWOT is the Fourth World War [3], the Cold War having been the third. And we broadened our coverage of indigenous peoples' and autonomy struggles, in recognition that this is also a war on the Fourth World—on stateless ethnicities, land-rooted peoples and localist political models.
Today we are a Daily Report [4], with ongoing coverage of struggles around the world, and a monthly E-Magazine [5] providing more finished journalism and commentary, both original and reprints. The US remains in Afghanistan. While GWOT Pentagon doctrine called for a two-war capability [6], the US is now waging five wars—Afghanistan [7], Pakistan [8], Iraq [9], Yemen [10] and Libya [11]. The Obama administration has abandoned the nomenclature of the "GWOT" in favor of the more clinical "Overseas Contingency Operations"; it has not limited the military's global reach. But now, from the Arab world [12] to Europe [13] to South America [14] to Oakland and Manhattan [15], the planet seems headed into a revolutionary situation.
We want to keep going. We feel like our mission is more vital than ever.
But after ten years, we are still struggling—both our iconoclastic positions and primitivist aesthetic doubtless costing us readers. While we refuse to compromise the first factor, we are working to address the second. For a year now, we have been awaiting a website redesign. But the professional website developer who volunteered his services has already designed our two new sibling sites—New Jewish Resistance [16], probably the only site on the web dedicated to fighting both Zionism and anti-Semitism, and Global Ganja Report [17], monitoring the cannabis industry and war on drugs. (With over 100,000 people behind bars in the US alone for nonviolent drug offenses, and the US still intervening in Latin America and elsewhere around the world in the name of narcotics enforcement, we make no apologies for treating cannabis as a serious political issue—it clearly is.)
But World War 4 Report is to remain our flagship site, and it remains (for all its vital material) stuck with a frankly clunky design. With our volunteer already overextended, we are coming to the conclusion that we may have to pay for this flagship site's redesign.
Over the past ten years, a small handful of readers have responded consistently and/or very generously to our fund appeals. World War 4 Report is forever grateful to: Robin Lloyd, Iara Lee, George Caffentzis, Bert Golding, Victor Manfredi, Frank Connelly, Melissa Jameson, Paul Hixon, Israel Taub, Peter Lamborn Wilson, Lura Irish, Mark Sanborne, Robbie Liben, Laura Liben, Bob McGlynn, Sandy McCroskey, Brian Hill, David Wilson, Mitch Ritter, Lucie McAllister, David Rodriguez, Russell Bates, Brian Tokar, Ronald Bleier, Jonathan March, Mary Turck, Sabine Guez, Marcia Slatkin, David Mandl, Rosalind Boyd, David Massey, Judith Brisson, Alexis Lathem, Samer Darwiche, Doug Salzman, Urko Aiartza, Nabil Abraham, Judith Mahoney Pasternak, and Paul McIsaac. Please forgive us if we left anyone out.
But outside of this small and dedicated following, donations have been few, far between and (in recent years) dwindling. This fund appeal is specifically not directed to those listed above. We need to know that we have a following beyond this select coterie.
Help us make the leap to our redesign. Please help us to survive and grow. In a winter 2002 fund appeal [18] we predicted that our dissident-left perspective in the spirit of Orwell would probably consign us to financial failure. Today, we remain marginal and struggling, but we have survived. If you are glad that we have done so, please ensure that we will be around to document, criticize and incite in the new world situation now in the making.
If you haven't donated to World War 4 Report before—or not recently—please do so today. We are depending on you.
Thank you, shukran and gracias,
Bill Weinberg
Send checks payable to World War 4 Report to:
World War 4 Report
121 Fifth Ave. #172
Brooklyn, NY 11217
Or donate by credit card:
Write us at:
feedback (a) classic.countervortex.org
