by Randy Wurster
Over the last several months, the “Ukraine: A Time for Peace campaign” has worked to create a series of brief, easily digestible videos for social media. These videos aim to convey the urgent need for an immediate end to the dangerous US policy of continued escalation in Ukraine and to urge our lawmakers to instead seek a diplomatic end to this conflict.
The human toll paid by both Ukrainians and Russians should, in a better world, be enough to spur a change in policy, yet that has not proven the case. After acknowledging the devastating death toll in our Introductory video, we focused our message on four specific reasons to push for negotiations that we hope will resonate broadly with Americans:
1: For the Sake of Our Planet
With 2024 on track to be the first full year with temperatures at 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, the link between militarization and climate change feels more pressing than ever. Thus, the subject of our first video was the destructive effects of the war on both Ukraine’s ecology and the climate worldwide. A study of the first two years of the war in Ukraine revealed the emission of 175 million tons of greenhouse gases. This is greater than the annual emissions of industrialized countries such as the Netherlands, and is equivalent to putting 90 million new gas-powered vehicles on the road. With more and more Americans rightly doing their part to curb climate change, we feel it is important to point out that without urgent progress to create a more peaceful world, all our climate change mitigation efforts will likely prove to be in vain.
2: For the Sake of Our Community
In April, Biden signed $61 billion in military aid to Ukraine, bringing the total funding for the war to over $180 billion. Our second video urges viewers to consider that this money could be used to educate, house, and care for members of our community, rather than prolong a dangerous war and line the pockets of weapons makers. Consider that the Department of Housing and Urban Development has estimated that homelessness in America could be solved with $20 billion.
3: To Avoid Nuclear Confrontation
We then turned our attention to what now stands as the most dangerous and pressing issue: the prospect of nuclear war. With our President approving the use of long-range missiles on targets in Russia, Time For Peace campaign founder Paul Shannon declared that “We have entered into new and dangerous territory in the Ukraine war” noting that this is “the first time in history that one nuclear superpower has been directly involved in a military attack against the other.” Paul explains that this video “attempts to communicate how this policy, and Russian responses, move us closer to the brink – calling all of us to act now to turn back from the growing possibility of nuclear war.”
A critical part of the message is to both invoke the horrific desolation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but reveal that the nuclear weapons of today are 3000x more powerful than the original atomic bombs. The explosion of a 50 Megaton Tsar Bomba in Boston would wipe out a radius from Dorchester to Malden, collapse buildings all the way to Burlington, shatter windows in Newburyport, and burn people in Pawtucket. When an early draft of a nuclear-focused video referenced such an attack “altering” life on the planet, Joseph Gerson (President of the Campaign for Peace, Disarmament, and Common Security) provided a sobering reality check, noting “were we to have a serious nuclear exchange it would do more than alter life as we know it. It would end it.”
4: A Better Deal for Ukraine
Additionally, we created a video aimed at addressing those who desire to continue the war in the hopes of a decisive Ukrainian victory, an audience which is informed by quite understandable sympathies for the Ukrainian people. However, the assumption that such a victory is possible, or that continued war improves Ukraine’s negotiating power is not an idea that most experts would ascribe to. Culling from a Quincy Institute webinar, we present differing opinions from three experts on whether or not the continuation of war is even in Ukraine’s best interest. While we let viewers decide for themselves which of these perspectives is most persuasive, we do believe the latter two arguments prove more compelling. RAND’s Samuel Charap notes that the cost of taking back Ukrainian territory currently occupied by Russia would be very high in terms of Ukrainian lives, and former intelligence analyst George Bebee suggests that the hope to establish the upper hand on the battlefield in order to improve negotiations will likely have a “tragic outcome.”
Not Exactly Going Viral
While we feel that our group has managed to distill compelling reasons for negotiations into 30-45 second videos, our posts have yet to gain traction on social media. The reasons for the lack of engagement on Ukraine content are many, but perhaps the greatest cause is the complexity of the conflict, in particular in understanding the events that preceded the war. To understand these issues, MAPA has a library of compelling webinars featuring experts educating, debating and discussing the Ukraine-Russia conflict in a longer format.
However, the goal of our short form videos is not to educate or opine on what caused the war, but simply demonstrate the reasons why the conflict must end now. As MAPA Board Member Harris Gruman recently stated, “whether you place the greatest blame for the Ukraine War on Russian aggression or NATO expansion, there is no debating that we have now arrived at what seems to be the most dangerous moment in human history since the Cuban Missile Crisis.”
Spreading the Word
While we have not found an audience on social media quite yet, spreading awareness through grassroots connections has proved fruitful. We believe that is because the underlying message resonates: that it is long past time to work towards a diplomatic solution before further damage to our climate, before continued neglect of our communities at home, and before the conflict evolves into a potentially terminal nuclear war. We ask our readers to consider spreading these messages in the hopes that the attention paid to the Ukraine war by Americans will become proportionate to the danger it poses to humankind.
—
Randy Wurster is a video editor and MAPA volunteer. He is active in the Palestine-Israel, Ukraine: A Time for Peace, and General Dynamic campaigns.
