STIGMERGY: The C4SS Blog
Dear Obama Supporters: a letter from an anarchist

Congratulations. Your preferred candidate won a second term as president. I’m sure y’all are too busy dancing in the streets and smilecrying and stuff to be on the Internet right now, but this will be here when all that is done.

Now that Obama has got himself a second term, you and I need to have a chat. I just have a couple questions I need to ask, and then you can be on your merry Democrat way.

  1. Now that this is no longer an “election year,” will you now pay attention to the drone strikes, kill lists, allowance of indefinite detention and mass deportation of undocumented immigrants?
  2. Now that Obama is safe in the White House until 2016, will you pay attention to the continued incarceration of Private Manning?
  3. Now that your dude has won, will you look critically at his connections to the parasitic financial institutions that sent our economy spiraling out of control in 2008?
  4. Now that there will never be another Obama campaign, will you protest with us against all of the above?

Or will you stay home, wring your hands and sit there looking worried that your friends won’t like you anymore if you speak out against all of these things, things that people in other countries are justifiably mad at? Will you still call people who protest these things impractical, “emotional progressives,” or worse?

Will you sit there, pensively waiting for Obama to become the man he promised he would be in 2008?

Here’s a hint: he won’t.

You don’t have to be an anarchist to see that the man you elected, while ostensibly “better” in a couple of arguably important ways than the man he was running against, is still no one to write home about. The “lesser evil” is still evil.

All we are asking is that you remove your head from your collective behind and, at the very least, help us make sure that his evil doesn’t grow.

You don’t need Adbusters to tell you to take to the streets. Just do it.

Translations for this article:

Anarchy and Democracy
Fighting Fascism
Markets Not Capitalism
The Anatomy of Escape
Organization Theory