well said david swanson! the anti-war movement died as soon as obama became president. but it shouldn’t have. we are involved in more wars now than ever before. same thing with the erosion of civil liberties, corporate thuggery, financial shenanigans, institutionalized racism, the criminalization of the poor, etc. swanson says it v clearly in this interview: we need to look beyond elections and the two party system. we need to stay focused on the movement. it’s our only chance.
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There was a major – reprehensibly small and weak, but a major and significant peace and justice movement by 2005 and 2006 (you read Bush’s memoirs, and the top Republican in the Senate is running to him secretly and saying, we must get out of Iraq, the public is turning against us), and as the Democrats came into power in Congress in ’07. And then it became a presidential election year in ’08, which always shuts down all useful activism. The movement faded away, disappeared, dried up, and was defunded. And it should not have. We should not go through these cycles of being willing to stand up in large numbers in serious ways for what we care about based on who’s in office and whether there’s an election.
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There is a very small number of people who are very well informed about Obama’s crimes, and are even engaged in active resistance, who nonetheless say we should vote for Obama. I’m not slandering those people by suggesting they are ignorant or uninformed or not engaged in activism; I’m suggesting that the activist movement as a whole is dramatically weakened when its position is we denounce your war crimes and we will vote for you if you continue and escalate them, that that is a weak stand to be building a movement from. (David Swanson)
More here.