CPIR Statement on the Re-election of Barack Obama

By the slimmest of margins, Barack Obama has won a second term as President of the United States of America. Unlike in 2008, very few of those who voted for him will feel any sense of joy or hope. Most of them will not have made a real choice to vote for him, but will have been the victims of a forced choice, i.e. the alternative was likely to be even more painful.

Informed Black people will have faced an almost impossible dilemma. They know that Barak Obama, as the first Black president of the USA, was also the first US president to official fund, arm and sponsor racist lynch mobs, who publicly humiliated, tortured and then hung hundreds of Black people, in the market squares of Benghazi and Misrata, Libya. They know that Obama gave Misrata militias, who dubbed themselves "The Brigades for the Elimination of Black Skins," the military and political cover to ethnically cleanse 40,000 Black people from the city of Tawarga. Many of these families are still in concentration camps all around Libya, but particularly in Tripoli, where Human Rights Watch found 5,000 of these ethnically cleansed people in just one camp - where inmates were subjected to torture, rape and murder at the whim of their militia captors.

And yet, informed Black people will also have known that the very sight of a Black face in the White House has generated a sense of pride and self-belief in young Black Americans. On the White House lawn, at least, the days of slavery seem finally to be over. The days when popular wisdom did not question the superiority of the White man, seem to be gone.

A smaller group again will have known that conditions for Working Class Black people have actually deteriorated during the last four years. One in ten Black Americans are now inside the US prison system, including those released on license. This is a system of terror against a population scarcely seen in the history of man. In many areas, there is no family that doesn't have somebody in prison - many doing life sentences for petty offenses, simply because it was their third conviction.

Of course, it is not only Black people who will have voted for Obama. Many White people, and people of other ethnic groups, will also have held on the the myth that the Democratic Party is a little more on the side ordinary folk than the Republicans are. Democratic presidents tend to be more handsome, with fuller smiles, and at ease with the language of the ordinary people. This is an emotional understanding. It bears no scrutiny on the basis of facts. Indeed, the only people Obama has shown kindness of heart to is the billionaire bankers of Goldman Sachs et al. And his kindness to them has been legendary - even as he sent in his armed police to break the heads of the Occupy Movements.

We Marxist anti-imperialists will have taken a somewhat different view. We know that the President of the United States of America is a mere puppet. The Masters of Men, the owners of America, do not stand for election. These Masters have ruled, in cold blood, for a very long time. They are not moved by the glitz of elections, or the petty, meaningless, debates that stir the emotions of Congress or the Senate. Obama will continued to do as he is told to do - just as Romney would have done. But, all puppets are not equally useful. Romney would have made a poor puppet. He looks too much like the string-pullers. He talks and walks like them. In effect, he tends to destroy the illusion. Obama, in contrast, is the perfect puppet for a genocidal regime. A smiling, handsome, Black face. A man of the people. A man of Africa. Who better to lead the new Scramble for Africa?

Communist Party of the Irish Republic
7th November 2012
Statement Ends