Alinsky, Beck, Satan and Me
First three of a series by former leftie David Horowitz. He was one of them and he understands them.
2009 August 16
tags: adam and eve, Glenn Beck, Lucifer, Obama era, Rahm Emmanuel, Rules for Radicals, Satan, Saul Alinsky
by David Horowitz
Glenn Beck will be on vacation this week but when he returns on the 24th he has invited me to come to New York to talk to him on camera about Saul Alinsky, the strategy guru of the Obama era. For the the Hillary-Soros generation of johnny-come-lately radicals and their ACORN footsoldiers, Alinksy is their Sun-Tzu and his book Rules for Radicals is the field manual for their struggle. I thought while I’m refreshing my acquaintance with this destructive fellow and re-reading his text, I would share my thoughts with you, serially over the next week.
For this first post, let’s just focus on the dedication of the book — to Satan:
“Lest we forget, an over-the-shoulder acknowledgment to the very first radical:” (Pause there for second. Now continue): “from all our legends, mythology, and history(and who is to know where mythology leaves off and history begins — or which is which), the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom — Lucifer.”
So Alinsky begins by telling readers what a radical is. He is not a reformer of the system but its would-be destroyer. This is something that in my experience conservatives have a very hard time understanding. Conservatives are altogether too decent, too civilized to match up adequately, at least in the initital stages of the battle, with their adversaries. They are too prone to give them the benefit of the doubt. They assume that radicals can’t really want to destroy a society that is democratic and liberal and has brought wealth and prosperity to so many. Oh yes they can. That is in fact the essence of what it means to be a radical — to be willing to destroy the values, structures and institutions that sustain the society we live in. Marx himself famously cited Alinsky’s first rebel (using another of his names — Mephistopheles): “Everything that exists deserves to perish.”
This is why ACORN activists, for example, have such contempt for the election process, why they are so willing to commit election fraud. Because just as Lucifer didn’t believe in God’s kingdom, so the radicals who run ACORN don’t believe in the democratic system. To them it is itself a fraud — an instrument of the ruling class, or as Alinsky prefers to call it, of the Haves. If the electoral system doesn’t serve all of us, but is only an instrument of the Haves, then election fraud is justified because it is a means of creating a system that serves the Have-Nots — social justice. Until conservatives begin to understand exactly what drives radicals and how dishonest they are — dishonest in the their core — it is going to be very hard to defend the system that is under attack. For radicals the noble end — creating a new heaven on earth — justifies any means. And if one actually believed it was possible to create heaven on earth, would he not willingly destroy any system hitherto created by human beings?
The many names of Satan, by the way, are also a model for radicals who camouflage their agendas by alternatively calling themselves Communists, socialists, new leftists, liberals and most consistently progressives. My parents, who were card-carrying Communists, never referred to themselves as Communists but always as “progressives.” The Progressive Party was run by the Communist Party and split off from the Democrats in 1948 (because Harry Truman opposed Stalin), but rejoined the Democrats in the McGovern campaign of 1972 and with the ascension of Barack Obama has become the Democratic Party.
Alinsky’s tribute to Satan as the first radical, and as the model of radicals to come, should cause us to reflect on how Satan tempted Adam and Eve to destroy their paradise. If you rebel and violate the law that has been laid down for you, “You shall be as gods” the serpent told them. You think Rahm Emmanuel was listening?
Oh, and let’s not forget this — the kingdom that the first radical “won” was hell.
Hell on Earth: Alinsky, Beck, Satan and Me, Part II
Boring From Within: Alinsky, Beck, Satan and Me, Part III
To Have And Have Not: Alinsky, Beck, Satan and Me, Part IV
Post-modern leftism: Alinsky, Beck, Satan and Me, Part V
Means and Ends: Alinsky, Beck, Satan and Me, Part VI
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Hell on Earth: Alinsky, Beck, Satan and Me, Part II
2009 August 17
tags: Jacobin, Lenin, Pol Pot, rachel carson, radicals, Saul Alinsky, unecessary aids deaths, welfareby David Horowitz
[This is part two of the series "Beck, Alinsky, Satan and Me]
Picking up where we left off, Obama/ACORN strategy guru Saul Alinsky began his manual for leftists by dedicating it to Satan, “the first radical known to man” who “rebelled against the establishment, and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom.” We noted that the kingdom Alinsky thought was some kind of achievement to inspire other radicals was in fact hell. Here, in a nutshell, is why conservatives are conservative and why radicals are dangerous. Because conservatives pay attention to the consequences of actions, including their own, and radicals don’t.
And there’s a reason for that. What they are trying to do is not to improve the lot of all of us or even some of us, but to fill up a cosmic emptiness, an emptiness they feel in their core. As Alinsky himself puts it, they are seeking to answer the question “Why am I here?” — a question which traditional religions attempt to answer but whose answers radicals scorn. Modern radicalism is a secular religion, and its hunger for meaning and hope and change cannot be satisfied by anything less than grandiose, totalizing schemes to transform the world. To bring up their failures, the enormities they are guilty of, the crimes committed in the name of their religion, is to strike a blow at hope itself, which is why they cannot and will not hear it.
One kind of hell or another is what radicalism — progressivism — has in fact achieved since the beginning of the modern age when it conducted the first genocide during the French Revolution. In a fever of revolutionary enthusiasm the Jacobins had changed the name of the cathedral of Notre Dame to the “Temple of Reason,” and then in the name of Reason proceeded to slaughter every Catholic in the Vendee region to purge supersitition from the earth. It was the precursor of Lenin’s destruction of 100,000 churches in the Soviet Union and the creation of a People’s Church to usher in the kingdom of socialist heaven, which led to the murder of 100 million people in Russia and China and the bankrupting of a continent before it mercifully collapsed — with progressives cheering it all the way and mourning over its demise. It was also the precursor of Pol Pot’s decree that every Cambodian who wore glasses be killed in order that Cambodia be rid of bad ideas.
Not every progressive hell is a genocide, but many come close. The crusade to rid mankind of the scourge of DDT launched by the American environmentalist Rachel Carson wound up killing 100 million children – mainly black Africans under the age of 5 — between 1975 and the present, and the killing is still going on. The crusade of the left to liberate gays from a “sex-negative culture” destroyed the public health system’s ability to control domestic epidemics and led to the deaths of more than 300,000 gay men in the prime of life.
The left’s crusade to build a welfare utopia destroyed the inner-city black family, spawned tens of millions of fatherless black children, and created a mass intractable and violent underclass which is still with us and growing today.
The leftist monopoly of the public school system in America’s major cities is daily destroying the lives of millions of poor black and Hispanic children while filling the coffers of the Democratic Party machine which keeps their oppression going.
But progressives never stop for a moment to look at the horrors they have wrought.
Look at the defense Alinsky’s disciples are making of the Obama socialized medicine plan as they ask distressed constituents at the townhall meetings, do you have Medicare and do you like it? That’s a government health care system that works. Oh? So why is it going bankrupt? Isn’t that the reason for the new system? This one of course is much bigger, so the bankruptcy will be much more painful and destructive. But there wouldn’t be a need for this “solution,” and the price of medical care wouldn’t so outrageous, if progressives hadn’t devised the present system in the first place.
So one rule for conservatives should be this: Don’t be so polite. When progressives propose their progressive solutions, remind them of the hell
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Boring From Within: Alinsky, Beck, Satan and Me, Part III
2009 August 18
tags: Barack Obama, News, Politics, Saul Alinskyby David Horowitz
Saul Alinsky, whose blueprint for revolution calls for working within the system and undermining it
[Links to the first two Alinsky blogs:
Part I: Alinsky, Beck, Satan and Me
Part II: Hell On Earth.]
Conservatives think of war as a metaphor when applied to politics. For radicals the war is real. That is why partisans of the left set out to destroy their opponents, not just refute their arguments. It is also why they never speak the truth. Deception for them is a military tactic in a war that is designed to elminate their opponents.
Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals is first of all a broadside against the New Left. What Alinsky attacks about the New Left is its honesty — something I”ve always regarded as its o–nly redeeming feature. While American Communists — the Old Left — pretended to be Jeffersonian Democrats and “progressives” and formed “popular fronts” with liberals to “defend democracy,” we in the New Left disdained their deception and regarded it as weakness. To distinguish ourselves from these Old Leftists, we said we were revolutionaries and proud of it.
“Up against the wall motherfucker” was a typical New Left slogan, telegraphing exactly how we felt about people who opposed us. The most basic principle of Alinsky’s advice to radicals is, lie to your opponents and potential opponents and disarm them by pretending to be moderates, liberals. This has been the most potent weapon of the left since the end of the Sixties. Racists like Al Sharpton and Jeremiah Wright posing as civil rights activists, radicals like Henry Waxman and Barney Frank posing as liberals. The mark of their success is how conservatives collude in the deception. Even Fox’s Megan Kelly, brilliant in all other things, still refers to the congressional socialists holding out for a total government takeover of the medical system as “liberals.”)
Alinsky chides New Leftists for being “rhetorical radicals” rather than “realistic” ones. New Leftists scared people but didn’t have the power to back up their threats. Alinsky’s manual is designed to teach radicals how to manipulate the public into thinking they’re harmless, in order to accumulate enough power to achieve the radical agenda — to burn the system down and replace it with a socialist gulag.
Make no mistake, this — a totalitarian future — is the real objective of Alinsky and his radical disciples who call themselves liberals and bore from within. Alinsky writes of “the “revolutionary force” of the 1960s, that its activists were “one moment reminiscent of the idealistic early Christians yet they also urge violence and cry ‘Burn the system down.!’ They have no illusions about the system, but plenty of illusions about the way to change our world. It is to this point that I have written this book.” Radicals who call for burning down America’s democracy “have no illusions about the system”! They just don’t know how to go about doing it.
Alinsky’s book could be called Machiavellian Rules for Radicals, because it is all about deception, about keeping others in the dark about your intentions until it is too late. Alinsky even acknowledges Machiavelli as his model: “What follows is for those who want to change the world from what it is to what they believe it should be.” These are the famous lines that Michelle Obama made in her own Democratic Convention speech.
Alinsky continues: “The Prince was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power. [I will have more to say about these Haves in the next blog.] Rules for Radicals is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away.”
Alinsky’s agenda is the same agenda as that of the radicals who called for “Revolution Now” in the 1960s. He just has a more clever way of doing it. If you want socialized medicine, don’t say you want socialized medicine. Say you want “Medicare for all,” as though transforming a partial government insurance for the indigent into a total system system required for everyone wouldn’t transform the program into a pillar of the totalitarian future.
Actually there’s nothing new in Alinsky’s strategy of appearing moderate in order to disarm your opposition. That was what Stalin’s popular front was all about — communists pretending to be democrats and forming allinaces with liberals in order to acquire enough power to shut the democracy down. And, in fact, it was Lenin’s idea too, which is where Alinsky got it in the first place. Lenin is one of Alinsky’s heroes — Castro is another — and he invokes the master in the course of chiding the rhetoricdal radicals of the New Left over a famous Sixties slogan, which was itself lifted from Mao. Mao’s slogan said political power comes out of the barrel of a gun. Comments Alinsky:
“‘Power comes out of the barrel of a gun’ is an absurd rallying cry when the other side has all the guns. Lenin was a pragmatist; when he returned from what was then Petrograd from exile, he said that the Bolsheviks stood for getting power through the ballot but would reconsider after they got the guns.”
In other words, vote for us now, but when we are the government it will be another story. One man, one vote, one time. This is the political credo of all totalitatarians, including Hitler, who was elected Chancellor and then made himself Fuerher and shut the voting booths down.
Lenin was not a pragmatist (how fatuous): he was a Machievellian monster who was engaged in a total war which justified every means to achieve its goals. Alinsky is marching to the same drummer. What he really means is that Lenin was a realist and understood how to use the power he had, and, when it was not enough to crush his opposition, to make up for its deficiencies with deception. “These rules [for radicals]” Alinsky explains, “make the difference between being a realistic radical and a being a rhetorical one who uses the tired old words and slogans, calls the police ‘pig’ or ‘white fascist racist’ or ‘motherfucker’ and has so stereotyped himself that others react by saying, ‘Oh he’s one of those’ and promptly turn off.” Get the power and then you can call them (and do with them) what you want.
“This failure of many of our younger activists to understand the art of communication has been disastrous,” writes Alinsky. What he really means is their failure to understand the art of mis-communication. This is the art that teaches radicals who are trying impose a socialist health care system in a country whose people understand that socialism destroys freedom, not to sell it as socialism, but to sell it as a “public option,” or as “Medicare for all.”
What this adds up to is a call to revolutionaries who want to destroy the system, to first work within the system until you can accumulate enough power to destroy it. In the movement, we used to call this the strategy of “boring from within.” Like termites, you eat away at the foundations until the building collapses.
Alinsky’s advice is: Don’t confront the system as an opposing army; join it and undermine it as a fifth column force: “‘That means working within the system.” That means that “any revolutionary change must be preceded by a passive, affirmative, non-challenging attitude toward change among the mass of our people.”
It is first necessary to sell the public on “change,” the “audacity of hope,” and “yes we can.” You do this by proposing moderate changes which open the door to your radical agendas. Says Alinsky:
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