To Have And Have Not: Alinsky, Beck, Satan and Me, Part IV
2009 August 19
tags: ACORN, Glenn Beck, Have-Nots, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Karl Marx, machiavelli, Manichaean, Obama, radical war, Sarah Palin, Saul Alinskyby David Horowitz
Links to the first three Alinsky blogs:
Part I: Alinsky, Beck, Satan and Me
Part II: Hell On Earth
Part III: Boring From Within
The epigraph for the first chapter of Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals which explains that “The Purpose” of the rules is from the book of Job: “The life of man upon earth is a warfare…”
For Alinsky and his Machiavellian radicals, politics is war. No matter what they say publicly or pretend to be, they are at war. They are at war even though no other factions in the political arena are at war, because everyone else embraces the System which commits all parties to compromise and peaceful resolutions of conflicts. For tactical reasons, the radicals will also make compromises, but their entire mentality and approach to politics is based on their dedication to conducting a war against the System itself. Don’t forget it (although if history is any indication, Republicans almost invariably will).
Niccolo Machiavelli
Because radicals see politics as a war, they perceive opponents of their causes as enemies on a battlefield and set out to destroy them by demonizing and discrediting them. Personally. Particularly dangerous in their eyes are opponents who are wise to their deceptions and realize what their agendas are; who understand that they are not the innocents they pretend to be but are actors whose reality is masked. (It is no coincidence that the pod people in the Invasion of the Body Snatchers were inspired by radicals in the Communist era). Thus it is precisely because Glenn Beck is on a mission to ferret them out, that they are determined to silence him and have organized a boycott to drive him off the air. Sarah Palin is another conservative they consider extremely dangerous and therefore have set out to destroy, personally. The list is as long as there are conservative leaders. This is because when you are in a war — when you think of yourself as being in a war — there is no middle ground.
A war by definition is a fight to the finish. It is waged against enemies who can’t be negotiated with but must be eliminated — either totally defeated or effectively destroyed. Conservatives don’t really have such an enemy and therefore are not mentally in the war at all, which is why they often seem so defenseless or willing to throw their fellow conservatives over the side when they are attacked.
The war Alinsky’s radicals conduct is for tactical reasons a guerilla war, as his manual is designed to explain. Conservatives are not at war with the system, but are determined to defend it, including its rules of fairness and inclusion, which provide a protective shield for cynical enemies willing to exploit them. Conservatives embrace the system and believe in the constitutional framework which guarantees opponents the right to declare war not only against them but against the system itself. Consequently, there is no real parallelism in this conflict. One side is fighting with a no-holds-barred, take-no-prisoners battle plan against the system, while the other is trying enforce its rules of fairness and pluralism (which of course does not mean that individual conservatives never break them).
What makes a war a war, is the existence of an enemy who cannot be negotiated with but has to be driven out of existence. For Alinsky and his radicals that enemy is the “oppressor,” the (alleged) “ruler” of the system, the Establishment, the ruling class (or race, or gender as it now happens), those who sit on the top of the “hierarchies” — the “Haves.” According to Alinsky, America is a “Have society.” His rules for radicals are rules for those who want to take the Haves’ power away.
“The setting for the drama of change,” Alinsky writes, “has never varied. Mankind has been and is divided into the Haves, the Have-Nots, and Have-a-Little, Want Mores.” (p.18)
This is the Manichean bedrock of radical belief, the foundation of its destructive agendas — that the world is divided into the Haves and the Have Nots, the exploiters and the exploited, the oppressors and the oppressed, and that liberation lies in the elimination of the former and the dissolution of the dyad. “In this book,” Alinsky explains, “we are concerned with how to create mass organizations to seize power and give it to the people.” (p.3) Power has to be “seized” because the Haves will defend what they have (and thus deprive the Have-Nots of what they want). That is why radicals are organized for war.
This myth of the Haves and the Have-Nots is the radical version of the religious division of the world into Good and Evil. If all deprivations and all the social misery in the world are attributable to the greed and selfishness of one group — the Haves — radicals would have a righteous cause. But it happens to be false, and the radicals’ claim to be fighting in the cause of justice a lie. It is the precise lie with which Marx begins the Communist Manifesto.
The history of all previous societies, Marx declares, is the history of “class struggle.” He then describes this class warfare in this way:
“Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight,…”
In our epoch, according to Marx, capitalists are the oppressors and are pitted against proletarians who are the oppressed. But to compare capitalists to slaveowners, or feudal lords and serfs, as Marx and his disciples down to Alinsky do, is ludicrous. There are tens of millions of capitalists in America, and they rise and fall with every economic wave. Where are the Enrons of yesteryear, and where are their bosses? If proletarians can become capitalists, and capitalists can be ruined, there is no class struggle in the sense that Marx and his disciples claim, no system of oppression and no need for revolution.
The myth of the Haves and the Have-Nots is just that — a myth; and a religious one at that, the same, as I have said, as the myth advanced by Manicheaans who claim that the world is ruled by Darkness, and that history is a struggle between the forces of evil and the forces of light. The category “Haves” for secular radicals is like the category “Witches” for religious fanatics and serves the same function. It is to identify one’s enemies as servants of the devil and to justify the war against them.
It is true that there are some haves and some have-nots. But it is false to describe our social and economic divisions this way, and it malicious and socially destructive to attempt to reverse an imaginary hierarchy between them. In reality, 0ur social and economic divisions are between the Cans and the Can-Nots, the Dos and the Do-Nots, the Wills and the Will-Nots. But to describe them this way — that is, accurately — is to explode the whole religious fantasy that gives meaning to radical lives.
Because the radical agenda is based on a religious myth, a rational person reading any radical text, including Alinsky’s will constantly come across absurd statements, which only a co-religionist could read without laughing. Thus, according to Alinsky, “All societies discourage and penalize ideas and writings that threaten the status quo.” This statement of course is lifted directly from Marx’s German Ideology: “The ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling class.” Alinsky then goes on to this howler: “It is understandable therefore, that the literature of a Have society is a veritable desert whenever we look for writings on social change.” According to Alinsky this is particularly true of our society which “has given us few words of advice, few suggestions on how to fertilize social change.” (p.7) On what planet did this man live and do his disciples now agitate, that they could miss the culture of “resistance” and “revolution” which is now actually the dominant theme of our culture?
Continues Alinsky : “From the Haves, on the other hand, there has come an unceasing flood of literature justifying the status quo.” Really? The curriculum of virtually every Women’s Studies department, Black Studies department, Peace Studies department, Gay and Lesbian Studies department, Asian and Native American and Chicano Studies department, virtually every anthropology and sociology and often English and comparative literature department in the country, is dedicated precisely to social change. Promoting social change is embedded in the mission statements of major universities and is the subject of innumerable commencement addresses which are often given by anti-capitalist radicals and even unrepentant American communists and terrorists (Angela Davis, Bernadine Dohrn), while the mission statements of virtually every college of education training teachers for our K-12 schools advocates social change and even explicitly promotes the radicals’ agenda of “social justice.”
Angela Davis
And since we now live in an Internet age, we should not fail to mention massive websites such as Huffington Post and Daily Kos and MoveOn.org, which are dedicated to promoting the Alinsky program of seizing power from the Haves and giving it to the people. And then there is the inconvenient fact that our president, a radical organizer and leader of an Alinsky organization (ACORN) himself, and an intimate and comrade of revolutionary extremists, ran his successful campaign on a platform not of defending the status quo but of changing it.
newsrealblog.com
Post-modern leftism: Alinsky, Beck, Satan and Me, Part V
2009 August 20
tags: al capone, frank nitti, political relativism, Saul Alinskyby David Horowitz
Alinsky's gangster mentor Frank Nitti
Links to the first four parts of the series:
Part I: Alinsky, Beck, Satan and Me
Part II: Hell On Earth
Part III: Boring From Within
Part IV: To Have and Have Not
Saul Alinsky came of age in the 1930s as a Communist fellow-traveler (as his biographer Sanford Horwitt tells us in Let Them Call Me Rebel), but his real social milieu was the world of the Chicago mobsters to whom he was drawn professionally as a sociologist. In particular he sought out and became a social intimate of the Capone gang and of Capone enforcer Frank Nitti who headed the gang when Capone was sent to prison in 1931. Later Alinsky said, “[Nitti] took me under his wing. I called him the Professor and I became his student.” (p. 20) While Alinsky was not oblivious to the fact that criminals were dangerous, like a good leftist he held “society” — and capitalist society in particular — responsible for creating them.
Alinsky never joined the Communist Party but instead became an avatar of the post-modern left. Like other post-modern leftists he understood that there was something deeply flawed in the Communist outlook, but like them he never really examined what those flaws might be — in particular never interrogated the Marxist view of society and human nature, or its connection to the epic crimes that Marxists had committed. Instead, Alinsky identified the problem as “dogmatism” and the solution as “political relativism.” The Alinsky radical has one principle — to take power from the so-called Haves and give it to the so-called Have-nots. What this amounts to, we shall see, is a political nihilism (Rules for Radicals, p. 110) — a destructive assault on the established order in the name of the “people,” which delivers power (and wealth) into the hands of a radical elite and makes them feel good about themselves in the process.
newsrealblog.com
Means and Ends: Alinsky, Beck, Satan and Me, Part VI
2009 August 21
tags: ACORN, Alinsky, Beatles, George Bush, Hillary, John Lennon, Ku Klux Klan, Marx, Michelle, Obama, Robespierre, Rousseau, Vietnam War, Vladimir Leninby David Horowitz
John Lennon
For the Previous Parts of the Series:
Alinsky, Beck, Satan and Me: Part I
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
The wisest thing Lennon (John, not Vladimir) said about revolutionaries was a line in the song which declared (sort of) his parting of the ways with them: “You say you want a revolution, well, you know, we’d all like to see your plan.” Lennon went on to say that radicals could count him out if they were preaching hate. (But then, the Beatles caved and changed the lyric so that it said both “you can count me out — in.” Well, who in in his right mind over the age of 30 looks for wisdom about reconstructing society to an art form in which “singing doo wah diddie diddie doo wah do” is regarded as genius? But don’t get me wrong, I love this stuff).
We’d all like to see your plan. Yes indeed we would.
The fact is that revolutionaries beginning with Rousseau and Robespierre and Marx have never had a plan. The ones who did and tried to build little utopian communities failed. But the really serious revolutionaries, the ones prepared to burn down the system and put their opponents up against the wall, they never have a plan. What they have is a vague idea of the heaven they propose to create on earth — in Marx’s case “the kingdom of freedom,” in Alinsky’s “the open society” — which is sentimental and seductive enough to persuade their followers that it’s alright to commit mayhem and murder — usually in epic doses — to bring it about. Otherwise, revolutionaries never give two seconds to the problem of how to make a new society work. How to keep people from committing crimes against each other (the Alinsky answer: capitalism makes them criminals), and how to get people to actually work, to produce. From Marx to Mao to Castro, revolutionaries have never had a clue. (Their excuse for the monstrous poverty and human suffering they create? — the capitalists are responsible, it’s the U.S. embargo.)
So if there is no plan, the devil is in the detail of the methods you use to get there. Each step of the way constitutes another block in the foundations of the world you are creating. The means tell you what the ends will be.
Alinsky’s biographer with the following anecdote about Alinsky’s advice to students wishing to protest the appearance on their campus of the first George Bush, before he became president, because he was America’s representative to the UN during the Vietnam War:
“College student activists in the 1960s and 1970s sought out Alinsky for advice about tactics and strategy. On one such occasion in the spring of 1972 at Tulane University’s annual week-long series of events featuring leading public figures, students asked Alinsky to help plan a protest of a scheduled speech by George Bush, then U.S. representative to the United Nations, a speech likely to be a defense of the Nixon Administration’s Vietnam War policies [Note: the Nixon Administration was then negotiating with the North Vietnamese communists to arrive at a peace agreement-- DH] The students told Alinsky that they were thinking about picketing or disrupting Bush’s address. That’s the wrong approach, he rejoined — not very creative and besides, causing a disruption might get them thrown out of school. [Not likely -- DH.]
“He told them, instead, to go hear the speech dressed up as members of the Ku Klux Klan, and whenever Bush said something in defense of the Vietnam War, they should cheer and wave placards, reading ‘The K.K.K. supports Bush.’ And that is what the students did with very successful, attention-getting results.” (Let Them Call Me Rebel, pp. xv-xvi)
This anecdote tells you everything you really need to know about this mentor to Hillary Clinton and the Obamas, and the ACORN radicals. Lenin once said that purpose of a political argument is not to refute your opponent “but to wipe him from the face of the earth.” The mission of Alinsky radicals is a mission of destruction. It doesn’t matter that the Vietnam war was not a race war — that millions of South Vietnamese were against the Communists, that the South was eventually conquered by North Vietnamese armies because the Viet Cong failed to win the hearts and minds of the South Vietnamese people. It doesn’t matter who George Bush actuually is or what he believes. Because your purpose is to erase him and the system he is alleged to represent. Therefore pick the symbol of the greatest evil that Americans — a small minority of Americans — were ever associated with, and use it to obliterate everything good they ever did in the service of your cause, which is to destroy the system which created them. If America’s cause in Vietnam is the Ku Klux Klan, it is evil and America is evil. If George Bush is the Ku Klux Klan, that’s it. Nobody needs to listen to him, he is non-person, a symbol of evil. Inside every radical is a Manichean at war with the forces of darkness and evil. In such war every means is justified, as we shall see. (To be continued…)
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