And now, a word about a good American being demonized, despite being long dead. Saul Alinsky is not around to defend himself, but that hasn't kept Newt Gingrich from using his name to whip up the froth and frenzy of his followers, whose ignorance of the man is no deterrence to their eagerness, at Gingrich's behest, to tar and feather him posthumously.
In his speeches, Gingrich pounds away at variations on the theme like the piano player in a cheap Western saloon. He declares, "The centerpiece of this campaign, I believe, is American exceptionalism versus the radicalism of Saul Alinsky," or, "I believe in the Constitution, I believe in the Federalist Papers. Obama believes in Saul Alinsky and secular European socialist bureaucracy."
It's all quite clever and insidious, a classic lesson in how to slander someone who cannot answer from the grave, reminiscent of the tactics Gingrich used in those GOPAC memos back in 1996, when he suggested buzz words and phrases to demonize opponents: corrupt, decay, pathetic, permissive attitude, self-serving, and, of course, radical.
In the case of Saul Alinsky, most of the crowd knows nothing about the target except that they're supposed to hate him. And why not? There's the strange foreign name -- obviously an alien. One of them. And a socialist at that. What's a socialist? Don't know -- but Obama's one, isn't he? Barack Hussein Obama, Saul Alinsky -- bingo! Two peas in a pod, and a sinister, subversive pod at that.
But just who was Alinsky, really? Born in 1909, in the ghetto of Chicago's South Side, he saw the worst of poverty and felt the ethnic prejudices that fester, then blast into violence when people are crowded into tenements and have too little to eat. He came to believe that working people, poor people, put down and stepped upon, had to organize if they were going to clean up the slums, fight the corruption that exploited them, and get a handhold on the first rung of the ladder up and out.
He became a protégé of labor leader John L. Lewis and took the principles of organizing into the streets, first in his hometown of Chicago, then across the country, showing citizens how to band together and non-violently fight for their rights, then training others to follow in his shoes. Along the way, Alinsky faced down the hatred of establishment politicians, attacks both verbal and physical, and jail time.
He was a gutsy guy. Outspoken, confrontational, profane with a caustic wit, one journalist said he looked like an accountant and talked like a stevedore. He had a flair for the dramatic, once sending a neighborhood to dump its trash on the front step of an alderman who was allowing the garbage to pile up. Or immobilizing city hall, a department store or a stockholders meeting with a flood of demonstrators demanding justice.
One thing Newt has right -- Saul Alinsky was a proud, self-professed radical. Just look at the titles of two of his books - Reveille for Radicals and Rules for Radicals. But a communist or socialist he was not. He worked with them on behalf of social justice, just as he worked alongside the Catholic archdiocese in Chicago. When he went to Rochester, NY, to help organize the African American community there after a fatal race riot, he was first invited by the local Council of Churches. It was conscience they all had in common, not ideology.
As far as his connection with Barack Obama, the president was just a kid in Hawaii when Alinsky died, something you would expect a good historian, as Gingrich claims to be, to know. The two men never met, although when Obama arrived on the South Side of Chicago as a community organizer, some of his grass roots work with the poor was with an Alinsky-affiliated organization.
But that's how it goes in the fight for basic human rights. Alinsky's influence crops up all across the spectrum, even in the Tea Party. Get this: according to the Wall Street Journal, the conservative holy of holies, the one-time Republican majority leader in the House of Representatives, Dick Armey, whose FreedomWorks organization helps bankroll the Tea Party, gives copies of Alinsky's "Rules for Radicals" to Tea Party leaders.
Watch out, Dick -- you could be next on Newt's list, although, curiously, in his fight against the wealthy Mitt Romney, Gingrich himself has stolen a page from Alinsky's populist playbook. After Romney beat him in the Florida primary, Newt insisted he would continue the fight for the nomination and shouted, "We're going to have people power defeat money power," a sentiment that was Saul Alinsky through and through.
Alinsky died, suddenly, in1972. At the time, he was planning to mount a campaign to organize white, middle class Americans into a national movement for progressive change, a movement he vowed to take into the halls of Congress and -- his words -- "the boardrooms of the mega-corporations."
Maybe that's why Newt Gingrich has been slandering Alinsky's name. Maybe he's afraid, afraid that the very white folks he's been rousing to frenzy will discover who Saul Alinsky was -- a patriot in a long line of patriots, who scorned the malignant narcissism of duplicitous politicians and taught everyday Americans to think for themselves and fight together for a better life. That's the American way, and any good historian would know it.
Watch Bill's video version of this ON DEMOCRACY essay:
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Charles Howard: Deep Calls to Deep: Re-imagining the Altar Call
Qasim Rashid: Laying Down The Sword: A Review
John Wellington Ennis: Why Mitt Romney Won't Get the Job
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 |
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| Obama | Romney | |
|---|---|---|
| Electoral Votes (270 to win) |
332 | 206 |
| Obama | Romney | |
|---|---|---|
| Total | 65,899,660 | 60,932,152 |
| Percent | 51.1% | 47.2% |
| Democrats* | Republicans | |
|---|---|---|
| Current Senate | 53 | 47 |
| Seats gained or lost | +2 | -2 |
| New Total | 55 | 45 |
| Democrats | Republicans | |
|---|---|---|
| Seats won | 201 | 234 |
Rules For Radicals promotes tactics and philosophy that would make Machiavelli blanch.
So, don't pretend to know SA if you're the one to be
posing pedantic questions. I doubt that you've ever
organized a community or a fragment of a community;
otherwise, you wouldn't be trying to disguise yourself
as even grasping the likes of SA by reading a book or two.
Try again. I think you have a good point, but you need whittle
that sentence down into 2 or 3.
Is there any other way to die? One moment you are alive, the next you aren't.
You know...as a lefty, commie, socialist....and I am one....I should say why...just this once....
Because I live in a community. Because I have friends in that community. Because when something bad happens to them.something not normal. something not covered by insurance....I want to help them. Just like they would me. And I do, to what extent I can. But this government....my government ... I pay into it....and no, I'm not that sure how the government finances work, but I'm pretty sure they're not the same as mine....but getting back to the point of this....My neighbor is in trouble. I want to help him but can't. My Government could but wont. You know why? Because my Government thinks it would be unfair to me to help my neighbor.
Maybe my government is on drugs. Maybe may government is evil. I don't know....what I do know is my government isn't listening to me. I don't care how unfair it might be to me......that guy is my neighbor....help him.
Seems simple enough to me. Does anyone else get it?
"He (the free society organizer, which is how Alinsky described himself) accepts the late Justice Learned Hand's statement that "the mark of a free man is that ever-gnawing inner uncertainty as to whether or not he is right". The consequence is that he is ever on the hunt for the causes of man's plight and the general propositions that help to make some sense out of man's irrational world."
"In the end he has one conviction-- a belief that if people have the power to act, in the long run they will, most of the time, reach the right decisions."
What, exactly, do you think the man stood for?
It is important to understand, that the underclass - government dependents of all kinds (and people, who can't wait to become government dependents), are the power base in a class war, the ruling political group is fighting against american people. Occupy Whatever scheme didn't work now, as environmental terrorism didn't work before that, so they will come up with something else.
Power of lumpens shouldn't be underestimated - documented history precedents:
Drunk and dirty crowds put down Democratic republic, established in Russia to replace Tsar's Empire in 1917
Drunk and dirty stormtroopers brought Hitler to power in Democratic Germany in 1933
Alcohol-abstinent and dirty jihadi Muslims brought Muslim Brotherhood to power in Egypt, which was an USA ally, in 2012
And a light example - Drunk, dirty and stoned Occupiers messed up public properties in more than few american cities i 2012
2012 is not over yet - have a nice weekend!