|
Barack Obama is the first U.S. president trained in the
belief system of radical organizer Saul Alinsky. More than ever,
Americans need to study Alinsky’s beliefs.
Information is scarce. Most writing on Alinsky is agitprop,
cranked out by loyal disciples planted in the media. Sanford D.
Horwitt’s Alinsky biography, “Let Them Call Me Rebel,” is no
exception. It seeks to whitewash the father of “community
organizing” as an American patriot, humanitarian and champion of
the downtrodden.
Despite its bias, “Let Them Call Me Rebel” reveals much about
the real Alinsky. The sheer quantity of evidence amassed in
these 618 pages overwhelm’s Horwitt’s efforts to spin it.
Horwitt’s book is not new (Vintage Books, 1989). However, it
is the only Alinsky biography in print – indeed, the only one
ever written. For that reason, it is a must-read for anyone
wishing to understand the Obama administration.
The Obama Connection
Ironically, Obama’s name does not appear in the book. When it
came out in 1989, Obama was still an obscure community
organizer, working for the Alinsky network in Chicago.
The Alinsky network is an “organization of organizations,” to
use Alinsky’s phrase. It is a vast and ever-expanding web of
activist groups and foundations, continually spawning new groups
– some permanent, some temporary – all designated by an alphabet
soup of shape-shifting acronyms. What these groups have in
common is that they were founded by Alinsky disciples and employ
the Alinsky method of community organizing.
Beginning in 1985, Obama worked for many such groups,
including the Gamaliel Foundation, the Midwest Academy, ACORN
and Project VOTE.
Obama received training from Alinsky’s flagship school for
organizers, the Industrial Areas Foundation. Later, Obama became
a trainer himself, teaching workshops on the Alinsky method.
Obama never met Alinsky, who died in 1972. However, our
president was trained by organizers who had worked directly with
the master.
“Barack Obama’s training in Chicago by the great community
organizers is showing its effectiveness,” wrote Lee David
Alinsky – son of the master organizer -- in a letter to the
Boston Globe, following Obama’s nomination for president. “[T]he
method of my late father always works to get the message out and
get the supporters on board. When executed meticulously and
thoughtfully, it is a powerful strategy for initiating change
and making it really happen. Obama learned his lesson well.”
The Amoral Alinsky
Alinsky was born in Chicago in 1909, the son of Russian
Jewish immigrants. He rejected religion at an early age.
Throughout his life, he preached that good and evil were
illusions, and that only power mattered.
“Somebody once asked me whether I believe in reconciliation,”
Alinsky used to tell his followers. “Sure I do. When one side
gets the power and the other side gets reconciled to it, then
we’ll have reconciliation.”
For Alinsky, compromise was just a trick, a way to get your
enemy off guard while you plotted your next attack. “If you
start with nothing, demand 100 percent, then compromise for 30
percent, you’re 30 percent ahead,” he wrote.
Alinsky pursued power for the sake of power. He demanded that
his young trainees do likewise. Idealists enraged him.
“He felt very strongly that if you are a do-gooder, you’re
never going to make it [as a community organizer],” recalls a
young Presbyterian minister who underwent Alinsky training in
1956.
The same minister relates that there was “one guy on our
staff whom Saul couldn’t stand, whom he treated viciously … a
young, black fellow from the Church of God.” This hapless
recruit “believed that he was called to do good, to love the
Lord and spread the gospel. Saul pulled all his defenses from
under him and exposed him, and he couldn’t take it. He just
collapsed under it.”
Do-gooders nonetheless flocked to Alinsky, driven by
masochism. They saw Alinsky as a spiritual teacher, who would
humiliate them for their own good.
Christians were easy marks for Alinsky’s con. He perfected
the art of manipulating Christian guilt, seducing entire
churches to his cause.
Hillary Clinton was thus seduced. She met Alinsky through a
radical youth group, run by her Methodist church. Later, she
interviewed Alinsky for her senior thesis in college -- a
75-page analysis of Alinsky’s organizing methods. She turned
down a job offer from Alinsky, since she was headed for Yale Law
School, but remained friends with him until his death in 1972.
Conning Christians
Horwitt documents Alinsky’s stunning success in persuading
Christian churches to fund his revolution. Money poured into his
activist training school, the Industrial Areas Foundation in
Chicago, from such unlikely sources as the Catholic Youth
Organization, the Archdiocese of Chicago and the United
Presbyterian Church.
Flush with church money, Alinsky and his organizers would
descend on impoverished communities, seeking to “agitate to the
point of conflict,” “fan resentments” and “rub raw the sores of
discontent”, as Alinsky put it.
“Picket-line priests” and nuns were ubiquitous fixtures of
Alinsky street actions, beginning with the 1946 Packinghouse
Workers strike in the Chicago stockyards, which he helped
organize.
Working with churches was part of Alinsky’s “mass jujitsu”
strategy – turning the strength of the enemy against itself. “I
feel confident that I could persuade a millionaire on a Friday
to subsidize a revolution for Saturday out of which he would
make a huge profit on Sunday even though he was certain to be
executed on Monday,” Alinsky once boasted.
Organized religion was as much an enemy of the people as
organized capital, in Alinsky’s view. He dreamed of a day when
all religions would meld into a single, global “ethical system”,
their creeds “synthesized into certain universals acceptable to
the people of the world.”
What were these universals? What exactly was Alinsky fighting
for?
Horwitt insists that Alinsky was no communist. Yet Alinsky
wrote in 1946 that he hoped for a “future where the means of
economic production will be owned by all of the people.” He
disparaged labor leaders who shrank from “revolutionary action
aimed at the destruction of monopoly capitalism.”
One year before his death in 1972, Alinsky published Rules
for Radicals, whose dedication page features what may be the
clearest distillation of Alinsky’s true beliefs.
Alinsky dedicated his book to “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.”
Richard Lawrence Poe is a contributing editor to Newsmax, an
award-winning journalist and a New York Times best-selling
author. His latest book is "The Shadow Party," co-written with
David Horowitz.
© 2009 Newsmax. All rights reserved.
|