Saul David Alinsky died 36 years before the election of Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton’s first attempt for the presidency. But many feverish screeds on social media, talk radio, and YouTube might have made one think he lurked behind these politicians like Rasputin. Spoken of by many on the right as a servant of the devil, “American Joseph Goebbels,” and “dangerous harbinger of insurrection,” Alinsky developed a reputation for insidiousness that may exceed his influence, considerable though it may be.
But liberals and leftists have no special purchase on Alinsky’s legacy. As one thoughtful, eloquent pundit recently wrote, “the Right has taken Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals and shoved it up where #TheResistance don’t shine.” Not long before this charming appropriation, Alinsky’s 1971 manual of political warfare found its way into the hands of some of the same Tea Party organizers who had made his name synonymous with everything they despised about the left. (See Alinsky court his Luciferian comparisons in the 1966 interview.)
But Alinsky wrote Rules for Radicals for his demographic. From the 30s to the 70s, he organized poor, working people in Chicago and other cities and addressed countercultural and civil rights activists nationwide. The opening paragraph of the book makes it perfectly clear who his readers are:
What follows is for those who want to change the world from what it is to what they believe it should be. The Prince was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power. Rules for Radicals is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away.
Alinsky’s reference to Machiavelli sets readers up for a high degree of ruthlessness and realpolitik, and the book does not disappoint. If you’re looking for Anarchist Cookbook-level radicalism, you’d best look elsewhere. While Alinsky talked tough, in an honest Chicago way, he did not recommend violence in his manual. In the Prologue, he denounces “parts of the far left who have gone so far in the political circle that they are now all but indistinguishable from the extreme right.” In recent revolutionary violence, he writes, “we are dealing with people who are merely hiding psychosis behind a political mask.”
Rules for Radicals recommends mostly working within the system—though in a twisted way Machiavelli is reputed to have done (whether or not he’s been interpreted fairly). Below, you’ll find Alinsky’s list of 13 “Rules for Radicals,” offered with his proviso that political activism cannot be a self-serving enterprise: “People cannot be free unless they are willing to sacrifice some of their interests to guarantee the freedom of others. The price of democracy is the ongoing pursuit of the common good by all of the people.”
1. “Power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have.” Power is derived from 2 main sources – money and people. “Have-Nots” must build power from flesh and blood.
2. “Never go outside the expertise of your people.” It results in confusion, fear and retreat. Feeling secure adds to the backbone of anyone.
3. “Whenever possible, go outside the expertise of the enemy.” Look for ways to increase insecurity, anxiety and uncertainty.
4. “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.” If the rule is that every letter gets a reply, send 30,000 letters. You can kill them with this because no one can possibly obey all of their own rules.
5. “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.” There is no defense. It’s irrational. It’s infuriating. It also works as a key pressure point to force the enemy into concessions.
6. “A good tactic is one your people enjoy.” They’ll keep doing it without urging and come back to do more. They’re doing their thing, and will even suggest better ones.
7. “A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.” Don’t become old news.
8. “Keep the pressure on. Never let up.” Keep trying new things to keep the opposition off balance. As the opposition masters one approach, hit them from the flank with something new.
9. “The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.” Imagination and ego can dream up many more consequences than any activist.
10. “The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.” It is this unceasing pressure that results in the reactions from the opposition that are essential for the success of the campaign.
11. “If you push a negative hard enough, it will push through and become a positive.” Violence from the other side can win the public to your side because the public sympathizes with the underdog.
12. “The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.” Never let the enemy score points because you’re caught without a solution to the problem.
13. “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions.
Alinsky’s rules can and have been used for anti-democratic designs. But he defines the U.S. as a “society predicated on voluntarism.” His vision of democracy leans heavily on that of a keen outside observer of early America, Alexis de Tocqueville, the French philosopher who “gravely warned,” writes Alinsky, “that unless individual citizens were regularly involved in the action of governing themselves, self-government would pass from the scene.”
Related Content:
Salman Rushdie: Machiavelli’s Bad Rap
How Machiavelli Really Thought We Should Use Power: Two Animated Videos Provide an Introduction
‘The Right of the People to Rule’: Listen to Theodore Roosevelt Speaking 100 Years Ago Today
*******
A Look at Alinsky’s Rules for Power – EXPOSED
When Hillary Diane Rodham was in college she interviewed Saul Alinsky for her thesis. It would seem that she grew to idolize him and stored it away in her memory bank for possible future use.
At some point during his college education, Barry Soetoro also came across the writings of Saul Alinsky. He too was impressed by his ideology and stored it away in his memory bank for possible future use. After changing his name to Barack Hussain Obama he was appointed to the Illinois state senate before running and winning the U.S. Senate for Illinois.
These two individuals driven by the ideology of Saul Alinsky and his writings collided during the 2008 Presidential election campaign cycle. They learned so we'll learn how to manipulate American voters and one individual eclipsed the other to win first the Democrat Party nomination, then the election and was inaugurated on 20 January 2009 as the 44th President of the United States – Barack Hussain Obama.
Not sitting idly by nor forgetting the writings of Saul Alinsky, Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton literally adapted her 2015 – 2016 campaign to the principles listed below. She followed this platform so perfectly so it would seem that winning the election and becoming the first female president was certainly within her grasp.
Rules for Radicals
Alinsky’s Rules for Power
From Rules for Radicals
by Saul Alinsky
Tactics mean doing what you can with what you have.
Tactics are those conscious deliberate acts by which human beings live with each other and deal with the world around them. In the world of giving and take, tactics are the art of how to take and how to give. Here our concern is with the tactic of taking; how the Have-Nots can take power away from the Haves.
For an elementary illustration of tactics, take parts of your face as the point of reference; your eyes, your ears, and your nose.
First the eyes; If you have organized a vast, mass-based people’s organization, you can parade it visibly before the enemy and openly show your power.
Second the ears; If your organization is small in numbers, then…conceal the members in the dark but raise a din and clamor that will make the listener believe that your organization numbers many more than it does.
Third, the nose; If your organization is too tiny even for noise, stink up the place.
Always remember the rules of power tactics.
First rule:
Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.
Second:
Never go outside the experience of your people. When an action is outside the experience of the people, the result is confusion, fear, and retreat.
Third:
Wherever possible go outside of the experience of the enemy. Here you want to cause confusion, fear, and retreat.
The fourth rule:
Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules. You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity.
The fourth rule carries within it the fifth rule
The Fifth rule:
Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule. Also it infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage.
Sixth rule:
A good tactic is one that your people enjoy. If your people are not having a ball doing it, there is something very wrong with the tactic.
A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag. Man can sustain militant interest in any issue for only a limited time, after which it becomes a ritualistic commitment.
Keep the pressure on, with different tactics and actions, and utilize all events of the period for your purpose.
The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.
The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.
If you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through into its counterside; this is based on the principle that every positive has its negative.
The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.
You cannot risk being trapped by the enemy in his suddenly agreeing with your demand and saying “You’re right – we don’t know what to do about this issue. Now you tell us.”
Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.
In conflict tactics, there are certain rules that the organizer should always regard as universalities.
One is that the opposition must be singled out as the target and “frozen.” By this, I mean that in a complex, interrelated, urban society, it becomes increasingly difficult to single out who is to blame for any particular evil. There is a constant, and somewhat legitimate, passing of the buck. The target is always trying to shift responsibility to get out of being the target.
One of the criteria in picking your target is the target’s vulnerability – where do you have the power to start?
Furthermore, the target can always say, “Why do you center on me when there are others to blame as well?” When you “freeze the target,” you disregard these arguments and, for the moment, all others to blame.
Then, as you zero in and freeze your target and carry out your attack, all of the “others” come out of the woodwork very soon. They become visible by their support of the target.
The other important point in the choosing of a target is that it must be a personification, not something general and abstract such as a community’s segregated practices or a major corporation or City Hall. It is not possible to develop the necessary hostility against, say, City Hall, which after all is a concrete, physical, inanimate structure, or against a corporation, which has no soul or identity, or a public school administration, which again is an inanimate system.
Power goes to two poles: to those who’ve got money and those who’ve got people.
Born in 1909 Saul Alinsky was a community organizer and organizer trainer in Chicago. He was a champion of confrontational tactics. Alinsky wrote two books on tactics and a biography of Mineworker president John L. Lewis.
Fred Ross, a student of Alinsky, was a major influence on Cesar Chavez, founder of the United Farm Workers union.
After reading this article it is perfectly clear that these principles (target, freeze, polarize and attack) can be used successfully against the attacker. When Barack Obama circumvented the Democrat front runner in a run from behind to beat Hillary Clinton in the 2008 campaign to gain the nomination nobody saw him coming and he went on to beat Republican John McCain for the presidency.
During the 2016 presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton tried unsuccessfully using the same tactics against Republican Donald Trump. What she failed to recognize was that political and personal attacks did not hurt Trump and he counter-attacked using similar tactics and failed to realize that she could not out-trump Trump. She could have used a few pointers in Trump’s first book “The Art of the Deal”.
This resulted in Trump winning the election and he was inaugurated on 20 January 2017 as the 45th President of the United States. That should have been the end of it, but liberals and Democrats across the nation plunged headlong into what has been described as TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome).
There was a total meltdown of common sense as marches, protesting and rioting began in carefully orchestrated venues and cities across the nation. The protests included members of Congress boycotting the inauguration, the state of the union address, and going full head-on in resistance mode against anything Trump. This was a case of targeting, freezing, personalizing, and polarizing President Donald Trump.
It also brought into play the First Rule, “Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have”. All the marches gave the façade of huge masses of dissatisfied voters when in reality the voters were what gave Donald Trump the victory in the election.
This brought into play the Second Rule, “Never go outside the experience of your people or the result will be confusion, fear, and retreat”. The experience of these liberals is to malign, slander, and discredit which seems pretty typical for those with legal training.
The Third Rule, “Whenever possible go outside the experience of the enemy where you want to cause confusion, fear, and retreat”. This works when the target is a political powerhouse that is primarily interested in maintaining enough votes to remain in office. It doesn’t work particularly well when the target is Trump who is not a politician and knows in advance who his enemies are.
The Fourth Rule, “Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.” This is where you take their rhetoric and shove it down their throats in spirited debates or through repeated public service announcements or campaign ads. This is where the target deflects or redirects this back in a counterattack.
The Fifth Rule, “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. It’s almost impossible to counterattack ridicule, as it infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage”. Hillary should have paid special attention to the word “Impossible”, because once again you can’t out-trump Trump. His counterattacks are instantaneous and very effective.
The Sixth Rule, “A good tactic is one that your people enjoy”; “A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag” & “Keep the pressure on”. This rule is a 3-part one, but your people only enjoy using this tactic when it’s not directed against them personally or when they run out of things to say or invent as they try to keep the pressure on. We’ve seen this constantly as the media, television personalities and athletics look for ways to take “Trump speak” to new levels where it comes across as Fake News.
According to Alinsky, “The threat is more terrifying than the real thing itself”; “Development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition” & “If you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through into its counterside because every positive has it's negative”; “The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative” “Don’t risk being trapped by the enemy by him suddenly agreeing with you and asking what you would do”.
Why else do you think the “Caravan” scare was announced so far in advance and reported on with daily regularity? The same thing happened with “Family Separations” just before that. And don’t forget the “gun control” and “second amendment” attacks on taking guns from law-abiding gun owners.
“Like getting guns off the streets will make everyone safer”. This premise has no basis or foundation as taking guns away from lawful gun owners simply allows unlawful gun owners' free reign to perpetrate random acts of violence.
According to Alinsky, “In conflict tactics, there are certain rules that should always be regarded as universalities”
“The opposition must be singled out as the target and frozen. It’s increasingly difficult to single out who is to blame for any particular evil”; “The target must have a vulnerability, where you have the power to start.”
“When you freeze the target, you disregard all arguments to blame others”.
“Then you zero in and freeze your target and carry out your attack. This will bring out all others who are visible by their support.”
“The other important point in the choosing of a target is that it must be a personification, not something general and abstract. It is not necessary to develop the hostility against City Hall, or a corporation or public school administration which is an inanimate system”
This is why it was necessary to personify Donald Trump as the target. Singling out Trump enables the attacking of his person, family, business dealings, domestic and foreign policy, and his proven passion for beautiful women. By pressing these attacks (putting on the pressure) the target (Trump) is kept off-balance, constantly defending and unable to perform effectively.
Alinsky, “Power goes to two poles: to those who’ve got money and those who’ve got people.”
This was an unforeseen development in choosing Donald Trump as the target. He is not your typical politician. He has no “need” to become president. He already has money “power” and people “voters” and therefore the two poles have come together nicely.
President Donald Trump has been a fighter his entire life. He knows how to scrap on the streets and in the corporate boardroom. Trump is someone who does not fall down without getting back up and when he comes up he comes up swinging.
I’ve written about it before, but nobody counted on the “God” factor affecting the outcome of the US elections. It was revealed early on during the campaign that God had chosen a special man for a special task. A man whom others looked down upon as unsuited to the presidency and who did not know God (profess to be a Christian).
Because God’s ways are not man’s ways, man was ultimately surprised when God chose a “swordsman” and not an “evangel” to become president. In the manner of Isaiah 45, God chose Donald Trump to be an “Isaiah 45” president; a scrapper who would not quit and was committed until he achieved or completed the task for which he had been chosen for.
America must see through the “smoke and mirrors” of the evil one who has been waging a battle against Almighty God from the time he was cast out of Heaven and banished to the realm of the earth. It’s not a battle between good and evil like we are led to believe. It is a battle of evil against God. The outcome has been predetermined and evil loses.
We are in the end times of an earth that is not our mother or has no feelings, no soul, and yet is undergoing birth pains (earthquakes, fires, floods, famine, wars, and rumors of wars in diverse places). There are many who say it will pass, but they are fooling only themselves.
I ask, “DO YOU KNOW JESUS?” In the bible (John 3:16) we are told that Jesus is the way to the Father God. There is no other way. The time to accept Jesus as Lord and Savior is now while you still breathe the breath of life. It is not by works, but by the grace of Almighty God who wishes none to perish, but that all would live with Him eternally. Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. Will you accept Him right now? – I am the Real Truckmaster!
One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors. -- Plato (429-347 BC)
THE PATRIOT
Knowledge Is Power And Information is Liberating: The FRIENDS OF LIBERTY BLOG GROUPS are non-profit blogs dedicated to bringing as much truth as possible to the readers.
GUEST POSTING: WOULD YOU LIKE TO BE PUBLISHED ... DO YOU HAVE SOMETHING ON YOUR MIND?
Knowledge Is Power - Information Is Liberating: The Patriot Welcome is a non-profit blog dedicated to bringing as much truth as possible to the readers.
Big Tech has greatly reduced the distribution of our stories in our readers' newsfeeds and is instead promoting mainstream media sources. When you share with your friends, however, you greatly help distribute our content. Please take a moment and consider sharing this article with your friends and family. Thank you
Keep on seeking the truth, rally your friends and family and expose as much corruption as you can… every little bit helps add pressure on the powers that are no more.
No comments:
Post a Comment