BILL, HILLARY, SAUL, AND MORAL RELATIVISM Saul Alinsky and the Lessons He Taught Bill and Hillary

Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky Courtesy of The Wanderer. From a FR post dated 03/23/00.

Saul Alinsky wrote two books outlining his organizational principles and strategies: Reveille for Radicals (1946) and Rules for Radicals (1971).

Rules for Radicals opens with a quote about Lucifer, written by Saul Alinsky: “Lest we forget at least an over-the-shoulder acknowledgment to the very first radical: 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.”

In Rules for Radicals, Alinsky says: “Here I propose to present an arrangement of certain facts and general concepts of change, a step toward a science of revolution.” He builds on the tactical principles of Machiavelli: “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.”

Rules for Radicals is concerned with the acquisition of power: “my aim here is to suggest how to organize for power: how to get it and how to use it.” This is not to be done with assistance to the poor, nor even by organizing the poor to demand assistance: “...[E]ven if all the low-income parts of our population were organized ... it would not be powerful enough to get significant, basic, needed changes.”

Alinsky advises the organizer to target the middle class, rather than the poor: “Organization for action will now and in the decade ahead center upon America’s white middle class. That is where the power is.”

Alinsky is interested in the middle class solely for its usefulness: “Our rebels have contemptuously rejected the values and the way of life of the middle class. They have stigmatized it as materialistic, decadent, bourgeois, degenerate, imperialistic, war-mongering, brutalized and corrupt. They are right; but we must begin from where we are if we are to build power for change, and the power and the people are in the middle class majority.”

To accomplish this, Alinsky writes that the organizer must “begin to dissect and examine that way of life [the middle class lifestyle] ... He will know that ‘square’ is no longer to be dismissed as such -- instead his own approach must be ‘square’ enough to get the action started.”

Rules for Radicals defends belief that the end justifies the means: “to say that corrupt the ends,” writes Alinsky, “is to believe in the immaculate conception of ends and principles ... the practical revolutionary will understand ... [that] in action, one does not always enjoy the luxury of a decision that is consistent both with one’s individual conscience and the good of mankind.”

Altogether, Alinsky provides eleven rules of the ethics of means and ends. They are morally relativistic:

“The practical revolutionary will understand Goethe’s ‘conscience is the virtue of observers and not of agents of action’; in action, one does not always enjoy the luxury of a decision that is consistent both with one’s individual conscience and the good of mankind.”

“The second rule of the ethics of the means and ends is that the judgment of the ethics of means is dependent on the political position of those sitting in judgment.” Alinsky elaborates his meaning on this point, saying that if you were a member of the underground Resistance, “... then you adopted the means of assassination, terror, property destruction, the bombing of tunnels and trains, kidnapping, and the willingness to sacrifice innocent hostages to the end of defeating the Nazi’s. Those who opposed the Nazi’s conquerors regarded the Resistance as a secret army of selfless, patriotic idealists ....” Rules for Radicals is therefore concerned with how to win. “...[I]n such a conflict, neither protagonist is concerned with any value except victory.”

“The third rule of the ethics of means and ends is that in war the ends justifies almost any means.”

“There can be no such thing as a successful traitor, for if one succeeds, he becomes a founding father.”

Rules for Radicals teaches the organizer that he must give a moral appearance (as opposed to behaving morally): “All effective action requires the passport of morality.”

The tenth rule of the ethics of means and ends states “that you do what you can with what you have and clothe it with moral arguments ... Moral rationalization is indispensable at all times of action whether to justify the selection or the use of ends or means.”

Rules for Radicals provides the organizer with a tactical style for community organization that assumes an adversarial relationship between groups of people in which one either dominates or is dominated.

“The first rule of power tactics is: power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.”

“Wherever possible go outside the experience of the enemy. Here you want to cause confusion, fear, and retreat.”

“Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules. You can kill them with this. They can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity.”

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.”

“In a fight almost anything goes. It almost reaches the point where you stop to apologize if a chance blow lands above the belt.”

One of the criteria for picking the target is the target’s vulnerability ... the other important point in the choosing of a target is that it must be a personification, not something general and abstract.”

“The enemy properly goaded and guided in his reaction will be your major strength.”

Saul Alinsky urged the active and deliberate “conscious-raising” (Ed note: a tactic used by feminists) of people through the technique of “popular education.” Popular education is a method by which an organizer leads people to a class-based interpretation of their grievances, and to accept the organizer’s systemic solutions to address those grievances. “Through the People’s Organization these groups [of citizens] discover that what they considered primarily their individual problem is also the problem of others, and furthermore the only hope for solving an issue of titanic proportions is by pooling all their efforts and strengths. That appreciation and conclusion is an educational process.”

Rules for Radicals stresses organizational power-collecting: “The ego of the organizer is stronger and more monumental than the ego of the leader. The organizer is in a true sense reaching for the highest level for which a man can reach -- to create, to be a ‘great creator’, to play God.” Alinsky considered Hillary a terrific “organizer” and wanted her to become his protege. She declined. She had bigger fish to fry. She learned her lessons well. She and Bill have employed Alinsky’s tactics probably better than anyone else.

Also a great read...

Saul Alinsky in South Dakota

Diane Alden
Tuesday, Jan. 7, 2003

Saul Alinsky died in 1972. He was a Marxist grassroots organizer who spent much of his life organizing rent strikes and protesting conditions of the poor in Chicago in the 1930s. However, unlike Christian socialist and activist for the poor Dorothy Day, Alinsky's real claim to fame was as strategist for anti-establishment '60s radicals and revolutionaries.

Indeed, Alinsky wrote the rule book for '60s radicals like Bill and Hillary Clinton, George Miller and Nancy Pelosi. He considered Hillary Rodham to be one of his better students and asked her to join him in his efforts as an organizer of radical leftist causes. But Hillary had other fish to fry on her climb to national prominence.

Alinsky had a true genius for formulating tactical battle plans for the radical left. He wrote two books outlining his organizational principles and strategies: "Reveille for Radicals" (1946) and "Rules for Radicals" (1971).

"Rules for Radicals" begins with an unusual tribute: "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."

The devil challenged authority and got his own kingdom, and that goes to the heart of what left is really about. That of course is to get power any way you can, including lying, cheating and stealing. The ultimate rule is that the ends justify the means.

Alinsky asserted that he was more concerned with the acquisition of power than anything else: "My aim here is to suggest how to organize for power: how to get it and how to use it." This is not to be done with assistance to the poor, nor even by organizing the poor to demand assistance: "[E]ven if all the low-income parts of our population were organized ... it would not be powerful enough to get significant, basic, needed changes."

Alinsky advises his followers that the poor have no power and that the real target is the middle class: "Organization for action will now and in the decade ahead center upon America's white middle class. That is where the power is. ... Our rebels have contemptuously rejected the values and the way of life of the middle class. They have stigmatized it as materialistic, decadent, bourgeois, degenerate, imperialistic, war-mongering, brutalized and corrupt. They are right; but we must begin from where we are if we are to build power for change, and the power and the people are in the middle class majority."

But that didn't stop Alinsky and his followers from using the middle class for their own purposes. They counted on the guilt and shame of the white middle class to get what they wanted. In order to take over institutions and get power, the middle class had to be convinced that they were somehow lucky winners in "life's lottery."

Alinsky's radicals found a perfect vehicle for their destruction of the American system and more particularly for taking and maintaining power. That instrument was the Democratic Party.

Transition and Transaction

The transition of the old Democratic Party to what exists today should not surprise or confound conservatives. Nor should Alinsky's tactics seem foreign. After all, for nearly 40 years, Republicans and the conservative agenda have been getting hammered by the left through the successful use of Alinsky tactics.

In that cause, radicals and the liberal-left gravitated toward the print and electronic media, toward the university professorate and the law. The left, consciously or unconsciously, adopted Alinsky's rules. The impact changed the nature of the Democratic Party and the direction of the United States. Increasingly, the left is succeeding in changing the nature of the Republican Party as well.

Suffice to say the greatest change has taken place in the relationship between the state and the individual. America is rapidly descending from a representative Constitutional Republic to a collectivist empire controlled by elites of one sort or another.

Alinsky's influence on the modern Democratic Party indicates that the ends do indeed justify the means. As Alinsky states in "Rules for Radicals" it was foolish to believe that means are just as important as the ends. He states that "to believe in the immaculate conception of ends and principles ... the practical revolutionary will understand ... [that] in action, one does not always enjoy the luxury of a decision that is consistent both with one's individual conscience and the good of mankind."

Sadly, not enough Republicans and conservatives learned Alinsky's rules until late in the game. A sign of hope is the fact that the new media, including talk radio and the Internet, are changing all that. One can hope it is not too late.

In any event, Alinsky's rules include:

"Wherever possible go outside the experience of the enemy. Here you want to cause confusion, fear and retreat."

"Make the enemy live up to his/her own book of rules. You can kill them with this. They can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity."

"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."

"The threat is generally more terrifying than the thing itself."

"In a fight almost anything goes. It almost reaches the point where you stop to apologize if a chance blow lands above the belt."

"Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it and polarize it." (Think Gingrich, Lott and the success of name-calling used by the likes of Bill Clinton, Paul Begala, James Carville, Maxine Waters and others against conservatives and Republicans. Think of how Clinton "enemies" like Paula Jones or Linda Tripp were treated.)

"One of the criteria for picking the target is the target's vulnerability ... the other important point in the choosing of a target is that it must be a personification, not something general and abstract." (Trent Lott comes to mind. Meanwhile, a former Klansman by the name of Sen. Robert Byrd got away with saying "nigger" on Fox News at least three times, and he still maintains his Senate seat and power.)

"The enemy properly goaded and guided in his reaction will be your major strength." For instance, Democrats imply conservatives are racists or that Republicans want to kill senior citizens by limiting the growth of the Medicare system, they imply Republicans want to deny kids lunch money without offering real proof. These red-herring tactics work.
Of course, Republicans reaction to all this is to immediately go on the defensive. Seldom do they unleash their pit bull orators or strategists. Rather than use the immense amount of data available to prove the conservative case, Republicans tug their forelocks, say "yes sir," and hope the accusations and name calling will go away.
Why is it that Republicans consistently fail to point out the monumental failures of the new Democrats? Failures such as the massive disaster that is the "war on poverty." On that topic alone Republicans should be drilling the public in every media venue and at every opportunity. Then and only then should Republicans offer alternatives to the failed policies of the Democratic left.

Republicans should pound relentlessly on the fact that the Democratic Party was hijacked by leftist reactionaries way back in the early '70s. The reactionary left is the obstructionist left. They do nothing but defend and cling to the failures of the past. That fact makes them reactionaries rather than radicals or progressives.

Unfortunately, Republicans still pretend that nothing has changed regarding the basic philosophy of the political parties. They refuse to understand the horrendous notion that Democrats tell us the U.S. Constitution is flexible. That means the rule of law is flexible. If that is the case the law and the Constitution mean nothing. It means that the law and Constitution are twisted by the whims and fancies of the moment.

In fact, in the 2000 election Al Gore maintained the Constitution could and should be manipulated because it was "flexible." Whatever happened to the amendment process?

Bill Clinton used executive orders to circumvent Congress and the Constitution. He used the agencies of the federal government against his enemies. Clinton set an extremely dangerous precedent. Alinsky would have loved it. It is a perfect example of the use of the Rules for Radicals – ends justify the means.

Hillary and Bill Clinton and other powerful former '60s radicals learned from Saul Alinsky. It is about time that a few more Republicans and/or conservatives did as well.

Alinsky in South Dakota

Remember that Alinsky's advice was that the ends justify the means. Think of Florida in 2000 and the manipulation of military ballots. Think of Milwaukee and unattended polling places, which allowed leftist college students to take handfuls of ballots to check off. Think of a million immigrants in the 1996 election granted instant voting rights by the Clinton administration.

More importantly, think of South Dakota in November of 2002, or Nevada in 1998 or 2002.

In a brilliant bit of investigative reporting, National Review's Byron York gave us a grand overview of the corrupt and unpleasant outline of how Alinsky's rules work during election season. Republicans, once again asleep at the switch, live in the land of euphoria. They still believe that their Democratic counterparts are among the angels on God's right.

Considering that Alinsky expresses admiration for Lucifer, they are looking in the wrong place to find many modern Democrats. Republicans still assume that the modern Democratic Party, its media sycophants, its operatives during national or state elections, will play fair. It is hard to say which is worse, Republican naïveté' or Democratic cheating and law breaking.

When Democrats cheat, especially under Bill Clinton's and Terry McAuliffe's watch, they whine when they discover they didn't cheat enough to win. When they are caught in the big lies, they expect Republicans to ignore it and give them a pass. The last election in South Dakota is a case in point.

In the primaries and election of 2002, lawyers from Washington started showing up at polling places in the hinterlands of South Dakota. The Republican leadership and the establishment should have seen it coming but they didn't.

As Byron York relates in "Badlands, Bad Votes": "On Election Day, Noma Sazama knew something unusual was going on the moment she arrived at her polling place, the St. Thomas Parish Hall in Mission, South Dakota. Sazama, a member of the local election board, noticed several strangers in the room – an unusual sight in Mission, population 904, where most people know one another. It turned out the strangers were all lawyers, Democrats who had come to town to serve as poll watchers for the race between incumbent Democratic senator Tim Johnson and Republican John Thune. One was from Washington, D.C., another was from New York City, and a third was from California. 'There were no locals, and I've never seen that happen before,' says Sazama, who has lived in the area for 73 years."

Furthermore, York maintains, "The Democratic team of lawyers confiscated the Parish Hall kitchen only a few feet from the balloting tables."

Witnesses swore in affidavits that party hacks had rented dozens of vans and hired drivers to bring voters to the polls. Lawyers from elsewhere made the Parish Hall their headquarters. Seventy-three-year-old Ms. Sazama stated, "They had the names and time-of-pickup and whether someone voted on them, and from those he would contact the drivers."

Finally she understood that the influx of outside Democrats were going to use the polling place as their headquarters, an action which is against the laws of South Dakota.

The lawyers tied up the phones, which meant that the poll watchers and election officials could not make needed phone calls. York quotes the election supervisor: "They were on the phone using it to call I don't know where, and I needed to call because we had some new districting. They were always talking on it."

When Wanless, the election supervisor, protested, she got a chilly reaction from the out-of-towners. "I felt like they were trying to intimidate me," she recalls.

In fact, all this is against South Dakota law, which states: "No person may, in any polling place or within or on any building in which a polling place is located or within one hundred feet from any entrance leading into a polling place, maintain an office or communications center. ..."

There were no Republican lawyers or authorities around to inform election officials that it was against the law for the Democrats to be running their campaign from a polling place. That was bad enough, but ever since November Republicans have failed dismally to make it a BIG national issue.

There was also complete failure to understand Alinsky's second basic rule: "Wherever possible go outside the experience of the enemy. Here you want to cause confusion, fear and retreat." The DNC counted on the locals being intimidated by a gang of high-priced lawyers – and of course they were.

Another Alinsky rule used in the November elections in South Dakota: "In a fight almost anything goes. It almost reaches the point where you stop to apologize if a chance blow lands above the belt." In other words, what you do is count on the failure of will by your opponent to call a foul. The opponent usually believes it is easier to do nothing, it is always easier to do nothing, and so Republicans "move on."

That is the kind of apathy Hitler's forces counted on in the Weimar Republic. The end-justifies-the-means cabal figures that even good people find it easier to do nothing.

In South Dakota, lawyers from diverse places were part of a brigade that the DNC uses to "ensure voters' rights are protected." But as York relates, "According to the testimony of dozens of South Dakotans who worked at the polls, the out-of-state attorneys engaged in illegal electioneering, pressured poll workers to accept questionable ballots, and forced polling places in a heavily Democratic area to stay open for an hour past their previously-announced closing time. In addition, the testimony contains evidence of people being allowed to vote with little or no identification, of incorrectly marked ballots being counted as Democratic votes, of absentee ballots being counted without proper signatures, and, most serious of all, of voters who were paid to cast their ballots for Sen. Johnson."

According to some witnesses, Democrats were also running car pools out of polling places on the Indian reservations, where investigators are discovering that the dead Indian vote had a major impact on the slim, last- minute, 524-vote Tim Johnson victory over John Thune.

Affidavits from South Dakotans also indicate that money probably changed hands in crucial areas in the boonies. It was not gas money for van drivers either, but paying per head per vote – shades of Tammany Hall and the elections in Boston wards. Nonetheless, Republicans have decided to "move on."

To get the entire story, including affidavits sworn to by South Dakota residents, read York's November article in National Review Online.

Alinsky Does Nevada

When I worked at Nevada Policy Institute in Nevada several years ago, the Post-election analysis of the 1998 election uncovered the fact that family pets received absentee ballots in crucial districts. Dead people were counted as well.

Democratic Senator Harry Reid's slim, 428-vote win against Republican John Ensign raised eyebrows and the juices of some who understand how the modern DNC and its phalanx of wheelers and dealers, lawyers and opportunists really work.

A part of the tactic includes breaking the law when you can and where you can get away with it. Remember, in the minds of the hijacked Democratic Party the ends do indeed justify the Luciferian means.

In Nevada on Dec. 24, 2002, the FBI seized ballots cast in primary and general elections. Said Daron Borst, FBI special agent in Las Vegas, "There is an ongoing investigation into election fraud, but I can't go into any details due to the nature of the investigation."

Ballots were taken after a complaint was lodged that 85 voters in tiny Eureka county did not live in that county or were long dead. The Eureka County probe marked the second time this year the FBI has become involved in a county election in Nevada.

As in South Dakota, it is much easier to get away with election fraud where people don't know the law or will not enforce the law or they are intimidated by the chutzpah and law breaking of crooks in Armani suits holding credentials from the Democratic National Committee.

Unfortunately, when Republicans don't pay attention to the corruption and allow themselves to get screwed time and again, they are also in league with the devil. By this failure of will, the sins of omission are as evil as sins of commission.

Voting fraud was rampant in 2000 and again in 2002 and it will be more so in 2004. Why aren't Republican lawmakers and the RNC making sure this does not happen again? In 2002, Terry McAuliffe told the world that Democratic lawyers would be out in the states keeping an eye on things. They did more than that and it was against the law.

The failure of Republicans to impose the rule of law on the cheaters, liars and manipulators allows those who use Alinsky's corrupt system to win. That fact tells us that the voting process means as little to our elites as does the Constitution.

Because of that fact, Republicans will lose future elections. More importantly, the people of the United States will lose.

The RNC and the GOP leadership just don't get it. Otherwise they would care enough to do something about it.

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