What Are Saul Alinsky's Real Rules for Radicals?

Conservative Bugbear - Leftist Saul Alinsky

And why are we using them ourselves?
How we fight is every bit as important as why we fight or even whether we win or not.  - TK

The great political debate of our times between the left and the right is fraught with lies, deception, hysteria and well-meaning fraud on both sides. What is disturbing about this is the assumption by the leadership and the movers and shakers on both sides that people are basically stupid and need to be herded about in their opinions like so many fat sheep. Both sides do it 

For instance, there is an old email running around that claims that Saul Alinsky wrote the following "8 levels of control" that must be obtained before you are able to create a socialist/communist state. The email goes on to say that the first is the most important.
  
1)       Healthcare "Control healthcare and you control the people”
2)       Poverty “Increase the Poverty level as high as possible." Poor people are easier to control and will not fight back if you are providing everything for them to live.
3)       Debt “Increase the national debt to an unsustainable level." That way you are able to increase taxes, and this will produce more poverty.
4)       Gun Control “Remove the ability to defend themselves from the Government." That way you are able to create a police state - total local control.
5)       Welfare “Take control of every aspect of their lives" (Food, Livestock, Housing, and Income)
6)       Education “Take control of what people read and listen to take control of what children learn in school.”
7)       Religion “Remove faith in God from the Government and school.”
8)       Class Warfare “Divide the people into the wealthy against the poor. Racially divide." This will cause more discontent and it will be easier to tax the wealthy with full support of the voting poor.
  
The email ends with this intentionally spooky statement:

     The bases are all covered!   We are ripe for the New world Order (World Communism)


It does sound familiar. It should. These "8 levels of control" are little more than a rehash of a hoax article back in the 40s called Communist Rules for Revolution. This isn't even original stuff and predates Alinsky. Alinsky had more than one set of "rules" outlined in his writing, but none were so nakedly radical as this hoax lays out. These 8 rules are nothing more than a crude attempt by ideologues on the right to link President Obama's policies to Alinsky. They probably think they are doing a service for their cause. 

They are not! One can make a clear connection between the president and the tactics of the radical left. This can be done if we compare Alinsky's actual "rules" to Obama policy, but it requires more thought to figure it out. The original author of this apparently thought we all needed help to understand how Alinsky's advice to radicals is being worked out by the current administration. There is a fatal assumption that we are too stupid to get it. I find that offensive.

Here's what Alinsky actually said. It's a primer for people seeking to capture and retain political power.

Always remember the first rule of power tactics: Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.

The second rule is: 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.

The third rule is: Wherever possible go outside the experience of the enemy. Here you want to cause confusion, fear, and retreat.

The fourth rule is: 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: 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 sixth rule is: 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.

The seventh rule: 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, like going to church on Sunday mornings.

The eighth rule: Keep the pressure on, with different tactics and actions, and utilize all events of the period for your purpose.

The ninth rule: The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.

The tenth rule: 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.

The eleventh rule is: 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 twelfth rule: The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative. You cannot risk being trapped by the enemy in his sudden agreement with your demand and saying "You're right — we don't know what to do about this issue. Now you tell us."

The thirteenth rule: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.
Read more at http://www.snopes.com/politics/quotes/alinsky.asp#rVShjCizoZYEBJT0.99

 Alinsky's Rules for Power Tactics:

1. Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.
2. Never go outside the experience of your people.
3. Whenever possible, go outside of the experience of the enemy.
4. Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.
5. Ridicule is man's most potent weapon.
6. A good tactic is one that your people enjoy.
7. A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.
8. Keep the pressure on with different tactics and actions, and utilize all events of the period for your purpose.
9. The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.
10. The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.
11. If you push a negative hard and deep enough, it will break through into its counterside.
12. The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.
13. Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.

Alinsky was surprisingly sensitive to criticism that he wasn't ethical despite his nakedly amoral approach to politics. So he included a set of rules for the ethics of power tactics. These "ethics" are so bankrupt, it's little wonder his ethics were frequently called into question.


Alinsky's Rules to Test Whether Power Tactics are Ethical:

1. One's concern with the ethics of means and ends varies inversely with one's personal interest in the issue.
2. The judgement of the ethics of means is dependent upon the political position of those sitting in judgment.
3. In war the end justifies almost any means.
4. Judgment must be made in the context of the times in which the action occurred and not from any other chronological vantage point.
5. Concern with ethics increases with the number of means available and vice versa.
6. The less important the end to be desired, the more one can afford to engage in ethical evaluations of means.
7. Generally, success or failure is a mighty determinant of ethics.
8. The morality of means depends upon whether the means is being employed at a time of imminent defeat or imminent victory.
9. Any effective means is automatically judged by the opposition to be unethical.
10. You do what you can with what you have and clothe it in moral garments.
11. Goals must be phrased in general terms like "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity," "Of the Common Welfare," "Pursuit of Happiness," or "Bread and Peace."

Always remember the first rule of power tactics: Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.

The second rule is: 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.

The third rule is: Wherever possible go outside the experience of the enemy. Here you want to cause confusion, fear, and retreat.

The fourth rule is: 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: 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 sixth rule is: 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.

The seventh rule: 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, like going to church on Sunday mornings.

The eighth rule: Keep the pressure on, with different tactics and actions, and utilize all events of the period for your purpose.

The ninth rule: The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.

The tenth rule: 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.

The eleventh rule is: 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 twelfth rule: The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative. You cannot risk being trapped by the enemy in his sudden agreement with your demand and saying "You're right — we don't know what to do about this issue. Now you tell us."

The thirteenth rule: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.
Read more at http://www.snopes.com/politics/quotes/alinsky.asp#rVShjCizoZYEBJT0.99

If you want to confront Alinsky's tactics and defeat them, you need to do so with truth. When we make up things to discredit the opposition, we sink to their level and it's little wonder our side is not doing well in the great debate of our time. We cast ourselves as being on the side of morality and yet, we've grown so desperately afraid because of their perceived power (Rule 1 - Power Tactics) that we have violated our own rules of moral conduct (Rule 4), which is just what the opposition wants and needs for us to do to discredit us.

Please can we stop this? We cannot fight the enemy using his own tactics. Deception works in war, but not so much in politics where we intend to avoid killing our opponents. The Communist and Nazi states could do this with impunity because when their political war was done, they had no moral compunction about eliminating those opponents who remained. That's why the communist/socialist death toll was so horrific in the 20th century. They were just cleaning house after the victory - mopping up the battlefield so to speak.

If we are not to be like that, we must start now by being scrupulously moral as to what tactics we employ in the struggle. I cite an example here of fraud by the right. I can cite as many, if not orders of magnitude more, examples of duplicity and outright lying by our friends on the left, who are generally not as bound by the strict moral code that most conservatives espouse, that is, if Alinsky's "ethics" are any indication of the state of morality on the left.

I do not intend this as a blanket damning of anyone right or left. There are individuals who possess a powerful sense of morality and ethics on both side, who find lying, fraud and calumny reprehensible and disavow any "ally" who uses such tactics.

It is the moral left and the moral right that have the power to save this country for all of us. In order to do so, we need to turn a hose on the hothead who have lost control of themselves and will say anything, forward anything or believe anything evil of their neighbor.  We are, at least those of us on the Christian right and left, are under strict orders to love our neighbors as ourselves. It's time those of us under such orders stepped up and led our own revolution - one in which love is that with which we charge cannons, rather than the naked hatred that bombards our media, our email boxes and our Facebook pages.

Just one man's opinion.

Tom King © 2014

Looking at the President Through Different Eyes

Conservative Christians do not understand President Obama. He claims to be a Christian and to have America's best interests at heart and yet he does things that make no sense to us looking at it from a Christian perspective.

I'm not going to speculate on whether the president is a closet socialist or Muslim or member of the Illuminati, so all you conspiracy theorists calm down. I haven't been converted yet. My beanie with the propeller is still safely tucked in the garage next to my tin foil hat!

What I am going to challenge you to do is to look at this administration through the eyes of the Muslim world. Seen from their perspective, President Obama appears quite different than he does seen from an American or Christian perspective. Here are some things about this administration as they probably look to the nations of Islam.

• Immigration - The administration is busily releasing hardened terrorists from GITMO and has initiated a program to grant so-called "minor terrorists" admission to the United States. These include individuals who supported the Muslim Brotherhood takeover and who now are at risk from the military who stopped the takeover. Meanwhile, the Obama administration threatened to deport a family that fled here from Germany because they wished to homeschool their children and the German government (under a 1936 Nazi law that made homeschooling illegal) planned to take their children from them. If I were a Muslim, it would signal to me that the president was sympathetic to Muslim causes and unsympathetic to Christians. Also, this president has made no effort to grant emergency refugee status to Christians who faced systematic slaughter in Syria, Egypt and African Muslim states. As a Muslim, I would see this as an effort to open the United States in the same way that Europe has done, a move that will one day allow this country to be as thoroughly Islamicized as Britain, Sweden, France and other European nations..
• Foreign Policy - When Muamar Ghaddafi finally opened his borders and attempted to repair relations with the west, Islamic fundamentalists rebelled with aid from terrorist groups. The United States rushed into aid the pro-terrorist side of a conflict in which neither side was the side of the good guys. Then we stood aside on a second 9/11 and allowed an American ambassador and his security force to be brutally murdered. He's opened a dialogue with rogue states. bowed to Middle-Eastern kings and generally cast his own nation as the bad guy with his world wide apology tour. He has given lip service to our historic support for the nation of Israel while steadily distancing us from them. He has stepped back and let Russia begin the reconquest of Georgia, the Ukraine and other former Soviet bloc states with nothing more than a whimpered protest. Were
• Economic Policy - This president appears to be bankrupting his own country with his efforts to appease foreign nations through massive payoffs, to create a majority dependent class in America that can be depended upon to vote the status quo and to suppress the American economic engine through punitive taxation and over-regulation. Were I Muslim I would believe that Barak Hussein Obama was acting in the interest of the future worldwide Muslim State that is prophesied in the Koran, by weakening the nation that stands as the primary obstacle to the success of the coming jihad. His domestic policy appears to be intent on weakening the United States from within. At least that's what it would appear to me looking at it through the eyes of one who believes in the eventual world domination of Islam.
• Religion - None of what seems to be a pro-Islamic policy, would be possible if, as the president claims, he is a Christian. If he is a Christian, then, he has left the Islamic faith he claimed to embrace when he was training in Indonesian Muslim Schools. By all rights, as an ex-Muslim, he faces the death penalty for leaving the faith according to the tenets of the Koran. Yet, he gets a by from the Muslim world and there is a widespread belief that he is a Muslim in the Islamic world. Many believe he is a secret Muslim and see, in his actions, someone acting in the interests of the faith.Besides the Koran allows Muslims to lie to infidels for the sake of the faith, so it's easy for the Muslims to believe that his claim to being a Christians are all part of the plan.

I am not saying the president of the United States is a Muslim. Personally, I believe that it is the president's deep-seated belief in progressive socialism that drives him. I think he sees himself as leader of a world-wide socialist government one day. I don't think this man plans to ever step down from power and retire comfortably to his ranch in Texas to write his memoirs as his predecessors have done. I think he has ambitions for a larger role in the world once he's tamed and defanged the American Beast.  I believe his handlers find him useful and want to see him rise to such lofty heights.

If you search for those handlers, you will find them hiding in plain sight. They'll be on the boards of political action committees. They'll be donating billions to help get suitable politicians elected to high office. They'll help develop public relations and marketing strategies to support their chosen figureheads. They don't have a secret handshake or meet at secret mountain hideaways to plot the end of the world. They are not the Illuminati or the Bilderbergers. They laugh at the fools who fall for that distraction and make themselves look ridiculous in the eyes of their fellows.

They are people who crave power, but not the kind of fame or glory that the politician craves. They act together with other powerful men because they have interests that coincide with them. They believe they are smart enough to manipulate the leaders who manipulate the fools who make up the ignorant masses of the world. They pull their strings always from what they believe is a safe distance.

They do not look behind themselves. They do not notice the fine strings attached to their own limbs nor are they aware that there is a darker power than themselves at the other end of those strings, manipulating the manipulators who are manipulating the leaders who think they are manipulating the masses.

And those who disconnect from the strings are a threat to the whole nasty plan.

So how do you disconnect? How do you free yourself from the influence of all this manipulation and, to call a spade a spade, EVIL?  To escape, to see the world as it is, you must become free yourself. I, personally, believe that a daily walk with Christ will do that for you. Jesus said "The truth shall set you free." It will certainly open your eyes. Harry Nillson once said, "You see what you want to see and you hear what you want to hear. You dig?"  This is true if you see yourself as the center of your universe. And, in consequence of your ego-centric paradigm, you assume that everyone sees things the way you do.


But they don't! People who see things differently than you are not being deliberately oppositional. They truly see things from their own point of view. The more radicalized that point of view, the harder it is for you to see things through another man's eyes. It's little wonder our nation is so polarized. the fringes of opinion in our nation have grown so far apart that they are no longer able to see each other as human beings. We're so deeply inside of our own ideology that we can no longer empathize with anyone ourside the parameters of our deep-seated belief system.

The only way out of that trap is the simple rule that Christ articulated for his followers. Love God with all your heart and your neighbor as yourself.  As it turns out the act of bestowing love on others is the bit that teaches us to see things as they really are.  Rodney King whose beating by LA cops started a riot in LA saw the bloodshed and horror being perpetrated in his name and asked, "Can't we all just love each other?"

The horror that Rodney witnessed on television through the God's-eye view of helicopter mounted TV cameras, apparently shook him to the core. Perhaps he remembered his mom or grandma taking him to Sunday school. Whatever it was, it helped him see things as God sees them and he had to speak out; to call for the only thing that could end the hatred and bloodshed.

There remaineth three things, faith, hope and love, but the greatest of these is love. We may have faith that our ideology is correct. We may hope for change right down to our wishbones, but in the final reckoning, it will be love in action, not feelings or a vague sense of rightness  that will change the world. It will be love shown in our actions. You can't scream, "YOU MUST LOVE ME!" while burning down an appliance store or trashing a church.  You can't cry, "Love is all there is," while hounding anyone who disagrees with your lifestyle. You can't cry, "Jesus saves!" while spraying "God hates fags!" on an aids clinic wall.

Not if you don't want to be driven mad by the inconsistencies  between what you say you believe and what you actually do. If you believe in the Golden Rule, you really should practice it if you want to maintain your sanity. If you believe you should love everybody and you don't, your brain will make itself crazy trying to deal with the double bind you've placed yourself in.

We are living in an increasingly mad world. I don't know about you, but I'm ready to go home before the whole thing melts down.





Tom King © 2014

Diplomacy Always Triumphs Over Action (Our Ideology Says So)

Pay no attention to those masked Russian soldiers with very large guns.
They're not really in Ukraine. President Obama has used his magic diplomacy!
We may expect unicorns and universal healthcare any minute now.

In 2008 Sarah Palin predicted that a wishy-washy response to Russia's invasion of Georgia would only encourage them to invade Ukraine next. The liberal press piled on her for that calling her a dim bulb and telling her not to worry her pretty little head about that because Obama's wise diplomacy would prevent that from ever happening. Now that the Russians have invaded Ukraine, the liberal self-appointed pundits claim that diplomacy is actually working despite appearances to the contrary.

One self-styled pundit said that threats of violence never work with Russia and that the Cold War ended, not because of Reagan's tough stance with the Russkies, but  because of "diplomacy".  Yeah, right - diplomacy in the form of more US military power than the fragile Communist Soviet Union's smoke and mirrors economy could keep up with. Diplomacy, they say, is actually working because President Obama is the smartest president ever and because, according to our ideology, diplomacy works. Diplomacy, they say, if done properly by a Democrat administration, works. The liberal punditry have said it works, therefore it must be working (again, despite evidence to the contrary).

Me? I think Palin was right.

© 2014 by Tom King
Sarah Palin image © Gage Skidmore
Russian soldiers © Daily Caller