The rumblings of discontent have begun. Even some of those who voted for Barak Obama are now having buyer’s remorse. They’re simply amazed at the policies his administration is pursuing…although they shouldn’t be.
If you want to know what makes Barack Obama tick, you need to go back to his days as a community organizer in Chicago. You need to understand what community organizing is all about, and to do that, you need to go back to the seminal writings of Saul Alinsky, widely viewed as the father of community organizing. His Rules for Radicals, first published in 1971, is still available if you look for it. I did, and I read it. He states the purpose of the book very clearly: “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.”
Now I know that not many people have actually read this book lately, so let me share a few more passages with you. You should keep these in mind as you’re trying to understand why the Obama administration is doing what it’s doing, because this is where he came from, and this is the philosophy he was trained in:
"All of life is partisan. There is no dispassionate objectivity."If you think about it, this explains a lot, doesn’t it?
“An organizer working in and for an open society is in an ideological dilemma. To begin with, he does not have a fixed truth – truth to him is relative and changing; everything to him is relative and changing. He is a political relativist.”
“In this world…’reconciliation’ means that when one side gets the power and the other side gets reconciled to it, then we have reconciliation…”
“The man of action views the issue of means and ends in pragmatic and strategic terms…He asks of ends only whether they are achievable and worth the cost; of means only whether they will work.”
“…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.”
“Ego must be so all-pervading that the personality of the organizer is contagious, that it converts the people from despair to defiance, creating a mass ego.”
“Before men can act an issue must be polarized. Men will act when they are convinced that their cause is 100 per cent on the side of the angels and that the opposition are 100 per cent on the side of the devil. He [the organizer] knows that there can be no action until issues are polarized to this degree.”
“The first step in community organization is community disorganization. The disruption of the present organization is the first step toward community organization.”
“…every move revolves around one central point: how many recruits will this bring into the organization…The only issue is, how will this increase the strength of the organization…Power is the reason for being of organizations.”
“Every organization known to man, from government down, has had only one reason for being – that is, organization for power in order to put into practice or promote its common purpose.”
On tactics: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it…in a complex, interrelated, urban society, it becomes increasingly difficult to single out who is to blame for any particular evil…a target…must be a personification, not something general and abstract…Furthermore, any 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 the others to blame.”
“…human beings can sustain an interest in a particular subject only over a limited period of time…After a period of time, it becomes monotonous, repetitive, and emotional treadmill, and worse than anything else a bore. From the moment the tactician engages in conflict, his enemy is time.”
“There is a way to keep the action going and to prevent it from being a drag, but this means constantly cutting new issues as the action continues, so that by the time the enthusiasm and the emotions for one issue have started to de-escalate, a new issue has come into the scene with a consequent revival.”
Thanks for listening.
No comments:
Post a Comment