[Bret L]

((I read Alinsky in 1982. Every right thinking American should read it
so they know what they are up against. It's a lot like Mein Kampf in
fact. Bret.))

A Review of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals

Richard Hoste

March 10, 2010

"Few Jewish radicals have had as much influence over American politics as Saul Alinsky (1909-1972). Born to Russian Jewish immigrants, he graduated from the University of Chicago and then went on to become a community organizer, being one of the first to bring radical politics to Chicago’s Black ghettos. Hilary Clinton wrote her senior thesis (PDF) at Wellesley College on Alinsky and his tactics, and he was a major influence on President Obama, who was trained as a community organizer in Chicago.

Alinsky was known more as a tactician than an ideologue. His most
famous book was Rules for Radicals, published a year before his
death. It’s still valuable reading today for its political insights
and what it tells us about the transformation that has happened in
America.

To Alinsky, the world is divided into the Haves, the Have-Nots and the
Have-a-little, Want Mores.

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.

One thing that differentiates Alinsky’s thought from that of
conventional leftists is his more sophisticated understanding of human
nature. To him, it isn’t rational to hope that one day people will
behave morally based on altruistic motives.

Also, Alinsky didn’t believe that we’ll one day reach a utopia where
all works of social justice have been done and people can live happily
ever after. Every political victory brings new problems, and conflict
is a permanent feature of life. Of course, you don’t tell the people
you’re trying to organize that because they would lose the will to
act.

Another important part of human nature is our need to rationalize our
actions. Once a young radical has forced a corporation or government
into a certain direction, expect that the establishment will invent
moral reasons for why it acted the way it did. Once again, getting
people to do the right things for the wrong reasons with a moral gloss
invented afterwards is the best we can hope for. “This is the low
road to morality. There is no other.”

When it comes to motivating people, an organizer must convince them
that they’re 100% in the right. Imagine if the Declaration of
Independence started out by listing all the benefits of colonial rule
and all the help that the Americans had gotten from the mother country
in fighting the Indians. It then went on to say that since
objectively the case was 60% for revolution and 40% against, the
colonialists had decided to break away. In that case there would’ve
been no revolution. It’s vital that one have his side convinced of
its own moral purity and the depravity of the enemy.

One of Alinsky’s greatest insights is that change has to be cloaked in
the language of tradition. Liberals who burned the American flag were
fools who were more interested in striking a posture for radicalism
than actually changing the world. Such actions were counterproductive
and turned many Americans away from the left. Let this be a lesson to
any White nationalists that feel the need to periodically dress up as
Nazis.

Alinsky’s analysis of the white lower middle class, whom by the 1970s
he hoped to radicalize, could’ve been written today. He points out
that they saw the unemployed as “parasitical” and were turned off by
the “liberal, democratic, holier-than-thou position” of those above
them. Alinsky worried about demagogues moving them far to the right.
The same section could be published today and all you would have to do
is replace the “John Birch Society” and “George Wallace” with “Rush
Limbaugh” and “Glenn Beck.” While we may or may not be finally seeing
the counterrevolution to the 60s in the Tea Party movement, we can at
least be certain that Alinsky’s dream of the White masses swinging to
the left is long dead.

While shrewd and practical, Rules reveals that Alinsky was like all
radical leftists a disturbed man. He does little more than project
his own misery when he talks about the pathologies of the American
middle class and certainly doesn’t present any evidence for his
claims. His danger stemmed from the fact that he loved the process of
liberal activism more than anything.

The chapter titled Tactics shows the shamelessness of Jewish radicals
and those they organized. To put pressure on a bank, Alinsky
recommends getting a thousand or more people to paralyze the
institution by each opening up a $5 or $10 savings accounts on the
same day. Part of the fun would be “the general enjoyment of seeing
the discomfiture and confusion on the part of the establishment.” The
bank would be ready to negotiate in order to be able to get back to
business.

One time Alinsky almost did put this “people power” to use was when he
wanted to pressure a large department store. He planned to bus 3,000
Blacks to the store and have them overwhelm the clerks as they shopped
for shirts and underwear. The business of any whites would be lost
for that day. Such a tactic is legal and there would’ve been nothing
anyone could’ve done to stop it. Alinsky made sure that word of the
plan leaked to the store and after that 186 positions opened up and
“for the first time, Blacks were on the sales floor and in executive
training.”

Rules recounts a time the author suggested to a group of low class
Blacks in Rochester, New York a way they could put pressure on the
city.

I suggested that we might buy one hundred seats for one of Rochester’s
symphony concerts. We would select a concert in which the music was
relatively quiet. The hundred Blacks who would be given the tickets
would first be treated to a three-hour pre-concert dinner in the
community, in which they would be fed nothing but baked beans, and
lots of them; then the people would go to the symphony hall-with
obvious consequences. Imagine the scene when the action began! The
concert would be over before the first movement! (If this be a
Freudian slip-so be it!)

Once again, this is a completely legal tactic. While a stink bomb
will get you arrested, a fart can’t. No law could possibly change
that. The city would’ve had its symphony destroyed until it gave in
to whatever arbitrary demands the community organizer made.

Rules goes on to describe the threat of a different “tactic involving
bodily functions” which he used against the city of Chicago. The plan
was to put people on flights going into O’Hare airport and having them
occupy the lavatories. Then when people arrived they would be
desperate to use the bathroom. Alinsky planned to have people
(Blacks, I assume) tie up all the stalls in the airport at the moment
when the flights arrived. While the city gave in before the tactic
could be deployed, one can tell that the author wishes it would’ve
gone through.

One can see children yelling at their parents, “Mommy, I’ve got to
go,” and desperate mothers surrendering, “All right-well, do it. Do
it right here.”...The whole scene would become unbelievable and the
laughter and ridicule would be nationwide.

Alinsky spends relatively few pages on his standard liberal references
to his love for humanity and many more in enjoyment of sick imagined
scenes like this. It seems that it took both Jews and Blacks to
create the modern PC state. There needed to be an outgroup hostile to
White society that was unusually intelligent and spiteful, and another
which was uniquely deficient in intelligence and a sense of dignity.

Jared Taylor is fond of saying that for white nationalists to succeed
they must show themselves to be better than their enemies. It’s hard
to see how one can read Rules and agree with that. Blacks and their
Jewish mentors have been able to get their way by being incredibly
shameless and without any concern for self respect. Blacks were and
still are completely willing to use Whites’ desire to avoid them as a
political tool. Such a thing is incomprehensible to the European
mind. Jewish radicals fantasized about the embarrassment White
parents had over their children not being able to find a toilet,
presumably picturing families hiding in corners as O’Hare airport was
turned into a Liberian slum.

While I don’t think it’s desirable or possible for Whites to ever use
such tactics, knowing about what ethnic competitors are capable of
should make us more forgiving of the at least honorable methods
Europeans used in centuries past to deal with their enemies. "

Richard Hoste (email him) writes on race, immigration, political
correctness and modern conservatism. His articles have appeared at
VDARE.com, The Occidental Observer, The Occidental Quarterly and
TakiMag among other places. His writes the HBD blog at Alternative
Right, where he regularly reviews classic and modern works on these
topics.

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