We posted this link yesterday from American Thinker: Alinsky's tactics: Hillary and Obama. A quote:
Obama's four-year stint as a political organizer and agitator in Chicago's South Side neighborhoods gave him a hands-on education in Alinsky revolutionary tactics, which he seems adept at using now. His problem, however, may be that he is in direct competition for the ultimate power prize, the Presidency, against another Alinskyite, Hillary Clinton, who studied Alinksy and his rule book and turned down an offer to work for him.
Here's a summary of Alinsky's Rules for Radicals. Simon at Classical Values considers The Democrats' Gramscian Problem. Divide and conquer to create the brotherhood of man, without use of arms. Alinksy was indeed a Gramscian Marxist, in my view, although he is often labelled otherwise. We did an introduction to Gramsci here. ("The long march through the culture.")
Simon links to a piece at
Armed and Dangerous about ideological warfare and the
Gramscian damage to America. He lists the most important Stalinist propaganda memes:
- There is no truth, only competing agendas.
- All Western (and especially American) claims to moral superiority over Communism/Fascism/Islam are vitiated by the West’s history of racism and colonialism.
- There are no objective standards by which we may judge one culture to be better than another. Anyone who claims that there are such standards is an evil oppressor.
- The prosperity of the West is built on ruthless exploitation of the Third World; therefore Westerners actually deserve to be impoverished and miserable.
- Crime is the fault of society, not the individual criminal. Poor criminals are entitled to what they take. Submitting to criminal predation is more virtuous than resisting it.
- The poor are victims. Criminals are victims. And only victims are virtuous. Therefore only the poor and criminals are virtuous. (Rich people can borrow some virtue by identifying with poor people and criminals.)
- For a virtuous person, violence and war are never justified. It is always better to be a victim than to fight, or even to defend oneself. But ‘oppressed’ people are allowed to use violence anyway; they are merely reflecting the evil of their oppressors.
- When confronted with terror, the only moral course for a Westerner is to apologize for past sins, understand the terrorist’s point of view, and make concessions.
He observes that these notions would have been considered insane just a generation ago, and comments:
The first step to recovery is understanding the problem. Knowing that suicidalist memes were launched at us as war weapons by the espionage apparatus of the most evil despotism in human history is in itself liberating. Liberating, too, it is to realize that the Noam Chomskys and Michael Moores and Robert Fisks of the world (and their thousands of lesser imitators in faculty lounges everywhere) are not brave transgressive forward-thinkers but pathetic memebots running the program of a dead tyrant.
Read the whole thing.
Photo: Neo-Marxist tactician Antonio Gramsci
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