Obama's Mentor and the Radicalism He Backed

[phuloi]

Sunday, March 8, 2009 8:37 PM

By: Richard Lawrence Poe







Barack Obama is the first U.S. president trained in the belief system of radical organizer Saul Alinsky. More than ever, Americans need to study Alinsky's beliefs.

Information is scarce. Most writing on Alinsky is agitprop, cranked out by loyal disciples planted in the media. Sanford D. Horwitt's Alinsky biography, "Let Them Call Me Rebel," is no exception. It seeks to whitewash the father of "community organizing" as an American patriot, humanitarian and champion of the downtrodden.

Despite its bias, "Let Them Call Me Rebel" reveals much about the real Alinsky. The sheer quantity of evidence amassed in these 618 pages overwhelm's Horwitt's efforts to spin it.

Horwitt's book is not new (Vintage Books, 1989). However, it is the only Alinsky biography in print - indeed, the only one ever written. For that reason, it is a must-read for anyone wishing to understand the Obama administration.

The Obama Connection

Ironically, Obama's name does not appear in the book. When it came out in 1989, Obama was still an obscure community organizer, working for the Alinsky network in Chicago.

The Alinsky network is an "organization of organizations," to use Alinsky's phrase. It is a vast and ever-expanding web of activist groups and foundations, continually spawning new groups - some permanent, some temporary - all designated by an alphabet soup of shape-shifting acronyms. What these groups have in common is that they were founded by Alinsky disciples and employ the Alinsky method of community organizing.

Beginning in 1985, Obama worked for many such groups, including the Gamaliel Foundation, the Midwest Academy, ACORN and Project VOTE.

Obama received training from Alinsky's flagship school for organizers, the Industrial Areas Foundation. Later, Obama became a trainer himself, teaching workshops on the Alinsky method.

Obama never met Alinsky, who died in 1972. However, our president was trained by organizers who had worked directly with the master.

"Barack Obama's training in Chicago by the great community organizers is showing its effectiveness," wrote Lee David Alinsky - son of the master organizer -- in a letter to the Boston Globe, following Obama's nomination for president. "[T]he method of my late father always works to get the message out and get the supporters on board. When executed meticulously and thoughtfully, it is a powerful strategy for initiating change and making it really happen. Obama learned his lesson well."

The Amoral Alinsky

Alinsky was born in Chicago in 1909, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants. He rejected religion at an early age. Throughout his life, he preached that good and evil were illusions, and that only power mattered.

"Somebody once asked me whether I believe in reconciliation," Alinsky used to tell his followers. "Sure I do. When one side gets the power and the other side gets reconciled to it, then we'll have reconciliation."

For Alinsky, compromise was just a trick, a way to get your enemy off guard while you plotted your next attack. "If you start with nothing, demand 100 percent, then compromise for 30 percent, you're 30 percent ahead," he wrote.

Alinsky pursued power for the sake of power. He demanded that his young trainees do likewise. Idealists enraged him.

"He felt very strongly that if you are a do-gooder, you're never going to make it [as a community organizer]," recalls a young Presbyterian minister who underwent Alinsky training in 1956.

The same minister relates that there was "one guy on our staff whom Saul couldn't stand, whom he treated viciously . a young, black fellow from the Church of God." This hapless recruit "believed that he was called to do good, to love the Lord and spread the gospel. Saul pulled all his defenses from under him and exposed him, and he couldn't take it. He just collapsed under it."

Do-gooders nonetheless flocked to Alinsky, driven by masochism. They saw Alinsky as a spiritual teacher, who would humiliate them for their own good.

Christians were easy marks for Alinsky's con. He perfected the art of manipulating Christian guilt, seducing entire churches to his cause.

Hillary Clinton was thus seduced. She met Alinsky through a radical youth group, run by her Methodist church. Later, she interviewed Alinsky for her senior thesis in college -- a 75-page analysis of Alinsky's organizing methods. She turned down a job offer from Alinsky, since she was headed for Yale Law School, but remained friends with him until his death in 1972.

Conning Christians

Horwitt documents Alinsky's stunning success in persuading Christian churches to fund his revolution. Money poured into his activist training school, the Industrial Areas Foundation in Chicago, from such unlikely sources as the Catholic Youth Organization, the Archdiocese of Chicago and the United Presbyterian Church.

Flush with church money, Alinsky and his organizers would descend on impoverished communities, seeking to "agitate to the point of conflict," "fan resentments" and "rub raw the sores of discontent", as Alinsky put it.

"Picket-line priests" and nuns were ubiquitous fixtures of Alinsky street actions, beginning with the 1946 Packinghouse Workers strike in the Chicago stockyards, which he helped organize.

Working with churches was part of Alinsky's "mass jujitsu" strategy - turning the strength of the enemy against itself. "I feel confident that I could persuade a millionaire on a Friday to subsidize a revolution for Saturday out of which he would make a huge profit on Sunday even though he was certain to be executed on Monday," Alinsky once boasted.

Organized religion was as much an enemy of the people as organized capital, in Alinsky's view. He dreamed of a day when all religions would meld into a single, global "ethical system", their creeds "synthesized into certain universals acceptable to the people of the world."

What were these universals? What exactly was Alinsky fighting for?

Horwitt insists that Alinsky was no communist. Yet Alinsky wrote in 1946 that he hoped for a "future where the means of economic production will be owned by all of the people." He disparaged labor leaders who shrank from "revolutionary action aimed at the destruction of monopoly capitalism."

One year before his death in 1972, Alinsky published Rules for Radicals, whose dedication page features what may be the clearest distillation of Alinsky's true beliefs.

Alinsky dedicated his book to "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."

Richard Lawrence Poe is a contributing editor to Newsmax, an award-winning journalist and a New York Times best-selling author. His latest book is "The Shadow Party," co-written with David Horowitz.

© 2009 Newsmax

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For those of you unfamiliar with Saul Alinsky and the evil he has generated, the about post will give you a very good backgrounder. And in reading it, one can see how the little mind of B.O. has been warped and molded to perform the socialist acts that he is now performing.