Obama and Saul Alinsky - The Other Side of Change :: Political News and commentaries

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September 3, 2008

Obama and Saul Alinsky - The Other Side of Change

Mary Jo Anderson, writing at InsideCatholic.com, notes how the two words change and unity surely epitomize Barack Obama's campaign for the presidency, and that during last week's Democratic Convention the two words "were extolled change hourly in a relentless drumbeat." The only relief came when unity was emphasized.

However, what nags at the back of her mind is that the call for "change" and "unity" is not so much an invitation but a command, which alerts the skeptic in her. More importantly, it should awaken the skeptic in all of us:

I've learned from covering the United Nations that when radicals cannot get delegates to agree to their terms, they change the meaning of those terms. Hence, "health and reproductive rights," though it sounds like innocent pre-natal care, is in reality the UN's goal to press for abortion on demand -- all in the name of doing something noble for the poor and oppressed.

Obama's understanding of "unity" has never been spelled out, but his past mentors -- and even some of his own comments -- paint a worrisome picture.

Obama said last year, "We're building a grassroots movement . . . [to] unite the country around our shared values" (emphasis added).

And then at a rally in February: "It is a choice not between black and white, not between genders and regions or religions, but a choice between the past and the future." In the context of the genderless world espoused by the gay lobby that Obama supports, or the Marxist vision of a religion-less world, those remarks about our future take on a different hue. In fact, there's a strong indication that for Obama, "unity" is part of a broader agenda -- a kissing cousin to the Marxist ideal of the undifferentiated collective.

Much has been written about Obama's career as a "community organizer," a benign term that was actually the brainchild of Marxist agitator Saul Alinsky, whose writings Obama studied and who founded an organization in Chicago for which Obama worked. Alinsky earned his doctorate from the University of Chicago in 1930 and went to work in the state penitentiary. He came to believe that the "social milieu," not personal behavior, was responsible for the plight of the inmates -- and therefore, a changed society would eliminate aberrant behavior. In1939, Alinsky created his Industrial Areas Foundation, a grassroots agitation organization that found its power in collectivizing working-class poor and idealistic radicals.

Alinsky is well-known for his second book, Rules for Radicals, which begins with praise for Lucifer, a rebel who achieved his own kingdom. The book stressed that activists must be "people committed to change." (Sound familiar?) He taught his agitators to avoid the "useless self-indulgence" of despising their own middle-class roots, instead exploiting the contempt they feel: "If we are to build power for change, the power and the people are in the big middle class majority."

He also encouraged radicals to seek "bridges of communication and unity . . . . [V]iew with strategic sensitivity the nature of middle-class hang-ups over rudeness or aggressive insulting profane actions. All this and more must be grasped and used to radicalize parts of the middle-class." In the name of "the poor and the oppressed," radicals catapult themselves into power, exploiting the goodwill of the desperate.

Alinsky further instructed: "Moral rationalization is indispensable at all times of action whether to justify the selection or the use of ends or means." Organizers are to drop the appearance of radical agitators and to don middle-class manners and behaviors so as to blend in while espousing their radical visions of the future -- a description that would suit Obama, according to Joseph Biden's own description of the senator as "mainstream... bright and clean."