On Wed, 18 Aug 2010 15:59:42 -0700, Chas. Chan wrote:

By Kyle-Anne Shiver

"They fear that the development and building of People's (community)
Organizations is the building of a vast power group which may fall prey
to a fascistic demagogue who will seize leadership and control and turn
an organization into a Frankenstein's monster against democracy."
- Saul Alinsky responding to his critics, Reveille for Radicals; p.
199

When Saul Alinsky began building his community-organization movement in
1930s Chicago, observers were watching Alinsky with one eye, while with
the other eye observing the building of communist and fascist movements
in Europe. It wasn't hard then to see in Alinsky's programs at home,
elements of the people's revolution from Russia, as well as some of the
same "in your face" tactics being employed by Hitler's Brownshirts.

What Alinsky's critics saw was the burgeoning of a national movement,
the carefully manipulated construction of people's organizations, which
all had two elements in common: (1) a collectivist creed, which denied
the existence of personal responsibility; and (2) an amoral dogma, in
which all means were justified by an imaginary utopian end.

While most modern Americans remember well Hitler's Holocaust and the
Cold War waged by a solid U.S.S.R., many of these same Americans have
swallowed some false history regarding the movements that spawned such
widespread, horrendous results. In what may be regarded as the most
triumphant propaganda victory of our time, fascism has been scrubbed of
all its Marxist roots, while communism has been scrubbed of its
millions of callous murders.

This post-WWII propaganda coup undeniably set the stage for the early
Alinsky critics' most feared eventuality, that the massive organizations
could be shrewdly adopted by a fascist demagogue, someone who could
"seize leadership and control" and turn them into a "Frankenstein's
monster against democracy."

But perhaps the most cunning propaganda feat in history has been
undertaken for the past 8 years. As Jonah Goldberg expertly expounds in
his book, Liberal Fascism, American left-wing ideologues have managed to
dissociate themselves from all the horrors of fascism with a "brilliant
rhetorical maneuver." They've done it by "claiming that their opponents
are the fascists."

Alinsky himself employed this method, quite deviously. Alinsky
biographer, Sanford D. Horwitt provides an anecdote using precisely this
diabolical tactic to deceive the people. From Horwitt's Let Them Call
Me Rebel:

"...in the spring of 1972, at Tulane University...students asked Alinsky
to help plan a protest of a scheduled speech by George H. W. Bush, then
U.S. representative to the United Nations - a speech likely to include a
defense of the Nixon administration's Vietnam War policies. The
students told Alinsky they were thinking about picketing or disrupting
Bush's address. That's the wrong approach, he rejoined, not very
creative - and besides causing a disruption might get them thrown out of
school. He told them, instead, to go to hear the speech dressed as
members of the Ku Klux Klan, and whenever Bush said something in defense
of the Vietnam War, they should cheer and wave placards reading, ‘The
KKK supports Bush.' And that is what they did, with very successful,
attention-getting results."

In what may eventually prove to be a devious rhetorical feat of
monstrous proportions, while the left has been indulging and fostering
the "Bush Is Hitler" meme, they may have just put a genuine ideological
fascist heir in the White House.


There is inherent danger in making scurrilous comparisons (as were
perpetrated unceasingly against George W. Bush), but there seem to be
some very worrisome signs in the rise of Barack Obama that we Americans
would be foolish to ignore.

Obama, the Closer

As I put forth last year in "Obama, the Closer", Barack Obama, did not
start his movement; Alinsky did.

Nor did Obama amass the organizations that propelled him. As detailed
by Heidi J. Swarts, in her book, Organizing Urban America, the movement
begun by Saul Alinsky in the 1930s has morphed into thousands of secular
and faith-based leftist political organizations. ACORN (Association of
Community Organizations for Reform Now) has perhaps the highest public
profile, is most reputed for radicalism, and is the organization with
which Barack Obama was first aligned. But ACORN is the mere tip of a
veritable iceberg of Alinsky-styled community organizations that sweep
across the entire United States and make up the backbone of faith-based
progressive movements as well.

These euphemistically called "community" organizations have next to
nothing to do with improving the communities and everything to do with
politics, primarily strong-arming government money to advance their
political aims. Prior to Reagan's election, these groups worked
independently for the most part, each seeking to effect local change
towards leftist ends.

But with Reagan's victory, ACORN founding member Wade Rathke sent out a
memo (published by Swarts; Organizing Urban America; p. 29) that would
reverberate all the way to Barack Obama's moment. ACORN had been
behaving as a sort of "Lone Ranger of the Left" for too long, wrote
Rathke. Ronald Reagan had formed a coalition among the middle- class
that threatened to bring greater prosperity without left-wing Statists
calling the shots. Rathke put out the call to the ACORN troops to stop
antagonizing those who would be allies, especially unions and church
organizations, once shunned by ACORN as too placid for the real fight
for power. For the next 25 years, the community organization network
built, proliferated and formed a solid, nation- wide base of political
strength, purely according to Alinsky's original vision, and all just
waiting for the right candidate to tap into it and lead it.

When folks from all corners of America proclaimed, seemingly with one
voice, Barack is the "One we've been waiting for," they were speaking
out of the vast Alinsky-originated network.

Neither did Barack Obama invent the political "ideology of change," nor
design its carefully crafted propaganda. While media folks talked of
the tingles up their legs and the brilliant rhetoric of Barack Obama,
they were heralding the speaker only, not the creator of the movement
and its slogans. That would have been Saul Alinsky, the man who took
fascism and cunningly made it appear to casual observers every bit as
American as apple pie.

Barack Obama is merely the movement's closer, the quintessential liberal
fascist with a teleprompter.

Alinsky's Ideology of Change: The Third Way

Goldberg fastidiously notes the comparison between Alinsky's "in your
face" rules for radicals, studied and perfected by Barack Obama, and
shows them to have profoundly fascist roots:

"...there's no disputing that vast swaths of his (Alinsky's) writings
are indistinguishable from the fascist rhetoric of the 1920s and
1930s...His worldview is distinctly fascistic. Life is defined by war,
contests of power, the imposition of will. Moreover, Alinsky shares
with the fascists and pragmatists of yore a bedrock hostility to dogma.
All he believes in are the desired ends of the movement, which he
regards as the source of life's meaning...But what comes through most is
his unbridled love of power. Power is a good in its own right for
Alinsky. Ours ‘is a world not of angels but of angles,' he proclaims in
Rules for Radicals, ‘where men speak of moral principles but act on
power principles."

Saul Alinsky was the man who transformed politics in America into all-
out war mode. Alinsky's tenth rule of the ethics of means: "You do
what you can with what you have and clothe it with moral garments."
All's fair in love and war, and politics, to Alinsky, was war.

"A People's (community) Organization is not a philanthropic plaything or
a social service's ameliorative gesture. It is a deep, hard- driving
force, striking and cutting at the very roots of all the evils which
beset the people. It thinks and acts in terms of social surgery and not
cosmetic cover-ups.

A People's Organization is dedicated to an eternal war. A war is not an
intellectual debate, and in the war against social evils there are no
rules of fair play."
Saul Alinsky; Reveille for Radicals; p. 133

Alinsky includes an entire section in Rules for Radicals on "The
Ideology of Change." The watchword of the Obama campaign was "change."
Just as Hitler mobilized the masses with a calculatingly undefined
demand for "change," so did Alinsky disciple, Barack Obama.

"Everything must be different!" or "Alles muss anders sein!," Hitler's
own campaign slogan, morphed into "Unite for Change," and the Obama
transition team's change.gov. Even the idea of a vast "movement" was
borrowed from Hitler. As Goldberg states, Hitler used the phrase, "the
Movement," more than 200 times in Mein Kampf.

The word ‘movement' itself is instructive. Movement, unlike progress,
doesn't imply a fixed destination. Rather, it takes it as a given that
any change is better.
(Goldberg; Liberal Fascism; p. 176)
Perhaps the most intoxicating allure to the fascist demagogue and his
movement for undefined change is its misleadingly conciliatory flavor.
Barack Obama continually, throughout his campaign and even now, portrays
himself as the Third Way between the cantankerous factions that have
polarized America for the past 80 years, since liberal fascism took root
as the Progressive Movement.

Obama claimed that Bush was too much the ideologue, that his policies
were driven by the Christian right, involved "false choices" between
all-out war on the one hand and diplomacy on the other, between the
welfare state and cold-hearted, do-nothing conservatism, between
absolute sovereignty and cowardly submission to the global community,
between doing all and doing nothing. And if any of this gibberish were
a true reflection of our political disagreements, Obama would be
somewhat correct. But as any sentient person knows, this radical
presentation of Obama's is absolutely false. That gets lost, though, in
the leader's conciliatory tone.

What must not get lost, however, is the very real fact that this Third
Way movement for change is as fascist as anything we have ever seen in
the USA. As Alinsky described his own "Ideology of Change," the lure is
in the claim that the leader has no ideology that would confine his
outlook to hard choices between what is moral or immoral, that there are
no boundaries set by either religion or politics, that everything can
change and the only thing that matters is one's end intention to do
something good.

As Hitler, before Alinsky, proclaimed, "Our program is to govern," not
delve into theory and dogma. This is in itself very appealing,
especially to an electorate sick of the contentiousness of the past
decade. This undefined "ideology of change" for the sake of change, for
some action that will break through the roadblocks of polarization, has
tremendous allure.

But Goldberg bursts that bubble:

The ‘middle way' sounds moderate and un-radical. Its appeal is that it
sounds unideological and freethinking. But philosophically the Third
Way is not mere difference splitting; it is utopian and authoritarian.
Its utopian aspect becomes manifest in its antagonism to the idea that
politics is about trade-offs. The Third Wayer says that there are no
false choices -‘I refuse to accept that X should come at the expense of
Y.' The Third Way holds that we can have capitalism and socialism,
individual liberty and absolute unity. Fascist movements are implicitly
utopian because they - like communist and heretical Christian movements
-- assume that with just the right arrangement of policies, all
contradictions can be rectified. (Goldberg; Liberal Fascism; p. 130)

Of course, thinking people -- when they are indeed thinking -- know this
is an utterly false promise. Life will never be made perfect because
all human beings are imperfect.

Unity, the Diabolical Lure

What of this longed-for unity then? Barack Obama proclaimed he was
leading a movement of people "united for change." What is the appeal
of unity?

The modern liberal fascist seeks that state between mother and child
which exists early on before the child seeks his own independence,
before mother must set herself at odds with him. It is the perfectly
secure state of childhood where all is lovely and peaceful and
nurturing, but cannot continue indefinitely if the child is to be
prepared to face a world of difficulty and hard choices. Nevertheless,
the yearning continues. It is this primordial yearning which sets
itself in the crosshairs of the fascist demagogue.

But in adult life, this type of unity is anything but desirable,
anything but virtuous. As Goldberg states, however, "elevation of unity
as the highest social value is a core tenet of fascism and all leftist
ideologies."

The allure of this mystical unity is so great that its demand to
sacrifice reason and thought on the false altar of infantile security is
seemingly lost to many. But as Goldberg also reminds us, "unity is, at
best, morally neutral and often a source of irrationality and
groupthink."

Rampaging mobs are unified. The Mafia is unified. Marauding barbarians
bent on rape and pillage are unified. Meanwhile, civilized people have
disagreements, and small-d democrats have arguments. Classical
liberalism is based on this fundamental insight, which is why fascism
was always anti-liberal.

Liberalism rejected the idea that unity is more valuable than
individuality. For fascists and other leftists, meaning and
authenticity are found in collective enterprises - of class, nation, or
race - and the state is there to enforce that meaning on everyone
without the hindrance of debate.
(Goldberg; Liberal Fascism; p. 172)

Just as the healthy relationship between parent and developing child
demands friction, so does the healthy relationship between truly liberal
citizens. Unity is the siren song of tyranny, not the call to genuine
progress.

Fascism: The Two Birds with One Stone Approach

I think of Obama's liberal fascism as a cancer that attempts to kill the
two birds of American exceptionalism with one stone. It is a deviously
appealing Third Way that in the end, if allowed to triumph completely,
kills both individual liberty and Judeo/Christian religion with its
single stone.

And, indeed this was the precise goal of Adolph Hitler. Unlike the
outspoken hatred of private property and religion espoused by communists
under Lenin and Stalin, Hitler preferred the more moderate- seeming
incremental takeover of private enterprise in the interest of the
"common good," and the slow-death of Judeo/Christian religion by
chipping away at it and replacing the people's dependence upon God
gradually with reliance on the state (Hitler).

[Note: Hitler's Holocaust was based on the Progressive Eugenics
principles set forth by Social Darwinist scientists and social engineers
of the 1920s, widely accepted both in Europe and in the United States.
Religion was not at the core of the Holocaust; race was. However,
Hitler's other chief aim was to destroy the Judeo/ Christian religions,
which he believed had ruined the Germanic race's world predominance.]

Of course, as the German people were duped into giving Hitler
totalitarian powers to work his magic "change," he took off the kid
gloves and accelerated the program.

In the end, however slow the process, however seemingly benign the
growth of the state may seem, liberal fascism has the same result of all
tyrannies before it: hell on earth for most and a self-indulgent feast
for the Statists in power.

As Barack Obama speaks, thinking Americans ought to hear the echoes of
past fascist demagogues and remember. Remember.

When Barack Obama promises "collective redemption" through his
profligate spending programs and vast overtures to a new world order
built on love for our fellow man, we ought to shudder not swoon.

We ought to remember that healthy global relationships are built upon
respect, not all-encompassing love, and that redemption for one's soul
is a commodity the state is not empowered to offer.

As Pope Benedict XVI has so presciently warned:

Wherever politics tries to be redemptive, it is promising too much.
Where it wishes to do the work of God, it becomes, not divine, but
demonic.

Be not fooled, America The movement, which appears most benign is
instead the most malignant growth ever seen on our soil. It's a cancer
that will kill, and however slowly it grows or however nice it may look
on the surface, doesn't change a thing.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/05/
barack_obama_the_quintessentia_1.html

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Lib...onah-Goldberg/
e/9780385511841/

"Be not fooled, America"
obviously, who ever wrote this for you does not feel it can stand by it's
self and has to use fear to gain it's support. beside, if you really know
nazism as well as you think you do, (you quoted him) you would understand
the goebbel's propaganda tactics being utilized by the GOP and faux news.
Since all you did was cut-n-paste this from some extreme right
propaganda portal, you have no clue what your saying and are just here
to **** off the group like a troll.