Sunday Morning Book Thread: Rules For Radicals [OregonMuse]

Good morning, morons. I had it in my mind earlier in the week to write a comment or two about Saul Alinsky for this thread, but Ace beat me to it earlier in the week. The John Fund article Ace linked to is quite good. I did not know that Alinsky was mobbed up pretty good. But should anyone be surprised? After all, isn't the mob just another kind of community organizer?

Left-wing politics is, as we all know, not about "helping the little guy", but rather extracting money from people and groups that progressives do not like and giving it to those they do. Now somebody please tell me how there's a dime's worth of difference between that and the mob's various business and protection rackets.

Anyway, here are all thirteen of Alinsky'a rules for radicals, from the book:

1. Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.

2. Never go outside the experience of your people.

3. Wherever possible go outside the experience of the enemy.

4. Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.

5. Ridicule is man's most potent weapon.

6. A good tactic is one your people enjoy.

7. A tactic that drags on too long is a drag.

8. Keep the pressure on.

9. The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.

10. The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.

11. If you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through into its counter side.

12. The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.

13. Pick the target, freeze it, personalize and polarize it.

And there they are.

Of course, one wonders what an old school commie agitator like Alinsky would have thought of the tactics of Andrew Breitbart and James O'Keefe?. Would he have smiled ruefully at the unexpected irony of his political enemies using his own tools against him?

Nah.

I'd bet he would've cried like a little girl, "Nuh uh, you can't do that, that's not fair."

You can easily find 'Rules for Radicals' as a torrent download. The book makes for interesting reading in a 'know your enemy' kind of way.

Tips for the Sunday morning book thread may be sent to me at my sooper sekrit e-mail address:

OregonMuse
and then the at sign
followed by yahoo
and then a dot and
then com.

So what has everybody been reading this week?

posted by Open Blogger at 10:58 AM

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