Oldgamer Reporting for Duty
Hillary Clinton, Saul Alinsky, and the Perpetual Revolution
As I stated in the last issue of the
Helios, I'm proud of my country. One of the things that I'm most proud of is the fact that a person can come from humble origins and have the liberty to make of himself what he has the determination to do. My father was a master mechanic who owned a service station in Chicago. His determination was passed on to me.
Among many things, I've the honor to at least speak to, and to have known several Presidents of these United States. Among them are Presidents Nixon, Reagan, Clinton, and GW Bush.
During the Reagan Administration, I made a simple call to the White House Switchboard to express my support for one of the President's policies. I was asked to hold. After several minutes, a very familiar voice came on the line saying, “Hello?” It was Mr. Reagan, and I had “lucked out” by being one of several calls randomly picked that day to talk to the President. It was one of the few times I've stumbled through a phone call.
More recently, I had the opportunity to speak to President Bush for a few minutes, in the company of several other people. It was a brisk exchange of ideas, but meeting a President is always something to be proud of.
Many years ago, after President Richard Nixon left office, I wrote a letter to him. To my surprise, he responded, and we carried on several years of correspondence. Some of my prized possessions are correspondence that bear the letterhead "La Casa Pacifica, San Clemente, California". To this day, I am struck by his charm, his intelligence, and the lack of arrogance and
hubris which has often been wrongly attributed to him.
Surprisingly enough, though ... for me, at least ... the President that I've known the best was Bill Clinton. If you're involved in politics to any degree in a small state like Arkansas, you will likely meet the governor, at some time. But I met him earlier, in 1974, during a formal debate. Later, when he was governor of Arkansas, I had occasion to meet and talk with him several times. Once, I even had one of his famous lunches at a McDonald's Restaurant, in Little Rock.
My impression of Bill Clinton was that he would have been much happier had he just been a good ole boy. For those of you from other countries, it's not easy to explain exactly what a “good old boy” is. In Mr. Clinton's case, I would say that a good ole boy is a fellow ... a blue-collar worker ... who labors all day in a chicken processing plant. When the day is over, he gathers with his buddies, kicks off his boots, turns on his Johnny Cash records, sips Coors (a brand of American beer featured in the movie
Smokey & The Bandit), and plans exactly how he will “pork” most of the girls at the plant. He always owns a pickup truck, and very often lives in a mobile home. He will be a hunter and fisherman. Yep. Bill's a good old boy, at heart. And no one is more astonished at his place in the world, today, than him.
But I have also met his wife. Hillary Diane Rodham-Clinton is a different matter altogether. When you meet with her, you are struck by the coldness in her eyes ... quite different from her famous husband. This is a coldness that cannot be undone by a few hundred thousand dollars worth of make-overs, telling her to smile, to kiss babies, and so on. It is an integral part of her. You look at her, and you see that this is not the wife of a “good ole boy”. No one will ever catch her making cookies, though she does tolerate his philandering (which goes back to the 1970's). She is a true believer.
A believer in what, you may ask? And that is the rest of this story ...
To answer that question, I must tell you who Saul Alinsky is.
Saul Alinsky was an American radical who “wrote the book” when it comes to community activism. His idea was that the system should be changed by radicals ... not liberals ... working outside of the system. Perhaps it might do well to let his own words speak for him:
"Liberals in their meetings utter bold works; they strut, grimace belligerently, and then issue a weasel-worded statement 'which has tremendous implications, if read between the lines.' They sit calmly, dispassionately, studying the issue; judging both sides; they sit and still sit.
The Radical does not sit frozen by cold objectivity. He sees injustice and strikes at it with hot passion. He is a man of decision and action. There is a saying that the Liberal is one who walks out of the room when the argument turns into a fight.
Society has good reason to fear the Radical. Every shaking advance of mankind toward equality and justice has come from the Radical. He hits, he hurts, he is dangerous. Conservative interests know that while Liberals are most adept at breaking their own necks with their tongues, Radicals are most adept at breaking the necks of Conservatives.
Radicals precipitate the social crisis by action - by using power. Liberals may then timidly follow along or else, as in most cases, be swept forward along the course set by Radicals, but all because of forces unloosed by Radical action. They are forced to positive action only in spite of their desires ...
The American Radical will fight privilege and power whether it be inherited or acquired by any small group, whether it be political or financial or organized creed.
He curses a caste system which he recognizes despite all patriotic denials.
He will fight conservatives whether they are business or labor leaders.
He will fight any concentration of power hostile to a broad, popular democracy, whether he finds it in financial circles or in politics.
The Radical recognizes that constant dissension and conflict is and has been the fire under the boiler of democracy. He firmly believes in that brave saying of a brave people, "Better to die on your feet than to live on your knees!"
The Radical may resort to the sword but when he does he is not filled with hatred against those individuals whom he attacks. He hates these individuals not as persons but as symbols representing ideas or interests which he believes to be inimical to the welfare of the people.
That is the reason why Radicals, although frequently embarking upon revolutions, have rarely resorted to personal terrorism."
The most powerful thing he ever said, for the purposes of this editorial was, “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. The real action is in the enemy's reaction. The enemy properly goaded and guided in his reaction will be your major strength. Tactics, like life, require that you move with the action."
http://www.fraw.org.uk/library/002/a...y_radical.html
Despising the “system”, including universities, Alinsky created his own program, including training academies, to teach people how to be community activists. Most of his own work was done in Chicago. He had many disciples, including Hillary Diane Rodham ...
In 1969, while I was fighting and almost dying for my country in the jungles of Southeast Asia, Mrs. Clinton was in her senior year at Wellesley College. Assigned a senior thesis, she chose one of her idols ... Saul Alinsky.
It should be noted that the Clintonista machine has ruthlessly struggled to keep her senior thesis out of the public's eye. Indeed, during the eight years of her husband's Presidency, everything that could be done was done to keep the thesis secret.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17388372 The most important thing to realize about this thesis is that it is the secret to decoding Hillary Clinton, and that is very dangerous to her presidential prospects.
Entitled “There Is Only the Fight”, Hillary's senior thesis is a 92-page paean to Alinsky. You can read the entire text at:
http://gopublius.com/hillary-clintons-wellesley-thesis . Had I been her professor, I would have given her an “A” for the work, because it is very well done and properly researched (when I was a university professor, I never let my personal differences with a student's politics to get in the way of objectively analyzing their work).
In her autobiography entitled
Living History, she stated, “My senior year at Wellesley would further test and articulate my beliefs. For my thesis I analyzed the work of a Chicago native and community organizer named Saul Alinsky…I agreed with some of Alinsky’s ideas…but we had a fundamental disagreement. (Alinsky) believed you could change the system only from the outside. I didn’t.…my decision (to go to law school instead of training as an Alinsky organizer) was an expression of my belief that the system could be changed from within.”
This is the key to it all. This is why Hillary didn't accept Alinsky's personal invitation to her to train at one of his academies, and perhaps, inherit the whole structure, upon his death in 1972. This is why she didn't go to the Harvard Law School, to which she had been accepted. Instead, she chose Yale, a hotbed of radical politics, at the time. She wanted to change the system from within, instead of from the outside.
Indeed, to my personal argument that America has the richest communists and socialists the world has ever seen, she would probably state (and I have heard her do so, on at least a couple of occasions), “To change the system, we've got to have the power. Wealth is power ... it is a tool that can be used to effect social change.” It also allows the “radical” to live in splendor, and travel in private jets, but that's another editorial.
After graduation from Yale, Clinton went to the law firm of
Truehaft, Walker, and Bernstein in Oakland, California. Two of the partners of this firm were communists, including Bob Truehaft, who was married to the communist Jessica Mitford. The firm was in the business of defending the Black Panther Party, among other radical groups. However, in her autobiography, there isn't a word about the radicalism of the firm.
But she doesn't completely suppress this period.
On July 23 of this year, Hillary said, “I have 35 years of being a change agent.” On January 27, she states, “Bill and I started a conversation 35 years ago about our country.” Indeed, in a 1993
Washington Post article defending nationalized health care, she said, “You know, I've been on this kick for 25 years.”
Interviewed this year, Alan Schechter, one of the emeritus professors of Wellesley College called the idea of Peggy Noonan that her senior thesis was the
Rosetta Stone of understanding Hillary “moronic”. He goes on to state that “…she's not a radical at all. I think she's very mainstream. She's a pragmatist. She's a much more thoughtful, cautious, careful, pragmatic person…”. Of course, Shechter is carefully hiding the fact from the American public ... which he regards as “stupid” ... the fact that Alinsky constantly emphasized the application of pragmatism to radicalism.
In 2000, the late Barbara Olsen managed to get a copy of the thesis and stated, “Perhaps the most prescient part of the thesis is a quote from a profile of Alinsky in
The Economist: ‘His charm lies in his ability to commit himself completely to the people in the room with him. In a shrewd though subtle way, he often manipulates them while speaking directly to their experience.”
You could easily have believed that she was speaking about her future husband ...
The campus radicals of the 1960's and 70's are an aging bunch, and they may see in Hillary their last chance to radicalize America. But if they expect her to create huge government bureaucracies, if she's elected President, to effect their wildest dreams, they are likely wrong. Hillary believes that, for example, President Lyndon Johnson's “Great Society” programs of the 1960's were a failure because they gave poor people a false sense of sharing the American dream. If a person shares that dream, he or she is not going to be radicalized. And the fight is everything, to her.
In the
Washington Post, shortly after her husband became President, Hillary said, “I basically argue that Alinsky was right ...”.
Free-marketeers, like me, argue that social programs stifle individual economic intiative. To a certain extent, Hillary agrees with this, but for different reasons. To her, social programs create dependence, and that is an obstacle to the radicalization of poor people. Hillary believes that change and reform are spurred on by conflict. Since all good and great things come from government, should not government create conflict, also?
She argues, on page 10 of her thesis, that, “Alinsky claims a position of moral relativism, but his moral context is stabilized by a belief in the eventual manifestation of the goodness of man. … the main driving force behind his push for organization is the effect that belonging to a group working for a common purpose has on the men he has organized.”
Anyone who has ever listened to a socialist apologizing (in the technical sense of the term) for human-rights abuses in socialist countries will be familiar with the moral relativism that both Alinsky and Clinton are calling for. The end justifies the means.
On page 6 of her thesis, she argues that “A radical is one who advocates sweeping changes in the existing laws and methods of government. These proposed changes are aimed at the roots of political problems which in Marxian terms are the attitudes and the behaviors of men.”
This Presidential Candidate does not want to make laws or implement policy. She wants to change the human race and become the new “god” creating a new humanity. But how is the person who is considered by most Americans as the most polarizing figure in America going to do this? Once again, her thesis gives us an answer:
“…polarization between those who believed in him and those who denounced him as a hate-monger delighted Alinsky: ‘In order to organize, you must first polarize. People think of controversy as negative; they think consensus is better. But to organize, you need a Bull Connor or a Jim Clark.’”
So, the purpose is not new laws, the implementation of those laws, or the stated “cause” of the movement.
“…the main driving force behind his push for organization is the effect that belonging to a group working for a common purpose has on the men he has organized.”
There is only the fight, in other words.
In her commencement address at Wellesley, in 1969 (while I started the long process of recovering from my wounds received at “Hamburger Hill”), Hillary said, “Every protest, every dissent… is unabashedly an attempt to forge an identity in this particular age. That attempt at forging for many of us over the past four years has meant coming to terms with our humanness.” She said this moments after launching into an impromptu verbal attack on Senator Edward Brooke of Massachussetts, the first black man elected to the Senate in more than a hundred years.
To be human, then, is to be part of the fight. The fight is for one's identity. The fight is to make everyone part of the fight. Perpetual revolution, for the sake of revolution, to forge one's own identity. Life flows, according to Hillary, not from God, but from the political system.
So, what will a Clinton Presidency look like?
First, it will not look like her husband's presidency. As stated before, Bill was just a good ole boy who wanted power for its own sake, and the perks that went along with it.
The true believer in radicalization, Hillary Dianne Rodham-Clinton, wants to use the power of the government to replace the much-weakened community action model of Alinsky (weakened by government actually doing something to help the poor).
Taxes will be increased drastically, but not because Hillary is a socialist bent on achieving social change through the transfer of wealth. They will be increased because it will hurt the US economy, and increase the number of unemployed and underemployed people in America. This will give the government the chance to create vast public works programs that will need ... not technology to solve them ... but muscle-power and bodies working for a pittance on the worksite. All of this will increase the chance to create more radicals in America.
There will be National Healthcare. But its purpose will not be to increase the health and wellbeing of the poor. It will be to destroy the greatest healthcare system in the world, which will actually harm America's healthcare system. If people are hurting, they are more likely to become radicalized.
But the most important thing in Hillary's spectrum of analysis is the notion of “federally-controlled planning”. On page 72 of her thesis, she says, “When one moves beyond the city and local issues, the idea of independent national organizing seems impossible. The Depression demonstrated the feasibility of federally controlled planning, and a massive war effort convinced us of its necessity.” So, the Great Depression and World War II were good things, from her standpoint. It made possible the massive application of federally-controlled planning to the social fabric of America.
Indeed, those who look forward to a era of world peace under America's first “woman President” may be in for a rude shock. Her critique of the War on Terror is that it is too limited in scope. It requires more aggressiveness. In other words, more federally-controlled planning. Expect a draft ...
Hillary Diane Rodham-Clinton ... achieve Power, set people against each other, and through the simple method of applying federally-controlled power to the conflict, create a new humanity.
Have I mentioned that I won't be a supporter of Mrs. Clinton in '08? ...
Postscript to the above editorial: While Bill Clinton was "studying" at Oxford, he started participating in anti-War rallies in Britian. Oxford was a center of anti-Americanism, at the time (it may still be ... these things tend to run in cycles, dependent upon whom the American people elect to the White House). During this time, he met Jessica Mitford, who I mentioned earlier as a communist activist. She encouraged him to spend Winter Break 1669-70 on a trip to Moscow.
He took her advice and stopped off, first, at Stockholm, which was a hotbed of Cold War espionage. Then, he went off to Moscow. On this "tour", he spent most of his time at the fabled
Patrice Lumumba Friendship University, which is to say it was the place where the government of the Soviet Union trained foreign agents for the KGB. Upon his return to the UK, Clinton stopped participating in the antiwar demonstrations. He started organizing them.
His friendship developed with Jessica Mitford ... the same Jessica Mitford whose husband was a senior partner at the Law Firm that Hillary Clinton went to after graduation from Yale ... until he left Britain in the Summer of 1970, and he took her advice to attend the Yale Law School. It was at Yale that he had his "chance" encounter with Hillary Rodham in the Law Library, and the rest is ... history.
Did I say "chance"? ...
The 17th TWC Helios
The University of Sydney | Bachelor of Arts III (Majoring in Ancient History and Italian Studies)
Originally Posted by Exarch
