Thursday, November 08, 2012

Matt 24 watch, 177d: What does being a Community Organizer of the Saul Alinsky Chicago School mean for Mr Barak Obama's worldview and domestic/ foreign policy policy agendas?

In following up on the re-election of Mr Obama, it is first highly significant to know just how little we know about this man. 

Remember, this is four years after he has already been president of the United States.

We do not know his College transcripts, or even the state of his health. And much more. By and large, we do not know what it means that he is a "Community Organizer." We do not know the impact of the neo-Marxist, Saul Alinsky, what he did, what he taught and what those who came from his school such as Mr Obama or wrote their degree theses on his teaching (such as Mrs Clinton) really think. 

And so on and so forth.

Doesn't that ring warning bells?


Shouldn't it? 

Daniel Doron of Israel Hayom, on Nov 1, 2012, gave perhaps the best summary of some possible implications I have seen, with of course a particular emphasis on Israel. So instead of trying to compose an elaborate exposition, let us clip and comment briefly:  

Obama's approach to Israel is derived from a world view that includes hostile attitudes toward the "capitalist" West, where he identifies a system of evil regimes that exploit and subjugate Third World nations. There is reasonable reason to worry that as the close friend of Professor Rashid Khalidi, who was close to Yasser Arafat and a student of Edward Said, Obama sees the creation of Israel as an imperialistic invasion into the Islamic world. He demands that Israel compensate the Palestinians by establishing an Arab state to correct the injustice caused to them.
 

The immense risk that Hamas could take control over this state, and use it to conduct a bloody war, apparently does not trouble the president.
Obama's world view influenced the profession he chose for himself following his university studies and before entering Chicago's corrupt political system.
Obama was a community organizer, a job invented by Saul Alinsky, a Jewish thinker who described in his book "Rules for Radicals" how it was possible to change the existing public order through cadres of extremist activists who recruit young people from universities, churches and even street gangs to partake in uninhibited subversive activity.

Machiavelli wrote "The Prince," according to Alinsky, "to preserve the power of those with means. My book is intended to aid those without the means to control the government … it is for those who want to change the world from what it is, to what they believe it should be." (In Hebrew, this would be for the "social activists" who believe that the "people want social justice.")

To carry out a successful revolution, the radical community organizer must first win the trust of the prevailing system, and then destroy it from the inside by inflaming hatred and divisions that motivate young people to rebel and tear down the existing social order. 
Elements of this worldview are quite familiar to us. 

Much of the anti-colonialism narrative we have deeply imbibed, pivots on the history of trade and colonisation by Western powers, and so a view of the world that explains history in that light of colonisation will resonate with us. 

And yes, our history is full of pain.

Pain that we need to find healing from.

But also, because our schooling in history generally does not give us a broad overview of global history, we often do not know that abusive imposition of power on weaker states is a commonplace of history, in all civilisations. 

So also, on the Middle East, we do not understand -- this is very politically incorrect but happens to be demonstrably true -- that, on a major view of that religion,  Islam as a religiously motivated social order sees itself as destined to establish a universal kingdom by conquest under the expected Mahdi, their key eschatological end times figure. We do not even know that for many Muslims, based on a hadith, a key sign is that from the direction of Khorasan a black flag army is to arise, and that even if one has to crawl across ice and snow one should join it. That army will have Mahdi in it, and will conquer the Middle East and then under Mahdi, the world to the East and the West is to be subjugated.

And where is this fabled Khorasan? 


Eastern Iran and east thereof.

 
Black Flags in the streets Tunisia,
the one on our right being the flag of Al Qaeda
As in, now we know why the Iranian Mullahs, Mr Ahmadinejad and co are obsessed with making Iran the vanguard for the Mahdi. Complete with nukes. 

Similarly, we can see why Al Qaeda and the Taliban as well as many Muslim militants use those ubiquitous Black Flags, envisioning such flags flying over the White House in Washington DC, the Parliament in London, and so forth. And more, much more.

They seriously believe in the Islamic conquest of the world in this century. Which is how the Arab Spring turning into an IslamIST winter looks to them: the beginnings of the reformation of the Caliphate -- the unified Muslim state, where the Caliph's main duty is to see to the advance of Islamic domination ultimately globally --  so that Mahdi may step in as the final, globe conquering Caliph.


Worse, in that process, there is an envisioned mass slaughter of Jews, per the notorious Gharqad Tree Hadith, as well as many other expressions of outright hatred of Jews in Islamic foundational teachings. 

To make the genocidal intent crystal clear, let me cite from the just linked, the crucial part of the Hamas Covenant, Article 7:
...the Islamic Resistance Movement aspires to realize the promise of Allah, no matter how long it takes. The Prophet, Allah's prayer and peace be upon him, says: "The hour of judgment shall not come until the Muslims fight the Jews and kill them, so that the Jews hide behind trees and stones, and each tree and stone will say: 'Oh Muslim, oh servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him,' except for the Gharqad tree, for it is the tree of the Jews." (Sahih Muslim, Book 41, Number 6985)
Genocide, in one word.

In short, IslamISM -- as opposed to the current views and behaviour of ordinary non-radicalised Muslims -- is a global conquest, totalitarian ideology with religious roots and a patent genocidal element targetting Jews.

In this context, by and large we simply do not know the 1400 year long history of expansionism and subjugation of the conquered that took Mohammed and his followers from being refugees from Mecca to first becoming the dominant ruling elites of Yathrib (renamed Medina) and to aggression towards the Jewish tribes there as well as the Meccan merchants, leading to war and conquest of the Arabian peninsula over the next decade. In the process, Mohammed himself oversaw the beheading of 600 - 900 men of one of the Jewish tribes of Yathrib, seizing their property, women and children. Then under Mohammed's successors, from about 632 to 730, the Muslim armies surged out in a wave of conquest from India in the East to Spain in the West. They were stopped 150 miles from Paris, at Tours, by Charles Martel, who inflicted a decisive defeat.

Similarly, we do not know of the apartheid-like status of dhimmitude imposed on the conquered, designed to subjugate and destroy the existence of these peoples. Today, this programme is most notably being renewed in Egypt with the original settled people of Egypt, the Copts.


Similarly, too many have forgotten or have never learned that the Jews are a native people of the Middle East. They have been repeatedly expelled from their home territory but have always returned. Most recently, from the 1870's on they have resettled ruinate Palestine and have renewed it, healing the land from centuries of neglect, then after the League of nations Mandate and the conflicts across the 1930's and 40's there was a UN Mandate of partition, which the Jews accepted and the Arabs rejected. 


On Israel's independence day, May 15, 1948, five Arab armies invaded, on a declared intent to wipe out the Jews. It failed.

As a consequence, there was an exchange of refugees, some 600,000 Arabs, and 800,000 Jews, three fourths of whom settled in Israel.


The present conflict is not because of an alien Jewish settlement imposed on a native people, but a conflict between native peoples in a region. One that is in many ways parallel to the conflicts of the Muslim majority and the Coptic minority in Egypt, or the Muslim-Christian conflict in Lebanon, or the conflict between Arabs and Kurds in Iraq, or the civil war that has just ended in the partitioning of Sudan, and the creation of South Sudan.

 
A conflict that is exacerbated by the IslamIST vision of global conquest and supremacy under the expected Mahdi and his black flag armies, and by the ingrained antisemitic attitude in Islamic culture and unfortunately in the Islamic scriptures and authoritative traditions. 

(And if you do not know what I am speaking about here or think I am mistaken, then you need to familiarise yourself with, say the Gharqad Tree end times slaughter of Jews Hadith that is a part of Clause 7 of the Hamas covenant, or the notorious chant on Khaibar, Khaibar, ya Yahud. [Cf this warning speech in the US Congress that read into the record Newt Gingrich's article on the Muslim Brotherhood, the Hamas branch and its covenant Article 7 as has just been linked, which seems to have been predictably ignored and brushed aside by the media elites.]

An Islamist vision for C21 as the era of subjugation of the world under Allah, His Caliph, his warriors and his law. Notice the hoped for renewed caliphate here and now (presented as "The United States of Islam"), and the extension to the whole world. Notice, the intent to conquer India and Israel, as well as West Africa, revealing the nature of Boko Haram. I gather this literally says books are forbidden, i.e Western learning is sacrilege and banned. Observe, also, the source for the map: the Research Division of the World Islamic Mission. It is worth noting that a Muslim Brotherhood programme of action for subjugating the world under Islam was captured after the 9/11 attacks, from a Muslim financier, by Swiss Financial Police.

But if one mistakenly projects the post colonialist narrative familiar in the Caribbean from our own history, unto the Middle East situation, then one will be fundamentally misled as to the reality of that complex region that has had many tensions and turbulence for -- literally -- thousands of years. 

Similarly, if one swallows the sort of summary view of society and its ills as Saul Alinsky taught in light of his neo-Marxism, one will easily believe that social ills have roots best explained in essentially Marxist terms, perhaps with some modifications depending on the variety of Marxist one is. 


I find it hard to believe that I have to revisit this, but it seems that a new generation has come up that does not know this and does not know how and why it has failed.

As Alinsky summarised in Rules for Radicals:
 "A Marxist begins with his prime truth that all evils are caused by the exploitation of the proletariat by the capitalists. From this he logically proceeds to the revolution to end capitalism, then into the third stage of reorganization into a new social order of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and finally the last stage -- the political paradise of communism." p.10. [And let us note, Marxism has always been quite varied in form, so, the sort of cultural/institutional subversion strategy advocated by Alinsky is not sufficient to remove him from the general frame of thought, whatever differences he may have had with say the Moscow orthodoxy.] . . . .
This ideological position is fundamentally flawed on many levels as the collapse of the Communist states from 1989 - 91 showed decisively. That is, history simply did not play out in the way that the "Scientific Socialists" -- Marx's self-chosen designation -- felt was the inevitable product of the controlling socio-cultural and economic forces. 

Direct empirical refutation, in short.

With over 100 million subjects slaughtered by tyrannical communist regimes, notoriously through the infamous 4:00 am knock on the door from the secret police, but many more by the brutal expedient of willfully induced famine. Mao's Great Leap Forward famine of the turn of the 1960's and Stalin's confiscation of the produce from Ukrainian peasants in the 1930's are perhaps the most notorious.


If you want a sounder understanding of the creation of wealth in light of waves of new technologies and risk-taking entrepreneurship, I think a good place to start is with Joseph Schumpeter, with his vision of a gale of creative destruction, in his 1942 Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy: "[a] process of industrial mutation that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one."


That is why we drive around in cars today, not horse-drawn buggies, wagons and carts. And it is why we have cheap laptop computers that outperform the supercomputers of not that many years ago. As Investopedia explains:

Creative destruction occurs when something new kills something older. A great example of this is personal computers. The industry, led by Microsoft and Intel, destroyed many mainframe computer companies, but in doing so, entrepreneurs created one of the most important inventions of this century.

Schumpeter goes so far as to say that the "process of creative destruction is the essential fact about capitalism."
Wealth and a generally improved condition of life is created as innovators and entrepreneurs find a better way, and find a way to bring that to market. People switch to the new way, and markets grow, creating new jobs and opportunities. 

(Of course, elsewhere the buggy-whip makers are going out of business and their former employees are hurting. So we need to find ways to cushion the shock and help people move from what is failing to what is growing.  Likewise, we would be wise to understand that greed and selfishness are human constants, so we need to safeguard the public and workers, the environment etc. But also, in the name of regulation and protection, much harm can be done by incompetence, corruption, negligence or ill-will. This is not a simple situation, and simplistic cure-alls offered by would be political messiahs will predictably fail. Reformation is possible, but must be sound and limited in light of understanding that the unintended consequences of a policy move may be far more important than the intended, and can lead to much harm. That is part of why we need to hear the range of stakeholders in the community on issues, and it is part of why we always need sound research and development of new knowledge.)

But we must also realise that being wrong does not stop a view from being persuasive, especially to the ill-informed and indoctrinated who are unaware of the flaws and horrors carried out by ruthless rulers in the name of the advance of the working classes (the proletariat) to the golden age of communism. 


Perhaps the most dangerous consequence of this view for domestic policy in not only North America but the Caribbean -- I speak here as a Jamaican who saw the stagnation induced in the 1970's through politicisation of the economy, and then propagandistically blamed on interference from Imperialist forces -- is that it feeds social polarisation and delegitimisation of free enterprise and high risk innovation. The way to prosper and have power is not to innovate and set up businesses that grow and hire people, but to get into the power system. And if you do succeed against all odds, you will be labelled as one of the notorious "one percent," who allegedly succeeded because they exploit and oppress the ninety-nine percent.

In short, surprise -- NOT, the "Occupy" movement is an obvious "Community Organizer" front operation meant to destabilise the system and to push the narrative of exploitation and uprising to crush the oppressors. 


I freely say this, as have seen it all before. 


We used to have ever so many mysterious front groups in Jamaica in the 1970's that would crop up around this crisis and that.  

Including, the one I hold responsible to this day for spreading the lies on shopkeeper "hoarding" (to "explain" the reality of shortages induced by foolish economic policies that had drained our foreign exchange reserves practically overnight) that led to the vigilante murder of one of my "Aunts" in her shop . . . this is not innocent stuff folks. 

And, I have seen where it naturally ends, chaos, violence in the streets and stagnation.

Let me "channel" the ghost of my "auntie": Can we not at least back down the propaganda voltage please, before other people get murdered?


Let us put the politics of envy, rage and ruthless factions behind us.


That is the context in which Doron warns:


Obama's world view is important because only by understanding it can we see that the president is not a failure, as his rivals claim, but a supremely talented individual who conquered the presidency out of nowhere, undermined the world order within four years and made the U.S. economy dependent on the government. All this in order to build a new world on the ruins of the old, one in which the sect of "elected officials" completely control the fate of "the people," exactly according to his guru and teacher, Alinsky.

Subversion of institutions from inside the system, just as Alinsky proposed.  

And of course the economic consequences are no mystery, as is the "more of the same" proposed solution. I well recall a biology teacher who explained it to us, all starry eyed: a little bit didn't work, so as we see one crisis after another, we need more, and more and more, till we end up with full Marxian socialism.


She was ever so confident that she understood the key to all history and progress, for the oppressed masses. She and others of her ilk were ever so confident that they were the vanguard of the future, and that the forces of reaction were what stood between the masses and a golden age.

Jamaica's economy predictably crashed (the crash was predicted but the decision-makers simply ignored it), and we have yet to recover, nearly forty years later.

It's all happened before elsewhere, but if one is ignorant of the lessons of history, it can be hard to avoid repeating the error of falling for the same old beguiling simplistic talking points from the drama of oppression by the few and cure-all liberation of the masses by radical-led subversion and/or overthrow of "the system." (Especially, where there is a wave of polarisation and atmosphere poisoning, leading to a hysteria that will accept things that in a calmer, better instructed mood would not withstand the cold light of day?)

So, will we learn some lessons from painful history, or will we insist on making the same old mistakes yet again? END