I came across this here, and in reading it I got a very eerie feeling crawl up my spine. The person that posted this prefaced it with “Saul Alinski devised and proved thirteen tactical rules for use against opponents vastly superior in power and wealth ...” I realized that the present administration of the United States is thoroughly versed in the tactics of radical politics as evidenced by their actions since the first stolen election. Or this list is universally true for all attempts to change the world to be the way whoever wants it to be their way. When applied by the vastly superior in power and wealth ... well ... I have followed each radical tactic with examples of such strategy being employed by our own rich and powerful Ghost Buster administration against their gravest enemy, truth seeking dissenters.
1. Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.
Convince citizen dissenters they will be treated as terrorists with the law behind you
2. Never go outside the experience of your people.
Never let your people experience anything outside your story, control the media.
3. Wherever possible go outside of the experience of the enemy.
Make official your lie by getting your cronies to write a fictitious rush to exonerate the administration, i.e. Kean 9/11 Report.
4. Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.
Make up rules that labels all dissenters terrorists, i.e. Homeland Security and the Patriot Act
5. Ridicule is man's most potent weapon.
Truth seekers are labeled conspiracy theorist Moonbats from the president’s podium and soon the name is on the lips of every Bush lover when faced by facts contrary to the 911 Report.
6. A good tactic is one that your people enjoy.
Stroke the rich and wannabe rich marks still shopping
7. A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.
Popularity sagging, stage another mini 9/11 or fake arrests just in the nick of time, popularity rising, fear gives way to rational analysis, popularity drops
8. Keep the pressure on.
Have your propaganda dispensing department, the media, keep talking about fear of the bad guys and not show the casualties or atrocities.
9. The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.
This one must be reversed for Bush, but he’s pretty adept at getting things backwards: He threatens us with hate filled muslims while the thing is his responsibility for the attacks and the sinister plans for world domination it serves.
10. Major premise for tactics is development of operations that will maintain constant pressure upon the opposition.
Involve every branch of law enforcement to be busy looking through old ladies purses, continually irritating them and calming them with the lie that it is for national security. Soon the irritation is “just life” like the frog may be boiled alive if you turn the heat up gradually enough.
11. If you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through into its counterside.Soon all opposition will either be converted to born-again-Bush-lovers, hypnotized sheep, in jail, or made to move elsewhere. We will get to them eventually.
12. The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.
The price of the success of the attack of 9/ll is the souls of all complicit helpers. Sorry, I couldn’t find any redeeming values upon which to base a constructive alternative.
13. Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.
Boy, do I really have to demonstrate the administration’s use of this one?!?!
4 comments:
I read this as perhaps intended misinterpretation of these rules taken out of context and perhaps viewed from perspective of believing the enemy's distortion of "radical". The beliefs, stances, and actions of your government and crew position them as far possible from its true meaning. It would be worth reading the entire piece from which this was taken. That is this page of Further Left Library. It would be better to study and even more so to apply the teachings of their original author, Saul Alinski, from his books, Reveille for Radicals and Rules for Radicals.
My copies of those were filled with noted pages and underlines. I practiced them through the major portion of a life of proud radicalism. The rules worked for me and still will for anyone who tries to apply them as intended. That is not in bolstering the US power brokerage but rather overthrowing it. To underscore the direction of Alinski's work it might be mentioned that Martin Luther King and César Chavez were also his students.
Those rules are not intellectual constructs expounded for purpose of understanding, analysis, and debate. They are topic headings concerned with doing something. They bear no value without the actions they guide. Further down the page that I've linked above is a section titled ORGANIZING FOR RADICAL ACTIVISM IS EASY. YOU CAN DO IT. HERE'S HOW It's lead paragraph is
"Radical activism is characterized most by what it leaves aside. That is analysis and rhetorical positioning. It is neither about political, social or moral beliefs, bearing witness, nor convincing anyone of the rightness of anything for such only gets in the way. Rather, it deals with uniting people so they may strike at the causes of their concerns by utilizing power as they see fit."
The brief following paragraphs comprise a recipe for going about it. One thing practiced radicals know is that ALL organizing for change is local. The simple steps described will allow anyone to start a local movement. I have personally used them to initiate formation of effective civil rights, anti-war, and antipoverty groups. The technique worked every time. I highly recommend it to any who are ready to move beliefs beyond thought and into the more satisfying but also risky endeavor of application.
Pocho,
I'm sorry if my use of Alinski's strategies was in any way demeaning to their original purpose by showing how the target of such strategies, the powerful and wealthy US administration, has perverted them to use against something they fear and call terrorists more passionately than their Arab scapegoats: the disbelievers, the dissidents, the sayers of truth so powerful they fill US prisons.
The view of daily life and the world from within the US borders is living proof of the success of the radical preemptivism of the propaganda machine when found to be so different than the view from where our bullets and missles land. The daily lies all lead back to the big one, 9/11/06.
Oh, you mean like the 3/11 of Madrid (Lo siento,!de verdad!) and would be/could have been 7/11 of London? Notice the simplicity of the name so all average Joe can memorize it in no time.
I have a question: we have a local brand here in Syria from even before 10/6 ('73)(no, not THAT long time ago) called 1-11. In the vivid conspirationist smart illuminated minds of the Bushmerts, shouldn't the brand (ladies shues, mind) be labelled as highly suspect of presumed potential terrorist activities?
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