[ilbegone]

Continuation from post #46

The next chapter of Alinsky's Rules for Radicals is entitled Of Means And Ends, which really needs to be read by one's self to get the full meaning.

However, in short I interpret it to say to use whatever means you have at hand that works to achieve the ends which are possible and the nuclear option is open if you're about to be defeated.

"The man of action views the issue of ends and means in pragmatic and strategic terms... he thinks only of his actual resources and the possibilities of various choices of action... He asks only of ends if they are achievable and worth the cost, of means only if they will work..."

"Conscience is the virtue of observers and not agents of action"

He says that people who pile up heaps of discussion and literature concerning the ethics of means and ends rarely write about their own struggles with life and change. "They can be recognized by one of two verbal brands: 'we agree with the ends but not the means," or 'this is not the time'. The means and ends moralists or non doers always end up on their ends without any means"

Rules:

1) One's concerns with ends and means varies inversely with one's personal interest in the issue... One's concerns with the ethics of means and ends varies inversely with one's distance from the scene of conflict.

2) The judgement of the ethics of means and ends is dependent upon the political position of those sitting in judgement

[Alinsky follows with a passage about the Nazi occupiers of France and the French resistance essentially stating "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter". He also cites our founding fathers and the Declaration of Independence as dwelling on the wrongs but not benefits derived from the British Empire - on the one side the omission of the good was justified, on the other it was deceit. Most examples in this chapter are long winded.]

"History is made up on "moral" judgements based on politics".

[Alinsky launches into a discussion of temporary convenience of the moment concerning allies and enemies, essentially "the enemy of my enemy is my friend", but the former enemy is a "friend" only until the mutual enemy has been vanquished then the "friends" revert back to being enemies. The example is the relationship between the Soviets and the United States before, during and after WWII]

3) In war the end justifies almost any means.

[Alinsky discusses Churchill cozying up to the Soviet Union against the Nazis, and Abraham Lincoln's extra-legal executive decision establishing military tribunals to judge anti-Union instigators civil courts couldn't touch: "must I shoot a simple minded soldier boy who deserts, while I must not touch a hair of a wily agitator who induces him to desert..."]

4) The ethics of means and ends must be made in the context of the times in which the action occurred and not from any other chronological vantage point.

[Alinsky says that by today's ethics we may now agree with the British of the Revolutionary war that there may have been some underhanded propaganda set ups and other propagandistic dirty tricks by the colonial revolutionaries but we must remember that we are no longer involved in a revolution against the British empire (concerning judgements we may render over two hundred years later). He contrasts our traditional position of freedom of the high seas (cites 1812 and 1917) with the 1962 blockade of Cuba. Numerous further examples.]

5) The concern with ethics increases with the number of means available and vice versa.

[Alinsky describes an attempt to blackmail him concerning sex with a woman not his spouse but the plot failed because Alinsky said to go ahead and make the information public because he likes women and he's not embarrassed about the tryst. Someone then came to Alinsky with with evidence of pedophilia against the original blackmailer but Alinsky rejected using the material to neutralize the opponent. However, if he were losing his objective he would have nuked the blackmailer with it.]

6) The less important the end to be desired, the more one can afford to engage in ethical evaluation of means.

7) Generally success or failure is a mighty determinant of ethics.

"The judgement of history... spells the difference between the traitor and the patriotic hero. There can be no such thing as a successful traitor, for if one succeeds he becomes a founding father.

8) The morality of a means depends on whether the means is being employed at a time of imminent defeat or imminent victory.

[Alinsky describes his long winded belief that using the nuclear bomb on Japan was immoral because Japan was essentially defeated.
**My take is that the Japanese were not defeated, that they would have continued to fight until every last one of them died and that (as a result of the bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima) Emperor Hirohito saved his people by commanding them to stop fighting. Those Japanese officers signing the war's end on the deck of the USS Missouri were not afraid of American military power and neither were the general population - the bombings saved many more total sum Japanese and American lives than they cost.]

9] Any effective means is automatically judged by the opposition as being unethical.

10) You do what you can with what you have and clothe it with moral garments.

[Long, long, long discussion that if Ghandi had access to firearms and the Indian population were not so passive, the break from Britain would have been a bloody one. After the British left, the new Indian government did much of what was previously stated (before independence) to be objectionable by the colonial empire to their own people. Some discussion about the impossibility of the American civil rights movement being both violent and successful.
** My take on Cesar Chavez and his labor movement (not mentioned by Alinsky): Chavez made the personally unpalatable choice to call in the Border Patrol on the illegals the employers used as strike breakers because that was the means beyond striking to achieve the end of forcing labor concessions from agricultural employers. The employers had and still use oversupply of labor in the form of illegal workers as a means to the end of avoiding labor concessions. Chavez used the morality of "economic justice", the employers used the morality of "reasonably priced produce at the market while making a 'reasonable' profit", because in self interest consumers are only going to pay so much while it is in the employer's self interest to milk all possible profit out of a product. In the end it's all about the self interest of who pockets what proportion of the cash among labor, employers and consumers - morality argument is a justification of a means to an end.]

"All effective actions require the passport of morality".

11) Goals must be phrased in general terms like "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity", "Of the common welfare", "Pursuit of happiness", or "Bread and Peace".

"The goal once named cannot be countermanded".

"...frequently in the stream of action of means towards ends, whole new and unexpected ends are among the major results of the actions. From a Civil War fought as a means to preserve the Union came the end of slavery."

To be continued...