Democrats, slavery, Irish, and Indians

[ilbegone]

Addendum to the previous post:

I've always been somewhat interested in history and became more interested since about 2005 with all the marches, rallies and the media running to self appointed, racist Latino spokesmen for a whole race (regardless of nationality and individuality) for pulp fodder. It was a lopsided media narrative with all "the borders crossed us", "stolen lands", and "nativist bigots" rhetoric. If the same standards of "journalism" were applied to 19th century western expansion Sitting Bull would have been a xenophobic, nativist race hater rather than a currently perceived noble defender of his territory and way of life.

I try to get past cultural legend to find the truth within its setting.

For example, during my childhood there were all the books, movies, and stories about the 19th century frontier filled with adulation of western bound people and a picture of the times which was romanticized and populated with heroes instead of regular people who had characters which were both faulty and extraordinary.

There is no perfect person.

The same is true of the general Mexican cultural version of history.

Jim Bowie was a hero of Santa Anna's Alamo massacre, an American cultural freedom fighter who's popular story blurred place and time in cultural legend. Jim Bowie of fact not only died in the ridiculous (maybe even stupid) defense of a cut off, isolated, non stratigic location (which Santa Anna could have bypassed and easily achieved victory) but was also a slave smuggling, land speculating drunkard who sometimes dispensed fraudulent land titles and who had no qualms about bribing the court. Bowie had both American and Mexican citizenship and was fluent in Spanish. And, the Alamo of the period was in Mexico until the beaten down revolution was won by a fluke - exploitation of an overconfident Santa Anna and his army sleeping in at San Jacinto. And, most of the fighting participation was done with a minority of the population.

Davy Crockett was a story telling failed eastern politician who came to Texas to reinvent himself, something different than the tales I absorbed as a child. The frontiersman schtick was largely a political gimmick employed back east (he did hunt and trap and had other woodland skills, nothing unusual for the times) and which subsequently became a major part of his legend.

Not all Anglos in Texas were for independence from Mexico, and there were Mexican Tejanos who fought alongside Sam Houston. Things were a lot more complicated than "us versus them" 180 years ago. There wasn't anything mentioned about the 1824 Mexican constitution or Mexican centralists and liberals when I was a kid. It's not a black and white tale either way

On the other hand, Pancho Villa is a Mexican hero with all the corridos, tales, and all the exaggeration of greatness to be expected from a national figure. The Villa of fact was a bipolar mass murderer who knew how to butter his bread with his base - until the butter ran out, his base abandoned him, and he turned on the base. He loved children and, being illiterate himself, sought to provide education. He was a curious mixture of generosity and malevolence. The man was an inveterate woman chaser and arranged a number of fraudulent marriages - which caused a lot of confusion and fighting after his death over who truly was his real wife. And, he could never learn that cavalry charges were futile against machine guns behind barbed wire.

Both Bowie and Villa would be rotting in jail if they were from our time in America and did the same things now.

I do a lot of reading and compare for similarities and differences of accounts. Naturally the writings of Californios Osio, Sepulveda, and Vallejo will have a general view which might be quite different than Fremont and Stanton's views. However, there will be some differences in the accounts of the Californios and one might fill in an unexplained part of another account. An individual account might not discuss something which might be embarrassing or maybe change the facts of an event. That's natural and to be expected of most eyewitnesses, and some parts of the accounts will be contradictory. And would the accounts be somewhat different if they had been written before and not, in some cases, decades after the Mexican American war?

I like professor David Weber's books on the Spanish and Mexican northern frontiers. The forwards and conclusions (to me) support the Chicano movimiento, but the pages in between contradict many of the fables and spins any number of ethnic studies professors throw out.

If someone talks about Mexicans herding cattle in Oregon before 1848 it's a false statement, didn't happen, and it casts suspicion on the work. Professor George Sanchez' book Becoming Mexican American seems to be an honest work - it's chock full of dry statistics and contains the priceless statement that when Mexicans moved into Los Angeles, the Californios moved out.

I don't think that many Mexican historians address the northern frontier much beyond the cultural grievances because it is such a black eye to the Mexican national consciousness.

I've gotten to where I read the notes of a book. I've found that some cherry pick their citations out of context to support their work, and I've seen one who extensively cites his own previous writings to support statements. A book I no longer have (written by a professor with a northern European surname) dishonestly alleges that racism was the founding principal in everything Anglo Americans accomplished or sought to accomplish from the Pilgrims to the present. It seems every other word in the book was either "racist" or "racism".

They say that to plagiarize from one is stealing, but to steal from many is called research.

A lot of books are biased either way. I do the best I can to sort through it all to reach a reasonable conclusion, and it isn't always comfortable to my previous beliefs. It seems that the more I learn, the more questions there are. It was much easier watching Fess Parker play Davy Crockett on that old snowy black and white TV you had to thump on every now and then to make it work.

[Jeanfromfillmore]

Originally Posted by ilbegone

Addendum to the previous post:

I've always been somewhat interested in history and became more interested since about 2005 with all the marches, rallies and the media running to self appointed, racist Latino spokesmen for a whole race (regardless of nationality and individuality) for pulp fodder. It was a lopsided media narrative with all "the borders crossed us", "stolen lands", and "nativist bigots" rhetoric. If the same standards of "journalism" were applied to 19th century western expansion Sitting Bull would have been a xenophobic, nativist race hater rather than a currently perceived noble defender of his territory and way of life.

I try to get past cultural legend to find the truth within its setting.

For example, during my childhood there were all the books, movies, and stories about the 19th century frontier filled with adulation of western bound people and a picture of the times which was romanticized and populated with heroes instead of regular people who had characters which were both faulty and extraordinary.

There is no perfect person.

The same is true of the general Mexican cultural version of history.

Jim Bowie was a hero of Santa Anna's Alamo massacre, an American cultural freedom fighter who's popular story blurred place and time in cultural legend. Jim Bowie of fact not only died in the ridiculous (maybe even stupid) defense of a cut off, isolated, non stratigic location (which Santa Anna could have bypassed and easily achieved victory) but was also a slave smuggling, land speculating drunkard who sometimes dispensed fraudulent land titles and who had no qualms about bribing the court. Bowie had both American and Mexican citizenship and was fluent in Spanish. And, the Alamo of the period was in Mexico until the beaten down revolution was won by a fluke - exploitation of an overconfident Santa Anna and his army sleeping in at San Jacinto. And, most of the fighting participation was done with a minority of the population.

Davy Crockett was a story telling failed eastern politician who came to Texas to reinvent himself, something different than the tales I absorbed as a child. The frontiersman schtick was largely a political gimmick employed back east (he did hunt and trap and had other woodland skills, nothing unusual for the times) and which subsequently became a major part of his legend.

Not all Anglos in Texas were for independence from Mexico, and there were Mexican Tejanos who fought alongside Sam Houston. Things were a lot more complicated than "us versus them" 180 years ago. There wasn't anything mentioned about the 1824 Mexican constitution or Mexican centralists and liberals when I was a kid. It's not a black and white tale either way

On the other hand, Pancho Villa is a Mexican hero with all the corridos, tales, and all the exaggeration of greatness to be expected from a national figure. The Villa of fact was a bipolar mass murderer who knew how to butter his bread with his base - until the butter ran out, his base abandoned him, and he turned on the base. He loved children and, being illiterate himself, sought to provide education. He was a curious mixture of generosity and malevolence. The man was an inveterate woman chaser and arranged a number of fraudulent marriages - which caused a lot of confusion and fighting after his death over who truly was his real wife. And, he could never learn that cavalry charges were futile against machine guns behind barbed wire.

Both Bowie and Villa would be rotting in jail if they were from our time in America and did the same things now.

I do a lot of reading and compare for similarities and differences of accounts. Naturally the writings of Californios Osio, Sepulveda, and Vallejo will have a general view which might be quite different than Fremont and Stanton's views. However, there will be some differences in the accounts of the Californios and one might fill in an unexplained part of another account. An individual account might not discuss something which might be embarrassing or maybe change the facts of an event. That's natural and to be expected of most eyewitnesses, and some parts of the accounts will be contradictory. And would the accounts be somewhat different if they had been written before and not, in some cases, decades after the Mexican American war?

I like professor David Weber's books on the Spanish and Mexican northern frontiers. The forwards and conclusions (to me) support the Chicano movimiento, but the pages in between contradict many of the fables and spins any number of ethnic studies professors throw out.

If someone talks about Mexicans herding cattle in Oregon before 1848 it's a false statement, didn't happen, and it casts suspicion on the work. Professor George Sanchez' book Becoming Mexican American seems to be an honest work - it's chock full of dry statistics and contains the priceless statement that when Mexicans moved into Los Angeles, the Californios moved out.

I don't think that many Mexican historians address the northern frontier much beyond the cultural grievances because it is such a black eye to the Mexican national consciousness.

I've gotten to where I read the notes of a book. I've found that some cherry pick their citations out of context to support their work, and I've seen one who extensively cites his own previous writings to support statements. A book I no longer have (written by a professor with a northern European surname) dishonestly alleges that racism was the founding principal in everything Anglo Americans accomplished or sought to accomplish from the Pilgrims to the present. It seems every other word in the book was either "racist" or "racism".

They say that to plagiarize from one is stealing, but to steal from many is called research.

A lot of books are biased either way. I do the best I can to sort through it all to reach a reasonable conclusion, and it isn't always comfortable to my previous beliefs. It seems that the more I learn, the more questions there are. It was much easier watching Fess Parker play Davy Crockett on that old snowy black and white TV you had to thump on every now and then to make it work.

"They say that to plagiarize from one is stealing, but to steal from many is called research"(quote)

Now that was funny!!!!

[ilbegone]

Another post on the whim of the moment, what results from baggage people from other nations bring with them. Might ramble a little ... but there's a point.

There are plenty of examples in America from the very beginnings of English colonialism to a couple of centuries after independence. For example, consider the San Patricios - Irish immigrants who deserted the American Army to fight on Mexico's side during the Mexican American war. I believe the desertion had more to with the fact that America was founded on English Protestant dissident values while Ireland was a Catholic Island. There had been centuries of blood spilled between Irish and English, including massacres perpetrated by both sides, before there was potential invasion of England from Ireland founded on a pact between Irish Catholics and English royalists after the English Civil War. Puritan Oliver Cromwell wielded a heavy protestant hand in a 1649 invasion of Catholic Ireland killing non combatants as well as executing captured prisoners.

Protestant America was engaged in war with Catholic Mexico in 1846 and Irish immigrants who had no loyalty to Anglo America switched sides. Irish Catholic nationalism and cultural memory much more than any number of exaggerated tales of fire breathing atrocity spun by modern Hollywood screen writers was primarily the reason for Irish immigrant desertion.

Which brings me to modern America.

A woman who was born into the upper class in El Salvador has a last memory of El Salvador of their house being bombed and the family fleeing to the United States when she was about 11 years old.

The woman is now middle aged, has a lucrative income, is much more familiar with Pinot Noir than Pupusas, and is very Americanized. Her uneducated and ignorant yet high class El Salvadoran mother lives with her.

They have a maid from El Salvador who is from the bottom class. The mother runs roughshod arrogant over the maid, treating her like shit. The maid, used to being treated like shit in El Salvador takes it. Often, while "mom" is finding something more for the maid to do, the daughter will send the maid home for having done enough to clean the house.

The maid likes to graze while cleaning and found the daughter's stashed marijuana cookies, secretively eating 13 when two will do (maid didn't know what they were and thirteen were missing from the hidden stash) before she left. The next time the maid came back she talked about losing her brains on the way home from the last visit and had been to a curando who blew smoke on her and gave her a magic hat to keep her brains from flying out of her head. She wears that hat everywhere she goes, might even wear it while she's sleeping.

The daughter, having had access to money and education, is American. The maid's children, who will probably grow up in relative poverty and superstition, will also become Americanized to a great degree while being propagandized into class warfare (not a great leap due to parental origins) and have a "Latino" political consciousness drummed into their heads by an American educational system co-opted by "diversity". Note that people who are described as "Latino" (without regard to personal national origin) have the highest drop out rate as a group.

Last night I asked a kindergartener what she was learning in school. She counted to twenty in Spanish, recited the tens to cien, and sang a couple of songs in Spanish. Her family hasn't spoken Spanish in the home for four generations. This little girl is like a grand daughter to me, what is her future?

I am somehow reminded of the City of Bell scandal. The city is crammed full of people born in Latin America who are used to being fleeced and taken advantage of by politically corrupt governments, there is no other political system where they come from. Until outsiders intervened, the City council and city administrators siphoned off millions of dollars while perpetrating voter fraud and all the rest. It was primarily possible by baggage the city of immigrants brought with them.

Now consider that "the path to citizenship" leads directly to Democrat voter registration without having to know much if anything at all about American democracy, American history, America itself, or even the English language.

[Jeanfromfillmore]

Originally Posted by ilbegone

Another post on the whim of the moment, what results from baggage people from other nations bring with them. Might ramble a little ... but there's a point.

There are plenty of examples in America from the very beginnings of English colonialism to a couple of centuries after independence. For example, consider the San Patricios - Irish immigrants who deserted the American Army to fight on Mexico's side during the Mexican American war. I believe the desertion had more to with the fact that America was founded on English Protestant dissident values while Ireland was a Catholic Island. There had been centuries of blood spilled between Irish and English, including massacres perpetrated by both sides, before there was potential invasion of England from Ireland founded on a pact between Irish Catholics and English royalists after the English Civil War. Puritan Oliver Cromwell wielded a heavy protestant hand in a 1649 invasion of Catholic Ireland killing non combatants as well as executing captured prisoners.

Protestant America was engaged in war with Catholic Mexico in 1846 and Irish immigrants who had no loyalty to Anglo America switched sides. Irish Catholic nationalism and cultural memory much more than any number of exaggerated tales of fire breathing atrocity spun by modern Hollywood screen writers was primarily the reason for Irish immigrant desertion.

Which brings me to modern America.

A woman who was born into the upper class in El Salvador has a last memory of El Salvador of their house being bombed and the family fleeing to the United States when she was about 11 years old.

The woman is now middle aged, has a lucrative income, is much more familiar with Pinot Noir than Pupusas, and is very Americanized. Her uneducated and ignorant yet high class El Salvadoran mother lives with her.

They have a maid from El Salvador who is from the bottom class. The mother runs roughshod arrogant over the maid, treating her like shit. The maid, used to being treated like shit in El Salvador takes it. Often, while "mom" is finding something more for the maid to do, the daughter will send the maid home for having done enough to clean the house.

The maid likes to graze while cleaning and found the daughter's stashed marijuana cookies, secretively eating 13 when two will do (maid didn't know what they were and thirteen were missing from the hidden stash) before she left. The next time the maid came back she talked about losing her brains on the way home from the last visit and had been to a curando who blew smoke on her and gave her a magic hat to keep her brains from flying out of her head. She wears that hat everywhere she goes, might even wear it while she's sleeping.

The daughter, having had access to money and education, is American. The maid's children, who will probably grow up in relative poverty and superstition, will also become Americanized to a great degree while being propagandized into class warfare (not a great leap due to parental origins) and have a "Latino" political consciousness drummed into their heads by an American educational system co-opted by "diversity". Note that people who are described as "Latino" (without regard to personal national origin) have the highest drop out rate as a group.

Last night I asked a kindergartener what she was learning in school. She counted to twenty in Spanish, recited the tens to cien, and sang a couple of songs in Spanish. Her family hasn't spoken Spanish in the home for four generations. This little girl is like a grand daughter to me, what is her future?

I am somehow reminded of the City of Bell scandal. The city is crammed full of people born in Latin America who are used to being fleeced and taken advantage of by politically corrupt governments, there is no other political system where they come from. Until outsiders intervened, the City council and city administrators siphoned off millions of dollars while perpetrating voter fraud and all the rest. It was primarily possible by baggage the city of immigrants brought with them.

Now consider that "the path to citizenship" leads directly to Democrat voter registration without having to know much if anything at all about American democracy, American history, America itself, or even the English language.

That last sentence is exactly was concerns me. Now consider that "the path to citizenship" leads directly to Democrat voter registration without having to know much if anything at all about American democracy, American history, America itself, or even the English language. And after that we are that much closer to looking like the country they tried to escape from.__________________

[ilbegone]

You know how "Latino activists" like to harp on such things as the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and other such that no one alive today had anything to do with?

Yep, just like like the blather about pre-1865 slavery in the U.S and all that hot air about slavery being outlawed in Mexico by this clause from the 1820 Plan de Iguala and the very short lived 1st Mexican Empire:

Todos los habitantes de la Nueva España, sin distinción alguna de europeos, africanos ni indios, son ciudadanos de esta monarquía con opción á todo empleo, según su mérito y virtudes.

When the truth is that inherited involuntary servitude (perpetual multi-generational peon slavery) continued on Mexican haciendas until the late 1920's. Cesar Chavez's grandfather escaped slavery from an hacienda in the 1880's by fleeing to the United States. There were continued slave raids on northern frontier Indian tribes for the southern Mexican "domestic servant" trade to at least the mid 19th century.

So, it should come as no surprise that people with Chinese ancestry had a rough time in Mexico up until the mid 20th century, including deportation and splitting up families - not across a mere border, but across an ocean.

I need to look at it more and flesh it out a little better than this offering...

However...

I knew that the railroad companies were recruiting in Mexico for laborers for U.S. railway construction and maintenance during the 1880's, and I knew that the Chinese Exclusion Act was in 1882, but I didn't know that American railroad builders took Chinese into Mexico to work on railway construction and in American owned mines in Mexico beginning in the 1880's. It all fits into the puzzle - Chinese imported from the U.S. and China to Mexico and Mexicans into the U.S. where they had never geographically been before.

I also knew about some of the race hatred towards Chinese in Mexico, but not much beyond a couple of local family anecdotes and some documentation concerning Chihuahua. However, I had no idea of why any Chinese would ever go to Mexico, of all places.

There was a lot of resentment in Mexico over the presence of foreign labor, and it appears that what happened to Chinese in California in the mid to late 19th century also happened with more vehemence to Chinese in the late 19th to the early to mid 20th century in Mexico. There was a lot of murdering of Mexican Chinese during the 1910 Mexican revolution, with Pancho Villa's bunch probably the most sanguinary, I think they killed every Chinaman they found. I believe this had not just to do with taking jobs from the locals, but suspicion about those who, in a land of rich and poor with no one in between, moved from foreign laborer to prosperous foreign merchant in a relatively short period of time.

Then there were the mass deportations where almost 3/4 of the Mexican population of Chinese, their Mexican wives, and their mixed Mexican/Chinese children were simply dumped across the northern border (with a U.S. re-deportation to China) or directly put on ships headed from Mexico to China. Some of these deportations were as late as the 1930's.

There was eventually some repatriation of the Mexican women and their mixed children, but those of unmixed Chinese blood were not allowed to return (I believe this to also be true for native born Mexican Chinese, but there would probably be few of those - Just like in the United States they generally didn't bring women with them, which in the United States begat a trade in Chinese prostitutes - unless they were the children of Chinese prostitutes also brought to Mexico. There was 50 to 70 years of this stuff).


An article I found just now Chinese-Mexicans celebrate repatriation to Mexico http://news.yahoo.com/chinese-mexica...064302534.html

A review on a book titled “The Chinese in Mexico, 1882-1940” I'm going to order has these statements:

...“There’s this rich history of the Chinese in Mexico that’s been forgotten for the most part,”...“It’s been forgotten because it’s a dark chapter in Mexican history, unfortunately.”...


...“Despite the violence perpetuated against Chinese immigrants, they continued to persevere and have contributed to Mexico’s diversity,” Romero said. “It is a great testament to their courage and will to survive in spite of great adversity and prejudice against them.”...


...Maderista forces entered Torreón on May 13, 1911, and two days later, they defeated the Mexican army. On May 15, Madero’s forces and civilian mobs targeted Chinese homes and businesses.

Many Chinese residents were killed and robbed. Their private residences and business were ransacked and destroyed. About 300 Chinese lost their lives. Romero said that this was the worst [single] act of violence committed against any Chinese diaspora of the Americas during the 20th century...

http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla...ed-179351.aspx

Another book that might be interesting:

MAMI


by Rebeca Lau

Mami: My Grandmother’s Journey is the unconventional story of a Chinese woman in the southern border city of Tapachula in Mexico in the 20th century. Her arranged marriage, her escape from the Japanese Army, her life in a country so distant and so different from her own, her struggles and successes, her internal conflicts. It is a story that interweaves the past and present of three generations living under one roof filled with cultural clashes between Chinese and Mexican traditions.

Rebeca Lau

Another one:

Chinese Mexicans: Transpacific Migration and the Search for a Homeland, 1910-1960

At the turn of the twentieth century, a wave of Chinese men made their way to the northern Mexican border state of Sonora to work and live. The ties--and families--these Mexicans and Chinese created led to the formation of a new cultural identity: Chinese Mexican. During the tumult of the Mexican Revolution of 1910, however, anti-Chinese sentiment ultimately led to mass expulsion of these people. Julia Maria Schiavone Camacho follows the community through the mid-twentieth century, across borders and oceans, to show how they fought for their place as Mexicans, both in Mexico and abroad.

Tracing transnational geography, Schiavone Camacho explores how these men and women developed a strong sense of Mexican national identity while living abroad—in the United States, briefly, and then in southeast Asia where they created a hybrid community and taught their children about the Mexican homeland. Schiavone Camacho also addresses how Mexican women challenged their legal status after being stripped of Mexican citizenship because they married Chinese men. After repatriation in the 1930s-1960s, Chinese Mexican men and women, who had left Mexico with strong regional identities, now claimed national cultural belonging and Mexican identity in ways they had not before.

There's another book I found about Chinese in both the U.S and Mexico but it had the cliche "vibrant community" and what appeared to be excessive race baiting rather than presentation of a study in the review (reminiscent of Howard Zinn), so it's probably a sensationalist crock of far left, frothing at the mouth ethnic studies professor, "social justice", masturbating to the mirror bullshit.

To conclude, just about anything negative about American history trotted out by "Latino activists" to make a case about long term, persistent, continuing white racism can find an equal or more negative parallel in Mexican history, and no one has to cherry pick, exaggerate, or manufacture the facts.

[ilbegone]

Since community organizer Barack Obama was influenced by master organizer and accomplished far left shit stirrer Saul Alinsky (some commentary in this thread http://saveourstate.info/showthread.php?t=8372 ) I feel it is appropriate to discuss Alinsky (b 1909? d 1972) and his methods. The methods are widely used by the far left and special interest groups aligned with the "progressive" movement (open borders, race hustlers, environmental, "social justice", etc.)

[There should probably be some future discussion concerning the historical meanings of political conservatism, liberalism, and the progressive movement's usurpation of the term "liberal"]

I will add that Alinsky commented on some (I believe sympathetic) professors who (the general gist or idea of my recollection, not an exact quote or exact circumstance) graded political science student essays on what Alinsky's motivations were - most of the professors' interpretations of Alinski were wrong according to Alinski.

So, here is my interpretation of what I read in Alinsky's 1971 book Rules for Radicals. which I have only read through once (and will study more closely), I understand a lot of which I didn't understand before. The book is in the tone of 1960's far left socialist activism. Alinski previously wrote other books and was training other organizers throughout the 1960's.

Alinsky seems to base his motivations on "social justice", to level the field concerning the "have nots" (the poor), "have some, want more" (the middle class) and "haves" (the wealthy). He justifies the tactics by his interpretation of history, that there is no such thing as a successful traitor because those traitors who successfully rebel move on to become founding fathers. A corporate officer once approached Alinsky and asked if could tone down the tactics some, Alinski replied that he would make a deal - that once corporations quit going after the jugular in their business campaigns against each other he would do the same with businesses he (Alinsky) targeted.

There is a prologue which seems to explain the need for guidance for young reformists since so many - frustrated and without a clue as how to accomplish change - seem merely to want to burn everything down. Most of the older, accomplished hands were neutralized in one form or another by 1950's McCarthyism.

The first chapter, "The Purpose", states that the book instructs "how to create mass organizations to seize power and give it to the people" (after some 50 or 60 years the result seems to seize power and deny it to the people). Alinsky says that the book is not ideological, that dogma is the enemy of freedom. Those who enshrine the poor are just as guilty as other dogmatists and just as dangerous (we could probably include "race baiters", radical environmentalism, "the separatism of 'diversity'" and so on). Alinski states he presents facts and general ideas to effect change and steps towards the science of revolution.

It seems that Alinski was motivated a great deal by his perception of poverty and racism, or maybe his theory of the causes and results of poverty and racism.

This is all I have time for now, will continue with probably several more posts,

[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...

[ilbegone]

A short diversion from Saul Alinski and the road map in his book Rules for Radicals used by community organizer Obama and a whole host of far leftists and a broad spectrum of minority racists. Besides, I'm away from home and don't have the book at hand.

Today I was in in a fairly well to do community on a hill overlooking a black slum in Los Angeles. It is west of the 110 along the line of Vernon (st, ave, blvd, what have you). The houses are spacious, and are high dollar enough I couldn't afford them on dirt cheap land. There were masses of residents jogging between 7:30 and 9:00 this morning just like any upper middle class to lower wealthy class people might do, and I didn't see any apparent low life among them - there were no bandanas, tats, color flying, no drug dealers or hookers hanging out on the corner...

It was an extremely clean, well groomed, all black community.

The only white people I know who were there today were myself, a friend, and an inspector (none who could have afforded those houses), there was construction work by three groups of Mexicans . Everyone else was black.

The point?

There are so many, like socialist race baiter Maya Wiley (from the Center of Social Inclusion - a very innocuous sounding name for a race baiting organization - and Maya can make a simple issue such as a white person tunelessly whistling while driving down an empty road with an empty mind into a maliciously racist affair), carry on that white people leave the inner city taking all the businesses with them, which leaves black people in what becomes a slum with no employment (version of the spin here http://www.centerforsocialinclusion....cial-inequity/ ). However, not one person who can escape what is becoming or is currently a slum will fail to do so, doesn't matter the color of the escapee. If the ghetto below begins encroaching on the wealthy black community on the hill, those black people on the hill will pack their wagons, hitch up and get the hell out of Dodge just as fast or faster than any white flight to the suburbs.

Check out CIS http://www.centerforsocialinclusion.org/

A biting 2012 opinion piece by Matthew Vadum incredibly published in the Washington Times:

A George Soros-funded pressure group is behind a new drive to teach Democratic congressmen how to smear their opponents as racist.

Last week House Democrats were tutored by the radical, left-wing, racial spoils group known as the Center for Social Inclusion. The group was brought in “to address the issue of race to defend government programs,” Joel Gehrke reported in the Washington Examiner...

...Facts don’t matter in Ms. Wiley’s estimation. “It’s emotional connection, not rational connection that we need,” she said...

...The Center for Social Inclusion is caught up in the toxic brew of Marxism coupled with identity politics. This pabulum that passes for serious thought on the nation’s university campuses holds that America is a morally depraved, structurally racist country that systematically oppresses everyone who is not Caucasian...

...The Center for Social Inclusion may also be hiding something. The group’s tax returns, which are supposed to be publicly available at the GuideStar disclosure website, are not available. This is highly irregular at least and a violation of federal law at worst [where's the IRS?]

It has long been axiomatic that when liberals are fretting about possibly losing power they scream “racist!” repeatedly at the top of their lungs as if sheer repetition of the smear will somehow make it true.

But teaching sitting representatives of the people whose salaries are paid by the taxpayers how to deploy malicious slanders to shut down open debate over government spending is surely a new low...

Full column http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/...the-race-card/

A much wealthier black guy (Russell Simmons) than those living on the hill above the slum who hosted one of Maya Wiley's "Race in American" events in his Beverly Hills home and who also seems to prefer that taxes are increased for everyone else in lieu of giving away his fortune to help thos in need http://www.centerforsocialinclusion....ly-hills-home/

Russell Simmons http://www.biography.com/people/russell-simmons-307186

[ilbegone]

To continue from posts 46 and 47 concerning Saul Alinsky and his book Rules for Radicals...

I haven cracked the book open again yet, nor do I now feel like writing a full fledged book report. However:

Further along in the book, Alinsky says that there have to be polarization to achieve goals for community change, that there has to be hatred. You can't on the one hand call a school district superintendent a "racist bastard" on the one hand, then describe him as a decent family man and good neighbor on the other. The horns, hooves, tail, lizard tongue, evil leer, and the devil's trident all have to be painted into the picture. In other words, completely dehumanized.

That is probably a large part of why we just can't seem to have a respectful, two way discussion in America any more, unless it's among people who just happen to 100% agree among themselves.

Also, the threat of an action is often worse in the perception of the target than the action itself. For example, to reach a goal Alinsky threatened to bring in a large number of people to clog up the restrooms in a busy airport. They would form perpetual lines and take up space in front of urinals and on top of toilets. Both the airport management and city hall were terrified of the vision of travelers doing the pee pee dance or crapping their pants in public and caved without a fight. Could Alinsky have pulled off the stunt if City Hall gave him the finger? We'll never know, and Alinsky won without a fight.

Alinsky says it's a mistake see his books as a linear guide as to what to do next, that every situation is different and requires its own tactic. Which seems to exclude the trump card "YOU'RE A RACIST!!!". Thank god that card is wearing out, maybe soon even the believers might be saying "Bah!" due to blanket overuse for about 60 years.

The book is an eye opener, and led me to understand much more about the political arena and "community activist" race baiters than I did before.

[Jeanfromfillmore]

Thank you so much for posting these insights to that book. It really gives an understanding to much of what is happening.