Democrats, slavery, Irish, and Indians

[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.

[ilbegone]

Originally Posted by Jeanfromfillmore

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

You're more than welcome.

I think that smearing, slandering, redirection, and clever (and not so clever) propaganda have worked the most.

I kept thinking about Alinsky's airport scenario where the threat was to clog up the restrooms and the statement that often the threat of an action is often worse than the action itself...

If the authorities had been quiet and Alinsky decided to go beyond bluff and bluster, innocent travelers would have been targeted instead of city hall and if the source of the disturbance became known, I believe it would have been counterproductive to Alinsky's goal.

Consider the knuckleheads who blocked "rush hour" traffic on Wilshire Blvd a couple of years ago to lobby for amnesty. All they did was piss off people who may not have been all that sympathetic to begin with.

Or the "Day without a Mexican", May Day", "Mexican labor day" (about 2008?) where the proponents ditched work and school and joined Mexican flag waving marches. There was a huge backlash on that one, from people who were fired to boycott of businesses who supported it.

The kids who were wanting to make a pro amnesty statement by hiking from Sacramento to Bakersfield a few months ago http://saveourstate.info/showthread.php?t=8263. They disappeared from the public radar quicker than a small fart in a brisk wind.

The clowns not too long ago who insultingly disrupted a governmental meeting, were tossed out, then considered themselves to have conducted "civil disobedience" on the scale of Rosa Parks. All they did was piss off the crowd they disrespected with no personal cost to themselves.

For some reason, they have traditionally had much more success in getting concessions from the educational infrastructure, particularly university level. Rather than having trespassers "occupying" buildings and grounds arrested and prosecuted in addition to expelling them, the various administrations caved. Currently students are now propagandized by the school systems.

The 1968 LAUSD Chicano walk outs are considered to be a great success by those who either directly participated or nostalgically rifle through shoe boxes full of yellowed newspaper clippings from the old school Chicano Movement glory days. However, all it did was to change the racial composition of the LAUSD school board from an exclusively white male board to nearly all Latina members - after more than 40 years the dismal Latino LAUSD graduation rate and educational underachievement remains about the same. In fact, those school board Latinas are now fighting amongst themselves over just whose campuses get what portion of the LAUSD financial pie with no progress on the education front.

[A thread of commentary about the 1968 walkout, drop out rates, LAUSD school board, LA Raza Unida takeover of the school system in Zavala county Texas, education in America, victimization claim, activism, etc here http://www.fightbackinsac.com/forums...ad.php?t=2788]

So, smearing, slandering, redirection, disinformation and fomenting racial polarization while working within the political structure is the avenue which has paid off from minority racist agenda to numerous incredible events within Obama's presidency.

[ilbegone]

After reading a number of books concerning colonial America and period English history (including the contemporary and difficult to read - for me - Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith) I become increasingly convinced that the Revolutionary war was as much about money as it was about English notions of personal liberty being asserted in the colonies (the American Bill of Rights seems to be a partial restatement of the 1689 English bill of rights http://www.constitution.org/bor/eng_bor.htm)

King George III had a professional army built up from the French wars he wanted to keep, yet it was not his right to keep a standing army in England in time of peace. So, much of it wound up originally in the western parts of the colonies. George needed to pay his soldiers (Stamp Act of 1765) as well as recoup the expense of the American part of the Franco / British 7 years war (known in America as the French and Indian war). Thus the various successive and progressively harsh tax schemes and increasingly punitive collection measures which so enraged the American colonists.

George Washington was a tobacco farmer and land speculator. The British mercantile monopoly on colonial trade squeezed tobacco farmers to sell low then saddled them with high interest rate loans. The Crown desired that colonization move towards Canada and Florida rather than west, which was the direction preferred by the rowdy, late arriving border peoples (Sots-Irish) from northern Ireland, southern Scotland and northern England. So, the British soldiers were originally stationed west of the Appalachian ridge in a futile attempt to stem the western tide. The Scots - Irish tended to squat wherever they pleased in the west (and return after being burned out by British soldiers or Indians) and British policy frustrated seaboard based land speculation.

The various import taxes (such as the molasses and sugar acts) combined with British trade monopoly led to smuggling. John Hancock, the man who signed his name so large on the Declaration of Independence so that King George wouldn't have to wear glasses to read the signature, was a smuggler who had at least one warrant out for his arrest. One British response to colonial smuggling was the infamous use of Writs of Assistance, which were perpetual, blanket search warrants which allowed British investigators to rifle and sift through whole neighborhoods and towns in order to find either contraband or evidence of smuggling via written records. Hence the 4th amendment concerning unreasonable search and seizure.

And, since no American court would convict a smuggler, the British began packing up suspects to be tried in England, therefore the American right trial in front of a jury of one's peers.

The list goes on and on.

The Mexican War of Independence was set off by the inept revolutionary priest Miguel Hidalgo, who read books banned by the Inquisition and was incensed by the Spanish authority which uprooted his olive trees, grape vines, and mulberry trees (leaves to feed silk worms). Spanish monopoly insisted that the Spanish colonies buy high priced olive oil, wine, and silk from the Royal monopoly on trade.

I'm not sure, but I think the French Revolution originally had to do with peasants being excessively taxed to refill a treasury depleted by a number of wars with England. The unrest was usurped by and turned into The Terror of the French Revolution by Robespierre and his henchmen, who eventually succumbed to the guillotine themselves. The Revolution eventually became the immensely destructive Napoleonic wars.

What sort of unrest did Lenin exploit in Czarist Russia? Did it originally have to do with economic grievances rather than Marxist dogma? I'll eventually check it out...

[ilbegone]

Great Ferguson video, it speaks the inconvenient truth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5f0mVn0HH6U