Thursday, July 3, 2014 Myths About Saul Alinsk

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Thursday, July 3, 2014

Myths About Saul Alinsky (and Obama)

http://therealtruthproject.blogspot.com/2014/...obama.html

Lately, right wing sources have been circulating a fictitious set of 8 "levels of control" or "How to create a social state" that Saul Alinsky was supposed to have written, which led off with
1) Healthcare – Control healthcare and you control the people

This myth is so thoroughly digested and accepted that answers.yahoo.com will spit it out as the answer to "What are the 8 levels of control as outlined by Saul Alinsky?" (last time checked: 2014-08-18).
Yet is very easily shown to be a total fiction.

Alinsky has been dead for over 40 years, yet the phoney connection between Alinsky and his supposed "How to create a social state" only appears on web pages from 2013 on, which probably means it is scuttlebutt generated for the post-election renewal of the war on Obama.

If you Google { alinsky "Control healthcare and you control the people" }
with a custom date range 1/1/2000-1/1/2013 you get 9 hits which all seem to not really be that old; but an unrestricted search gives 85,600 results (note that Google gives different results for different people based on their records of what you've shown interest in -- so your mileage may vary)

So, apparently nobody ever heard of Alinsky saying "Control healthcare and you control the people" before 2013, though he's been dead since 1972.

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The above-quoted list of steps for "How to create a social state" is another example of a political attempt to tie the names of Saul Alinsky with those of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. But the list is not something taken from the actual writings of Saul Alinsky, nor does it even sound like something he would have written (e.g., the line about "controlling health care" is anachronistic for his era, and the idea of "increasing the poverty level as high as possible" is the very antithesis of what Alinsky worked to achieve). This list is simply a modern variant of the decades-old, apocryphal Communist Rules for Revolution piece that was originally passed along without attribution until Alinsky's name became attached to it (presumably because someone out there thought it sounded like something Alinsky might have written).

Critics of President Barack Obama (who also worked as a community organizer in Chicago prior to embarking on his political career) have often linked his name with that of Saul Alinsky, sometimes in ways that suggest the two men knew each other and worked together. However, they never even met: Alinsky died of a heart attack in 1972, when Barack

Obama was but a ten-year-old child living in Hawaii. Another prominent Democrat, former senator and secretary of state Hillary Clinton, has been linked with Alinsky because she wrote her senior thesis on the topic of "An Analysis of the Alinsky Model" while she was a student at Wellesley College in 1969.

The closest analog (in form, if not in content) to the above-reproduced list of "How to create a social state" to be found in the writings of Saul Alinsky is the following list of "power tactics" Alinsky outlined in his 1971 book Rules for Radicals. Note that Alinsky's list is devoted solely to tactics (i.e., methods for accomplishing goals) and does not specify any particular targets of those tactics (e.g., health care, religion, gun control):

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