The Divisive Hillary Clinton Miasma Campaign Against Barack Obama as Alinsky Radicalism, described in Hillary Clinton's Senior Thesis About Alinsky
Did you know that the polarizing divisiveness that Hillary Clinton engenders is intentional by design as a potent political offensive weapon, and predicted by her senior thesis at Wellesley College? That thesis as a searchable PDF is found at GOPublius and we comment on it extensively below. Read on....
It was only mildly surprising for this observer to see the majority of Democratic Party voters in Texas, Ohio and Rhode Island honor and support the divisive campaign of personal attacks run by the Hillary Clinton against Barack Obama, who for his part remained gentlemanly and true to his proclaimed direction of trying to be a uniting rather than a divisive force for the country and for the world, a strategy which surely cost him many votes.
In spite of the yesterday results, Obama still leads in delegates, so that we can expect all-out warfare until the actual nomination.
The campaign will now get dirtier than ever before, given the success that the Hillary Clinton mud machine just had with its divisive tactics among the Democratic Party voters in Texas, Ohio and Rhode Island. But there is method in this madness, as you will read below, which goes back to Hillary Clinton's formative years and to her political mentor Saul Alinsky.
The Wikipedia writes about Hillary Diane Rodham, now Clinton:
As a student at Wellesley she wrote "her senior thesis about the tactics of radical community organizer Saul Alinsky under Professor Schechter (which, years later while she was First Lady, was suppressed at the request of the White House and became the subject of speculation as to its contents)."
We quote from the Wikipedia:
"In 1969, Hillary Rodham wrote a 92-page senior thesis for Wellesley College entitled "There Is Only The Fight…": An Analysis of the Alinsky Model. The subject was famed radical community organizer Saul Alinsky. Rodham, an honors student at Wellesley, received an A grade on the thesis. The work then went unnoticed until Hillary Rodham Clinton entered the White House as First Lady. Clinton researchers and political opponents sought out the thesis, thinking it contained evidence that Rodham had held strong radical or socialist views.
In early 1993, the White House requested that Wellesley not release the thesis to anyone. Wellesley complied, instituting a new rule that closed access to the thesis of any sitting U.S. president or First Lady, a rule that in practice applied only to Rodham. Clinton critics and several biographers seized upon this action as a sure sign that the thesis held politically explosive contents that would reveal her radicalism or extremism. Hostile Clinton biographer Barbara Olson wrote in 1999 that Clinton "does not want the American people to know the extent to which she internalized and assimilated the beliefs and methods of Saul Alinsky." In her 2003 memoirs, Clinton mentioned the thesis only briefly, saying she had agreed with some of Alinsky's ideas....
The suppression of the thesis from 1993 to 2001 at the request of the Clinton White House was documented in March 2007 by MSNBC.com investigative reporter Bill Dedman, who read the thesis at the Wellesley library.... A Boston Globe assessment found the thesis nuanced, and said that "While [Rodham] defends Alinsky, she is also dispassionate, disappointed, and amused by his divisive methods and dogmatic ideology."Rodham's former professor and thesis adviser Alan Schechter told MSNBC.com that "There Is Only The Fight…" was a good thesis, and that its suppression by the Clinton White House "was a stupid political decision, obviously, at the time."" [emphasis added]
In his Rules for Radicals, Saul Alinsky wrote:
"[The Russian] Dostoevsky said that taking a new step is what people fear most. Any revolutionary change must be preceded by a passive, affirmative, non-challenging attitude toward change among the mass of our people. They must feel so frustrated, so defeated, so lost, so futureless in the prevailing system that they are willing to let go of the past and change the future. This acceptance is the reformation essential to any revolution. To bring on this reformation requires that the organizer work inside the system, among not only the middle class but the 40 per cent of American families - more than seventy million people - whose income range from $5,000 to $10,000 a year [in 1971].... If we fail to communicate with them, if we don't encourage them to form alliances with us, they will move to the right. Maybe they will anyway, but let's not let it happen by default.."Alinsky's political approach, which Alinsky ascribed to his major in archaeology, a discipline which he said required imagination [because the facts are few], brings to mind the similar ideas of the Communist political philosopher Leon Trotsky in establishing the proletariat as the ruling class. Later a student of criminology, Alinsky attached himself to the infamous Capone gang in Chicago, and later worked in Chicago as what he himself called being a professional anti-fascist. His first book was Reveille for Radicals and Alinsky was of the opinion that America's future rested with radicals. Hillary Clinton writes in her senior thesis about radicals:
"A radical is one who advocates sweeping changes in the existing laws and methods of government. These proposed changes are aimed at the roots of political problems which in Marxian terms are the attitudes and the behaviors of men....
As Alinsky learned during the FIGHT-Kodak controversy there are great numbers of middle-class Americans suffering from feelings of powerlessness. They, who control the consumer market and the voting box, are bewildered by their children and the wars fought on television screens. The middle class is fertile ground for organizing and, Alinsky thinks, radicalizing."
Hillary Clinton has internalized Alinsky's radical left theories so well that the group of Americans that Alinsky refers to above make up the majority of Hillary Clinton's voters today: middle-to-lower-class, medium-to-poorly-educated, medium-to-low-income. By comparison, and paradoxically to some degree, Barack Obama, a black, as voting analyses show, appeals to voters with a higher educational level. It is the vote of the masses that are Clinton's specialty, and that is why she won so handily in a State like Ohio, even though she and her husband through NAFTA are in fact responsible for the great job losses in that State in the first place. The lower classes do not understand that but react like trained seals to proper stimuli.
Note that Alinsky's prevailing theme was divisive methods. The Boston Globe (see above) thought quite erroneously that Clinton was merely "amused" by those methods. Amused is not the right word at all and the people at the Boston Globe must have not read this thesis very carefully. Hillary Clinton has made those divisive methods her political modus operandi.
For Alinsky, CONFLICT and NOT consensus is the key to power, a basically dialectical, Marxist idea. The leader, or organizer, says Alinsky (and we quote from Hillary's thesis):
"has an initial function of serving as an abrasive agent to rub raw the resentments of the people of the community; to fan latent hostilities of many of the people to the point of overt expressions... to provide a channel into which they can pour their frustration of the past; to create a mechanism which can drain off underlying guilt for having accepted the previous situation for so long a time.
When those who represent the status quo label you [i.e. the community organizer] as an 'agitator' they are completely correct, for that is, in one word, your function--to agitate to the point of conflict"....
In order to organize, you must first polarize."
Part of that polarization process is simple harassment, e.g. quoted from the thesis:
"the strategy of escalated demands used by FIGHT in its struggle with the city-controlled agency:
"We subjected them to constant harassment.""
Conflict is definitely the campaign method that Hillary has chosen.
Hillary concludes the thesis: "Alinsky ... considers himself a revolutionary. In a very important way he is.... If the ideals Alinsky espouses were actualized, the result would be social revolution."
It is not without reason that she (and her husband of course) had her thesis "suppressed" from public view as long as they could, as that thesis shows the germination of the way that Hillary does her political business, which is the road of CONFLICT and not of consensus, and if conflict is what the voters want, they will be getting a lot of it in weeks to come.
Other Blogs or Websites on this topic
The Captain writes there, erroneously: "On one hand, trying to determine someone's political views by reading a thesis written four decades earlier is silly."
Captain, first read the thesis and then draw your conclusions. In this case, there is a direct line from that thesis to what Clinton is doing politically today.
MSNBC - Reading Hillary Rodham's hidden thesis
As written at the Brown Daily Herald:
"A Republican consultant told MSNBC.com that Clinton's political foes could highlight that while Clinton was writing about Alinksy, Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., was a prisioner of war in Vietnam." Well, that might be pushing it.
Ethics Scoreboard - playing the ball on the wrong side of the net
Permalink : Andis Kaulins : 3/05/2008 02:05:00 PM
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