“Pick The Target, Freeze It, Personalize It, And Polarize It”

H/T Pat Dollard.

American Thinker:

By James Lewis

'Pick the Target, Freeze It, Personalize It and Polarize It.’
- Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals.

That’s what Barack Obama taught his ACORN followers in all his Community Agitator classes in Chicago.

That slogan defines mob scapegoating, of course. It is an exact prescription for whipping up mobs — by race, by gender, by ethnicity, by religion. If you want to know how to whip a mob of Pakistani Taliban fascisti to whip a young girl for flirting with a young man in public, this is exactly what you do: Pick the Target, Freeze It, Personality It, and Polarize It.

And notice that “the target” is no longer a human being. It’s an “It.” Try substituting the word “victim” for “target,” and you see how it works.

This is exactly what the Dixiecrats did to blacks in the Jim Crow South, and what President Obama does today with capitalists who run General Motors and Wall Street.

So the purported comedienne Janeane Garofolo interprets the anti-tax tea parties as obviously racist. You see, Ms. Garofolo can read minds, in spite of all the obvious decency of the tea party protesters. And Obama’s Department of Homeland Security has now pinpointed our chief terrorist danger: It’s “right-wing extremists,” including Iraq War vets coming back home.

In psychiatry, scapegoating is called “displacement of rage,” and it is often said to be a low-level defense, one that comes easily to people who are already emotionally troubled or impaired. With mature adults scapegoating doesn’t work very well — not unless you can make them into insecure wrecks by destroying their incomes, for example. That’s what happened to the German middle class in the Weimar Republic. It’s what will happen in this country if the economy fails to recover. That is why it is so vital to keep the administration from its most extreme spending plans, which could harm the economy if the Democrats in Congress are foolish enough.

Scapegoating is very simple, and very malevolent. It is the defining feature of human destructiveness. All the truly irrational actions in human history involve displaced rage. Pathological societies in the world are always torn by a search for new scapegoats.

Scapegoating is a really effective manipulation for mobs that have long ago decided that their real enemy is… anybody. Because that overwhelming feeling of rising rage matters much more than whoever is the victim of the moment. That overwhelming tension is intolerable and seeks an outlet.

For instance, the target could be the kulaks.

“Comrades! … You need to hang (hang without fail, so that the public sees) at least 100 notorious kulaks, the rich, and the bloodsuckers. … This needs to be accomplished in such a way, that people for hundreds of miles around will see, tremble, know and scream out: let’s choke and strangle those blood-sucking kulaks. …
Yours, Lenin.” (italics added)

That’s Lenin the mob leader after the Bolshevik revolution. ‘Pick the Target, Freeze It, Personalize It and Polarize It.’ The kulaks were Russian peasants who owned a couple of cows instead of just a scrawny goat like most others, and therefore provided juicy hate objects for the mob. Lenin knew how to whip up those mobs because that’s how it was done during the four centuries of Romanov rule before the Revolution. It is deeply ingrained in Russian folklore — you can see it in the opera Boris Godunov, where a pair of Orthodox priests whip up a mob to kill two Catholic priests, foreigners from Poland. That was just before 1500 AD.

Scapegoating is emotional high explosive that you can direct at will, like those fire-spewing proton packs in the movie Ghostbusters. You just ‘Pick the Target, Freeze It, Personalize It and Polarize It.’ It’s like pulling a trigger on human emotions and watching the human target get blown away. We’ve seen it ever since the Boomer Left took over the media, most recently with the abuse heaped upon George W. Bush.

Saul Alinsky was born in 1909 of Russian Jewish parents in New York City. Why was the Alinsky family living in America in 1909 rather than Minsk or Pinsk or Omsk or Chomsk? Because they fled the Russian pogroms of 1890-1910, like thousands of other Jews.

I don’t know if Alinsky’s parents were direct victims of the peasant mobs, but chances are that his aunts or uncles or grandparents must have been. I have a friend whose grandmother was knouted to death by Cossacks in Poland in the 1920’s. I don’t think her grandchildren and great-children have ever come to terms with that horror, even though they are living in the next century in America. It is a multigenerational trauma.

Horrific traumas can have that effect. In the Jim Crow South blacks were scapegoated by the very same kinds of mobs, led by the very same kinds of agitators — virtually all of them white Democrats. It seems that some blacks are still experiencing the emotional ripple-effects, decades later.

Now follow this closely: The Alinsky family fled to the United States because life was intolerable in the old country. They found safety in America. Emma Lazarus was another Jewish immigrant, who understood the difference between the Old and New World well enough. She wrote about the Statue of Liberty,

“A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.”

Emma Lazarus must have been an extraordinary woman, because her poem brims with gratitude for the New World: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…”.

That is a very different feeling than the young Saul Alinsky harbored. Little Saul must have seen the Statue of Liberty often enough on the skyline of his childhood. But he never understood it the way Emma Lazarus did. We can only wonder why, because thousands upon thousands of persecuted refugees kept flowing into New York City when he was growing up.

And then little Saul grew up and wrote Rules for Radicals, and dedicated his life to … the very same art of whipping up mobs that his parents fled from. Rules for Radicals might have been written by a medieval mob agitator; only a few words need to be changed. ‘Pick the Target, Freeze It, Personalize It and Polarize It.’ 

Substitute “heretic” or “witch” for “target” and you have all the religious persecutions in human history.

Substitute “blacks,” and you have a Dixiecrat lynch mob. Substitute “whites,” and you have all of J-Wright’s sermons at Trinity United, Chicago. It’s all the same thing. Human nature doesn’t change.

Alinsky:

“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.”

Funny thing is, Emma Lazarus thought that America was the revolution those huddled masses were looking for.

Alinsky did not write his little book of Rules against the Tsar of Russia, nor against mob demagogues in general; rather, he wrote it in a rage against free market wealth, against capitalist individualism, against the prosperous middle class and its most successful home, the United States of America. Alinsky became the hero for other agitators — people who used to call themselves “communist agitators.” Those were not shameful words when little Saul was growing up, they were proud words.

Agitare comes from the Latin word for “stirring up,” the same root as the word “activist.” A “community activist” is just a slightly different name for the old phrase “communist agitator” — one who stirs up a group, just like those old hairy demagogues in Tsarist Russia and Poland, and then in Soviet Russia, Germany, China and Cambodia, in Rwanda and Kosovo, the Punjab and Indonesia ….

Question: How is it that little Saul Alinsky, child and grandchild of victims, became the new persecutor?

Here is a strange twist of fate. Starting with the huge expansion of the US college campuses in the Sixties, Saul Alinsky’s little book went viral. Alienated middle-class kids with no personal experience of poverty or suffering — in the sense that blacks knew it in the South and the Jews and many others in Europe and Asia — they all went around with Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals in their backpacks. Radicalism became romantic.
Alienated and ignorant kids yearned to become Che Guevara and kill the capitalists. That’s how rich kids like Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn learned their theology. It’s how they became heroes in their own eyes. Such saintly people, giving their all for the poor and helpless.

Hillary Rodham complained about her authoritarian father when she was a child, and instantly on getting to Wellesley she fell for Saul Alinsky and his Rules, and became an admiring disciple of the Master of Scapegoating. Hillary’s first major political act was to join the staff of the Senate Watergate Committee, where she wrote a legal brief for the Committee on why President Richard Nixon should not, repeat not, be allowed legal counsel in his impending impeachment and trial.

‘Pick the Target, Freeze It, Personalize It and Polarize It.’

See how it works?

So the persecuted become the persecutors. Hillary the victimized child — at least in her own mind — became the really visceral hater of the Clinton White House. The black victims of mobs in the South had children and grand-children, some of whom — by no means all — became the Reverend J-Wright, or Louis Farrakhan.
The children of victims of Russian persecution, some of them — by no means all — became romantic Alinsky radicals. Those children of wealth worshipped men of violence, and sanitized them — Che, Mao, Fidel, Carlos the Jackal, Ayers, Mumiah, the list goes on.

The Reverend J-Wright preaches mob incitement. It’s all over his sermons. His younger successor in the same church, Rev. James Moss III, has his own style of incitement. He tells his congregation that black people will never be accepted by whites; they are lepers, with an ugly skin condition that makes them diseased outcasts forever. Sweet, ain’t it? The worst Dixiecrat agitator during Jim Crow couldn’t have put it worse than that.

Take the rage that people feel and direct it to the most convenient human victim. ‘Pick the Target, Freeze It, Personalize It and Polarize It.’ J-Wright started life as a Black Muslim, as he tells it, and then studied Black Liberation Theology. What’s BLT? Well, Pope Benedict says it’s a cover name for Marxism. In this case, racial Marxism. Which brings us right back to Lenin whipping up the Bolshevik mobs to kill the kulaks.

It doesn’t matter where you direct the rage. Brazil’s Marxist president Lula blames “white people with blue eyes.” We are living in a time of reverse racism, having flipped Dixiecrat racism to the other side. The tragedy is that we have not transcended race, not and as long as racial demagogues can squeeze this new hatred for money and power. The Obamas are the very incarnation of reverse racism. That is why they felt the need to show contempt to the Queen of England, and to bow down to the pre-medieval King of Saudi Arabia. In the next four years, or eight, or longer, you will see them do that over and over and over again, because that is their lifelong obsession.

Barack Obama and Michelle attended J-Wright’s church for twenty years, and had their little girls baptized and raised at Trinity United. Our President was brought up by a mother who was a young college radical from Mercer Island, WA, and Kansas. His absentee father in Kenya was a proud post-colonial socialist — until, it seems, he ran into trouble with Jomo Kenyatta and had two car accidents in a row; the second one of which killed him. But Barack Obama didn’t draw the rather obvious lesson that his father may have been assassinated by a typical post-colonial tyrant. Instead, he adopted the side of the persecutor in the same way the young Saul Alinsky did. Obama grew up in his early years in Indonesia, where hundreds of thousands of ethnic Chinese had recently been massacred by — you guessed it — raging ethnic mobs looking for scapegoats. Oddly enough those Indonesian massacres are not mentioned in Obama’s two autobiographies.

Obama’s first boyhood mentor was the CPUSA’s guy in Hawaii, a black man filled with racial rage and resentment, and little Barry was handed on from one radical friend to the next, in a long chain by way of Harvard Law to the Chicago Democrat Machine. The one big gap in his autobiography is his college years at Columbia, but knowing what we know we can fill that in pretty well. He married Michelle, herself a daughter of an African-American ward boss and friend of Jesse Jackson, who made a brilliant career out of scapegoating corporations for money, power and personal fame. Then Barack was taught politics by Emile Jones, the political godfather of Southside.

There’s only one useful rule for predicting human beings:

People tend to do in the future what they did in the past.

So Barack Obama is now President of the United States.

What will he do?

How about ‘Pick the Target, Freeze It, Personalize It and Polarize It?’

There go those AIG bonus guys. Let’s tax ninety percent of their bonuses and smear them in the media. Done.

There goes Rick Wagoner. Let’s kill his career at GM. Done.

Let’s try to rouse up the mob against Rush Limbaugh. Oops! Forget it — he’s got his own megaphone. Next time just go for the ones who can’t protest.

Now he darkly threatens trying officials responsible for making policy in the Bush administration.

Life will be so much better then, won’t it?

Or will it?

An example can be found at Gates of Vienna in a video embedded in this topic; Modern European Fascism

ALERT To False Front Predators: Major Leftist Indoctrination Group Poses As Veterans Aid Organization

H/T Pat Dollard.

Paul Rieckhoff, dead center

An insidious, treacherous, anti-military, anti-democracy and anti-capitalist organization called “Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America”, IAVA, is posing as a veteran’s aid and support group in an attempt to turn the last non-Leftist bastion of America into the Left’s mightiest arm of real force.

They are dedicated to one mission, and one mission only: indoctrinate the average service member into a Leftist ideologue loyal to George Soros’ and Obama’s neo-Marxist revolution. Go to this link and scroll down to the bottom, and you will see the IAVA’s “report card” on politicians’ performance as supporters of the troops. John McCain is given a D, Barack Obama a B.

George Soros is a financier of the IAVA. ( From Blackfive: But Burden says what really bothers him about IAVA’s report card is its insistence that its grades are nonpartisan. He points to IAVA’s funding: Jonathan Soros, son of liberal financier George Soros, is sponsoring the group’s annual dinner next month. At the same time, the IAVA uses technology provided by Democracy in Action, a self-described “progressive nonprofit” that provides discount services to liberal groups. And, Burden points out, Rieckhoff once delivered the Democratic response to one of President Bush’s radio addresses.) They used to operate under the moniker Operation Truth before they came up with the less radical sounding IAVA. Blackfive did an expose on Operation Truth.

The IAVA, led by Paul Rieckhoff, claims to operate as as a “non-partisan” group, but as you can tell by both the report card linked above, and the fact that Rieckhoff blogs exclusively for the Huffington Post as the face of the IAVA, they are anything but. You can put the fact that Rieckhoff makes such a bluster about his alleged “firecely non-partisan” stance into the “Me thinks thou do protest too much” file.
Anyone who operates behind such a curtain of blatant deception is a coward, a predator, and fits the vernacular appellation of “weasel”. Don’t presume that the term “traitor’ hasn’t come to my mind, either.

Predatory IAVA commercial:



From Rieckhoff’s propagada machine:

Paul Rieckhoff is the Executive Director and Founder of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA). A non-partisan, non-profit founded in 2004 with tens of thousands of members in all 50 US states, IAVA is America’s first and largest organization for Iraq and Afghanistan veterans. IAVA’s mission is to improve the lives of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans and their families.

Rieckhoff served as an Army First Lieutenant and infantry rifle platoon leader in Iraq from 2003-2004. He is now a nationally recognized authority on the war in Iraq and issues affecting troops, military families and veterans.

Rieckhoff has appeared on hundreds of television and radio programs. Recent appearances include: NBC’s “Nightly News,” ABC’s “World News With Charles Gibson,” CBS’s “The Early Show”, PBS’s “Tavis Smiley” “The Charlie Rose Show,” and “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer,” CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360,” MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show,” HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher,” the “Dr. Phil Show” and numerous NPR programs.

He is a contributor to the New York Times, Associated Press, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and Newsweek and a regular blogger for The Huffington Post, Military.com, and Scoop 44.

Click here to read why one former IAVA member left the group. To quote: “Today I’ve come to realize they are another hack organization masquerading as non-partisan.”

More here.

“Whom The Gods Would Destroy, They First Make Mad”

H/T Pat Dollard.

NY Daily News:
 
From anger to madness: A class-warfare crazed government mob is running amok

by Michael Goodwin

Everybody makes mistakes, and I made a beaut the other day. I was wrong to call members of Congress blow-hards and buffoons and declare them worse than useless.

I was too kind.

I should have said our representatives are gangsters in pinstripes and pearls. They are petty tyrants and the more power they grab, the more at risk we are. Homeland Security should flash Code Red any time this Congress is in session.

It is twilight in America now. The House vote to use the tax code to retroactively punish bonus babies was an act of sheer madness. What started as phony outrage at AIG has crossed the line into insane policy. It is stunning that the vote was lopsided and bipartisan.

The Senate is itchy to go along, and President Obama says he’s ready to tighten the thumbscrews on the banks. Is there no adult who will bring a straitjacket?

We should all be very afraid. Class warfare is mere predicate for a witch hunt that, once unleashed, will not stop with misbegotten wealth. It will punish success and stifle innovation. Dissent will invite dishonor.

That Congress is a gang of cheap connivers is not news. Chris Dodd, Charlie Rangel, Charles Grassley, Barney Frank - they have been national embarrassments for years.

But now they are dangerous, emboldened by public fear and anger. They know nothing, but have power and smell opportunity for more.

Missing in action is the Barack Obama who vowed to unite the country around common values. Lately he has been the very opposite of the man he promised. Instead of hope, many have a growing fear of the arrogant government he leads.

Obama is smart, quick and charming, and, as he showed on “The Tonight Show,” owner of a thousand-watt smile he can deploy at will. He silkily manages to make the ridiculous sound reasonable. When he insults the Special Olympics, he is forgiven.

Yet even “Tonight” host Jay Leno broke from full flattery to reveal his qualms about the meaning of the bonus tax. “Here’s something that kind of scared me,” he said. “If the government decides they don’t like a guy, all of a sudden, hey, we’re going to tax you and then, boom, and it passes.”

Obama brushed it off, part of an endless road show claim that he will bring back “common sense” to the financial system and restore “those values that built America.”

If only. In truth, there is no history for what he is doing. He is the most radical President of our times, far outside the mainstream of our political philosophy.

He is not a reformer who fixes things. He fancies himself “transformative,” a man who reshapes and reorders. It apparently begins with smashing the existing order under the pretext of managing the crisis he inherited.

During the campaign, a fellow journalist confided that “I know Obama is a Manchurian candidate, I just can’t figure out what for.”

I laughed then, but no more. Obama represents a secular religion that believes, no matter the malady, Washington is the antidote. More government is the chicken soup of his tribe.

It is an illusion of many Republicans and Democrats that Washington can successfully manage the economy and our lives. Our institutions and culture are too big, too diverse and too unruly to be run like a banana republic.

Yet the economic mess has robbed the nation of its confidence, and the vacuum is being filled by politicians bearing promises and borrowed dollars. The true cost of this “help” will come later, with back-breaking debt and a lack of growth and opportunity.

We can’t say we haven’t been warned. “Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad” is more than folklore. It predicts our fate if we follow the government mob.