PrintJuly 11, 2010
Alinsky, Stalinsky, It's Still the Same Old Agitprop
"Stalinism" is a useful term for the totalitarian left -- even to the left itself. It's one word they haven't been able to chew up, gulp down, and transform into its opposite. They still know what "Stalinist" means, even after generations of new names for the same community agitators: "The New Left," "hippies," "Black Panthers," "youthful radicals," "idealistic students," "feminists," "the workers," "black nationalists," "Third World socialists," "the wretched of the earth," "Green Party," "Gay activists," "LGBT," "Global Warming," "peace and freedom party," "eco activists," "civil rights campaigners," "post-modernists," "gender studies," "J Street," "Bolivarismo," "ACORN," "undocumented workers," "Moveon.org," "Liberation Theology" -- there must be hundreds and hundreds of front labels for the Same-Old, Same-Old. They make up new ones all the time. This year's fashionable lefty cult is called ... "progressivism!"
But they do remember what "Stalinism" means, because that was the bad left. It's what they call each other in their constant civil wars. Wasn't Stalin somebody eighty years ago? It's hard to remember. Don't know much 'bout history, don't know much 'bout nuthin, but Stalin still rings a bell.
The fact is that Stalinism is still here today because it has never gone away. Or what do you suppose Bill Ayers and Jodie Evans were doing in Egypt and Cyprus before sailing toward Gaza with that boatful of Turkish suiciders who were all ready to kill and be killed for Allah? Was that a coincidence? It looked like a classic piece of agitation-propaganda. A whole mob of journos were there to get pictures of all the blood and gore. The media are basically lazy, and they want onlly to hustle for photo-ops when they know they can get a big headline. It's simple laziness. The Turkish suicider stunt on the "peace flotilla" gave them headlines for weeks. Today the brainwashed masses in Europe and the Muslim countries still think the innocent side was guilty, which was the whole purpose of the stunt. Turkish fascist demagogues like Erdogan are still making hay off it.
The AP and Reuters could have written their stories before the Gaza stunt because they know it upside-down and backwards. If it bleeds, it leads, and if the Israelis had succeeded in peacefully steering those boats toward the port of Ashdod, there would have been no story. So they needed blood, and the Turkish Islamists were happy to provide it -- and with luck, to kill some Jews in the process. White hats, black hats, just like an old B Western. The only news the left can handle is old news. It's just like the old global warming crowd, who are even now going back to the lies they love so well. They can't live without those lies.
I would be very surprised if Obama and his "anti-terror czar" John Brennan didn't know all about the Gaza stunt. Their close friend Jodie Evans was right on the spot, after all, organizing the international "peaceful" demonstrators who instantly flew back home to drop identical headlines accusing Israel from Norway to Pakistan. Some of them weren't even there, but they still gave on-the-spot reports. They knew the narrative.
Jodie Evans has been to the White House six times, and that's not counting all the phone calls, the e-mails and tweets, the cutouts, and the meetings across the street in that sharia-compliant coffee shop where all the lobbyists meet the Obama gang.
In fact, John Brennan had just dropped a gigantic hint to a Muslim group that jihad is a "legitimate tenet of Islam." Jihad means "holy war," like the Crusades. That is the predominant meaning of the word in the Muslim media. The double-talk meaning of "jihad" is "inner struggle for purity," but in politics, it just isn't used that way. The word "jihad" is a political lie, and the left knows that, just like the Muslim fascists do. It's like the word "peace" in the mouth of Jozef Stalin. So Brennan dropped a deliberate inside-baseball wink-wink nod-nod to the Islamist radicals around the world. His Arab audience loved his use of "al Quds" for "Jerusalem," which legitimates the (false) assertion that Islam has an originalist claim to Jerusalem. That's why they cheered his quotation. He was telling them "Obama is on your side! Regular Americans are too stupid to get it!"
We have a big jihad sympathizer in the White House, just like Obama and his buds from Chicago, just like Jeremiah Wright and Louis Farrakhan, just like Obama's hero Malcolm X, and just like Jodie Evans and Bill Ayers whipping up crowds for Hamas. These people are predictably on the side of medieval reactionaries who practice barbarities against women, gays, Jews, Christians, and especially any creed that advocates tolerance and open-mindedness. The left is enabling evil today, just as it enabled Mao Zedong's evil in China, Pol Pot's evil in Cambodia, and Stalin's evil in Russia, Poland, and Ukraine.
So are we really supposed to think Jodie and John Brennan didn't know about the Turkish suiciders with white headbands and their wills all signed, chanting "Kaibar! Khaibar!" even before they took off for Gaza? Jodie doesn't have Brennan's phone number in the White House? The CIA doesn't have thousands of highly paid local sources to find out what really happened? Or -- maybe Jodie and John just weren't surprised that the stunt went exactly as planned?
They knew, just like they knew exactly what Helen Thomas has believed for the last two centuries. For a decade or more, Helen Thomas was the Propaganda Commissar of the White House press corps, whipping them on to attack enemies like George W. Bush. The left has known about Helen Thomas for years. She doesn't bother to hide her real beliefs. The American people find out only when she left her job for saying out loud what she'd told them every single day for all of her life in the White House press room. Good old Helen. What an idealist.
Agitprop was the Stalinist name for "community organizing," back when Communist agitators were proud to be called Communist agitators. The Gaza crisis served community agitator Obama with perfect timing, because it put overwhelming pressure on Israel just when he wanted to do some heavy-duty arm-twisting.
Yes, I know -- Obama loves Israel this week. But Obama is a cold-blooded Stalinoid. His slogan is "If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a pistol." He just pulled the race card on Israel while seeming to sound friendly. He "has a gift" for that kind of double-message. Look at old photos of ruthless Malcolm X, and you can see a bit of Obama.
The radical left is run by agitprop artists who practice the same mob incitement that worked so well for Mom and Pop the Reds in the good old days. The Reichstag Fire was an agitprop stunt by the Nazis, but they learned to do all that in the same Bohemian cafés that Lenin used to haunt. It was Hitler and Goebbels who first articulated the Big Lie technique, but it was the Marxists who have used it since 1848. The Communist Manifesto starts with a threat to stir up class revolution throughout Europe. The left knows Marx and Engels wrote that threat in to make it happen all over Europe. Their agitprop created the reality, they think. This is a standard Alinsky tactic, but it's old, old.
Saul Alinsky just wrote up those old techniques for sixties radicals to memorize and made them look brand-new. There is nothing new about it. Every mob leader in history has used the same gambits.
When Noam Chomsky was kept out of Israel a couple of months ago, the worst epithet he could think of was to call Israel "Stalinist." But it's Chomsky himself who is the rhetorical bomb-thrower and propagandist, as he has been all his life. Chomsky has managed to scare and intimidate the field of linguistics for a half century, to the point where nobody believes him anymore but they don't dare to say it out loud. That's Stalinist intimidation. Nobody dared to contradict Stalin in public until he was safely dead. Then they all explained how they were innocent the whole time.
Noam Chomsky is personally responsible for a huge amount of the anti-Israel (and anti-American) agitation on the left. If Israel were run by Stalinists, the whole country would stand up and salute Obama and Chomsky with six million raised fists, all chanting in unison. But that isn't what they do over there. Millions of robots chanting in unison is for Cuba and North Korea, all the "progressive" places that Chomsky adores. Chanting in unison is for the American Robot Media.
Real democracies don't do unanimous salutes. Rush Limbaugh has a regular shtick where he plays all the media airheads saying the same words over and over again on any given day. It is astonishing. Losing their audience? Just keep repeating the Party Line. It can't be a coincidence. Real people don't have identical thoughts on the same day, day in and out. It used to be just the Communists who followed the Party Line like little stick figures. Today it's the whole media. "Mainstream" now means homogenized, lowbrow, ignorant, robotic, group-thinking cheap plastic puppets. America used to have great journalists -- Benjamin Franklin was one, and Mark Twain, and Henry Louis Mencken, all sharp writers and independent thinkers. They would be nauseated by today's media. Today, the only real journalists write for blogs.
Stalinism is no stranger to the American left. It is part of its very being. Every time another old Stalinist dies, the New York Times has a crying fit, telling us what a sweetheart the bloody-minded old fanatic really was. That's all you really need to know about the New York Times.
At some point you have to conclude that the left knows exactly how bloody and destructive it really is. Sure, a lot of the brainwashed followers live in deep denial, but the big names know. Chomsky knows where the bodies are buried, and he knows where he wants to have the next Gulag. So does Jimmy Carter, another peace-loving fan of Hamas and Hezb'allah. So does Obama. They know, they know. They are not innocent.
Malcolm Muggeridge, who ended his life as a passionate conservative and a Catholic, was born into that "progressive" little world in Manchester, England. Muggeridge became a journo for the BBC and the Guardian, the left-totalitarian organs of propaganda in the U.K. He admitted in his excellent autobiography that the Guardian writers just lied their heads off every day to push the Party Line.
George Orwell was part of that circle, and after he saw the bloodshed in Spain by the Reds and the fascists, each killing innocents with abandon, he satirized the mendacious BBC as the Ministry of Truth in 1984. Guess what? They haven't changed one little bit. Today, the Guardian and BBC combine leftist agitprop with Islamist ideology. That's why they constantly beat up on Israel in the Euro media, just like the New York Times. The left is predictable, marching in lockstep just like the old days, and they always pick the most destructive and mendacious side. They think it's Progress because to the left, we are the enemy. Don't believe me? Look it up in Alinsky's little book. America and its middle-class culture are the enemy.
But they know what really happens when leftists take over. They can't be stupid enough not to know, not after all these years. Some of them even read history books. It was a Marxist historian in France who pinned the "100 million dead victims" on the left. They know, they know.
Muggeridge was the Guardian's correspondent in Moscow during the Stalin-made famines in the Ukraine starting in the 1930s. His describes how Western correspondents were corrupted and intimidated by Stalin and by each other; they lied and lied about the Soviet horrors, knowing full well what was going on. Their Russian friends were taken away and shot, and they just kept lying. The regime went so far as to give train tours to the Ukraine for Western reporters so they could swear to their home audiences that all the peasants were laughing and well-fed. Muggeridge went along with the others -- including Walter Duranty of the New York Times, who got a Pulitzer for his decades of stellar lying -- and they saw the starving peasants standing by the railroads, village after village. Then they went back to Moscow to lie about it. Journoliars. None of them were honest.
Western journoliars lied to protect their jobs, to push their Stalinist faith, and to keep their privileged upper-class status in the land of the dying and tyrannized. Muggeridge may have been a little less guilty than the rest, but he admits that he wrote his share of lies. The Guardian would have fired him even if the Soviets didn't kick him out, so he just lied. It's exactly what CNN did during Saddam Hussein's reign of terror in Baghdad -- if your memory for media lies goes back that far. You can look it up on Google.
Historically, liberal Democrats played footsie with Stalin for thirty years (1922-1953). So did Labour socialists in Britain and Western Europe. An estimated 40 million people were killed by Stalin during that time, and that was no secret on the left. They knew, they knew. They just covered it up in the media, and thereby kept the mass killers in power. It's pretty much what they are doing right now for the genociders in the Sudan and the Congo. Scratch a Stalinist, and you find a willing defender of mass murder. All for the good of humanity, of course.
Which makes me wonder: Now that the radical Left is in control of the Democrats again, why is today any different from the days of Stalin? Just because Hillary and Obama learned from Alinsky's book, is that any different? Different cover, same book.
These are not good human beings. I'm sorry, I know some of them, and I know how incredibly blind they can be. But they can't be as blind as that. It's not possible. They know.
Or as one of their own propagandists said about poor Richard Nixon -- they are Guilty! Guilty! Guilty!
