The Ruling Class — Past and Present

Defenders of the idea that only the ruling class should be able to make decisions for everybody else desperately try to put lipstick on the tyrannical pigs of history and today.

One common argument – in both Russia and in the West – is the defense of Lenin as a well-intentioned guy whose good work was cut short by his premature death. Then that bad old Stalin took over and tyranny sprang up like flowers after a rain in the desert.

Robert Gellately in Lenin, Stalin and Hitler has examined this notion and has totally destroyed its claim to veracity from first-hand accounts. His conclusion is that Lenin was “a heartless and ambitious individual who was self-righteous in claiming to know what was good for humanity, brutal in his attempt to subject his own people to radical social transformation, and convinced he held the key to the eventual overthrow of global capitalism and the establishment of world Communism.”

The picture Gellately paints of Stalin and Hitler shows that Lenin’s character flaws were shared by them as well.

Gellately describes Lenin in terms that disturbingly fit Saul Alinsky, President Obama’s intellectual inspiration. Both men wrote that the current system needs to be collapsed. While Alinsky argued that it should be collapsed from within, Lenin sought the same goal by deliberately provoking a civil war which would then be followed with murder and terror as an official regime policy. Lenin was successful, and as a result of the war, he emerged in total control of the country at a cost of two million dead. Of course, he and his disciple Stalin killed many tens of millions more in the years following.

Larry Grathwol was the FBI agent who infiltrated close-Obama-friend Bill Ayers’ terrorist Weather Underground. He testified that he had a conversation with Ayers in which the terrorist said that after taking power it would probably be necessary to kill 25,000,000 Americans who could not be reeducated to accept the new communist system.

Grathwol reported that Ayers made that statement in a room of some twenty-five people, most of whom had graduate degrees. Gellately found that the leaders of the death squads in Hitler’s Nazi regime were also similarly well-educated. This information certainly adds perspective to the detrimental value afforded by a liberal arts education in most universities of the United States.

All three of these mass murderers followed the Alinsky prescription faithfully, namely, “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” When we look at President Obama’s method of operation, we can see that he learned this lesson well. (Indeed, Obama taught Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals for two years at the University of Chicago School of Law).

He picks targets for smearing (banks, insurance companies, Republicans, etc.). He then goes on to freeze his target, to personalize it (greedy executives, House Minority Leader John Boehner) and then to polarize. Polarizing is part of the acid used by the 20th Century’s tyrants as well as Saul Alinsky and his followers.

While we are not yet where Germany and Russia ended up,, the end game of polarizing the population against a personalized enemy led to the destruction of Jews and foreigners under the Nazis. And in the Soviet Union, it led to the destruction of the nobility, the educated, and the clergy, as well as businesses and farm owners. As Rahm Emmanuel, the president’s close friend and former White House Chief of Staff has put it, you never let a good crisis go to waste. The crisis allows the implementation of the Alinsky formula, creating an enemy that must be fought. In order to fight the enemy, the tyrant demands that all power be handed over to him.

According to Rep. Michelle Bachmann, Obama now controls seventy percent of the private sector in the United States. This takeover has been carried off by a constant rush from one crisis to another. “The time for talking is over. The time for action is now.”

Well, Mr. Obama, the time for voting is coming. The time for the arrogance of power is over.