And What if Obama is a Marxist?

http://townhall.com/columnists/kenblackwell/2014/02/14/and-what-if-he-is-a-marxist-n1795046/print

Well, what if the President is a Marxist? Stanley Kurtz was one of those cooler heads in 2008 who rejected the claim that Barack Obama was a Marxist, a socialist.

Then, he researched the record and wrote Radical-in-Chief. Kurtz’s book is a long, detailed, and very carefully researched analysis of the Obama record.

Kurtz finds Obama acknowledging in his own words, in Dreams from my Father, that he was mentored as a teen growing up in Hawaii by a man he identifies only as “Frank.” We know now that that man was Frank Marshall Davis, a lifelong communist. Grove City College professor Paul Kengor has documented Davis’ attachment to the USSR in his book, The Communist.

On campus, Barack Obama sought to prove he had not “sold out” to the system, so he consciously sought out the Marxist professors on campus (p. 150) Sought them out.

We can understand why President Obama may not want his college course grades spread all over the Internet. But there is something more than a little weird about the fact he won’t even disclose the college courses he took.

Stanley Kurtz provides incontrovertible evidence that young Barack Obama attended the April 1983 Socialist Scholars Conference at Cooper Union in New York City.

This big confab is doubly significant. It’s important because it brought together committed Marxists from all over the country. It’s important because it was held to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Karl Marx’s death.

Kurtz notes that Barack Obama himself admits he went to this meeting (and Kurtz believes but properly adds that he cannot prove that young Mr. Obama probably attended the follow-up socialist meetings in the 1980s, as well.)

Even when making the case—a powerful case—that President Obama is a socialist, a devotee of Karl Marx, Stanley Kurtz does not engage in hysterics. He suggests that Obama seems to be tracking with the left wing of the Swedish Socialist Party. He is seeking to bring Marxist socialism to America, but not by employing the brutal methods of the Soviet-era KGB.

Well, that’s a relief. But it would explain Obamacare. Is it really incompetence? Is it really just a “botched” rollout? Or, is it, as The New Republic’s Noam Scheiber says, “a deceptively sneaky way to get” single-payer socialized medicine?

For a man as intelligent as Barack Obama is, it is hard to imagine that all of this trouble is accidental, that it all is the result of “folks” who just made some mistakes in their zeal to do good.

If President Obama actually is a Marxist, then all of this suddenly makes sense. And he has never given us any indication he is anything else. That alone can explain the current crisis for this Great Republic.

Obama’s Communist Mentor - Frank Marshall Davis

http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/print-friendly/48895

By Alan Caruba Sunday, August 19, 2012

In the 1970s, when Obama was an adolescent growing up in the care of his grandparents in Hawaii, among their circle of friends was Davis. His grandparents wanted to provide a black man as a role model for the young mixed-race child, the result of a short marriage between their daughter and Barack Obama Sr., a Kenyan she had met while both were studying Russian at the University of Hawaii.

Obama came of age in a household devoted to leftist ideologies, so it was no surprise that Davis was among their circle of friends. He had moved to Hawaii from Chicago in the late 1940s, continuing a lifetime of work as a journalist editing and writing for newspapers advocating the communist ideology and the party line set forth by the Soviet Comintern, short for the Communist International whose aim was to extend communism worldwide. It directed the work of the Communist Party USA whose members were devoted to the Soviet Union. Most members like Davis, when questioned, denied membership, taking the Fifth Amendment.

Presently the leading historian on communism in America is Dr. Paul Kengor, the author of “Dupes: How America’s Adversaries have Manipulated Progressive for a Century.” His latest book is “The Communist: Frank Marshall Davis—The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mentor.”

“There were hundreds of thousands of American communists like Frank,” writes Dr. Kengor, “who agitated throughout the twentieth century. They chose the wrong side of history, a horrendously bloody side that left a wake of over 100 million corpses from the streets of the Bolshevik Revolution to the base of the Berlin Wall—double the combined dead of the century’s two world wars.”

Davis’ influence over Obama is carefully documented by Dr. Kengor who says, “The people who influence our presidents matter.”

Not once in his memoir does Obama identify him, referring to him only as Frank, neglecting to mention that Davis was “a pro-Soviet, pro-Red China, card-carrying member of Communist Party USA” whose card number as 47544. It should come as no surprise that Davis found Chicago a favorable place to live. It was where he founded and edited the Chicago Star, “known among the locals as the ‘Red Star.’”

He would repeat this later in Honolulu.

“Frank Marshall Davis’s political antics were so radical,” writes Dr. Kengor, “that the FBI placed him on the federal government’s Security Index, which meant that he could be immediately detained or arrested in the event of a national emergency, such as a war breaking out between the United States and the USSR.”

OBAMA - REVOLUTION YOU CAN BELIEVE IN

By Melanie Phillips

Obama model of radical community organizer.

The Spectator

September 09, 2008

http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/2073071/revolution-you-can-believe-in.html

The seditious role of the community organizer was developed by an extreme left intellectual called Saul Alinsky. He was a radical Chicago activist who, by the time he died in 1972, had had a profound influence on the highest levels of the Democratic Party.

Alinsky was a ‘transformational Marxist’ in the mould of Antonio Gramsci, who promoted the strategy of a ‘long march through the institutions’ by capturing the culture and turning it inside out as the most effective means of overturning western society.

In similar vein, Alinsky condemned the New Left for alienating the general public by its demonstrations and outlandish appearance. The revolution had to be carried out through stealth and deception. Its proponents had to cultivate an image of centrism and pragmatism. A master of infiltration, Alinsky wooed Chicago mobsters and Wall Street financiers alike. And successive Democratic politicians fell under his spell.

His creed was set out in his book Rules for Radicals – a book he dedicated to Lucifer, whom he called the ‘first radical’. It was Alinsky for whom ‘change’ was his mantra.

And by ‘change’, he meant a Marxist revolution achieved by slow, incremental, Machiavellian means which turned society inside out. This had to be done through systematic deception, winning the trust of the naively idealistic middle class by using the language of morality to conceal an agenda designed to destroy it. And the way to do this, he said, was through ‘people’s organizations’.

Community organizers would mobilize direct action by the oppressed masses against their capitalist oppressors. In FrontPageMagazine.Com John Perazzo writes:

These People’s Organizations were to be composed largely of discontented individuals who believed that society was replete with injustices that prevented them from being able to live satisfying lives. Such organizations, Alinsky advised, should not be imported from the outside into a community, but rather should be staffed by locals who, with some guidance from trained radical organizers, could set their own agendas.

The installment of local leaders as the top-level officers of People’s Organizations helped give the organizations credibility and authenticity in the eyes of the community. This tactic closely paralleled the longtime Communist Party strategy of creating front organizations that ostensibly were led by non-communist fellow-travelers, but which were in fact controlled by Party members behind the scenes…
Alinsky viewed as supremely important the role of the organizer, or master manipulator, whose guidance was responsible for setting the agendas of the People’s Organization…, Alinsky laid out a set of basic principles to guide the actions and decisions of radical organizers and the People’s Organizations they established. The organizer, he said, ‘must first rub raw the resentments of the people; fan the latent hostilities to the point of overt expression. He must search out controversy and issues, rather than avoid them, for unless there is controversy people are not concerned enough to act.’

The organizer’s function, he added, was ‘to agitate to the point of conflict’ and ‘to maneuver and bait the establishment so that it will publicly attack him as a “dangerous enemy.” ‘ ‘The word ‘enemy,’ said Alinsky, ‘is sufficient to put the organizer on the side of the people’; i.e., to convince members of the community that he is so eager to advocate on their behalf, that he has willingly opened himself up to condemnation and derision.
Obama’s connection with Alinsky, whom he never met but whom he reportedly idolized, was through two bodies promoting the Alinsky model of community organization, ACORN and the Gamaliel Foundation. John Perazzo again:

Obama was trained by the Alinsky-founded Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) in Chicago and worked for an affiliate of the Gamaliel Foundation, whose modus operandi for the creation of ‘a more just and democratic society’ is rooted firmly in the Alinsky method. As The Nation magazine puts it, ‘Obama worked in the organizing tradition of Saul Alinsky, who made Chicago the birthplace of modern community organizing…’ In fact, for several years Obama himself taught workshops on the Alinsky method.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.