Must read: Saul Alinsky's 25,000 word interview with Playboy Magazine in 1972

http://twitter.com/JamesOKeefeIII ^ | unknown | Playboy Interview

[smokingfrog]

Empowering People, Not Elites Interview with Saul Alinsky

Saul Alinsky is, along with Thomas Paine, Henry George, and Dorothy Day, one of the great American leaders of the nonsocialist left.

Response to our earlier article dealing with Alinsky has been so great that we worked to obtain this extensive interview with him, conducted by Playboy magazine in 1972. It is, by far, the most detailed conversation with Alinsky that we know of. The interview will be appearing in weekly installments here at The Progress Report.

Part One For the past 35 years, the American establishment has come under relentless attack from a bespectacled, conservatively dressed community organizer who looks like an accountant and talks like a stevedore. According to The New York Times, Saul Alinsky "is hated and feared in high places from coast to coast" for being "a major. force in the revolution of powerless people -- indeed, he is emerging as a movement unto himself." And a Time magazine essay concluded that "it is not too much to argue that American democracy is being altered by Alinsky's ideas."

In the course of nearly four decades of organizing the poor for radical social action, Alinsky has made many enemies, but he has also won the respect, however grudging, of a disparate array of public figures: French philosopher Jacques Maritain has called him "one of the few really great men of this century," and even William Buckley, Jr., a bitter ideological foe, has admitted that "Alinsky is twice formidable, and very close to being an organizational genius." He was preceded by his reputation on a recent tour of Asia, where he was hailed by political and student leaders from Tokyo to Singapore as the one American with concrete revolutionary lessons for the impoverished Third World.

Not bad for a slum kid from the South Side of Chicago, where he was born on January 30, 1909. After working his way through the University of Chicago, Alinsky attended graduate school for two years, then dropped out to work as an Illinois state criminologist. In the mid-Thirties, as a side line, he began to work as an organizer with the then-radical C.I.O., in which he soon became a close friend and aide to John L. Lewis. Then, in 1939, he phased himself out of active participation in the labor movement and into the role of community organizer, starting in his own back yard -- the Chicago slums. His efforts to turn scattered, voiceless discontent into a united protest aroused the admiration of Illinois governor Adlai E. Stevenson, who said Alinsky's aims "most faithfully reflect our ideals of brotherhood, tolerance, charity and the dignity of the individual." In 1940, Alinsky elicited a generous grant from liberal millionaire Marshall Field III, who provided funds to establish the Industrial Areas Foundation, which has remained Alinsky's primary base of operation. Throughout the next decade, with Field's financial backing, Alinsky repeated his initial success in a score of slum communities across the nation, from Kansas City and Detroit to the barrios of Southern California.

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[Defiant]

Snow's Angels -- parody -- Peter Boyle.

Young Frankenstein?

RIP, Frank Barone.

[LucyJo]

Too bad this article was only in Playboy. Too few people, who got the magazine, seem to have “read the article”, or, if they did read it, their minds were too distracted to grasp the significance of someone like this being lionized and promoted.

Millions of others wouldn’t buy a Playboy for the articles OR the pictures, and most “journalists” who reported on what Alinsky had to say would do so selectively, and in a way that would legitimize and promote him as well.

There still are people today who don’t have a clue what’s going on around them, because the people who are trained to be journalists were trained at the feet of people with Alinsky’s agenda. They “love” this “blankety-blank” country, doncha know? Trouble is - just like Alinksy - they are “loving” it to death.