I have a copy of that book, and it’s a painful read. It’s a glimpse into the mind of someone with one foot in hell.
Breitbart had a article back in 2012 that I just found: The Community-Organizer-in-Chief, Part One: The Alinsky Ethics and it is disgusting to read, as it is Alinsky, unvarnished by the veneer of a book.
This was a telling passage in it (from Breitbart):
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This liberal Cloak of Moral Invisibility allowed Alinsky to embrace huge contradictions, something blindingly evident in the Playboy interview. At one point, Alinsky tells a favorite story of his that is designed to give him an air of ethical superiority. As he tells it, when he was a kid he got into a fight with some other neighborhood kids and was brought in front of the local rabbi for discipline, who tells him:
ALINSKY: “You think you’re a man because you do what everybody does. But I want to tell you something the great Rabbi Hillel said: ‘Where there are no men, be thou a man.‘ I want you to remember it.” I’ve never forgotten it.
This is a great statement of moral courage: do the right thing, even if you must stand up to those around you. In fact, Alinsky used “‘Where there are no men, be thou a man” as one of the epigrams for his book Rules for Radicals.
What’s really interesting, though, is that while Alinsky claims he’s “never forgotten it,” just a few paragraphs later in the exact same interview, Saul Alinsky regales the interviewer with stories showing that he’s actually lived his life with exactly the opposite ethic. Astonishingly, he brags to Playboy about stealing, lying and consorting to murderers.
For example, Alinsky discusses his college days during the depression. He says he was “hungry.” Not starving, mind you. Hungry. Rather than using his intellect and energy to create value and earn money to feed himself, Alinsky instead figures out an elaborate scheme to defraud cafeterias.
ALINSKY: "We got the system down to a science, and for six months all of us were eating free. Then the bastards brought in those serial machines at the door where you pull out a ticket that’s only good for that particular cafeteria. That was a low blow. We were the first victims of automation."
When asked by the interviewer if he “any moral qualms about ripping off the cafeterias?”, he responded:
ALINSKY: "Are you kidding? I wouldn’t have justified, say, conning free gin from a liquor store just so I could have a martini before dinner, but when you’re hungry, anything goes — There’s a priority of rights, and the right to eat takes precedence over the right to make a profit — and just in case you’re getting any ideas, let me remind you that the statute of limitations has run out."
So much for “Where there are no men, be thou a man”; Saul Alinsky was actually the one organizing the other students into stealing. Alinsky’s avowed situational ethic won out over the word of Rabbi Hillel which mean that the owners and employees of the cafeteria had no right to profit because Alisnky decided they didn’t–and “to each according to his need” and all that, man.
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I made myself finish reading "Rules for Radicals" then decided I was going to dictate and audiobook version to distribute to anyone I knew who would be interested, but...I couldn't do it. I gave up after a chapter. I couldn't read it without revealing the disgust in my voice as I dictated. Ugh.