Who ya gonna call? Saul Alinsky – The Right needs you!
‘To fuck your enemies, first you have to seduce your allies’.
Saul Alinsky
If the rioting over the death of Saint George of Fentanyl reaches British Intelligence Towers, prior to burning the old place down, you might want to retrieve our old-school porn stash for your future reference. It is in a big box in Barry Shand’s ‘office’, and marked ‘Important political stuf’ [sic., It was Barry]. It is mostly full of old copies of Playboy magazine, and we came across one – so to speak – from 1972 featuring an interview with Saul Alinsky. In case any of you are still labouring under the misapprehension that Black Lives Matter sprang fully formed from the chaos of the urban black mind, it serves as a reminder that the current anarchy was very much pre-scripted.
Alinsky was, shall we say, a ‘community organiser’, a job description given rather a fey reputation by virtue of the fact that it is what Barack Obama did before his eight-year attempt to sabotage the land of the free, turning it into the land of the free stuff for the feckless.
Now, we could just re-iterate the interview, but it’s best you read it yourself, just as long as you appreciate that it is some read. It’s practically a novella.
And, before we have a brief look at the politics, a word about the smarts. By Christ was this guy funny. There is a piece in the main magazine here about Lenny Bruce. Alinsky could have opened for him.
My father taught me many things, and one of them was the humour of the Jews. More, the self-deprecating humour of the Jews. Jews love to laugh at themselves, to poke fun at Jewishness. This is something the Alt. Right will never understand. The Alt. Right really had something going there for a while, but then they had to spoil it all by saying somethin’ stupid like don’t trust the Jew in history. It’s a mild insanity born of envy, there is something mad about the goy. And it spoiled everything. The Alt. Right are like that smart guy you know could be your friend if it weren’t for that smell, the feisty tang of imperfectly washed clothes on an imperfectly washed body.
The Jews laugh at themselves in a way that blacks and Muslims absolutely do not, cannot. If those two cultures could learn that the twin cousins of mockery and self-mockery are a vital run of thread in life’s rich tapestry, a lot of the world’s problems would be solved. Blacks and Muslims, now there are two humourless cultures who are just sitting up and begging to have the piss taken out of them. But that cannot happen, with the results you see around you at the time of writing. But back to the interview.
It reads like a litany of tall stories, and who knows how much is true and how much fiction? Alinsky is one of those way-larger-than-life American action men, like George H. Earle or Howard Hughes or Orson Welles, who invented their lives as much as they lived them, but one thing is indubitably true about Saul Alinsky; by Christ could he organise people.
And there, in essence, is what the modern Right lacks.
There is no one, literally no one in the UK today who can round up the political Right and point them in the right direction, as it were. Who is there, tell me truly? Tommy Robinson? Nigel Farage? Katie Hopkins? Jacob Rees-Mogg? All valid and important voices, but a market-stall tombola rather than a podium of credible choices. The Right needs a pragmatist, in the American philosophical sense of the word, a Harry Hopkins, a Jimmy Hoffa, even an Elliot Ness. I kind of hate say this, but the Right needs ein Führer. In a nice way. And yet there is no one.
The problem for the Right is not that Alinsky was a creature of the Left. The problem is that he utilised a set of ideas which were always up for grabs. The Left just got there first. Same thing with Gramsci. If a Right-wing firebrand had sprung up and shaken down corporations and city councils, organised demos in the most insane and provocative way possible, hung out with mobsters and learned their modus operandi, written the head-spinning, breathless and gung-ho playbook Rules for Radicals, and generally raised hell, then Right-wing ideas might now be in the ascendancy. But that is not the way for the Right. Our way is to tut-tut and sit around with expensive coffee and say, well, what if a white man had said that about a black man, and, ooh, imagine if it was Muslims who had done that. And that is why the Right is fucked.
The modern Right in the UK has no balls.
Just as the Alt. Right gradually realised the impetus provided to progressives and Common Purpose by the writings of Saul Alinsky and Antonio Gramsci, and how they should have been writing the playbook rather than allowing the intellectual negligibles of the Left to steal the gig, the Right needs a Saul Alinsky. Sniping away from the sidelines, joining Britain First, getting all worked up with Toby Young, thinking the SDP or the Brexit Party are going to make a difference, feeling smug because you read TakiMag and watch Paul Joseph Watson videos, are all fine and dandy. But until there is a New Right worthy of the name, and firebrand mobilisers like Alinsky on our side, it’s all just piss in the wind.
Photo credit: Pierre869856