In my latest National Post column I call on Parliament to rein in the overweening pride and overreaching presumptions of Canada’s courts, especially the Supreme Court.
“The issue that is not clear to organizers, missionaries, educators, or any outsider, is simply that if people feel they don't have the power to change a bad situation, then they do not think about it.”
Saul Alinsky Rules for Radicals
“A sense of humor. Back to Webster's Unabridged: humor is defined as ‘The mental faculty of discovering, expressing, or appreciating ludicrous or absurdly incongruous elements in ideas, situations, happenings, or acts...’ or ‘A changing and uncertain state of mind…’ The organizer searching with a free and open mind void of certainty, hating dogma, finds laughter not just a way to maintain his sanity but also a key to understanding life. Essentially, life is a tragedy; and the converse of tragedy is comedy. One can change a few lines in any Greek tragedy and it becomes a comedy, and vice versa. Knowing that contradictions are the signposts of progress he is ever on the alert for contradictions. A sense of humor helps him identify and make sense out of them. Humor is essential to a successful tactician, for the most potent weapons known to mankind are satire and ridicule. A sense of humor enables him to maintain his perspective and see himself for what he really is: a bit of dust that burns for a fleeting second. A sense of humor is incompatible with the complete acceptance of any dogma, any religious, political, or economic prescription for salvation. It synthesizes with curiosity, irreverence, and imagination. The organizer has a personal identity of his own that cannot be lost by absorption or acceptance of any kind of group discipline organization. I now begin to understand what I stated somewhat intuitively in Reveille for Radicals almost 20 years ago, that ‘the organizer in order to be part of all can be part of none.’”
Saul Alinsky Rules for Radicals [he’s listing the ideal elements for an organizer and I found the notion that left-wing radicals are consistently marked by a good sense of humour especially about themselves was itself so funny it was worth quoting].
“Frequently personal domestic hang ups were part of the conferences [“frequent long conferences on organizational problems”]. An organizer’s working schedule is so continuous that time is meaningless; meetings and caucuses drag endlessly into the early morning hours; any schedule is marked by constant unexpected unscheduled meetings; work pursues an organizer into his or her home, so that either he is on the phone or there are people dropping in. The marriage record of organizers is with rare exception disastrous. Further, the tensions, the hours, the home situation, and the opportunities, do not argue for fidelity. Also, with rare exception, I have not known really competent organizers who were concerned about celibacy. Here and there are wives and husbands or those in love relationships who understand and are committed to the work, and are real sources of strength to the organizer.”
Saul Alinsky Rules for Radicals
“To pander to those who have no stomach for straight language, and insist upon bland, non controversial sauces, is a waste of time.”
Saul Alinsky Rules for Radicals
“’There is no graded scale of essential worth,’ [Martin Luther King Jr.] King had written a year before his assassination. ‘Every human being has etched in his personality the indelible stamp of the creator. Every man must be respected because God loves him.’ Every woman too, a feminist might have added. Yet King’s words, while certainly bearing witness to an instinctive strain of patriarchy within Christianity, bore witness as well to why, across the Western world, this was coming to seem a problem. That every human being possessed an equal dignity was not remotely self-evident truth. A Roman would have laughed at it. To campaign against discrimination on the grounds of gender or sexuality, however, was to depend on large numbers of people sharing in a common assumption: that everyone possessed an inherent worth. The origins of this principle – as Nietzsche had so contemptuously pointed out – lay not in the French Revolution, nor in the Declaration of Independence, nor in the Enlightenment, but in the Bible.”
Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World
“The young react to their chaotic world in different ways. Some panic and run, rationalizing that the system is going to collapse anyway of its own rot and corruption and so they’re copping out, going hippie or yippie, taking drugs, trying communes, anything to escape. Others went for pointless sure-loser confrontations so that they could fortify their rationalization and say, ‘Well, we tried and did our part’ and then they copped out two. Others sick with guilt and not knowing where to turn or what to do went berserk. These were the Weather men and their like: they took the grand cop-out, suicide. To these I have nothing to say or give but pity – and in some cases contempt, for such as those who leave their dead comrades and take off for Algeria or other points.”
“Prologue” in Saul Alinsky Rules for Radicals
“Surrounded by masked men during a phosgene attack at Verdun, Pierre de Mazenod was reminded of a ‘carnival of death.’ For many, gas took the war into the realm of the unreal, the make-believe. When men donned their masks they lost all sign of humanity, and with their long snouts, large glass eyes, and slow movements, they became figures of fantasy, closer in their angular features to the creations of Picasso and Braque than to soldiers of tradition. Dorgelès called the gas mask ‘this pig snout which represented the war’s true face.’ British comment on the German gas attacks included the following: ‘With used by the Germans of poison gas the war took a more bitter turn and horror followed horror until the soldier of civilization had to rise to a height of courage putting altogether in the shade that of the Knights of old, who went out to fight loathly dragons which breathed fire and mephitic vapours. In this mortal struggle with a race of scientific orang-outans, it requires a shutting of the eyes to externals and a looking inward to see the nimbus shining from the brow of the soldier... But how much more splendid than that of any beplumed, caparisoned soldier of old, is his courage as he rides, or squats in mud or dust, swathed in his chemical bandages so that all human likenesses is lost, awaiting not only shot and shell and steel, but flammenwerfer, asphyxiating gas, lachrymatory gas, stink gas, and other instruments of German warfare!’”
Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era