Down on Its Luck
Las Vegas used to be a recession-proof oasis. Not anymore.

Steve Freiss
NEWSWEEK WEB EXCLUSIVE
Updated: 4:29 PM ET May 5, 2008
On the third weekend of every April, Emily Ann Frankston and her family—spread out over five states—meet up in Las Vegas for their annual family vacation. This year was different. The only ones to show up were Frankston, her husband and her brother-in-law, and they stayed just two nights instead of the traditional three. "My two sisters back east said airfares were too high, my mother-in-law lost her job in January, and some of the others said they were busy, but we think they didn't want to spend the money," says Frankston, 37, who drove in from the Phoenix area. "We've done this for the past nine years. Even after 9/11 we all came. But this year's it's just us. This recession is really hurting everyone."

It's even hurting the city of Las Vegas, the economy of which was once thought to be impervious to the economic swings suffered by the rest of the country. Not anymore. According to the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA), Las Vegas has seen gambling revenues fall only once since 1970: in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terror attacks they dropped 1 percent in 2002 from 2001. So far this year they've fallen 4 percent, the number of conventions held has dropped 10.4 percent, and average daily room rates were off 3.8 percent in the first two months of 2008, according to the most recent data available. Visitor volume was up 1.2 percent through February, but market analysts say that's because of the extra day provided by this being a leap year; March's figures will likely put the year-to-date numbers in negative territory. The stock price of MGM Mirage, owner of Bellagio, Mirage and eight other Strip resorts, has halved, from $100.50 in October to about $49 on Friday. In recent weeks the company eliminated 440 middle management jobs to save $75 million annually. "We made a structural change in our company to become more efficient and provide the same level of service, but we did have to advance that effort because we were also seeing a softening in the marketplace," says MGM Mirage spokesman Alan Feldman.

What's leaving Las Vegas more susceptible to this economic crisis than to previous ones? Diversification. Roughly 60 percent of the Las Vegas Strip's revenues now come from nongaming activities. By contrast, in 1991 and 1992, when the last comparable slowdown occurred, nongaming activities provided just 42 percent of overall revenue. "This is different from prior downturns," says Bill Lerner, a Deutsche Bank gaming-sector analyst. "Now that there are a lot more nongaming amenities, the visitation mix is leaning toward nongamblers, and the consumer coming to Vegas is different now than it was."

It doesn't help that the city's convention business is slipping. Several annual conventions have seen fewer attendees show up and have seen those who do come stay for shorter periods. For example, last week's National Association of Broadcasters confab attracted 105,000 registrants, down from 111,000 in 2007, according to NAB executive vice president Chris Brown. Those figures could have been worse, Brown says, but advance registrations were so far down that several hotel-casinos voluntarily offered to cut room rates by $10 or more to encourage attendance. Says Brown, "That's never happened before."

The Frankstons aren't the only vacationers staying away. Nearly 7 percent fewer cars crossed the Nevada-California border along Interstate 15 through February, reflecting in part that record-high gasoline prices are curtailing drive-in visitors from the largest neighboring state. Making matters worse, three airlines with substantial service to Las Vegas—Aloha, ATA and Champion—are going out of business.

Even the mortgage mess and the subsequent credit crunch have taken a toll on Vegas. Several major construction projects on the Strip are delayed due to financing problems, including a second tower for Donald Trump's new condo-hotel. Also delayed is a plan to build a $6 billion version of New York City's famed Plaza Hotel. And while construction continues on the half-built $3 billion Cosmopolitan Resort and Casino next to the Bellagio, the project may be in jeopardy after developer Bruce Eichner's company defaulted on a $760 million loan from Deutsche Bank. (Eichner did not respond to NEWSWEEK's request for comment.)

Despite such problems, other developers still seem more than willing to bet on the future of Vegas. There is more than $30 billion in new construction scheduled for the Strip. And assuming those projects don't get squeezed by the credit crunch, some 40,000 new hotel rooms will be added to the current 136,000 by 2011, resulting in 100,000 new service sector jobs.

Like other major U.S. cities, Las Vegas is banking on the Euro-rich to help out during these tough times. According to Robert LaFleur, a gaming-stock analyst for Susquehanna Financial Services, "Bachelor parties in Vegas are now all the rage for soon-to-be-wed fellows from Australia and the U.K., for instance, because it's so cheap to get there … Right now it's an easy sell to get people from overseas."

The city isn't skimping on its advertising budget, either. Last week the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority launched a $12 million three-month national TV ad blitz called "Vegas Right Now" that insists "that there are new reasons why you ought to come," says Rob O'Keefe of R&R Partners, the ad agency that handles the annual $90 million tourist board account.

But given the host of problems facing the city, an ad campaign might not be enough of a fix. In one, called "The Dangers of Thinking," an announcer urges the audience to "do without thinking. Do Vegas right now." While it was witty, the ad irked Vegas regular Tania Franco of Atlanta, whose husband was recently forced to take a pay cut at his job. "The message is 'Don't think about how crappy your economic situation is, just come to Vegas, damn it. If you don't, you're a wallowing loser.' That's insensitive."

URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/135638

Democrats’ Platform for Revolution

By John Perazzo
FrontPageMagazine.com | 5/5/2008

Americans are well acquainted with presidential candidate Barack Obama’s legendary pledges to bring “change” to America’s political and social landscape. (For example, see here and here and here.) Indeed, “Change We Can Believe In” is the slogan that adorns the homepage of his campaign website and so many of the placards displayed by the supporters who attend his speaking engagements. His Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, is also well practiced at issuing calls for change. Her “Change and Experience” ad campaign was but an outgrowth of her 1993 declaration, as First Lady, that “remolding society is one of the great challenges facing all of us in the West.” Most Americans are unaware, however, that when Obama and Clinton speak of “change,” they mean change in the sense that a profoundly significant, though not widely known, individual -- Saul Alinsky -- outlined in his writings two generations ago.

Alinsky helped to establish the confrontational political tactics, which he termed “organizing,” that characterized the 1960s and have remained central to all subsequent revolutionary movements in the United States. Both Obama and Clinton are committed disciples of Alinsky’s very specific strategies for “social change.”

Obama never met Alinsky personally; the latter died when Obama was a young boy. But 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. Obama and his fellow agitators made demands for many things in the Eighties, including taxpayer-funded employment-training services, playground construction, after-school programs, and asbestos removal from neighborhood apartments. Journalist and bestselling author Richard Poe writes: “In 1985 [Obama] began a four-year stint as a community organizer in Chicago, working for an Alinskyite group called the Developing Communities Project. Later, he worked with ACORN and its offshoot Project Vote, both creations of the Alinsky network.” (In recent years, Poe notes, both of those organizations have run nationwide voter-mobilization drives marred by allegations of fraudulent voter registration, vote-rigging, voter intimidation, and vote-for-pay scams.) The Nation reports, “Today Obama continues his organizing work largely through classes for future leaders identified by ACORN and the Centers for New Horizons on the south side.”

Hillary, for her part, actually got to know Alinsky personally. She was so impressed with Alinsky’s theories and tactics vis a vis social change, that during her senior year at Wellesley College she interviewed him and subsequently penned a 92-page thesis on his ideas. In the conclusion of that thesis, she wrote:

If the ideals Alinsky espouses were actualized, [t]he result would be social revolution. Ironically, this is not a disjunctive projection if considered in the tradition of Western democratic theory. In the first chapter it was pointed out that Alinsky is regarded by many as the proponent of a dangerous socio/political philosophy. As such, he has been feared -- just as Eugene Debs or Walt Whitman or Martin Luther King has been feared, because each embraced the most radical of political faiths -- democracy.

During her senior year, Hillary was offered a job by Alinsky but chose instead to enroll at Yale Law School. Alinsky’s teachings, however, would remain close to her heart throughout her adult life. According to a Washington Post report, “As first lady, Clinton occasionally lent her name to projects endorsed by the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), the Alinsky group that had offered her a job in 1968. She raised money and attended two events organized by the Washington Interfaith Network, an IAF affiliate.”

Given the huge intellectual debt that both Democrat presidential candidates owe to Saul Alinsky, it is vital for all American voters to understand precisely who he was and what he taught. As you read this, you will hear in his words the echo of many familiar, outspoken leftist agitators for “change.”

Though Alinsky is generally viewed as a member of the political Left, and rightfully so, his legacy is more methodological than ideological. He identified a set of very specific rules that ordinary citizens could follow, and tactics that ordinary citizens could employ, as a means of gaining public power.

Alinsky was born to Russian-Jewish parents in Chicago in 1909. He studied criminology as a graduate student at the University of Chicago, during which time he became friendly with Al Capone and his mobsters. Ryan Lizza, senior editor of The New Republic, offers a glimpse into Alinsky’s personality: “Charming and self-absorbed, Alinsky would entertain friends with stories—some true, many embellished—from his mob days for decades afterward. He was profane, outspoken, and narcissistic, always the center of attention despite his tweedy, academic look, and thick, horn-rimmed glasses.”

According to Lizza:

Alinsky was deeply influenced by the great social science insight of his times, one developed by his professors at Chicago: that the pathologies of the urban poor were not hereditary but environmental. This idea, that people could change their lives by changing their surroundings, led him to take an obscure social science phrase—“the community organization”—and turn it into, in the words of Alinsky biographer Sanford Horwitt, “something controversial, important, even romantic.” His starting point was a near-fascination with John L. Lewis, the great labor leader and founder of the CIO. What if, Alinsky wondered, the same hardheaded tactics used by unions could be applied to the relationship between citizens and public officials?

After completing his graduate work in criminology, Alinsky went on to develop what are known today as the Alinsky concepts of mass organization for power. In the late 1930s he earned a reputation as a master organizer of the poor when he organized the “Back of the Yards” area in Chicago, an industrial and residential neighborhood on the Southwest Side of the city, so named because it is near the site of the former Union Stockyards; this area had been made famous in Upton Sinclair's 1906 novel, The Jungle. In 1940, Alinsky established the aforementioned Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), through which he and his staff helped “organize” communities not only in Chicago but throughout the United States. IAF remains an active entity to this day. Its national headquarters are located in Chicago, and it has affiliates in the District of Columbia, 21 separate states, and three foreign countries (Canada, Germany, and the United Kingdom).

In the Alinsky model, “organizing” is a euphemism for “revolution”—a wholesale revolution whose ultimate objective is the systematic acquisition of power by a purportedly oppressed segment of the population, and the radical transformation of America’s social and economic structure. The goal is to foment enough public discontent, moral confusion, and outright chaos to spark the social upheaval that Marx, Engels, and Lenin predicted—a revolution whose foot soldiers view the status quo as fatally flawed and wholly unworthy of salvation. Thus, the theory goes, the people will settle for nothing less than that status quo’s complete collapse—to be followed by the erection of an entirely new and different system upon its ruins. Toward that end, they will be apt to follow the lead of charismatic radical organizers who project an aura of confidence and vision, and who profess to clearly understand what types of societal “changes” are needed.

As Alinsky put it: “A reformation means that the masses of our people have reached the point of disillusionment with past ways and values. They don’t know what will work but they do know that the prevailing system is self-defeating, frustrating, and hopeless. They won’t act for change but won’t strongly oppose those who do. The time is then ripe for revolution.”[1]

“[W]e are concerned,” Alinsky elaborated, “with how to create mass organizations to seize power and give it to the people; to realize the democratic dream of equality, justice, peace, cooperation, equal and full opportunities for education, full and useful employment, health, and the creation of those circumstances in which men have the chance to live by the values that give meaning to life. We are talking about a mass power organization which will change the world…This means revolution.”[2]

But Alinsky’s brand of revolution was not characterized by dramatic, sweeping, overnight transformations of social institutions. As Richard Poe puts it, “Alinsky viewed revolution as a slow, patient process. The trick was to penetrate existing institutions such as churches, unions and political parties.” Alinsky advised organizers and their disciples to quietly, subtly gain influence within the decision-making ranks of these institutions, and to introduce changes from that platform. This was precisely the tactic of “infiltration” advocated by Lenin and Stalin.[3] As Communist International General Secretary Georgi Dimitroff told the Seventh World Congress of the Comintern in 1935:

Comrades, you remember the ancient tale of the capture of Troy. Troy was inaccessible to the armies attacking her, thanks to her impregnable walls. And the attacking army, after suffering many sacrifices, was unable to achieve victory until, with the aid of the famous Trojan horse, it managed to penetrate to the very heart of the enemy’s camp.[4]
Alinsky’s revolution promised that by changing the structure of society’s institutions, it would rid the world of such vices as socio-pathology and criminality. Arguing that these vices were caused not by personal character flaws but rather by external societal influences, Alinsky’s worldview was thoroughly steeped in the socialist left’s collectivist, class-based doctrine of economic determinism. “The radical’s affection for people is not lessened,” said Alinsky, “...when masses of them demonstrate a capacity for brutality, selfishness, hate, greed, avarice, and disloyalty. It is not the people who must be judged but the circumstances that made them that way.”[5] Chief among these circumstances, he said, were “the larcenous pressures of a materialistic society.”[6]

To counter that materialism, Alinsky favored a socialist alternative. He characterized his noble radical (read: “revolutionary”) as a social reformer who “places human rights far above property rights”; who favors “universal, free public education”; who “insists on full employment for economic security” but stipulates also that people’s tasks should “be such as to satisfy the creative desires within all men”; who “will fight conservatives” everywhere; and who “will fight privilege and power, whether it be inherited or acquired,” and “whether it be political or financial or organized creed.”[7] Alinsky maintained that radicals, finding themselves “adrift in the stormy sea of capitalism,”[8] sought “to advance from the jungle of laissez-faire capitalism to a world worthy of the name of human civilization.”[9] “They hope for a future,” he said, “where the means of production will be owned by all of the people instead of just a comparative handful.”[10] In short, they wanted socialism.

In 1946, Alinsky wrote Reveille for Radicals, his first major book about the principles and tactics of “community organizing,” otherwise known as agitating for revolution. Twenty-five years later he authored Rules for Radicals, which expanded upon his earlier work. His writings, and the tactics outlined therein, have had a profound influence on all “social change” and “social justice” movements of recent decades.

Alinksy’s objective, which he clearly stated in Rules for Radicals, was to “present an arrangement of certain facts and general concepts of change, a step toward a science of revolution.”[11] The Prince, he elaborated, “was written by Macchiavelli for the Haves on how to hold onto power. Rules for Radicals is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away.”[12]

If radicals were to be in the vanguard of the movement to transfer power from the Haves and the Have-Nots, Alinsky’s first order of business was to define precisely what a radical was. He approached this task by first distinguishing between liberals and radicals. Alinsky had no patience for those he called the liberals of his day—people who were content to talk about the changes they wanted, but were unwilling to actively work for those changes. Rather, he favored “radicals” who were prepared to take bold, decisive action designed to transform society, even if that transformation could be achieved only slowly and incrementally. Wrote Alinsky:

Liberals fear power or its application.… They talk glibly of people lifting themselves by their own bootstraps but fail to realize that nothing can be lifted except through power…Radicals precipitate the social crisis by action—by using power…Liberals protest; radicals rebel. Liberals become indignant; radicals become fighting mad and go into action. Liberals do not modify their personal lives[,] and what they give to a cause is a small part of their lives; radicals give themselves to the cause. Liberals give and take oral arguments; radicals give and take the hard, dirty, bitter way of life.[13]
If the purpose of radicalism is to bring about social transmutation, the radical must be prepared to make a persuasive case for why such change is urgently necessary. Alinsky’s conviction that American society needed a dramatic overhaul was founded on his belief that the status quo was intolerably miserable for most people. For one thing, Alinsky saw the United States as a nation rife with economic injustice. “The people of America live as they can,” he wrote. “Many of them are pent up in one-room crumbling shacks and a few live in penthouses...The Haves smell toilet water, the Have-Nots smell just plain toilet.”[14] Lamenting the “wide disparity of wealth, privilege, and opportunity” he saw in America, Alinsky impugned the country’s “materialistic values and standards.”[15] “We know that man must cease worshipping the god of gold and the monster of materialism,” he said.[16]

Profound economic injustice was by no means America’s only shortcoming, as Alinsky saw things. Lamenting the nation’s “rather confused and demoralized ideology,”[17] he further identified “unemployment,” “decay,” “disease,” “crime,” “distrust,” “bigotry,” “disorganization,” and “demoralization” as inevitable by-products of life in capitalist America.[18] Such a state of affairs, he said, made life for a majority of Americans nothing more than an exercise in drudgery. “At the end of the week,” said Alinsky of the average American, “he comes out of the hell of monotony with a paycheck and goes home to a second round of monotony…. Monday morning he is back on the assembly line.… That, on the whole, is his life. A routine in which he rots. The dreariest, drabbest, grayest outlook that one can have. Simply a future of utter despair.”[19] “People hunger for drama and adventure, for a breath of life in a dreary, drab existence,” he expanded.[20]

According to Alinsky, this unhappy existence exerted a profoundly negative influence on the American character. Alinsky perceived most Americans as people who were governed by their prejudices, and who thus felt great antipathy toward a majority of their fellow countrymen -- particularly those of different racial, ethnic, or religious backgrounds. “[M]ost people,” he said, “like just a few people, and either do not actively care for or actively dislike most of the ‘other’ people.”[21]

Having painted a verbal portrait of a thoroughly corrupt and melancholy American society, Alinsky was now prepared to argue that wholesale change of great magnitude was in order. What was needed, he said, was a revolution in whose vanguard would be radicals committed to eliminating the “fundamental causes” of the nation’s problems,[22] and not content to merely deal with those problems’ “current manifestations”[23] or “end products.”[24] The goal of the radical, he explained, must be to bring about “the destruction of the roots of all fears, frustrations, and insecurity of man, whether they be material or spiritual”;[25] to purge the land of “the vast destructive forces which pervade the entire social scene”;[26] and to eliminate “those destructive forces from which issue wars,” forces such as “economic injustice, insecurity, unequal opportunities, prejudice, bigotry, imperialism, … and other nationalistic neuroses.”[27]

The objective of ridding the nation of the aforementioned vices dovetailed perfectly with Alinsky’s belief that all societal problems were interrelated. According to Alinsky, if segments of the population were beset by crime, unemployment, inadequate housing, malnourishment, disease, demoralization, racism, discrimination, or religious intolerance, it was impossible address, to any great effect, any particular one of those concerns in isolation. They “are simply parts of the whole picture,” he said. “They are not separate problems.”[28]

“[A]ll problems are related and they are all the progeny of certain fundamental causes,” Alinsky elaborated.[29] “Many apparently local problems are in reality malignant microcosms of vast conflicts, pressures, stresses, and strains of the entire social order.”[30] Thus “ultimate success in conquering these evils can be achieved only by victory over all evils.”[31] In other words, what was needed was a revolution, led by radicals, to literally turn society upside-down and inside-out.

Alinsky then proceeded to lay out the method by which radicals could achieve this goal by forming a host of “People’s Organizations” -- each with its own distinct name and mission, and each of which “thinks and acts in terms of social surgery and not cosmetic cover-ups.”[32]

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.[33]

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. As J. Edgar Hoover explained in his 1958 book Masters of Deceit: “To make a known Party member president of a front would immediately label it as ‘communist.’ But if a sympathizer can be installed, especially a man of prominence, such as an educator, minister, or scientist, the group can operate as an ‘independent’ organization.”[34]

Alinsky taught that the organizer’s first task was to make people feel that they were wise enough to diagnose their own problems, find their own solutions, and determine their own destinies. The organizer, said Alinsky, must exploit the fact that “[m]illions of people feel deep down in their hearts that there is no place for them, that they do not ‘count.’”[35] To exploit this state of affairs effectively, Alinsky explained, the organizer must employ such techniques as the artful use of “loaded questions designed to elicit particular responses and to steer the organization’s decision-making process in the direction which the organizer prefers.[36]

“Is this manipulation?” asked Alinsky. “Certainly,” he answered instantly.[37] But it was manipulation toward a desirable end: “If the common man had a chance to feel that he could direct his own efforts … that to a certain extent there was a destiny that he could do something about, that there was a dream that he could keep fighting for, then life would be wonderful living.”[38] In Alinsky’s calculus, the common man could achieve this renewed vitality of spirit via his membership and active participation in the People’s Organization.

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. “The organizer,” Alinsky wrote, “is in a true sense reaching for the highest level for which man can reach -- to create, to be a ‘great creator,’ to play God.”[39]

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.”[40] The organizer’s function, he added, was “to agitate to the point of conflict”[41] and “to maneuver and bait the establishment so that it will publicly attack him as a ‘dangerous enemy.’”[42] “The word ‘enemy,’” said Alinsky, “is sufficient to put the organizer on the side of the people”;[43] 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.

But it is not enough for the organizer to be in solidarity with the people. He must also, said Alinsky, cultivate unity against a clearly identifiable enemy; he must specifically name this foe, and “singl[e] out”[44] precisely who is to blame for the “particular evil” that is the source of the people’s angst.[45] In other words, there must be a face associated with the people’s discontent. That face, Alinsky taught, “must be a personification, not something general and abstract like a corporation or City Hall.”[46] Rather, it should be an individual such as a CEO, a mayor, or a president.

Alinsky summarized it this way: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it…. [T]here is no point to tactics unless one has a target upon which to center the attacks.”[47] He held that the organizer’s task was to cultivate in people’s hearts a negative, visceral emotional response to the face of the enemy. “The organizer who forgets the significance of personal identification,” said Alinsky, “will attempt to answer all objections on the basis of logic and merit. With few exceptions this is a futile procedure.”[48]

Alinsky also advised organizers to focus their attention on a small number of selected, strategic targets. Spreading an organization’s passions too thinly was a recipe for certain failure, he warned.[49]

Alinsky advised the radical activist to avoid the temptation to concede that his opponent was not “100 per cent devil,” or that he possessed certain admirable qualities such as being “a good churchgoing man, generous to charity, and a good husband.” Such qualifying remarks, Alinsky said, “dilut[e] the impact of the attack” and amount to sheer “political idiocy.”[50]

Alinsky stressed the need for organizers to convince their followers that the chasm between the enemy and the members of the People’s Organization was vast and unbridgeable. “Before men can act,” he said, “an issue must be polarized. Men will act when they are convinced their cause is 100 percent on the side of the angels, and that the opposition are 100 percent on the side of the devil.”[51] Alinsky advised this course of action even though he well understood that the organizer “knows that when the time comes for negotiations it is really only a 10 percent difference.”[52] But in Alinsky’s brand of social warfare, the ends (in this case, the transfer of power) justify virtually whatever means are required (in this case, lying).[53]

Winning was all that mattered in Alinsky’s strategic calculus: “The morality of a means depends on whether the means is being employed at a time of imminent defeat or imminent victory.”[54] “The man of action … thinks only of his actual resources and the possibilities of various choices of action,” Alinsky added. “He asks only whether they are achievable and worth the cost; of means, only whether they will work.”[55] For Alinsky, all morality was relative: “The judgment of the ethics of means is dependent on the political position of those sitting in judgment.”[56]

Given that the enemy was to be portrayed as the very personification of evil, against whom any and all methods were fair game, Alinsky taught that an effective organizer should never give the appearance of being fully satisfied as a result of having resolved any particular conflict via compromise. Any compromise with the “devil” is, after all, by definition morally tainted and thus inadequate. Consequently, while the organizer may acknowledge that he is pleased by the compromise as a small step in the right direction, he must make it absolutely clear that there is still a long way to go, and that many grievances still remain unaddressed. The ultimate goal, said Alinsky, is not to arrive at compromise or peaceful coexistence, but rather to “crush the opposition,” bit by bit.[57] “A People’s Organization is dedicated to eternal war,” said Alinsky. “… A war is not an intellectual debate, and in the war against social evils there are no rules of fair play.… When you have war, it means that neither side can agree on anything…. In our war against the social menaces of mankind there can be no compromise. It is life or death.”[58]

Alinsky warned the organizer to be ever on guard against the possibility that the enemy might unexpectedly offer him “a constructive alternative” aimed at resolving the conflict. Said Alinsky, “You cannot risk being trapped by the enemy in his sudden agreement with your demand and saying, ‘You’re right -- we don’t know what to do about this issue. Now you tell us.’”[59] Such capitulation by the enemy would have the effect of diffusing the righteous indignation of the People’s Organization, whose very identity is inextricably woven into the fight for long-denied justice; i.e., whose struggle and identity are synonymous. If the perceived oppressor surrenders or extends a hand of friendship in an effort to end the conflict, the crusade of the People’s Organization is jeopardized. This cannot be permitted. Eternal war, by definition, must never end.

A real-life expression of this mindset was voiced by one Charles Brown, a former member of Voices in the Wilderness, an organization that opposed U.S. sanctions against Saddam Hussein’s regime prior to the 2003 American-led invasion that deposed the Iraqi dictator. “To be perfectly frank,” Brown reflected, “we were less concerned with the suffering of the Iraqi people than we were in maintaining our moral challenge to U.S. foreign policy. We did not agitate for an end to sanctions for purely humanitarian reasons; it was more important to us to maintain our moral challenge to ‘violent’ U.S. foreign policy, regardless of what happened in Iraq. For example, had we been truly interested in alleviating the suffering in Iraq, we might have considered pushing for an expanded Oil-for-Food program. Nothing could have interested us less.”

While Alinsky endorsed ruthlessness in waging war against the enemy, he was nonetheless mindful that certain approaches were more likely to win the hearts and minds of the people whose support would be crucial to the organizers’ ultimate victory. Above all, he taught that in order to succeed, the organizer and his People’s Organization needed to target their message toward the middle class. “Mankind,” said Alinsky, “has been and is divided into three parts: the Haves, the Have-Nots, and the Have-a-Little, Want Mores.”[60] He explained that in America, the Have-a-Little, Want-Mores (i.e., members of the middle class) were the most numerous and therefore of the utmost importance.[61] Said Alinsky: “Torn between upholding the status quo to protect the little they have, yet wanting change so they can get more, they [the middle class] become split personalities… Thermopolitically they are tepid and rooted in inertia. Today in Western society and particularly in the United States they comprise the majority of our population.”[62]

Alinsky stressed that organizers and their followers needed to take care, when first unveiling their particular crusade for “change,” not to alienate the middle class with any type of crude language, defiant demeanor, or menacing appearance that suggested radicalism or a disrespect for middle class mores and traditions. For this very reason, he disliked the hippies and counterculture activists of the 1960s. As Richard Poe puts it: “Alinsky scolded the Sixties Left for scaring off potential converts in Middle America. True revolutionaries do not flaunt their radicalism, Alinsky taught. They cut their hair, put on suits and infiltrate the system from within.”

While his ultimate goal was nothing less than the “radicalization of the middle class,” Alinsky stressed the importance of “learning to talk the language of those with whom one is trying to converse.”[63] “Tactics must begin with the experience of the middle class,” he said, “accepting their aversion to rudeness, vulgarity, and conflict. Start them easy, don’t scare them off.”[64]

To appeal to the middle class, Alinsky continued, “goals must be phrased in general terms like ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’; ‘Of the Common Welfare’; ‘Pursuit of happiness’; or ‘Bread and Peace.’”[65] He suggested, for instance, that an effective organizer “discovers what their [the middle class’] definition of the police is, and their language -- [and] he discards the rhetoric that always says ‘pig’ [in reference to police]. Instead of hostile rejection he is seeking bridges of communication and unity over the gaps…. He will view with strategic sensitivity the nature of middle-class behavior with its hang-ups over rudeness or aggressive, insulting, profane actions. All this and more must be grasped and used to radicalize parts of the middle class.”[66]

A related principle taught by Alinsky was that radical organizers must not only speak the language of the middle class, but that they also must dress their crusades in the vestments of morality. “Moral rationalization,” he said, “is indispensable to all kinds of action, whether to justify the selection or the use of ends or means.”[67] “All great leaders,” he added, “invoked ‘moral principles’ to cover naked self-interest in the clothing of ‘freedom,’ ‘equality of mankind,’ ‘a law higher than man-made law,’ and so on.” In short: “All effective actions require the passport of morality.”[68]

This tactic of framing one’s objectives in the rhetoric of morality precisely paralleled a communist device for deception known as “Aesopian language,” which J. Edgar Hoover described as follows:

“Nearly everyone is familiar with the fables of Aesop…. Often the point of the story is not directly stated but must be inferred by the reader. This is a ‘roundabout’ presentation. Lenin and his associates before 1917, while living in exile, made frequent use of ‘Aesopianism.’ Much of their propaganda was written in a ‘roundabout’ and elusive style to pass severe Czarist censorship. They desired revolution but could not say so. They had to resort to hints, theoretical discussions, even substituting words, which, through fooling the censor, were understood by the ‘initiated,’ that is, individuals trained in [Communist] Party terminology….

“The word ‘democracy’ is one of the communists’ favorite Aesopian terms. They say they favor democracy, that communism will bring the fullest democracy in the history of mankind. But, to the communists, democracy does not mean free speech, free elections, or the right of minorities to exist. Democracy means the domination of the communist state, the complete supremacy of the Party. The greater the communist control, the more ‘democracy.’ ‘Full democracy,’ to the communist, will come only when all noncommunist opposition is liquidated.

“Such expressions as ‘democracy,’ ‘equality,’ ‘freedom,’ and ‘justice’ are merely the Party’s Aesopian devices to impress noncommunists. Communists … clothe themselves with everything good, noble, and inspiring to exploit those ideals to their own advantage.”[69]

But Alinsky understood that there was a flip side to his strategy of speaking the palatable language of the middle class and the reassuring parlance of morality. Specifically, he said that organizers must be entirely unpredictable and unmistakably willing -- for the sake of the moral principles in whose name they claim to act -- to watch society descend into utter chaos and anarchy. He stated that they must be prepared, if necessary, to “go into a state of complete confusion and draw [their] opponent into the vortex of the same confusion.”[70]

One way in which organizers and their disciples can broadcast their preparedness for this possibility is by staging loud, defiant, massive protest rallies expressing deep rage and discontent over one particular injustice or another. Such demonstrations can give onlookers the impression that a mass movement is preparing to shift into high gear, and that its present (already formidable) size is but a fraction of what it eventually will become. “A mass impression,” said Alinsky, “can be lasting and intimidating…. Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.”[71] “The threat,” he added, “is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.”[72] “If your organization is small in numbers,” said Alinsky, “… conceal the members in the dark but raise a din and clamor that will make the listener believe that your organization numbers many more than it does.”[73]

“Wherever possible,” Alinsky counseled, “go outside the experience of the enemy. Here you want to cause confusion, fear, and retreat.”[74] Marching mobs of chanting demonstrators accomplishes this objective. The average observer’s reaction to such a display is of a dual nature: First he is afraid. But he also recalls the organizer’s initial articulation of middle-class ideals and morals. Thus he convinces himself that the People’s Organization is surely composed of reasonable people who actually hold values similar to his own, and who seek resolutions that will be beneficial to both sides. This thought process causes him to proffer -- in hopes of appeasing the angry mobs -- concessions and admissions of guilt, which the organizer in turn exploits to gain still greater moral leverage and to extort further concessions.

In Alinsky’s view, action was more often the catalyst for revolutionary fervor than vice versa. He deemed it essential for the organizer to get people to act first (e.g., participate in a demonstration) and rationalize their actions later. “Get them to move in the right direction first,” said Alinsky. “They’ll explain to themselves later why they moved in that direction.”[75]

Among the most vital tenets of Alinsky’s method were the following:

· “Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules. You can kill them with this, for they can no more live up to their own rules than the Christian Church can live up to Christianity.”[76]

· “No organization, including organized religion, can live up to the letter of its own book. You can club them to death with their ‘book’ of rules and regulations.”[77]

· “Practically all people live in a world of contradictions. They espouse a morality which they do not practice.… This dilemma can and should be fully utilized by the organizer in getting individuals and groups involved in a People’s Organization. It is a very definite Achilles’ heel even in the most materialistic person. Caught in the trap of his own contradictions, that person will find it difficult to show satisfactory cause to both the organizer and himself as to why he should not join and participate in the organization. He will be driven either to participation or else to a public and private admission of his own lack of faith in democracy and man.”[78]

We have seen this phenomenon played out many times in recent years. For instance, a case of police brutality against black New Yorker Abner Louima in 1997 was cited repeatedly by critics of the police as emblematic of a widespread pattern of abuse aimed at nonwhite minorities. Similarly, the misconduct of a handful of American soldiers at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison in 2004 was portrayed as part of a much larger pattern that had been approved by the highest levels of the U.S. government. And on the battlefields of the Middle East, any American military initiative that has inadvertently killed innocent civilians has been cited by opponents of the war as evidence that U.S. troops are maniacal, bloodthirsty killers. In each of the foregoing examples, the allegedly hypocritical American authorities were accused of having violated their own “book of rules” (rules that are supposed to govern the conduct of the police or the military).

Alinsky taught that in order to most effectively cast themselves as defenders of moral principals and human decency, organizers must react with “shock, horror, and moral outrage” whenever their targeted enemy in any way misspeaks or fails to live up to his “book of rules.”[79]

Moreover, said Alinsky, whenever possible the organizer must deride his enemy and dismiss him as someone unworthy of being taken seriously because he is either intellectually deficient or morally bankrupt. “The enemy properly goaded and guided in his reaction will be your major strength,” said Alinsky.[80] He advised organizers to “laugh at the enemy” in an effort to provoke “an irrational anger.”[81] “Ridicule,” said Alinsky, “is man’s most potent weapon. It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule. Also it infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage.”[82]

According to Alinsky, it was vital that organizers focus on multiple crusades and multiple approaches. “A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag,” he wrote. “Man can sustain militant interest in any issue for only a limited time … New issues and crises are always developing…”[83] “Keep the pressure on,” he continued, “with different tactics and actions, and utilize all events of the period for your purpose.”[84]

Toward this end, Alinksy advised organizers to be sure that they always kept more than one “fight in the bank.” In other words, organizers should keep a stockpile of comparatively small crusades which they are already prepared to conduct, and to which they can instantly turn their attention after having won a major victory of some type. These “fights in the bank” serve the dual purpose of keeping the organization’s momentum going, while not allowing its major crusade to get “stale” from excessive public exposure.[85]

A People’s Organization, said Alinsky, can build a wide-based membership only if it focuses on multiple issues (e.g., civil rights, civil liberties, welfare, rent, urban renewal, the environment, etc.) “Multiple issues mean constant action and life,” Alinsky wrote.[86]

One example of such an organization today is the International Action Center (IAC), founded by Ramsey Clark and staffed by members of the Marxist-Leninist Workers World Party. To broadcast the notion of American evil as widely as possible, IAC has created numerous “faces” for itself, each one serving as a unique portal through which the organization can reach a portion of the public. But in the final analysis, there is no difference between any of these nominally distinct groups, among which are International ANSWER, the Korea Truth Commission, No Draft No Way, Troops Out Now, Activist San Diego, the People’s Video Network, the Mumia Mobilization Office, the New York Committee to Free the Cuban Five, the National People’s Campaign, the Association of Mexican American Workers, Leftbooks, the Rosa Parks Day headquarters, and the People’s Rights Fund. These groups are concerned with such varied issues as racism, the Iraq War, American war crimes, the military draft, Cuban spies, the allegedly wrongful incarceration of a convicted cop-killer, the Arab-Israeli conflict, poor working conditions, immigrant rights, “vigilante” hate groups, poverty, civil rights violations, economic inequality, and globalization. And for the most part, all of these groups are composed of the very same people.

Alinsky cautioned organizers to judiciously choose to initiate only those battles which they stood a very good chance of winning. “The organizer’s job,” he said, “is to begin to build confidence and hope in the idea of organization and thus in the people themselves: to win limited victories, each of which will build confidence and the feeling that ‘if we can do so much with what we have now, just think what we will be able to do when we get big and strong.’ It is almost like taking a prize-fighter up the road to the championship -- you have to very carefully and selectively pick his opponents, knowing full well that certain defeats would be demoralizing and end his career.”[87]

Alinsky also taught that in some cases the mission of the People’s Organization could be aided if the organizer was able to get himself arrested and thereafter exploit the publicity he derived from the arrest. “Jailing the revolutionary leaders and their followers,” Alinsky said, “… strengthens immeasurably the position of the leaders with their people by surrounding the jailed leadership with an aura of martyrdom; it deepens the identification of the leadership with their people.” It shows, he said, “that their leadership cares so much for them, and is so sincerely committed to the issue, that it is willing to suffer imprisonment for the cause.”[88] But Alinsky stipulated that organizers should seek to be jailed only for a short duration (from one day to two months); longer terms of incarceration, he said, have a tendency to fall from public consciousness and to be forgotten.[89]

During the 1960s Alinsky was an enormously influential force in American life. As Richard Poe reports: “When President Johnson launched his War on Poverty in 1964, Alinsky allies infiltrated the program, steering federal money into Alinsky projects. In 1966, Senator Robert Kennedy allied himself with union leader Cesar Chavez, an Alinsky disciple. Chavez had worked ten years for Alinsky, beginning in 1952. Kennedy soon drifted into Alinsky's circle. After race riots shook Rochester, New York, Alinsky descended on the city and began pressuring Eastman-Kodak to hire more blacks. Kennedy supported Alinsky's shakedown.”

Though Alinsky died in 1972, his legacy has lived on as a staple of leftist method, a veritable blueprint for revolution -- to which both Democratic presidential candidates, who are his disciples and protégés, refer euphemistically as “change.”

[1] Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals (New York: Vintage Books), March 1972 edition, p. xxii. (Original publication was in 1971.)

[2] Ibid., p.3.

[3] J. Edgar Hoover, Masters of Deceit (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1958), p. 213.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Saul Alinsky, Reveille for Radicals (New York: Vintage Books), 1989, p. 90. (Original publication was in 1946.)

[6] Ibid., p.91.

[7] Ibid., pp. 16-17.

[8] Ibid., p. 26.

[9] Ibid., p. 25.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals, p. 7.

[12] Ibid., p. 3.

[13] Saul Alinsky, Reveille for Radicals, pp. 21-22.

[14] Ibid., p. 4.

[15] Ibid., p. 92.

[16] Ibid., p. 40.

[17] Ibid., p. 92.

[18] Ibid., p. 45.

[19] Ibid., p. 43.

[20] Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals, pp. 120-121.

[21] Saul Alinsky, Reveille for Radicals, pp. 6-7.

[22] Ibid., p. 15.

[23] Ibid.

[24] Ibid., p. 40.

[25] Ibid., p. 16.

[26] Ibid., p. 60.

[27] Ibid., p. 25.

[28] Ibid., p. 57.

[29] Ibid., p. 59.

[30] Ibid., p. 60.

[31] Ibid., pp. 59-60.

[32] Ibid., p. 133.

[33] Ibid., pp. 48, 64.

[34] J. Edgar Hoover, Masters of Deceit, p. 90.

[35] Saul Alinsky, Reveille for Radicals, p. 44.

[36] Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals, p. 91. Saul Alinsky, Reveille for Radicals, p. 104.

[37] Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals, p. 92.

[38] Saul Alinsky, Reveille for Radicals, p. 43.

[39] Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals, p. 61.

[40] Ibid., pp. 116-117.

[41] Ibid., p. 117.

[42] Ibid., p. 100.

[43] Ibid.

[44] Ibid., p. 130.

[45] Ibid.

[46] Ibid., p. 133.

[47] Ibid., pp. 130-131.

[48] Saul Alinsky, Reveille for Radicals, p. 125.

[49] Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals, p. 151.

[50] Ibid., p. 134.

[51] Ibid., p. 78.

[52] Ibid.

[53] Ibid., p. 29.

[54] Ibid., p. 34.

[55] Ibid., p. 24.

[56] Ibid., p. 26.

[57] Saul Alinsky, Reveille for Radicals, p. 150.

[58] Ibid., pp. 133-134.

[59] Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals, p. 130.

[60] Ibid., p. 18.

[61] Ibid., pp. 18-20.

[62] Ibid., p. 19.

[63] Saul Alinsky, Reveille for Radicals, p. 93.

[64] Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals, p. 195.

[65] Ibid., p. 45.

[66] Ibid., p. 186.

[67] Ibid., p. 43.

[68] Ibid., pp. 43-44.

[69] J. Edgar Hoover, Masters of Deceit, pp. 101-102.

[70] Saul Alinsky, Reveille for Radicals, pp. 150-151.

[71] Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals, p. 127.

[72] Ibid., p. 129.

[73] Ibid., p. 126.

[74] Ibid., p. 127.

[75] Saul Alinsky, Reveille for Radicals, pp. 169-170.

[76] Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals, p. 128.

[77] Ibid., p. 152.

[78] Saul Alinsky, Reveille for Radicals, pp. 93-94.

[79] Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals, p. 130.

[80] Ibid., p. 136.

[81] Ibid., p. 138.

[82] Ibid., p. 128.

[83] Ibid.

[84] Ibid.

[85] Saul Alinsky, Reveille for Radicals, pp. 151-152.

[86] Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals, pp. 76-78, 120.

[87] Ibid., p. 114.

[88] Ibid., p. 155.

[89] Ibid., p. 156.

John Perazzo is the Managing Editor of DiscoverTheNetworks and is the author of The Myths That Divide Us: How Lies Have Poisoned American Race Relations. For more information on his book, click here. E-mail him at wsbooks25@hotmail.com

WASHINGTON - In unusually blunt terms, Defense Secretary Robert Gates on Monday challenged the Air Force, whose leaders are under fire on several fronts, to contribute more to immediate wartime needs and to promote new thinking.

Gates singled out the use of pilotless surveillance planes, in growing demand by commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan, as an example of how the Air Force and other services must act more aggressively.

Gates has been trying for months to get the Air Force to send more unmanned surveillance and reconnaissance aircraft, like the Predator drone that provides real-time surveillance video, to the battlefield. They are playing an increasing role in disrupting insurgent efforts to plant roadside bombs.

"Because people were stuck in old ways of doing business, it's been like pulling teeth," Gates said of his prodding. "While we've doubled this capability in recent months, it is still not good enough."

Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell said Gates' complaint about struggling to get more drone aircraft to the battlefield was aimed not only at the Air Force but at the military as a whole.

Gates made his remarks to a large group of officers at the Air Force's Air University at Maxwell Air Force Base, Ala. Noting that they represent the future of Air Force leadership, he urged them to think innovatively and worry less about their careers than about adapting to a changing world.

Later, Gates flew to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., to deliver a speech to cadets and faculty members. He encouraged young soldiers to "take on the mantle of fearless, thoughtful but loyal dissent" when the situation calls for it, and to "defend your integrity as you would your life," according to a text of his prepared remarks released in advance by the Pentagon.

He alluded to a controversial article published last May in the Armed Forces Journal in which the author, Army Lt. Col. Paul Yingling, wrote that America's generals had failed the nation by not properly preparing the armed forces for war in Iraq and by not accurately portraying to the public how the war was unfolding.

Gates said he was impressed that the Army allowed that critique to be published.

"I believe this is a sign of institutional strength and vitality," Gates said.

Gates also said the Iraq war is a "hard sell" for continued support from the American public, and he warned in strong terms of the consequences of getting into an armed conflict with Iran.

"Another war in the Middle East is the last thing we need and, in fact, I believe it would be disastrous on a number of levels," he said in his prepared remarks. He called Iran "hell bent" on acquiring nuclear weapons and said that as a result he favors keeping the military option on the table.

At Maxwell, Gates did not mention any of the controversies that have dogged the Air Force in recent months — most recently the disclosure that investigators had found that a $50 million contract to promote the Air Force's Thunderbirds aerial stunt team was tainted by improper influence and preferential treatment. The probe found no criminal conduct but laid out a trail of communications from Air Force leaders — including from its top officer, Gen. Michael Moseley — that eventually influenced the 2005 contract award.

The Air Force also has been involved in a pair of embarrassing nuclear-related mistakes, and Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne, the service's top civilian, was compelled to issue a public statement last month disowning a public remark by a senior general that suggested the Air Force was at odds with the Bush administration over money in the proposed 2009 budget for F-22 stealth fighters.

The bulk of Gates' remarks focused on suggested areas in which the Air Force can adapt to changing times.

While Gates' comments were directed mainly at the Air Force, his concern about faster fielding of unmanned surveillance and reconnaissance aircraft included a broader appeal to the entire military. The Army, Navy and Marine Corps have been expanding their fleets of drone aircraft.

"In my view we can do and we should do more to meet the needs of men and women fighting in the current conflicts while their outcome may still be in doubt," he said. "My concern is that our services are still not moving aggressively in wartime to provide resources needed now on the battlefield."

He cited the example of drone aircraft that can watch, hunt and sometimes kill insurgents without risking the life of a pilot. He said the number of such aircraft has grown 25-fold since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, to a total of 5,000.

To push the issue harder, Gates said he established last week a Pentagon-wide task force "to work this problem in the weeks to come, to find more innovative and bold ways to help those whose lives are on the line."

Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said Gates expects an initial report from the group by early May.

Gates likened the urgency of the task force's work to that of a similar organization he created last year to push for faster production and deployment of mine-resistant, ambush-protected armored vehicles that have been credited with saving lives of troops facing attacks by roadside bombs in Iraq.

"All this may require rethinking long-standing service assumptions and priorities about which missions require certified pilots and which do not," Gates said, referring to so-called unmanned aerial vehicles in the Air Force fleet that are controlled by service members at ground stations.

Gates, who served in the Air Force in the 1960s as a young officer before he joined the Central Intelligence Agency, urged the officers in his audience to dedicate themselves to thinking creatively.

"I'm asking you to be part of the solution and part of the future," he said.

From The Times
April 21, 2008
Zimbabwean farmers swap troubles to fight drugs in Afghanistan

Nick Meo in Kandahar
As he drives out into the dusty fields of Kandahar province keeping one eye open for the Taleban, Harry Spies can't help daydreaming sometimes about the farm he used to have in Zimbabwe.

Three years after he gave up on Africa, Mr Spies is one of a number of white farmers who have brought their knowledge of agriculture, and experience of guerrilla warfare, to the opium fields of southern Afghanistan.

A handful of contractors are almost the only foreigners still risking commercial work in the south. Veterans of the 1970s bush war are prominent among them. They use their skills to set up agricultural projects which provide an alternative to opium for farmers.

In Zimbabwe, Mr Spies was one of the lucky ones. He leased his farm, finally giving up in 2005 when he decided the writing was on the wall. A fellow ex-Zimbabwean who works alongside him in Afghanistan had paid the final instalment on his property a week before it was invaded by Robert Mugabe's “war veterans”.

From Kandahar and Helmand, all of them have been keenly watching events back home. Mr Spies believes that even if Mr Mugabe leaves power the farmers who left can never go back to their old life in Zimbabwe.

He said: “You put your heart and soul into those farms. They were your retirement - they were something to pass on. Your labour force was like an extended family which you fed and educated.

“That's gone now. Farmers would only go back if the World Bank or somebody like that would give guarantees, and now a farm would have to be run as a commercial enterprise like a factory or a business.”

Unlike some farmers, Mr Spies is not entirely resentful of Mr Mugabe and believes that his reforms helped those farm labourers who were not lucky enough to have good employers.

In the last few years about 1,200 white farmers out of 4,500 have given up on Zimbabwe and moved abroad, crippling the rural economy. Most have gone elsewhere in Africa or to Australia and New Zealand.

An American entrepreneur working on agricultural projects for international aid agencies such as USAid first recognised their value in the uniquely difficult farming environment of southern Afghanistan.

[]Steve Shaulis, the owner of Central Asia Development Group, said: “Our Zimbabwean staff are among the best farmers in the world and have the toughness to operate in the unforgiving environment of southern Afghanistan. They are comfortable with providing their own security in the field.”

The CADG farmers have helped Afghan villagers establish modern drip feed irrigation systems to replace traditional irrigation which was destroyed by the Red Army, as well as running cash-for-work programmes to give labourers an alternative to opium harvesting.

Although it works in the most difficult provinces in the country the company has had no serious security incidents with its workforce. In contrast to the giant corporations who only venture out in armoured cars with large numbers of armed guards it works close to the community, receiving the protection of tribal leaders in return.

Years of war and destruction have impoverished Afghan farmers and left them addicted to opium as a cash crop, but the Zimbabwean farmers believe agriculture could have a bright future in southern Afghanistan once roads and electricity are developed.

Mr Spies said: “The quality of the fruit is very good - fantastic pomegranates, almonds and grapes. Farmers don't make that much cash out of opium and when they grow it they are preyed on by some nasty moneylenders. They would switch to orchard crops, which make almost as much money, if there was an infrastructure for getting them to market.”

Their own army experience may have been decades ago but it is still invaluable. “If you really fall in the cactus you know what to do,” Mr Spies said.

Some have never really got over it. “What is this Zimbabwe?” fumed one of his colleagues when The Times asked about his past. “I am a Rhodesian.

Parag Khanna sees a decadent West confronting a united Asia: “Because of the East, the West is no longer master of its own fate.”

very so often, a grand thesis captures the world’s imagination, at least until it is swept away by events or by a newer, more plausible thesis. The latest one to do so, in policy think tanks, universities, foreign ministries, corporate boardrooms, editorial offices, and international conference centers, is that America’s time of global dominance is finished, and that new powers, such as China, India, and Russia, are poised to take over. It’s an idea that has had as much currency within the United States as elsewhere.
All great empires set too much store by predictions of their imminent demise. Perhaps, as the Greek poet Constantine Cavafy suggested in his poem “Waiting for the Barbarians,” empires need the sense of peril to give them a reason to go on. Why spend so much money and effort if not to keep the barbarians at bay?
Still, the current economic growth of China—and also of India and Russia—is impressive. In “Rivals: How the Power Struggle Between China, India and Japan Will Shape Our Next Decade” (Harcourt; $26), the former Economist editor Bill Emmott refers to a World Bank analysis predicting that both China and India “could almost triple their economic output” in the next ten years or so. By the late twenty-twenties, China could overtake the United States as the world’s biggest economy. The spectacle of Chinese turbo-capitalism is inspiring Marco Polo-like awe in some Western commentators. Mark Leonard, the author of “What Does China Think?” (PublicAffairs; $22.95), reports, with more enthusiasm than plausibility, that “a town the size of London shoots up in the Pearl River Delta every year.” Parag Khanna, in “The Second World” (Random House; $29), informs us, rather gleefully, that “Asia is shaping the world’s destiny—and exposing the flaws of the grand narrative of Western civilization in the process. Because of the East, the West is no longer master of its own fate.”
It has been a while since policy mavens have used terms like “destiny” with a straight face. But that’s the kind of language we are beginning to hear, now that American “hyper-power” (as a former French foreign minister liked to call it) is being challenged. There are good reasons for skepticism about such grand forecasts. Economic statistics in autocracies such as China are notoriously unreliable, and it’s worth recalling all those breathless predictions, a few decades ago, of Japan’s imminent global domination. But, even if we aren’t so quick to write off America’s cultural, political, economic, and military clout, the fact that the American economy has to rely on infusions of cash from China, Singapore, and the Gulf states suggests that something important is taking place.
Exactly what is happening, and with what consequences, are matters of dispute. Some see great opportunities. At the start of “The Post-American World” (Norton; $25.95), Fareed Zakaria, the editor of Newsweek International, states that his book is “not about the decline of America but rather about the rise of everyone else.” He’s among those who argue that the newly rich powers should be embedded quickly and snugly in international institutions such as the G8, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization. Others say that it’s naïve—so very “old Enlightenment,” as Robert Kagan, the author of “The Return of History and the End of Dreams” (Knopf; $19.95), puts it—to imagine that the aggressive ambitions of great nations can be muzzled that way. Protecting the Free World, Kagan thinks, will require a stiffer military backbone. He envisages a clash between the global constellation of democracies and the nouveau-riche autocracies. Khanna, for his part, describes a vigorous East united against a more and more decadent West. (He is fond of quoting Oswald Spengler—always a bad sign.)
Zakaria sees the future in less belligerent terms. His is the voice of what might be called the Davos consensus, after the Swiss resort where, under the auspices of the World Economic Forum, financial and political élites gather each year for convivial networking. What’s striking about that consensus, though, is how swiftly it can change. The first time I visited this august assemblage, around the turn of the century, the received opinion was that the United States was so far ahead of the rest of the world that no one could ever catch up. This year in Davos, America’s fall was on everyone’s lips.
Zakaria, who is judicious, reasonable, smooth, intelligent, and a little glib, predicts nothing so rash. He points out that, aside from some pockets of backwardness, the whole world has been getting much richer. Global capitalism has been a huge success. Far from menacing local cultures, as some fear, globalization has, by his accounting, been good for cultural diversity. France and South Korea, “long dominated by American movies, now have large film industries of their own,” he writes, omitting to mention that France had one before Hollywood threatened to wipe it out, and that its revival in France, as in South Korea, has been due more to state subsidies than to global capitalism. Still, even though the economic scene looks gloomier now than it did when he finished his book, Zakaria is correct to insist that many people everywhere have benefitted from the global boom.
The problem, Zakaria writes, is that “as economic fortunes rise, so does nationalism.” This is apparent in Russia, of course, but it is equally so in China, where he talked to a young businessman, and felt as if he “were in Berlin in 1910.” Actually, the prickly nationalism of many Chinese may have less to do with their newfound prosperity than with China’s fraught combination of political autocracy and economic liberalism: nationalism and economic boosterism are all the autocrats have at their disposal to try to legitimatize their continuing monopoly on power. In any case, Zakaria is inclined to think that rational calculation will ultimately prevail. He maintains that the Chinese are by nature a pragmatic people, who will surely realize that it is in their interest to be embedded in the liberal global order. “The veneration of an abstract idea,” he explains, “is somewhat alien to China’s practical mind-set.”
This piece of cultural analysis does not quite explain the veneration, fairly recently, of Chairman Mao’s highly abstract ideas. In fact, ideology has always played a large role in Chinese politics, and Robert Kagan, perhaps the cleverest of the neoconservatives, points out the limits of Chinese pragmatism. Like the Russians, he writes, the Chinese leaders have “a comprehensive set of beliefs about government and society and the proper relationship between rulers and their people,” and are convinced that the chaos and uncertainties of democracy pose threats to their nation. “Chinese and Russian leaders are not just autocrats therefore. They believe in autocracy.” This is indeed what Chinese rulers have believed for thousands of years, drawing support from some highly abstract ideas expressed in Confucian philosophy.
Zakaria says that China, like India, wants “to gain power and status and respect, for sure, but by growing within the international system, not by overturning it. As long as these new countries feel they can be accommodated, they have every incentive to become ‘responsible stakeholders’ in this system.” But can powerful autocratic regimes really be accommodated in global economic institutions, without undermining either their own autocratic powers or the liberal democracies? As Kagan says, “Power is the ability to get others to do what you want and prevent them from doing what you don’t want.” Something may have to give.
Zakaria’s answer is “consultation, cooperation, and even compromise.” The United States, he reminds us, is still ranked by the World Economic Forum as “the most competitive economy in the world.” What’s needed to perpetuate American supremacy is greater knowledge of the world outside, a willingness to open the borders to new immigrants, and, above all, a policy of consulting foreign leaders instead of lecturing them or going it alone. “The chair of the board who can gently guide a group of independent directors is still a very powerful person,” Zakaria observes.
he harder edge of Robert Kagan’s prose is bracing after Zakaria’s smooth assurance. Reading Kagan is like reading the work of a very clever Marxist: the logic is impeccable, even when the premise is wrong. His main premise is not particularly new. In a line of thought popular among German conservatives between the two World Wars, Kagan holds that liberals are dreamers who believe that nations will behave decently once they are part of a rational world order, where all are free to pursue their enlightened self-interests within a framework of internationally agreed-on rules, as promulgated by such institutions as the League of Nations and the United Nations. Trade, and the mutual dependencies that result from it, will eliminate belligerence between powers, liberals suppose. But, in Kagan’s view, liberalism, or what he sometimes calls “Enlightenment liberalism,” is deluded. Like the German conservatives, Kagan sees a very different world, one that is “embedded in human nature” and animated by what the ancient Greeks called thumos, “a spiritedness and ferocity in defense of clan, tribe, city, or state.” Here such phrases as “national destiny,” shaped by history and blood, have a congenial home. The United States, he points out in his new book—as he did at greater length in his previous book, “Dangerous Nation” (2006)—has “intervened and overthrown sovereign governments dozens of times throughout its history.” An “expansive, even aggressive global policy was consistent with American foreign policy traditions,” because the essence of Americans’ patriotism “has been inextricably tied to a belief in their nation’s historic global significance.” Once a red-blooded interventionist, always a red-blooded interventionist. That, for Kagan, is the nation’s destiny—and a good thing, too.
Kagan’s account of America’s essential nature ignores long-standing traditions of isolationism, Lincoln’s fierce opposition to the Mexican War, because of his respect for sovereign boundaries, and Woodrow Wilson’s promotion of the kind of international institution that Kagan discounts. In Kagan’s view, the debacle of the Vietnam War dented American confidence in an expansive foreign policy. The neoconservative project, accordingly, has been to regain the confidence to carry out America’s destiny once more, in the name of democracy and “the belief that all men are created equal and have certain inalienable rights that must not be abridged by governments.” To people who share this faith, he writes, “wars that defend these principles” can be right “even if established international law says they are wrong.” They think that the United States shouldn’t let international institutions hamper its interventions in foreign countries.
But, Kagan argues, autocratic powers like China and Russia have no love for those institutions, either. To them, he writes, “the international liberal order is not progress. It is oppression.” They will therefore form alliances with fellow-autocrats, who will oppose any encroachment on their sovereignty. International institutions, for them, represent just such an encroachment. And the Europeans, despite their enthusiasm for the international system, will nevertheless see that it’s in their interest, as fellow-democrats, to stick with the United States. The idea of embedding the growing powers of Asia, Russia, and the Middle East in the kind of new liberal order favored by people like Fareed Zakaria is, for Kagan, a hopeless dream.
ust as Cold War thinking, on both sides of the Iron Curtain, created a certain ideological clarity, this clean division between the democrats and the autocrats is invigorating in its simplicity. The real world, alas, is rarely so clean. Kagan acknowledges that the United States sometimes has to support authoritarian regimes to further its interests. But, like the Cold Warriors of old (who were slow to recognize the sharp divisions between China and the Soviet Union), he tends to see potential enemies as a common front. As an example of the new axis of autocracy, Kagan cites the Shanghai Coöperation Organization, a loose alliance consisting of China, Russia, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan. These are all autocracies, but is their alliance really based on a shared horror of democratic intervention, as Kagan believes? As Bill Emmott points out, the S.C.O. was formed because of concerns about Islamist movements in China, Russia, and Central Asia, but also because China doesn’t want Russia to dominate Central Asia and thinks that the S.C.O. can boost its influence there.
Kagan may well be correct to argue that the Chinese see themselves as a traditional rising power, like Germany and Japan in the nineteenth century, both of which stressed military as much as economic strength. The question for the United States and other democracies is how to keep autocratic powers safely contained. Compared with Russia and China, the United States still has overwhelming military might. But how useful is that as an instrument of policy? Emmott points out that things are very different from the days when imperial Germany and Japan started throwing their weight around. A rising power no longer needs a strong military to secure natural resources. They can be bought on open markets, or acquired from unsavory regimes in exchange for easy credit. And the democratic countries have business interests that are at odds with a staunch opposition to autocracies that have poor human-rights records. We like those cheap Chinese imports.
Nor is it so clear that military muscle is a better way to defend democratic interests than international institutions. Both are needed, to be sure. But Kagan himself observes that Russian and Chinese leaders are right to worry about those institutions. He poses the key question: “Can autocrats enter the liberal international order without succumbing to the forces of liberalism?” If the answer is no, that would be a pretty good reason to try to ensnare them in it.
About twenty years ago, there was a common belief that military power meant little, that the soft power of Germany and Japan would rule the world. This was a mistake. But hard power can easily be overrated, as the war in Iraq and the “war on terror” demonstrate. Kagan rather skates over the subject of the war in Iraq, which he ardently supported: “A stable, pro-American Iraq would shift the strategic balance in a decidedly pro-American direction.” Well, yes.
He does, however, make a significant point that is overlooked by those who believe that the combined blessings of trade, capitalism, and rising prosperity lead inexorably to liberal democracy. And this is the international appeal of autocracy. The Soviet Union, after an initial spurt of industrialization, was a model of economic failure. Contemporary China, so far, is not. As Kagan says, “Thanks to decades of remarkable growth, the Chinese today can argue that their model of economic development, which combines an increasingly open economy with a closed political system, can be a successful option for development in many nations.”
Some commentators, like Mark Leonard, see this as a revolutionary intellectual breakthrough. In fact, the Chinese experiment has antecedents: Pinochet’s Chile, South Korea under military dictatorship, and, to some extent, Bismarck’s Germany. (Zakaria’s previous book, “The Future of Freedom,” explored the topic of pro-development autocracies in some detail.) It’s not surprising that Third World dictators should be attracted to this model. More worrying is the allure it has for technocrats, businessmen, architects, and politicians even in the democratic West. Who wouldn’t prefer to make deals in a country without independent trade unions? Who would turn down the chance to redesign entire cities without public interference?
In foreign policy, as Leonard points out, China has a distinct advantage over the United States, especially after the Iraq misadventure: “Where American policy-makers champion the Washington Consensus, the Chinese talk about the success of gradualism and the ‘Harmonious Society.’ Where the USA is bellicose, Chinese policy-makers talk about peace. Whereas American diplomats talk about regime change, their Chinese counterparts talk about respect for sovereignty and the diversity of civilizations.” Such talk is self-serving and disingenuous, but in most of the world it is also more appealing. Moreover, a dogmatic insistence on isolating dictators, such as the Burmese junta, does little to oust them, and actually diminishes America’s influence.
n some Asian countries, China’s economic success has strengthened the notion that democracy is just another outmoded Western idea hopelessly unsuited to Asians. Parag Khanna is inclined in this direction. Somewhat oddly for a man whose résumé includes fellowships at the Council on Foreign Relations, the Brookings Institution, and the New America Foundation, he is enthralled by the idea of Western democratic decadence, an idea that’s promulgated with particular enthusiasm in Singapore. (The name of Kishore Mahbubani, Lee Kuan Yew’s promoter of “Asian Values,” duly appears in his book and in several of the others under review.) In its contempt for liberal democracy, Khanna’s “The Second World” would be refreshing if it were not so wrongheaded and so badly written: “Located at the mouth of the Yangtze River, Shanghai subsumes China’s best and brightest into a culture of doing in the way New Yorkers are known for, its first world urban culture and cosmopolitan design already earning it the status of a global hot spot.”
Having talked to hundreds of fellow think-tankers and pundits all over the world, Khanna has concluded, among other things, that “democracy is even less in demand because many Asian countries actually have good leaders.” This is an extraordinary statement, in light of the democratic movements that have arisen in South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, China, the Philippines, Pakistan, and Indonesia in the past few decades. It’s true that spokesmen for the Chinese (and Singaporean) élites tend to be suspicious of democratic change, and to associate democracy with mob rule. According to Mark Leonard, “Many scholars complain that Chinese intellectuals have lost their traditional role as the social conscience of the nation—and been co-opted by the government.” In fact, advising the rulers is the traditional role of Chinese intellectuals. (Many of those with a social conscience are in exile, or in jail.) Still, advice can be critical, up to a point. The Chinese thinkers Leonard interviewed tend to be either neoliberals, who want more capitalism, or leftists, who want more socialism. Some are more pro-democratic than others; few share the naïve trust in their leaders that Khanna assumes is the natural habit of Asians.
Even less persuasive is Khanna’s belief in a united Asia, a kind of revival of Japan’s wartime Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, this time under a Chinese roof. He quotes a Malaysian diplomat (where does he find these people?) who claims that “creating a community is easy among the yellow and the brown—but not the white.” This claim isn’t supported by the rivalry between India and China. And it’s not supported, either, by the enormous difficulties that Southeast Asian nations have had in overcoming regional hostilities, and political differences, simply in order to institutionalize their shared economic interests in the trade bloc ASEAN.
To Robert Kagan, the increasingly warm relations between India and the United States, symbolized by a nuclear pact in 2006, are a sign that the democracies are beginning to line up together. India has been a democracy for some six decades, and its relations with the United States used to be much frostier than America’s relations with Pakistan under military dictators. But things changed after the Cold War. India no longer needs to play the United States off against the Soviet Union. Instead, it needs the United States as a counterweight against China.
India being a democracy, Khanna rather disapproves of it. China has order, he says, while India “achieves less because it is chaotic.” But Japan, which is hardly chaotic, has also edged closer to India, and shows little sign as yet of wanting to break away from America’s nuclear embrace. If anything, the Japanese are even more suspicious than the Indians are of a resurgent China. For the first time since the eighteen-seventies, Japan has a serious Asian rival, and politicians on both sides of the East China Sea are still picking at the wounds of the last great war. When it is in the interest of the Chinese government to stir up nationalism, usually for domestic reasons, memories of Japanese atrocities are recalled, and this invariably provokes nationalistic counterblasts from the Japanese.
However fast the economies of new powers are growing, then, forecasts of their world domination leave out a great deal. China has a demographic problem—too many boys—compounding its potentially catastrophic ecological problems. Russia’s wealth is dependent on the price of oil. India, with its messy democratic system, might well have staying power, but no one sees it as a threat to the United States. And, besides, the “Harmonious Society” of Asia could still be violently disrupted by conflicts over Taiwan, North Korea, Tibet, Kashmir, and various islands, some of them sitting on oil reserves claimed by Vietnam, India, China, South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan. China is frightened that Japan might become a nuclear power, and makes every effort to keep it down, or at least out of the United Nations Security Council. Russia and China watch each other tensely across the Siberian border. North Korea periodically lobs missiles in the direction of Japan. And the South Koreans and the Southeast Asians are stuck between a democratic Japan they don’t trust and an autocratic China they must warily accommodate.
The one nation whose presence still guarantees a measure of stability in Asia is the very one whose influence commentators are so quick to write off: the United States of America. The Chinese may not like the fact that the United States has so many bases in Japan and South Korea, but they still prefer it to a nuclear-armed Japan. Cases of American G.I.s molesting local girls enrage the populations of South Korea and Japan, but they still feel safer with a U.S. military presence than without it. Aside from the disaster in Vietnam, the United States has been a reasonably good Asian cop. But how long can it continue to play that role? The longer this postwar arrangement goes on, the longer it will take the East Asian powers to manage their own security responsibly. The same can be said of the Europeans, as became painfully clear in the Balkan conflicts.
Kagan is right when he says that “the world’s democracies need to show solidarity for one another, and they need to support those trying to pry open a democratic space where it has been closing.” But this task would be made a lot easier if the United States were to depart from what Kagan believes to be its national destiny of “expansive, even aggressive, global policy,” and amplify its influence by fully engaging with international institutions, instead of seeing them as threats to its national sovereignty. Democracy would be a far more persuasive model than Chinese or Russian autocracy if some of its main proponents were less eager to believe that the open society comes out of the barrel of a gun. ♦