Monday, October 20, 2008

G K Chesterton on Hypocrisy

The Devil's own handbook--Rules for Radicals,--with its rules slavishly obeyed by the Left-o-Wackies such as Obama, Axelrod, and far lesser darklings such as One Wisconsin Now leaders like Xoff, would have us believe the following dictum:

"Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules. You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity."

Uh-huh.

Long before Alinsky wrote his rules, G K Chesterton was hearing the whining from Englishmen opposed to WWI.

His retort will, of course, confuse the un-thinking, but it is eminently sensible. (It's found in the Introduction to The Everlasting Man.)

"As for the general view that the Church was discredited by the war--they might as well say that the Ark was discredited by the Flood. When the world goes wrong, it proves rather that the Church is right. The Church is justified, not because her children do not sin, but because they do."

And following the logic, Chesterton un-masks the knaves:

"But that marks their mood about the whole religious tradition; they are in a state of reaction against it."

I don't have to remind you that those 'in a state of reaction against the religious tradition' were foreshadowed by precisely that creature to whom Alinsky dedicated his book, and who remains actively reacting to this very day...

Q. E. D.

5 comments:

Robert Doeckel said...

you're an idiot of the highest order.

Dad29 said...

And that's an 'intelligent' response, "ass-kicker"?

Grim said...

I still think it's a good point. Alinsky's focus was on things Lucifer would like -- his whole point about insisting on the rules wasn't to reinforce the rules, but to undermine the concept of rules. It was to discredit the rulebook and the whole society that gave rise to it, in the hope of a self-described racial revolution.

If you're facing someone who takes Lucifer as his model, at least we know what is stronger. The way to reinforce society against that has to be the old way. As Chesterton put it: "If you would have the Horse of old..."

Dad29 said...

Alinsky was honoring Nietzsche's "transvaluation of all values"...

Grim said...

Sorry: I had intended to write "a self-described radical revolution" (i.e., Rules for Radicals). Alinsky was not especially interested in race.

In any event, working to rebuild the basic values underlying our system of government -- and the basic comity on which that government is based -- has to be the method to work against such radicalism.