The Conservative Chain Letter
Everyone has come across a chain letter of some kind at one point or another, haven’t they? Be it via email (back when email was the hot mode of conversation on the internet) or more commonly on social media sites such as MySpace or Facebook. They’re usually in the cheesy format of telling you that if you pass it along good fortune will come your way and if not you’ll be cursed with bad mojo for the rest of your days, or some such other nonsense. Then you have the more “intellectual” forms of chain mail, such as the politically charged chain letters. I don’t know if they tend to lean toward one wing or another, but I’d assume that the end of the political spectrum with older supporters, being the right, would be more prone to sending old-school emails to their retired, republican buddies to warn of the horrors of Obama and socialism. That being said, it just so happens that an associate of mine came across one of these conservative-leaning chain letters through one of their clients. Their client printed a couple of copies to share with acquaintances of theirs for one reason or another and, surely much to their chagrin, a copy found itself in my clutches.
The passage of the letter I came to have in my possession seemingly must be the final portion of a longer piece, as the first paragraph seems awfully incomplete. It makes reference to Saul Alinsky, an American community organizer and political activist peaking popularity during the 1960s. He was averse to mainstream political groups and focused on improving the living quality for less fortunate groups and minorities in inner-city areas. Sounds like a pretty shady character, right? The conservative right would have you think so, anyway. The letter at hand talks specifically of eight rules supposedly laid out in one of Alinsky’s publications describing how a government goes about controlling its people. The specific work being referenced is Alinksy’s Rules for Radicals, which talks of twelve rules. The twelve rules are completely different from the ones mentioned in this letter, and they sound nowhere near as specific. They sound like something out of The Prince by Machiavelli, and are meant by Alinsky to motivate the poverty-stricken to strive for success and positions of leadership by outlining the philosophies used by those who would keep them down. These eight different rules are seemingly being put forward in this letter in the context that Alinksy supported this type of action and was a proponent of the subjugation of a nation’s people.
- Healthcare – Control healthcare and you control the people.
- Poverty – Increase the poverty level as high as possible, poor people are easier to control and will not fight back if you are providing everything for them to live.
- Debt – Increase the debt to an unsustainable level. That way you are able to increase taxes, and this will produce more poverty.
- Gun Control – Remove the ability to defend themselves from the government. That way you are able to create a police state.
- Welfare – Take control of every aspect of their lives (food, housing, and income).
- Education – Take control of what people read and listen to, including what children learn in school.
- Religion – Remove the belief in the god from the government and schools.
- Class Warfare – Divide the people into the wealthy and the poor. This will cause more discontent and it will be easier to tax the wealthy with the support of the poor.
The listing of those eight points and the letter itself is closed with:
Does any of this sound like what is happening today in the United States?
No, I don’t claim to be a scholar on Alinsky’s work, but as I said, I don’t see any of these in his original twelve rules. Some of them don’t in themselves have any blatant political leaning, as all it takes is a domineering corporate hand in any government to make people poor and increase the national debt, but others sound like they’re straight out of a scary storybook about Obama that conservatives read to their children at night. I guess the easy thing to do is to look at the list point by point.
First we have healthcare, which, even if it is mentioned somewhere in one of Alinsky’s works, is obviously being brought up right now because of Obamacare. This rule is one that has an clear conservative undertone. I don’t see how “controlling” healthcare gives anyone direct and total control over the people, but what a lot of conservatives and general people don’t seem to understand about Obamacare is that it doesn’t “control” healthcare or even how much it costs – its main function is to balance out the cost for a good amount of people who need it. It changes a lot of things for people who need or don’t have healthcare, but it isn’t some big, commie slap in the face to the insurance industry or medical companies – if anything it’s just a way for the government to say, “okay, you win, we’ll play along” to the medical corporate machine. All that being said, how does that control the people? The only controlling aspect is the individual mandate, which forces the uninsured to sign up to help balance out costs for the sick. Sounds more like corporations controlling the government than the government controlling the people, doesn’t it?
Next there’s poverty and the national debt. It’s true that poor people are easier to control, but when you think of Americans who are running low on funds, what strikes you as the primary cause? The cost of living, income inequality, inflation – all things that are affected more by corporate decisions than government ones. Companies choose to pay their workers less than what it takes to live and make them work short hours and hectic shifts so they can’t work a second job very easily. So the costs for everything go up as people’s paychecks get smaller and smaller. And is it really fair to say that everyone who is poor is being given “everything for them to live”? Sure, there are a lot of people on welfare and unemployment, but do those programs really provide people with everything? Hardly. And increasing the debt for the sole purpose of raising taxes? That doesn’t even make any sense. Why not just raise taxes? The tax issue even being mentioned is a point toward this thing having a conservative author.
Gun control? Really? People still believe the government is trying to take their guns? It isn’t even logistically possible. There are more guns than people in this country and they’re never going to go away. Anyone who thinks their guns are in jeopardy of being taken by the government so they can’t defend themselves from said government is obviously conservative and also insane. I’m a gun-owner and I support the right to own firearms for protection and sport, but when it comes to the machine gunners who claim their chain gun is for hunting deer, when can we just admit we’re a little obsessed?
Again with the controlling people’s lives with welfare. Food, housing, and income are apparently being controlled by the government because they give lower income people a pittance of food stamps? Sounds like the author has it out for people who are on government assistance, which just so happens to be a symptom of being conservative. And why are most people on welfare to begin with? Because they can’t find a good job and food is too expensive, unless you want to eat fluoride laced chips and drink carcinogenic soda for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Education and religion are always on the conservative mind. The government does have a big pull in what is taught in school, but how much time to people spend watching TV and listening to music compared to how much time they spend in school? And guess what controls what’s on TV and in pop songs? Corporations. And the last time I checked religion has killed more people than atheism or agnosticism. How exactly does it keep people from being controlled by the government? Isn’t there all kinds of stuff in the Bible about obeying authority and following rules, anyway?
And finally, class warfare. This one flat out says that the wealthy are being taxed to support the poor. So who’s the victim here – the poor people mentioned earlier, or is it the wealthy now? That one comes straight from the conservative handbook. How are classes divided, anyway? By the rich being kept rich and the poor being kept poor. So all these taxes the rich have been apparently paying are going to the poor and neither group is changing their status. Everyone knows about the whole top 1% thing. The 85 richest people on the planet control half the world’s wealth. Those taxes sure have hurt the rich, huh?
So, in summation, chain letters are stupid – especially if they’re completely fabricated from what would be passed off as real facts and done so by ignorant people. Some old rube, in trying to sound like a politically informed “insider”, just proved that their whole side of the political spectrum is fighting all the wrong battles. That’s not to say that any side is completely on the right track, because if that were the case you’d think we’d have at least two years where people aren’t all up in arms about how the president and/or the government sucks. Just like the stock market, the best risk/reward balance is achieved through diversity.
Share This Blog
