Current events: "Ten Steps" to ruin?
Back in the late 1940s and early 1950s, "Current Events" was one of the school topics intended to interest school children in what was going on in the world and in national affairs. Back then, students may have paid more attention to current events than today’s students. After all, many of us had just gotten our fathers or grandfathers back from the horrors and privations of World War II.
But, just when we thought all was well, there came new threats to world peace in the form of the Soviet Union and Red China. We worried that these new threats might take our parents and grandparents away from us again.
Particularly worrisome was a tract being circulated that some claimed revealed the "Ten Steps" the communists were going to employ to bring America to her knees. Of course, we insisted that would never happen; however, quoted below are the "Ten Steps." We quote. You decide.
"1. Corrupt the young, get them away from religion. Get them interested in sex. Make them superficial. Destroy their ruggedness. 2. Get control of all means of publicity. 3. Get people’s minds off their government by focusing their attention on athletics, sexy books and other trivialities. 4. Divide the people into hostile groups by constantly harping on controversial matters of no importance. 5. Destroy the people’s faith in their natural leaders by holding the latter up to contempt, ridicule and obloquy. 6. Always preach true democracy, but seize power as fast and as ruthlessly as possible. 7. By encouraging government extravagance, destroy its credit and produce fear of inflation with rising prices and general discontent. 8. Foment unnecessary strikes in vital industries, encourage civil disorders, and foster a lenient and soft attitude on the part of government toward such disorders. 9. By specious argument cause the breakdown of the old moral virtues, honesty, sobriety, continence, faith in the pledged word, ruggedness. 10. Cause the registration of all firearms on some pretext, with a view to confiscating them and leaving the populace helpless."
Some, who do not particularly care for Mr. Obama, try to link his boyhood education to the "Twelve Rules for Radicals," the work of the socialist community organizer, Professor Saul Alinsky. While Professor Alinsky’s "Twelve Rules for Radicals" and the "Ten Steps" read very much the same, it should be noted that Mr. Obama (then Barry Soetoro) was just an 11-year-old schoolboy in Indonesia when Professor Alinsky died in 1972 in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California.
Actually, the expert on Saul Alinsky is Hillary D. Rodham Clinton who wrote her senior thesis at Wellesley on the writings of Professor Alinsky. If no one has brought that fact to your attention before, it may be because Miss Rodham’s 92-page thesis (which I just read) is incredibly boring. In pursuit of her subject matter, Hillary D. Rodham interviewed Saul Alinsky twice. After their second face-to-face interview, Professor Alinsky was so impressed with Hillary that he offered her a job as his assistant. She declined his offer.
Putting concerns about how Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton were educated aside, a better use of time might be to consider the State of the Union in the context of the "Ten Steps."
Nationally syndicated columnist, William Hamilton, was educated at the University of Oklahoma, the George Washington University, the U.S Naval War College, the University of Nebraska, and Harvard University.
©2014. William Hamilton.
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