Authored by Raymond Ibrahim via AmericanThinker.com,
What is ultimately behind so many of the (manufactured) ills currently plaguing the West, from leftist lunacy and gender insanity to unnecessary lockdowns and wars?
In a word, the ultra-rich — the billionaire elite. So argues bestselling author Hanne Nabintu Herland in her latest book, The Billionaire World: How Marxism Serves the Elite.
In a series of brisk chapters, Herland — a historian of religions and founder of The Herland Report — traces all the world’s major problems back to the billionaire elite and their use of Marxist repression and social engineering.
While this may seem counterintuitive, Herland makes — and documents — several powerful arguments.
The fact that a tiny elite control much can be seen in that even seemingly opposing and competing brands, such as Coke and Pepsi, are usually owned by the same company, says Herland. The same applies to supposedly opposing “leftist” and “rightist” media. Six corporations control 90% of all U.S. media. As for the political arena, the “richest 0.01% have accounted for 40% of all campaign contributions through corporate donations.”
In short, “These mastodonte private companies completely dominate our way of life, what we eat, drink, watch on TV, what we wear, and who we vote for.”
Little wonder that, no matter what happens in the world, and no matter how such developments are detrimental to the average person, the ultra-rich tend to only get richer. According to Herland, “82% of all wealth generated in 2017 went to the richest 1% among us, while the poorest world population of 3.7 billion saw no increase in wealth.”
But it’s worse than that; there seems to be a direct correlation between how much poorer the average man gets and how much richer the billionaires get. Writes Herland,
[T]he richest among us made billions of dollars on the COVID-19 world tragedy, while the world’s poor plunged into unimaginable poverty… The shutdown strategy made the billionaires’ profit soar. In the span of just a few months in 2020, Bill Gates made $75 billion, Jeff Bezos $67.9 billion, Mark Zuckerberg $37.8 billion, and Elon Musk $33.6 billion.
Meanwhile, 48% of small business owners in America experienced severe economic turmoil — with fully one-third of them going bankrupt, and with Black-owned businesses suffering disproportionately — due to this lockdown that otherwise profited the billionaires.
From a macro-historic perspective, the West is slowly regressing, and the ultra-rich are becoming “the globalist version of feudal lords, as the new Western slave class emerges beneath them.”
But how did this lamentable state of affairs comes to pass in the first place? Marxism — in its myriad forms and iterations — is Herland’s answer. Since the 1960s, beginning with the “free sex and drugs” movement, Marxism, especially in the guise of godless materialism, has wormed its way into Western culture, poisoning, corrupting and destroying everything that originally made the West great, and therefore making it ripe for the most powerful — meaning the richest — to manipulate and control. Writes Herland,
The Marxist attack on historic Western values has weakened the very core of our culture, destroyed social stability and the family, quenched free speech and silenced the people — and thereby removed the obstacles for the billionaire class to gain centralized control… The combination of strong private corporations coupled with political socialist ideologies has pushed for a radical groupthink model in which the population is expected to agree with the consensus — not unlike that which we witnessed during National Socialism in Germany before and during World War II.”
Marxism is especially apt at exploiting any environment where freedom and liberty erode and are replaced with groupthink. In the words of Vladimir Lenin:
We must be ready to employ trickery, deceit, law-breaking, withholding and concealing truth… We can and must write in a language which sows among the masses hate, revulsion and scorn towards those who disagree with us.
It needs no great expounding to say that these tactics dominate all social and political discourse today — more than a century after they were first written down.
There is much more to recommend Herland’s Billionaire World. Almost every pressing topic — including the politicization of science, the rise of (openly Marxist) groups such as Black Lives Matter (BLM), the global persecution of Christians, the stoking of racial tensions, and the rewriting of history — is connected to the overlooked role of the billionaire elites and their self-serving agendas.
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Raymond Ibrahim, author of Defenders of the West and Sword and Scimitar is the Distinguished Senior Shillman Fellow at the Gatestone Institute and the Judith Rosen Friedman Fellow at the Middle East Forum.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 11/09/2023 – 17:00
