Capitalism: True and False

By Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

Hanne Nabintu Herland’s The Billionaire World: How Marxism serves the Elite (2023) is a vital book that will help you understand what is going on in the world today. It will also help you to defend capitalism against objections that are all-too-common today.  Herland distinguishes two kinds of capitalism: real and fake.  The real kind is a voluntary society, in which people trade goods and services with each other, and everybody benefits. The fake kind is one in which a few greedy billionaires use the state to gain power and privileges for themselves. These billionaires are willing to enslave humanity to gain their nefarious ends.

Here is what Herland says about them:

“In the West, the ultra-rich own almost everything. Private investment corporations such as Blackrock, Vanguard, Capital World, Fidelity Management, Berkshire Hathaway and State Street represent capital owners who own media companies, Big Tech, Big Pharma, the military complex, and the food industry. They also fund politicians and exert strong influence over political decision makers as well as government funds and assets.

These investment companies have become so powerful that they control most of the world’s capital. Whichever industry you take a look at, you easily find many of the top shareholders, decision makers and names among the ten leading institutional investors. Most of the companies that we perceive as competing brands are actually owned by the same company; for example The Coca-Cola Company and PepsiCo.

These mastodonte companies completely dominate our way of life, what we eat, drink, watch on TV, what we wear, and who we vote for. They are the rulers of social media, the mainstream media, Hollywood, and most of the entertainment business.”

This domination leads to a totalitarian control over people:

“To an employee, this economic entanglement has vast implications. In order to keep their job and be able to put food on the table, journalists and editors alike have to exhibit their willingness to agree with the narrative being pushed. If they object to the politically correct groupthink, they’re out. The desired narrative is structured to produce the highest possible capital gain for the news business’ super-rich owners, with the blessing of media leaders, government officials, leading politicians, and the academic elite.”

People usually think of Marxism as the enemy of the super-rich, but in fact the billionaires and the Marxists are allied to overthrow Western civilization:

“This is a point the book ponders over. It would have been close to impossible for the billionaire class to succeed without the weakening of the Western social culture. The reference here is precisely to the remarkable socialist revolt against classical, Western values such as the demand for individual accountability, the right to own the fruit of one’s own labour, the establishment of decentralized government and independent institutions, private property rights, and equality, regardless of race, class, or gender; to precisely the Marxist aim of crushing social stability to impose a centralized government and the atheist world order, destroying the “bourgeois” family structure and the nation-state, and repressing free speech and critical thinking for those who oppose the left-wing narrative. . .Fear was key to create an obedient population under Joseph Stalin and fear is the key word today.”

After reading this, you may wonder, “Who is Hanne Herland? Why should we believe what she says? The distinguished and astute Paul Craig Roberts explains and summarizes her views:

“Hanna Herland is a leading intellect of the Western world.  She is a defender of civilization and Christian morality and a stalwart opponent of the Satanic forces that are attacking our civilization.  In her new book, The Billionaire World, she explains the variety of assaults on Western civilization that are undermining the belief systems and cohesiveness of Western countries.   Among them are the concentration of wealth in a few hands, the weaponization of scholarship by Cultural Marxists, the transformation of education into indoctrination, a declining sense of duty and responsibility on the part of governments, and the erosion of Christian morality.

Wealth concentration brings information control.  Herland explains that the voices of people have been silenced by the enormous control exercised by monopolies and interlocking directorships of a handful of immensely rich entities. A few private investment corporations–Black Rock, State Street, and Vanguard–own the stocks and sit on the boards of most of the large corporations.  This puts tremendous power and control in a few hands. Even competing companies, such as Coca Cola and Pepsi Cola, are owned by the same parent company.

Six mega-corporations control more than 90% of the US media.  The extraordinary control by a handful over Western civilization permits the imposition of self-serving narratives which if challenged results in being fired from livelihood and cancelled.  The former feminist icon Naomi Wolf speaks of it happening to her.

We have witnessed since 2016 the efforts of the ruling elite through the Democrat Party, CIA, FBI, and media to cancel Donald Trump, the President of the United States, and by controlling the narrative to subject him to criminal prosecution.

The West’s acceptance of immigrant invasions has destroyed social cohesion, and American efforts to integrate blacks have reintroduced privilege into law.

In the US control over the narrative has been used to deracinate the white population and to create a two-tier legal system with racial privileges for blacks. White people, especially white families, have disappeared from corporate advertisements, leaving the impression that the US is a majority black country. This is an example of how “diversity” results in its opposite.

A large number of corporations and the Pentagon have announced that they are only hiring and promoting blacks. If a US corporation were to announce that it is only hiring and promoting white people, the Department of Justice would come down on them like a ton of bricks.  For a half century US universities, corporations and governments state, local, and federal  have given blacks preferential treatment in university admission, employment and promotion  in total violation of the 14th Amendment of the US Constitution.  Nothing has been done by Congress or the judiciary about this obvious violation of the Constitution, allegedly our ruling document.

Today we live in a world in which blacks are so privileged that only white people can be guilty of hate speech and hate crimes.  In the United States and most of Western Europe whites are guilty simply because they are white and thereby “aversive racists.” The ethnic basis of white countries is under attack and results in social dissolution.

Cultural Marxism weakened Western civilization’s social culture, morals and beliefs, leaving civilization less capable of resisting other challenges. Cultural Marxists used critical theory to weaponize scholarship for a march through the institutions. They took over the universities  undermining objectivity and destroying the confidence of Western peoples in their beliefs and values. It has gone so far that white museum curators describe their collections as exemplifying white racism.  It is the policy of Western governments to turn nation states into towers of babel in which there is no cultural unity.

That is where we stand today.  What can we do about it?  This is the question of our time.  When the aristocracy was destroyed, essentially by envy, so was the traditional focus by governments on duties and responsibilities.  Selfishness and self-interest and now Identity Politics took over the job of ruling. The social obligation and responsibility of ruling disappeared. In its place is the self-interest of a ruling elite without a sense of responsibility and duty.

In the Western universities truth has been politicized.  What is true depends on whether it serves the narratives.  If not, it is “misinformation” and is suppressed. Despite the emphasis on “diversity,” diversity in thought and ideas is disappearing.  Official narratives are imposed and enforced.

Hanna Herland’s main message is that we have forgotten God.  The liberals have erased God.  Where does that leave us?

It leaves us without a moral compass. Without a moral compass we don’t know where we are.  In other words, we are morally lost.  How do we regain a moral footing?

The decline in civic virtues, morality, and discipline–which we experience all around us– always results in disorder and injustice. Indeed, as we watch the US Democrats throw away justice in their narrative-building attacks on President Trump, we are witnessing the final and complete collapse of Western civilization. Truth no longer matters.

In the place of a confident civilization, a great achievement in human history, we now have Sodom and Gomorrah and a Tower of Babel.

Is Sodom and Gomorrah and a Tower of Babel worth defending against Russia, China and Iran? Hanna Herland doesn’t raise this question, but it is another question that we face. With the white ethnicities–the basis of the US and European nations–deracinated, what do these countries have to defend except the self-interests of their ruling elite?”

As an example of the way the elite controls the media, Herland names Wikipedia:

Wikipedia has since its birth been a leading Liberal, progressive, atheist portal in demonizing European history, Conservatives, anti-militarism activists, religions and countries outside the Western hemisphere.

It has been a main neo-Marxist driver in the West to color the minds of Westerners and change its value system.

On a continual basis, its neo-Marxist editors make sure that philosophers, authors, intellectuals who disagree with the progressive view are cunningly demeaned and their message twisted and belittled.

A quick glance at the pages of some, is quite enlightening: Leading Western intellectuals are portrayed as half-crazy “conspiracy theorists”(a label given to those who present facts that are undesired in the Liberal progressive or globalist camp) etc. They are labelled as homophobes, islamophobes, racists, male shouvinists, half-crazy, colonialists, old-fashioned, out dated or flat out mad.

When reading, you simply get the subtle undertone of the person being someone “one should not listen to, as he obviously is quite crazy.”

The same stigma is applied to countries or political leaders that the neo-Marxist do not like. The depiction of these nations, or civil wars/conflicts is a blue print of what the current American establishment views these nations.

Wikipedia has diligently followed the recipe of neo-Marxist, New Left thinker Herbert Marcuse who openly stated that if the progressive message was to succeed, it was vital to discriminate the majority views/those that the Left do not “like” or endorse.

Wikipedia is currently one of the leading portals for the shutting down freedom in the West. Read Dr. Paul C. Roberts analysis below:

Over the course of my life I have watched integrity shrivel up and die everywhere in the Western world. It is not like it was ever really abundant, but there was a goodly amount of it, and it had authority.

People, especially those in public life, weren’t shameless as they are today, writes Dr. Paul C. Roberts, a leading American political economist and a regular guest at The Herland Report.”

Herland argues that the fake Covid “epidemic” played into the hands of the billionaires:

“The 2020 Covid-19 response may be an example of how billionaires dominate politics, NGOs, and the field of medicine. , , The shutdown strategy made the billionaires’ profits 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.”

Let’s do everything we can to expose these evil billionaires who use Marxism to overthrow the genuine free market. Read Hanne Herland’s The Billionaire World and learn the truth about them!