“Why are all successful people leftists?” my daughter said, challenging me with a smile.
I knew she meant Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, Bill Gates, and other powerful people who are trying to change the world to match their imagination.
“Not all of them. Those leftists are just very loud,” I replied.
However, it’s true that many among the ultra-wealthy are leftists. Why? I have to find the answer, because many young people look up to them and believe that their beliefs are in line with the truth.
After reading quite a few insightful books, I learned that what’s happening now is nothing new. Since the late 19th century, Western elites have been fascinated with communism and supported its cause. In the pursuit of such utopian ideals, traditional values have been trashed; America has been brought to the brink of socialism; and hundreds of millions of people around the world have been thrown to the bloodthirsty communist beast.
Alliance of Western Elites and Russian Communist Revolutionaries
Antony C. Sutton (1925–2002) was a British-American economist, historian, professor at California State University, and research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. His books “Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution” and “Western Technology and Soviet Economic Development” detailed Western elites’ seemingly incomprehensible support of Soviet Bolsheviks. In a 1987 interview, Sutton summarized his findings:“They [Lenin and Trotsky] created a revolution with no more than about 10,000 revolutionaries. They needed assistance from the West, and they got assistance from Germany, from Britain, and from the United States. ... In 1918, the Bolsheviks really only controlled Moscow and what was Petrograd, which is now Leningrad. They could not have beaten off the White Russians, the Czechs who were in Russia at that time, the Japanese who entered. They could not have beaten it off without assistance from the United States and from Britain.
“After the revolution ... they [the Bolsheviks] could not operate the plants. So what do we do? With Averell Harriman and the Chase National Bank and all friends on Wall Street, they go in there. ... We have these 250–300 concessions with which American companies went into Russia, and they started up the idle plants. ... All these top capitalists went in and they got Russia going on behalf of the Bolsheviks, because the Bolsheviks either shot or kicked out all the people out of Russia who would run the plants.”
“Stalin paid tribute to the assistance rendered by the United States to Soviet industry before and during the war. He said that about two-thirds of all the large industrial enterprises in the Soviet Union had been built with United States help or technical assistance.”
Trade and technology exports continued during the Cold War, including the eras of the Korean and Vietnamese wars. Sutton quoted Shirley Sheibla’s writing in Barron’s Weekly on Jan. 4, 1971: “The United States has been the ‘arsenal for communism’ in the Soviet Union.” Most weapons, tanks, and trucks of North Korean and North Vietnamese communists were provided by the Soviet Union, and “were produced in plants erected and equipped by American and European companies.”
Why Did Western Elites Support Communism?
With the rapid development of science and technology since the 18th century, people started to drift away from belief in God and believe that humans could take care of everything. With certain arrangements or planning, some people thought, humankind could get rid of all their suffering and build a paradise on earth. Different socialist and communist thoughts mushroomed from this way of thinking.By the early 20th century, socialist ideas had conquered the minds of those at the top of the financial, industrial, academic, and political realms. The elites never saw communism as an enemy due to holding similar utopian obsessions. Instead, communist radicals were considered a force that they could harness—like a wrecking ball—on their way to tearing down old structures and building a new world.
Through interlocked organizations and foundations supported by Wall Street, the elites have had a direct influence on government policies for some time. Take, for example, two of the organizations: the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and the Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR).
The IPR was established in many Pacific nations in 1925. According to Quigley:
“Most of these awards for work in the Far Eastern area required approval or recommendation from members of IPR. ... And, finally, there can be little doubt that consultant jobs on Far Eastern matters in the State Department or other government agencies were largely restricted to IPR-approved people.”
The IPR was found by Congress to be “virtually an organ of the Communist Party of the United States,” according to Wormser.
Another Similarity Between Elites and Communist Radicals
To understand better the relationship between elites and communists, we have to set aside the influence of Karl Marx.“These are the rules of big business. They have superseded the teachings of our parents and are reducible to a simple maxim: Get a monopoly; let Society work for you; and remember that the best of all business is politics, for a legislative grant, franchise, subsidy or tax exemption is worth more than a Kimberly or Comstock lode, since it does not require any labor, either mental or physical, for its exploitation.”
In an economic sense, we can see a common characteristic between elites and communist radicals: They both want to get something for nothing through political control, either by robbing and killing to take other people’s property or by using political means to gain huge wealth through monopoly.
From the Past to the Present
Time flies. In the 21st century, huge asset-management companies seem to be more powerful than the hereditary banking dynasties. The recently wealthy technology company leaders overshadow the CEOs for Ford or General Motors. People change. Companies change. But the leftist ideology that many of them embrace remains the same, thanks to a century of brainwashing through education and media.“The powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole.”
“To achieve a better outcome, the world must act jointly and swiftly to revamp all aspects of our societies and economies, from education to social contracts and working conditions. Every country, from the United States to China, must participate, and every industry, from oil and gas to tech, must be transformed.
“In short, we need a ‘Great Reset’ of capitalism.”
You may ask, why do the elites push for the Great Reset? How would they benefit from it?
Remember, when the world order is revamped, old structures will be dismantled, new industries will be established, and new markets will be explored. Those with ties to the higher echelons of power have ample opportunity to profit handsomely from the process, though countless others will fall between the cracks in the restructuring, such as the workers of the Keystone XL pipeline.
“Welcome to the year 2030. Welcome to my city—or should I say, ‘our city.’ I don’t own anything. I don’t own a car. I don’t own a house. I don’t own any appliances or any clothes.
“It might seem odd to you, but it makes perfect sense for us in this city. Everything you considered a product, has now become a service. We have access to transportation, accommodation, food, and all the things we need in our daily lives. One by one all these things became free, so it ended up not making sense for us to own much.
“Shopping? I can’t really remember what that is. For most of us, it has been turned into choosing things to use.
“Once in a while, I get annoyed about the fact that I have no real privacy. Nowhere I can go and not be registered. I know that, somewhere, everything I do, think, and dream of is recorded.”
A typical utopian picture with a contemporary twist, wouldn’t you say? It’s the same dream that leftists have pursued for over a century, and the same dream that has been used to justify the killings of millions of people.
“Why, the utopian investor asks, should we measure the success of a company exclusively in terms of the number of smartphones it sells every quarter, multiplied by the cost of a smartphone, minus the costs associated with making and distributing those smartphones? Why shouldn’t we define success to include our beliefs and our values? Why shouldn’t we add another variable to the equation, one that measures the ‘footprint’ associated with the manufacture and distribution of the smartphones? Why shouldn’t we demand—given the power our control of capital grants us—that our values be reflected in the investment of that capital? Why shouldn’t we insist that our values—religious in nature and unpopular in the voting booths—be the standard for participation in our system?
“That, in a nutshell, is the ESG movement.”
Morality or Ambition?
The leftists usually measure others with the moral standard they define. They sneer at conservatives for their clinging to God, guns, and the Constitution. In reality, they’re not very serious about their own “moral standard.”BlackRock is the world’s largest asset-management company and the leader of the ESG movement. Its CEO, Larry Fink, imposes his social ideals on a lot of companies through the company’s incredible capital power.
While BlackRock forces American companies to fulfill its sustainability standard, it imposes no such requirement on Chinese companies. This is because “China will be one of the biggest opportunities for BlackRock over the long term,” according to Fink.
Soukup also pointed out that BlackRock is the largest shareholder of PetroChina, a state-owned Chinese petroleum company that is not only “un-green,” but also funded by Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir regime, which practices modern-day black slavery and has been termed “a State Department-sanctioned state sponsor of terrorism.”
“In [the novel] 1984, the government’s Ministry of Peace conducts war. The Ministry of Love deploys cruel punishment. The Ministry of Truth falsifies historical records.
“In 2020, we have our own versions: Fact-checkers codify slanted opinion. Myth busters dispel truth. Online knowledge is shaped by agenda editors. Free speech is controlled by censorship. The news—isn’t the news. And you aren’t the consumer; you’re the product.”
What Do I Tell My Daughter?
In 1983, at the Templeton Prize award ceremony in London, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a survivor of the Soviet gulag system, began his remarks with the following memorable words:“More than half a century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of older people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.
“Since then, I have spent well-nigh 50 years working on the history of our revolution. ... But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.”
Many prophecies in history predict the dominance of communism and loss of faith before the arrival of the Creator. The communist specter is very deceptive. Not only does it play upon and draw energy from human vices, but it also appeals to people’s compassion with fallacious narratives.
I told my daughter that it’s important for her to know right from wrong in this chaotic period. “What you read, watch, and believe will impact your life decisions. But at the end of the day, it is yourself who is responsible for everything you do and every decision you make. Therefore, be smart, instead of becoming a pawn of those with self-serving motivations, because you cannot blame anyone else when you are judged in this human realm, and beyond.”