Commentary
In the 1930s, the world had three powers that aspired to dominate the world: the communists of the Soviet Union under Stalin, who sought a worldwide proletariat revolution that redistributed wealth to the masses; the Nazis of Germany under Hitler, who sought to establish a global top-down fascist regime; and the United States under FDR, which sought to spread free-market capitalism throughout the world.
Although these three powers competed for global dominance with each other, they nonetheless sought alliances of convenience when it served their interests. Stalin tried to form an alliance with the West to counter Hitler’s rise, and when rebuffed, he entered into a non-aggression pact with Hitler. Later, the capitalist West and communist Russia allied against fascist Germany.
Today, the world has five globalist elites with worldwide aspirations—communist China and Islamists have joined refashioned successors of the three of the 1930s. As in the 1930s, the elites form alliances and cooperate in numerous areas, often to crush opposition from their own subjects.
Today’s Socialists
The fall of the Soviet Union didn’t extinguish Karl Marx’s aspiration to abolish private property and the family in favor of the egalitarian economic model: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!” Its most visual proponents today are found in the U.S. Democratic Party’s progressive wing, championed by Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the Democratic Socialists of America.Today’s socialists, hewing to cultural Marxism and identity politics, have won over academia, much of the government bureaucracy, and much of the press. They’re anti-family anti-capitalists who want workers to control and governments to own public utilities and other major industries. Their success in transforming the U.S. culture to intersectionality, gender fluidity, and identity politics can be seen in numerous public opinion polls, such as a recent Harvard Harris poll of attitudes among the coming generation: 79 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds support the “ideology that white people are oppressors and nonwhite people and people of certain groups have been oppressed and as a result should be favored today at universities and for employment.”
Today’s Fascists
The fascist economic model was a hybrid form of capitalism, with a competitive free market at the shopkeeper level and government-supported cartels and oligopolies in major industries—Nazi Germany had 2,100 cartel agreements alone, most famously involving giants such as I.G. Farben in chemicals, Siemens and AEG in electricals, and Krupp in armaments.This concentration of industry, which placed big business at the commanding heights of the fascist economy, was also favored by U.S. industrialists. In 1931, General Electric President Gerard Swope, with the endorsement of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, called for the compulsory cartelization of all major American corporations into federally controlled trade associations for each industry. General Motors President William Knudsen, after meeting Goering, talked of Germany as “the miracle of the 20th century.”
Today, proponents of a fascist-style economy, or corporatism, are organized under the mantle of the World Economic Forum (WEF), which is funded by 1,000 member corporations—typically multinationals with sales of $5 billion or more—and sympathetic governments. It seeks a new model of governance called “Stakeholder Capitalism” that would reduce the influence of the electorate in favor of a Great Reset plan called Global Redesign in which a coalition of multinational corporations in league with governments have an outsized role in managing the world economy. Elected officials would work with corporations and fund them to deliver desirable outcomes without being the ultimate decision-makers.
Under the paternalistic power structure that it touts, the mandate of corporations would be broadened to include corporate social responsibility, rather than being narrowly limited to earning profits for shareholders. Property would be controlled by managerial elites. The slogan “You'll own nothing and be happy“ crystallizes the WEF’s sentiment. Leaders of the WEF include Bill Gates, BlackRock’s Larry Fink, and the heads of Big Pharma and Big Tech, all of whom have demonstrated their ability to set public policy that rewards their organizations.
American Foreign Policy Hawks
After John F. Kennedy’s debacle in Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, and Lyndon B. Johnson’s unpopular war in Vietnam, the peace movement in the United States pushed the Democratic Party to shun its traditional use of military force to counter the spread of communism and promote democracy abroad. In reaction, hawkish liberal Democrats and traditional Republicans found common cause in advocating a strong interventionist military. Known as neo-conservatives, they intervened through the CIA, the U.S. military, and NATO to counter anti-Americanism throughout the world. The muscular presence of today’s foreign policy hawks can be seen in Ukraine, the Middle East, and East Asia.Although neocons became known primarily for their stance on foreign policy—Ronald Reagan’s “peace through strength” encapsulates their ideology—they were best described as establishment centrists who first came together in opposition to the counterculture of the left, which included hippies, peaceniks, and radical social programs such as LBJ’s Great Society. Opposition to Donald Trump within the Republican Party was largely led by the foreign policy hawks, who objected to his brash style and his ambivalence toward NATO and his intention to withdraw U.S. troops from overseas bases.
Islamists
During World War II, Muslim Turkey was allied with Nazi Germany, as were Arabs under the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, who in 1941 met Hitler in Germany and attempted to form an Arab Legion allied with the Axis powers. Muslim countries, energized by the revival of Arab nationalism and Islamic fundamentalism, were focused on regional aspirations during World War II.The latter half of the 20th century saw jihadism evolve from a regional to a global phenomenon, initially because of the Soviet Union, which in the 1960s invented American “imperial Zionism” and sponsored Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization to counter the West in the Middle East. The 1970s saw the overthrow of the Shah of Iran by Khomeini’s Iranian Revolution, the 1980s the Beirut bombings and the defeat of the Russians in Afghanistan, and the 1990s the first attack on the World Trade Center and the beginning of large-scale immigration of Muslims into the United States. The Jihadist goal of global domination became clear and credible to the West after the attacks by al-Qaeda on Sept. 11, 2001.
Communist China
Over the millennia, China was a regional power, often at war with its immediate neighbors in Russia and Asia, and often inward-looking. At the start of the 21st century, China began its dominance on a global scale with its membership in the World Trade Organization, which created an industrial giant that de-industrialized much of the West. As China’s prowess increased, it infiltrated Western economies by acquiring Western corporations, by populating and funding universities, and by influencing the election of government officials in other countries.The new China with global ambitions became especially evident with Xi Jinping’s 2013 Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which involves some 150 countries accounting for two-thirds of the world’s population, and China’s expressed desire to become the world’s largest economy by 2049, the 100th anniversary of Mao’s founding of the People’s Republic of China.
China is no longer viewed as a benign giant. French President Emmanuel Macron warned that the BRI could make partner countries “vassal states,” and many in the United States now view China as America’s No. 1 military and geopolitical threat.
Strange-Bedfellow Cooperation
The five globalist groups are ideologically incompatible, each seeking the ultimate defeat of the other four. Within the United States, each has a degree of influence through lobbying and public relations activities, but none has the clout to unilaterally impose its will over a skeptical electorate. In response, globalists ally in strange-bedfellow groupings to bend policy to meet their objectives.For example, the de facto open-immigration policy promoted by the progressive wing of today’s U.S. socialists is hugely unpopular with the American public and America’s foreign policy elite because it threatens national security, increases crime, and undermines the country’s social fabric. Yet open immigration persists because it serves the interests of various globalist elites.
Big business corporatists benefit because the large numbers of immigrants flooding the labor markets lower their labor costs. Islamists benefit because open immigration permits the infiltration of terrorists as well as large numbers of Muslims who can influence domestic politics through protests. Communist China benefits because open immigration enables espionage—according to the chair of the House Homeland Security Committee, a majority of the illegal Chinese immigrants are men of military age with ties to the Chinese Communist Party and its military.
Likewise, climate policies harm the general public but benefit most of the global elites, albeit for different reasons. Socialists and fascists/corporatists, who each have their own brand of world government, promote climate policies because they lend themselves to global criteria for the regulation of industry and human behavior. Communist China, as the chief supplier of renewable energy equipment, benefits economically. Islamists also benefit economically as Western countries curb their own production and lose market share to the Muslim fossil fuel exporting countries that fund the Islamists. And almost everyone favors climate policies for their virtue-signaling merit.
Likewise, critical race theory harms the general public but benefits the socialists, for whom it is a raison d’être; benefits the Islamists, by validating the accusation of Islamophobia; and benefits communist China, by allowing it to point to U.S. moral failings whenever China is accused of violating the human rights of its own ethnic minorities.
Because radical social innovations in the West—whether gender fluidity or Black Lives Matter or critical race theories—undermine the West’s cohesion, all the enemies of the West support their infiltration into Western society. That, and a distaste for a citizenry exercising individual freedoms, sums up what the five globalist elites have in common.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
