Against the Great Reset: 'The War on Capitalism'

Against the Great Reset02 Aug, 2022 6 Min Read
Atop the sinister Magic Mountain, dread Klaus lies scheming.

Continuing today, and for the next 11 weeks, The Pipeline will present excerpts from each of the essays contained in Against the Great Reset: 18 Theses Contra the New World Order, to be published on October 18 by Bombardier Books and distributed by Simon and Schuster, and available now for pre-order at the links. 

 

Part III: THE ECONOMIC

Excerpt from "The War on Capitalism" by Conrad Black

As other contributors have mentioned, if any place could be identified as the birthplace of the Great Reset, it must be the small, drab, German-Swiss Alpine town of Davos, a center of contemporary anticapitalism, or at least radically altered and almost deracinated capitalism, and site of an ever-expanding international conference. (It grew exponentially and has spawned regional versions.)

I attended there for many years by invitation in order to ascertain what my analogues in the media business around the world were doing. The hotels are spartan and the town is very inaccessible. When I first attended nearly forty years ago, the Davos founder, the earnest and amiable Klaus Schwab, had ingeniously roped in a number of contemporary heads of government and captains of industry and leaders in some other fields and had sold huge numbers of admissions to well-to-do courtiers and groupies from all over the world, attracted by the merits of “networking.”

Davos, and its regional outgrowths across the world gradually came to express a collective opinion of the virtues of universal supranationalism (the Davos variety of globalism): social democracy; environmental alarmism; the desirability of having a nonpolitical international bureaucracy; a public sector-reflected image of the Davos hierarchy itself (and in fact, in many cases, preferably the very same individuals); and gently enforcing a soft Orwellian conformity on everybody. It must be said that many of the sessions were interesting, and it was a unique experience being amid so many people capable in their fields, and this certainly includes almost all of those who were revenue-producing, “networking” spectators and not really participants.

Davos is for democracy, as long as everyone votes for increased public sector authority in pursuit of green egalitarianism and the homogenization of all peoples in a conformist world. It was the unfolding default page of the European view: capitalism was to be overborne by economic redistribution; all concepts of public policy were to be divorced from any sense of nationality, history, spirituality, or spontaneity and redirected to defined goals of imposed uniformity under the escutcheon of ecological survival and the reduction of abrasive distinctions between groups of people—such obsolescent concepts as nationality or sectarianism. (My hotel concierge stared at me as if I had two heads when I inquired where the nearest Roman Catholic Church was and was even more astonished when I trod two miles through the snow there and back to receive its moral succour; the parishioners appeared a sturdy group.)

The Covid-19 pandemic caused Davos Man to break out of his Alpine closet and reveal the secret but suspected plan: the whole world is to become a giant Davos—humorless, style-less, unspontaneous, unrelievedly materialistic, as long as the accumulation and application of capital is directed by the little Alpine gnomes of Davos and their underlings and disciples. This is a slight overstatement, and Klaus Schwab would earnestly dispute that the purpose of Davos is so comprehensive, anesthetizing, and uniform. His dissent would be sincere, but unjustified: the Great Reset, a Davos expression, is massively ambitious and is largely based on the seizure and hijacking of recognizable capitalism, in fact and in theory.

Against the Great Reset

On sale Oct. 18: pre-order now at the links above.

There has indeed in the last thirty years been a war on capitalism conducted from the commanding heights of the academy and very broadly assisted by the Western media that has been gathering strength as part of the great comeback of the Left following their bone-crushing defeat in the Cold War. As international communism collapsed and the Soviet Union disintegrated, it was difficult to imagine that the Left could mount any sort of comeback anytime soon. We underestimated both the Left’s imperishability and its gift for improvisation, a talent that their many decades of predictable and robotic repetitiveness entirely concealed.

By some combination of intuition and tactical cunning, the hard Left crowded aboard the environmental bandwagon. Until the nineties, the environment was the concern of authentic if sometimes tedious conservationists such as the Sierra Club and Greenpeace, and despite their harassment of nuclear testing by the French around Tahiti and their demonstrations against goodwill visits of American aircraft carriers, they were sincere people making an arguable case.

Suddenly they were overwhelmed by the hard Left imposing a new agenda of strangulation of capitalism by coming through the rear windows and attacking practically every industry as a threat to human survival for ecological reasons. We can only salute their ingenuity and persistence as they co-opted susceptible members of the scientific community to produce asinine arguments like Dr. Michael E. Mann’s infamous conjuration of the “hockey stick,” which held that global warming proceeded horizontally for a long time and then suddenly shot upwards at a forty-five-degree angle as a hockey stick does when the stem reaches the blade. This and spurious calculations based on reading the rings on the trunks of trees and other superstitious opinations won the approval of a huge gallery of gullible, faddish, and cynical people. They made an unlikely coalition: Al Gore became a centimillionaire on this issue; the Prince of Wales mounted a great hobby horse that he still rides, and the most vocal airheads of Hollywood have ben howling like banshees on the issue for decades.

Aggressive green parties arose in many countries and harvested the naiveté and narcissistic ambition for attention of large numbers of people championing antipollution causes that in the abstract no reasonable person could oppose. They were allied or infested with the old left and skulked forward, ideological wolves in paradisiacal lambs’ clothing. Germany has no petroleum resources but had built an extensive and absolutely safe nuclear power capacity, but the aggressive German Green Party came snorting out of the Teutonic forests like a Wagnerian monster and bullied Angela Merkel’s government into abandoning the entire nuclear program. Germany in effect became an energy vassal state of Russia through the Nord Stream pipeline, the completion of which the Biden administration facilitated in withdrawing the Trump administration’s intervention to prevent the pipeline’s completion. With the Ukraine war, it is again suspended. Thus the second most important country in the Western Alliance is almost detached from it, all by the apparently innocuous and meliorist actions of Germany’s peppiest environmentalists, and with the ultimate complicity of the current U.S. president.

Even the outgoing prime minister, Boris Johnson, an authentic if idiosyncratic Tory, has bought into the global warming danger, though to those who know him, it is hard to imagine that he believes a word of it. The objective evidence is that to the extent that it can be measured at all, the overall temperature of the world has risen by one degree centigrade in the last hundred years and will rise by another centigrade degree this century. This is not in itself harmful, and it is not outside normal historic climate cycles. There has been no rise in the in the world’s temperature in this century, and the whole task of gauging the world’s temperature including thermometers at various depths of the oceans and all over the surface of the earth is quite imprecise.

In the future, historians will look with astonishment on the speed and zeal with which the post-Cold War world burdened itself with bone-cracking expenses and severe social costs radically altering its economy to avoid a rise in the world’s temperature that we have no reason to believe will occur on anything like the scale the alarmists have been wailing about. And if it does occur in any measure, we still have no scientifically serious evidence that it is anthropogenically caused. It will be seen as something like the alleged seventeenth-century Dutch tulip hysteria, which had people paying the equivalent of $25,000 for a single potted bulb.

Rarely in the Cold War did capitalism’s Marxist enemies do anything that earned the respect one gives a gallant or brilliant adversary. In these initiatives, our enemies leapt from the jaws of bitter and total defeat, hijacked the careening gadfly of esoteric conservationism, and transformed it surreptitiously into a well-camouflaged battering ram that has inflicted immense costs and opprobrium on the corporate world and great sadness and inconvenience on the laboring proletariat on whose behalf the Marxist Left has supposedly been crusading these past 150 years.

A companion unpleasant surprise to the ingenuity and resilience of the international Far Left in its environmental assault upon capitalism has been the venality, cowardice, and invertebrate tactical stupidity of much of the corporate world. We find oil companies putting up slick television advertising praising and purporting to be part of the heroic march to a fossil fuel-free world. As corporations fell over themselves agreeing that the U.S. state of Georgia’s eminently sensible voting reform statute, passed in the wake of the disputed presidential election of 2020, was a reversion to Jim Crow if not slavery itself and demanded that Georgia be punished by moving the Major League Baseball All-Star Game from Atlanta to Denver (where restrictions to ensure verifiable voting are more severe than in Georgia), the leadership of corporate America was largely revealed, once again, at least in public policy terms, as contemptibly enfeebled and morally bankrupt...

Next week: an excerpt from "Socialism and the Great Reset" by Michael Anton.

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12 comments on “Against the Great Reset: 'The War on Capitalism'”

  1. Someone needs to come up with an eyecatching plan that is not long winded, to capture general publics eye.
    Most people in today's world does not have the attention span to read a book or article on how they are being hoodwinked.
    Simple phrases that capture people's attention that show we are all good stewards of this globe. How cow farts help counteract or work together with nature to create a better world. That is a very base thought on what I am talking about.

  2. We'd be lucky if they settle for feudalism. Peasant farmers were permitted to eat meat -- they want us reduced to eating bugs. The order they want is a more extreme divide than that of ancient Egypt, where the elite were ranked with the gods.

  3. Michael, thank you for your reply. I've posted this on GETTR and sent it to m small group of friends. I'm not sure what more I can do. I know we need to win believers. Perhaps that is the best place to get involved.

  4. I feel that more and more people every day are figuring out what these people are doing, and that they are doing it to create, as Chicklus says, a feudal state with elites and serfs. My concern is will we be able to stop them?

    1. This is why I have assembled this eminent writing team, to lay out the issues and outline the avenues of attack. More than a year ago, when we started this project, many thought the idea of the Great Reset was some sort of conspiracy theory. Now we know, and in their own words, that it is terribly real. Now it is up to you all to help us stop it.

  5. A wonderful article by Conrad Black and a much-needed book against the "Great Reset!"
    To add to this understanding of this massive movement of global reset, allow me to recommend three books to read and I believe attach themselves to the roots of this reset. 1. The True Believer, by Eric Hoffer. "It is necessary for most of us these days to have some insight into the motives and responses of the true believer. For though ours is a godless age, it is the very opposite of irreligious. The true believer is everywhere on the march, and both by converting and antagonizing he is shaping the world in his own image." 2. Civilization and Its Discontents, by Sigmund Freud. Civilization is only made possible by individual renouncement. The instinctive life of man is one of aggression and egoistic self-satisfaction; the sense of guilt has become the maker of civilized humanity. 3. Escape from Freedom, by Eric Fromm. A German communist and psychologist. He was also a member to the Frankfurt School of Critical Thinking that has done so much damage to America and Americans since the 1930’s. Erich knows what people fear the most and has passed that knowledge into the hands of people like Klaus Schwab. The left loves fear. It gives them everything they want at very little cost. Fear is the tool of trade among socialists as a whole and is currently in use to a high degree in socialist America today as we all know.

  6. I ask myself why would these people do this. Many of them do not really believe all of this rubbish. The answer I keep going back to is that I believe that those in Davos want to bring back feudalism. Some elites at the top with everything and the rest of us serfs. I do not think for one moment that "the green energy conservation" will effect their lifestyles one bit, only ours. They will continue to fly on jets, stay cool in the summer and warm in the winter and eat steaks or anything else their hearts desire because they deserve it because they are our betters. With the inventions in the mid to late 19th century and the rise of the middle class, the elites started to lose their power. They want it back.

  7. History is replete with large numbers of 'knowledgeable' individuals who have been unable or unwilling to discern true evil from good. We are experiencing this now. In part, in our time, these people have been ill-informed, primarily because the media has sided with the leftist globalists. However, those ill-informed are not blameless. They too must delve to discern facts from fake information. Will it be too late when they learn the true evil intent of the totalitarian leftist globalists? More important, are there enough who believe and understand their aims that will oppose this 'history-repeating', 'freedom-stealing' theft attempt?

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