The WEF’s Theresienstadt Moment
As BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street pull back on ESG investing, the Great Reset draws a sinister parallel from the Holocaust and the final days of the Third Reich
“BlackRock’s support for climate and social resolutions falls sharply” reported the Financial Times on 23 August. I pricked up my ears at this, not only as ESG (environment social & governance) is an especial bugbear of mine, but because I’ve been tracking with great interest its apparent fall from grace among its hitherto champions – the titans of global finance, BlackRock and Vanguard – as discussed in my recent essays Get Woke, Go Broke: Vanguard Ditches ESG Investing and The End of ESG?
The FT went on to say:
BlackRock’s support for shareholder proposals on environmental and social issues fell sharply for the second year in a row as it refused to back resolutions it deemed too didactic or pointless.
The world’s largest money manager voted in favour of just 26 such proposals globally at companies’ annual meetings in the 12 months to June, equivalent to roughly 7 per cent of the total.
That represented a significant decline from last year, when it backed 22 per cent globally, and the 2021 proxy season, when it voted in favour of 47 per cent.
BlackRock is quoted as claiming its support has fallen “because so many shareholder proposals were overreaching, lacking economic merit, or simply redundant”.
I maintain now, as I did in March this year, that the sudden reticence of the big asset managers around ESG has nothing to do with its economic merit – if this was the case, this ludicrous program of social engineering would never have been adopted in the first place – and that the backpaddling has a lot more to do with “sustained attacks from Republicans in the US accusing [BlackRock] of being too ‘woke’” and what CEO Larry Fink recently called a “weaponised” use of the term ESG by both the right and the left.
In short, they’ve been rumbled. People have caught on, and the game is up. People everywhere – people like you, and people like me – have been having conversations about ESG and, quite rightly, it’s getting a bad rap.
Moreover, big fund bosses may be starting to realise that the billions of pension fund dollars they’ve been staking on insane ‘social justice’ and ‘green’ initiatives cannot be justified from a fiduciary standpoint and this could mean big trouble for them in the short term if investors get wise.
Until recently a combination of buoyant economic conditions and shareholder naivety meant the time horizon on ‘sustainable’ investing was medium to long term and we can surmise that in the process of sniffing each other’s farts and drinking Klaus Schwab’s Kool-Aid, the fund bosses and their pals at the WEF truly believed that woke capitalism was the way to achieve their Great Reset.
It would appear however, that things have not gone exactly to plan (as things never do when centrally controlled along stringent ideological lines). They overextended themselves and now the enemy is closing in.
It is tempting at times like this to celebrate, but history teaches us about tyranny, and we would be wise to heed these lessons.
In 1944 a curious pantomime took place at the SS concentration camp town of Theresienstadt, 40km north of Prague in what is now Czechia. In an attempt to deceive a visiting delegation of the Red Cross, the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) and its menial functionaries in the Theresienstadt camp administration embarked upon a “Great Beautification” of the ghetto.
As the ostensible reason for deporting Jews from Germany and occupied Europe (manual labour) seemed implausible in the case of senior citizens, Theresienstadt was billed as a "spa town" where elderly German Jews could "retire" in safety. As such, the ghetto naturally spawned its own propaganda application and became part of the clumsy web of deception spun by the Nazi bureaucracy – chiefly within the Reich itself.
But with mounting pressure from occupied Denmark and Sweden, whom the Foreign Office and Wehrmacht wished to placate for strategic reasons, the RSHA was persuaded after much stalling to allow a visit from the Red Cross, and thus extend the deception to the international stage.
An elaborate renovation project was ordered and, overseen by the ghetto Council of Jewish Elders, prisoners planted gardens, painted housing complexes, renovated barracks, and developed and practiced cultural programs for the entertainment of the visiting dignitaries to convince them that the "seniors' settlement" was real. In actual fact Theresienstadt was little more than a transit camp, a waystation for Jews from all over Europe on their way to the main centres of slave labour and extermination.
Despite the gaudy hyperbole, the Red Cross delegation was taken in by the hoax and returned favourable reports to the international community. This urged the ever-enterprising German leadership on to even greater propagandistic endeavours and a documentary film of life in the “beautified” ghetto was commissioned.
With the German collapse quickening however, the project was first fast-tracked and then abandoned altogether, and the completed film was never even screened. By mid-1944, the Red Army had penetrated deep into Poland threatening the Third Reich’s primary killing centre – the vast complex of Auschwitz-Birkenau, and Theresienstadt was quickly emptied of its remaining inhabitants so they could be sent east for ‘special treatment’ while the machinery was still intact.
This capricious behaviour is typical of totalitarian states comprised of various competing agencies who broadly share the same endgame but have diverging ideas on how to arrive there, and who vie for ascendency within their closed system. Adolf Hitler is well-known to have actively facilitated this jockeying for position amongst his various subordinates as he sensed that their infighting would lessen the likelihood of a coup against him.
Never was this cross-pollination of policy-making more evident than in the dying months of the Third Reich and we can see it in the final fate of the Theresienstadt ghetto.
By 1944 it was clear to all but the most naïve Nazi functionaries that the elimination of European Jewry was a state priority and as such the Foreign Office and Propaganda Ministry supported this goal, but by their way of thinking, such an undertaking could only be deemed a success if they maintained the nominal goodwill of the international community – even their enemies – and so for them, the cover up was the most important aspect of the program.
The SS however was unconcerned with diplomacy and PR and more interested in getting the job done – completing the task allotted to them by the Fuhrer. To the SS, the completion of the program itself superseded any such niceties.
Thus, as the determining agency, they deemed the propaganda film a ‘nice to have’ but ultimately immaterial to the mission’s success.
Such is the tug of war between competing factions within a totalitarian bureaucracy and, as is often the case, where sleight of hand and grand illusion failed, brute force won the day.
I wonder if we’re seeing the same thing now with ESG?
Could it be that, like the officials in Hitler’s Foreign Office, the mandarins of the New World Order preferred the PR victory, but that their chosen means of sorcery and grand illusion, through the soft power of ESG, has become redundant in the face of growing public awareness and a deteriorating economic landscape?
Could it be that, like the Theresienstadt movie, ESG is becoming a mere ‘nice to have’? Could it be that the underwriters of the Great Reset, like the SS leadership in 1944, have no more time for these half-measures and propagandistic subterfuges?
Could it be that woke has outlived its usefulness?
Could it be that, as with the approach of the Russians in the east, they’ve seen the writing on the wall and are anxious now to finish the job while they still have the means to do so, and by whatever means necessary?
Perhaps I’m overplaying the analogy, as I am wont to do as a WW2 geek and great believer in the rhyme of history. But having watched this space closely for the past few years, the parallel appears to me to be valid – things are destabilising, and we would be fools to believe that Schwab, Gates, Blair, Soros and the rest have this thing one hundred percent mapped out, or indeed that they act as a single monolithic bloc. It is in fact a virtual certainty that the menace we face is comprised of several loosely affiliated conglomerates who, like Hitler’s bureaucracy, work together when it suits them and spend the rest of the time squabbling over whose way is the best way.
Such is the nature of tyranny.
And if indeed my read is correct, it only remains to be asked: In lieu of compliance through lofty social engineering matrices, woke capitalism, and ESG investing, what means will they employ next, now that we’re wise to the game and banging on the boardroom door demanding answers?
In lieu of the “Great Beautification” and its attendant propaganda triumph, what fate now awaits the inhabitants of Theresienstadt?
Postscript:
My Holocaust comparison is not deliberately alarmist; I am simply attempting to decode the wildly shifting priorities of our contemporary tyrant class against a historical baseline. That said, I do believe we are at a crossroads and that now is the time for supreme vigilance – for the fact is that in many respects, we are winning. The globalists have indeed overextended themselves; gone too far, too fast; and they are losing control of the narrative. As I have discussed previously, this is when a tyrant is at his most dangerous and unpredictable – when he feels his grip loosening. I believe something big is on its way – the next ‘crisis’ – and this time it may be something worse than lockdowns and vaccine mandates, or at least equally repressive but more permanent. The good news is, unlike the inmates of Theresienstadt, we are not currently under armed guard and there are no trains waiting to take us east. We have options. Much of what the elites have planned for us relies on a majority of people opting in. Therefore, our task remains simple, and very achievable – to wake as many people up as possible, in as short a time as possible. This is why I do what I do, for if my words can bring even one person over, and that person then takes up the mantle and spreads the message further, then it has all been worth it. Be not afraid my friends, hold your heads high, and do what you know to be right – and this way, come what may, we will be victorious.
A general note on the Holocaust:
My journey down the rabbit hole has brought me in contact with all manner of Holocaust scepticism. I use this word rather than ‘denial’ because to question the historical accuracy of an event is not necessarily to deny it (though many do) – just as to question the veracity of a deadly pandemic is not necessarily to deny that there was a virus. After unquestioningly accepting the established narrative of the Holocaust for my entire life, I’ve recently become cagier on the subject, having discovered some inconsistencies – which may be the subject of a future essay. I believe nothing should be beyond critical analysis and as such I do have some questions about the Holocaust. However, in what has been a 30-year study of the topic, and my keenest area of historical intertest since childhood, I have yet to see compelling evidence that any substantive aspect of the narrative is fraudulent. As a matter of principle, I am therefore compelled to discuss the Holocaust precisely within the context that it has been presented by witnesses and historians, until such time as evidence to the contrary dictates otherwise.
I have got into my head that "activism" is quite new thing in history, and it's not just about "social movements in conflict" -- probably not that at all -- but the middle class turning on itself.
I haven't explained this very comprehensively, so there'll be holes in the completeness of argument I pushed across to you. But it seems to me that the Nazis were supreme examples of "activism", even though of course they shut it down ("activism") the first chance they got. I think the Alinsky Rules are a good example of Nazism in this sense. The cold-heartedness of the "supreme thinkers". It was probably Lenin rather than Hitler that first gave rise to it (though it was probably Jonathan Swift who first described it), but whoever, now we're stuck with it.
I have a number of issues that I think are worth pursuing here. (A lot of my bald statements are conclusions I've come to having been an employee all my life -- a good position to see things objectively from, but psychologically much more than politically, and I think that to waste a whole novel on politics is rather to take the fun out of writing novels.)
First issue: The role of universities into the feeding of the political elite. We don't actually have politics in the old sense anymore. We have student politics. A lot of the things people get up to these days, a lot of the front they show, would have been shameful only thirty years ago. Perhaps this is what you mean by "humanisation". The sheer inadequacy of the people now in charge, at any corporate level. They are however shameless about it. (Why does Biden remind me of Dan Quayle? Why does Trump remind me of Jane Fonda?)
Second issue: Activism and Nazism. We are used to thinking of the Nazis as demonic and abnormal. That's not how Carl Schmitt (who joined them in 1933) regarded them. Schmitt (along with Heidegger and Heisenberg, one of the True Intellects of the Nazi regime: his specialty was the theory of law in relation to politics) testified to the legality of the state and its institutions from the Weimar through to the Nazi period. He thought that liberalism (which he associated with Jewishness, overtly by 1936) was the enemy of the State, undermining it and throwing the world into political chaos and "deterritorialisation". And he was right to assure himself that the Nazi state was founded on legal continuity -- there was no October Revolution -- though he did not see what we can see today.
And just what is it that we can see today? That activism has established a new world not by overthrowing the old one, but by simply infiltrating and inhabiting it to death -- by making us ALL nihilists (as Dostoevsky said), mainly on account of "our liberal instincts", our creating "space" for ourselves, though all of this has now suddenly changed and we find ourselves in a place where our liberal preferences and our "space" matters not a bit. We find ourselves given over to gauleiters and mad hippies who enjoy nothing better than telling us that our "space" now belongs to them, and maybe it always did. (For those of us who can bear Q&A, this is the best place to watch "the best" publicly lacking all conviction just prior to reminding us, with their mad-hippy passionate intensity, just how bad they really are. Mostly on account of an overdose in their infancy of student politics.)
So what is "activism"? What is the historical form and process by which it has become the only game in town? And how, despite its peculiar aversion to what it sees as its greatest enemy (in its mind, those tanks continually rumble down the streets), can it share with this deadliest enemy, in such minute detail, the pure land, the spirit of unity, the hatred of entryists (“Jews”), the reduction of morality to utility, the never-ending bitter sophistry, the commitment to “supreme identities” -- how can it, in short, be so fucking evil?
Nietzsche, in The Genealogy of Morals, says this:
"... On such a ground of self-contempt, a real quagmire, every weed will grow, every poisonous plant, and all so tiny, so hidden, so dishonest, so sweet. Here the worms of vindictive feeling and reaction squirm; here the air stinks of things kept secret and unacknowledged; here the net of malicious conspiracy is continually spun -- the conspiracy of the suffering against the well-constituted and the victorious, here the sight of the victor is the object of hatred. And what deceitfulness is required in order not to acknowledge this hatred as hatred! What an expenditure of grand words and gestures, what an art of 'honest' defamation! These failures: what noble eloquence streams from their lips! How their eyes swim with so much sugary, slimy, humble devotion! What are they really after? To REPRESENT, at least, justice, love, wisdom, superiority -- such is the ambition of these 'lowest of the low', these sick men! And how skilful such an ambition makes them! Admire in particular the forger's skill with which the stamp, even the jangle, the golden sound of virtue is faked here. They monopolise virtue now, these weak and incurably sick men, there is no doubt about that: 'We alone are the good, the just', this is the way they speak, 'we alone are the homines bonae voluntatis'. They wander around among us as living reproaches and warnings -- as if health, good constitution, strength, pride, the sense of power were in themselves marks of depravity, which would at some stage require atonement: ah, how ready they are to COMPEL atonement, how they thirst after the opportunity to be EXECUTIONERS. There is among them a plethora of vindictive men disguised as judges, whose mouths continually secrete the word 'justice' like a poisonous saliva, with lips always pursed, ready to spit at anything which looks content and goes its way in good spirits ..."
I can't go on. Adam Bandt is hoving into view.