An Illusion of Philanthropy

by Hans Vogel

Hans Vogel outlines the historical rise of robber barons and their legacy of influence through modern-day globalist philanthropy, showing how charitable foundations and NGOs, guided by the money-driven mindset of their predecessors, now shape international agendas on issues from climate policy to public health.

When around 1900 the US economy was growing at dizzying rates, a small number of entrepreneurs became extraordinarily successful. That success was measured by a single standard: money. They amassed dazzling amount of dollars. Though none of them was called Scrooge McDuck, they were at least as rich and could swim in coin-filled pools. John Pierpont Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie, Henry M. Flagler and dozens of tycoons made fortunes so enormous as had hardly ever been seen before. Their fortunes were made in banking, oil, steel, railroads, cotton, chemicals and other branches of trade and industry. King Croesus was just small fry next to them. They were so amazingly rich, they could do whatever they wanted. They could get away with murder, which some of them actually did, if only indirectly, such as by not providing proper labor conditions for their workers.

Since these entrepreneurs were practically above the law, they were called robber barons, like those noblemen in medieval Europe making a living as highwaymen. The public was also aware of the fact that it is just impossible to make a really big fortune while always remaining strictly within the law.

The robber barons’ criminal behavior at the expense of society, the state and their fellow citizens eventually caused a major public outcry. The so-called muckrakers, a group of journalists (we would call them investigative journalists today) played a key role in informing and enlightening the public. Ida Tarbell, author of the highly influential The History of the Standard Oil Company (1904) was one of these. In 1906, Upton Sinclair published the novel The Jungle, depicting the dreadful labor conditions in the Chicago meat packing business.

As the public became better and more thoroughly informed, and as a result was becoming more indignant, the robber barons sought ways to clean up their act or at least to appear to be doing so. Since money was their only standard and the beginning and end of their worldview, they soon concluded that the best way that could be done was by spending money on “good” causes and to do that very much in the public eye. These good causes included especially health and education. Special charitable foundations were set up to invest in medical research, to build hospitals, and to found universities and public libraries. Johns Hopkins University was founded in 1876, Rice University in Houston in 1912 and in Durham, North Carolina, in 1924 Trinity College was renamed Duke University thanks to the funds provided by the Duke family.

Such charity donations served as a double-edged sword since they enabled the generous givers to decide what kind of research was conducted and who was to benefit. Thus, hospitals had facilities where only the very rich could go for treatment. In the end, charity also served as a kind of perpetual tribute to the generosity and kindness of the robber barons. Thus, lavishly decorated Carnegie Hall (1891) in New York is a lasting monument to the steel king Andrew Carnegie, and so is the Peace Palace in The Hague (1913). For all the publicity about the robber barons’ philanthropy, however, its public benefits turned out to be more limited than the public was led to believe by sycophantic politicians, public officials and the venal press.

The American system in which rich men with de facto criminal records would fill in sometimes sizable gaps left by government policies was exported after the end of World War II. After the end of “real existing socialism” in 1991, the charity framework was rolled out worldwide. New members of the growing chorus of do-gooders continued to come from the US, but also from other countries. At the same time, charitable foundations were often less emphatically connected with the individuals who had amassed their fortunes in the first place, and therefore, many newcomers carried more general-sounding names. Such as the Danish Novo Nordisk Foundation, the world’s richest charity. The second-richest, however, is called the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and is thus obviously connected with one of the most notorious present-day robber barons. The Open Societies Foundations were founded by another robber baron, George Soros, a Hungarian-born convicted criminal.

In addition to the foundations created by rich individuals or dynasties, there are what one might call crowd-funded charities, such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Doctors Without Borders that also happen to rely heavily on government funding provided by state agencies and ministries. Nations that one often finds as sponsors of such NGOs include Germany, England, the Netherlands, Norway, Denmark and Sweden. Therefore, to call the beneficiaries of such funding NGOs is not really correct, because of their heavy reliance precisely on governments. Moreover, these governments are all members of the US Empire.

Most charities and NGOs cooperate within the framework of broader networks, held together at the top by outfits such as the WHO, the WEF and the UN. During general meetings at their headquarters and special venues or luxury resorts such as Davos, goals and directives are established for all to abide by.

What began more than a century ago as a sort of private extension or rather complement to government policies today has morphed into a highly influential structure of NGOs, charities and foundations cooperating closely with global organizations. Most governments are then compelled to cooperate as well, which in practice boils down to following down to the minutest detail the orders given out by the WHO and the WEF. These set the agenda that governments are pressed into adopting and carrying out. Since all charitable foundations and NGOs have adopted the worldview and reasoning of the original American robber barons, it may be said that much of the world is now being run according to the distorted ideas and assumptions of those robber barons. Essentially, all of their ideas are based just on money, but they are doing their best to conceal that ugly fact.

The preferred issues include so-called climate policy in response to what has been identified as anthropogenic “global warming,” public health (notably in response to supposed “pandemics”), as well as things like “gender justice” (a term used by the NGO Oxfam) and “gender equality.” But also mass immigration and the wellbeing of third-world immigrants in Western nations and naturally also what have come to be known as SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals) such as identified by Agenda 2030.

None of the above issues have been identified or formulated as a result of traditionally established political processes, namely autonomously within individual states according to locally entrenched norms: whether monarchical, democratic, liberal, autocratic, socialist, republican, fascist, national socialist or some indigenous tradition. Those traditional ways of establishing policy goals are by their very nature non-globalist, but more importantly, they reflect local concerns and are designed to find local solutions for problems affecting local circumstances. Until recently in the EU (before the brutal centralization under the corrupt plagiarist Ursula von der Leyen), this was the principle of subsidiarity: whenever feasible, problems needed to be solved at the lowest possible level, so as not to cause a work overload at the administrative center.

Of the globalist issues, however, none is the result of any normal or traditional decision-making process. One might say the modern-day robber barons and their legions of spineless minions have established the prevailing globalist issues. Absolutely all of them are based on fake science (“global warming”), fake medicine (“pandemics”) and faulty legal reasoning (gender and woke lunacy). Essentially, all of these issues are money-making schemes designed to steal money from the gullible public.

The globalist issues (“problems”) and their solutions have been defined by delusional psychopaths who convinced themselves that they work for the common good, whereas they only have their self-interest, self-enrichment and self-aggrandizement in mind. In other words, they may believe they are doing philanthropic work but in actual fact their policies are delusional and often positively criminal.

This may have to do with the very nature of philanthropy. Doing good just for the sake of doing good may be theoretically possible but to be able to do that, one can hardly be human.

Therefore, those who claim to be doing that are not to be trusted since they have another agenda: Agenda 2030.