Climate Change and European Cultural Imperialism

A 1970s FrancoGerman initiative aimed at righting energy trade imbalances morphed over the next decade into a global oilandcoal phaseout campaign falsely advertised as an effort to protect Earth’s atmosphere from carbon dioxide overload.

Seeking to level the playing field between their resourcepoor homelands and the Anglosphere’s fossil fuel superpowers, the ParisBerlin Axis uses “Climate Change” to domestically impose, and globally export, renewable energy and electromobility. Success hinges upon capturing the Anglosphere’s cultural assets. This report profiles eight enterprises comprising the vanguard of European attempts to control AngloAmerican culture; namely:

1. Bertelsmann
2. Holtzbrinck

3. Deutsche Welle

4. Agence France Presse

5. Vivendi

6. Publicis

7. Elsevier

8. Spotify

(Anglosphere,” “AngloAmerica” and “Englishspeaking world refer to: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.)

In 1835 Carl Bertelsmann began printing hymnals, prayerbooks and a faithbased Westphalian newspaper. Carl sowed and reaped Evangelical revivalism. His son Heinrich added romantic novels to the family’s oeuvre. Heinrich’s only child, Fredericka, betrothed loyal employee, Johannes Mohn, who took over operations after Heinrich’s passing.

Johannes’ son, Heinrich, was an early donor to the Nazis, as were his pastor and church. Heinrich joined the SS, as did his son Reinhard (19212009). Bertelsmann’s inhouse theologian was proNazi. Bertelsmann’s star poet wrote the speech inaugurating the 1933 bookburnings. With wares freighted with Volkish and antiSemitic content, Bertelsmann became the Third Reich’s largest
publisher. In 1943 they moved 19 million books. Bertelsmann supplied special editions to the Wehrmacht and boosted profits by exploiting slave labor in Eastern Europe and Holland.

PostWWII Bertelsmann stayed afloat partly by having hoarded paper at war’s end but mainly by transferring control to Reinhard, whom Allied commanders found palatable. (Reinhard spent much of WWII in a Kansas POW camp.) Bertelsmann printed books commissioned by British intelligence.

Bertelsmann’s first sortie into the Anglosphere was their late1970s acquisition of Bantam Books. In 19867 they purchased Doubleday and opened a New York office. In 1998 they bought Random House. A 2013 merger hatched Penguin Random House; 75 percent Bertelsmannowned. Penguin Random House, the world’s largest commercial book publisher, churnsout 70,000 digital
offerings and 15,000 printed volumes per year for the English and Spanishlanguage markets.

Annual sales of print, audio and ebooks exceed 600 million units. A 10,800strong workforce (5,000 in North America) harvests annual revenues of $4 billion. Penguin Random House hides behind 320 brands called “imprints.” These imprints are the putative “publishers” found on books information pages. Imprints tally the venerable houses captured by Bertelsmann; i.e., Viking, Knopf, Ebury, Hamish, Putnam, Ballantine, Puffin, DK and Vintage et al.

Bertelsmann supplies its German customers through Verlagsgruppe Random House, owner of 40 additional illustrious brands. Whollyowned Bertelsmann subsidiary, Bertelsmann Printing Group (BPG), does all Bertelsmann’s printing and prints catalogs and brochures for outside customers. In addition to its German operations, BPG’s five American and one British plants employ 7,200 workers. BPG hauls in annual revenues of $1.5 billion.

Bertelsmann Education Group’s 1,600 staff sell $350 million worth of: online training courses, digital teaching aids, school marketing, and student recruitment services every year. Their whollyowned online university, Udacity, serves the Silicon Valley milieu with tutorials about Cloud and Artificial Intelligence. 60,000 apply for Udacity’s 15,000 available annual positions. Bertelsmann employees take preference.

Bertelsmann’s Climate Change contribution is multipronged. Regarding publishing, it campaigns on nonfiction and fiction fronts. The total catalog of nonfiction global warming alarmist books issued by Bertelsmann probably exceeds a thousand titles. Recent additions include: Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming (David WallaceWells); Climate Leviathan (Joel Wainwright); No Immediate Danger: Volume 1 of the Carbon Ideologies (William Vollmann); and the illustrated kids’ book: What is Climate Change? (Gail Herman). Book releases warrant
companyfunded author tours and talkshow interviews, as were arranged for Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Sequel.

Bertelsmann practically invented alarmist supremo Bill McKibben (End of Nature; Global Warming Reader etc.). They definitely invented Climate Central the trusted source of information on all things climaterelated sponsor of collectibles like: Global Weirdness and Where is Climate Heading? Bertelsmann reformatted the US Government’s Global Change Research Program’s report into: Climate Report (2019).

More insidiously, Bertelsmann’s climate fiction offerings depict apocalyptic futures wracked by humaninduced global warming. Clifi” bestsellers include: The Water Knife (Paola Bacigalupi); Year of the Flood (Margaret Atwood); Green Earth (Kim Stanley Robinson); The Gracekeepers (Kirsty Logan); Gold Fame Citrus (Clare Vaye Walkins); and Solar (Ian McEwan).

The clifi genre was coengineered with Holtzbrinck (see below) in whose library one finds: The Dry (Jane Harper); The City in the Middle of the Night (Charlie Jane Anders); Odds Against Tomorrow (Nathaniel Rich); and Green Like Dying (Rouxi Chen).

Since 2007 hundreds of clifi novels along with countless clifi shortstories and screenplays have miraculously appeared. Librarians buy clifi by the tonne. Clifi potboilers are required reading in high school and undergraduate literature courses where they melt into millions of malleable minds.

Altogether Bertelsmann’s 8 divisions employ 130,000 workers. They generated sales of $19 billion in 2020. Whollyowned, Arvato, provides ecommerce and IT services to German banks, telecoms and retailers. As well, Arvato’s 36language, 48,000employee, call centres field inquiries on behalf of hundreds of corporate clients world over. Bertelsmann’s RTL owns 67 television channels, 38 radio stations and 10 streaming platforms.

RTL operates Germany’s largest private television network. RTL is either the top, or second to the top, television broadcaster in 8 EU countries. RTL’s Radio Deutschland owns 17 stations. RTL owns four advertising firms. RTL’s 15,686 employees produce most RTL content. Yearly revenues approach $7 billion. Bertelsmann’s Gruner & Jahr (G&J) showers 500 print and digital magazines onto Europe but mainly onto Germany and France where half the population buys at least one G&J periodical. G&J wholly owns the weekly Stern (circulation: 750,000) and 25% of its rival, Der Spiegel (circulation: 840,000).

G&J’s flagship daily, Dresdenbased Sachsische Zeitung (circulation: 230,000), is coowned with the German Social Democratic Party. G&J and Holtzbrinck coown Germany’s premier journalism college. RTL and G&J moil the internet with 1,500 YouTube channels. Monthly views are in the billions. Bertelsmann’s music division, BMG, deploys 974 specialists at 20 facilities to provide audiovisual, recording and steaming assistance to “indie” artists. BMG also offers marketing, licensing, royalty and copyright services.

Hoarding music copyrights since 1984, BMG now owns 3 million songs including many vintage hits appearing in movie soundtracks and on radio playlists. BMG is the world’s fourth largest music company.

Bertelsmann’s “corporate responsibility” webpage parades an array of internal carboncutting, papersaving, treeplanting and obligatory employee “be green” initiatives. Bertelsmann aspires to carbon neutrality by 2030. GCP Media, the German wing of Bertelsmann Printing, recently carbon neutralized its entire operations.

Bertelsmann’s pursuit of Climate Change objectives tracks the company’s deep ties to several German Government agencies pushing the same agenda; notably the GoetheInstitut. Pre1945 this institute, then named German Academy, and was a worldview weapon and espionage center wielded by Rudolf Hess, and later by Goebbels. Renamed “GoetheInstitut,” it now employs 1,000 staff and a $400 million stipend from the German Foreign Office, to spread the German language; instil positive images of Germany abroad; and, facilitate cooperation with German institutions.

Bertelsmann is owned 19.1 percent by the Mohn family, and 80.9 percent by 3 entities: BVG, Reinhard Mohn Foundation, and Bertelsmann Foundation. BVG owns all voting shares. The Mohns control all 3 entities.

Christoph Mohn chairs Bertelsmann and the Reinhard Mohn Foundation. Christoph is also a BVG shareholder and chairs BVG’s steering committee. Christoph’s mom, Liz Mohn, is Bertelsmann Foundation Vice Chair and a Bertelsmann Director. Her daughter, Brigitte Mohn, is an Executive Director of Bertelsmann Foundation, a Bertelsmann Director, and a BVG shareholder.
Summoned by the Mohns to Bertelsmann’s board are four Bertelsmann subsidiary managers and reps from the Danish renewable energy giant, Orsted; and, from Deutsche Bank, Daimler and Volkswagen German behemoths inseverably attached to the climateindustrialcomplex.

Liz Mohn followed her late husband Reinhard into the uberenvironmentalist Club of Rome. Bertelsmann Foundation began formal collaborations with the Club in 1993.
Bertelsmann Foundation issues no grants. It is a selffinanced think tank with annual expenditures of $90million and 360 employees. The Foundation hosts 200 confabs yearly to advance 70 separate projects typically joint ventures with German universities.

The Foundation spawns hundreds of reports and books (including a 6volume Reinhard Mohn compendium). Its annual 500page Sustainable Development Report, cowritten with UN Special Advisor Jeffrey Sachs, bashes governments for falling short on their climate commitments. The Foundation is committed to “enhancing international cooperation toward reifying the Paris Accords.
The Foundation scrutinises public opinion, especially voting behaviour.

Foundation execs decry populism” as a threat to EU integration. Their Twelve Stars Initiative invites philosophers to envision a fullyoperational EU Armed Forces. A government relations specialist runs the Foundation’s American branch where she enlivens Washington with forums, exchanges and multimedia shows.

Georg von Holtzbrinck’s father sold his distressed Westphalian estate after WWI. With hyperinflation vaporising the proceeds of this sale, Georg took up magazine distribution while still a student.
Georg joined the Nazi University Section in 1931 while the group was under sanction for assaulting Jewish students and professors. (Uncle Erich was an SS Commander.) Georg joined the Nazi Party in 1933.

Parlaying personal commendations from Hitler’s lawyer, and aid from the Party newspaper, Georg acquired distribution rights for German Labor Front magazines (annual circulation: 28 million). Georg personally designed the special edition celebrating Poland’s invasion.

Georg joined a cabal of businessmen who plundered Jewishowned publishing firms. He then became a prominent book publisher, producing volumes for the Wehrmacht. Allied prosecutors described Georg as a devoted Nazi who benefitted immensely from Party contacts. Nevertheless, Georg got off with a mere fine. He carried on publishing. Like the Mohns he also benefitted
immensely from hording paper at war’s end.

In the late1940s Georg took over the German Book Association. Over the ensuing 20 years he capitalised on his role as book middleman, and on close relationships with a cabal of German publishers, to acquire minority stakes in newspaper and book publishing firms. In 1971 he pooled these acquisitions into Holtzbrinck Publishing Group. His son GeorgDieter (b. 1941) assumed command in 1980, three years before Georg’s expiration.

Under GeorgDieter (r. 19802001) Holtzbrinck acquired German newspapers and Englishlanguage publishers; the latter specialising in science and education. GeorgDieter transferred Holtzbrinck Publishing to his sister (Monika Schoeller, 19392019) and his halfbrother (Stefan). He retained ownership of select newspapers and coowns Die Zeit with his relatives

Stuttgartheadquartered Holtzbrinck Publishing Group is a multinational. Half its sales are in Englishlanguage markets. Springer Nature, is 53 percent Holtzbrinckowned. The original journal, Nature, was published by Macmillan from 1869 until its 1995 purchase by Holtzbrinck. The acquisition setoff a proliferation of Naturebranded journals. Berlinbased SpringerVerlag dates to 1842. BC Partners bought Springer Science+Business Media in 2013 for $4 billion; merging it with Holtzbrinck 18 months later.

Springer Nature owns many of the world’s mostcited scientific journals such as: Scientific American, Scientific Reports and Nature. Scientific American was founded in 1845. Holtzbrinck bought it in 1986. Scientific American comes out monthly in a dozen languages. Each edition sells 10 million copies in either print or digital form. The magazine counts 200 Nobel Prize winners among its past or current stable of authors.

Scientific Reports, the world’s largest open access scientific megajournal, possesses an extensive Earth Science and Enviroscience collection containing innumerable climaterelated papers.
With 53,000 weekly subscribers, and an 8.0 pass along rate, Nature retains 424,000 regular readers. Nature is the world’s second most influential science journal (behind AAAS’s Science). Nature.com receives 9 million unique monthly viewers.

Nature Communications publishes several dozen journals. Regarding Climate Change, the most relevant being: Nature Earth and Environmental Sciences, Nature Ecology and Evolution, Nature Sustainability, Nature Energy, and Nature Climate Change (the world’s highest impact climate publication).

Nature Partner Journals are coventures between Springer Nature and various institutes. For example, NPJ Climate and Atmospheric Sciences is copublished with the King Abdullaziz University’s Center for Climate Change Research (home to the world’s most powerful climate modelling computer). Holtzbrinck also owns Macmillan Learning, Macmillan Publishing and Palgrave Macmillan.

Macmillan Learning sells educational materials, classroom kits and teaching tools. They: “maintain deep partnerships with the world’s best researchers, educators, administrators, and developers.”

Macmillan Publishing targets English and German retail book markets. Among its imprints are: St. Martin’s Press, Henry Holt, and S. Fischer. Palgrave Macmillan targets academics and businesses with books and periodicals focussed on economics, history and political science. Holtzbrinck owns hundreds of academic journals; scores of which run climaterelated papers.

Finally, subsidiaries Holtzbrinck Science and Holtzbrinck Digital oversee 30 companies engaged in software development and marketing. These companies dovetail with numerous tech startups bankrolled by Holtzbrinck Ventures.

This is taken from a long document. Read the rest here: friendsofscience

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    Alan Stewart

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    Kudos to the Nth degree for your efforts Walter. Thank you!!

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