Ibram X. Kendi’s “How to Be an Antiracist”, Robin DiAngelo’s “White Fragility”, and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “Between the World and Me” all have one publisher in common.
Bertelsmann, the German giant, which formerly used to put out “The Christmas Book of the Hitler Youth”, has become the leading publisher and distributor of some of the most famous and influential racist woke books.
Americans are unaware of the role that the Ex-Nazi company plays in poisoning our discourse with racism and wokeness because it operates under the cover of the names of the American and English book publishers that it gobbled up.
Americans don’t see the Bertelsmann brand, instead they see Random House, whose current state would make Bennett Cerf turn in his grave, and Penguin Books, along with other familiar names like Doubleday, Ballantine, Knopf, Schocken, now tragically owned by an ex-Nazi company, Crown, Viking, Putnam, Bantam, Del Rey, Golden Books and so many others.
Bertelsmann has conquered and gutted American publishing’s crown jewels. The book spines beloved to generations of readers are now just assets to a corporate office in Westphalia which uses them to distribute racist hate across America.
That includes promoting Ta-Nehisi Coates’s claim in “Between the World and Me” that the 9/11 firefighters and police officers were “menaces of nature” and “not human to me” to 9th graders and Robin DiAngelo’s racist “White Fragility” whose message, as CNN summed up, is that “if you’re a white person… you’re a racist.”
Not satisfied with pushing racism, Bertelsmann has also been involved in the controversy over sexualizing children.
“Beyond Magenta”, which describes 8-year-olds having sex and contains the sentence, “from six and up, I used to kiss other guys in my neighborhood, make out with them, and perform oral sex on them”, has been protested by parents.
And it’s being promoted by Penguin Random House to teens and young adults.
Earlier this year, Markus Dohle, the German CEO appointed by Bertelsmann to head up Penguin Random House, declared war on parental rights advocates by setting up a $500,000 Dohle Book Defense Fund to “advocate against censorship, track and expose the egregious assaults on books and ideas playing out in classrooms, state legislatures and other arenas.”
But Bertelsmann isn’t done consuming and destroying American publishing and culture. It’s determined to take over Simon & Schuster. That would add notable names such as Scribner, Pocket Books, Baen, the Folger Shakespeare Library and Washington Square Press to its hoard.
Penguin Random House, (no. 1), and Simon & Schuster (no. 3), are two of the big five publishers who control 80% of the trade book market. Penguin Random House, under Bertelsmann, accounts for around 40% of hardcover sales and between a fifth to a quarter of paperback book sales.
No single book publisher comes close to that level of dominance.
With the addition of Simon & Schuster, the new Bertelsmann monster could command half of the hardcover book market making it bigger than all the other publishers combined.
What’s even worse is that of the ‘Big 5’ book publishers in the United States, Macmillan is already owned by Germany’s Holtzbrinck, and Hachette, which ate Time Warner’s book publishing arm including Little, Brown, is a French company.
That would, at best, leave HarperCollins, owned by News Corp, as the closest thing to an American publisher among the country’s dominant publishers.
Foreign companies would control 77% of the American hardcover book market and between 50% to 73% of our paperback market. In an environment where the big publishers only keep getting bigger, those numbers will get worse, not better.
And as we have already seen with Bertelsmann and Hachette, which shamefully published “In Defense of Looting”, foreign publishers have no problem exploiting and monetizing our social problems while tearing apart our country.
The damage that Bertelsmann and Hachette have already done to our society and our children is a warning against allowing foreign companies to control the lifeblood of our culture. Aside from being a blatant antitrust violation, the Bertelsmann seizure of Simon & Schuster is a national security threat.
In an initial first step, the takeover was blocked by a federal judge.
The ruling came after an extended trial whose evidence included an “internal company document” proposing the purchase of Simon & Schuster which described the big five as an “oligopoly”. That was quite an admission.
While the ruling is a rare victory for antitrust, Bertelsmann is moving to appeal.
Even if the ex-Nazi publisher fails in its bid to totally dominate publishing, it’s still causing immeasurable damage due to its current dominance. And it may be time for a future White House and Congress to revisit the question of whether foreign companies dominating our cultural industries is good or bad for America.
As a sample, consider some of the books that Penguin Random House is currently promoting, including “Democracy in Black”, which claims that America’s “democratic principles do not exist in a space apart from [its] national commitment to white supremacy.” Alongside it are “Forty Million Dollar Slaves” about black atheletes, and Ibram X. Kendi’s “How to Be an Antiracist”.
Getting Bertelsmann’s claws out of our culture won’t immediately fix wokeness, but it will create more actual diversity in the publishing market and scale back some of the poison that is being poured into our veins by its million dollar racists.
Bertelsmann claims that it wants to help Americans. That’s as trustworthy as the lies that it used to spread falsely claiming that it resisted the Nazis and that the regime had shut it down when in actuality it was in bed with the Nazis.
Under Hitler, Heinrich Mohn, the head of the family business, was a member of the SS Sponsors Circle, and Bertelsmann became the largest supplier of books to the German Army. (The company is now headed by his grandson, Christoph Mohn.) Printers churning out its books used Jewish slave labor from the ghetto.
After the war, the Mohns lied and claimed that the company had been persecuted by the Nazis to convince the Allies to allow them to stay in business.
Even in 1998, one of its executives claimed that “the Carl Bertelsmann publishing house, was one of the few non-Jewish media companies closed down by the Nazi regime” because they “had been publishing books that were banned by the Third Reich as subversive. Bertelsmann’s continuing existence was a threat to the Nazi attempt to control freedom of expression.”
What they were actually publishing was “The Christmas Book of the Hitler Youth”.
In 1984, Bertelsmann brought in a former Nazi propgandist who had been churning out Hitler poems during the war and published a book which claimed that WWII had been caused by America, not Germany, and that Jews “controlled most of the media”, to write its official fake history of resistance to the Nazis.
It was a son of Holocaust survivors who exposed the lie and showed that the Nazi publisher was actually churning out horrors like “Sterilization and Euthanasia — a Contribution to Applied Christian Ethics” and “With Bombs and Machine Guns Over Poland”. Bertelsmann reacted by warning a public broadcaster to stop the “sinister and dangerous” reporting on the story.
The expose came as the ADL was about to honor the Bertelsmann Foundation.
It included the revelation that Nazi propogandist Joseph Goebbels had intervened to aid Bertelsmann employees.
But Bertelsmann needn’t have bothered lying and covering up its past. As Goebbels might have predicted, no one cared.
And now, as Bertelsmann is on the verge of dominating American book publishing even while pumping out more racist books, no one still cares.
Having failed to learn from history, we are repeating it.
Oooh, nazi. Is there a nazi in the room with you now?
First: not at all funny
Next: terrible grammar
RED ACTIVIST HAMMERS COMRADE
For Kathy, friend, mentor and wife. Stupor Mundi.
Copyright ©2022 A. J. Reffes. All rights reserved. Published by Progress Publishers, Berlin, Germany.
The use of ‘ex-Nazi’ is wrong. There is nothing remotely suggesting anything about being ex
So don’t buy the crap Bertlesmann is pushing. No business, no Bertlesmann.
You’re talking like a Radical Free Market Capitalist not a paternalistic, government protection, mixed-economy, CONSERVATIVE.
“It was the so-called “conservatives” . . . who ran to the government for regulations and controls [over the broadcasting industry], and who cheered the notion of “public property” and service to the “public interest.” – Ayn Rand
“Historically, from the Sherman Act to Herbert Hoover to the Bush Administration, it is the conservatives, not the Leftists, who have always been the major destroyers of the United States.” – Leonard Peikoff
The Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 was a Republican conservative monstrosity against Free Market Capitalism, against freedom and liberty. Sen. John Sherman (R–Ohio), the principal author of the Sherman Antitrust Act.
Hey doofus, I never said I wasn’t a “Radical Free Market Capitalist”. That is your assumption about me and everyone else who is Christian and still, somehow, manages to be a free market capitalist.
And there is no thing as a “radical” free market capitalist. There is simply market capitalism. Your biggest problem, other than being an obsessive compulsive Objectivist, is you think you are the only free market capitalist and that being one is radical. You are aren’t radical. You are simply annoying.
It would seem there isn’t anything NSDAP related going on now with the company, so why keep saying “ex-Nazi”?
“Greenfield” … oh. I see. I just keep noticing. Tiny-hat chosenites strike again.
Hitler did nothing wrong
poor little jimmy, just a JEW envying loser – keep seething in your jealousy you irrelevant clown
Gee Jaimee, another name calling Jew hater on these comment boards. How original and intelligent.
Tiny-hat chosenites? Really?
Yo, “Hitler did nothing wrong” guy. Did you vote for Biden or Trump?
Every Walter Mitty with a keyboard can become a fearless tough guy, spewing abuse like a Mickey Spillane/Don Rickles mindmeld.
For all we know mister lederhosen is incapable of doing the goose step and is a lifelong invalid.
Triggering outrage as an absurd troll may be his only joy.
I encourage his participation.
Daniel, you are one of my heroes..
A true carrier of the name Daniel you are..
Bertelsmann do a lot of tv also in Europe btw, alt the RTl stations for example.
Never hear about Qatar Al Qaida Isis financing connection that Wikipedia says there is, only about gay rights in Qatar and foreign workers’ rights . But this is beyond believe to go play a world up in that country.
The Syrian refugees that came after the redline debacle are welcomed by Obama foundation youth leaders on Lesbos. But who paid and supported the Islamists?
And who is flooding racists and capitalist sexist guilty Europe with these ” wonderful immigrants” ?
In my country Dutch people can’t get a home now ! Devide and conquer some more.
Qatar’s influence operation is indeed everywhere and it’s massive. But it’s worst in America. They own D.C.
And the migrant flood is backed by Qatar, implemented by the Islamist regime in Turkey
Amalek wants to unite Christianity and Islam at any cost. Rewriting history and make everybody woke is just a part of it. They got to ridicule G’d and his commandments especially the multiply yourselves one.
USA needs to be altered drastically in their worldview also.. Israel gone,…..Qatar not so bad,…..pays supporters to come to worldcup and do positive reporting on socials. MSM mad about that, But nothing about the terror.
So a gay in the closet is worse than thousands of death people ? Really?
Umwertung aller wetten, conversion of all values, the travesty of things. There is such a concept as the pink swastika. Sodom was a hidden part in Arab cultures also. Nothing much new under the sun. One country finds sofisticated ways to undermine another. IBM worked with the Nazis also. And they had a not so secret code prior to 9 11 about 9 11. What about that? It’s been a long way in the planning and Trump don’t fit into that.
Former Dutch Christian Democrat social secretary Aart Jan de Geus was director of Bertelsmann which owns the RTL media group that supports the German Christian Democrat party of Angela Merkel ‘Das Schaffen Wir’.
https://www.welt.de/politik/deutschland/article138826896/Deutschland-braucht-500-000-Zuwanderer-pro-Jahr.html
fascinating, but not surprising. There are deep political roots here.
When I studied in Germany, I was a member of the Bertelsmann Book Stores. This entitled me to buy at the stores. I had to buy something every few months, but they had lots of special reduced price items. I ended my membership when they closed the outlet in my college town. The nearest store was rather far away, and I did not want to travel all that way to buy discount items. But I liked my bargains while I could get them easily. I did not realize that the company was trying to dominate the book selling market to the extent that it is. At least it is not the Chinese who are doing this. Or perhaps they will try to take this market away too. I have the impression that the new woke books are something the far Left or cultural Marxists are promoting to destroy Western conservative traditions and culture. But of course the Nazis were a branch of leftism, with ties and parallels to communism. The next assault might come from Islamists, I would expect that consolidation is in the cards, like Amazon, ebay, AIRBNB and many other industries that have tended to become monopolized.
Speaking of China, a lot of book printing is now being outsourced to China. And then those books have to submit to Communist Chinese censorship.
It’s easy, Daniel. Buy books published by quality independent publishers like these.
https://www.artscroll.com/
https://www.feldheim.com/
https://www.israelbookshoppublications.com/
https://korenpub.com/
those are great Jewish book publishers, still a problem for society at large
Guess who published Donal Trump’s “The Art of the Deal.” Ballantine Books. Owned by Random House. Owned by Bertelsmann.
Yes, we should worry that a handful of companies monopolize the publishing business. But to claim they Bertelsmann is trying to destroy Western civilization by imposing woke ideology is moronic to an extreme that is shocking even by the standards of FPM.
So there?
Do you want a gold star?
Do you consider yourself a serious person with a serious reason for living? Did you used to?
Art of the Deal was published in 1987.
Bertelsmann bought Random House in 1988.
But apart from that, great work.
Sorry for the spaghetti structure in what I am writing. But everything has to do with everything else and i am writing as i go, and need to be concise. Shouldn’t be too much of a problem (?)
Yeonmi Park says the wokeness at campus reminds here of North Korea ! Is it just a tactical thing to get our moral compass off line, or is there more to it? It comes hand in hand with the dumbing down off the masses to start with. Rabbi Kessin says the gender confusion that IS the zoama, the essence of the denial of the Devine order as folks at the 50 th level of moral decay do ! The contamination of the snake, when Adam and his wife fell into the material world is zoama.( Think of the 50 days between Passover and the giving of Thora, of course there are also 50 gates of wisdom on the good side )
Some commentators are at this owest level. Hitler also killed disabled children, what is so good about that ? Where are you at ?
There are plenty of videos showing Michelle O. to be a man, and i have an anecdote about a trans neighbor who just loves Michelle, and he lives half the time in NY to review books ! Anyway, connect all the dots with this link, it is about the business model the migrant crisis has become ! And read my previous comments !
Sent from Yahoo Mail on Android
Meet the companies link is from World Tribune.com
Wokeism, Transhumanism are Eugenics all over again.
Since we are closer to Chimps than Bonobos, we are highly aggressive against “the other.”
It’s a DNA thing and has spiraled and spiraled for the ages.
Bertelsmann is simply the head chimp in his troop and means to keep it that way, as did Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Xi, etc. etc.