NEW WORLD ORDER
During the Persian Gulf War, 1991, as USAF aircraft and ships launched their opening missile salvoes against Baghdad, President George H.W. Bush gave a speech to Congress proclaiming, “a big idea—a new world order, where diverse nations are drawn together in common cause to achieve the universal aspirations of Mankind: peace and security, freedom and the rule of law”.
Whoa. In one fell speech Poppy Bush confirmed the worst fears of the John Birch Society (JBS), the patriotic militias, the fundamentalist Christian right and pale computer buffs who need to get out more: George Bush was bent on the introduction of one-world government controlled by a micro clique of capitalists. Within weeks the world of conspiracists went mad for the New World Order (NWO) conspiracy.
The phrase “New World Order” had been common currency in the Birch Society, almost since its foundation in 1958 by Robert Welch. A fervent anti-Red, Welch initially identified Communism as the primary force pushing a globalist agenda. (Not unreasonably: one of the first proponents of the concept “New World Order” was British socialist and writer H. G. Wells in his 1940 book of that title, (see Document, p.364) which envisioned a technocratic global order with a planned economy.) Looking at the US Republican right, Welch saw an equally criminal desire to construct a global power system run by the “Insiders” and one, given the inherent weaknesses of the USSR, the main power-base of Communism, with a better chance of realization. Welch was heavily influenced by his readings of eighteenth-century scribes on the Bavarian Illuminati, Augustin de Barruel and John Robison, while the theory was honed by John Birch Society’s pet intellectual Gary Allen in
If Gary Allen put the wheels on the NWO conspiracy, others promptly climbed aboard. Christian fundamentalist Pat Robertson was one of the first to take a seat with
Truth to tell, the NWO theory, with its apocalyptic scenarios and instrumentalist politics, has long left the orbit of history and entered the realm of paranoid mythology.
Gary Allen,
William Guy Carr,
William Cooper,
Jim Keith,
Pat Robertson,
DOCUMENT: H. G. WELLS,
There will be no day of days then when a new world order comes into being. Step by step and here and there it will arrive, and even as it comes into being it will develop fresh perspectives, discover unsuspected problems and go on to new adventures. No man, no group of men, will ever be singled out as its father or founder. For its maker will be not this man nor that man nor any man but Man, that being who is in some measure in every one of us. World order will be, like science, like most inventions, a social product, an innumerable number of personalities will have lived fine lives, pouring their best into the collective achievement.
We can find a small-scale parallel to the probable development of a new world order in the history of flying. Less than a third of a century ago, ninety-nine people out of a hundred would have told you that flying was impossible; kites and balloons and possibly even a navigable balloon, they could imagine; they had known of such things for a hundred years; but a heavier than air machine, flying in defiance of wind and gravity! that they KNEW was nonsense. The would-be aviator was the typical comic inventor. Any fool could laugh at him. Now consider how completely the air is conquered.
And who did it? Nobody and everybody. Twenty thousand brains or so, each contributing a notion, a device, an amplification. They stimulated one another; they took off from one another. They were like excited ganglia in a larger brain sending their impulses to and fro. They were people of the most diverse race and colour. You can write down perhaps a hundred people or so who have figured conspicuously in the air, and when you examine the role they have played, you will find for the most part that they are mere notorieties of the Lindbergh type who have put themselves modestly but firmly in the limelight and can lay no valid claim to any effective contribution whatever. You will find many disputes about records and priority in making this or that particular step, but the lines of suggestion, the growth and elaboration of the idea, have been an altogether untraceable process. It has been going on for not more than a third of a century, under our very eyes, and no one can say precisely how it came about. One man said “Why not this?” and tried it, and another said “Why not that?” A vast miscellany of people had one idea in common, an idea as old as D?dalus, the idea that “Man can fly”. Suddenly, swiftly, it GOT ABOUT—that is the only phrase you can use—that flying was attainable. And man, man as a social being, turned his mind to it seriously, and flew.
So it will certainly be with the new world order, if ever it is attained. A growing miscellany of people are saying—it is GETTING ABOUT—that “World Pax is possible”, a World Pax in which men will be both united and free and creative. It is of no importance at all that nearly every man of fifty and over receives the idea with a pitying smile. Its chief dangers are the dogmatist and the would-be “leader” who will try to suppress every collateral line of work which does not minister to his supremacy. This movement must be, and it must remain, many-headed. Suppose the world had decided that Santos Dumont or Hiram Maxim was the heaven-sent Master of the Air, had given him the right to appoint a successor and subjected all experiments to his inspired control. We should probably have the Air Master now, with an applauding retinue of yes-men, following the hops of some clumsy, useless and extremely dangerous apparatus across country with the utmost dignity and self-satisfaction…
Yet that is precisely how we still set about our political and social problems.
Bearing this essential fact in mind that the Peace of Man can only be attained, if it is attained at all, by an advance upon a long and various front, at varying speed and with diverse equipment, keeping direction only by a common faith in the triple need for collectivism, law and research, we realise the impossibility of drawing any picture of the new order as though it was as settled and stable as the old order imagined itself to be. The new order will be incessant; things will never stop happening, and so it defies any Utopian description. But we may nevertheless assemble a number of possibilities that will be increasingly realisable as the tide of disintegration ebbs and the new order is revealed.
To begin with we have to realise certain peculiarities of human behaviour that are all too disregarded in general political speculation. We have considered the very important role that may be played in our contemporary difficulties by a clear statement of the Rights of Man, and we have sketched such a Declaration. There is not an item in that Declaration, I believe, which a man will not consider to be a reasonable demand—so far as he himself is concerned. He will subscribe to it in that spirit very readily. But when he is asked not only to subscribe to it as something he has to concede by that same gesture to everybody else in the world, but as something for which he has to make all the sacrifices necessary for its practical realisation, he will discover a reluctance to “go so far as that”. He will find a serious resistance welling up from his sub-conscious and trying to justify itself in his thoughts.
