Biweekly Discussion - Who's Behind The "New World Order"?
Details
We're currently hosting our discussions at Café Walnut, near the corner of 7th & Walnut in Olde City, just across the street from Washington Square Park. The cafe's entrance is below street level down some stairs, which can be confusing if it's your first time. Our group meets in the large room upstairs.
Since we're using the cafe's space, they ask that each person attending the meetup at least purchase a drink or snack. Please don't bring any food or drinks from outside. If you're hungry enough to eat a meal, they have more substantial fare such as salads, soups & sandwiches which are pretty good and their prices are reasonable.
The cafe is fairly easy to get to if you're using public transit. With SEPTA, take the Market-Frankford Line & get off at the 5th Street Station (corner of 5th & Market), and walk 2 blocks south on 5th and then turn right on Walnut Street and walk 2 blocks west. With PATCO, just get off at the 9th-10th & Locust stop and walk 3 blocks east & 1 block north. For those who are driving, parking in the neighborhood can be tough to find. If you can't find a spot on the street, I'd suggest parking in the Washington Square parking deck at 249 S 6th Street which is just a half block away.
WHO'S BEHIND THE "NEW WORLD ORDER"?
ASSESSING CONSPIRACY THEORIES ABOUT THE BOHEMIAN GROVE, THE COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS, THE BILDERBERG MEETING & THE TRILATERAL COMMISSION
INTRODUCTION:
In this discussion, we'll explore the conspiracy theories about the so-called "New World Order" and look at the rumors & allegations swirling around four shadowy organizations that are supposedly conspiring to bring it about.
MEANING OF THE TERM "NEW WORLD ORDER" & A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE NWO CONSPIRACY THEORY IN THE U.S.:
First of all, we need to define what the term "New World Order" means and where it comes from. Wikipedia gives a decent history of the term:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_world_order_(politics)#Historical_usage
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_World_Order_(conspiracy_theory)#History_of_the_term
The phrase "new world order" was initially used in connection with Woodrow Wilson's global zeitgeist during the period just after World War I during the formation of the League of Nations. Contemporaries called it "the war to end all wars" as it was a powerful catalyst in international politics, and many felt the world could simply no longer operate as it once had. World War I had been justified not only in terms of U.S. national interest, but in moral terms—to "make the world safe for democracy". After the war, Wilson argued for a "new world order" which transcended traditional great power politics, instead emphasizing collective security, democracy and self-determination. However, the US Senate rejected membership of the League of Nations, and the term fell from use when it became clear the League was not living up to expectations.
During World War II, British author H.G. Wells wrote a book entitled The New World Order (1940) arguing for the establishment of a technocratic world state and of a planned economy to prevent future wars. Despite the popularity of his ideas in some state-socialist circles, Wells failed to exert a deeper and more lasting influence.
The term "new world order" was used very little in the immediate period after World War II, although the phrase was used by some in retrospect when assessing the creation of the post-World War II set of international institutions, including the United Nations, NATO, the Bretton Woods system, the International Monetary Fund, and the Marshall Plan.
During the Red Scare of 1947–1957, agitators of the American political right, influenced by the work of Canadian conspiracy theorist William Guy Carr, increasingly embraced and spread fears of Freemasons & Jews as the alleged driving forces behind an "International Communist Conspiracy". The Red Scare came to shape one of the core ideas of the political right in the United States, which was that socialist sentiment was pervasive in America, and that by advocating for social welfare programs & involvement in international institutions, both New Deal Democrats & Rockefeller Republicans were contributing to a gradual process of collectivism that would inevitably lead to a communist one-world government.
Right-wing activist groups such as the John Birch Society disseminated a multitude of conspiracy theories in the 1960s claiming that the governments of both the United States and the Soviet Union were controlled by a cabal of corporate internationalists, greedy bankers and corrupt politicians who were intent on using the U.N. as the vehicle to create a "One World Government". This right-wing anti-globalist conspiracism fuelled the Bircher campaign for US withdrawal from the UN. American writer Mary M. Davison, in her 1966 booklet The Profound Revolution, traced the alleged New World Order conspiracy to the establishment of the US Federal Reserve in 1913 by international bankers, whom she claimed later formed the Council on Foreign Relations in 1921 as a shadow government.
The John Birch Society's hardline isolationalist stance & accusations of communism against even Dwight Eisenhower led to them being marginalized from the Republican Party by the early 1960s. However, their conspiratorial views spread to many of the Republican followers of Barry Goldwater, leading to a rift within the GOP in the election of 1964.
American writer Gary Allen proliferated the NWO conspiracy theory in the 1970s & 1980s with his books None Dare Call It Conspiracy (1971), Rockefeller: Campaigning for the New World Order (1974), and Say "No!" to the New World Order (1987), and his books articulated the anti-globalist theme of much of the current right-wing populist conspiracism in the US. The political activist Lyndon LaRouche also spread the NWO conspiracy theory during these decades, tailoring it in such a way that it appealed to people on both the far left & the far right.
After the fall of communism in the early 1990s, the main scapegoat of the American far right shifted from "crypto-communists" to "globalists" plotting on behalf of the New World Order. American televangelist Pat Robertson, with his 1991 best-selling book The New World Order, popularized a belief among the Religious Right that Wall Street, the Federal Reserve, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Bilderberg Group, and the Trilateral Commission control the flow of events from behind the scenes, nudging politics covertly in the direction of world government for the Antichrist.
In the early 21st century, the NWO conspiracy theories got a significant boost from the spectacular & shocking nature of the 9/11 attacks, which resulted in the proliferation of online conspiracy theories about an "inside job" orchestrated by a shadow government within the US. After the 2003 Iraq invasion revealed that Saddam Hussein didn't have any WMDs as Bush had claimed, this led to further online speculation that the "New World Order" was pushing the US into needless wars.
Shortly after the 2008 financial crisis, several politicians and pundits used the term "new world order" in their advocacy for a comprehensive reform of the global financial system. These statements had the unintended consequence of providing fresh fodder for New World Order conspiracism, culminating in Fox News host Sean Hannity stating that "the conspiracy theorists were right".
The election of Barack Obama also elicited more NWO conspiracy theories from conservative pundits, with Glenn Beck regularly arguing on Fox News that Obama was pushing a crypto-socialist agenda and about to enact martial law, while provocateur Alex Jones attracted a lot of attention by making even more outrageous claims at Infowars.
In 2013, Public Policy Polling found that about 28% of Americans claim to believe that "a secretive power elite with a globalist agenda is conspiring to eventually rule the world through an authoritarian world government or New World Order", while another 25% says they're "not sure". Perhaps not surprisingly, there's a strong partisan bent to this belief, with 34% of Republicans and 35% of independents saying they believe in the New World Order threat compared to just 15% of Democrats.
https://www.publicpolicypolling.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/PPP_Release_National_ConspiracyTheories_040213.pdf
- NOTE: If you'd like to see a more in-depth coverage of the history of the "New world Order" conspiracy theory, check out Tim Callahan's article from the Oct. 2010 edition of Skeptic Magazine entitled, "The End of the World and the New World Order: Black Helicopters, Hong Kong Gurkhas, Global Conspiracies & the Mark of the Beast":
https://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/10-10-20/
VARIETIES OF "NEW WORLD ORDER" CONSPIRACY THEORIES:
From reading a lot of articles & blog posts about the New World Order from a variety of sources, I've identified a range of views that fall into roughly 5 categories, which I've ranked in order of increasing plausibility of the claims they make:
- Supernatural/Pseudo-Scienific NWO Conspiracy Theories: There's a variety of NWO conspiracy theories that are wildly implausible because they incorporate supernatural elements, alleging that global elites are Satanists & practice black magic (e.g. Pat Robertson's "New World Order"), that they are aliens in disguise (e.g. David Icke's reptilians) or in league with aliens (e.g. Majestic 12), or that they possess advanced technology like zero-point energy or geoengineering tech that can produce hurricanes & earthquakes.
- Pseudohistorical NWO Conspiracy Theories: There's a variety of NWO conspiracy theories that don't have any supernatural or pseudo-scientific elements, but that make claims that are inherently implausible because they involve groups that mainstream scholars say either never existed (e.g. Elders of Zion, Priory of Sion, Fourth Reich) or existed in the past but no longer exist today (e.g. Knights Templar, Rosicrucians, Bavarian Illuminati, Hellfire Club, Jacobins).
- NWO Super-Conspiracy Theories: There's a range of NWO conspiracies that don't contain pseudo-scientific or pseudo-historical elements, but are nevertheless highly implausible because they allege plots that are wide-ranging & long-lasting and organizations that are almost omnipotent yet highly secretive. The political scientist Michael Barkun calls these "super-conspiracy theories" because they often link multiple alleged conspiracies together hierarchically (e.g. see the above diagram). The classic examples of NWO super-conspiracy theories are historian Carroll Quigley's theory about an Anglo-American "Round Table" conspiracy for world domination hatched by Cecil Rhodes in 1880 and the John Birch Society theory that an "International Communist Conspiracy" controlled both sides during the Cold War and still exists today.
- NWO Quasi-Conspiracy Theories: There's a somewhat more plausible range of claims about international conspiracies by corporations, think tanks & politicians which are not quite as large, long-lasting or powerful as those in the "super-conspiracy theories". Often these "quasi-conspiracy theories" (my term) come from journalists & amateur historians who are careful to cite primary sources and adept at weaving compelling narratives, but they are still hyperbolic in their rhetoric, cherrypick evidence, and conflict with the current consensus in academic fields like political history, political science, political sociology & institutional economics. Good examples of NWO quasi-conspiracy theories are Naomi Klein's book Shock Doctrine and John Perkins' book Confessions of an Economic Hitman, as well as the conspiracy theory about imminent plans for a "North American Union" that went viral during Obama's presidency.
- Elite Theory, Institutional Analysis, Public Choice Theory & Social Network Analysis: These are 4 somewhat related types of academic analysis of political networks that can appear somewhat similar to the NWO quasi-conspiracy theories but make more sophisticated & more empirically sound arguments. Social scientists occasionally use the term "New World Order" but usually talk instead about somewhat related concepts that define the political & economic climate of the post-WWII era like the Liberal International Order, Pax Americana, Late Capitalism, Transnational Capitalism, Post-/Trans-nationalism, Managerial Capitalism, the Managerial State, Globalization, etc.