New World Order conspiracy theory

• 1. Introduction

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  The New World Order conspiracy theory describes a supposed secret plan to place the whole planet under one totalitarian government. Believers call the plan the New World Order, or NWO. The shared claim is that a secretive power elite with a globalist agenda wants an authoritarian one-world government. That government would replace sovereign nation-states. An all-encompassing propaganda would then present the arrival of the New World Order as the culmination of history's progress.

  Influential figures from the past and the present have been named as members of this cabal. It is said to work through numerous front organizations to orchestrate major political, social and economic events. Crises are supposedly exploited, or even caused, so that controversial policies can be pushed through at national and international levels.

  In 1950, James Warburg appeared before the United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and spoke a sentence that is still quoted. "We shall have world government, whether or not we like it. The question is only whether world government will be achieved by consent or by conquest." The line is famous. It shows that talk of world government was being spoken openly in Washington decades before the theory took its modern shape.

  Until the early 1990s, belief in a New World Order stayed inside two American countercultures. The larger one was the militantly anti-government right. The smaller one was the part of fundamentalist Christianity concerned with the end-time emergence of the Antichrist. Scholars of conspiracy theories and religious extremism, including Michael Barkun and Chip Berlet, later observed that the idea had seeped into popular culture. They warned that mass hysteria over it could harm American political life, from lone wolf terrorism to the rise of authoritarian ultranationalist demagogues.

  This documentary asks where the phrase came from and why it meant something hopeful to some speakers and something sinister to others. It asks who has been accused of running the plot and what the historical record says about those accusations. And it asks why the story keeps returning, in new forms, whenever the world seems to be changing too fast.

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• 2. Two Meanings

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  Woodrow Wilson and Winston Churchill both used the phrase "new world order" during the 20th century, and neither of them was describing a plot. They meant a new period of history, marked by a dramatic change in world political thought and in the global balance of power after the First and Second World Wars.

  Those postwar years were seen as a chance to try idealistic proposals for global governance. The goal was collective effort on problems too large for any single nation-state, while still respecting each nation's right to self-determination. The League of Nations took shape in 1920, the United Nations in 1945 and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1949. International arrangements such as the Bretton Woods system and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade were meant to keep a cooperative balance of power and help nations reconcile.

  American paleoconservative business nationalists criticized these cosmopolitan efforts from the 1930s onward. Progressives welcomed the new bodies but found them lacking. In their view, the United Nations suffered from a democratic deficit, because it was chartered as a free association of sovereign nation-states rather than as a step toward democratic world government. Cosmopolitan activists around the globe judged the intergovernmental organizations too ineffectual for real change, and they formed a world federalist movement.

  The British writer and futurist H. G. Wells went further in the 1940s. He took the phrase "new world order" and redefined it as a synonym for a technocratic world state and a planned economy. In 1928 he had already promoted cosmopolitanism in The Open Conspiracy, offering blueprints for a world revolution and a World Brain. His 1940 book The New World Order made the phrase popular in state socialist circles, and it gave the term a second meaning used only by those socialist supporters and their anti-communist opponents.

  Despite the notoriety of his ideas, Wells never gained a lasting influence. By the source's account, he could not concentrate his energies on a direct appeal to the intellectuals who would have had to coordinate a Wellsian world.

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• 3. Red Scare Roots

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  William Guy Carr, a Canadian conspiracy theorist, shaped much of what American agitators believed during the Second Red Scare. Both secular and Christian right activists drew on his work. They spread dubious fears of Freemasons, Illuminati and Jews as the supposed driving forces behind an "international communist conspiracy".

  The threat of "Godless communism" took the form of an atheistic, bureaucratic world government, demonized as the "Red Menace". It became the focus of apocalyptic conspiracism. The Red Scare also left a core idea on the American political right. Liberals and progressives, with their welfare-state policies and programs such as foreign aid, were said to be feeding a gradual global collectivism. That process would end with nations replaced by a communistic one-world government.

  In the 1960s, the John Birch Society pushed the story further. This right-wing populist group claimed that the governments of both the United States and the Soviet Union were controlled by one cabal. The cabal was said to include corporate internationalists, "greedy" bankers and corrupt politicians, all intent on using the United Nations as the vehicle for a "One World Government". The claim fueled a campaign for American withdrawal from the UN.

  In 1966, the American writer Mary M. Davison published a booklet called The Profound Revolution. It traced the alleged plot to the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913 by international bankers. She claimed the same bankers later formed the Council on Foreign Relations in 1921 as a shadow government. Many readers of the day would have taken "international bankers" as a reference to a postulated international Jewish banking conspiracy masterminded by the Rothschild family.

  Another American writer, Gary Allen, gave the theme its fullest popular form. His books None Dare Call It Conspiracy appeared in 1971, Rockefeller: Campaigning for the New World Order in 1974, and Say "No!" to the New World Order in 1987.

  The fall of communism in the early 1990s removed the original villain. Attention shifted from crypto-communists to globalists, who were now accused of plotting a unified world government. In this version, the government would be controlled by an untouchable oligarchy of international bankers, corrupt politicians and corporatists, or by the United Nations itself. The scholar G. William Domhoff notes a flaw in the new version. The UN is powerless, and even moderates within the American Establishment are unwilling to give it more than a limited role.

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• 4. Bush and the Pulpit

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  On the 11th of September 1990, President George H. W. Bush stood before a joint session of the United States Congress and delivered a speech titled Toward a New World Order. He described his hopes for global governance after the Cold War, in cooperation with post-Soviet states. The New York Times observed that progressives were denouncing the idea as a cover for American imperial ambitions in the Middle East. Conservatives rejected any new security arrangements and fulminated about a possible revival of the UN.

  Chip Berlet, an investigative reporter who studies right-wing movements, wrote that the Christian and secular far right were especially terrified by the speech. Fundamentalist Christian groups heard the End Times in Bush's words. More secular theorists approached it from an anti-communist and anti-collectivist standpoint, and they feared that the United Nations would gain hegemony over all countries.

  The following year, the televangelist Pat Robertson published a best-selling book titled The New World Order. It made him the most prominent Christian disseminator of conspiracy theories about recent American history. His scenario placed Wall Street, the Federal Reserve System, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Bilderberg Group and the Trilateral Commission behind the scenes. Together they were said to nudge people covertly toward a world government that would serve the Antichrist.

  Robertson was drawing on a prophetic tradition older than the United States Congress's speech. Since the 19th century, apocalyptic Christian writers, starting with John Nelson Darby, had predicted a globalist plot to impose a tyrannical order. They read it into the Book of Ezekiel, the Book of Daniel, the Olivet Discourse and Revelation 13:7. Contemporary versions differ on who plays the Antichrist. Candidates include the President of the European Union, the Caliph of a pan-Islamic state and the Secretary-General of the United Nations.

  Some of the sharpest critics came from inside Christianity. In 1993, the historian Bruce Barron wrote a stern rebuke in the Christian Research Journal while reviewing Robertson's book. Gregory S. Camp followed in 1997 with Selling Fear: Conspiracy Theories and End-Times Paranoia. The religious studies scholar Richard T. Hughes argues that the rhetoric has no basis in the Bible at all. In his view, it takes a comforting message about the coming kingdom of God and turns it into fear, panic and despair.

  The preacher-theologian Peter J. Gomes warned fundamentalists that a "spirit of fear" can distort scripture and history. Camp saw a "very real danger that Christians could pick up some extra spiritual baggage" by credulously embracing conspiracy theories.

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• 5. Militias and Screens

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  Linda Thompson, Mark Koernke and Robert K. Spear were among the conspiracy theorists whose galvanizing language, throughout the 1990s, is credited with fueling the rise of the American militia movement. Its anti-government message traveled by speeches at rallies and meetings, and by books and videotapes sold at gun shows. It also moved over shortwave and satellite radio, fax networks and computer bulletin boards. It has been argued that overnight AM radio shows and viral material on the internet did the most to push people toward extremist responses.

  The theory then spread sideways. It found its way retroactively into the formerly apolitical writing of Kennedy assassinologists, ufologists, lost land theorists and occultists, partly inspired by fears surrounding the "Satanic panic". From the mid-1990s, these subcultures carried the idea to a larger audience of seekers of stigmatized knowledge, who shared a disillusionment with political efficacy. Since the late 1970s, writers such as Stan Deyo, Milton William Cooper and David Icke had added extraterrestrials and "Reptilians" to the plot. Barkun saw one upside. If the world's secret rulers are aliens, the traditional human scapegoats are downgraded or exonerated.

  In 1994, the esoteric group the Order of the Solar Temple wrote letters to justify its mass suicide. The letters claimed the group had been persecuted by the New World Order.

  Hollywood brought the fringe to a general audience between the mid-1990s and the early 2000s. By then the theory had grown to include black helicopters and FEMA "concentration camps". The television series The X-Files, which ran from 1993 to 2002, the 1997 film Conspiracy Theory and the 1998 film The X-Files: Fight the Future are often cited as notable examples.

  The 2008 financial crisis gave the phrase a second wind. Politicians and pundits such as Gordon Brown and Henry Kissinger used "new world order" while arguing for comprehensive reform of the global financial system. They called for a "New Bretton Woods" that would take account of emerging markets such as China and India. The talk reinvigorated the conspiracy, and the talk-show host Sean Hannity said on his Fox News program that the "conspiracy theorists were right". Progressive media-watchdog groups have criticized Fox News, and its now-defunct show Glenn Beck, for bringing the theories to mainstream audiences.

  In 2009, the directors Luke Meyer and Andrew Neel released a critically acclaimed documentary titled New World Order. It explores the world of theorists such as the radio host Alex Jones. Its subject has produced odd alliances. Right-wing agitators and left-wing rappers such as KRS-One, Professor Griff of Public Enemy and Immortal Technique have found common cause in opposing a political system.

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• 6. Secret Societies

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  Freemasonry arose in Great Britain in the 18th century and is among the world's oldest secular fraternal organizations. The esoteric nature of its symbols and rites led to accusations, from the late 18th century, that Masons secretly practiced Satanism. The charge that Masons plot to subvert religions and governments and take over the world traces back to the Scottish author John Robison. His reactionary theories crossed the Atlantic and influenced outbreaks of Protestant anti-Masonry in the 19th century United States.

  In the 1890s, the French writer Léo Taxil wrote pamphlets and books charging that Masonic lodges worshiped Lucifer. Taxil later admitted that his claims were a hoax. They are believed and repeated anyway, and they strongly influenced later anti-Masonic claims.

  Some theorists went on to speculate that George Washington and Benjamin Franklin wove Masonic geometry into the Great Seal, the one-dollar bill and the layout of Washington, D.C. The evidence does not support this. The Eye of Providence and the unfinished pyramid were used as much outside Masonic lodges as within them in the late 18th century, and no published information establishes the Masonic membership of the men who designed the Great Seal.

  The Latin phrase "novus ordo seclorum" has appeared on the reverse of the Great Seal since 1782, and on the back of the one-dollar bill since 1935. It translates as "New Order of the Ages" and alludes to the start of an era in which the United States stood as an independent nation-state. Conspiracy theorists often mistranslate it as "New World Order". Masonic researcher Trevor W. McKeown adds that the many Grand Lodges are independent and sovereign, with no common agenda. Famous Freemasons have held views across the political spectrum.

  The Order of the Illuminati was founded by the university professor Adam Weishaupt on the 1st of May 1776, in Upper Bavaria. Its members were advocates of freethought, secularism, liberalism, republicanism and gender equality, recruited from German Masonic lodges. In 1785, agents of Charles Theodore, Elector of Bavaria, infiltrated, broke up and suppressed the order. There is no evidence that it survived.

  In the late 18th century, Robison and the French Jesuit priest Augustin Barruel began to speculate that the Illuminati had survived and masterminded the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror. During the 19th century, European ruling classes took the fear seriously. Their oppressive reactions provoked, in 1848, the very revolutions they hoped to prevent.

  Between the world wars, the British historian Nesta Helen Webster and the American socialite Edith Starr Miller popularized the myth. Both claimed the Illuminati served Jewish elites. The evangelist Gerald Burton Winrod and other fundamentalist Christians carried it across the United States. Later the John Birch Society named Skull and Bones, the Bohemian Club, the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission as Illuminati fronts. Leonard Zeskind credits the Birch co-founder Revilo P. Oliver with introducing the idea. In 1975, the satirical Illuminatus! Trilogy, by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson, blamed the Illuminati for cover-ups such as the shooting of John F. Kennedy.

  The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, first published in Russian in 1903, is an antisemitic canard. It purports to be the minutes of secret meetings of Jewish masterminds plotting world domination. In 1921, the journalist Philip Graves exposed it in an article in The Times. In 1967, the British academic Norman Cohn proved it a hoax and a plagiarism in his book Warrant for Genocide.

  There is general agreement that Matvei Golovinski fabricated the text for Okhrana, the secret police of the Russian Empire, before the 1905 Russian Revolution. He copied almost word for word in places from The Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu. That 19th-century satire against Napoleon III was written by Maurice Joly.

  The forgery still circulates. The authors of the 1982 book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail called the Protocols the most persuasive evidence for the Priory of Sion, a society that journalists and scholars have exhaustively debunked as a hoax. Skeptics note a newer gambit. Some theorists claim the Protocols really came from fallen angels or alien invaders. Because the antisemitic text itself is left unchanged, the maneuver gives the forgery credibility and circulation.

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• 7. Bankers and Round Tables

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  In 1877, at the age of 23, Cecil Rhodes wrote a will that wished to fund a secret society, which he called the Society of the Elect. Rhodes, an English-born South African businessman and mining magnate, wanted the British Empire to reannex the United States. In 1890, he explained that the only feasible way to carry out the idea was "a secret society gradually absorbing the wealth of the world". The aim was "England everywhere", which he believed would end all wars and bring one language throughout the world.

  Rhodes also put his energy into the Rhodes Scholarship, established in 1902, with the British statesman Alfred Milner as one of its trustees. Its original goal was peace among the great powers. Future British, American and German leaders would study free at the University of Oxford and share a world view. Milner and the British official Lionel George Curtis became the architects of the Round Table movement, which promoted closer union between Britain and its self-governing colonies.

  Curtis founded the Royal Institute of International Affairs in June 1919. In his 1938 book The Commonwealth of God, he argued for an imperial federation that would reannex the United States. It would be presented to Protestant churches as the work of the Christian God. The Commonwealth of Nations arrived in 1949, but only as a free association of independent states.

  The Council on Foreign Relations began in 1917 with New York academics whom President Woodrow Wilson asked to offer options for postwar American foreign policy. In June 1918, Nobel Peace Prize recipient and secretary of state Elihu Root organized 108 financiers, manufacturers and international lawyers. That group became the Council on Foreign Relations on the 29th of July 1921, and its first project was a quarterly journal, Foreign Affairs, launched in September 1922. The Trilateral Commission followed in July 1973, at the initiative of the banker David Rockefeller, then chairman of the council. It was created to foster cooperation among the United States, Europe and Japan.

  In the 1960s, the John Birch Society was the first to join these threads. It cast the council and similar think tanks as fronts for the Round Table of an "Anglo-American Establishment", financed by an "international banking cabal". Theorists feared that bankers would subordinate American sovereignty to a strengthened Bank for International Settlements.

  The historian Carroll Quigley, author of the 1966 book Tragedy and Hope, was cited by both W. Cleon Skousen of the Old Right and Carl Oglesby of the New Left. Quigley himself rejected the idea of a one-world plot. He described British and American "benevolent imperialism", driven by the shared interests of economic elites. He added that the Round Table's influence waned after the Second World War and the Suez Crisis, and that it is now largely a ginger group for the Commonwealth. After 1965, he said, the real problem was that no elite was in charge and acting responsibly.

  Larry McDonald, the second president of the John Birch Society and a Georgia congressman, wrote a foreword to Allen's 1976 book The Rockefeller File. He saw a plot "international in scope, generations old in planning, and incredibly evil in intent."

  David Rockefeller's 2002 autobiography Memoirs contains a statement that theorists cite as proof. Barkun argues it is partly facetious, in its use of the words "conspiracy" and "treason", and partly serious about trilateral cooperation. In a the 13th of November 2007 interview with the Canadian journalist Benjamin Fulford, Rockefeller said he felt no need for a world government. He called the accusation that he ruled the world nonsensical.

  Domhoff says the council has "nearly 3,000 members, far too many for secret plans to be kept within the group." It sponsors discussion groups, debates and speakers, issues annual reports and opens its historical archives. Laurence H. Shoup calls the council an "imperial brain trust" that decides which options reach the table. Yet all of these critics agree that studies of the council show a very different role from the one conspiracy theorists claim.

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• 8. How It Would Happen

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  Theorists who believe in a New World Order disagree about how it would be built. The most common answer is gradually. They list milestones: the Federal Reserve in 1913, the League of Nations in 1919, the International Monetary Fund in 1944, the United Nations and the World Bank in 1945, and the World Health Organization in 1948. The list continues with the European Union and the Euro in 1993, the World Trade Organization in 1998, the African Union in 2002 and the Union of South American Nations in 2008.

  A newer favorite is the North American Union, with its imagined currency, the amero. Believers say the Council on Foreign Relations and its counterparts in Mexico and Canada proposed it, and that the borders between the three nations are being erased. Skeptics reply that it exists only as a proposal in one of the thousand academic and policy papers published each year. Most of those papers are filed away and forgotten by junior staffers. In March 2009, China and the Russian Federation pressed for a new international reserve currency, and theorists feared a single global currency.

  A harsher scenario comes from the militia movement. It imagines a coup d'état by a "secret team", using black helicopters, to impose a world government enforced by foreign U.N. peacekeepers. Believers cite the Rex 84 and Operation Garden Plot plans, and they predict martial law, gun confiscation and internment in FEMA camps. Before 2000, some survivalists expected the Y2K problem to set the process in motion. Skeptics trace such fears to the siege mentality of the militia movement and to a wider apocalyptic narrative on the American right.

  Surveillance supplies another version. Consumer privacy advocates Katherine Albrecht and Liz McIntyre argued that RFID "spychips" resemble the Number of the beast in the Book of Revelation. In January 2002, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency established the Information Awareness Office, which Congress defunded in 2003. Its logo showed the Eye of Providence atop a pyramid, with the Latin phrase scientia est potentia, meaning knowledge is power. The historian Richard Landes notes that even Gutenberg's printing press, in 1436, set off waves of apocalyptic thinking.

  Fear of population control is another strand. Theorists condemn United Nations Agenda 21 as a plan to concentrate people in cities, and Glenn Beck wrote a dystopian novel about it. Skeptics trace the fear to the eugenics movement of the early 20th century and to far-right opposition to fluoridation, vaccination and mental health services during the Red Scare. The World Health Organization listed vaccine hesitancy among the top ten global health threats of 2019. Citing the New World Order as a reason to refuse vaccination was, however, rare.

  The most extreme fear is mind control, from Project MKULTRA to "Silent Sound Spread Spectrum". The tin foil hat has become a byword for paranoia. Skeptics argue that this fear comes from two factors together: strong individualist values and a lack of power. The result is what some psychologists call "agency panic", an intense anxiety about losing autonomy to outside forces.

  Skeptics also name three habits of thought. The furtive fallacy treats every significant fact of history as sinister. Conspiracism puts conspiracies, rather than social and economic forces, at the center of the story. Fusion paranoia absorbs fears from any source whatsoever. In 2005, Domhoff wrote an essay titled There Are No Conspiracies. In 2008, Mark C. Partridge noted that nationalism, the opposite of a global government, is rising and that attempts at global governance have been "categorical failures". That same year, David Rothkopf argued in Superclass that a world of 6 billion people is governed by an elite of 6,000.

  In June 1979, an unknown benefactor using the pseudonym "R. C. Christian" had a huge granite megalith built in Georgia. It acts as a compass, calendar and clock, and it carries ten guides in many languages for survivors of a doomsday event. The Georgia Guidestones became a Rorschach test. Some New Agers revere it as a ley-line power nexus, while a few theorists say it bears the New World Order's anti-Christian "Ten Commandments." Should the stones survive for centuries, as their creators intended, many more meanings could arise, equally unrelated to the designer's intention.

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