A Short History of the New World Order

Amid reports that the alleged LAX gunman Paul Ciancia left a
note that referred to the “NWO” — widely believed to be a
reference to the New World Order — Lizzie Crocker of The Daily
Beast has written a short
piece about the history of the phrase. I make a few
appearances in her story:

It might be easy to mistake the
NWO as a concept born out of Tea Party politics, since the movement
occasionally throws the term around, especially when talking about
the Obama administration. But Jesse Walker, author of The
United States of Paranoia, says that the idea has been a
constant in modern American political life and its historical roots
run deep….

According to Walker, the [debate over the] League of Nations
introduced the term to the political and cultural lexicon after the
First World War to describe “evolving world institutions.” The New
World Order was also the titular subject of writer H.G. Wells’ 1940
treatise, published one year after the outbreak of World War II,
which advocated that nation states band together to prevent future
outbreaks of war (“I am not going to write peace propaganda here,”
Wells wrote.) The idea of a one-world government also appears, in a
thinly-veiled form, in Wells’ 1933 book The Open Conspiracy:
Blue Prints For a World Revolution (whose subtitle he later
changed to, “What Are We To Do With Our Lives?”), which encouraged
a “mental sanitation process” to erase nationalistic ideals from
people’s consciousness so they can accept their new roles as “world
citizen[s].”

From there the article goes on to describe the John Birch
Society’s discovery of the phrase, as figures such as Nelson
Rockfeller and Richard Nixon deployed the term in various contexts
in the 1960s. And then we jump to the ’90s and President George
H.W. Bush, who used the words “new world order” while sketching a
vision of the post–Cold War world. Bush’s fondness for the phrase
helped unleash a new wave of New World Order fears, not just on the
populist right but in the counterculture.

One point I stressed in the interview is that it’s possible for
critics of the New World Order to use the term to describe broad
political trends or to use it to describe a
conspiracy allegedly driving those trends. It is not an innately
conspiracist concept, though it is frequently bound up with
conspiracy stories.

If you’re interested in reading Wells’ book The New World
Order, it’s online here. The
Open Conspiracy is here.
And it’s been a while since I last did a roundup of United
States of Paranoia links, so:

• Arthur Goldwag, who has written a
couple of
books about conspiracy theories himself,
reviews the book on his blog.

• Seth Blake reviews
it in the Los Angeles Review of Books.