From Carroll
Quigley to the UN Millennium Summit: Thoughts on the New World
Order
by Steven Yates
Shortly after the
collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union,
President George Bush Sr. proclaimed us as on the verge of a New
World Order. Bush did not coin the phrase, of course; nor did he
introduce it into political discourse. Exactly what is its intended
referent? Either of two things, apparently. (1) A would-be global
government trumping national governments, meaning the de
facto end of national sovereignty; or (2) the efforts some
believe are currently underway, operating through the United Nations
in particular but through other groups as well (the Council on
Foreign Relations is a frequent target) to create such a global
order. The agenda itself is sometimes called the New World Order
conspiracy.
Does such an agenda
really exist, or are statements about conspiracies to create world
government nothing more than "right wing" paranoia? To my mind, this
question is surprisingly easy to answer, though the best way to
approach it has changed in recent years. The results ought to give
all believers in freedom and genuine self-determination more than a
few sleepless nights. Yes, Virginia, there is a proposed New World
Order, whether we call it that or not. Let us consider two separate
pieces of evidence that point to this conclusion. The first is
contained in the writings of an historian; the second took place
right under our noses this past week in New York City. The word
conspiracy is, however, a misnomer. Conspiracies, by definition,
operate in secret. In that case, efforts to build a New World Order
may have begun in secret, but now all the evidence one needs is on
the UN’s own website.
Washington, D.C., the
1960s: Carroll Quigley and Tragedy and Hope.
Back in the early
1960s, historian Carroll Quigley did extensive research for his
encyclopedic Tragedy
and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time. Tragedy and
Hope recounted, in over 1,300 tightly-written pages of small print,
the gradual rise to power of a small cadre of extremely wealthy and
powerful individuals. Many were products of wealthy bloodlines. Some
were bankers; others began in other industries but got into banking
because that was where the real power was. They operated mostly
behind the scenes, not as national political elites but as an
international elite – or superelite. For them, natural borders and
loyalties were increasingly meaningless. Much has been written about
the Rothschilds who discovered in the late 1700s that it was
possible for bankers to get rich by loaning money to governments,
extending the loans encouraging government to become dependent on
them, attaching provisions to the extensions calling for specific
policies, and then tallying up the interest. Other such bloodlines
would soon follow (the Rockefellers and Morgans here in the US).
Shortly before the
turn of the last century, Cecil Rhodes, the British diamond tycoon
who had operated for years in South Africa, willed a significant
portion of his huge fortune to the establishment of a secret society
in England. Its purpose was to lay the foundations for world
government, under the theory that world government alone could bring
about world peace and security for all. The Rhodes Scholarship
program at Oxford University was drawn from this fortune as an
effort to bring the "best and the brightest" under the influence of
a certain body of ideas. Bill Clinton, of course, was a Rhodes
Scholar for a while (although he didn’t complete the program). Many
other influential politicians, journalists, and writers in the
English-speaking world have been Rhodes Scholars.
So-called conspiracy
theorists have written extensively of organizations such as the Council on Foreign
Relations, founded in 1921, the Trilateral Commission, founded
in 1973, and the European Bilderberg Group (which, interestingly,
has no home page of its own) as having the same goal: the creation
of a world government with themselves at the helm. These groups have
been accused of having done everything from financing the rise of
both Communism and Nazism to bankrolling both sides in World Wars I
and II. Allegations abound that they set about to gain control over
both major political parties in the US, the US legal system, the US
media (including all major newspapers and television networks as
well as the Hollywood entertainment culture), and finally – and
especially – so-called public education at all levels from
kindergarten to public universities. They would operate by seeing to
it that programs and projects that would help advance the agenda of
centralization were well funded, while others were left to fend for
themselves – not knowing why.
How much truth there
is to these allegations is, of course, not easy to determine. It is
unlikely that the perpetrators would leave a paper trail that just
anyone could follow. On the other hand, the existence of such
operatives offers an elegant explanation, satisfying Ockham’s Razor
in its appeal to simplicity, for why so much of twentieth century
history has been a one-way street, with all traffic flowing left. It
also answers: Why does the U.S. federal government continue to grow
larger and more centralized no matter which major political party
controls the White House or Congress? Why do independent political
movements (one thinks of the Libertarians and the Reform Party)
founder despite having produced some very worthwhile ideas and
having gained the support of a segment of the public? Why are
efforts to achieve political, economic and educational independence
systematically assaulted by pundits, by the media and by well-funded
liberal groups as soon as they threaten to become influential in the
body politic?
Carroll Quigley
wrote, in Tragedy and Hope: "There does exist, and has
existed for a generation, an international Anglophile network which
operates, to some extent, in the way the radical Right believes the
Communists act…. I know of the operations of this network because I
have studied it for twenty years and was permitted for two years, in
the early 1960s, to examine its papers and secret records. I have no
aversion to it or to most of its instruments. I have objected, both
in the past and recently, to a few of its policies … but in general
my chief difference of opinion is that it wishes to remain unknown,
and I believe its role in history is significant enough to be
known."
Who was Quigley? Not
a "right winger" in the John Birch
Society but a highly respected senior-level professor of
political history at the Foreign Service School at Georgetown
University. He specialized in macrohistory, or the study of
large-scale, global developments and trends. In this one passage, he
not only puts his finger on both conceptions of the New World Order
as presented above, he positions himself as one of the insiders.
While one may, if one is so inclined, discount the writers of
self-published tracts with PO Box addresses in small towns hardly
anyone has heard of before, Carroll Quigley is impossible to
dismiss. He was, after all, one of Bill Clinton’s chief mentors,
personal heroes, and the one person Clinton thanked by name in his
first inaugural address. Quigley had had Clinton as an undergraduate
years before at Georgetown. As a youth Clinton already had his eyes
set on the Presidency. Seeing that even as a teenager, Clinton was
one of those people who was fascinated by power and would compromise
any principle to obtain it, Quigley saw him as having the "right
stuff." It was Quigley’s powerful connections that obtained for
Clinton the Rhodes Scholarship.
The publishing
history of Tragedy and Hope is worth considering, in light of
what we have seen so far. There is circumstantial evidence that
efforts were made to suppress the book. When it appeared, published
by Macmillan, it became the academic equivalent of a bestseller. And
then, mysteriously, available copies suddenly disappeared. It became
almost unobtainable. Inquirers were told that the book had gone out
of print, which was very unusual since there were thousands of
backorders. (First editions are now collector’s items fetching
hundreds of dollars.) Representatives of Macmillan seemed afraid to
talk about the book. Quigley himself struggled to get Macmillan to
issue a second edition, as pirated copies were beginning to
circulate. It received a legitimate reprint, of course, but by a far
smaller publisher with far less prestige, and the book was very hard
to find for years (today, with the advent of online companies such
as Amazon.com, the book is easier to obtain). Near the end of his
life, a despondent Quigley observed that Tragedy and Hope
"has brought me many headaches as it apparently says something that
powerful people don’t want known."
New York City, 2000:
The United Nations Millennium Summit, Sept 6-9.
It has remained
easy, despite Quigley’s impressive credentials, to dismiss the
thought of a relative handful of behind-the-scenes operatives
controlling the direction of history as the product of kooks.
Journalists and pundits routinely and contemptuously dismiss
"conspiracy theories" almost by reflex. However, some of the major
players in the "conspiracy" do little to hide their aims. Maurice
Strong, co-chairman of a United Nations affiliated organization
called the UN Commission on Global Governance, said, "It is simply
not feasible for sovereignty to be exercised unilaterally by
individual nation-states, however powerful." Shridath Ramphal,
another co-chairman of the same organization, added, "The bedrock of
every country’s international relations must be the mission of using
the United Nations system as the machinery for working and acting
together." Strobe Talbott, US Deputy Secretary of State in the
Clinton Regime, was considerably more blunt: "Nationhood as we know
it will be obsolete, all states will recognize a single, global
authority… National sovereignty wasn’t such a great idea after all."
None of these people want to end the nation-state in favor of freely
acting and trading individuals; individualism is an anathema to this
mindset. They are talking openly of global government, doing
everything except calling it that.
So as already noted,
we no longer need to approach the topic in conspiratorial terms. The
evidence is available on the World Wide Web where anyone with a
computer and a modem can read it. The United Nations website
currently contains a gold mine of information about the push for
global government. To be sure, none of the writers call it that; the
closest they come is global governance, which its defenders claim is
not the same thing. Moreover, what is presented is presented in
language that is very attractive by today’s standards. It makes full
use of all the politically correct buzzwords about democracy,
sustainability, inclusion and diversity. This website makes liberal
use of the We
The Peoples Millennium Forum Declaration and Agenda for Action
which was adopted last May. This past week, the Millennium Summit
convened in New York City and has been called the largest assemblage
of heads of state under one roof in all of human history.
What is this Summit
all about? Where does the New World Order vision stand today? From
above document and others on the website we can glean that the
following are on the agenda:
- A global "peacekeeping
force," publicly endorsed Wednesday by Bill Clinton. He told the
gathered dignitaries that the UN needs "a rapid deployment force
of well-trained and well-equipped solders capable of projecting
‘credible force’ into trouble spots." Along these lines, a
Republican, Constance Morella (R-MD), has introduced a bill
calling for a United Nations Rapid Deployment Force, which would
turn 6,000 American soldiers over to the UN, which would mean that
Americans would be taking orders from non-Americans. Seven other
countries have already signed aboard with similar pledges. The UN
is ready to create its own "standing army" of the sort the U.S.
Constitution forbids.
- An International Criminal
Court – ostensibly to hold national governments accountable for
human rights abuses; an international treaty "would provide for
compulsory referral of unresolved disputes to [an] International
Court of Justice." U.S. citizens could, in principle, be tried
before tribunals of non-Americans.
- A global system of taxation:
[the Forum urges the United Nations] "to introduce binding codes
of conduct for transnational companies, and effective tax
regulation on the international financial markets, investing this
money in programmes for poverty eradication."
- Global coerced
redistribution of wealth and income, combined with global
affirmative action: [Governments should] "focus their efforts and
policies on addressing the root causes of poverty and providing
for the basic needs of all, giving special priority to the needs
and rights of disadvantaged and underrepresented."
- A global approach to AIDS,
already the most politicized disease in human history:
[Governments should] "address the incidence, impact and continuing
human costs of HIV/AIDS. To increase spending for health research
and to ensure that the fruits of this research reach the people."
- The international equivalent
of the Americans With Disabilities Act: [Governments should]
"recognize the special potential of people with disabilities and
ensure their full participation and equal role in political,
economic, social and cultural fields. To further recognize and
meet their special needs, introduce inclusive policies and
programmes for their empowerment, and ensure that they take a
leading role in poverty eradication."
- International
radical-feminization: the UN is called upon "to ensure that gender
mainstreaming effectively brings women into leadership positions
throughout the system and a gender perspective into all its
programmes and policies; to provide gender training; …
[governments are called upon] "to allocate more recourses and
create an enabling environment for implementation of their
commitments to women’s and girl’s human rights, including
promotion of women into decision-making positions… " This is one
of many such remarks, calling for the "gender perspective"
invented by the radical feminists of American colleges and
universities.
- International public
education: "provide universal access to ‘education for all,’
prioritizing free basic education and skills training…. We call on
governments…to reduce the technology gap, and to restructure
educational policy to ensure that all children (girls and boys)
receive moral, spiritual, peace and human rights education….
Special attention must be paid to the girl child…."
- International equivalents of
affirmative action and minimum wage laws: [Governments should]
"move toward economic reforms aimed at equity: in particular, to
construct macro economic policies that combine growth with the
goal of human development and social justice; to prevent the
impoverishment of groups that emerged from poverty but are still
vulnerable to social risks and exclusion; to improve legislation
on labor standards including the provision of a minimum legal
wage…."
- Complete absolution of past
debts: [Governments should] "cancel the debts of developing
countries, including odious debts, the repayment of which diverts
funds from basic needs…."
- Universal gun registration:
the UN should "expand the UN Arms register in order to show
production and sale of small arms and light weapons. It should
include specific names of their producers and traders." Of course,
those implementing this call for arms registration could define
"small arms and light weapons" in any way they saw fit.
- Strengthening UN power
generally: "A major task of the world community in the
twenty-first century will be to strengthen and greatly enhance the
role of the United Nations in the global context. Governments must
recommit themselves to the realization of the goals and mandates
of the United Nations Charter. A challenging task is to firmly
protect the integrity of the United Naitons, counter the erosion
of its role and to further strengthen and augment international
institutions capable of implementing and enforcing international
standards, norms, and law, leading toward the formation of a
new political and economic order. [Emphasis mine.]
- Elimination of veto power:
[the Forum urges the UN] "to limit and move toward eliminating the
use of the veto. The UN must move towards veto restriction. First
could be an enlargement of the area of "procedural votes" for
which the Charter excludes the veto…. Complete veto abolition
should be sought as a step towards the elimination of permanency."
In others words, a major internal check on the power of the
superelite is to be eliminated, by incremental steps.
There is, of course,
more – much, much more. This is just a sampling; it is
impossible, in an article of this length, to do more than scratch
the surface. However, what is here should suffice as evidence that
we are looking at a potential power grab of unprecedented
proportions. There are, we should note, a few table scraps tossed
toward such notions as national sovereignty and self-determination.
At one point the call is made for the UN "to respect national
sovereignty and the prohibition of the use of force, which are
fundamental in the UN Charter." But in the next breath, it is made
clear that the use of force is not ruled out. And "The UN General
Assembly should set up a broad commission to analyze standards for
forceful action in cases where crimes against humanity, war crimes,
or genocide are committed." As in Kosovo, where allegations of such
crimes were absurdly exaggerated, international "peacekeeping"
troops moved in, and the result was the decimation and dislocation
of entire populations which continues to this day?
Clearly, whether we
label the kind of system proposed by the Millennium Forum the New
World Order or not, we are seeing here the recipe for social
engineering on a global scale. And just as in individual nations, it
could not be implemented without thought control on an equally
massive scale – which would explain the preoccupation with education
permeating all the web pages; see (7) above again. Or, as one
Charles Mercieca, PhD, writes, representing the International
Association of Educators for World Peace, "We may begin to realize
the great challenge our schools face in trying to create a new
generation that will be influenced merely by high moral standards
based on the universal welfare of all people without exception. We
need to create a generation which acts on principles of high moral
order, a new generation which views money and wealth as occupying
the bottom of all major world priorities, a new generation which
views happiness, serenity and peace as spiritual elements which are
the key to true and genuine success in life." Perhaps Dr. Mercieca
can tell us how this "true and genuine success in life" can be had
without free producers whose preoccupations are likely to be "money
and wealth" and whose actions alone can create jobs and advance the
quality of economic life worldwide.
The socialist
overtones of the entire Millennium Forum and its attending documents
are unmistakable. The much-touted UN Charter for Global
Democracy is in fact a call for global socialism. This holds
true whether the speakers talk about Third World poverty and the
need to redistribute wealth without any attention to the means by
which wealth is produced, or whether they appeal to "sustainability"
and proceed to the need for political and bureaucratic controls on
business in the name of radical environmentalism. In the final
analysis, the Forum vision would concentrate the capacity to use
force in a network of highly centralized global-governmental
organizations. It should be clear that "national sovereignty" and
the "self-determination" rights of indigenous peoples and societies
would be respected if they conformed to the internationalist vision,
and receive short shrift if they did not. The calls for "a
sustainable environment" which permeate the various documents on the
UN website would in fact strangle the very independent economic
developments which alone could lift peoples out of poverty, given
sufficient time and effort.
Finally, there is
the question of who would foot the bill for all these ventures,
e.g., free education for all, universal health care, etc. That
should be clear. It would be U.S. taxpayers, through the new system
of global taxation. Protest, and the International Criminal Court
will come after you. I suspect that this outfit, if it was actually
put in place, would make the IRS look like choirboys by comparison.
Opposing the New World
Order.
Can an agenda this
vast, backed up by the quantity of resources available to the
superelite, be effectively countered? It would not be surprising if
some simply despaired of putting a stop to the process of
centralization of power in the hands of these very few.
The beginnings of an
answer may be found in the writings of the eighteenth century
Scottish philosopher David Hume, if we are willing and able to take
them to heart. Hume observed that in the final analysis, political
authorities derive their legitimacy from those they have authority
over: no group of tyrants, no matter how great their resources, can
maintain themselves in power by sheer political might indefinitely.
We, the people (not the "peoples"), after all, vastly, vastly
outnumber the superelite who – as the New York City summit has
proven – can fit into a large auditorium. Those in power remain in
power by maintaining credibility, and also by keeping everyone else
as ignorant as possible about what they are up to. Once they lose
both, their fall is assured.
One of the chief
reasons the Soviet Empire collapsed was that its leaders lost
credibility in the face of the obvious fact that, given the
opportunity, peoples would undertake a mass exodus out from under
Communist domination. This had happened in Eastern Europe,
culminating in the dramatic fall of the Berlin Wall in late 1989. It
could very well happen in the United States, as evidenced by the
steadily awakening interest in the idea of secession and the
appearance of secession movements all over the country, including in
state legislatures. These are animated by the idea that the
Washington government has gotten too big, too expensive, too
unresponsive, and suffering from collective amnesia regarding its
founding principles.
Given the failures
of the Washington empire, motivated by welfare-state ideology, why
would anyone regard as credible any effort to expand this ideology
to create a global empire? It is clear that the UN superelite is
trying.
The latter
realization has motivated Ron Paul
(R-TX), one of the few freedom-believing Congressmen, to
introduce, or reintroduce, the (HR 1146). This Act, in its
second incarnation (the first was in 1997), after languishing in
committee, has garnered attention this past week for obvious
reasons. It has become the basis for over 300,000 signed petitions
collected by the American
Policy Center, whose president, Tom DeWeese, organized the
effort. These petitions call for the U.S. to pull out of the UN.
Paul’s bill would give a pullout the sanction of law by repealing
the United Nations Participation Act of 1945; moreover, by also
repealing the United Nations Headquarters Agreement Act, it
effectively orders the UN off American soil. Moreover, it disallows
the appropriation of funds collected in the US for any UN purposes,
and repeals Acts instituting U.S. involvement in the United Nations
Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and US
participation in the United Nations Environmental Program.
Meanwhile, there were protesters in New York City this past week.
Americans may not be satisfied with the Washington government, but
they would be even more horrified if they woke up one day and found
themselves ruled by an international body, even more remote from
their interests and concerns.
For all the actual
diversity that exists on planet Earth, peoples seem to have one
thing in common: they resent intrusions into their way of life at
the hands of outsiders. Most peoples will countenance at least being
ruled by their own, even if the rule is less than perfect. I predict
that the particular vision of a New World Order animating the
Millennium Forum will not to pass without the very bloodshed the
150-plus dignitaries say they want to avoid. After all, around the
world the leading tendency is toward decentralization and secession
(Tibet from China, Chechnya from Russia, Azerbaijan from Armenia,
the Kurds from Iraq, Quebec from Canada: the list goes on and on).
It goes without saying that there are people right here on U.S. soil
who are ready to take up arms to protect their natural right to live
as they see fit if they are not coercing anyone else, and to protect
their regional identities and values from the hypothetical
multiculturalist empire being advocated by the very powerful. (Come
to think of it, small wonder that the elites and superelites all
favor "gun control"!)
It is worth
realizing that there are unlikely to be any sudden, earthshaking
moves made to dissolve what little is left of individual freedom in
the U.S., subjecting us all at once to a global tax, an
international standing army, international courts, etc. The means by
which America’s masses have been stripped of their freedoms to date
have all been very gradual, often by stealth; there is enough in the
above-cited documents to indicate that this will not change. Why
should it? To date it has been an effective methodology of
increasing control. It has already led to a level of state power
over individuals that would have horrified the Framers. All we are
likely to see is continued encroachments of a new layer of controls,
a new bevy of bureaucrats to satisfy, new limitations on what we are
able to do (and say) legally, and an increasingly UN-friendly
educational system. Already, one can attend school board meetings or
faculty meetings on the campuses of technical colleges and hear
appeals that we should all be educating the young to become "global
citizens."
However, are we up
to the task? We live in a unique period in history, because of the
ready availability of information on the World Wide Web and over the
Internet. Carroll Quigley’s Tragedy and Hope can be ordered online.
The literature of liberty is readily available through a multitude
of forums ranging from the Ludwig
von Mises Institute to Laissez-Faire Books.
Bona fide censorship today is very, very difficult. Moreover, it
makes little sense to speak of "conspiracies" when what is being
done, is being done right out in the open where everyone can see it.
One is tempted again and again of the arrogance of power. The real
question, then, is: do we have the will to make use of our own
resources?
Whether we are up to
avoiding further centralization here in the US is still open to
debate. The effects of decades of "public education" have taken
their toll: Americans, by and large, are far more fascinated with
Survivor, World Championship Wrestling and the fall
football season than they are the affairs of state that determine
the long-term destinies of nations. Our educational system now
stresses vocational training, not the Declaration of Independence
and the Constitution, even at so-called liberal arts colleges.
Consequently, though the UN Summit has been given at least some
publicity by major media and on the World Wide Web, most people have
no idea what it is all about – or, in many cases, that the event is
even happening.
So for us this
question is still up for grabs: New World Order, United Nations
Millennium Summit style, or freedom? If we do not educate ourselves
about the superelite is up to – or if we continue to dismiss
whistleblowers as kooky "conspiracy theorists" – we will deserve the
consequences.
September 9,
2000
Steven Yates has a PhD in
philosophy and is the author of Civil
Wrongs: What Went Wrong With Affirmative Action (San
Francisco: ICS Press, 1994). A frequent contributor to
LewRockwell.com and The
Edgefield Journal, he lives and freelance writes in Columbia,
South Carolina. He is at work on a new book entitled The Paradox
of Liberty.
Steven Yates
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