A One World Government?

During the heady days of the Persian Gulf War, President George Bush dusted off an ancient phrase that immediately set teeth on edge - that is, the grinding teeth of conspiracy trackers.

"I hope history will record that the Gulf Crisis was the crucible of the new world order," Bush intoned in the wake of his greatest triumph, the American-led victory against Iraq. New World Order. The phrase had tripped from the president's lips at least half a dozen other times before and after American smart bombs had transformed the former "wimp" into a short-term war hero.

Of course, the real meaning of the term - bandied about for decades by a phalanx of elite bankers and industrialists - couldn't have been clearer to ultra-right-wingers of the John Birch Society ilk. Simply put, New World Order was code for "one-world government," a megalomaniacal communist plot to enslave the planet. In the words of the late Gay Allen, the prolific Birch Society author, "Communism is an arm of a bigger conspiracy to control the world by power-mad billionaires." Bush, the ultimate establishment insider, was clearly an agent of these crypto-capitalist/communist forces - as had been every sell-out president since FDR.

Lest we dismiss such concerns as the ranting of survivalist kooks, it's important to note that the New World Order is an equal opportunity conspiracy theory. Left-wingers were just as exercised by Bush's words, although progressives tended to see the preppy president more as a champion of capitalism run amok than as a creeping commie.

In fact, right-wing or left, suspicions about the New World Order are actually quite rational. The champions of the "NWO" are indeed a cadre of powerful industrialists, bankers, academics, and politicians who for three quarters of a century have been a gray eminence behind the governance of Britain and America. More to the point, perhaps, they are the governors of the Western world. Call them what you will, they are they "Establishment." Through vastly influential organizations like the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission, these elites formulate tomorrow's public policy today and staff the ship of state with their own.

If this network is something less than the Red devil depicted in many a right-wing conspiracy theory, it is nonetheless a kind of big business cabal that helps the elite of the private sector, if not "rule the world," then at least run it like a business.

The self-appointed historian of this power brokerage was Georgetown University professor Carroll Quigley, a distinguished scholar whom right-wingers regard as a smoking gun personified. In his massive history of the modern era, Tragedy and Hope, the late Professor Quigley wrote that there "does exist, and has existed for a generation, an international Anglophile network which operates, to some extent, in the way that the radical Right believes the Communists act."

Quigley admitted that he "had been close" to this "semisecret organization" of international manipulators - indeed, admired its goals - and had been allowed to examine its "papers and secret records."

According to Quigley, the network's benevolent aim is "nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole" - thereby assuring peace and prosperity and, of course, profit.

This network grew out of secret political societies hatched by diamond baron/stealth fanatic Cecil Rhodes (Rhodesia, Rhodes scholarships) and a clutch of bleeding-hear imperialists resolved to prevent the sun from setting on the British Empire. By 1908, Rhodes was dead, but his dream and vast wealth lived on to sire the furtive Round Table Groups.

During the early part of this century, the aristocratic Round Tablers - who set up franchises in South Africa, Australia, the United States, and Canada - yearned to "civilize" native subjects of the British dominion. If properly instilled with liberal Oxford values and presumable an appreciation of cricket, even the most "backward" races could lean to be contented, perhaps "autonomous," citizens of empire. A connected dream was to yoke all of the English-speaking nations (America included) into a confederation of Atlantic states, with the capital in Washington, D.C.! (To Birchers' ears this is an early echo of the dread "one-world government.") If Their grander schemes flopped rather obliquely, the Round Tablers achieved a failure of spectacular proportions when they led the drive to appease Hitler.

In America, the Rhodes groups and J. P. Morgan banking interests incorporated the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in 1921 as a Round Table "front." According to Quigley, CFR and other Round Table cutouts became "a power structure between London and New York which penetrated deeply into university life, the press, and the practice of foreign policy" in both countries. This is the famous "Eastern Establishment" that continues to hold sway over the U.S. government, academia, Wall Street, and major American media outlets, including the New York Times and Washington Post.

The American arm of the network flourished under the patronage of billionaire benefactors, including the Morgan and Carnegie interests - and of course the ubiquitous Rockefeller family.

Ah, the Rockefellers! Dons of the financial underworld! Godfathers of the commie/capitalist internationale! That, anyway, is what many a right-wing conspiracist believes. In Bircher fulminations, the four R's - Rhodes, Rothschilds, Rockefellers, and Reds - are demons that turbocharge the dry facts or Professor Quigley.

The radical-right theories were never synthesized more impressively than in Gary Allen's 1971 call to arms, None Dare Call It Conspiracy. Mergiing nativist strains of anticommunism, antielitism, and "gold standard" conservatism, Allen argues that the Rockefeller-CFR-Establishment cabal - dubbed the "Insiders" - had toiled for decades to "abolish the United States" and establish an "all powerful world socialist super-state."

Allen wasn't suggesting that supercapitalists like the Rockefellers were sincere Marxists, but rather that they used socialism "as the bait… the excuse to establish the dictatorship." According to Allen, the Rockefellers, the British Rothschild clan, and their carious corporate agents had not only financed Lenin and the Bolshevik revolution, but David Rockefeller may have been the "paymaster" who later fired his employee, Soviet premier Krushchev! How did "the Rockefeller Foreign Office" keep unruly Moscow in line? Allen muses that the Insiders might have used "SMERSH, the international Communist murder organization described in testimony before congressional committees and by Ian Fleming in his James Bond Books."

Allen's vision was nothing if not dramatic. In a successful effort early in the century to hijack the American economy and political arena, he repots, the Insiders established a central bank (the Federal Reserve System), lorded over by international bankers; they followed up by saddling citizens with the income tax, thereby fulfilling two key planks of Marx's Communist Manifesto. The Insiders then "scientifically engineered" the stock market crash of 1929. They managed to top that feat by starting World Wars I and II (the latter through their appeasement of Hitler) and the Vietnam debacle, profiteering in all cases by arming both sides. Oh yeah, they also invented the nefarious United (communist) Nations as the keystone of their relentless New World Order.

In a rare instance of giving the Rockefellers a bit of a break, Birchers revived the old right-wing theory that the real powers behind the Insider throne - both communist and "cartel capitalist" - were those standby conspiracy bugaboos, the illuminati, a secret freemasonic society that definitely existed, albeit in eighteenth-century Bavaria.

(In an effort to cast the Illuminati as a "Zionist" cabal, anti-Smites - and Allen wasn't one - often invoke the Jewish Rothschilds and the old lie that the Bolshevik revolution was all a Jewish plot. Allen dismissed that "thinking," and typically had a more interesting angle: The Insiders themselves covertly promoted such anti-Semitic falsehoods in an effort to tar all their critics as racists. Of course, Allen offered no evidence for this theory, but perhaps he was onto something. More than one modern blowhard of the "there-are-no-conspiracies" school has offhandedly broadbrushed conspiracy theorists by yoking them with Holocaust apologists.)

Although the conspiratorial tapestry woven by the Birchers was a bit, well, busy, even the staid Professor Quigley grudgingly acknowledged that it contained "a modicum of truth." For one thing, the so-called Insiders "had no aversion to cooperating with the Communists," per Quigley. After all, big business is big business, and what better way of acquiring access to untapped natural resources than being neighborly? Likewise, the CFR-dominated U.S. Department of State was indeed very influential in midwifing the UN. And the Round Tablers did push for the income tax and the Federal Reserve.

As for the Rockefellers, the family has played a major role in the network since its early days. David Rockefeller, chairman of the CFR board, founded the Trilateral Commission in the early 1970s (same Euro-American "internationalists" but with the additional membership of Japanese power players). Another Rockefeller-Insider group arose as the retiring Round Tables passed the torch to the CFR (either that, or went deep under-ground, a hunch of many conspiracy theorists): This was the Bilderberg Group, named for the location of its first annual meeting, the hotel Bilderberg in Oosterbeek, Netherlands.

As we've seen, the CFR-Trilat-Bilderberg membership rolls were brimming with American official and politicians eager to suck up to the power establishment. Even Richard Nixon, whose animus for the Eastern Elite was famous, joined the CFR and later hired Rockefeller protégé Henry Kissinger. (Birchers haven't forgotten that President Nixon invoked the spooky phrase "new world order" during his trip to Red China.) Other U.S. presidents who were Insiders included Gerald Ford (CFR, Bilderberg), Jimmy Carter (CFR, Trilat), George Bush (CFR board director, Trilat), and even Bill Clinton (CFR, Trilat, and Bilderberg).

During the Carter era 284 CFR/Trilats held administration positions. Key Insiders included Vice President Walter Mondale, national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski (director of the Trilateral Commission), Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and CIA Director Stansfield Turner. By the end of Reagon's two terms, the number had risen to 313. Reaganite Insiders included Secretaries of State Al Haig (a favorite candidate for Watergate's Deep Throat) and George Shultz (the tenth consecutive CFR alumnus to hold that job) and CIA director William Casey.

Under Bush, "the conspiracy president," the number skyrocketed to 382, including national security advisor Brent Scowcroft and the attorney general, Richard Thornburgh.

As for the Clinton administration, little has changed as far as CFR faces go. Secretary of State Warren Christopher, all five of his undersecretaries, and many of their underlings are CFR-ites. So are Clinton's national security adviser and CIA director, and so is his Republicrat aide, David Gergen.

Gergen is only one point of light in a constellation of media stars absorbed into the CFR. A partial list included the late Walter Lippman (a CFR director in the 1930s), CIA propagandist/Life magazine publisher C. D. Jackson (who helped set up the Bilderberg Group), New York Timesman Leslie Gelv (current CFR president), Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw, and Jum Lehrer, the non-Canadian half of the Macneil/Lehre NewsHour.

Though the CFR/Trilat connection runs deep into the blue veins of the Establishment, predictably its members scoff at the suggestion that they hold excessive influence over American "democracy" and world affairs. David Rockefeller once sniffed at what he called these "foolish attacks on false issues." With perhaps excessive modesty, he assured the skeptics that his Trilateral Commission is just "a group of concerned citizens interested in fostering greater understanding and cooperation among international allies."

Well, apparently all groups of concerned citizens are not created equal. As journalist Bill Moyers put it in a 1980 TV documentary: "David Rockefeller is the most conspicuous representative today of the ruling class, a multinational fraternity of men who shape the global economy and manage the flow of its capital. Rockefeller was born to it, and he has made the most of it. but what some critics see as a vast international conspiracy, he considers a circumstance of life and just another day's work."

If the New World Order isn't a blueprint for the "world super-state" of Bircher nightmares, it may simply mean a world more "orderly" for transnational big business. The implications are just as ominous, for although Trilats don't aim to raze Capitol Hill to make way for a U.N. high rise, they have made it clear that democracy often hampers their terribly important work. Not only have the Round Table progeny pushed for "limited," strongman "democracy" in third world countries, they have openly complained about the surfeit of liberty for the little people in this country.

A 1975 Trilateral Commission report concluded that the United States was plagued by an "excess of democracy," when "what is needed is a greater degree of moderation in democracy," to improve "governability." Trilat co-founder Brzezinski recommended a study on "Control Over Man's Development and Behavior" to devise "new means of social control," especially "in advanced societies."