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General News    H3'ed 12/17/18

Tomgram: John Feffer, The New World Order Is Here

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This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

They swore he'd never build, just tear down. He was, after all, the ultimate loner president with a grim history of bankruptcies. It was obvious that, among other things, he'd destroy the country's alliances. And admittedly, these last two years his strength hasn't always been in building. Take that "big, fat, beautiful wall" of his. You know, the one the Mexicans were going to pay for until it turned out that Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi were the Mexicans he had in mind. Not only hasn't he gotten it built, but he's now threatening to shut down part of the government if the Democrats won't agree to fund it. In something like a hissy fit, in fact, he recently swore that he'd be "proud" to do so, wouldn't for a second blame it on the Democrats, and might even order the Pentagon to spend a few billion of the bucks he's been shoveling its way to build that wall for him -- all of which may represent a first when it comes to presidential public relations.

Still, in other areas, how wrong they were! It couldn't be clearer now that Donald Trump is capable of building bigly. Just look at the recent climate-change meeting in Poland if you want some striking evidence of his success! It took a year or so, but now he's no longer alone in trying to deep-six the Paris climate accord and turn this planet into a fossil-fueled hothouse from hell. Thanks to his kind words and supportive gestures and those of figures close to him, Trump and his men actually managed to put together an informal but potentially powerful alliance of fossil-fuel producing countries at that recent Polish conference -- Vladimir Putin's Russia, Mohammed bin Salman's Saudi Arabia, Australia, and Kuwait -- to take the world down with him. And on a planet on which fossil fuel emissions remain on the rise and American bank investments in coal and oil from tar sands (but not in renewable energy) are also on the upswing, here's a strong sign of what such an alliance could ultimately accomplish: glaciers in a part of East Antarctica long considered stable are now melting, a flood threat, sooner or later, to coastal areas globally. In other words, the outlook is bright indeed, if you happen to be a Big Energy tycoon or CEO.

Now, let TomDispatchregular John Feffer, author of the new climate-change thriller Frostlands, the second in his Splinterlands series of dystopian novels, fill you in on the real New World Order whose creation Donald Trump and his alliance are intent on aiding and abetting. Tom

Are You Ready for an Epoch Fail?
Globalists Really Are Ruining Your Life
By John Feffer

You know the story: the globalists want your guns. They want your democracy. They're hovering just beyond the horizon in those black helicopters. They control the media and Wall Street. They've burrowed into a deep state that stretches like a vast tectonic plate beneath America's fragile government institutions. They want to replace the United States with the United Nations, erase national borders, and create one huge, malevolent international order.

The only thing that stands in their way is -- take your pick -- the Second Amendment, Twitter, or Donald Trump.

Conspiracy theorists have, in fact, been warning about just such a New World Order for decades, going all the way back to the isolationist critics of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and to fears about the United Nations in the post-World War II moment. During the Cold War, the John Birch Society and fringe elements of the Republican Party nurtured just such anti-globalist sentiments, but they never made much headway in the mainstream world. As the Cold War ended, however, the anti-globalist virus began to spread again, this time more rapidly, and it's threatening to become a pandemic.

The Agenda 21 Dystopia

On September 11, 1990, just after Saddam Hussein ordered the invasion of Kuwait and just before the reunification of Germany, George H.W. Bush spoke of a "new world order" that would unite all countries in defense of the rule of law and thwart the Iraqi autocrat's regional ambitions. The phrase was meant as a rallying cry, not an actual plan, but that didn't stop the president's America First critics from reading all manner of mayhem into his speech.

The elder Bush, who had long toiled in the shadow of Ronald Reagan, was in some ways a curious target for those who feared the end of U.S. sovereignty. As recent posthumous assessments revealed, he was an early champion of states' rights (against civil rights), supported prayer in school and the NRA, made a U-turn as a presidential candidate to oppose abortion, launched wars in Panama and the Persian Gulf, and presided over the collapse of the Soviet Union. Anti-globalists, however, focused on a different part of Bush's re'sume': he'd gone to Yale, later belonged to a wealthy elite of Texas oil barons, served as ambassador to the United Nations, and was a card-carrying member of both the Council on Foreign Relations and that most elite of global agenda-setting outfits, the Trilateral Commission.

Such characteristics made him particularly vulnerable to attacks from the far right. Preacher Pat Robertson, for instance, disliked Bush's staid Episcopalianism and resented losing to the future president in the 1988 Republican primaries. In his 1991 bestseller, The New World Order, Robertson refocused all his ire on the president's presumed global ambitions. "Is George Bush merely an idealist or are there now plans underway to merge the interests of the U.S. and the Soviet Union in the United Nations?" he asked rhetorically and then, of course, provided the answer:

"A single thread runs from the White House to the State Department to the Council on Foreign Relations to the Trilateral Commission to secret societies to extreme New Agers. There must be a new world order... There must be world government, a world police force, world courts, world banking and currency, and a world elite in charge of it all."

Though that 1991 book is largely forgotten, the televangelist's attacks on Bush's "globalism" resurfaced again and again in different forms. Beginning in 1994, for instance, Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins' Left Behind series spun Robertson's dire predictions of a one-world government into 16 novels and several dreadful movies. Just to ensure that readers wouldn't miss their point, they even installed the anti-Christ as the head of the United Nations. More recently, Donald Trump's attacks on Hillary Clinton's elitism echoed some of the very themes Robertson had sounded almost three decades earlier.

Oddly, though, Bush and Robertson agreed on one thing, on which they even found common ground with former Vice President Al Gore: the importance of addressing climate change.

As president, Bush pushed a number of environmental initiatives related to air quality, ozone depletion, and climate change more generally. In 1992, his administration even endorsed a tepid "action plan," Agenda 21, that came out of that year's global environmental meeting in Rio de Janeiro. In reality, it was just another of an endless stream of documents produced by such environmental conferences. For some Americans, however, those two words came to evoke the most terrifying aspect of the Bush era, proof positive that he was covertly constructing the very New World Order that he had invoked.

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Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and, most recently, the author of Mission Unaccomplished: Tomdispatch (more...)
 

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