have different origins, but they were not mutually exclusive. Thus New World Order theory came to constitute a common ground for religious and secular conspiracy theorists.
The internal logic of Antichrist and Illuminati ideas might explain their compatibility, but it did not explain their rise to prominence in the early 1990s. Notwithstanding right-wing suspicions about George Bush and his patrician connections, his use of the phrase is not sufficient to explain its currency among outsider and antigovernment groups. More important than Bush’s rhetoric was the dramatic change in the international political landscape produced by the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. This development removed suddenly from mental maps a defining element of the post-1945 period: the figure of an adversary. The Soviet Union was not simply an enemy, it was the enemy, the evil empire against which all American and “free-world” resources were marshaled. It was also a visible opponent, with a physical presence and location. Although themes of invisible communist subversion were prevalent in the 1950s, these spectral agents could ultimately be linked to the visible symbol of the Soviet state. Finally, Americans saw Soviet communism as a conspiracy, a plot using various devious means to take by stealth what could not be acquired by direct confrontation. The Sino-Soviet split, the USSR’s increasing economic difficulties, and the sclerotic Soviet leadership made conspiracy theories less persuasive. Nonetheless, as long as the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact client states held together, their vast nuclear arsenal and their stated aim of subduing the West imposed a kind of Manichaean moral order on the American consciousness. The world was a battleground between light and darkness.
Between 1989 and 1991, that organizing conception abruptly vanished. The Soviet Union disappeared, the Warsaw Pact dissolved, and the Russian Federation teetered on the brink of economic and political collapse. While undoubtedly these developments had strategic benefits for the United States, they carried a psychological price. The dualistic worldview that had existed since the end of World War II, with its clearly delineated struggle between good and evil, was suddenly no longer viable. And the mind abhors a vacuum where conceptions of moral order are concerned.
It was a particularly confusing period for Protestant premillennialists. Under the influence of dispensationalism, they had looked primarily to foreign affairs for signs of the imminence of the end-times. Popularizers such as Hal Lindsey had developed elaborate scenarios of the international conflicts that would bring on and define the Tribulation. In all of them, two factors were paramount. First, the Soviet Union would take a central role. Second, the crucial events would take place as a result of war in the Middle East that involved Israel.58
The post–Cold War period made this vision increasingly untenable. Although some millenarians insisted that the fragmentation of the Soviet Union was a sham to deceive the West, over time the decay of the former Soviet states became undeniable. The centrality of the Middle East became more and more problematic as well. The Gulf War in 1991 temporarily reinvigorated conceptions of an ultimate world conflict in the Middle East, but the war’s rapid conclusion dashed such hopes. In addition, a major war involving Israel became less likely, thanks to both peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians and the end of Soviet aid to anti-Israel client states. Thus the loss of the traditional enemy was felt most acutely by millennialists.
The New World Order came to fill this vacuum for premillennialists and for many on the far right. As this chapter has indicated, the sources for New World Order ideas can be traced back many decades, whether in the Antichrist version or in the secret-society / Illuminati version. Yet despite the concept’s significant historical roots, it had always been a subsidiary motif. It did not appear as the central organizing concept for significant numbers of fundamentalists and right-wing ideologues until about 1990.
In fulfilling its role as a central moral vision, the New World Order had significant advantages. First, precisely because it had roots in the past, it could be put forward as a legitimate moral vision rather than an innovation. As Boyer has noted, millenarians are nothing if not adaptable, and they have a long history of bringing formerly secondary themes to the fore when circumstances require. Second, the New World Order is by its very nature invisible, always cloaked in garb that disguises its true nature, whether it takes the form of the United Nations, of philanthropic foundations, or of academic organizations. This gives it a resiliency that makes New World Order theory virtually unfalsifiable. No event or set of events can reliably be taken as disconfirming evidence, for in the view of conspiracy theorists, nothing is as it seems. Finally, New World Order theory seemed to provide a graceful way of exiting the domain of international relations and refocusing upon domestic politics. Although the forces of the New World Order are international, they are assumed to be concentrating on domestic agendas, particularly the alleged destruction of American liberties. In an era no longer dominated by chronic international conflict, the New World Order allows its devotees to rebuild their Manichaean worldview in a new venue.59
4
New World Order Conspiracies II
A World of Black Helicopters
In sum, New World Order theory claimed to provide an overarching explanation for contemporary politics by fitting all events into a single scenario: a diabolically clever and unscrupulous secret organization was in the process of seizing control of the world. As the preceding chapter discussed, this scenario appealed to both religionists and secularists. The former saw in it the end-time events associated with the Antichrist, while the latter regarded it as confirmation of their fears of elite domination. To the extent that both groups found such ideas compelling, New World Order became a generic, “ecumenical” conspiracy theory, which—at least in its overall configuration—could be shared across the religious-secular boundary.
As these ideas were developed in the 1990s, the picture of the New World Order became increasingly detailed. Instead of simply positing conquest by an evil cabal, the New World Order came to include highly specific claims about both the identities of the conspirators and the means they would employ to seize power and defeat their opponents. Among the latter techniques, three allegations were particularly significant: that black helicopters are tangible evidence of the conspiracy’s existence, that a network of concentration camps is being readied to incarcerate dissenters, and that a technology of mind control has been developed in order to make the rest of the population docile and malleable. The significance of these claims lies in their relative novelty. While other elements of New World Order theory, such as the Illuminati, have roots that go back centuries, the black helicopter, concentration camp, and mind-control charges are extremely recent. They first took shape in the 1970s, and did not become linked for another two decades.
THE CONSPIRACY’S MEMBERS
The largest subset of the literature concerns the identity of the New World Order’s masters. Conspiracists—convinced that their truths are empirically verifiable—are rarely satisfied simply to posit a vague other, but rather are obsessed by the need to break the cabal into its constituent parts, in terms of both organizations and individuals. This push to identify the conspirators has bifurcated into a modest approach, in which the conspiracy is identified with a single organization, and an ambitious approach, in which the conspiracy operates through a network of linked organizations. The ambitious versions, referred to here as superconspiracies, appear to be proliferating, driving out or absorbing the simpler plots.
The modest version of conspiracy theory concentrates on one or two well-defined groups, whose individual members are identifiable. Most commonly, the groups selected are composed of elites such as the Council on Foreign Relations or the Trilateral Commission. They have only slightly overlapping memberships, but the involvement of the Rockefeller family in both has made them attractive targets.
The Council on Foreign Relations—by far the better known of the two—is particularly identified with its influential publication, Foreign Affairs. The council was organized in 1921, “dedicated to increasing America’s understanding of the world and contributing ideas to U.S. foreign policy.”
