During the eighteenth century, popular fears of world domination by secret societies like the Elders of Zion, the Masons, and the Illuminati were widespread throughout Europe and the Americas. In the centuries to follow, these old notions spawned new fears about the New World Order—or NWO—which is a broad conspiracy theory that grew within the crucible of two world conflicts and the Cold War. As a result, the NWO engendered a worldview in which existing anti-Semitism and racism were thoroughly steeped in virulent anticommunism and religious dogmatism. In short, the theory holds that an all-powerful shadow world government has been leeching away the rights and prerogatives of the willfully blind citizens of Western democracies since the end of World War II in 1945, and perhaps well before that time.
The most powerful organization behind the NWO theory, the John Birch Society, saw a conspiracy older than the United States invigorated with the rise of the Soviet Union and Communist China, and conceived the United Nations as the stooge and front for the “Red Menace.” These forces of international communism were thought to be aided by a secret “fifth column” of homegrown American malcontents and spies. The “Red Scare” of the 1950s in general—and the witch hunt of McCarthyism in particular—could be seen as a notable mainstream manifestation of what was, in the main, a phenomenon of fringe-group hysteria.
John Birch Society
Headquartered in Appleton, Wisconsin, the John Birch Society (JBS) is named after an American intelligence agent and Baptist missionary killed in China by Communist forces in August 1945. John Birch is thus viewed by the JBS as a martyr in the battle for American values in the face of the threat of world domination by communism, as well as the first casualty of the Cold War, the struggle between the capitalist West and the Communist East after World War II. The John Birch Society, founded by Robert H. W. Welch Jr. in 1958, aims to battle communism and to promote personal responsibility and limited government, both within the United States and in the world at large; therefore it has long been a fundamental goal of the society to extract the United States from the United Nations, which it identifies as a harbinger of the sinister “One World Government” to come.
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Since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent end of the Cold War, however, the association of a coherent Communist menace with a shadowy New World Order has given way to suspicion and fear of any pan-governmental organization or treaty, from the World Trade Organization to the United Nations to the World Health Organization to the North American Free Trade Agreement to any international arms treaty that could be construed as a check upon U.S. sovereignty or an impediment to America’s ability to defend itself. Concurrent with the advent of this more generalized fear of international cooperation has been the ascent of armed militia groups intent upon securing and protecting the rights of individual Americans by force of arms. These organizations see the federal government as little more than an extension of the forces of evil—a “Zionist Occupational Government,” or “ZOG,” in the phrase of some such sources—and hence a real and present danger to be battled in open war, and not merely a potential threat against which to prepare.
Unfortunately, it is thus not at all surprising that the development of the so-called “Patriot” and “Militia” movements has given rise in some cases to actual acts of violence against the federal government, which is seen by NWO believers as either an unwitting ally at best or—much more likely—a willing collaborator of the “One World Government.” The bombing in Oklahoma City of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building on April 19, 1995, by Timothy McVeigh is one of the most notable incidents associated with this antigovernment movement. Moreover, large federal programs from welfare to Social Security to “Obamacare” are seen as outgrowths of the tendrils of a New World Order in which individual rights and responsibilities will give way to control by a faceless bureaucracy acting on behalf of an oligarchic cabal. Moderate opponents of “big government,” extremist radicals in the militia movement, and NWO conspiracy theorists draw upon very old wellsprings of American distrust of power and centralized authority.
In early 1991, President George H. W. Bush used the phrase “new world order” to describe the opportunities afforded to America by global markets and the breakdown of trade barriers. Depending on the position of the listener, however, Bush either publicly heralded the coming of the much-feared One World Government or showed particular tactlessness in his word choice. In either case, conspiracy theorists jumped on the gaffe, taking it as hard evidence of what they had long decried. That same year Pat Robertson published a national best-seller titled New World Order, which took these formerly fringe ideas well into the mainstream.
Robertson’s text extended a venerable tradition of American conspiracy texts onto the pages of the New York Times best-seller list, bringing to popular attention ideas that were derived from or analogous to those postulated by such authors as William Guy Carr (The Red Fog over America, 1955), John Stormer (None Dare Call It Treason, 1964), Mary M. Davison (The Profound Revolution, 1966), William Luther Pierce (The Turner Diaries, 1978), and Milton William Cooper (Behold a Pale Horse, 1991).
Although the concept of the One World Government at the heart of the New World Order is at its core what most Americans would understand as an extremely right-wing conspiracy theory, it certainly has firmly established left-wing counterparts. This trend on the left gained real purchase during the counterculture of the 1960s, and most especially in the antiwar and civil rights movements, which saw the oppression of peasants in Southeast Asia and poor African Americans in the rural South as institutionalized manifestations of a centralized authority unresponsive to the concerns of ordinary citizens. Long-held suspicions that those in power ignored the rules of the law were validated by the revelations of the Watergate scandal, while a break-in by leftist radicals at the FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, during the same era provided hard evidence that J. Edgar Hoover’s agents had long been identifying, spying upon, and attempting to muzzle and punish dissenters and opponents of government policies.
The current spate of Wiki-leaks revelations and the actions of whistle-blowers such as Edward Snowden have added vastly more weight to the argument that the governments of the United States and its allies have been overreaching their legal authority and subordinating the liberties and rights of individuals in the name of national security concerns, especially since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Indeed, the largely unilateral action of the United States during the “War on Terror” provoked outrage on the left, which mirrored the anticommunist fervor on the right, and critics such as Gore Vidal openly questioned the agenda of the George W. Bush administration in pursuing military action that aligned with perceived business agendas. The excesses at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay added fuel to this fire; moreover, critics of U.S. foreign policy built upon a philosophical foundation developed by Noam Chomsky in his outspoken critiques of the first Bush administration’s policies during the first Gulf War.
Perhaps the most notable militant left-leaning action that might provide a counterweight for the right-wing “Patriot” organizations would be the so-called “Occupy” movement, which utilized social media to enact large-scale protests that shut down business districts in large cities in the United States and around the world. In its overt challenge to what it perceived as a shadowy banking structure with obscure but potent tentacles throughout the machinery of government, the Occupy movement built on the earlier successes of large-scale tumultuous anarchist actions, which disrupted World Trade Organization meetings at “the Battle in Seattle” in 1999 and subsequently elsewhere. Such violent confrontations of powerful international extragovernmental bodies—self-styled David versus Goliath battles between courageous individuals asserting the rights of the little guy in the face of gargantuan, unaccountable, and unresponsive multinational organizations—is a move that might have been stolen from a John Birch playbook.
In addition to numerous websites and blogs dedicated to a range of related subjects, the American fixation with abuses of power by government agencies and extragovernmental cabals has found its way into popular expression through a number of television projects and movies, notably the X-Files TV series and the Indiana Jones film franchise. Although largely focused upon UFOs and other inexplicable phenomena, some of the most disturbing episodes of the X-Files pitted rogue FBI agents Mulder and Scully against shadowy puppeteers who seemingly controlled the actions of their own government. Even the filming of such sequences was suggestive of conspiracy and intrigue, often involving dim lighting, half-visible faces wreathed in smoke, and hoarse, almost unintelligible whispers. The Indiana Jones movies, on the other hand, made light of a government conspiracy to discover, control, and hide away sources of enormous power, notably in the closing sequence of the first film, which depicts a mundane and seemingly limitless warehouse stockpiled with wonders of miraculous powers; the fourth film opened in the same setting.
Military-Industrial Complex
Often used as a derisive shorthand term for out-of-control government spending by critics on both the right and left of the political spectrum, “military-industrial complex” has become a common catchphrase in American society. Although many might associate the use of this term with the antiwar movement during the conflict with Vietnam during the 1960s, relatively few Americans know that this phrase originated with President Dwight D. Eisenhower in a speech shortly before he left office after two terms. A five-star general and the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe during World War II, Ike was no dove, but in this speech he warned in stark terms that the Cold War military buildup was economically unsustainable in the long run. More than half a century later, Ike’s warning still resonates in the American consciousness, and many of his fellow citizens today quote Eisenhower without knowing it.
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Conspiracy theories—old and new—are hardly unique to the American character or to American folklore. A persuasive argument might be mounted, however, that a deeply ingrained and widespread notion of American “exceptionalism”—that is, the concept that America is a unique nation in the history of the world, and that its citizens are therefore both special in their understanding of their rights and responsibilities and in the sense that they are under constant threat from the age-old antidemocratic forces arrayed against such liberties—in tandem with the tradition of and legal protections concerning free speech and the right to have and bear arms, provide a particularly fertile ground for the development of such theories, which have become particularly virulent and widespread since the development of the Internet.
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See also Bilderbergers; Conspiracy Theories; September 11 (2001) Conspiracy Theories; X-Files
Further Reading
Aaronovitch, David. 2010. Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History. New York: Riverhead Books.
Arnold, Gordon B. 2008. Conspiracy Theory in Film, Television, and Politics. Westport, CT: Praeger.
Bennett, Richard M. 2003. Conspiracy: Plots, Lies and Cover-Ups. London: Virgin.
DeHaven-Smith, Lance. 2013. Conspiracy Theory in America. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Fenster, Mark. 1999. Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Goldberg, Robert Alan. 2001. Enemies Within: The Culture of Conspiracy in Modern America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Knight, Peter. 2003. Conspiracy Theories in American History: An Encyclopedia. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO.
Olmsted, Kathryn S. 2009. Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Walker, Jesse. 2013. The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory. New York: Harper.