Understand what the New World Order conspiracy theory is – 07/17/2023 – Politics

Created after the end of the Cold War to designate the world with several centers of power and not just two anymore, the term New World Order has also been used as the name of a conspiracy theory. According to her, there is a movement to implement a global and totalitarian government. Billionaires like Bill Gates and George Soros have their names involved in the theory, as if they were the sponsors of this plan.

Often, the term appears alongside other expressions linked to conspiracyism, such as Great Reset and globalism, and also related to lies. The Prove It Explains section provides more information on what New World Order theory is all about to help the reader identify misinformation content.

How do we check

The team researched professional press reports and institutional websites about the origin of the expression New World Order (The New York Times and Washington Post), the rise of the conspiracy theory (SheetOpera Mundi and Revista Galileu) and who are its propagators (Vice and Institute for Strategic Dialogue), both in the United States and in Brazil.

Emergence of the expression

There are two meanings of the term New World Order. One of them refers to the historical period that began after the end of the Cold War. Before that, the expression had already been aired by politicians such as the American Woodrow Wilson and the British Winston Churchill, but it did not become known.

According to a report by The New York Times, the person who began to spread the expression was the then president of the United States George HW Bush in 1990. In August of that year, he said, in a press conference about the crisis in the Persian Gulf: “When looking at the countries that are participating here now, I think we have a chance for a new world order”.

“He liked the sound of that phrase”, says the report in the American newspaper and, a month later, in a speech at the UN, he used the expression again. “It is in our hands to leave these dark machines behind in the dark ages to which they belong and move forward to crown a historic movement towards a new world order and a long era of peace,” he said.

Also according to the New York Times, Bush would have heard the expression of his Secretary of State, James A. Baker III, who, as Secretary of the Treasury of President Ronald Reagan, would have heard the Minister of Finance of Peru, Alva Castro, in a lecture in 1986. The Peruvian made an appeal for a “new world order”, asking for a change in the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

The Washington Post, on the other hand, says that the suggestion of the name came from a boat trip with Bush’s national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, at the same time, in August 1990.

Another point that possibly contributed to the expression being widespread, reported the New York Times, is the fact that Mikhail S. Gorbachev, then president of the Soviet Union, also used the term at a conference in the Kremlin in April 1990. only at the beginning of the formation process of a new world order,” he said.

Conspiracy theory

One of the ways that the term “New World Order” was linked to a conspiracy theory was the publication of the booklet “None Dare Call it Conspiracy”, by the American Gary Allen in 1972.

Allen was a member of the John Birch Society, an extreme right-wing, racist and staunchly anti-communist organization founded in 1959 in the United States. In his book, according to the Opera Mundi website, “he expounded a conspiracy theory that the environmental movement, the peace movement, the women’s liberation movement, most of the media, international Soviet communism and the United Nations were all in league with the Rockefellers who sought to control the world through the Council on Foreign Relations”.

Still according to Opera Mundi, the John Birch Society, which until then had few members, saw the number of affiliates grow after the release of the work when George Bush started talking about a “New World Order”. That’s because the expression was the organization’s favorite when it came to conspiracy. So it was as if Bush Sr. had given a boost to the use of the term as a conspiracy theory.

Over the years, the theory gained new contours. According to Vice, she has been linked to “all manner of dystopian horrors, including forced depopulation programs, a secret reptilian ruling class, and ‘elite globalists’ on a satanic mission to bring about the ‘end times’.”

As reported by Galileo magazine, the New World Order is a “super conspiracy” according to American political scientist Michael Barkun, who talks about a hierarchy of conspiracies. In addition to the “super” ones, he adds, there are “eventual” conspiracies, linked to specific events, such as the September 11 attacks, and “systemic” ones, in which an entire system (military, politicians, scientists) is involved. “New World Order theories claim that past and present events are to be understood as the result of the efforts of an immensely powerful but secretive group to control the world,” Barkun told Galileo.

Still as the magazine explains, depending on the objective of the conspirators, this super powerful group can be formed by different people, such as Jews, communists, bankers, Vatican, Freemasons, UN, and even aliens.

Together

More recently, the expression New World Order has been appearing linked to other theories, such as the “Great Reset”, or “Great Reset”, which can be translated as “great restart”, or “great reboot”.

As Agência Pública informs, this other theory began to be spread after the 2020 World Economic Forum. In its 50th edition, the event was called “The Great Reset” for proposing the resumption of the world economy, with the reduction of social inequality and improvement of several post-pandemic sectors. The term ended up being “borrowed” by conspiracists. The founder of the Forum, Klaus Schwab, even has his name involved in these theories.

According to Agência Pública, Glenn Beck, a conservative politician and American disinformer, helped transform the term into a conspiracy theory by launching, in 2022, a book in which he claims that the “Great Reset” is “a conspiracy between bankers, businessmen and governments to found global totalitarianism, imposing a green agenda, more rights for women and social equality”, which “would generate a slowdown of the economy and lead people to unemployment”.

propagators

According to Vice, references to the New World Order conspiracy in the United States are used mainly by the far right. “There is a generic New World Order conspiracy and there is a more specific version of it used by certain right-wing extremists,” said ADL Center on Extremism Senior Research Fellow Mark Pitcavage. “The most general version is that this is an abbreviated reference to some kind of vague left-wing conspiracy [organizada pela esquerda]where ‘elites’ are trying to manipulate nations and individual actors for their own nefarious ends.”

The expert told Vice that the generic version of the theory allows different groups to be held responsible for the alleged institution of the New World Order. “Some people might include the Freemasons or the Illuminati. The anti-Semites would say it was Jews. Others would say it was Communists. Others would say it was Jewish Communists. It was nebulous, and that’s the advantage it had.”

The theory of the New World Order, according to the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, an American organization dedicated to reversing the growing wave of polarization, extremism and disinformation in the world, gained strength among militia movements and right-wing extremists, which refer to to the New World Order in the context of anti-state narratives.

In Brazil, the spread of conspiracy theory is also linked to the right. Former Bolsonarist federal deputy Daniel Silveira, for example, has already stated that his favorite book is “Politics, ideology and conspiracies”, by Larry Abraham and Gary Allen, member of the John Birch Society and author of the aforementioned conspiracy works. In the work, according to O Globo, “the authors accuse billionaires and bankers of being the hidden face of communism to create a supra-world government”. Olavo de Carvalho, Bolsonarism guru who died last year, recommended the book.

why do we explain

Conspiracy theories, in general, tend to offer simple explanations for complex issues. Some strategies used by the conspirators are the manipulation of the context of the information, the appeal to the emotional and the identification of an “enemy”, forming a discourse based on the polarization “us against them”.

That is why it is necessary to be careful with content that offers easy answers and makes suggestions without proving or disclosing the source for what is being said.

Other checks on the topic

In 2022, Comprova showed that a text on Telegram spread conspiracy theory about the international treaty of the World Health Organization and that, contrary to what conspiracy theory claims, Lula is alive and has not been replaced by a doppelganger. This year, the project explained why George Soros’ name appears in several conspiracy theories.

Lupa has also proven that the UN has not published a document establishing the New World Order.