The New World Order (book)



Are these the ravings of a lunatic? The New World Order is a 1991 book by Pat Robertson in which he pushed every conspiracy theory he could that was popular at the time. ("A catch all for conspiracy theories," is how one reviewer put it. ) Robertson was strongly influenced by the John Birch Society, and like the JBS, included the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, the Illuminati, and the Rothschild family as part of the New World Order conspiracy.

A book with no conclusions
One of the most telling things about this book is how little Robertson, by his own admission, can actually conclude anything. On occasion, he'll just admit that he has no evidence to back up what he says, such as when he wrote the following on the death of Abraham Lincoln:

Why was this populist idea so dangerous that Lincoln was killed for believing it? Robertson explained a page earlier:

Of course, Robertson offers no evidence that Lincoln thought this. In fact, the American Civil War increased the national debt from $63 million to $2.2 billion, and Lincoln was even forced to default on the nation's debt in 1862. If Lincoln really did not any simple means to keep the nation out of debt, but was also so adamant about it that if those in control of the banks felt the need to end his life, Lincoln sure did have a strange way of showing it.

Other times, Robertson will just ask the readers a question which, assuming they agree with the book, to which they should already know the answer. "Can it be that the phrase the new world order means something entirely different to the inner circle of a secret society than it does to the ordinary person?" "[I]s there not a possibility that the Wall Street bankers, who have so enthusiastically financed Bolshevism in the Soviet Union since 1917, did not do so for the purpose of promoting world communism but for the purpose of saddling the potentially rich Soviet Union with a totally wasteful and inefficient system that in turn would force the Soviet government to be dependent on Western bankers for its survival?" (That one is a hard no because, to put it simply, Western bankers didn't back the Bolshevik revolution. ) "Is it possible that the Gulf War was, in fact, a setup?" (A setup to what exactly?) "Before [World War One], monarchies held sway. After the war, socialism and high finance held sway. Was it planned that way or was it merely an 'accident' or history?"

Of course, the main flaw with this argument is also its appeal, anything is possible, in the most general sense of the term. It is totally possible that everything Robertson suggests is the case actually happened, but that fails to make it any more true because, to put it simply, so is every other counter explanation that is not fully impossible.

Al Franken in his book Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot spoofed this style of "just asking questions" by asking the following:

His answers to those questions are "yes, no, yes, and accident of history" respectively.

Getting things wrong
While Robertson doesn't always use facts to back up his claims, it should be noted that he does occasionally attempt to pull from reality — and fails quite a bit. At one part, in order to promote his views against oligarchy, he attributed the following quote to be Lincoln:

There's no evidence that Lincoln actually said this, and Lincoln's official biographer even noted that this quote was nothing more then “a bold, unblushing forgery.”

On another occasion, Robertson wrote that "the Supreme Court of the supposedly Christian United States… forbade children in public schools to pray." This is an old religious right claim that has been debunked thousands of times, but prayer is not banned in public schools, although school staff cannot lead students in prayer, both staff and students are allowed to engage in it if they so choose.

Fun with sources
In a 1995 article in The New York Review of Books, Jacob Heilbrunn looks at some of the people Robertson cites, and the results were eye opening. You see, Robertson very much relies on World Revolution: The Plot Against Civilization and Secret Societies and Subversive Movements by Nesta H. Webster, a British fascist.

Robertson was also fond of Secrets of the Federal Reserve: The London Connection by Eustace Mullins, who is a Holocaust denier.

Fascist?
Umberto Eco's famous essay "Ur-Fascism" uses this book as an example for one of its fourteen features of fascism: