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New World Order Conspiracies I

The New World Order and the Illuminati

Although styles of millenarian thought have become increasingly diverse, the result has not been the cacophony one might expect. Despite the unprecedented millenarian pluralism in contemporary America, the varieties described in the preceding chapter—religious, secular, and improvisational—have been integrated by the wide acceptance of a unifying conspiracy theory commonly denoted by the phrase New World Order. This theory may be found in religious, secular, and improvisational versions. In this chapter I examine its disparate origins, for it appears to have developed separately out of religious and secular ideas that subsequently converged.

New World Order theories claim that both past and present events must be understood as the outcome of efforts by an immensely powerful but secret group to seize control of the world. Most commonly, these theories now include some or all of the following elements: the systematic subversion of republican institutions by a federal government utilizing emergency powers; the gradual subordination of the United States to a world government operating through the United Nations; the creation of sinister new military and paramilitary forces, including governmental mobilization of urban youth gangs; the permanent stationing of foreign troops on U.S. soil; the widespread use of black helicopters to transport the tyranny’s operatives; the confiscation of privately owned guns; the incarceration of so-called patriots in concentration camps run by FEMA; the implantation of microchips and other advanced technology for surveillance and mind control; the replacement of Christianity with a New Age world religion; and, finally, the manipulation of the entire apparatus by a hidden hierarchy of conspirators operating through secret societies.

These concepts were, of course, far removed from what President George H. W. Bush had in mind when he popularized the phrase new world order at the time of the Gulf War of 1991. He drew on a quite different tradition, one which went back many decades and referred to a new and more stable international system associated with effective mechanisms for collective security. This distinction, however, is not one that New World Order writers have found persuasive. Indeed, considering Bush’s past associations with such organizations as Skull and Bones (a secret society at Yale University), the United Nations, and the CIA, it was easy for conspiracists to view his new-world-order references as messages to his fellow plotters. While Bush no doubt thought the phrase suggested a reassuring entry into a post–Cold War world, those who saw conspiracies everywhere saw his open use of the term as evidence of the cabal’s newfound brazenness.¹

Thus, by the early 1990s, what most regarded as innocuous political rhetoric was seen by others as a sign of onrushing calamity. They did so not only because they distrusted Bush’s patrician origins but because, unbeknown to him, the New World Order was already a well-consolidated element in the thinking of both religious millenarians and those on the extreme political right. It is not clear how far back these sectarian usages go, but they certainly antedate Bush’s use by decades.

The idea of the New World Order as a sinister development draws on two distinct streams of ideas that evolved separately but eventually converged. One source is millenarian Christianity, embedded in fundamentalist Protestantism. Its speculations about the end-times, when history would reach its climax and termination, led to scenarios in which a diabolical figure—the Antichrist—would fasten his grip upon the world. The other, secular source, less easily categorized, consists of a body of historical and political pseudoscholarship that purported to explain major events in terms of the machinations of secret societies. They, rather than governments, were said to be the real holders of power. The eventual aim of these shadowy plotters was nothing less than world domination—the imposition of a New World Order.

THE REIGN OF THE ANTICHRIST

The term Antichrist itself appears only a few times in the New Testament, relegated to the First and Second Epistles of John. It is invoked almost in passing, but always with the sense that the person or persons referred to are “deceivers” and “false prophets” who will appear as adversaries in the last days. The sparse scriptural citations speak sometimes of a single Antichrist, and sometimes of many: “Little children, it is the last hour: and as ye heard that Antichrist cometh, even now have there arisen many antichrists; whereby we know that it is the last hour” (1 John 2:18). Other than suggesting a capacity for deceiving the faithful, these passages say little about what such a person or persons will do. The vagueness of the concept, however, allowed it to be filled out with whatever content believers wished, particularly as time passed and it became evident that the Christ’s return was to be indefinitely delayed.²

Two strategies eventually developed for the elaboration of the concept. The most common was to seek the Antichrist’s identifying characteristics, the better to recognize him when the time came. Eventually, this quest produced a massive literature, especially among Anglo-American Protestants, aimed at determining who the Antichrist was, and always assuming that there was only one. The second strategy, which seems to have developed later, joined the figure of the Antichrist to an organization or institution through which he was to impose his will on the faithful.³

The Antichrist’s eschatological role was significantly increased by the rise of dispensational premillennialism in the late nineteenth century. The dispensational system, devised by British evangelical John Nelson Darby (1800–1882), quickly became the dominant form of millenarianism among Protestant fundamentalists, and remains so today. Premillennialists believe the millennium will not begin until after Christ’s return and the events associated with it. Postmillennialists, on the other hand, regard the Second Coming as an event that will not take place until the millennium itself has ended. As a result, premillennialists conceive the end-times in terms of high drama and the catastrophic demise of the present order, while postmillennialists are far more apt to view the millennium as a state to be achieved through the gradual perfection of the world. Darby produced an elaborated version of premillennialism, in which sacred history was divided into periods or “dispensations,” concluding with a complicated sequence immediately before the Second Coming. He argued that the end-times would commence with a seven-year period called the Tribulation. At the outset of the Tribulation, the saved would be Raptured, “caught up in the air” to be with Christ in heaven until his return. For the unsaved, however, the seven years of the Tribulation would be a time of increasing violence, persecution, and terror, much of it at the Antichrist’s hands.

According to Darby’s system, the Antichrist would become the leader of a global dictatorship after three and a half years, at the midpoint of the Tribulation, and seek to secure the world for Satan until the battle of Armageddon signaled Christ’s return. The leading dispensationalist theologian, John Walvoord, says of this period, “This man’s absolute control of the world politically, economically, and religiously will give him power such as no man has ever had in human history. His brilliance as a leader will be superhuman, for he will be dominated and directed by Satan himself.” This scenario might well be dismissed as merely idle speculation, were it not for the conviction of many contemporary millennialists that the Tribulation will begin soon. In keeping with Darby’s belief that the prophetic clock would begin to run only after scriptural prophecies concerning the Jews were fulfilled, Christian millennialists see in the creation and expansion of the State of Israel indisputable evidence that their end-time expectations are about to be fulfilled.⁴

While some millenarians concentrated on the Antichrist’s personal characteristics, the better to identify him, others began to speculate about his apparatus of control—for if, indeed, the second half of the Tribulation was to be dominated by a world dictatorship, then surely that would require a formidable governmental and administrative structure. Because his rule was to constitute a resuscitated Roman empire, there had to be an organizational as well as a personal component. This train of thought was evident as early as the 1920s, when some American millennialists regarded the new League of Nations as the institution awaiting the Antichrist’s controlling hand.⁵

The interwar period provided fertile ground for Antichrist speculation, not only because of the League but also because of the emergence of European dictators. Hitler and, especially, Mussolini lent themselves to the scenarios of millenarians. For once, Mussolini seemed to trump his German ally because—at least insofar as the Antichrist was concerned—his identification appeared to be firmer. He reached an agreement with the pope, he ruled from Rome, and he made no secret of his desire to revive the Roman empire. Among the most enthusiastic exponents of this theory was American Nazi sympathizer and anti-Semite Gerald Winrod (1900–1957).⁶

Winrod was of two minds concerning the Antichrist. On the one hand, like many of his contemporaries, he saw Mussolini as a natural candidate. On the other, his intense anti-Semitism dictated that the Antichrist be a Jew. The two positions could be harmonized by making the Jews the Antichrist’s allies, or by manufacturing a Jewish ancestry for Mussolini. Unlike the typical dispensationalist, Winrod felt compelled to draw Jews into the Antichrist system. He did so most extensively in a 1936 pamphlet, Antichrist and the Tribe of Dan.⁷

In this pamphlet, Winrod brushed aside the issue of Mussolini’s family background. Indeed, it was not necessary to establish his Jewish roots in order to identify him as the Antichrist—quite the contrary. For Winrod, “If it developed that Mussolini is the Antichrist, the rumors concerning his Jewish ancestry would be confirmed.” The issue, in any case, was not Mussolini but the organizational structure behind him, for Winrod saw the Antichrist as merely the instrument of an invisible Jewish conspiracy: “A Jewish Antichrist, in the end of this age, pre-supposes an international system of Jewish government. There can be little doubt that such a system, based upon the Jewish Money Power, has already been created—and is ready to step into the open and assume control of world affairs as soon as the time is ripe.” Winrod did not abandon the concept of a personified Antichrist, but he joined it so closely to a conspiracist view of history that the man and the organization became inseparable.⁸

The anti-Semitic implications of the Antichrist suddenly reemerged more than sixty years later when, in January 1999, the Reverend Jerry Falwell asserted that the Antichrist was probably already alive and was certainly a Jew. He seemed genuinely taken aback when many called the claim anti-Semitic. In a press statement, Falwell asserted, “Since Jesus came to earth . . . as a Jewish male, many evangelicals believe the Antichrist will, by necessity, be a Jewish male.” Saying that he himself is “strongly pro-Jewish and pro-Israel,” he denied any anti-Semitic intent, and agreed in hindsight that it would have been better never to have made the claim.⁹

As Falwell’s comments suggest, Winrod’s views were hardly typical of evangelicals—he was even tried for sedition during World War II. But his linkage of the person of the Antichrist with a satanic organization later reappeared in other forms. In this manner, the Antichrist suspicions originally attached to the League of Nations came to rest on the United Nations after 1945. The UN was a more tempting target for American millenarians, for although the United States had rejected membership in the League, it was a prime mover in the new organization. In the postwar era, Antichrist fears on the organizational level confronted, as it were, an embarrassment of riches, for in addition to the UN, the creation of the European Common Market (later the European Union) offered yet another potential venue for the Antichrist’s machinations. Because the Antichrist’s domain was widely regarded as successor to the Roman empire, a western-European superstate was a particularly attractive candidate.

In addition to these organizational developments, Antichrist writers were encouraged by technological ones. The Antichrist folklore consistently emphasized his capacity for deception and control; indeed, it became an unquestioned tenet of dispensationalism that the world would initially welcome the Antichrist as a charismatic peacemaker whose diabolical designs would remain hidden until he had achieved total power. Modern technology appeared to equip the Antichrist with hitherto unavailable capacities for misrepresentation and domination. Electronic communications, especially television, could create instant global celebrity, while computers and microelectronics offered the means to monitor and control behavior and commerce.

In fact, for some the Antichrist and the computer came to be virtually interchangeable.¹⁰ Paul Boyer notes, “Several [religious] popularizers even suggested that Antichrist would be a computer.” The most common version of this legend is that a giant computer in Brussels, the headquarters of the Common Market / European Union, would keep track of everyone in the world. Because the Book of Revelation says that the mark of the beast would be required for anyone to buy and sell during the Antichrist’s reign, such concentrated power could theoretically control the world. In another, more baroque version of the computer-as-Antichrist, the Brussels machine was said to be at the center of a global network of 365 computers that would keep track of the Antichrist’s minions in their various secret, conspiratorial organizations. So prevalent did these beliefs become after about 1980 that a 1994 tract on computers and the Antichrist explicitly repudiated them: “False reports and silly rumors only damage the credibility of one of the most powerful prophetic passages in Scripture.”¹¹

An important result of these developments was an increasing tendency among fundamentalist millenarians to view the Antichrist as part of a system of control rather than simply an evil and deceitful individual. The figure of the Antichrist became enmeshed in a complex of related ideas: the mark of the beast as a satanic device to control economic activity; the universal bar code and implanted microchips as precursors of the literal mark; credit and debit cards as ways of habituating people to an economy without tangible money; and vast computer systems tracking the details of daily life. Although these were real and in some cases disturbing developments, the manner in which Antichrist writers treated them carried the seeds of a conspiracist view of the world. They saw in them an insidious plan for satanic control. As Grant Jeffrey says:

The prophecies of the Bible tell us a world government will arise in the last days led by the Antichrist, the world’s last dictator. . . . The prophets also foretold that money would cease to exist in the last days. It would be replaced by a cashless society that will use numbers instead of currency to allow you “to buy and sell.” We are now rapidly approaching the moment when these ancient Bible prophecies can be fulfilled through the introduction of the 666–Mark of the Beast financial system of the Antichrist.¹²

Fundamentalist millenarians saw President Bush’s uttering of the phrase new world order as a sign that the network of Antichrist forces had advanced so far that they could risk speaking about it publicly. To those already habituated to thinking about the Antichrist not simply in individual terms but as a system that drew in the United Nations, computers, and the global economy, the public invocation of the New World Order could only mean that the days of the Tribulation were imminent.

Thus, New World Order came to connote an impending world dictatorship in which the Antichrist would seize control through a combination of co-opted international organizations and marvels of electronic surveillance. But simultaneously, a second conception of the New World Order had arisen, growing in this case from secular roots.

THE ILLUMINATI

The secular version of the New World Order foresaw an equally bleak future, also dominated by expanding tyranny. In this case, however, the source of domination was not the power of Satan but an evil cabal that sought absolute power over the world’s people and resources for its own selfish reasons. Although many secret societies were deemed to be carriers of the conspiracy, the one most often invoked was also the most shadowy and obscure, the Illuminati.

Richard Hofstadter began his seminal essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” with an example probably unfamiliar to most of his readers—the belief in late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century America that the new nation was about to be taken over by the Bavarian Illuminati. The fear of a plot by this secret Masonic society had been stoked by an earlier literature that sought to portray the French Revolution as the result of an Illuminatist conspiracy. The two key works on this revolutionary conspiracism were John Robison’s Proofs of a Conspiracy (1798) and Abbé Barruel’s Memoirs, Illustrating the History of Jacobinism (1803). Although the alleged doings of Illuminatist plotters in America seemed credible to some prominent New England clerics and academics, the panic peaked by the turn of the nineteenth century, after which it became increasingly clear that the Illuminati lived mostly in Robison’s fantasy life. Hofstadter himself disposed of the topic by noting that it may have opened the way for the anti-Masonic movement of the 1820s and 1830s, but he then proceeded to better-known examples of the “paranoid style,” such as anti-Catholic nativism. The Illuminati were relegated to the role of the progenitors of a conspiracist strand in American life that was to take other forms in the future.¹³

In fact, however, the Illuminati—or at least the image of the Illuminati—had just begun to spread by the 1830s. Both Robison’s and Barruel’s books continued to be reprinted, and both are featured works currently sold by the John Birch Society’s book service. Its catalog touts Barruel’s work as “the most comprehensive expose of a Master Conspiracy to rule the world,” while it offers Robison’s book as a description of “this secret group, whose select members became part of a conspiracy to enslave all people in Europe and America.” By way of updating Robison’s scenario, his current American publisher asserts that the Illuminati “have long since discarded Freemasonry as their vehicle,” preferring to operate in “universities, tax-free foundations, mass media communication systems, government bureaus such as the State Department, and a myriad of private organizations such as the Council on Foreign Relations.”¹⁴

So much mythology has encrusted the Illuminati that their actual history has been obscured, even by scholars. This is a case of the image having achieved greater prominence than the reality of the organization itself—an ultimate though dubious tribute to the influence of the genre begun by Robison and Barruel. Distinguishing the image from what it purports to represent is made more difficult by the Illuminati’s own penchant for secrecy, its small size, and its brief lifespan. Nonetheless, the broad outlines of its history are reasonably clear.

The Bavarian Illuminati (formally, the Order of Illuminists) was established by a Bavarian canon-law professor, Adam Weishaupt, on May 1, 1776. Utilizing organizational models taken from both the Jesuits and the Masons, Weishaupt created a secular organization whose aim was to free the world “from all established religious and political authority.” An elaborate apparatus of secrecy and ritual was designed not only to protect the organization from state penetration but to mold its members into an elite capable of achieving Weishaupt’s grandiose objective. By the early 1780s, it had acquired a peak membership of approximately twenty-five hundred, most in German-speaking areas. The organization’s aims and its clandestine methods (for example, the infiltration of some Masonic lodges) attracted unwelcome government attention, which proved potent enough to bypass even the order’s security measures. By 1787, the Illuminati had been dissolved, but its sweeping goals, attention to secrecy, and insistence on unswerving personal dedication made it a model for a sizable number of early-nineteenth century revolutionary organizations, much in the manner of the Paris Commune in the next century.¹⁵

In short, the Illuminati influenced subsequent revolutionaries, albeit indirectly, even though the organization seems on the most reliable evidence to have lasted no more than eleven or twelve years. Yet the irony is that if its sympathizers were eager to preserve its legacy and to achieve the total liberation that had eluded Weishaupt, its enemies were even more eager to keep it alive. They insisted that it had never died, that its dissolution was only apparent, and that in the ultimate act of clandestinity, it had survived its own death. The fact that the order had been dissolved even before the French Revolution began made allegations of its survival all the more attractive, for how better to explain an unprecedented upheaval than by fastening on an unprecedentedly cunning cabal? Hence by an act of reductionist self-deception, opponents of the revolution could both explain its occurrence and resuscitate the Illuminati. And so began the convoluted tale of an evil conspiracy that was said to move from country to country, and century to century, setting off revolutionary conflagrations wherever it appeared.

The Illuminati in the Twentieth Century

Illuminati literature took a major leap in the interwar period of the twentieth century, when the legend of Weishaupt’s group came to be placed within a far more complex and ambitious conception of history. This transformation was mainly the work of two English writers, Nesta Webster (1876–1960) and Lady Queenborough, also known as Edith Starr Miller (d. 1933), each responsible for remarkably similar syntheses of the Illuminati literature. It is scarcely hyperbole to say, as Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke does, that without Webster “few Americans today would have heard of the Illuminati.” The women shared an unshakable faith in Robison’s and Barruel’s notion that the Illuminati were responsible for the French Revolution, and like the earlier authors, they insisted that the Illuminati had not disappeared in the late 1780s but had gone on causing mayhem for decades thereafter. More important, Webster and Queenborough added two ideas that turned out to be immensely influential in later years: first, that world history could be correctly understood only as the product of the machinations of secret societies; and second, that Jews were central to these activities. By elevating secret societies to the role of prime movers in world history, they left the French Revolution behind, extending the Illuminati’s field of action into the present, including above all a catalytic role in the Russian Revolution. By linking Illuminism with the Jews, Webster and Queenborough gained access to a whole new body of conspiracy ideas, which they quickly appropriated.¹⁶

The problem they both confronted was that of fitting an organization that had not been founded until 1776 and that appeared to have fizzled out in about 1787 into a conspiracist historiography. Building such a theory, while at the same time giving the Illuminati their due, required them to sweep in a whole raft of other organizations as ancestors, successors, affiliates, or subsidiaries of the Illuminati. In the end, Webster and Queenborough included, among many others, the Knights Templar, the kabbalists, the Rosicrucians, and the Carbonari, postulating or claiming to demonstrate all manner of linkages among dozens of clandestine groups. Thus was born the concept of a kind of interlocking directorate of conspirators who operate through a network of secret societies. The fact that there had actually been secret societies that had played a modest role in channeling European political dissent from about 1790 until the middle of the nineteenth century gave a surface plausibility to some of these claims, but scarcely provided justification for the wildly inflated charges made by Webster and Queenborough.¹⁷

Webster, writing in 1924, concluded that the world’s ills were attributable to anti-Christian Illuminati, to “Pan-German Power” (she was, after all, writing shortly after World War I), and to “the Jewish power.” She was unsure exactly how these three forces were intertwined, but proposed the following scenarios:

If . . . one inner circle exists, composed of Illuminati animated by a purely destructive purpose it is conceivable that they might find support in those Germans who desire to disintegrate the countries of the Allies with a view to future conquest, and in those Jews who hope to establish their empire on the ruins of Christian civilization. . . . On the other hand it may be that the hidden center consists in a circle of Jews located in the background of the Grand Orient [Masonry] working in accord and using both Pan-Germans and Gentile Illuminati as their tools.

She ended up unsure which was the more likely, though she clearly leaned toward the second possibility. In any case, who was using whom scarcely mattered, since the three forces differed only marginally in their capacity for evil.¹⁸

Lady Queenborough’s view of the world was much the same: a complex of secret societies acted in concert to control the world and corrupt its values through their domination of the arts, political parties, the press, crime, and a host of other forces. But for her the ultimate lever was money, because money could buy control. “This power,” she concluded, “is wholly in the hands of international Jewish financiers.” She had less difficulty than Webster in figuring out the relation between the Illuminati and the Jews; as far as she was concerned, the Illuminati was simply one tentacle of the Jewish world conspiracy: “Illuminism rep-resented the efforts of the heads of the powerful Jewish Kahal [sic] which has ever striven for the attainment of political, financial, economic and moral world domination.”¹⁹

Webster’s and Queenborough’s ideas quickly crossed the Atlantic. Once again, the main channel for their dissemination in America appears to have been Gerald Winrod. His 1935 pamphlet Adam Weishaupt, a Human Devil drew explicitly on Webster and Queenborough, as well as on Barruel and Robison. Paraphrasing Queenborough, Winrod concluded, “The real conspirators behind the Illuminati were Jews.” As far as he was concerned, communism in the Soviet Union was merely Illuminism’s most recent manifestation. “Karl Marx . . . edited [sic] his teaching out of the writings of Adam Weishaupt.” As if that were not sufficient, Winrod proceeded to lay out a series of resemblances between the Illuminati and the Bolsheviks, ranging from alleged ideological parallels to their common penchant for changing their names. He concluded “that the Illuminati was Jewish. In like manner the Moscow dictatorship is Jewish.” Hence to fight Jews was simultaneously to fight both communism and the Illuminati, who now merged into a single entity.²⁰

Anti-Illuminism thus became a staple of the American far right, particularly in that variant that linked the Illuminati to a worldwide Jewish conspiracy. This tendency was doubtless reinforced by the wide circulation given in the 1920s to Victor Marsden’s English translation of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, whose contents were disseminated in the United States through Henry Ford’s weekly newspaper, The Dearborn Independent. The Protocols purports to be the transcripts of speeches given to an assembly of Jewish “Elders” who collectively conspire to rule the world. It takes the form of twenty-four brief addresses that explain the techniques Jews and their Masonic allies will employ to subvert governments and institutions. As journalists and scholars quickly discovered, it was plagiarized from two sources: Maurice Joly’s A Dialogue in Hell: Conversations between Machiavelli and Montesquieu about Power and Right, a polemic directed against Napoleon III and having nothing to do with Jews; and an anti-Semitic novel, Biarritz, by “Sir John Retcliffe” (aka Hermann Goedsche).²¹

After World War II, however, the situation had seemingly changed. The Protocols had long been discredited as a forgery, anti-Semitism had begun what was to be a long and steady decline, and the fixation on the origins of the Russian Revolution, so strong in the interwar period, gave way to the predictable mutual hostilities of the Cold War. Indeed, one may speculate that this combination of factors explains the manner in which Hofstadter treated the Illuminati literature. Writing in the depths of the Cold War and preoccupied with the Red Scare of the 1950s, he treated the Illuminati literature not as a living part of American mythology but as an artifact of the early nineteenth century, interesting largely as a precursor of the paranoid political style. If Hofstadter was aware of the links among Webster, Queenborough, and Winrod, he chose not to mention them.

In fact, Illuminism was of more than merely antiquarian interest, for the American right was on the threshold of an Illuminati explosion. Much of the stimulus for this renewed interest came from the John Birch Society, founded by Robert Welch in 1958. Welch himself picked up the strands of Robison’s argument even as Hofstadter was writing in 1964, and it remained a staple of the society’s view of history after Welch’s death.²²

A recent systematic statement of Birch Society conspiracy theory blends traditional sources—Barruel and Robison—with modern scholarship on the Illuminati. It dismisses the supposed suppression of the order as meaningless, contending that it was soon transplanted to both the United States and other parts of Europe, where it gave rise to the Communist Manifesto and the revolts of 1848. The Birchite retelling attributes to the Illuminati the creation of movements as varied as “the Marxian and ‘utopian’ socialist movements; anarchism; syndicalism; Pan Slavism; Irish, Italian and German ‘Nationalism’; German Imperialism; the Paris Commune; British ‘New Imperialism’; Fabian Socialism; and Leninist Bolshevism.”²³

Contemporary Illuminati Literature

The post-1965 Illuminati literature became so vast that only a sampling can be discussed here, drawn from both secular and religious sources. Larry Abraham’s Call It Conspiracy, first published in 1971, claims to expose a conspiracy of “Insiders” bent on world domination: “After the Insiders have established the United Socialist States of America (in fact if not in name), the next step is the Great Merger of all nations of the world into a dictatorial world government.” Although his roster of Insiders is drawn from the usual reservoir—the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission—their roots are claimed to be in the late-eighteenth century Illuminati: “The role of Weishaupt’s Illuminists in such horrors as the Reign of Terror is unquestioned, and the techniques of the Illuminati have long been recognized as models for Communist methodology.”²⁴

While Abraham avoids the overt anti-Semitism of Webster and Queenborough, he treads perilously close to an anti-Semitic theory of history, in which Jews sit at the center of a conspiratorial web. “Anti-Semites,” he claims, “have played into the hands of the conspiracy by trying to portray the entire conspiracy as Jewish. Nothing could be farther from the truth.” Nonetheless, he places the Rothschilds at the conspiracy’s heart, and calls the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith an instrument created by “the Jewish members of the conspiracy” to “stifle . . . almost all honest scholarship on international bankers” through “highly professional smear jobs.” The Rothschild family established banks in Frankfurt, Vienna, Paris, and London. Their prominence as international bankers peaked in the early nineteenth century and waned thereafter as national governments became increasingly adept at raising funds without recourse to private bankers. Nonetheless, the specter of Rothschild power continued to grow even as the family’s real influence declined. Although this type of speculation was widespread throughout anti-Semitic circles in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it was notably strong in the United States, where radicals of every stripe seemed obsessed by financial conspiracies. The Rothschilds, who combined Jewishness, banking, and international ties, presented an attractive target.²⁵

A more openly anti-Semitic version of Illuminati theory came in 1984 from the pen of Eustace Mullins, a protégé of Ezra Pound. Like his mentor, Mullins sees the world’s evil as a product of financial manipulation, in which Jews play a central role. But as an explanation of world, as opposed to modern, history, his conspiracist vision makes the Illuminati merely a link in a much longer chain that extends back to the ancient Near East and forward to the nascent communist movement of the early Marx. Weishaupt himself is portrayed as a mere figurehead. As Queenborough and Winrod had claimed half a century earlier, Mullins sees the Illuminati as really run by Jews, in this case a Jewish banker who worked for the Illuminati’s “corresponding branch in Italy.”²⁶

A slightly different set of emphases informed William T. Still’s 1990 book, New World Order: The Ancient Plan of Secret Societies. Here, too, the link between the Illuminati and the Rothschilds is of prime importance. By the time Weishaupt and his key followers were forced to flee Bavaria, “the Illuminati had taken root among the rich and powerful of Europe, including, possibly, the wealthiest of all, the first international bankers and railway kings, the German brothers Rothschild.” Weishaupt’s infiltration of the Masonic movement, together with the Rothschilds’ money, made possible the manipulation of the French Revolution. But Still parts company with many earlier writers in concentrating on Masonry as the key to understanding the conspiracy’s reach. Jewish bankers may supply the conspiracy’s capital, but its camouflage comes from its control of the Masonic movement. Nevertheless, Still is willing to concede that in the twentieth century, the plotters have found alternative homes in such organizations as the Council on Foreign Relations.²⁷

Religious concerns hover in the background of much recent Illuminati literature; the Illuminatists’ deism tends to be regarded as anti-Christian agitation if not outright satanism. In the majority of the literature, the alleged Illuminatist attack on revealed religion is a secondary motif, but in the works of Texe Marrs and Pat Robertson, it emerges as the central theme.

Unlike almost all others who have written about the Illuminati, Texe Marrs detaches the idea from any historic roots. While deeply suspicious and fearful of Masonry, Marrs, a Texas-based evangelist, has no particular interest in Weishaupt, whom he barely mentions, or in the actual Illuminati order. Instead, the Illuminati becomes an umbrella category under which he can subsume everything from the Knights of Malta and Skull and Bones to the Aspen Institute and the Trilateral Commission: “All of these groups—and many more which we will expose—are part of one gigantic, unified, global network known collectively as the Secret Brotherhood. In the past they have also been identified as the Illuminati.” Although its members are anti-Christian, their demonic religion is itself part of God’s plan, a sign of the nearness of the millennial end-times. “The unseen men who rule the world are determined to bring in their New World Order by the magical year 2000—the advent of a New Millennium.” The chaos this portends “will fulfill Bible prophecy, for our Lord warned us the time would come when the very denizens of hell would lash out and attempt to destroy God’s people.” The Illuminati, by whatever name, are none other than the beast of the Book of Revelation.²⁸

No work on the Illuminati published in recent decades—whether secular or religious—has matched the influence of Pat Robertson’s The New World Order, which first appeared in 1991. With several hundred thousand copies in print, it turns up in mainstream bookstores and airport paperback racks, as well as at outlets that cater to evangelicals. Robertson’s secret plotters aim to create a world government, simultaneously attacking Christian religion and American liberties, and setting in motion the final struggle between the forces of good and evil that will bring history to a close.

In the course of laying out this scheme, Robertson presents a picture familiar to readers of Illuminati literature: Weishaupt’s order prepared the way for the French Revolution, then became the source for global communism, eventually producing the Russian Revolution. These efforts were financed at key points by Jewish international bankers: the Rothschilds; the firm of Kuhn, Loeb; Jacob Schiff; and the Warburgs.²⁹

This is scarcely an original scenario. Its significance lies not in its content but in its authorship, for Robertson is the first modern religious and political figure of national stature to embrace a belief in an Illuminatist conspiracy. Oddly enough, Robertson’s views passed nearly unnoticed by the mainstream press for four years, until 1995, when they became the subject of two lengthy and critical articles in the New York Review of Books. The articles’ authors, Michael Lind and Jacob Heilbrun, pointed out that Robertson had drawn heavily on the work of both Webster and Mullins, and that in fact he was recycling their anti-Semitic theory of history. The essays appeared at a time that Robertson’s political organization, the Christian Coalition, was reaching out beyond evangelical Protestants to other “people of faith,” including Jews. Stung by the Lind and Heilbrun articles, Robertson and the coalition’s then director, Ralph Reed, apologized to the Jewish community and denied holding anti-Semitic views. Nonetheless, even as his book continued to circulate widely, Robertson has never explained why he employed sources such as Webster and Mullins.³⁰

Authors such as Abraham, Still, Mullins, Marrs, and Robertson represent a widely diffused form of Illuminati conspiracy theory, but theirs is not the only version. They have done little more than produce variations on the synthesis developed by Webster and Queenborough. Simultaneously with this derivative literature, however, a second form of Illuminati material began to appear—what might best be described as superconspiracy theories. In these theories, a single line of secret-society plotters spawned by Illuminism is replaced by extraordinarily complex structures of plots layered within one another, like Russian nested dolls, or linked together in complex combinations. Beginning in the 1970s, increasingly complex scenarios of Illuminati plots began to circulate, first on the fringes of evangelical Protestantism, and subsequently in some New Age circles. Both varieties, for reasons that will become clear, quickly spread into the radical right.

Among the earliest descriptions of a superconspiracy was Des Griffin’s Fourth Reich of the Rich, which appeared in 1976. While Griffin accepts and builds on the work of Robison, Barruel, and Webster, he gives their traditional attack on the Illuminati a significant theological twist, for he projects the origins of the Illuminati back to before the creation of the world. He accomplishes this by fusing the original idea of an Illuminati conspiracy with the far older story of Lucifer’s rebellion against God.³¹

Griffin believes the earth was originally populated by Lucifer and his fallen angels, after the failure of their rebellion in heaven—a view held by others on the radical right, such as Christian Identity preacher Wesley Swift. Although Adam had the opportunity to undo Satan’s earthly crimes, his and Eve’s sin in the Garden eliminated that option. A satanic system was eventually institutionalized in Babylon by the shadowy Nimrod (a figure sufficiently obscure to be utilized freely by those seeking to reconstruct the antediluvian past). According to Griffin, Nimrod created a satanic religion that not only survived the Flood but eventually infiltrated and captured the Catholic Church. Griffin owes this strange argument to a Scottish divine, Alexander Hislop (1807–65), who presented an almost identical view in his book The Two Babylons, published in the 1850s.³²

The novelty of Griffin’s work lies in his fusion of this version of sacred history with conspiracist explanations of modern politics. Thus, in addition to their seizure of the Catholic Church, he claims that satanic forces also lay behind the founding of the Illuminati, which was to become the master instrument in Lucifer’s scheme to regain full control of the earth. Even the Illuminati’s apparent dissolution in the late 1780s was part of the plan, the better to conceal the conspirators’ nefarious activities: “This lie [concerning the dissolution of the Illuminati] has been perpetuated ever since by ‘historians’ anxious to cover the truth about the Illuminati’s subsequent activities.”³³

These activities took familiar forms: the French and Russian Revolutions, the establishment of the Federal Reserve, and the advancement of a global dictatorship. In thus linking the Illuminati with both an obscure Luciferian past and a revolutionary future, Griffin made possible a form of anti-Semitism far more sweeping than that which had appeared in the interwar synthesis. He did so by bringing into prominence a theme that had been subordinate in Webster’s writing about The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. While Webster was inclined to regard The Protocols as an authentic document of some kind, she was not entirely sure what kind it was—not surprising in light of the fact that her own book, Secret Societies and Subversive Movements, was published only a few years after the forgery had been exposed.³⁴

Griffin, writing more than half a century later, has no such reservations. Indeed, he asserts that The Protocols is none other than “the ‘Long Range Master Plan’ by which this comparatively small group of immensely wealthy, diabolically crafty and extremely influential men [the leaders of the Illuminati] plan to subvert and pervert the leadership in all strata of society in order to attain their goal.” As for the Jews, they are important participants in the plot, but The Protocols was deliberately given a Jewish cast so that its Illuminati origins could be better concealed. Griffin reprints most of The Protocols verbatim—launching what was to become a staple of conspiracism in the 1990s, the idea of the “Illuminati Protocols.”³⁵

At the same time that Griffin was laying out his superconspiracy, tales of an equally involved Illuminati plot were sweeping through churches, mainly Pentecostal ones. From 1976 to 1979, itinerant evangelist John Todd began to present, through personal appearances and audiotapes, a strange tale of Illuminati intrigues. Todd claimed to have been raised by a witch mother and trained as a witch since his early teens. He had allegedly progressed through an occult hierarchy until he was made a “Grand Druid High Priest” and “a member of the Druid Council of Thirteen,” the instrumentality through which he claimed the Illuminati implemented their designs.³⁶

Todd was a shadowy figure who moved around frequently, but the basic outlines of his career as an evangelist have been reconstructed. He appeared first as a storefront preacher in Phoenix, Arizona, in 1968. He was then nineteen and already claimed to have been a witch before his born-again experience. He appears to have been in the army from 1969 until sometime in the early 1970s. He had psychiatric problems in the military, though it is not clear whether they led to his discharge. He reemerged in the Phoenix Pentecostal subculture in 1973 with much-elaborated tales of his witchcraft days. He left for Dayton, Ohio, the next year, where instead of rejoining Christian organizations, he opened an occult store, the Witches Cauldron. He apparently engaged in sex with minors during this period, for which he received a sentence of six months in jail. Released after two months and placed on probation, he quickly violated his parole by returning to the Phoenix Pentecostal community, though he may have continued to dabble in the occult. He next appeared in California as a Christian evangelist. During at least some of this time, he appeared to gravitate toward fundamentalism and attacked Pentecostals. Within a few years, his itinerant preaching and tapes of his sermons began to spread widely among conservative Christians.³⁷

Todd’s superconspiracy was remarkably detailed, so much so that there seemed to be more institutions within the conspiracy than outside it. Todd was less concerned with reconstructing history than with laying out the conspiracy’s structure. In place of discussions of the French and Russian Revolutions, he substituted elaborate diagrams of conspiratorial hierarchies, which he passed out at church meetings. The Illuminati allegedly worked its will largely by wielding financial power, led by the Rothschilds but aided by, among others, the Rockefeller, Kennedy, and Dupont families; the central banks of England, France, and the United States; the world copper market; and many major corporations. The Council of 13, of which Todd claimed to have been a member, executed decisions of the Rothschild tribunal through its control of churches, political institutions, and voluntary associations. Thus, among its lackeys were the World Council of Churches, the Anti-Defamation League, the Council of Foreign Affairs [sic], the United Nations, the FBI, the CIA, the Communist Party, the John Birch Society, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Masons, and the Knights of Columbus. In Todd’s mind, the Illuminati were Satan’s coordinating mechanism, through which diabolical forces insinuated themselves into virtually every aspect of American life.³⁸

Todd not only exposed the depth of the Illuminati’s penetration, he also claimed to know its “Plan for World Takeover.” It involved removing the Republicans from control, repealing the tax exemption for churches, criminalizing genocide (which Todd interpreted as meaning that converting someone from one religion to another could result in a murder charge), awarding martial-law powers to the president, and passing an antihoarding act. At the same time, Israel would cause World War III, and the financial machinations of the Rothschilds would leave all Americans at their mercy. Todd even incorporated Charles Manson’s “helter skelter” plan, in which the country would be terrorized by motorcycle gangs.³⁹

By the late 1970s, Todd’s increasingly strident attacks on other Christian religious leaders had begun to erode his support. During these years, he predicted that the Illuminati’s plan would begin to be implemented in fall 1979. In 1984, Todd was placed on five years’ probation for incest and in 1988 was sentenced to thirty years in prison in South Carolina for rape.⁴⁰ He was subsequently involuntarily committed to a behavioral-disorders treatment program as a sexually violent predator. Todd was a man of many names as well as a prolific litigator while in custody, where he generally sued as “Kris Sarayn Kollyns.” In one curious filing, he attacked personnel at his institution for preventing him from practicing his Wiccan religion, an odd complaint for someone whose brief moment of fame was tied to his claim to having unmasked the witchcraft conspiracy.⁴¹ In response to what must have been his last foray in the judicial system, a later court reported that “the plaintiff died on or about November 10, 2007.”⁴² Notwithstanding the strange trajectory of his later life, his ideas maintained an independent existence. They were adopted wholesale by the heavily armed Christian Identity commune, the Covenant, Sword, and Arm of the Lord, which published a summary of Todd’s conspiracy beliefs in a 1981 pamphlet, Witchcraft and the Illuminati.⁴³

The penetration of Illuminati superconspiracy theories into fundamentalist and right-wing circles was predictable. The former found them a vivid demonstration of the devil’s doings, while the latter used them to conceptualize a cunning, shape-changing literature of the “New Age.” The New Age is a construct variously described in terms of the counterculture, self-actualization, neopaganism, and individual spirituality. The appearance of Illuminati themes in this amorphous area has, however, been limited to a relatively well-defined segment of the literature— specifically, that concerned with UFOs and extraterrestrials.⁴⁴

One of the earliest attempts to link the Illuminati with UFOs came in 1978 from Stan Deyo, an American expatriate in Australia. His book The Cosmic Conspiracy fused Illuminati theory with dispensational premillennialism and a variety of UFO speculation generally referred to as Alternative 3. Alternative 3 began as the eponymous 1977 British television program that purported to expose a plot in which a secret organization of the superrich kidnapped and exploited scientists in order to create a clandestine space-colonization program that would allow them to escape the earth before pollution and overpopulation reached catastrophic levels. Though widely considered a hoax, both the television program and a subsequent book quickly came to be accepted as fact by many conspiracy theorists.⁴⁵

Deyo’s book is not entirely coherent, but the basic argument may be reconstructed as follows. The Illuminati’s remote origins lay in the “mystery school of Moses,” whose esoteric teachings were amplified and transmitted by Solomon and the master masons who built Solomon’s temple. In time, however, these “mysticists” split into two factions, one religious and one antireligious. The Illuminati provided the leadership for the “perverted,” antireligious faction.⁴⁶

The Illuminati went underground after the French Revolution (Deyo, not surprisingly, cites Robison), but their hand remained visible in subsequent upheavals: “modern ‘observers’ must surely concede that the most daring and diabolical social experiments in the history of man are presently illustrating the basic tenets of Weishaupt’s school in both Russia and China.” Far from limiting their activities to Europe and Asia, however, the Illuminati have insinuated themselves into centers of power in America. Indeed, according to Deyo, the Great Seal of the United States is full of Illuminati symbolism (a theme commonly found in conspiracist literature). The fixation on the seal emphasizes its reverse side. Conspiracists like Deyo insist that the pyramid capped by a single eye is an Illuminati symbol, and they translate the motto “Novus ordo seclorum,” not as “A new order of the ages,” but as “New world order.” He concludes that from a scriptural point of view, “America is either a pawn of the modern Babylonian mystery school or the seat of the ‘new Babylon’ mentioned in Christian prophecy.” The Illuminati’s power structure is made up of familiar elements: the Council on Foreign Relations, the United Nations, the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderbergers (an organization of European and North American movers and shakers), the Club of Rome (a private international organization of civil servants, academics, and business people devoted to the study of global problems), and the Royal Institute of International Affairs (a London-based foreign policy think tank founded in 1920).⁴⁷

To this point, there is little in Deyo’s arguments to differentiate them from theories already introduced by Robison, Webster, Griffin, and others. He enters new territory, however, with the appearance of his variation on Alternative 3. Powerful though the Illuminati are, their ultimate goal, “the establishment of a dictatorial world government,” has remained just out of reach. It could be achieved, Deyo speculates, only in a sufficiently charged atmosphere of global crisis. A crisis of unimaginable dimensions could both maintain cohesion within the Illuminatist forces and induce the population to accept unprecedented regimentation. What might induce people to give up their freedom? Deyo suggests that an appropriate catalyst would be an invasion by UFOs, in either of two scenarios. One envisions a fake extraterrestrial invasion, in which conspirators on earth produce an armada of seemingly alien flying saucers manned by human impostors, in order to create an artificial common enemy against which humanity could unite under a world government—an idea similar to that proposed by André Maurois in his 1923 tale, The Next Chapter: The War against the Moon.⁴⁸

But Deyo seems more attracted to a scenario drawn from Alternative 3, in which cascading deprivations lead an increasingly desperate humanity to accept the leadership of seemingly benevolent “space brothers,” who are in reality the conspirators in disguise:

I can see it now . . . frozen in an energy crisis, saddened by the Watergates of the world, dying from environmental pollution, starving from food shortages, frightened of a global nuclear war, sick of the moral decay, afraid of the daily news, bankrupted by global monetary fluctuations, unemployed from economic depressions, crowded by the ever present birth rate, frightened by the suspicion that a global weather catastrophe was about to happen . . . man-kind . . . would have been ready for “Alternative Three.”

In Deyo’s variation, the conspirators bring in spacecraft manned by “teams of highly-trained actors,” who offer their leadership in “the greatest attempted deception of all history.” The Illuminati, having discovered the secret of antigravity propulsion, can now use their fleet of flying saucers first to control the earth and then, if circumstances require, to leave it.⁴⁹

Deyo then takes this strange idea one step further by linking it to dispensational premillennialism, in a manner not unlike that of Marrs and Robertson. God’s plan for the end of history requires seven years of the Tribulation before Christ’s Second Coming can inaugurate the millennial age. Essential to the Tribulation is a New World Order ruled by the Antichrist and his forces, whose control has been made possible by the appearance of the false extraterrestrials. Presumably, the saved will be spared the severities of Illuminati rule, having been rescued in the Rapture of the Church, a disappearance made plausible to those who remain by the presence of UFOs. On this point, however, Deyo is ambiguous, for he closes his book with the survivalist admonition that all opponents of the Illuminati should “acquire warm clothing, good walking boots, means of procuring food from the land, a basic medical kit, and a Bible.”⁵⁰

The Conspiracism of Milton William Cooper

The most elaborate and convoluted such theory, however, has come from Milton William Cooper, characterized by one scholar of apocalypticism, Daniel Wojcik, as “perhaps the most infamous UFO conspiracy theorist.” Regardless of whether this accurately characterizes Cooper, his 1991 book Behold a Pale Horse is not only among the most complex superconspiracy theories, it is also among the most influential, widely available in mainstream bookstores but also much read in both UFO and militia circles. What little is known about Cooper’s life prior to his career as a conspiracist came from Cooper himself. He claimed to have been raised in a military family, to have served first in the air force and then in the navy (the latter in Vietnam), and to have been discharged in 1975. After graduating from a junior college in California, he worked for several technical and vocational schools. He burst onto the ufology scene in 1988 with dramatic revelations of government involvement with extraterrestrials, charges he repeated in Behold a Pale Horse.⁵¹

Cooper projected the Illuminati back to remote origins as the manifestation of a long-simmering Luciferian plot. Far from having been founded by Weishaupt, the Illuminati were an outgrowth of the sinister activities of the medieval Knights Templar. Weishaupt merely established a new and particularly evil outpost of this order, financed by the Rothschilds. Although Cooper denied any anti-Semitic intent, he followed his predecessors in linking the Illuminati to Jewish influences. As Griffin had claimed earlier, Cooper asserted that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was an Illuminatist tract. Indeed, he reprinted the entire text, with the somewhat disingenuous prefatory note that “this [The Protocols] has been written intentionally to deceive people. For clear understanding, the word ‘Zion’ should be ‘Sion’; any reference to Jews should be replaced with the word ‘Illuminati’; and the word ‘goyim’ should be replaced with the word ‘cattle.’”⁵²

American members of the Illuminati became so emboldened, Cooper said, that they felt free to incorporate Illuminatist and Luciferian themes into the Great Seal of the United States, and he repeated the common claim that the phrase “Novus ordo seclorum” on the seal really means “New world order.” The Illuminati, however, are allegedly not an American but an international organization, whose inner circle is the Bilderbergers. The Bilderberg group, an organization of European and North American businessmen, academics, and lawyers, was founded in 1952 and—like its offshoot, the Trilateral Commission—has been a favorite of conspiracy theorists seeking to identify the secret holders of power. Cooper claimed that together with a dizzying array of other secret societies and front organizations—including the Knights of Columbus, the Jesuits, the Masons, the Communist Party, the Nazi Party, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Vatican, and Skull and Bones—the Illuminati and the Bilderbergers “all work toward the same ultimate goal, a New World Order.” When the conspirators feel ready, their minions in the federal government will swoop down on “patriots,” probably on a national holiday, and incarcerate them in detention centers run by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, removing the last sources of resistance.⁵³

To this point, Cooper’s theory resembles the speculations of earlier conspiracists such as Todd. But UFO themes eventually emerged as central to Cooper’s view of the world. Indeed, he presented not one but two Illuminati-UFO superconspiracy theories, both of which he alleged to be true. The first, like Deyo’s, assumed that the conspirators capitalize on fear of catastrophe by inventing an alien threat in order to arrange their own rescue. The second claimed that actual extraterrestrials are acting in concert with human plotters to take over the world.

According to the first version, Illuminatists have been working on an invasion-from-outer-space hoax since 1917, the better to bring the New World Order into being. The Cold War was no hindrance, as the Soviet leaders were active participants in the conspiracy. Cooper claimed to have seen documents showing that once a year, U.S. and Soviet nuclear submarines met under the polar ice, connected their airlocks, and hosted a meeting of the Bilderberg policy committee to advance “combined efforts in the secret space programs governing Alternative 3”—surely as bizarre a gathering as one can find in a literature replete with strange meetings.⁵⁴ Such astonishing efforts were necessary, according to Cooper, because “the elite” had learned that the future of the human race was grim in the absence of dictatorial regimentation:

They were told that by or shortly after the year 2000 the total collapse of civilization as we know it and the possible extinction of the human race could occur . . . They were told that the only things that could stop these predicted events would be severe cutbacks of the human population, the cessation or retardation of technological and economic growth, the elimination of meat in the human diet, strict control of future human reproduction, a total commitment to preserving the environment, the colonization of space, and a paradigm shift in the evolutionary consciousness of man.

Only the New World Order can accomplish this. Even Cooper conceded that it may be necessary: “The New World Order is evil but very much needed if man is to survive long enough to plant his seed amongst the stars.”⁵⁵

But while at one level, Cooper ruefully conceded that the New World Order is a grim necessity, at another he was prepared to do battle with evil. That other level concerned the aliens, for even though Cooper sometimes believed Illuminati circles would invent an extraterrestrial threat in order to provide a pretext for the seizure of power, at other times he was certain that the ETs have already arrived.

Cooper was one of the first to link Illuminati theory with some of the stranger beliefs about extraterrestrials that began to appear in ufology circles in the late 1980s. In Cooper’s version, sixteen alien spacecraft crashed in the United States during the Truman administration, leading the inner circles of government to fear an imminent invasion from space. According to Cooper, the next president, Dwight Eisenhower, decided that the safest path was a negotiated treaty with the aliens, and one was allegedly signed on February 20, 1954, by Eisenhower and “our first alien ambassador from outer space.” In order to regulate relations with the aliens while keeping their presence secret, an inner circle was established within the U.S. government, consisting of individuals involved with and controlled by the Illuminati. Although the aliens have proved to be slippery allies, routinely violating the treaty, they have been a boon to the Illuminati, who could now pursue an Alternative 3–style escape from the earth’s coming calamities, thanks to the space travel technology they acquired.⁵⁶

In the end, Cooper gave the aliens the last word, asserting that the Illuminati are really not so powerful after all. In fact, the conspirators are little more than the unknowing tools of extraterrestrial masters: “aliens have manipulated and/or ruled the human race through various secret societies, religions, magic, witchcraft, and the occult.” The Illuminati, seemingly at the pinnacle of the world’s power hierarchy, are exposed as the dupes of a strange and evil alien race.⁵⁷

THE NEW WORLD ORDER AS A POST–COLD WAR PHENOMENON

As we have seen, by the early 1990s, both the Antichrist and the Illuminati literatures had identified their respective subjects with an imminent tyranny most often subsumed under the New World Order rubric. The two literatures had also begun partially to overlap, so that religious students of the Antichrist like Robertson experienced no difficulty in drawing the Illuminati into their speculations. The two might 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