THE NEW WORLD ORDER: A Brief History

During his 2005 inaugural address, given at the height of the Second Iraq War, President George W. Bush, amidst a rhythmic wave of noble patriotic sentiment, said something very strange:

“We go forward with complete confidence in the eventual triumph of freedom. Not because history runs on the wheels of inevitability; it is human choices that move events. Not because we consider ourselves a chosen nation; God moves and chooses as He wills. We have confidence because freedom is the permanent hope of mankind, the hunger in dark places, the longing of the soul. When our Founders declared a new order of the ages; when soldiers died in wave upon wave for a union based on liberty; when citizens marched in peaceful outrage under the banner "Freedom Now" - they were acting on an ancient hope that is meant to be fulfilled. History has an ebb and flow of justice, but history also has a visible direction, set by liberty and the Author of Liberty.”

President Bush’s narrative of American history here is heavily colored by the neoconservative “Whig” or “Wilsonian” narrative of the development of America as the long march of freedom and equality against the forces of reaction and repression.  On one level, this argument is actually not so strange in as much as its utopian Masonic vision of America has been present in the United States since its very beginning. Moreover, there is also an immediate historical context for the 43rd president’s speech, for language of “the eventual triumph of freedom” clearly is referring to War on Terror (which continues to this very day, fourteen years later).

However, there are a few choice phrases that stand out as especially queer and are, in fact, redolent with strange occultic and New Age concepts.

The phrase “new order of the ages” on the great seal was famously placed on the back of the U.S. one dollar bill in 1935 by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt at the instigation of Henry Wallace who served as Secretary of Agriculture for FDR from 1933-1940 before becoming vice president from 1941-1945.

The Great Seal of the United States, so beloved of Wallace, has a very curious legend surrounding it. Allegedly, Thomas Jefferson, the author of the original “All Seeing Eye” seal, in a scene very similar to Joseph Smith’s vision of the Book of Mormon and Mohammed’s narrative of the reception of the Koran, was visited by a black figure at night who handed him an illustration of the seal.  (more...)

THE NEW WORLD ORDER: A Brief History Part I    Part II    Part III