I Was Wrong About the New World Order

But not, unfortunately, in the way you are probably hoping from my title. In a previous post I wrote:

“By the way, the One World Government folks actually started tossing around their motto, “The New World Order” back in the days of Bush 41.”

LRC reader Brian Reilly informed me that “The New World Order” was referenced decades earlier by Secretary of State, Robert B. Lansing in his 1921 book, The Peace Negotiations, a Personal Narrative:

“Without denying that present conditions have, of necessity, modified the old policy of isolation and without minimizing the influence of that fact on the conduct of American foreign affairs, it did not seem essential for the United States to become the guardian of any of the peoples of the Near East, who were aspiring to become independent nationalities, a guardianship which the President held to be a duty that the United States was bound to perform as its share of the burden imposed by the international cooperation which he considered vital to the new world order.”

But it gets even worse. After posting the above, LRC contributor Charles Burris wrote to remind me that in an LRC post he wrote in February he cited an excerpt from a book by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engles written in 1844 called The Holy Family. Here’s my abbreviated version of it:

“Undeterred by this examination, the French Revolution gave rise to ideas which led beyond the ideas of the entire old world order….The revolutionary movement which began in 1789…gave rise to the communist idea…This idea, consistently developed, is the idea of the new world order.”

“The New World Order”—from Communists Marx and Engels to CNN (which, ironically, for years I’ve been referring to as the  Communist News Network). Uh-oh.