THE NEW WORLD ORDER
Between 1983-1986, the British-born conspiracy theorist Antony Sutton wrote a series of pamphlets about the Order of Skull & Bones. According to informed sources, Sutton was one of several historians who were provided with a large file of the Order’s internal documents, including minutes of some meetings, descriptions of rituals, and what would appear to be a rather complete list of its members from its founding through to the early 1980s. The short pamphlets were compiled into one volume and published as a book in 1986.
For someone closely following the just-concluded Persian Gulf War and attempting to gain some insight into George Bush’s performance during that largely orchestrated affair, one recurring theme in the Sutton volume stands out like a sore thumb: the New World Order.
According to the Skull & Bones documents used by Sutton in his somewhat flawed profile of the Order, the creation of a New World Order is a primary goal of the Bonesmen and has been for decades. For the initiates into the Order, the term New World Order has a very specific meaning.
It is a world dominated by American military power and American control over all strategic raw materials. Just as the Greek city-state of Sparta provided the Skull & Bones with the image of a WASP warrior caste, the Persian Empire, with its system of coalitions of satrap armies, provides the model for the Bonesmen’s New World Order. The image of Secretary of State James A. Baker III traveling from foreign capital to foreign capital demanding military legions or chests of gold to finance the war for a New World Order is an image straight out of the chronicles of the Persian Empire.
According to the recent biography of Henry Stimson, the man who inspired President Bush was firmly convinced that it was essential for America to go to war once every generation or so. It was, for Stimson, a spiritually cleansing process which enables the nation to rally behind a cause and overcome its weaknesses and shortcomings in one grand burst of military fervor. The romantic mystique of the purgative powers of combat is key to understanding the political philosophy of Skull & Bones.
Although America’s Vietnam debacle remains a bitter memory of the Bonesmen’s failure in war, the recent Persian Gulf conflict, with its massive overkill and the use of highly advanced weapons and technologies, is now the new glorious symbol of the WASP warrior caste’s reincarnation. When President Bush vowed that the Gulf War would not be another Vietnam, he was speaking first and foremost to his fellow Bonesmen — not to the American people. If such thinking smacks of dangerous fantasy on the part of a major world power in the modern era, it is indeed.
On a more practical political level, the Gulf War was a gambit to save the Bush presidency from a mounting pile of domestic financial woes, not the least of which was the savings and loan (S&L) crisis and a pending series of failures of major commercial banks. In the months preceding the Gulf showdown, the president’s own son, Neil Bush, came under intense media scrutiny for his role in the failure of a large S&L in Colorado. Neil’s photograph, testifying under oath before a congressional committee probing fraud among top S & L managers, became a familiar front-page feature in every major newspaper in America, threatening dangerous popular disillusion with the Yale Bonesman in the White House. With a U.S. federal government deficit projected at nearly a half a trillion dollars for Fiscal Year 1991, in large part because of the S&L crisis and a shrinking business tax base, the Democratic Party majority in the U.S. Congress was pressing for deep cutbacks in defense spending now that the Cold War had ended.
On the international stage, the reunification of Germany, clearly the most dramatic event of 1990, posed new challenges to the Bush team. Germany was about to emerge as the dominant power in continental Europe by virtue of its advanced industrial infrastructure and its long tradition of independent political dealings with Moscow. Just months before the outbreak of the Gulf crisis, Germany’s Chancellor Helmut Kohl had met with Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and signed a long term economic assistance pact. As a result, Gorbachev dropped all remaining objections to the immediate reunification of Germany.
At that point, the Bush administration changed its tactics. Previously, in sharp contrast to the Thatcher government in Great Britain, it had been nominally in favor of German reunification. But at the Houston economic summit of the Group of Seven Industrialized Countries in the summer of 1990, the United States blocked (with Britain) Germany’s plan of unconditional economic aid to the Soviet Union. President Bush took the position that the Soviet Union must submit to International Monetary Fund requisites as a precondition for any substantive economic assistance.
In the Far East, Japan’s continuing growth in manufacturing also posed a threat to Washington’s desire to retain superpower status. If President Bush and his Bonesmen coterie were unaware of a stunning historical analogy, their British “cousins” were quick to pick up on the parallels between the global strategic situation in July 1990 and the identical international situation that existed 100 years earlier.
In the 1890s, France, under the brilliant political leadership of Foreign Minister Gabriel Hanataux, was attempting to forge a Eurasian alliance with Germany, Russia and Meiji Japan. The idea was to link continental Europe with Japan and China through a series of large overland infrastructure projects, beginning with the Trans-Siberian Railroad. Through treaties covering key areas of economic and security matters, Hanataux hoped to create a zone of prosperity, built on a foundation of rapid economic growth and extensive trade.
Such a political-economic common interest alliance threatened the imperial hegemony of Great Britain. At the turn of the 20th century, Britain looked to the United States (as its English-speaking ally) to join in sabotaging the Hanataux plan. Through the Spanish-American War of 1898 and the Russo-Japanese War of 1905, Britain and her American junior partner (by then led by Henry Stimson’s old mentor Teddy Roosevelt) managed to disrupt the French-German-Russian-Japanese economic axis. Two world wars and the Great Depression were the consequences of that interference.
