Vladimir Moss – Orthodox Christianity Author

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GLOBALIZATION AND THE NEW WORLD ORDER: AN ORTHODOX PERSPECTIVE

Written by Vladimir Moss

GLOBALIZATION AND THE NEW WORLD ORDER: AN ORTHODOX PERSPECTIVE

     “The real victor in 1989,” writes Mark Mazower, “was not democracy but capitalism.”[1] But it was a new kind of capitalism – globalization. Not that globalization was really new. As Peter Frankopan writes, “We think of globalization as a uniquely modern phenomenon; yet 2000 years ago too, it was a fact of life, one that presented opportunities, created problems and prompted technological advance…

     “Two millennia ago, silks made by hand in China were being worn by the rich and powerful in Carthage and other cities in the Mediterranean, while pottery manufacted in southern France could be found in England and in the Persian Gulf. Spices and condiments grown in India were being used in the kitchens of Xinjiang, as they were in those of Rome. Buildings in northern Afghanistan carried inscriptions in Greek, while horses from Central Asia were being ridden proudly thousands of miles away in the east.”[2]

     What was new after 1989 was the width and depth of the new wave of globalization that had begun in the 1950s under the aegis of America, and became consolidated after the victory of America, the world’s only remaining superpower, in 1989-91, enabling Eastern Europe and other formerly communist regions to take part in its formerly forbidden delights.

     During the Cold War, there had been two very different worlds, Capitalism and Communism, and a third world that swayed from one side to the other. By the end of the millennium there was essentially only one world, the world of globalization. Even Russia and China became partially globalized: only North Korea and to some extent Iran remained outside the new global civilization.

     “I believe,” wrote Thomas L. Friedman, “that if you want to understand the post-Cold War world you have to start by understanding that a new international system has succeeded it – globalization. This is ‘The One Big Thing’ people should focus on. Globalization is not the only thing influencing events in the world today, but to the extent that there is a North Star and a worldwide shaping force, it is this system. What is new is the system. What is old is power politics, chaos, clashing civilizations and liberalism. And what is the drama of the post-Cold War world is the interaction between this new system and these old passions.”[3]

     This was an exaggeration: the old world was by no means dead, neither its “passions” nor its political structures. But there can be no arguing about the importance of globalization. The question is: what is it? 

     Investopedia defines globalization as “the tendency of investment funds and businesses to move beyond domestic and national markets to other markets around the globe, thereby increasing the interconnection of the world. Globalization has had the effect of markedly increasing international trade and cultural exchange.”[4] But it has eroded the power of national governments and increased those of multi-national corporations (150 MNCs now control two-thirds of the world economy). If national governments do not cooperate with the MNCs and the globalization process, they risk seeing factories and jobs removed to other, lower-wage-paying countries. This causes unemployment in some industries and therefore social unrest.

     Moreover, while trade liberalization may provide comparative advantage, especially in a period when tariffs are initially high (as in the post-war period), it is quite another matter with financial liberalization. For, as Mazower writes, “the globalization of financial makes it increasingly difficult for nation-states to preserve autonomy of action, yet markets – as a series of panics and crashes demonstrates – generate their own irrationalities and social tensions. The globalization of labour, too, challenges prevailing definitions of national citizenship, culture and tradition.”[5]

     While true globalists welcome these tensions and disruptions as creating the perceived need for a world government, the shorter-term consequences are undoubtedly bad. Thus Dani Rodrik writes in 2018: “Perhaps the hyper-globalisers’ most egregious mistake after the 1990s was to promote financial globalization. They took the textbook argument and ran amok with it. Free flow of finance across the world would, it was confidently predicted, set money to work where it could do most good. With free-flowing capital, savings would be automatically channeled to countries with higher returns; with access to the world markets, economies and entrepreneurs would have access to more dependable finance; and, ordinary individual savers would benefit, too, as they’d no longer be compelled to put all their nest eggs in one national basket.

     “These gains, by and large, simply never materialized; sometimes, the effect was the opposite of what was promised. China became an exporter of capital, rather than an importer of it, which is what the theory implied young and poor countries should be. Loosening the chains of finance produced a string of extremely costly financial crises, including that in East Asia in 1997. There is, at best, a weak correlation between opening up to foreign finance and economic growth. But there is a strong empirical association between financial globalization and financial crises over time, as there have been since the 19^th century, when freely moving international capital would flow with gusto into the Argentinian railways or some far-flung corner of the British Empire one minute, only to flee away from it the next.

     “Modern financial globalization went furthest in the Eurozone. Monetary unification aimed at complete financial integration, by removing all transaction costs associated with national borders. The introduction of the euro in 1999 did indeed drive down risk premiums in countries such as Greece, Spain, and Portugal, as borrowing costs converged. But what was the effect? To enable borrowers to run large current account deficits, and accumulate problematic amounts of external debt. Money flowed into those parts of the debtor economies that couldn’t be traded across borders – above all, construction – at the expense of tradable activities. Credit booms eventually turned into the inevitable busts, and sustained slumps in Greece, Spain, Portugal and Ireland followed amid the global credit crunch.

     “Today, the economics profession’s view on financial globalization is ambivalent at best. It is well understood that market and government failures – asymmetric information, bank runs, excess volatility, inadequate regulation – are endemic to the financial markets. Globalisation often accentuates these failures. Indeed, in the 1997 East Asian crisis those economies that kept more control of foreign capital survived with less damage. In sum, unconditional openness to foreign finance is hardly ever a good idea…”[6]

     Globalization, then, has both pros and cons… Samuel Huntingdon made an important distinction between two different things that were becoming global: modernization and westernization.[7] Globalization in the sense of the modernization and integration of the whole world is not evil in itself. It could even work to the furtherance of the good - and not only economic good - in certain circumstances. If, for example, the True Faith could be preached globally, using global means of communication, as it was in the time of the apostles. Thus would the Lord’s prophecy be fulfilled: “This Gospel of the Kingdom will be preached in all the world as a witness to all the nations, and then the end will come” (Matthew 24.14). What is evil is the globalization of westernization, the spreading of the apostate culture of the western world.[8]

      It is easy to see that a global republic or kingdom would have no place in it for Orthodoxy except as a kind of cultural museum, an exhibition of East European folklore, and could very quickly turn the propaganda of freedom into the reality of a tyranny that could be worse than any that has gone before it.

     Opinions on globalization are thus sharply divided. Indeed, the debate between the globalists and anti-globalists is probably the sharpest debate in the contemporary world. Christians tend to believe that since the Tower of Babel, different languages and nations have been created by God to slow down the spread of evil, and as refuges against it; but for atheist globalists individual, sovereign nations are the evil.

* 

     Globalization leads logically to the demand for a world government that will regulate the process of globalization, facilitating it and removing the supposed obstacles to the prosperity of the global community, such as global warming or the spread of pandemics or over-population.

     There is no longer any secret about the fact that many of the world’s richest and most powerful men are working towards a world government. This was being spoken about openly already by Bush and Gorbachev at the end of the Cold War; they saw it as a natural product of the new international situation brought about by perestroika and the end of the Cold War. Bush went further, using what for many was a code word for something more sinister: “the new world order”. For Bush this appeared to refer to the rule of international law administered by the United Nations in close cooperation with the United States as the world’s only surviving superpower and executed most successfully by the international alliance assembled for Operation Desert Storm against Saddam Hussein. It was based on several presuppositions that were fulfilled, briefly, under Bush senior, but not fulfilled under his son, Bush junior. These included:

1.     The willingness of the non-democratic members of the Security Council – Russia and China – to cooperate with the consensus of the other nations and not apply their vetoes. As time passed, this willingness disappeared. By 2003 even western members of the Council, such as France, refused to cooperate.

2.     The willingness of the United States never to take the initiative in overseas military operations without the agreement of the United Nations. This disappeared under Bush junior, whose neo-con government was openly contemptuous of the United Nations.

3.     The willingness of the United States to act solely in the interests of “the international community”, and of the populations of those countries subject to invasion, and not in order to promote its own interests, political, military or economic. This was not the case in 2003, when the interests of the Iraqi people as a whole were scarcely considered, while the interests of American big corporations, such as Halliburton, played a major role.

4.     The willingness of the United States not to obey the wishes of the Israelis unconditionally. Thus Bush senior “enraged the Israel lobby during the Gulf war by pressuring Israel not to respond to Iraq’s missile attacks, choosing not to occupy Baghdad and promising America’s Arab allies that the US would push Israel on the Palestinian issue.”[9] 

     President Bush’s reference to a “new world order” was rich in connotations for conspiracy theorists, who have seen in this phrase the code-name for an age-old conspiracy at world domination, going back to Weishaupt’s Illuminati of the late eighteenth century.

     Thus Mike Hanson writes: “Many believe that a powerful group of Illuminati Freemasons manipulated and won the War of Independence in 1776 and then took control of the new United States of America. They believe that this Secret Brotherhood has never conceded that control to this day. It is interesting to note the design for the Great Seal of the United States, which contains magical symbols dating to ancient Egypt and beyond, including the pyramid and all-seeing eye of Horus. Above and below this symbol are two Latin phrases, Annuit Coeptis and Novus Ordo Seclorum. These translate as ‘Announcing the birth, creation, or arrival’ of ‘A Secular [Non-Religious] New Order of Ages’. In other words, they were announcing the creation of the New World Order.

     “The founding of the United States was a massive step in the plan for centralized global power. Today, this part of the Great Seal can be found on the back of every US dollar bill, which seems appropriate, given that the Secret Brotherhood controls the American economy. The decision to put the Pyramid and Novus Ordo Seculorum symbol on the dollar was made by the 33^rd degree Freemason, Franklin D. Roosevelt, in 1935, with the full support and encouragement of his vice president, Henry Wallace, another 33^rd degree Mason. The American flag was also designed to reflect Brotherhood symbolism, and the Statue of Liberty [representing Isis] was given to American Freemasons by a French Grand Orient (Illuminati) Masonic Order.

     “Today, the Secret Brotherhood’s conspiratorial network includes the mysterious Bilderberg Group; Yale University’s prestigious Skull & Bones Society, the clandestine Black Lodges of Freemasonry, and the secretive Knights of Malta. Its diabolical influence reaches into the corridors of power at the White House, the CIA, the Federal Reserve, even the Vatican…”[10]

     “According to Neil Wilgus in The Illuminati, George Washington had read [John Robinson’s] Proofs [Proofs of a Conspiracy against All the Religions and Governments of Europe, carried out in the Secret Meetings of the Free Masons, Illuminati, and Reading Societies] and felt that the allegations contained therein deserved further investigation. Washington’s own correspondence with fellow Masons clearly indicates that he was well aware of subversive forces at work within rival branches of masonic lodges in Europe, and expressed concern that the curse had spread to American lodges. Wilgus also writes that Thomas Jefferson was at least somewhat familiar with Weishaupt’s works and felt an admiration for him. It appears Jefferson disagreed with Washington’s point of view that the Illuminati had infiltrated American Freemasonry; Jefferson believed that such a thing could no possibly happen in America, since our freedom of speech would have made secrecy unnecessary. Obviously, Jefferson was either a member of the secret brotherhood, or else he was just painfully misguided in this belief, for the Illuminati continues to secretly guide American foreign and domestic policy to this very day…”[11]

     Hanson’s argument is not convincing. It is highly unlikely that the Illuminati were numerous enough to engineer any revolution as early as 1776 and as far away as America… Moreover, there is no evidence for any continuity between the eighteenth-century Illuminati and any twentieth-century American government. Certainly, some American presidents, such as Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, were high-ranking Masons, and Roosevelt may have influenced or even decreed the introduction of the Masonic symbols on the American dollar bill, including the inscription Novus Ordo Seculorum. And they may have identified this New World Order with the universal triumph of the American foreign policy aims of democracy, free trade and universal human rights. But there was no secrecy or conspiracy about these aims: they were openly proclaimed from Woodrow Wilson in 1919 to George H. W. Bush in 1991. Conspiracy implies a certain malevolence that needs to be hidden from public view; and such a conspiracy in the highest reaches of American power in that period has yet to be demonstrated.

     But this is not to say that some other organization, not directly descended from the Illuminati, and not necessarily governmental, but having essentially the same conspiratorial aims, may not exist. For conspiracies do exist; and it would it would be foolish to deny that there may be other non-governmental organizations or global cabals with serious dreams of world domination. The Rothschilds and the Rockefellers are astonishingly rich, as are other famous globalists such as Bill Gates and George Soros; and at the time of writing (2020) these men, all globalists, between them control a large number of the world’s most powerful institutions.[12]

     One of these institutions is the highly secretive Bilderbergers, founded by a Rothschild ally, Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands. In June, 1991, at the Bilderberger meeting in Baden-Baden, Germany, David Rockefeller said: "We are grateful to the Washington Post, the New York Times, Time Magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost forty years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subjected to the lights of publicity during those years. But, the world is [now] more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national autodetermination practiced in past centuries."[13] This was proof – by a man who should have known - that there did indeed exist a powerful plutocracy, “an intellectual elite and world bankers” striving to create a world government that would be at the expense of “national autodetermination”, that is, the sovereignty of individual national states. From Rockefeller’s remarks, we can see that this plan for a world government had been in the making for nearly sixty-five years, that is, since the early 1950s. (It should be remembered that the plot of land in New York where the United Nations building was built was bought from the Rockefeller family.) We also see from his remarks that the promise of secrecy which the Bilderbergers had felt to be necessary in the early 1950s was now no longer believed to be so pressing at the time of Rockefeller’s speech – presumably because that year, 1991, the year of the West’s seemingly final victory in the Cold War, seemed to betoken “the End of History” and the final triumph of that system of political and economic governance – liberal democracy and the free market – which the Bilderbergers knew well how to manipulate. Again, at the Bildeberger meeting in May, 1992 Henry Kissinger said: "Today Americans would be outraged if U.N. troops entered Los Angeles to restore order; tomorrow they will be grateful! This is especially true if they were told there was an outside threat from beyond, whether real or promulgated, that threatened our very existence. It is then that all peoples of the world will pledge with world leaders to deliver them from this evil. The one thing every man fears is the unknown. When presented with this scenario, individual rights will be willingly relinquished for the guarantee of their well being granted to them by their world government."

     President George H.W. Bush saw in a revamped United Nations the core of global unity: "I see a world of open borders, open trade and, most importantly, open minds; a world that celebrates the common heritage that belongs to all the world's people.... I see a world building on the emerging new model of European unity. ... The United Nations is the place to build international support and consensus for meeting the other challenges we face.... the threats to the environment, terrorism... international drug trafficking... refugees.... We must join together in a new compact -- all of us -- to bring the United Nations into the 21st century."

     The Americans under Truman had created the United Nations in 1945, so it was logcal for Truman’s successor to want to relaunch it in 1991.

     However, all confederations of sovereign or quasi-sovereign states are extremely difficult to hold together, as the history of the last days of the Soviet Union and of Yugoslavia – and probably, in our generation, of the European Union after the departure of Britain – clearly shows. Moreover, the freer and more democratic the members of the confederation are, the more difficult it becomes to achieve consensus, and the greater the temptation to turn these free confederations into less free, more despotic federations. In the case of today’s “international community”, the difficulties are multiplied many times, while the temptation to form a world government that will impose its will on all the nations of the world – through technological means and/or technological created crises, such as the coronavirus - increases proportionately. Unless such a world government can be guaranteed to follow Christian rather than secular and atheist principles, it is likely that it will become the most despotic state in history. Hence we can see how the victory of even the most enlightened democracy can easily lead to the victory of the most evil and totalitarian despotism – the despotism of the Antichrist himself…

* 

     We have seen how world leaders were already receptive of the argument for a world government in 1989-92. Let us now turn to the argument put forward by the Israeli philosopher Yuval Noah Harari, who writes: “Since around 200 BC, most humans have lived in empires. It seems likely that in the future, too, most humans will live in one. But this time the empire will be truly global. The imperial vision of dominion over the entire world could be imminent.

     “As the twenty-first century unfolds, nationalism is fast losing ground. More and more people believe that all of humankind is the legitimate source of political authority, rather than the members of a particular nationality, and that safeguarding human rights and protecting the interests of the entire human species should be the guiding light of politics. If so, having close to 200 independent states is a hindrance rather than a help. Since Swedes, Indonesians and Nigerians deserve the same human rights, wouldn’t it be simpler for a single global government to safeguard them?

     “The appearance of essentially global problems, such as melting ice caps, nibbles away at whatever legitimacy remains to the independent nation states. No sovereign state will be able to overcome global warming on its own. The Chinese Mandate of Heaven was given by Heaven to solve the problems of mankind. The modern Mandate of Heaven will be given to humankind to solve the problems of heaven, such as the hole in the ozone layer and the accumulation of greenhouse gases. The colour of the global empire may well be green.

     “As of 2014, the world is still politically fragmented, but states are fast losing their independence. Not one of them is really able to execute independent economic policies, to declare and wage wars as it pleases, or even to run its own internal affairs as it sees fit. States are increasingly open to the machinations of global markets, to the interference of global companies and NGOs, and to the supervision of global public opinion and the international judicial system. States are obliged to conform to global standards of financial behavior, environmental policy and justice. Immensely powerful currents of capital, labour and information turn and shape the world, with a growing disregard for the borders and opinions of states.

     “The global empire being forged before our eyes is not governed by any particular state or ethnic group. Much like the Late Roman Empire, it is ruled by a multi-ethnic elite, and is held together by a common culture and common interests. Throughout the world, more and more entrepreneurs, engineers, experts, scholars, lawyers and managers are called to join the empire. They must ponder whether to answer the imperial call or to remain loyal to their state and people. More and more choose the empire…”[14]

     “The empire”… Yes indeed; for one thing is clear: a world government or empire is highly unlikely to be democratic, however much lipservice may be paid to democracy. And if it is not democratic, then it will be despotic. This is the whole pathos of the position of the Brexiteers who led Britain out of the European Union in January, 2020. Although most of the arguments have been about economics, the true Brexiteers, as the historian Niall Ferguson, a former “Remainer”, has ruefully come to recognize, are quite prepared for their country to take a “hit” in terms of economics so long as it retains true sovereignty, that is, real independence from the European Commission, that is, the despotic Politburo of the European Union. However, the “Remainers” retort that this is not so, that the admitted “democratic deficit” is being overcome, that the European parliament is – or, at any rate one day will be – the real sovereign power in Europe and the true expression of the democratic will of the European peoples.

     The argument between globalists and anti-globalists in Europe is a vitally important one, which neither side can afford to lose. For the European Union is seen by many as a kind of microcosm of world government, and the acid test of its real feasibility. For if, it is argued, globalism can triumph on the European continent, which is a kaleidoscope of so many different languages, cultures and historical traditions whose lack of unity has engendered so many of the most destructive wars in human history, then it can triumph anywhere and everywhere. If, on the other hand, even such a modern country as Britain, which has been historically at the forefront of almost every modernist wave in politics, economics and culture, succeeds in her bid for freedom, then she will become a beacon for the so-called “populists” or anti-globalists everywhere. Moreover, it is argued, Europe must hold off the British challenge insofar as Europe is the original homeland of democracy, claims to promote democracy as one of its core values, and admits only democracies among its member-states (that is, democracies prepared to surrender their freedom to the new despotism).

* 

     Globalism is certainly the main trend in geopolitics. But whether globalism is truly irresistible is another matter…

     Martin Wolf points out that “globalization is not destined, it is chosen. It is a choice made to enhance a nation’s economic well being – indeed, experience suggests that the opening of trade and of most capital flows enriches most countries.”[15]  But if globalization is freely chosen, it can also be freely rejected. Suppose a nation decides to put other values above economic well-being? Is it free to do so?  If the will of the people is strong enough to endure relative poverty, it is free, and it will retain its freedom so long as certain critical instruments – for example, control of its own currency and taxation and borders – remain within its power. But once it gives these up to a supra-national union, it loses that freedom.

     Suppose a nation decides to put its religion above all, seeing it as threatened by the global religion of ecumenism or the various New Age cults that accompany it? This is what Putin’s Russia claims to be doing. It openly rejects western liberalism and LGBT-ism, is planning (with China and Iran) to introduce a new reserve currency to replace the dollar, and wants to create a Eurasian space to rival and eventually replace America’s global sphere of influence.

     However, as more and more people both inside and outside of Russia are coming to realize, Putin’s plans are unrealistic and not succeeding. First, as Stephen Kotkin points out, while Putin may be dreaming of a Eurasian sphere of influence, it is China that is actually creating it; meanwhile, Russia becomes weaker and weaker by comparison with China and more dependent on it. Secondly, while opposing the global new order, Putin still wants to be part of it for the simple reason that he and his criminal Mafiosi colleagues depend on participation in it to make the huge ill-gotten gains they are now addicted to. Thirdly, in the moral-religious sphere Putin’s Russia is displaying gigantic hypocrisy. What is the use of opposing LGBT if most of your bishops are homosexuals? Or of denigrating western religions by comparison with Orthodoxy if you still belong to the World Council of Churches and the ecumenical movement, and hob-nob with the leaders of all the world’s false religions?

     In principle, the attempt to escape the globalistic new world order is not only praiseworthy for an Orthodox nation but absolutely necessary if its people are to achieve salvation. However, for such an attempt to succeed, which is possible only with God’s help, it is necessary that the confession of the nation and its leaders must be truly Orthodox, which it certainly is not now. Moreover, the Russian nation and Church must be prepared to undergo considerable material losses and deprivation; for economic autarchy, like political autocracy, comes at a price. Such a transformation – in effect, a second Russian revolution - is possible. With God all things are possible… 

September 11/24, 2020.

[11] Hanson, op. cit., p. 63.