For many, a code word for a conspiratorial “one-world government.” The stan-dard implication, particularly in far-right circles, is of a dangerous communist, Jew-ish, or similar “insider” plot to dominate the world.
In general political discourse, the term simply denotes forms of globalism and universalism. According to Thomas H. Henriksen (1992, 1), the concept had roots in ancient sacred and secular thinking. Dutch legal theorist Grotius’s internation-alist tradition is a seventeenth-century example. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt is said to be the chief architect of the 1990s concept of the new world order. Roosevelt envisioned a collaboration of great powers, with the United States taking a strong role; these powers would hold permanent seats on the UN Security New World Order
125 Council. But Roosevelt’s vision had to wait until the end of the Cold War, the
de-cades-long contest for world order between the United States and the Soviet Union.
Yet, whatever its context or meaning, use of the phrase invariably makes con-spiracy trackers shudder, on both the political Right and Left. Suggesting a sky-will-fall situation to those who feel threatened by the idea of any overarching political or economic order, the concept has the potential to open the way to violence as a defense against perceived oppression, as when Theodore Kaczynski, the
“Unabomber,” sought the destruction of the “worldwide industrial system.”
A tradition of theorizing about new world orders has flourished on the Ameri-can radical Right. For example, Gary Allen, in his 1971 None Dare Call It Con-spiracy, posited the existence of a Rockefeller–Council on Foreign Relations cabal that sought to establish a world socialist superstate. In today’s antigovernment movement, conspiracy theories focus on such similar players as the federal govern-ment (whose antiterrorist legislation facilitates “infiltration” of the movegovern-ment), the United Nations, the World Bank, the IRS, the media, and multinational corpora-tions. Among Christian Identity followers, the Jews, the banks they are said to control, and secret organizations through which they are said to act, such as the Freemasons (George Washington was one) and Illuminati (an eighteenth-century Bavarian secret society), constitute a cabal of conspirators. Even the Olympics bring world governments into dangerously close alliance. (The bombing in Atlanta dur-ing the 1996 Olympics has been tied to the antigovernment movement.) Christian fundamentalists have scripted a religious drama in which one world organization gains control of all the governments of the world, opening the way for the Anti-christ to step in.
Joel Dyer (1997) has painted a convincing picture of the role of such far-right theories among the antigovernment movement in rural America, which has links to militias and domestic terrorists who see themselves as being in a state of war with the U.S. government. The theories help rural Americans explain on their own terms what they know in fact to be a serious farm crisis in America’s heartland—behind which lurks an equally real movement toward agricultural consolidation. In such a context, the notion of a powerful order, arising from a sensitive position of weak-ness in society, flags real problems.
During the 1991 Gulf War, President George Bush, defining the broad goals of his administration’s foreign policy, proclaimed a “New World Order.” Addressing the nation in 1991, the president alluded to the “big idea”: nations linked in “uni-versal aspirations of mankind.” His references to a new world order, however, were criticized on the Left as evoking Nazi sloganeering and disguising lust for hegemony in the Middle East; by others, as naïve and arrogant belief fostered by liberalism’s post–Cold War triumph. On the far Right, the phrase, coming from an establish-ment insider like Bush, resonated with all the old suspicions—crypto-capitalist/com-munist plots. Little more than a decade after the Gulf War, President George W.
Bush’s administration groped for a foreign policy to deal with unresolved Arab and Palestinian-Israeli problems and with the resurgence of international terrorism, calling up a “New World Order.”
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From an Arab perspective, the new global order was fundamentally one defined by the powerful West. Sadiki (1995) explains how nations of the southern hemi-sphere sensed disenfranchisement and potential dispossession. According to Sadiki, Western support for authoritarian regimes, armament buildups, the linking of Is-lam with terrorism, and racist assumptions about Arab peoples do not bode well for the proclaimed peace of the embattled New World Order. “A hegemonic world . . . is like putting a plastic bag over the world, and preventing it from breathing.
Eventually it will be torn open” (Roy 2001, 131).
Also debunking the promise of a new world order have been pro-Israeli voices.
Some complained of a “war on terrorism” that is not a global fight against terror-ism but rather a war against terrorists that attack the United States. In putting to-gether the coalition against international terrorist Osama bin Laden, the United States wooed Syria and Iran, countries that allegedly provide refuge and training for suicide bombers who attack Israel. According to Evelyn Gordon of the Jerusa-lem Post, “This doesn’t look a whole lot like a new world order. . . . It looks like a cold-blooded sellout of Israel” (The Week, October 12, 2001, 13). See also ANTI
-CHRIST;COMMUNIST; JEW;PLOT;VAMPIRE;WAR.
Nihilism
An outlook that denies society’s traditional conventions, institutions, and even moral truths; as a philosophy, nihilism denies the objective basis for any truths.
Nihilismderives ultimately from Latin nihil, “nothing.” The term was coined in 1799 but became popular in the 1860s in reference to the nineteenth-century radical Russian movement that advocated skepticism and rejection of authority.
Viewing social institutions as irrevocably bad or meaningless, nihilism may ad-vocate their destruction by such means as assassination, terrorism, and “propaganda by the deed.” In the nineteenth-century radical movement among the Russian intelligentsia, which became disillusioned with the slow pace of reform in Russia, the so-called nihilists sought to justify violence to achieve revolution. In some nine-teenth-century Russian literature, nihilists are depicted as corrupt, infantile char-acters; Ivan Leskov’s At Daggers Drawn features nihilists who, as “contract killers,”
kill a rich husband to enable his widow to inherit (Laqueur 1987, 179). Some real-life nihilists, contrary to this image, did propose constructive programs.
The nineteenth-century use of the term was originally popularized by the Rus-sian writer Ivan S. Turgenev in his novel Fathers and Sons, published in 1862.
Turgenev’s “nihilist,” Bazarov, is a passionate young medical student who argues that to build a better world everything must first be destroyed. Turgenev made his ni-hilist “honest, truthful, and a democrat to the marrow of his bones”; the novel’s objective was to discredit the idle gentry class. What’s more, the revolutionary on whom Turgenev based his Bazarov, D. I. Pisarev, adopted the label nihilist in pride;
and liberals and revolutionists in the United States used the term sympathetically for those they felt had suffered badly under czarist rule. However, many Russian radicals attacked the caricature they believed Turgenev had drawn of them, while Nihilism
127 still other Russians argued that Turgenev set out to brand the country’s young
revo-lutionaries, harbingers of the Bolsheviks, with the caustic epithet of nihilist.
In the twentieth century, the term was revived with its negative connotations to describe Nazi German ideology; to refer to individual terrorists such as Theodore Kaczynski, the “Unabomber”; to taint the beliefs of those on college campuses said to want to dismantle the canon of Western literature and art; and to stereotype Middle Eastern terrorists. A 1999 article in the British Independent on Sunday, dis-cussing a bombing in London by a far-right racist group, wrote that the “nihilist thugs know that a ‘race war’ will never happen,” and referred to them also as
“anarcho-Nazis.” See also ANARCHISM;EXTREMIST;FANATIC;RADICAL;REVOLUTIONARY;
TERRORISM.
9-11
September 11, 2001, the day that al-Qaeda terrorists plowed hijacked U.S. com-mercial airliners into the World Trade Center towers, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania. The day was, in the words of Arundhati Roy (2001, 120), “a mon-strous calling card from a world gone horribly wrong.” The devastating assaults created a strong sense of outrage, horror, agony, and sympathy for the victims throughout the world, including in Muslim countries, and a feeling that “things will never be the same.” Most of all, the attack was horrific to Americans, who saw it as an attack on them, an awakening to the cold reality that they were not imper-vious or invulnerable as they had long assumed. At the same time, the American response, aided by language, offered up an altruistic view of the tragedy, uniting the country not simply against an “evil enemy” (see ENEMY;EVIL), but around the inspiring acts of heroism shown in New York City, donned “America’s city” that day (Silberstein 2002, xii).
The media, however, seemed almost to claim the calamity as theirs. References to 9-11 proliferated after the attacks, part of a flood of television and other images, many of them transfixing, surrounding the tragedies. The images took on a life of their own, seldom escaping their audience, yet barely informing.
America’s treatment of the tragedies was not really about information or com-prehension, however. Thomas de Zengotita (2002, 23) wrote, “How often did you hear, how often did you say, ‘Since the events of 9-11’? A new idiom had been deposited in the language, approaching the same plane of habituality as ‘by the way’
or ‘on the other hand.’ And in the process we got past it after all.” Zengotita’s point was that we were borne away from the events themselves as they became trans-formed into a sea of references and images. They numbed us in their endless sweep.
Just as a numb hand can’t feel the fullness of a block of wood, Zengotita analo-gized, encountering only the interrupting surface, so did our minds lose contact with the real events.
Making the real events recede from our grasp was, among many other uses of the 9-11 reference, its eruption in advertising—from special edition glossy publi-cations showing images of the devastation in New York to television talk shows to flags displayed on store windows (there was even 9-11 solace food and 9-11
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vacations, peddled as antidotes to the horror). The commercialization of the refer-ence—and a sense that special business interests, not America as a whole, owned it—was resented by many of those most wounded by the tragedies. Other commen-tators noted the American-centric aspect of September 11: Many other peoples have been assaulted by terrorist attacks, bombings, and massacres in recent decades that received relatively little notice, while September 11 was referred to as a holo-caust (see HOLOCAUST). Still others complained about more specific matters, such as using such terms as tragedy that failed to capture the “evil” of September 11 (what U.S. News & World Report columnist John Leo said sounded like a “passing natu-ral disaster”) or preceding the reference with the innocuous-sounding phrase the events of. Thus, six months after the attacks, a letter to the editor appeared in the New York Times complaining of how that short phrase attempts to remove us too far from the atrocities: “A heart attack is a cardiac event to clinicians, perhaps, but not to the one who suffers it. ‘The events of Sept. 11’ tries to distance us from that wildly inconceivable catastrophe, and from our wildly inconsolable grief, but it’s a sham. . . . call them what they were—terrorism and murder” (Joy Jacobson, Febru-ary 26, 2002).
Some commentators also lamented that the expression “9-11” itself just doesn’t work in evoking the atrocities it names. Rather than naming an act of genocide, as some called the calamities, “9-11,” as newspaper columnist Kathleen Parker put it, “sounds like a one-stop joint for a quickie lube and a Diet Coke.” For that mat-ter, though, WWII, the acronym for the Second World War, does not really call up the atrocities of that conflict either. Other commentators linked 9-11 with those numbers everyone dials during an emergency.
In any case, the word is here to stay. The American Dialect Society deemed 9-11the term that would most likely endure from the year. See also GENOCIDE;GROUND ZERO;MASSACRE;MURDER; PEARL HARBOR ANALOGY;TERRORISM.