The Evolution of the ‘New World Order’ (from WWI to the tea party)

[pampango]

It might be easy to mistake the NWO as a concept born out of Tea Party politics, since the movement occasionally throws the term around, especially when talking about the Obama administration. ... the League of Nations introduced the term to the political and cultural lexicon after the First World War to describe “evolving world institutions.”

A new band of conspiracy theorists perpetuated NWO paranoia in the 1950s, championed by the John Birch Society, named after an American intelligence officer and Baptist missionary killed during a melee with Chinese communists. Birch, often called the “first victim of the Cold War,” became a martyr for the far right. ... By the 1960s, Birch Society people and others of that orientation started picking up on [the New World Order]... It’s tied up with an anxiety not just about a loss of sovereignty but a fear of centralized government power of all kinds. (These days, the John Birch Society often comes up in articles and blog posts about the billionaire Koch brothers, whose father was a prominent member.)

As the Cold War receded into history, the New World Order was redefined again. In the 1990s, NWO conspiracy theorists believed the bipolar world—in which the superpower of the West faced off against the superpower of Communism—would be replaced with a one-world government established by the Cold War victors.

The populist right and the militia movement became obsessed by the phrase—and it entered the counterculture. "It summarizes this whole idea that not only are we losing our individual liberty to big government at home but we’re losing national sovereignty to some larger global force,” says Walker. “Conspiracy theories often take real trends and turn them into a metaphor where there’s a vast intelligence behind that trend. So someone writing critically about the NWO in a conspiratorial way and a non-conspiratorial way might be criticizing the same thing.”

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/11/05/the-evolution-of-the-new-world-order.html

I had not realized that the term "New World Order" went back to the League of Nations and the post-WWI period.