Kissinger’s hope for a new world order….led by Obama

Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger is usually compelling in his analysis of world conflicts and poltical situations, with gravity and insight. Right now, he’s causing a stir with some brief but unexpected remarks on the responsibility that falls to President-elect Barack Obama when he takes office.

I can’t access the link to this LifeSiteNews article that raised some flags this past week, but the video is embedded in it (though oddly, I’ve just been made aware that YouTube has no longer made the video available).

It’s written by John-Henry Westen.

In a interview with CNBC Monday, former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said that President-Elect Barack Obama’s most important, or defining task would be the creation of “a new world order.”

What?!

Here’s what he said in that short clip, whether it’s still available by now or not:

“The president-elect is coming into office at a moment when there is upheaval in many parts of the world simultaneously,” said Kissinger. “You have India, Pakistan; you have the jihadist movement. So he can’t really say there is one problem, that it’s the most important one. But he can give new impetus to American foreign policy partly because the reception of him is so extraordinary around the world. I think his task will be to develop an overall strategy for America in this period when, really, a new world order can be created. It’s a great opportunity, it isn’t just a crisis.”

That’s what started the whole spiral of alerts, and it’s a good time to review what’s meant by the “new world order” before the media get too far along spinning it to mean something else.

Some commentators have suggested that the highly escalated conflicts in the Middle East and the world financial crisis have made the time ripe for a long-anticipated and foreshadowed “New World Order” to come to fruition.
Celebrated Canadian author Michael O’Brien, who has written extensively on the ‘new world order,’ spoke with LifeSiteNews.com about Kissinger’s statement. 
 
“Only in one sense is Kissinger’s analysis correct,” said O’Brien.  “The current world situation is presently one of a multitude of crises and at the same time a moment of opportunity.  However, positing a leap towards what he calls a ‘new world order’ is fraught with difficulties.

“What does the term mean? In all likelihood it can only mean an imposed top-down global social-political revolution.  In other words, solutions would then come from a reigning authority over all nations putting aside individual conscience and principles of national self-determination.”
 
O’Brien added: “A true and healthy order in the human community can only arise from an internal revolution of the moral order. It cannot be imposed without imposing greater ills.  In all likelihood, Kissinger and like-minded globalists, see the present world configuration as a creative disintegration which would usher in a new form of world government.  In such a situation, management by crisis overrides authentic exercise of human freedom and responsibility.”

It’s critical to understand this, and not tolerate it.

For pro-life advocates, the proposal of a ‘new world order’ has been linked to the anti-life principles promoted at the United Nations.  Pope Benedict, while still a Cardinal, expounded on this matter in the introduction to a book published in 1997.  Then-Cardinal Ratzinger wrote the preface to a book by Michel Schooyans, entitled The Gospel: Confronting World Disorder. Here’s that preface.

In the preface Ratzinger first denounces the “new world order” describing it as more or less a culmination of Marxism. He goes on to say that a Christian is “obliged to protest” against it.

What are Christians obliged to protest? In 2000, Cardinal Ratzinger made it clear in his opposition to the UN’s proposal for a ‘New World Order’.

Reduce the Guests at the Common Table

is how he succinctly summarized the goal of that worldview. 

“A philosophy of this kind no longer has the utopian burden that characterized the Marxist dream,” he clarified. “On the contrary, it is very realistic, in as much as it sets limits to the means available for reaching it and recommends, for example, without by so doing attempting to justify itself, not being concerned with the care of those who are no longer productive or who can no longer hope for a determined quality of life.”

Bingo. That’s what we’ve been up against on our weekly radio show outreach on ‘America’s Lifeline’, among other media works, in engaging laws outlawing conscientious medicine and protecting rights to informed consent and health care for all imparied and disabled patients, on the basis of human dignity and universal human rights so that no person’s life is threatened by the ‘tyrnanny of the majority’.

This (New World Order) philosophy, the Cardinal says, “no longer hopes that men, used to wealth and well-being, will be disposed to make the necessary sacrifices to attain a general welfare, but rather proposes strategies to reduce the number of guests at the table of humanity, so that the presumed happiness they have attained will not be affected.”

It is a self-interested philosophy, closely related to eugenics and abortion and euthansia. Benedict made the Church’s position clear from the beginning of his papacy in 2005, and he’s only spoken out more on it even since.

The new Pope is also not afraid to take on the aggressive worldview that seeks to relegate Christianity to the back of the bus in public discourse.  In an interview published last year in the Italian newspaper “La Reppublica” and re-distributed world-wide via the Vatican Information Service, Ratzinger, issued a serious warning to Christians to defend against, “an aggressive secular ideology.”

He recalled, “In Sweden, a Protestant pastor who had preached about homosexuality, based on a line from Scriptures, went to jail for one month.” He noted that the state should “not impose religion,” but “allows these religions to be factors in building up society”. However some states are now giving way to “an ideology which is imposed through politics and which does not give public space to the Catholic or Christian vision.”

Urging Christians to fight the dangerous trend, he said: “In this sense, a struggle exists and we must defend religious freedom against the imposition of an ideology which is presented as if it were the only voice of rationality, when it is only the expression of a ‘certain’ rationalism.”

Ratzinger did not shy away from fighting such trends even when they were promoted by great powers such as the United Nations.  Writing in the Italian newspaper Avvenire in 2000, he denounced the UN vision of a “new world order.”

Beware the new buzz phrase. It may be well-marketed, but the end product remains the same ideology that wants to deny a moral voice to public discourse affecting the social policy that limits the acts of moral and spiritual beings. Which is why Pope Benedict is always teaching the “new humanism”, recognizing that order in the world has to be informed by the moral dimension of mankind.

Beware buzz phrases.