More skullduggery from the conspiracy crowd

Any hope that Michael Coffman, a supposed expert in forestry science with a doctorate from the University of Idaho, has anything important to say about politics was long since discredited when he began speaking — namely in a 2010 interview for the fringe Republic Magazine — about what he perceived as the global warming scam. Of course, one has to look no further than the front page to surmise that the Republic Magazine has long since discredited itself too with headline teasers like “The New World Order,” “The Order of Skull & Bones” and “The Bohemian Grove.”

Great_Seal_of_the_United_States

In any case, during an interview for his screed, “Plundered: How Progressive Ideology is Destroying America,” Coffman argues that liberals will purposefully work to create an “economic collapse” so that in the end, one world government will be established:

When it hits it’s going to hit hard and it bothers me that people are going to be destroyed because these people have this agenda and this blind reality. …(This government will supposedly) ride in on the white hat with a solution as people are starving and so forth around the world, but all you have to do is sign on this dotted line and give us all of your of rights, and we’ll decide what you can or cannot do.

Here’s the whole loony interview:

This, of course, is old school New World Order nonsense that crazies, particularly religious crazies, have been crying about for ages. Of course, the conspiracy theorists incorrectly claim that the Latin phrase in the American seal found on the $1 bill, “Novus ordo seclorum,” means “New World Order” in English. Actually, the phrase was suggested by Founding Father Charles Thomson in 1782, and was always coined to mean the creation a new America. The phrase means, “A New Order of the Ages,” and as this site explains, translating “New World Order” back to Latin would not render, “novus ordo seclorum.” Rather, according to Google’s translator, it is “novus ordo mundi.” I say that with the understanding that modern translators can miss nuances in the language that are all but lost to history.

The New World Order drivel and the one government notion by and large originated, like so many dangerous ideas, with religion. According to more evangelical, watching-the-skies Christians, Revelation 13 shows that one day, the world will be ruled by one religion — according to this site Islam — as well as one government. According to that same site, the evangelicals are saving us from certain doom by way of a one world government. When they are gone, they say, there goes the neighborhood:

The logical (logical?) conclusion is that the Rapture of the Church has to precede the demise of America. Only the elimination of Evangelicals from the electorate will permit the rest of the country to sink into the cesspool of amoral liberal politics, and create the conditions necessary for America to subordinate its sovereignty to any international body.

Amoral liberal politics, ay? I wonder what North Koreans or the Chinese would say to this one world government imposed by those nasty liberals. If anything disproves the nearly hallucinatory notion that the entire globe will be led by just one person, it must be North Korea. Sure, North Koreans will follow their dear leader, but unless the antichrist — or whatever — actually turns out to be someone in the blood line of Kim Il-sung, don’t count on North Korea bowing the knee to anyone else. More accurately, though, don’t count on any of it.

Revelation revisited

Illustration for John Milton’s “Paradise Lost“ by Gustave Doré, 1866.

Here is an intriguing look at the Book of Revelation that claims that the writer of the book, emphatically not John the Apostle, wasn’t writing about the end of the world, but rather about the collapse of the Roman empire, with Nero as the one stamped with the numerals 666.

I don’t know what John Milton’s personal interpretation of the Revelation might have been other than what he wrote in Paradise Lost, but it seems at least plausible to me that Milton, as ever, was onto something revolutionary.

In Paradise Lost, Satan, of course, is actually the Satan of religious lore, but Milton also established his character to symbolically represent Charles I, the king of England, and hell as the British monarch and empire at large. Students of British history well know, of course, that Milton was in favor of dethroning Charles I and supported republicanism, free speech and freedom of the press. In other words, he was well ahead of his time.

Again, I don’t know if a study has ever been undertaken, but what are the implications here if Milton, some 360 years ago, interpreted the Book of Revelation in the more modern sense, with the “end” coming not to the world, but to what was perceived as an evil, oppressive empire?

4 big myths of Book of Revelation – CNN Belief Blog – CNN.com Blogs.

[Image credit: Illustration for John Milton’s “Paradise Lost“ by Gustave Doré, 1866.]