After a lifetime marked by continuous promotion of a “new world order,” either in government or academia, Richard N. Gardner passed away on February 16 at his home in New York City. He was 91.
Born and raised in New York City, Gardner willingly followed the path of many who eagerly labored to dilute American sovereignty in favor of a world dominated by the United Nations. For him, that path included earning degrees in economics at Harvard University, a law degree at Yale University, and a doctorate in economics at Oxford University’s Rhodes Scholar program. His doctoral thesis unsurprisingly carried the subtitle, “The Origins and the Prospects of our International Economic Order.” He was an internationalist to the core, a man who used his unquestioned talent spending a lifetime to dilute the uniqueness of the United States and build a world government.
His several years at Oxford in the early 1950s saw Gardner become a willing disciple of Cecil Rhodes, who used his enormous fortune to create a secret society capable of ruling all of mankind. Famed Georgetown University Professor Carroll Quigley approvingly wrote about the Rhodes secret aim in his 1981 book The Anglo-American Establishment. Quigley wrote:
The secret society of Cecil Rhodes is mentioned in the first five of his seven wills…. The scholarships were merely a facade to conceal the secret society or, more accurately, they were to be one of the instruments by which members of the secret society could carry out his purpose.
That “purpose,” detailed in the first of the Rhodes wills, included extending “British rule throughout the world … the ultimate recovery of the United States as an integral part of a British Empire … the consolidation of the whole Empire … [and] the foundation of so great a power as to hereafter render wars impossible.” In short, Rhodes wanted a world government run by him and his disciples with no allowance for individual nations and peoples to decide for themselves how they would live and what kind of government they would establish.
In his 1966 book Tragedy and Hope, Professor Quigley provided details about the 1891 inauguration by Rhodes of a secret society to rule mankind. The fabulously wealthy Rhodes passed away in 1902, but the members of the elitist group he founded proceeded to gather like-minded individuals to carry out his plans. By 1919, these totalitarian-favoring individuals founded Britain’s Royal Institute of International Affairs and a sister branch of their scheme in the United States known as the Council on Foreign Relations.
Gardner eagerly accepted membership in the Council on Foreign Relations. He later accepted membership in The Trilateral Commission whose long-range goal has always paralleled what the CFR has sought.
The years 1961 to 1965 saw Gardner employed at the State Department. He won a place as a law professor at New York’s Columbia University in 1974 and drew attention to himself with a feature article in the CFR’s Foreign Affairs journal for April of that year. Entitled “The Hard Road to World Order,” it lamented the failure of like-minded internationalists to achieve “instant world government” and “a greatly strengthened International Court.” For a more effective way to destroy the independence of nations and create the desired all-powerful super-government, he proposed:
In short, the “house of world order” will have to be built from the bottom up rather than from the top down. It will look like a great “booming, buzzing confusion,” to use William James’ famous description of reality, but a end run around national sovereignty, eroding it piece by piece, will accomplish much more than the old-fashioned frontal assault.
The Gardner article clearly showed his willingness to compromise American independence and incrementally build a world government. Listing steps toward that goal, he included strengthening the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (now known as the World Trade Organization). These organizations are either UN-created or UN-related. Further Gardner recommendations in his revealing article included taking advantage of concern about the environment, world population, food, laws for governing the seas, disarmament, and world government control of communications. He additionally sought an increase in the UN’s occasionally murderous peacekeeping endeavors. With a display of unvarnished hubris, he lauded his program to centralize power over the planet with a claim that his “case-by-case approach can produce some remarkable concessions of sovereignty that could not be achieved on an across-the-board basis.” The man could never honestly swear an oath to support and defend the U.S. Constitution.
The in-again-out-again Columbia Law School professor served the Carter administration as Ambassador to Italy (1977-1981). Back to Columbia, he continued pushing for world government with a spring 1988 Foreign Affairs article entitled “The Case For Practical Internationalism.” Of interest to those who strongly disagree with movement toward world government, Gardner lamented the growing loss of support for the UN among the American people. In 1992, he produced a new plan that would use the growing propaganda about environmentalism with a monograph published by the CFR entitled Negotiating Survival: Four Priorities After Rio. An early champion of the UN’s Agenda 21, which called for draconian restrictions on humanity’s normal behavior, he was among the first to substitute the term “climate change” for the worn-out environmental nonsense then being paraded as worrisome “global warming.” Back into a diplomatic post, he served the Clinton administration as Ambassador to Spain (1993-1997).
Always taking advantage of possibilities to have his thoughts published in liberal publications, Gardner would regularly forward his truly subversive thoughts to the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, and other carriers of highbrow left-wing attitudes.
Forces now being labeled “Deep State” have lost one of their major promoters with the death of Richard N. Gardner. Replacing him will not be easy for the advocates of world government especially during a time when distrust of anyone connected to the Deep State continues to grow.
John F. McManus is president emeritus of The John Birch Society.
