Interview with Nicholas Hagger by Geoff Ward
How newspapers covered the outbreak of hostilities on October 7, 2023.
An interview with Nicholas Hagger, man of letters, cultural historian, philosopher and author of sixty books, whose new work ‘The Golden Phoenix: Russia, Ukraine and a coming New World Order’ (O-Books, October 2023) analyses how Russia’s invasion of Ukraine impacts on the West’s envisaged ‘Great Reset’ and progresses the rival Western, Russian and Chinese efforts to bring about a New World Order.
Nicholas began by commenting on the West’s debt problem.
NH: The West’s prospects do not look good. The events of the 21st century, from Middle-Eastern wars to Covid, have brought the Western financial system to the brink of collapse. On 19 January, 2023, the US hit its debt-ceiling and there was a prospect that the US would run out of funds just when Ukraine needs more and more funds to continue its war with Russia. In June, 2023, the US debt-ceiling was raised, and the US continues to live on borrowed funds.
GW: Isn’t power shifting from the West to the East?
NH: The West, comprising the US, UK, EU, Israel and their supporters, has a population totalling 1.214 billion. The world’s population is currently just over 8 billion (8,069,975,991) according to recent UN estimates, and a considerable number of just under 7 billion are within the 149 countries (of the 193 UN member-states) that have benefited from China’s Belt-and-Road Initiative. There is a sense that following the West’s withdrawal from Afghanistan power is shifting from the West to the East.
GW: What is the situation with the rival New World Orders?
NH: The West is trying to hold its own. In The Fall of the West (O-Books, November, 2022), I see the West as collaborating with the Syndicate (my word, what Eisenhower referred to as ‘the military-industrial complex’) to bring in a New World Order backed by Klaus Schwab’s World Economic Forum and the UN’s Agenda 2030. Schwab’s outlook and ‘Great Reset’ have an authoritarian streak, as they intend to blur the physical, digital and biological to exercise a form of mind-control via new technology. In Schwab’s words, ‘You will own nothing, have no privacy … and be happy!’
This New World Order would be sufficiently authoritarian to accommodate Russia and China and, depending on world events, could come into being before the establishment of a democratic World State, which is the ideal I have outlined in my books: a multipolar World State that will include the US, the EU, Russia and China and be democratic.
In The Golden Phoenix, I take account of the war in Ukraine. I see Russia as attempting a regional New World Order that will recover some of the ex-Soviet territories it lost following the events of 1991, and rising phoenix-like from the ashes of the Soviet Union in alliance with a regional Chinese New World Order that is waiting to invade Taiwan and spread its military influence across the world behind the goodwill created by the Belt-and-Road Initiative in 149 countries.
In addition to the Western-Syndicate New World Order I have just described, rising phoenix-like from the ashes of the West’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, there is the democratic New World Order waiting in the wings, the supranational, democratic, partly-federal, Golden Phoenix New World Order that is rising from the ashes of the Second World War.
GW: How do Hamas’s recent massacre in Israel and Israel’s military action against Hamas in Gaza affect the outlook for the West?
NH: The West is divided, with the US and UK supporting Israel while urging Israel to stay within international law, and the EU and many in the US Democratic Party and in the UK Labour Party following the UN in calling for an immediate ceasefire. Meanwhile, Gaza City is being turned into rubble and, with hospitals out of fuel, the population of 2.2 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip is suffering terribly.
GW: What will be the outcome? Hamas like IS?
NH: Israel is conducting a siege of Gaza City to get Hamas to surrender. If they succeed and no other outside forces get seriously involved, Hamas will be regarded as a terrorist successor to IS, and will cease to exist in the same way.
GW: A regional war? What if other outside forces do get seriously involved?
NH: The US has sent two aircraft carriers to be south of the Gaza River off the coastline of Gaza to deter Hamas’s funder, Iran. If Iran were to enter the war, the war would become regional with Iran and all the northern Islamic states, including Iraq and Syria, fighting Israel, which may not be supported by the southern Islamic states.
GW: Would there be fewer Western arms for Ukraine?
NH: There would be a consequence in Ukraine. The US, having recently hit one debt-ceiling, may no longer fund Ukraine to the same extent, and Russia may turn the present stalemate into a superiority that allows Russian troops to seize all the Donbas. Iran is already supplying drones to Russia for use in Ukraine, and there would be a strengthening of the present alliance between Iran, Russia, China and North Korea, and all the authoritarian nation-states within the 149 Belt-and-Road countries.
GW: Nuclear danger? If Israel were threatened from many sides within the Middle-Eastern region, and its survival was in doubt, would Israel use a nuclear weapon? A Third World War?
NH: If Israel’s much-hated attack on Gaza, which is widely regarded as disproportionate, does result in a regional war, then the world may be sliding into the Third World War. The Freemasonic Albert Pike in his letter to Mazzini, the Italian politician, of 1871 (if it was not a 20th-century hoax) forecast that a First World War would overthrow the Tsars and strengthen Communism, a Second World War would destroy Nazism and found a sovereign Zionist state of Israel in Palestine, and a Third World War would result in Islam (the Muslim Arab world) and Zionism (the state of Israel) destroying each other. His forecast in 1871, more than 150 years ago (if his letter is genuine) does not look impossible at present, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu having declared that Israel has embarked on a long war which will be their ‘second war of independence’.
So what would be the consequences of Russian superiority in Ukraine and an Islamic civil uprising or intifada against Israel, which Netanyahu has said is fighting its second war of independence, ie, fighting to continue to exist as a Zionist country?
Clearly the West would be weakened and the authoritarian alliance in the East would be strengthened, and the Western New World Order that plans to blur the physical, digital and biological — blur the distinction between human beings and AI machines — and be authoritarian, may be the first New World Order to exist. The masses in Russia, China and Iran may then cry out for freedom and change the authoritarianism from within, along with the masses in the West who support humanity against the mechanisation of human beings, and make possible the multipolar, democratic, ideal New World Order I have dealt with in my books.
It’s too early to say which way things will go in the Middle East, and what powers and nation-states will get involved, but the West is in great danger of being drawn into a regional war and, soon after, a Third World War, if it sides with unbridled Israeli aggression against civilians, justified by Israel on the grounds that Hamas are using civilians as human shields.
GW: Might the Golden Phoenix New World Order rise out of a Third World War?
NH: The fall of the West may be sooner than we realise, and the rising of the Golden Phoenix’s multipolar, democratic World State may be from the ashes not of the Second World War but from the ashes of the Third World War.
My book The Promised Land (O-Books, October, 2023) came out at the same time as The Golden Phoenix. It is about my journey through Biblical Jordan and Egypt in 2020, during which I went up Mt Nebo in Jordan and stood where Moses stood. (I first went to the Biblical Middle East in 1962 after I arrived in Iraq in 1961 to spend a year lecturing at the University of Baghdad.)
The Promised Land’s front cover shows the view from Mt Nebo that Moses saw shortly before he died on Mt Nebo, and that I saw in 2020: I looked across the River Jordan into Israel, to beyond Jerusalem, and I imagined I had seen all the countries of the world spread out beneath the mountain.
A time of world peace with all nations co-operating and enjoying prosperity is a dream that has been held by many great writers and thinkers over the years, including Dante and Kant. It is surely better than spreading war, which reduces countries like Ukraine and Gaza to rubble and takes hundreds of thousands of lives, just as the Second World War reduced Berlin and many cities to rubble. All religions are clear that despite the justifications of governments, killing thy civilian neighbour en masse is not the way to live.
The vision of a World State with all nation-states retaining their sovereignty and with humankind a unity within a democratic political structure is one that can still give us hope that there can yet be a Golden Age in which all human beings know peace and prosperity.
