We hear the term “New World Order” all the time. We are afraid of that term.  But if there is a New World Order, then what of the Old World Order, the political order which has existed for hundreds of years? If we are suspicious of, and resistant to the New World Order, what order are we trying to conserve?

To find out the history and character of the Old World Order, we need to travel back in time to the 17th Century to the time of the Thirty Years War.  The Thirty Years War was fought in Europe from 1618 to 1648.  It began when the Austrian-Hapsburg Empire tried to impose Roman Catholicism on their Protestant subjects in Bohemia. It grew into a religious war of Protestant against Catholic, the Holy Roman Empire against France, the German princes and Princelings against the emperor and against each other, the nation of France against the Habsburgs of Spain.  At one point Swedes, Danes, Poles, Russians, and the Dutch all got into the act.  Until World War I, it was the bloodiest and costliest war in European history.