Many people believe that, before long, a man of superior intelligence, wit, charm, and diplomacy will emerge on the world scene as a savior. He will seemingly possess a transcendent wisdom that enables him to solve problems and offer solutions to many of today's most perplexing issues.
His popularity will be widespread. His fans will include young and old, religious and non-religious, male and female. Talk show hosts will interview his colleagues, news anchors will cover his movements, scholars will applaud his uncanny ability at resolving what has escaped the rest of us, and the poor will bow down at his table.
He will, in every human way, appeal to the best idea of society.
But according to conservative news sites like Raiders News Update, his profound comprehension and irresistible presence will be the result of an invisible network of thousands of years of collective knowledge. He will, like the pharaohs of Egypt, represent the embodiment of a very old and super-intelligent spirit. Just as Jesus was the "seed of the woman" (Gen. 3:15), he will be the "seed of the serpent."
It's been assumed for centuries that a prerequisite for his appearing is an all-seeing world order, an umbrella under which national boundaries dissolve, and ethnic groups, ideologies, religions, and economics from around the world, exist beneath his hungry domination.
At the head of his utopian administration, his single personality will surface. He will appear to be a man of distinguished character, but will ultimately become "a king of fierce countenance" (Dan. 8:23).
With imperious decree he will facilitate a totalitarian world government. Those who refuse his New World Order will be branded as unpatriotic, and imprisoned (or destroyed) until finally he exalts himself "above all that is called God, or that is worshiped, so that he, as God, sitteth in the temple of God, showing himself that he is God" (2 Thess. 2:4).
For many years the idea of his Orwellian society, where his all-seeing Antichrist-eye watches over the smallest details of our lives and qualifies our human liberties, was considered anathema. The concept that rugged individualism could somehow be sacrificed for his anesthetized universal harmony was repudiated by America's greatest minds.
But something happened in the 1970's. Following a call by Nelson Rockefeller for the creation of a "New World Order," presidential candidate Jimmy Carter campaigned, saying, "We must replace balance of power politics with world order politics."
Evidently he struck a chord with world leaders.
During the 1980's, then president George Bush repeated Carter's one-world dirge, announcing over national television that "a New World Order" had arrived. Following the initial broadcast, he addressed the Congress where he added: "What is at stake is more than one small country [Kuwait], it is a big idea - a new world order, where diverse nations are drawn together in common cause to achieve the universal aspirations of mankind: peace and security, freedom, and the rule of law. Such is a world worthy of our struggle, and worthy of our children's future!"
The current administration's response to Bush Senior's call for a new world order, in which peace and security, freedom, and the rule of law is aspired, has been to authorize increasingly severe surveillance of - and even elimination of - civil liberties.
The Total Information Awareness System, the controversial Pentagon research program that aims to gather and analyze a vast array of information on Americans, has hired at least eight private companies to work on the effort,[1] while without any official public notice, and without any congressional hearings,[2] the Bush administration continues to push the quick development of the commercial applications that will be overseen by The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), a big-brother amalgam of government and private sector sources ala Orwell's 1984.
"It will extensively mine government and commercial data banks, enabling the FBI, the CIA, and other intelligence agencies to collect information that will allow the government—as noted on Nightline—to essentially reconstruct the movements of citizens. This will be done without warrants from courts, thereby making individual privacy as obsolete as the sauropods of the Mesozoic era."[2]
Meanwhile, biometrics - the incessantly hyped technology that relies on physical characteristics such as fingerprints, facial and iris patterns, to ID individuals - is emerging as the indisputable security standard of the new corporate realm. The next logical step of The Total Information Awareness System will be to monitor travel, banking, and security authorization using biometric chips implanted in the body according to some futurists.
As if that was not enough, the Coast Guard confirmed plans just this week to employ 70 Unmanned Drones to monitor people-movements along U.S. Coastlines. If the robotic eyes-in-the-sky are successful, additional robots for vast surveillance and information-analysis will look for suspicious patterns in everything from personal driving habits to the movies you watch, prescriptions you purchase, telephone calls you make, and arguments you have with your spouse or divorcee.
"It is as if a giant plan is unfolding," one time presidential candidate, Pat Robertson observes. "Everything perfectly on cue."
While I've disagreed with some of Pat's comments recently (Not while I was a guest on his 700 Club show), I can't help but feel this particular comment - "It is as if a giant plan is unfolding" - is inspired.
Is The Total Information Awareness System part of the Antichrist's plan? It, or something like it, will be.
An ancient scheme is unfolding. At the core of the conspiracy a leader of indescribable brutality is about to materialize. His all-seeing, all-controlling quest will make the combined depravities of Antiochus Epiphenes, Hitler, Stalin and Genghis Khan - all of whom were types of the antichrist - look like child's play.
