Harlan K. Ullman is the chairman of the Killowen Group, which advises leaders in government and business, and the former national security advisor to Presidents Gerald Ford and George H. W. Bush. He is also the author of the “shock and awe” doctrine, which was used to such effect in the Iraqi wars. Writing for the Atlantic Council, an influential think tank based in Washington, DC, he argued that “non-state actors” have the power to threaten the “state-centric system of the international order” created by the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648.

According to Ullman, the principal threat, from information freely available on the Internet and exploited by individuals like Edward Snowden, Bradley Manning, and, by implication, Julian Assange (whistleblowers all), was perhaps greater even than the threat of international terrorism.

There was, he said, a “second reality” that could threaten what would be a “new world order.” This reality was located in the “failed and failing states,” such as Afghanistan and Zimbabwe, with Brussels and Washington “in between.”

What, then, is this new world order of which he speaks? Apart from a reference to the same used by President George H. W. Bush in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, Ullman does not provide any specifics. If one looks elsewhere, however, there is much evidence of what it must be. But first, it must be noted that Ullman explicitly laments that “…little is likely to be done to reverse or limit the damage imposed by failed or failing governance… (w)ithout an extraordinary crisis.” He is clearly in the camp of those who believe that even a failing state should be saved, if necessary, through the mechanism of an extraordinary crisis (artificially contrived, as required).

Zbigniew Brzezinski is a renowned political scientist, former national security advisor to President Jimmy Carter, and co-founder, with David Rockefeller, of the secretive Trilateral Commission. In his book, published in 1970, titled Between Two Ages: America's Role in the Technetronic Era, he wrote: “The technetronic era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society. Such a society would be dominated by an elite, unrestrained by traditional values. Soon it will be possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and maintain up-to-date complete files containing even the most personal information about the citizen.” [Emphasis added.]

In the same work, he made this Orwellian prediction: “In the technetronic society, the trend would seem to be towards the aggregation of the individual support of millions of uncoordinated citizens, easily within the reach of magnetic and attractive personalities exploiting the latest techniques to manipulate emotions and control reason.” So it becomes evident that reason must be defeated in the march toward this new world order.

In a speech delivered to the Council on Foreign Relations in May 2010, in Montreal, Brzezinski warned about a phenomenon thus far overlooked by the strategists; what he described as a “global political awakening,” which, he said, would make things “much more difficult” even for a world power like the United States.

It appears that when he speaks, Brzezinski, like his fellow geopolitical planners, tends to speak in code. The following is a good example: Members of the G20, he said, were “lacking in internal unity with many of its members in bilateral antagonisms.” His written word is, however, quite unambiguous. The brave new society that he envisaged, as early as 1970, would be more controlled because its controllers would be unrestrained by traditional values.

Brzezinski's observations on the potential menace (to individual freedom) of the technetronic era show extraordinary insight. Certainly, his prediction was far more accurate than that made almost three decades later by James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg in The Sovereign Individual, in which the authors foresaw a society largely liberated from the shackles of government by the same phenomenon. If Ullman's fears should be realized, however, then Davidson and Rees-Mogg may yet be vindicated.

Ullman, one would guess, is a disciple of Zbigniew Brzezinski. The threat that he foresees to the Westphalian system of governance by non-state actors like Edward Snowden can readily be equated to Brzezinski's concern with a “political awakening.” It also becomes evident why the political establishments of the United States and Britain reacted with such fury to the Snowden revelations.

For an insight to the extent of that fury, look no further than The Guardian website for an account on how that venerable publication was compelled, by what was said to be the threat of legal action, into the physical destruction of the computers containing the information disclosed to them by Snowden. A single quote will set the scene:

“In two tense meetings last June and July the cabinet secretary, Jeremy Heywood, explicitly warned The Guardian's editor, Alan Rusbridger, to return the Snowden documents. Heywood, sent personally by David Cameron, told the editor to stop publishing articles based on leaked material from American National Security Agency and GCHQ. At one point, Heywood said: 'We can do this nicely or we can go to law.' He added: 'A lot of people in government think you should be closed down'.”

What The Guardian had done, along with other publications elsewhere, was to publish details of the extraordinary reach of the invasion of individual privacy under the guise of national security. What they had not done, with their disclosures, was to breach the Official Secrets Act—an offense that would have had almost immediate criminal repercussions.

The real issue is, of course, not state security, but state authority. This is also what so disturbs the militaristic sensibilities of Harlan K. Ullman: unarmed private individuals have begun to challenge the reach of a 370-year-old system of governance and the unearned privileges conferred by that system.

The idea of a compliant world population controlled by a world government, whose writ would extend across the universe of human affairs, is a perennial one. Karl Marx had such a plan, although he envisaged a more benign system of universal brotherhood in which each would care for the other, and the need for a controlling state would eventually disappear. (He had evidently not paid attention to the biblical account of the brothers Cain and Abel.) Bertrand Russell thought that universal compliance could be achieved if a central authority distributed the world's food supply, strictly according to a predetermined rationing system.

The various improvers of the human condition each have an idea that involves a period, at least, of voluntary or involuntary enslavement. The current, post-Soviet idea would create a permanent voluntary servitude, where each subject becomes a ward of the state. The mechanism is a gradual transition from socialism to an inevitable serfdom, where the state assumes the status of the godhead.

There will, as Zbigniew Brzezinski has predicted, be an elite, for the elite will always be with us, as will a vast majority of impoverished, as Bertrand Russell had foreseen. The enemy of this process, as Ullman has said, is the individual, and the diminishing prospects for its companion virtue, personal freedom, which is now best represented by the courageous and lonely campaigner, like Edward Snowden.

George Orwell, it seems, was mistaken only about the date.