The New World Order

By H G Wells and Constantin von Hoffmeister

Whether it is attainable, how it can be attained, and what sort of world a world at peace will have to be.

Today the phrase 'New World Order' evokes dystopian visions of enforcing a uniform international peace, Big Brother surveillance and legal order through a system of collective security and stringent control of

• Language: English
• Publisher: Legend Books Sp. z o.o.
• Release date: Nov 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9788367583138

H G Wells

H.G. Wells (1866–1946) was an English novelist who helped to define modern science fiction. Wells came from humble beginnings with a working-class family. As a teen, he was a draper’s assistant before earning a scholarship to the Normal School of Science. It was there that he expanded his horizons learning different subjects like physics and biology. Wells spent his free time writing stories, which eventually led to his groundbreaking debut, The Time Machine. It was quickly followed by other successful works like The Island of Doctor Moreau and The War of the Worlds.

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Legend Books 2022

© 2022 by Legend Books Sp. z o.o. (www.legendbooks.org)

First published in 1940.

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The Apocalyptic Order of H. G. Wells

Introduction by Constantin von Hoffmeister

H. G. Wells demanded nothing less than a complete restructuring of the world — a complete overhaul of all existing governments and institutions — with the ultimate aim of uniting humanity once and for all in a superstructure of a world state. The key to bliss and salvation, according to Wells’ prophetic views, was collectivisation. Not man against man should be the driving force of history, but man with man against all obstacles that may hinder mankind’s progress as a whole. The species should develop its members on a socialist platform, where not profit was the main driver of evolution but capitalised Man’s desire to contribute to the welfare of his community. This desire could be a drive if certain levers were pulled and buttons pushed on the surface of the machine that would incite the people to strive for the welfare of one because combined it leads to the welfare of all.

Race and class prejudices must be eradicated if we as one people want to establish a global system based on justice. Peoples of the Third World can indeed be lifted to an equal footing, based on appropriate legislation, instead of being treated like children to be pampered and kept in perpetual bondage to their self-proclaimed benefactors. Wells anticipated today’s anti-racist consensus by several decades. He also argued that eventually class war would become a thing of the past. Due to appropriate equalising measures taken by the new rulers of the Earth, people would work to satisfy their needs, and common people, not just hereditary and parasitical aristocrats, would finally be able to go on the ‘Grand Tour’ themselves — thus foreshadowing the mass tourism and swarmed beaches in the southern climes today.

Wells’ surmise that most old buildings are not worth preserving was unfortunately shared by many post-World War Two governments in Europe, which proceeded to demolish the old parts of towns that had not already been obliterated by British and American bombs — all to make way for the future of ‘automobile-appropriate’ streets. This way of thinking has since completely reversed as now city councils are desperately trying to save what is left and even proudly rebuilding what they once proudly destroyed — all in a bid to make the citizens’ surroundings less Brutalist and more cozy and, of course, to attract more tourists. It would be interesting to know if Corbusier’s plan to raze old Paris and replace it with a block-grid one would have met Wells’ approval.

The New World Order envisioned by Wells entailed the making of a new man, not unlike the ‘New Soviet Man’ propagated by his Bolshevik contemporaries — a man integrated into the collective with his own needs and freedoms intact but checked against aggression and subversion by the world police with support of the world air force and its all-seeing eyes attached below the pilot’s cabin. No guns are allowed because if one has a gun, who does one want to kill? Forced disarmament of governments and private citizens may lead to a new wave of peace between ethnic groups known for having been antagonistic towards each other before the New World Order and human harmony became a reality. Regarding the implementation of the New World Order, for Wells, it was not a political agenda from above, not a product of global elites, but a kind of systemic process of social self-organisation. However, according to conspiracy theories peddled today by cranks and intellectuals alike, it is usually only a few powerful groups or individuals who control everything from behind the scenes.

Wells asserts that there is only one chance for mankind to survive the current alarming calamities and artificial catastrophes: the total reorganisation of global relations in the face of the self-destructive activities of a selfish, ethnocentric mankind. He insists that the new age of fraternity must not tolerate sovereign nation-states, which might cause enmity between races and peoples, and independent rulers, who might supervise the build-up to wars unleashed by them or their enemies, but rather be led by social engineers pulling the levers of production and consumption within a system of mass collectivisation. Utopian or dystopian? The reader can judge for himself whether the global Eden achieved through a bloodless world revolution is a beauty to behold and cultivate or a monstrosity to exorcise before it can germinate.

The New World Order is the answer to the natural equilibrium of multipolarity. The former tries to tame the chaos of the latter. Great spaces competing against each other in the system of multipolarity is Darwinism in action and hence a natural process. The New World Order imposing its will by force on diverse nations and ethnicities is trying to bottle a hurricane. One day it will out by sheer pressure and wreak havoc in the orderly cities with their row houses and uniformed couriers. The New World Order is thus Promethean as it attempts to harness what has never been successfully harnessed before — namely human nature. Since voluntary cooperation is impossible and ruthless competition the norm, the New World Order is a fire-stealing phenomenon that establishes regulated human rule in opposition to the wild, which has to be subjugated afresh on a daily basis.

Voluntarism is an aberration and mental affliction. In the world of Star Trek, the United Federation of Planets is a galactic organisation that strives to encompass all known advanced species. Its goal is to prevent the eruption of wars between planets through employing seasoned conflict resolution by Federation officers. Humans seem to know that equality is best and any sort of discrimination based on speciesism is to be frowned upon and strongly discouraged. Aliens not inclined to follow this path are often chastised and pressured into acquiescence. Wells’ future society would function along the same lines, all along watchtowers and digital surveillance. The Prime Directive does not apply to fully fledged members of a civilised community but only to those noble savages that have not seen the light of reason yet, being still trapped in the cage of their own savagery.

The New World Order is desirable for those who wail in the distance, sit in the confessional and have a morbid fear of being let loose upon the world without boundaries hammered into tablets brought down a mountain by a white-bearded man holding a crooked staff. Such individuals cannot sustain their individuality in the stormy seas representing the nothingness, in the shape of aimlessness, of the pre-apocalyptic techno-landscape. The oblong box of Schrödinger’s cat is littered inside with the cemeteries of nations: maybe the dead will stay dead or maybe they will rise again and dance — this time together forever.

Moscow, Russia

November 12, 2022

1. The End of an Age

In this small book I want to set down as compactly, clearly and usefully as possible the gist of what I have learnt about war and peace in the course of my life. I am not going to write peace propaganda here. I am going to strip down certain general ideas and realities of primary importance to their framework, and so prepare a nucleus of useful knowledge for those who have to go on with this business of making a world peace. I am not going to persuade people to say ‘Yes, yes’ for a world peace; already we have had far too much abolition of war by making declarations and signing resolutions; everybody wants peace or pretends to want peace, and there is no need to add even a sentence more to the vast volume of such ineffective stuff. I am simply attempting to state the things we must do and the price we must pay for world peace if we really intend to achieve it.

Until the Great War, the First World War, I did not bother very much about war and peace. Since then I have almost specialised upon this problem. It is not very easy to recall former states of mind out of which, day by day and year by year, one has grown, but I think that in the decades before 1914 not only I but most of my generation — in the British Empire, America, France and indeed throughout most of the civilised world — thought that war was dying out.

So it seemed to us. It was an agreeable and therefore a readily acceptable idea. We imagined the Franco-German War of 1870–71 and the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78 were the final conflicts between Great Powers, that now there was a Balance of Power sufficiently stable to make further major warfare impracticable. A Triple Alliance faced a Dual Alliance and neither had much reason for attacking the other. We believed war was shrinking to mere expeditionary affairs on the outskirts of our civilisation, a sort of frontier police business. Habits of tolerant intercourse, it seemed, were being strengthened every year that the peace of the Powers remained unbroken.

There was indeed a mild armament race going on; mild by our present standards of equipment; the armament industry was a growing and enterprising one, but we did not see the full implication of that; we preferred to believe that the increasing general good sense would be strong enough to prevent these multiplying guns from actually going off and hitting anything. And we smiled indulgently at uniforms and parades and army manoeuvres. They were the time-honoured toys and regalia of kings and emperors. They were part of the display side of life and would never get to actual destruction and killing. I do not think that exaggerates the easy complacency of, let us say, 1895, forty-five years ago. It was a complacency that lasted with most of us up to 1914. In 1914 hardly anyone in Europe or America below the age of fifty had seen anything of war in his own country.

The world before 1900 seemed to be drifting steadily towards a tacit but practical unification. One could travel without a passport over the larger part of Europe; the Postal Union delivered one’s letters uncensored and safely from Chile to China; money, based essentially on gold, fluctuated only very slightly; and the sprawling British Empire still maintained a tradition of free trade, equal treatment and open-handedness to all comers round and about the planet. In the United States you could go for days and never see a military uniform. Compared with today that was, upon the surface at any rate, an age of easy-going safety and good humour. Particularly for the North Americans and the Europeans.

But apart from that steady, ominous growth of the armament industry, there were other and deeper forces at work that were preparing trouble. The Foreign Offices of the various sovereign states had not forgotten the competitive traditions of the eighteenth century. The admirals and generals were contemplating with something between hostility and fascination the