So this fortnight will mark the beginning of a conscious effort on my part to take Room 101 back to its conspiratorial roots. We begin with a piece on a man who was a big hero of mine growing up, but after watching Alex Jones's Endgame and doing some of my own research, I am much more unsure of ... science fiction god and leading futurist of his day H G Wells. For those unaware, Wells was the author of all-time science fiction classics like The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, The Island Of Doctor Monroe and, of course, The War of the Worlds.
"Countless people will hate the New World Order
and will die protesting against it." -- H G Wells
The New World Order (1940)
This genuinely chilling quote is the ominous opening to Jones' Endgame. To the informed, the very words "New World Order" alone should be enough to send a shiver down the spine but what makes this quote - which could so easily be mistaken for coming from the pages of Hitler's Mein Kampf - all the more frightening is the fact that it came from a man still so wildly respected and admired even today as a true visionary like H G Wells.
But what is the New World Order anyway and what did Wells mean by the phrase? My own understanding is that the term "New World Order" refers to a proposed future world government or pan-Earth union. The first truly global empire that would include and supplement all the nations of the world and, conspiracy researchers say, be ruled by a tiny oligarchy of enlightened elites who know what is best for us.
If this nightmare future ever unfolds, at best, it would be as if mankind were reduced to being no more than perpetual children, forever under the governorship of a benevolent parent never truly allowed to grow up and make our own choices in life. However, if human history is anything to go by, it would probably be far worse than that ... benevolent dictators are somewhat of a rarity whereas abuse of power and tyrants are commonplace. Whatever the case, though, the New World Order would mean the complete end to what we now call freedom and, very sadly, in my opinion, this is pretty much exactly what Wells calls for in his book of the same name.
The road to Hell is often paved with good intentions and Wells' The New World Order is perhaps an excellent example of this. Spurred on by the tragedy and horrors of the Great War and the beginning of a new war with a revived Germany, Wells makes a strong argument for ending the reign of the nation-states and creating in their place a new "world state" (the New World Order) to unite and rule all the diverse peoples of the globe. A new "world peace" not all that different to the Roman peace of two millennia ago, ending war once and for all by force. Where national sovereignty is a ghost and any nation or person who disturbs the "World Pax" is dealt with "brutally and completely" by a "world police."
Much of what Wells calls for in The New World Order sounds reasonable and sensible enough: an end to war, discrimination and unemployment. But the ends don't justify the means. It is and will always be immoral to force all the world's nations and people into bowing to the demands of a global empire. No matter how elegantly disguised Wells may put it.
Even now in the 21st century, there are parts of The New World Order that make for some genuinely troubling and even scary reading. For instance, Wells shows nothing but disrespect for the US Constitution, America's most sacred and important founding document: "I do not know how sane men in America are going to set about relaxing the stranglehold of the Constitution ... and pull America into line with the reconstruction of the rest of the world." But this is nothing compared to Wells' dark vision of a world disarmament police."
Incredibly, Wells makes the astonishing demand that the whole world, not just ordinary citizens but the nations themselves too, should be forcibly disarmed...everyone except the "world peace" enforcers of course:
"The world has a right to insist that not simply some German government but the people generally recognise unequivocally and repeatedly, the rights of man asserted in the Declaration, and it is disarmed and that any aggressive plant, any warplane, warship, gun or arsenal that is discovered in the country shall be destroyed forthwith, brutally and completely. But that is a thing that should not be confined to Germany. Germany should not be singled out for that. Armament should be illegality everywhere, and some sort of international force should patrol a treaty-bound world."
A disarmed world totally at the mercy of a single global authority is an obvious formula for abuse and tyranny. Even Wells is forced to admit this danger: ''Its chief dangers are the dogmatist and the would-be 'leader' who will try to suppress every collateral line of work which does not minister to his supremacy." But the international force of young, uneducated thugs, totally loyal to the "world state" Wells envisions policing the globe sound especially dangerous:
"A sturdy and assertive variety of the new young will be needed for the police work of the world. They will be more disposed for authority and less teaching or creative activities than their fellows. The old proverb will still hold for the new order that it takes all sorts to make a world, and the alternative to driving this type of temperament into conspiracy and fighting it and, if you can, suppressing it, is to employ it, win it over, trust it, and give it law behind it to respect and enforce. They want a loyalty and this loyalty will find its best use and satisfaction in the service of world order."
Interestingly, ever the futurist, Wells predicted (somewhat accurately) that this "world police" force would be largely air based: "It is not unreasonable to anticipate the development of an ad hoc disarmament police which will have its greatest strength in the air." Perhaps darkly foreshadowing the many examples of "strategic bombing" of so-called rouge states and terrorists we have seen in recent years.
There is so much more in The New World Order we could discuss but the bottom line has to be that any peace brought about by force is no peace at all. War is not peace and a "World Pax" can hardly be considered freedom.
One more thought. When you take on board Wells' New World Order ideas, new and darker interpretations of his writings become possible. Here is the famous beginning of The War of the Worlds:
"No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns, they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water... Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this Earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us."
Was Wells really using the Martians as an allegory for colonialism as is widely believed or could the Martians represent something else? The architects of the New World Order perhaps? Read The New World Order with The War of the Worlds and decide for yourself.
