Today marks the birthday of the British writer, H.G. Wells. Like so many others, I grew up reading Wells’s science fiction, with War of the Worlds as my favorite. It’s still one of my favorite stories. To commemorate his birth, Google added a small picture (that they call a ‘doodle’) based on War of the Worlds. It shows Martian tripods menacing an English village, perhaps not far from the Martians’ first landing at Horsell Common. It’s a kind gesture.
Here’s the doodle:
Later, in my early twenties, I stumbled upon an essay from George Orwell, entitled, “Wells, Hitler and the World State.” In the essay, Orwell takes on Wells’s unrealistic view of the Nazi threat. (A pdf link to the essay is available from Google Scholar.)
That’s right — even in 1941, after the Third Reich had subjected all Europe to savage conquest and murder, Wells still deprecated the Nazi threat:
In March or April, say the wiseacres, there is to be a stupendous knockout blow at Britain… . What Hitler has to do it with, I can- not imagine. His ebbing and dispersed military resources are now probably not so very much greater than the Italians’ before they were put to the test in Greece and Africa.
The German air power has been largely spent. It is behind the times and its first-rate men are mostly dead or disheartened or worn out.
In 1914 the Hohenzollern army was the best in the world. Behind that screaming little defective in Berlin there is nothing of the sort… . Yet our military ‘experts’ discuss the waiting phantom. In their imaginations it is perfect in its equipment and invincible in discipline. Sometimes it is to strike a decisive ‘blow’ through Spain and North Africa and on, or march through the Balkans, march from the Danube to Ankara, to Persia, to India, or ‘crush Russia’, or ‘pour’ over the Brenner into Italy. The weeks pass and the phantom does none of these things—for one excellent reason. It does not exist to that extent. Most of such inadequate guns and munitions as it possessed must have been taken away from it and fooled away in Hitler’s silly feints to invade Britain. And its raw jerry-built discipline is wilting under the creeping realisation that the Blitzkrieg is spent, and the war is coming home to roost.
Wells was a pacifist, and as one can see from his remarks, he looked upon Hitler in 1941 as a fading threat.
Orwell, not nearly so famous at the time, saw the foolishness in Wells’s remarks, and was willing to say as much:
All sensible men for decades past have been substantially in agreement with what Mr Wells says; but the sensible men have no power and, in too many cases, no disposition to sacrifice themselves. Hitler is a criminal lunatic, and Hitler has an army of millions of men, aeroplanes in thousands, tanks in tens of thousands. For his sake a great nation has been willing to overwork itself for six years and then to fight for two years more, whereas for the commonsense, essentially hedonistic world-view which Mr Wells puts forward, hardly a human creature is willing to shed a pint of blood.
Before you can even talk of world reconstruction, or even of peace, you have got to eliminate Hitler, which means bringing into being a dynamic not necessarily the same as that of the Nazis, but probably quite as unacceptable to “enlightened” and hedonistic people…..
Hitler is all the war-lords and witchdoctors in history rolled into one. Therefore, argues Wells, he is an absurdity, a ghost from the past, a creature doomed to disappear almost immediately. But unfortunately the equation of science with common sense does not really hold good. The aeroplane, which was looked forward to as a civilising influence but in practice has hardly been used except for dropping bombs, is the symbol of that fact. Modern Germany is far more scientific than England, and far more barbarous. Much of what Wells has imagined and worked for is physically there in Nazi Germany. The order, the planning, the State encouragement of science, the steel, the concrete, the aeroplanes, are all there, but all in the service of ideas appropriate to the Stone Age. Science is fighting on the side of superstition….
I’m a libertarian, and with all like-minded Americans, I would very much prefer a world of liberty, free exchange in capital and labor, and peace with other nations. We have a right to live this way. I doubt very much, though, that any of these things will endure in America without vigilance.
We face no deadly threat in this beautiful state, so far from danger abroad. We are fortunate in a way of which Europeans in 1941 could only dream.
We need only conserve what we have, and assure its free and natural evolution.
There will be any number of people who’ll ask you to trust them, rely on their opinions, accept that they have others’ best intentions at heart. That, ultimately, they know better than you, because they’re so kind, evolved, enlightened, etc. They may describe themselves as they wish. When they say it, though, I am sometimes reminded of men like Wells, so right about everything except what threatened everything.
I very much enjoy Wells’s stories, as much as I did when I was a boy. For judgment, though, in politics or international affairs, I would readily choose Orwell’s instincts over Wells’s.