Katasonov on the New World Order by H.G. Wells

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

The new world order is a familiar phrase. It is difficult to say who invented it and when. Some believe that the term was born in America. On June 20, 1782, Congress approved the bilateral Great Seal of the United States. The obverse of the seal featured a bald eagle, the national symbol of the United States. On the other, there is an unfinished pyramid, the apex of which is crowned with an eye in a triangle.

The phrase on the scroll under the pyramid reads: Novus ordo seclorum (New order for the ages). Since the 30s of the twentieth century, the reverse side of the Great Seal began to be depicted on a one-dollar bill. However, the inscription on the Great Seal and on the dollar bill is somewhat different from the phrase New World Order; it is believed that the authorship of this term belongs to an English writer H. G. Wells(1866-1946).

H. Wells was one of the most popular foreign writers in the Soviet Union. He was perceived as a representative of the science fiction genre. His novels The Time Machine (1895), The Invisible Man (1897), and The War of the Worlds (1898) are especially famous. For half a century of creative activity, Wells wrote about 40 novels and several volumes of stories, more than a dozen polemical works on philosophy and about the same number of works on the restructuring of society, two world histories, about 30 volumes with political and social forecasts, more than 30 brochures on topics about the Fabian Society, armament, nationalism, world peace, three books for children, an autobiography.

H. G. Wells was not only a writer. He immersed himself quite deeply in history, sociology, biology (he was a biologist by education), physics, mechanics, astronomy, chemistry. I followed the development of technology, assessed the consequences of its application. Introducing some scientific concepts into his works and depicting the technology of the future, he sometimes showed amazing insight, ahead of his time. Thus, in 1895, in his novel The Time Machine, he introduced the concept of a four-dimensional world; later Einstein used this concept when developing the theory of relativity. In World Unchained (1914) Wells writes about nuclear weapons based on the fission of the atom. It describes a world war, an "atomic bomb" is dropped from an airplane (that's exactly what it was called). In 1898, in his novel The War of the Worlds, Wells described a picture of the coming world war with the use of aviation, poison gases, devices like a laser (he later detailed the description of these types of weapons in the novels When the Sleeper Wakes, War in the Air). And it is no longer necessary to talk about spaceships conquering the space of the Universe, for example, in the novel "The First People on the Moon" (1901). I think that Evgeny Zamyatin, in his dystopian novel We (1920), described the spaceship Integral, borrowing some details from H. G. Wells.

At first, Wells was optimistic about the role of scientific and technological progress as a means of improving human society. However, optimism diminished when the First World War broke out. Advances in science and technology, embodied in the latest weapons, have resulted in millions of deaths on the battlefield. The writer realized that science and technology are a double-edged tool that can make a person happy, and can bring destruction and death. The rapid development of transport, communications, international trade led to the fact that the space dividing states began to disappear, as it were. But friction and conflicts remained, any spark could lead to a military fire, which is especially dangerous when thousands of miles of space cease to be a serious obstacle for weapons and military equipment. Wells' center of attention began to shift towards social, political, and military issues.

Wells understood that the world was heading for some kind of catastrophe, which could not be prevented only with the help of science and technology. It is necessary to change something in the structure of society, political power, economic model, in the world order. And in 1928, Wells published a work under the intriguing title Open Conspiracy. Blueprints for a World Revolution”(The Open Conspiracy: Blue Prints for a World Revolution). This is more of a philosophical and political essay. Or a manifest program. Wells uses in this book the same "new world order" with which we started our conversation. And in 1940 he published a book that was called The New World Order.

In The Open Conspiracy, Wells calls for the creation of a new world order, different from the one that existed at the time of writing. And then there was a world of capitalism with economic crises and chronic social tension, which threatened at any moment to develop into a socialist revolution. In the twentieth century, wrote V. Lenin, the world of capitalism reached its highest, monopoly stage, which inevitably gave rise to imperialist wars for the redivision of the world. The First World War was purely imperialist, and in 1928, when the Open Conspiracy appeared, it was already felt that a second imperialist war could break out (the Treaty of Versailles, signed at the Paris Peace Conference, programmed the preparation of such a war).

Wells' main idea: there should be a United, Universal State in the form of a Republic on the planet. Nation states must voluntarily surrender their sovereignties by handing them over to the World Government. An “open conspiracy” is not hostile to governments, parliaments and monarchs who agree to consider themselves temporary institutions that will still function during the transition period: “If constitutions, parliaments and kings are such that they can be tolerated - as temporary institutions, operating until the republic comes of age, and as long as these constitutions are guided in the spirit I have indicated, the "Open Conspiracy" does not attack them. " Presumably, in relation to those governments and monarchs who were not ready to voluntarily surrender their powers, it was supposed to use force. So, the idea is to seek universal and eternal peace through wars. Wells was somehow confident that these wars would be the last in the history of mankind.

However, how to connect different peoples with very different cultures in a single state? A single World Religion should play an important role in erasing the national and cultural differences of individual peoples: “The more beautiful and attractive false loyalty, false ideas of honor, false relationships established by religions seem to us, the more we should strive to free our consciousness and consciousness from them. those who surround us, and to the irrevocable rejection of them. " Neither Christianity nor other world religions are suitable for the role of the World Religion, which, in Wells's opinion, instilled only "prejudices" and "false values." By the way, Wells did not show sympathy for Christianity and in every possible way approved of the policy of aggressive atheism pursued in Soviet Russia. In this he was supported by some other British intellectuals, such as Bernard Shaw.

Wells was well acquainted with Arnold Toynbee (1889-1975), the author of the multivolume work "Comprehension of History", which outlined ideas about the civilizations that existed and exist in the world. While agreeing that the diversity of civilizations exists, Wells believed that it was necessary to get rid of it, to build a single civilization. Get rid of by destroying "backward" civilizations, in which he also wrote Russia ("Russian civilization"): "India, China, Russia, Africa are a mixture of applied social systems, some of which are doomed, while others will be taken to extremes: finance, the mechanization and political invasion of the civilizations of the Atlantic, Baltic and Mediterranean destroy them, take possession of them, exploit and enslave them to a greater or lesser extent."

The only "promising civilization" Wells considered the Anglo-Saxon world. It is his interests that he represents. It's no secret that Wells was a Freemason and member of secret societies. According to the author of The Committee of 300, John Coleman, Wells was a member of this committee, which is considered the highest authority in the world behind the scenes.

The ruling elites of unpromising civilizations should be on the side of the "Open conspiracy", they should be given hope to become part of the world elite: to which Europe and America owe their rise, the Open Conspiracy can make endless promises. In one leap, they will be able to leave the dying ship of their outdated system and, over the heads of their present conquerors, in full swing join the brotherhood of the rulers of this world."

It is noteworthy that H. G. Wells was counting very much on Soviet Russia in the implementation of the "Open Conspiracy." He positively assessed the power of the Bolsheviks: “Many consider this government an extremely interesting innovation. As a community of propagandists turned into a republic, it is being inspired by the Open Conspiracy ideas, paving the way for their implementation.”

By the very title of his book, Wells claims to be a revolutionary. He was impressed by the fact that the Bolsheviks were also revolutionaries, moreover, "international". Trotsky immediately after October 1917 put forward the slogan of turning the "Russian" revolution into a "world" one. True, at the time of Wells' writing of the Open Conspiracy, Stalin had already figured it out with Trotsky, announcing the possibility of building socialism in a single country in order to ideologically substantiate the industrialization that was beginning in the country. However, these innovations in the life of the USSR, apparently, did not reach Wells, or he perceived them as "tactical maneuvers."

In The Open Conspiracy and elsewhere, Wells carefully tackles the question of the socioeconomic structure of the society he desires. In any case, this is a model in which monopolies and banks dominate, and the economy is controlled by the state. Wells was familiar with John Maynard Keynes, the ideologue of state intervention in economic life, and, apparently, viewed the world of the future as Keynesian capitalism. One can feel the influence on Wells and the Austrian-German economist Rudolf Hilferding, known for his fundamental work "Financial Capital" (1910) and who created the theory of "organized capitalism". For Hilferding, this is the ideal form of society based on the domination of bank capital, which brings order to the economy and social life. This is neither spontaneous capitalism, nor socialism. This model appealed to Wells, who was one of the most prominent Fabians. The Fabian Society, founded in London in 1884, united the intellectual British elite of the reformist-socialist views, affiliated with the Labor Party. At the same time, the Fabians (and Wells) had very vague ideas about socialism.

In some ways, however, Wells's view of the new world order was very definite. He believed that the social structure of the future society should be extremely simple. Above - the elite, below - all the rest (plebs, proletarians, masses). No strata and middle classes. The elite should be made up of intellectuals and capitalists. Just as the Bolsheviks proclaimed an alliance of workers and peasants as the basis of the socialist system, so for H. G. Wells, the basis of society should be the alliance of intellectuals and big business.

As for Russia of that time, despite its “civilizational backwardness,” according to Wells, it had a great chance of joining the NPM faster than others, since it had an “intelligentsia”. The "open conspiracy" was counting very, very much on this stratum, "whose members number in only a few tens of thousands. They alone have access to the ideas of world perestroika, and in the matter of forcing the Russian system to take a real part in the world conspiracy, one can count only on this small minority and on the reflection of its influence on the myriads of individuals controlled by it. The further east you go, starting with European Russia, the greater the ratio between the number of people who have a mind that is stable and prepared enough for us to make them understand us and help us, and the number of people who do not have such a mind changes. in favor of the latter, which leads us to a frightening conclusion. Destroy this small faction and you will find yourself face to face with barbarians prone to chaos and lacking the ability for any kind of social or political organization surpassing that of a military adventurer or robber chieftain. Russia itself (without the Bolshevik regime. - VK) is in no way a guarantee against the possibility of such degradation."

Wells hoped very much that Soviet Russia would support the Open Conspiracy. However, the USSR went its own way and even confused the cards for those British conspirators, whose views were expounded by the English writer. This finally became clear to Wells in 1934, when he visited the Soviet Union and met with Stalin. At the same time, the idea of an Open Conspiracy remained relevant for decades. English writers like Aldous Huxley and George Orwell borrowed something from H. G. Wells and added something to his description of the future of the new world order.

P. S. Wells's book The Open Conspiracy has not yet been translated into Russian.