The New World Order

By: H.G. Wells

First published: January 1940

Present edition used by Orkos Press 2014

The following is one of two posts I have done on two different books with the same title about the same subject although from two different perspectives and written at two different times and written by two very different authors. One is liberal and one is conservative. The first four paragraphs are identical. If you read the one by Robertson you can skip the next four paragraphs.

The first book on the reading list, The New World Order, by H.G. Wells was written first, (1939), prior to World War II and his book deals in the theoretical aspect of a global, one world future. He wrote his book from the perspective of a European. H.G. Wells was a brilliant author probably best known by most for his works of science fiction but well known to those in the fields of economics, the political sciences and the social sciences for his writings on social issues. He was a socialist and a globalist and promoted a unified world. He believes that without a centralized government the human race is doomed (which I agree with him on). He was brilliant and could foresee many technological developments that have become reality. I believe the flaw in his equation is human nature as on a regular basis he makes references to there being enough sane people to establish a logical system. This believed in spite of the reality of human beings being largely emotional and irrational, in other words if not literally insane in the usually accepted definition but at least basically not sane. The book is very short and often deals in vague generalities. Also being written before the present United Nations was established he could not address or even foresee the problems it would be responsible for. Another thing is he could see the flaws of all past revolutions and the reasons they failed. The present advocates for change in America are speeding down the same failed highway on retread tires that have blown numerous times and been retreaded.

The second book is by Pat Robinson who is a present day religious evangelist and a political conservative. He has been on television for decades on his program The 700 Club. His book on the New World Order was published in 1991. His book is written from the perspective of an American. He opposes a one world government and supports capitalism. He discusses in detail the states of various places throughout the world and how they got to the conditions they are in. He discusses in detail with facts and reason how the one world globalists have created most of the problems by their attempts at correcting other problems. The last section of the book uses Christianity to bolster his positions. Many would not read the book because they are atheists, are of a different faith, or dislike him because of his being religious and conservative. The book would be worth reading and the facts of the problems of the present concept of a new world order would stand the test of scrutiny even if one skipped the very last section on religion. He deals with the reality that Wells could not as Wells was looking to the future with theories while Robertson is looking at the realities of the present. He dissects the United Nations and shows the type of world they are creating and working for.

Both are worth reading. Wells shows the hopes of intellectuals dealing in theories involving humanity and Robertson shows the ugly reality that often gets created with the best of intentions from these theories. After reading both the old saying about the “road to hell is paved with good intentions” will take on a whole new meaning. I personally do believe in the necessity of a central authority being required to oversee certain aspects of global life but you can’t have harmony and progress with radically divergent cultures in one nation. The present situation in the United States and the disaster that Europe is becoming should make that apparent to all but the hopelessly impaired both intellectually and psychologically. The clash between the left and the right on issues involving economics, gender, race, culture and religion makes peaceful diversity impossible unless enforced which requires tyranny. Those advocating radical change are using the word revolution. The following is a quote on revolutions from The Blank Slate The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven Pinker:

“The visions contrast most sharply in the political revolutions they spawned. The first revolution with a Utopian Vision was a French Revolution – recall Wordsworth’s description of the times, with “human nature seeming born again.” The revolution overthrew the ancient regime and sought begin from scratch the ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity and a belief that salvation would come from vesting authority in a morally superior breed of leaders. The revolution, of course sent one leader after another to the guillotine as each failed to measure up to usurpers who felt they had a stronger claim to wisdom and virtue. No political structure survived the turnover of personnel, leaving a vacuum that would be filled by Napoleon. The Russian Revolution was also animated by the Utopian Vision, and it also burn through a succession of leaders before settling into the personality cult of Stalin. The Chinese Revolution too, put its faith in the benevolence and wisdom of a man who displayed, if anything, a particularly strong dose of human foibles like dominance, lust, and self-deception. The perennial limitations of human nature prove the futility of political revolutions based only on the moral aspirations of the revolutionaries.”

The New World Order

by H.G. Wells

Publisher: Orkos Press 2014 (First published in 1940)

Chapter 1: The End of an Age

“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.” Pages 6, 7

“The Hague Tribunal was established and there was a steady dissemination of the conceptions of arbitration and international law. It really seemed to many that the peoples of the earth were settling down in their various territories to a litigious rather than a belligerent order. If there was much social injustice, it was being mitigated more and more by a quickening sense of social decency. Acquisitiveness conducted itself with decorum and public spiritedness was in fashion.” Pages 7, 8

“Economic life was largely directed by irresponsible private businesses and private finance which, because of their private ownership, were able to spread out their unifying transactions in a network that paid little attention to frontiers and national, racial or religious sentimentality. “Business” was much more of a world commonwealth than the political organizations. There were many people, especially in America, who imagined that “Business” might ultimately unify the world and government sink into subordination to its network.” Page 8

“……… As I write, in the moment, thousands of people are being killed, wounded, hunted, tormented, ill-treated, delivered up to the most intolerable and hopeless anxiety and destroyed morally and mentally, and there is nothing in sight at present to arrest this spreading process and prevent its reaching you and yours. It is coming for you and yours now at a great pace. Plainly insofar as we are rational foreseeing creatures there is nothing for any of us now but to make this world peace problem the ruling interest and direction of our lives. If we run away from it it will pursue and get us. We have to face it. We have to solve it or be destroyed by it. It is as urgent and comprehensive as that.” Page 11

Chapter 2: Open Conference

“One of the more unpleasant aspects of a state of war under modern conditions is the appearance of a swarm of individuals, too clever by half, in positions of authority. Excited, conceited, prepared to lie, distort and generally humbug people into states of acquiescence, resistance, indignation, vindictiveness, doubt and mental confusion, states of mind supposed to be conductive to a final military victory. These people love to twist and censor facts. It gives them a feeling of power; if they cannot create they can at least prevent and conceal.” Page 13

“…… The air is full of the panaceas of half-wits, none listening to the others and most of them trying to silence the others in their impatience. Thousands of fools are ready to write us a complete prescription for our world troubles. Will people never realize their own ignorance and incompleteness, from which arise this absolute necessity for the plainest statement of the realities of the problem, for the most exhaustive and unsparing examination of differences of opinion, and for the most ruthless canvassing of every possibility, however unpalatable it may seem at first, of the situation?” Page 17

Chapter 3: Disruptive Forces

“The new power organizations are destroying the forests of the world at headlong speed, ploughing great grazing areas into deserts, exhausting mineral resources, killing off whales, seals, and a multitude of rare and beautiful species, destroying the morale of every social type and devastating the planet. The institutions of the private appropriation of land and natural resources generally, and of private enterprise for profit, which did produce a fairly tolerable, stable and “civilized” social life for all but the most impoverished, in Europe, America and East, for some centuries, have been expanded to a monstrous destructiveness by the new opportunities. The patient, nibbling, enterprising profit-seeker of the past, magnified and equipped now with the huge claws and teeth the change of scale has provided for him, has torn the old economic order to rags. Quite apart from war, our planet is being wasted and disorganized. Yet the process goes on, without any general control, more monstrously destructive even than the continually enhanced terrors of modern warfare.” Page 23, 24

“Now it has to be made clear that these two things, the manifest necessity for some collective world control to eliminate warfare and the less generally admitted necessity for a collective control of the economic and biological life of mankind, are aspects of one and the same process. Of the two the disorganization of the ordinary life which is going on, war or no war, is the graver and least reversible.” Page 24

“This war storm which is breaking upon us now, due to the continued fragmentation of human government among a patchwork of sovereign states, is only one aspect of the general need for a rational consolidation of human affairs. The independent sovereign state with his perpetual war threat, armed with the resources of modern mechanical frightfulness, is only the most blatant and terrifying aspect of that same want of a coherent general control that makes overgrown, independent, sovereign, private business organisations and combinations, socially destructive. We should still be at the mercy of the “Napoleons” of commerce and the “Attilas” of finance, if there was not a gun or a battleship or a tank or a military uniform in the world. We should still be sold up and dispossessed.

“Political federation, we have to realise, without a concurrent economic collectivisation, is bound to fail. The task of the peace-maker who really desires peace in a new world, involves not merely a political but a profound social revolution, profounder even than the revolution attempted by the Communists in Russia. The Russian Revolution failed not by its extremism but through the impatience, violence and intolerance of its onset, through lack of foresight and intellectual insufficiency.” Page 25

Chapter 4: Class War

“……. Throughout the ages this has been going on. The rich, the powerful generally, the more intelligent and acquisitive have got away with things, and sweated, oppressed, enslaved, bought and frustrated the less intelligent, less acquisitive and the unwary. The Haves in every generation have always got the better of the Have-nots, and the Have-nots have always resented the privations of their disadvantage.” Page 26

“The point to note is that in the unplanned scramble of human life through the centuries of the horse-and-foot period, these incessantly recurring outbreaks of the losers against the winners have never once produced any permanent amelioration of the common lot, or greatly changed the features of the human community. Not once.” Page 27, 28

“The Have-nots have never produced the intelligence and the ability and the Haves have never produced a conscience, to make a permanent alteration of the rules of the game. Slave revolts, peasant revolts, revolts of the proletariat have always been in fits of rage, acute social fevers which have passed. The fact remains that history produces no reason for supposing that the Have-nots, considered as a whole, have available any reserves of directive and administrative capacity and disinterested devotion, superior to that of the more successful class. Morally, intellectually, there is no reason to suppose them better.” Page 28

“Marx saw the world from a study and through the hazes of a vast ambition. He swam in the current ideologies of his time and so he shared the prevalent socialist drive towards collectivism. But while his sounder-minded contemporaries were studying means and ends he jumped from a very imperfect understanding of the Trades Union movement in Britain to the wildest generalisations about the social process. He invented and antagonised two phantoms. One was the Capitalist System; the other the Worker.” Page 29

“So while other men toiled at this gigantic problem of collectivization, Marx found his almost childishly simple recipe. All you had to do was to tell the workers that they were being robbed and enslaved by this wicked “Capitalist System” devised by the “bourgeoisie”. They need only “unite”; they had “nothing to lose but their chains”. The wicked Capitalist System was to be overthrown, with a certain vindictive liquidation of “capitalists” in general and the “bourgeoisie” in particular, and a millennium would ensue under a purely workers’control, which Lenin later on was to crystallise into a phrase of supra-theological mystery, “the dictatorship of the proletariat”. The proletarians need learn nothing, plan nothing; they were right and good by nature; they would just “take over”. The infinitely various envies, hatreds and resentments of the Have-nots were to fuse into a mighty creative drive. All virtue resided in them; all evil in those who had bettered them. One good thing there was in this new doctrine of the class war, it inculcated a much-needed brotherliness among the workers, but it was balanced by the organisation of class hate. So the great propaganda of the class war, with these monstrous falsifications of manifest fact went forth. Collectivisation would not so much be organised as appear magically when the incubus of Capitalism and all those irritatingly well-to-do people, were lifted off the great Proletarian soul.” Page 30, 31

“Even for 1848 this is not intelligent social analysis. It is the outpouring of a man with a B in his bonnet, the hated Bourgeoisie, a man with a certain vision, uncritical of his own sub-conscious prejudices, but shrewd enough to realise how great a driving force is hate and the inferiority complex. Shrewd enough to use hate and bitter enough to hate. Let anyone read over that Communist Manifesto and consider who might have shared the hate or even have got it all, if Marx had not been the son of a rabbi. Read Jews for Bourgeoisie and the Manifesto is pure Nazi teaching of the 1933-8 vintage.” Page 32

“This avoidance of fundamental criticism is one of the greatest dangers to any general human understanding. Marxism is no exception to the universal tendency. The Capitalist System has to be a real system, the Bourgeoisie an organised conspiracy against the Workers, and every human conflict everywhere has to be an aspect of the Class War, or they cannot talk to you. They will not listen to you. Never once has there been an attempt to answer the plain things I have been saying about them for a third of a century. Anything not in their language flows off their minds like water off a duck’s back. Even Lenin by far the subtlest mind in the Communist story – has not escaped this pitfall, and when I talked to him in Moscow in 1920 he seemed quite unable to realise that the violent conflict going on in Ireland between the Catholic nationalists and the Protestant garrison was not his sacred insurrection of the Proletariat in full blast.” Page 33

Chapter 5: Unsalted Youth

“Chief among these breaking-points, people are beginning to realise more and more clearly, is the common, half educated young man.” Page 38

“Measured by any standards except human contentment and ultimate security, mankind appears to be much wealthier now than in 1918. ………. Increased productivity is really a swifter and more thorough exploitation of irreplaceable capital. It rises to a maximum and then the feast is over. Natural resources are being exhausted at a great rate, and the increased output goes into war munitions whose purpose is destruction, and into sterile indulgences no better than waste. Man, “heir of the ages”, is a demoralised spendthrift, in a state of galloping consumption, living on stimulants.” Page 38, 39

“……… The “mob” of the twentieth century is quite different from the almost animal “mob” of the eighteenth century. It is a restless sea of dissatisfied young people, of young men who can find no outlet for their natural urgencies and ambitions, young people quite ready to “make trouble” as soon as they are shown how.” Page 39

“A leader of vision with adequate technical assistance might conceivably direct much of the human energy he has embodied into creative channels. For example he could rebuild the dirty, inadequate cities of our age, turn the still slovenly country-side into a garden and play-ground, re-clothe, liberate and stimulate imaginations, until the ideas of creative progress became a habit of mind. ….. [he] will be further hampered by the fact that in organizing his young people he has had to turn their minds and capacities from creative work to systematic violence and militant activities. It is easy to make an unemployed young man into a Fascist or gangster, but it is hard to turn him back to any decent social task. Moreover the Champion’s own leadership was largely due to his conspiratorial and adventurous quality. He himself is unfit for a creative job. He finds himself a fighter at the head of a fighting pack.” Page 41, 42

“The British oligarchy, demoralised and slack with the accumulated wealth of a century of advantage, bought off social upheaval for a time by the deliberate and socially demoralising appeasement of the dole. It has made no adequate effort to employ or educate the surplus people; it has just pushed the dole at them.” Page 43

“So the British Empire remains, paying its way down to ultimate bankruptcy, buying itself a respite from the perplexing problems of the future, with the accumulated wealth and power of its past. It is rapidly becoming the most backward political organisation in the world. But sooner or later it will have no more money for the dole and no more allies to abandon nor dominions to yield up to their local bosses, and then possibly its disintegration will be complete (R.I.P.), leaving intelligent English people to line up at last with America and the rest of the intelligent world and face the universal problem.” Page 45 (I will make a comment here. When I read this I vividly pictured in my mind President Lyndon Johnson and his “Great Society”.)

Chapter 6: Socialism Unavoidable

“In Western Europe now the dissolution in the drive toward socialisation progress by leaps and bounds. The British governing class and British politicians generally, overtaken by a war they had not the intelligence to avert, have tried to atone for their slovenly unimaginativeness during the past twenty years in a passion of witless improvisation.” Page 51

“A revolution, that is to say a more or less convulsive efforts at social and political readjustment, is bound to come in all these overstrained countries, in Germany, in Britain, and universally. …….. We cannot prevent its onset. But we can affect the course of its development. It may end in utter disaster or it may release a new world, far better than the old. …..” Page 55

“The more highly things are collectivised the more necessary is the legal system embodying the Rights of Man. This is been forgotten under the Soviets, and so men go in fear there of arbitrary police action. But the more functions your government controls the more need there is for protective law. The objection to Soviet collectivism is that, lacking the antiseptic legally assured personal freedom, it will not keep. …..” Page 57

Chapter 7: Federation

“Let us now take up certain vaguely constructive proposals which seem at present to be very much in people’s minds. They find their cardinal expression in a book called Union Now by Mr. Clarence K. Streit, which has launched the magic word “Federation” upon the world. The “democracies” of the world are to get together upon a sort of enlargement of the Federal Constitution of the United States (which produced one of the bloodiest civil wars in all history) and then all will be well with us.” Page 63

“In The Fate of Homo Sapiens I examined the word “democracy” with some care, since it already seemed likely that great quantities of our young men were to be asked to cripple and risk their lives for its sake.” Page 64

“In the book I have already cited I will discuss What is Democracy? And Where is Democracy? I will do my best there to bring Mr. Streit down to the harsh and difficult facts of the case. Page 64

“There is one aspect of money to which the majority of those that discuss it seemed to be incurably blind. You cannot have a theory of money or any plan about money by itself in the air. Money is not a thing in its self; it is a working part of an economic system.” Page 67

“Mr. Streit betrays at times as vivid a sense of advancing social collapse as I have, but it has still to occur to him that that collapse may be conclusive. There may be dark ages, a relapse into barbarism, but somewhen and somehow he thinks man must recover. George Bernard Shaw has recently been saying the same thing.

“It may be worse than that.” Page 71

“It would, I suggest, be far easier to create the United States of the World, which is Mr. Streit’s ultimate objective, than to get-together the so-called continent of Europe into any sort of unity.” Page 73

Chapter 8: The New Type of Revolution

“Let us return to our main purpose, which is to examine the way in which we are to face up to this impending World Revolution.” Page 75

“To many minds this idea of Revolution is almost inseparable from visions of street barricades made of paving stones and overturned vehicles, ragged mobs armed with impromptu weapons and inspired by defiant songs, prisons broken and a general jail delivery, palaces stormed, a great hunting of ladies and gentlemen, decapitated but still beautiful heads on pikes, regicides of the most sinister quality, the busy guillotine, a crescendo of disorder ending in a whiff of grapeshot……” Page 76

“Our argument throughout has been that things have gone too far ever to be put back again to any similitude of what they have been. We can no more dream of remaining where we are then to think of going back in the middle of the dive.” Page 79

“Previous revolutionary thrusts have been vitiated by bad psychology. They have given great play to the gratification of the inferiority complexes that arise out of class disadvantages. …… The revolution we are contemplating will aim at abolishing the bitterness of frustration. But certainly it will do nothing to avenge it. Nothing whatever. Let the dead past punish its dead.” Page 81

“Wealth, personal freedom and education, may and do produce wasters and oppressive people, but they may also release creative and administrative minds to opportunity. The history of science and invention before the nineteenth century confirms this. On the whole if we are to assume there is anything good in humanity at all, it is more reasonable to expect it to appear when there is most opportunity.”

“And in further confutation of the Marxist caricature of human motives, we have the very considerable number of young people growing from middle-class and upper-class homes, who figure in the extreme left movement everywhere. “ Page 82

“It is a misfortune of their generation, that so many of them have fallen into the mental traps of Marxism. It has been my absurd experience to encounter noisy meetings of expensive young men at Oxford, not one of them stunted physically as I was by twenty years of under-nourishment and devitalised upbringing, all pretending to be rough-hewn collarless proletarians in shocked revolt against my bourgeois tyranny and the modest comfort of my declining years, and reciting the ridiculous class war phrases by which they protected their minds from any recognition of the realities of the case.” Page 83

Chapter 9: Politics For the Sane Man

“But between us and that goal intervenes the vast and deepening disorders of our time. The new order cannot be brought into existence without a gigantic and more or less coordinated effort of the saner and abler elements in the human population. The thing cannot be done rapidly and melodramatically.” Page 86

Chapter 10: Declaration of the Rights of Man

(Here he lists and explains with a short explanation of each of these rights . I will not list them but let you locate a copy of the book and read them for yourselves. Many lhey look like they came from the concept of the American Bill of Rights.)

Chapter 11: International Politics

“The advocacy of such movements of the mind and will as I am speaking of here is in itself among the operating causes in political adjustment, and those who are deepest in the struggle are least able to estimate how it is going. Every factor in political and international affairs is a fluctuating factor. The wise man therefore will not set his heart upon any particular drift or combination. He will favor everything that trends towards the end at which he aims.” Page 105

“In the companion predecessor to this book, The Fate of Homo Sapiens, I tried to drive home the fact that our species has no more reason to believe it can escape defeat and extinction, than any other organism that plays or has played its part in the drama of life. I tried to make clear how precarious is our present situation, and how urgent it is that we should make a strenuous effort at adjustment now.” Page 112

Chapter 12: World Order in Being

“There will be no day of days then when a new world order comes into being. ….. No man, no group of men, will ever be singled out as its father or founder. For its maker will not be this man nor that man nor any man but Man, ….. World order will be, like science, like most inventions, a social product, an innumerable number of personalities will have lived fine lives, pouring their best into the collective achievement.” Page 114

“And who did it? Nobody and everybody. Twenty thousand brains or so, each contributing a notion, a device, an amplification. They simulated one another; they took off from one another.” Page 114

“One might have imagined that long before this one of the many great bankers and financial experts in our world would have come forward with a clear and simple justification for the monetary practices of today. He would’ve shown how completely reasonable and trustworthy this money credit system was. He would’ve shown what was temporarily wrong with it and how to set it working again, as the electrician does when the lights go out. ……. It dawns upon more and more of us that it is not a system at all and never has been a system, that it is an accumulation of conventions, usages, collateral developments and compensatory expedients, which creaks now and sways more and more and gives every sign of a complete and horrifying social collapse.” Page 122, 123

“Most of us have believed up to the last moment that somewhere distributed among the banks and city offices in a sort of world counting house, there were books of accounts, multitudinous perhaps and intricate, but ultimately proper accounts. Only now is a dawning upon comfortable decent people that the counting house is in a desperate mess, that codes seem to have been lost, entries made wrong, additions gone astray down the column, records kept in vanishing ink…….” Page 123

“The secret trouble in their minds is gnawing doubt that their own proper “plan”, the panacea, is in some subtle and treacherous way likely to fail them if it is put to the test. The internal fight against this intolerable shadow betrays itself in their outer behavior. Their letters and pamphlets, with scarcely an exception, have this much in common with the letters one gets from lunatics, that there is a continual resort to capital letters in abusive terms. They shout out at the slightest provocation or none.” Page 123, 124