H. G. WELLS THE NEW WORLD ORDER

H. G. WELLS
THE NEW WORLD ORDER

First Published . . January 1940.

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

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. etc........

Kurt A. Johnson(Amazon.com) wrote:
In this book, author and political thinker Herbert George Wells (1866-1946) posits that the world was at that time moving rapidly towards a socialist, one-world government. Examining various trends then occurring, he found that this movement was overwhelmingly supported by the bulk of the world's population, and he went on to suggest how the new world order would function and what it would look like.

This book was first published in 1939, when Mr. Wells was into his 70s. By this time in his life, he was already considered behind the times, and this book clearly shows that. He is surprisingly attached to the Nazism, which he imagines as a step in Germany's movement from democratic capitalism towards international socialism. (It wasn't until the end of the war that he found out that the SS had compiled a list of prominent Britons to be liquidated after Operation Sea Lion, and that near the top was his own name!)

In point of fact, what this book is is Wells' taking his love of international socialism and viewing then-current trends with the idea that everyone else was as enamored of it as he was. The analysis, seen from seventy years on, looks more like wishful thinking than like clear-eyed analysis. He was correct in his view of the dangers of Russia's "Tyranny of the Proletariat," but he failed to understand the nature of the men in charge of the Soviet Union - writing, for example, "Stalin, I believe, is honest and benevolent in intention..."