H.G. Wells’ Visionary Political SF Back in Print

Looking along the Science Fiction shelves in Waterstones in Bristol last week, I found a large selection of H.G. Wells’ books are now being republished. These include not only well-known favourites like The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, First Men in the Moon and The Island of Dr Moreau, but also two of his explicitly political SF novels, When the Sleeper Wakes and A Modern Utopia. When the Sleeper Wakes is about a merchant banker or stockbroker, who falls asleep and wakes up centuries in the future to find that his activities have created a nightmare capitalist dystopia. A Modern Utopia is about a group of travellers from our world, who enter an alternative reality in which the Earth is ruled by a single world government, everyone speaks the same language and there is complete racial and sexual equality. On the negative side, it also shows Wells’ disdain for democracy, as political power is held by four ‘samurai’, unelected guardians with absolute power.

I haven’t bought them, and so don’t know what they’re like. However, it’s clear that they are vehicles for Wells’ socialist views, like his The Shape of Things to Come.

The Complete Guide to the Bigots, Racists, Islamophobes and Weirdoes in UKIP

The website Angry Meditations has put up this post, Your definitive guide to UKIP’s racists, sexists, homophobes, Islamophobes, anti-Semites, paedophiles, animal abusers, and violent bullies. listing every every racial and religious bigot, misogynist, paedophile, animal abuser and general weirdo in UKIP and their offensive statement and views, or their crimes against children and animals. And there’s a very long line of them, from the Fuhrage downwards.

They include not just the Purple Duce himself, but also senior party officials, such as Steve Crowther, Neil Hamilton, Matthew Richardson, Misty Thackeray, Christopher Monckton, Stuart Wheeler, and Winston Mackenzie; the party’s MP, Mark Reckless; their MEPs, Janice Atkinson, Diane James, Julia Reid, Stuart Agnew, Patrick O’Flynn, Roger Helmer, Bill Etheridge, Mike Hookem, Gerard Batten and Godfrey Bloom; their parliamentary candidates, Bill Walker, Donald Grewar, Przemek Skwircynski, John Rees-Evans, Dr Jonathon Munday, Martyn Ford, Lynton Yates, Rev. George Hargreaves, Ted Strike, Philip Rose, Julia Gasper, Kerry Smith, Mark Walker, David Evans and John White; local chairs and party secretaries, Steve Kendall, Pamela Preedy, Neil Whitear, Richard Crouch, David Challice, Peter Entwhistle, and Andy Lovie; local councillors, Trevor Shonk, Martyn Heale, Tiggs Keywood-Wainwright, Donna Edmunds, Chris Paine, Eric Kitson, Rozanne Duncan, David Silvester, and Dave Small; council candidates, Geoff Courtenay, Anne-Marie Crampton, John Lyndon Sullivan, Dean Perks, Iain McLaughlan, Paul Rimmer, Magnus Nielsen, David Wycherley, James Silverfox, Gary Port, William Henwood, Matt Pavey, Ronald Loebell, Heino Vockrodt and Keith Woods; ordinary UKIP members and affiliated groups and individuals, David William Griffiths, Jan Zolyniak, Douglas Denny, Timothy ‘Dusty’ Miller, Christian Soldiers of UKIP, Demetri Marchessini, Richard Desmond, Robert Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz, Bjorn Soder and Mike Read.

The article begins

As a historic election looms in Britain, a self-described anti-establishment party which wants to leave the EU and cull immigration is beginning to make waves. UKIP promises to restore lost British glory by renegotiating trade deals and placing restrictions on immigration, and insists that it is an inclusive, libertarian, non-racist party.

So, one would expect an exposé list like this to be full of candidates taking on the most powerful and greedy: Media elites, corporate CEOs, stockbrokers, bankers, and anybody else with significant money or influence. And yet, this “non-racist” party instead seems to be riddled with hate-filled bigots whose sole delight is targeting minorities and those with absolutely no power.

Perhaps this list is part of some big Lib Dem-Labour-Tory-BBC conspiracy to discredit the opposition and maintain the status quo. Or perhaps its evidence of a pervasive lack of compassion and a rife infestation of hatred.

Unfortunately, I have to update this list nearly every week, and it’s therefore divided into sections to make it easier to read.

It’s at https://angrymeditations.wordpress.com/2014/12/16/your-definitive-guide-to-ukips-violent-racists-sexists-homophobes-benefit-haters-anti-semites-islamophobes-and-extremists/ if you want to take a look at the list yourself and see the really disgusting ideas and actions of the people listed themselves.

And after reading that long list, you’re left wondering if there’s anyone, anyone at all in UKIP, who isn’t a raging bigot who hates just about marginalised group around, and who isn’t a threat to children and livestock.

Fascism and Big Business on Man as Predator

Historians and political theorists have observed that one of the key features of Fascism is that it views human relationships very much as a kind of Hobbesian ‘war of each against all’, and sees humans really as another form of rapacious predator. Hitler and the Nazis were fond of Nietzsche’s celebration of the ‘blond beasts’, while at the same time censoring the other parts of the philosopher’s oeuvre that directly contradicted the foundations of the regime.

Critics of the Neo-Cons, such as the authors of the book Confronting the New Conservatism, also note that the Neo-Cons have an essentially Hobbesian view of humanity as a collection of alienated social atoms, each competing and struggling with the others. They also observe that the Neo-Cons extend this principle to foreign affairs. All countries are engaged in a struggle for supremacy, so there is little point in establishing international alliances. Rather, as superior civilisations, America and the West should be free to impose their will and standards by force.

Brady makes the same point in his book, The Structure of American Fascism. He makes the point that American businessmen have exactly the same views. This has resulted in the invasion and plunder of other countries, in which justification for the military action has been secondary.

The inner face of fascism considers man as a beast of prey. Scientists, artists, the rank and file of the people, may recoil from this doctrine: the leading figures in the business world of Italy, Germany, England, France, and the United States do not. In 1938, Spengler, then approved by the Nazis as a prophet of the New Germany, wrote:

“Man is a beast of prey. I shall say it again and again. All the would-be moralists and social-ethics people who claim or hope to be ‘beyond all that’ are only beasts of prey with their teeth broken, who hate others on account of the attacks which they themselves are wise enough to avoid. Only look at them. They are too weak to read a book on war, but they herd together in the street to see an accident, letting the blood and the screams play on their nerves. And if even that is too much for them, th4ey enjoy it on the film and in the illustrated papers. If I call man a beast of prey, which do I insult: man or beast? For remember, the larger beasts of prey are noble creatures, perfect of their kind, and without the hypocrisy of human morale due to weakness.”

In this view man is arrayed against man. The only code of behaviour which has any real meaning for the species is that “might makes right”. Where only strength counts, the strong are those who have taken; who have the power to have and to hold. The weak are those without holdings – of station, or property, or power. It is a doctrine that human society is nothing but organised “piracy”. Is there any fundamental difference in appreciation of human values or in general outlook on life between a stockbroker and a pirate? So far as the specific activity is concerned there is no difference, not even in the methods of sharing the spoils. What on the open seas is thought of as an outlaw and “piratical” raid of group on group, is in another setting played as a legitimate game in which each man is pitted against every other man for all he can “get by with” short of a snarl with criminal law.

That businessmen in the United States hold this view is beyond question. They hold it axiomatic in describing the character of their own kind, and they hold it to be valid for the human race at large. Anyone who has taken the trouble to interview stockbrokers, captains of industry and finance, advertisers, public relations counsellors, or other participants in, and apologists for, the business system will soon learn that this view of human nature governs their actions and their behaviour in practically all things, and that it is regarded as so obviously true as to require no comment, explanation, or justification.

Thus there is not the slightest objection to using all the armed forces of the state in a war on India, on Morocco, on Manchuria, on Abyssinia, on Nicaragua, Spain, or Mexico. If you are big enough, strong enough to take it, the rule is: take it. Take the country, take its resources, take its wealth, take the lives, health and happiness of all its inhabitants. “Realities rule”; the justification can be concocted later.

Nor, on the other hand, is there the slightest objection to using the troops against strikers, hunger-marchers, share-croppers, or any other group which for any reason whatsoever wants a little of what the insiders may have. All the emphasis on war, all the promotion of the army and the navy, of “national defence,” of that curiously bellicose frame of mind commonly known by the euphemistic term “patriotism,” is born of the same view of life, of human nature, of civilisation and culture.

And this same attitude is very much alive in modern politics. The invasion of Iraq took place not to oust Saddam Hussein as a dictator and threat to world peace. It was so that the Americans and Saudis could control the vast Iraqi oil industry. At the same time, western companies wanted to acquire Iraqi industries, which were to be privatised and sold to them. And the Neo-Cons wished to turn the entire country into a low taxation, free trade utopia. Even more sinister, the GM companies were also lined up to patent the rare crops indigenous to the country, as part of a scheme to force the Iraqi people to use their products.

Back in Britain, we have the Tories passing legislation banning protests and political lobbying close to elections. Just in case these sway the voters and the Tories lose the election. Tebbit has emerged again to urge the government to pick a fight with the unions. And Boris Johnson, the major of London, doesn’t have enough money to pay his firefighters, but he did have enough cash to buy two armoured cars for the police.

As for the character of the international business class, one of Lobster’s contributors wrote that he had asked one of his friends, who had attended a meeting of international financiers, what they were like. ‘Worse than you can possibly imagine’, was the reply.