Talk:Political views of H. G. Wells

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Politics

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Text and/or other creative content from this version of H. G. Wells was copied or moved into Political views of H. G. Wells with [649712693 this edit]. The former page's history now serves to provide attribution for that content in the latter page, and it must not be deleted as long as the latter page exists.

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I am moving "Political views" from the H.G. Wells article to this dedicated article. Valerius Tygart (talk) 17:30, 3 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Other views[edit]

This articles makes out that Wells was consistent in opposing racism and eugenics. This is not the case. How about including these views:

"And how will the new republic treat the inferior races? How will it deal with the black? how will it deal with the yellow man? how will it tackle that alleged termite in the civilized woodwork, the Jew? Certainly not as races at all. It will aim to establish, and it will at last, though probably only after a second century has passed, establish a world state with a common language and a common rule. All over the world its roads, its standards, its laws, and its apparatus of control will run. It will, I have said, make the multiplication of those who fall behind a certain standard of social efficiency unpleasant and difficult… The Jew will probably lose much of his particularism, intermarry with Gentiles, and cease to be a physically distinct element in human affairs in a century or so. But much of his moral tradition will, I hope, never die. … And for the rest, those swarms of black, and brown, and dirty-white, and yellow people, who do not come into the new needs of efficiency?

Well, the world is a world, not a charitable institution, and I take it they will have to go. The whole tenor and meaning of the world, as I see it, is that they have to go. So far as they fail to develop sane, vigorous, and distinctive personalities for the great world of the future, it is their portion to die out and disappear.

The world has a greater purpose than happiness; our lives are to serve God's purpose, and that purpose aims not at man as an end, but works through him to greater issues."

Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress Upon Human Life and Thought (1901), The Faith, Morals, and Public Policy of The New Republic, p. 340 - 343

"The true objection to slavery is not that it is unjust to the inferior but that it corrupts the superior. There is only one sane and logical thing to be done with a really inferior race, and that is to exterminate it. Now there are various ways of exterminating a race, and most of them are cruel. You may end it with fire and sword after the old Hebrew fashion; you may enslave it and work it to death, as the Spaniards did the Caribs; you may set it boundaries and then poison it slowly with deleterious commodities, as the Americans do with most of their Indians; you may incite it to wear clothing to which it is not accustomed and to live under new and strange conditions that will expose it to infectious diseases to which you yourselves are immune, as the missionaries do the Polynesians; you may resort to honest simple murder, as we English did with the Tasmanians; or you can maintain such conditions as conduce to “race suicide,” as the British administration does in Fiji."

A Modern Utopia (1905), Ch. 10, sect. 3

John Price (talk) 09:06, 3 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Wells is definitely complicated on these issues--I'm pretty sure he was a liberal of his time, and also had deeply ingrained racist and misogynist leanings, and definitely not enough antipathy toward eugenics. But simply quoting A Modern Utopia flatly like this does not really prove anything: this is a statement about "inferior race" treatments that is really parody; in the book itself he disowns his narrator's voice, and compares his novel/dialogue to Plato's Republic--which is arguably totalitarian and does not present (really) a "utopia" so much as a modified dystopia. More on this weird dystopian/anti-utopian vision and its distortions of history and various social ideas is on Wikipedia's own article A Modern Utopia. Meerkat77 (talk) 14:30, 4 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]