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. 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.4

This astonishing passage, in which the phrase “have to go” sanctions genocide, reminds us that the difference between one kind of totalitarianism and another is more a matter of nuance than ideology. That is, Wells deals in words, not acts, but the twentieth century would see Hitler and Josef Stalin (1879-1953) put ideas into practice that resemble Wells’s notions with harrowing results. Wells’s racism, unlike that of Hitler, does not derive from any discernable biological theory of racial superiority—though his sweeping statement about “swarms of black, and brown, and dirty-white, and yellow people” strongly suggests it—but from the idea that only an educated elite has the right to govern, while the obligation of the masses is to serve. Those who do not qualify for a place in the New Republic will have to be exterminated, not out of cruelty but out of a twisted kind of altruism: If they are truly unfit, they only waste resources and pollute the society of the new elite.

This new society will assert itself through violence. Wells notes that the New Republic will flourish in times of peace, but that it develops “only very painfully and slowly, amidst these growing and yet disintegrating masses.” Its development will accelerate because war is inevitable and, along with it, “the absolute determination evident in the scheme of things to smash such a body [society as it is], under the hammer of war, that must finally bring about rapidly and under pressure the same result as that to which the peaceful evolution slowly tends.”5 While this advocacy of violence is shocking, it is nevertheless the hallmark of the twentieth century’s most prominent forms of totalitarianism, fascism and Marxism-Leninism. While each puts into practice at least some of Wells’s ideas, they are different because they correspond to specific national and cultural contexts and histories. Wells’s ultimate hope is to move mankind (at least what he would call the best of it) beyond the nation state into a single corporate nation with one language and a single purpose.

Wells is the product of a peculiar moment in Western history. Between 1814, the final defeat of Napoleon, and 1914, the outbreak of World War I, there is a century of relative peace for Europeans. There are international conflicts (the Crimean War of 1853-1856, the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871, and the Boer War of 1899-1902) as well as myriad internal and civil clashes (uprisings all over Europe in 1848 and the American Civil War of 1861-1865, for example), but none of these compares to World War I in terms of casualties, destruction, and collective demoralization. It may well be, giving him the benefit of the doubt, that Wells had no clear grasp of the full meaning of what he was advocating in the name of social rationalization, but the fact is that his proposals—genocide, the subordination of individual rights to the needs of the state, and the concept of total war—are all too familiar to those born during the twentieth century. It is certainly the case that Wells’s hideously radical thought makes most of us cringe, but we must also remember that everything he wrote was echoed, repeated, and, unfortunately, practiced by others.

Anticipations was not one of Wells’s popular books, but its retrospective importance with regard to The War of the Worlds is immense. Wells could not create his New Republic anywhere in the real world, so he caused it to take place in the realm of the imagination. The War of the Worlds is nothing more or less than the attempt