Danger of drifting into war: HG Wells addresses the Reichstag – archive, 16 April 1929
Berlin, Monday
A large audience that included members of the Diplomatic Corps and representatives of the German Foreign Office listened to Mr HG Wells’s address in the Reichstag this evening on The Common Sense of World Peace.’ The following is a summary of Mr Wells’s address:-
“For some time (said Mr Wells) my mind has been greatly concerned with the question of the peace of the world. Our wounded and tormented but by no means exhausted world is now struggling away from traditions of militant nationalism toward the great but still imperfectly apprehended possibilities of a world peace. What precisely is this peace for which all the world appears to be clamouring, and what are the inevitable conditions for bringing it about?
The desire for peace will no more give us peace by itself than the concentration of the mind upon hunger will nourish the body.
Celebrating HG Wells’s role in the creation of the UN Declaration of Human Rights
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Peace talk evasions
“Secondly, I want to stress the fact that the new road to world peace is a complex and toilsome road with harsh and disagreeable corners and many living and sensitive, and possibly, resentful obstructions that may have to be removed.
One difficulty very fundamental and very formidable is being shirked and evaded in all this peace talk. This difficulty is the Sovereign independence of State. Until we tackle it instead of walking round and round it, we shall not make much further progress towards organised peace. We shall go on wasting our various emotions upon peace pacts, and our substance upon war preparation just as we are doing at the present moment.
Take the Kellogg Pact of last year, which is typical of these popular perambulations about our central difficulty. The Pact is the means by which the citizens of the United States have relieved their consciences in the matter of world affairs without the slightest interference with their ordinary way of carrying on in life. By this simple treaty, war, we are assured, has not been simply outlawed but abolished in the world.
How far this has been achieved can he measured by two very simple addition sums, one giving the war expenditure for 1928 for all nations concerned before the Pact, and the other the estimate for the equivalent, expenditure in 1929. That is the real index of the value of this network of peace pacts and agreements. The Kellogg Peace Pact was contrived by men whose conception of peace is entirely controlled by the idea of integral and unassailable sovereignty.”
Italy’s Vatican Agreement
On the other hand, continued Mr Wells, a Zollverein spreading out until by including the whole world, it passes out of existence, or a federation of world banking and monetary controls, or on consolidation of the control of world shipping and overland transport by a federal board would take the world halfway towards an everlasting-peace.
“The day a man with a ton of goods can travel from Cardiff to Vladivostok or from Moscow to San Francisco as he can now travel from San Francisco to New York, without a passport or a Customs examination, without seeing a battleship or a soldier in uniform, or a single warplane in the air – the chief structures of a world pact will exist. To get Europe out of the tariff pits in which it has buried itself, to induce all these inter-locking and entangled semi-parochial national Governments that divide us to-day – to induce them to give way to broader and saner controls means a vastly more complex effort than getting eminent statesmen to sign peace declarations they have not the slightest intention of observing. It means a propaganda and struggle such as the world has never before known.”
Mr Wells dwelt on the need of the new Kulturkampf, which must take place before current education can be replaced by the new education which he advocates. Nationalistic teaching must be scrapped. History as it has been taught in its nationalistic form must be washed out of the minds of men. In its place must be taught the history of social evolution, the story of the growth of the great human society of to-day and man’s steady conquest of power and freedom. Nationalism must be exorcised from the world.
The new Kulturkampf must come to a reckoning with all forms of religious profession and activity. “Christianity claims to be a uniting religion to all mankind, overriding all races and kingdoms, but in practice it is closely associated with an antiquated cosmogony, a limited and partial teaching of history, and a supple acquiescence in existing institutions and in existing Governments and dictatorships which is no doubt ascribable to its preoccupation with spiritual things.
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The recent agreement between the Vatican and the intensely nationalistic dictatorship of Italy deepens one’s doubt whether Christian statecraft has now either the will or the capacity to help materially in the great task of world federation.”
‘Fresh Wars Ahead’
In conclusion Mr WeIls said: “Meanwhile, for all our pacts and promises, the world moves plainly forward towards fresh wars. The obduracy and stupidity of the British and other Governments have gradually forced back Russia, in her isolation, upon the traditions of the old nationalistic imperialism that fell in 1917. Russia, through isolation, is becoming once more a land of self-centred imperialism, and a vast struggle in Asia between Russia and the West on the old exhausting fruitless lines is manifestly in preparation. Russia may still call it a struggle against western imperialism, but it becomes more and more plainly a struggle for the mental and physical ascendancy of Russia. Nothing effective is being done to avert that collision. It can begin in Asia, almost anywhere now, and involve the whole world needlessly, monstrously and fruitlessly.
China is a festering half continent of war possibilities, and from Italy throughout the re-nationalised fragments of the Austrian and Turkish empires and so to the Near East a score of promising war occasions are rapidly developing. A little sooner or a little later these latent wars will come. They will come of themselves. All we have to do is to go on doing what we are doing now – let these things drift, sign our declarations, enjoy our sentimental occasions, and presently the guns will go off by themselves.
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The war censorships will stop any further talk and the drill-sergeant will kick us back into the drill-yard. There may be ten centuries of drill-yard before mankind, ending, perhaps, in the complete destruction of the drill-yard. That need not be; we may yet win in our war to end war. We must clear our minds of cant and delusion, and face the immense complexities and difficulties and labours of the task before us frankly and simply, as a good surgeon faces a difficult operation, or an engineer faces the wilderness. Ten years of faith-healing for the sickness of the world are enough. It is time that real work for world peace was begun.”