"Inferior races"

[alabaster]

And we men, the creatures who inhabit this earth, must be to them
at least as alien and lowly as are the monkeys and lemurs to us. The
intellectual side of man already admits that life is an incessant
struggle for existence, and it would seem that this too is the belief
of the minds upon Mars. Their world is far gone in its cooling and
this world is still crowded with life, but crowded only with what they
regard as inferior animals. To carry warfare sunward is, indeed,
their only escape from the destruction that, generation after
generation, creeps upon them.

And before we judge of them too harshly we must remember what
ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only
upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its
inferior races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness,
were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged
by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. Are we such
apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same
spirit?

It is interesting to note his use of the words, "inferior races". I have also read his history of the world and he freely uses terms, such as Aryan, that are violently taboo today.

It just goes to show you that the Nazi philosophy did not emerge in a vacuum; there is a tendancy to forget that that mode of thought was the norm, not the exception, for most people, even radical socialist liberals like Wells.

So what is he saying in these two paragraphs? Is he satirising his people's justification of wars of extermination on racial grounds, or does he honestly believe the Martians have a claim to our world, because they are racially superior to us?

[RickyB]

and he was only 21!

[<[Iron Man]>]

Well no ones perfect

[mctoddridesagain]

Interesting questions Alabaster.

I suspect that Wells's attitudes to race were rather complex. Having not read enough of his work, I cannot really comment on how his views may have developed (and changed) over time. However, you may want to read this chapter from 'A Modern Utopia' (1905, so not too long after WotW) which is concerned almost entirely with 'race':

www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hgwells/1905/modern-utopia/ch10.htm

There is much to think on there, too much to quote from extensively. However, here is Wells on the extermination of races:

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.

Note the comments concerning the British. To me they are slightly sardonic. I believe his comments in WotW are also to be read in that spirit. The chapter of 'A Modern Utopia' actually excoriates racism, though Wells uses language we would perhaps blanch at on the whole. His attitude is that there are so many differences between individuals within a race that to speak of an 'average Englishman' is as absurd as an 'average Chinaman'. He condemns those who take their 'average Englishman' to be wholesome, intelligent, vigorous etc., and then compare him with an 'average Chinaman' who is lazy, shifty, stupid etc. In other words, the tendency to take the best of one's own and compare it with the worst of the other, thereby making no point at all.

To Wells, also, the idea of 'inferior' races is as ludicrous as 'superior' races. Wells states as follows, in a passage which directly precedes the one above:

Suppose, now, there is such a thing as an all-round inferior race. Is that any reason why we should propose to preserve it for ever in a condition of tutelage? Whether there is a race so inferior I do not know, but certainly there is no race so superior as to be trusted with human charges. The true answer to Aristotle’s plea for slavery, that there are “natural slaves,” lies in the fact that there are no “natural” masters. Power is no more to be committed to men without discipline and restriction than alcohol. 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.

The last sentence is incredibly harsh (and naturally runs on into the discussion of extermination above) but it isn't a justification for 'ethnic cleansing' as Wells did not (at least in 1905) believe in an 'inferior race' - he is merely taking the logic to its absurd end.

Of course, there is much else in Wells's beliefs that most do find repugnant today - he was a eugenicist and believed in weeding out the 'unfit'. But he did not believe that any one race could be declared 'unfit' entire of itself.

Wells may have been an elitist, but he wasn't a racist (or, at least, not by the common standards of his day).

[quaderni]

Great points on the race issue.

The word 'race', for Victorians, meant a lot of things - it implied family, community, biological variations (sub-species and variations within a family) and also human variation. Hence you have references to 'races' of plants, or 'races' of dogs, for instance. Darwin's work was chock full of these references, though Darwin himself was anti-racist and anti-slavery (although evangelical fascists in the US smear him with those words, they aren't true).

As a number of historians have pointed out, Victorian society was so racist that people used race to explain, quite literally, everything about the human condition. Even people who were anti-racist, in their politics and public pronouncements, still thought in 'racist' terms.

A really interesting book on this subject is by John Efron, entitled _Defenders of the Race_. It shows how deeply race thinking penetrated Victorian thought in England, Germany, and Russia.

[mctoddridesagain]

Efron’s book sounds really interesting, Quaderni, I’ll look out for it.

As you say, ‘race’ was a bit of a catch-all term for the Victorians, being used with striking imprecision. And even those who were liberal for their day spoke and wrote in racial terms we would find disconcerting today.

As I said before, although Wells was certainly a eugenicist (a whole new can of worms in its own right!), his views on race weren’t as cut & dried as some seem to suggest (there are various Christian websites which condemn him for racism as well as eugenicism). And during a life as long as his, if there were shifts in his thought, then that is scarcely to be wondered at.

Certainly a poke around on the internet finds some curiosities, little gems even.

In a conversation in 1930 between Wells and Rabindranath Tagore, the Indian poet and spiritual guru (he was a close friend of Ghandi), the following exchange took place:

TAGORE: Do you think there are any fundamental racial difficulties?

WELLS: No. New races are appearing and reappearing, perpetual fluctuations. There have been race mixtures from the earliest times; India is the supreme example of this. In Bengal, for instance, there has been an amazing mixture of races in spite of caste and other barriers.

TAGORE: Then there is the question of racial pride. Can the West fully acknowledge the East? If mutual acceptance is not possible, then I shall be very sorry for that country which rejects another's culture. Study can bring no harm, though men like Dr. Haas and Henri Matisse seem to think that the eastern mind should not go outside eastern countries, and then everything will be all right.

WELLS: I hope you disagree. So do I!

TAGORE: It is regrettable that any race or nation should claim divine favouritism and assume inherent superiority to all others in the scheme of creation.

WELLS: The supremacy of the West is only a question of probably the past hundred years. Before the battle of Lepanto the Turks were dominating the West; the voyage of Columbus was undertaken to avoid the Turks. Elizabethan writers and even their successors were struck by the wealth and the high material standards of the East. The history of western ascendancy is very brief indeed.

On the subject of miscegenation, some writers claim Wells to have been dead set against it, as was the general custom. But various of his writings suggest otherwise. In ‘The Open Conspiracy’, Wells states:

‘To exaggerate the dangers and evils of miscegenation is a weakness of our time. Man interbreeds with all his varieties and yet deludes himself that there are races of outstanding purity, the "Nordic," the "Semitic," and so forth. These are phantoms of the imagination.’

And the frankly unpleasant Earnest Sevier Cox, writing in ‘White America: The American Racial Problem as Seen in a Worldwide Perspective’ (1937), denounced Wells thus:

‘…H.G. Wells finds fault with the white Americans for their social exclusion of the American mixbreeds, “who are of their own blood.” That such a writer as Wells should at this late date be an apostle of miscegenation is evidence that the Negro problem has ramifications beyond the Negro race.’

When a scumbag like Cox condemns a man, he must be doing something right!

[quaderni]

Cheers to Wells. If a scumbag like Cox denounces him, he's clearly doing something right.

I'm reminded of the recent exchange on the Daily Show, here in the US. John Stewart ran clips of Robert Novak, Pat Buchanan, and Gordon Liddy denouncing Mark Felt, the informant 'Deep Throat' who ratted out Nixon.

Stewart said:

-- Novak, Buchanan, and Liddy hate Mark Felt. Mark Felt is a great man.