1898 Book "War of the Worlds" Reflects Conservative View of 9-11

In keeping with the fact that FR has the most relevant postings of any "blog," an FR posting last night led me to Bartleby.com where I was able to read the entire 1898 novel "War of the Worlds" in 6 hours.

I was surprised by how conservative a liberal HG Wells was. It must have been a time when most liberals were like Zell Miller...holding tons of respect for the military and abhorring "decay" in society. If any of you are thinking "I wouldn't want to read a 107 year old book that is probably stupider than the movies" please think again. If you are thinking "Since I already know what happens, I wouldn't want to read the book" please think again. Here are some reasons why you and especially your children should read the book (spoiler alert):

1) The book actually has a plot that is realistic (at least not insulting to sci-fi readers who know the author wrote the book in 1898). The Martians have a motive to attack (Mars is losing air and water), they do so with limited resources (10 waves of "cylinders" are fired in the 10 day period that occurs rarely when Mars and Earth are close to each other), the Martians are not magically all-powerful (they have to regroup and change tactics when humans learn how to bring a tripod down), they actually have a strategy as they attack only southern England because they know this is the center of the world's major superpower and the entire world can be realistically crippled by simply conquering London (Teddy Roosevelt of the US probably hadn't quite captured Cuba when the novel was published in 1898 which might have shocked Wells into recognizing that the US had become the world's superpower), and the protagonist and his brother could actually be expected to separately walk the countryside of London in the manner that they do (as opposed to Tom Cruise walking the length of Massachusetts with his 8 year old daughter seemingly overnight) . In the book, there are no machines buried for "millions of years" under busy traffic intersections where sewer pipes would have been laid.

2) Although Spielberg clearly shows respect for the military in his new movie, the 1898 novel "War of the Worlds" shows the British army and navy fighting to the death and blocking and distracting the enemy in order to successfully buy time for trainloads and boatloads of civilians to escape certain death. The novel clearly shows how the military battles bought time for millions of people to leave London, leave the southwest London suburbs where the Martians have their original "base camp," and indeed leave England altogether via boat to Holland and France. Spielberg's movie, if it wanted to be true to the book, could have taken just 10 seconds of Morgan Freeman narration to show that the big Armageddon battle that a National Guard unit makes over the crest of a hill, actually had the effect of slowing down the limited number of tripods and allowing tons of civilians to escape an area where they otherwise would have all been killed. The liberal crime of the two movies was in giving the viewer the impression that the enemy was "unlimited" and that "killing one enemy only seemed to create more enemies".

Wells would have nothing of the leftist concept that it was useless to try to stop the enemy, even though he does resign the reader into thinking that the Martians are going to win via superior technology, immoral tactics and strategy. When you've read the book, you will be in awe of the HMS Thunderchild which makes a suicide run at three tripods in the shallow part of the English Channel that are determined to sink boatloads of civilians trying to flee to Holland and France...thus allowing most boats to get out to deeper water and out of range of the heat rays (Spielberg conflates the river ferry scene and the ocean steamer scene).

In today's war on terror, how many useless liberals do you know personally who think of Islamists as infinite in number and "if you kill one terrorist you only create 10 more terrorists"? HG Wells' book, even when predicting defeat for the humans, does not support this attitude, but Spielberg's film actually does support such thinking and that is not to Spielberg's credit. Spielberg makes it look like the entire world is being invaded by millions of tripods. Wells just has 10 tripods making short work of southern England, mainly via the immoral use of poison gas, so they can establish the place as a base to build flying machines to finish off the conquering of the world. Wells is more realistic, and thus more conservative in his thinking. He says in the final chapter that "we have learned [from our 9-11] and we can stop them when they try again."

3) Furthermore, the book clearly offers the military timely technical advice on how to win in a "war on terror". First of all, it shows the importance of "GPS Devices" which were called "Heliographs" and involved some kind of triangulation. The Martians actually feel threatened by British Special Forces who crawl through the woods to pinpoint the positions of the tripods with these heliographs (thus the Martians deliberately burn fields and forests and deliberately seek out to destroy individual people crawling around the countryside). Wells heavily emphasizes WMD threats in his book. He makes it very clear that whoever will control the skies will control the world. Airplanes had not yet been invented in 1898, but Wells is saying that it is imperative that England get a fleet of flying machines. Finally, Wells shows how the Martians introduce gas warfare when they realize that they cannot win with just their heat rays. MOST PEOPLE IN THE BOOK DIE FROM GAS WARFARE. This book, plus the experiences of WW1 eighteen years later, would have had a huge impact on mankind determining that gas warfare was too inhuman to contemplate using. But it also would have prepared people to realize that gas warfare COULD HAPPEN (as it did within a generation).

4) Spielberg's "survivalist" is actually a religious "curate" in the book. Modern Christians may not like the depiction of a holy man as a spineless wimp whom the hero has to kill because he has lost his mind and is getting too loud. But, in 1898, the threat to the church wasn't from without, it was from within.The curate dies in the book because the Martians have built a basecamp next to their hideout (the movies never explain why aliens care so much about who might be in one basement) and the drunken, gluttonous curate later starts yelling "The Lord is bringing us home for our sins" before the hero has to kill him to keep him quiet. Conservatives of 1898 could see this as showing how some church ministers have weak characters and are drunk and gluttonous. Jesus had a problem with certain "holy men" himself. By the way, Spielberg conflates the "artilleryman" and the "curate" into the Tim Robbins crazy character, but Spielberg does gets it right when he has Tim Robbins character killed for making too much defeatist noise.

5) If you have family members who didn't quite understand 9-11, please buy them this book (or download it free from Bartleby). Wells basically creates a 9-11 for a decadent 1898 England whose values he wants to preserve. Take this line for instance: "It may be that in the larger design of the universe this invasion from Mars is not without its ultimate benefit for men; it has robbed us of that serene confidence in the future which is the most fruitful source of decadence." How many useless liberals do you know who have a "naive confidence" in the future where WMDs never existed in Iraq so they will never exist in New York (and who don't want to be reminded of 9-11)?

5) Finally, the book has romance and family values in it where Spielberg brings, to his credit at least, only family values. The ending of the book evokes the emotions of standing at Ground Zero in Manhattan with a loved one who had been in the Twin Towers on that fateful day. To get a taste of how well the book is written in this respect, take the final paragraph (spoiler alert):

"to see the people walking to and fro among the flower beds on the hill, to see the sight-seers about the Martian machine that stands there still, to hear the tumult of playing children, and to recall the time when I saw it all bright and clear-cut, hard and silent, under the dawn of that last great day. And strangest of all is it to hold my wife’s hand again, and to think that I have counted her, and that she has counted me, among the dead."

More on how the book's conservatism differs from the movies and the leftists of the post-911 world:

1) Leftists of the modern era cannot conceive of a realistic plot for a war of civilizations and so they don't believe one exists and won't prepare to fight as a result. This way of thinking is reflected in the way the WOTW movies are clearly presenting civilizational clashes as unrealistic fantasy. The book, on the other hand, was in 1898, a clear warning to the British that the Germans (for instance) could develop tanks and airplanes and perfect gas warfare and annihilate England out of a simple desire to have resources that Britain controls. The book's message that others can and will "attack us out of envy" is very realistic. I am sure that the book was seriously studied at Sandhurst and other military academies in the days before WW1. The 1898 book is more of a help IMHO in conceptualizing the war on terror than the 2005 movie is (despite the fact that I think Spielberg did a respectable job of evoking some of the post 9-11 unity and spirit - I do recommend the Spielberg movie, but rue the fact that Spielberg obviously felt the need to display Americans as a "dysfunctional family").

2) Leftists don't see Islamists as having a motive to fight the west other than their own projected motive of "defeating western conservative thought." This leftist unwillingness to pinpoint a realistic motive for our enemies (Vietnam, Iraq) is possibly reflected in the movies' not bothering to pinpoint a motive for the aliens. The 1898 WOTW book, on the other hand, goes into extensive detail about what the motives for the war were (dwindling resources on Mars, humans as a food source).

3) Leftists don't want to see how Islamists (and the "insurgency" in Iraq) are constantly having to change tactics in the war on terror because the other tactics were not working. You will never hear a leftist journalist say "suicide bombings are being used now because the insurgents are afraid of direct confrontations with US and Iraqi troops". This is because leftists don't want to believe that our enemies actually can be defeated militarily (meaning they have tactics that fail). This is definitely reflected in the way the WOTW movies show the alien tactics to be successful from start to finish. The message is supposed to be that our enemies will only defeat themselves or diplomacy, like bacteria, will defeat them. In the book, however, the tripods have NO FORCE FIELDS and the heat rays cannot always stop those humans who can successfully hide a cannon in a concealed trench and fire at a tripod from close range. The Martians are forced to regroup and change tactics, just like Al Qaeda. Scientists in the book examine gas residues to try to figure out how the British population can survive a future gas attack. The book clearly states that England would have had a chance if it had prepared and that England can prepare and defeat the Martians if they try again (presumably by innoculating themselves first against bacteria). The book ends with the Martians having seemingly given up on attacking Earth and trying to invade Venus instead. This reflects the very conservative point of view that the best way to defeat an enemy is to make it "not worth it" for the enemy to choose you as their enemy, but rather to choose someone else instead (we defeated the Nazis and later the Werewolf insurgency by directing Germans' attention on the "Red Threat"). Just as HG Wells had the Martians deciding that the Venusians were possibly easier to conquer than the Earthlings, it is likely because of our policy of defeating Al Qaeda militarily in Iraq that Zarkawi is now announcing that the "Shiites are Al Qaeda's real enemy". Metaphorically, for Al Qaeda, Venus may be easier to defeat than Earth. Wells understood this concept.

4) Leftists believe our enemies are always innumerable and constantly multiplying so it is no use to fight them. Both WOTW movies give this impression and they may as well have been named "The Slaughter of the World" instead of "War of the Worlds". The book, on the other hand, has a small force of 10-15 tripods with a grand total of about 50 Martians attack England and this force takes 25-40% casualties of its machines (but can repair some of these machines and build new ones) during what could be termed an actual "war". The HMS Thunderchild delivers the enemy a 15-20% loss with one heroic act that gives thousands of British the chance to escape across the English Channel.

The point is clearly made that the 50 Martians that attacked would not have been able to receive reinforcements until Mars and Earth were in opposition again (I think that means every 7 years or every 3 years?).

On military issues: the book "War of the Worlds" predicts Dunquerque 42 years later (via the Thunderchild episode) but with the British saving themselves in the opposite direction while brave members of the military fight a desperate rearguard action. I am wondering if any of the defenders at Dunquerque actually thought about how they were playing the role of the ironclad HMS Thunderchild from a novel they would have read as children. The success of the fictional lowlying ironclad HMS Thunderchild against the Martian tripods may have convinced a lot of children to grow up to be military submarine warfare experts.

HG Wells predicted in WOTW that:

1) Air Supremacy is paramount in war
2) Surface ships (and wooden ships) are vulnerable on oceans in war
3) Gas warfare can and would be used to horrific effect
4) Lasers would someday replace bullets

He is still ahead of his time and, thus, worth reading a lot more than Spielberg is worth watching. Again...I do recommend the new movie and, no, I don't work for Spielberg.

Interesting note: I thought that posting on this was wasting important business time...but I just spoke with an older British customer on the subject of the Thunderchild and he ordered a lot of products from me afterwards. I guess, to many British people, the "memory" of the fictional Thunderchild is still pretty powerful. Spielberg could have had an American submarine save passenger ships in a similar manner in his new film...but he chose not to have what could have been his most famous scene since the one in Saving Private Ryan where Tom Hanks takes a bullet for Matt Damon in a raging battle and then whispers "make this worth it." Maybe there were plans for a Thunderchild scene but the leftists in Hollywood convinced Spielberg not to have such heroics displayed as having been "worth it".

Which brings me to a major point about the book: HG Wells spends an entire chapter on how the Martians would eventually recruit humans to be traitors against their own kind and help harvest other humans for food. He describes leftists perfectly in this chapter. The hero listens to the artilleryman explain how this would happen...and the hero realizes to his horror that it would actually happen. Please read it! HG Wells predicted, in 1898, that the likes of Michael Moore would exist.

It is not for nothing that survey questions on Operation Iraqi Freedom concentrate on "was it worth it." This is an effort by those who would divert attention from all the civilians who have avoided death in blown up airplanes and buildings because the enemy was occupied by our Thunderchilds. They want us to go to sleep so we can be harvested without resisting, just like Wells predicted. Then again, I don't want to sound like the artilleryman. Wells had the hero walking away from him because he did not want to dwell on paranoia too much. :-)

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