• shawn1122@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    3 days

    War of the worlds has its share of apologia for colonialism. It’s fiction from a different era and may be judged by those standards.

    The entire premise is for Britain to reflect on its inhumane colonial practices as it is “conquered” by a more technologically Martian race. It flips the script so that colonizers may imagine themselves as colonized.

    But several arguments in the book dominish colonial practices including

    1. Implying that the colonized people deserve their subjugation because they have also engaged in imperialism in the past. (what would be referred to in the modern day as Whataboutism).

    2. It retains an hierarchical racial framework by referring to the Tasmanians (those colonized and exterminated by those now colonized by Martians) as racially inferior.

    3. The environmental impact of the technologically superior Martians gets erased and Britain is restored after they die off due to Earth’s microorganisms. In the real world, colonial nations, their allies and their settler nations have contributed 50% of cumulative carbon emissions since the Industrial revolution despite making up 15% of the global population. Little has been done to correct that imbalance.

    It’s a fascinating book no doubt but H.G. was a product of his time and was in support of imperialism for much of his life, only to have his views change as he came to see the true purpose of colonialism (labor exploitation and extraction).

    In The New Machiavelli he writes:

    "We English do not own that country, do not even rule it. We make nothing happen; at the most we prevent things happening.” 

    Which better represents the anti-colonial views he developed over time.