One World Government

Living in the South East of England, I guess I ought to know a little more about H.G.Wells as he was born not so far away from where I live.

Science fiction is not really my genre. I don’t find it particularly inspiring, and not being a scientist, I find it all rather far-fetched and daft.
However, I should not be so dismissive. H.G. Wells was not merely a writer. He was an exceptionally gifted man who, had he lived a few decades later, could easily have been the first person to consider the workings of the internet, or even had a good bash at Quantum physics.

It is interesting to me how frequently the world synergises together; past and present, east and west for no apparent reason, and yet all of this happened on Friday in a split second of both hopelessness and another one of hopefulness.

After hearing the devastating news about the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, I went on to look at the Guardian website. On that site, I found an interesting article about H.G. Wells and his somewhat complicated sex life.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/mar/11/hg-wells-david-lodge

Wells advocated a “world brain” and “one world government”; a true equity around the world where everyone had an equal say and that power, wealth and governance was equally distributed across the nations.

What a pity we didn’t listen to him.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Brain

As I said, it looked as though H.G. Wells’s idea about a world brain was not so far removed from what we now know as the world wide web.

With one world government he believed that we were one humanity and should act accordingly, i.e. sharing, caring and working together to bring about world peace.
However, the right wing went and monopolised this “New World Order” and twisted it into something that was as far removed from Well’s Utopia than could be imagined. The Right wanted a new world order with finance at the core, dictating and controlling.
Looks as though they got what they wanted.
Big Society? It is an excuse of a New World Order and should be seen for the sham that it is.

Clearly I need to read more about One Brain and One World Government but it just made me think, upon reading about H.G. Wells, how far away from his ideology we actually are.

And then, in the depths of the Japanese disaster came a voice of reason that was from the President of the USA, saying precisely that: we were one humanity, one people – a mere word or two away from a hope of one world government; something that Obama could not possibly say because the present day Macarthyists would have him locked up with the other Commies that are not allowed to speak their mind in their so-called democracy.

We are one world, one nation and yet we continue to deny the fact that human beings are human beings wherever they live in the world. How many times has this lack of respect for both similarity and difference got the world into trouble? Whilst we are one world, we should also recognise difference and stop playing at this gross stereotyping as well.

I was quite appalled on listening to the great John Humphreys on Saturday morning. People around the world were reflecting on how ordered and calm the Japanese were in the wake of this terrible atrocity. In a country where there are about 2000 earthquakes a year, they are constantly waiting for the “Big One” just as the residents near the San Andreas fault are doing so too.

When the earthquake struck, they were frightened as much as anyone else might have been but they knew the drill and acted accordingly. Fortunately for them they live in a country where a government is progressive enough to consider the longer term infrastructure of the country and its people and has built buildings accordingly to withstand even the most intense Richter Scale disasters.

So on comes Mr Humphreys to ask a correspondent in Japan whether the Japanese people are evacuating their towns, affected by the potential fall-out from the nuclear reactor, of their own volition or because they have been ordered to do so.

Now I could be being picky here but I am afraid alarm bells were immediately sounding in my mind. Dear John, I felt a need to say, this is Japan not China. These are different nations, not the same. They are as different from the British are to the French or the British and the Russians, and yet simultaneously they are part of one humanity.

We all too frequently make assumptions based on ill-informed and frequently wrong facts, and we then group people together as though they are all the same, and yet we group them together negatively rather than glorifying in the gift on of one humanity.

It is complicated and I hope I am not contradicting myself. What I am trying to say is that of course one nation just as one individual is unique but we are also the same. Putting us together because we all have black hair, or all use a particular alphabet to write and read is just plain wrong.

Putting us together with shared values and a unification in hopefulness and mindfulness is a different matter altogether.

It doesn’t matter, as far as I am concerned, whether the disaster of this week happened six streets away, six miles, six hundred or six thousand. The people suffering are my fellow human beings and I have far more in common with them than the things that separate me. However, I also acknowledge that they have different customs, faiths and tastes that are possibly quite different to my own, and these differences are good and should not be ignored and certainly there should be no attempt to eradicate the difference with some sort of right winged eugenics operation.

People who are against a federal Europe do not understand this. They do not understand that in having unity we should not lose ourselves. Back to the individual; in joining two hands together in matrimony, for example, one should never lose sight of the person that you are and the person that you might end up being. The unity of nations does not suppress the uniqueness of one nation. It merely finds the positive commonalities and works with those according to a shared set of values that are probably based on the key instincts of survival – moving on to something more enlightened.

It does not deliberately make trouble with the differences.

As much as I would like to spend time in France, I am not French for all my state of being a Francophile. I am British and therefore am very different to my counterparts across the Channel. However, I wish to embrace their style of life and I appreciate their values, particularly when it comes to work and culture. I may be slightly different in France but I never see myself as a foreigner.

When I am in another continent, I do feel more alien to people around me, even if we are speaking the same language, as in the USA, but I still don’t feel “foreign”.

It has become such a divisive word.
It has become such a divisive world, and in continuing to stereotype we reiterate prejudice and encourage racism. And in negatively separating nations we do the very same thing.

It’s complicated, which takes me back to Obama and H. G. Wells.

Surely the one thing that is obvious is that we are one humanity and in some ways, many of the problems of the world might be eradicated if we saw this as a unifying factor of good rather than a communist dystopia.

We should be celebrating difference and we should be celebrating our uniqueness and individuality. Within the laws of shared values, we should grow and be who we want as a nation and as individuals. What we should definitely not do is define people together because the ‘look the same’ or their countries are in close proximity. What we should definitely do is cry for our human family who are suffering anywhere in the world, be in under the tsunami disaster of Japan or the extreme poverty of life in the impoverished villages of countries in Africa.

This week is Comic Relief. To placate the Daily Mail readers, the founders of Comic Relief decided from the offset that they would support charities both home and abroad. Aiming for £5 million in their first year, they exceeded this three-fold.
One of the extremely positive things about this organisation is that they respect difference and embrace similarity to accentuate and emphasise the suffering of one human to the consciousness of another.

Maybe this is what Obama would have liked to say on Friday. It is all of our responsibility as part of humanity to be concerned about our fellow human beings in Japan at this time of natural disaster but read into his words more, then really, wouldn’t it be great if we were a One World Government where the problems of our neighbours were our own irrespective of distance and difference?

I’d better go and check out what H.G. Wells might have said.

It just goes to show that we can all be in danger of dismissing the thoughts and views of someone based entirely on a lack of knowledge of them. It seems to me that there is something far deeper and meaningful in this man’s mind that his Time Machine concoction.