The term New World Order first appears as the title of an essay by Herbert George Wells in 1940. The same Wells of “The Time Travel Machine”, “The Invisible Man” and, most importantly, “War of the Worlds”. The last of the three has inspired not only a respectable number of motion pictures, but also the first experiment in mixing virtual reality with reality, “suspension of disbelief-in-real-time”: it was Orson Welles’ famous show, intended to shock and awe American radio audiences. The success was spectacularly greater than expected, with scenes of insanity unfolding in homes and streets, including loss of life, for which no responsibility was ever claimed.
Interestingly, the same scenario would later inspire the historical aversion of the inventor of the term “Evil Empire”, Ronald Reagan, to a humanity that would unite beyond its “mere differences” if it ever faced an alien threat.
If “The Time-Traveling Machine” is a kind of futuristic thesis on social stratification, “War of the Worlds” is related, not in a covert manner, to a larger-scale project that has begun to be discussed at the time of its publication :
In his autobiography, H. G. Wells, a socialist and a member of the Fabian Society states that since 1900 he already considered a World Governance to be a deterministic [no matter how distant] consequence of the state of affairs at the time. In his 1928 book, Open Conspiracy, HGW foreshadows Klaus Schwab, referring to influential groups that must propagate at every opportunity the need for a global scientific elite which will eliminate problems such as poverty and war. In New World Order [1940], he talks in detail about World Governance.
Given all that, the groundbreaking invention of a hostile, alien race [“The War of the Worlds” published in 1898] acquires an unexpectedly …educational dimension. For the alien introduced through it into popular literature is not the innocent, two-dimensional bogeyman, but the rival awe of another, under construction entity. The “Extraterrestrial” is the harbinger/root cause of a free from ethnic/racial prejudices… “Earthling”.