The Shape of Things To Come - Suppression of Religions

Suppression of Religions

One of the major aspects in the creation of the World State envisioned by Wells is the abolition of all organized religion—an act deemed indispensable in order to give the emerging "Modern State" a monopoly over education and the complete ability to mould new generations of humanity worldwide into the required shape.

The abolition of Islam is carried out by the Air Police, who "descend upon Mecca and close down the main holy places", apparently without major incident. Eventually, Islam disappears, its demise accelerated by the decay of Arabic and its replacement by "an expanded English". Some twenty mosques survive, deemed to be worthy of preservation on architectural grounds. The Lebanese-American scholar George Nasser remarked on this aspect of Wells' book: "In the 1979 imagined by H.G. Wells, a self-appointed ruling elite composed mainly of Westerners, with one Chinese and one Black African and not a single Arab member, would establish itself in the Arab and Muslim city of Basra and calmly take the decision to completely extinguish and extirpate the Muslim religion. (...) In the 1979 of real history, Khomeini's Islamic Republic of Iran came into being".

There is only a single mention of Buddhism's abolition, and no reference to any serious problem encountered by the Modern State in eradicating it from East Asia.

The most prolonged and formidable religious opposition envisaged by Wells is from the Catholic Church (there is little reference to Protestants). The Pope and entire Catholic hierarchy are gassed unconscious when blessing the new airplanes built by a revived Fascist Italy. After the Catholic Church is decisively crushed in Italy, it finds refuge in Ireland, "the last bastion of Christianity" which becomes a Catholic theocracy. Ireland is also subdued, after which limited Catholic resistance is maintained in Latin America, under "a coloured Pope in Pernambuco"—but it, too, is finally put down.

Wells gives considerable attention to the fate of the Jews. In this history, the enfeebled Nazi Germany is incapable of systematic murder on the scale of the Holocaust. However, Jews greatly suffer from "unorganized" persecution, and there is a reference to anti-Jewish pogroms happening "everywhere in Europe" during the chaotic 1950's. And in a world where all nation-states were a doomed anachronism, Zionism and its ambition to create a new such state obviously came to naught.

In the later struggle between the emerging world state and its opponents, Jews are seen as caught between the hammer and the anvil. Following the launch of its anti-religious campaign, the Modern State closes down all kosher butcheries still in operation - while the opening act of the "Federated Nationalist" rebels opposing this state is to perpetrate a pogrom against Jews in the Frankfurt area. Eventually, in Wells's vision, it is the Modern State's forced assimilation which wins out and the Jews—who had resisted earlier such pressures—become completely absorbed in the general society and lose their separate identity.