The Great Disillusionment

H.G. Wells, the fall of empires, and the future of the United States

This month marked the debut of the newest film from the rapidly ascendant independent production company A24. Its title alone is enough to strike anxiety in the hearts of many Americans: Civil War. No, this film is not about the war that took places in the 1860s, but a fictional event in the near future. The dystopian narrative imagines an America divided between states loyal to the federal government (whose president has managed to gain a third term and abolish the FBI) and various secessionist movements.

The film should not be seen as an accurate prediction of anything to come. The idea that California and Texas would team up to form their own Western Alliance, for instance, seems incredibly unlikely. Indeed, any future widespread violence in the United States will probably not break neatly along regional lines as it did in the days of Lincoln.

Instead, the film is a projection of our anxieties. Consider that it is being released at a time when one of the two main presidential candidates seemed disinclined to leave office in 2020 and has made his disdain for the FBI more than clear. Not only that, but the state of Texas is currently battling with the federal government over the issues of immigration and border security.

The intent of the film’s writer and director Alex Garland is clear: if we as Americans do not learn to live together, to stop viewing each other as traitors, to place our trust in the electoral process and the peaceful transfer of power, our gun saturated society could descend into violence. As he said in the interview with CBS Sunday Morning above, “Unless we come to our senses, our polarized, divisive, non-communicative accusatory state is going to continue.”

The tendency to depict our greatest fears through the form of story seems innate in human beings. Always, there are prophets who seek to warn the others, “That way leads to destruction!” Usually, the majority of people fail to listen.

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In the summer of 1870, the French military was well past its glory days under Napoleon, when it went stampeding over the European continent. There was a hunger to reassert its dominance: to establish itself as the greatest power in Europe. Perhaps this is why the French parliament chose to declare war on the Kingdom of Prussia. It would prove to be one of the worst decisions in the history of the French military. (Cue jokes about that being a high bar to clear.)

Under the leadership of Otto von Bismarck, who would go on to become the founding father of the modern state of Germany, the North German Confederation joined with Prussia to repel the French invasion. Not only did the French fail to gain any additional territory, but within a few short months Paris itself had fallen to the Germans. The French monarchy was finally tossed in the wastebin of history, the new powerful state of Germany was born, and the entire balance of power in Europe had shifted.

These events were highly concerning to the British, who at the time were absolutely dominant on the seas but nevertheless feared that the new industrial powerhouse of Germany, with its formidable Prussian military spirit, could mount a successful invasion of the British Isles. Within weeks of the end of the Franco-Prussian War, a novella called The Battle of Dorking began to be serialized in a British magazine. It was the work of George Tomkyns Chesney, a former member of the Royal Engineers, and depicted a Britain under attack from a German-speaking military of superior technological capabilities.

During his time in the military, Chesney had grown concerned about what he believed to be the unpreparedness of British forces for a major conflict. He hoped in publishing The Battle of Dorking to raise public awareness and convince politicians to devote the necessary resources to the military. Perhaps inevitably, Chesney mainly succeeded in setting off a trend of so-called invasion literature, which would seize not only Victorian Britain but also France, Germany, and the United States.

In hindsight, the British were right to feel concerned about the possibility of catastrophic warfare, for the twentieth century did bring the two most destructive conflicts ever suffered by humanity, with most of World Wars I and II being fought on European soil. Yet, neither of those wars brought a successful invasion of the British Isles.

Rather, the only land combat that occurred on those islands in the twentieth century was of the civil variety. For much of the century, Ireland would be consumed by violence, resulting in the independence of the Republic of Ireland and a string of bombings within England itself. This was essentially a civil war: one driven by intractable differences of opinion within the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland (later Northern Ireland). Sometimes we don’t fear the right things.

But of all the dystopian accounts that made up the genre of invasion literature, one towered head and shoulders above the rest. The particular genius of its author was to swap the invaders from a foreign country with invaders from a foreign planet.

The author was H.G. Wells and the book was War of the Worlds.

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Changing the invaders to Martians placed Wells’ tale in the realm of science fiction. Indeed, he is considered to be the father of the genre, having previously also written The Time Machine. But the genius of the book was not truly in its science. In fact, Wells had been duped by a mistaken belief of the time that there were canals on the surface of Mars and this indicated the presence of intelligent life. Rather, Wells’ greatest achievement was his blistering critique of European colonialism.

The War of the Worlds opens with one of the most famous paragraphs in modern literature, its sense of foreboding legendary. We see the inhabitants of planet earth going about their business, blissfully unaware that a vastly more powerful species is seeking to conquer their world and exploits its resources.

“Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. And early in the twentieth century came the great disillusionment.”¹

Wells’ greatest literary successor to date has likely been Isaac Asimov, who writes of War of the Worlds that the coming of the Martians to Victorian England is not so unlike the arrive of the Portuguese Black Ships in feudal Japan or the fleet of Christopher Columbus in the Caribbean.

“Think, then, how the various non-European nations of the world, particularly those of Africa, must have felt as the 1800s drew to an end. It must have seemed to them that, for centuries, their lands had been ‘watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than theirs’ (or at least by a technology greater than theirs). They must have thought that these foreigners with ‘intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded their lands with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against them.’ Surely, to the inhabitants of the Americas, Australia, Africa, and Asia, the coming of the European ships must have seemed as an invasion of Martians would seem to us today.”²

The irony of War of the Worlds is that it flips the script on the European colonizers: the British Empire was the greatest superpower at the time of Wells’ writing, but in the book it is the primary target of the Martian invaders. This is no accident.

The horrors that the Martians unleash on the people of southeastern England are scarily reminiscent of the type of modern warfare that would prove so destructive in the two World Wars. Consider this passage, which describes the Martians’ deadly heat ray.

“Forthwith flashes of actual flame, a bright glare leaping from one to another, sprang from the scattered group of men. It was as if some invisible jet impinged upon them and flashed into white flame. It was as if each man were suddenly and momentarily turned to fire. Then, by the light of their own destruction, I saw them staggering and falling, and their supporters turning to run.”³

Less than two decades after Wells wrote those words, flame throwers would come into use on the Western Front of World War I. Indeed, as I re-read bits of Wells’ book for this article, I was reminded of nothing so much as this scene from the 2022 adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front. (WARNING: Contains graphic violence.)

By the time the Martian heat ray has finished its work, Wells’ protagonist finds himself in a landscape as lifeless as the muddy fields of Flanders.

“The undulating commons seemed now dark almost to blackness, except where its roadways lay grey and pale under the deep blue sky of the early night. It was dark, and suddenly void of men…Patches of bush and isolated trees here and there smoked and glowed still, and the houses towards Woking station were sending up spires of flame into the stillness of the evening air.”⁴

Near the end of War of the Worlds, the main character wanders through a deserted London, the most powerful imperial capital in the world humbled within a matter of days. It is a chilling foretaste of how so many great cities would be utterly destroyed in World War II. But here comes Wells’ other genius: despite the failures of the British authorities to mount any kind of substantial resistance to the Martians, the aliens are all dying.

When Columbus arrived in the New World, he introduced diseases that virtually wiped out the native population. In War of the Worlds, it is the other way around: the invading Martians cannot survive the simple bacteria of planet earth. As Wells’ narrator comes across the dead bodies of the Martians, he reflects upon the strange deliverance granted to humanity.

“By the toll of a billion deaths man has bought his birthright of the earth, and it is his against all comers; it would still be his were the Martians ten times as mighty as they are. For neither do men live nor die in vain. Here and there they were scattered, nearly fifty altogether, in that great gulf they had made, overtaken by a death that must have seemed to them as incomprehensible as any death could be. To me also at that time this death was incomprehensible. All I knew was that these things that had been alive and so terrible to men were dead. For a moment I believed that the destruction of Sennacherib had been repeated, that God had repented, that the Angel of Death had slain them in the night.”⁵

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The lesson of War of the Worlds is not simply that empires once thought invincible come to an end, but also that they come to an end in spite of the inability of the colonized peoples to gain military victory. Here Asimov draws the connection with the end of European colonialism following World War II.

“In the book, of course, the Martians are finally stopped, but not through any successful action of human beings. H.G. Wells died in 1946, too soon to see that European imperialism would finally be stopped also, but not through any successful action of the non-Europeans. The Europeans destroyed themselves by their own actions. In a kind of European civil war, they fought World War I (1914-1918) and World War II (1939-1945). By the end of the second war, the overseas European empires still seemed intact, but that was superficial. The victors of the two wars (particularly the United States) had proclaimed they were fighting for liberty and democracy, and it was hard to continue to deny this to non-Europeans….Within a quarter of a century of the end of World War II, the European overseas empires were gone as though they had never been.”⁶

The causes of World War I have been debated ad nauseum by historians, but the usual narrative is as follows: The competition between colonial powers led to a rapid military escalation in which the Europeans increased arms production and feverishly made alliances of mutual defense. This meant that Europe was a tinder box waiting to explode into total war. World War I’s unsatisfactory peace deal then led directly to World War II.

From a material standpoint, that is all true. Yet, a part of me does wonder if the same spirit that brought an end to Sennacherib might not be alive and well in our times: if the one who breaks the bow and burns the chariots with fire might have engineered the great European conflagration. Could the hands that carved out the seas also be holding evil in check? Could the one who brought the enterprise of Babel to ruin also have an interest in checking the power of seemingly invincible empires? Is there any act of exploitation that does not, in time, receive its just reward, not only in the hereafter but also in the here and now?

I am reminded of Abraham Lincoln’s haunting words in his Second Inaugural Address.

“If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’”⁷

For as much as he loved America, believed in its founding principles, and wanted it to survive as a unified nation, Lincoln also had a sense of the greater drama at play. He also had a healthy fear of God, such that he realized America too was stepped in blood, to use a phrase from Macbeth. Perhaps, Lincoln speculated, the Civil War that had brought such destruction to the supposedly United States was the righteous judgment of God upon an empire that had exploited others, and this was in fact America’s great disillusionment.

I cannot know for certain if the Civil War was God’s way of bringing an end to slavery on the American continent, or if the bloodletting of World Wars I and II was a rightful punishment for the crimes of colonialism. But I know that God is sovereign over history, and there is no empire that will not, in time, see its pretensions brought to naught, as likely by internal division as anything else.

In the year 2024, many of the fundamentals of the American empire are sound. The potential for economic growth remains high. Its military is still head and shoulders above any other. Yet, internal division is ripping at the fabric of American society. The nation’s problems remain unaddressed as politicians squabble and obfuscate in the hope of winning the next election. Voices calling for compromise and peace are drowned out by the cries of those with a personal interest in fomenting discord.

It is enough to bring a person to despair, but we must admit that if the American empire does crumble at some point in the near or distant future, it may be nothing more than the sovereign will of God at work. Alternatively, we may find that this storm of division is itself the coming of the Martians, and the would-be autocrats cannot survive among a people long since made immune to tyranny. Perhaps, after all, we have our birthright of this land.

Of the deep things of God, I know little, but this I believe: that there is life beyond the end of empire, that the hand of God is shaping history toward its rightful end, and that, in the immortal words of H.G. Wells, men neither live nor die in vain.

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1. Wells, H.G. The War of the Worlds, Signet Classics edition (New York: Penguin, 2007), 5.

2. Asimov, Isaac. Afterword to The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells, Signet Classics edition (New York: Penguin, 2007), 205.

3. Wells, 27.

4. Wells, 28.

5. Wells, 185.

6. Asimov, 205-6.

7. https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/lincoln2.asp