A book written in 1928 by the leading British Round Table strategist, H.G. Wells (New York: Doubleday, Doran and Company). The Open Conspiracy is Wells’ Mein Kampf —a recipe for how to establish a world government that would, over time, perhaps even over generations, recruit individuals and set up institutions to create a world “directorate” to run a “new world order.”Wells does not stand in opposition to fascism or communism, he merely sees these forms as experiments or immature expressions of the “new order” which will be replaced by his vision of the new order.
“The Open Conspiracy is not so much a socialism,” says Wells, “as a more comprehensive scheme that has eaten and assimilated whatever was digestible of its socialist forebears.” He even suggests that “young people” be incorporated into the Open Conspiracy through organizations like “the Italian fasci.”
No, Wells has one essential enemy that the Open Conspiracy must destroy: that is, the sovereign nation-state. The goal of its destruction is his life’s work.
As Wells put it, “This is my religion …. This book states as plainly and clearly as possible the essential ideas of my life, the perspectives of my world. My other writings, with hardly an exception, explore, try over, illuminate, comment upon or flower out of the essential matter that I here attempt at last to strip bare to its foundations and state unmistakably. . . . Here are my directive aims and the criteria of all I do…. [It is] a scheme for all human requirements.”
End the nation-state forever, replacing it with a world government run by the “Atlantic” elite: “The Open Conspiracy rests upon a disrespect for nationality, and there is no reason why it should tolerate noxious or obstructive governments because they hold their own in this or that patch of human territory. It lies within the power of the Atlantic communities to impose peace upon the world and secure unimpeded movement and free speech from end to end of the earth.
“This is a fact on which the Open Conspiracy must insist.”
But, Wells cautions, the Open Conspiracy might have to make war in order to end war. He explains that the Open Conspiracy’s commitment to world peace and ending war does not mean an exclusion of soldiers, warriors, and military means. Rather, the question is to whom might these warriors be loyal. It may be necessary for the Open Conspiracy to use “enlightened” warriors: “From the outset, the Open Conspiracy will set its face against militarism . . . [but] the anticipatory repudiation of military service . . . need not necessarily involve a denial of the need of military action on behalf of the world commonweal, for the suppression of national brigandage, nor need it prevent the military training of members of the Open Conspiracy. . . . Our loyalty to our current government, we would intimate, is subject to its sane and adult behavior.”
• Control human population to a limit set by a “world directorate” created by this elite. The means to be used for this population control would be “science” (eugenics, sterilization, and birth control); and total economic control by the world “directorate” of all credit generation, and of all distribution of economic staples needed for human survival (food, water, and shelter).
The Open Conspiracy “turns to biology for. . . the regulation of quantity and a controlled distribution of human population of the world.” And without this degree of control, the human race is doomed. So instead of the General Welfare of the U.S. Constitution, Wells suggests a selective welfare where the world directorate eliminates population growth in order to perfect the race. This is not just a material necessity, explains Wells, but larger, for under the Open Conspiracy “[man] will not be left with his soul tangled, haunted by monstrous and irrational fears and a prey to malicious impulse. . . . He will feel better, will better, think better, see, taste, and hear better than men do now. All these things are plainly possible for him. They pass out of his tormented desire now, they elude and mock him, because chance, confusion, and squalor rule his life. All the gifts of destiny are overlaid and lost to him. He must still suspect and fear.”
• Eliminate forever the “illusion” that man is made in the image of God, and as such, has a capacity for the Good. Instead, Wells insists that man is an “imperfect animal”: jealous, rageful, easy to anger, and “not to be trusted in the dark.”
“Man is a malicious animal,” says Wells, with a “common disposition to be stupid, indolent, habitual and defensive.” In man, the creative impulses are weaker forces than “acute destructive ones.” Human nature is destructive, he insists, explaining: “To make is a long and wearisome business, with many arrests and disappointments, but to break gives an instant thrill. We all know something of the delight of the bang. Such impulses must be controlled by the world directorate.”
Wells, at one point, attempts to boil down his new religion to six “basic essential requirements”:
- The complete assertion, practical as well as theoretical, of the provisional nature of existing governments and of our acquiescence in them;
- The resolve to minimize by all available means the conflicts of these governments, their militant use of individuals and property and their interferences with the establishment of a world economic system;
- The determination to replace private local or national ownership of at least credit, transport, and staple production by a responsible world directorate serving the common ends of the race;
- The practical recognition of the necessity for world biological controls, for example, of population and disease;
- The support of a minimum standard of individual freedom and welfare in the world;
- The supreme duty of subordinating the personal life to the creation of a world directorate capable of these tasks and to the general advancement of human knowledge, capacity, and power.”
But the most telling of these “essentials” is the summation, in which Wells insists on an attack on the human soul, that quality that distinguishes human beings from beasts. He insists that all Open Conspirators embrace “the admission therewith that our immortality is conditional and lies in the race and not in our individual selves.”
Upon reading The Open Conspiracy, Bertrand Russell, the other leading British Round Table subversive, wrote to Wells, “I do not know of anything with which I agree more entirely.”
An Unbroken Continuity
The major target of Wells’ Open Conspiracy is “the United States and the States of Latin America,” where, Wells
explains, there is less of a “tangle of traditions and loyalties … of privileged classes and official patriots . . . than in the old European communities.”
Additionally, Wells is nothing if not a global thinker, and, in addition to the U.S., he sees Russia as a crucial target to be assimilated by the Open Conspiracy. At one point, he chuckles that, despite the Soviet Union’s formal commitment to the “proletariat,” the Open Conspiracy “may rule in Moscow before . . . New York.”
He sees America as uniquely important in the Open Conspiracy because of its growing economic strength. For Wells, the American System of economics, i.e., Hamiltonian economics, is the enemy of the Open Conspiracy, and the financier faction is its ally.
By 1928, Wells writes, “American industries no longer have any practical justification for protection, American finance would be happier without it,” but without the success of the Open Conspirators, this protectionism will simply go on and on.
There is no question that the institutions created by William Yandell Elliott and Robert Strausz-Hupe conform precisely to Wells’ “blueprints” for ending the American System that he found so offensive to his new religion. He instructed his current and future Co-Conspirators to further the “new religion.” He instructed:
“Through special ad hoc organizations, societies for the promotion of Research, for Research Defense, for World Indexing, for the translation of Scientific Papers, for the Diffusion of New Knowledge, the surplus energies of a great number of Open Conspirators can be directed to entirely creative ends and a new world organization” can be built up, superseding, but incorporating, “such dear old institutions as the Royal Society of London, the various European Academies of Science and the like, now overgrown and inadequate. . . .”
More broadly, in writing The Open Conspiracy, Wells set out to recruit a worldwide network of Open Conspirators, who would operate, within their national settings, on behalf of the global subversion of all nation-states, the “scientific” depopulation of the darker-skinned races of the planet, and the establishment of One World oligarchical domination, under Anglo-American leadership.
“The political work of the Open Conspiracy,” Wells writes, “must be conducted upon two levels and by entirely different methods. Its main political idea, its political strategy, is to weaken, efface, incorporate or supersede existing governments. . . . Because a country or a district is inconvenient as a division and destined to ultimate absorption in some more comprehensive and economical system of government, that is no reason why its administration should not be brought meanwhile into working co-operation with the development of the Open Conspiracy.”
But, Wells cautions, no one should be excluded from the Open Conspiracy, not for reasons of class, occupation, or nationality. Instead, “[T]he Open Conspiracy must be heterogeneous in origin. Young men and women may be collected into groups arranged upon lines not unlike those of the Bohemian Sokols or the Italian Fasci.. . .”
By the time the first edition of Wells’ Open Conspiracy bible had appeared, institutions like the Rhodes Trust, the Round Table, the British Fabian Society, the Royal Institute of International Affairs, and its New York City adjunct, the Council on Foreign Relations, were already engaged in the process of recruiting successive generations of agents, agents-of-influence, and agents provocateurs, to the One World banner. Wells’ The Open Conspiracy gave focus to the effort, stating bluntly the long-term objectives, and highlighting the critical importance of selecting and recruiting the best and the brightest, albeit corrupted, minds—what Wells called the “serious minority.”
(Nearly) a century later, Wells’ “Open Conspiracy” is still trying to prevail.
