Socialist HG Wells’s role in the creation of the UN Declaration of Human Rights
HG Wells wrote several classic, visionary novels about the very worst consequences a past and a present can have on a future, and a great deal of what he wrote, though it takes fantasy form, has come to pass, with stunning corollaries with his own time, the time after him, with our own time, and presumably with the as-yet-unwritten time ahead of us too.
So, what did the socialist visionary choose to do, at the latter end of his life, when he was in his 70s – the man who had seen and foreseen so much, in his fiction and his political writing, including (and this is just scraping the surface of his foreseeing) tanks, global warming, aerial flight and bombardment, visible mass surveillance, invisible mass surveillance, modern germ warfare, radio, TV, video, the world wide web, the atom bomb, fallout and radioactive waste, laser beams, cosmetic surgery, chemical weaponry? What did the far-seeing man do, whose literary rise and circulation in the world had made him exceptionally powerful and exceptionally thoughtful about the workings of power, the man who had been invited to meet and advise both Roosevelt and Stalin, who had worked on ways, in his latter years, to “release a new form of power in the world”, a power “without tyranny”, one “to hold men’s minds together in something like a common interpret-ation of reality” and a real “unification of our race” and to work for “our collective life”? What could such a profoundly prophetic writer do, who not only knew but drew for us the thin line between fantasy and reality, possibility and impossibility, and who so convincingly, prophetically and repeatedly envisioned the worst possible things that the world, the universe and the human beings in it can do to each other?
He wrote and published, in 1940, a book called The Rights of Man “using ‘man’, of course,” as he said, “to cover every individual male or female, child or adult, of the species”. He helped form and sustain PEN, where an internationality of writers would come together and think the world, and fight for and protect each other’s freedom to write and freedom to read. He helped form and sustain the National Council for Civil Liberties, now known as Liberty, to monitor and fight for the freedoms that human beings need, and that weak or bullying governments who want all the power will always want to mess with..............................
More:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/nov/20/ali-smith-celebrates-hg-wells-role-creation-un-declaration-of-human-rights
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