Golding wrote Lord of the Flies in 1954, less than a decade after World War II, when the world was in the midst of the Cold War. The atrocities of the Holocaust, the horrific effects of the atomic bomb, and the ominous threat of the Communist demon behind the Iron Curtain were all present in the minds of the western public and the author. This environment of fear combined with technology’s rapid advances act as a backdrop to the island experiences: the shot-down plane, for example, and the boys’ concern that the “Reds” might find them before the British do.
Historically, in times of widespread socio-economic distress, the general public feels itself vulnerable and turns to the leader who exhibits the most strength or seems to offer the most protection. In Lord of the Flies, Jack and the hunters, who offer the luxury of meat and the comforts of a dictatorship, fill that role. In exchange for his protection, the other boys sacrifice any moral reservations they may have about his policies and enthusiastically persecute the boys who resist joining their tribe. These circumstances somewhat mirror Germany’s economic suffering, which paved the way for the radical politics of Adolph Hitler’s Nazism in the aftermath of World War I and in the worldwide depression of the 1930s.
Based upon his wartime experiences in the British Navy, Golding asserted that the unlimited brutality shown by the Nazis was a capacity not limited to Germans or indeed to any particular group. While the world was horrified by news of the Nazi death camps, Golding felt that none of the nations was too far from committing atrocities of the same magnitude. According to Golding, humankind’s propensity toward evil and violence coupled with the “psychology of fear” motivates humanity to act in unconscionable ways. When the United States used the atomic bomb in Japan, more than 100,000 people were killed in three days by dropping two bombs. Overall, a total of 55 million people lost their lives in World War II. Such catastrophic violence and loss of life was clearly not lost on Golding: An atomic war causes the boys’ evacuation in Lord of the Flies, and the sign from the world of grownups that the boys so wish for turns out to be the body of a dead paratrooper, floating down from an aerial battle.
