To be fair the aliens were nasty pieces of work, eating an old lady and a young girl.
However the Journalist did have a rant blaming the alien invasion on British colonialism so that was a woke box well and truly ticked.
I think colonialism as it pertained to the developing world back then, was very much viewed as a "colinialise or BE colonialised by others" kind of affair, and Spain, Portugal, France and Germany were also hard at it when it came to expanding the material wealth and strategic outposts of their respecting sovereignties. Merchant "adventurers" would set sail and deliver reports of other lands with fertile soil, mineral wealth etc, and eventually governmental outposts would be replaced with militias and garrisons and eventually we'd just plant a flag in the region and declare it a sovereign extension of the realm.
This is precisely what HG Well's "martians" fictitiously did to the UK. They arrived to kill and basically take over it's holdings for their own use. The UK [as was] was being given a very large dose of it's own medicine in terms of violent colonization by those with superior weapons and intellect.
But even the second world war was an example of all the European "pushing and shoving" which then abounded when it came to who gets to plant their own flag and where they get to plant it.
If history now looks back at these events as being the atrocities of nation states and The War Of The Worlds is being presented as a:
"How would you like it?" scenario...meant to educate and expose the hubris involved in nation building, then I suppose that's fair enough. We live in an ever evolving world but peacefully co-existing with those we may have the might and means to overpower is relatively new concept given the bloody history of colonial expansion. Whether or not we're ready to burn all our flags and everything else which symbolizes national identity is another question, but HG Wells was definitely a proponent of a "One World" government and saw the dismantling of nation states [as we know them] as the only solution to the problem of conflict and warfare.
Ironically, it's the very notion of some kind of "New World Order" which meets a tremendous amount of resistance and suspicion within the modern minds of many who remain unconvinced that the desire for this is rooted in "noble" aspiration. There are many who see this as being nought but an opportunity for the ultimate form of tyranny from which there will be no escape, should it ever come to pass.
We live in interesting times...