George Bernard Shaw

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George Bernard Shaw (known as Bernard Shaw) (1856-1950) was an Irish writer and playwright, born in Dublin. He was a lifelong socialist and a member of the Fabian Society. Many of his plays had social themes, including Major Barbara and Pygmalion; the latter was the inspiration for the musical My Fair Lady. Also among his many plays were Arms and the Man, The Devil's Disciple and Saint Joan. In 1925 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Religion

As a child Shaw attended the Church of Ireland, an autonomous province of the Anglican Communion. Until he was thirty or so, Shaw called himself an atheist. He became one, he later quipped, before he could think.[1] In the 1890's, Shaw repudiated atheism. In his 1931 play, "Too True to be Good," One of Shaw's characters delivers a speech sometimes taken to be Shaw's own view:

“ THE ELDER [rising impulsively] Determinism is gone, shattered, buried with a thousand dead religions, evaporated with the clouds of a million forgotten winters. The science I pinned my faith to is bankrupt: its tales were more foolish than all the miracles of the priests, its cruelties more horrible than all the atrocities of the Inquisition. Its spread of enlightenment has been a spread of cancer: its counsels that were to have established the millennium have led straight to European suicide. And I—I who believed in it as no religious fanatic has ever believed in his superstition! For its sake I helped to destroy the faith of millions of worshippers in the temples of a thousand creeds. And now look at me and behold the supreme tragedy of the atheist who has lost his faith—his faith in atheism, for which more martyrs have perished than for all the creeds put together.[2] ”

But in renouncing materialism, Shaw did not embrace theism, but rather espoused a mystical "Life Force," which he regarded as an impersonal force manifested in the sex drive and evolution, leading toward the development of god in the form of a Nietzschean "Superman."[3] In a 1907 lay sermon at Kensington Town Hall in London, Shaw exhorted:

“ When you are asked, "Where is God? Who is God?" stand up and say, "I am God and here is God, not as yet completed, but still advancing towards completion, just in so much as I am working for the purpose of the universe, working for the good of the whole of society and the whole world, instead of merely looking after my personal ends."[4] ”

"In truth, Shaw didn’t believe in an existing God at all," concludes Gary Sloan. "What he believed was that evolution, eons hence, will produce a godlike race in which the life force will consummate its quest for godhead."[5]

Politics

Shaw began his education by reading John Stuart Mill, August Comte, Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer, and was converted to socialism by Henry George's Progress and Poverty. Moving on to Karl Marx's Das Kapital, he began preaching socialism with the utmost zeal and enthusiasm[6] at socialist rallies, or just standing on soapboxes at Speaker's Corner in London's Hyde Park.[7]

After reading a Fabian tract, Why are the many poor? in 1884, Shaw joined the Fabian Society, which, he wrote, "set up the banner of Socialism militant." He began writing Fabian tracts, and personally converted Sidney Webb, recruiting him into the Fabian Society.[8]

At the invitation of Stalin, Shaw visited the Soviet Union[9] in 1931, at age 75.[10] He became a loyal apologist for Stalinism, reporting the Gulag to be a kind of luxury vacation spa, its large population due solely to "the difficulty of inducing [a prisoner] to come out... As far as I could make out they could stay as long as they liked."[11] On the last day of his pilgrimage, he said, "Tomorrow I leave this land of hope and return to our Western countries of despair."[12]

In 1933, Shaw wrote a Letter to the Editor of the Manchester Guardian, denouncing Malcolm Muggeridge's exposé of Stalin's Terror Famine as a "lie" and a "slander"; the following year he published a 16,000-word apologia for Stalin's mass murders, in which he expressed sympathy for the "unfortunate Commissar" who "found himself obliged to put a pistol in his pocket and with his own hand shoot" disobedient workers, "so that he might the more impressively ask the rest of the staff whether they yet grasped the fact that orders are meant to be executed." Shaw went on to attack the rule of law, in favor of the arbitrary rule of men, adding:

“ [T]he most elaborate code of [law]... would still have left unspecified a hundred ways in which wreckers of Communism could have sidetracked it without ever having to face the essential questions: are you pulling your weight in the social boat? are you giving more trouble than you are worth? have you earned the privilege of living in a civilized community? That is why the Russians were forced to set up an Inquisition or Star Chamber, called at first the Cheka and now the Gay Pay Oo (Ogpu), to go into these questions and "liquidate" persons who could not answer them satisfactorily.[13] ”

In 1936, Shaw publicly defended Stalin's Great Terror, saying, “Even in the opinion of the bitterest enemies of the Soviet Union and of her government, the [purge] trials have clearly demonstrated the existence of active conspiracies against the regime... I am convinced that this is the truth, and I am convinced that it will carry the ring of truth even in Western Europe, even for hostile readers.”[14] Shaw likewise defended Stalin's mass executions, warning, "we cannot afford to give ourselves moral airs when our most enterprising neighbor... humanely and judiciously liquidates a handful of exploiters and speculators..."[15] In 1949, he even wrote a defense of Stalin's pseudo-scientific Lysenkoism

In addition to socialism, Shaw was an advocate of eugenics. "Extermination must be put on a scientific basis if it is ever to be carried out humanely and apologetically as well as thoroughly," he wrote. "[I]f we desire a certain type of civilization and culture we must exterminate the sort of people who do not fit into it.[16] In one public address, Shaw gave expression to the Nazi doctrine of "life unworthy of life" (Lebensunwertes Leben):[17]

“ You must all know half a dozen people at least who are no use in this world, who are more trouble than they are worth. Just put them there and say Sir, or Madam, now will you be kind enough to justify your existence?

If you can’t justify your existence, if you’re not pulling your weight, and since you won't, if you’re not producing as much as you consume or perhaps a little more, then, clearly, we cannot use the organizations of our society for the purpose of keeping you alive, because your life does not benefit us and it can’t be of very much use to yourself.[18]

”

One of Shaw's long-term obsessions was mass murder by means of poison gas. In a 1910 lecture before the Eugenics Education Society, he said:

“ We should find ourselves committed to killing a great many people whom we now leave living... A part of eugenic politics would finally land us in an extensive use of the lethal chamber. A great many people would have to be put out of existence simply because it wastes other people's time to look after them."[19] ”

In the BBC's weekly magazine, Shaw made a 1933 "appeal to the chemists to discover a humane gas that will kill instantly and painlessly. Deadly by all means, but humane not cruel..."[20] His appeal would shortly come to fruition in Nazi Germany. As Robert Jay Lifton notes in The Nazi Doctors, "The use of poison gas—first carbon monoxide and then Zyklon B—was the technological achievement permitting 'humane killing.'"[21]

Shaw admired not just Stalin, but Mussolini and even Hitler.[22] He despised freedom, writing, "Mussolini... Hitler and the rest can all depend on me to judge them by their ability to deliver the goods and not by... comfortable notions of freedom."[23] Asked what Britons should do if the Nazis crossed the channel into Britain, Shaw replied, "Welcome them as tourists."[24]

Notes

  1. ↑ Sloan 2004
  2. ↑ Bernard Shaw, "Too True to be Good," (Samuel French, Inc., 1935) ISBN 0573601518, p. 99
  3. ↑ George Bernard Shaw, Act III: "Don Juan in Hell," Man and Superman (Brentano's, 1916), pp. 71-142
  4. ↑ "The New Theology," Christian Commonwealth, May 23 and 27, 1907
  5. ↑ Sloan 2004
  6. ↑ Henderson 1911: 102-104.
  7. ↑ Mazer
  8. ↑ Henderson 1911: 102-106.
  9. ↑ Cary M. Mazer, Bernard Shaw: a Brief Biography, University of Pennsylvania
  10. ↑ "Review: The Lure of Fantasy: Bernard Shaw, Volume III, by Michael Holroyd," The Economist, October 26, 1991
  11. ↑ Hollander 1998: 146
  12. ↑ Hollander 1998: 38-39
  13. ↑ Shaw 1933
  14. ↑ Arnold Beichman, "Death of the Butcher," 2003 No. 2
  15. ↑ Hollander 1998: 152-153
  16. ↑ Shaw 1933
  17. ↑ Dr. Stuart D. Stein, "Life Unworthy of Life" and other Medical Killing Programmes, University of the West of England
  18. ↑ Edvins Snore, The Soviet Story (Clip)
  19. ↑ The Daily Express (London), March 4, 1910, quoted in Dan Stone, Breeding Superman: Nietzsche, Race and Eugenics in Edwardian and Interwar Britain (Liverpool University Press, 2002) ISBN 0853239975
  20. ↑ The Listener (London), February 7, 1934
  21. ↑ Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (Basic Books, 1986) ISBN 0465049052, p. 453
  22. ↑ "Shaw Heaps Praise Upon the Dictators: While Parliaments Get Nowhere, He Says, Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin Do Things," From an Address By George Bernard Shaw, The New York Times, December 10, 1933
  23. ↑ Hollander 1998: 169
  24. ↑ Thomas Sowell, "Pacifism and war," Jewish World Review, September 24, 2001 (7 Tishrei, 5762)

External Links

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