Middle East and Terrorism: The Hitler and Stalin Loving Socialist Whose Statue No One Will Touch

By Geoffrey Clarfield

George Bernard Shaw had a monstrous side as this article by Daniel Greenfield in Middle East and Terorism explores.

“I was a National Socialist before Mr Hitler was born. I hope we shall emulate his great achievements in that direction,” the famous socialist writer whose statue smilingly stands in a fountain in Niagara-on-the-Lake behind the Shaw Cafe & Wine Bar wrote.

The statue is part of the local shtick which includes the Shaw literary festival.

The festival may perform Shaw’s On the Rocks, but it doesn’t include his preface to the play, where he argued that, “extermination must be put on a scientific basis if it is ever to be carried out humanely and apologetically as well as thoroughly” and holds up the Soviet Union as an ideal example where the “essential questions: ‘are you pulling your weight in the social boat? are you giving more trouble than you are worth?’” were answered by the Cheka who would “‘liquidate’ persons who could not answer them satisfactorily” to meet the “urgency of how to dispose of people who would not or could not fit themselves into the new order of things.”

While Niagara-on-the-Lake may have a statue of Shaw, the famous socialist writer kept a portrait of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Cheka, the Soviet secret police, on his wall.

The statue of George Bernard Shaw, one of many, including outside the National Gallery of Ireland (sculpted by Paolo Troubetzkoy, who fled the Communists and was harassed to death by the Nazis: two regimes that Shaw enthusiastically supported), has rarely been questioned.

In a time when Isaac Newton has been accused of profiting from colonialism and his name scrubbed from science, Edinburgh University removes David Hume’s name, and the University of Liverpool purges Gladstone because even though he opposed slavery, his father owned a plantation, a socialist much closer to our time who headlined an article, “Heil Hitler” still stands.

Certainly the London School of Economics, probably the most pernicious institution in the country, hasn’t cut ties with its genocidal and murderous founder. And the Fabian Window, depicting the founders of the socialist cult, including Shaw, still hangs in LSE’s Shaw Library.

While most still think of Pygmalion or My Fair Lady when they think of Shaw (if they think of him at all), his views on eugenics, socialism, and genocide were never secret. Audrey Hepburn singing, “The Rain in Spain” is a long way from Shaw writing that, “If we desire a certain type of civilization and culture we must exterminate the sort of people who do not fit into it.”

That included the Jews of whom Shaw wrote, “I think we ought to tackle the Jewish Question by admitting the right of the State to make eugenic experiments by weeding out any strains they think undesirable”, but as a committed eugenicist he was hardly going to stop there, writing that, “the majority of men at present in Europe have no business to be alive.”

“Appeal to the chemists to discover a humane gas that will kill instantly and painlessly,”

Shaw wrote that WW2 was “a war between inbreeding and cross breeding, between mongrels and pedigrees; and Hitler has the courage of his convictions to a sublime height which has nerved him to stake a world war on it. Altogether a very remarkable fellow, this Hitler.”

None of this is a secret though Shaw apologists in literature and the media insist that he was just adopting a persona and issuing hyperbolic statements to provoke the public. But that doesn’t explain his private expressions of support for the Communists and the Nazis.

Shaw proved useful to both Hitler and Stalin. Hitler ordered Goebbels to protect Shaw’s writings as useful to the Nazi cause and Stalin met with the famed playwright. It was easy to see why when even as late as 1944, Shaw wrote that, “we claim to be fighting for democracy; and Adolf Hitler retorts unanswerably that British democracy is nothing but Anglo-Semitic plutocracy”.

The socialist playwright made little effort to hide the noxiousness of his views. If they’re obscure it’s only because generations of leftists have worked to keep them so. When Glenn Beck briefly made them a focus of his show, the experts rushed in to explain why it was a non-issue.

And yet now, as statues are being toppled and institutions renamed, it’s still a non-issue.

Shaw’s statues, like Marx’s statues, despite his racism, will stay where they are because both men represent the exact principle for which so many statues are being toppled to begin with.

Only the statues of creators are being toppled, while the statues of destroyers are preserved.

Some men become radicals and extremists because they dream of a better world. Others only talk of a better world because they hate the real world and have nothing but contempt for most of the people who occupy it. They dream of a revolution that will spill the blood of those whom they, like Shaw, deem useless, and replace the prosaic routines of daily life with a cult of personality and a forced commitment to a set of impossible ideals no matter what they are.

And so the Shaw statues will stand even as the political terror of the cultural revolution goes on.

Read it all here.