Skip to content

Socialism means caring for the rejected and down trodden in our society!

In 1933, in a preface to On The Rocks, Bernard Shaw derided the principle of the sanctity of human life as an absurdity to any good Socialist, calling for extermination to be put \’on a scientific basis\’. Shortly after, in the Listener, Shaw wrote;

Appeal to the chemists to discover a humane gas that will kill instantly and painlessly: in short a gentlemanly gas – deadly by all means, but humane, not cruel. It might be useful in war, but if another war does not come, we shall find a use for it at home.

Shaw reasoned that to kill off the acquisitive classes is \”quite reasonable and very necessary\” since \’no punishment will ever cure them of their capitalistic instincts\’.

Though Shaw was more concerned with the extermination of the idle, the unfit and opponents of Socialism, he defended the rights of the Nazis to exterminate the Jews – but preserving the clever ones. Writing to Beatrice Webb in 1938, he said;

We ought to tackle the Jewish question by admitting the right of States to make eugenic experiments by weeding out any strains they think undesirable, but insisting they do it as humanely as they can afford to

With a \’humane lethal gas\’ no doubt.

Along with Shaw, the Webbs and HG Wells, even Virginia Woolf was a supporter of State murder; after passing a line of the profoundly mentally ill, she wrote \”Imbeciles – every one of them a miserable, ineffective, shuffling, idiotic creature. It was perfectly horrible. They should certainly be killed.\”

9 thoughts on “Socialism means caring for the rejected and down trodden in our society!”

  1. So Much For Subtlety

    Stephen Jay Gould said that good ideas floated around in the air like butterflies and that scientists were all waving their nets around – so it happened that several tended to come up with similar ideas at the same time.

    While I stand second to none in my contempt for the Webbs, Woolf and even Shaw, everyone was thinking these sorts of things. All it needed was a rejection of Christianity and modern chemistry. Someone would have done it in the end. We will probably end up doing it again as the campaign for euthanasia seems to be gaining ground. Why not?

  2. While I stand second to none in my contempt for the Webbs, Woolf and even Shaw, everyone was thinking these sorts of things.

    Indeed

    Between 24 and 30 July 1912, a month after the Second Reading of the Mental Deficiency Bill in Parliament, the first international Eugenics Conference was held in London, and was attended by four hundred delegates. Churchill was a Vice-President of the Congress, and Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, was one of its directors, as was Charles Eliot, a former President of Harvard, and the Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford, Sir William Osler.

    Wouldn’t be so sure about the rejection of religion, though.

  3. Isn’t this where some cheery cove points out that Sweden carried merrily on with eugenic sterilisations into the 70s?

  4. I think that Margaret Sanger, the founder of “planned parenthood” was another enthusiast for the selective culling of people she considered imperfect.

  5. Ad din Marie Stopes, promoter of birth control, who was also a eugenicist.
    And she cut her son out of her will after he married a girl who was imperfect – she wore glasses.

  6. I thought GBS was a Fabian, not a pure Socialist?

    Fabians are far worse than Socialists, as one might haveore chance convincing a Socialist to abandon coercion.

  7. “I remember when Mr. H. G. Wells had an alarming fit of Nominalist philosophy; and poured forth book after book to argue that everything is unique and untypical as that a man is so much an individual that he is not even a man. It is a quaint and almost comic fact, that this chaotic negation especially attracts those who are always complaining of social chaos, and who propose to replace it by the most sweeping social regulations. It is the very men who say that nothing can be classified, who say that everything must be codified. Thus Mr. Bernard Shaw said that the only golden rule is that there is no golden rule. He prefers an iron rule; as in Russia” –

    G. K. Chesterton, ‘St. Thomas Aquinas’.

  8. People who’re good at writing plays and novels in “not very good at coherent political philosophy” shock. Film at 11.

    Sanger and Stokes, incidentally, were both vehemently opposed to euthanasia – they believed in readily available contraception for all, and in sterilisation for the seriously mentally disabled.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *