Bernard Shaw and Lenin (Hitler, attack, Soviet, western)

[no kudzu]

Last night on PBS I watched a documentary called The Soviet Story ( I believe). It documented with horrible footage how lenin and stalin set the stage for hilter and the extermination of millions. There was footage of the playwright George Bernard Shaw saying things like "undesirables should be killed for the good of the whole" and other savage remarks. Today I have googled Bernard Shaw to try to find the exact quotes but the only thing I can find are his witty remarks and critiques of his plays. How can I find the quotes this man used regarding the extermination of so many innocent people? I never knew anything about Shaw in this regard.

Many thanks.

[no kudzu]

I found the clip of Shaw from this documentary but his exact quote is hard to understand and a translation quickly covers the print. So I'm still wanting to know where can I actually READ what Shaw had to say about Hitler and mass murder?

[delusianne]

I cant understand a word he said in that clip, but if GBS said something like that his tongue was very firmly in his cheek.

[kevxu]

Originally Posted by no kudzu

Last night on PBS I watched a documentary called The Soviet Story ( I believe). It documented with horrible footage how lenin and stalin set the stage for hilter and the extermination of millions. There was footage of the playwright George Bernard Shaw saying things like "undesirables should be killed for the good of the whole" and other savage remarks. Today I have googled Bernard Shaw to try to find the exact quotes but the only thing I can find are his witty remarks and critiques of his plays. How can I find the quotes this man used regarding the extermination of so many innocent people? I never knew anything about Shaw in this regard.

Many thanks.

Contact PBS. You are unlikely to be the only interested person.

[delusianne]

Here are examples from 1933 that give a feel for Shaw's unique way of speaking, and show his POV pretty clearly.

1933 Articles : GB Shaw Article Archive

That exhaustive collection is from THIS exhaustive collection of Shaw-related news articles: Article Index : GB Shaw Times Archive

[John Walmsley]

Originally Posted by delusianne

Here are examples from 1933 that give a feel for Shaw's unique way of speaking, and show his POV pretty clearly.

1933 Articles : GB Shaw Article Archive

That exhaustive collection is from THIS exhaustive collection of Shaw-related news articles: Article Index : GB Shaw Times Archive

deslusianne,

I tried to find some of GBS's more extreme statements, but your examples are excellent. It's unfortunate that a man of so many literary gifts should have such radical opinions. He was one of many intellectuals of the early 1900s who embraced eugenics and extreme views of culling "undesirables" from society. He even called for the development of a "toxic gas" as a humane way of achieving this end, grimly suggestive of Hitler's later "final solution."

Shaw aggressively attacked Malcom Muggeridge's expose' of Stalin's imposed terror famines as lies. According to Robert Conquest, whose book The Harvest of Sorrow documents the grim realities of this crime against humanity, Shaw was duped by being shown Potemkin villages that gave no hint to the horrific conditions under Stalin's collectivization program. Conquest quotes Shaw as saying, "I didn't see a single under-nourished person in Russia, young or old. Were they padded? Were their hollow cheeks distended by by pieces of india rubber inside?" However, many western writers of the time were, willingly or otherwise, blinded to the scope of this human tragedy.