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[–]Jesus 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Says the guy who pushed for Eugenics under the Fabian Society and who thought those who could not work should be peacefully euthanized, very much what the National Socialists advocated for.

Shaw’s dual embrace of communism and fascism was broadly typical of Fabians or other sorts of socialists. Many Fabians supported the eugenic program of the National Socialists of Germany and Austria.

Shaw believed Communism and Fascism to be much the same thing, and was in favour of both of them.

In 1933 Shaw's suggestion that chemists develop a “humane” poison gas for the extermination of those he regarded as social parasites, those who refuse to work and insist that society support them (including the idle rich as well as the deliberately idle poor). He also made references to euthanaisa of the disabled.

In 1927 Shaw published in the London Daily News a letter titled “Bernard Shaw on Mussolini: A Defence.” He came under sharp attack for this by both socialists and liberals, but persisted in his admiration of Mussolini throughout the 1930s. While sharply condemning Hitler’s anti-Semitism, he spoke positively about the Nazis for renouncing the Versailles Treaty, which Shaw had opposed, and for their supposed economic reforms, writing in 1935, “The Nazi movement is in many respects one which has my warmest sympathy.” As late as 1944, deep into World War II, when he was strongly supporting the British war effort against Germany, he still in print had something positive to say about Hitler’s Mein Kampf. He claimed that he was a National Socialist before Hitler was.

He was well-disposed toward Oswald Mosley, Britain’s home-grown fascist demagogue, declaring Mosley “the only striking personality in British politics.” He turned against the German Nazis and Italian fascists during World War II, but never wavered from his adulation for the Soviet Union, first under Lenin, and then, undiminished, under Stalin.

Eugenics was supported by some leftists and liberals, such as H. G. Wells, John Maynard Keynes, Margaret Sanger, Sidney Webb, Virginia Woolf, progressive Republican Theodore Roosevelt, and Stanford University President David Starr Jordan. But similar advocacy was widespread on the right and center, where eugenics champions included, in Great Britain and Ireland, Conservative Prime Minister Arthur Balfour, Winston Churchill, W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, and Julian Huxley; in the United States, Alexander Graham Bell, John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford, John Harvey Kellogg (founder of the breakfast cereal company), and Clarence Gamble (heir to the Proctor and Gamble fortune). The main difference is that the Irish and Britons mainly talked about eugenics while the American corporate foundations poured large amounts of money into its implementation. In the U.S., thirty states adopted involuntary sterilization laws used to forcibly neuter 64,000 people between 1907 and 1963.

This was promoted by wealthy organizations such as the Rockefeller, Ford, and Carnegie foundations. The Rockefeller Institute prominently employed the pro-Nazi French biologist Alexis Carrel, who wrote:

“Those who have murdered, robbed while armed with automatic pistol or machine gun, kidnapped children, despoiled the poor of their savings, misled the public in important matters, should be humanely and economically disposed of in small euthanasic institutions supplied with proper gasses. A similar treatment could be advantageously applied to the insane, guilty of criminal acts.”

Notice how the criteria becomes more and more sweeping as the list grows, from murderers to armed robbers to mere swindlers and then to people who spread false information, and finally the mentally ill who step over some legal line.