User:Larryhoyt/sandbox

''Last paragraph in Political and Social Witings. "Creative evolution", Shaw's version of the new science of eugenics, became an increasing theme in his political writing after 1900. He introduced his theories in The Revolutionist's Handbook (1903), an appendix to Man and Superman, and developed them further during the 1920s in Back to Methuselah. A 1946 Life magazine article observed that Shaw had "always tended to look at people more as a biologist than as an artist". By 1933, in the preface to On the Rocks, he was 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"; critical opinion is divided on whether this was intended as irony. In an article in the American magazine Liberty, in September 1938, Shaw included the statement: "There are many people in the world who ought to be liquidated". Many commentators assumed that such comments were intended as a joke, although in the worst possible taste. Otherwise, Life magazine concluded, "this silliness can be classed with his more innocent bad guesses".''

However, when examined in light of several other concurrent attributed quotes, it is hard to give Shaw the benefit of the grumpy jokester, as he sets the stage for his Eugenic Utopia.

In his play, "On The Rocks" Shaw tracks the history of all governments riding themselves of the undesirables of their time and notions and says that, "Extermination must be put on a scientific basis if it is ever to be carried out humanely and apologetically as well as thoroughly...

"Let us then assume that private property, already maimed by factory legislation, surtax, and a good deal of petty persecution in England, and in Russia tolerated only provisionally as a disgraceful necessity pending its complete extirpation, is finally discarded by civilized communities, and the duty of maintaining it at all costs replaced by the duty of giving effect to the dogma that every ablebodied and ableminded and ablesouled person has an absolute right to an equal share in the national dividend. Would the practice of extermination thereupon disappear? I suggest that, on the contrary, it might continue much more openly and intelligently and scientifically than at present, because the humanitarian revolt against it would probably become a humanitarian support of it; and there would be an end of the hypocrisy, the venal special pleading, and the concealment or ignoring of facts which are imposed on us at present because extermination for the benefit of a handful of private persons against the interests of the race is permitted and practised. The old doctrine of the sacredness of human life, which in our idiot asylums at Darenth and elsewhere still terrifies us into wasting the lives of capable people in preserving the lives of monsters, was a crude expedient for beginning civilization." As Shaw claims it is only when the miscreants and lessers of society are put out of his misery by society that we will truly be rational and successful as a society...

"The notion that persons should be safe from extermination as long as they do not commit willful murder, or levy war against the Crown, or kidnap, or throw vitriol, is not only to limit social responsibility unnecessarily, and to privilege the large range of intolerable misconduct that lies outside them, but to divert attention from the essential justification for extermination, which is always incorrigible social incompatibility and nothing else..."

"Sooner or later this situation will have to be thoroughly studied and thought out to its logical conclusion in all civilized countries. The lists of crimes and penalties will obsolesce like the doctors' lists of diseases and medicines; and it will become possible to be a judge without ceasing to be a Christian. And extermination, my present subject, will become a humane science instead of the miserable mixture of piracy, cruelty, vengeance, race conceit, and superstition it now is." Source: George Bernard Shaw, "On the Rocks" (1933), Preface.

Earlier in his Eugenics activity Shaw had sown the seeds for the how to rid society of it's unwanted and unproductive lessers.

"We should find ourselves committed to killing a great many people whom we now leave living, and to leave living a great many people whom we at present kill. We should have to get rid of all ideas about capital punishment …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." Source: George Bernard Shaw, Lecture to the Eugenics Education Society, Reported in The Daily Express, March 4, 1910.

And in 1934, acknowledging that he was enhancing the system used by the Germans and the Soviets and applying them more broadly and perfectly in his Utopian Eugenics ruled world, "The moment we face it frankly we are driven to the conclusion that the community has a right to put a price on the right to live in it … If people are fit to live, let them live under decent human conditions. If they are not fit to live, kill them in a decent human way. Is it any wonder that some of us are driven to prescribe the lethal chamber as the solution for the hard cases which are at present made the excuse for dragging all the other cases down to their level, and the only solution that will create a sense of full social responsibility in modern populations?" Source: George Bernard Shaw, Prefaces (London: Constable and Co., 1934), p. 296.