{"id":1509270,"date":"2022-06-09T11:20:59","date_gmt":"2022-06-09T15:20:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1509270"},"modified":"2022-06-09T11:21:22","modified_gmt":"2022-06-09T15:21:22","slug":"why-george-bernard-shaw-whitewashed-josef-stalin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/why-george-bernard-shaw-whitewashed-josef-stalin\/","title":{"rendered":"Why George Bernard Shaw Whitewashed Josef Stalin"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">14<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fwhy-george-bernard-shaw-whitewashed-josef-stalin%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1509270&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><p>History, as we all know, tends to favor the victors of wars. This in part explains why two of the greatest architects of 20th Century genocide, Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler, have been treated very differently in the more than 50 years since they held power. Hitler is so universally reviled that he canceled his own first name. Stalin on the other hand is presented as a more complicated and nuanced figure. It\u2019s not just that Stalin\u2019s Soviet Union defeated Hitler and Germany (with Allied help), Uncle Joe also had powerful and smart friends in the West, high among them was the celebrated Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw.<\/p>\n<p>In fairness to Shaw, at least in his younger days, the Soviet Union, and before it, Russia in general held a heady appeal to Western artists. Even prior to the Bolsheviks, the pump had already been primed, in theater by the plays of Chekov and the directing style of Stanislavski, and in literature more generally, Tolstoy, who at the start of the 20th Century was wildly praised and mimicked. So it was natural for Shaw, himself a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.researchgate.net\/publication\/287405140_BERNARD_SHAW_AND_POLITICS\">socialist<\/a> with progressive ideas, to see the USSR not as a red menace, but as a hope for humanity.<\/p>\n<p>Shaw\u2019s work, notably in \u201cPygmalion\u201d and \u201cMan and Superman,\u201d deals with political and cultural issues, especially surrounding class and gender. Of humble birth himself, Shaw distrusts the hierarchical system of England and Ireland, unlike his contemporary, Oscar Wilde, born nearby him in Dublin, Shaw was not the manor born. We can see why this storyteller of working-class stock took a shine to the notion of a workers\u2019 paradise.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>In \u201cThe Revolutionist\u2019s Handbook,\u201d Shaw writes \u201cNow we have yet to see the man, who, having any practical experience of Proletarian Democracy, has any belief in its capacity for solving great political problems or even for doing ordinary parochial work intelligently and economically.\u201d So, he was not a huge fan of democracy. Shaw preferred the idea of being ruled by perfect systems. And he thought the Soviet Union was well on its way to achieving just that.<\/p>\n<p>Had Shaw been ignorant of the atrocities committed by Stalin, we might easily forgive him for falling into the soft lies and propaganda of the Soviet state. But by the 1940s the scale and scope of Stalin\u2019s crimes were becoming known, yet Shaw <a href=\"https:\/\/fee.org\/articles\/george-bernard-shaw-was-so-enamored-with-socialism-he-advocated-genocide-to-advance-it\/\">stayed<\/a> a stalwart ally. So much so, in fact, that anti-authoritarian (and <a href=\"https:\/\/thewire.in\/books\/remembering-george-orwell-the-socialist\">socialist<\/a>) author George Orwell, acting as an informant to the British government, would <a href=\"https:\/\/www.jstor.org\/stable\/27929796\">name<\/a> Shaw as \u201creliably pro Russia on all major issues.\u201d Orwell named names.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>So how was it that Shaw, and not just him, but so many of the brightest artists and writers of his time, were willing to look past murder and even genocide? We ask this not in the spirit of canceling George Bernard Shaw, but of truly understanding what led him to this dark compromise.<\/p>\n<p>There is a tendency in our time to imagine that the first 2 decades of the 21st Century saw the fastest and most profound technological expansion in history. Yet, the opening 20 years of the 20th Century might have us beat in terms of the structural changes to physical and cultural spaces. The wide adoption of the light bulb, automobiles, planes, the phonograph, and moving pictures transformed the plastic of reality. The bright, shiny London of young Bertie Wooster in the 1920s was nothing like the dark and murky, gas-lit city of Sherlock Holmes just a few decades before. Shaw experienced both.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>It is easy to see why he and his contemporaries imagined that material needs could soon be furnished without the punishing demands put upon a capitalist labor force. In Stalin, Shaw saw a true man of the age. He didn\u2019t fiddle around with legislatures, courts, or markets, he announced five-year plans and got them done. Shaw would go to his death in 1950 truly believing that, in the long run, the unfortunate deaths of millions would be for the common good. Above the bed where he died was a framed picture of Josef Stalin.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Before we are too harsh in our historical judgment of Shaw, we ought to take a square look at his descendants in the entertainment industry today. Hollywood has become famously beholden to a China that is credibly accused of genocide and has committed an ocean of human rights abuses. This fealty to China might be more motivated by money than Shaw\u2019s love of Soviet Communism, but it is also about control. This is true with regard to the progressive or \u201cwoke\u201d messaging so pervasive in Hollywood\u2019s products, but also a general insistence on obedience to the state, so long as it is controlled by Democrats.<\/p>\n<p>In some ways, our country\u2019s relationship to China is very similar to Shaw\u2019s with the Soviet Union. We accept inconvenient tragedy because in the<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>History, as we all know, tends to favor the victors of wars. This in part explains why two of the greatest architects of 20th Century genocide, Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler, have been treated very differently in the more than 50 years since they held power. Hitler is so universally reviled that he canceled his &#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":346,"featured_media":1509348,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1509270","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1509270","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/346"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1509270"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1509270\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1509348"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1509270"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1509270"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1509270"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}