"The classes and the races, too weak to master the new conditions of life, must give way. [. . .] they must perish in the revolutionary holocaust."
It's interesting that in recent times, socialism has been successfully re-branded and white-washed as a feel-good ideology where everyone gets what they need, everyone is equal and nice to each other, greed and poverty are erased, brotherhood of man reigns eternal, etc. In many ways, socialism is more popular now than it ever has been because people are less honest about it now than they ever have been. Ardent socialists either make excuses or simply refuse to turn their heads and look back at the history of the ideology they espouse.
The simple fact is that no other political philosophy has been so closely linked to mass murder and oppressive dictatorship as socialism. Except in the realm of lofty conjecture and theory, socialism in practice is defined by brutal, genocidal regimes and a complete lack of respect for human life and dignity. The history and future of socialism is haunted by Communist China, Soviet Russia, and Nazi Germany, the three most murderous regimes in history. All three were socialist, either national or international. All three abused innocent people in horrific ways we could never imagine. But why?
"You must all know half a dozen people, at least, who are of no use in this world, who are more trouble than they are worth. Just put them there and say: "Now sir, or madam, will you be kind enough to justify your existence? If you can't justify your existence, if you are not pulling your weight in the group, if you are not producing as much as you consume or perhaps a little more, then we cannot use the reorganization of our society for the purpose of keeping you alive because your life does not benefit us and it can't be of very much use to yourself."
A pretty ballsy thing for a playwright to say, true? What makes Shaw himself worthy of sitting in judgment of the worth of another person? What's the difference between what he's advocating and Hitler's Final Solution? Shaw even called on scientists to develop a painless way to kill multitudes of people. He also defended "the right of States to make eugenic experiments by weeding out any strains that they think undesirable."
"These remains of nations [the Slavic peoples] which have been mercilessly trampled down by the passage of history, as Hegel expressed it, this ethnic trash always becomes and remains until its complete extermination or denationalization, the most fanatic carrier of counterrevolution, since its entire existence is nothing more than a protest against a great historical revolution. . . The next world war will cause not only reactionary classes and dynasties but also entire reactionary peoples to disappear from the earth. And that too would be progress."
Nazi Germany had the "Master Race." Russia had the "New Soviet Man." China had "thought reform." Through purging the population of anyone deemed "undesirable," socialist regimes have always sought to mold the population into unquestioning soldiers ready to die for the fictitious "common good," or simple worker drones devoid of any individuality or ambition. Socialist regimes over the past century killed over 100,000,000 innocent people and jailed and/or tortured even more. Millions starved at the hands of their own government such as in Ukraine and China. There were mass murders of thousands and even millions by socialists in Cambodia, Cuba, Bulgaria, East Germany, Romania, Korea, Vietnam, Ethiopia, Hungary, Tibet, Poland, Mongolia, and other places, but you gotta crack some eggs to make an omelet, right?
The truth is that any attempt to establish socialism will lead to a totalitarian nightmare. History has proven this time and again, yet there are still enough people yelling gibberish with their fingers in their ears that people have to be reminded of the unrivaled destructiveness of socialism when put into practice.
1. those ignorant of the reality and fell victim to the nice sounding egalitarian rhetoric.
2. those who understand exactly what the reality is but see a spot for themselves among the organizers of such a regime.
I made some calculations. If Stalin killed 40,000,000 people, then he killed about one person for every minute he lived.