Niall McCrae
Tony Blair boasted of ‘Cool Britannia’, a modern multicultural country freed from the shackles of social conservatism. ‘We don’t do history’, his press secretary Alastair Campbell said, but the progressive Left has always been obsessed with historical revisionism. As George Orwell wrote, he who controls the past, controls the future.
Decolonisation is a major theme in the ‘woke’ takeover of universities. As the British Empire is harshly and ignorantly reinterpreted as a racist regime, any hitherto venerated figure with colonial involvement must be banished. Correcting past faults by the standards of the present, busts and portraits are removed, lecture halls are renamed, and classic works are deleted from the curriculum.
Imperialism is associated with eugenics. Yet in the early to mid-twentieth century much of the British intelligentsia, particularly those of left-wing ideology, was drawn to this pseudo-scientific endeavour to create a society ridden of tainted stock. .Although eugenics became a bad word after the horrors of Nazi Germany, such policy was most keenly pursued in US states such as California, where tens of thousands of mentally subnormal and psychiatric patients were involuntarily sterilised in the 1930s.
While biographies of favoured politicians and scholars excuse or overlook their membership of the Eugenics Society, others are severely censured. University College London has taken extraordinary steps to dishonour its great polymath Sir Francis Galton, known as the father of eugenics. This navel-gazing contrasts sharply with an event merely a mile away, where a commemorative window was unveiled in 2006 by prime minister Tony Blair at the London School of Economics. George Bernard Shaw had not merely a passing interest in eugenics: he introduced the idea of quiet euthanasia by means of the gas chamber.
Born in Dublin in 1856, Shaw moved to London aged 20. Struggling to make ends meet, in 1884 he joined the Fabian Society, using his wit as an open-air speaker. By the 1920s he was simultaneously a popular playwright and a fervent activist in the cause of socialism. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925, although the Pears’ Cyclopaedia of the following year described his plays as ‘tantalising brilliant and effective in parts, but just as tantalisingly inefficient as dramatic entireties’. Among his widely-read political works was The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism, which made Marxism accessible to millions. But for all his literary talent, Shaw was a ‘useful idiot’ for the Soviet regime.
It is well known that the British Left was mesmerised by the Russian communist venture, but historians have too readily excused this as naïve idealism. The likes of George Lansbury and Jimmy Maxton lauded not only the purportedly egalitarian system, but also the ruthless eradication of ‘counter-revolutionaries’. The Soviet Union had many enthusiasts at the London School of Economics, which opened in 1921. The most prominent founder was Shaw, who urged a Bolshevik-style revolution in Britain. As historian Giles Udy noted in Labour and the Gulag, ‘little-known or mentioned today’, Shaw ‘had a brutal and cruel streak to which the written record abundantly attests’.
Shaw believed that Stalin was following an uncompromising Fabian approach to communism. Defending execution of political criminals, Shaw remarked: ‘a well-kept garden must be weeded’. In 1931 Shaw visited Moscow, where he was fêted and all his preconceptions confirmed. Here was the future for mankind: rationally planned, and unsentimental. The workshy deserved to be sent to the gulag, where their labour would be exploited and exhausted. For a conservative thinker or politician to have used the term ‘social parasites’ would never be forgiven, but Shaw is strangely excused.
When the show trials began in Moscow in 1937, Western sympathies were severely tested: here were pioneers and principal figures of the Soviet Union admitting guilt for incredible crimes, surely under duress. Shaw, however, held the line: ‘On the top of the ladder is a very trying place for old revolutionists who have had no administrative experience…They often have to be pushed off the ladder, with a rope around their neck’.
Heinous crimes against humanity were acceptable to Shaw, who scoffed at the sanctity of life. Indeed, a major appeal of communism was its godlessness and hostility to Judaeo-Christian mores. Like Richard Dawkins today, Shaw was a militant atheist, who wanted children of religious parents removed to orphanages. Back in 1910, he considered how society could dispose of large numbers of undesirable people in the most efficient way: ‘I appeal to the chemists to discover a human gas that will instantly and painlessly’. As well as the mentally and physically handicapped, this ‘lethal chamber’ would have use in exterminating antisocial elements, including political opponents.
While Shaw was not directly responsible for Zyklon-B and the Holocaust, he offered intellectual credibility to the extremes of ideologically-motivated eugenics. How can such abhorrence be given a free pass while Galton is demonised? As a socialist, Shaw benefits from the Manichean law: he was on the side of good, and must have meant well. Tony Blair, in his address at the LSE commemoration, said; ‘A lot of the values that the Fabians and George Bernard Shaw stood for would be very recognisable, at least I hope they would, in today’s Labour Party’.
And so we come to the present. The covid-19 pandemic has been fully exploited by the four horsemen of the globalist apocalypse: mega-financier and funder of cultural Marxist causes George Soros, Big Pharma commander-in-chief Bill Gates, world government director Klaus Schwab, and Tony Blair. There are others of course, but these men stand out for their determination to exert progressive ideology on the world, leading to an elite-driven technocracy.
Blair is a very vocal promoter of pseudo-medical apartheid, asserting that ‘vaccinated and non-vaccinated people should have different freedoms’. This objective is pushed in the absence of logic, scientific evidence or morality. It certainly has little justification in public health. But Blair wants control, and is using the old tactic of divide and rule. The enslaved compliant masses will be brainwashed into blaming the awkward refuseniks, who must be scapegoated, shunned and stigmatised as dangerous ‘anti-vaxxers’.
Like George Bernard Shaw, Blair would probably be happy to see thousands of dissidents given one-way tickets to Wellingborough, where a huge new prison is nearing completion (with crematorium attached). He might not shed a tear for victims of lynch mobs. In these dark days, it is troubling but not surprising that graffiti appeared in a public square in Germany, urging ‘Ungeimpfte ins Gas’(gas the unvaccinated).
George Bernard Shaw had Pygmalion and Tony Blair had his Britpop soundtrack, but behind the façade lurks unspeakable evil.
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