Yesterday we examined George Bernard Shaw‘s enthusiasm for Hitler – and noted a 1933 letter to the New York Times in which he suggested that the Führer, instead of planning to exterminate Jews, should simply say: “I will tolerate Jews to any extent, as long as no Jew marries a Jewess. That is how he could build up a strong, solid German people.”

At other times, however, Shaw was gung-ho for extermination. A strong supporter of eugenics, he championed “the right of the State to make eugenic experiments by weeding out any strains they think undesirable.” He spelled out his ideas as follows:

I think it would be a good thing to make everybody come before a properly-appointed board, just as they might come before the income tax commissioner, and say every five years, or every seven years, just put them there, and say, “Sir, or madam, now will you be kind enough to justify your existence?” If you’re not producing as much as you consume or perhaps a little more, then, clearly, we cannot use the big organizations 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…. I appeal to the chemists to discover a humane gas that will kill instantly and painlessly. In short, a gentlemanly gas – deadly by all means, but humane not cruel.

Some Shavians have insisted vehemently that when Shaw offered this suggestion, he was kidding, in the same way that Jonathan Swift was kidding in his famous essay “A Modest Proposal.” But Shaw wasn’t kidding. He floated the same idea in a private letter to his friend Beatrice Webb, writing: “I think we ought to tackle the Jewish Question by admitting the right of the States to make eugenic experiments by weeding out any strains that they think undesirable, but insisting that they do it as humanely as they can afford to.”

The only thing left to say about Shaw’s pro-Nazi views is that they survived Nazism itself. After Hitler’s death, Shaw remembered him as a “national hero”; when some of the Führer’s highest-ranking honchos were put on trial at Nuremberg after the war, Shaw considered them martyrs.

Shaw’s admiration for the Nazis, however, was eclipsed by his enthusiasm for Stalin and company. When Hitler invaded Russia in 1941, Saw was delighted because he was sure the results “would reveal to the world the real strength of Soviet Communism.” The rapidity with which the Bolsheviks transformed Russia impressed him, and caused him to dismiss the Fabian ambition of gradually turning Britain socialist. Scorning law-abiding activists who sought to effect change from within the system, he looked up to men with “iron nerve and fanatical conviction.” During a 1931 visit to Moscow, he announced: “I have seen all the ‘terrors’ and I was terribly pleased by them.”

Shaw returned to Britain from Russia “filled with religious fervour for the communist cause” (as one journalist has put it) and eager (as one of his biographers, Michael Holroyd, has written) to “bring the light of the Soviet Church to new audiences round the world.” Indeed, just as Shaw had promoted the idea of the Nazi extermination of Jews and other human beings whom he viewed as undesirables, he also argued for the wholesale massacre of Russian opponents of Communism, arguing that “if we desire a certain type of civilization and culture we must exterminate the sort of people who do not fit into it.” All this, dear reader, from the second-greatest playwright in the English language.