₦airaland Forum

Arguable GB Shaw (1856-1950) was one of the best writers who ever lived. His work "Arms and the man" has been translated to over fifty languages and is read worldwide, it is still one of the books used by WAEC. He even won the noble prize for literature in 1925. Any literature lover would immediately recognise him, but most of us especially Africans are unaware of the shadier aspect of his life.

For exaple he was a profound atheist, This aspect of Shaw's life is not known to many today, but back then it caused quite a scandal as atheism was a big no no, even today atheism is still frowned upon especially in developing countries. GB Shaw defended his belief despite all this even saying at one time that "the fact that a beliver is happier than an atheist is no more to the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one" in essence comparing believers to drunkards.

Shaw also proved controversial when he supported notorious Russian dictator Joseph Stalin of the soviet union and declared his government prosperous even though Stalin killed over a million people, he even visited gulags (prison camps in Russia and Siberia) and said there were "luxurious" as a result Shaw was condemned by both British and American media. Shaw's love for Stalin was so much that that he once wrote a letter to the guardian newspaer condeming them for publishing an article on Stalin's terror famine which ahd killed approximately 2 million in Ukraine alone. He called the articles "all lies" to damage Stalin's benevelont image.

Another contreversial aspect of his life was that despite being an atheist he glorified islam and in his own words said he hoped "one day modern Europe would learn to accept islam and that they were reluctant to do so because they believed mohammed was anti-christ and a threat to the christian faith" This angered a lot of people and is still a flaring point for some today.

Lastly, this man whom a lot of literary scholars have come to love actually suported eugenics , the practise of selective breeding that involves forced sterilization of men and women cosidered worthless, weak, unintelligent and most dissapointing people of a particular race seen as inferior. Eugenics was a method used by Nazi's and is currently been propargated by white domination groups. Most people who fell victim to such were usually poor black and jewish people.in 1933 Shaw said on air that the best way to eradicate society's unwanted was through the use of poison gas as he cosidered it humane and painless (it wasn't). This method would later be adopted by Nazi Germany
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When Britain was been bombed by the Nazi's and he was asked what he would do if he was the prime minister, he said he would "welcome them as tourist". He glorified Hitler,Stalin and Mussolini all murderous dictators and said he considered them worthy human beings. He was also anti jewish and once said "jews should stop being jews and start acting like human beings"

I wanted everyone to know what type of man GB Shaw was and though there's no denying he was a brilliant writer the stains he left behind will be too difficult to erase