Replies

Anyone STARTING OUT with a quote from the Eugenist GEORGE BERNARD SHAW who personally believed in the EXTERMINATION OF THE “SOCIALLY INCOMPATIBLE is already “suspect” from the start.

“The notion that persons should be safe from extermination as long as they do not commit willful murder, or levy war against the Crown, or kidnap, or throw vitriol, is not only to limit social responsibility unnecessarily, and to privilege the large range of intolerable misconduct that lies outside them, but to divert attention from the essential justification for extermination, which is always incorrigible social incompatibility and nothing else.”

Source: George Bernard Shaw, “On the Rocks” (1933), Preface.

USE OF GAS CHAMBERS

“We should find ourselves committed to killing a great many people whom we now leave living, and to leave living a great many people whom we at present kill. We should have to get rid of all ideas about capital punishment …

A part of eugenic politics would finally land us in an extensive use of the lethal chamber. A great many people would have to be put out of existence simply because it wastes other people’s time to look after them.”

Source: George Bernard Shaw, Lecture to the Eugenics Education Society, Reported in The Daily Express,March 4, 1910.

KILLING THOSE “UNFIT TO LIVE”

“The moment we face it frankly we are driven to the conclusion that the community has a right to put a price on the right to live in it … If people are fit to live, let them live under decent human conditions. If they are not fit to live, kill them in a decent human way. Is it any wonder that some of us are driven to prescribe the lethal chamber as the solution for the hard cases which are at present made the excuse for dragging all the other cases down to their level, and the only solution that will create a sense of full social responsibility in modern populations?”

Source: George Bernard Shaw, Prefaces (London: Constable and Co., 1934), p. 296.