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YouTube Videos on Shaw The essay below explains why Shaw is the subject of
some very distorted “hate videos” these days, but your time might be better spent going to a new
GBS Channel where you can find many more YouTube videos that show the real GBS, at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxGpZjHhix37VN-zFfX6psg/playlists. Or come back to this after you’ve read through the
matter below. Just as Shaw loved playing with the still camera, as
both photographed and photographer, he seemed to love even more playing with
the movie camera, but strictly as the subject of somebody else’s filming,
which made him vulnerable, of course, to the abuse of editors who wanted to
use his appearances for purposes contrary to Shaw’s purposes. If you wish to see Shaw mugging for the
camera and playing at being amusing and outrageous, there are many film clips
available online, not only on YouTube, but here are a few YouTube addresses
that will give you a representative sample.
He would have been better off if he had not done some of these, for
they made excellent grist for the right-wing propaganda mill. |
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SHAW SALUTES The photo above, taken from a film clip (of which
there’s more than one version), is a wonderful example of the mischief being
done by right-wing smear campaigns these days, which attempt to discredit
“socialism” (meaning “Obamacare” or any other government-run social program)
by showing socialists of the past like Shaw appearing to support the
murderous regimes of Hitler, Mussolini, etc.
But this is a gross distortion of the original context, as you’ll see
when you view the YouTube video just below.” You’ll see that Shaw is actually
mugging for the camera and playing
at being Mussolini delivering a “sieg heil.” And note
that the date of the clip is 1928, when it was still possible to joke around
about Mussolini and think he wasn’t a villain, and Hitler hadn’t come to
power yet: “(Rare!) George
Bernard Shaw's First Visit To America (1928 Fox Movietone
Newsreel)” from transformingArt, but you can also
find this in a slightly different version entitled “GBS at his home in 1928,”
by the Balloon Guy , and the latter title I believe more likely. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40VegR6uaTI&feature=player_embedded
“Justify
your existence!” The film clip that’s second in the list is even more
outrageously propagandistic, as you can tell simply by noting the
melodramatic music in the background.
Shaw is shown approving of exterminating “the unfit,” but of course,
as even the film’s melodramatic narrator admits, Shaw’s idea of “the unfit”
was quite different from Hitler’s and had nothing to do with Jews, gypsies,
the malformed, or political enemies of the fascist state. “The unfit,” for Shaw, were the same
“Members of the Idle Rich Class” that he had always castigated for consuming
much more than they produced and that his character John Tanner had appealed
to in “The Revolutionist’s Handbook” appended to Shaw’s play Man and Superman (1904) to justify
their existence with more productive and more conscientious work for the
public good. And Shaw had made it
clear by his membership in the Fabian Society that his preferred way of “extermination” was through education (i.e.,
Fabian “permeation”), but Tanner’s handbook suggests it might have to be left
to evolution if education didn’t work, and in that the Life Force was to be
left alone to its own devices, forget eugenics. The “unfit” would select each other to
mate with and their eventual sterility would cause them to lose out in the
evolutionary struggle. The reference
is to the historically factual way that many aristocratic and oligarchic
families had vanished over the centuries due to class-conscious breeding
practices that gradually weakened them.
Shaw can be blamed for a rather naïve and unskillful attempt at times
to use the newest form of news media for his own purposes, but he was simply
being consistent with his lifetime habit of outraging the capitalist
establishment with hyperbolic statements delivered either with a straight
face or some jokingly pretend face, the purpose of which was to wake up the
somnolent who through inaction were allowing mankind’s selfish, destructive,
warlike impulses to rule the day. “George Bernard Shaw Defends Hitler, Mass Murder”
(important to see note above) http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=hQvsf2MUKRQ |
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“(Rare!) Various Scenes with George Bernard Shaw (1931 Fox Movietone Newsreel)” [Good example of Shaw’s playing with
the movies]. |
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“Jacob Epstein - George Bernard
Shaw” |
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“George Bernard
Shaw Quote” (No actual Shaw in this but typical of the attributing to Shaw of
apocryphal cleverness) |
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“Evil Communists Episode 2: George Bernard Shaw”
[Good for a laugh?] |
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“British Board of
Film Censors - Pygmalion (1938)” [The classic opening of the film] |
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And many more. Every one you open
will show Shaw performing for the camera. |
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