The Conservative Cave

Current Events => Breaking News => Topic started by: SVPete on August 21, 2026, 08:00:50 AM

Title: Worth Knowing, Probably Not Quite Threadworthy 8/21
Post by: SVPete on August 21, 2026, 08:00:50 AM

QotD: George Bernard Shaw’s role as Stalin’s useful idiot

https://quotulatiousness.ca/blog/qotd-george-bernard-shaws-role-as-stalins-useful-idiot/ (https://quotulatiousness.ca/blog/qotd-george-bernard-shaws-role-as-stalins-useful-idiot/)

Quote

George Bernard Shaw stood in Stalin’s USSR in 1931, watching millions starve to death, and declared there was no famine at all. The Nobel Prize-winning playwright didn’t just stay silent about the horror unfolding around him. He actively promoted the lie that would help Stalin cover up one of history’s greatest atrocities.

Shaw toured Ukraine during the height of the Holodomor, when Soviet grain requisitions had stripped peasants of every scrap of food. Conservative estimates put the death toll at 3.5 million Ukrainians. Shaw saw the empty villages, the skeletal survivors, the mass graves. Then he signed a public letter praising Stalin’s “remarkable progress” and told Western journalists that reports of famine were capitalist propaganda.

Why would an intelligent man become Stalin’s useful idiot? Shaw believed in central planning with religious fervor. He thought brilliant intellectuals like himself could design society better than millions of individuals making their own choices. When confronted with central planning’s inevitable result (mass death), he chose to lie rather than admit his ideology killed people. Shaw preferred beautiful theory to ugly facts.

The NYT's Walter Duranty was not Stalin's only ghoulish liar-shill.