A few days ago I discovered that the terrorist who was responsible for the 2011 Norway attacks had written a manifesto in which he quotes Shaw twice. The first quotation is one of the aphorisms in "Maxims for Revolutionists," one of the addenda to Man and Superman, and it reads:
"Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it."
The other
quotation is a little bit more complex. Not only because the whole sentence has
the usual convolute syntax that so many of us have grown to enjoy, but because
it is part of a longer context that needs to be discussed as well. The
quotation in question is the following:
"A
revolution always seems hopeless and impossible the day before it breaks out
and indeed never does break out until it seems hopeless and impossible."
As many of
you may remember, this fragment is from the Preface to Back to Methuselah. Specifically, it is part of the
section called "The Betrayal of Western Civilization." In this section, before
writing the sentence I have quoted above, Shaw is complaining about the abuses
on the part of allegedly democratic governments in the form of censorship and
repression (though not exclusively) because they are afraid.
"Statesmen
are afraid of the suburbs, of the newspapers, of the profiteers, of the
diplomatists, of the militarists, of the country houses, of the trade unions,
of everything ephemeral on earth except the revolutions they are provoking; and
they would be afraid of these if they were not too breaks out, and indeed never
does break out until it seems hopeless and ignorant of society and history to
appreciate the risk, and to know that a revolution always seems hopeless and
impossible the day before it impossible; for rulers who think it possible take
care to insure the risk by ruling reasonably."
In other
words, what may seem like encouragement for revolutionists is actually a plea
for reasonable government. This surprises no-one among Shavians, for we know
Shaw was not a man of action.
That is
perhaps why Lenin called him "a good man fallen among Fabians."
That is
perhaps why he decided to walk away from the Bloody Sunday riots.
That is
perhaps why he joined and promoted a political (Fabian) society that was named
after a Roman general that defeated Hannibal
with delaying tactics.
And that is
perhaps why we find interesting connections between censorship and revolution
in Shaw's writings. So, for example, we can read something to the same effect
of the above in the Statement of the evidence in chief
of George Bernard Shaw before the Joint-Committee on Stage Plays (1909).
"The
Inquisition and the Star Chamber, which were nothing but censorships, made
ruthless war on impiety and immorality. The result was once familiar to Englishmen,
though of late years it seems to have been forgotten. It cost England a
revolution to get rid of the Star Chamber. Spain did not get rid of the
Inquisition, and paid for that omission by becoming a barely third-rate power
politically, and intellectually no power at all, in the Europe she had once
dominated as the mightiest of the Christian empires."
Paradoxically
(not quite), as he points out in his famous letter to H. M. Hyndman (28
April 1900), Shaw
is a revolutionary himself, but a "moral revolutionary"
"I am
a moral revolutionary, interested, not in the class war, but in the struggle
between human vitality and the artificial system of morality, and
distinguishing, not between capitalist & proletarian, but between moralist
and natural historian."
Shavians of
the world, unite!
