G.b. Shaw Impales ‘nordic Nonsense’ in Note to Nazi

To Dr. Frank Haiser, Austrian Nazi resident in Schiebbs, Niederosterrich, George Bernard Show has written a letter on the subject of “the Nietzschean nonsense” about a Nordic race, which the Jewish Daily Bulletin reprints from Time and Tide, an English magazine, Dr. Haiser, to whom Time and Tide attributes a great share in the growth of the Nazi movement in Austria, had written to shaw, now vacationing at Stresa, from which place the English dramatist replied as follows:

Dear Dr. Haiser:

Do not waste your time on this pseudo-Nietzschean nonsense about a Nordic race. There is no such thing as the Nordic race; and very soon there will be no such thing as a race in the world except the race of the greyhound after the electric hare. Leave all that to the romantic and ignorant Americans, who happen to be, like myself, blonde and six feet high.

What there is, and probably always will be during one epoch, is the solid fact that out of every hundred persons only five at most will be capable of making decisions and giving directions. Whether the five are called Nordics, or blonde beasts, or simply bosses, does not matter a scrap. In Ireland my family called themselves “the Shaws” (as who would say “the Hohenzollerns”), but they contained the full normal percentage of human rank-and-file. It is pleasant for Hans and Fritz to imagine themselves Allerhoechsts, because they have flaxen hair and blue eyes; but most of them are being ordered about by hook-nosed Hittites and blonde Philistines whose ancestors came from the south, not of the Baltic, but of the Dead Sea.

I have never taught “the biological gospel of a new race-aristocracy.” My contempt for that disguise of simple snobbery is unbounded. I have declared steadily that what we need is a scientific test of human capacity (not of ability to pass examinations) and the classification of citizens into grades, the choice of rulers by the popular vote, or of Cabinets by Parliament, being limited to members of the appropriate grades.

Until such a test is discovered we must insist on absolute equality of income. Without this iron basis real eminence has no chance of asserting or developing itself except by the rarest of strokes of luck. This is the secret of the importance and final indispensability of Socialism.

There is no such thing as a Superman. There are super mathematicians like Einstein and super play-wrights like myself; but they are bungling amateurs in a dozen other departments of human activity. In the theatre I am my chauffeur’s master; but in the garage he is mine. You write English better than 999 out of every 1,000 educated Englishmen; but in China, probably, you would be the slave of an interpreter.

We shall never learn anything about the arts of government from writers like Marx and Nietzsche, who never had to govern anyone or administer a vote or a revenue. Lenin had very soon to tell his fellow-apostles of Marxism that there was not a clerk with ten years office experience who did not know more than they about practical business. It was my six years experience as a municipal counsellor that enabled me to understand history. I know barely enough German to understand the titles of your books, and nothing on earth would induce me to read one of them, though your letter is amusing enough to extract this answer from me on a very wet day in Stresa. Thank you for it.

Faithfully,

G. Bernard Shaw.