George Bernard Shaw, Glenn Beck And The Ignorance Of The American Right

Interesting piece in the Canadian Globe and Mail on our very own George Bernard Shaw, playwright and raconteur par excellance, and American demagogue and right wing media personality, Glenn Beck. Poor old GBS has been a long time target of GB and as the article reports:

‘Much more bizarre, though, is a recent spate of virulent online and media attacks on Shaw’s reputation as a progressive, if eccentric, humanitarian. His critics tar him as a totalitarian supporter of Hitler and Stalin who wanted to send society’s weakest members to the gulag or to develop a “humane gas” to kill them.

The instigator of the commotion is Glenn Beck, the popular Fox News and talk-radio host, whose TV series wrapped up this week. “I don’t care that he wrote witty little plays,” Mr. Beck has railed. “The man was a monster.”’

Okey-dokey, then…

Beck, who has had his early evening soapbox show pulled from Fox News, has become the champion of American counter-history, the kind espoused by Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann (and apparently Presidential wannabe Newt Gingrich) so these attacks on Shaw are of a pattern. Though of all the left wing (or right wing) ideologues in 20th century history to zero in on Shaw must be surely be the most bizarre of targets. But this is Glenn Beck after all.