The shameful roots of the Shaw Festival

The Shaw Festival is a major Canadian theatre festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario founded in 1962 as a salute to Irish Playwright George Bernard Shaw.  The Globe and Mail noticed how this year among others the lack of diversity among actors, which mirrored Shaw’s own beliefs:

Shaw was a Stalinist and helped whitewash the Ukrainian Holodomor

From his Wikipedia page:

After visiting the USSR in the 1930s where he met Stalin, Shaw became an ardent supporter of the Stalinist USSR. The preface to his play On the Rocks (1933) is primarily an effort to justify the pogroms conducted by the OGPU. In an open letter to the Manchester Guardian, he dismisses stories of a Soviet famine as slanderous and calls reports of its exploited workers falsehoods.[57] Asked why he did not stay permanently in the Soviet ‘earthly paradise’, Shaw jokingly explained that England was a hell and he was a small devil. He wrote a defense of Stalin’s espousal of Lysenkoism in a letter to Labour Monthly.

You can download the play here, it should be in the public domain in Canada.

Edit:  I found a lot more information online.  Very scary to know we have a festival for a man who believed Auschwitz was caused by overcrowding.

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