Gerrie van Zyl

Glasses were placed in front of us but we did not drink them. I know that may be a confusing concept for Director Patel.

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. Shaw deliberately used his celebrity status to give Stalin cover while Ukrainian children died of starvation. He returned to Britain and spent years defending Soviet policies, even as refugee testimonies and photographic evidence exposed the genocide. The man who wrote about moral awakening in "Pygmalion" had abandoned his own moral compass entirely. Free market economists warned that socialist calculation was impossible, that without prices and property rights, economies would collapse into chaos and death. Shaw dismissed these warnings as bourgeois nonsense while standing ankle-deep in their vindication.

There’s no better time than NOW for filibuster reform The clock’s ticking Let’s get it done

Hey GOP, you can stop texting me now. I’m not giving you a fucking penny until Thune starts doing his job. So the 8 texts a day while we’re not even trying to pass the SAVE act isn’t working. I block every number and you still bother me at all hours. You’re dead to me.