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Bernard Shaw enters and seats himself at desk. Interviewer: We are ready for you to talk to America. We hope you will be kind to them tonight. GBS: That is not what they expect from me. You see I love them, but if I was kind to them they would take no more notice of me than ... that! (snaps fingers). Interviewer: This is here for you to talk (Adjusts microphone). GBS: What's the signal? Interviewer: There will be a green light to signal the start. GBS: Well I shan't look very nice in a green light. They won't see me. Now, well all right blaze away, I'm quite ready ... "Hello America, all my friends in America, hello all you dear boobs who have been saying for a month past that I have gone dotty about Russia. Well if the latest new from your side is true, you can hardly be saying that now. Russia has the laugh on us, she has us fooled, beaten, shamed, shown up, outpointed and all but knocked out. We have lectured her from the heights of our moral superiority, and now we are calling on the mountains to hide our blushes, in her presence. We have rebuked her ungodliness and now the sun shines on Russia as on a country with which God is wellpleased. We don't know where to turn for comfort or approval, we have prided outselves on our mastery and big business and it's solid foundations in the knowledge of human nature, and now we are bankrupt. Your President who became famous by feeding the starving millions of war devastated Europecannot feed his own people in time of peace. The despairing cries of our financiers here have resounded through the world and have created a run on the Band of England and broken it. Our budget shows a deficit of 170 million. Yours shgow a deficit of 900 million, our businessmen cannot find employment for 3 million of our workers, and yours have had to turn twice as many into the streets. Our statesmen on both sides can do nothing but break the heads of starving men or buy them off with dole and appeals to charity. Our agriculture is ruined, and our industry collapsing under the weight of their own productiveness because we have not brains enough to profit by them, and in the face of all this business incompetence, political helplessness and financial insolvency Russia flaunts a budget surplus of 150 million, her people employed to the last man and woman, her scientific agriculture doubling and tebling her harvest, her multiplying factories, her efficient rullers, her atmosphere of such hope and security as has never been seen in a civilised country on earth. Naturally the contempt of the Russians for us is enormous, you fools they are saying to us, why can you not do as we are doing? You cannot employ or feed your people. Well, send them to us and if they are worth their salt we will employ and feed them. You cannot even make your silly laws obeyed ot keep your armed gangsters and racketeers out of your streets at noon-day. Well send them to us and you will have no more trouble with them. People who will not make good as citizens in russia do not trouble anyone long. And what can we say in reply?But who would have throught it, pretty feeble that aye? Too0 true to be pleasant isn't it? Well let me give you a word or two of consolation. After all the wonderful things the Russians are doing consists mostly in carrying out suggestions made by Americans - many of whom have been sent to jail for their pains. I am not an American but I am the next worst thing - an Irishman. Fifty years ago I was got hold of by an American named Henry George who opened my eyes so surprisingly that I felt I must follow his notions up, so I tried a German Jew named Karl Marx who opened my eyes still wider, leaving it quite plain to me that our Capitalist system - though we could frooze along with it for a time at a cost of frightful unhappiness and degrading poverty - for nine tenths of the population was bound to end in the bankruptcy of civilisation. Fourteen years later a Russian named Ulianov better known to you as Lenin, followed my example and read Marx. In 1914 our Imperialists involved us in a War. You tried to keep out of that War, but were forced in. Thanks to you that War instead of doing what the Imperialists meant to do abolished three empires, changed Europe from a Royal continent to a Republic one and transformed the only European power which was bigger than the USA population, extent of territory and natural resources into a federation of Communist Republic. That was not quite what you intended, was it? Your boys were not sent to the slaughter cheering for Karl Marx and echoing his slogans 'proletarians of all lands unite' - however, you've done it. This wonderful new power in the world, this Union of Socialist Republic or short, for the USSR is what you have got for your liberty loan and the blood of your young men, it was not what you intended to get, but it seems that it was what God intended you to get, anyhow, you did it. I know it is hard because you and poor old England ar ein the bankruptcy court, where France has already had to compound with her creditors 10 cents to the dollar, whilst the USSR - your baby - is on the up grade. That looks a little, doesn't it, as if the Russian were manging their affairs better than we are. However, you do not bear all the responsibilty of establishing Communism in Russia, you share it with me, me, now speaking to you, Bernard Shaw. In 1914 some of you may remember I declared that if the soldiers had any common sense they would come home and attend to their business instead of senselessly slaughtering one another because their \officers ordered them to. Some of you are very angry with me for taking a common sense view of War which is an affair of glory and patriotism. It has nothing to do with common sense, well the British soldier has no common sense and went on slaughtering. The French had no common sense and kept blazing away. The German and Austrian soldiers were just as foolish .. sound goes here ... an astonishing thing happended, the Russian soldiers took my advice. They said 'we have had enough of this' and came straight home. They formed bodies of workmen and soldiers called 'Soviets', and they raised the cry of all power to the 'Soviets'. The Government of the Tsar which was as rotten as it was abominably tyranical collapsed like a house of cards. But the Soviets could do nothing without leaders and the political constitution. That was the opportunity for Lenin and his friends who had educated themselves politically by reading Marx, they had the courage to jump at it. They took command of the Soviets and established the USSR exactly as Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, Franklin and Tom Payne established the United States of America 141 years before. If you have any about about the similarity of the two cases let me suggest an amusing Sunday game for which one of your Sunday papers might conduct the material. Make a typical collection of the articles in the Royalist newspapers and political pamphlets, American as well as British, issued during the last quarter of the 18th century, strike out the dates, the names of the countries and then names of it's leaders. The game is for your friends to fill up the blanks. What country is this you will ask, which has broekn every social bond and given itself over to do the bidding of a gang of athiests, drunkards, libertines, thieves and assassins. Yours friends will guess wrong. Where the right answer is America, he will guess Russia, when the right names is Washington they will cry Trotsky. They will declare that the puzzles are too easy to be worth solving. That Jefferson is Lenin, that Franklin is Litvinoff, that Paine is Lunachartsky, that Hamilton is Stalin. When you tell them the truth they will probably never speak to you again, but you will have given tham a valuable moral lesson which ought to be the object of all Sunday games. Today there is a statue of Washington in London, and tomorrow there will no doubt be a statue of Lenin in new York with the inscription 'Blessed are ye when men shall revile you, and say all amnner od evil against you'. By the way, you might finish the game by looking at the newspaper that you yourself are in the habit of reading and if as is possible, you find that it is pumping into your household day by day scurrilous venom that your grandfather used to have to swallow about the founders of the United States of America you might write the Editor a hint that you would prefer something a little more up to date, and that if he cannot give you some reasonably believeable and clean mouthed news about the most interesting political experiment in the world you will have to take in a saner paper. And now, perhaps, you would like to know what is my reaction to Russia when I visited ... Americans always want to know my reactions to the latest thin in 'scareheads'. Well my first impression was that Russia is full of Americans. My second was that every intelligent Russian had been in America and didn't like it because he had no freedom there. This, of course, was an illusion caused by the fact that all the Russians who could speak English really spoke American, but the same can be said of all European countries now. To get to and from Russia I travelled through France, Germany, Poland and Holland in each of these countries I was received with some sort of official welcome, but in every case the deputations or officials advancing to receiving me were violently shoved aside by an enthusiastic American beaming with hospitality and shouting genially 'Mr Shaw, welcome to France or Poland, or Russia ir Germany as the case may be'. Thant's what makes you so popular all over the world, you make yourself at home everywhere and you always have the first world. It is such a pleasant surprise when I think I am giving my hand coldly and formally to a native King or a President or a Secretary of State, or an Archbishop or a Chairman of a Local Academy of Literature to find that I am being embarassed by one of dear old Uncle Jonathon's nephews who have been only two hours longer in the country then myself. Mind I am not complaining, I like it, but I don't think the Kings and Presidents and Secretaries and Chairmen do like it, so I just thought I'd mention it. And now let me give you a few travelling tips in case you should join with the American rush to visit Russia and see for yourself whether it is all real. If you are a skilled workman, especially in machine industry and are of suitable age and good character, they are very particular about character in russia, you will not have too much difficulty, they will be only too glad to have you. Proletarians of all lands are welcome if they can pull their weight in the Russian boats. If you are a lady or gentleman with lots of money they will graciously allow you to spend as much of it as you like in Russia and will make you quite comfortable. Indeed if you are stingey and spend less than 10 roubles a day they will make you pay the difference before you leave, so it is no use trying to save on that minimum. They will not treat you with the smallest difference for these Russians do not stand in awe even of an American. In fact I must break it to you that their feelings towards you will be a mixture of pity for you a a refugee from the horrors of American capitalism and enourmous intellectual contempt for your political imbecility in not having established communisim in your own unhappy country. But they will be quite friendly and heplful, just as they would be tto a lost and starving monkey and if you are nice to them they will take you to their bosoms and tell you the story of their lives on the smallest provocation. They are so free from your anxieties and worries about your affairs and your children and your rents and rates, and taxes that they can afford to be kind to you and they are so proud of their communistic institution that they are only too anxious to show them to you. But you must be careful you must not count on human nature being the same in Russia as America. My friend, General Dawe?, your Ambassador here, was talking to me the other day about human nature, how you can't change it no matter how you change your institutions. Now before you go to Russia you had better study human nature scientifically. The easiest way to do that is to send to the nearest glazier for a piece of putty. Putty is exactly like human nature. You cannot change it no matter what you do. You cannot eat it or gorw apples in it, or mend clothes with it, but you can twist it and pat it and model it into any shape you like and when you have shaped it, it will set so hard that you will suppose that it would never take any other shape on earth. No the Russian putty is jsut like the American putty, except that the American putty is softer and sets harder. The Soviet government has shaped the Russian putty very carefully into a shape quite different from the Americans and the Russian putty has set hard and produced quite a different sort of animal. The noses and chins and ears and eyes are not so very different but the inside doesn't work in the same way. In particular the conscience is startlingly different so that the schievements which are an American's pride and glory seem to the Russians to be infamous crimes. For instance, the first thing that would occur to a hundred per cent American in Russia is that with it's natural wealth it must be a splendid country to make money in, even without touching the natural resources. A great deal might be done by speculating in the difference between the value of the rouble in Moscow and Berlin. Wages are low and profits high, so why let all the profit be wasted on the government when a capable man can organise business for himself and put the profits in his own pockets. What is the use of wasting good money on the public. As a deceased American Financier once said at a public enquiry 'you make money by looking after yourself, not by looking after the public'. Now if you take that line in Russia you will soon get rich but when this fact comes under the notice of the income tax authorities they will ask the Police to enquire into your methods. An agent of the GPU perhaps you would call it the OGPO, they tough you on the shoulder and conduct you to the offcies of that famous secret police.There you will be invited to explain your proceedings and your views on life in general. You will be allowed to vindicate your American business principles and your belief in individualism and self help to the full hundred per cent. You will not be reproached or bullied or argued with, nor inconvenienced in any way, only when you have made yourself quite clear you will suddenly find yourself in the next world if there be a next world. If not you will simply cease to exist and your relatives will be politely informed. THIS IS ON COMMUNISM, RUSSIA, AMERICA ETC. EXCELLENT INTERVIEW

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