Preface; Extermination
Ignoring the satirical elements of Shaw's rhetoric, and that he is presenting many arguments of sometimes questionable sincerity for the "humane" execution of criminals, the last sentence here has sometimes been misquoted as if it as part of an argument for exterminations for the sake of eugenics, by preceding it with a selected portion of a statement later in the essay: "If we desire a certain type of civilization, we must exterminate the sort of people who do not fit into it … Extermination must be put on a scientific basis if it is ever to be carried out humanely and apologetically as well as thoroughly".
1930s, On the Rocks (1933)
Context: In this play a reference is made by a Chief of Police to the political necessity for killing people: a necessity so distressing to the statesmen and so terrifying to the common citizen that nobody except myself (as far as I know) has ventured to examine it directly on its own merits, although every Government is obliged to practise it on a scale varying from the execution of a single murderer to the slaughter of millions of quite innocent persons. Whilst assenting to these proceedings, and even acclaiming and celebrating them, we dare not tell ourselves what we are doing or why we are doing it; and so we call it justice or capital punishment or our duty to king and country or any other convenient verbal whitewash for what we instinctively recoil from as from a dirty job. These childish evasions are revolting. We must strip off the whitewash and find out what is really beneath it. Extermination must be put on a scientific basis if it is ever to be carried out humanely and apologetically as well as thoroughly.
