Thoughts of Rudyard Kipling

Crossposted at Dailykos.com

This diary is the result of a comment thread from this diary by plf515 Thursday. We got to kicking around the thought of whether Kipling was actually an imperialist. I maintain that he was not in the sense that he approved of armed takeover of foreign countries, and some historians agree with me, but not all do.

The poem in particularly was in question was White Man’s Burden. Some interesting notes about that particular work include the fact that it is about American imperialism, not British, and that Kipling had resided in the United States from 1892 to 1896. This poem was written in 1899, and is related to the American occupation of the Philippines after the Spanish-American War.

I indicated to the readers of the comment thread that I would explicate this work paragraph by paragraph, which will be done forthwith. I would like to correct a technical misstatement that I made in the comment thread. Kipling was never the British Poet Laureate. He did win the Nobel Prize in Literature, the youngest author at the time (but the Nobels were only six years old at the time of his award in 1907).

In this treatment, the original words will be bold, and my explication of them in normal type.

The White Man’s Burden

Take up the White Man’s burden–
Send forth the best ye breed–
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives’ need;
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild–
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child.

OK, now you have occupied this territory about which you know little of nothing. Send your youngest and strongest to occupy this place, thousands of miles from home, go ahead. You have to take care of these people and maintain order, now that you own them, and they do not like it very much. You understand so little about their culture that you consider them inferior, evil, and unable to govern themselves.

Take up the White Man’s burden–
In patience to abide,
To veil the threat of terror
And check the show of pride;
By open speech and simple,
An hundred times made plain
To seek another’s profit,
And work another’s gain.

OK, send the soldiers there. You broke it, so you bought it. Now you have to put down insurrection, and combat terrorism at the same time, and not let the people there get too cocky. Those folks work for America now, and the solders will see to it. The profits of their resources will go to people other than them.

Take up the White Man’s burden–
The savage wars of peace–
Fill full the mouth of Famine
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
The end for others sought,
Watch sloth and heathen Folly
Bring all your hopes to nought.

Ok, send the solders there. They have to keep the peach with violence. Now you have to do something about rebuilding infrastructure, like farms, hospitals, and the like. Just about when you think you have succeeded, the one that the corporatists want, watch the Chinese get the oil contracts.

Take up the White Man’s burden–
No tawdry rule of kings,
But toil of serf and sweeper–
The tale of common things.
The ports ye shall not enter,
The roads ye shall not tread,
Go mark them with your living,
And mark them with your dead.

Go ahead, sent the solders there. Take out the guys who were in charge. Now YOU have to make it work, from the simplest to the most complex parts of society. But it will not be easy, because the people will resist. Only by an overwhelming force can this be done, and many of your own will die over it.

Take up the White Man’s burden–
And reap his old reward:
The blame of those ye better,
The hate of those ye guard–
The cry of hosts ye humour
(Ah, slowly!) toward the light:–
“Why brought he us from bondage,
Our loved Egyptian night?”

Go ahead, occupy it. The People of the United States will blame you for it when it goes badly, and the People of this territory will resent your presence. Keep telling them that things are better, even though the standard of living will be much worse and they will long for the days before the invasion.

Take up the White Man’s burden–
Ye dare not stoop to less–
Nor call too loud on Freedom
To cloke your weariness;
By all ye cry or whisper,
By all ye leave or do,
The silent, sullen peoples
Shall weigh your gods and you.

Go ahead, go and try to keep it. It is your DUTY. But you will get tired of it before long, but not admit it. And whey you fail, the people whom you mistreated will remember with malice.

Take up the White Man’s burden–
Have done with childish days–
The lightly proferred laurel,
The easy, ungrudged praise.
Comes now, to search your manhood
Through all the thankless years
Cold, edged with dear-bought wisdom,
The judgment of your peers!

Go ahead, try it, but I know what will happen. Things will be great, on paper, you will be treated as liberators. The people will throw flowers at you. So you think, with a childish, limited mind. Finally, reality will set in: you are wrong to do this, and after years of dissatisfaction, the American people will remember you, and judge you as the worst leader in history.

Wow. The more I looked at this poem, the more I thought of Iraq. Kipling was prescient. Written 104 years before the Iraqi invasion, it is almost a template of what was to come, even though it was about the Philippine occupation. What I take from this is that Kipling understood very well what occupation was all about, and the White Man, believing superiority, is actually the fool. I do not see a shred of racism in this work, but am certainly willing to listen to other opinions.

Warmest regards,

Doc

Tags: Dailykos.com, Iraq, Kipling, Learning, Literature, Teaching, White Man's Burden