I’m going to disturb you, Gentle Reader. Some of you, at least. You may find what follows antiquated, a delusion of a past century. Perhaps you’ll deem it offensive. But I have something in mind that Rudyard Kipling expresses beautifully in the poem below.
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.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 mad plain.
To seek another’s profit,
And work another’s gain.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 hope to nought.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 make them with your living,
And mark them with your dead!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 ye us from bondage,
“Our loved Egyptian night?”Take up the White Man’s burden
Ye dare not stoop to less
Nor call too loud on freedom
To cloak your weariness;
By all ye cry or whisper,
By all ye leave or do,
The silent, sullen peoples
Shall weigh your Gods and you.Take up the White Man’s burden
Have done with childish days
The lightly proffered 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!
How often has that poem been cited as an expression of white supremacy? I can’t count that high. But is that what Kipling is expressing in the above verses? Is it even close?
In the years before the First World War, when it was said that “The sun never sets on the British Empire,” Great Britain ruled over colonial possessions throughout the world. Its world-girdling trade fostered wealth in every corner of the globe. Its incomparable navy protected ocean-borne travel and commerce. Its colonial administrators sought to advance the values of civilization in every land they governed. Today, a century and more since Britain’s retreat from empire, those lands that were fortunate enough to have been British colonies are markedly superior to the colonial possessions of other European nations. And most persons of the Twenty-First Century have little knowledge of how that came to be, or what it wrought, or why.
In those days, Great Britan was the world’s foremost power. Yet it exerted little actual force to become so, or to maintain its dominion. There was some – Herbert Lord Kitchener was involved in much of it — but in the main, the British colonies knew peace, order, and steadily advancing prosperity.
The British ruling class regarded raising the colonies to European standards of order, cleanliness, and prosperity as Christians’ moral obligation. To be gentle about it, those conditions did not obtain before the British arrived. What the colonial administrators found upon their arrival sickened and appalled them.
Remember this famous episode from India?
A story for which Napier is often noted involved Hindu priests complaining to him about the prohibition of Sati by British authorities. This was the custom of burning a widow alive on the funeral pyre of her husband. As first recounted by his brother William, he replied:
“Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs.”
British governors and peacekeeping forces in the colonies were unabashed about eliminating the barbarities prevalent in the lands they governed. They held it to be their obligation as Christians.
(For those who don’t keep up with the trends in India: the practice of sati has achieved a resurrection. It’s just that today, it’s called “kitchen accidents.” No foolin’.)
Only the unthinking embrace of moral and cultural relativism makes it possible to view British colonial rule as evil. In truth, much of the world owes what peace and prosperity it possesses to its years under British rule: the rule of savages, whatever their race, by white Christian men.
And today we are taught to be ashamed of it, even as the reports of cannibalism, rampant rape of children, ethnic cleansing, and brutalities inconceivable by a Western mind pour in from the length and breadth of the Third World. We are taught that “it never should have happened” – that First World colonialism was inherently and unqualifiedly evil, that to imagine that the values of Christian-Enlightenment civilization are superior to the savagery of killers, rapists, and brutes is “white supremacy.”
Choose according to your tastes. I stand with Rudyard Kipling.
2 comments
Yes, and I too stand with Kipling, as do many others some of whom have never heard of him, unfortunately,
Yep. The world was a much better place when it was ruled by the Brits.