[ SECRET POST #5585 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #5585 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.


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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 08 secrets from Secret Submission Post #799.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[fscom]

05. https://i.imgur.com/QJrnaCh.jpg

[(Anonymous)]

Early jingoistic Kipling and old jaded burned out Kipling are two very different poets.
He still wrote my favourite short poem, which is only ever more applicable.

https://allpoetry.com/A-Dead-Statesman
A Dead Statesman
I could not dig; I dared not rob:
Therefore I lied to please the mob.
Now all my lies are proved untrue
And I must face the men I slew.
What tale shall serve me here among
Mine angry and defrauded young?

[(Anonymous)]

Well, he was a shithead but he could undeniably write.

[(Anonymous)]

Why? I don't know much about him and wiki is weak on the particulars.

[(Anonymous)]

He was a supporter of the British Empire, cheerleader for it in many ways, especially in India. However, he was also against seeing Indians as racially inferior and campaigned for the Empire in the sense that he thought it was the English people's duty to uplift the "savages" and civilize them. Technically that makes him an early woke SJW, if you want a laugh at the bitter irony. He was still racist, and a cultural supremacist though.

He also vigorously campaigned and wrote propaganda for WW1 which encouraged hundreds of thousands of young men to never get any older. This is the one that broke him though, because one of those young men was his own son. His son who was technically considered medically unfit for service, but who convinced his dear old dad to use his contacts to get that assessment overturned and allow him to serve. And then he was lost in the mud at the Third Battle of Artois, his body was never found.

[(Anonymous)]

I don't think it's accurate to describe someone who thinks that it is the duty of the superior English civilization to uplift the savage Indians as a "woke SJW". I don't think that is a coherent usage of the language.

[(Anonymous)]

I think the previous poster was being sarcastic. You could call him Fair For His Day, though (per TVTropes).

[(Anonymous)]

I guess you could argue it's technically more woke to see them as "could be our equals, just need Cultural Improvement(tm)" than as "inherently inferior trash people." It's kind of depressing that that was what passed for enlightened back then tho

[(Anonymous)]

I don't think it actually was what passed for enlightened at the time, though. I think that was probably more or less the mainstream opinion, and the people who saw Indians as inherently inferior trash people were the extremist die-hards. The woke SJWs of the day would have been people (mostly radical liberals and socialists) who saw Indians as racially equal and who opposed imperialism.

[(Anonymous)]

By the end of Kipling's life, yes, it was just the extremists who saw it that way. For the bulk of Kipling's life, no, they were the mainstream and he was not. You are transposing your standards of our current days onto a very different society and time period. Don't do that, it will not aid your understanding of how progress works.

[(Anonymous)]

I agree that it is wrong to transpose the standards of the present onto the past. But I think it also happens that, at times, in seeking to avoid transposing the standards of the present onto the past, we make the opposite error - we assume that attitudes in the past were much worse than they actually were. And in doing so, we end up praising people as being "enlightened" for holding the standard beliefs of the day, and we end up ignoring the people from the time who actually were making moral critiques and pushing for radical change.

And I think that's really what's happening here. The British imperialist project always justified itself in terms of the benefits that it brought to the people at ruled - that was how the British saw their governorship of India going back at least to the start of the Raj if not further. They constantly talked in terms of uplift of the people they ruled, and the idea that the eventual end goal for India would be self-governance and home rule in some form or other was absolutely a mainstream idea during Kipling's time. I don't see anything that Kipling said that would have been advanced or controversial at the time.

On the other hand there actually were people who were criticizing the imperial system and the Indian government. Again, they were the socialists and radical liberals - the anti-imperialists, the Indian nationalists, the people who were pushing for India to have representative government in the 1890s, the people who formed the British Committee of the Indian National Congress and who elected an Indian, Dadabhai Naoroji, as an MP in 1892. There's a huge gulf between the position of those people, and the positions of Kipling, who Kipling was generally violently opposed to. This worldview where everyone in the year 1900 was such a vicious racist that Kipling was enlightened by comparison relies on completely ignoring and overwriting these people, both the Indians themselves and the British people who agreed with them and made advanced moral critiques of imperialism on lines we would find similar today. If you want to talk about a failure of understanding how progress works, I think that's what it looks like.

[(Anonymous)]

Eh. He was plenty fond of dragging the British. If he thought someone was a pinhead, he would write them as a pinhead, regardless of class, ethnicity, faith, or gender.

And if he thought someone was pretty cool, he'd write them as cool, whether they were an aged Muslim matriarch, or a doddering old museum docent, or a benevolently scheming society lady, or or or...

There's just. There's so much more to Kipling than jingoism.

[(Anonymous)]

Compared to the "use the blecks and rajas as a resource, they are no better than animals" mindset he was campaigning against at the time. Kipling's stance was that Indians and Black people were not inherently inferior to the western races, just unlucky enough not to have progressed along the path of civilization like the whites had. And that it was the positive duty of the white races to lead them along that path, by invading them and replacing their uncivilized structures with God and Empress. That was a socially progressive stance for his time period. Yes, by the standards of the time, Kipling was woke. And also horribly racist, but actively less racist than those around him as far as he saw it.

Time makes a mockery of all social progressive stances though. Just imagine how -ist we'll all seem in only twenty years time.

[(Anonymous)]

I don't think that it was a particularly socially progressive stance by the standards of his own time period, though. I'll grant that he was probably not the most racist person of his time period, but I don't think his views were really out of the mainstream in any way, and at the end of the day, he remained a fervent supporter of Empire. He supported the Empire in India, in Africa, in Ireland - and on all of those issues, there were absolutely contemporaries of his who did not support the Empire where he did. There were absolutely people who were criticizing and pushing back on all those views. And Kipling was an opponent of them. If you want to call someone a woke SJW, it should be those people - the Wilfrid Lawsons, the Keir Hardies, the Charles Bradlaughs - not Kipling.

Now, those people weren't actually necessarily "woke" by modern standards - for example Henry Labouchere was a prominent radical and anti-imperialist of the time; he was also a fervent anti-feminist, anti-semite, and homophobe. The past is still a foreign country. But I don't think actually looking at the details of what Kipling's contemporaries thought and believed actually leads to the conclusions that you think it does.

[(Anonymous)]

The "who shall return to us the children" poem is some heavy shit I tell you what

[(Anonymous)]

He was a major poetic bulwark, propagandist and full-throated supporter of British imperial domination at the peak of the empire, with everything that entails. He was a deeply conservative, imperialist and unionist figure even by the standards of his own time. That's more or less what I have in mind.

Sort of an aside, but I think in general Wikipedia has a strong tendency to whitewash conservative British figures, especially ones from the era before WW2, sometimes to the point of being effectively dishonest. It's a pattern that I've seen repeated many, many, many times. The faults of people will be minimized; views which they had will be phrased euphemistically; endless excuses will be offered for them; people will go out of their way to find as many positive citations and references to them as possible; sometimes things they did will be simply ignored and not mentioned. It's obviously not a conspiracy or anything - I think it's partly how British political history has been written in recent decades, and partly the demographics and point of view of the people who edit these pages - but as a general rule pages like this are in effect written from a partisan Tory point of view.

[(Anonymous)]

Not really. Wiki sanitises everything, from historical figures of all nations to modern day celebs of all races.

[tabaqui]

I like his poetry, but I like his writing better. Captains Courageous and The Jungle Books are two of my very favorite of his stories and in my top 10 most favorite of all time.