[ 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

[(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.