[ 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)]

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.