-Caveat Lector-
>From thenewstatesman
> <Picture: New Statesman Logo>
>
> 5 July 1999
>
> The NS Essay - Send forth the best ye breed
>
> Geoffrey Wheatcroft explains why the left wants the white man's
> burden again
>
> <Picture>We have won a great victory, and acquired a new
> province. Already you can hear Kosovo spoken of as a
> "protectorate", echoing the good old days when the red-painted
> corners of the globe included such imperial territories as the
> Bechuanaland Protectorate, one of the nicer euphemisms of the Age
> of Empire, along with the even better "mandate".
>
> Some Americans are now saying quite bluntly, Ferdinand Mount
> writes in the Sunday Times, "We'll have to stay in Kosovo not for
> months or years but for a generation." As Mount says, the great
> problem at the end of the century is not so much external
> aggression and international war, which the United Nations was
> designed 50 years ago to deal with, but the breakdown of law and
> order inside ostensibly sovereign countries: Bosnia, Lebanon,
> Rwanda, Sri Lanka, Grenada, Liberia, Haiti, Somalia.
>
> In Africa, the breakdown has been so grave that various
> commentators, from the English Tory Peregrine Worsthorne to the
> American liberal William Pfaff, have written about the possible
> need to recolonise the continent. Mount observes that even the
> liberal left - perhaps they especially - thinks that the west was
> culpable in not intervening in Rwanda. In a lecture in London, J
> K Galbraith has just said that the end of colonial rule has also
> meant the end of effective government. In a humane world order
> "we need a mechanism to suspend sovereignty . . . to protect
> against human suffering and disaster".
>
> Reading these writers, I heard a bell ring. Hadn't someone said
> this before? There it was on my bookshelves in the large,
> black-bound Collected Verse, published by eerie coincidence
> exactly 100 years ago: "Take Up the White Man's Burden".
> Kipling's famous poem of that name (or do I mean poem of that
> famous name? I wonder how many people who know the title have
> read it) was inspired, as its subtitle says, by "the United
> States in the Philippine Islands 1899": it is astonishingly apt
> to the US in the Balkans in 1999.
>
> The Americans had spent a hundred years or more minding their own
> business, creating their own republic and following their
> manifest destiny to expand westwards, but not sending armies
> outside their country's borders. In 1898, they had fought for the
> first time a conventional war with the decaying Spanish empire,
> and acquired the Philippines as well as Puerto Rico, to Kipling's
> delight. He sensed that his own country was at the apogee of her
> imperial greatness from which she must decline, and that the
> torch must be passed westwards. It made sense, in Kipling's own
> terms.
>
> Kipling has been wilfully misunderstood by the left. No phrase of
> his was more quoted, or more misrepresented, than "the lesser
> breeds without the Law". As George Orwell wrote in his own
> politically incorrect way, "this line is always good for a
> snigger in pansy-left circles", conjuring up the image of a pukka
> sahib kicking a coolie. But the notorious line actually refers to
> the Germans. It comes from the poem "Recessional", written in
> 1897, the year of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee, as a warning
> against imperial arrogance and hubris. Since the subject peoples
> of Africa and Asia were then incapable of those failings, "lesser
> breeds without the Law" patently doesn't describe them. Orwell
> himself misses a point, I think. The lines go:
>
> If , drunk with sight of power, we loose
> Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe,
> Such boastings as the Gentiles use,
> Or lesser breeds without the Law -
> Lord God of hosts, be with us yet,
> Lest we forget - lest we forget!
>
> Kipling is a precise as well as a mysterious writer, and "Or"
> suggests a deliberate antithesis. I suspect that the Gentiles
> were the Germans, in all their new boastful pride, and the lesser
> breeds were some more contemptible imperial power, such as the
> Italians.
>
> But Orwell was right when he defended Kipling from leftist
> detractors; more right than he may have realised. Kipling was
> obviously an imperialist, and arguably a racist, but he was not a
> reactionary. I am not even sure that he was what Orwell calls "a
> Conservative, a thing that does not exist nowadays". Kipling was
> contemptuous of the established order, even in small ways. He
> declined all honours, including the OM, and privately referred to
> King Edward VII as "a corpulent voluptuary" - not the language of
> respectful church-and-crown Toryism.
>
> Far from being a sentimental nostalgist for happier days, Kipling
> believed passionately in progress. His writings are shot through
> with rapturous celebrations of the machine age, of ships and
> railways. And he believed just as passionately in the empire as
> an agent of progress.
>
> This was an entirely natural connection. As A J P Taylor put it,
> Europeans in the late 19th century believed that they "had
> achieved the highest form of civilisation ever known" and had a
> duty to take it to benighted, uncivilised peoples. And Taylor
> added correctly that "these were radical beliefs". As the Age of
> Empire reached its high-water mark and began to ebb, the left
> took up the cause of anti-colonialism, in a way that required a
> certain rewriting of history, not least its own.
>
> In the 19th century, many people had fought against slavery and
> the exploitation of the weak. Admirable men and women gave their
> lives to the abolition campaign in the 1850s and to end Leopold's
> murderous regime in the Congo 50 years later. But you will search
> Victoria's reign in vain for anyone on the left, any more than
> the right, who thought that Africa, or even Asia, had
> civilisations that bore serious comparison with Europe's. There
> were "Negrophiles" who believed in paternalist benevolence
> towards black Africans, but there were no "Africanists" of the
> Basil Davidson type. Few were more disdainful than Marx himself
> of what he thought of as inferior peoples and cultures. He came
> close to commending Europe's expansion in general - how could the
> rest of the world come to socialism if it had not first passed
> through some form of bourgeois rule? - and he approved of the Raj
> in particular, because "the British were the first conquerors
> superior, and therefore inaccessible, to Hindu civilisation".
>
> Not only did the idea that all nations and cultures are equal
> take a long time to arrive, so did the idea that imperialism was
> a racket based on material exploitation. Materialism doesn't, in
> fact, provide a very satisfactory explanation for colonial
> expansion. Bengal nabobs or West Indian planters could make big
> money, but most of Africa was seen as a dead loss economically,
> as it was, and the motives for the scramble for Africa in the
> 1880s and 1890s were not material.
>
> Our subsequent attitudes were largely conditioned by J A Hobson's
> writings about the Boer war, which led to his famous book
> Imperialism. This example was highly misleading. South Africa
> really did have a glittering prize in the form of the Rand gold
> mines, and the Boer war (for all the high-minded imperialist
> claptrap about protecting the South African natives) really was
> fought for material reasons, to keep the Rand safe for the mining
> companies. But the drive for investment that Hobson discerned did
> not have to mean formal imperial conquest. A century ago, the
> Argentine and Chile were largely, and very profitably, owned by
> the City of London. But in South America we had the wit to make
> money without the tedious and expensive responsibility of sending
> armies and administrators.
>
> In the Balkans today, the west plainly can have no base material
> motive. Nobody has suggested that the west wants to get its hands
> on the natural resources of Kosovo: there aren't any. We
> intervened, President Clinton says, because otherwise "we
> wouldn't have been able to sleep at night". We showed, Tony Blair
> says, that the west was "prepared to stand up for the values of
> civilisation and justice". All this is supposedly quite new.
> "Increasingly," Michael Elliott writes in Newsweek, "the great
> wars of this century, in which national survival was genuinely at
> stake, look like aberrations rather than the norm."
>
> But is that true? Did Britain really fight for "national
> survival" in 1914-18 and 1939-45? We may have been broadly
> fighting on the old balance-of-power principle, to prevent one
> power dominating Europe, but our proximate reasons for entering
> the wars were altruistic and chivalrous, to protect Belgian
> neutrality and then to protect Polish sovereignty.
>
> In other words, there is nothing at all new in wars being fought,
> in the eyes of those who fought them, for the values of
> civilisation and justice. That was just what imperialists thought
> they were doing when they brought the rest of the world their
> "mission civilatrice". Call it what you like, Ferdinand Mount
> writes, " 'liberal imperialism' or 'humanitarian intervention' or
> 'strategic co-operation' - but the empire is back".
>
> So it is, and "back" is the operative word. Kipling might not
> have used those phrases, but this is precisely what he was saying
> in "The White Man's Burden". We have fought another of what he
> called "the savage wars of peace". Our duty now in Kosovo is
> clear.
>
> 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.
>
> Why, K-For could almost take that stanza as its motto. Our
> soldiers in Pristina and Prizren had better remember
>
> in patience to abide,
> To veil the threat of terror
> And check the show of pride.
>
>
> If Kipling's poem had a purpose, it was remarkably successful. He
> sent "The White Man's Burden" to Theodore Roosevelt, hero of the
> war against Spain in Cuba, destined to be president from 1901-09,
> and one of the more ludicrous recipients of the Nobel peace
> prize. Roosevelt passed it on to Henry Cabot Lodge, saying
> wrongly that it was "rather poor poetry" but rightly that it was
> "good sense from the expansionist viewpoint".
>
> And the Americans did take up the white man's burden. Woodrow
> Wilson was acting in Kipling's spirit when he finally broke with
> the American isolationist tradition and took the US into the
> Great War in 1917. Shortly before, he explained that he had
> attacked Mexico "to teach these people to elect good men".
>
> That strange mixture of expansionism and moralism continued
> through another world war and a cold war. Even the left applauded
> when the GIs were "fighting fascism" in 1941-45. Yet American
> conservatives suspected then that idealistic war-waging to make
> the world safe for democracy might one day meet its nemesis, as
> it did in Vietnam. But remember that was not a reactionary war in
> its origins, and the US had no material motive in South-east
> Asia. It was famously begun by "the brightest and the best", the
> Kennedy liberals, who would have been unable to sleep at night if
> they had not intervened on behalf of civilisation and justice.
>
> So there is a clear line running from President Roosevelt to
> President Wilson to the second President Roosevelt to President
> Kennedy, and thence to President Clinton. Kennedy's inaugural
> speech promised that America would pay any price and shoulder any
> burden for the defence of freedom; that burden again, generations
> after Kipling.
>
> What goes around comes around. We have spent most of the 20th
> century shedding the white man's burden. How strange that, a
> century after the phrase entered the language, we should be
> taking it again. And we must be prepared once more, in Kipling's
> blunt and bleak words, to
>
> Watch Sloth and heathen Folly
> Bring all your hope to nought.
>
> And we had better get used once more to
>
> The blame of those ye better,
> The hate of those ye guard.
>
> I hope we know what we are doing.
A<>E<>R
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