Hi Keith,
I'm sure you misunderstood the thread. I went back and had a
look. It definitely says "a little" more clarification. You didn't just
reply, you swamped me with several hours reading and chasing of urls linked
to urls linked to... :) Anyway, you get the picture.
Knocked out by the revelation of your family connection to Groote Schuur.
I'd be eating my heart out if it were me. As it was I found the house and
garden highly evocative, soaked in an ambience of something not quite
definable other than the very powerful feel that real people had coped with
some very real and major issues there.
An item I didn't include in my last post was the Nat Party junket at the
house which featured the very public release of another of those glossy
spindoctoring brochures about South Africa. The Minister of Information
(yes, the very same who presided over the Information scandal) decided to
make it a big event with foreign and local press, plus as many members of
the cabinet and their wives as he could assemble.
He chose the main hall at Groote Schuur, lined it with the notables, placed
we scruffier sprigs of the Fourth Estate furthest from the bar and launched
into his spin. My attention wandered slightly. Something at the edge of my
peripheral vision was bothering me.
I focused. It was Cecil himself, in that famous Cape painting, staring down
from the wall at the far end. He was looking directly at the speaker's back
with such an expression of outrage that I snorted loudly, nudged the journo
next to me who passed on the joke. Soon half the press corp was snorting and
giggling, so much so that the Speaker stopped and stared us into silence. I
quickly shot a pic with a vague idea of working a satirical angle into the
story.
I kid you not, when the darkroom boys later send the pic down to the
newsroom there was none of the quality my imagination had imbued. Rhodes was
not even looking at the speaker and his expression was as lugubrious as
ever. So much for mindset.
Thanks for the Orwell piece, some interesting points raised though I've
always thought if he'd got himself laid more we could have been spared his
excursions into literary criticism. He made one important point about
Kipling's work: while the Rudyards have long ceased from Kipling and the
Haggards ride no more his epigrammatic phrases still sprinkle the language
while the critics have been forgotten.
Eliot worried whether Kipling was a poet or a just a versifier. A truly
Prufrockian observation. Too many coffee spoons I'd guess.
Much appreciated your backgrounder on Milner et al. I've saved it for
further rumination at leisure. And Pears Soap as an easer of the White Man's
Burden? Keri could hear me chortling from the other end of the house and
came racing in to share the joke. I told her with a straight face that we
use racist soap - and proved it by showing her the ad.
Thanks for making my day.
Bob.
PS: Your mention of South Africa's A-bomb test stirred a memory. I went back
to the bookshelf and found it, on page 61 of Dr Richard Mueller's "Nemesis,
the Death Star" (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, New York 1988). Mueller at that
time was Professor of Physics at Berkely and Faculty Senior Scientist at the
Lawrence Berkely Laboratory. The book is an account of how he came to prove
his theory of repeat extinctions of species throughout earth's geological
history and their cause, an orbiting star with a periodicity of some 65
million years. On page 61 Mueller states - in citing various jobs he had
done for the US government that year: "Frank Press asked me to be on a
special committee to investigate a report that South Africa had tested a
nuclear weapon. (We were able to show that they had not made such a test)."
(Mueller's brackets).
----- Original Message -----
From: "Keith Addison" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <Biofuel@sustainablelists.org>
Sent: Friday, April 21, 2006 2:03 AM
Subject: Re: [Biofuel] A little (more) clarification
Hi Bob
>... I once posed for a picture (fully clothed I hasten to add) in
>Rhodes bath, a massive Victorian monstrosity in his Rondebosch mansion, and
>reflected how times had changed. The house was then occupied by one John
>Vorster whom I was there to interview.
Groote Schuur was my great grandfather's house. Or rather it was the
family farm. It stretched from where Groote Schuur hospital is now at
one end to the university at the other end. That was Abraham de
Smidt. He was the Surveyor-General of the Cape, and a fine
water-colourist, still well-known at Sotheby's and well-priced too.
(My grandfather said his father was a cantankerous old swine, LOL!)
Abraham built the gardens, Rhodes probably prettied them up and
extended them, and added the monstrosity bath. Abraham sold the house
and the farm to Rhodes in the late 1890s, for which we never quite
forgave him. Rhodes later gave it to the government, and we didn't
think that was such a good idea either, we didn't like people like BJ
Vorster living there, not that it was any of our business anymore.
Abraham wouldn't have welcomed him either. You'd have been right
welcome though. :-) Not quite sure what Abraham would've thought of
Nelson Mandela living at Groote Schuur, but I thought it was great!
Fortunately I never had to see Vorster at Groote Schuur, it was at
the Pretoria residence at Bryntirion instead, along with Ian Smith. I
really enjoyed that, the company was attacked by a swarm of wild
bees, it's a wonderful thing to see prime ministers fleeing for their
lives for a change. A couple of years later I had to go to Vorster's
daughter's wedding and IIRC the reception was at Groote Schuur but I
didn't go to the reception.
Milner's kindergarten and Milner's Round Table were not the same,
though there was some overlap. The kindergarten died off, not so sure
about the Round Table. The kindergarten morphed into the "Cliveden
Set" centred at the Astors' country pile and didn't survive the
accusations of upper-class appeasement before WW2 when they tried to
influence British policy towards friendly relations with Germany.
I lived in Milner's headquarters in Johannesburg when I first worked
there, a large old pile behind the Sunnyside Park hotel named
Milnerloo. It was up for redevelopment so we had it as a communal
house shared by a bunch of young reporters for just about nothing. I
used to listen for echoes sometimes but I don't think I heard any.
Milner's kindergarten were the bright young upper-class British
technocrats Milner brought in to reconstruct the economy following
the Boer War. Later as you say South Africans fought alongside the
Brits in the trenches of WW1, but that hardly tells the story of what
happened after the Boer War. It wasn't quite that Milner and his
brats healed the Boer/Brit divide. See any signs of their modern
inheritors healing the US-Iraqi divide?
As with Iraq now, and no doubt Afghanistan too if Washington hadn't
forgotten, the kindergarten reconstructed the shattered economy very
much in Britain's interests, with British control over every aspect
of the economy, from the mines to finance and everything in between.
After all, that's why Rhodes started the war in the first place, it's
what the empire's "victory" was for. These days it's oil, that time
it was gold. Not quite that simple but it's true nonetheless. Kruger
certainly thought so.
The British ended the Boer with scorched-earth tactics. Milner and
Kitchener had the Boer farms burnt, built chains of blockhouses
criss-crossing the land, and herded the Boer women and children into
concentration camps, where up to 30,000 of them died of disease and
starvation. Meanwhile dragnets of troops went through the guerrilla
country section by section, and by 1902 the remaining Boers
surrendered, leaving the land depopulated for a couple of decades.
Meanwhile the kindergarten dispossessed the Boers of their own
economy.
The concentration-camp victory left Britain the "dirty dog" of Europe
for the way it had won the war. As a result, at the Union
negotiations that followed, to weld the two British colonies of the
Cape and Natal and the two defeated Boer republics of the Transvaal
and the Orange Free State into one country, the British team held the
low moral ground and made concession after concession to the Boers,
especially of Black rights, the Boers' old enemies: the Cape's Black
franchise, voting rights, land rights, were sacrificed. The ANC was
formed in response to these losses. So black resentment was added to
the Boers' resentment. This still echoes down through the following
decades right down to now. For more about this, and what the Boers
themselves thought about healed divides and reconstructed economies,
please see this previous message, quite an interesting story:
http://snipurl.com/pg9x
Anyway, it's pretty much what you can often expect to find when you
check under the corners of the British Empire's carpets which the sun
never set on. Iraq is another corner.
There's more to say about the kindergarten and Milner's Round Table,
but I'll do it in the next post.
I understand what you're saying about Rudyard Kipling and his context
but I think a crucial part of Kipling's context is to be found in
some of the rebuttals to The White Man's Burden published at the
time, which I linked.
America's occupation of the Philippines is another matter, as to
whether it ended up better or worse than many of the British Empire's
colonial adventures, well, which would you rather die of, lung cancer
or emphysema? You say "errors made long before by Imperial Britain",
but was it only long before? There's not much to indicate they'd seen
the error of their ways and mended them. How would the concentration
camps in Pretoria square with that idea? That happened *after*
Kipling wrote The White Man's Burden (1899), the Boer War started the
same year, and it wasn't much of a shining example to Kipling's
"lesser breeds without the law" (he meant Germans, but I suppose
Americans would qualify). Sure the Boers were also whites not blacks
or browns (or Europe wouldn't have been so outraged) but that hardly
counts. Quite patronising of Mr Kipling even in its best
interpretation, that it was only meant as a fatherly admonition to
the Americans. The British Empire was expanding at the time, not
shrinking, and empires are empires, apologists and all.
Have you read what George Orwell says about Kipling? The
anti-imperialist and the imperial defender. Interesting read. He says
Kipling was "a sort of publicity agent for Cecil Rhodes", but being
Orwell he doesn't just label him. "One reason for Kipling's power as
a good bad poet I have already suggested - his sense of
responsibility, which made it possible to have a world-view, even
though it happened to be a false one."
http://www.george-orwell.org/Rudyard_Kipling/0.html
Rudyard Kipling - Essay by George Orwell
"If any question why we died/ Tell them, because our fathers lied" -
Kipling.
The White Man's Burden did have a super-clean image at the time anyway:
http://snipurl.com/pgas
Best
Keith
>Hi Keith,
> Thanks for those urls, and the reminder about Milner, Cecil
>John and his financier mates. Point taken but off the point of which more
in
>a moment. I once posed for a picture (fully clothed I hasten to add) in
>Rhodes bath, a massive Victorian monstrosity in his Rondebosch mansion, and
>reflected how times had changed. The house was then occupied by one John
>Vorster whom I was there to interview.
>Nattering aside, I didn't come to praise Rudyard, I came to bury him within
>his context. He lived in a time of empire. Within that narrow ken he held
>fast to basic human values still extant today. Nothing much to argue with
in
>lines such as "Fill full the mouth of famine/And bid the sickness cease"
nor
>in "By open speech and simple/An hundred times made plain/ To seek
another's
>profit/And work another's gain". His poem was aimed at Americans who were
>then making their first major imperial venture. His hope was that he could
>deflect them from errors made long before by Imperial Britain. His hope was
>vain, but well expressed.
>He was a gadfly to imperialists, anti-war to the core and all too conscious
>of the transience of human achievement. His "Recessional" of 1897, written
>at the height of empire, scandalised the establishment. "The Widow's
Party",
>an anti-war poem about the Widow of Windsor (Queen Victoria), ensured that
>he would never be offered the post of Poet Laureate.
>(Forgive my childish enthusiasms, I've been a Kipling freak since I first
>read "If" at school and then went on to research his work at varsity. ).
>As for Milner and his kindergarten of little bureaucrats, again context
>please. He was sent out to do a job. South Africa, after three years of a
>ruinous war was a disaster area, and not just for the Boers. It was the
>Brits greatest public relations disaster in the history of their empire,
one
>from which they never recovered and which eventually destroyed the Tories.
>Milner was told to fix it. He did what any man of vision would do, he
looked
>around for men of substance, the movers and shakers, the deal makers and
the
>button pressers, and brought them on board. His success in healing the
>Boer/Brit divide and getting the shattered economy up and running only
>became apparent a decade or so later in World War One when Boer and Brit
>fought side by side.
> After the interview with Vorster, he told me his grandfather had ridden
>in the commando that bottled up Rhodes for some months in Kimberley during
>the Boer War. We were sitting on that magnificent verandah at Groote
Schuur,
>looking out across the incredible gardens that Rhodes had created. I asked
>if he felt any sense of triumph or achievement. He laughed and said:
>"Interview over, but off the record, it doesn't do to boast. Certainly not
>in Africa. Who knows who will be sitting here in 20 years time."
>It was a prescient remark. Barely 20 years later I saw a news picture of
>Nelson Mandela sitting on that verandah. And, I can't quite swear to this,
>it looked like the same damn chair.
>Regards,
>Bob.
> ----- Original Message -----
>From: "Keith Addison" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>To: <Biofuel@sustainablelists.org>
>Sent: Thursday, April 20, 2006 12:11 AM
>Subject: Re: [Biofuel] A little (more) clarification
>
>
>Hi Bob
>
> >Hi y'all,
> > I'd say Rudyard was laughing (he had a great capacity for
> >humour) at the misnomer we have made of his "White Man's Burden".
> >Judging out of context is like shooting fish in a barrel. Kipling lived
and
> >wrote in a time of Empire, and what he was trying to do was set a few
>ground
> >rules within the context of Empire. For their time, and within the limits
>of
> >the age, the rules had merit. His White Man's Burden was written in 1899
in
> >response to the American invasion of the Philippines. His hope was that
> >Americans would be humble in their might and sparing of their use of
power.
> >Written more than a century ago, it is eerily prescient of the present
> >debacle in Iraq.
>
>Did you know that Kipling was a founder member of Milner's Round
>Table? The back-room of all back-rooms, darling of the conspiracy
>theorists, whatever would they have to talk about over tea otherwise.
>It was founded by Rhodes and Milner, along with Kipling, Maurice
>Hankey, Arthur Balfour, Lord Rothschild et al, American members
>Morgan, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Warburg...
>
>There were several responses to Kipling's "White Man's Burden". Here's one:
>http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1903blackburden.html
>Edward Morel: Black Man's Burden 1903
>
>Another:
>http://www.swans.com/library/art8/xxx074.html
>The Brown Man's Burden, by Henry Labouchère - 1899
>
>Another:
>http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5476/
>"The Black Man's Burden": A Response to Kipling
>
>Best
>
>Keith
>
>
> >The actual words are:
> >
> >Take up the White Man's Burden -
> >Send forth the best ye breed -
> >Go bind your sons to exile
> >To serve your captive's 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 made 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,
> >And the hate of those ye guard -
> >The cry of hosts ye humour
> >(Ah slowly) towards 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 your 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 judgement of your peers!
> >
> >Regards,
> >Bob.
> >
> >----- Original Message -----
> >From: "Mike Weaver" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> >To: <Biofuel@sustainablelists.org>
> >Sent: Wednesday, April 19, 2006 2:13 AM
> >Subject: Re: [Biofuel] A little clarification
> >
> >
> > > Rudtard Kipling is rolling is his grave but William Easterly probably
> > > approves of pretty much everything you've said.
> > >
> > > Michael Redler wrote:
> > >
> > > > I just wanted to chime in here.
> > > >
> > > > Keith wrote:
> > > >
> > > > "It reached a stage here where the list would not have
> > > > survived unless we'd formulated the rules, which were already there,
> > > > we didn't just make them up."
> > > >
> > > > It's also too common to see a reactionary restriction of expression,
> > > > screening all posts before distribution (for example).
> > > >
> > > > This forum proves that a loose framework is very effective
> > > > at maintaining individual freedoms while allowing it's membership to
> > > > participate in maintaining continuity.
> > > >
> > > > Kim: I read some of your posts and couldn't help notice the
> > > > similarities between your views and the ideology driving the White
> > > > Man's Burden. Maybe it's time to rethink the ideals to which we, in
> > > > the US, have been indoctrinated. Maybe it's a good time to question
> > > > the perceived credibility and legacy left behind by people like
> > > > McCarthy and accept the fact that it's not acceptable to steer the
> > > > culture, economy and government of another country simply because
you
> > > > feel you're "better".
> > > >
> > > > You wrote: "Our right to determine the direction of our life today
is
> > > > unparalleled in human history."
> > > >
> > > > So, Babylon, Ancient Greece, etc. don't count. The Magna Carta was
> > > > "just a piece of paper" (if I can borrow an expression from our
> > > > president).
> > > >
> > > > There have been and are, better examples of democracy in human
history
> > > > than the republic we Americans pretend to push on others in the
> > > > process of building an empire.
> > > >
> > > > Do some research on our Constitution and it's origins. It will lead
> > > > you in a few directions - one of which is toward the Iroquois
nation.
> > > > Ask an Iroquois about their "right to determine their life" - if you
> > > > can find one. You talk about the reassignment of land for the
greater
> > > > good but conveniently under emphasize the eradication of those
people
> > > > in the process of fulfilling that illusion.
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > Mike
>
><snip>
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