Rogues Gallery III

[Rootsie]

No Rogues Gallery of 19th Century racism would be complete without Rudyard Kipling’s  famous (or infamous) poem "The White Man’s Burden". Though best known today as the author of The Jungle Book and Just-So-Stories for children, Kipling was the great 19th century apologist for imperialism. In the poem one can see distilled  scientific racial theories: the recapitulationist ‘half devil and half child’, and the terrible ‘burden’ of ministering unto the dark doomed races of humanity.

The White Man's Burden
by Rudyard Kipling

First published in McClure's Magazine (Feb. 1899).

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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 hopes to nought.

Take up the White Man's burden--
No iron 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
The hate of those ye guard--
The cry of those ye humor
(Ah, slowly!) toward 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 will or whisper,
By all ye leave or do,
The silent sullen peoples
Shall weigh your God and you.

Take up the 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 judgment of your peers.

[sageautumnspazdogz]

That is an amazing poem which unfortunately is too true. It's never made sense to me how someone can do that, take over an entire civilization and destroy it trying to get rid of their already present and beutiful culture. Right now, we're studying Vietnam and talking about the "White Man's Burden". It's atricious and horrific, and still present today in the ways that the Bush Administration is trying to make a puppet government in Iraq. We are once again repeating the past.

[Rootsie]

Yes sage.
And notice how they try to put a virtous face on evil, insisting what they are doing is the moral thing, the 'Christian thing' to do.