Re Rudyard KIPLING. The dismissing as racist and colonialist

[UTUSN]

Apropos of my recent facile badmouthing ( http://www.democraticunderground.com/10027791814 ), especially since I bandy this quote: (Re Pius XII, FDR on the Holocaust) : [FONT style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: yellow"]“Fluctuations of historic judgment are the lot of great men[/FONT], and Roosevelt will not escape it … But if history has its claim, so has the present. For it has been wisely said that [FONT style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: yellow"]if the judgment of the time must be corrected by that of posterity[/FONT], it is no less true that [FONT style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: yellow"]the judgment of posterity must be corrected by that of the time[/FONT].” – Felix FRANKFURTER

JACKSON and Woodrow WILSON fit in here. But is there a line to draw - what about Confederates, Nazis?

********QUOTE*******

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/05/01/it-s-high-time-we-let-rudyard-kipling-out-of-the-penalty-box.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+thedailybeast%2Farticles+%28The+Daily+Beast+-+Latest+Articles%29
Time’s Up 04.30.16 11:15 PM ET
[font size=5]It’s High Time We Let Rudyard Kipling Out of the Penalty Box[/font]
The ‘The Jungle Book’ author also wrote a lot of jingoistic trash, but judging him by the standards of our time, not his, serves him poorly and obscures his true genius.

Malcolm JONES

During his lifetime, Rudyard Kipling seemed like a man who could do no wrong. Like his contemporary Mark Twain, he possessed the enviable ability to appeal to both children and adults. Critics loved him, too, and so did his fellow writers. Henry James said, “Kipling strikes me personally as the most complete man of genius (as distinct from fine intelligence) that I have ever known.” In 1907, at the age of 41, he won the Nobel Prize for literature.

Kipling, though, made one big mistake. He was an unabashed fan of colonialism, and that enthusiasm put him on the wrong side of history and tarnished his reputation beyond repair. Today he is known as the man who coined the phrase “the white man’s burden,” and that, sadly, is all most people know of him. ....

But even Orwell refused to condemn Kipling outright, first because Orwell hated the pious liberals who hated Kipling more than he hated Kipling, but second because he grudgingly admired Kipling. Indeed, he goes so far in his Kipling essay as to ardently defend Kipling against those who accused him of being a fascist. He was an imperialist who truly believed that English values would civilize the world. But that did not make him a fascist. It just meant that he was, if anything, a sort of deluded idealist—misguided and too often shortsighted (Orwell again: Kipling never understood the money end of colonialism, never saw that it was a system not merely of superciliously “civilizing” people but of ripping them off as well), but an idealist all the same. ....

None of this will matter, though, to those who never pass up an opportunity to happily dismiss Kipling as a jingoistic fool who wrote a lot of bad poetry. They’ll just keep telling us how awful he is. Perhaps they take some grim satisfaction in feeling superior to those in the past who made bad choices when it came to politics and world affairs. Perhaps they can’t see that judging people in history by modern standards is a useless pastime.

The truth is, Kipling wrote a lot of ill-conceived garbage and he wrote a lot of truly wonderful fiction as well, and it’s usually not at all hard to tell the difference. Even when it is, the effort is justified. Pondering how a writer so good could occasionally go so wrong forces us to contemplate how all of us, even the most enlightened, can be swayed and deluded by the assumptions and beliefs that hold sway in the times in which we live. But doing that requires that we understand that in Kipling’s shoes, we might have made the same mistakes. And what fun is that? Certainly not as much fun as digging him up every generation or so and beating him like a piñata.

********UNQUOTE********

[mikehiggins]

1. Reading KIM for about the zillionth time

Kipling is fine by me, by Jingo! His ideas about "white man's burden" are ridiculous by our standards but were a standard of belief during his time. What should be accepted are works like KIM and the JUNGLE BOOKS, and probably a bunch more. The dross, and the antiquated colonialist precepts, can easily be ignored.

ENDERS GAME, and the sequels, were written by a modern author who also had views easily dismissed in 2016 but that didn't make his works unworthy.

Reading Kipling does not a colonialist, racist make.

[eppur_se_muova]

2. A man is not a static object, like a photograph, but like a movie, changes over time ...

... the beliefs he holds towards the end of his life may be only poorly represented, or even opposite to, his earlier work.

In his later years Kipling, like many Britons, began to question the high cost of maintaining the Empire by armed occupation. "Arithmetic on the Frontier" portrays the whole idea as hopeless:

Arithmetic on the Frontier





A GREAT and glorious thing it is
To learn, for seven years or so,
The Lord knows what of that and this,
Ere reckoned fit to face the foe -
The flying bullet down the Pass,
That whistles clear: "All flesh is grass."

Three hundred pounds per annum spent
On making brain and body meeter
For all the murderous intent
Comprised in "villainous saltpetre".
And after?- Ask the Yusufzaies
What comes of all our 'ologies.

A scrimmage in a Border Station-
A canter down some dark defile
Two thousand pounds of education
Drops to a ten-rupee jezail.
The Crammer's boast, the Squadron's pride,
Shot like a rabbit in a ride!

No proposition Euclid wrote
No formulae the text-books know,
Will turn the bullet from your coat,
Or ward the tulwar's downward blow.
Strike hard who cares - shoot straight who can
The odds are on the cheaper man.

One sword-knot stolen from the camp
Will pay for all the school expenses
Of any Kurrum Valley scamp
Who knows no word of moods and tenses,
But, being blessed with perfect sight,
Picks off our messmates left and right.

With home-bred hordes the hillsides teem.
The troopships bring us one by one,
At vast expense of time and steam,
To slay Afridis where they run.
The "captives of our bow and spear"
Are cheap, alas! as we are dear.


http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poems_arith.htm

[linuxman]

3. I don't judge people from the past by the standards of today.

It's insanely self-righteous to take the position that you have some moral highground over someone long dead, purely due to your good fortune of having been born at a time when society shaped your sensibilities differently. Many are convinced that had they been born 1,2,300 or more years ago, they'd be the exact same moral paragon they are today. We are products of our time, our upbringing, and our experiences. God help me if my grandchildren judge my life based on a standard not even dreamt of yet.

Do kipling's beliefs stand up to today's standards? No, but then again few do. Too many people are willing to dismiss the work, the achievments, and the greatness of past figures in some quest for ideological purity. After all, how can one be a true progressive when they ever had a positive thought about Kipling? .

[Adrahil]

4. My wife is a British Victorian Lit Professor.

She is very progressive. Michel Foucault is her intellectual guide. She teaches Kipling all the time. She would agree with the article (more or less). Kipling was USUALLY an advocate for imperialism. But his views were pretty complicated and shifted through his life. And whatever his politics, he was a pretty great writer.

Mark of the Beast is a short story he wrote that is actually pretty complicated on issues of race and empire.

She is not alone. Most of her colleagues teach him too.

[UTUSN]

5. Part of the (my) problem is not doing the work of actually *reading* the author. n/t