America: a Beacon, not a Policeman

NEW STATESMAN (UK)--Why Left Supports Bombings--Returning to Imperialism--Kipling

Americans Against World Empire  Homepage

The New Statesman Essay  (7/11/99)

Geoffrey Wheatcroft explains why the left wants the "white
man's burden again"

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.