Thursday, February 5, 2009
WHITE MAN'S BURDENTake 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.
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 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 mark 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 hosts ye humour
(Ah, slowly!) toward the light:--
"Why brought he 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 cloke 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 the White Man's burden--
Have done with childish days--
The lightly proferred 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!
Source: Rudyard Kipling, The White Man's Burden (1899), Washington State University, retrieved on 12 September 2008
DEFINITIONS
The supposed or presumed responsibility of white people to govern and impart their culture to non-white people, often advanced as a justification for European colonialism.
FINDINGSAn analysis of the poem concluded that Kipling presents a Eurocentric view of the world, in which non-European cultures are seen as childlike and immature. This view thus implies that white people have the responsibility to rule over, and develop the cultures of people from backgrounds different from them until they are recognised by Europeans by fully adopting Western ways. The term "the white man's burden" has been seen to be racist, or a metaphor for a deferential view of Western national culture and economic traditions, also known as "cultural imperialism". It is also seen to be philanthropic, that the rich have a principled obligation to aid "the poor" "better" themselves regardless of their will to or otherwise.
Under a historical perspective, the poem makes clear the rampant approach that allowed colonialism to progress. The poem may have been originally projected as a form of send-up, but it proved to be a "beneficent role" which the initiation of Western ideas could help in lifting non-Westerners out of “poverty and ignorance”. The whole poem suggested that it is not just the native people who are enslaved, but also the "functionaries of empire", who are destined to be in colonial service and may die helping other races "less fortunate" than themselves.
The West (being USA, Europe, the UN) have hypocritically and nonsensically proved themselves ineffective in almost every country they have ever intervened in based on Christianity, capitalism, democracy, and offloading grain, drugs, and weaponry. Those countries that stood up for their own development—China, India, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, Turkey, Chile etc— were much better off in the past few decades compared to countries who blindly followed the “exceptionally brilliant” model of radical free market economics the West planned on their behalf or simply plunged into civil war, violence, theft on an immense scale, and poverty due to failed invasions, unwise programs to adjust the structure of the country, and policies that were imposed anyhow only because the West thought it would help, not necessarily doing so in the end.
Love, JOVYNE xD
