[dirtboy]

This is the complete, non-Readers Digest version of the poem:

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.

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 (1) 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, (2)
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!

[Txsleuth]

Thank you very much--

and thank you, too, NMC EXP, for posting the article in the first place!!!

[Law is not justice but process]

I haven't read this particular bit of Kipling's verse for a wile. TR may have thought it marginal poetry, but I consider it the quintessential statement of one view of "imperialism": the view that it is the duty of the "civilized world" to bring civilization to the heathens. If the civilized world failed to do so, darker forces would move in and the heathen would suffer a fate far worse than colonization. It is a very politically incorrect view, but in my opinion it is not without merit (witness the difference between India with its British-derived democracy and the legacy of communism in China). It is not much of a leap to have the same view about bringing democracy to the Arab world.

The comparisons here have been mostly to the situation in Iraq. I see an even stronger comparison to the situation with Western aid to the tsunami victims:

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.

Pretty much sums up the Indonesian Government's reaction to U.S. aid operations and Christian aid groups. They have let religious xenophobia come before the good of their own people. "Heathen Folly" indeed.