Rudyard
Kipling was Wrong
Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 2/2/20
Oh, East is East and West is West and never
the twain shall meet.
Kipling wrote these words in 1889 in his poem,
“The Ballad of East and West.” Born in
India to distinguished British academics, Kipling was educated in England but
returned to India to become a journalist.
Though a lover of Britain and a defender of the West, he considered
himself an “Anglo-Indian.”
Another
Kipling poem, “The White Man’s Burden,” troubled many readers. Was the poem a condescending justification of
imperialistic European racism or a sincere call to Westerners to uplift the
poverty-stricken, freedom-denied peoples of India and the entire East?
A
casual reading of Kipling’s classic children’s stories and incisive poems will
show that Kipling was no racist. He
celebrated the lands of which he wrote; their people, that is, not their
politics. Winner of the 1907 Nobel Prize
for Literature, Kipling believed that the West held values that the East
needed. At the end of his life, however,
Kipling was convinced that because of poverty and political tyranny, all
efforts to bring the East and West together would come to naught.
But
that was then (Kipling died in 1936); this is now. Today the East is coming to the West, the
opposite of what Kipling hoped for. This
doesn’t mean “the twain” have met or made peace. It means the West is allowing the quiet
invasion of Eastern values and systems, particularly centralized government.
Today
one of the leading candidates for the Presidency is an avowed “democratic”
socialist. Sen. Bernie Sanders frequently attempts to explain what a
“democratic” socialist is. He need not. Socialism, whatever adjective you attach to
it, is the enemy – yea, the end – of individual liberty. It extols the nebulous “village” to the detriment
of every non-nebulous, breathing individual villager. It’s an –ism that has oozed from afar into
America for decades and is now heralded by at least two serious presidential
candidates. Illegal immigration has
fueled this –ism.
Along with competitor
Elizabeth Warren, Sanders would bring to America the central planning of the
East such as that of China and Saudi Arabia.
Central planning for such things as free higher education, Medicare for
all, the death of private insurance, gun confiscation, etc., requires central
government power. These two Robin Hood
candidates are enjoying strong support from college students and other young
adults, indicating that the ways of the East have already established a
considerable foothold.
No, no. Sanders and Warren favor Swedish socialism,
their supporters claim. Sweden is
approximately the size of California.
Practically any system can function in a small nation. For a continental nation like America,
China-like controls are necessary for the socialistic measures now proposed by
the nation’s left.
What
precisely is the difference between the East and the West? The Greeks were the first Westerners. Their fledgling democracy and love for beauty,
philosophy, and debate were handed off to Rome, then to early modern Europe, then
to early America, with liberty increasing every mile of the way. Contrast this
path to that of Eastern nations where exultant freedom simply never took root. While Herodotus, Cicero, Blackstone, and
Jefferson preached freedom and its attendant progress, nations great and small
east of the Mediterranean continued to dwell in tyrannical darkness. With few exceptions such as India, the East
has never championed democracy as has the Western world. This is particularly true of the Middle
Eastern Islamic-dominated nations.
In
Europe, Western values are dying.
According to Jonathan Steele in “The New Migration,” Europe’s aging
population is a present reality. This
population gap is being filled, says Roger Cohen of the New York Times, and is
best illustrated by Germany where 7 million of its 80 million people are Eastern-born
and unschooled in free markets and representative government.
As
this column has asked before, if multiculturalism works, why since 1990 have
the USSR, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia splintered into 21 nations? Why the ongoing secessionist movements in
Spain, Italy, and alas, the U.K? Why the
strife-ridden situation in London’s Muslim-dominated borough of Tower Hamlets
where I visited recently and learned that Muslims and non-Muslims are so often
in conflict?
The introduction above
is incomplete. Kipling’s next line is “Till Earth and Sky stand presently at
God’s Great Judgment Seat.” But that’s
why he’s wrong. We are ahead of
Kipling’s schedule. If easternized
Europe is a dead man walking, how long will it take for America to see that
invasions must be resisted, that commonality of some kind is every
civilization’s glue, and that every American should honor the Western values
that have kept us free and fed?
Socialism is not one of
those values.
Roger Hines
1/29/20
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