The White Man's Burden

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Satirical illustration by Canadian cartoonist William H. Walker, Life magazine , March 16, 1899

The White Man's Burden (Eng .: " The White Man's Burden ") is a poem by Rudyard Kipling . He wrote it under the impression of the American conquest of the Philippines and other former Spanish colonies. The poem is considered one of the essential testimonies of imperialism ; his title became proverbial.

The poem first appeared in McClure’s magazine in 1899 and was subtitled The United States and the Philippine Islands when it was first published . Kipling originally intended it for his contribution to Queen Victoria's 60th anniversary to the throne . He used the poem Recessional , which was more pessimistic and cautionary than The White Man’s Burden , drawing attention to the complacency and arrogance of the British Empire .

content

The opening verse of the seven-stanza poem asks the reader to take on the “burden of the white man”. It was created against the backdrop of the Spanish-American War . The USA conquered Cuba , Puerto Rico , Guam and the Philippines , replacing the previous colonial power Spain. During his stay in the USA, Kipling became personally acquainted with the US President Theodore Roosevelt . Kipling's message is for Americans who are hesitant about imperial expansion.

At the beginning Kipling calls the indigenous population of the colonies “freshly caught half-savage and half-child” and explicitly calls on those who are supposed to take on the “burden of the white man” to banish their (own) sons and to meet the needs of their prisoners in heavy armor to let. In addition, there are allusions to the biblical exodus from Egypt , in which the Israelites, unlike their descendants, are not allowed to see the promised land and those freed from captivity longed to return to the Egyptian darkness. "The ports that you must not drive the streets, you will not enter it, she makes with your living and mark them with your dead!" These lines remind just the immediate past catastrophe of the first Bauversuchs of the Panama Canal with over 20,000 (mainly of European descent) dead.

reception

The work was judged very critically by some of Kipling's contemporaries such as Mark Twain and Henry James . Equating the American manifest destiny with classical colonialism was rejected, as was the assumed attempt to reinterpret colonization as a humanitarian act . A parody was published under the title The Brown Man's Burden by Henry du Pré Labouchère in the satirical weekly Truth and in Literary Digest (February 1899).

However, the interpretation of the critics is not without controversy. Kiplings (" East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet. ") Interprets the relationship between Orient and Occident and thus also of the "burden of the white man" in a somewhat more differentiated manner. East and West represent something like “two sides of a coin”, the complexity of which cannot be fully perceived by the other. "East" and "West" each have a different cultural foundation and are characterized by their dissimilarity, but are nonetheless mutually dependent. The white man's burden of bringing “light” into the dark Orient can also represent a misguided commitment and does not necessarily have to be about a secular mission.

According to Stanley Wolpert , modern, dynamic states like the USA are supposed to push back the stagnating European colonial powers like Spain. The effort is worthwhile, the aim is recognition by equals (peer) and a form of further development that includes rulers and ruled.

In a comparison of Kipling's The Man Who Wanted to Be King and the war in Afghanistan, Steve Sailer named Kipling's statement of an imperial obligation as being entirely relevant. He took up a bon mot from John Derbyshire , according to which Kipling was “an imperialist who was completely without any illusions about what it means to be an imperialist. Which in some ways shows that he wasn't really an imperialist. "

Others see the poem as a tearful justification of presumptuous, arrogant injustices.

  • HT Johnson wrote the poem The Black Man's Burden in April 1899 .
  • ED Morel , a British journalist in the Belgian Congo , wrote about the atrocities of colonial rule in 1903. He called his article The Black Man's Burden .
  • In the feature film The Shining by Stanley Kubrick , who is regarded by some critics as an indictment of the American genocide of the Indians, the protagonist mentioned incoherent the quote to burden's White .
  • In 1995, the film White Man's Burden (Street of Vengeance) was made, which used the title of the poem.

literature

Web links

Commons : The White Man's Burden  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files
Wikisource: The White Man's Burden  - Sources and full texts

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Stuart Creighton Miller: Benevolent Assimilation: The American Conquest of the Philippines, 1899-1903 . Yale University Press, 1982, ISBN 0-300-03081-9 . P. 5: "... imperialist writers demanded to seize the whole peninsula in the name of the burden of the wise man"
  2. ↑ Denis Judd: Diamonds are forever: Kipling's imperialism; poems of Rudyard Kipling . In: History Today . 47, No. 6, June 1997, p. 37.
  3. ↑ Examples of inclusion in the mass media at that time (1899–1902):
  4. ^ Benjamin Pimentel: The Philippines; “Liberator” Was Really a Colonizer; Bush's revisionist history . The San Francisco Chronicle, October 26, 2003, p. D3. : The poem is a call to imperialism.
  5. ↑ The White Man's Burden. In: McClure’s Magazine 12 (Feb. 1899).
  6. ↑ swans.com
  7. ↑ Janwillem van de Wetering : The Koan and other Zen stories. Rowohlt, Reinbek 1996, ISBN 3-499-60270-9 .
  8. ↑ Steve Sailer: What Will Happen In Afghanistan? United Press International , September 26, 2001.
  9. ↑ Pankaj Mishra: On the ruins of the empire . In: Le Monde Diplomatique , January 2013, p. 12
  10. ↑ HT Johnson: The Black Man's Burden .
  11. ^ ED Morel: The Black Man's Burden .
  12. ↑ tailslate.net