Reminder: Rudyard Kipling Was a Racist Fuck and The Jungle Book Is Imperialist Garbage

[Potoooooooo]

http://io9.gizmodo.com/reminder-rudyard-kipling-was-a-racist-fuck-and-the-jun-1771044121

We are currently in the 21st century. We are in the second decade of the 21st century and there are not one, not two, but three Jungle Book movies on the horizon. And that means that it’s time to remind everyone that Rudyard Kipling was a piece of racist, imperialist trash.

In 1967, French literary critic Roland Barthes published “The Death of the Author,” an essay whose title has become synonymous with judging works on their own merits and ignoring any biographical details about their creators. I expect a lot of people to bring this up when talking about the modern movie incarnations of The Jungle Book.

I also expect people to defend The Jungle Book from the other side. To say that it can’t be read with modern ideas in mind. It was written in 1894 by a white British man who was born in India. That’s just how they thought back then.

Both arguments only work up to a point. The death of the author doesn’t excuse the inherent racism and imperialism baked into The Jungle Book. And the argument about when the book was written and by whom doesn’t excuse either Disney or Warner Bros. from making adaptations of it in the 21st century. Unless these movies are loaded with historical context, or are subversive critiques of Kipling, they’re still adapting, for entertainment, a story that has fundamental issues.

 

[ideologyhunter]

Fine, but the only issue I care about is, what do the newly politically correct want to do with artifacts of the old ideology -- ban them? The Bible has a load of primitive crap in it from beginning to end -- yes, that should be said about it -- after that, leave it to the individual to partake/not partake. Otherwise, with the "suppress it" mentality, which I've run into many a time, we'd be banning tons of black-and-white films and removing a Christ shitload of books off the shelves. BTW, in my memory Kim is a lot more objectionable than J. Bk., although I find Kipling's style maddeningly hard to stomach and don't read him on that score.

 

[Nice Squirrel]

They will tear Little Black Sambo from my cold, dead imperialist hands.

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

Okay, I read the op and I was curious about this so I read the linked article. I came across this paragraph:

I’m not saying that Kipling should be censored, but I am saying that he cannot be presented without context. There are messages in The Jungle Book that are very hard to remove. Hell, Disney managed to add to the problems in the 1960s when it added a character called King Louie, who is widely seen as a racist caricature of black people. (Kipling’s book has monkeys, which are the worst of the animal lot, being incapable of having government and only able to mimic others without a decent culture of their own.)

When I had first read about King Louie here in this forum I was presented with skepticism about King Louie representing anything at all. And I gave that little credence. However, now I am reading someone write that monkeys were symbolic of a political message that contained some racism, I began to wonder if Kipling's story was an allegory. If so that gives a totally new context to criticism of Kipling's work.

So now I checked it out to see if Kipling's work was allegorical. I found this on Wikipedia:

The tales in the book (as well as those in The Second Jungle Book which followed in 1895, and which includes five further stories about Mowgli) are fables, using animals in an anthropomorphic manner to give moral lessons. The verses of The Law of the Jungle, for example, lay down rules for the safety of individuals, families, and communities. Kipling put in them nearly everything he knew or "heard or dreamed about the Indian jungle."[3] Other readers have interpreted the work as allegories of the politics and society of the time.[4]

 

[Tom Sawyer]

There's also the issue that leaving a defensless baby with a pack of wolves will only result in that baby getting eaten. That fucking panther is a muderer and we need to stop celebrating him.

 

[repoman]

So, ScreenJunkies just did an honest trailer for the 1967 Jungle Book version.

From the author of Rikki Tikki Tavi and "The White Man's Burden"?!? - uh oh

That was the opening of it and no more mention of it. I think it is the perfect amount needed.

I laughed at that...

 

[Veritass]

So, ScreenJunkies just did an honest trailer for the 1967 Jungle Book version.

From the author of Rikki Tikki Tavi and "The White Man's Burden"?!? - uh oh

That was the opening of it and no more mention of it. I think it is the perfect amount needed.

I laughed at that...

"The White Man's Burden - The United States and the Philippine Islands"

http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5478/

 

[Horatio Parker]

I dunno. Maybe I'm a literary dummy, but the poem seems as much a warning as anything else.

To wait in heavy harness

On fluttered folk and wild—

By open speech and simple

An hundred times made plain

To seek another’s profit

And work another’s gain

search your manhood

Through all the thankless years,

Cold-edged with dear-bought wisdom,

 

[Sarpedon]

Umm, it isn't a warning.

It's yet another attempt to portray the aggressor as the persecuted one. Like so many other things. "You made us invade your country, forced us to make you grow opium poppies, that we then unwillingly sold to China! Oh what a burden being a white guy is!"

Kipling is very problematic. It's very hard to draw the line between art that you can still appreciate despite its having some racist content, and art that is so racist that it has to be rejected wholesale. For example, I recently saw "The Man Who Would Be King," based on a Kipling book and starring Sean Connery, Michael Caine and Christopher Plummer. It was a beautifully shot and well made film. However, it's imperialistic Kipling crap was so hard to ignore it nearly wrecked the film. On the other hand, when I watch a Marx brother's film, I can generally ignore the occasional racist crap and laugh with the dangerous behavior with scissors. Is it because one film the racism is compartamentalized within an occasional joke or sketch, while in the other it underlies the entire film? Should they have known better in the sixties what could have been excused in the forties? Or is it just my own prejudices showing through?

 

[Horatio Parker]

Umm, it isn't a warning.

It's yet another attempt to portray the aggressor as the persecuted one. Like so many other things. "You made us invade your country, forced us to make you grow opium poppies, that we then unwillingly sold to China! Oh what a burden being a white guy is!"

Kipling is very problematic. It's very hard to draw the line between art that you can still appreciate despite its having some racist content, and art that is so racist that it has to be rejected wholesale. For example, I recently saw "The Man Who Would Be King," based on a Kipling book and starring Sean Connery, Michael Caine and Christopher Plummer. It was a beautifully shot and well made film. However, it's imperialistic Kipling crap was so hard to ignore it nearly wrecked the film. On the other hand, when I watch a Marx brother's film, I can generally ignore the occasional racist crap and laugh with the dangerous behavior with scissors. Is it because one film the racism is compartamentalized within an occasional joke or sketch, while in the other it underlies the entire film? Should they have known better in the sixties what could have been excused in the forties? Or is it just my own prejudices showing through?

I don't think it's meant to be completely one sided. The implied victimhood seems to me to refer to those on the front lines, the "exiled sons".

...Go bind your sons to exile, to serve your captives' need;...

...To veil the threat of terror And check the show of pride;...

...The end for others sought,

I can see how it could be interpreted as "serving" the conquered, but as easily could refer to the exiled sons. I find it difficult to imagine that Kipling was unaware of this double sided quality.

 

[TSwizzle]

The Jungle Book is a fantastic movie. I loved it as a kid and an adult.




George Sanders, brilliant.

 

[Sarpedon]

Boo, fucking hoo. There was nothing stopping Kipling from being a hack in England. It's not as if he was convicted of something and sent to Australia.

 

[arkirk]

Boo, fucking hoo. There was nothing stopping Kipling from being a hack in England. It's not as if he was convicted of something and sent to Australia.

Kipling undoubtedly was an apologist for the entire Colonial Age when European attempted to include the entire world in empire. Kipling romanticized inhuman international domination and exploitation of the British Empire. I have never given him too much of a look see because never thought we needed any more of that form of justification for empire. The U.S. did end up stepping into the same place as the British Empire and is in line for its own harvest of empire. None of us seem to get the notion that the only civilized rule is by consent....informed consent...and that is not ever accomplished with tanks and planes and bombs and military contractors...all our current leadership ever thinks about.

 

[Playball40]

It's a long read, but well worth it. Or it could be that I just love reading George Orwell

http://www.george-orwell.org/Rudyard_Kipling/0.html

 

[arkirk]

It's a long read, but well worth it. Or it could be that I just love reading George Orwell

http://www.george-orwell.org/Rudyard_Kipling/0.html

You're not alone on that account.

 

[bilby]

I don't know, I've never kipled.

 

[arkirk]

I don't know, I've never kipled.

What? A resident of the Empire who has never Kipled? Unbelievable!

 

[4321lynx]

It's a long read, but well worth it. Or it could be that I just love reading George Orwell

http://www.george-orwell.org/Rudyard_Kipling/0.html

Yes indeed. Excellent. Thank you for the link to this masterly essay. Gives us a picture of Kipling and his time; the British Empire then; the Empire and England and its classes in Orwell's time; and an insight into Orwell's mind and past experience.

I particularly liked the last paragraph...

He dealt largely in platitudes, and since we live in a world
of platitudes, much of what he said sticks. Even his worst follies seem
less shallow and less irritating than the 'enlightened' utterances of the
same period, such as Wilde's epigrams or the collection of
cracker-mottoes at the end of MAN AND SUPERMAN.

...to which I add the 'enlightened' utterances on the subject in this thread.

 

[Horatio Parker]

It's a long read, but well worth it. Or it could be that I just love reading George Orwell

http://www.george-orwell.org/Rudyard_Kipling/0.html

You're not alone on that account.

Me too. Brilliant. Thanks for posting.

One flawed author I like, Henry Miller, was also illuminated by Orwell's Down and out in London and Paris.

Not-so-obscure movie quote: "What have the Romans ever done for us?".

 

[TSwizzle]

Boo, fucking hoo. There was nothing stopping Kipling from being a hack in England. It's not as if he was convicted of something and sent to Australia.

He did make exceedingly good cakes.