The White Man’s Burden, Rudyard Kipling

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.

In the waning days of the Nineteenth Century, liberal imperialism was christened the White Man’s burden in Kipling’s famous poem: “take up the White Man’s burden” of civilizing the dark peoples of the East by, inter alia, converting them to modern God fearing Christians.

Fast forward to the here and now. Forget the White Man’s burden, now we have woke evangelism instead.  Our foreign policy establishment preaches the LGBTQI+ gospel apparently to convert the world to queerdom. And we’ll drone your wedding party to get our way if we have to.

We fancy ourselves a tolerant culture. You want to be queer go for it. Only now, if you are not an equally “tolerant” culture, you are deemed barbarian. This is apparently our newly enlightened imperial mandate. They want to impose it on everyone else in the world just like they want to impose it on you, you deplorable low brow! But you see there is a big difference between the principle of  “live and let live” that many here ascribe to and the selfish arrogance of woke collectivism. You know what we need to do as a country?  Mind our own f*cking business.

Michael Cook, The Rainbow Flag Flutters No More Over the US Embassy in Kabul:

“[H]ow many Afghan soldiers saw the rainbow flag waving over the US$800 million embassy compound and said, “Allahu Akbar, I am proud to be fighting shoulder to shoulder with Joe Biden”? Probably none. Probably many Afghanis considered it to be one step short of treading on a copy of the Qu’ran.”

“This is not to say that the US did not have a responsibility to promote human rights in Afghanistan — the dominant culture there is violently hostile to women’s rights and religious freedom. Afghanistan is a signatory to human rights declarations and should abide by them. But aggressively promoting un-Islamic values in a deeply religious country can only be described as the epitome of insolent cultural imperialism. It’s worse than the condescension of the moustache-twirling sahibs who invaded Afghanistan in the 19th Century to make the world safe for the East India Company.”

“In the breast-beating and examination of conscience which must follow this massive humiliation, the United States should remember that its position in the world depends not only on military might and economic clout but also on its “soft power”.”

“It’s hard to imagine anything more self-serving or arrogant than the LGBTQI+ narrative. It’s not welcomed in most of the countries where the US has vital interests. It undermines the traditional family and the principles of major religions – including Islam and Christianity. Should it continue to be one of the main features of American foreign policy?”

[end of excerpt]

Two weeks ago I posted the Graveyard of Empire picture without any changes. I held back because I didn’t think we had yet reached quite the same epic humiliation experienced by the British in 1842.

Well, I changed my mind in the past 24 hours…

WB7