The white man's burden

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.

- Rudyard Kipling

This is the opening stanza of a notorious poem, penned at the height of Victorian imperialism.

It is regularly held up as a paradigm-case of white supremacist racism. The ironic thing is that it’s hard to tell the difference between Kipling’s patronizing attitude and the equally patronizing attitude of modern-day white liberals. They still treat Africa as though it were a European colony or charity-case, just waiting for the Great White Hope to swoop in and civilize the backward natives.

Another irony is that in the unraveling of the Anglican Communion, African clergymen generally regard their Caucasian counterparts north of the equator as modern-day barbarians who have reverted to heathen mores. If anything, the S. hemisphere needs to reevangelize the N. hemisphere.

In my opinion, the best thing we could do for Africa is to arm--as in firearms--our brothers so that they are able to defend themselves against the jihadis.

Rushdoony wrote an excellent book on The Politics of Guilty & Pity which is well worth reading at a time like this. And the following bloggers (see below) have posted some excellent material on the current shakedown. In particular, Frank Turk has been running a great series on the whole subject.

As a practical matter, "soak the rich" is code language for soak the middle class, because the poor don't pay income tax and the rich hire tax attorneys. Remember that Teresa Heinz-Kerry, a multi-billionairess, is in a low-income tax bracket. Income redistribution begins, not at the top, but in the middle, and moves upward or downward.

http://mcryanmac.blogspot.com/

http://centuri0n.blogspot.com/

http://pedanticprotestant.blogspot.com/