10 thoughts on “The Case Against Kipling”

  1. “East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.”
    Usually quoted as another example of his racism etc… by people who have never read the poem itself. The last lines are:
    “But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,
    When two strong men stand face to face though they come from the ends of the earth!”

  2. Hmm, not so easy? I’m sure the people making the case for Churchill, Washington, and the Betsy Ross flag all being racists will have no problem making the case for Kipling or hot dogs or Ghandi or anything really.

      1. They are sexist and transphobic.

        Cis hot dogs or trans hot dogs? What about the hot dogs that identify as bratwurst, or hamburgers? Or are made with tofu or some other horrid vegan substance?

  3. How long before vat grown meat becomes cheap enough to ban all the famous people of today as “cannibals” for ruthlessly killing and eating their follow mammals?

  4. Kipling was a chronicler of his times and necessarily a part of them. I’d say he was less racist than many of the time after growing up in India and he’s the poet of the early machine age. I do particularly like “The Sons of Martha”.
    He’s popular in military SF which is where I learned to like his poems.
    I’d been exposed to him in high school ( private school modeled somewhat on Brit private schools – I hated it, not the academics but the rest of the ethos/culture) but it didn’t take then.

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