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Fariha
is on page 496 of 1369
After the greatest victory she had ever known, Britain was a lesser world power than before, and Kipling was quite acute enough to see this. The virtue had gone out of the classes he idealised, the young were hedonistic or disaffected, the desire to paint the map red had evaporated. He could not understand what was happening, because he had never had any grasp of the economic forces underlying imperial expansion.
— Feb 12, 2026 06:54AM
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Fariha’s Previous Updates
Fariha
is on page 500 of 1369
Here are half a dozen phrases coined by Kipling which one sees quoted in leaderettes in the gutter press or overhears in saloon bars from people who have barely heard his name. It will be seen that they all have a certain characteristic in common:
East is East, and West is West.
The white man’s burden.
What do they know of England who only England know ?
The female of the species is more deadly than the male.
— Feb 14, 2026 07:41AM
East is East, and West is West.
The white man’s burden.
What do they know of England who only England know ?
The female of the species is more deadly than the male.
Fariha
is on page 500 of 1369
The ruling power is always faced with the question, “In such & such circumstances,what would you 'do' ? whereas the opposition is not obliged to take responsibility or make any real decisions.Where it is a permanent and pensioned opposition, as in England, the quality of its thought deteriorates accordingly. Moreover, anyone who starts out with a pessimistic, reactionary view of life tends to be justified by events..
— Feb 14, 2026 07:19AM
Fariha
is on page 495 of 1369
...It is not a text that makes much impression on the post Hitler mind. No one, in our time, believes in any sanction greater than military power; no one believes that it is possible to overcome force except by greater force. There is no “law”, there is only power. I am not saying that that is a true belief, merely that it is the belief which all modern men do actually hold.
— Feb 12, 2026 06:50AM
Fariha
is on page 487 of 1369
The notion that you can somehow defeat violence by submitting to it is simply a flight from fact. As I have said, it is only possible to people who have money and guns between themselves and reality. But why should they want to make this flight, in any case ? Because, rightly hating violence, they do not wish to recognise that it is integral to modern society and that their own fine feelings and noble attitudes...
— Feb 10, 2026 07:26AM
Fariha
is on page 485 of 1369
...but in so far as he is a member of the middle class, doing work which he has chosen for himself, he is one of a few million favoured human beings who live ultimately on the degradation of the rest. He wants to get on with his work, wants to be out of reach of Nazi tyranny and regimentation, but he will not act against the Nazis in any other way than by running away from them.
— Feb 10, 2026 07:11AM
Fariha
is on page 480 of 1369
....in a totalitarian society, if they had any freedom of expression at all, they would probably concentrate on laziness or cowardice, but at any rate on the unheroic in one form or another. It will not do to condemn them on the ground that they are vulgar and ugly. That is exactly what they are meant to be. Their whole meaning and virtue is in their unredeemed lowness, not only in the sense of obscenity,
— Feb 07, 2026 07:46AM
Fariha
is on page 466 of 1369
There are several vital differences between totalitarianism and all the orthodoxies of the past, either in Europe or in the East. The most important is that the orthodoxies of the past did not change, or at least did not change rapidly. In medieval Europe the Church dictated what you should believe, but at least it allowed you to retain the same beliefs from birth to death.
— Feb 01, 2026 07:41AM
Fariha
is on page 465 of 1369
Totalitarianism has abolished freedom of thought to an extent unheard of in any previous age. And it is important to realise that its control of thought is not only negative, but positive. It not only forbids you to express—even to think— certain thoughts, but it dictates what you shall think, it creates an ideology for you, it tries to govern your emotional life as well as setting up a code of conduct.
— Feb 01, 2026 07:38AM
Fariha
is on page 450 of 1369
We cannot be utterlydefeated if we have made our revolution beforehand. We may see German troops marching down Whitehall, but another process, ultimately deadly to the German power-dream, will have been started. The Spanish people were defeated, but the things they learned during those two and a half memorable years will one day come back upon the Spanish Fascists like a boomerang.
— Jan 30, 2026 07:33AM
Fariha
is on page 443 of 1369
An army of unemployed led by millionaires quoting the Sermon on the Mount—that is our danger. But it cannot arise when we have once introduced a reasonable degree of social justice.
Progress and reaction are ceasing to have anything to do with party labels. If one wishes to name a particular moment, one can say that the old distinction between Right and Left broke down when Picture Post was first published.
— Jan 27, 2026 11:12AM
Progress and reaction are ceasing to have anything to do with party labels. If one wishes to name a particular moment, one can say that the old distinction between Right and Left broke down when Picture Post was first published.
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Feb 12, 2026 06:55AM
It is notable that Kipling does not seem to realise, any more than the average soldier or colonial administrator, that an empire is primarily a money-making concern. Imperialism as he sees it is a sort of forcible evangelising. You turn a Gatling gun on a mob of unarmed “natives”, and then you establish “the Law”, which includes roads, railways and a court-house. He could not foresee, therefore, that the same motives which brought the Empire into existence would end by destroying it. It was the same motive, for example, that caused the Malayan jungles to be cleared for rubber estates, and which now causes those estates to be handed over intact to the Japanese. The modern totalitarians know what they are doing, and the nineteenth-century English did not know what they were doing. Both attitudes have their advantages, but Kipling was never able to move forward from one into the other.
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