Legacy of a Lie

Born in India, Rudyard Kipling epitomized the pomp and circumstance of England’s global imperialism. Some of his memorable writings include The Jungle Book, Gunga Din, and his powerful poem If: If you can keep your head when all about you/ Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,/ If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you…/ Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies/ Or being hated don’t give way to hating…

Rudyard was also a vital part of the “military-industrial complex” of his day before Eisenhower coined that warning for us all. The Boer War was pivotal in his desire to keep the British Empire dominating that situation at all costs. His world view was tainted with white supremacy, especially as portrayed in his work The White Man’s Burden where he urges the United States to take up the “burden” of empire in their dealings with the Philippine Islands and assume colonial control of the Filipino people.

Because of his infatuation with imperialism and war, the English government asked him to write pro-WWI propaganda, an offer he couldn’t refuse. Much to his delight his son John attempted to join the Royal Navy, but was rejected on medical grounds due to his terrible eye-sight. He was turned down by the military for the same reason. Finally, he was accepted into the Irish Guards, but only because his father lied about his medical issue and pulled some strings to get him in. Sadly, John died in battle, and sources say he was last seen stumbling in the mud in search of his glasses, which had fallen off during attack.

With or without glasses, it doesn’t take too much insight or hindsight to understand how that principle has applied to so many of the wars throughout history. Just the wars in this country’s relatively short lifespan were based on misconceptions of truth. For example, some historians speak of America’s two original sins: the conquest of those natives already living here before the coming of the pale faces, some of whom sincerely thought that it was their God-given “manifest destiny” to take the land away from those first Americans. And the whole notion that white folk could own black slaves would lead to the irreconcilable conflict of the Civil War. Our ancestors fought tooth and nail over what turned out to be a whole lot more than little white lies fabricated by their fathers. In Dixieland where I was born, many still believe that we were never those terrorists fighting against these United States and that the South won the war of northern aggression.

Thanks to religions, lies can leave their legends in realms other than wars, even when we should know better. Like the flat earth society is still convinced that Copernicus and Galileo were lying about their new-fangled constructs of the solar-centered universe. Bible-thumpers still lay claim to the notion that the world was created in a week about five thousand years ago. The awful scourge of racism is based on a formidable lack of knowledge and its consequential lie which claims that some people are created more equal than others.

Sir Walter Scott coined the phrase “O, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive.” We all know the truth of that in our bones, but nobody felt that more than Rudyard Kipling when he got the word about the death of his son John. That confrontation with such a god-awful truth led him to confess this epitaph to war:

If any question why we died,
Tell them, because our fathers lied!