The White Man's Burden

Bonus addition below.

It is all too fashionable today to disparage white men.  It is politically correct to denounce, demean and dismiss men in general and white men in particular, but do not for a moment think that this is new. It has taken different forms and has been aimed at different subsets over the years and few have taken the brunt as much as Anglo white men. The Europeans seem to have been neglected in this regard but rest assured their turn will come. For the moment it is Americans who have replaced the English white whipping boy.

It is almost ironic, from an English viewpoint. The English have been standing on a hill, surrounded,  being pilloried for the best part of 80 years and who was down the slope throwing rotton tomatos? Yep, along with sundry others, Americans, I am sad to say. Now it is their turn.

The 'British' were for quite a while the 'Colonial overlords' we are told. We ( I am one) had an 'Empire' We were 'Imperialists'. No good came out of Imperialism, goes the mantra,in complete disregard to the evidence.

Take India, for example. 

Upon hearing a visiting English chap speak up in the UK bar about a book he has been reading (by an Indian chap) several voices chimed up.

Brilliant, about time modern Britain realised Colonialism was a force for good, not to be ashamed of (Leftwing nonsense), of course there were mistakes, but giving India, Malaysia and Central and Southern Africa, Law, Hospitals, Schools, Railways & Roads Democracy and Employment was no small undertaking.

And..... 

If you were a country that was going to be colonised in the 18th/19th centuries, your best choice - by a long way - would be the Brits.

I pulled a couple of pints for those small interjections. 

The British ( I say that rather than 'English', because many were actually Scottish, Welsh and Irish) worked like, well, MEN, in India to raise it to some semblance of  modern civilisation. They were literally educated to the role in the Public Schools (that is to say, Private schools) to 'Serve'. 

And serve they did.

But at the end of WW2 largely under pressure from America, the British Empire was rapidly dismantled and the 'colonisers' sent packing.  Britain could not afford the burden in any event.

This has proven a disaster in many parts of the world. 

It should have been an eye opening realization that 'Empire' was an investment and not as the lefties would have us believe a plot to simply exploit. The American Governments' post war never got that, which is possibly built into the national psyche.  America, one might recall, was a beneficiary of several hundred years of British Blood and Treasure investment before they cooked up a rationale to steal it all and declare independance and throwing the 'oppressive colonial overlords' out. Something not taught in their schools.

This sounds harsh, but truth often does. 

But to the chap, John Preston, a literary sort who had a book under his arm. He left it on the bar. It was by an Indian fellow. And it took a very different view from the PC crowd's. 

John cautioned us....

Before you read this review, it's important that we get a couple of things straight. 

The first is that Kartar Lalvani is himself Indian. 

The second is that, as far as I can tell, he is not mad.

 The British were imperialist brutes? 

No, Britain made India great (says an Indian!) 

The reason both these things are so important is that for more than half a century scarcely anybody - let alone an Indian - has dared suggest that British rule in India was anything other than an utter disaster.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/books/article-3497620/The-British-imperialist-brutes-No-Britain-India-great-says-Indian.html

In his preface, Lalvani notes sadly that he's been living in England for more than 50 years and in that time 'I have not encountered a single native Brit who has stated any form of belief that the British benefited India'.

Even British education has fallen to the lefty hordes. 

Received wisdom - carefully nurtured by generations of Lefty academics - holds that Britain, the wicked colonial oppressor, sucked the wealth out of India, crushing the poor Indians under their boot heels at the same time.

As the founder of Vitabiotics, 'Britain's most successful vitamin company', Dr Lalvani is presumably a very busy man.

Yet he feels so strongly that British rule in India has been unfairly vilified that he's produced a scrupulously researched examination of its achievements.

One of the main charges against the British is that they looted India of many of its assets.

Nonsense, insists Lalvani. If anyone looted India, it was the Persians - by the time the British arrived, the country's coffers were almost empty.

But surely India has always been dogged by the most appalling poverty? Isn't that also a legacy of British rule? Not according to Lalvani. As he points out, it's now almost 70 years since the British left India and the poverty is almost as bad as it's ever been.

If there is a villain to be fingered here - someone responsible for keeping India bumping along the bottom - it's not a representative of British rule.  Instead, we should be pointing accusingly at none other than Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first prime minister who is generally reckoned to be the father of the nation.

It was Nehru who cravenly sucked up to Stalin - a far greater brute than any Brit. 

Not that one can criticise Nehru nor indeed Stalin (the Enn-word in the woodpile?) of course.  Few dare say a word about Nehru's 'Partition' for instance - Britain gets the blame for that, of course - and the expulsion of over a million Muslims to the newly created Pakistan. Perhaps Europe can dig out his plans and use them again.  Same place, perhaps? 

One rarely hears a fuss made about the exploits of the Dutch East India mob, the sort of Halliburton of the day. The British copied them with the British East India Company, also Halliburtonish. The Dutch, of course, aren't 'Anglo' so they barely rate. Trade rather than road building was their game although they did quite a bit of the civilising spade work. Hmmmm. Back to Nehru and Stalin. Two likely (but not 'white' ) lads.

'As a result, India's pace of industrial growth was seriously stunted, depriving the country of precious financial development funds from the U.S. and European nations.'

Lalvani is only limbering up, though. It isn't until he gets into what the British did for India's infrastructure that he really hits his stride.

Not only did the British give India a legal system, an efficient police force, an apolitical army and a smooth running - if astonishingly bureaucratic - civil service, but just look at the concrete benefits they provided.

Let's start with roads. In 1836, work began to construct a highway between Calcutta and Lahore - that's 1,423 miles.  When it was finally completed almost 30 years later 'wheeled carriages could roll across the land' for the first time.

There is time here only for a few of a multitude of examples, I told him.  So he showed me the title again.

THE MAKING OF INDIA: THE UNTOLD STORY OF BRITISH ENTERPRISE  

by Kartar Lalvani

(Bloomsbury £25)

Not only that, trees had been planted every 60 ft along the way 'to provide beautification and much-needed shade to travellers'.

And then, of course, there were the railways. In a section entitled Awe-Inspiring Railways Statistics, Lalvani lists how India's railway network came to cover the map. He's right; the statistics really are awe-inspiring.

In 1853, there were a mere 21 miles of railway in India. Ten years later, there were 2,512. Jump forward 20 years, and that figure has gone up to 10,000 miles, and another 20 years later to 26,378.

The British built more railways in India than America, France, Germany and other European colonialists built in all their colonies. 

And in order to do so, they had to build bridges - lots and lots of bridges. At this point it's worth recalling Franklin D. Roosevelt's quote: 'There can be little doubt that in many ways the story of bridge building is the story of civilisation.  'By it, we can readily measure a people's progress.'

In fact, the British had been building bridges in India long before the railways came along.  In 1811, the first iron bridge in British India was built across the Gomti River at Lucknow - the design was based on a bridge over the River Wear in Sunderland. When it was shipped to India, it became the largest single structure ever exported from Britain.  It consisting of 2,627 pieces, of which just 19 arrived broken.

To build the Simla railway that led from the plains up to the cooler hill country, the track had to climb almost 500 ft - requiring the construction of 103 tunnels. And this for a railway that was a mere 60 miles long.

In the late 1700s, the British decided to construct a mint in Calcutta. Behind a colonnaded facade inspired by the Temple of Minerva in Athens, steam-driven machines stamped out 200,000 coins every eight hours.

A few years later they built another equally grand mint in Bombay. When an Indian engineer at the Bombay mint came to London in the 1840s, he took one look at the Royal Mint and pronounced it to be 'much inferior'.

Inevitably, a history like this is going to be on the selective side. For instance, there's barely any mention of a thoroughly discreditable episode such as the opium trade, while the Indian Mutiny also passes in a convenient blur. But even so, it's still hard - indeed almost impossible - not to be struck by how much the British sought to improve India.

Of course, their ideas of what constituted improvements were very British ones, yet many of the institutions they introduced are still functioning pretty well today.

And when the time eventually came for the British to leave India in 1947, power was relinquished with 'for the most part good grace and mutual respect' - unlike a lot of other countries one could mention.

After reading a book as bracingly controversial as this, you may find yourself in need of some refreshment - 

a cup of tea, perhaps.   

As you are waiting for the kettle to boil, you could reflect on how it was the British who introduced tea to India, turning the country into the biggest tea producer in the world in little more than a century.

And from there you might go on to chalk up a few other achievements: the introduction of coffee, sugar, fresh drinking water, public toilets...

Doubtless there will be those who dismiss Dr Lalvani as the worst kind of imperialist lackey.  But I defy anyone with a modicum of open-mindedness not to read The Making Of India and concede, however grudgingly, that he just might have a point.

As interjected above, there were Hospitals, Schools, Law courts and Law, Government and above all a Common Language to knit together people with over 200 existing languages. All painstakingly and expensively put in place. And we won't even mention the massive trade imbalance that saw funds flood into India 

A burden of maintaing all of that fell on the shoulders of British tax-payers and their sound, middle-class, Christian souls.


(As an aside, it is estimated that 20% of the world's gold dangles on Indian Ladies.) 

Additional interjection.

Tucker Carlson added a personal view from a visit he made earlier in the month.

Flying from Donald Trump to the beautiful ruins of another empire

Tucker Carlson’s diary: 

The aesthetic merits of British colonialism; 

The first thing you notice about Mumbai is the first thing you notice about every place the British once occupied, which is how much of themselves they left there. 

 http://www.spectator.co.uk/2016/03/flying-from-donald-trump-to-the-beautiful-ruins-of-another-empire/

The US spent over a decade and trillions of dollars in Iraq, and the only physical evidence that remains is a concrete embassy compound, some airstrips and a sea of steel shipping containers. Maybe because they never considered that they might leave, the British built entire cities out of stone, with railways to connect them. 

And they did it with reliably good taste. 

Too often lost in the hand-wringing over the evils of colonialism is the aesthetic contribution of the British empire. The Brits tended to colonise beautiful places and make them prettier. 

Bermuda, New Zealand, Fiji, Cape Town — notice a theme? 

Style wasn’t an ancillary benefit; it was part of the point. 

Behind every Gurkha regiment marched a battalion of interior designers.

English taste seemed to improve with distance. At home, 19th-century British architecture tended towards excess, layers of rococo baubles alternating with blocky overkill. 

Abroad, the form became more flexible, often incorporating local features like Moorish arches and minarets. (Contrast this with the French, to whom every colony was a chance to recreate an outer ring of Paris.) 

The average English customs house on a minor Bahamian island enhances its surroundings more than anything Frank Lloyd Wright ever built. More durable too. 

British colonial buildings were the most appealing structures in virtually every city the empire controlled. 

Fifty years later, they often still are. When he seized power in Pakistan, Pervaiz Musharraf never even pretended to settle in the new PM’s residence in Islamabad. He headed for the old British headquarters in Rawalpindi, where he sat beneath ceiling fans sipping Scotch and reading Flashman novels.

So, think about it whilst you hear about the wrath now poured upon the poor American men. Particularly those who have, too, chosen to Serve.

Barbara Holligsworth was wrapped in a Flag in the US Room. 

Troops at Ft. Gordon Subjected to Unauthorized Lecture on ‘White Privilege’

Troops stationed at Ford Gordon, Georgia were subjected to an unauthorized lecture on “white privilege” during an Equal Opportunity briefing last year, according to a PowerPoint presentation the Army released last month to Judicial Watch under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

It beggars belief that it was 'unauthorised'. Someone is ducking for cover. 

The PowerPoint presentation, which was shown to 400 members of the 67th Signal Battalion on April 2, 2015, defined privilege as “an unearned advantage,” and stated: “Our society attaches privilege to being white and male and heterosexual regardless of your social class.”

“Privilege exists when one group has something of value that is denied to others simply because of the groups they belong to, rather than because of anything they’ve done or failed to do,” the briefing continued.

Women of Colour now share the Privilege of being killed in combat just like White males.

“Privilege grants the cultural authority to make judgments about others and to have those judgments stick….Privilege means being able to decide who gets taken seriously, receives attention, etc ….

 “Privilege is always at someone else’s expense and always exacts a cost… however passive and unconscious, [it] results in suffering and deprivation for someone.”

One wonders whether this hectoring was in fact part of a 'Resist Indoctrination Course' and given as an example of the type of sheer crap an enemy of the nation might subject a soldier to.  

Under a slide entitled “The luxury of obliviousness,” troops were told that “race privilege gives whites little reason to pay a lot of attention to African Americans or to how white privilege affects them. ‘To be white in America means not having to think about it.’”

“The trouble we’re in can’t be solved unless the ‘privileged’ make the problem of privilege their problem and do something about it,” the slideshow concluded, urging soldiers to “reclaim” words such as “racist”, “patriarchy”, “oppression and dominance”, and  [of course, drum roll please....] “feminism”… “so that we can use them to name and make sense of the truth of what’s going on.”

Ze Truth vill zet you unt Barabbas, frei. 

“We certainly found it shocking,” Judicial Watch attorney William Marshall told CNSNews.com. “We’re always on the lookout for any indoctrination material provided to our military personnel. In my view, this is a pretty radical way of looking at race relations.” 

Why? How come the Military does not produce its own training materials? Hello. 

In response to an inquiry by 

CNSNews.com, an Army spokeswoman said that “the slides presented were not authorized.  "The information on the slide presentation was not a part of the original training material distributed to all battalion Equal Opportunity Leaders from the brigade's Equal Opportunity Advisor.

“The presentation shown was altered by the instructor and was not then, nor was it ever a presentation that the Army approved,” Capt. Lindsay Roman, public affairs officer of the 35th Signal Brigade, told CNSNews.com in an email.

Has that 'Instructor' been charged with sedition?  Silly question really. 

She added that the brigade “supports the right of every Soldier, civilian employee and family member to file an Equal Opportunity complaint when experiencing or witnessing unfair treatment based on race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation and/or national origin.”

As long as it is not simply exercising White Privilege, presumably, and does not complain about a 'person of colour' or a female, or heavens and the Batallion Cmdr forbid, a Transgender person' ! 

When CNSNews.com asked Roman if the instructor had been disciplined for altering the original training material, she replied: “The brigade leadership determined that re-training was the most appropriate course of action, and the instructor received a 40-hour block of instruction.”

Again, presumably the previous 'Train the Trainer' program did not work. Had someone made 'unauthorised' alterations to that too? 

Diversity and Inclusion.

“The United States military is in the midst of the longest period of sustained combat in our nation’s history,” Judicial Watch said in a press release.

“It is beyond belief that our military personnel would be required to sit through a left-wing effort at PC brainwashing as the price for defending our country.” 

http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/barbara-hollingsworth/troops-ft-gordon-got-unauthorized-lecture-white-privilege

You had better believe it.

Drink up. I have some tea from Darjeeling especially blended for White American Male oppressors.

And don't worry: some friendly woman of colour will write a book in 60 years or so saying you were actually quite a benefit.

Pax.