The twenty-second in my ongoing series examining the poetry of Rudyard Kipling. The other posts in the series may be read here, here , here , here, here , here, here, here, here, here, here, here , here, here, here , here, here, here , here, here and here. Kipling throughout his life was an ardent foe of socialism. His opposition was not primarily due to its economic follies, but rather due to its exaltation of the state. Kipling was patriotic, but he never, contrary to the stereotype of him, ever turned Britain into an idol to be worshiped. Kipling understood men too well to think that any group of men, under the rubric of The State, could be exempt from the follies and vices that plague our species. He viewed government as a necessary evil, with the emphasis on evil, and thought that those wielding the power of the State always needed to be carefully watched and restrained.
These themes were eloquently on display in the poem MacDonough’s Song written by Kipling in 1917. The poem was a continuation of a science fiction, yes, Kipling wrote science fiction, story called A.B.C., written by Kipling in 1912, where a world government, the Aerial Board of Control, in 2065 acts to crush a rebellion in Chicago against its authority. Go here to read the short story. I view it both as an attack on socialist ideas of utopia and a satire on the demagoguery that usually goes with politics.
The poem is fairly bleak in its unsparing look at human nature and government. The couplet
If it be wiser to kill mankind Before or after the birth— has a dire resonance with our abortion on demand culture. Separation of Church and State is a common theme on the Left today, while many of the same people labor ceaselessly to make the State all-powerful. Kipling’s warning is just as relevant today as when he wrote it. Here is the text of the poem:
WHETHER the State can loose and bind
In Heaven as well as on Earth:
If it be wiser to kill mankind
Before or after the birth—
These are matters of high concern
Where State-kept schoolmen are;
But Holy State (we have lived to learn)
Endeth in Holy War.
Whether The People be led by The Lord,
Or lured by the loudest throat:
If it be quicker to die by the sword
Or cheaper to die by vote—
These are things we have dealt with once,
(And they will not rise from their grave)
For Holy People, however it runs,
Endeth in wholly Slave.
Whatsoever, for any cause,
Seeketh to take or give,
Power above or beyond the Laws,
Suffer it not to live!
Holy State or Holy King—
Or Holy People’s Will—
Have no truck with the senseless thing.
Order the guns and kill!
Saying—after—me:—
Once there was The People—Terror gave it birth;
Once there was The People and it made a Hell of Earth.
Earth arose and crushed it. Listen, O ye slain!
Once there was The People—it shall never be again!
Donald R. McClarey
Paul Zummo
Almost Chosen People 
Funny the mythologically immense role that a few months of hysteria and political failure in France has had in the minds of enemies ever since. To judge by this kind of talk, you would imagine that Ropesbierre had been a political success.
Totalitarian theorists and regimes ever since the French Revolution Fabio have looked to the Terror for inspiration. Marx returned to this theme again and again.
Never as much as the theorists of counter-revolution. What Kipling says of the French Revolution here is historically false; which shows the importance of the mythology.
We will never agree on the French Revolution Fabio.
I certainly don’t disagree about the monstrous evil of placing various bookish notions above the reality of human beings. I simply disagree that it had more to do with the French Revolution than with the rest of Europe. If anything, the opposite is the case. Nazism originated in Austria, in the very heartland of the opposition to French ideas (and please, none of the dumb Goldbergian puns about National Socialists being Socialist); Marx was a Prussian with a lot in common with Bismarck, and his ideological roots were in Hegel, who opposed the French Revolution and admired Burke. Lenin in turn perverted Marx’ teachings, keeping in effect only the notion of the party as the vanguard of the proletariat – which came from Marx’ Prussian belief in “organizing the proletariat” (one of Bismarck’s chief goals in domestic policy, too). And have you ever stopped to notice how similar Britain’s conscious use of the potato blight to slaughter the Irish was to the tragedy of Cambodia? The parallels are scary. Here you have two countries, both of about eight million inhabitants, both dominated by an alien oligarchy (the Communists of Cambodia were barely closer to the people than the bureaucrats of Westminster to the Irish). In both cases, the alien oligarchy was obsessed by an abstract economic doctrine – Trevelyan was Malthus’ prize student and believed in the inevitability and justice of mass starvation, just as the Communists believed in the inevitability and justice of the mass slaughter of the bourgeoisie. Both were obsessed by unreal notions of the utter moral renewal of the victims of their experiments – an Anglicized Ireland, a collectivized Cambodia. Both killed about a quarter of their wretched subject country’s population in a couple of years. Both did so in the full sight of the world, unconcerned by any rebuke or protest. (And in both cases one of the goals was the extinction of the Catholic Church and of the native religion of the country.) The evils of the nineteenth and twentieth century had little to do with the French Revolution, but were rather rooted in the excessive and superstitious worship of Reason in the pre-Revolution and non-Revolution world. Prussia and Austria, the two enemies of the Revolution, were dominated by Enlghtenment principles. One significant point that went right through all the worst convulsions that were to follow was that the Enlightenment theorists were often racist by principle – what Voltaire and Condorcet wrote not only about blacks but even about the Chinese would make your hair curl – whereas the Revolution, on the whole, was not. And there can be no doubt that racial theories were at the heart of most of the worst ideological developments of the modern world, directly in the case of Nazism and of monstrosities such as Leopold II’s rule in the Congo, less directly but still unarguably in the case of Marxism. (There the element of racial determinism was disguised by that of class, but in fact the notion of class war can be shown to depend upon that of race war in various ways. Incidentally, the connection also goes back to the enemies of the French Revolution: Baron Gobineau based his racial theories, from which everyone else drew, from the notion that the aristocracy of France was of Frankish descent, whereas the lower classes that were understood to have overthrown its rule were racially Celtic and Roman. Once again, the origin of evil is not in the Revolution but in the REACTION to the Revolution: Gobineau invented racism starting from aristocracy.)