"All left-wing parties in the highly industrialized countries are
at bottom a sham, because they make it their business to fight against
something which they do not really wish to destroy. They have
internationalist aims, and at the same time they struggle to keep up a
standard of life with which those aims are incompatible.
[...]
A humanitarian is always a hypocrite."
- George Orwell in his essay "Rudyard Kipling"
"He could not understand what was happening, because he had never had
any grasp of the economic forces underlying imperial expansion. It is
notable that Kipling does not seem to realize, 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
evangelizing. 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 not know what
they were doing. Both attitudes have their advantages, but Kipling was
never able to move forward from one into the other. His outlook,
allowing for the fact that after all he was an artist, was that of the
salaried bureaucrat"
- George Orwell in his essay "Rudyard Kipling"