Oh! The Ruin of Mandalay

It’s not often I’m relieved that my Dad is no longer around. This morning, however, is different. Yer see, Rudyard Kipling was his favourite poet, and my Dad knew poetry, having published his first when he was just 14 years old. It was a poem from the pen of an average-ish student who, if he was lucky, would one day take over his father’s music shop. But as a result of the poem being read by his teacher and his father, his true talents were realised and nurtured.

Several years later, he was awarded a scholarship to Oxford University, where he read English Literature under the tutelage of C S Lewis and J R R Tolkien. It doesn’t get much better than that. Except in Dad’s eyes it did, in the form of Kipling.

So to learn that Kipling’s Mandalay had been removed from the BBC VJ Day commemorations would have angered him to the point of acute distress. Apparently one line in the poem is to blame as being “derogatory to people of colour”:

        An' a-wastin' Christian kisses on an 'eathen idol's foot

I pulled out one of Dad’s Kipling tomes, of which he had many, and re-read the poem in its entirety. Ah ha! The ‘narrator’ – a British soldier serving in Burma – was bemoaning the fact that this beautiful Burmese lady, the soon-to-be love of his life, was wasting her lips on a mud figurine of Buddha, when she could be kissing him, a Christian.

How is that derogatory? I just don’t see it! What I do see is the systemic sycophancy of the BBC and celebrities spitting on the people who actually matter and who have actually done something to be proud of in their careers, like defeating tyrants and aggressors so that the rest of us can live peaceful, fruitful lives. I’m talking about the Burmese veterans who consider Mandalay to be a part of their individual and collective souls. But comfort for them in their old age plays second fiddle to the whims of wokeness.

Of course Mandalay is not the actual problem. The ‘problem’ is Kipling himself, a well-known bastion of British colonialism whom idiots consider unworthy to kiss their heathen, satanic feet. Kipling must be cancelled. All trace of his existence and all of his works must be expunged.

And just to twist the knife, the BBC want to make Burmese veterans pay for their TV licence. I hope they refuse en masse. Like my Dad would have done.

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