Rudyard Kipling's Interview with Mark Twain (1889) | Hacker News Reader

Rudyard Kipling's Interview with Mark Twain (1889)

storyoftheweek.loa.org

63 pointsakehrer12 comments

It's interesting that Twain grew to loathe Kipling due to the latter's efforts to get the US to "take up the white man's burden" and assume Britain's imperial ambitions as it was forced to give up its possessions. Hitchens has a great bit about it in Blood, Class, and Empire.

White Man's Burden:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Man%27s_Burden

Interview PDF: http://www.loa.org/images/pdf/Kipling_Interview_Twain.pdf

“Your conscience is a nuisance. A conscience is like a child. If you pet it and play with it and let it have everything that it wants, it becomes spoiled and intrudes on all your amusements and most of your griefs. Treat your conscience as you would treat anything else. When it is rebellious, spank it—be severe with it, argue with it, prevent it from coming to play with you at all hours, and you will secure a good conscience; that is to say, a properly trained one. A spoiled one simply destroys all the pleasure in life. I think I have reduced mine to order. At least, I haven’t heard from it for some time. Perhaps I have killed it from over-severity. It’s wrong to kill a child, but, in spite of all I have said, a conscience differs from a child in many ways. Perhaps it’s best when it’s dead.”

I find this a great advice.

On a similar seriously-wtf-did-that-really-happen note, H.G.Wells once interviewed Stalin...

http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2014/04/h-g-wells-it-se...

Discussed last year on HN at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7616566.

It wasn't so surprising at that time. Stalin hadn't become 'Stalin' yet, and Wells was on the English left.

Speaking of interviews, there's an interesting event in Australia at the moment. A program on the ABC called Q&A invited a person suspected of terrorism onto the program. That in itself isn't fascinating (at least to me).

The Australian Prime Minister has threatened one of the countries News Sources (ie. the ABC who aired the show), this includes a change of leadership of ABC - and as the ABC is government funded, almost certainly funding cuts. The government has clearly threatened a media outlet - not for being prejudiced, but for allowing a view to be expressed.

It's fascinating people think an interview between Stalin and Wells is a W-T-F. What better way to understand differing views than to sit down and talk. I really don't understand the notion that suppressing an argument will make it go away. It reminds me of security through obfuscation.

> What better way to understand differing views than to sit down and talk. I really don't understand the notion that suppressing an argument will make it go away. It reminds me of security through obfuscation.

Not only suppressing your oposition is a wrong way to go if you care about "understanding differing views", it seems to me as a pretty lame way to do things even if you want to just get rid of it. A better way is to figure out a way to satisfy them somehow, so that they lose momentum.

Why not, instead of directly silencing your opponent, go to him and say: "We hear you, we understand you're angry, people have a right to hear it. you know what? How about we give you a late-night talk show. We can talk to the News Source, they'll open up a slot for you. You'll even get paid properly, so you can funnel this money into furthering your cause if you so choose."

And then you can just sit and watch how your oposition disappears into background.

Um .. everyone agrees that inviting him on the show was a mistake. The host of Q&A, the director of the ABC included. That was even without knowing he had made loathsome threats against women on twitter.

We're a fair way away from a simple airing of differing views here.

I think you may have misunderstood me --- I wasn't going 'wtf why is this abomination allowed', I was going 'wtf here are two huge figures from history who I would never have thought would meet each other, meeting each other'.

Mostly the latter rather than the former - Stalin had very much become 'Stalin' of show trials, forced mass collectivization, etc and these were known outside of the Soviet Union. It was just much more common for left-leaning Western intellectuals to rationalize, excuse or otherwise explain the nature of the regime away.

Like GB Shaw praising Russia to the skies. http://www.garethjones.org/soviet_articles/bernard_shaw.htm

On Stalin's show trials Shaw said reports had been exaggerated and he rejected suggestions that the accused had only pleaded guilty because they had been drugged or tortured.

Meanwhile as we know, at least 720,000 people were executed in the terror that followed and millions more died from hunger and ill-treatment in concentration camps.

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