IMPERIALISM

since ancient times, and legends dreamed up by the British intelligentsia
have played a decisive role in the formation of the bureaucrat and the secret 
agent of the British services. 

Legends have always played a powerful role in the making of history. 
Man, who has not been granted the gift of undoing, who is always an un-
consulted heir of other men's deeds, and who is always burdened with a
responsibility that appears to be the consequence of an unending chain
of events rather than conscious acts, demands an explanation and
interpretation of the past in which the mysterious key to his future
destiny seems to be concealed.  Legends were the spiritual foundations of
every ancient city, empire, people, promising safe guidance through the
limitless spaces of the future. Without ever relating facts reliably,
yet always expressing their true significance, they offered a truth beyond
realities, a remembrance beyond memories.

Legendary explanations of history always served as belated corrections
of facts and real events, which were needed precisely because history itself
would hold man responsible for deeds he had not done and for consequences
that he had never foreseen. The truth of ancient legends, — what gives them
their fascinating actuality many centuries after the cities and empires and
peoples they served have crumbled to dust - was nothing but the form in
which past events were made to fit the human condition in general and
political aspirations in particular. Only in the frankly invented tale about
events did man consent to assume his responsibility for them, and to con-
sider past events his past. Legends made him master of what he had not
done, and capable of dealing with what he could not undo. In this sense,
legends are not only among the first memories of mankind, but actually the
true beginning of human history.

The flourishing of historical and political legends came to a rather abrupt end
with the birth of Christianity. Its interpretation of history,
from the days of Adam to the Last Judgment,
as one single road to redemption and salvation,
offered the most powerful and all-inclusive legendary explanation of
human destiny.
Only after the spiritual unity of Christian peoples gave way
to the plurality of nations,
when the road to salvation became an uncertain article of individual faith
rather than a universal theory applicable to all happenings,
did new kinds of historical explanations emerge. The nineteenth
century has offered us the curious spectacle of an almost simultaneous birth
of the most varying and contradictory ideologies, each of which claimed to
know the hidden truth about otherwise incomprehensible facts. Legends,
however, are not ideologies; they do not aim at universal explanation but
are always concerned with concrete facts. It seems rather significant that
the growth of national bodies was nowhere accompanied by a foundation
legend, and that a first unique attempt in modern times was made precisely
when the decline of the national body had become obvious and imperialism
seemed to take the place of old-fashioned nationalism.

The author of the imperialist legend is Rudyard Kipling, its topic is the
British Empire, its result the imperialist character (imperialism was the
only school of character in modern politics). And while the legend of the
British Empire has little to do with the realities of British imperialism, it
forced or deluded into its services the best sons of England. For legends at-
tract the very best in our times, just as ideologies attract the average,
and the whispered tales of gruesome secret powers behind the scenes
attract the very worst. No doubt, no political structure could have been
more evocative of legendary tales and justifications than the British Empire,
than the British people's drifting from the conscious founding of colonies
into ruling and dominating foreign peoples all over the world.
The foundation legend, as Kipling tells it, starts from the fundamental
reality of the people of the British Isles.*'' Surrounded by the sea, they need
and win the help of the three elements of Water, Wind, and Sun through the
invention of the Ship. The ship made the always dangerous alliance with the
elements possible and made the Englishman master of the world. "You'll
win the world," says Kipling, "without anyone caring how you did it: you'll
keep the world without anyone knowing how you did it: and you'll carry the
world on your backs without anyone seeing how you did it. But neither you
nor your sons will get anything out of that little job except Four Gifts one
for the Sea, one for the Wind, one for the Sun and one for the Ship that
carries you.
For, winning the world, and keeping the world, and carrying the world
on their backs on land, or on sea, or in the air your sons
will always have the Four Gifts. Long-headed and slow-spoken and heavy
damned heavy in the hand, will they be; and always a little bit to wind-
ward of every enemy that they may be a safeguard to all who pass on the
seas on their lawful occasions.
Hannah Arendt 
The Origins of Totalitarianism