upon the will of prostrate Egos...

I stumbled across an essay this morning by George Orwell. I'm still trying to process the essay, yet at the same time I don't want to lose this gem. So I'm posting it here in full. I should add, however, that, since there's no need to let this long beautiful essay dominate the page, please click the read more link at the end of this excerpt to read the entire essay.

Shooting an Elephant

In Moulmein, in lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people—the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me. I was sub-divisional police officer of the town, and in an aimless, petty kind of way anti-European feeling was very bitter. No one had the guts to raise a riot, but if a European woman went through the bazaars alone somebody would probably spit betel juice over her dress. As a police officer I was an obvious target and was baited whenever it seemed safe to do so. When a nimble Burman tripped me up on the football field and the referee (another Burman) looked the other way, the crowd yelled with hideous laughter. This happened more than once. In the end the sneering yellow faces of young men that met me everywhere, the insults hooted after me when I was at a safe distance, got badly on my nerves. The young Buddhist priests were the worst of all. There were several thousands of them in the town and none of them seemed to have anything to do except stand on street corners and jeer at Europeans.

All this was perplexing and upsetting. For at that time I had already made up my mind that imperialism was an evil thing and the sooner I chucked up my job and got out of it the better. Theoretically—and secretly, of course—I was all for the Burmese and all against their oppressors, the British. As for the job I was doing, I hated it more bitterly than I can perhaps make clear. In a job like that you see the dirty work of Empire at close quarters. The wretched prisoners huddling in the stinking cages of the lock-ups, the grey, cowed faces of the long-term convicts, the scarred buttocks of the men who had been Bogged with bamboos—all these oppressed me with an intolerable sense of guilt. But I could get nothing into perspective. I was young and ill-educated and I had had to think out my problems in the utter silence that is imposed on every Englishman in the East. I did not even know that the British Empire is dying, still less did I know that it is a great deal better than the younger empires that are going to supplant it. All I knew was that I was stuck between my hatred of the empire I served and my rage against the evil-spirited little beasts who tried to make my job impossible. With one part of my mind I thought of the British Raj as an unbreakable tyranny, as something clamped down, IN SAECULA SAECULORUM, upon the will of prostrate peoples; with another part I thought that the greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest’s guts. Feelings like these are the normal by-products of imperialism; ask any Anglo-Indian official, if you can catch him off duty.

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A mob [Entitlement Slaves] has gathered. In full possession of its spite and ire for the behemoth [the Constitution] determined to tear down what these squatters have built up, the mob looks to the Imperial [Liberalism], his long carbine over one shoulder, five fat slugs in his shirt pocket-- not unlike five smooth stones and a sling --to bring down this "destructive" giant and replace it with the giant facade of greater personal liberty.

The Imperial doesn't have to shoot the elephant but his growing boot of colonial serfdom has been so long on Liberty's throat it seems best to put the beast-- our Constitution --out of its misery. The mob behind him-- entitlement slaves --both hating the hand that supports them and loving him for the boons he grants them, salivate at the prospect of stripping the carcass. He doesn't have to shoot the elephant but he's oppressed the unwashed for so long he both sees himself as their protector and beneficent lord. He knows better than the pachyderm what nature has to say about freedom, and balance. And in the end botches the killing, forcing it to suffer a prolonged and painful death.


I find the parallels here to be curious: The Mob, ignorant and both distrustful and dependent upon the Imperial. The Elephant struggling to live the life it was meant to live in the face of the Imperial who sees himself as superior and justified in killing the law the elephant represents, and the Mob who wants what it wants, the Elephant be damned. I don't think the Imperial understands what he's done. And the Mob can't think beyond the meat they've hacked from freedom's corpse.

George Orwell later wrote something that perfectly describes this scenario:

War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Strength is Ignorance.