"Shooting an Elephant"

“When the white man turns tyrant, it is his own freedom that he destroys.”- George Orwell,

Orwell as a colonial cop in Burma, 1922-1929

Please Note : The bolded portions of this blog are direct quotes from Orwell’s short story, Shooting an Elephant

“I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys. He becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the conventionalized figure of a sahib lord and master ridiculous position to save face .

George Orwell,1903-1950.

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“With one part of my mind I thought of the British Raj as an unbreakable tyranny, as something clamped down, in saecula saeculorum {in an age of ages : forever and ever}, 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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We can all be thankful Eric Blair, later George Orwell, went to Burma (now Myanmar) in1922 as a police constable for the British empire. His job was to keep the natives in line. When he saw what imperialism did to himself and the Burmese peoples his stay there was years seven years of torture and self loathing. He left and soon after became a writer, adopting his now world famous name. Later books sold in the millions world wide and he is still one of the most cited authors of our times. He had a gift for prophecy. What is “Orwellian” has become a benchmark in our societies. His book,1984, is the prototype for the dystopian societies we are determined to construct.

In his early years as writer he intentionally inserted himself into different situations often living in poverty and near destitution to authenticate his writing.

In the story he is forced to shoot an elephant for no good reason, other than there was a crowd of 2000 Burmese following him. To not shoot the elephant he would have appeared foolish and he had to maintain his image as the intrepid colonial cop. In the last line of the story, he writes. “I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool.”

It is not hard to conclude from the story that his seven years in Burma in a job he despised was instrumental in him choosing writing as his career. A year before his death in 1949 he published 1984, his most famous work. Shooting an elephant was a momentous turning point in how he saw the world .

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“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 flogged with bamboos — all these oppressed me with an intolerable sense of guilt.”

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Orwell going to Burma was similar to Mark Twain going to the Philippines in 1899. When Twain saw the genocide the USA committed there he was appalled, arriving back in the USA he immediately formed the Anti-Imperialist League with like minded souls.

The apocalypse of white racism

Delving into history it becomes as always the great whistleblower, telling our story which tyrants and despots must bury to maintain their tyrannies.

Both Orwell and Twain saw the Devil’s work first hand and raised the alarms bells as best they could but to no avail. They saw first hand imperialism is the tool of white racism the crude and brutal way of dealing with “the white man’s burden.”

History is littered with wars, genocides and massacres conducted by the white race. In earlier times these were more covert and news of them only arrived retroactively as historical markers, statistics, numbers , just more numbers from remote countries outside the bastions of the West.

Now the world is much more transparent and atrocities in Ukraine and Gaza cannot be hidden from public view and spectacle. The white supremacists must carry out their racial cleansing agenda and the public is required to stomach the lurid spectacle like Romans in the Colosseum calling for more violence, more blood.

The supremacists must now do in public what was semi-covert and did not have the immediacy and spectacle it does now. Their inhumanity is forced into the open as the apocalypse of white supremacy, here and now, in all its manifestations and crippled ideologies— namely imperialism neoliberalism, militarism.

God’s chosen people have become the Devil’s henchmen.

It was stunningly clear at the end of WW ll a new world order was emerging. In spite of its economic prowess and dominance US policy planners knew they had a big, big problem. Then, as now, the USA only speaks for four per cent of the world’s population. It was obvious that to have any degree of dominance it would have to maintain a monopolistic military and commercial presence. The tools of choice quickly became imperialism(mimicking that of the defunct British empire) militarism, economic extortion, regime change, claiming to be “exceptional”, as God’s chosen people.

The emergence of Eurasia was only a matter of time and they had to be well prepared to confront it on arrival. That emergence, along with the emergence of new the multipolar world is taking place as a direct challenge to America’s teetering hegemony. Instead of a soft landing and taking its place in the new world order it is the spiteful ogre lashing out at the world it can no longer control.

The spiteful ogre doing his rounds

Ukraine, Gaza and now Yemen are the apocalypse of white supremacy and imperialism collapsing hard and fast. Western imperialism is by definition self-defeating.

For too long Western imperialists have vainly attempted to kept the jungle out of the garden, but now their garden is badly weeded over and highly toxic. The collapse of their garden has been largely of their own making as history dutifully records.

The war mongering ideologues have to start seeing the world as it is and not through lens of their cut throat ideologies and delusional ambitions.

Orwell’s quotation at the top of the page has never had greater relevance than today. The white man has become his own worst enemy.