Shooting an Elephant (1936)
orwellfoundation.com
orwellfoundation.com
> And it was at this moment, as I stood there with the rifle in my hands, that I first grasped the hollowness, the futility of the white man’s dominion in the East. Here was I, the white man with his gun, standing in front of the unarmed native crowd – seemingly the leading actor of the piece; but in reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind. I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys.
Side note: I didn't know about Elephants and "Musth", so I looked it up:
Musth or must (/ˈmʌst/; Urdu: مست, from Persian, lit. 'intoxicated') is a periodic condition in bull (male) elephants characterized by highly aggressive behavior and accompanied by a large rise in reproductive hormones.
Speaking of Elephants, I recommend a very interesting story about an Elephant named Jacopo in Venezia, Italy, ~200 years ago [0]. In that case, it was shot with a cannon, given that Venetians weren't exactly used to deal with Elephants in the city.
[0]: https://www.dailyartmagazine.com/curious-stories-of-venice/
Laughter is a whip that keeps us in line. It's horrible to be laughed at against your will. Either you suppress unwelcome laughter or you start controlling it.
For example, from Robinson Crusoe:
"He told me it was men of desperate fortunes on one hand, or of aspiring, superior fortunes on the other, who went abroad upon adventures, to rise by enterprise, and make themselves famous in undertakings of a nature out of the common road; that these things were all either too far above me or too far below me; that mine was the middle state, or what might be called the upper station of low life, which he had found, by long experience, was the best state in the world, the most suited to human happiness, not exposed to the miseries and hardships, the labour and sufferings of the mechanic part of mankind, and not embarrassed with the pride, luxury, ambition, and envy of the upper part of mankind."
Orwell's style is much more well-ordered and understandable, IMO. Maybe the GP is referring to something like that?
[1] https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/521/pg521-images.html
I read Down and Out my first year of college. What stuck with me was his idea that it is very expensive to be poor.
I read Shooting an Elephant for an English class. It's hard not to think of the pointlessness of the Great Game when thinking about Afghanistan.
Politics and the English Language, Notes on Nationalism, ...
Orwell was a great writer. Hitchens wanted to be Orwell. Hitchens was good but, nope, not Orwell. Hitchens was unbelievably wrongly wrong about Iraq and would never admit it. He should have re-read Shooting an Elephant very slowly, very carefully, with a long suffering English lecturer patiently getting its point across. It'd help if he'd actually lived there instead of just wearing a Kurdish pin.
This absolutely disintegrated the UK left, especially the more "modern liberal" end, because they'd got on board the idea of gunpoint liberation of post-colonial countries run by strongmen and/or Islamists. When this turned out to be a disaster, there was nowhere ideologically to go that didn't involve admitting error.
Like Orwell, they came to Iraq with no choice other than to shoot the elephant.
It is not about what is right or wrong, it is what the majority want. Right now in the USA we have cancel culture using social media to get people fired from their jobs for mistakes they make. Sort of like the natives that wanted the elephant killed.
The majority rule in politics in the USA and determine who gets elected. The average person has an IQ of 100, and half are dumber than that. It is easier to fool them than it is to convince them that they have been fooled.
Life is suffering according to Buddhism, we all suffer in some way shape or form.
The narrator strikes me as someone who has confidence issues and then rationalizes it by blaming it on colonialism or social pressure or whatever. He made the decision to kill a living thing, particularly in a poor way that caused the animal to suffer. If he made a mistake the honorable way to handle it is to admit it and take complete responsibility, not come up with excuses that retroactively frame it as some sort of philosophical dilemma.
In India they used elephants as bulldozers and tanks. Really abuse the elephants. It is a part of their culture.
Events out of their control let an elephant get sick and go on a rampage, trample some natives, and be shot to death as a result. Everyone was a little bit wrong and culture had a little bit to do with it.
We have the same problem with racism in the USA, it was a part of US culture to use black people as slaves, something that is wrong now and considered evil. Police officers killing black men lead to black lives matter and riots in cities. This is wrong on so many levels, and a BLM org is needed to make sure it stops happening. Meanwhile the average white person isn't racist the KKK and Nazi white people are racist and evil. The problem is that many white people lack empathy for the killed black men, and just accept it as collateral damage.
It is a teaching concept in that story, as well as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, To Kill A Mockingbird, 1984, etc. that get banned in schools because they offend people. The whole concept of the book is to offend so people will learn a lesion in why racism and tyranny are evil and we should not allow them to happen.