- Feb 2017
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orwell.ru orwell.ru
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No one had the guts to raise a riot
This line stands out to me because it reveals that the narrator doesn't see the colonial occupation of Burma as something that physically threatens the safety of Burmese dissenters. He thinks that the citizens are weak because they don't fight back. He doesn't consider that a riot would be quickly dispatched by the European occupying force.
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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 skin color of the Burmese is coupled with the image of sneering faces. These Burmese "hoot." Orwell's choice of verbs here indirectly compares the occupied people with unruly bar patrons, or rowdy sports fans.
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All this was perplexing and upsetting.
Perplexing because he doesn't see his privilege or power as threatening. He believes the propaganda he's been sold and thinks of himself as a savior.
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I had already made up my mind that imperialism was an evil thing
Yet he goes to work every day as an imperialist.
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all these oppressed me with an intolerable sense of guilt.
Doesn't see himself as complicit, or as the oppressor.
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still less did I know that it is a great deal better than the younger empires that are going to supplant it.
What evil empire will supplant the one he belongs to? Is it evil because it denies him membership, or because the propaganda of the new empire doesn't grant him the moral authority to police occupied people?
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the real motives for which despotic governments act
This ought to be good.
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.44 Winchester and much too small to kill an elephant, but I thought the noise might be useful in terrorem.
The uneducated soldier makes a highly educated decision about the size of the gun he needs to incite terror.
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I could feel their two thousand wills pressing me forward, irresistibly. 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.
His inability to empathize has probably skewed his "radar" for what their wills want him to do.
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he shall spend his life in trying to impress the ‘natives’
Impress, not understand. Not work with.
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Besides, legally I had done the right thing, for a mad elephant has to be killed, like a mad dog, if its owner fails to control it.
The three perspectives he considers are:
- legal
- the elder's
- his peers Natural law doesn't enter in. Nor does the idea that the elephant could be left alone to graze and breed.
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I was very glad that the coolie had been killed; it put me legally in the right and it gave me a sufficient pretext for shooting the elephant.
Here is the operative sentence.
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