Note: This is the only piece of writing that I can think of that has brought tears to my eyes in the past 8 years.
By George Orwell
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.
One day something happened which in a
roundabout way was enlightening. It was a tiny incident in itself, but
it gave me a better glimpse than I had had before of the real nature of
imperialism – the real motives for which despotic governments act.
