History

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.

By Jean-Paul Sartre

"Nothing of Importance This Day"- Dairy of King George III on July 4th 1776

America's independence was actually declared by the Continental Congress on July 2, 1776. However, Thomas Jefferson's document The Declaration of Independence was adopted on the July 4. In otherwords, this was a case where a document has overshadowed an actual event. By publishing those words, our founding fathers had effectively signed their own death warrants. Jefferson wrote that he intended the document to be a harmonize of the sentiments of the day. The Declaration was to be "an expression of the American mind," which was to placed "before mankind the common sense of the subject, in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent." Our founding fathers showed the sort of courage which bears repeating 228 years later. On the eve of Independence Day, John Adams wrote to his wife, "I am well aware of the toil, and blood, and treasure, that it will cost us to maintain this declaration, and support and defend these states. Yet, through all the gloom, I can see the rays of light and glory; I can see that the end is more than worth all the means, and that posterity will triumph." Upon signing the document, John Hancock joked, "There! His Majesty can now read my name without glasses. And he can double the reward on my head!" After signing the document, Ben Franklin reminded his friends, "We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately."The abolitionist Fredick Douglass called the declaration our "saving principles". He reminds us today "to be true to them on all occasions, in all places, against all foes, and at whatever cost." Lincoln's words might chime our mystic chords of memory: