The Politics of George Orwell

The Politics of George Orwell ICarlyle King When George Orwell left Eton he was so heartily sick of being a poor boy among rich boys that instead of proceeding to the university he immediately went into the ranks of the British governing class. He joined the Indian Imperial Police and spent five years, from 1922 to 1927, carrying the white man's burden in Burma and accumulating thereby an intolerable weight of guilt that took him many years to expiate. He left Burma with a very bad conscience. For five years he had been part of an evil system, an oppressive and hypocritical racket, and he was haunted by the faces of the people whom he had treated as if they were SUb-human: Innumerable remembered faces-faces of prisoners in the dock, of men waiting in the condemned cells, of subordinates I had bullied and aged peasants I had snubbed, of servants and coolies I had hit with my fist in moments of rage ... -haunted me intolerably.1 Imperialism always means treating people in this way, he insists in the essay "Marrakech"; alI colonial empires are founded on the assumption that people with brown faces are not human beings in the same sense as Europeans are human beings: their flesh is different, they do not have human feelings, their poverty is not noticeable, they probably don't have names. This is the unacknowledged premise of the white man's dealings with the peoples of Africa and Asia. Orwell repudiated this assumption. Imperialism, Orwell insists, not only makes a man a tyrant, it makes him a liar. It makes him incapable of honest thinking, it stifles the free play of mind, it forces him to play a crooked part so constantly that in the end he becomes crooked. In playing the despot the white man destroys his own freedom. He must spend his life in trying to impress the "natives"; in so doing he surrenders his own selfhood and becomes a 79 80 CARLYLE KING dummy instead of a man. "He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it." In his first book, Burmese Days, Orwell made use of his experiences in Burma and projected his own feelings through his character Flory, an unattractive, insecure, lonely man who loathes the life he is compelled to lead. F10ry despises himself, because he has grasped the truth about the English and their Empire: The Indian Empire is a despotism- benevolent no doubt, but still a despot· ism with theft as its final object. ... It is a stifling, stultifying world in which to live. It is a world in which every word and every thought is censored. In England it is hard even to imagine such an atmosphere. Everyone is free in England; we sell our souls in public and buy them back in private, among our friends. But even friend~ ship can hardly exist when every white man is a cog in the wheels of despotism . Free speech is unthinkable. All other kinds of freedom are permitted. You are free to be a drunkard, an idler, a coward, a backbiter, a fornicator; but you are not free to think for yourself. Your opinion on every subject of any conceivable importance is dictated for you by the pukka sahibs' code.2 Here in embryo are the main themes which run through all of Orwell's books: his hatred of tyranny, snobbery, and class; his love of democratic freedom. In his school days he had suffered the humiliations of poverty and the bullying of classmates and teachers; in his young adulthood he had humiliated and bullied brown-faced adults. For the rest of his life he worked for a society in which there should be neither masters nor slaves. Like a nagging conscience, he never stopped reminding Iiberalminded Englishmen, and especially the socialist intelligentsia, that they were receivers of stolen goods. Their standard of living, the standard of living of all Englishmen, was possible only by the organized robbery carried on in the colonial empire. They were standing on the backs of Asiatic coolies, and for all their fine words about "self-determination" and "aid to backward peoples" they had, he challenged...