Orwell's Elephant

Few twentieth-century authors handled allegory with the adeptness of George Orwell. Consequently, a number of his works are claimed by ideologues of every stripe, particularly Animal Farm and 1984.

America's divided political landscape owes much to Orwell's theories regarding the role government plays in our lives, but one certainty exists regarding his legacy. He was a fervent anti-imperialist, as his essay Shooting an Elephant makes quite clear.

The next time a Tea Party hack starts rapping to you about the Orwellian nature of the current phase of U.S. governance, remind him that the "war on terror" he staunchly supports is nothing more than neoimperialism wrapped in a rhetorical package.


Here is a critique of Orwell from my collection, Alt-Everything.


Orwell’s Elephant

In his essay “Shooting an Elephant” (1936), George Orwell creates a clever metaphor for the slow death of British imperialism. But he is also sounding an alarm regarding the threat of Empire building around the world, not just the abomination of his homeland’s brand of tyranny.

The parable of the elephant is a call to recognize the complex nature of human relations, as well as the differences that grace nations with variant cultures. Wishing to save face among a jeering, disrespectful mob, the young police officer hunts down and repeatedly fires at a slow-to-die, rebellious elephant, while the Burmese under his watch wait anxiously to move in and ravage its carcass. Orwell had not wanted to shoot the elephant, or even be at the scene, but he was, after all, a policeman. It was his duty to be there—in his own mind, and in the minds of Britain’s bitter Burmese subjects, who were laughing at his predicament.

The essay was more than a mere remembrance of something pitiful that happened to him as a young man. It was a shot across the bow of growing National Socialism in Germany.

In 1936, Hitler was busy mobilizing a new army to reclaim the losses of Versailles. A herd mentality, blooming from Hitler’s fiery nationalistic oratory and relentless propagandizing, allowed Nazi racism to grow unchecked amid tangible social and economic improvements in most Germans’ daily lives. In short order, rearmament created plentiful jobs. The awful poverty, unemployment and despair the Germans suffered after the Great War could be viewed as ancient history, and would not be allowed to reemerge if Germany reclaimed Empire. Orwell, like many others—inside and outside of Germany—knew the fallibility of Hitler’s vision. The larger portion of the German populace, however, did not see the elephant in the room, or if it did, the certainty of how to react to it remained unclear.

The animal did the heavy work—it had after all brought the nation out of economic misery by picking up the people with its trunk and settling them firmly on its back. So, among most people, it was respected. One could only hope that it remained docile.

In the parable, locals tell Orwell the elephant is in a particular neighborhood. Orwell is inclined to disbelieve them, until he sees a commotion and walks around a corner and sees a dead man. “The people said that the elephant had come suddenly upon him round the corner of the hut, caught him with his trunk, put his foot on his back and ground him into the earth.” This time the elephant had not put a man upon his back to support him amid dire poverty. Quite the opposite—it crushed the man. Such was, in 1936, Hitler’s plan for the Jews and the sovereign nations bordering Germany.

Germans, and much of the world, did not want to believe that Hitler, like the elephant in Orwell’s parable, “had gone ‘must,’” that is insane, while in the throes of the brand of violence most often associated with rape and murder.

When Orwell finally catches up with the elephant, it is quietly feeding in an opening of paddy fields near a well traveled road. “He was tearing up bunches of grass, beating them against his knees to clean them and stuffing them into his mouth,” writes Orwell. The elephant appeared serene—harmless. Could it have really killed a poor, innocent man in a moment of madness?

Orwell had seen his country's tyranny. He was disturbed by his complicity in its madness as a young police officer in Burma, admitting he was uneducated and naïve. Like an innocent traveler who has stumbled into a bad neighborhood in any large city, he regretted being there. He had glimpsed the “moment that when the white man turns tyrant… it is his own freedom that he destroys.” He glimpsed it again in the rising specter of Nazism.


TS