When Empire Warps the Mind: From Orwell’s Burma to Gaza Today
November 5, 2025•215 words
Considered one of the most powerful essays ever written, George Orwell's essay "Shooting an Elephant" is timeless and reflects on the present genocidal imperialistic tendencies of the present era.
George Orwell rejects comfort of a straightforward story about a good man who is ensnared by circumstances beyond his control. Rather, he reveals how imperialism corrupts the colonizer from the inside out. Despite his awareness of the injustice and the humanity of the Burmese people, he is resentful of their everyday hostility and guilty of enforcing what he refers to as the "dirty work of Empire."
His admission of having violent fantasies, in which he sees himself driving "a bayonet into a Buddhist priest's guts," is the pinnacle of this tension. This is not a personal shortcoming, but rather a psychological intoxication created by empire itself. He says, "These kinds of feelings are the typical byproducts of imperialism."
Imperialistic systems imprison both the powerful and the weak in vicious cycles of resentment, hatred, and anger, forcing moral clarity impossible.
In Gaza today, occupation and U.S. support of hundreds of thousands of bombs and ammunition to help in the cause of Israeli genocide against the Palestinians of Gaza; that feeds violence for generations, exhibiting the same destructive dynamic that Orwell experienced, just on a more extreme scale.