The Communist Party is back!

EE94 · Mar 30, 2007

Zeke12 said:

You shot an elephant, eh. You might be interested, then, in something that happened to me the other day.

But at that moment I glanced round at the crowd that had followed me. It was an immense crowd, two thousand at the least and growing every minute. It blocked the road for a long distance on either side. I looked at the sea of yellow faces above the garish clothes-faces all happy and excited over this bit of fun, all certain that the elephant was going to be shot. They were watching me as they would watch a conjurer about to perform a trick. They did not like me, but with the magical rifle in my hands I was momentarily worth watching. And suddenly I realized that I should have to shoot the elephant after all. The people expected it of me and I had got to do it; I could feel their two thousand wills pressing me forward, irresistibly. And it was at this moment, as I stood there with the rifle in my hands, that I first grasped the hollowness, the futility of the white mans dominion in the East. Here was I, the white man with his gun, standing in front of the unarmed native crowdseemingly the leading actor of the piece; but in reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind. I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys. He becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the conventionalized figure of a sahib. For it is the condition of his rule that he shall spend his life in trying to impress the natives, and so in every crisis he has got to do what the natives expect of him. He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it. I had got to shoot the elephant. I had committed myself to doing it when I sent for the rifle. A sahib has got to act like a sahib; he has got to appear resolute, to know his own mind and do definite things. To come all that way, rifle in hand, with two thousand people marching at my heels, and then to trail feebly away, having done nothingno, that was impossible. The crowd would laugh at me. And my whole life, every white mans life in the East, was one long struggle not to be laughed at.
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Lord Jim??

zeke12 · Mar 30, 2007

Shhhhhh...

You were Shooting an Elephant, remember?

writing irish · Mar 30, 2007

I'm in a Burmese Daze.

Jones · Mar 30, 2007

I just wanted to say that I own this T-shirt, and I regret the night I wore it in Havana.

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The Communist Party is back!

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