Synthesis: Responding to a Quotation

The following prompt invites the student to enter this chapter’s Conversation.

In “Shooting an Elephant”, George Orwell observes that “when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys,” and that this man “wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.” Consider the implications of Orwell’s observations about human nature in political situations. Then write an essay in which you defend, challenge, or qualify the paradoxes that Orwell presents. To support your argument, refer to the selections in this chapter as well as to your knowledge of history and current events.

Consider this essay by Sarah Berlinger, an eleventh-grade student, and analyze the rhetorical strategies that she employs.

The Paradox of Power

Sarah Berlinger

The archetypal tyrant rules his empire from behind the closed walls of a sumptuous palace, meting out unilateral pronouncements with a heavy, jewel-encrusted hand. Yet beneath the gaudy façade, the expectations of his people and the reputation he must uphold shackle him to conformity. In his 1936 essay “Shooting an Elephant,” George Orwell articulates this paradox: “When the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys. . . . He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.” As a policeman in Burma, Orwell was the closest link that the townspeople had to an authority figure. As a result, they brought him under their will and expected him to ward off any dangers. An elephant once threatened the safety of the village. The townspeople wanted Orwell to kill the elephant—against his own wishes. In reality, the powerful and absolute possess the least amount of control, as they have no choice but to do everything possible to hold on to their dominion; ultimately, the authority lies in the calloused hands of the common man.

Imperialism counterintuitively empowers the oppressed; in the end, the people emerge victorious, while the imperialists remain trapped by their follies. The definition of tyranny can extend to any situation in which one government controls a separate people. In this sense, imperialism and tyranny are synonymous—yet by overpowering another group, tyrants unwittingly surrender their freedom, bound to their role as oppressor, much as their new subjects are bound to them. The most familiar example of the imperialistic paradox within our own history can be found in the American Revolution. The Stamp Act was the tipping point in the colonists’ tolerance of British rule. After this, organized resistance movements sprang up and gained both support and momentum. The subjugated retain the power of rebellion, masters of their own future, whereas those in charge have no choice but to fruitlessly follow the mission to which they have condemned themselves—or risk losing face. King George III had no option but to retaliate against his subjects, which served only to further fuel their fury. His reputation and the expectations of his subjects forced the king to reject the Olive Branch Petition, the colonists’ last attempt for a peaceful resolution. Too deeply involved, the king had to barrel blindly along his one-way path, dooming himself and his country to failure. Imperialism binds oppressors to precedent and conformity much more tightly than rulers can bind their subjects to them.

Similarly, when a government professes its complete superiority, the regime goads the rest of the world to prove it wrong; often, the world does just that. King Ferdinand of Spain sent a letter with the conquistadors on their voyages to the New World. The king demanded that the natives “acknowledge the Church as the ruler and superior of the whole world.” He warned that if they

do not do this and maliciously make delay in it, I certify to you that, with the help of God, we shall powerfully enter into your country, and shall make war against you in all ways and manners that we can, and shall subject you to the yoke and obedience of the Church and of their highnesses; we shall take you, and your wives, and your children, and shall make slaves of them.

The list of enumerable threats incited the natives to resist. Upon their arrival, however, the Spanish were forced to carry out what they had promised. Yet, as history can attest, the Spanish no longer control the Carribean, nor any other former colonies in Central and South America. Political might engenders greed and corruption, yet it also encourages the common man to rebel—when he does so, he dooms the tyrant’s rule: the determination of many usually overpowers the greed of a few.

In contrast to an imperialistic society, only in a governmental system where a Big Brother authority is absent does Orwell’s power paradox fade into the background: a government President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed in the Gettysburg Address as a “government of the people, by the people” that “shall not perish from this earth.” Henry David Thoreau, an American author and philosopher, states in “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience” that a government “is only the mode which the people have chosen to execute their will.” People, however, can corrupt and be corrupted. The government itself “is equally liable to be abused and perverted before the people can act through it.” Act they will, though, for as Thoreau observed during the Mexican-American War, “the people would not have consented to this measure.” For this reason, in order to hinder a power-hungry tyrant from taking over, it is advantageous to weaken a government’s authority from the beginning by placing the might in the hands of the many, instead of entrusting it to the whims of a few. In this way, one person cannot subsume all the power, tethering himself to his own precarious might. As Thoreau proclaims, “That government is best which governs least. . . . For government is an expedient by which men would fain succeed in letting one another alone; and. . . when it is most expedient, the governed are most let alone by it.” This form of authority ensures that Orwell’s political paradoxes—the inseparable relationship between power and weakness—cannot develop to stifle the advancement of individual societies.

However, despite all these preventative measures that attempt to thwart a political power imbalance, when one country declares war on another, Orwell’s paradox eventually surfaces. Countries enter war for a variety of reasons. Often, however, they do so out of self-interest: territorial expansion, monetary gain, or trade development and protection. In short, greed—however nobly disguised—usually prompts war. In much the same way that imperialism represses the independence of colonists, an entire country loses its freedom when it enters into combat. This is because in a war, countries become tyrants, concentrating power in the hands of the few—the government—and restricting it from the many—the world. Even though a country may dominate the globe, its strength impedes the freedom of its citizens. John Adams’s Alien and Sedition Acts, the 1917 Espionage Act, and the 1944 Supreme Court decision Korematsu v. United States all proclaimed that in times of war the government could limit the average citizen’s civil liberties, overriding existing democratic principles. Moreover, even though the country has dominance, and a person within it retains the ability to choose, the impetus of going to war binds many emotionally and physically. Tim O’Brien wrote about such a situation in The Things They Carried, a fictionalized account of his own experiences in Vietnam. In one scene, O’Brien receives a draft notice during the Vietnam War era; morally lost and confused, he runs away toward the Canadian border. O’Brien laments: “All those eyes on me—the town, the whole universe—and I couldn’t risk the embarrassment. . . . I couldn’t endure the mockery, or the disgrace, or the patriotic ridicule.” Because of this he “submitted. . . . [He] would go to the war—[he] would kill and maybe die—because [he] was embarrassed not to.” Even though he was less than twenty yards from freedom and the border, O’Brien could not leave because the force of war held him in place. War suppresses the freedom of the nation and its citizens, rather than expanding it.

Furthermore, governments and their people each wear Orwell’s “mask” during times of war. Armed conflict, both a by-product and a cause of Orwell’s paradox, causes a state to “[seek] to destroy its own culture.” This idea is mirrored in “The Destruction of Culture,” in War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, written by Chris Hedges, a contemporary American writer and war correspondent specializing in the socio-political environments of the United States and the Middle East. Hedges explains that “only when this destruction has been completed” can the government “begin to exterminate the culture of its opponents.” The regime destroys “authentic culture—that which allows us to question and examine ourselves and our society”—and replaces it “with a warped version of reality” where “[t]he enemy is dehumanized” and “[a]ll is dedicated to promoting and glorifying the myth, the nation, the cause.” These myths cause us to “doubt our own perceptions.” The “mask” then arises: people are transformed into what the government wants them to resemble and to think. Hedges points out the horrific results of this practice: “[w]hen the visible and tangible symbols of one’s past are destroyed or denied, the past can be recreated to fit the myth.” In wartime, all forms of government brainwash their respective citizens into believing the “mask” and “myth” that will further promote the war—and the unilateral desires of the country. Hedges describes how on a trip to a war museum in Vienna, he couldn’t find a single room dedicated to World War II. Asking around, he discovered that in Austria World War II might as well have not existed—the “mask” of society had wiped the war from the collective consciousness of the country’s citizenry. History itself has disparate interpretations based on which side of the war a country has pledged its allegiance. One Serbian textbook describes Gavrilo Princip, a Bosnian Serb who assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, as a “hero and a poet.” A Croatian textbook, however, castigates him as an “assassin trained and instructed by the Serbs to commit this act of terrorism,” whose actions sparked the onset of World War I. Similarly, Jamaica Kincaid reflects Hedges’s and Orwell’s ideas in “On Seeing England for the First Time,” an essay in which she examines her life growing up in colonized British Antigua. Kincaid comments that colonization, in some cases, is a result of war. As such, she had “long ago been conquered”—forced to believe in England’s superiority, and her inferiority, because she “was not from it.” Her whole country wore a “mask,” throwing away their culture, cloaking themselves in all things “Made in England.” These “masks” divide the world across wartime alliance lines, cementing the hatreds of opposing sides during times of peace and colonization. The antagonistic views that arise irrevocably alter the entire globe’s history, with no two groups agreeing on the same series of events. History, one of the only definite aspects of time on this planet, is rendered indefinable and inconstant because of this process, rewritten to fit the needs of each society. Whole communities wear a “mask,” wishing to conform to the “myths” of their country preceding, during, and following times of war. Orwell’s lens redefines power as a distortion of truth.

Excessive power consumption makes a person—or a government—considerably weakened and restricted; might and politics are extremely corrosive to the freedom and advancement of society. In times of war, all governments descend into tyranny and wear respective Orwellian “masks.” These render a united community shattered. This social phenomenon holds true in contemporary times. A vast number of Americans view the U.S. occupation of Iraq in a positive light, thinking themselves liberators of the Iraqi people and crusaders of democracy. However, the majority of Iraqis think of Americans not as liberators, but as oppressors. Similarly, Libyan dictator Muammar el Qaddafi imposed a brutal regime on his people for forty-two years. Eventually, his subjects revolted against him. They gained both national and international support: world leaders across the globe called for Qaddafi’s resignation. Nevertheless, the Libyan leader stubbornly and fruitlessly clung to his power, in the same restrictive way that his power clung to him, binding him to his demise. Our world is drunk on and dripping in power. Even in the alleged democratic nations, democracy has transformed into something ostensible: existing governmental regimes endanger and circumvent core principles of egalitarianism; economic collapse threatens the global markets; citizen unrest is both pervasive and destabilizing. The current fragile state of the world is a result of an unequal distribution of power and is a plea for greater transparency, truth, change, and equality in government and politics. Ironically, only the common man, whose vision remains unobstructed by tyrannical tendencies, can break this cycle of degeneracy and distorted reality that increasingly characterizes the world today.