Orwell and the Totalitarian Mind - Essay Example

Orwell and the Totalitarian Mind George Orwell’s second novel, Burmese Days, develops themes to which he will return in later novels. Chief among them is his relentless exploration of totalitarian systems and the people who succeed best in them. Though Burmese Days is Orwell’s depiction of colonialism in the days of the British Raj, it explores the ways in which state agencies established to maintain power inevitably corrupt those who run them, the powerful, and those who are ruled by them, the weak. By doing so, such regimes foster totalitarianism. Protagonist John Flory, the manager of a lumber company in Burma, is stationed along with a dozen or so British citizens in Kyauktada, a small village which one of the British refers to as “a filthy hole.”(184) The social center for these minor government officials and company managers stationed in the “bloody, bloody hole” (18) is the Club whose policy is Whites Only, for it is whites who administer government in this outpost of imperialistic British rule of the subcontinent. The amount of liquor consumed in the Club by its male members, most of them infantile and cynical, is staggering. When the British Commissioner suggests the Club elect one non-white to membership, most of the Englishmen are enraged. But the news has filtered into the native community where two men, U Po Kyin and Dr. Veraswami, wish to be honored by joining. U Po Kyin is a Subdivisional Magistrate of Kyauktada who prospers by graft and plotting, while the doctor respects everything British; his ardor for Englishmen impels him to call them “torchbearers upon the path of progress.”(42) But the grossly obese U Po Kyin sees the doctor as an enemy and methodically destroys his reputation. Flory is the doctor’s friend and is criticized for being so by racist members of the Club. He is also, consequently, a ‘mark’ for U Po Kyin and, like the doctor, is ultimately so disgraced (as well as disconsolate over Elizabeth Lackertseen’s rejection) that he commits suicide. Of course, this sketch does no justice to Orwell’s nuances of human behavior, but it at least reveals the levels of corruption and racism among the novel’s several factions. Colonial Imperialists and Imperial Natives “Absolute power corrupts, but absolute powerlessness corrupts absolutely.” This observation, made by once Presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson, encapsulates what most often occurs when Third World countries are conquered and then ruled by more ‘advanced’ countries. Ugandan President and criminal, Idi Amin, for example, has been thought by many to be merely aping, though perhaps without their subtlety, what he’d learned from the British during their occupation of his country. This is apparent in Orwell’s depiction of the British in Kyauktada as well as U Po Kyin and even the gentle and British-loving doctor. Among the members of the Club, it is Ellis who represents the most virulent and corrupting form of racism but it is accepted by the others: “And then the conversation veered back to the old . . . subject – the insolence of the natives, . . . the dear dead days when the British Raj was the British Raj and please give the bearer fifteen lashes.” (34) This sort of racism, of corruption, is obvious in the novel, as is the corruption of U Po Kyin, who insists to his wife, “The blacker I can paint him [the doctor], the more glorious my own conduct will appear.”(140) In fact, U Po Kyin is the Idi Amin of Kyauktada. However, the corruption that is not so obvious (because it is, in a sense, more insidious and consequently sadder) is Dr. Veraswami’s. His opinion of the British - “. . . how noble a type is the English gentleman!”(38) - has blinded him to their disrespect of his very existence. Flory explains to him just how virulent the club members’ attitudes are but the doctor will not believe it or, at least, is more comfortable denying it. The enemy he recognizes and fears, justifiably, is another “nigger” like himself – U Po Kyin. But even Elizabeth is corrupted, though her corruption began in childhood in Britain. The thrill she experiences during the hunt, especially in that emblematic moment when Flory kills the ‘imperial pigeon,’ reveals not so much an appreciation of this country as it does her disregard or willful ignorance of it.(165) Because Orwell grew up in Burma and was briefly a member of its police force, a case may be made that he thought the foreignness of Burma itself, the heat and thick jungles and endless rain in monsoon seasons, corrupted those sent to administer the ‘colony.’ This is hinted in Flory’s feelings when his return to England is interrupted and he must return to Rangoon: “It was one of those moments when one becomes conscious of a . . deterioration in one’s life. . . This country which he hated was now . . . his home.”(71) He accepts his displacement but clearly despises the place. Orwell makes clear that corruption is the inevitable outcome of imperial subjugation, and that power as administered by Kyauktada’s rulers and imitation by its native subalterns brings them all closer to a legacy of the 20th century: Totalitarianism. Hitler and Stalin: A Result of Imperialism? The conditions in Russia that resulted in Communism and eventually Stalin and those in Germany that spawned the rise of National Socialism and Hitler were unique to those countries and cultures. That those two totalitarian regimes were a consequence of British – and by that time American – imperialism strikes me as dubious. Neither country was land-locked but had access to maritime adventurism if they wished, though Germany’s access to maritime expansion was obviously limited to the Baltic. Germany had been beggared by the Versailles Treaty at the end of WWI while the Russian Revolution had been predicated by Lenin and others on a European Communist Revolution that never occurred, leaving Communist Russia isolated. Both Hitler and Stalin developed their brands of totalitarianism through their skillful manipulation of paranoia rather than as a reaction to Imperialism. The one country whose Totalitarianism – and militarism - was influenced by Imperialism was Japan, for the United States had put an embargo on oil from southeast Asia and, some have insisted, forced Japan to respond as it did. However, Orwell’s novel suggests how Imperialism/Colonialism fosters the emergence of Totalitarian regimes by depicting the corruption of occupying forces in a country and the subsequent assumption by the occupied that corruption is the way successful countries become successful. As he did in most of his writing, Orwell elucidates a crucial foundation of totalitarian systems: the denial of individual validity and the assumption that governing is to perpetuate the State rather than ennoble and free the individual. Works Cited All quotes are from: Orwell, George. Burmese Days. Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc. New York: 1950. Read More