Doliner's essay, "Orwell's Epiphany," brings to light the end game of the current tyrants and imperialists in power in America and England, and the West. Near the end Doliner says: "As long as megalomaniacal capitalists -- that is, those whose whole energy is dedicated to expansion -- continue to control policy, the world will edge towards world war and ecological catastrophe." Just replace 'capitalists' with 'fascists' and that sentence becomes even better. On the whole, Doliner is on point, aside from his characterization of capitalism - the real term, when the corporate class merge with the political class, is fascism, and should be stated so. Other than that, Doliner's piece is well worth reading. There a lot of one-liners throughout the piece that perhaps say more about the current situation than whole paragraphs. Ex: "With all the crooks who can't leave, America is looking more like a prison than a free country." Ex #2: "The endless expansion of power megalomania that goes along with the endless expansion of wealth megalomania leaves force, like wealth with no purpose other than to grow, so such force becomes purely destructive. "
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 man's dominion in the East. Here was I, the white man with his gun, standing in front of the unarmed native crowd -- seemingly 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.
—George Orwell in Shooting an Elephant
(Swans - November 2, 2009) George Orwell, as a policeman in Burma in 1924, found that he was forced to shoot an elephant that had earlier run amok but, by the time he arrived, had already calmed down and was harmless. It was the expectations of the huge crowd (he estimated it at at least 2000 people) that forced him to shoot the elephant. "A sahib has got to act like a sahib," he comments. That he was forced to do what he did not want to do, that he had become a "puppet" the crowd manipulated, was, to Orwell, what marked imperialism as absurd and futile. He concludes, "I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool." Today no American would think of doing in Iraq what Orwell did in Burma -- saunter out in front of a large crowd armed only with an old gun and shoot an elephant essential to somebody's life. Someone would be sure to pop him off. Americans cannot administer the nether regions the way the British did. They have to ride around in heavily armed vehicles when they go on patrol.
