Go Commie Pinkoes!

The following are a rewarding meander through the beautiful and labrynthine garden that is George Orwell's mind as reflected in the fantastic novel Burmese Days, if you have the stamina to read to the end. These are my favourite quotes from the novel, a novel which is arguably finer than 1984, and one which I recommend to everyone. When you read them, see if any of the quotes remind you of another certain conflict in which the U.S. (everyone's favourite empire) is currently embroiled....

p. 26
“Butler!” yelled Ellis, and as the butler appeared, “go and wake that bloody chokra up!”
“Yes, master.”
“And butler!”
“Yes, master?”
“How much ice have we got left?”
“’Bout twenty pounds, master. Will only last to-day, I think. I find it very difficult to keep ice cool now.”
“Don’t talk like that, damn you—‘I find it very difficult!’ Have you swallowed a dictionary? ‘Please, master, can’t keeping ice cool’—that’s how you ought to talk. We shall have to sack this fellow if he gets to talk English too well. I can’t stick servants who talk English. D’you hear, butler?”
“Yes, master,” said the butler, and retired.

p. 29
“Really I think the laziness of these servants is getting too shocking,” she sighed. “Don’t you agree, Mr. Macgregor? We seem to have no authority over the natives nowadays, with all these dreadful Reforms, and the insolence they learn from the newspapers. In some ways they are getting almost as bad as the lower classes at home.”

- Bolshie

p. 30
Mr. Macgregor stiffened at the word ‘nigger,’ which is discountenanced in India. He had no prejudice against Orientals; indeed, he was deeply fond of them. Provided they were given no freedom he thought them the most charming people alive. It always pained him to see them wantonly insulted.

p. 31
“It’s all very well, but I stick to what I said. No natives in this Club! It’s by constantly giving way over small things like that that we’ve ruined the Empire. This country’s only rotten with sedition because we’ve been too soft with them. The only possible policy is too treat ‘em like the dirt they are....”

p. 32
“Our burra sahib at Mandalay always said,” put in Mrs. Lackersteen, “that in the end we shall simply leave India. Young men will not come out here any longer to work all their lives for insults and ingratitude. We shall just go. When the natives come to us begging us to stay, we shall say, ‘No, you have had your chance, you wouldn’t take it. Very well, we shall leave you to govern yourselves.’ And then, what a lesson that will teach them!”

p. 33
Oh, what a place, what people! What a civilisation is this of ours—this godless civilisation founded on whisky, Blackwood’s and all the ‘Bonzo’ pictures! God have mercy on us, for all of us are part of it.

p. 39
“...Hanging together, we call it. It’s a political necessity. Of course drink is what keeps the machine going. We should all go mad and kill one another if it weren’t for that. There’s a subject for one of your uplift essayists, doctor. Booze as the cement of empire.”
* * *
“But my dear friend, what lie are you living?”
“Why, of course, the lie that we’re here to uplift our poor black brothers instead of to rob them.”

p. 40
“Dr. Veraswami had a passionate admiration for the English, which a thousand snubs from Englishmen had not shaken. He would maintain with positive eagerness that he, as an Indian, belonged to an inferior and degenerate race.”
* * *
“My dear doctor,” said Flory, “how can you make out that we are in this country for any purpose except to steal? It’s so simple. The official holds the Burman down while the business man goes through his pockets. Do you suppose any firm, for instance, could get its timber contracts if the country weren’t in the hands of the British? Or the other timber firms, or the oil companies, or the miners and planters and traders? How could the Rice Ring go on skinning the unfortunate peasant if it hadn’t the Government behind it? The British Empire is simply a device for giving trade monopolies to the English—or rather to gangs of Jews and Scotchmen.”

p. 68
For as his brain developed—you cannot stop your brain developing, and it is one of the tragedies of the half-educated that they develop late, when they are already committed to some wrong way of life—he had grasped the truth about the English and their Empire.
* * *
The real work of administration is done mainly by native subordinates; and the real backbone of the despotism is not the officials but the Army. Given the Army, the officials and the business men can rub along safely enough even if they are fools. And most of them are fools. A dull, decent people, cherishing and fortifying their dullness behind a quarter of a million bayonets. (end p. 69)

p. 70
Time passed, and each year Flory found himself less at home in the world of the sahibs, more liable to get into trouble when he talked seriously on any subject whatever. So he had learned to live inwardly, secretly, in books and secret thoughts that could not be uttered. Even his talks with the doctor were a kind of talking to himself; for the doctor, good man, understood little of what was said to him. But it is a corrupting thing to live one’s real life in secret. One should live with the stream of life, not against it.

p. 73
It is not the less bitter because it is perhaps one’s own fault, to see oneself drifting, rotting, in dishonour and horrible futility, and all the while knowing that somewhere within one there is the possibility of a decent human being.

p. 85
When one does get any credit in this life, it is usually for something that one has not done.

p. 117
When you have existed to the brink of middle age in bitter loneliness, among people to whom your true opinion on every subject on earth is blasphemy, the need to talk is the greatest of all needs.

Like all men who have lived much alone, he adjusted himself better to ideas than to people.

p. 119
“Take the world as a whole, it’s an eccentricity to be white.”

p. 135
The point was, was the doctor the kind of man who would hold seditious opinions? In India you are not judged for what you do, but for what you are.

p. 137
Policemen and magistrates are natural enemies.”

p. 139
“Good gracious, woman, what idea have you got hold of now? You do not suppose that I am rebelling against the Government? I—a Government servant of thirty years’ standing! Good heavens, no! I said that I had started the rebellion, not that I was taking part in it. It is these fools of villagers who are going to risk their skins, not I. No one dreams that I have anything to do with it, or ever will, except Ba Sein and one or two others.”

p. 147
“Our motto, you know is, ‘In India, do as the English do.’”

p. 151
Her presence had changed the whole orbit of his mind.

p. 167
She was conscious of an extraordinary desire to fling her arms round Flory’s neck and kiss him; and in some way it was the killing of the pigeon that made her feel this.

p. 176
It is strange how the drivelling habits of conversation will persist into almost all moments.

p. 179
Blessed are they who are stricken only with classifiable diseases!

p. 183
One cannot propose marriage immediately after an earthquake.

p. 201
It is always so with titled people, they are either adored or hated. If they accept one it is charming simplicity, if they ignore one is it loathsome snobbishness; there are no half-measures.

p. 203
Of course, like all sons of rich families, he thought poverty disgusting and that poor people are poor because they prefer disgusting habits.

p. 220
It is dreadful when people will not even have the decency to quarrel.

p. 227
Envy is a horrible thing. It is unlike all other kinds of suffering in that there is no disguising it, no elevating it into tragedy. It is more than merely painful, it is disgusting.

p. 238
Eight hundred people, possibly, are murdered every year in Burma; they matter nothing; but the murder of a white man is a monstrosity, a sacrilege.

p. 240
“Well, for God’s sake get them to talk this time. Never mind the bloody law. Whack it out of them. Torture them—anything. If you want to bribe any witnesses, I’m good for a couple of hundred chips.”
Westfield sighed. “Can’t do that sort of thing, I’m afraid. Wish we could. My chap’s know how to put the screw on a witness if you gave ‘em the word. Tie ‘em down on an ant-hill. Red peppers. But that won’t do nowadays. Got to keep our own bloody silly laws.”

p. 241
“...The good old Germans! They knew how to treat the niggers. Reprisals! Rhinoceros hide whips! Raid their villages, kill their cattle, burn their crops, decimate them, blow them from the guns.”

p. 249
[Flory] always found it difficult to believe that Orientals could be really dangerous.

p. 260
There is seldom any talk of rebellion after the rains have started—the Burmans are too busy ploughing, and in any case the waterlogged fields are impassable for large bodies of men. (9/11-->August is not the time to introduce new products)
* * *
There is a humility about genuine love that is rather horrible in some ways.