REVIEW ARTICLE 87 under threat from Hitler's fascist armies. On this occasion, he expressed the view: 'When small nations are independent they are unable to protect themselves; when they are not independent they are invariably misgoverned'; on another occasion, Orwell dismissed as absurd the nationalist demands for freedom on the argument that 'In a world of power politics and intolerant nationalism . . . there are only five or six countries capable of holding their own. . . .' (Britain, of course, being one of the privileged five or six) and 'backward agricultural countries like India and the African colonies can no more be independent than a cat or a dog.* Alok Rai attributes to Orwell's colonial experience as a member of the Imperial Police in Burma (1922-27) a pivotal role in his political and creative development. The new reading of Orwell's works based on his colonial experience—Burmese Days, (1934), A Hanging (1931) and Shooting of an Elephant (1936)—draws on studies of colonial writings such as Edward Said's Orientalism. While in Burmese Days Alok Rai identifies certain new, discontinuous elements—the protagonist Flory's suicide and some aspects in the characterisation of Flory's Burmese mistress Ma Hia May which open up new areas of investigation—he situates the novel largely in the colonial tradition of writing. Orwell's internal division on the issue of colonialism surfaces most vividly in the first person narrative of Shooting of an Elephant where he admits: With one part of my mind I thought of the British Raj as an unbreakable tyranny, as something clamped down, in saecula saeculorum, upon the will of prostrate peoples; with another part I thought that the greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest's guts. Ironically, Orwell used the fact of his first-hand colonial experience to attack the left for its inadequate commitment to anti-imperialism with an undisguised sense of superiority. Orwell was avowedly a kind of socialist. Historical events and experiences—from depression-hit England, through the Spanish Civil War, Fascism and the Second World War to the later Cold War period—found their expression in changing political attitudes. Analogous to his attitudes on the questions of class and anti-imperialism, two elements emerge as significant in defining his kind of socialism: aesthetic disgust as one of the sources from which he derived his political impulse, and his sense of identification with 'victims' or with 'victimhood'. Orwell is disgusted by the manifest ugliness of the bourgeois world and imperialist practice in the colonies, without being so moved by or even perceptive of the economic relations of production and distribution which take this ugly outer form. It is almost as if Orwell would find capitalism and imperialism more acceptable if the capitalists were more cultured and less 'sniggeringly superior' in their dealings with the lower classes and the imperialists more benevolent and less aggressive to the native population. His sense of identification