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Byline: Christopher Dickey; With Tracy McNicoll in Paris
When George Orwell was a young man in the 1920s, he served as a British policeman in the colony of Burma. On duty there he saw, as he put it, "the dirty work of empire at close quarters." He deplored the "white man's" oppression of the "native people" in "the East." But what Orwell found most disconcerting was the trap his own country had fallen into. "When the white man turns tyrant, it is his own freedom that he destroys," Orwell wrote a few years later in his essay "Shooting an Elephant." "In every crisis he has got to do what the 'natives' expect of him. He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it."