Shooting An Elephant: Inner Conflict Assigned to serve as a subdivisional police officer in Moulmein in Lower Burma, George Orwell "had in mind that imperialism was an evil thing." He struggled for the realization of which side he was for. The mature Orwell would have surely known how Voltaire's dictum went, that "when one man is imprisoned unjustly, the only place for a just man is prison." But Orwell's own thoughts went much further than that: "he was not talking about the personal guilt or innocence of the imprisoned and downtrodded Burmese, but of their needless suffering under a system of despotism and alien rule."