Colonial violence often springs from petty fear of looking foolish, not policy

Evidence

Luhmann’s actions have everything of the ordinary and everyday about them. They seem not dissimilar to the pitiful motives of George Orwell’s district officer in “Shooting an Elephant.” Both feared to look the fool and responded with violence to defend their own tenuous standing and that of their European compatriots. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1153

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the reader’s existing reading on epistemic anxieties and the psychology of colonial administrators; Orwell’s Shooting an Elephant as a canonical framing of colonial face-saving violence.
• ADDENDUM: Could support an article on how personal status anxiety, not ideology, drove colonial brutality — a psychological micro-mechanism of empire.