By Lasantha Pethiyagoda –
Lasantha Pethiyagoda
Passing an age of decimation of civil liberties and individual freedom, carried out in the name of fighting manufactured enemies of selection, any civic selection will have shackled citizens to an interconnected police and safety state, unprecedented in modern Sri Lankan political history just before the preceding regime.
In a tyrannic serfdom, the freedom of the wild ass is no freedom at all, as the popular dictum exclaims, whilst the search for unbridled power and limitless terms of office, symbolised these in explicit kind.
Contemporary tyrannies are deceptive. In the age of technology, it has to do with the need to hide its true nature from the eyes of those on whose assistance and indifference its maintenance depends. Effective tyrannies excel at hiding reality from public view, turning the truth on its head and criminalising its manifest victims.
The greatest purveyor of corruption, vice and violence in the country have to surely have had state patronage not merely to survive but thrive. Its varied mechanisms, as properly as getting the major exponent of the deadly arrogance that has poisoned the atmosphere for so extended and having been whitewashed from the discourse should constitute the most significant threat to civil society.
If not for its timely finish in January it would have installed a far deeper malady within the Sri Lankan spirit than had hitherto been seasoned. No significant social issue – wealth inequality, underworld violence, racial and religious disharmony- could be resolved whilst the state remained an entity that continues year in year out, spending much more cash on military “defence” and grandiose projects than on applications of social upliftment – a most specific recipe for a spiritual death of the nation. It ought to be incandescently apparent that no one particular who has any concern for the integrity and life of Sri Lanka could have ignored that status quo.
This is the overarching point that drives our existing debates about injustice and militarism even by way of right now. The debasement of the national psyche, the callousness toward continuous targeted killing and violence, the belief that the state has not only the correct but the duty to bring violence anyplace in the land that it wants: that is what lay at the heart of Sri Lanka’s embrace of endless militancy. A rotted national soul does certainly allow leaders to wage endless wars of attrition, but endless violence also rots the national soul. At times this seems to be an inescapable, self-perpetuating cycle of degeneration and degradation.
Sri Lanka’s elite despised the subjugated, poor, malnourished and weak. They felt unequal and wanted a discriminatory technique that lacked any sense of frequent decency. They have been pretentious and cowardly they encouraged religious bigotry with out morality or compassion. They helped the authorities to criminalise independence and freedom abuse ladies and kids revel in vulgar exhibitionism of wealth and opulence, largely in undesirable taste.
For Sri Lankans to endure what lies ahead they will have to harness the human imagination. It is this imagination that makes possible transcendence from darkness to light. In order to nourish and sustain this imagination, the people require to form a basis for widespread grounds.
These will be the forces that they will have in spot of the freedom they lack. The oppressed would be the first, since they know their fate, to admit that on a rational level such a notion may appear absurd, but they also know that it is only by way of the imagination that they or their future generation will survive.
The collective consciousness of ordinary citizens is the most potent power that can turn the tide towards a saner atmosphere.
How this is inspired and sequestered by accountable forces, from within or without in the a variety of factions, will establish what follows in the decades to come.
The effective elite had been specifically interested in moulding their younger generation into becoming a chosen individuals. They wanted their offspring to be folks who esteem energy and strength with awe even though despising and getting contemptuous of financial, physical and social weakness in their serfs.
This young generation will be incapable of becoming outraged with indignation of a society in which the powerful, influential and rich would invariably have had their way whilst the marginalized majority poor and powerless masses were denied even their impotently ineffectual say a new generation habituated into perceiving intolerance as the moral-ethical regular and raw violence as the only solution to all issues or variations future generations only focused on ‘getting ahead’ and incapable of resisting the unrelenting tide of injustice.
Operating against this endogenous imperialism is the privilege and the burden of all who deem themselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than the superficial nationalist humbug of racist bigots headed by some militant saffron clad traitors, and which go beyond our nation’s self-defined ambitions and positions. We should speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for victims of our nation and for these the ruling elite fictitiously referred to as the enemy.
For centuries, minorities and the marginalised had small handle over their destinies. Forces of bigotry and violence kept them subjugated by the majority aristocrats. Suffering, for the oppressed, was tangible. Death was a continual companion.
For a state whose leaders had historically been guided, in most instances by nobler dictates and motivations, like the ten leadership qualities (dasa raja dhamma), and the general populace’s belief that all blessed things, like timely rains, fair climate and bountiful harvests, and general effectively-becoming and prosperity of the populace comply with when rulers reign justly and righteously (devo vassathu kalena, raja bhavathu dhammiko), our contemporary history leaves a lot to be desired, for numerous good and clear causes.