Uncle Sam and Aunt Samantha [the not so 'Odd Couple']

Uncle Sam is a household name among those who keep themselves informed about international politics. Uncle Sam often makes himself known to those who had previously no knowledge of him. Uncle Sam barges into countries in a classic guns-in-booty-out mode. Uncle Sam enters households in numerous ways but something announces himself in the form of a bomb. Uncle Sam claims he’s bringing democracy, but in fact hands out dismemberment, destruction, displacement and death.

The origin of the name is lost in legend but in common parlance, Uncle Sam (US) is a shorthand for the United States and is a personification of the US Government.  In the USA, Uncle Sam symbolizes often patriotic emotion. In other parts of the world and at other times, Uncle Sam is recognized for being a common thug.  And that’s putting it mildly.

Ok. Moving on.  

We have two Sams to talk about. One is not referred to as Sam but could be give him last name. Mangala Samaraweera. I am sure in the case of the other, the name must have been truncated to Sam at one point or another. Samantha Power.  The first, our man. Well, some might say ‘THEIR man’, but let’s get to that later. The other, a US Ambassador to the United Nations during the Barack Obama Presidency.  These two can be talked of together and in the context and under the shadow of Uncle Sam.  The latter a good enough rep and the former an underling, but a much loved one.  

Samantha lays out the love thick and unabashed thus: ‘Right now, I am in the final weeks of finishing writing a new book. I have been working non-stop to meet my deadline. I won’t even leave my house to buy groceries. But if there is one person who could get me to travel over 8,000 miles at the moment, it is Mangala.’

Sweet.  

She was delivering the keynote address at an event marking Mangala’s completion of 30 years in politics. She said a lot of nice things about Mangala, as is par for the course when friends speak of friends (or bosses speak of loyal vassals). More specifically, she wanted to talk about ‘what we can learn from Mangala’s 30 years in politics about the central challenges of our time – and how we must confront them.’ So she touched on what she believes are ‘the three themes that run through Mangala’s life’s work — dignity, modernization, and democracy.’

Now Aunty Samantha is not a Trumpite. She’s not a redneck. She’s not a Republican even. She belongs to the left wing of the far right wing in the ideological spectrum in the USA. This ‘left’ and the relevant ‘right’ are close neighbors and is sometimes indistinguishable too. At best, they have the language that the right lacks, and while they can make claims to be more sensitive to issues of color, race, gender and such in the USA, when it comes to international politics, they are as obnoxious as the right.

Aunty Sam, for example, has tough words for governments she dislikes, her own as well as those in countries historically at odds with the global agenda of the USA.  Tough words for her own governments for not doing enough to destroy other governments and military outfits at war with nations friendly to the USA. She won’t utter a word against Israel and the considerably horrendous track record of rights violation of Palestinians. 

She forgets her lovely vocabulary when it comes to all the crimes against humanity that the United States of America is guilty of.  She could but does not talk about the military industrial complex that is the bedrock of the USA economy. She knows the political economy of war but leaves that book at home when she has to deliver rousing orations marked with self-righteous indignation. She knows that ‘democracy’ is a hollow word, an excuse even, for troop deployment against regimes that do not toe the line drawn by Washington. She has read Francis Fukuyama and knows that even if one purchases the theory of there being ‘a common evolutionary pattern in the direction of liberal democracy’ one of the biggest roadblocks is in fact the USA, not just in terms of the democracy-cause (liberal is taken to be neoliberal economic ideals which are patently anti-intellectual and a nightmare when it comes to a healthy planet and wholesome, meaningful lifestyles) but basic dignity of societies. She won’t go there and we are not surprised. 

I don’t blame Aunty Samantha for being utterly and clownishly ignorant about Sri Lankan history. It is typical for such people to ask their friends ‘what’s happening’ and to re-utter the versions offered as biblical truth. She known nothing of ‘spontaneous protests’, not in October-November and not across our history. She knows nothing of orchestrated protests and how democracy and justice are terms often abused and which lend themselves as decent cover for the furtherance of parochial political interests. She delivered her address on March 28th. On that very day, Uncle Mangala Sam’s government showed what it takes decency, modernization and democracy to mean when tear-gassing and baton-charging protesting teachers, just as it had on the previous day dished out these delicacies to protesting students. 

Uncle Mangala Sam’s decency credentials are well known. He was decently silent when he served under Chandrika Kumaratunga, a regime that stripped a woman naked and engaged in blatant malpractices during the Wayamba Provincial Council election. That regime was marked by corruption and thuggery. He was one of Mahinda Rajapaksa’s closest aides in the run up to the 2005 Presidential Election. He was the campaign manager and was his first Foreign Minister. As foreign minister, he took an arbitrary decision that compromised Sri Lanka’s friendship with much of the Arab world. He would later deploy thugs from his electorate to beat up political opponents. That’s the infamous kurundu-polu operation. Maybe Aunty Samantha has not heard of it and if not it just means that she’s pretty naive.

Aunty Samantha did cotton on to some laudable political moments in Uncle Mangala Sam’s early political life.  She says, ‘his inspiration to get involved in politics came in the late 1980s, when the government was suppressing the Marxist youth insurrection in the South, and dead bodies were being hung on lampposts in his home town.’ Let’s unpack this salute a bit.

What’s ‘South’? Where does ‘South’ end and ‘North’ begin? Is the island geographically cut (cuttable) at the center point of the straight line from Devundara to Kankasanthurai and a line drawn perpendicular to it from East to West?  Is that how we get North and South? Language is not innocent, Aunty Samantha should know. 

More tellingly (about her ignorance, buffoonery or [yes!] political smoothness) is that she doesn’t say anything about who was doing the suppression when Mangala ‘burst into the scene as protector and benefactor of the suppressed’. The UNP. That’s the United National Party. That’s Ranil Wickremesinghe’s party. That’s the party that’s been Uncle Sam’s island-darling for decades.  They are the people in power RIGHT NOW. 

Anyway, Uncle Mangala Sam is a cabinet minister now and this regime, Aunty Samantha ought to know, is corrupt to the core, as or worse than the previous regime. They robbed the Central Bank, what more need we say? Uncle Mangala Sam was silent about all that. That’s complicity. He knew, he knows, and was and is quiet. That’s decency? This government has repeatedly postponed elections. Uncle Mangala Sam hasn’t been upset by this. That’s decency? That’s his commitment to democracy? 

Mangala has consistently massaged separatism and by extension terrorism due to his utter confusion about things cultural; he’s rabidly anti-Sinhala and anti-Buddhist. That’s not decent. That’s not showing any balance. That could be ‘modernism’ of the kind that plays in the mind of Aunty Samantha, simply because Uncle Sam is a racist bigot. There’s something wrong about championing secularism while at the same time showing religious intolerance AND being quiet about the many privileges that certain religious communities enjoy (in Sri Lanka, for example). 

He has his convictions, as does Aunty Samantha and they have every right to hold on to them. Does not mean that these convictions are all about decent, modernizing and democracy aspirations for countries and the world of course, even though they heavily rely on such words for their rhetoric. Aunty Samantha has notions of a ‘better world’ but she cannot expect everyone to embrace that vision, especially since that better world is a bunch of ill-used words that cover up a lot of horrible things. 

She’s come a long way to be by her friend’s side. That’s good. Friends should stand with friends. She’s Aunty Samantha, Uncle Sam’s sister, let’s say. I would hesitate to say either are friends, and I would be wary of her friends especially this friend who demonstrated in text-book fashion how to play lackey without shame, co-sponsoring an anti-Sri Lanka resolution in Geneva with the world’s best known rogue-state, yes, the United States of America. 

Uncle Mangala Sam not known to be a crook although he’s a senior minister of a crooked, irresponsible, anti-democracy and downright incompetent government that’s shown Aunty Samantha how willing and able it is to bash in the heads of those who disagree. On that note, she would do well to revisit the end of the eighties when the uncles of the movers and shakers in this government abducted, tortured and killed (even burning people alive!) some 60,000 people. Mangala can tell her that story, but he won't, I am willing to wager.

For one thing though, I respect Mangala Samaraweera. His honest and unapologetic championing of the rights of the LGBTQ community and related personal freedoms. That’s something, but it’s lost in the mountain of political muck the man has accumulated over thirty years. 

Aunty Samantha says ‘we all know his best is yet to come!’ Well! I am not cheering that.

READ ALSO: 

Samantha Power's Keynote Address (a briefing note)

malindasenevi@gmail.com. www.malindawords.blogspot.com