The wages of believing one’s own lies

Eleven years ago, when the World Trade Centre, NY, the White House and the Pentagon were subjected to multiple attacks, the world was shocked.  Americans of the United States were shocked beyond belief.  World-shock was probably prompted by two things.  First, the audacity of the attack and the tragedy it produced, and secondly on account of the unthinkable having happened; the US was supposed to be invincible or that is the impression that Washington-based media-spin industry had created. 

When the shock abated, as often happens, sympathy for victim was laced with the whispered expression, ‘just deserts’.  People talked of cocks coming home to roost, of what went around coming around.  The ‘shock’ felt by the USA was quickly replaced by belligerence, revenge-intent and unbridled racism.  Nothing went from the people of Iraq or those of Afghanistan, but they were bombed into the Middle Ages. In the name of justice and democracy. 

Then came the turn of the Middle East and the now infamous ‘Arab Spring’ which, after a few hopeful months, settled into an unending winter of discontent.  The USA instigated rebellion.  Rebels were armed.  Al Qaeda operatives in these countries suddenly became bosom buddies.  The USA, as a nation, cheered when the Libyan leader was murdered in cold blood. 

And two days ago, the US Ambassador to Libya, J Christopher Stevens, was killed in an attack on the US consulate in Benghazi.  It is reported that unidentified armed men had stormed the grounds overnight amid uproar among Muslims over a US-produced film said to insult Prophet Muhammed. 

Hillary Clinton, US Secretary of State is upset, naturally.  She says ‘many Americans (sic) are asking how such an attack could have happened in a country America (sic) had helped to liberate’.  The answer lies perhaps in a shocking inability to extricate oneself from the lies one propagates.  Propaganda is an inevitable part of politics, but it remains something that comes in the ‘overstatement’ column.  It is about inflation.  It tweaks or (in most cases) exaggerates the dimensions of truth.  The astute politician will see it as tool but will not believe his/her own lie.

There is a reason why the world understood 9/11 and understood it differently from the way the US chose to read it.  There is a reason why the world understands this horrific act that took the life of Stevens, even though the world will not approve. 

The USA must wake up from its drunken imperialist stupor.  Clinton and Obama and any others who may want to be President and/or Secretary of State in that country must understand that the world is not fooled by media spin.  They must understand that if they continue to operate in the manner they have, where queries about crimes against humanity are brushed aside with ‘don’t ask me that question’ or ‘we are executing a plan’ or some such nonsense, no Ambassador or US representative anywhere in the world is safe.  Steven is a victim of US foreign policy in the first instance and secondly that of a mob attack.  Mobs, Clinton should also understand, are made not just by fanatics but by those who stoke the fires of fanaticism by their own brand of religious intolerance. 

The USA is not a tolerant nation.  In the mad rush to ‘Save the USA from terrorism’, her leaders have forgotten that fostering terrorism has been a longtime strategy of containment and that terrorism is a preferred and frequently used fighting option (from Hiroshima/Nagasaki through CIA-led assassination to the drone attacks in Afghanistan).  The world is no less safe.  And no one is less safe than Americans (of the US) abroad.  J Christopher Stevens’ death testifies to this.  Clinton must understand. 

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Let us caress ‘Kattankudy’

I was not planning to write this morning (Friday, August 05, 2011).  Didn’t write yesterday either.  This is not the place for laying out reasons but let me say ‘sorry’ nevertheless.  I write today because I must.  I know that’s clichéd but I am not cringing as I might have on another occasion.  A couple of days ago I got a text message from a man I’ve never seen but I know through email exchanges and rare messages.

Ramzeen Azeez is one of the most well-read people I know.  He knows a lot about a lot of things and is generous with his time and wisdom.  He points out error or misconception gently, as is the way of those who have opened their minds to perceive the eternal verities.  He’s not alone of course and one day I will write about all the giants who with affection, giving and wisdom make me less of a dwarf than I am. 

Ramzeen is a devout Mohammedan and I feel a discerning and humble student of the Holy Quran.  He teaches English to Sinhala children in Habarana.  I am sure he’s teaching them more than English songs and pronunciation, but it warmed me when he informed me recently, with unmistakable pride, that they can now sing ‘My Bonnie Lies over the Ocean’. 

‘Today is the 21^st anniversary of the massacre of 147 people who were praying in mosques in Kattankudy’, the text message read.   We forget and I am not sure if that’s good or bad, honestly.  On the other hand, if we do remember or are reminded, we must in the very least caress for gripping tight only hurts gripper and gripped.  These are therefore caressing thoughts of a time that could hardly be identified with things soft and tender.  Or so I would like to think.

I am a regular recipient of hate mail.  I respond to each and every person, named, bogus-named and otherwise anonymous.  I am asked to feel ashamed about July 1983 and the suffering that Tami people were subjected to.  My remorse, as I have mentioned many times, is that the citizens of this country, especially the Sinhalese could not save all the Tamils attacked by marauding mobs, instigated by ruling party thugs and given a free hand upon the directives of those in power.  I do not ask, by the same token, that Tamil people apologize to me for the horrendous crimes committed by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) against people like me in the name of Tamil Nationalism. 

If ever any Sinhalese speaks of LTTE atrocities, there are people who shoot back saying ‘you produced the LTTE’.  And that’s a half-truth at best, but in fact a downright lie.  Tamil people down the lane we lived in never caused us any harm.  Their political loyalties were not known then and are irrelevant as far as I am concerned in the matter of being good neighbours.  Like in our Sinhala villages, all doubts, jealousies, suspicions, ill-will and other negative things were and are put aside on joyous and sorrowful occasions.  Just like in the aftermath of the tsunami where the first lorry loads of relief items collected by ordinary people in the southern parts of the country were sent to the then LTTE-held areas. 

I don’t agree with those who support the LTTE or those who advocate separatism, even the Chelvanayakam variety of ‘a little now, more later’ that is touted by the self-reinvented devolutionists, but I do understand ‘aspiration’ and sense of ‘grievance’.  When I receive hate mail, I am not angered.  I have often wondered what the Muslims had done to the Tamils, or were perceived to have done, to warrant the silence about the Kattankudy massacre on August 3, 1990.    

I’ve wondered why the fact that one in ten Muslims was an IDP did not factor into the conflict equation at any serious discussion on the subject. 

On the 11^th of June that year, the LTTE murdered in cold blood 600 policemen who had been instructed by the then President, Ranasinghe Premadasa to surrender to the LTTE to keep a tenuous ceasefire alive.  The LTTE thereafter ordered Muslims to vacate Kattankudy or else!  The geo-politics related to ethnic cleansing and manufacturing traditional homelands deserves a lot of comment.  Today, twenty one years later, just as on that day 21 years ago, all that is relevant is the capacity of human beings to treat their fellow creatures with barbarity.  All that is relevant is that those who lost their loved ones remain without them.  All that is relevant is that the LTTE is no longer around to do a repeat of all this.  All that is relevant is that it could happen all over again if the relevant lessons are not learned. 

I don’t know anyone who died that day.  I don’t know their relatives.  I know just internet caricatures, for example Mohammed Ibrahim, then 40, who told the New York Times, ‘I was kneeling down and praying when the rebels (not sure if that’s the word he used or the word that the particular reporter used; probably the latter in this age of horror-cleansing media spin) started shooting; the firing went on for 15 minutes; I escaped without being hit and found myself among bodies all over the place.  Or Mohammed Arif, a 17 year old student at the time, who said, ‘Before I escaped from a side door and scaled a wall, I saw a Tiger rebel put a gun into the mouth of a small Muslim boy and pull the trigger’.

Ibrahim would be 61 now and Arif 38.  I don’t know what lives they’ve lived or if they are still alive.  I don’t know who the assassins were and what happened to them thereafter.  All I know is that 147 people were murdered.  It was so unnecessary.  Like the close to 100,000 who died in the 30 year conflict, the 60,000 killed between 1988 and 1989, and the 20,000 killed in 1971.  Unnecessary. 

That we are  still coherent as a nation and a people is certainly consolation. Whether we will remain as such is never guaranteed.  It requires courage, compassion, humility and tenderness. 

It is good to remember.  It is good to touch without touching, in the manner of exercising equanimity in the face of life’s vicissitudes.  I forgot, but was reminded.  I am just extending my friend Ramzeen’s arm, using words.  I hope they touch, that they caress.

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White men don’t kill, period

A few weeks ago, the world hadn’t heard of a man called Anders Behring Breivik.  Today he’s a name on the street. A little over a week ago he was blood on the streets, bricks all over, smoke and bereavement, tears and fear.

Today, when I think of Anders Behring Breivik, I remember a man called Timothy McVeigh, another of those blood-brick-body-part-fear-tear gentlemen who also happened to be a white, blond-haired, blue-eyed individuals who were egged on by the most fundamentalist and extremist interpretations of Christianity but who never earned the terrorist tag. 

Today, thinking of both these terrorists (should we call them Christian Terrorists, as per the style of the mainstream Western media and the big name leaders of that part of the globe?) my thoughts went to Ron Shelton’s 1992 film ‘White men can’t jump’, starring Wesley Snipes and Woody Harrelson.  It is about streetball hustlers and not gun-toting thugs spraying bullets in the name of Jesus Christ, and  I remembered the movie on account of the title, because reading about Breivik, it seemed that there’s a strong conviction among those who write to the mainstream media that white men don’t terrorize. 

Made me think of Adolf Hitler, the man who did to white people what white people had been doing to black, brown and yellow people for centuries.  Made me think that if the mainstream press is reluctant to call Breivik and McVeigh terrorists, it is not surprising that they would not associate the biggest perpetrators of crimes against humanity in the past two decades, George W Bush, Tony Blair, Barack Obama, Gordon Brown and David Cameron with the thing called ‘terrorism’. 

This, ladies and gentlemen, one is persuaded to conclude, is the privilege of power.  Power allows you to define others and dodge definition, even if act describes oneself more than those vilified with name-tag and descriptive. 

The whole of Norway is gripped by fear.  It is accompanied by brave-face announcements of resistance.  Norway is operating as though terrorism is some kind of unknown tropical disease even though Norway has for years been a staunch supporter of terrorist outfits and has done all it could to legitimate terrorism (by the LTTE and by Isreal, for example).   Norway has been the default ‘Eelam’ of Tiger Terrorism.  

Now Norway, with all these associations with terrorism and blood-shed (including barbaric rituals of slaughtering whales by the hundreds every year accompanied naturally by a lot of chest-beating, nationalistic hurrahs), seems to be nationally tongue-tied in naming Breivik as the terrorist that he is.  Just like the USA or the big-name networks were net-tied in calling McVeigh a barbarian.  They might as well make a movie titled ‘White men don’t terrorize’. 

The point that is missed in all this is that terrorism is not the preserve of any community, nation, ethnicity, religious sect etc.  Terrorism is terrorism.  It must be named, it must be prevented and its perpetrators eliminated or else captured and held so they cannot harm innocent people. 

I’ve just read an article by Karen Kissane titled ‘The Enemy Within’, which refers to last week’s twin attacks in Norway.  Karen writes about a 200,000-strong ‘March of Flowers’, a remembrance parade commemorating the victims.  ‘Brought out the best in people,’ Karen correctly observes.  I don’t know if Karen knows about terrorism and what it does to people in other parts of the world, but we in Sri Lanka have seen hundreds of Breiviks and had we done this flower march on each occasion a Breivik doused us with blood and bullets, this island would be flower-less now. 

Catharsis relieves perhaps and I empathize with the Norwegians who expressed grief and resolve one way or another.  On the other hand, as expected, Breivik’s terrorism has brought to surface the latent racism of Europe, Swastikas and all.  Let me qualify that.  White racism is something the world experiences every day, in the form of dictates and bullets, and worse, explanations that it is being sprayed around for the benefit of the victims.  So when I say it ‘surfaces’, I mean that it has just marked its presence on European streets.  The media, of course has painted these ‘developments’ as somehow being marginal, evidence of anomaly and certainly having no common ground with the ideology, policy and actions of the relevant governments in dealing with the rest of the world or with people in their own countries who are not quite white, subscribe to faiths other than Christianity and in other ways ‘different’.

The white media (yes, let’s call it what it is!) is bending over backwards to establish that Breivik was a loner and not a product of long-standing white supremacist ideologies that lie just below the thin skin of European liberalism.  The racism inherent in the Maastricht Treaty is never mentioned.  The blowing up of cities, massacre of hundreds and the displacement of tens of thousands of non-whites by white armies operating under orders of white political establishments (Barack Obama is as white as they get in terms of what he says and does with respect to non-whites, just in case you wondered) is absent from political discussion on the Oslo attacks. 

Had the attacker been a professed Muslim or carried a name like Mohammed, on the other hand (as has happened in history), the media would not have enough of spouting venom on the subject of ‘Islamic Fundamentalism’, I am willing to wager.  Indeed, the initial reaction after the bomb explosion in Oslo was nothing more than speculation about it being the work of Islamic Fundamentalists, just like in Oklahoma in 1995, before it was found that the terrorist (sorry, mentally unstable psychopath) was white, blue-eyed, blond-haired and subscribed to the Christian faith.

Let me repeat the bottom line reading of the mainstream media and general Western perceptions in the matter of dozens of people being killed:  ‘White men (and women of course) don’t engage in terrorism!’

Did I hear someone laugh?  If I did, it must be some deranged non-Christian who is either brown, black or yellow.  Am I correct, Your Royal Highness (sic), King Harald?  What say you, Your Excellency (sic), Jens Stoltenberg? And how about you little Rupert Murdoch wannabes playing pundit in the busy cities of Europe or reporting about terrorists and terrorism from other parts of the world? 

[Courtesy 'Sunday Island', July 31, 2011]

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