Dodging an inglorious end – An Orwellian redrafting of recent history
Posted on October 7th, 2015
R. Chandrasoma Courtesy Island
We are told by high authorities in the government that our former President has good hopes of being alive in the years ahead because of the political heroism and encompassing compassion of those who defeated him at the recent historic elections.
Indeed, the claim has been made by no less a person than the globe-trotting (and oracular) Foreign Minister that the former Leader (MR) escaped an inglorious end strapped to an ‘Electric Chair’ because of the pleading and promises of the New Leadership – to purge our ancient land of the political roguery and rampant venality that (supposedly) characterized the ruler-ship of the defeated President.
There was also a more ominous charge –that was music in the ears of the Anglo-American ‘mafia’ that currently polices the world. MR was supposedly in the same class as the ‘villainous’ Saddam Hussein and the much-feared Gaddafi – both heavily advertised in the Western Press as brutal dictators that brought not only ruin to their own countries but imperiled the world because of their insatiable greed to be great and powerful whatever the material and human cost. Indeed. so great was their advertised political depravity that the entire world was alarmed and affronted. The hilarious comparison with MR was a staged political stunt – he had, of course, no weapons of mass destruction nor was he outside the Democratic Process and the Rule of Law that dictators are supposed to enjoy. He defeated a historic enemy and re-launched Sri Lanka as a free and prosperous nation. It is here that
Orwellian Revision is famously employed – the artful suppression of the facts about a disastrous rebellion by a bloody tyrant and murderer of thousands of innocents.
The heroic feat that saved Lanka from political extinction was ‘rewritten’ as an assult on the ‘rights of the people’ and the word ‘genocide’ gained importance to the enemies of a stable and prosperous Sri Lanka.
The New Leadership –the Avenging Horsemen of the Apocalypse – carried this Orwellian rewriting of history much further when what was largely a political campaign against MR ‘morphed’ into a moral crusade against an Evil Dictator and his Band of Thieves. A hallucinatory landscape was created where men were (supposedly) kidnapped in broad daylight, women raped and children molested. It was a time – so declared the enemies of MR – of robbing and fobbing when free citizens lived perilously with White Vans patrolling the streets to pick unruly malcontents.
This is the Great Orwellian Redaction that the Propaganda Arm of the New Liberation Movement used with great success. Let honest citizens compare the ‘then’ with the ‘now’ –the brief age of triumph and confidence under MR with the abnegatory bathos of a life under defeatism and humiliating contrition-fashioned as a Machiavellian strategy to further the political ends of those threatened with early extinction in the battle for power.
A final comment on the Electric Chair. The British seized the Last King of Sri Lanka on protests made by the Ruling Elite that he was unfit to be a King. It was a historic betrayal. The surrender of our one-time President to gloating foreigners by those briefly ensconced in power – if and when this happens –will surely rank with the earlier historic shame.
October 7th, 2015 at 1:00 pm
We should NOT have ended the war. LTTE should have been beaten to weakness BUT we should have kept the war going.
It is a small price to pay for the UNITY of the nation.
Did you notice it is those who GAINED MOST from peace that want to kill war heroes?
October 7th, 2015 at 3:44 pm
NO ONE COULD BLAME a country with discipline. 2010 was the beginning of WAR AGAINST OF VINAYA.
October 7th, 2015 at 5:14 pm
Is there a High Court in Jaffna ? OR is this a Kangaroo Court ? Are these Rana Viruwos’ providing some entertainment to poor Tamil Widows providing them some income ? Who is this Judge Manickavasagar ?
Sri Lankan court sentences four soldiers to 25 years for gang rape of Tamil woman
Wed, Oct 7, 2015, 10:06 pm SL Time, ColomboPage News Desk, Sri Lanka.
Oct 07, Colombo: A Sri Lankan court on Wednesday has sentenced four government soldiers to 25 years in prison each for the gang rape of a Tamil woman in the former war zone in 2010.
The High Court in Jaffna found the former soldiers of the 572 Brigade guilty of the raping the 27-year old mother of two, in Visuvamadu, Kilinochchi in June 2010.
The court ordered the men each to pay Rs. 500,000 ($3,600) to the victim as compensation, AFP reported.
“A lengthy jail term was given because these soldiers brought the military into disrepute,” a court official quoted Judge Manickavasagar Illancheliyan as saying.
Each soldier was also ordered to pay Rs. 100,000 to a female neighbor who was sexually harassed during the assault.
Three of the soldiers were present in court to hear Wednesday’s verdict, while the fourth was tried in absentia.
Sri Lankan security forces have been accused by rights groups of routinely using sexual violence on Tamil detainees even after the end of the island’s drawn-out separatist war.
October 8th, 2015 at 2:42 am
Lorenzo,I know even Gota regretted ending the war but in a different context that the persecution he has to under go.
Actually it is not the ending of the war that we should regret but allowing this bunch of wolves to come in to power.
Now we would do better by working out a way to get rid of these wolves rather than keeping on regretting.