Singing Yankee-Doodle-Doo on Hanuman’s Tail down Ramayana Trails
Posted on May 5th, 2024
e-Con e-News
blog: eesrilanka.wordpress.com
‘Before you study the economics, study the economists!’
e-Con e-News 28 April – 04 May 2024
• Mathematics Professor Nalin de Silva’s last column in his popular blog kalaya.org pointed to the fingers of India’s National Security Adviser Ajit Doval in the April 2019 terror. ‘Today India is a world power’, he observed, concluding, ‘If our intelligence agencies do not work wisely, we will be dragged down India’s Ramayana Trail…’
This ee is dedicated to Nalin de Silva who passed away on 02 May 2024. There are many, including so-called nationalists & ‘socialists’, who breathed a sigh of relief when he passed. We are not among them. We looked forward to his daily writings, and enjoyed his iconoclasm especially his smithereening of the most sacred so-called scientific shibboleths of the white world. We wish him a bullet-train ride to Nirvana, for he taught us to be questioning, even while not always agreeing with the good doctor’s diagnoses & prognoses.
De Silva was dismissed as being opposed to science, and both praised & insulted for his almost impudent & imprudent adherence to mysticism, yet his assertion that ‘Physics is all about finding out whether something works or not’ is most certainly scientific.
Such a practical definition may be anathema to our scholars – our engineers make no engines; our artists, slaves to an imported science and consumer technology. While constantly blaming politicians, they excel in not making anything that works – for the people of this country, at least. And while de Silva opposed Marxism (he rarely mentioned Leninism, though never forgot his old Trotskyist opposition to Stalin), his statement on physics recalls:
The sporadic use of machinery in the 17th century was of the greatest importance,
because it supplied the great mathematicians of that time with
a practical basis & stimulant to the creation of the science of mechanics
– Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, Chapter 14
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‘National liberation exists only when the national productive forces
have been completely freed from every kind of foreign domination’
– Amilcar Cabral, The Weapon of Theory, 1966.
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Our so-called ‘nationalists’, and those opposed to nationalism & the nation-state, have no sense of the modern machine-making industrialization & culture that alone can nourish & undergird demands for ‘freedom’ etc. The multifaceted kamikaze attacks on the economy and the political culture escalated in the last few years to make us vassals of the USA & its poodles, India & Japan, have left both nationalists & socialists bedazzled and bewildered.
With our government constantly denying it is importing cars (rather than the machines to make them), yet promising to ‘free trade’ (an old English con-job while invading the world), Japan’s Toyota this week took out advertisements to sell new HiAce passenger vans! And the US envoy joined with Justice Minister Wijeyadasa Rajapakshe (who now wishes to be President) to ‘pledge assistance to enhance the effectiveness of Sri Lanka’s judicial processes!’ The US Constitution still enables ‘slavery’ (read its 13th Amendment fully) so know well what justice they wish to enhance!
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• ‘Ethnonationalist state!’ ‘Ethnocentric parochial Lankans’! ‘Sinhalization & Buddhisization! ‘Ethnoreligious supremacy’! ‘Virulent Sinhala nationalism pursuing cultural purity!’ This ee also examines the penchant of our university pundits & NGO-funded artists to throw out epithets and make idealistic demands, without examining our capacity to materially lift those heavy imported weights.
This ee Focus reproduces Kanishka Hevavisenthi’s Academics, Art Historians & Ethereal Aesthetes: Know Your Money, Materials, Machines & Machinations! which examines the real aim (to prevent modern industrialization!) behind: ‘The constant attack on Sinhala Buddhism & a united culture by the academic gangs & their artistic cavalcades riding imported cars funded by imperialism…’
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• ‘To be sure, Sri Lankan apparel has made a distinctive contribution to the nation’s economy since the late 1970s, with local industrialists (MAS, Brandix, Hirdramani Group, eg) growing from strength to strength’, effuses a group of Sri Lankan professors & PhD seekers employed in imperialist countries (see ee Focus). They’re responding to the assertion – also in the Financial Times, by a ‘self-funded PhD student’, researching ‘delusional disorders’ (how apt!) –that some union leaders cause disruptions within factories to acquire better funding and position, disrupting productivity.
However, both sides do not point to the elephant in the factory: that much of Sri Lanka’s ‘industry’ is not ‘modern industry’ but assembly & manufacture, based on labor-intensive production. In plantations, garments, tourism, etc, even a slight change in wages can cause a large loss of profits, even as the enormous profits these thieves do make, have never been invested in labor-saving technology, raising the skills of workers, in a sector where not a pin, needle, thread or textile are made in Sri Lanka. As SBD de Silva always said: ‘If our country was turned into one big garment factory, one big plantation, one big hotel, we would not need schools & universities anymore!’
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• This ee examines the various pamphlets & demands made around May Day – the international workers’ day celebrated around the planet (in China it’s a 5-day holiday). These pamphlets & essays are by political parties, academics & NGOs (see ee Random Notes, & Focus) The capitalist media’s role (while lamenting ‘poor’ workers’ manipulation by politicians) is to of course downplay and distort its significance, in a world dominated by capitalism led by the USA, where many multinational corporations (MNCs) are more powerful than nation-states.
One NGO pamphlet on May Day prioritizes LGBTQ rights higher on its lists of demands than the ‘fight against child malnutrition, the economic & social structure for their future’, ‘the environment for future generations’ and the ‘ethno-national question’. Interesting, how the demands prioritized by the funding provided, to privileged white males & females & in-betweens, snake their way into local discourse.
Then there is a much-media-advertised promise to raise the daily wages of (tea and rubber) estate workers, midst the avowed opposition by the Planters’ Association (the real rulers of this country, who park their billions outside the country, refusing to invest in modern production) turns out to be a media stratagem to buy votes….
Meanwhile, plans to sell off the country’s national assets continue apace. This week on the 50th anniversary of Portugal’s so-called ‘revolution’, which saw it flee its colonies in Africa (while promoting horrific genocides to prevent their economic & political advance) – Portugal’s government rejected ‘paying reparations for colonial, slavery legacy!’
Indeed, why should still-imperialist Portugal pay? And if it tries to do so, how would it do so? There are no stated programs & plans by our own leaders & countries as to exactly how they would invest such.
The USA, Portugal and South Africa (aka England South) inflicted horrific genocides on Southern Africa throughout the 1980s for their impudence in chasing out the Portuguese colonialists. Amilcar Cabral (quoted above) was assassinated by Portugal’s secret police, 8 months before Guinea-Bissau’s declaration of independence.
Europe is now a colony of the USA. And the USA – plus its colonial poodles India & Japan – now openly flaunting their colonial power in Sri Lanka, will steal any reparations right back! Or even better, the import-export colonial plantation oligarchy will sell it right back.
And yet…. everyone is looking deep into imported devices for answers that are better shaped and held by our own hands…