The “Ugly American”
(2007) and the American General George S. Patton (1885-1945)
C. Wijeyawickrema cwije7@yahoo.com
The great American General George Patton believed in reincarnation.
He thought in his previous birth he was the Carthaginian General Hannibal
(247-183 B.C.), (Hannibal is known as the “father of military strategy).
Patton was famous for his demand from Washington politicians to permit
him go ahead and remove Stalin’s red army from occupying what later
became the Russian-controlled Europe. He was not allowed and he died
of an accident.
It was too late when Winston Churchill gave his “iron curtain”
speech to an American audience in March 1946 in Missouri. In June 1987
after billions of dollars and thousands of deaths on the cold war, Ronald
Regan could confidentially ask Gorbachev to “tare down this wall.”
So much of human suffering could have been avoided if politicians listened
to General Patton.
President Abraham Lincoln decided to offer peace and reconciliation
to the Confederates on March 4, 1865. On April 9, 1865 he allowed the
defeated Southern Confederate army to go home without any punishment
or any restriction. They went home with their guns and old prejudices
and made the life of Black Americans so miserable for another 100 years.
His assassination just six days after his winning the Civil War perhaps
weakened the anti-slavery forces. Soon the Southern politicians re-introduced
the old slavery by way of Jim Crow laws and the Ku Klux Klan. The situation
became so bad that at the time of inaugurating the Lincoln Memorial
in May 1922, Black leaders left the ceremony because they were required
to sit in a separate section! Blacks had to wait until the Civil Rights
Marches of the late Martin L. King Jr., in the 1960s to regain their
lost rights (de jure, if not de facto) for a second time.
Monica Duffy Toft, a Harvard professor specializing on the history of
civil wars and conflicts challenges the commonly-accepted idea that
negotiated settlements are the best way to end civil wars. Her views
in 2003 (The geography of ethnic violence: identity, interests, and
the indivisibility of territory, Princeton university press) are in
agreement with the ideas listed in the three paragraphs above. Without
a total defeat sparks will be hidden beneath the ashes. Those with vested
interests, from politicians who want beggar’s wounds to weapons
dealers to war-supply commission sharks and peace mudalalis have to
stay in business. Divide and rule at a global level, the clash of civilization
thesis of Huntington, another Harvard professor, are fuel for such investments.
Unlike the “White man’s burden” which can be interpreted
in different ways, the epithet “Ugly American” gives a nasty
picture of Americans as arrogant, demeaning and thoughtless in behavior
when abroad. The term originated as the title of the book, The ugly
American by William Lederer and Eugene Burdick written in 1958. Gotabhaya,
the defence secretary, is a Sri Lankan by birth and an American citizen
by law. Living abroad makes some people more patriotic than those who
did not live away from the island. The current UNP leader is the deputy
president of the International Democratic Union which is 100% pro-American.
Why then did he call Gotabaya an ugly American?
The Sinhala Buddhists always admired the good and kind American. They
know a bad American administration is different from the American people.
Any villager in Sri Lanka knows (at least knew) who the American Colonel
Henry Steel Olcott (1832-1907) was who came to Ceylon in 1880. The former
British Civil Servant, T. W. Rhys Davids (1843-1922) who translated
the Pali Texts to English did perhaps a better service to world Buddhism
but the villagers have no clue about Davids. But the Sinhala Buddhists
treated Olcott as a Bodhisattva. This is perhaps the highest level of
recognition given to an American by another nation in the world’s
history. Olcott was the first white Buddhist in the modern world and
he gave a helping hand to the Buddhist resurgence movement brewing in
the island since the 1840s. While the local “Sinhala” representative
opposed making Vesak a public holiday in the colony, Olcott was the
other white man apart from the white governor who supported it.
While villagers followed the Middle Path of admiring and accepting the
good America, there have been two extremists groups. The Marxists category
in Sri Lanka disrespected America since the formation of their political
party in 1935. Today we have relics of them in the names of Vaasu and
Baahu and some JVP elements. The other extremist group has been the
political leadership of the UNP in Sri Lanka, who blindly worshipped
American administrations like what Din Diem, Marcos, the Shah of Iran,
the Baby Doc in Haiti or Batista did in Cuba. SWRD opened an embassy
in China in April 1957 which was similar to President Nixon’s trip
to China in February 1972. But the UNP leadership never learned. For
his blind kissing of the American ring, the late JRJ was known in Sri
Lanka as the Yanki Dikie. Mrs. Gandhi armed Tamil terrorist groups because
JRJ was blindly pro-American. If there is a ghost of JRJ today, that
person is the western and American-dependent current UNP leader.
To understand the UNP leader’s Gotabhaya trashing one has to begin
with the Englishman Paul Harris, who was “deported” from Sri
Lanka during the UNP rule. Paul wanted to live in Sri Lanka like what
Arthur C. Clarke did. Paul identified the CFA of 2002 as the “greatest
give away in history.” This shameful act was no different from
the 1987 Indo-Sri Lanka document forced upon JRJ by Rajiv Gandhi. The
military guard tried to kill Gandhi at the airport parade. The CFA was
a coup between Prabakaran and Eric Solheim which created a prison in
the south Sri Lanka and a de facto state in the North-East.
Gotabhaya killed the façade called CFA, the humiliating stupid
document which was based on a philosophy of gifting pistols to Prabakaran
by a servile, ring-kissing defence secretary or presidential advisor
who called the terrorist Pulendran “Machang”- my dear brother-in-law!
It was the UNP leader’s basket with all his eggs and G.L. Pieirs’
international safety net. What Paul Harris predicted was confirmed later
by Karuna’s confessions. Gotabaya disproved the Colombo peace mudalali
and Anura B-Mangala S canard that the war is not winnable. Gotabaya
proved that the GOSL military can defeat Tamil terrorists that the Indian
army could not (or did not want to) defeat if only the corrupt and incompetent
politicians from Colombo allow the army to do its job free of selfish
political interference.
Gotabhaya is attacked because the end of war means the beginning of
the second war against corruption, waste and the empowerment of people
at the village level. When UNP leader informed Sajith Premadasa to limit
his Sahanaya activities to Hambantota area it was for selfish reasons.
In this sense the most dangerous person for a politician who acts like
the proverbial fox going behind the goat expecting something to fall
is Gotabaya.
Gotabhaya is attacked because he is in line with Patton, Winston Churchill
and professor Toft. Gotabaya knew first-hand what had happened at Vadamarachci
in 1987 and the drop of dhal by the Indian planes. He is determined
not to let a second Vadamarachchi in 2007. The Sinhala Buddhists never
discriminated against any ethnic community. The Sinhala-Tamil conflict
was a creation by the Colombo ruling families (of Tamil, Sinhala and
Muslim origin) for the benefit of the Colombo families. They did not
want English, western life style and privileges replaced by an empowerment
of Sinhala and Tamil villagers. When Karuna says “give us what
Colombo gets” he has given a non-Colombo answer to the late Kumar
Ponnambalam’s Colombo demand that “Tamils have aspirations.”
The only aspiration Jaffna Tamils have today after 30 years of death
and misery is to seek liberation for them from a cruel dictatorship
based on cyanide pills.
Terrorism is a cancer. We all know that treatment to cancer is total
removal of any traces of cancer from the human body. Despite attempts
to get Prabakaran to wear a three-piece suit and helping terrorists’
children to obtain a western education, Prabakaran can never join the
democratic stream in Jaffna. The average Tamil in Jaffna, an innocent
family-devoted human being, will not vote for terrorist candidates if
there is free and fair elections. The American and British diplomats
in Colombo know this but it is the ghost of “white man’s burden”
that confuses them.
Prabakaran consider Gotabhaya and Sarath Fonseka as cancers in his Eelam
body and tried to remove them. There was divine intervention. God Vishnu
who protects Sri Lanka protected them. The “Patton Prayer”
is an example of how General Patton received such divine blessing. On
December 8, 1944, Patton called the Third Army Chaplain in Nancy, France
and asked him, “Do you have a good prayer for weather? We must
do something about those rains if we are to win the war.” The prayer
worked and Americans use it now on a regular basis in churches. Even
the UNP leader recently identified Gotabhaya as one of the Four Gods
(Satarawaram Deviyo) who are supposed to be protecting the island.
The American Congress and the American opinion do not support Tamil
terrorism. They do not think Sinhala Buddhists are bad people. Just
like the way it was American support that really gave birth to Israel
(President Truman’s statement on May 14, 1948) if America thought
otherwise an Eelam would have been a real possibility by now. So when
Gotabhaya is called an ugly American, it may be an expression of a love
and hate relationship the American lackeys in Sri Lanka have with some
American officials. It may be a hidden anger or jealousy against American
officers for not actively supporting the CFA 2002. While the UNP leader
and CFA recognized terrorists as equal partners America banned them
as killers of innocent humans.
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