THE LOGIC OF 'PEACE' TALKS
If the LTTE is strong enough, and if as some people project, the terrorists are capable of defeating the Sri Lankan Government forces, why not allow them to establish an Eelam after fighting a "war". It is clear to the LTTE, the Tamil racists and the west that the LTTE is not capable of establishing an Eelam through "war", and the so called peace talks are a way of achieving what the LTTE cannot win through "war". LTTE always pretends that it is not in support of "peace" talks but finally sit for discussions with the government, again pretending that they had made a big sacrifice in agreeing for talks due to the "pressure" of India (Thimpu) or of the west.
Then at the beginning of the talks or while being engaged in talks, they make demands to the government that would help them to achieve Eelam. Invariably the west supports these demands, and the government of Sri Lanka is pressurised by them to concede the demands. However, the nationalist forces oppose these racist separatist demands, and the government cannot concede them without antagonising and then massacring the majority of the Sinhalas. So far no government has resorted to massacring the Sinhalas and the "peace" talks have broken down as the LTTE is not interested in agreeing to anything less than what they demand. This has been the general pattern since the beginning of the Thimpu talks, and Geneva is not going to be different, unless the analysts in the west have learnt and devised a new approach to be adopted at the talks.
The pundits (in the sense of pandithayas) would say that neither the Sri Lankan government nor the LTTE is in a position to win the "war", and that is the reason for having "peace" talks. However, it is not the Sri Lankan government that started the "war" and it is wrong to say that the government forces are not capable of ending it. It was India then and the so called international community now, that is against the Sri Lankan forces defeating the LTTE and thus ending the "war". If the so called international community adopts the policy that they follow in west Asia, Europe and America, in Sri Lanka as well, then the LTTE would have been defeated long time ago. It is the west that keeps the LTTE going, and this is something that the Sinhalas, especially those living in the west do not want to admit.
These cyber patriots and others in Sri Lanka who have been brainwashed by the Christian education that they had received at schools and universities would not like to think that at the root of the problem is the west.
It is not my intention to have a brief for the Sri Lankan government under Mr. Mahinda Rajapakse, but it is clear that he and his government are prevented from defeating the LTTE by the west and their agents in the country. The west applies pressure on the government in terms of trade, loans which are sometimes referred to as aid. If the people and the leaders are prepared to sacrifice in order to defeat the LTTE, then we do not have to be bullied by the so called international community.
What most of the Sinhalas, especially those who live in the western countries do no want to admit, nay hear, is that it is the west that has mainly prevented the Sri Lankan government from defeating the LTTE and Tamil racism. If the Sinhalas, especially those who are engaged in cyber warfare to defeat the LTTE, would organise themselves to apply pressure on the respective western governments and expose them to the general public then we would be in a much better position. Organising protests against the governments in the countries in which they live may be a difficult task than typing e-mails daily, especially for those retired from their work, but nevertheless it is worth trying. They could learn something from the Muslims in those countries who are prepared to protest against those governments in spite of being residents of the relevant countries.
I have not seen the cartoons of Prophet Mohammad published by the Danish newspapers but in the name of press freedom can any editor publish anything in his newspaper? The countries have failed to define limits for collective freedoms or community freedoms of expression. Voltaire may have said that one's freedom ends where the nose of the other person begins or words to that effect, in respect of individual freedom, but western Christianity which is very weak when it comes to concepts involving others as communities has failed to come out with equivalents of Voltaire's statement in respect of group freedoms of expression. In fact I would say that they are incapable of doing so within the Greek Judaic Christian (GJC) Chinthanaya with its concept of a chosen people. People such as the psychoanalysts would try to define one in terms of the "other", though the "other" is a concept that could be grasped by the mind only after the mind grasps the "existence" of itself. However, even Lacan and others who talk of others erroneously, are not at all concerned with "other communities". It is something that follows from the GJC Chinthanaya.
In these columns west is identified as the west, simply because it is Christian, their governments are Christian, their cultures are Christian, their knowledge is Christian, though it is the Christianity that was created with the modernity of Europe, which too was created in the west in the fifteenth century. The Christianity thus created did not remain static and has evolved over more than five centuries going through various stages. Various western Christian intellectuals may have identified these periods and phenomena as renaissance, reformation, industrial revolution, capitalism, democracy, Fordism (mass production whether of motor vehicles or of university graduates), liberalism, globalisation etc., but it can be shown that what is behind this trend could be associated with the flow of knowledge from the eastern countries to the western countries through the Arabs first.
In order to accommodate that knowledge the west had to change their Chinthanaya from Catholic Chinthanaya to what we identify as the GJC Chinthanaya, thus transforming Catholicism to Lutherism or Christianity of Luther, Calvin and others. GJC Chinthanaya, like any other Chinthanaya has its own attitudes, logic and epistemology. The logic of Christianity is two valued two fold while that of Catholicism is two valued three fold. Epistemologically Catholicism is based on concrete thinking (thinking is not same as the Chinthanaya) while Christianity is based on abstract thinking.
With respect to attitudes the Catholic Chinthanaya was inclined towards community a whole while GJC Chinthanaya concentrated on the individual and the sensual pleasures of each and every individual. If Catholicism was communalistic and concentrated on synthesis, Christianity was individualistic while paying more attention to analysis. A pundit could point out that it is wrong to identify these Chinthanayas according to the scheme given above as there are always exceptions. There are exceptions even to Boyle's law also but it is always good to identify general trends, something which I appreciate in the GJC Chinthanaya.
West is always the west for me, and the attitude of GJC Chinthanaya to force their ways of life, knowledge, culture, religion etc., on others in the world, acting based on the "Biblical assumption" that the western Christians are the chosen people of the God is one of the factors behind western Christian colonialism that has created most of our problems. The Portuguese and the Spaniards began colonising the world with the incipient Christianity that had inherited the concept of the chosen people from Catholicism, which in turn had adopted the Jewish concept, in the third century during the time of the Roman king Constantine. It has to be pointed out that Calvin and Luther were only the representatives of a movement that had begun some decades before them, and were the symbols that were associated with the religion that came to be associated with the western Christian modernity. In more than one sense Calvin and Luther were children of Christianity rather than founders of a new religion. Christianity as a religion is a part of Christianity as a culture and finally a Chinthanaya.
The concept of Chinthanaya (Chinthanaya has come a long way since it was used by Dr. Gunadasa Amarasekera as the Sinhala equivalent of thought about twenty years ago, when he wanted to translate Russian national thought to Sinhala. Chinthanaya is neither thinking nor thought and it may be grasped as a generalisation of the concept of paradigm.) has helped us to understand what happened in Bharat during the Buddha's day as well as the emergence of Hinduism at a later stage. Mr. C. Rudra of Wattala writing to The Island on the 6th of January 2006, has referred to an article by me on "The West, Prabhakaran and War" and has perpetuated some misconceptions found in the writings of Dr. Ananda Coomaraswamy and others. Hinduism is different from Vedic religion as much as Christianity is different from Judaism, though both religions have the "same" God Yehovah. I intend writing a separate article on this aspect when space and time permit to do so. It is not only the history of Hinduism that has to be cleared but the history of Sri Lanka that the Tamil racists attempt to distort. This has a bearing on the so called peace talks scheduled to be held in Geneva, as the whole concept of an Eelam is based on distorted history of Sri Lanka where it is claimed that the eastern and northern provinces, ironically demarcated by the British as late as 1889, had been the homeland of the Tamils. The talks are bound to fail as they are based on distorted history, mythical Sinhala domination, and conceding Eelam with the support of the west that cannot be won by "war".
Professor Nalin de Silva
>
>
>