Power of subterfuge

Napoleon Bonaparte once openly admitted that he feared three newspapers chasing after him to thousand bayonets. To understand the implications of that statement fully we have to imagine the destructive capacity of 1,000 bayonets and then comprehend a power that is more destructive than that.

Napoleon, being a warrior who used the power of arms to establish his iconic status should know what he was talking about and that should make us understand the power media exercise in world affairs.

Listening to the Defence Secretary of the Sri Lankan government at the launch of the ‘Humanitarian Operation - Factual Analysis’ one could but sympathize with Defence Secretary Rajapaksa for he was making a plea for the world press to look at the Sri Lankan situation more objectively and factually devoid of concoctions and ‘Lies agreed upon’. He is the man who gave leadership to defeat the most dreaded terrorist outfit known to humanity and then launched the operation to save the lives of 300, 000 IDPs including 11,000 former cadres of that dreaded outfit.

Humanitarian operations

A feat, truly unparalleled in the history of humanitarian operations, anywhere in the modern world! Yet, today Gotabhaya Rajapaksa, rather than resting on his laurels, is a man straining every once of power within him to defend his role and the role played by the Sri Lankan forces in conducting that operation.

Today, it is not the planted time bombs or the maniacal suicide bombers that haunt this nation but the ‘bayonets’ of certain arms of the Western media that attack this nation to tarnish its image. During the operation, Gotabhaya Rajapaksa was constantly complaining about the media that sapped the will of the forces and justified fascist terror and today he is defending the legitimate forces for eliminating terror, mayhem murder that practically held the whole nation to ransom for 35 years.

This simply is the power of media and the vested interests that man that powerful institution shaping and creating ‘world opinion’. The fact that, no bombs have exploded in Sri Lanka killing thousands of civilians for the past two years; no barricades on Sri Lankan roads hampering day-to-day activities: no emergency laws empowering security forces; no ‘sole representatives’ but only the elected representatives in the North after 35 years and even the fact that people in all parts of the country are moving about freely and living without the fear psychosis breathing a sense of hope in 35 years, are not matters for this sections of the media. All those positives are being buried in an avalanche of allegations they themselves have concocted against the Sri Lankan government by repeating those very same allegations with no credible evidence.

International community

Where was this alleged 40,000 dead and buried and would not that make a mountain of corpses difficult to hide? What are their names if they were among the 300,000 that were rescued? Why should 300,000 IDPs walk in to the area manned by security forces, so relieved, if they were shelled ‘indiscriminately’ as alleged, by those very security forces? Do we believe those doctors only when they make statement from LTTE area and not believe them now when they say that they lied under LTTE pressure?

Is the information released by a dreaded terrorist outfit more credible than the information released from an elected government? Don’t we know that the main weapon of a terrorist is the element of surprise which they derive by moving freely among civilians and behaving like civilians? Did not the international community and the ‘Peace Co-Chairs’ continued to press the LTTE to release the civilians as they were held under duress as a human shield? Did not the LTTE refuse to release the civilians and admitted to their ‘go between’ KP that they were their only means of defence at that stage?

These are the questions that escape these ‘diligent’, ‘objective’ ‘informed’ and ‘ethical’ journalists of the British Channel 4 in their alarmism which is their way of making themselves worthy of a readership.

Western economic supremacy

If you say that the Western governments have made the universal norms such as human rights and democracy as a modus operandi to perpetrate a new imperialistic order, a lot of people in the aggrieved countries like Sri Lanka would tend to agree. But if you say that the Western media institutions are the vehicle of that perpetration, those who still believe in the freedom of expression may question that statement. The fact however is that, the media in the West is more imperialistic than their governments and it is the press that have the ‘nose’ for imperialism and double standards and the governments simply follow.

This is why Monika Lewensky’s semen stained dress made headlines in the Western media for days while the thousands of civilian killings in Iraq did not. The message is that ‘President Clinton cannot abuse his own willing apprentice whereas President Bush can kill thousands of Iraqis without being reported’. This is because the former affects America which the American media would mind but the latter affects the world which nobody ought to mind.

For years they demonized communist regimes as ‘killers’ and also ‘oppressive’ and when Moa Tsetung banned the import of marijuana the press opined that it was a violation of ‘free trade’. But today China has become the main contender for Western economic supremacy. They still harp on the ‘violation of human rights in China’ as if providing food, shelter, clothing, education and employment to millions in China is not granting the basic human rights that were denied for centuries by the so-called ‘Free world’.

Nation building is a difficult task, especially for small nations like Sri Lanka. There are insidious forces of imperialism that always operate in disguise and now that they have failed to get us by the war they may try to get us by ‘peace’ ‘human rights’ and/or ‘democracy’.

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