THE PAST LASTS …
For all those who say that there is an overreaction on
the part of the defence establishment to the legitimate
expression of academic dissent in the North, the article in
these pages yesterday by Dr. Susantha Goonetilleke, a former
president of the Sri Lanka Association for the Advancement of
Science (SLAAS), should be must reading.
Dr. Goonetilleke gave the reader a brief overview of how the
academic community in the North was by and large complicit in
the falsification of facts, with regard to archaeological
discoveries that cast light on ancient place names for instance,
in the Northern Province.
These academics, working to the grand plan of the LTTE
disinformation unit, went along with a devious campaign to
reclassify these findings as evidencing some kind of ‘Tamil
Buddhism’, that was separate from the Buddhism that prevailed in
other parts of the country.
This process of rewriting history could not be rectified
until there was a comprehensive liberation of the North, and the
areas previously held either by force of terrorist weapons or
through force of pervasive Tamil Tiger intimidation were brought
under the full control of the Sri Lankan government, through its
Armed Forces. It is in this particular context that the current
attempt to rationalize the runaway academic freedoms of the
North, acquires legitimacy after years of this nonsense, when a
virulent form of Nazi-like disinformation was the order of the
day in the North.
After all, the Jaffna academics that have gone into paroxysms
of righteous anger – feigned of course -- against the
restoration of law and order in Jaffna and the rest of the
North, never tire of talking of an army-led ‘thought police’
that seeks to, as they say, regiment the views of the free and
independent intellectual community.
Thought police? The LTTE diktat which prevailed in the North,
with the active connivance of the academic community, was in
pursuance of thought obliteration, never mind thought policing –
and the creation of a robot culture for scholar and Everyman,
that believed in only one thing, the alleged cruelty of the
hegemonic dominant culture of what they called ‘the Buddhist
government’s Sinhala occupying forces’!
These LTTEers and their partners in academe had no time to
‘police’ people’s minds, they steamrollered over the slightest
hint of original thought in the region. Goebbels could have been
put to shame with some of the blatant tactics of falsification
and vilification these academics peddled, to promote the LTTE’s
brand of altered history.
Some readers would remember that the LTTE’s brand of Nazism
was no joke -- Prabhakaran at one point adopted the Nazi salute,
and it took one tough question posed at his infamous
Killlinochchi press conference for him to decide to eschew that
nod to Nazism, and the Nazi ideology, whose methods he was the
best mimic and exponent of, in modern times.
What alternative does the defence establishment have under
the circumstances, other than to be hyper-vigilant, and ensure
that there is no brainwashing comparable to the fascist order of
mind control that was adopted during the ignominious period
Prabhakaran held the people of the North ransom to his
insatiable desire for total control?
If the military has to control things in the North now, it is
just so that Prabhakaran’s brand of control from the grave is
put down, and kept down forever. Nobody should underestimate the
level of diabolical distortion that the Nazi-like LTTEers were
capable of through a dishonest and pliant academic community in
the North.
Not all, but a great many of them were able to
internationally sell the myth of Sinhala led persecution with
tales as tall (and as dangerous) as Sinhala Buddhists and their
fondness ‘for Tamil meat’ -- as Susantha Goonetilleka pointed
out in his article on Monday.
The country breathes a collective sigh of relief that these
days of perfidy are behind us and that Sri Lankans are spared
this drivel of unadulterated race-based hatred. But eternal
vigilance is the price of peace, and hats off to the defence
establishment for not being misled by the liberal bleeding
hearts that would have us believe that just because Prabhakaran
died at Nandikadal, his narrative from hell would also double
down and die with him. |