WHEN THE WORLD TURNS ...
The usual culprits in Colombo civil society are pretending
not to understand the lack of mass sentiment with regard to the
impeachment. These people, Jehan Perera that warmongering
peacenik chief among them, were down on their knees hoping that
civil society will regard the impeachment issue as a calamity,
and respond by getting onto the streets, hopefully creating the
conditions for an Arab Spring style uprising.
Things didn't work remotely in that way. And now we have
Jehan Perera writing a tract claiming that though the masses
should rightfully have been agitated and been cacophonic if not
catatonic (my words, but it is essentially what he meant ...)
about the impeachment, they weren't because the state media was
very effective in its 'propaganda' and the rest of the media,
particularly the Sinhala language press, could not counter that
propaganda blast.
This is Jehan, with his funny little simplistic notion that
the world turns around him, and that the universe is essentially
centered around the mean and scurvy little hobgoblins of the
Colombo civil society whinge, whine and dine set. Ergo, his tidy
little narrative that there was really something there in the
impeachment that called for mass protest, but the movement
somehow did not catch fire the way it was expected to, because
the state media did an effective propaganda job!
This assumes somehow that the people cannot think for
themselves, and that Jehan Perera has to think for them, and
that somehow when the people do not behave the agitated and
monkey-like way Jehan does, it has to necessarily be because of
some other sinister third force -- in this case, the named state
media.
This of course has been the regular Colombo-centric narrative
for what seems to have been ages. When the people do not vote
the way they vote, the Jehans and the Paikiasothys say the
elections have been rigged.
When reactions to issues such as the impeachment do not go
the way they want, these same people say, the state media
intervened. This seems to be the curse these people have been
born with -- to believe that the world begins and ends wherever
they snuck their inquisitive and meddlesome little probosces.
The fact remains that in the main, the kept private media or
the greater part of it, the Sinhala media included, flailed away
making the impeachment an issue to assail the regime with.
Ninety per cent of the press, kept and supine and
unquestioning, peddled the bought and paid for line that the
impeachment was somehow a calamity. The state media -- so called
-- is but a five per cent of the entire media outreach, press
and broadcast media included.
Despite this, the people made up their own minds, the way
people make up their own minds when it comes to voting time,
throwing sand at the Colombo centric fantasy that some rootless
political force, worshipped by Jehan and Weliamuna, will form a
new government.
Sorry JC, JP, W and PK and the rest of the country's conmen
pretenders and sundry narcissists, the world does not revolve
round you folks, or the Colombo five star coffee shops that you
frequent. The common people can and do think. They have what are
called brains. These have not been addled by a little learning
at some Ivy League talk-shop on some obscure tennis scholarship
-- or the disruptive power of oodles of kroners, deutsche marks
euros and dollars coming from offshore benefactors.
These are simple people, but they are not simpletons. They
are bright enough to know that the world does not turn around
them, something that you need a reincarnation of Copernicus to
teach Jehan, Weliamuna and that lot.
They made an informed decision, based on the facts of the
impeachment, and they followed their better instincts. They
calculated that despite the banshee private media voices, a lack
of integrity is a lack of integrity, and they were honest or
god-fearing enough to discern that this person who occupied the
CJ's chair certainly was not fit for that post after everything
she got herself involved in. It's much like the way they vote --
though Colombo tries to generally make them swallow a certain
kind of pill, time and time again, they have voted with their
better instincts, and it is because they did that, that
Prabhakaran was destroyed, and Jehan is forlorn and more than a
little lachrymose these days.
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