National Suicide in the South and North

The suicide attack at the Petta Railway Station

A survivor of the Madu bomb blast

“When my neighbor’s home burns, my own is in danger.”1 To begin from where we concluded and conclude from where we began, it is necessary to quote the following passage from our previous paper:

“The ghosts of Darfur appear to be walking again on a different terrain…, the specters of which have come to stay on the Northern battle front of Ceylon…,”

Further;

“…the Ceylonese South is no more than the rotten military bowels of Pakistan, in itself the Ceylonese South moulds its North as the Darfur in the Indian Ocean…


So no more it awaits… the North is exporting its equal wrath in to the bowels of the oppressor's heart …….whose affects will be born again and again on the surface of the great pearl and shall paint its crust with unhindered human blood.”

Indeed. So it was painted with human blood of its infants and civilians. If it is true that this war is really a fight for national existence, for freedom, if it is true that these priceless possessions can be defended only by the iron tools of murder, if this war is the holy cause of the people, then everything else follows as a matter of course, we must take everything that the war may bring as a part of the bargain. He who desires the purpose must be satisfied with the means. War is methodical, organised, gigantic murder. But in normal human beings this systematic murder is possible only when a state of intoxication has been previously created. This has always been the tried and proven method of those who make war. Bestiality of action must find a commensurate bestiality of thought and senses; the latter must prepare and accompany the former.2

As many as sixty people were murdered in the South by the LTTE in a series of suicide and claymore attacks, dipping the Southern mass in its own blood. It digs in to the ribs of South to show that Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam is still here… Government of Sri Lanka played its part by bombing a bus in Madu, Wanni, murdering twelve school girls with eight other people including three teachers and a principal. It is continuously launching arbitrary air strikes, bombarding the war refugees in the Northern borders of Wanni and in many other areas of the North. The Southern mass nails its head on the idea that, “the North is killing itself and the GOSL is innocent”.

History is repeating itself. Both factions have exported the war in to the heart of public sphere, the battle is fought by slaughtering the mass of the oppressed and their infants in North and South alike. The Sinhalese and the Tamil bourgeois, the ruling capitalists have no fear of their lives, the war is fulfilling its own cause and pose no threat to their luxuriously mis-shaped everyday orgy. Then the catastrophe has arrived. More than 50, 000 underdeveloped spirits, haunting in the rural South were pulled in to the SL Army during the period of last six months, hitting a record high walks in to the Government war machine, not knowing how many in to the LTTE. Numerical tables instruct the public without exciting their emotions.3 All the sons of the dispossessed peasants and the malnutritioned workers are called upon to take up arms against each other. The flower of the nation armed with the best instrument of murder will make war upon each other. Behind this march there looms the final crash. Not the workers, but the ruling class has brought this. They are driving things to the gallows, they are leading the workers to the abyss. And we ask, are the peasants of today really nothing but sheep to be led mutely to the slaughter? 4

Starting the “debate” on the extension of the emergency, the premier of the country stated that there is an attempt by the international elements to get this country in to their hands, and he also talked high on the terrorists not sparing any place when resorting to violence. Therefore he is concerned about the International and National plot, the unity of the two opposites which is about to rob the motherland from its Sinhalese. And he imputes the Southern mass to assist the Government in its cause. We repeat, “…in normal human beings systematic murder is possible only when a state of intoxication has been previously created. This has always been the tried and proven method of those who make war. Bestiality of action must find a commensurate bestiality of thought and senses; the latter must prepare and accompany the former”. Everything must justify its existence before the judgment-seat of reason or give up existence.5 So the Government of Sri Lanka has prevailed; nonchalantly it fastened the laurel of the liberator of Sinhalese culture to its helmet. Yes, it endeavored to carry through the role of the “liberator of Nation”, though often with visible discomfort and rather awkward grace.6

The Southern petty-bourgeois and the peasantry have become ‘the outer protective shell’7 of the Sinhalese State, therefore they have become a politico-ideological force superseding its epicenter of political will. In North, the oppressed mass has no milder bearings, it equals itself with the LTTE’s regime. Thus the political solution to the conflict has walked hand in hand from the military barracks, and resided on the banks of the public life. The Northern and Southern public have formed an offensive army guarding its States, and the States are seizing the public with its war machine. This short phase of infinite murder means that war has withdrawn itself from the battlefield between the defense lines of the Government Forces and the LTTE, and deposited itself in the more luxurious political accounts of the general public. The final solution will be written with public’s blood, on the streets and highways of South and on the jungle roads of the North.

Still… business is flourishing upon the ruins. Cities are turned in to shambles, villages in to cemeteries, the public in to beggars; popular rights, treatise, alliances, the holiest words and the Members of the Parliament have been turned in to scraps.8 Both factions, the Government and the LTTE, looks upon each other as the evil genius of its people, worthy only of the contempt of the world. Hunger revolts in North and South, misery and dispersion every where.

The war mongering middle strata, the petty-bourgeois of the South, emerges out of the most shameful defeats as spotlessly as he innocently went into them. With the strengthened confidence that he must win, he is more than ever is certain that he and his party – (the JVP, SLFP, UNP, the Heritage Party) need no new principles, that events and conditions must finally come to meet them.9 Gigantic his problems are his mistakes. No firmly fixed plan, no orthodox rituals that holds good for all times show him the path that he must travel. Historical inexperience is his only teacher, his eight fold path to Nibbana is not only covered with unspeakable suffering but with countless mistakes. His final liberation, depends entirely upon the workers and the oppressed peasants, on whether they learn to understand from their own racist mistakes.10

And now, the Government is screening its only possible show to the Southern crowd and to its international viewers; the conjuring up of the dead from its grave, the 13th Amendment and the Provincial Elections in the East. The provincial election is not conducted in the East, but is projected on to the screens planted in South and in abroad to convince them, the viewers, that the Government possess the political consent of the Eastern mass. Sixty eight people have been abducted in the East during the period of last three months and twelve of them are candidates to the Provincial Election to be held in the East. Allow us to repeat from our previous paper, “Right is on the side of might, legal phrases are on the side of impotence.”11 This shall build the necessary path for the LTTE to re-enter itself in to the active ideology of the Eastern oppressed, therefore to reactivate its mission in the Eastern front. Even the advisor to the president, Vasudeva Nanayakkara has confirmed that the sixteen bodies which were unearthed in Kabithigollawa recently are those of the abducted, murdered by the Government’s terrorist unit; the Sri Lankan Forces.

In no country has public opinion so completely vanished, nowhere has it been so completely superseded by official opinion, by the order of the government,12 as in Ceylon. Nowhere is the press so thoroughly gagged, so completely choked off - twelve journalists were murdered during the period of last two years; nowhere is the political and industrial class struggle of the working class, so entirely abandoned as in Neo-Ceylon. Its great historical problem is the struggle for peace, and the class struggle, in the times of bloody ethnic war.

What then has changed in this respect when the war broke out? Have the propertied classes in a spell of patriotic fervor declared: in view of the needs of the war we hereby turn over the means of production, the earth and the factories therein, into the possession of the people? Have they set aside all political privileges, will they sacrifice them upon the altar of the motherland, now that it is in danger? Of course nothing of the sort has occurred. 13 Property rights, exploitation and class rule, even political oppression in all its “Sri” Lankan thoroughness, have remained intact.

We must realise what it was that happened here. People must cease to be will less, thoughtless herds. That is new in the history of the Earth. Hitherto masses have always blindly followed the lead of those who interested in war, who drove them at each others throats to mass murder. That shall stop. The masses must ceased to be instruments, the yeomen of war profiteers.14

Hitherto men in Neo-Ceylon have constantly made up for themselves false conceptions about themselves, about what they are and what they ought to be. The phantoms formed in the human brain are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life process.15 They have arranged their relationships according to their ideas of Racist Nationalism. The phantoms of their brains have got out of their hands. They, the creators, have bowed down before their creations. Let us liberate them from the chimeras, the ideas, dogmas, imaginary beings under the yoke of which they are pining away. Let us revolt against the rule of thoughts..., nor the guns load themselves, nor the triggers pull itself… Let us teach men, says one, to exchange these imaginations for thoughts which correspond to the essence of man; says the second, to take up a critical attitude to them; says the third, to knock them out of their heads; and -- existing reality will collapse.16

References:

1. Luxemburg .R, The Junius Pamphlet – The Crisis in the German Social Democracy. Third Sri Lankan Edition. pp 64
2. Ibid. Pages 17 – 18
3. Marx .K, Marx and Engels Collected Works Vol. 1. Pp 133
4. Luxemburg .R, The Junius Pamphlet – The Crisis in the German Social Democracy. Third Sri Lankan Edition.. Quoting August Bebel in the Reichstag in the Morocco and Victor Adler at the International Peace Congress, November 12. Pp 10, 12
5. Engel .F, Anti-Dhurring, Introduction. Pp?
6. Gramsci .Antonio, Selections from the Prison Notebooks
7. Luxemburg .R, The Junius Pamphlet – The Crisis in the German Social Democracy. Third Sri Lankan Edition. Pp 61
8. Ibid. Pp 6
9. Ibid. Quoting Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852). Page 6
10. Ibid. Pp 6
11. Marx .K, Marx and Engels Collected Works Vol. 1. pp 6
12. Luxemburg .R, The Junius Pamphlet – The Crisis in the German Social Democracy. Third Sri Lankan Edition. Pp 74
13. Ibid. Pp72
14. Ibid. Pp?
15. Marx .K and Engels .F, The Germen Ideology, Chapter I. Pp?
16. Ibid. Pp?

The Darfur In the Indian Ocean...?

The birth of an era of social malice – can there be anything more “magnificent” in the affairs of the mankind? The social order is transformed in to a state of protracted murder and mass robbery. The institutions and traditions, the resurrection of which has been periodically carried out by the general public, are now nailing that same mass on the cross of social democracy in all its nakedness. The age of globalization is mere pre-history; the “Eye” of its warpath has now turned towards nations…

>The Neo-Ceylon state is firing blades in to the heart of its general public, it has withdrawn itself from the Cease Fire Agreement with the LTTE and has declared the New Year as the year of war. It is an unavoidable reality that war in all its potency develops earlier than peace 1.., yet it presupposes the latter shall prevail soon after the combat is seized. But it has ceased to come along that lane. War is nothing but deception, it is nothing but deceiving the watchful eye of its observers, in this case it is the eye of the general masses, the murder of whom, has become a monotonous task. And yet, the final solution is not one step nearer. Feudal rule has caught in its own tarp and can not ban the spirit it has invoked.

>The fat red riding president, Mahinda Rajapakse, who hoped for comfort amid the cradle of its kin, has met its own wolves under the swathe of deep family love. His creation of family heirs has left himself at the corner as the only remaining representative of its own opinion. His magnanimous show is over; the curtain has fallen on this political reservist as well as on its MPs as they pull out amid the joyous cries of its enthusiastic and starving mass. We no longer see their laughing faces, smiling cheerfully from the train windows upon a war mad Southern population. Quietly they trot through the streets, with their sacks upon their shoulders, filled with their portfolios, and the public with a fretful face goes about its daily task. Gone are the blooming street demonstrations, gone are the singing throngs, gone the violent mobs ready to denounce ready to whip themselves in to a delirious frenzy over every nail driven in to the heart of the oppressed 2; the Southern mass is breathing the atmosphere of ritual murder, as it hurls itself to the perfect land of man and the beast; which shall prevail is a question of power and volcanic organization on each others hand.

>Weeks before the decision was taken to withdraw itself from the CFA, the Defense Secretariat, a former Sri Lankan army general and the loyal brother of the “President” announced that the “the Cease Fire Agreement is a dead treatise and it is time that we burry it and march the battalions inward to Killinochchi”, not weeks later, the Prime Minister of the country announces the withdrawal from the Cease Fire Agreement and announce the year 2008 as the “year of war”. What is more naked than this..? The executive presidency and its cabinet of ministers is mere excreta of public verdict, the absolute power which yields control over the country is concentrated in to a feudal family integument who never kissed the vote of the general public.

The “procurement” of weapons for the Sri Lankan forces has been brought under a government company, under the leadership of Ghotahbhaya Rajapakse and the Auditor General is banned from the inspection of those monetary figures which have never even been entered in to a public balance sheet. The “loyal” brother to the president, the defense secretariat is making a fortune out of a systematic killing of its desired population, while the profits are springing, like weeds from the fields of the dead. The executive presidency and its MPs are being confiscated inside a barless prison by this un-seizeble family rule. What is more naked than this…? The country is brought under a feudal family format who dares to embrace the vote of the public.

>The Eastern surface is being brought under the executive rule of Bazil Rajapakse, the “loyal” brother to the president, who pumps the spirit of slaughter in to the flesh of the paramilitaries who freely roam on the soil of Eastern borders subsequent to the withdrawal of the LTTE from its ranks. He, the Bazil Rajapakse, the bearer of the throne of the East is drawing gigantic development plans and inviting the multinationals and nationals to capitalize on the Eastern surface. It is him who has completed the pre-capitalist accumulation of the East, the subsummation of labour by capital for which 20% of the capital investments of who ever investor, must be deposited in the swollen accounts of Bazil Rajapakse. In addition, all the civil administration posts of the North & East is being filled by retired army generals and the commanding positions of religious institutions are being replaced and filled with the family members of the Rajapakse monarch. What is more naked than this..? The body of the country is crafted with Fascist flesh whose skeleton reveals the iron structure of the Feudal rule who dare to turn its ear even to the bourgeoisie democratic winds blowing from the Western deserts.

The unionization, demonstrations, strikes and protests are being murdered by the bourgeoisie factory of its ethical production. The court hurls its sharp blades of law in to the heart of the elementary struggles of the oppressed and rules them out ceaselessly in favor of the architect of the fiend floating on the waters of the Indian Ocean. The Negro-Robin Hoods in the ILO have also sent allegations in vain against the measures of the Ceylonese judiciary.

In to the disillusioned atmosphere of pale daylight there rings a different chorus; the hoarse croak of the hawks and hyenas of the battlefield. The spirit of the struggle is choked away from the rest of the Earth, all roads closed that bring the winds of Jaffna to the Southern surface. The North is called the unfaithful wretch by his cousin on the other side. The ghosts of Darfur appear to be walking again on a different terrain…, the specters of which has come to stay on the Northern battle front of Ceylon…, a miles walk by the government forces beyond the surface of its Forward Defense Line lay many miles of slaughter and sharpened mass ruin.

Shamed, dishonored, wading in blood and dripping with filth, thus the half feudal society stands, the Ceylonese South is no more than the rotten military bowels of Pakistan, in itself the Ceylonese South moulds its North as the Darfur in the Indian Ocean…

So no more it awaits… the North is exporting its equal wrath in to the bowels of the oppressor’s heart, murdering twenty six civilians with infants as a beacon of mortified flesh to mark the end of the Cease Fire Agreement, whose affects will be born again and again on the surface of the great pearl and shall paint its crust with unhindered human blood.

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language 3. Thus the Ceylonese government put on the mask of the ancient kings, draped itself alternately in the guise of those feudal rulers –king Dutugamunu, Ghotahbhaya and so on­­­­- who still haunt the brains of the living. But unheroic though the current ruling monarch is, it nevertheless needs its public to perform heroism, sacrifice, terror, civil war, and national wars to bring itself into being. Therefore the GOSL is preaching its public to be heroic, vigilant and no more patriotic in order to secure its own existence from being displayed within the contemporary museums of Sri Lankan political history.. And the LTTE is no more equal to the task, it has wrapped itself with the latter’s un-diminishable product, and waging a never ending spiral of massacre until the South strips its imaginary costumes..

How does the birth of a new Empire of such strength come about? What path through the labyrinth of social process leads to it?

It is nothing but the impotency and hypocrisy of the (L)eftist political parties in Ceylon and its rotten body of Trade Union organizations who laid the foundation for this empire of murder and robbery to rise above the earth and its people. The left politicians have left the proletariat and the peasantry to its irreversible doom and more over, it has aborted the weak fetus of Socialism that grows and moulds inside the womb of capitalism by depositing themselves in the side banks of the oppressor state. The immediate advice to the proletariat and Ceylon peasantry is the murder of middle class Left parties and their body of Trade Unions at one blow. No more do we need them, no more they shall become a reality.

A huge amount of foreign aid is continuously pumped in to the prevailing economy of war, it has grown a sea of blood which inundates the entire surface of the North and East and the South alike while the inflation rate of most of the life making goods have burst themselves towards 100% - 150% range. The fact that 1/4 th of the Sri Lankan population live in absolute poverty of less than Rs. 791 per month and about 1/3rd below the higher poverty line of Rs. 950 per month4 implies that the country’s development process have not been holistic nor any egalitarian, and the system of war governance have reinforced these conditions which result in impoverishment of the poor while the ruling factions have continuously accelerated its every form of wealth; the richest 20% of the population receives 49.9% of the GDP5.

The assassination of the parliamentarian Mr. T. Maheshwaran and the shock of an information which he released on the murderous role which the government forces have undertook in the area of North and East , two days prior to his murder, uncloaks the brutal killers roaming under the Sinhala Buddhist defense shield. Mr. Maheshwaran’s murder is an open declare of state terrorism against any individual or group who attempts to be the voice of the people who are powerless and brutally murdered everyday. Mr. Maheshwaran has pledged to expose information on planned killings of civilians in the district of Jaffna and in the Northern Province alike, by sending paramilitary groups to those areas by the Central Government of Sri Lanka.

Many lives of the workers employed at the National Media Corporation have entered in to an inevitable armed struggle against the paramilitaries of the government and the state sponsored underworld carders. No one was arrested following the recent incident at the National Media Corporation when the Minister of Labour raided the institution and assaulted the News Director for he is guilty of not telecasting a speech made by the Minister at an inaugural ceremony of an opening of a bridge.

It triggered an uprising of the people within the institution premises itself, the workers greeted the Minister and his underworld carders with stones and iron fists. The new army of liberation was equipped, and roaming within the borders of the Colombo city. It was a spontaneous operation of the masses, an hour of revolutionary uprising, in all its purity the workers were storming their way to heaven; but it no longer recognized the ghosts of the lumpen empire is watching over its cradle.

Soon after the Minister was shamelessly transported to the General Hospital in Colombo under the protection of the SF and STF, the Central Investigations Department confiscated the video tapes which contained the attack against Minister and its killer gang, the tapes were confiscated in order to launch governments murderous wrath over the people who rose against this nuclear fists of the Lumpen Bourgeois. It has become a dire necessity to cut off the lumpen heads that have grown on the political integument of the mass of the people.

The grand Lion of the South is copping its own tong with its own antique blade, now blunt and out-of-date. Not three months ago that the Sunday Leader press which is located within the high security zone in Colombo was burned down, who else other than the government forces can destroy the property of its own military strong hold….? A few days later a security guard of Minister Anura Bandaranaike was murdered in the high security zone of Colombo chopping his neck open, and had sat free his body in to high secured waters of the Barey Lake.

All these killings must be executed by the state for the sake of National security. These people who were murdered by the government are Sinhalese and Tamil terrorists who support the cause of the LTTE. Is this not the evil that the government propagates through out the whole mass of the people in the country by the use of its media apartment?

For this sort of a “false consciousness” to be implanted in to the ideology of the general public requires the prior construction of the consent of power across a sufficiently large spectrum of population to win elections. The dominant ideology of the ruling class typically grounds consent. It is constructed out of long standing cultural socialization rooted deep in National traditions. It therefore can be profoundly misleading and disguising real conflicts under cultural prejudices and National values can therefore be mobilized to mask other realities 6.

The word “freedom” resonates so widely within the common understanding of the Americans that it becomes a ‘button that elites can press to open the door to the masses’ to justify almost anything. Thus could Bush retrospectively justify the Iraq war and the Sri Lankan state can justify the mass slaughter through out the country in the same way or at least they can make an attempt on that path; “therefore political problems become insolvable when disguised as cultural ones” 7.

It was only through playing the nationalism card in the Falkans/Malvians war that Margaret Thatcher could win the re-election and promote further Neoliberal reforms internally 8.

If the Neoliberal state is facing the general period of declining capitalism and therefore grave economic crises, then what might replace it? What did the Sri Lankan government and no less the Bush administration do when they faced the seven signs of Neoliberal chronic economic imbalances?

1. uncontrollable internal budgetary deficits
2. a balance of payment crisis
3. rapid currency depreciation
4. unstable valuation of internal assets
5. rising inflation
6. rising unemployment with falling wages
7. capital flight

They stepped its gear in to the ‘war on terrorism’, the rise of militaristic means to handle chronic economic crises, it is namely a shift towards Neo-conservatism; in other words it is the emphasis on Nationalism to justify and provoke public support on military acquisitions. This militarization of the public sphere has much to do with asserting domestic control over much divided body of politic (such as the Sri Lanka Freedom Party, the JVP, The Buddhist Monks and its affiliate mass). Fear and insecurity were all too easily and in this case successfully manipulated for the construction of power.

The grade one child recruitments for national schools in Sri Lanka was conducted inside a fascist integument. Fifty five points out of hundred were rewarded to those children who had their parents and relatives employed in the armed forces, this resulted in 90% of the student recruitments for the National schools were fulfilled by the children of the armed personnel.

There is no other country so barbarous and in which the mass of the people were robbed to such extent of political understanding, light and knowledge - no other country has remained in the Indian Ocean’; Sri Lanka is the exception. The pearl of the Indian Ocean has depreciated all of its value and sunk itself to the bottom of its waters.

Many parliamentarians faced death threats when they refused to vote for the governments 2008 budgetary proposals, the family members of three Tamil National Alliance (TNA) parliamentarians were abducted just days before the voting of the national budget was conducted. The end result was the successful overcoming of the budgetary crisis that the Sri Lankan government faced through the use of its capacity to seize the lives of its rivals.

The OPEC oil prices hike that came with the oil embargo of 1973 placed vast amount of financial power at the disposal of the oil producing states such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Abu Dhabi. We know from the British intelligence repots that the U.S was actively preparing to invade these countries in 1973 in order to restore the flow of oil and bring down the oil prices. We also know that the Saudis agreed that time, presumably under military pressure, if not open threat from U.S to recycle all of their petrodollars through the New York Investment Banks9. The end result was the successful overcoming of the oil crisis that U.S was about to face through the use of its capacity to seize the lives of its rivals.

What is there to be more precise than this? It is nothing but the global unity of Intra-State Fascism.

So what are our president and ministers thinking about? The president regards the proletariat as gun powder, and political knowledge is a spark; the president is convinced that if the spark falls on to the gun powder, the explosion will be directed first and foremost against the terrorism of the state 10.

“Right is on the side of might.”
“Legal phrases are on the side of impotence.11 “










References:

1. Marx K. Grundrisse
2. Luxemburg R. The Junius Pamphlet
3. Marx K. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
4. Household Income and Expenditure Survey 1995/96 – Department of Census and Statistics, Colombo.
5. Ibid.
6. Gramsci A. Selections From the Prison Note Books
7. Ibid.
8. Harvey D. A Brief History of Neoliberalism
9. Stigleize J. The Roaring Nineties
10. Lenin V. I. What Are Our ministers Thinking About?
11. Marx K. Collected Works Vol. 8

Dear All,

Please forward this article to everyone and make the move to end this never perishing war, lets make this the path to begin our muted conversation to paint the Map of Freedom…