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
“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?
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?
No comments:
Post a Comment