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Wednesday 19 February 2014

Geneva and the educated


Apparently there are only three countries that will have to face substantive resolutions in Geneva in March, and all of them Sri Lanka, Myanmar and North Korea happen to be Buddhist countries of one yana (vehicle) or the other. Of the three countries Myanmar has been “disciplined” after continuous application of pressure including economic sanctions and the country has agreed for a so called consensual resolution. In the exercise of “disciplining” Myanmar the western Christian countries had Aung San Suu Kyi as their agent, but in Sri Lanka and North Korea they do not have such a leader who could effectively challenge the relevant “regime” and the west has to depend on so called international pressure. As we have said often what we experience today is a clash between the Judaic Christian culture and the Islamic and Buddhist cultures. The Islamic culture is more powerful as a military power and also as a political force and the Judaic Christian cultural hegemony has concentrated on two Buddhist countries this year.

It is very likely that in Sri Lanka the west can depend on a more westernized elite group especially in education than in North Korea, and that in the latter  there is not so much of a discussion on the impending resolution in the media. The Sri Lankan educated people are obsessed with Geneva and most of them seem to believe that their future would be decided in March in Geneva. It is unfortunate that free education in Sri Lanka has produced a western educated group irrespective of the medium of instruction, which depend on so called analysis of western intellectuals echoed by the local pundits. If not for the so called uneducated people in the country, Sri Lanka would have agreed to any suggestion by the Judaic Christian west without even critically thinking of what is taking place.

This is one of the reasons why we have to defeat the hegemony of the Judaic Christian Culture especially in the sphere of knowledge. Edward Said in his Orientalism published in 1978 concentrated on what is known as post colonialism by the western intellectuals, described how an Eurocentric view of the Islamic world and the orient in general misrepresented oriental culture. The Orient of the westerners was something that the western intellectuals created and not the orient of the people living in that part of the world. Said was a Professor in English at an American university and he was accepted by the western intellectuals in general. Said also described a relativity of knowledge, his emphasis being on how the west, meaning of course the western intellectuals, saw the orient. It is nothing but the Orient relative to the western intellectuals, and we could say that it was the Orient created relative to the Judaic Christian culture based on the Greek Judaic Christian (GJC) Chinthanaya.

Said was accepted by the western intellectuals in general for the simple reason that in spite of his criticism he was also a western intellectual. Said accepted the GJC Chinthanaya and also the so called methodologies adopted in the western intellectual world, which included the western scientific method and the Aristotelian logic. The term post colonialism, a creation of the western intellectuals hide the fact that western Judaic Christian colonialism has not ended. The present day western intellectuals very often use the prefix post in describing phenomena, as for example  in the case of post colonialism and post modernism, and by that usage one is assured that colonialism and modernism and other such phenomena have ended though it is not the case.

Said described one form of relativism of western knowledge, without challenging the basis of such knowledge. The sociologists in the west have come out with theories on relativity of knowledge without going into the foundations of western knowledge. It was a relativity of “sociology” based on the GJC Chinthanaya and the western intellectuals had no problem with the relativities of Said or others. Except in the case of Feyerabend who challenged the so called scientific method in his book “Against method”, and who was not recognized by the western intellectuals,  the others including Kuhn who wrote “The structure of scientific revolutions” were content with the methods in western science. Kuhn was interested in describing how western science progressed through so called revolutions and he only challenged Popper’s view of western science where science advanced as a result of scientists attempting to falsify the existing theories.

Even Feyerabend did not say that western science is “pattapal boru” (blatant lies) and the moment one came out with the view that western scientific theories and other abstract western knowledge are mere stories (pattapal boru) concocted by western intellectuals relative to Judaic Christian culture based on GJC Chinthanaya the whole hell broke lose. It is interesting to note that the greatest opposition came from Sinhala nationalists who defend western science without any understanding of western Physics that is at the pinnacle of western knowledge. People who have read on Physics from popular books but who have never studied that subject after the GCE (Advanced Level) formally with the Mathematics involved, very often failing in the subject at the examination, are the most ardent followers of western science. Incidentally the most attentive of the “pattapal boru” kathava are the students of the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Moratuwa who very often get very good marks in Physics and Mathematics at the GCE (Advanced Level) examination. 

Now what is the relevance of all these stories to Geneva?  The Geneva circus is managed by western intellectuals with the assistance of people such as Navi Pillai who are very often educated people in the western tradition whatever their nationality, ethnicity, religion may be.  To begin with, we are given the impression that Geneva is an international forum. It may be the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) that meets in Geneva every March but the stage is managed by the western countries that pretend to be the international. The west represents a bogus international but the hegemony of the Judaic Christian culture is such that the bogus international is projected as the international, of course, with the assistance of the products of western education found in media, universities, NGOs, parliament, judiciary, officialdom and other such places. The media discusses Geneva and project it to be a life and death experience of the ordinary people.

Even if the resolution against Sri Lanka instigated by England and presented by USA is carried through what can the so called international do?  The UNHRC in Geneva cannot impose economic sanctions but as we have been telling for more than four years there can be economic sanctions imposed by individual countries or group of countries on their own, to punish us for defeating the LTTE, the agent of the west not only against Sinhala Buddhist culture but the Tamil Hindu culture as well. The so called educated people are sacred at the outcome and they think that would have to starve to death if “unofficial” economic sanctions are imposed. The irony is that some of these educated people or at least their parents were not opposed to eating “bajiri” during the so called second world war (the computer insists that I begin these words with capital letters) which was a war of the west and not a world war, in order to safeguard and protect the interests of the English colonials. The elite schools were shifted to places such as Bandarawela during this time forcing the offspring of the privileged to stay away from home. The educated went through all these difficulties to protect not the sovereignty of the nation but the interests of the English colonials. For the educated, whether they were educated in English or Sinhala (Educated Tamils are outside the equation as their problem is formulated in a different way by the western intellectuals) safeguarding the interests of the English colonials appear to be more important than protecting the sovereignty of the nation, and they are prepared to sacrifice for the former purpose and not for the latter. Such is the power of the western education we receive at schools and universities. Let us feed the educated with some “bajiri” if the need arises.

Nalin De Silva

19-02-2014