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| Sunday, 23 October 2005 |
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Features |  |
| News Business Features Editorial
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Should you retain sacrifice in cleansing ritual? Solemn Thoughts by Wendell Solomons A press report tells us that passengers were called off a Colombo-Singapore plane flight following a phoned-in bomb alert. It was the third Colombo flight that succumbed to a false alert. In a previous alert - received when the plane was already in the air - the rush of 400 passengers to return to ground caused a loss of a life. Police investigators traced the present phone call that sacrificed a Colombo-Singapore flight to the mobile phone of a male friend of a flight stewardess. Reacting to the plight of passengers, SriLankan Airlines dismissed from its staff the stewardess who may have wished to stay home that day in Ratnapura. How many more phone calls will ring with authenticity enough to cause the sacrifice of journeys of others? Following the December 2005 tsunami, the remedy offered by a disc jockey on one of several FM radio stations that continued disco music even in broad daylight was: "Love the one you love and forget the world." Who would happen to you and me if everyone forgets the world and chooses to hide out by huddling? Basic fact Media persons have played a powerful role in feeding a carefree and senseless opportunism to community. Take one of the large behaviour adjustment examples fed to millions globally in cinema and on TV, the audience including local media men and women. On April 10th, 1912, records tell us that the liner `Titanic' narrowly missed another ship as it set sail from Southampton on its maiden voyage. On April 15th, 1912, an iceberg field in the Atlantic Ocean ripped a hole in the body of the ship. 745 persons, mainly through being placed in lifeboats, chanced to survive death by drowning in the Atlantic Ocean. The `Titanic' had begun its voyage with 2,340 passengers and crew. Now smoke and mirrors The U.S. movie labelled with the name of the ship `Titanic' offered you a mass drowning at sea as backdrop for setting off a romantic affair. Like some other perception programming media productions generated in particular in the US and begun in the anti-Moscow era of `Dr Zhivago', the producers hammered into the minds of captive audiences around the world - millions of people - the message, "Love the one you love and forget the world." Such foreign media messages led up to a Sinhala film I wrote to describe in the Sunday Observer of October 2. In Sulanga enu pinisa the creators of the film (now blocked from cinemas,) went so far as to leave you with the message that a release into Nirvana (from the coarseness of man, woman or child,) may be gained readily through suicide. What I found within the sacrificial element of the local film was an inversion of sacrificing the world. I had quoted U.S. cult priestess Ayn Rand who when dying said: "It is not I who will die, it is the world that will end." She had requested a large floral DOLLAR sign to decorate her funeral. That reveals something about the megalomaniac's dedication to the rich men who since the 1930's financed her writings that otherwise might fail in publication. It had served her financiers that a population be divided and ruled and thereby not offer resistance. Strategic countries would submit to rule by squeaky puppets whom the financiers bankroll from time to time by mass producing placards, streamers, balloons and other hoopla of election time. On the other hand, at 1977 general elections, Sri Lanka had been called a model democracy in the Third World by The Economist journal of the UK. Soon afterwards Sri Lanka came in for social engineering by the World Bank and related Western agencies to the tune of an Ayn Rand associate. Milton Friedman, a second generation US immigrant who had played side-kick to Barry Goldwater, had risen with financial backers to take over as powerful US Presidential Advisor on Economics. With the US Cabinet member for Finance in charge of the major shareholding of the World Bank, Friedman's theme `Free to Choose' prevailed through the Word Bank dispensed `Open Economy.' His theme opened the doors widely in small, countries to powerful, giant transnational companies. Friedman bamboozled to place the fox inside the chicken house. After the island was exposed to `Open Economy' for five years, 25 th July 1983 saw gangs without government curb, "Free to Choose" to sacrifice the homes of Tamil-speaking citizens in Sri Lanka's South, with flames. Cleansing by sacrifice I anticipated that such a sacrifice to the gods would be met with counter-sacrifice. History suggested that civil war would follow, and this I remarked to friends who doubted such an aftermath in the island. Ethnic polarisation took a severe toll on the country's population. After 12 years of wasting came the next response by a group of opportunists who had risen to top rank in the services. They volunteered an attack on the predominantly Tamil northern city of Jaffna. In the hysterical second sacrifice thought up in mid-1995, top-brass opportunists disregarded the public-spirited warnings of retired airforce chief Harry Goonetileke. He asked how the army could hold onto Jaffna afterwards. During the effort of the next six years, ignoring him, opportunists in the services attended to the business of further dislocating you and me accompanied by the washing out with blood of the 1994 election slogan of Sri Lanka's President "Peace and Prosperity." So the 2005 claim of the President that she could not trust the army, even appears an understatement. Removing embedded roots Sadly, the roots imbedded by Western aid and media agencies in Sri Lanka's professional minds, whether uniformed or civilian cadre, remain to suck the country's juices under any elected government. A professional club of which I happen to be a member has been taken over by a clique that has dropped all former academic activity to concentrate on re-activating its confederacy with hard alcohol. When drunk the professionals glorify themselves by shifting blame to the country. You will recognise this mantra of sacrifice, Nothing will ever go right in this country. They write off the whole country for themselves. How many other professional clubs are involved in cleansing by sacrifice of others for personal glorification? A weekly tabloid, formerly leftist, praised the local sacrificial film on its page 17 on October 2, 2005. That example might suggest to us how local media leaders could instead contribute positively in helping us remove the roots of the nihilist (Sinh. Shunyavadaya) cult of sacrifice exported to the country. Dr. Mahathir Mohamed used the theme "Beyond Existing Frontiers" for a speech in Colombo this year. We must get beyond this frontier of mind. We must cease cleansing by sacrificing each other. National salvation requires the restoring of balance that was the heritage of elders. |
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