e-Con e-News

‘Before you study the economics, study the economists!’

e-Con e-News 22-28 October 2023

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The English ‘Governor’ Brownrigg & his translator, the ‘writer’ D’Oyly, usually star as ghosts at the Brutish Council’s misnamed Galle Literary Festivals. It should be called The D’Oyly Literary Festival, for it is with his sort – forget Robert Knox – that the real English fiction begins in the land of Sinhale. The D’Oylys!

     If 2022 was the new 1815, when’s the new 1818?

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‘His blood was attainted and could not be permitted to infect the race any further’– PE Pieris, Tri Sinhala: the Last Phase, 1796-1815

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‘One single instance of no distant date will be acknowledged

to include everything which is barbarous & unprincipled in public rule,

and to portray the last stage of individual depravity & wickedness,

the obliteration of every trace of conscience, & the complete extinction of human feeling.

In the deplorable fate of the wife & children of Eheylapola Adikar these assertions

are fully substantiated; in which was exhibited the savage scene of 4 infant children,

the youngest torn from the mother’s breast, cruelly butchered, & their heads bruised in a mortar

by the hands of their parent; succeeded by the execution of the woman herself

& 3 females more, whose limbs being bound, and a heavy stone tied round

the neck of each, they were thrown into a lake and drowned.’

– Sir Robert Brownrigg’s (the Governor) official declaration

‘after the taking of the Kandyan country’

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This last quote is from the Wikipedia entry on Madduma Bandara, one of those ‘4 infants.’ Many Sinhala researchers believe these atrocities never took place. Just as many now dismiss the media terrors hourly ascribed to the Palestinian people, while pointing speechless at the real ‘civilized’ perpetrators of horror, who are also behind the cameras, pressing buttons all the time.

     So who says this 1815 ‘pounding’ episode happened, the year that Treaty of Vienna that supposedly brought peace to Europe for a 100 years (until their World War I), while bringing down further hell on the rest of us? Well, we can understand genocidaires (now there’s a sexy French bon mot!) such as governors F North, T Maitland & R Brownrigg.

English is the greatest language of the greatest mass-murder, plus plus enabling wholesale erasure of their deeds, with their BBC, their chief public mouth organ & foghorn & broom. We have to admire the English for their persistence in wholesale bloodsports, whether it’s of a matter 208 years ago in Sinhale, or hot off the press, as they say, from Palestine. Then again, 2022 was the latest 1815!

     Look at Wikipedia’s entry on Brownrigg, who was made colonial governor in 1813:

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‘General Sir Robert Brownrigg, 1^st Baronet, GCB (1758-1833)

was an Irish-born British statesman & soldier.

He brought the last part of Sri Lanka under British rule

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ee according to our very own English style guide, normally & mechanically always replaces ‘British’ with ‘English’ – for it is English they all lecture us & it is English that still misrules – not Latin or Gaelic or Celtic or Welsh – and it is English alone that can make sense or nonsense of such a word as ‘brought’.

     ‘Brought’ is of course a euphemism for the real terrorism demanded by Brownrigg in 1818. He not only brought. He took. The better-known of his thefts being the Golden Tara statue from Trincomalee, now parked at that ‘secular’ English museum in London, which religiously loots what the Bank of England forgets. And what he left is still the most underdeveloped regions of the country to this day – Uva, etc.

     The bios of Brownrigg and Madduma Bandara above come from Wikipedia, which ee prefers to call Whiteypedofilia, cos they baldly push such innocent lies, making them so commonplace, multiplying their bunker blasts of honky honk. Then again, they do need to whiten that bloody wash that robs the world.

     But what intrigues is that it’s not just the English who told & tell such tales. The English had waged several wars, overt & covert on Sinhale and had been defeated. Their last resort was to strike a deal, like the US salesman D Trump says. A deal they immediately reneged on, of course. The English claim that locals, as if in a daze, kept asking, ‘When are you leaving?’

     Three years later, during the English war on Sinhale in 1818, and our first war for independence (from the English), the resistance killed 1,000 ‘Indian’ soldiers who were one-fifth of the entire English force deployed. Yet those tall tales are not repeated by ‘Indians’, necessarily. Again, we don’t know what kinda Indians those English troops were, for the King was also kinda Indian, though he ruled as a Sinhala Buddhist. The English also decimated the Veddha people, who protected the frontiers (the English now tag them indigenous!).

     But yes, what intrigues is that such stories are still repeated and rewarded 200 years later by Sri Lankans themselves (who ee monikers as ‘Brownrigg’s Bastards’ even if they speak English or not). There are ‘radical’ ‘rock&roll’ ‘rebels’ who write songs repeating these assertions about the ‘pounding’, as do the politicians they may collectively hate:

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‘Former President R Premadasa erected a statue of Madduma Bandara

on 1986 March 29 at Ehelepola village, in honour of the child hero.’

– Nimal S Bogahawatta, Madduma Bandara Ehelepola

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The elder brother who was 11 years old was afraid;

his lips were quivering and his eyes were full of tears.

But, little Madduma Bandara was a brave boy.

He loved his family and his motherland.

He was not afraid to die. – Junior Observer, 2011

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‘Overwhelmed by his uncontrollable temptation,

he attempted to embrace [Ehelapola Kumarihamy].

She then had the audacity to blurt out calling the King

‘Wadugaya’ (Telangu Tamil), ‘get out.’

She also shouted, ‘Do you think that I am a Waduga woman,

I am a pure-hearted Sinhalese woman.’

– Stanley E Abeynayake, ‘Ehelapola Kumarihamy,

A symbol of chastity’, Sunday Observer, 2012

We will get to the different forces behind such yarns originally spun to justify the coup d’etat of 1815 and the consequent genocide in the highlands & Vellassa of 1818. The consequences of 1815 as of the coup d’etat of 2022 are yet to be revealed. Rest assured, elections have been shown the backseat and if 2022 ironically offers the way beyond elections, it will have to finds its way beyond the massive popular mandate given to a Sinhala Buddhist President, all duly thwarted by the old ghosts of 1818, who keep returning. & with a greater vengeance, each time.

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Slaughter every man, woman, and child (including babies suckling at the breast)

– Robert Brownrigg

     In 2011 President Mahinda Rajapaksa had Parliament revoke Robert Brownrigg’s Gazette Notification that condemned the rebels of 1817-18 as ‘traitors’ and confiscated their properties. The then-President declared Brownrigg’s Gazette Notification null & void, and renamed all those ‘traitors’ to the English as ‘National Heroes’, with their descendants honored on Republic Day of Sri Lanka, 22 May. What he didn’t do was posthumously label Brownrigg as a terrorist. Ten years later, the Rajapakses themselves would face another very English coup d’etat, which they apparently could do nothing to prevent, except strategically withdraw to prevent further bloodshed. 2022 was the latest 1815 (see ee Random Notes).

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In Sri Lanka’s north & east, Uva & north central regions,

the UN & other agencies have funded local partners

to establish children’s educational & recreation centres.

These facilities are sparsely occupied and hardly maintained.

Yet, pictures from launch events often adorn presentations

to various stakeholders claiming continuous enrichment of less-privileged lives.

The European Union among others offers funding to dozens of agencies to empower

and uplift rights & livelihoods of women. Most of these funds are spent

on lavish lifestyles & entertainment of partner agencies, while the real impact

& assistance touching the lives & hands of women is barely marginal.

– Oshadee de Silva (see ee Focus)

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Where has all ‘the aid’ gone? – Nawaz Dawood’s 1980 book Tea & Poverty recalls that England had generously ‘given’ £80million in ‘aid’ throughout the 1960s to Sri Lanka. Whereas they, even more generously (to themselves), extracted £800mn out of Sri Lanka in the same years. Meanwhile, we had to buy their overpriced industrial goods & services to obtain their ‘aid’. How much of all that munificence is now part of our unpayable debt? Let’s set up a Corruption Bank for the IMF, and add this ‘aid’ to the deposits.

     ‘Where have millions of US$s invested in good governance & accountability projects all gone? asks The Island’s Shamindra Ferdinando (see ee Focus), adding, ‘$73mn down the drain?’ Fernando details the dollars poured into bribing ‘independent’ ‘civil society’ by USAID etc. Can you imagine if roubles & yuan were uncovered in English & US politicians’ ample offshore accounts? Fernando asks the US embassy about whether their dollars have improved parliamentary practices, and the US responds…

     However, despite all this megaphone about government corruption, the real corruption – which isn’t corruption but good old capitalism – is the business-as-usual practices of the multinational corporations (MNCs) that rule us and are never named! The role that MNCs like Unilever play, controlling the media through advertising & their agencies, and worse, such as controlling labour through ‘subsidiaries’ and monopolizing the home market.

     ee is reproducing Oshadee de Silva’s keen observations on: Global NGOs & local partners running amok under the guise of doing ‘good’? The headline sounds true enough, though ‘amok’ is very kind, and an insult to elephants, for the actual havoc these so-called NGOS have created is immeasurable. But about what kind of interference exactly is this Silva upset about?

     The smooth way the article is written, we cannot tell whether it was written by a person or a bot, but the manner in which it is written, purportedly against foreign interference, wanders or makes a beeline to the new IMF-inspired Labour Act. Silva says: ‘Many local NGOs have taken up arms against the draft Labour Act, which ironically consists of terms insisted upon by western governments & partners. What then is their real cause?’

     Indeed, we have often wondered why there are no ‘NGOs’ criticizing the terms under which workers are employed in textile- & garment-related industries still based in the imperialist countries.

     We also wonder about the UN & various dubious US thinktanks who are so worried about women’s unpaid work while at the same time enabling ‘grandparents’ to immigrate, to look after children abroad who are all forced to go to work, or freeze their unhoused butts in winter.

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• ee continues to serialize Idirimagen Idiriyata, the Communist Party of Sri Lanka ‘s ‘Alternative Program’. The CPSL claims, ‘Sri Lanka has now been overtaken by a large number of middle-income countries that have successfully restructured and developed their education systems’. The CPSL therefore makes an urgent call for reform in all educational sectors by looking at current national policies for general education, higher education, skills development, vocational training and technology, and examining how a policy for the development of national resources could provide all citizens with suitable knowledge, skills and technology: ‘The only hope for the future generation…’ (see ee Focus)

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• Enduring the English media & associated glitterati in Sri Lanka is to recall the Barbadian memoir Growing up Stupid under the Union Jack by Austin Clarke, and Grenadian Bernard Coard’s How the West Indian Child Is Made Educationally Sub-normal in the British School System: the Scandal of the Black Child in Schools in Britain. (Coard is more ‘famously’ known as being blamed for instigating a coup-detat in socialist Grenada that resulted in the US invasion of exactly 40 years ago)

     England’s ESN – ‘Educationally Subnormal’ (ESN) schools, formerly ‘Schools for the Mentally Subnormal’, enrol rather large numbers of Black children, especially those from the Anglo-Caribbean community.

     Sri Lanka’s media is however actually stupid and ‘educationally subnormal’. It is not a genetic condition, yet. It is not for a lack of talent or ability. We even export (if that’s a standard) English teachers, editors, and we boast ‘export-only’ poets, novelists & artistes who crave accolades named after English slave owners in the Caribbean (Booker, Tate, etc), or European missile sellers (Nobel). OK, it doesn’t matter who underwrites the cheque, though the IMF hints SL launder more unrecorded money than dirty linen.

     Maybe it’s because, as Marx noted about his magnum opus Capital, written in German: Germans so infected with the petty mentalities of traders & merchants would simply not understand what was happening in the modern world of industrial machine capital. (see ee Random Notes, Haiti on the Edge of White Invasion Again)

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Contents:

The Beheaded Babies Corporation (BBC): D’Oyly & Brownrigg’s Bastards