e-Con e-News

blog: eesrilanka.wordpress.com

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

e-Con e-News 11-17 February 2024

‘Hi guys! How are you doing, exhorted US Ambassador Julie Chung

as she walked towards a group of MPs…

after the ceremonial opening of Parliament…

Another parliamentarian quickly shot a question

before the US envoy could move over towards another group:

JVP leader, Anura Kumara Dissanayake is in India.

Are there any Indo-Pacific issues linked to the visit?”

No, no,” she hurriedly responded.

Ambassador Chung, who represents a nation that once was the first

to put a man on the moon, also used the MPs as a sounding board.

She asked whether anyone there had climbed Adam’s Peak or Sri Pada.

Then she proudly boasted she had walked to the top in just 2.5 hours last month.

From her schooldays, she swaggered, she has done a lot of hiking…’

– Sunday Times

We dare not suggest what the US envoy has had to hike, to saddle her way up into the notoriously incestuous white echelons of the US State Department, but she is just doing her job, as demanded by US government’s Integrated Country Strategy, which ee continues to reproduce:

*

The US Mission’s program & training will focus

support on prosecutors, judges, other justice sector partners,

Members of Parliament, and their staff.

(see ee Focus).

*

Imagine, the SL Envoy ‘Hippie Mike’ Samarasinghe in war-war-war-Washington breezing into the US con-con-Congress or stepping into the cloakrooms of their hanging (ooops, injecting) judges and hired prosecutors to tell them they need our training in enlightened compassion? Ha!

     All this falls under the US government’s Integrated Country Strategy, which we continue to reproduce. This ICS excerpt proudly notes, the US embassy is the ‘lead donor’ in civilizing Sri Lankan society! The ‘Mission’ (& its missionaries) will, ‘in cooperation with allies & partners’, ‘endeavour to provide actors in these sectors with tools to continue operations & maintain their capacities to reach broad audiences.’ Every single trope that emanates from the US envoy’s upper orifices and the media lower orifices, from ‘corruption’ to ‘majoritarian’ to ‘Sinhalese nationalism’ to ‘long-standing ethnic conflict’, etc, will be found in this ICS document, which sees Sri Lanka playing ‘a crucial role in [their] Indo-Pacific Strategy’.

*

This week therefore saw Liz Allen, the US Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy, make the first visit of such an official to Sri Lanka. ‘Public Diplomacy’ is another euphemism for ‘Psychological Warfare’. US President Ronald Reagan’s Office of Public Diplomacy, was ‘a dedicated propaganda unit run by Reagan’s top National Security Council aide Oliver North, who simultaneously worked with cocaine traffickers to arm the Nicaraguan ‘contra rebels’.

     Allen duly met ‘government officials, media representatives, digital content creators, & NextGen leaders’, including Daily Mirror‘s Piyumi Fonseka (‘Investigative Journalist of the Year in 2022’, awarded by the owners of her newspaper) and Peradeniya professor Arjuna Parakrama of generations past (whose interview on the systematic dismantling of ‘free education’ ee reproduces below – see ee Focus).

     Meanwhile, a Sri Lanka National Commission for UNESCO is being set up, and critics point out, the white-dominated UNESCO is attempting to ‘again take over’ education policy in Sri Lanka, another subtle ploy to ‘take away our sovereignty’. Parakrama also says, ‘Nearly 40% – two-fifths of our schools – don’t go beyond the primary level’. And ‘of the 395 registered international schools, 7 come under the Board of Investment, the others are registered as companies!’ Parakrama fails to say that these criminal policies have been encouraged by the US’ World Bank who has been heavily bribing Education Ministry officials with junkets and foreign degrees. Could he tell Ms. Allen that?

     Parakrama however says the attack on education is happening because ‘education is seen as an investment, not as a right… It follows that education for some people – the marginalised, the vulnerable, the disabled, and so on – then becomes something that you don’t get much of a return on, so you dispense with or at least devalue educating the disadvantaged, which is what education should not do,’. He terms the National Education Policy Framework (NEPF) ‘frightening’ and ‘a potential crime against the country’. There has ‘been no open public consultation in this regard and that the framework was now at the parliamentary Sectoral Oversight Committee stage’.

     ee has often been critical about the preponderance of arts graduates. But as Parakrama points out, it has to do with the structures enforced by policy and impoverishment. ee however doesn’t quite understand why Parakrama makes a distinction between ‘investment’ and ‘rights.’ Without our own investment in modern industrialization, we are producing frogs for snakes, feeding the imperialist countries with our not so ’free’ educated graduates. It is cultivators and workers who disproportionately pay for this ‘free’ education, and as SBD de Silva often quipped, it may have been far better to give free fertilizer to cultivators than to give ‘free’ education to the already privileged?

*

‘Sri Lanka hails from a written history that spans beyond 2,500 years and is a legacy

of the collective effort of the people that lived in the past & at present.

That legacy of inheritance has been the synergy behind the formation

of a language of its own, a religious philosophy, a set of values,

as well as vibrant cultural traits typical to this nation.

However, the interventions of western colonialism & imperialism

over nearly 500 years have exerted a great deal of dominance through

cultural hegemony. In the colonial era, the Western colonists engaged

in outright genocidal acts, destroying & looting historic architecture,

desecrating religious sites, and seeking to subvert the local language

& religious practices. Now, imperialist & neocolonial forces use

so-called soft power to establish their hegemonic power & cultivate

false consciousness among segments of our population, to induce them

into comprador behaviour. Their strategy is to use techniques like mass media

(including film, music, advertising), as well as social media & education

to indoctrinate liberal cultural values & manufacture consent for continued

imperial domination. In many sections of the middle class, the vernacular languages

are discouraged and local beliefs & customs are ridiculed & humiliated.

Cultural norms & customs of the nation are looked down upon.’

(see ee Focus, CPSL)

*

This ee reproduces the Alternative Program of the Communist Party (CPSL) on Cultural Development. ee does wonder however, whether culture is a ‘surplus’ as such and all about ‘consumption’: food, movies, etc. The country suffers from this culture of consumption, rather than a culture of production. And our nationalists (forgetting Dharmapala’s early attempts at industry) appear not to have focused on how modern industrialization is key to modern independence and socialism! A lesson, Japan does not wish to share with us, but as the discussion on China in the Congo shows (see ee Random Notes), it is up to us to decide. Meanwhile, this year’s Cricket World Cup in Barbados is being linked to US war games in the Caribbean aka West Indies! Culture indeed! (see Random Notes)

     England’s culture of production saw the rise of industrialization in ‘mechanic institutes’ run by and for workers. The foolish feudal pretensions of Oxford & Cambridge (which our academics love) claimed that the ‘humanities’ were the realm of the ruling class, whereas science was for their servants.

     We need more industrial and educational content in our media, not ‘superstars’ who can sing and dance like monkeys, but skilled workers who can make machines (even monkeys fashion tools!). China’s TikTok algorithms are regulated to promote ‘wholesome videos with content about young inventors’ etc. Whereas the whites delegate TikTok to sex, drugs and rock&roll. We need every workplace and school to dedicate more to research & development, to look at repair & reverse engineering, and replacement of imported parts, such self-reliance which the USA’s ICS for Sri Lanka hates!

*

• Witness the widespread academic & media farces called post-colonialism & geopolitical conflict. The white man (& their varied genders) continues to invade and siege Asia, Africa & the Americas, and this features Sri Lanka & China – and this has gone on for over 500 years, continuing to this day. So what makes colonialism a bygone practice? – as one teenage reader of ee told us, they have done it for over 500 years almost successfully, so why stop – and what makes it a matter of politics related to geography? They are robbing the world.

     The USA has gradually taken over Sri Lanka from England after 1948, overseeing economic diversion, to sabotage industrialization, using assassination, attempted coup d’etat, bribery, and escalating terrorism.

     The US has waged war on China right from the beginning of the USA’s so-called post-colonial existence in 1776, pushing opium from Turkey on China. The US has profited from and participated in Europe’s opium wars, the suppression of the Taiping (Heaven on Earth) Rebellion, and sought ‘equal opportunity’ with Europe, to divide and exploit China into extraterritorial concessions. So what makes this a ‘geopolitical’ conflict? China has never invaded the Americas – only the whites themselves have. The US has long colonized Mexico, Hawaii & the Philippines (committing another forgotten genocide there), arming and then colonizing Japan (and now arming them again), dividing Korea & Vietnam (annihilating that country, before being kicked out). Their wars in Korea and Chinese Taibei (aka Taiwan) are called ‘frozen wars’. US military occupy the geographies of Korea & Taiwan, Japan & various Pacific Islands, let alone Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, as well as their wars in West Asia, and the present horror in occupied Palestine. The US (& that white man with a tan, Barry Obama) has imposed US bases in Africa and their media has whited-out the genocides in the Congo & Great Lakes. Yet our bribed intellectuals, media & academics, merrily talk of post-colonialism & geopolitics. They keep talking of Sri Lanka’s ‘China Debt Trap’ – when in truth it is US’ Wall Street that is trapping us (see ee Random Notes). Indeed, no Asian or African country has invaded Europe (at least in the last 500 years!) or their settler states.

*

Contents:

The Arts of Post-Colonialism, Geopolitics & Other White Trash