{"id":108067,"date":"2020-10-26T16:50:53","date_gmt":"2020-10-26T23:50:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=108067"},"modified":"2020-10-26T16:50:53","modified_gmt":"2020-10-26T23:50:53","slug":"the-chapa-interview-with-us-military-professor-dr-mendis-us-policy-in-sri-lanka","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2020\/10\/26\/the-chapa-interview-with-us-military-professor-dr-mendis-us-policy-in-sri-lanka\/","title":{"rendered":"The Chapa Interview with US-military professor Dr. Mendis: US policy in Sri Lanka"},"content":{"rendered":"

Chandre Dharmawardana. <\/em><\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n

Please listen to an interview of Dr. Mendis ((https:\/\/youtu.be\/Lh4D4qGE854<\/a>) which touches on US policy and Sri Lanka, and hear between the words.\u00a0 See how a\u00a0 Sri Lankan young man straight out of a Pollonaruwa school system gets educated in the US via a scholarship to becomes a complete supporter of the American Manifest Destiny\u201d that he teaches to US soldiers.\u00a0 US policies to lead the world\u00a0 has only helped to enrich the elite classes of the US and impoverish the rest. But Dr. Mendis\u00a0 is very comfortable with US policy. It is unlikely that Dr. Naom Chomsky’s writings are part of his syllabus.

Dr. Mendis studies at Minnesota and\u00a0 joined the US Army\u00a0 teaching service which provides education for\u00a0 US forces living in US bases all over the world. Most countries including the US exploit their poor kids for fighting, while the rich kids\u00a0 escape to “better”, safer\u00a0 jobs, or join the army as officers. So,\u00a0 the ordinary soldiers\u00a0\u00a0 need education to learn how to use complicated weapons, and also to do a civilian job when they get back to normal life when they are discharged or get injured (a very common eventuality). So Professors like Dr.\u00a0 Mendis travel\u00a0 among NATO bases\u00a0 teaching soldiers US geography, economics, history, and justifying US foreign policy. In Canada too there is\u00a0 the Royal Military College (e.g., in Kingston) and its professors teach Canadian soldiers – but unlike Canada, US has\u00a0 bases\u00a0 in over a 100 countries.

It is painful to see Dr. Mendis’s failure to note how US dominates other countries, using its\u00a0 military presence to weaken regimes, and deploying its\u00a0 capitalist globalization program to allow its Big Business to dominate the economies of poor countries. Nigeria,\u00a0 the most populous country in Africa\u00a0 has the U.S. West African contingent\u00a0 stationed at a $110 million air base in Agadez, Niger.\u00a0 The under-educated Muslim leaders of the North are buttressed by the US forces, and they together exploit the south (with its educated people) to extract oil to sell via US companies. Does even 10% of the income go to Nigerian people?\u00a0 Nigeria is a very poor country with a sick and traumatized population. The country is eternally in turmoil and on the brink of war between the North and the South with government death squads eliminating dissent. The UN-human rights commission in Geneva,\u00a0 the Human Rights NGOs, the Right-to-Protect agents of the “human-rights” lobbies etc., see no evil.

Oil is the main reason why the US and its Businesses are in Nigeria.\u00a0 This is why I have opposed Sri Lanka’s attempt to explore for oil and\u00a0 gas in the Mannar sea. If the GOSL finds oil there, big powerful\u00a0 oil companies backed by the West will use extremely\u00a0 dangerous methods to takeover such resources. If they have the SOFA and the MCC, they will do the oil drilling!\u00a0 They will justify it saying that such resources must not fall into the hands of China. If you are weak and find a big treasure, you get robbed.

Dr. Mendis talks of the Jeffersonian policy of Freedom, democracy etc., laid down by the founding fathers and applied to the white population of the US, and the Hamiltonian policy\u00a0 of economic domination laid down by Treasury Secretary Hamilton during George Washington’s time.

Hamilton was the father of American capitalism, which arguably produced one of the highest standards of living in the world for the white population.\u00a0 According to Historian\u00a0 Knott His policies at the Treasury Department were designed to enhance the development of manufacturing. His economic policies such as a national bank, tariffs to protect American manufacturing, …contributed to the overall rise of the United States as an economic superpower.\u201d In consequence, Hamilton insisted in having an eventual dominating US military presence all over the world.

But US ideas of democracy and liberty are applied essentially to the Whites and to European nations.\u00a0 The US blacks, Natives and other nations were considered subjects to be held in check for\u00a0 economic exploitation as dictated by Hamiltonian policies.
Dr. Mendis does not see all that. He\u00a0 ignores how the US in the South American continent\u00a0 supported corrupt dictators\u00a0 to exploit the resources of those countries by US companies Mining, taking over land and making them into US plantations.\u00a0 A few Latin American countries followed the lead of Cuba and drove out the US, but\u00a0 most others are still struggling. Haiti is a very good example. The equivalents of the 1983 Black July that the Colombo Tamils suffered once\u00a0 has happened to US Blacks and Native peoples regularly, every decade or so.

In South Asia and in the Pacific, the Vietnamese were most successful in driving out the US by waging\u00a0 war. Vietnamese successfully\u00a0 kept\u00a0 China out of their country,\u00a0 developed its own patriotic\u201d form of socialism. Vietnam avoided any anti-Americanism and\u00a0 is using US technology to its own advantage in in even collaborating with highly aggressive companies like Monsanto.

Dr. Mendis does not see any problem with SOFA, MCC and other instruments of domination used by the US. This is not unusual. The neo-liberal politicians like Mangala Samaraweera, Ranil Wickremasinghe, and some in the\u00a0 Pathfinder organization etc., also believe that\u00a0 participating in US conglomerates is the way to prosperity. As\u00a0 Dr. Mendis explained, SOFA, MCC etc\u00a0 already apply to\u00a0 countries now in the US orbit. As part and parcel of the US military machine, perhaps Dr. Mendis thinks like a US soldier, and what\u00a0 is good for US forces is good for the world and for God.

SOFA and other mechanisms make the signatory countries becomes almost like a member of NATO, without the advantages of NATO membership\u00a0 that the\u00a0 Western NATO countries enjoy. It is logical and valid for a country like Canada or Italy to e in NATO, but not for Sri Lanka or Ecuador. The MCC is a sugar pill to make SOFA and other military takeover agreements palatable to the rulers who agree to comply, or are made to comply under military pressure. Some one like Pompeo is mandated to do just that. The MCC will make it easier for US Capital to penetrate and dominate the Sri Lankan business and agrarian sectors.\u00a0 Dr. Mendis kept on insisting that SOFA has been signed in 2017 but\u00a0 did he know that it was done in quasi-secrecy by the Yahapalanaya administration? or may be he felt that the end justifies the means of achieving Hamiltonain objectives.

Unfortunately, Dr Mendis did not look at how this US action, directed to checkmate Chines action has only benefited a small elite t of each of these societies that joined in with the US. These elites who control the business sector of those countries become part of US capitalism, while leaving the ordinary people even more poor. US capitalism is good for those who are well to do, but not for the vast majority of people, even in the US.\u00a0 The business machine\u00a0 doesn’t cannot stop\u00a0 to care about the poor, as seen in how Brendix preferred to push the workers to meet export targets even when the workers were in danger of Covid.\u00a0 One finds that directors of Brenidx are also directors of Air Lanka, and perhaps they have the capacity to bend even health rules about who they can fly in and fly out!\u00a0 The Chapa interview did not bring out any of this because the Interviewer, although clearly uncomfortable with Dr. Mendis’s views, was very hesitant to ask tough questions from an old friend!

Sri Lanka has had a history of being an independent nation right at the center of the maritime Silk Road since the time of the Greeks. Its history, and its contribution to the world can continue even within the “Manifest Destinies” claimed by big nations.\u00a0 Dr. Mendis and other fail to see this. This is not a matter of politics, but of biology and bio-diversity. Just as bio-diversity is good for reasons that I cannot go into here, an ecology of diverse nations with independent views is good for humanity.

So, I\u00a0 re-iterate that Sri Lanka should take a closer look at Vietnam that defeated the US in war, and has in spite of it come back as a friendly with the US while being independent of it while also being strongly independent of China.

Chandre Dharmawardana. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Chandre Dharmawardana. Please listen to an interview of Dr. Mendis ((https:\/\/youtu.be\/Lh4D4qGE854) which touches on US policy and Sri Lanka, and hear between the words.\u00a0 See how a\u00a0 Sri Lankan young man straight out of a Pollonaruwa school system gets educated in the US via a scholarship to becomes a complete supporter of the American Manifest […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[85],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-108067","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chandre-dharmawardana"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108067","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=108067"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108067\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=108067"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=108067"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=108067"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}