{"id":153790,"date":"2025-12-21T16:01:45","date_gmt":"2025-12-21T23:01:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=153790"},"modified":"2025-12-21T16:01:45","modified_gmt":"2025-12-21T23:01:45","slug":"the-itching-fingers-behind-a-puppeteered-aragalaya","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2025\/12\/21\/the-itching-fingers-behind-a-puppeteered-aragalaya\/","title":{"rendered":"The Itching Fingers Behind a Puppeteered\u00a0Aragalaya"},"content":{"rendered":"

e-Con e-News<\/a><\/em><\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n
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blog: https:\/\/eesrilanka.wordpress.com<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018Before you study the economics, study the economists!<\/em>\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

e-Con e-News 14-20 December 2025<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

*<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>\u2018<\/a>Whitey didn\u2019t leave,<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Whitey didn\u2019t stay.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Neither went, nor remained.<\/em>\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2013 Nanda Malini, Nidahas Baila<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

*<\/p>\n\n\n\n

An enigma indeed. National Freedom Front (NFF) leader Wimal Weerawansa\u2019s adroit revelations this week about who secretly visited the then-Speaker Mahinda Yapa Abeywardena at midnight on 13 July 2022, detains us once again, as he wipes away the fogs emanating out of the merchant media\u2019s mist machine (see ee Sovereignty<\/em><\/strong>, Wimal Weerawansa Divulges Hooker Nona\u2019s Testimony<\/em>).<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

     <\/strong>Speculations keep overflowing with muddling reportage, as to who was trying to foment a coup to hurry the extra-parliamentary ousting of a popularly elected President Gotabhaya Rajapakse, so as to ease the entry of all-time favored blue-eyed tannic toyboy, Ranil Wickremesinghe. Was it delayed, as such a blatant coup could have sparked a horrific bloodbath on that fateful day? Yet it was Ranil\u2019s unelected accession that was enabled through the fig-leaf of bipartisan parliamentary assent. Still, who was able to deploy the \u2018elite\u2019 paramilitary Special Task Force (STF) to surround the Speakers\u2019 Residence? Who promised to call the agitations all off \u2018in 45 minutes\u2019 even as the Aragalists were purportedly baying to burn down parliament that night? Was it Julie Chung the always-leaving never-going US envoy (Feb 2022 \u2013 ?)? Was it the then-Indian High Commissioner in Colombo, now posted-down-under \u2013 Gopal \u2018The Cowherd\u2019 Bagalay (May 2022 \u2013 Dec 2023)?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

     Controversy clambered higher than the clouding heavens roiling above, as the former speaker is said to have revealed all to Sunanda Maddumabandara, the Senior Advisor (media) to President Ranil Wickremesinghe (July 2022 \u2013 Sept 2024). Maddumabandara\u2019s most recent work, Aragalaye Balaya<\/em> (The Power of the Aragalaya<\/em>) fingers Bagalay as having directly interfered in Sri Lanka\u2019s internal affairs. This revelation was reported as contradicting assertions by NFF leader Wimal Weerawansa in his book 9: the Hidden Story<\/em> and by polemicist Sena Thoradeniya\u2019s tract, Galle Face Protest: System Change or Anarchy?<\/em> \u2013 both of whom had presumably and unfairly dared nail the always-skirting US envoy as the official stirrer of the aragalaya pot. The envoy had merely activated the US embassy\u2019s innumerable little governmental-non-governmental (GNGO) fingers wrapped in dainty dollar bills.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

     Weerawansa this week presciently pointed out that Maddumbandara\u2019s book does not contradict his assertion that it was indeed the US government quarterbacking the kerfuffle; that the Envoy had merely preceded the Bharati boy. Nor does Weerawansa\u2018s book deny that this official Indian Bagalay was sent trotting behind to reinforce the US Envoy\u2019s demand, which the speaker is said to have heroically or stoically turned down. Critics point out that Wickremesinghe loyalist Maddumabandara\u2019s media assertions have been frequently found to be numerically challenged and terminologically inexact.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

     It is no surprise that the UNP leader and his coterie would eagerly seek to whitewash the role the US government has played in undermining elected governments midst their cacophonous bluster about \u2018democracy\u2019 and \u2018rule of law\u2019. Always-breakdown RW eagerly and patiently awaits his turn, once again, despite his protestations that he has not installed himself as UNP leader-for-life. Given RW\u2019s frequent recent jaunts to India, it appears that the permission to implicate Bagalay has been given the imprimatur by the spooks shadowing Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, former president of Tata Sons\u2019 Global Corporate Affairs Division, and present India Minister of External Affairs. It is also more than clear that India is unable to assert its independence from US foreign policy dibs over the nation of Bharat and the ocean known as Indian, wherein Sri Lanka has always played a crucial role.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

*<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Japan\u2019s leaders continue to issue dire threats against China, as demanded by their colonial master, the USA. Yet, as Warwick Powell nevertheless cries out, Asia needs to consolidate its economic relationships \u2018as the foundations for regional stability & peace\u2019. ee Focus<\/em><\/strong> continues Powell\u2019s conversation with Norway\u2019s Glenn Diesen on how \u2018Japan Risks Economic Decline & War\u2019.  He points out, DPR Korea & China \u2018have had a mutual defense arrangement since the 1950s\u2019<\/em><\/strong>. He warns: half a million Ukrainians or more have died \u2018in the name of the USA\u2019s war\u2019, noting that the USA is not in the Ukraine \u2018for the Ukrainians or anyone else. They\u2019re there for the USA.\u2019 Diesen declares that Europe is in deep delusion, apparently ignoring that it is the USA who blew up the NordStream pipeline to ensure Europe\u2019s industrial and economic dependence. Warwick notes, Asia is \u2018ultimately\u2026 going to need to find a way to a post-US future,<\/strong>\u2019  or like Europe: sink with the Titanic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

*<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The USA\u2019s atomic bombing of Japan was the \u2018First Act of the Cold War<\/em>\u2019<\/strong>, recalls Roy Singham, giving thorough evidence of why there was absolutely no need for such a horrific deed. Instead he shows, using the USA\u2019s own evidence, that the nukes were aimed at deterring the USSR<\/strong> to whom Japan was about to surrender. ee Focus<\/em><\/strong> continues Singham\u2019s amazing yet unsettling accounts of the \u201880th<\/sup> Anniversary of the Victory in the World Anti-Fascist War (WAFW<\/strong>)\u2019 \u2013 subtitled, \u2018Understanding Who Saved Humanity: a Restorationist History\u2019. Singham proves how \u2018the moment fascism fell, the mask dropped\u2019 and the US decided to commit genocide in Korea<\/strong>, massacring over 20% of their population: \u2018No nation in modern history has suffered such concentrated destruction\u2019.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

     The imperialists then began to attack the socialist countries that had actually made the greatest sacrifices to defeat fascism. The moment Ho Chi Minh declared Vietnam\u2019s independence; the English released & rearmed French troops<\/strong> in Saigon\u2026 Capitalism\u2019s so-called victory, has turned out to be Pyrrhic and ruinous to the world\u2026.and the innumerable obituaries about communism \u2013 somewhat premature\u2026.and yes, the US and Europe are rearming fascism again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

*<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018When the chips fall, we will not have the excuse<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

of saying we were not warned or had been fooled.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In its ambition for world domination, the Trump<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

administration is neither coy nor understated<\/em>.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2013 Sunity Maharaj (Trinidad)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This week sees the tourism traders in Sri Lanka promoting smuggled Indian ganja on Bentota Beach. They claim to be honoring the Jamaican reggae balladeer Bob Marley. They seek to drown out Marley\u2019s more poignant pointing to the English slavers (\u2018old pirates\u2019) who sold Africans to the \u2018merchant ships.\u2019 Traders have made Marley\u2019s name more an eponym for the banned herb in Lanka, than a lyricist of liberation. Then again, a televised Rastafarianism (a caricature of the Maroonism of escaped and resistant slaves), was promoted to counter the Marxism-Leninism that triumphed in Cuba & Grenada, etc. , and has been either invaded or besieged.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

     Yet Sri Lanka has received an even more urgent message from the Caribbean (which the BBC<\/em> keeps calling by its cricketing plantation slave name \u2013 the West Indies<\/strong>). We have already noted the installation of doppler radar on Trinidad\u2019s twin island Tobago, that turns out to be not for weather warnings but for military purposes (see ee <\/em><\/strong>06 December 2025). We won\u2019t even ask whatever happened to those innumerable joint military exercises and equipments that promised to protect us against such uncalled-for happenings as took place on that rather evocative date of 27 November.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

     This week, the Trinidadian scribe Sunity Maharaj details the USA\u2019s latest moves to \u2018reassert & enforce\u2019 their 202-year-old Monroe Doctrine<\/em><\/strong> on the test of the Americas (note the plural) as it assembles (see ee Focus<\/em><\/strong>) a huge military force outside Venezuela, to grab its vast oil reserves<\/strong>, under the pretext of interdicting narcotics. Open warfare there will send the prices of imported fuel sky high, and send Sri Lanka\u2019s import-dependent economy tumbling further even as the US dispatches envoys to prescribe salves. The Monroe Doctrine <\/em>proclaims that the USA can intervene anywhere & in any country in the Western hemisphere. And not only\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

*<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018Take up the White Man\u2019s burden \u2013<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Send forth the best ye breed \u2013<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Go bind your sons to exile<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

To serve your captives\u2019 need;<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

To wait in heavy harness<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

On fluttered folk & wild \u2013<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Your new-caught sullen<\/strong> peoples,<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Half devil & half child<\/em><\/strong>\u2026\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Last week, ee<\/em><\/strong> pointed to the USA\u2019s policy of Manifest Destiny<\/em><\/strong>, which invoked divine anointment to extend its dominions to the Pacific (Hawaii, Polynesia, Melanesia), and Asia (Philippines). Monroe Doctrine<\/em> or Manifest Destiny<\/em>, all of it is an extension of England\u2019s White Man\u2019s Burden<\/em><\/strong> \u2013 the title of a poem written by Anglo-Indian Rudyard Kipling to extol the USA\u2019s invasion of the Philippines\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

     It is important to recall here that Don Trump\u2019s assertions are a continuation of his Democratic Party predecessors like B. Obama & J. Biden, despite all claims to the contrary. Trump has just been more open. In his first term, Trump invoked his genocidal antecedent US President Andrew Jackson (1829-37) who massacred and drove out the original peoples of North America\u2019s southern territories \u2013 Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek and Seminole \u2013 to make way for the enslaving cotton plantations. In his second term, Trump has rather curiously invoked \u2018Tariff King\u2019 US President William McKinley (1897-1901), who invaded the former Spanish colonies, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Philippines, wars led by their veterans of the \u2018Indian Wars\u2019 in the US South. A most-mortal McKinley was later assassinated by a purported Polish anarchist, and replaced by the thuggish Theodore Roosevelt, who proclaimed US diplomatic policy, as \u2018Speaking Softly, & Carrying a Big Stick<\/em>\u2019. Trump shrugs off such prevarications, and insists on ranting wildly & brandishing blunt weapons. Cosplaying master, he signals irrationality & contradiction as his right. US rulers\u2019 links to known Nazis are also not surprising, given that prominent European & other Americas\u2019 leaders today such as Canada\u2019s Chrystia Freelander, Germany\u2019s Ursula von der Leyen, Estonia\u2019s Kaja Kallas, and recently elected Chilean President Jos\u00e9 Antonio Kast \u2013 are all the grand\/children of devout Nazis. Then again, the USA needs no lessons in fascism. The Nazis always acknowledged the white settlers of the Americas & elsewhere, as their elder siblings, from whom they have learned much\u2026And now after the so-called and much heralded \u2018pink wave\u2019 of social democrats who clearly have no way to overcome capitalism, we have to get ready to overcome another assault by their rested and fully financialized born-again avatara\u2026.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

*<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sri Lanka\u2019s resistance to the more barbarous impulses emanating from the North Atlantic are not new. Our land was invaded by Portugal, 13 years after Spain pounced on Haiti (from the Taino \u2018Ayti\u2019) in 1492; and our economy has been captured for almost 200 years by the English system of import-export \u2018human resources\u2019 derived from the chattel slavery first practiced in the Americas. Trinidad (T&T), whose plantations added the sugar to an Anglo-fied tea, is considered the most literate land in the western hemisphere (even if we now only hear of the less machete-edged calypsos that cry out, \u2018Olay Olay Olay Olay\u2026feelin Hot Hot Hot<\/em>\u2019). Yet heated is how the entire archipelago feels, as Maharaj describes the moment of truth about the Caribbean\u2019s claims to independence, as the US government sets out to fulfil its latest National Security Strategy 2025<\/em>, & not just for their part of world. The USA is seeking to impose bilateral pacts to enable US military forces on their soils.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018You taught me language,<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

& all I know is how to curse<\/em>.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2013 Caliban\u2019s retort to Prospero<\/p>\n\n\n\n

in Shakespeare\u2019s Tempest<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

*<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What was the real reason for the gaping difference between the economy of Sri Lanka, a non-settler colony, and settler colonies such as New Zealand, etc? Was it just because the genocidal settlers brought modern (machine-making) industrial skills from Europe? No way, says SBD de Silva, as we begin Chapter 5 of his classic opus The Political Economy of Underdevelopment<\/em>. SBD as usual provides innumerable examples from around the world. What matters more turns out to be their severance from the absentee capitalists & expat businessmen of the metropolitan economies (Sri Lanka is still full of them), and their freedom to invest in local manufacturing and food production. The presence of a white working class also pressured the settler governments, who had to provide them subsidized skilled employment in state industrial monopolies. In fact, those settler colonies, like Rhodesia & Kenya, that were unable to fully sever their ties with Europe, were prevented from truly advancing their economies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

     SBD also examines the growth of a white caste system of skilled industrial labor, and the deliberate prevention of such skills among the natives; the \u2018sharpest\u2019 measures took place in Africa, where Africans, contrary to the broadcast idiocies, showed they were most capable of acquiring acute technical proficiency. SBD provides a very interesting exchange between the English bankers (who refused to hire Ceylonese in executive positions due to orders from London) and the Ceylon Banking Commissioners. He also provides evidence of how the planters had no skills in agriculture save their \u2018accident of European birth\u2019. Instead, the English pursued a deliberate education policy of keeping the natives<\/em>, \u2018stupid under the Union Jack\u2019, producing clerks proud of elocuting their non-industrial English skills, while exaggerating the abilities of the whites. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

*<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sri Lanka\u2019s economy has been taken hostage by New York\u2019s Wall Street (metonym for financial manipulations<\/em><\/strong>), with the present governor of the Central Bank in Sri Lanka eager to display his \u2018independence\u2019 from the country\u2019s best interests, by preventing investment in our modern advance. He hopes to acquire some later pensionable posting in Manhattan or London. ee<\/em><\/strong> is now almost at the end of the excerpts of Gustavus Myers\u2019 1917 History of Tammany Hall, <\/em>which shows how, despite the constant show trials against corruption, <\/em>New York offered the most magnificent examples of financial malfeasance & skulduggery, displaying the foremost examples in the world of capitalism\u2019s private capture of legislatures through their control of the latest transport & communication technologies. Here we learn of the \u2018pretended political warfare<\/strong>\u2019 between the capitalist political parties and their \u2018secret understandings\u2019.  He shows how the Republicans came to be \u2018the preferred instrument through which the powerful financial, industrial, utility, commercial & other corporations operated to get the legislation that they wanted\u2019. More significantly, we learn of the capture of trade unions by gangsters and the protection of such gangs by the capitalist state through their \u2018full control of the criminal machinery of the law\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

*<\/p>\n\n\n\n

_________<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Contents:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n
The Itching Fingers Behind a Puppeteered Aragalaya<\/a><\/blockquote>