{"id":64582,"date":"2017-03-25T15:29:35","date_gmt":"2017-03-25T22:29:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=64582"},"modified":"2017-03-25T15:29:35","modified_gmt":"2017-03-25T22:29:35","slug":"romanticizing-the-past-as-a-form-of-political-deceit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2017\/03\/25\/romanticizing-the-past-as-a-form-of-political-deceit\/","title":{"rendered":"Romanticizing the Past as a form of Political Deceit"},"content":{"rendered":"

R Chandrasoma<\/em><\/span><\/h2>\n

It is a weakness of the system of memory-recall in humans that the good things that happened to us remain vivid in our memory while the misfortunes and travail that dogged our life tend to be pushed into oblivion. Nobody gets any joy in recalling an unpleasant past. Historians show the same weakness \u2013 their record of the past is more a eulogy than a substantial statement of the facts. That politicians \u2018manufacture history\u2019 is well known but there are \u2018manufactures\u2019 that are so outrageously wrong that a rebuttal is necessary.<\/p>\n

The Prime Minister (RW) while lambasting the opposition has repeatedly stated that \u2018Ceylon\u2019 \u2013 Sri Lanka \u2013 before the British left our country \u2013 was only second to Japan in in the \u2018well-being\u2019 of \u00a0its people. This \u2018fact\u2019 is now taken as Gospel by leading members of the current government and a story is related of the tragic decline of our once-prosperous nation by the practice of the wrong kind of (divisive) politics.<\/p>\n

Let us interpolate a remark about Japan. In the years before the Great War Japan was an industrial giant about to embark on a vast military adventure that changed the world. Her Naval Armada and Carrier- based Air force routed both the British and American Naval forces in the first phase of the Pacific War. It exported good to all the world and its people were famous for their skill and ingenuity. To \u00a0place Sri Lanka in the same league table with this Asian colossus is a category error \u2013like saying that a donkey is second only to a horse.<\/p>\n

Let us recall some of the salient facts about \u2018Ceylon\u2019 before the British left our shores. In the Great Malaria Epidemic of 1934-35, over half a million people died \u2013 mostly children and young adults. \u00a0(The total population was about five million.) Parts of Sri Lanka – the so-called malarial districts \u2013 had emaciated populations that were bereft of schools, hospitals and markets. They battled it out with no help from the \u2018Government\u2019 of the day. Fetish worship, devil-dancing and magic were the chief means of alleviating this intolerable existential misery.<\/p>\n

A curious social anomaly existed that complicated greatly the social profile of the nation of the time \u2013 the existence in the large towns of \u2018Kalu Suddhas\u2019 that aped the life-style of the Colonial Overlord and constituted a cultural subspecies that concealed \u2013 by their social dominance and loyalty to the Foreign Overlord – the true misery of the common peopled. These \u2018comprador bourgeoise\u2019 had a great time battening on the largesse of the foreigner \u2013 they lived in commodious bungalows with lush green gardens and troops of servants \u2013 parts of Colombo that foreigners admired greatly. Perhaps that ex-brigand from Singapore saw the Kalu-Suddhasa in action in their green villas of the metropolis with dancing servants and food and wine in abundance and mistook the oasis for the encircling desert.<\/p>\n

What was the stark realty in the 30\u2019s and 40\u2019s of the last century? Most children died at birth. Births were mostly in hovels \u2013 hospitals and doctors were unknown except in those green neighborhoods were the Kalu Suddhas and their fond offspring lived. The force of mortality acted on young adults as much as it did on infants and children \u2013 TB and Enteric Fever were killers of the young. There were no jobs for the rural poor and women of all ages led a life of hard work and servitude.<\/p>\n

This is only an apercu of the dismal state of our land when the alien was our overlord \u2013 a period of oppression and dire hardship for the masses while a few had it good – thanks to their \u2018symbiosis\u2019 with the hated foreigner. As stated earlier, to speak of Sri Lanka as being only second to Japan is like saying that a hog is only second to a lion because the fleas on the hog are as good as those on the King of the beasts. We know, of course, that in the wretched game of politics it is often part of the winning strategy to lie and to deceive. In this case, however, the untruth insults the vast multitudes that died in misery in a land under the heel of the conqueror.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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

R Chandrasoma It is a weakness of the system of memory-recall in humans that the good things that happened to us remain vivid in our memory while the misfortunes and travail that dogged our life tend to be pushed into oblivion. Nobody gets any joy in recalling an unpleasant past. Historians show the same weakness […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-64582","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-r-chandrasoma"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64582","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=64582"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64582\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=64582"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=64582"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=64582"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}