{"id":67915,"date":"2017-07-17T21:45:23","date_gmt":"2017-07-18T03:45:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=67915"},"modified":"2017-07-17T14:16:13","modified_gmt":"2017-07-17T21:16:13","slug":"prof-laksiri-fernando-jumps-into-the-anti-sinhala-buddhist-garbage-bin-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2017\/07\/17\/prof-laksiri-fernando-jumps-into-the-anti-sinhala-buddhist-garbage-bin-again\/","title":{"rendered":"Prof.Laksiri Fernando jumps into the anti-Sinhala-Buddhist garbage bin again"},"content":{"rendered":"

H. L. D. Mahindapala<\/em><\/span><\/h2>\n

There are clear indications in Prof. Laksiri Fernando\u2019s\u00a0 response to my comment that he suffers from the common disease that affects some academics in the professoriate :<\/strong> they can\u2019t hold two thoughts together and balance both in their pinheads to either think straight or arrive at a rational \/ logical conclusion. So, I\u2019m afraid,, it has come to a point where I have to educate him on what he wrote.<\/p>\n

Take, for instance, his claim that his concerns were with the Bodu Bala Sena (BBS) and not the Mahanayakes emerging as a state within the state. In saying this he indicates amply his inability to understands what he writes. He wrote unambiguously : My concern has been about the evolving reactionary nationalist ideology. It is perhaps along this ideology, that the Asgiriya Mahanayake Theras are dragging the other prelates into politics. More worrying is the emergence of Mahanayake Theras as a state behind the state, dictating terms undemocratically.\u201d This is the sum and substance of his complaint alleging that the\u00a0 Sangha is running the state. He sees the Mahanayakes as a formidable obstruction to constitutional changes.<\/p>\n

The Mahanayakes have quite correctly stated that there is no need for constitutional changes at this stage. This has thrown\u00a0 him\u00a0 into a confusing spin because he is for constitutional changes to accommodate the Tamil separatist agenda which has been escalating incrementally, on the little now and more later\u201d tactics defined by S. J.V. Chelvanayakam, the father of Tamil separatism. He is highly agitated now that the Mahanayakes have decided to make their voices heard against Tamil separatism which is now resurfacing\u00a0 in the guise of constitutional changes. The issue of Bodu Bala Sena is purely incidental. He\u00a0 is concerned\u201d that the Sangha has become a state within a state\u201d, as he indicates in his headline as well. He puts the blame wholly on the politics of the Mahanayaka Theras who are opposed to the separatist politics of the Tamils of the North which has been the central issue bedevilling Sri Lankan politics in\u00a0 the post-independent era.<\/p>\n

He uses the Bodu Bala Sena only as a peg to hang the most grave accusations that he can think of against the Mahanayakes. He says that the Mahanayakes are reactionary\u201d, undemocratic\u201d and dictating terms to the state\u201d. And he is concerned that the Mahanayakes instead of withdrawing into some cave for permanent meditation are now dragging the BBS and other prelates into the politics of reactionary nationalist ideology\u201d. Then, having levelled these charges against the Sangha, he accuses me of getting\u00a0 it wrong because I have challenged the real essence of his hidden agenda which is to denigrate the Maha Sangha and weaken their power \/authority at all levels. His only defence is to backpedal saying that his concerns were not with the Mahanayakes but with the BBS. This disingenuous backpedalling makes it almost impossible to have a decent debate with him because he can\u2019t either understand what he has written, or\u00a0 he is trying\u00a0 to dodge the\u00a0 issue which he can\u2019t defend. His references to the BBS are mere red herrings. He concentrates his fire on the role of the Mahanayakes as seen in the quote above. He says that the Mahanayakes are responsible for dragging the other prelates into politics\u201d. If he is serious and means what he says about the Mahanayakes then why blame the BBS?<\/p>\n

As I said earlier, he is now playing the role of an emeritus Meetota-mullah\u201d who has fallen into the garbage bin of anti-Sinhala-Buddhist politics. He has sent\u00a0 his critical faculties into\u00a0 retirement and is quite happy to spend his spare time recycling\u00a0 the threadbare anti-Sinhala-Buddhist clich\u00e9s manufactured by racist G. G. Ponnambalam in the\u00a0 thirties. Like all the lumpen Marxists of various shades who led the post-independent generations into nowhere he is now chanting his tired old mantras, smirking smugly like a fat cat that has swallowed the canary.\u00a0 As a frustrated Trotskyite he must have waited in his days at Peradeniya, like Godot, for Trotsky\u2019s\u00a0 Permanent Revolution that never came. This\u00a0 has been the miserable fate of these kalatipol <\/strong><\/em>political scientists like him. Their theories, their analyses, their paradigms, their solutions and predictions have fallen into sunyata <\/strong><\/em>\u2013 nothingness. Seeing the failure of the grandiose theories of Trotskyism the\u00a0 likes of Laksiri Fernando have now returned to bark in their anti-Sinhala-Buddhist kennels at the Sangha moon.<\/p>\n

Of course, his Trotskyite leaders \u2013 Dr. N.M.Perera, Dr. Colvin R. de Silva, Leslie Gunawardena, Doric de Souza, Bernard Soysa etc., \u2013 were all good men who discovered as they matured that there were more profitable political plums to be picked from Mrs. Bandaranaike\u2019s grass root basket than the theoretical fictions laid down in the Permanent Revolution of Trotsky. \u00a0As a Trotskyite he must have believed in\u00a0 the theoretical fantasies of Trotsky who argued that it is\u00a0 possible to skip the evolutionary historical stage of going\u00a0 through capitalism to socialism, as stated by Marx, and\u00a0 leap straight from a peasant, semi-feudal, semi-capitalist Russian economy into a workers revolutionary paradise.<\/p>\n

Having gone nowhere with his Trotskyite theories this one-time professor has now retired to play the old record which is stuck in the groove of bizarre psychobabble of majority-minority complex\u201d. It is pathetic to seem\u00a0 him retiring\u00a0 into this clich\u00e9. At the end of his academic career is this all what\u00a0 he has to\u00a0 offer as an explanation for the complex North-South conflict? After all his years in the professoriate is his crowning scientific finding to repeat what Leslie Gunawardena had told him about\u00a0 the majority-minority complex\u201d when he was a post-graduate going in search of theme to write his doctoral thesis? Doesn\u2019t he have anything original to say to save his reputation as a political scientist, if he had any at all?<\/p>\n

He even hints that I am a victim of this majority-minority complex\u201d because I am married to a Tamil. I proclaim unreservedly that I am\u00a0 proud to\u00a0 have married one of the gracious, tolerant and enlightened Tamils I have ever met. She has taught me the humane side of the violent Tamil culture that destroyed her people, including her loved ones.. If anything my marriage proves that I can\u2019t be a racist. I\u2019ve even adopted a Tamil boy as my son. I am more close to my Tamil relatives than to my Sinhala relatives. These facts must make Freud laugh through his backside if he reads the psychobabble of this kalatipol<\/strong><\/em> scientist who is now pretending to be a psychoanalyst, with extraordinary powers to read my mind. What is apparent, however, is that Freudians reading his bogus theories will find it difficult to classify him as a psychoanalyst\u201d as defined in the\u00a0 compound\u00a0 word. Instead, they will have to split the word into two and consider\u00a0 him as either a psycho\u201d or an anal-yst\u201d!<\/p>\n

Leaving aside his psycho-waffle, it must be noted that there is a Ph.D awaiting any researcher who is daring\u00a0 enough to trace the tragic trajectory of Trotskyite politics, which ended up in divisive and opportunistic politics. Neither George Lerski nor Prof. V. Ranjith Amerasinghe has delved deep in their theses on Sri Lankan Trotskyism to reveal the tragi-comic narrative of Trotskyism that declined from a grand world revolution propounded in 1905 by Trotsky to its brutal variation that manifested in the birth and death of Marxist fascists in the JVP who ran\u00a0 amok in the seventies and the eighties.<\/p>\n

The irony is that when the revolution expected by the founding fathers of Trotskyism came it took them by surprise. It, in fact, exploded in their faces when the fathers of Trotskyism were in the seats of power defending their ministerial portfolios in a bourgeois regime ruled by a feudal radalaya,<\/strong><\/em> according to their own analysis.\u00a0<\/em><\/strong>The Marxist children in the JVP, however, must be recognised, as the product of the Marxist revolution nurtured and promoted by the Trotskyites in\u00a0 the\u00a0 thirties. Their worst nightmare came true in the seventies, eighties and\u00a0 nineties when the revolutionary children they fathered took the guns and came at them. Prof. Carlo Fonseka, another wonky Trotskyite, had to flee to Sweden to escape the wrath of the misguided Marxist kids who were demanding revolutionary justice. Unable to explain their political predicament \u2013 their political duty was to back the revolution — the Marxist\u00a0 intellectuals blamed the CIA who had nothing to do with it. They, however, never took responsibility for paving\u00a0 the path to political violence. Later when the North erupted\u00a0 in violence they were happy to blame\u00a0 Sinhala-Buddhism and the Sangha. So the lingering memories of failed Trotskyism forces its loyal henchaiyas,<\/strong><\/em> to respond predictably to Sinhala-Buddhism the way the Pavlovian dogs respond to the salivating bells.<\/p>\n

Their intellectual hypocrisy is appalling. They were very selective in identifying the causes that led to the violent movements of the South and\u00a0 North.\u00a0 The first wave of political violence in the post-independent era came from the Marxists of the JVP. The left-wing theoreticians \/ academics attributed the violence in the Sinhala south to the systemic failures of the capitalists and neo-imperialists who crept in with globalisation. The Marxist theories legitimising political violence from the thirties came in handy for the Sinhala\u00a0 youth who had no one else to blame. The lumpen Marxist eventually produced the fascist cult of the JVP. But when it came to the Northern violence they changed their\u00a0 theories to blame Sinhala-Buddhists. The anti-Sinhala-Buddhist racism, preached by Ponnambalam also in the thirties, evolved gradually over the post-independent decades to produce the fascist cult of the LTTE. The Marxist fathers produced Rohana Wijeweera. And the Tamil racist fathers produced Velupillai Prabhakaran. Both were fascist terrorists whose primary concern was their political survival, oppressing and persecuting the people who looked up to them as their liberators. The misled youth of both communities were offered solutions by their political fathers that did not answer the challenges they were facing. Both communities were facing the identical economic malaise of the time : a stagnant economy that failed to provide the the youth\u00a0 with upward social mobility. The Southern youth fed on Marxism blamed the capitalist class. The Northern youth\u00a0 fed on anti-Sinhala-Buddhist racism\u00a0 took to Tamil racist violence.<\/p>\n

It was clear even at the time that the common factors that propelled the youth to violence were the\u00a0 socio-economic frustrations that held them captive in a stagnant\u00a0 economy, together with the missteps of the governments of the day, exploited by the aggressive Tamil leadership to thrive on Tamil racism. The angry youth, finding no way out, fell for the extremist ideologies and took up arms in both regions. The confounded theoreticians, not knowing how to grasp the meaning\u00a0 of the swirling forces that were unmanageable, came up with two different explanations for\u00a0 the Southern and Northern violence, though both violent movements were steered by the youth misled by their political fathers. In the North they could not blame the economic factor because the only marketable political force was anti-Sinhala-Buddhist racism. Tamil racism dominated peninsular politics decisively in the post-Ponnambalam decades. All Tamils and their intellectual agents in the South became loyal disciples of\u00a0 Ponnambalam. Even Laksiri Fernando remains to\u00a0 this day as a brain-washed Ponnambalaya : he has nothing new to say except to regurgitate the racism of Ponnambalam who was the first to break the peaceful\u00a0 coexistence that prevailed in colonial\u00a0 and\u00a0 pre-colonial\u00a0 times with his anti-Sinhala-Buddhist\u00a0 provocative\u00a0 speech at Navalapitiya in 1939. And it is\u00a0 that racist narrative that ran down the 20th century and spilled over to the 21st.<\/p>\n

The recurring theme in the voluminous texts of the anti-Sinhala-Buddhist propagandists who occupied chairs in academia has been the betrayal of Buddhism.\u201d These hack-a-demics\u201d unashamedly parroted the racist political line laid down by G. G. Ponnambalam \u2013 the malevolent figure who turned racism into a destructive political ideology. Some Tamil ideologues, however, hail him as father of Tamil nationalism\u201d which never existed even in his dreams. If he was a nationalist he would have asked for a separate state and not a percentage of power in the state. Even Chelvanayakam first asked for federalism before he he switched to Eelam. The unethical and unacceptable part of the Ponnambalayas in academia is that they never failed to pose as original thinkers producing, for instance, peer-reviewed theses for their doctored Ph.Ds when in\u00a0 reality they were merely recycling Ponnambalam\u2019s rabid racism.\u00a0 Besides, they refused\u00a0 to\u00a0 recognise that all ideologies \u2013 religious, political, moral etc., \u2013 had betrayed the pristine principles on which they were supposed to operate. Their blinkered politics opens up opportunities for any sophomoronic university student to produce a thesis on Jesus Betrayed\u201d, Mohammed Betrayed\u201d, Mao Betrayed\u201d, or even Bibbikan and Konda Kavun Betrayed\u201d!<\/p>\n

Universal human history has been bleeding perpetually with the betrayal of the noble principles of the founders. From Buddhism and Christianity to the UN Charter it is the same old story : each ideology has a record of\u00a0 failing to live up to the original principles. To pick on Buddhism alone is the cheapest academic trick in the book. From Tambiah to Seneviratne to Fernando they all scream that Buddhism has been betrayed. This is the most trite excuse for them to bash Buddhism. Why only Buddhism?<\/p>\n

Most of those who attacked Sinhala-Buddhism were Marxists of one shade or the other and they never ever dared to explore the failure of their Marxist idols. For instance, Marx betrayed his own principles of liberating the working class when he seduced his female domestic and produced an illegitimate child whom he refused to recognise as his son. So why not raise the question of Marxism Betrayed? Let\u2019s go further and examine the roles played by Indira Gandhi, Chandrika Kumaratunga and even Radhika Coomaraswamy, who was playing the part of Mother Theresa to children at the UN but never dared to even peep at the plight of the children abused by the Catholic Church, and ask why the ICES has failed to produce a volume on Feminism Betrayed\u201d.<\/p>\n

There is enough evidence, I believe, to expose the hypocrisy of those who\u00a0 harp on Buddhism betrayed. So let\u2019s leave Laksiri Fernando\u2019s trite Trotskyism and psychobabble aside for the moment and get back to one\u00a0 more issue raised by him in his\u00a0 response. He wastes the\u00a0 better part of his response in focussing\u00a0 on his bogus majority-minority complex\u201d. Finally he comes to the three cases I took\u00a0 up to examine his accusation of the Sangha running a state within the state.\u00a0 I said that when the anti-conversion bill came up, sponsored by the JHU, President Bush, the die-hard Evangelist intervened, and stopped the bill from going\u00a0 through parliament. Colombo Telegraph<\/strong><\/em>, quoting Wikileaks, revealed that the then American Ambassador, Jeffrey Lunstead, intervened and wrote back to\u00a0 the State Department, saying that the Bill is dead.\u201d Which, of course, makes the American government a superior force to that of\u00a0 the Sangha who were opposed to illegal\u00a0 conversions. I now repeat that a not a peep came out of him when the American state imposed\u00a0 its will undemocratically. My argument was to confirm that\u00a0 the Sangha, which is a home grown member of the civil society, has a right to play its traditional role than a foreign government. Isn\u2019t this example good\u00a0 enough to prove that the Americans are better at running\u00a0 the Sri Lankan state than the Sangha? And if the American state can poke its unwanted finger\u00a0 in vital domestic affairs why can\u2019t the Sangha do the same?<\/p>\n

He then comes back at me\u00a0 raising an irrelevant\u00a0 issue\u00a0 of a time frame\u201d and asking\u00a0 what happened when Mahinda Rajapakse became\u00a0 president.\u00a0 This happened in 2012\u00a0 when MR was prime minister and it was he who said that the bill is dead\u201d, according\u00a0 to Wikileaks. In other words, even MR admitted that the Sinhala-Buddhist state has surrendered to the Evangelist\u00a0 state of Bush. So what has a time frame\u201d got to do with the illegal intervention of America in Sri Lankan affairs? In whatever time-frame it\u00a0 took place, the\u00a0 fact remains that the Sangha has less power than the Christian American state when push comes to shove. So how valid is Laksiri Fernando\u2019s objections to the role of the Maha Sangha? If he wants to make a Sri Lanka a secular state is he prepared to abolish the Ministries for the protection of\u00a0 Christianity, Islam and Hinduism as well?<\/p>\n

Clearly, Laksiri Fernando has no effective counter-punch. So he\u00a0 hides behind his fictitious time-frame\u201d which doesn\u2019t change the fact that if the Americans can dictate policy to Sri Lanka the Maha Sangha should have the same right, irrespective of\u00a0 the policy preferences of Laksiri Fernando. All this makes me worried that he has lost his capacity to put up a rational fight to defend himself. The signs are that a\u00a0 visit\u00a0 to his\u00a0 head-shrinker is long\u00a0 overdue to\u00a0 save his cognitive powers before he writes his next rant against Sinhala-Buddhism.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

H. L. D. Mahindapala There are clear indications in Prof. Laksiri Fernando\u2019s\u00a0 response to my comment that he suffers from the common disease that affects some academics in the professoriate : they can\u2019t hold two thoughts together and balance both in their pinheads to either think straight or arrive at a rational \/ logical conclusion. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-67915","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-h-l-d-mahindapala"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67915","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=67915"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67915\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=67915"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=67915"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=67915"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}