{"id":79334,"date":"2018-07-15T22:39:09","date_gmt":"2018-07-16T04:39:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=79334"},"modified":"2018-07-15T05:21:18","modified_gmt":"2018-07-15T12:21:18","slug":"irresponsible-use-of-language-or-intellectualist-misrepresentation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2018\/07\/15\/irresponsible-use-of-language-or-intellectualist-misrepresentation\/","title":{"rendered":"IRRESPONSIBLE USE OF LANGUAGE OR INTELLECTUALIST MISREPRESENTATION?"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Rohana R. Wasala<\/em><\/span><\/h2>\n

The Midweek Review feature article under the title Hitler Reincarnate \u2013 And Sri Lanka\u2019s Presidential Stakes by Susirith Mendis (The Island\/July 4, 2018) embodies the soft soothing voice of wisdom, that got drowned in the cacophonous \u2018sound and fury\u2019 raised in the wake of the Asgiriya Anunayake Ven. Wendaruwe Upali thera\u2019s \u2018Hitler\u2019 remarks made in the course of a sermon delivered at an alms-giving conducted at the residence of Gotabhaya Rajapaksa, a potential presidential candidate for 2020. This is despite Mendis\u2019s unquestioning acceptance of the garbled English version of the monk\u2019s words given by certain intellectuals\u201d as a true representation of the Anunayake thera\u2019s Sinhala language remarks. Mendis seems to have missed the live video of the monk speaking.\u00a0 Since, apparently, he hasn\u2019t listened to what the monk actually said speaking in Sinhala, he assumes the distorted English rendering of the monk\u2019s remarks given by those he calls with some awe \u2018Sri Lanka\u2019s pre-eminent political scientist and commentator\u2019, and \u00a0\u2018eminent social scientist\u2019 to be authentic, which it is not. What Mendis describes as \u2018This great revival of Hitler\u2026.\u2019 (that was allegedly \u2018triggered\u2019 by the Anunayake thera\u2019s words) is an airy nothing. It is an imaginary bogey created by you-know-who survivalists currently bogged down in a swamp of anarchy of their own making. (The farfetched Gotabhaya-Hitler analogy hit off as an ideal slogan for those who were waiting for the proverbial straw to hang on to\u201d in Mendis\u2019s own words.) The truth is that there will never be any Hitlers in Sri Lanka, come the polls. The sneaky ones who seized upon and benefited from the Anunayake thera\u2019s verbal faux pas won\u2019t have another chance when the people are allowed the chance to exercise their franchise freely at future elections.<\/p>\n

Mendis quotes the monk as (mis)translated by the previously mentioned\u00a0 eminent intellectuals: \u2018As the clergy, we feel the country needs a religious leader\u2026 Some people have described you as a Hitler. Be a Hitler. Go with the military and take the leadership of this country” – or something to that effect\u2019. (This is an intellectualist distortion of the prelate\u2019s words. The prelate never said: \u2026\u2026 \u2018we feel the country needs a religious leader\u2026\u2026\u2019 or\u00a0 \u2018Be a Hitler. Go with the military and take the leadership of this country\u2019 Please look at my own correct translation of his actual words given towards the end of this essay.) And immediately, he (Mendis) condemns those words in no uncertain terms, but wisely desists from blaming the whole Maha Sangha for any alleged advocacy of ruthless Hitler-like despotism; instead he looks askance at the indecent haste of the \u2018intellectuals\u2019 who unleashed an uncalled for blitzkrieg (on the monk) that is far out of all proportion to the target: \u2018This kind of politically explosive profanity is usually uttered by politicians themselves \u2013 the not uncommon \u2018foot-in-mouth\u2019 disease amongst their kind. Not by erudite Buddhist priests during sermons to would-be leaders of the nation \u2013 even in the privacy of their homes\u2019. Well said! Mendis does not believe that erudite Buddhist monks would utter words like these (although the venerable prelate in question did as he assumes on the authority of the two \u2018intellectuals\u2019). He is also justifiably impatient at the \u2018formidable\u2019 intellectuals who mounted devastating attacks on the Anunayake thera \u2018the foolhardy Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) men who rounded up and mauled a prowling leopard in Kilinochchi \u2013 to intellectually club the Anunayake to pitiful incoherence and silence\u2019. But I don\u2019t agree with Mendis that the Anunayake was reduced \u2018to pitiful incoherence and silence\u2019 on account of being misunderstood or misinterpreted; where our nation is concerned, he is a far more authentic intellectual than these uncomprehending and incomprehensible intellectuals. The monk was very coherent and articulate in his attempt to explain himself. Mendis is making too much of the Anunayake\u2019s suspected ignorance about Hitler. I don\u2019t doubt that he knows enough about world history to know that Hitler was a universally hated dictator. However, Mendis is correct about the overreaction of the so-called intellectuals to the monk\u2019s particular remarks. To me, these are some pedants who, for some reason, are or are behaving like pseudo-intellectuals (or mere intellectualists), selfish, coldhearted, and lacking in empathy towards their co-ethnics. Needless to say, the kind of deliberate misrepresentation of the ideas of people that they don\u2019t agree with gravely contradicts their claims to intellectuality.<\/p>\n

In the same context, Mendis adds: \u2018Not surprisingly, someone exclaimed that it was an attempt at \u2018killing a mosquito with a canon\u2019. The last word here is an inadvertent misspelling (not, obviously, a misquote) on the part of Mendis. Though most probably a slip of the pen, it is a significant error. The word used in that quote is not \u2018canon\u2019, but \u2018cannon\u2019, the first means a general rule or principle by which something is judged, or a list of religious texts as being of the highest authority; the second is a large piece of artillery, a heavy gun mounted on two wheels (especially in ancient times). The error is significant because both these words could be considered relevant in the context implied. Actually, the \u2018someone\u2019 that Mendis mentions is none other than myself (the present writer). \u2018Killing a mosquito with a cannon\u2019 is the title of an article of mine published in The Island newspaper and in the Lankaweb online journal on June 29, 2018. Mendis implicitly reinforces my critical view of the intellectualists\u2019 attack on the prelate for he says:\u00a0 \u2018Nay, it is more like \u2018trying to kill a fly with (a) multi-barrelled rocket launcher\u2019! But his lamenting \u2018Poor Anunayake! He has had his day in the sun and on prime-time news for the worst of possible reasons!\u2019 is uncalled for, because the monk did not make any outrageous \u2018Hitlerite\u2019 proposal to Gotabhaya, nor was he courting the limelight of media attention.<\/p>\n

My article contains the correct English rendering of the Anunayake thera\u2019s Hitler remarks. It is totally different from the version whose authenticity Mendis has taken for granted because it came from some \u2018formidable intellectuals\u2019. I have a problem with these intellectuals. The problem is that they don\u2019t pay the same attention to Sinhala that they pay to English. The need for verbal explicitness is less important for spoken language than for written communication because the first enjoys certain advantages that the second doesn\u2019t in making the intended meaning clear. A writer is obliged to find other devices to compensate for that deficit. A speaker uses their tone of voice, facial expressions, shared background knowledge, common cultural assumptions, immediate direct feedback from the listeners, their body language that provides<\/p>\n

cues to the speaker to modulate their message so as to present it without ambiguity and without the risk of being misunderstood. The intellectualist commentators with ideological axes to grind have taken the monk\u2019s references to Hitler and military rule out of context. I am reproducing my own translation of those remarks contained in the aforementioned article (\u2018Killing a mosquito with a cannon\u2019) here with some further clarifications. The monk, Ven Wendaruwe Upali, \u00a0never said \u2018Be a Hitler. Go with the military and take the leadership of this country\u2019 as the commentators have claimed, (which would have been a seditious suggestion). Instead, this was what the monk said (my translation, with explanatory comments to help the non-Sinhala speaker):<\/p>\n

\u2018You have been called a Hitler. So, what we finally remind you is that you might even become a Hitler (it\u2019s not that we want you to become a Hitler) and rebuild the country. (Loud laughter was heard from the listeners at this point). What the Maha Sangha finally reiterates is that you rebuild this country even by resorting to a military administration (it\u2019s not that we expect you to be a military ruler)\u2019. (It was clear that he referred to these two images as unlikely options in Gotabhaya\u2019s case.) The laughter that greeted the monk\u2019s reference to Hitler was never reported or commented on in the media as far as I know. The guffawing indicated the Rajapaksa brothers\u2019 lighthearted dismissal of the Hitler invocation as a joke. But the reverend monk\u2019s cogent call for a righteous but firm government that will put an end to the present chaos was unlikely to be lost on the listeners to the sermon, and on the common people who subsequently heard it as reported in the media.<\/p>\n

Incorrect is also the biased, culturally self-exiled intellectuals\u2019 translation: \u2018As the clergy, we feel the country needs a religious leader\u2026\u2019. It is completely wrong. These intellectuals, that Mendis has unfortunately relied on, have given an equally misleading translation of the Sinhala word \u2018daehaemi\u2019, \u2018adhering to the dhamma\u2019. The correct English word is \u2018righteous\u2019, not \u2018religious\u2019. As any person with average intelligence knows, the terms \u2018righteous\u2019 and \u2018religious\u2019 are not synonyms. To say that the country needs a \u2018religious leader\u2019 can only mean that the country needs a Buddhist ecclesiastic (a high monk) as ruler! That\u2019s not what the prelate said. The monks are not demanding\u00a0 that a Buddhist theocracy be established. That such a thing is inconceivable need hardly be stressed. But a false suggestion like that implying an alleged \u2018threat of a religio-fascist state\u2019 will be very useful for those who have evil designs on Sri Lanka. The recent conjuring up of the ghost of dead terrorism by a Tamil woman MP and state minister could be an orchestration at least partly inspired by this deliberate misinterpretation of the Anunayake thera\u2019s urgent request to a potential leader of a future Sri Lankan government.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Rohana R. Wasala The Midweek Review feature article under the title Hitler Reincarnate \u2013 And Sri Lanka\u2019s Presidential Stakes by Susirith Mendis (The Island\/July 4, 2018) embodies the soft soothing voice of wisdom, that got drowned in the cacophonous \u2018sound and fury\u2019 raised in the wake of the Asgiriya Anunayake Ven. Wendaruwe Upali thera\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[91],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-79334","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rohana-r-wasala"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79334","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=79334"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79334\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=79334"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=79334"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=79334"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}