{"id":96041,"date":"2019-12-06T16:05:34","date_gmt":"2019-12-06T23:05:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=96041"},"modified":"2019-12-06T16:05:34","modified_gmt":"2019-12-06T23:05:34","slug":"kandy-man-with-long-name-who-fought-the-brits-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2019\/12\/06\/kandy-man-with-long-name-who-fought-the-brits-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Kandy Man with long name who fought the Brits."},"content":{"rendered":"

By Gary Brecher<\/strong><\/em><\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n

You see some pretty sick stuff when you do my job, but I just read \nsomething sicker than any Congo cannibal buffet.   It\u2019s an article by a posh \nlittle Limey named Jeremy Brown condemning the Sri Lankan Government for being \ntoo messy in putting down the LTTE, and demanding that we stop buying the cheap \ntextiles the poor Sinhalese make their living churning out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What\u2019s sick about this is that the British establishment destroyed \nthe Sinhalese people completely.   Completely and purposely, sadistically; stole \ntheir land, humiliated and massacred their government and made it Imperial \npolicy to erase every shred of self-respect the Sinhalese had left.   You can \ntalk about the Nazis all day long, but for my money nothing they did was as \ngross as what you find out when you actually look into the history of \nBritish-Sinhalese relations.   If you can even call them relations\u201d – I guess a \nmurder-rape is a sort of relationship.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But nobody knows about it.   Weird, huh?   Nothing \u2018weirds\u2019 me out \nmore than the total news blackout the Brits have managed to put on all the sick \nshit they did to brown and black people all over the world.   They had a system, \nand it worked. They\u2019d grab some paradise island in the tropics, use the Royal \nNavy to wall it off from the rest of the world and crush the local tribe.   If \nthe locals resisted, the Brits would starve them to death, shoot them down, \ninfect them with smallpox or get them addicted to opium \u2013 whatever they had to \ndo to gang-rape the locals so bad that they would lose the will to \nresist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And to this day, they don\u2019t catch even a little bit of Hell for it.   \nEverybody thinks the Brits are all cute and harmless.   You\u2019re all a bunch of \nsuckers for those suave accents, you suckers!   The truth is that compared to \nthe Brits, the Nazis who people are always whining about, were a gang of \neighth-grade stoners who ran around spray-painting swastikas on school \nproperty.   The Nazis lasted one decade; the Brits quietly ran their \nextermination programs for three hundred years and to this day they wouldn\u2019t \neven think of feeling guilty about it – it wouldn\u2019t cross their \nminds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s what made me want to puke battery acid when I read Mister \nJeremy Brown\u2019s sermon on the naughty Sinhalese: this pig Brown has no clue about \nwhy Sri Lanka is so fucked up, no hint at all that it\u2019s the result of British \nImperial policy. Not mistakes\u201d or a few bad apples\u201d or regrettable excesses\u201d \nbut clear, cold, ruthless British policy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the funniest bits in Brown\u2019s little Anglican sermon to the \nSinhalese is when he mentions Arthur C. Clarke, the Brit sci-fi writer who moved \nto Sri Lanka.   The reason that\u2019s funny is that a few years back, when he was \ntoo senile and drunk to watch his tongue, Clarke admitted in an interview that \nthe whole reason he moved to Sri Lanka is for the boys.\u201d   As in, he liked to \nrape little boys, and they were cheap and pretty in the dear old ex-colony.   \nThe Brits wouldn\u2019t stop raping the Sinhalese even after their troops were forced \n(sorry, withdrawn) from the island.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jeremy Brown wouldn\u2019t know that, of course.   To him, Clarke is a \nwonderful example of all the wonderful things British people have done for poor \nlittle Sri Lanka:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Britain has helped to rebuild Sri Lanka\u2019s tourist industry: Britons \naccounted for 18.5 per cent of the foreigners who visited the former colony\u2019s \nfamous beaches, wildlife parks, tea plantations and Buddhist temples last \nyear.   Only India sends more tourists.   Many Britons also own property there, \nespecially around the southern city of Galle, not far from where Arthur C. \nClarke, the British science fiction writer who settled in Sri Lanka, used to \nlove to scuba dive. [Is that what they\u2019re calling it these days?<\/em><\/strong> ]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So the question facing British shoppers and holidaymakers is this: \nshould they continue to support Sri Lanka\u2019s garment and tourist \nindustries?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Don\u2019t you love that last sentence: Sadly, the answer must be no.\u201d   \nAnybody who can write a sentence like that without blowing his brains out at the \nmonitor is a hopeless twit anyway, but let\u2019s help Jeremy out a little bit, \nfolks, let\u2019s go back in time and take a quick look at all the wonderful things \nthe Brits did for these rotten, ungrateful Sinhalese.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The pattern you see in the colonizing of Sri Lanka is a real familiar \none, if you study the European naval empires: the Portuguese, the greatest \nsailors and explorers, came to Sri Lanka long before the Brits, claimed the \nplace, but couldn\u2019t hold on to it.   The Portuguese lost the island to the \nDutch, those up & coming Protestant go-getters, in the mid-1600s.   That\u2019s \nanother pattern you see everywhere, the old Papist powers losing out to the \nProtestants, who were just faster and smarter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The next stage was also totally by the book: the Brits, the canopy \ntree if you know what I mean, come along and force the Dutch out.   There were \ntimes the Brits sort of liked the Dutch; they were Protestant, at least, and \nblonde\/blue-eyed.   But business was business, and the Brits realized, by the \nend of the 1700s, that Ceylon was worth taking.   Of course they didn\u2019t say that \nin public; the official reason was that they had to boot the Dutch to guard the \nisland from the nasty radical Frenchies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That way of stealing islands, making it sound like you had to take \nthem for the greater good\u2013that was classic Brit strategy.   They always made it \nlook like they were forced, against their will, to grab this or that colony.   I \ndon\u2019t know if you all ever saw a movie called Erik the Viking\u201d, but it has a \ngreat scene with John Cleese playing this insane bloodthirsty warlord who orders \npeople tortured to death in this tired, disappointed upper-class voice, and then \nwhines, It\u2019s the stress that gets you\u201d \u2013 all put upon and harassed \n(the \u2018White Man\u2019s burden\u2019<\/em><\/strong>).   That\u2019s a perfect image for the way the Brits booted the Dutch \nout of Ceylon, tut-tutting while they stole every shed, cannon and bale of tea \non the island.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With the Dutch trade rivals gone, the Brits had only one problem \nleft: those damned natives, the Sinhala, or Kandyans\u201d as they were called back \nthen.   The name, Kandyans,\u201d came from the fact that their main city was Kandy, \nup in the highlands in the south of the island, the fat part of the teardrop.   \nThe Sinhala lived in the highlands for the simple reason that it was a little \ncooler, not as totally malarial, up there compared to the coastal \nmarshes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By all accounts, the Sinhala\/Kandyans were harmless slackers, who \ndidn\u2019t need or want much from the outside world.   All they asked was for people \nto leave them alone up on their big rocky highlands to do their Buddhist \nthing.   Unfortunately that wasn\u2019t British policy.   It irked the redcoats that \nKandy still had a king, an army, all this impudent baggage that went with \nindependence.   The British decided to break the Sinhalese completely and crush \ntheir whole society.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You have to remember that by this time, the early 1800s, the Brits \nhad perfected their techniques in little experiments all over the world.   Those \nClockwork Orange shrinks were amateurs compared to the Imperial Civil Service.   \nThey had dozens of ways of undermining native kingdoms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

British administrators were trained to do a kind of rough, quick \nsociological sketch of the natives, get a sense of the fault lines and then \nfigure out how to exploit them.   The Brits saw fast that the Kandyans were a \nsluggish bunch of people divided into rigid castes in the classic subcontinent \npattern.   That made it easy: the Brits made two big castes their official pets \nand shunned the others, setting up a violent hate between different parts of \nSinhalese society.   That guaranteed that if the diehard Sinhalese\/Kandyan \nnationalists ever revolted, the teacher\u2019s-pet castes would have a good selfish \nreason to help massacre them. (It\u2019s called \u2018divide & rule<\/em><\/strong>\u2019<\/strong>)<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then there was the Kandyan king himself.   The Brits weren\u2019t dumb in \nthe way Paul Bremer was dumb, de-Baathifying\u201d Iraq.   They loved corrupt local \nrulers. Much easier and cheaper to bribe one fat old degenerate on a throne than \nnegotiate with all the commoners.   So the Brits started playing with the \nnervous, Kandyan royals, scaring them with the threat of losing everything and \nthen teasing them with the possibility of the safe, soft life of a Brit \npuppet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This was the major league of colonialism.   To give you an idea of \nhow important Ceylon\/Sri Lanka was back then, try this on: in 1802, when French \narmies were kicking British and Prussian and Italian and Russians all over \nEurope (weird how nobody remembers that?), the Brits were so terrified they \ntried to give Napoleon all their colonies except Sri Lanka and Trinidad.   Those \nwere the two they needed to keep.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Kandy Men<\/strong>: No match for the British vampire lords<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And this is where another standard Brit policy came into play \u2013 a \nreal smart one that we ought to be imitating: use native auxiliaries, not \nhomeland troops, as much as possible.   For all kinds of reasons, but here are \nthe main ones:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

1. If you bring in troops from some remote part of the Empire to do \nyour dirty work, it\u2019s those troops, those faces and accents, the locals will \nremember, and hate, for generations.   So you, the sly little pink Brit \nadministrator, can stroll in later and commiserate with the locals as they show \nyou around their burned huts, bayoneted kids, etc., and even say with a straight \nface, Oh my, those auxiliaries from wherever; what heathens?   Outrageous!   I \nshall certainly let Whitehall know about these abuses.\u201d   Then, of course, you \nget in his sedan chair, close the curtains and chuckle all the way home to where \nhis personal \u2018native\u2019bum-boy was waiting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

2. Nobody back in London counts casualties as long as it\u2019s Malay \nmercenaries dying.   You can lose a lot of them\u2013and a lot of Malays did die \nfighting the Sinhala, especially in the total rout of a malaria-sapped \nBritish\/Malay force at the Mahaveli River in 1803 \u2013 but nobody is going to make \na fuss in the Times of London (Mister Jeremy Brown\u2019s paper, as you may \nrecall).   If you\u2019re lucky they\u2019ll pop off before payday and you can keep their \npayroll for that estate in Shropshire.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

3. Dropping hot-blooded feisty Malay Muslims with guns far from home \nand making them fight Sinhalese bleeds Malay society as well as Sinhalese.   \nLeft in peace, Malays could be trouble \u2013 a proud, warlike people.   So by \nsending them to die in Ceylon, you\u2019re diverting all that young, angry Malay \nblood away from SE Asia and using it to bleed Kandy.   Two birds with one \nblood-soaked stone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You see why I get impatient with you gullible suckers yammering about \nthe Nazis? The Nazis were retards, a white-trash tantrum, an eighth-grade \nchemistry-class pipe bomb, a quick-fizzle flash in the pan, compared to the \nBrits, the scariest motherfuckers ever to butt-fuck the planet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The mercenaries the Brits sent to crush the Kandyans were Malays, \nMuslims from SE Asia who didn\u2019t need a lot of pep talks to slaughter South Asian \nBuddhists (and steal their chickens).   That was life for the Brits back then, \nat the top of their game: picking up pieces from one part of the world and \ndropping them where they\u2019d do the most harm, half the world away.   Ah yes, \nlet\u2019s ferry some Malay mercenaries to Kandy, that should give the bloody \nidol-worshippers something to think about!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Destroying Buddhism was a big part of Brit policy.   The Buddhist \nroutine, the temples, begging monks, long boring prayers \u2013 it was the glue that \nkept Kandy together.   So the Brits decided to destroy it.   They even said so, \nin private memos to each other.   They weren\u2019t shy in those days.   Here\u2019s the \nBrit governor in 1807: Reliance on Buddhism must be destroyed. Make sure all \n<\/p>\n\n\n

[village]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

chiefs are Christian.\u201d\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Up to 1818, the Brits had a blast messing with doomed Sinhala \nrebellions; a good time was had by all, except the Sinhalese.   They had a very, \nvery bad time, and it was about to get worse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

See, another constant you\u2019ll find in British imperial policy is that \nalthough they\u2019re very sly and patient, they have a very good sense of when to \ncut the crap and just wipe out a tribe that\u2019s been annoying them for too long.   \nThey were getting sick of the Sinhalese, with all their bickering and intrigue; \nthe redcoats just weren\u2019t enjoying the game the way they used to, so boom: the \nkill \u2019em all\u201d era began.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But they did it smart, not like the idiot boastful Nazis you all love \nto obsess on.   I bet every one on the planet can name the Nazi death camps, but \nI\u2019d be surprised if more than, say, a half dozen people outside Sri Lanka can \nname the policy the Brits used to destroy the Sinhala for good.   Anybody?   Didn\u2019t think so!   See, here\u2019s another little tip for up \nand coming genocidaires<\/em> out there: always pick the most boring name \npossible.  Those Nazis, with their heavy-metal jewellery and stupid titles! \nDopes! You want extermination programs with names that put everybody to \nsleep.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And that\u2019s why in 1818 Britain brought the wasteland policy\u201d to \nKandy.   They could have called it what that Liberian whacko called his \ncampaign: Operation No Living Thing.\u201d – that\u2019s what it meant: Brit-led troops \ndraining the sea\u201d the Sinhala irregulars swam in by burning every hut, every \nfield, and killing every animal in every village they suspected of harbouring \nrebels.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now that\u2019s another key Brit imperial technique: that word rebels.\u201d   \nBlows me away: how can a Sinhalese in Sri Lanka, fighting for the country his \npeople have owned for a hundred generations, be a rebel\u201d?   And the pipsqueak \nredcoat officers hunting him down, were born and raised in Britain.   He was not \nthe rebel,\u201d he was the force of law and order, the rightful authority.   It\u2019s \nquite a racket if you have the sheer, sociopathic nerve to say it with a \nstraight face. (I\u2019m talking to you, Mister Jeremy Brown!)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What does rebel\u201d mean, anyway?   I\u2019ve noticed that in English press \nit\u2019s a bad word.   Here, in the US of A, it\u2019s different, because we were the \nrebels in 1775 and proud of it.   But see, people who know the American \nRevolution think that the Brit policy against the Yankees, where (give or take a \nBanastre Tarlteton or two), the redcoats tried to avoid killing civvies, was \nnormal Imperial policy.   Bullshit! The reason the Brits let us go and didn\u2019t try \nscorched-earth on us, was that we WERE Brits, as far as they could tell: white \nprotestant English-speaking humans.   If you weren\u2019t all of the above, you \nweren\u2019t human.   The only other war where English troops had the same restraint \nwas \u2013 take a wild guess.   Right: the English Civil War.   In England, they \nfought clean.   But when Cromwell marched up to subdue the Scots, who were \nProtestant (good) but non-English (bad), a lot of POWs never made it back to the \nholding pens and a lot of crofts were torched, and a lot of girls were raped.   \nWhen he moved from Scotland to Ireland, where the filthy locals were filthy \nPapist as well as non-English, well, you don\u2019t want to know what happened \nthere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So in places like Sri Lanka, full of brown heathens, Brit policy had \nnothing to do with fucking Yorktown – more like Dresden, only \nlower-tech.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Wasteland Policy\u201d was smart and mean at the same time\u2013another \nsure mark of the Brit imperial touch.   It was designed to deny the rebels\u201d \nsupport in the short term, but in the long term it was pure punishment, taking \naway the land, livestock and other assets of all the Sinhalese who were even \nsuspected of being rebel\u201d-lovers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And it worked.   To this day, 200 years later, the Sinhalese castes \nthat backed the rebels are dirt poor, and worse: they\u2019re hated by everybody \naround them and they even hate themselves.   And nobody even remembers who did \nit to them, poor lab rats.   They think it\u2019s their own fault, that there\u2019s \nsomething wrong with them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s more, and worse, but to tell the truth, this is making me \nsick.   I\u2019ve tried to tell this story a dozen times and nobody wants to know.   \nYou just end up vomiting battery acid all night, and pigs like Mister Jeremy \nBrown of the Times of London never lose one second of sleep over all those \nbodies and all those lies and sheer nastiness.   What\u2019s the use?   I\u2019ll just \nfast-forward through a couple of highlight shots.   Take reprisals, you know, \nlike those bad old Nazis used to do after a rebel\u201d attack?   The Brits were \nthere way before the Nazis.   They took revenge for a half-assed Kandyan revolt \nby killing one out of every hundred Sinhalese.   Like, at random. To keep it \nfair, you know, not play favourites.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And then the nastiest imperial weapon of all: the demographic bomb.   \nThis was a Brit specialty all over the world (see Fiji for a weirdly similar \ncase).   The Brits ran India, so they had total control over millions of \nobedient Tamil peasants who were starving, desperate, and ready to go anywhere, \njust pile into the hold of a ship and get out to cut cane or plant rice in some \nplace that may as well have been on the moon for all they knew.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So along with the massacre\/reprisals, the Brits came up with one of \ntheir classic two-birds-one-stone plans: to neutralise the Sinhalese, let\u2019s \nimport huge hordes of Tamils from India!   They\u2019re cheap and docile and they\u2019ll \ngive the Sinhala something to keep them busy even after we have to leave the \nisland – and meanwhile they\u2019ll drive the price of labour down even further.  \nBrilliant, chaps, absolutely brilliant!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And they did it.   It worked so well it\u2019s still working today.   And \nwhen they were done totally destroying the poor Sinhalese, the Brits did what \nthey do best, better than any other murder gang on the planet, they took that \namnesia zapper from Men in Black\u201d and zapped everyone in Sri Lanka, then turned \nit on themselves and were suddenly so innocent, so damn virtuous and clean, that \na pig like Mister Jeremy Brown can actually sit down at a computer and boast \nabout all the wonderful times England has raped Sri Lanka, from olden times \nright down to Arthur C. Clarke buggering every little boy on the island.   One \nhell of a job, Brownie!   Satan himself must be shaking his head, muttering, \nGotta give it to the fuckin\u2019 Limeys, damn it, they\u2019ve got no shame at all; ya \ngotta admire that.   Damn, even I wouldn\u2019t have had the gall to talk like \nthat.   Jeremy Brown. I\u2019m putting him down for CEO of the Hell \nPropagandastaffel\u201d the minute his liver packs up and he lands down \nhere.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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

By Gary Brecher You see some pretty sick stuff when you do my job, but I just read something sicker than any Congo cannibal buffet.   It\u2019s an article by a posh little Limey named Jeremy Brown condemning the Sri Lankan Government for being too messy in putting down the LTTE, and demanding that we stop […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[120],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-96041","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96041","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=96041"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96041\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=96041"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=96041"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=96041"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}