By Thimibirivela Ranarala –

Kumar David’s latest matchmaking (August 16, 2015) to preserve the status quo, demands that the JVP soft-pedal opposition to federalism, etc. 

Worse, matchmaker David ((hereafter, MatchmakerD) is essentially calling for the JVP to drop their program for a strong modern industrializing state, claiming such “dirigisme’ is past expiry date in the world. He upholds a “mixed economy” – whatever that is!

He insists that “After the end of the Soviet Union…a new model of mixed economic growth became apparent in China.” Really? We show below he knows nothing of China’s real economy or history.

MatchmakerD clearly knows nought of modern realities, of such strong national states that challenge colonial depredation and underdevelopment, offering the finest blueprints for our future.

In his willful ideological confusion and ignorance of the world and history, he wishes that the JVP cut the umbilical cord sustaining that party’s more rational cadre-base, a base sustained despite repeated annihilation. 

Having made a profession of whinging overtime about the Old Reds hanging on to the Blue hem of the bucolic Mrs. B’s sultry sari, look how he justifies his pendulous dangling off the fungal-Green lunkets of dead kleptocrats who refuse to die and still haunt us. Instead, he offers these thieves ‘critical support’, assiduously avoiding how the Bond billions were pillaged right under his watchful eyes.

How could wide-eyed corruption critic and good-governance proponent MatchmakerD ignore these unca-nephs’ very robber-baron DNA? He perhaps hopes our memories will dessicate with every dreary morning dew, while ‘retail’ corruption is highlighted: like killing petty drugdealers (that enable the Big Pharma monopolies – the real pushers!)

Such ‘Sari Pota’ analysts as MatchmakerD also conveniently ignore that their ‘hem’ construct is insulting misogyny. Derived from ‘hiding behind a woman’s skirt’, etc., MatchmakerD and these so-called leftists still claim advanced thinking. Well, their ‘slip’ is indeed showing! And such slips take us not to Freud (despite lusting for the ménage-à-trois of uncle, nephew and the holy ghosts of ’87-89) but to Marx.

For MatchmakerD declares himself not just Marxist but Leninist – though not Stalinist! He could still add Comrade Joseph Stalin to Hitler, Caligula and Jack the Ripper to namecall Colombo’s latest nemesis, but that may remind Gotabaya that Comrade Joe is demonized by the whites cos Stalin’s USSR blossomed into an industrial power in doublequick time.

Dropping historical notes and names from a selective socialist canon, MatchmakerD continually contradicts himself. Alternately rabid anti-SLFP and anti-UNP, he soon finds solace in these “good governance” coalitions headed by such parties. He even credits himself as originator of the common candidate, the matchmaker – but lo! that kapaveema soon went kapothi!

Hanging on to sagging Green jockstraps for dear life, awaiting enlightenment to trickle down on him, he now wants the ‘Young’ Left to continue his clinging. In asking the JVP to give up on building a strong country via challenging the merchant economics that underpins it, he cannot admit that new China has not, will never, abandon what Lenin called “the commanding heights of the economy”. 

Nor can he admit that his prime yaka, Comrade Joe, was only able to defeat Nazi Germany by building a modern industrialized state in a short duration unheard of in history. Yet oh how the white running dogs now howl (though Joe made the cover of Time twice, cos the mighty Red Army was smashing the Nazi war machine)! Before that, MatchmakerD’s ideological forebears – not understanding tactic – opposed the brilliant Soviet stroke of seeking detente with Germany to buy time, while the Atlantic powers armed Germany to attack the USSR.

Our socialists are not scientific socialists but utopians, romantics and anarchists!

MatchmakerD likewise misunderstands Lenin’s call for self-determination. Such sad leftists mimic Jehovah’s Witnesses (refusing blood transfusions because of misreading doctored texts). Lenin’s calls always had context and program: We are different from Russia, with its history of (largely German) Tsarist imperialism, in Poland, etc., nor are we the USSR either (soon simultaneously invaded by 14 different countries). Nor are we white-settler states like USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Israel, or South Africa. Our history is longer than English rope (and Birmingham shackles) and way different. Facile comparisons are bootless.

Held forcibly under colonialism, we (perhaps minus MatchmakerD) have fought them for 514 years at least. We are one and the same people, and before the invaders, a people-in-the-becoming absorbing migrant and mercenary over millenia. Think Southeast Asia where Chinese, Indians and Lankika over centuries became Malay until colonialism froze them into minority-hood. Just as much as industrial Tamilnadu (which, for all its ‘culture’, cannot provide residents clean water minus faeces) is an entity in the becoming (absorbing people south of the Deccan).

Except our history is way longer 

Likewise MatchmakerD misunderstands China, even claiming Taiwan as a democracy. He clearly misunderstands token showcase front-windows of imperialism, much like Singapore or Israhell. He even whinges about China fortifying the South China seas. Let us recall history for idiots: Why is the Philippines named after a white man, Spain’s King? What was Philip (and his pirate Magellan) doing in the China Seas? – plucking coconuts from those 7,700 islands?

After a Borgia pope divided the world between Spain and Portugal in 1494, the Portuguese invaded us from the west, while Spain’s Magellan sneaked in the other way to trade with China. Held to the Philippines, the Chinese state kept Spain at bay, off those very seas! From there the ‘Manila Galleons’ traded gold and silver stolen from the Americas for the great manufactures of China – from soft silk to delicate porcelain, taken back to Mexico and put on ‘Havana Galleons’ to Seville and Europe, soon plundered by English pirate Drake.

Staying with historical idiocy: He calls the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966-76), “Maoism’s other great debacle… a harebrained stab at ideological and cultural purification, leading to a breakdown of state and society”. Really? He has too many ‘Wild Swans’ defecating in his brain. China’s current leader, Xi Jinping was sent by the Communist Party, along with 17 million other urban youth, to ‘learn from the peasant’. Read Xi’s biography: he learned lots. Our decadent corrupted urban youth in Colombo could learn more, not from white international schools that rob our wealth and brains, or from Hollywood or Harry Potter, they can share the needed magic of science from the villages. Xi says he owes a great debt to those seven years of rural experience. Combining urban and rural knowledge, that impoverished village he shared knowledge with, soon industrialized into a prosperous locale. So who’s the harebrain?

So what’s MatchmakerD’s actual point? He wishes to weaken an already weak state. His hatred for the Sinhala people, is not based on a love for Tamil people, despite his claims. For, like Colombo’s usurious mercantile set, his hatred is against real democracy, fearing the privileges unfairly bestowed by colonialism upon a minority (both within the majority, and those minorities within minorities) will go the way of the dodo. Rather than dodder quietly into the twilight, he rages not against the dying of the light but against rising of the dawn.

The bottom line is MatchmakerD deploys the English ploy using ‘minorities’ against Sinhala Buddhists anyway he can. He promotes ‘traditional homelands’, a term popularized by South Africa’s apartheid regime to relegate Africans to Bantustans – desolate reservations: Canada’s settler state taught them to construct. What is ‘traditional’ in a country as ours with such a long long history of contiguous centripetal continuity longer than India? He claims the cry for Eelam arose post-1983.

Yet the English massaged the dreams of certain class fractions (from low-country quislings north-south-east-west to fake upcountry aristocrats) throughout the 19th century, in order to fissure and capture the country. By the 1920s, even such liberals as Arunachalam could dream of a northern outpost plus a worldwide Eelam stretching throughout ‘Tamil Colonies’? Where’s that? From Malaysia through Ceylon and India to Durban, and who knows, maybe even Brent or Aberdeen (where our tea profits ended up) and even New York and Toronto (where free-education-trained brains drained to)! Some even claim Indonesia, Vietnam, and Yunnan (in China)!

MatchmakerD’s fervent domestic hope, as the English always wish, is these mythical hallucinations will take away land from the Sinhala, demoralize the Buddhists (adherents to a far more ethical and rational creed than any other), thereby undermining the real core of 514-year opposition to imperialism in this country.

Pity there’s no office at the Kachcheri or Colombo Town Hall to license ‘Marxists’. There should be a Marxist Gate-Mudaliyar post to deny poseurs such self-adulation! ‘Marxist’ is used in the morning and discarded by high noon, by those lured to jobs in INGOs or in constitution-making. 

He even lamented Nihal Jayawickrama’s constitutional interpretations, lamenting it was politically inspired. Indeed, as Marx noted, in consitutions always check the last line, which usually contradicts all idealisms afore-proclaimed. Why didn’t MatchmakerD? Marxists making constitutions for capitalists should never forget: our merchants are always enthusiastic about rights, but much more about ground rents!

Calumny against ‘Marxists’ has been widespread, as the 1848 Communist Manifesto ere pointed out: “Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as communistic by its opponents in power?…”

‘Marxist’ as a slander is now gouged from the gutters of corporate media, by death squad commanders as convenient slur to justify murder, or by any ‘modern’ dupe dismissing any argument as passé. 

Attacking Marxism is always good for fundraising from backward merchants: Recently a wannabe-Presidential-candidate insulted Marx to fill his campaign war chest, hoping to soon outmanoeuvre his current good governors to whose lunket he still cleaves. MatchmakerD once insulted this wannabe as “a Sinhala-Buddhist chauvinist”, but then ‘tactically’ massaged this social climber’s ego to break up the previous government.

Let’s not call all this ‘Machiavellianism’ – for Machiavelli was an adept who wished to unite his country, not divide it. Hold up a mirror instead to this fake ‘prince’ (the nondescript Kumar, not Kumara or Kumaran) and show him for what he is, another rabid communalist, who clothes his desperate deshabille in borrowed plumage.

But just as there are many ways to fillet a feline, striped or maned, we here show that Master David (what Palestinian Goliath does he wish to slay, sticking to such doctored biblical nom-de-pens?) is exactly what he insults – the opposite of a Marx who would change the human condition.

Belonging to one or more of the numerous little Trot-groupuscules that his Hanoverian Majesty’s political police dream up to confuse the naif, MatchmakerD reserves his regular fire for what he calls the ‘Dead Left’.

Let’s annoint it the Annihilated Left! For if we truly can count, certainly tens of millions were slaughtered throughout the 20th century: dedicated people daring to attempt a better world on the basis of scientific socialism, from the nascent USSR, through Germany and Eastern/Central Europe, East Asia, Southeast Asia (Indonesia 1965 springs incarnadine to mind), West Asia (O Yemen!), or the darker Americas, and of course Africa, from Algiers to Jo’burg, let alone Lumumba’s Congo, where millions still killed right now before our eyes. Or, not before any eyes! For this world’s BBCs and CNNs and Reuters carry no headlines about Congo or Yemen, nor did they in 1987-89 right here. 

Meanwhile, UN investigators prefer looking up other saris and skirts and hems!

Ahem!