{"id":215441,"date":"2020-12-21T19:43:24","date_gmt":"2020-12-21T14:13:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/?p=215441"},"modified":"2020-12-27T16:26:36","modified_gmt":"2020-12-27T10:56:36","slug":"an-ideas-vaccine-against-the-pandemic-of-gotabaya-type-ultranationalist-despotism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/index.php\/an-ideas-vaccine-against-the-pandemic-of-gotabaya-type-ultranationalist-despotism\/","title":{"rendered":"An Ideas Vaccine Against The Pandemic Of Gotabaya-Type Ultranationalist Despotism\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Dayan Jayatilleka<\/a> –\u00a0<\/span><\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Dr. Dayan Jayatilleka<\/p><\/div>\n

Both the regime ideologues and the anti-regime neoliberal ideologues view Lankan reality through the prism of \u2018the Sinhala-Buddhist majority vs the minorities\u2019, with the only difference between them being that for the regime it is a question of the \u2018marginalized Sinhala-Buddhist majority\u2019 vs the \u2018privileged minorities\u2019 while for the neoliberals it is, (as one said in a recent tweet) \u2018marginalized minorities\u2019 vs \u2018Sinhala-Buddhist civilization state\u2019.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The reality is contrary to this frame whichever way its angled, and came into sharp focus in a series of incidents, most dramatically the Mahara massacre. Except for the very rich and well-connected, which the Sanders-AOC wing of the US Democrats would call \u201cthe 1%\u201d, \u201cthe 99%\u201d of the Sinhala-Buddhist majority is also suffering at the hands of a heartless regime, not in its ethno-religious identity but in its material, socioeconomic being and as citizens. Either you believe that the overwhelming bulk of the citizenry is satisfied under this regime, or you have to accept that the majority of Sinhala-Buddhists who constitute a majority of the citizens, are suffering and disgruntled. \u00a0 \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The regime\u2019s Sinhala-Buddhism<\/a><\/span>, though sincere as self-image, objectively functions as a disguise for the interests of a minority of crony capitalists, ex-military brass and a single clan. The regime\u2019s cosmopolitan-liberal critics fall into the trap of their foe when they attack the Sinhala-Buddhists as a bloc and Sinhala-Buddhism as a communitarian identity.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Urging a New Liberalism and outlining its platform in a December 2020 essay in Prospect magazine entitled \u2018The Future of Liberalism\u2019, Timothy Garton Ash, Isaiah Berlin Professorial Fellow at St Antony\u2019s College, Oxford, and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, begins by identifying what went wrong, opening the door to authoritarian majoritarian ultranationalism.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In a description that perfectly fits the Ranil-CBK-Mangala \u2018cosmopolitan liberalism\u2019 which created the space for the Gotabaya phenomenon and its triumph, Garton Ash<\/a><\/span> writes:<\/p>\n

\u201c\u2026Cosmopolitan liberals paid too little attention to the other halves of our own societies. We talked a lot about \u201cthe international community,\u201d much less about national communities. By concentrating on the legitimate desire of diverse minorities for recognition of their complex identities, we failed to see how those whom early multiculturalists had assumed to belong to secure majorities now felt increasingly insecure and threatened in their own identities. This left the door open to the \u201cwhite identity politics\u201d of Trump and his ilk. The majority-feeling-like-a-minority resentment was heightened by liberal elites\u2019\u2026contempt for the half of society without higher education, especially when that other half expressed simplistic and politically incorrect views. Witness Hillary Clinton\u2019s notoriously condescending phrase about \u2018the basket of deplorables\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a segment captioned \u2018The State-Nation\u2019, Garton Ash makes yet another observation enormously pertinent to the politically illiterate and obtuse Lankan cosmopolitan (neo)liberal intellectual-ideological conclave:<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is uncomfortable territory for contemporary liberals. Some are altogether unhappy with the stubborn persistence of nations. But rather than drawing up our battered troops on a marshy frontline marked \u201cinternationalism versus the nation,\u201d we need to regroup on the more defensible high ground of the nation defined in liberal terms\u2026These are surely terms on which liberals can engage, arguing not about the need for a national political community\u2014which was, after all, one of the main demands of European liberals in 1848, the year Marx published his manifesto\u2014but about the definition and character of that community. As overnight frontier closures and national government responses to the COVID-19<\/a><\/span> pandemic have again demonstrated, the nation is just too important, and too strong in its emotional appeal, to be left to the nationalists.\u201d (Ibid)<\/p>\n

Ranil-Mangala \u2018cosmopolitan liberalism\u2019 or rather \u2018globalist neoliberalism\u2019 did just that, namely, leave the nation, with its importance and strong emotional appeal, to be monopolized by the nationalists.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Timothy Garton Ash makes a strong, explicit pitch for a liberal patriotism, which the Lankan Opposition democrats should adopt:<\/p>\n

\u201cOurs will therefore be an inclusive, liberal patriotism, capacious and sympathetically imaginative enough to embrace citizens with multiple identities\u2026Such an open, positive, warm-hearted version of the nation is capable of appealing not just to dry reason but also to the deep human need for belonging and the moral imperative of solidarity. While the coronavirus pandemic initially triggered a bout of national self-isolation, it has also showed us the best in community spirit and patriotic solidarity. Liberal patriotism is an essential ingredient of a renewed liberalism.\u201d (Ibid)<\/p>\n

He mourns that post-cold war liberalism had ignored the warning of French political philosopher Pierre Hassner that the irrepressible human \u201cyearning for community and identity, on the one hand, and for equality and solidarity on the other\u201d would be re-born. Garton Ash writes that \u201c\u2026Community and identity are values (and human needs) often emphasized in conservative thought, while the socialist tradition has paid particular attention to equality and solidarity.\u201d He then places his cards on the table: \u201c\u2026In the half-jesting spirit of the Polish philosopher Leszek Ko\u0142akowski\u2019s celebrated 1978 essay \u2018How to Be a Conservative-Liberal-Socialist,\u2019 I propose that we should be conservative-socialist-liberals.\u201d (Ibid)<\/p>\n

It may be some interest to the Lankan reader that a critical revaluation and rectification of Liberalism had been suggested along broadly compatible lines by me in the late 1990s in a South Asian Liberal Review published by the Friedrich Naumann Stiftung and concurrently in the Lanka Guardian magazine, later reproduced in my 2014 volume \u2018Long War, Cold Peace\u2019. (See: \u2018Liberalism\u2019, in Chapter 5: Reflections and Perspectives, \u2018Long War, Cold Peace\u2019, Vijitha Yapa, Colombo 2014, pp 415-419.)\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

If as Timothy Garton Ash posits, \u2018cosmopolitan liberalism\u2019 led to a hollowing out and the consequent victory of the authoritarian ultranationalist Right in the First World\/West, how much more dangerous has it been in the Global South (with Brazil and Sri Lanka as examples)? How much more appropriate would the splicing of his two formulae, \u2018liberal patriotism\u2019 and a \u2018conservative-socialist-liberalism\u2019 be, and how necessary the supplement or \u2018booster\u2019 of a left-liberal populism (Mexico\u2019s President AMLO, Bolivia\u2019s President Arce), in the societies of the South, such as ours?<\/p>\n

The current crisis of humanity has four facets: the pandemic, climate change, economic recession and ultranationalist despotism. Just as the global rollout of the anti-corona vaccines will decide the fate of the pandemic in 2021, the outcomes in the other three crisis-domains will be decided by whether or not a \u2018vaccine of ideas\u2019 with the composition suggested by Timothy Garton Ash, Jake Sullivan, and above all Pope Francis in his latest encyclical Fratelli Tutti (celebrated by philosopher Charles Taylor), is produced and distributed among humanity.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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