{"id":78645,"date":"2013-03-23T18:34:27","date_gmt":"2013-03-23T18:34:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/?p=78645"},"modified":"2013-03-26T13:49:06","modified_gmt":"2013-03-26T13:49:06","slug":"where-is-it-all-going-to-end","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/index.php\/where-is-it-all-going-to-end\/","title":{"rendered":"Where Is It All Going To End?"},"content":{"rendered":"

By\u00a0Emil van der Poorten<\/a><\/span>\u00a0–<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Emil van der Poorten<\/p><\/div>\n

The recent attacks on Christian denominations bears out the contention I made earlier and which significantly more erudite observers of the national scene have identified as a government gone completely mad in its efforts to distract the public from the realities that are descending upon this nation and for which the current corrupt and violent government should take complete responsibility.<\/p>\n

It is more than a year since the invasion of a mosque in Dambulla<\/a><\/span> by a thousands-strong Buddhist-priest-led mob and NOTHING has been done to bring those responsible to book.\u00a0 Even worse than a government from which little better can be expected, the religious hierarchies, inclusive of those of the Islamic faith, have done, as the saying goes, \u201cdiddley-squat\u201d in the matter of seeking appropriate investigation and justice.\u00a0 As for even the usual mealy-mouthed motherhood and apple pie statements that are traditional in this nation of invertebrate religionists, forget it!\u00a0 Either they haven\u2019t even uttered the usual hypocrisies or our permanently supine media has not even bothered to quote them.<\/p>\n

The artificially-generated \u201cHalal controversy\u201d has been another nail in the coffin of those wishing to practice their faith in a country where that right is supposedly guaranteed in its very constitution.\u00a0 But then, after the so-called \u201cimpeachment\u201d of the Chief Justice<\/a><\/span> for not doing the bidding of the Chief Executive of this country, one might as well whistle Dixie as expect law, order and common decency to prevail in this land of 2500 years of Sinhala Buddhist<\/a><\/span> Civilization, particularly after the appointment of Ms. Bandaranayake\u2019s successor<\/a><\/span> whose credentials more than speak for themselves.<\/p>\n

The continuing attacks on Christian denominations reached a point when even that \u201cevangelical luminary,\u201d Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith<\/a><\/span>, was embarrassed into appealing to the government to intervene when one of his denomination\u2019s churches in the Sabaragamuwa Province was vandalised and a statue of either the Virgin Mary or Jesus Christ, built at very considerable expense, totally destroyed.\u00a0 Of course, his Eminence, after going through the motions of \u201cprotest,\u201d then retreated to the Vatican where, not untypically of a denomination that produced a Pope that collaborated with Adolf Hitler and the Borgias before him, was considered a candidate for the Papacy!\u00a0 As used and abused as that saying is, \u201cO tempora, o mores\u201d is apt in the circumstances!<\/p>\n

Of course, the so-called Evangelical Churches have proved, once again, to be sitting ducks for the saffron-clad storm \u2013troopers of this regime.\u00a0 The primary reason for this is that they appear to be the most successful in bringing people into their fold, mostly because they are prepared to lay emphasis on dealing with the worldly needs of the very poor and offer them succour\u00a0 in a form that the \u201cmain-line\u201d churches usually don\u2019t deign to do.\u00a0 That success, obviously, lays them open to allegations of unprincipled conduct in effecting those conversions.\u00a0 As one who dealt with this mode of operation in another country at another time and sought, as a community organizer, to ensure that unprincipled methods were not applied in efforts to convert the most vulnerable members of a community, I believe I can state with some objectivity and, certainly, with a significant degree of experience, that these \u201cunethical conversions\u201d are not always what they seem to be.\u00a0 In fact, there were a number of occasions when I and other community organizers ended up with egg on our faces when the \u201cconverts\u201d proved a lot savvier than we thought they were and abandoned their new-found faith after extracting whatever material benefits they needed at the time from the evangelists!\u00a0 To the disappointed evangelists, all we could offer was the old piece of advice, \u201cCaveat emptor\u201d or buyer beware, more than partially tongue in cheek!<\/p>\n

However, this self-righteous objection, backed by a proclivity for violence, to \u201cunethical conversions\u201d is coming (surprise! surprise!) from those who wouldn\u2019t know ethics if they came and bit them in that part of their anatomy in which their grey matter obviously resides.\u00a0 To call these self-righteous goons unprincipled thugs would be to understate the case. \u00a0To expect them to act with a modicum of decency and intelligence would call one\u2019s own intelligence into serious question.<\/p>\n

Of course one of the strange things, upto now, has been the fact that there have been no major recent attacks on Kovils or other Hindu places of worship, at least no very high-profile incidents that rival the recent attacks on mosques and mullahs and Christian churches and their pastors.\u00a0 However, a friend, better versed in the manner in which attacks such as these are orchestrated, has warned me that it is just a matter of time before those places of worship will also come under attack.\u00a0 After all, people of this stripe have a precedent going back more than half a century \u2013 the immolation of the Pusari<\/em> of a Hindu temple south of Colombo during the communal riots of 1958.\u00a0 And the current crop of goons has more than tacit support for their murderous behavior, something that the hypocritical S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike<\/a><\/span> didn\u2019t openly offer those who launched the attacks on the Tamils.<\/p>\n

As a side-bar, it is interesting that the two heads of government when the pogroms were launched against the Tamils in 1958 and 1983 had very similarly dismissive evaluations of those landmark events.\u00a0 Bandaranaike described them as a few isolated incidents and was ready to ignore the behavior of the \u201cgoondas\u201d until the Indian government allegedly threatened to land troops at Ratmalana airport to bring law and order to the streets and villages of Sri Lanka.<\/p>\n

As for J. R. Jayewardene<\/a><\/span>, his official response to the bloodshed of Black July<\/a><\/span> was more than dismissive.\u00a0 He suggested quite clearly that \u201cthe Tamils had it coming to them\u201d<\/p>\n

I have one little piece of advice for those Sri Lankan observers of what is obviously a wave of intolerance and hysteria that is being built to tsunami proportions by those determined to camouflage their moral and ethical nakedness, our relegation to the status of a pariah <\/em>state and the looming economic collapse:\u00a0 don\u2019t waste your time looking for events in Sri Lankan history where some statesman came galloping in on his white steed to save all that is (was?) decent in this country where many of its loudest defenders claim that the philosophy of Gautama is sacrosanct and will be maintained forever.\u00a0 There was no such person in the past and it is even less likely that there will be such a savior in the future.\u00a0 Pretty well all those who might have had the intelligence to engage in such a task are too busy either raiding the public coffers or directly or indirectly helping those who are!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[…]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":49743,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,46],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-78645","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-colombotelegraph","category-constitutional-reforms"],"yoast_head":"\nWhere Is It All Going To End? - Colombo Telegraph<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/index.php\/where-is-it-all-going-to-end\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Where Is It All Going To End? - Colombo Telegraph\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"[…]\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/index.php\/where-is-it-all-going-to-end\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Colombo Telegraph\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2013-03-23T18:34:27+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2013-03-26T13:49:06+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/07\/Emil-V-P.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"336\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"402\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"COLOMBO TELEGRAPH\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"COLOMBO TELEGRAPH\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"6 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/index.php\/where-is-it-all-going-to-end\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/index.php\/where-is-it-all-going-to-end\/\",\"name\":\"Where Is It All Going To End? 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