By

R. Chandrasoma

We are told by high authorities in the government that our former President has good hopes of being alive in the years ahead because of the political heroism and encompassing compassion of those who defeated him at the recent historic elections.

Indeed, the claim has been made by no less a person than the globe-trotting (and oracular) Foreign Minister that the former Leader (MR) escaped an inglorious end strapped to an ‘Electric Chair’ because of the pleading and promises of the New Leadership – to purge our ancient land of the political roguery and rampant venality that (supposedly) characterized the ruler-ship of the defeated President.

There was also a more ominous charge –that was music in the ears of the Anglo-American ‘mafia’ that currently polices the world. MR was supposedly in the same class as the ‘villainous’ Saddam Hussein and the much-feared Gaddafi – both heavily advertised in the Western Press as brutal dictators that brought not only ruin to their own countries but imperiled the world because of their insatiable greed to be great and powerful whatever the material and human cost. Indeed. so great was their advertised political depravity that the entire world was alarmed and affronted. T

he hilarious comparison with MR was a staged political stunt – he had, of course, no weapons of mass destruction nor was he outside the Democratic Process and the Rule of Law that dictators are supposed to enjoy. He defeated a historic enemy and re-launched Sri Lanka as a free and prosperous nation. It is here that

Orwellian Revision is famously employed – the artful suppression of the facts about a disastrous rebellion by a bloody tyrant and murderer of thousands of innocents.

The heroic feat that saved Lanka from political extinction was ‘rewritten’ as an assult on the ‘rights of the people’ and the word ‘genocide’ gained importance to the enemies of a stable and prosperous Sri Lanka.

The New Leadership –the Avenging Horsemen of the Apocalypse – carried this Orwellian rewriting of history much further when what was largely a political campaign against MR ‘morphed’ into a moral crusade against an Evil Dictator and his Band of Thieves.

A hallucinatory landscape was created where men were (supposedly) kidnapped in broad daylight, women raped and children molested. It was a time – so declared the enemies of MR – of robbing and fobbing when free citizens lived perilously with White Vans patrolling the streets to pick unruly malcontents.

This is the Great Orwellian Redaction that the Propaganda Arm of the New Liberation Movement used with great success. Let honest citizens compare the ‘then’ with the ‘now’ –the brief age of triumph and confidence under MR with the abnegatory bathos of a life under defeatism and humiliating contrition-fashioned as a Machiavellian strategy to further the political ends of those threatened with early extinction in the battle for power.

A final comment on the Electric Chair. The British seized the Last King of Sri Lanka on protests made by the Ruling Elite that he was unfit to be a King. It was a historic betrayal. The surrender of our one-time President to gloating foreigners by those briefly ensconced in power – if and when this happens –will surely rank with the earlier historic shame.

Courtesy:The Island