and other horrors:
From the New Yorker magazine, or more accurately one of its blogs, a reprint of the "Letter from the Grave", written in case of his assassination by Lasantha Wickramatunga, a Sri Lankan journalist employed by the Sunday Leader, the main Sri Lankan newspaper. These paragraphs introduce the letter, which has been widely reproduced, especially in Asia:The Leader’s investigative reporting had been fiercely critical of the government and of the conduct of its war against Tamil separatists; Wickramatunga had been attacked before. He knew that he was likely to be murdered and so he wrote an essay with instructions that it be published only after his own death. Some mutual friends in the region sent a copy to me today. Read it in full below. It is like nothing else you will read today, that I promise.New Yorker 12.Jan.09
A very brief bit of context: Sri Lanka’s government, drawing support from the island’s Sinhalese ethnic majority, has been at war since the nineteen-eighties with various militant separatist groups representing the country’s Tamil ethnic minority. In recent years, the war has narrowed to a contest between government troops and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, a group designated as a terrorist organization by the United States and others. The L.T.T.E. purports to speak for the aspirations of Tamil civilians, but it has conducted its campaign with child soldiers, suicide bombers, and other horrors. For its part, the Sri Lankan government has arranged for the disappearance and murder of uncounted numbers of Tamils, just as it “disappeared” and murdered thousands of its own Sinhalese citizens during an earlier period of counterinsurgency.
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The tacit condemnation of the Tamil Tigers for their use of "child soldiers, suicide bombers, and other horrors" is the language of well brought up pigs. Polite, sensible, selfish, evil. Inasmuch as anything can be called evil, it will have this one common attribute, it is the elevation of the self above all else.
This is what makes it hard to fix as a target, because we all have that as beings, as organisms, except those of us who put all our selves into something larger. And then that larger thing is either selfish in its own turn, or not. And on it goes.
We eat other forms of life, and our selfishness in that seems natural and a part of the world. Why not each other's lives, if we can place the other we digest outside of what we call our selves? And this is how it happens.
The Palestinians are not "us", in just the way the Aztec and the Cherokee were not "us", in just the way the Jews in Germany in 1939, or in Spain in 1492 were not "us". It's simple and biologically exact. Us, deserving of approval and protection and finally, survival - even physical immortality should science come up with the keys for that; and against "us" "them" deserving of nothing but our merciful offering of a chance to beg forgiveness and demonstrate remorse and the possibility of joining "us" as inferior less-deserving participants in our ongoing centrality to life itself, or death.
The author of the New Yorker piece, Steve Coll, sees the dead journalist Lasantha Wickramatunga as one of "us", he is after all another journalist, articulate and well-read no doubt, and he probably spoke English proficiently. Never mind that the reason he was killed was that he shed too much light on the dark forces against which the Tamil Tigers are now waging their last most heroic campaign before what will be, if it happens, a kind of extinction.
By practicing these "other horrors" the Tamil Tigers, regardless of Wickramatunga's sympathy for their cause, and his death because of that sympathy, have placed themselves definitively as "not us", as "them".
At the same time the introduction in the New Yorker - and I have to admit I don't know anything about the sympathies held by Steve Coll, who may sympathize greatly with their cause, may only feel intimidated by the bloody proof of the viciousness of the Sri Lankan government who evidently have the enthusiastic support of Coll's own government, the US - ignores everything that would make a moral distinction between the two sides, and sits comfortably at a safe distance from anything like engagement with anything at all beyond the self-interest of those who speak it.
It is a reverting to a kind of an antique childish etiquette, of decorous silence and subtly conveyed simple emotions. And clinging to the only clear moral artifact available, the obvious moral wrong of these "other horrors".
But these "other horrors" don't seem to involve white phosphorus or cluster bombs or depleted uranium.
And nothing in the article suggests any concern with the choices people must make when their voices are consistently denied, when their suffering is denied, when those who speak for them are punished, killed in this case, and their options limited to defeat or final acts of desperation.
The logic is that when you're outgunned and outnumbered you surrender, and you adapt, you become the slave or servant of your new masters, and the world will then roll contentedly along on its new path.
These same spineless assertions have been made consistently, though mostly invisibly, tacitly, whenever the defiant resistance of the oppressed has been inconvenient to those whose comfort depends on peaceful coexistence with the oppressor.
Accusations of the intolerance and authoritarianism of Cuban society under Fidel and the revolution, and in many other countries - and still even now with all the near-instantaneous information available these accusations are made against popular leaders in South America like Morales and Correa, and especially Chavez in Venezuela, come from those who create both the conditions against which the rebellion has its core being, and the resistance to the success, when it comes, of the rebellion, which in turn creates the rigidity and severity the oppressive force can then complain about, except now in South America they can't, because the Bolivarians are pretty flexible.
Emphatically this charge is now made against Hamas in the Middle East.
And there's never any real acknowledgment of what they faced, all these pariah movements, individually and separately, or in parallel and consistently, that pushed them toward rigidity and severity, and desperate measures. This is a trick, a deception. A rhetorical device.
It's a rhetorical trick of sadists, who will argue complacently, with confidence, until the foundations of their cruelty begin to crack. At which point we can expect consistency from many of these souls who express such horror and disgust at the desperate methods of desperate people. We can expect them to shift as quietly as they can from condemnation to what was all along approval.
They will, as soon as it becomes obvious the wind is shifting, quickly adopt the outer signs of the other side, and become encouraging champions of the oppressed, who now bid fair to win.
The terrorist leader - in the eyes of the English government - George Washington is a national hero, and at least nominally admired by those who condemn terrorism, not because his cause was just and his methods were morally superior, but because he won. Many of those who participated in the establishing of post-Revolutionary early US society would as easily have participated in the extension of English colonial rule, had it looked to go that way. The popular media now is rife with such individuals, whioh gives the impression it's the natural human condition to surrender and compromise when expedient, and to exercise sadistic dominance when it's the most direct means of maintaining power.
Those making the tacit argument now against the adoption of these "other horrors", because they're "horrors" and because morally superior people don't stoop to the use of "horrors", are the decendants of precisely that logical decision, to compromise and surrender in the face of otherwise likely defeat, and of course, once started down that path how much more sensible it is to surrender at the first sign of superiority in your enemies, to anticipate defeat far enough in advance you can give up with your dignity intact. Not very often was that decision the result of a moral refusal to stoop to "horrors" in order to resist a larger more powerful enemy.
But there are still among us the spirits of those who refused compromise with evil, who fought to the end, who chose death above dishonor.
Rosa Luxemberg, herself a martyred hero who refused surrender whatever the cost, pointed back nearly 2000 years to Spartacus, a martyred hero whose name the comfortable have recently turned into a hook for selling Pepsi Cola, because at this time nothing really matters but comfort, and selling things.
Sadists despise their victims, it's in the nature of that relationship, but especially they despise the awakening victim who begins to refuse the chains of dominance, which threatens to undo everything.
To those comfortable under the hierarchies of sadism suicide bombers are always markers of a pathology in the group from which they emerge - to those whose lives depend on submission to the more powerful this makes perfect sense. The pathology is the lack of selfish imperative.
Child soldiers, suicide bombers, these "other horrors", all threaten the delicate sensibilities of the compromised, as much as they outrage the compassionate, those who are appalled at clearly unnecessary suffering of the innocent wherever it happens. It's just that for the practitioners of these "other horrors" the suffering was already there, it is in fact an already existing suffering their desperate acts attempt to redress.
Still, decent people must condemn the use of horror and terror.
Unless the horror and terror are employed by the already powerful, upon whose power the comfortable decent depend, for their comfort and the leisure of their decency, which being threatened then makes any expedient weapon justified.
Blowing up a woman with a 9mm projectile fired from a tank while she cowers in the rubble of her home is a regrettable but sensible and understandable by-product of superior military action against those who threaten the stability of a clearly superior society. No symmetry there between the ghastly last act of the female suicide bomber and the soldier inside the tank.
These "other horrors" are consistently employed when nothing else has worked. What about that? Doesn't honor say anything about that?
Nowhere do we see the assumption of the suicide belt as first choice of weapon in any resistance, it's always the last most desperate thing, erupting from a population driven to the brink of defeat.
We may see child soldiers in the feral armies of some African states and find no justification there, only moral collapse and disintegration - but if we have a strong enough lens we can see 14 year old boys, and younger, with guns in arms fighting professional soldiers deployed in the service of King George, during the American Revolutionary War.
If the cause is just why not whole families engaged? Child soldiers have as much potential for honor as any other soldier who fights for cause and not for mere employment.
Coll's introduction to Wickramatunga's letter from the grave was written, and we need to be very careful that the fact of the New Yorker's printing it, with the tacit claims of journalistic solidarity implied by that, doesn't obscure the fact that it's presented, from within a context that justifies everything Wickramatunga was killed for opposing.
The headlines these past weeks have been bleak for the Tamil Tigers - in the US and Canada sympathizers are being convicted for "conspiring to provide material support" to what the US State Department, now personified by Hillary Clinton and bearing the resolute image of Barack Obama's political will, is calling a "terrorist organization".
70,000 people have died in the campaign for independence for Eelam in Sri Lanka, and once again the official position of the United States government is firmly behind the butchers.
