A Brief Colonial History Of Ceylon(SriLanka)
Sri Lanka: One Island Two Nations
A Brief Colonial History Of Ceylon(SriLanka)
Sri Lanka: One Island Two Nations
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Thiranjala Weerasinghe sj.- One Island Two Nations
?????????????????????????????????????????????????Friday, May 11, 2018
The Danger of Leadership Cults
One of the most important aspects of organizing is grass-roots educational programs that teach people, by engaging them in dialogue, about the structures of corporate power and the nature of oppression. One cannot fight what one does not understand.
( May 8, 2018, Boston, Sri Lanka Guardian) No
leader, no matter how talented and visionary, effectively defies power
without a disciplined organizational foundation. The civil rights
movement was no more embodied in Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. than the
socialist movement was embodied in Eugene V. Debs. As the civil rights leader Ella Baker understood,
the civil rights movement made King; King did not make the civil rights
movement. We must focus on building new, radical movements that do not
depend on foundation grants, a media platform or the Democratic Party or
revolve around the cult of leadership. Otherwise, we will remain
powerless. No leader, no matter how charismatic or courageous, will save
us. We must save ourselves.
“You didn’t see me on television, you didn’t see news stories about me,”
said Baker, who died in 1986. “The kind of role that I tried to play
was to pick up pieces or put together pieces out of which I hoped
organization might come. My theory is, strong people don’t need strong
leaders.”
All of our radical and populist organizations, including unions and the
press, are decimated or destroyed. If we are to successfully pit power
against power we must reject the cult of the self, the deadly
I-consciousness that seduces many, including those on the left, to
construct little monuments to themselves. We must understand that it is
not about us. It is about our neighbor. We must not be crippled by
despair. Our job is to name and confront evil. All great crusades for
justice outlast us. We are measured not by what we achieve but by how
passionately and honestly we fight. Only then do we have a chance to
thwart corporate power and protect a rapidly degrading ecosystem.
What does this mean?
It means receding into the landscape to build community organizations
and relationships that for months, maybe years, will be unseen by mass
culture. It means beginning where people are. It means listening. It
means establishing credentials as a member of a community willing to
make personal sacrifices for the well-being of others. It means being
unassuming, humble and often unnamed and unrecognized. It means, as Cornel West said,
not becoming “ontologically addicted to the camera.” It means, West
went on, rejecting the “obsession with self as some kind of grand
messianic gift to the world.”
One of the most important aspects of organizing is grass-roots
educational programs that teach people, by engaging them in dialogue,
about the structures of corporate power and the nature of oppression.
One cannot fight what one does not understand. Effective political
change, as Baker knew, is not primarily politically motivated. It is
grounded in human solidarity, mutual trust and consciousness. As Harriet Tubman said:
“I rescued many slaves, but I could have saved a thousand more if the
slaves knew they were slaves.” The corporate state’s assault on
education, and on journalism, is part of a concerted effort to keep us
from examining corporate power and the ideologies, such as globalization
and neoliberalism, that promote it. We are entranced by the tawdry, the salacious and the trivial.
The building of consciousness and mass organizations will not be quick.
But these mass movements cannot become public until they are strong
enough to carry out sustained actions, including civil disobedience and
campaigns of noncooperation. The response by the state will be vicious.
Without a dedicated and organized base we will not succeed.
Bob Moses was
the director of the Mississippi Project of the SNCC (Student
Non-Violent Coordinating Committee) in the early 1960s when that group
organized to register black voters. Most blacks had been effectively
barred from voting in Mississippi through poll taxes, literacy tests,
residency requirements and other barriers. Moses, like many organizers,
was beaten and arrested. Blacks who attempted to register to vote were
threatened, harassed, fired from their jobs, physically attacked and
even murdered.
“In essence, it was low-grade guerrilla warfare,” Moses said recently at
an event at Princeton University, in New Jersey. “In guerrilla warfare,
you have a community you can disappear into and emerge from. That’s
what we had. We had a group of local activists who had been a part of
the NAACP local organizations and who had a different sense after World
War II. They were our base. I can go any place, any time of the night,
knock on a door. Somebody was going to open it up, give me a bed to
sleep in, feed me. They were going to watch my back.”
“We had a guerrilla community that we could disappear into and then
emerge to take some people down to the battleground, the courthouse in
some local town with people trying to register to vote,” he said. “At
that point, you were exposed and possibly open to some danger. The
danger came in different ways. There were the highway patrols, which the
state organized. Then there were the local sheriffs. Then there’s the
Klan citizens. Different levels of danger. The challenge is to
understand that you are not always in danger. Those who couldn’t figure
that out didn’t last. They didn’t join.”
“In guerrilla warfare, you have to have an end,” he said. “You learn
that from people in the guerrilla base who had been fighting and
figuring out how to survive and thrive in a guerrilla struggle. The only
way to learn that is to immerse yourself. There’s no training. In
Mississippi, most of the people who did that were young, 17, 18, 19. And
they lived there.”
Organizing, Moses said, begins around a particular issue that is
important to the community—raising the minimum wage, protecting
undocumented workers, restoring voting rights to former prisoners,
blocking a fracking site, halting evictions, ending police violence or
stopping the dumping of toxic waste in neighborhoods. Movements rise
organically. Dissidents are empowered and educated one person at a time.
Any insurgency, he said, has to be earned.
“If you get knocked down enough times and stand up enough times then
people think you’re serious,” he said. “It’s not you talking. They’ve
heard everyone talk about this forever. We earned their trust. We earned
the respect of young people across the country to get them to come down
and risk their lives. This is your country. Look what’s going on in
your country. What do you want to do about it? We established our
authenticity.”
Moses warned movements, such as Black Lives Matter, about establishing a
huge media profile without a strong organizational base. Too often
protests are little more than spectacles, credentialing protesters as
radicals or dissidents while doing little to confront the power of the
state. The state, in fact, often collaborates with protesters, carrying
out symbolic arrests choreographed in advance. This boutique activism is
largely useless. Protests must take the state by surprise and, as with
the water protectors at Standing Rock,
cause serious disruption. When that happens, the state will drop all
pretense of civility, as it did at Standing Rock, and react with
excessive force.
“You can’t be a media person [the subject of media reports] and an
organizer,” Moses said. “If you’re leading an organization, it’s what
you do and who you are that impacts the people who you are trying to get
to do the organizing work. If what they see is your media presence,
then that’s what they also want to have. It’s overwhelming to be a media
person in this country. To attend to the duties of being a media
person, the obligations that follow a media person, really means that
you can’t attend to the obligations of actually doing organizing work.
Once SNCC decided it needed a media person, it lost its organizing base.
It disintegrated and disappeared. You can’t do both.”
The mass mobilizations, such as the Women’s March, have little impact
unless they are part of a campaign centered around a specific goal. The
goal—in the case of SNCC, voter registration—becomes the organizing tool
for greater political consciousness and eventually a broader challenge
to established power. People need to be organized around issues they
care about, Moses said. They need to formulate their own strategy. If
strategy is dictated to them, then the movement will fail.
“People need to figure out for themselves what they want to do about a
problem,” Moses said. They need “agency.” They do not get agency, he
said, “by listening to somebody tell them things.”
“They can develop agency by going out and trying things,” he said. “It
works, or it doesn’t work. They come back. They think about it. They
reformulate it. Staff people are keeping track of what it is, who it is,
what they’re working on. They are documenting it. This is the
difference between a mobilizing effort, where you’re getting people to
turn out for an event, and trying to get people self-engaged and
thinking through a problem.”
“When you do civil disobedience, the question is not about the power
structure but the people you’re trying to reach,” he said. “How do they
view what you’re doing? Do you alienate them? It’s a balance between, in
some sense, leading and organizing. When you do your civil
disobedience, it may or may not help with expanding your organizing
base.”
Moses, who believes that only nonviolent resistance will be effective,
said the Vietnam anti-war movement hurt itself by not accepting, as the
civil rights movement did, prison and jail time as part of its
resistance. Many in the anti-war movement, he said, lacked the vital
capacity for self-sacrifice. This willingness to engage in
self-sacrifice, he said, is fundamental to success.
“The anti-war movement would have had a huge impact if it had been able
to agree that what we’re going to do is go to prison,” he said. “We are
going to pay a certain price. We’re going to earn our insurgency against
the foreign policy establishment of the country. We’re going to say no
and go to prison. That way, they could have emerged when the war was
over as the insurgents who had paid, in their own way, the price of the
war.”
Chris
Hedges, spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central
America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from
more than 50 countries and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor,
National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times,
for which he was a foreign correspondent for 15 years.