The Suffocating Grasp Of An Emergent Dictatorship: FUTA And The Survival Of Democratic Dissent

By Kumar David -

Prof. Kumar David

“Where they burn books, they will afterwards burn people” - Heinrich Heine (German Poet 1821)

The madness fanned by Gobles and fired by Nazi student organisations, reached a frenzied climax on the night of 10 May 1933 when the nation’s great libraries were stripped of radical, socialist, pacifist, culturally alien and Jewish books, and piled on bonfires, lit as Germany careened to censorship, culture control and eventually the most naked of all Twentieth Century dictatorships. No nation that permits the state to crush its knowledge workers can long survive. The FUTA strike is no longer about academic salaries, long ago it morphed beyond that, it is no longer about securing a fair deal in education for the nation’s children, that Rubicon has also been crossed. What are at issue in Sri Lanka are the last two surviving outposts of democracy. Can the independence of the judiciary and the academic right to dissent survive, or will they perish. It’s no longer about whether you agree with the 6% or not, it’s about shackles of a more menacing nature. Dear god, not even Hitler made Martin Borman, leader of the brown-shirted fascist SA street thugs, the minister of higher education!

If the FUTA strike is crushed it will resemble the crushing blow that JR inflicted on the working class and independent political activity in July 1980. I do not want to over dramatise, it is only in retrospect that we can make secure historical judgements, but it is possible that this is one of the final chances the nation will get to throw back the executive power of an authoritarian menace. The state is primed for the offensive, but public opinion, the working class and trade unions, and the educated classes and left opinion are half asleep, but fortunately, also half awake.

The FUTA strike is no longer about FUTA, it’s about you and I and what we do to bring to a halt the caravan of state as it rumbles on to total control of public life. Total is totalitarian; totalitarianism is the natural culmination of the authoritarian state. Just as nature abhors a vacuum, so authoritarianism abhors all things it cannot subdue. It moved heaven and earth, and cash and threats, to abort a Muslim-Tamil power centre rising outside and beyond its control in the Eastern Province– and Muslim leaders, as habituated for decades, betrayed their community for the umpteenth time. It will not permit an elected provincial council in the North unless international pressure compels it to; it will muzzle the judiciary and harness the police.                                         Read More