The Land Of The Cowards And The Home Of The Opportunists

By Tisaranee Gunasekara -July 28, 2013 

“….for what may seem

Terrible or bizarre, when once our eyes

Have had time to acclimatise,

Becomes quite commonplace.” -La Fontaine (Selected Fables)

For 12 years the semiotics of Nazi Germany shaped Victor Klemperer’s existence. As a German Jew, he witnessed how the Nazis turned the language of Goethe, Schiller and Heine into a tool; and experienced, at first hand, the diabolical results of the consequent transformation of German society and the German mind.

The Nazis would take a familiar word, give it a new meaning by implication, and use it intensely and extensively until it sank deep into the public mind and caused noxious changes in the public consciousness: “If someone replaces the words ‘heroic’ and ‘virtuous’ with ‘fanatical’ for long enough, he will come to believe that a fanatic really is a virtuous hero, and that no one can be a hero without fanaticism. The Third Reich did not invent the words ‘fanatic’ and ‘fanaticism’; it just changed their value….[i]”

An analogous process is at work in Rajapaksa Sri Lanka. It was evident in renaming the Fourth Eelam War a ‘Humanitarian Operation (with Zero Civilian Casualties), the giant internment camps ‘WelfareVillages’ and the Witch Trial of Chief Justice Shirani Bandaranayake an impeachment. It is evident in the deliberate fanning of the flames of ethno-religious racism, in the whipping up of ant-devolution hysteria, in the transformation of Gen. Fonseka from Patriotic Hero to Arch Traitor.

The latest manifestation of this toxic process of psychological and moral transformation is the case of Dayasiri Jayasekara.

The defection of Dayasiri Jayasekara was an act of pure unadulterated opportunism. In making his jump, Mr. Jayasekara, until very recently a voluble critic of Rajapaksa Rule, was motivated by nothing more than naked self-interest. Like those other UNPers who took the same path, he did what he did because he wanted to be more than a leader in the opposition, because he wanted the illusion and the trappings of power

Opportunism is common to all politics. The problem is when it is transformed from a negative to a positive value, and depicted as an honourable act.                   July 28, 2013