Dayan’s Smart Patriot: Will The Real Smart Patriot Please Stand Up?

By Romesh Hettiarachchi –February 23, 2015

Romesh Hettiarachchi

Preliminary Issues

Undoubtedly, the political worldviews of Dayan and I diverge in many respects. For one, Dayan’s expectation that interlocutors list their political views when critiquing political positions is hardly reasonable. While my criticisms of the Tamil Tigers and Tamil nationalism are public, such criticism need not be expressed every time I write. The logic of my writing ought to be determined on its own merits. Or in other words, idiots can be found all over the world, irrespective of geographical location.

That being said, Dayan is right in pointing out my limitations in a conversation about what it means to be Sri Lankan. I simply have lived outside the country for too long to discuss this matter with any degree of authority. Its for this reason, that unlike Dayan, I generally prefer to listen and read to the political opinions of others. In fact my views as a Sri Lankan living outside Sri Lanka may only matter to the extent that I and others are capable to leverage the collective strengths of our diasporan communities to service the needs and lives of all Sri Lankan citizenry.

However as a simple observer, most ordinary Sri Lankans aren’t preoccupied with categorizing their friends into patriots and traitors. Most Sri Lankans only resort to these tendencies when local intellectuals, media and the politicians give them reason to do so. Dayan’s Smart Patriot is simply one more attempt to give Sri Lankans such reasons. My response to Dayan’s conception of the Smart Patriot simply seeks to ensure this idea does not gain traction.

Dayan’s Nationalism: A Bourgeois Nationalism?

Dayan points to Liu Shaoqi’s description of the nationalist internationalist as described in “Internationalism and Nationalism” to assert that one can in fact be nationalist and internationalist at the same time. While curious to know whether Dayan sees himself as either a member of the bourgeoisie or the proletariat, Dayan’s assertion is slightly disingenuous. Shaoqi differentiated between genuine patriotism and bourgeois nationalism in the same way I described in the very next paragraphs of the same essay:Read More