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, April 29, 2016
From Inclusive Left To Excluding Right

By Charles Ponnuthurai Sarvan –April 28, 2016
Lilies, if they fester, smell far worse than weeds ~ (From Shakespeare’s sonnet, No. 94)
The caption above is derived from, and relates to, a book by Daniel Oppenheimer titled Exit Right: the People Who Left the Left and Reshaped the American Century.
Oppenheimer studies the character and career of six apostates,
individuals who left the visionary politics of the Left and moved to the
extreme right. Where did they start off from, and where did they end?
Why did they change belief, values and commitment? What were the
consequences? To cite one case, David Horowitz, once in the New Left
movement, son of members of the Communist Party, came to recognise and
champion his Jewish identity. He’s now, among other things, director of a
website that tracks individuals and organisations on the political
left; opposes ‘political correctness’ and left-orientation in academia;
is unsympathetic to the suffering of Africans under the slave trade,
claiming that Africans and Arabs are as much complicit, and is fiercely
anti-Islam. “There’s no zealot like a convert” applies as much in
politics and public life as it does in religion.
Very often, discussion is at cross-purposes because crucial terms are
not defined. Working towards a clarification of ‘socialism’, I suggest
that though the concept has political and social implications, its
foundation is a certain approach to economic organisation and control.
The emphasis being on economic structure, socialists see society along
the horizontal lines of class. While Moslems, Sinhalese and Tamils
(alphabetical order) or Buddhists, Christians, Hindus and Moslems can,
and do, belong to the upper, middle and working classes, a vertical
division would categorise individuals according to ‘race’, religion or
skin-colour – irrespective of individual income – and place them in
different, mutually-excluding, categories. (Caste can be said to have
both the horizontal and vertical axes but is not relevant to the present
exploration.) Thus, racism and socialism cannot co-exist; a ‘racist’
cannot be a socialist, though some fondly and determinedly make that
claim: it’s remarkable how we human beings easily accommodate, and
comfortably live with, contradiction. The Nazis labelled themselves
National Socialists but had nothing to do with socialism. On the
contrary, they exterminated the socialists they could get their hands
on.