By Thimibirivela Ranarala –

Hello Amnesia my old friend
What’s that you said again?
And what on earth is your name?

Tisaranee Gunasekera’s article (Politics in Make-Believe Realities), makes one truly wonder what reality such journalists inhabit.

Ms. G decries “total amnesia, forgetting everything one has said and done”, and then suggests that this ‘thug-life’ was invented by a single recent politico, Gotabaya Rajapaksa.

Perhaps such forgetful writers can explain their role during the beeshanaya of the 1980s, and that of these current purveyors of good governance? Perhaps there were very very ‘good’ reasons to justify the hacking, garrotting, stripping, impaling with barbed wire, beheading, burying alive and burning on imported tires that transpired in the tens of thousands?

Now some only seem to remember rich Colombo boys, like Lasantha or Wasim. Perhaps such mercantile accountants can only count up to 10, and thereby erase the at-least 60,000 country folk! 

Does Ms. G know history or is history, for her, what she remembers or chooses to remember? 

So let us ask again, who pulled those bones apart,

Was it a Bonaparte? And if we don’t want heroes or zeroes, 

Tell us how many white vans fit into those pajeros?

Ms. G seeks spiritual uplift by quoting, of all people, former US-President Obama, to tell us “humanity is at a crossroads”; that Trump signals the winds of authoritarianism. Really? Since when? Since Obama and Clinton murdered Colonel Gaddafi and returned Libya to a slave market? Since creating terrorist ‘rebels’ and turning Syria and Yemen into living hells? From Korea to the Congo, from Vietnam to Iraq, to Afghanistan, from Palestine to Yemen, what winds have too long blown over us?

And what white cynicism allowed a war criminal like Obama to even enter South African airspace, let alone deliver a lecture about Mandela! Had they even seen or read how Mandela celebrated Gaddafi, as a leader who stood by the African struggle, while Obama’s US and its poodle England were nuclear-arming apartheid? Mandela’s grave could now be renamed Robben Kanatte, for caged he is again!

Meanwhile Sri Lanka has been run over over and over again at “the crossroads of history”, at least since Lourenco D’Almeida blew in and introduced Iberian mass murder to our shores.

Then she insists that most monks do not know world history! Where does most of any profession know ‘world’ history?” History has lasted a long time as will the future, and covers the entire cosmos. Besides, there are sparkling examples of monks knowing more about our world and history than English journalists. It is said that Bhikkus scared the gay English governor Frederick North by telling him that the mountainous redoubts of Sinhale knew England was at war with France, the Dutch and the Marathas, and were eagerly awaiting the arrival of a Jacobin French fleet in eastern waters!

Gunasekera also attacks railways workers for going on strike. Yet the yahapalanists she adores had reneged on open promises to those rail workers, and now calls them ‘terrorists’? Her selective attacks will enable these ‘good governors’ to privatize the railroads, another public asset.

Does she forget that her father Sena Gunasekera, along with Jeanne Moonesinghe, were sacked because of their trade union membership in the Ceylon Mercantile Union, by the private owners of the Lake House, the relatives of these good governors so currently adored?

And speaking of journalists, since she loves Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary so much: Bierce also said, journalists have “established ink baths which some persons pay money to get into, others to get out of. Not infrequently it occurs that a person who has paid to get in pays twice as much to get out.”

So can anyone tell us how much these good governors have paid to get out of such malodorous ink baths as this?

The article also adds Jack the Ripper to Hitler and Caligula and other epithets reserved exclusively for a certain family but not for the ‘uncles and nephews’. These scribes have clearly been reduced to Tourette’s syndrome, a neurological disorder characterized by the compulsive utterance of obscenities. Indeed, Jack the Ripper was perhaps England’s almost-King Prince Albert – once a welcome guest in Ceylon, who added to English mass murder here, of not just people but of elephants too.

Ms. G then expresses horror over the GMOA recording who their friends and enemies are? Really? Does not every good editor have a list, provided by their owners, of who their organ will publish, omit, praise and vilify? Don’t the pharmaceutical companies have lists of the doctors they bribe to prescribe? Didn’t that ruling dispensation she served in the 1980s have lists to hand over to death squads? Did not the US embassy provide a lists of their local enemies to be killed in the 1980s?

Playing the populist card, the article hits out at the corruption of politicians. Are they the only corrupt? What of journalists, and other professions? And who corrupts them? Why not give us a list of the top corporations that pay bribes in this country? How does Unilever and Standard Chartered Bank and Caltex retain its power? Is it just soap and superstars? Petrol and rugger balls and literary awards?

Remember 1978, when 400 thugs of the ruling party union, which soon became the largest union in the country, threatened and drove section heads off the premises of the Thulhiriya Textile Mills. And therein lies the tale of how the Left really left us? And guess who owns Thulhiriya now? Apparently vegetarians who abhor their mini-mas!

A famous politician when asked how much, once declared, “You know the rates!” So what are the rates? Why won’t our hallowed journalists let us know?

The article claims doctors are denying service to the suffering and dying. But the people are dying for information that the media constantly deny us, to let us make rational decisions.

We are dying for the power to transform this colony into a modern society too. 

How ironic then that those involved in such imbroglios became leading spokespeople for human rights and good governance. Perhaps like in mafia funerals, where assassins are the first to wail and offer condolences…