Cult-watching – now that smacks of “Train-spotting” and could very well become a cult occupation of our time. Viva la cults! And the Cult Coutre.

I would actually be interested in reading a piece on the ‘Cult of Stalin’….’Cult of Mao Tse-tung’…’Cult of Mahinda Rajapaksa’! It would, in fact make either a fascinating thriller type best seller, or a widely read academic piece of writing that acquires intellectual fame. After all it has a kind of international appeal!

Surely bottle, there must be someone out there who will not “greet our query with a stony silence.”. (Actually coming to think of it, any such enterprise, published and unfortunately famous, might generate a response that reduces the author to a stony cold eternal silence)

That “fine and hugely intellectual incumbent administration”…

Pol Pot’s ardent beliefs led to a complete imitation of Stalin and the result was one of the greatest catastrophes in human history. I have lived in Cambodia for three years at the time when Cambodia was trying to recover from that catastrophe. However, that process of recovery, if it is to succeed at all, will take fifty years or more, even to come back to the level of development Cambodia had achieved prior to Pol Pot’s regime. All the basic infrastructure of public institutions have been destroyed. There is no idea of administration of justice in Cambodia. The police have become completely subordinated to the ruling party. There were no people qualified to the judges and the so-called judiciary was purely a rubber stamping agency for the executive. People who had grievances, in fact almost everybody had grievances, had no place to make their complaints. Even now citizens are being reduced to the status of a zero.

The other consequences are as drastic on economy, politics, society and culture. However, this is not the place to talk about that for lack of space.

Ne Win was only a pseudo-admirer of Stalin. He also introduced a complete state of repression into this country, justifying it National Socialism, while in fact he was in fact amassing wealth and power for himself. Today, Burma has been reduced to a primitive place and achieving any kind of order or development in that country is next to impossible. There, too, the administration of justice does not exist even as a concept. There are doctoral studies being conducted on the manner in which Cambodian police, prosecution and judiciary were completely transformed to serve the interest of the few in power. Here, too, the citizens are reduced to zero.

Those who admire Stalin have already led this country in the same path. But there’s a difference now. They pretend that there is no such repression in Sri Lanka. To defend such repression during the time of President Premadasa and to deny now, during the time of President Rajapaksha is to say that the rule of law and democracy has improved from the time of President Premadasa. Whether from the point of view of law, meaning absence of law, and destruction of institutions, things have degenerated further. From the point of view of arbitrariness into criminal investigations, into violations of human rights, things at an all-time worst now.

Anyway, if someone defends these things openly, that’s a more honest approach than to state that no such repression exists now.

Sri-Lanka might have become a gulag island if the terrorists had their way. Whew! Thank God that never happend!