Michael Roberts
The Western media’s heavy focus yesterday and this week on the 9/11 attacks on USA, and especially the dramatic footage of the Twin Towers in New York burning and then collapsing has captured hearts and minds in the West. I was still teaching at Adelaide University then and working at my desk at home when I received a telephone call from one of the University’s media personel asking me to turn on my TV immediately.
I did so reluctantly but, of course, was transfixed by the unfolding media footage. …..suicide killers and suicide bombings were par for the course for any academic studying Sri Lankan political affairs. The Tamil Tiger attack on the Central Bank on 1996 may not have been as eye-catching that on the Twin Towers, but remains a good junior “cousin” …. ……….Ask Somachandra Skandakumar who was in the George Steuart Building opposite the Central Bank and faced the shocks and witnessed the carnage outside.
That was THEN in 2001. The 9/11 zealots, therefore became part of the worldwide forces that that fell squarely within my research interests. A far-reaching outcomeof ths pursuit occured within the portals of Adelaide University in Early December 2005 when I assembled a small coterie of scholars at Adelaide University in a Workshop over several sessions focused on “Sacrificial Devotion to Cause.”***
The concept of “sacrificial devotion“, I stress, does not embrace killing attacking enterprises only. The phenomenon of protest suicide carried out so dramatically by the Quaker Norman Morrision in front of the Pentagon in Washington on 2 November 1965, Thich Quang Duc’s self-immolation.in Saigon (10 June.1963) and Jan Palach’s censure of the Soviet invasiion of Czechoslavakia via self-immolation in Wenceslaus Square Prague on 19 January 196 are also acts of sacrificial devotion in this reasoning. It is reiterated here as a subject for debate: does such an omnibus concept aid our understandings of the world? ….. our researches within this our world?
https://en.wikipedia9.org/wiki/Thích_Quảng_Đức
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Palach
Norman Morrison’s Self-Immolation Protesting the Vietnam War Shocked America’s Conscience
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colombo_Central_Bank_bombing
http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/january/31/newsid_4083000/4083095.stm
https://military-history.fandom.com/wiki/Colombo_Central_Bank_bombing
99.9999% of “terror” attacks are state sponsored. The question often is which state!!