Category Archives: disparagement

Guta Goldstein’s Holocaust Songs: A Spirit Undying

Jane Albert, in The Australian, 8 November 2024 …. where the title runs thus: “The Song that kept Guta alive during the Holocaust ….,”

It is often said that music has the power to heal and nourish, but for Guta Goldstein there were times in her childhood when music and singing were her only nourishment.

Guta Goldstein with her longtime friend and music scholar of the Holocaust, Joseph Toltz. Aaron Francis / The Australian

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British Colonial Socio-Political Distinctions via Stace’s Revelation of Life in Galle, 1910 et seq

Michael Roberts

Walter Terence STACE was a British man born in Ireland in 1886 who entered the British colonial service after a university education and was assigned to Sri Lanka in 1910. He married a Burgher lady, MM Beven in 1928 – is second marriage this – and then resigned in 1932 and moved on to USA where he pursued a successful university teaching career in Philosophy. Following his retirement, he composed an autobiography in 1964 with the intriguing title FOOTPRINTS ON WATER.   

This work has been edited by Bernd Pflug with an excellent and readable “Critique” at the end of the autobiography and presented in Sri Lanka in a slim volume of 218 pages by the Perera Hussein Publishing House.

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Ranil’s Hand in the Batalanda Killings?

VISIT this item sent to me by a Richmondite Medic residing in Britain with this note: 

 I recently heard Ranil W’s name linked to Batalanda but did not know what it was about.  This blog reveals all, what a murderer R is,as well as what crimes most of the political leaders before him also did. Watch and make your mind up.   Author Nandana [Weerarathne] is an investigative journalist  who had self-exiled himself until  the fall of  RW from power.…………….. Shocking!

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Race Relations in Britain Today: Readings via Responses to Audrey Maxwell’s 1998 Study

Michael Roberts 

After I presented my late departed sister Audrey Maxwell’s study, one presented in a book oAudrey Mugn Cross-Cultural Marriage edited by Rosemary Breger & Rosanna Hill [1998, Oxford, Berg] in TPS, I moved on to ……..

Audrey Mug  A ]  https://thuppahis.com/2024/10/31/addressing-audrey-maxwells-research-on-cross-cultural-marriages-in-englan/

AUDREY Mug shots B] and circulated an invitation to scholars and friends in Britain seeking critical thoughts on her study and/or reflections on relations between coloured immigants people and dinky-die BriA tons today; see ………………………………. https://thuppahis.com/2024/10/31/ag-audrey-maxwells-research-on-cross-cultural-marriages-in-englan/

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Not all Issues are Black or White: Some Voices from the Offspring of Cross-Cultural Marriages

Audrey Maxwell [nee Roberts] …  a chapter in Rosemary Breger and Rosana Hill (eds). Cross-Cultural Marriage. Identity and Choice, Oxford, Berg, 1998, …. ISBN 1 85973 968 7 paper … with this reproduction being rendered possible by our nephew-in-law Tissa Abeywardena

Although this volume focuses on intermarriage, it seems appropriate to include some voices of children of such marriages – which are becoming more numerous because of the expansion of worldwide contacts within the ‘global village’. This chapter is not an in-depth study of a representative sample, but rather intends to recognize that cross-cultural marriages produce consequences for their progeny. Such children face ambiguous loyalties and difficult choices in their life encounters. Nevertheless, though media coverage tends to highlight their problems rather than their advantages, the offspring who spoke to me indicated clearly that they felt there are many rewarding features deriving from their cultural inheritances. It is encouraging that, though having no claim to representativeness, these accounts at least all end on a positive note.

In 1995 I interviewed eight such ‘children’ (aged between eighteen and thirty­ four), reached through networking among people connected, in one way or another, with the University of Oxford. The respondents are middle class, well educated and articulate. I encouraged them to talk of their life histories using open-ended, unstructured, tape-recorded interviews. The accent was on their own thoughts and how they see their world.

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British Satire at its Most Fertile Ferment

Edward Tew, in The Sunday Times, 7 July 2024,where the title runs this: Farewell to the Tory clown show, a true satirist’s dream”

For the last six years I’ve been engaged in a secret love affair with Jacob Rees-Mogg. This may be news to him, considering we’ve never met, but I’ve fantasised about him being given a sponge bath by his nanny, pushing women and children off the Titanic on his way to a lifeboat, as an object on Antiques Roadshow and even poking his “plonker” through a suet pudding for his premium OnlyFans customers. I’m not a pervert, I’m a satirist.

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Myths About the Indian Middle Class Today

Bastian Steuwer in FRONTLINE, 14 August 2024 where the title reads ”Two myths about the Indian middle class” .… segment of article here because the buggers in FRONTLINE want a subscription …. My response here is a form of THUPPAHI protest 

They [i. e. the middle class] sustain a politics which does not disturb the position of the privileged few and deflects the focus from larger issues of economic justice.

 

 The first myth is in invoking the “middle class” as synonymous with income taxpayers, investment gains, and so on. Promoting policies for the middle class, the ordinary Indian, or the common man naturally enjoy broad support….. Photo Credit: Rajanish Kakade

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Nationalist Studies and the Ceylon Studies Seminar at Peradeniya, 1968-1970s

Michael Roberts …. repeating an old TPS item [with highlighting added] because of the implications of the recent TPS item  by Bedgar Perera re Prof Rex Clements.

The years 1966 to 1975 were heady days in Ceylon. Especially so for some of us in Peradeniya Univeristy where the CEYLON STUDIES SEMINAR was launched in November 1968 by a few members of the Arts Faculty assisted by the facilities provided by Professor Gananath Obeyesekera at the Sociology Departmentlocated then on Lower Hantane Road away from the centre of teaching. Not least among these facilities was the service provided by the Sociology Department peon Sathiah[1] who cyclostyled the written seminar papers beforehand for circulation so that those who were keen could read any presentation beforehand if they so wished – a procedure that also maximized discussion time. This background service was seconded by the typing services of Mrs Hettiarachchi in the History Department and Mr Kumaraswamy in the Sociology Department.

   Sathiah — an essential servicing hand …

  & Bishop Lakshman Wickremasinghe, who perceived the depth of the festering ethnic split early on

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Toffsy Turvy in the UK: A Labour Party Government?

Edward Upali in Canada

After 14 years of chaotic rule, the governing Conservative Party of the UK, lost the General Election to the Labour Party on July 4, this year.  However the Labour Party, battered by successive election losses and the threat of losing ground to the Liberal Democrats, had transformed itself to be almost an image of the Conservative party, never mind their working class supporters. Since the July 4, election, Labour were out to reassure the British voting public that they have nothing to fear from a Labour take over, and that life would go on as usual, except for the old age pensioners.

 

 

 

 

The Labour Party was led by Sir Keith Stramer LLB, KCB, KC. the leader of the Opposition since 2020, became the Prime Minister of the UK on July 4.  Rishi Sunak, B.A. M.B.A , the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Conservatives became the leader of the Opposition.

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The Branding of Islamic Migrants to Ceylon Over the Centuries

WHEN Shamara Wettimuny’s article  in the History Workshop Journal entitled The Colonial History of Islamophobic Slurs in Sri Lanka”  …. was placed in FACEBOOK it received the following set of comments: some prejudiced against and some in favour. The ethnic difference in the authors is quite marked and thereby marks the depth of ethnicity in the island context …. TODAY.  

Moving at a tangent, I stress that the research work that generated the book by Roberts, Colin-Thome & Raheem which is entitled People Inbtween (1989 Sarvodaya) becomes profoundly relevant to this set of engagements. Note that my deployment of the THUPPAHI concept for my web-site’s brand name emerged from this body of research. So, do visit this entry as well: https://thuppahis.com/why-thuppahi/

The original article can be access in THUPPAHI at ………………… https://thuppahis.com/2020/09/07/experiencing-denigration-in-sri-lanka-the-muslims-yesterday-and-today/

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