Shamindra Ferdinando
Member of House of Lords, Michael Naseby, has assured [us] that he will try very hard to convince the UK to make public the sections of the Colombo British High Commission dispatches censored by London, pertaining to the last phase of the Vanni offensive. Lord Naseby gave this assurance at the launch of his memoirs, ‘Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained’ at the BMICH on Tuesday (29).
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Tisaranee Gunasekara, in Sri Lanka Guardian, 1 April 2022, where the title reads “Sri Lanka: On Protests”
I don’t know who is organising the Sunday’s planned protest. For me, that mystery is a serious problem. This is not a Hollywood movie, a Lankan version of V for Vendetta.
On November 2019, 6.9million Lankans overestimated the intelligence, capacity and compassion of the Rajapaksa brothers. That mistaken assessment was the root cause of the tragedy we are living through today as individuals and as a nation. Should we now compound that error by fatally underestimating their will to power?
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| The aftermath of the protest against the Government yesterday in Colombo suburb |
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The initial launch of Paradise Lost. Paradise Regained by Lord Michael Naseby scheduled in Colombo in 2020 was scuttled by the covid pandemic …. so the launch was taken up recently in the House of Lords in London (alas, amidst severe political and economic turmoil in the island).
Left: Lord Michael Naseby (seated)
John Rajan Yorke leaning across table; Amal Abeyawardene (at right)
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Michael Patrick O’Leary …. The PADRAIG, in Ceylon Today, …. whose chosen title = “Putin’s Bloody Past” …. Part One”
From 2007 to 2013, Catherine Belton was the Moscow correspondent for the Financial Times. She currently works as an investigative correspondent for Reuters, based in London. In her book Putin’s People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Took On the West, she gives a good insight into the character of Putin as he rose to power.
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Sophie Roel in conversation with Razeen Sally on “The best books on Sri Lanka recommended by Razeen Sally”
Many visitors to Sri Lanka have been beguiled by its charms, from its hill towns to its beaches, its ancient temples to its friendly people. And yet, for a quarter of a century until 2009, it was torn apart by a brutal civil war. Here, Sri Lanka-born political economist Razeen Sally, author of Return to Sri Lanka: Travels in a Paradoxical Land, recommends the best books to get a better understanding of Sri Lanka and the complexities that make the country so fascinating to visit and read about.
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Ivan Timofeev of the Valdai Club, deploying this title “Russia now has just three options left on Ukraine” … with highlighting imposed by Thuppahi
With Washington rejecting many of Moscow’s security concerns, the prospect of escalation is rising. The US has handed Russia a written response to its proposed security guarantees. While Washington refuses to accept Moscow’s demands for a legally binding pledge that NATO will not expand further towards its borders, it has indicated it is ready to discuss certain issues, including arms control and strategic stability.
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n a recent post for the Daily Sceptic, Toby claims the received wisdom on the Ukraine crisis is basically right, noting that he’s “experienced the unusual sensation of feeling more in step with the mainstream media than I have with my sceptical friends”. While he makes some good points, I don’t think he really steelmans the sceptical position.
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Padraig Colman, … at https://pcolman.wordpress.com/2022/03/02/ukraine-part-one/
Apparently the invasion of Ukraine is a defensive measure. It beggars belief to even contemplate Ukraine as a genocidal terrorist state and Russia as a liberal human rights defender.
Little Victims
Many years ago, I set out to write a short poem about my father on the Normandy beaches on D-Day. It developed into a longer meditation on the malignant forces of ideologies and systems of terror that crush common people and sweep them away. The great tides of history, of isms and empires, buffet little people, maim them, kill them, uproot them and inflict damage that lasts for years or generations. I noted that all over the globe vicious wars, disintegrating nations and dying empires still today produce a flotsam of refugees. Great men discount little people. On the TV, I see ordinary Ukrainians in drab winter clothes calmly queuing at the supermarket. Most are masked against Covid but they wave at the camera. What are these people being punished for?
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Jane Russell, in an essay dedicated to Shirlene de Silva who introduced her to the Mandelstam’s writings …. an essay writen on 1 March 2022 with the title “Ukraine and its place in 20th century Russian literature: Osip and Nadezhda Mandelstam”
Osip Emilievich Mandelstam, the genius Russian-Jewish poet murdered by Stalin, met his Jewish wife, Nadezhda Yakovlevna, in a nightclub in Kyiv when both were in their twenties. It was 1919, the second year of the Soviet revolution, which was finally getting going after the 1st World War.
Osip Emilievich Mandelstam
Nadezhda Mandelstam
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Ross Douthat, in New York Times, 26 February 2022, with this title “Vladimir Putin’s Clash of CIvilizations”
When the United States, in its hour of hubris, went to war to remake the Middle East in 2003, Vladimir Putin was a critic of American ambition, a defender of international institutions and multilateralism and national sovereignty.
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thuppahi
