Michael Roberts
Early in the month of February 2023, I was invited by a young friend, Dr Geethika Dharmasinghe, to deliver a Zoom Video Lecture to a small class of her students at Colgate University in New York. These students were following her course on “Religion and Violence in Asia.”
Gandhi speaking and Zahran Hashim in pact with fellow Lankan jihadists 
…. Zahran was one of the two suicide bombers at the Shangri La Hotel in Colombo on Easter Sunday 2019 where where 36 people died
Filed under accountability, Al Qaeda, atrocities, cultural transmission, ethnicity, heritage, historical interpretation, Islamic fundamentalism, jihad, jihadists, landscape wondrous, life stories, LTTE, meditations, Muslims in Lanka, nationalism, politIcal discourse, racism, religiosity, self-reflexivity, sri lankan society, suicide bombing, terrorism, the imaginary and the real, trauma, unusual people, vengeance, world events & processes
A Short Essay in the Library of Social Science, presented at ………………………………………………. https://www.libraryofsocialscience.com/newsletter/posts/2015/2015-04-03-Roberts-2.html with this NOTE “Part II of Michael Roberts’ Review Essay of Nations Have the Right to Kill”
To read the entire essay on our website, click here.
Michael Roberts
The LTTE emerged as an underground militant organization in May 1976. Though sustaining strong informal links with the Tamil United Liberation Front, the parliamentary party committed to independence, the youth who led the LTTE believed that a revolutionary path was the only route available to their peoples.
The pogrom directed against Tamil people living in the south central parts of Sri Lanka in July 1983 resulted in a huge expansion of its personnel. It was around this stage that Pirapāharan decreed that all fighters should carry a cyanide capsule—a kuppi as they call it in Tamil—so that they could “bite it” when imminent danger of capture was looming.
LTTE soldiers in camp seen with the kuppi round their necks (photo by Shyam Tekwani)
Female recruits receive the kuppi at a passing out ceremony
Filed under accountability, art & allure bewitching, authoritarian regimes, cultural transmission, education, Eelam, ethnicity, heritage, historical interpretation, Hitler, jihad, landscape wondrous, life stories, LTTE, martyrdom, military strategy, patriotism, performance, politIcal discourse, power politics, prabhakaran, self-reflexivity, Sinhala-Tamil Relations, sri lankan society, Tamil Tiger fighters, unusual people, world events & processes
Michael Roberts
Thilan Samaraweera may not have possessed the natural talents of an Aravinda, Kumar or Mahela, but he was (and is) an intelligent and industrious man who worked at his trade. He also faced that traumatic episode when the Sri Lankan coach was attacked by Pakistani jihadists as they headed for the Gaddafi stadium in Lahore on the 3rd March 2009. He was one of those injured by shrapnel (like Tharanga Paranavithana) and despatched to hospital.
Sri Lankan player Thilan Samaraweera is taken aboard an ambulance on March 4, 2009 shortly after flying home from Pakistan where the Sri Lankan team was ambushed by gunmen just before entering a cricket stadium in Lahore. Seven players were wounded in the attack that also killed eight Pakistani nationals and drew wide spread international condemnation. AFP PHOTO/ISHARA S. KODIKARA
03 Mar 2009, LAHORE, Pakistan — epa01653561 Sri Lankan cricketers board a Pakistani Air Force helicopter, as they are air lifted from Gadaffic cricket stadium, after unknown gunmen attacked Sri Lankan cricket team, in Lahore Pakistan on 03 March 2009. Unidentified gunmen attacked Sri Lanka’s cricket team when it was being escorted to a local stadium in Pakistan’s eastern city of Lahore, leaving six policemen and two civilians dead and four Sri Lankan players injured, media reports and officials said. EPA/RAHAT DAR — Image by © RAHAT DAR/epa/Corbis
Michael Roberts
On the 25th of April, ANZAC DAY, Australia honoured its war dead in ceremonies large and small throughout the country. This moment has been marked every year –beginning with a ceremony in London in 1916 which recognised the deadly toll and the bravery shown on the Gallipoli Peninsula in Turkey where so many colonial Aussies fought … and died … on behalf of the British state (their “mother-country” to many Aussies then).
Filed under accountability, Australian culture, australian media, centre-periphery relations, cultural transmission, Eelam, ethnicity, governance, heritage, historical interpretation, jihad, landscape wondrous, law of armed conflict, life stories, LTTE, martyrdom, military strategy, modernity & modernization, nationalism, patriotism, politIcal discourse, power politics, prabhakaran, religiosity, self-reflexivity, Sinhala-Tamil Relations, sri lankan society, Tamil Tiger fighters, the imaginary and the real, unusual people, vengeance, war reportage, world events & processes
B = The Lahore Assault on the Cricket Entourage in March 2009 …………………… https://thuppahis.com › 2019/10/02 › bewildering-facts… 2 Oct 2019 — Roberts, Michael 2009a “The Lahore atrocity: our cricketing ambassadors,” Island, 14 March 2009. Roberts, Michael 2009b “Cricket and Lahore: This Item appeared in Dilshy Banu’s Facebook post and I have borrowed it and its photographs for circulation via Thuppahi – in part because it marks a little “outpost activity” in the course of the war and largely because I have met Dilshy and respect her courageous career choices and her lines of philanthropic endeavour….. Michael Roberts, 18 November 2021
Dilshy Banu: “Kokkadicholai in Batticaloa: Traversing Tension during Eelam War IV”
Filed under accountability, authoritarian regimes, centre-periphery relations, charitable outreach, communal relations, cultural transmission, economic processes, ethnicity, female empowerment, heritage, historical interpretation, IDP camps, insurrections, jihad, landscape wondrous, life stories, NGOs, patriotism, politIcal discourse, reconciliation, rehabilitation, religiosity, self-reflexivity, sri lankan society, transport and communications, travelogue, unusual people, war reportage, welfare & philanthophy, women in ethnic conflcits
Michael Roberts, reproducing here an expanded version of article printed in Lanka Monthly Digest, September 1999, Vol 6:2, pp. 56-57…. with citations added.
A Kurd in Germany immolates self in protest vs Ocalan’s fate
ONE : In February 1999 a Kurdish nationalist leader, Ocalan, was caught by the Turkish authorities. Kurdish refugees in the Western world erupted in protest. In London a young girl Neila Kanteper set herself alight. In Sydney a young lad was caught on camera with petrol can and cigarette lighter as he threatened similar action. As I walked into the local news-agency in Adelaide that week the proprietor[1] waved the picture of Kanteper in flames in front of me and in considerable alarm inquired how anyone could take such an extreme measure. He could not ever take such a step, he said. His remarks gain in significance from the fact that they were unsolicited and had not been preceded by prior conversation. I was in a hurry and did not explore matters further, but I conjecture that his bewilderment stemmed not only from the method of death by fire, but also from such terminal commitment to a collective cause. The question, therefore, is whether in similar circumstances an act of martyrdom involving death by hand-gun would produce the same level of astonishment. Relatively speaking, death by gun seems to be so much more acceptable to the Western world than death by flame.
Filed under accountability, atrocities, authoritarian regimes, Buddhism, centre-periphery relations, cultural transmission, ethnicity, fundamentalism, heritage, historical interpretation, Indian religions, jihad, landscape wondrous, life stories, patriotism, performance, photography, religiosity, religious nationalism, self-reflexivity, the imaginary and the real, trauma, truth as casualty of war, Uncategorized, unusual people, world events & processes, zealotry
Jolly Somasundaram
“Truth is like the Sun, one can shut it off for sometime, but it will not go away.” …. Elvis Presley
Afghanistan has done it again! A country, where her geography was her destiny, made her push towards repeated trysts with history- Alexander’s Greeks, Mongols, Mughals, the Brits, Russians, Americans. She, redoubtable to foreign invaders, specialised in making her country, micro- Kanattestans for these invading hordes. These done-in foreign forces now out-done, were not small fry but superpowers.
Troops from Britain- the Rotweiller in her time slot of Empire building- were decimated three times, bleaching this arid landscape. Undaunted, Sysyphean Britain ventured on the fourth, though now a metamorphosed American poodle: same wipe-out. Russia, in her own time slot of imperial hope, was similarly sent scurrying home. Smaller European countries- Australia, Germany, France Italy, Canada, wishing to taste Petite Gloire but lacking oomph, hitch hiked on the NATO bandwagon: the same degrading exit.
Filed under accountability, Afghanistan, Al Qaeda, american imperialism, authoritarian regimes, British imperialism, conspiracies, fundamentalism, historical interpretation, Islamic fundamentalism, jihad, landscape wondrous, life stories, Middle Eastern Politics, military strategy, power politics, religious nationalism, security, self-reflexivity, the imaginary and the real, trauma, truth as casualty of war, unusual people, vengeance, world events & processes, zealotry
David Kilcullen, in The Australian, 31 July 2021,. [and The Inquirer, 31 July ]where the title reads “Making sense of the Afghan fiasco, and how to fix it” … 2021 and with this byline : “there are four moves that could stabilise the situation long enough to get talks back on track.”
If a gaffe is when a politician accidentally tells the truth, US President Joe Biden committed one a few weeks ago, answering a question about Afghanistan, when he said “the mission hasn’t failed, yet”. That “yet” contains multitudes: a tangle of military and humanitarian factors refracted through political spin and a hyper-partisan US media.
Afghan militia gather with their weapons to support Afghanistan security forces against the Taliban, in Afghan warlord and former Mujahideen Ismail Khan’s house in Herat on July 9. Picture: AFP
Filed under american imperialism, australian media, authoritarian regimes, centre-periphery relations, disparagement, ethnicity, governance, historical interpretation, human rights, Indian Ocean politics, insurrections, Islamic fundamentalism, jihad, landscape wondrous, law of armed conflict, life stories, military strategy, nationalism, politIcal discourse, power politics, refugees, security, self-reflexivity, trauma, unusual people, war reportage, world events & processes, zealotry
ONE: Scott Atran: “The Devoted Actor Unconditional Commitment and Intractable Conflict across Cultures,” ... as introduced to Thuppahi by The Library of Social Science,in New York, … with this abstract at journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdf/10.1086/685495
Uncompromising wars, revolution, rights movements, and today’s global terrorism are in part driven by “devoted actors” who adhere to sacred, transcendent values that generate actions dissociated from rationally expected risks and rewards. Studies in real-world conflicts show ways that devoted actors, who are unconditionally committed to sacred causes and whose personal identities are fused within a unique collective identity, willingly make costly sacrifices. This enables low-power groups to endure and often prevail against materially stronger foes. Explaining how devoted actors come to sacrifice for cause and comrades not only is a scientific goal but a practical imperative to address intergroup disputes that can spiral out of control in a rapidly interconnecting world of collapsing and conflicting cultural traditions. From the recent massive media-driven global political awakening, horizontal peer-to-peer transcultural niches, geographically disconnected, are emerging to replace vertical generation-to-generation territorial traditions. Devoted actors of the global jihadi archipelago militate within such a novel transcultural niche, which is socially tight, ideationally narrow, and globe spanning. Nevertheless, its evolutionary maintenance depends on costly commitments to transcendental values, rituals and sacrifices, and parochial altruism, which may have deep roots even in the earliest and most traditional human societies. Fieldwork results from the Kurdish battlefront with the Islamic State are highlighted.
Filed under accountability, art & allure bewitching, atrocities, authoritarian regimes, chauvinism, communal relations, Eelam, ethnicity, Fascism, heritage, historical interpretation, Indian religions, Islamic fundamentalism, jihad, landscape wondrous, life stories, LTTE, military strategy, performance, photography, politIcal discourse, religiosity, self-reflexivity, suicide bombing, Tamil Tiger fighters, terrorism, the imaginary and the real, trauma, unusual people, vengeance, war reportage, world events & processes
thuppahi
