Category Archives: military expenditure

September 20, 2023 · 1:03 am

Wickremasinghe Rejects AUKUS Pact

An Item in rtcom.news, 19 September 2023, with the hëadline  “South Asian leader slams AUKUS pact” …..

The US-led initiative was created to antagonize Beijing, Sri Lanka’s president has said.

Sri Lankan President Ranil Wickremesinghe has condemned the AUKUS pact as an alliance designed to target China, calling it a “strategic misstep,” and insisting it will only divide Asia into rival camps and destabilize the region. Speaking on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly on Monday, Wickremesinghe took aim at AUKUS, which was formed by the US, UK, and Australia in 2021. “I don’t think it was needed,” he said. “I think it’s a strategic misstep. I think they made a mistake,” the president stated. “It is a military alliance moved against one country – China.”

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August 27, 2023 · 11:29 pm

François Valentijn’s Description of Ceylon

Thiru Arumugam in The Ceylankan Vol 26/3, August 2023, where  the title reads “François Valentijn wrote a 462 page ‘Description of Ceylon’ 300 years ago … Part 2” ……… Part 1 having appeared in The Ceylankan J 102 Vol 26(2) May 2023, pp 24-25. …..  also by Thiru Arumugam

First and Second Chapters [Geography] For his sources of information about the geography and history of Ceylon up to the Portugueseperiod, Valentijn relies on the Portuguese writer Diogo do Couto’s Ceylon section of his books Decadas da Asia (Decades of Asia)5. Couto was Chief Keeper of the Records in Goa from 1595 to 1616. Goa was the Asian headquarters of the Portuguese. Valentijn also took information from the Dutch writer Father Philippus Baldeus6, who lived in Jaffna from about 1656 to 1665. For the description of the interior of Ceylon he relies on Robert Knox7, as the Portuguese and Dutch had limited access to these areas. There was a pirated Dutch translation of Knox’s book by S de Vries published in Utrecht in 1692 and Valentijn would have used this translation. Valentijn plagiarised freely, sometimes copying entire sections from these books. In those halcyon pre-copyright days, the printed word was considered public property!

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July 13, 2023 · 12:18 am

Leading Aussie Newspaper’s Gross Misreading of Ukraine’s War Situation

An Observer at A Black Sea Town … with highlighting imposed by The Editor, Thuppahi

I thought Ukraine was doing well – so says Peter Jennings writing in The Australian yesterday.  Jennings claimed Putin was “fighting for his survival” and talked about Zelensky’s “astonishing fighting spirit”; that Putin has been defeated in every war aim; that Ukraine will never come under Russian control; and that Putin’s “strategic leadership has been stunningly incompetent”. Yes, Ukraine has held up well.

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June 12, 2023 · 12:19 pm

Nuclear Disarmament! Farcical Face at G7 Summit

 Kanwal Singh, in RT News, 6 June 2023, where the title runs: “The G7’s nuсlear-weapon-free world ‘vision’ is a farce” …. with the highlights in black being those within the digital version

The choice of Hiroshima as the venue of May’s G7 meeting implied that the issue of nuclear disarmament would be highlighted in the summit documents. Not surprisingly, the G7 leaders issued the “Hiroshima Vision on Nuclear Disarmament” to mark the occasion.

 

 

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April 2, 2023 · 5:35 pm

AUKUS becomes QuadAukus … and alarms “Raucous-Aucous”

NOTES from “Raucous-Aucous”

ONE: Aukus wins the Marx/Goebbels  Award for propaganda campaign of 2023…………..

Note.  A recent news item in The Australian revealed that plans are being made with Japan, India, UK, US and Australia to combine Quad and Aukus into one alliance – probably to be called QuadAukus.
There is also talk of NZ and the Philippines joining, or at least considering joining.

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March 23, 2023 · 12:14 am

Incarceration Camps in the Pacific Theatre of World War II Deciphered

Anoma Pieris presents her work on “Pacific War Incarceration Camps” …. to the world 

While there have been many excellent studies on colonial penal environments in the Asia Pacific region, mainly prisons, very few scholars have approached the wartime internment and prisoner of war camps associated with the Pacific War as comparable carceral spaces that might offer deeper insights into imperial and national forms of political sovereignty and border conflict. There are few comparative studies across geographical areas or imperial regimes. Sarah Kovner’s book Prisoners of Empire: Inside Japanese POW Camps (Harvard University Press 2020), though focused on Japanese military imperialism, is important for that focus, and increasingly, several anthologies have offered us a similar analytical breadth by juxtaposing numerous national perspectives. The Architecture of Confinement: Incarceration Camps of the Pacific War (Cambridge University Press, 2022) is similarly ambitious in its scope. It uses the arc of the Pacific Basin to frame a comparative study including Australia, Singapore, North America and Japan as important nodal points in the wartime incarceration camp geography. Its aim is to investigate the impact of the war on settler societies, more so than on the imperial contestants dominating both theatres of World War II.

Anoma Pieris and Lynne Horiuchi at former Cowra POW Camp site in 2016 … photo: Anoma Pieris.

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February 16, 2023 · 7:14 pm

Saviour Heli-Service: Vital Air Force Link during Eelam Wars

An Item in  http://www.airforcemonthly.com, April 2011, retrieved by a Military Aviation enthusiast friend of Michael Roberts ….

 


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November 12, 2022 · 12:16 pm

Poppy Day in Ceylon and Sri Lanka

Retd Brig. Hiran Halangode

This year the Armed Forces Remembrance Day and Poppy ceremony is due to be held on Sunday the 13th November 2022 at the Viharamahadevi park in Colombo. Since November is the month of Remembrance universally, it is commemorated world over.

 

 

 

 

 

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October 23, 2022 · 9:16 pm

Galle Fort Today: Its Dutch Legacy

Mahil Wijesinghe, in Sunday Observer Epaper, 23 October 2022, with this title “Dutch Legacy of Galle fort“

The Galle city is home to a population of around 100,000. Easily reached via the Southern Expressway, the A2 Highway or the coastal rail track, Galle is indeed a place worth a stop. A quick walk through the chip-stone laid busy streets, you will discover the rich history of the colonial period and the natural beauty of the seascape.

 

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September 17, 2022 · 3:13 pm

“Ceylonese” Fighting for Britain during the Two World Wars

Michael Roberts

Following the recent publication of the book Volunteers from Ceylon who served in the British and Commonwealth Forces during World War I (1914-1918) and World War II (1939-1945) …. I asked the assiduous compilers of this work to provide a convenient statistical summary of the number of personnel from Ceylon who decided to serve the British Empire in its hour of need (with all the political and cultural implications of these decisions in my ‘compass’).

So, Thuppahi can now present the statistics courtesy of Kumar Kirinde (ex-Trinity College and SL Air Force).

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