A Circular Letter from Richard Koenigsberg of the Library of Congress ‘Collective’ in New York, 31 January 2022
A very brief contribution directly below from Michael Roberts, a great anthropologist/scholar coming out of Asia. He’s the webmaster of Thuppahi’s Blog, which contains fascinating essays and articles as well as original, vivid photographs. Among the pieces you can read on his website:
TRUMP AND HITLER IN THE SAME BED?
Filed under accountability, authoritarian regimes, European history, Fascism, fundamentalism, governance, historical interpretation, Hitler, landscape wondrous, law of armed conflict, life stories, modernity & modernization, nationalism, politIcal discourse, power politics, press freedom & censorship, psychological urges, racism, trauma, unusual people, war crimes, world events & processes
Police fired water cannon and tear gas Sunday at stone-throwing protesters after tens of thousands of demonstrators marched through Brussels against Covid-19 rules.
Paul McNamee in The Age, 15 January 2022, where the title reads “Djokovic an easy target in anti-vaxxer witch hunt”
Clearly, the outcome of the Federal Court case on Sunday has implications for Novak Djokovic. How about for the Australian Open?
The Australian Open is far and away Australia’s biggest international sporting event. Hosting all the world’s best tennis players in arguably the best sporting precinct in the world, it generates close to one billion dollars in economic impact for the state of Victoria. It puts Melbourne front and centre on the world stage for two weeks but, this year, for all the wrong reasons.
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Sanjeewa Karunaratne, whose chosen title = ” Stories from Civil War– Young Girl’s Wish” …. see http://www.sanjeewakarunaratne.com/index.php/blogs/hungry-counsel/stories-from-sri-lanka-s-civil-war-young-girl-s-wish
Pix from Stephen Champion’s pictorial book inserrted here to highlight the ‘fiesta’ of kill and counter-kill
I call him Jayantha to protect his identity. Calm and collected, he was a good friend at high school. His parents were middle-class schoolteachers. During high school, some of the friends visited Jayantha’s home; and they were talking weeks about how pretty his elder sister was. Not surprisingly, she was to become the beauty queen of this small town. Inspector Dammika was in charge of the police station in this town. Through my good friend Mike, I met this soft-speaking police officer and happened to spend a night at his bungalow. He was Mike’s brother-in-law. At the time, I did not know that he got charged with her murder. A few years later, Dammika and his father-in-law were assassinated. A couple of year later Mike got killed.
Jamie James, initially presented in Literary Hub, 3 June 2019, with this title “Pablo Neruda’s Life as a Struggling Poet in Sri Lanka: A Young Poet’s Adventures in the Foreign Service”At 22, Pablo Neruda was an international literary celebrity—and desperately poor. His second book, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, had been a sensational success and would eventually become one of the bestselling books of poetry in the 20th century (more than 20 million copies to date), but he was paid almost nothing for it. He was a student at the Universidad de Santiago in Chile, and hunger was an issue; he wore a billowing cape to conceal his emaciated physique and a wide-brimmed hat that hoped for an air of mystery.
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Michael Roberts
In my reading, the spirit of cricket was spiked and shattered at its iconic home-ground of Lords yesterday. Not only yesterday –the fifth day. IThe “spiking” occurred throughout the match with (A) tailenders’ bombarded with headhigh short-pitched bowling by both sides; (B) verbal badinage and assualts — camouflaged as “badinage” and presented with smiles — from both parties; and (C) the spiking of the ball by Jimmy Anderson [according to one report] among the events on the ground.
Kumar Oh Kumar …. what future for “The Spirit of Cricket” talk you delivered during the famous COWDREY LECTURE some years back!
… https://www.espncricinfo.com/story/kumar-sangakkara-s-mcc-spirit-of-cricket-lecture-522183
Basil Fernando: A Short Abstract re the book Body, Mind, Soul, Society: An Autobiographical Account
This book (176 pages) is an attempt to contribute towards an understanding of the impact of violence on human persons and the society. It is based on the direct experience of living and working in Sri Lanka and Cambodia. However, references are also made to several more developing countries in Asia with which I have been engaged in working after the experiences in Sri Lanka and Cambodia. The book is written from the perspective of a victim who is also an observer.
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Jason Steger, in Sydney Morning Herald, 14 December 2020, where the title runs thus: “A sit-down with a spy novelist: what John le Carre learnt from the secret service”
“When you enter the secret world and you are engaged in the intensive examination of your enemy, your opponent, you in a sense begin to know him and think about him not just as an opponent but some kind of secret sharer.”
Michael Roberts, reprinting an essay drafted in 2007 and since presented in Fire & Storm in 2010 (chapter 19: 131-38)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVpbl0azdFM …. Kamikaze strike
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ALSThis short essay appeared in the year K????K within the Website run the Library of Social Science headed by Richard Koenigsberg and he has sent it to me this month (November 2020) — presumably inspired by the recent jihadist attacks in Europe and by Thuppahi’s determined pursuit of the comparative literature on martyrdom pursued in a variety of contexts by diverse forces (not merely Islamic).
Michael Roberts
Addressing the practices of remembrance in Australia, Richard Koenigsberg has noted the irony that a battlefield defeat at Gallipoli in World War One, 1915, served a people as an emblem of nationhood: the “Australian nation, came into being on the foundations provided by the slaughter of its young men.”
Burying the dead at Gallipoli in 1915 ,,,and The Last Post 
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thuppahi
