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Category Archives: trauma
Sharika Thiranagama in Profound Q & A on Sri Lanka’s Traumatic Past
Kaniyan Pungundran – Editor-in-Chief of Jaffna Monitor ….September 2025 … ..where the title runs thus: “JVP Still Denies the Tamil Ethnic Question: Sharika Thiranagama Speaks to Jaffna Monitor”
It feels like yesterday. As a student, I remember flipping through Amuthu, a Tamil-language magazine published by Lake House. One day, I came across an article about Dr. Rajani Thiranagama—her brilliant career, and how she was cowardly and mercilessly assassinated. More than the tragedy of that brave woman, what seared itself into me was the image of her two young daughters standing beside their mother. Even as a boy, I felt a deep and overwhelming compassion for them. That night, I hugged my mother tightly, whispering questions to the God I was raised to believe in: How could anyone kill the mother of two small children?
Years later, I found myself sitting across from one of those children—Sharika Thiranagama—interviewing her in detail for Jaffna Monitor. As we spoke, what struck me repeatedly was not only her brilliance as an academic but also the warmth, composure, and clarity that radiated from her. That evening, I watched as she disagreed with some of my friends. The way she objected—polite, firm, and unshakably precise—made me realize that though her life was marked by loss at the most vulnerable age, she had absorbed her mother’s humility, bravery, and steady mind. It was in that moment I understood how personal tragedy had forged not bitterness, but intellectual rigor—how the child who once heard gunshots from her doorstep had grown into a scholar determined to dissect the very forces that create such violence.
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Cold War Machinations in the Past: Allende & Bandaranaike
Darini Rajasingham-Senanayake, whose chosen title is “The Cold War Killing of Ceylon’s Bandaranaike and Chile’s Allende: ‘Operation Colombo’, Culture War and the Disinformation Game”
Decolonizing Global South History and WOKE Film
Rithika Kodithuwakku as a Tamil Sakkili Woman in Asoka Handagama’s art house rape fantasy which effectively character assassinated Chile’s Poet Laureate, Pablo Neruda in a different sort of ‘Operation Colombo’ to that which followed the CIA backed coup against Democratic Socialist President Dr. Salvador Allende in September 1973
September marks anniversaries in the chilling deaths of two democratically elected Socialist heads of state during the United States’ led Cold War anti-communist crusade that unfolded across the world for almost half a century between: The first assassination of concern here, happened in Colombo, the capital of the geostrategic Indian Ocean island of Ceylon on September 25, 1959. The second death happened half way across the world in South America– fourteen years after the assassination of Ceylon’s first Socialist Prime Minister S.W.R.D Bandaranaike.
On September 11, 1973, President Salvador Allende, South America’s first Socialist head of state died during a US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), backed coup as military helicopters strafed the Presidential Palace in Santiago de Chile.
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Shattered Lives in Sri Lanka’s Wars: Several Lesser-Known Strands
Dennis McGilvray in ASIAN ETHNOLOGY Vol 73, 1&2, pp 348-49, reviewing Sharika Thiranagama, In My Mother’s House: Civil War in Sri Lanka. Philadelphia PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011
The title of this book points to the author’s personal connection with the decades-long Sri Lankan ethnic conflict, which ended abruptly in 2009 after much of the manuscript had been written. Her mother was a Tamil academician and human rights activist assassinated by the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) in 1986 in Jaffna because of her outspoken condemnation of brutalities committed by the Tamil Tigers as well as by the Sri Lankan armed forces. This volume offers a scholarly analysis of the deep effects of the civil war upon a generation of displaced Sri Lankan Tamils and Tamil-speaking Muslims, but the author’s family history will be immediately recognized by many readers familiar with Sri Lanka.
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Long-Distance Tamil Nationalism in Toronto
Sharika Thiranagama …. Abstract of her refereed article in the American Anthropologist, Vol. 116, No. 2 (JUNE 2014), pp. 265-278 (14 pages) …. where the title reads thus: “Making Tigers from Tamils: Long-Distance Nationalism and Sri Lankan Tamils in Toronto”
This article discusses the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora in Toronto and its relationship to the Tamil separatist group, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). Taking the case of the Sri Lankan Tamils, oft-cited as the example par excellence of long-distance nationalism, I argue against naturalizing diasporic ethnonationalism to investigate instead how diasporas are fashioned into specific kinds of actors. I examine tensions that emerged as an earlier elite Tamil movement gave way to the contemporary migration of much larger class-and caste-fractured communities, while a cultural imaginary of migration as a form of mobility persisted. I suggest that concomitant status anxieties have propelled culturalist imaginations of a unified Tamil community in Toronto who, through the actions of LTTE-affiliated organizations, have condensed the Tigers and their imagined homeland, Tamil Eelam, into representing Tamil community life. While most Tamils may not have explicitly espoused LTTE ideology, as a result of the LTTE becoming the backbone of community life, Tamils became complicit with and reaffirmed the LTTE project of defending “Tamilness” militarily in Sri Lanka and culturally in Toronto. I suggest that the self-presentation of diasporic communities should be analyzed within specific histories, contemporary conflicts and fractures, and active mobilizing structures.
Rajini Thiranagama Continue reading
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USA vs Ceasefire in Gaza !!
‘Archie S’
The United States vetoed a UN Security Council resolution demanding an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.
Gaza no longer exists. The UN is a zombie – an impotent bunch of misfits, like a limp dick. One can only feel sorry for the Palestinians. They’ll be turned into cutlets for the “Free World’s” dinner in “the great feast of celebration of democracy, freedom and prosperity” on the blood and bones of Palestinians. It reveals democracies are parasitic that feeds of the bones and blood of others.
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London’s “Aragalaya”? A Populist Revolt ….. From the Right!
A NOTE from AVI YEMENI to BERTRAM DANIEL, September 2025
Hey Bertram,
Finally, the world is uniting against the Cabal and the control
I’ve covered a lot of rallies in my time, but I’ve never seen anything like what unfolded in London on September 13. An enormous number of people flooded the streets for Tommy Robinson’s Unite the Kingdom rally. The atmosphere was electric. It wasn’t just another protest; it felt like a cultural revolution in motion.
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The Vocabulary Girding & Gilding Israel’s Programme of Genocide in Palestine
Gamini Seneviratne, in The Island, 12 September 2025, where the title is “Human Animals”
The words in the heading do not refer to those who are slaughtering the human beings resident in Gaza and the West Bank. They are the ones used by the Zionist invaders to refer to the people of Palestine.
Indeed, the term “human” is used by them and their fellow criminals in the western world in this context only as an adjunct to ‘shields” employed by Hamas. Incidentally, and there are many such features ‘incidental’ to the completely false Zionist-Euro-American narratives, no evidence has been forthcoming of Hamas shielding itself behind anyone, least of all the people they represent and protect.
WASHINGTON, USA – FEBRUARY 21 : John Mearsheimer speaks during a panel organised by Foundation for Political, Economic and Social Research (SETA) Foundation in Washington, United States on February 21, 2019.
(Photo by Yasin Ozturk/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)
John Mearsheimer Continue reading
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Crazy Run-Rate From Crazy Opening Batsmen
Vithushan Ehantharajah, in ESPNcricinfo, 13 September 2025, where the title is
Phil Salt and Jos Buttler took England to 100 in the powerplay • Darren Staples/AFP via Getty Images
Filed under life stories, patriotism, performance, trauma, world events & processes
