Category Archives: violence of language

March 19, 2021 · 1:55 pm

Trump and Hitler in Same Bed? Generating Love and Hate?

A NOTE from Richard Koenigsberg, March 2021 …. in an Item presented four years back and headed thus: “Is Trump Stealing Hitler’s Playbook? How does One Test the Truth of a Hypothesis: Predictive Validity.” 

Hitler addressing rally in May 1937 — Associard Press Photo …https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/05/books/review/the-nazi-menace-benjamin-carter-hett.html  

  Donald Trump  speaking at Phoenix on 23rd June 2020 (https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-06-24/trump-phoenix-speech-demagogue)

A wonderful Internet radio program, Howard Bloom Saves the Universe, is hosted by Chad Dougatz. Howard invited me to join the show to explore the question, “Why does Donald Trump stir us (either negatively or positively).”

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March 9, 2021 · 2:01 am

The Making of Wahhabi Zealots in Sri Lanka, 1980s-2019

Michael Roberts

All those addressing the fervour that promoted the killing work of the Zahran Hashim jihadist network in Sri Lanka in April 2019 must come to grips with the modern currents of Wahhabi political thinking that go back to the outpourings of the Egyptian intellectuals Sayyid Qutb[1] and Al-Zawahiri[2] in the latter half of the 20th century. This step will then take investigators to the Al-Qaida movement[3] and thence to the more recent brand of Wahhabism embodied within ISIS.

Sayyid Qutb  al-Zawahiri

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March 8, 2021 · 11:26 pm

Remembrance: Marking 21/4 Jihadist Zealotry in Sri Lanka

Pictures by Raymond Aponsu and Sulochana Gamage

Churches observed Black Sunday yesterday in protest over the terror attacks on 2019 Easter Sunday, calling on the government to deliver justice by prosecuting those responsible for the attacks. Protestors led by the two Colombo Auxiliary Bishops Rt.Rev. Anthony Jayakody and Rt.Rev.Maxwell Silva held placards pleading for justice in Negombo in front of the Katuwapitiya Church which was bombed on April 20, 2019 while others led by Malcolm Cardinal Ranjith gathered in front of the Kochchikade St. Anthony’s Church yesterday.

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March 5, 2021 · 10:42 am

Rise in Anti-Chinese Sentiments in Australia

Naaman Zhou, in The Guardian, 4 March 2021, with this title “How Anti-Chinese Seniment in Australia seeped into the Mainstream”

  Photograph: Torsten Blackwood/AFP/Getty Images

Community members say current levels of anti-Chinese sentiment have been fanned by the pandemic, Donald Trump’s rhetoric, souring trade relationship and a political atmosphere that encourages a ‘creeping distrust’ of Australians of Chinese heritage. 

Threatening letters sent to Asian councillors and a surge in race hate attacks during the pandemic has renewed calls for a centralised hate tracker.

Councillor Kun Huang received [a hate] letter on a Monday. Among the insults about his name, the threats of death, the blame for the Covid-19 pandemic, the accusation that he had been stealing all the milk powder, buying up all the houses and bringing disease to Australia “for centuries”, the staff at the Cumberland Council noticed a name and an address. This was a race hate letter signed by its supposed perpetrator.

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February 17, 2021 · 7:38 am

Split in Black Lives Matter Protest Movement?

VISIT https://leftoutmag.com/2021/02/04/breaking/

Today Black Lives Matter Inland Empire announced its departure from the Black Lives Matter Global Network, highlighting several grievances, and perhaps, calling attention to the need for movement leaders and members of movement organizations to have broader conversations of transparency, Collective organizing and accountability. The following is a statement from Black Lives Matter Inland Empire.

Ethiopia Berta, an activist and educator who has been fighting for a change for many years, marches in Washington, D.C., on June 6. Last year she worked to keep Democracy Prep Public Charter School in southeast Washington, D.C., from closing…. Pix by Dee Dwyer

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February 8, 2021 · 2:41 pm

Trauma and Joy in Cricket …. and Abusive Lankan Aussies

Ajit Jayasekera — Email Memo to Michael Roberts, 15 February 2021

When we went to Australia for the Tri Nations tournament with England and Australia in December 2002/January 2003, the team was captained by Sanath Jayasuriya and the Coach was Dav Whatmore. We were after a rather disastrous tour of South Africa, where we were roundly beaten in both formats of the game and started this tournament in similar disastrous manner getting smashed by both England and Australia in the opening games.

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January 22, 2021 · 2:06 pm

A Joust between a Tamil Nationalist and a Thuppahi Mongrel

Michael Roberts, in Sri Lanka Guardian, 12 September 2011
 Early in September [2011] I circulated an item describing efforts mounted by private enterprise in cooperation with the Sri Lankan state (military as well as government agents) to alleviate the life world of Tamil people being re-settled in the northern Vanni – a continuation of efforts in the IDP camps at Menik Farm in 2009 – through the establishment of psycho-social units working on the mental health of children in particular. Clearly, this note and its documents were part of the empirical terrain relevant to the propaganda war raging since early 2009.
My focus was on the ideologies permeating the thinking of Sinhala-speaking people over the centuries. It is my speculation that similar deep structures permeate the thinking of Tamil-speaking people in Sri Lanka and India; and for that matter, mutatis mutandis, most of the people in India. It will call for a brave Tamil scholar to investigate and disclose this phenomenon today.

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November 20, 2020 · 2:15 pm

Easter 2019 Killings in Lanka: Stark Reactions in Ireland

Sarah Macdonald, on 30 April 2019 in https://www.catholicireland.net/sri-lankans-ireland-grieve-loss-life-loss-freedom-religion/

“Further militarisation has been called for in a country where the density of soldiers to civilians is one of the highest in the world” – Sri Lankan academic Dr Jude Lal Fernando of the Irish School of Ecumenics.

Darina Allen, Honorary Consul General of Sri Lanka to Ireland, at the Mass to remember the victims of the Sri Lanka bombings in the Pro Cathedral in Dublin. Pic John McElroy.

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November 12, 2020 · 2:27 pm

Kamikaze, Mujahid, Tamil Tiger: Sacrificial Devotion in Comparative Lens

Michael Roberts, reprinting an essay drafted in 2007 and since presented in Fire & Storm in 2010 (chapter 19: 131-38)

  • “Gandhi tried for years to reduce himself to zero” (Dennis Hudson 2002: 132).
  • Hitler: “You are nothing, your nation is everything” (quoted in Koenigsberg 2009: 13).
  • LTTE: “the martyr sacrifices himself for the whole by destroying the I…” (Dagmar Hellmann-Rajanayagam’s interpretation of a Tamil Tiger supporter’s poem; 2005: 134).
  • Spokesman for Al Qaida after the Madrid bombing: “You love life and we love death”
  • Col. Karuna, ex-LTTE: “Death means nothing to me….”
  • The Hagakure is “a living philosophy that holds that life and death [are] the two sides of the same shield” (Yoshio Mishima in his The Way of the Samurai, quoted in Moeren 1986: 109-10).
  • “Bushido means to die” (Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney 2002: 117).
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVpbl0azdFM …. Kamikaze strike

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November 6, 2020 · 10:58 am

Allahu Akbar! Missing Dimensions in Contemporary Reportage

Michael Roberts

I recently watched a good part of Stephen Sackur’s dialogue with a French lady politician [whose name I have forgotten]. Sackur pursued his usual hard-line aggressive and bullying mode of questioning – posing vigorous criticisms of the French government’s position on secularism and its hostility to the carving out of sacred domains by French Muslim peoples.  The implicit suggestion[1] was that the British system’s tolerance of religious sensibilities was a better line of policy.[2]

Muslim protests … and the selfie proudly posted by the Islamic terrorist who was responsible for the killings in Nice in October 2020

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