Lanka Citizen

Presidential campaign is accelerating full throttle, candidates of the two main parties dropping the others far behind. But the voters who are not the hardcore kind adhered to a certain party seem yet undecided. Floating vote will decide the winner.

Who can be the winner? Anybody can be. But who should be the winner? This �should be� factor depends upon the political stand of the individual.

Anything can happen except Siddhalepa Mudalali or Wije Dias Sahodaraya or one of the other nine similar candidates will win. Therefore there is no point arguing one of the left candidates should win although whatsoever leftists we are.

Tamils and Muslims can ignore this election on the basis that it is just to select the Sinhala ruler to govern the Sinhala dominant state that provides second level citizenship to the minorities.

But the people like us cannot come to that stand although we have leftist thinking as we are Sinhalese. The way the future president leads this country is very important to us.

Therefore we have to decide who should be the president although both contenders are equally hated by us.

Ethnic problem wise, Ranil�s slogans are more attractive because he promotes federalism vis-�-vis Mahinda�s unitary state. He looks like a non-racist while his attempts to adorn himself with nationalist costumes make him a laughing stock. Sinhala nationalist forces charge him that he will betray the country to tigers. Then why don�t the tigers support him to carry out a project that is so good for them?

in fact Ranil is the most feared figure to the tigers. During his rule he was consuming time without taking steps to solve the problem. He expected the Tamil Liberation Movement would liquidate during the period of no war � no peace. His strategy of containment proved successful as the LTTE split with Karuna�s rebellion. On the other hand he created a sharp security network with the help of western allies. LTTE doubts his plans what ultimately can impose a lesser devolution of power and force LTTE to accept it, threatening a possible military onslaught.

This project could be successful if JVP and JHU did not launch a do-or-die campaign to oust the UNP government. After all Ranil�s approach towards the ethnic problem is a dangerous one in the point of view of the Tamil Liberation Movement. Therefore although they do not support anybody, Ranil�s defeat can be warmly welcomed. It literally means Mahinda�s success.

On the other hand, nationalist extremists who have lined up with Mahinda actually make the Tamil cause easier. Their unbending stubbornness towards the devolution of power provides a space to the LTTE to rationalize its military strategies.

Therefore in every measure Mahinda will be the LTTE�s choice.

Ranil�s economic policy will no way be popular among the masses, although it is embraced by the upper echelon of the business community. �Regaining Sri Lanka� which Ranil put forward and will be reactivated after his victory was heavily criticized by the JVP and the civil society organizations. The economic philosophy behind it, the growth will trickle down and alleviate poverty, is a clich� questioned even by the president of the World Bank Mr. Paul Wolfenson. Huge borrowings he has intended are sure to increase the indebtedness of the nation. It is highly questionable whether these super infrastructure development projects are really to connect the poor to the growth or for the benefit of the foreign investment that come to the country just looking for hire and fire cheap labour. In common man�s perspective Ranil is a sales representative of western capital who is going to sell everything from CEB to village tank.

Comparatively Mahinda has a better appearance because he has no policy at all, except rhetoric. People can expect a presidency with no rapid changes. Yet who knows what is in this man�s mysterious coldness? Will he keep the JVP sahodarayas at hand or will he kick them out, nobody knows. If the sahodarayas will stay, there will be some kind of impediment to the structural reforms that the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund will push through. In that perspective as well, Mahinda is the �people�s choice�. That can be the reason for Vasu sahodaraya�s latest summersault, if it is not to secure a seat in a future parliament.

Mahinda is the perfect choice for the middle class. He will be the creator of government employments, regardless any work is available for the new recruits. Salaries will be paid in five figure numbers from the coffers filled with the money hard earned by garment workers, Middle East housemaids and estate workers. He will not cut the public sector like Ranil. Pensions will be re-granted for government servants. Further, he has promised to safeguard all the other middle class fantacies.

Wow! What a match!

Will the farming community respond to the Amude or Denim jeans? Or Rs.350 bag of fertilizer or Rs.550 bag? Nobody knows yet. But both have plans to grant freehold titles to the colony settlers. Ranil had planned to increase urban population to 50% from the current level of below 25%, in his �Regaining SriLanka�. How is he going to do that? Will he make the farmers sell their lands to the growers of cash crops and make them migrate to towns as wage labourers. Who supports such life gambling? Mahinda has, at least, not articulated such plans.

What does the real working class think at this moment? Colombo city dwellers both rich and poor have turned to Ranil. They expect Ranil will create more jobs, the kind the private sector offers, and more earnings. Estate workers will have to obey their Kankanis and vote Ranil. They have never expected anything beyond their leaders expected from elections.

Now I am going to summarize my argument. For SLFP Mahinda was OK when he was selected as the presidential candidate regardless whatever the president and Anura utter now. Mahinda has set himself perfectly in the JVP propaganda machine that can paste a poster on each and every wall and for the JVP Mahinda is the sinking man�s bit of staw. For the good old left parties plus Vasu Sahodaraya have no other choice to cling to a seat or two in a future parliament. For the JHU and Bhumiputhra Party Mahinda will the person who saves the Sasane and Pandu Heliya (religion and the pot of saffron die). For the LTTE as well Mahinda will be the less fearful leader. For the middle class Mahinda is the saviour of their dreams. For the farming community he will be the person who at least will not modernize it too rapidly. He is a man who states that no privatization will occur under his presidency.

That is why I say Mahinda is everybody�s darling, if not most of them. Out of two rotten eggs, people have to select one that at appears less rotten.

www.lankaleft.com

Although responsible for 70 million deaths, Mao also succeeded in rebuilding a nation, and many retain a nagging suspicion that this could not have been achieved, by Mao or anyone else, without strong-arm tactics. For many Chinese, an intense pride in that achievement overshadows revulsion at Mao’s crimes.

Indeed, Chinese history and folklore are replete with tyrants. It is taken as a commonplace among many Chinese that their country, with its size and population, is somehow uniquely chaos-prone and difficult to rule. So the corollary notion that anyone hoping to bring order would need to twist a few arms is entrenched in Chinese minds, and even people with direct and painful knowledge of Mao’s cruelty grant him a degree of grudging respect.

By KENNETH MURPHY

A Book Review: Mao: The Unknown Story, By Jung Chang and Jon Halliday

‘Tyranny is a habit, wrote Dostoyevsky, it has a capacity for development, it develops finally into a disease.”

In 1919, a young essayist named Mao Zedong urged his fellow Chinese to cast off their oppression. Nothing extraordinary in that, as China’s last emperor had been dethroned almost a decade earlier. What was extraordinary is that Mao also asked his countrymen to have sympathy for their oppressors, who were, after all, human beings like ourselves. Their tendency toward oppression, he wrote, was merely “an infection or hereditary disease passed on to them from the old society and old thought.”

As ruler of the People’s Republic of China three decades later, such sympathy, if it ever really existed, had clearly been abandoned, for Mao had long since been afflicted with the disease of despotism.

Jung Chang’s and Jon Halliday’s biography Mao: The Unknown Story is the tale of the progress of that disease, tracing Mao’s rise from provincial pamphleteer to the Luciferian head of state of the world’s most populous nation. Co-writer Chang is the author of the best-selling Wild Swans; this is the first full-length biography of the Great Helmsmen by a Chinese writer.

Mao’s Confucian upbringing in a well-to-do peasant family in Hunan; early dabbling with radical politics; the cunning, ruthlessness and duplicity that allowed him to triumph both in the political infighting with his Communist comrades and as a military commander against the superior armies of Japan and Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalists; a mythically large personality; remarkable charisma; the unrestrained flights of hubris that created a New China and then plunged it into chaos — all of this bears retelling and re-examining, because, unlike Hitler and Stalin, Mao retains a patina of respectability in the West.

Today, even China’s heavily doctored official accounts, while straining to gloss over the rough edges of Mao’s legacy, cover the basic outline, blaming Mao’s “errors” for the ensuing chaos. Jung Chang and British writer Jon Halliday bring us the full magnitude of the catastrophe Mao inflicted on China: China does not accept Western estimates of 20 million to 30 million deaths from famine caused in the early 1960s by the rash economic policies of Mao’s Great Leap Forward. In fact, the official histories shun the word “famine” altogether, and refer to the period instead as the “Three Difficult Years.” Also obscured by party historians, out of obvious self-interest, are the varied deeds of Mao’s colleagues, including his eventual successor Deng Xiaoping, who did some of Mao’s worst dirty work while he lived but began undoing his policies the moment Mao died.

Such crimes and drama make Mao an irresistible subject. But Jung and Halliday are primarily interested in the Great Helmsman as a form of political epidemiology: How did Mao contract “oppressor’s disease,” and how was it able to progress so far as to ravage him and China both?

Although responsible for 70 million deaths, Mao also succeeded in rebuilding a nation, and many retain a nagging suspicion that this could not have been achieved, by Mao or anyone else, without strong-arm tactics. For many Chinese, an intense pride in that achievement overshadows revulsion at Mao’s crimes.

Indeed, Chinese history and folklore are replete with tyrants. It is taken as a commonplace among many Chinese that their country, with its size and population, is somehow uniquely chaos-prone and difficult to rule. So the corollary notion that anyone hoping to bring order would need to twist a few arms is entrenched in Chinese minds, and even people with direct and painful knowledge of Mao’s cruelty grant him a degree of grudging respect.

Chang and Halliday have no truck with this. Chiang Kai-shek could, for instance, have restored the country’s unity, and perhaps held off the Japanese more effectively, they say, were it not for Mao’s betrayals and rebellion.

In Western minds, views of Mao have not so much blended the good parts with the bad as evolved according to how much and what kind of information was coming out of China at the time Mao was being analyzed. Much of what dribbled out during Mao’s earlier years was filtered through sympathetic chroniclers such as Edgar Snow and Agnes Smedley, and tended to show him as a romantic and heroic rebel. As it emerged that Mao’s victims numbered in the tens of millions, damning comparisons with Stalin, Hitler and Pol Pot have become harder for supporters to fend off. Yet somehow that grudging admiration for creating New China never went away entirely.

It is, of course, China’s current leaders who ought to have the clearest view of Mao. Their judgment, tellingly, has been to reverse his most basic policies by putting China on the road to a market economy. So why, Chang and Halliday wonder, do they continue to give his portrait pride of place in Tiananmen Square?

No book has come as close to unravelling the mystery of Mao’s character as this one. The authors combine scholarship (their use of the Soviet archives to reveal Mao’s actions is groundbreaking) with the narrative drive Chang brought to her Wild Swans, sweeping the reader effortlessly back to the bizarre and deadly world created by Mao and his circle of disciple-accessories. There is no cheap psychohistory. This is a book about what is really knowable.

Inevitably, in a book that covers the most calamitous years in China’s long history in more than 800 pages of text, there are gaps. Sources are inadequately noted. Military history in general gets shorter shrift than it deserves for a leader so obsessed with playing the warlord. The argument raised here, that Mao became a victim of his self-imposed isolation, neglects the close watch Mao kept on technical and economic issues. The record shows a man much more in touch with what was happening in the economy than this book sometimes lets on.

Indeed, if Mao had left such details in the hands of competent managers and interfered less, catastrophes such as the Great Leap Forward, when peasants were encouraged to build mini steel mills in their villages, might have been abandoned sooner.

The Mao that emerges from this book was the overseer of state terror that left an indelible scar on the Chinese economic powerhouse that is now emerging. To understand Mao’s long march with the Devil, there can be no better starting point than Mao: The Unknown Story, for Chang and Halliday grapple with the fundamental questions of history. Do leaders shape great events and great evils? Or is it events that are in the saddle? To this old question, Jung Chang and Jon Halliday give a definitive answer where Mao is concerned.

Kenneth Murphy’s Unquiet Vietnam: A Journey to the Vanishing World of Indochina, was recently published in London. Currently a senior fellow at Smolny Collegium, Saint Petersburg State University, Russia, he is at work on a cultural and political history of postwar Italy.

Courtesy, The Globe and Mail, October 29, 2005

Addressing a ceremony organised by Uva Provincial Council Chief Minister Vijith Vijayamuni Soysa to felicitate her at Bibile, President Kumaratunga stressed that she had no intention of forming National Governments with those who tried to tarnish her image when they had the opportunity of working together with her.
She said that it was better if the people can extend their support to the SLFP candidate at the forthcoming election to take forward the good programmes of her Government without any interruption.

“It is better if people can extend their support to our candidate at the forthcoming election to take forward this programme successfully,” President Kumaratunga added.

She said she will support him to take forward the development process initiated by her. She recalled that the previous UNF Government was not keen to proceed with the many development programmes she initiated.

Courtesy Daily News 31.10.2005