Lanka Citizen

by Nalin Swaris

After he was baptized, the Gospels tells us, Jesus was “led by the Spirit out into the desert to be put to the test by the devil”. Jesus fasted for forty days and forty nights. He was spiritually strengthened but physically weak. It was when the pangs of hunger were most acute that the devil came to him. Knowing that Jesus had become spiritually powerful Satan told him: “If you are the Son of God command these stones to turn into bread” But Jesus told Satan: “Human beings do not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of God”. Satan then took Jesus to the holy city and set him on the parapet of the Temple and asked him to throw himself down in the full view of assembled devotees to test the literal truth of a Jewish religious text that God would send his angels to rescue him. Jesus replied “Do not put the Lord thy God to the test”. Thereafter Satan took Jesus to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendour and promised all that would be his, if he fell down at Satan’s feet and worshipped him”. Jesus replied quoting the scriptures, that “one must do homage and serve one’s Lord and God alone”. Having exhausted his wiles Satan left Jesus, Matthew tells us, but Luke adds “to seek another opportune moment”.

The Perils of Leadership
The narrative of Jesus being taken from place to place by the devil must not be taken literally. They are symbolic of the subtle meanderings of the mind which conjure up fantasies of power and grandeur to entice and ensnare men or women called by divine or human election to be leaders of their fellows. Leaders could mislead their ignorant and helpless people. The people fall into the snares of leaders, religious and political whose external show of wealth power and glory make them fall down in adoration before these princes of this world. Leaders pretend they can provide instant solution to a people’s problems not just by turning stones into bread but into rich cake. An empty magic show is presented as a miraculous performance. The new Magi come bearing their fake myrrh for socially created ills. The new Magi obscure with frankincense smoke the worship of the Golden Calf. The Hidden God of the New Israel Marx observed is Capital. Soren Kierkegaard the Danish existential theologian denouncing the ease with which the once feudal Christian Churches had come to terms with the capitalist order of things called the new Christianity “bourgeois religion”. Thrown back to the most primitive form of religion - totemism - people believe that their fates are ruled not by powerful human actors but by mythic Bulls and Bears. The Stock Exchange is the new Temple where blessing are bestowed and curses rained down.

The World is on Fire
Karl Marx used a metaphor of primitive religiosity when he described a culture where everything, earth, wind, water and fire and all beings - a man’ skills or a woman’s sensuality are reduced to their vendibility and can be interchanged in terms of their monetary value, as “The Fetishism of Commodities”. Six century centuries ago at the very dawn of mercantilist culture in North East India the Buddha raised alarm: “The World is on Fire – ablaze with what? Ablaze with the fire of Craving – the Eye is burning, the Ear is burning, the Nose is burning, the Touch is burning, the Mind is burning. Burning. Burning!”. The Ad industry inflames the senses by creating artificial fears and desires. Instant fixes for synthetic wants. The religious reflex of this materialist culture is the quick fix and instant prosperity offered by right wing neo Evangelicals whose global leader is George W. Bush. The Buddha used a most appropriate metaphor for Craving - Fire. Fire is the only one of the four elements that can sustain itself by consuming everything it touches. Deny it fuel and it dies. Nibbana like the Sinhala ‘nivanna’, means ‘putting out - the Flame of Craving. The prophet of neo liberal economics Francis Fukuyama, a ‘secular’ theologian, sees the End of History – as the time when Globalisation will be all in all and the ‘Last Man’ will be satiated by “an immense accumulation of commodities - a consumer Paradise. It is interesting that the goal of neo liberal free market economics is projected as the triumph of the ethos of consumerism – a condition in which humans exist to consume - bringing forth a new type of human being whose “gods” as St. Paul decried, “are their bellies”. The Free market socio economic system conspires to triumph not by military or economic compulsion alone. It must create A New Human Being – with a new personality structure. The aim of the new globalizing culture is to create an unthinking, conforming human being who will succumb uncritically to norms values and tastes dictated by the mass media. It seeks to subvert indigenous cultures and break the ability to resist, to create a mindless one dimensional human being.
The Free Market is a secular religious myth which calls for an act of faith. It does not exist anywhere on this planet. All continental European economies are rationally regulated economies. When born-again Buddhist Ranil W., speaks of his special relationship with born-again Christian George W., he is doing so at a time when George Bush’s credit even in his own country is fast declining. When Wickremesinghe says he will speak to ‘Bush mahattaya’ and get the textile quota restored he belies the very first article of his real faith. For what sort of ‘free market’ is it where poor nations of this world have to beg for quotas to export their textiles? Under such a dispensation even the most pretentious local textile magnate lives a precariously dependent existence. They are, as Marx put it “existences with licences”.

Free Market or Fair Markets?
George W. Bush ran into stormy weather - as if it were the lashings of hurricane Beta - when he tried to tout his idea of a Pan American Free Trade Zone (FTAA) to Latin American Heads of State a fortnight ago. Unlike Mr.Wickremesinghe and his ‘Heritage’man Milinda Pinto Moragoda or his then Minister of Commerce, the Latin American Heads of State refused to behave like well domesticated poodles. Cut the crap they in effect told Bush effect and stop asking us to open up our markets while you protect yours. He arrived in Buenos Aires with more than 2000 US agents, and a free market Plan. He was forced to leave with his tail between his legs. As tens of thousands protested outside against the Bushmania of free market economics, the tone for the fiery debate on the FTAA was set by the host of the summit President Kirchner of Argentina. He fearlessly declared opposition to international financial institutions, the Washington Consensus, the idea of privatization and the free market as a panacea, of agricultural subsidies for the farmers of USA and protectionism of US industries through quotas, and the proposed FTAA: “Simply signing an agreement will not lead to an easy and direct road to prosperity”, he said, adding that the US, with its “role as first global power”, needed to consider its policies towards the region as they “not only provoke misery and poverty, but also add to institutional instability”. Kirchner finished by saying “our poor, our excluded, our countries, no longer accept that we have to keep talking in a low voice”. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez applauded Kirchner, saying, “It was a valiant speech. He is inviting us to say things openly.” Chavez and Kirchner, along with Uruguayan president Tabare Vasquez and Brazilian president Luis Inacio “Lula” da Silva, formed the counter-bloc to the US’s attempts to push forward talks on the FTAA in its current form. All these leaders knew how WB-IMF policies imposed on them using military dictatorships had brought their countries to bankruptcy and spawned immense misery among the masses Venezuela’s President Chavez was the main speaker at the 40,000-strong rally in the Buenos Aires football stadium on November 5. On the stage together with other radical celebrities was Hebe Bonafini the working class leader of the Mothers of the Disappeared Movement in Argentina (whom I have had the privilege of meeting in Amsterdam) . Chavez told the wildly cheering crowds: “FTAA has been defeated by the peoples of this continent, and today, in Mar de Plata, it is time to bury the FTAA. The next thing we will bury is capitalism.” Diego Maradona in clear homage to his absent hero Fidel Castro reflected the mood of the people when he said, while embracing Chavez, “Argentina has its dignity! Let’s throw Bush out of here!”

In a poll carried out by Public Opinion, Markets and Services (OPSM), 75% of Argentines showed sympathy for Chavez. The poll also recorded that six out of 10 Argentines were against or strongly against the presence of Bush in Argentina.

Nicodemus by Night
Today the oxygen of critical thought has been sucked up by a mafia of neo-liberal intellectuals and hustlers who are acting as the hired agents of the West and using their immense resources to promote a basically anti-national agenda. The insidious plan to further this end is to promote the cause of a separate state controlled by the One Party Dictatorship of the LTTE - under the guise of federalism and to plunge this country into multi polar violence inviting Western punishment and intervention. Hence their constant intimidation that if one does not capitulate to the LTTE despite its blood drenched path of killings, ethnic cleansings, political assassinations, abductions for ransom, abductions of children to be transformed into socio-pathic killers, there will be war and that those who oppose the LTTE will have to bear responsibility for it, As if foreign funding is not enough the wealth of the slick local corporate sector is also being poured into to ensure the defeat of Mahinda Rajapakse.

Jesus declared that he came to proclaim Good News to the poor and the oppressed. In the Gospel of Luke we read that a rich man named Nicodemus, drawn to Jesus’ message but too embarrassed to be seen with him by day in the company of the poor, came at night to seek instruction from him. The message of Jesus was that there can be no lasting peace without social justice. In a perverse bouleversement of Jesus’ declaration: “You cannot serve God and Mammon”, American dollar bills carry the logo “In God We Trust”. The new religion has successfully cloned God and Mammon. Today Nicodemuses and the representatives of Jesus and the Buddha relish in each others’ company by day and by night and jealously guard their common interests.

It is extremely saddening that a message of the Archbishop of Colombo with a photograph of his Lordhip was lent for a full page Ad with the incendiary title “Christians Awake!”. It also carried a self promoting photo of the business tycoon – who paid for the AD - contemporary Sri Lanka’s most highly profile convert from Buddhism to Roman Catholicism. The Ad implicitly urges Christians to ready themselves for a New Crusade to defend their sacred rights in case Mahinda Rajapakse and his supporters win the elections.

A victory for Mahinda Rajapakse will not resolve all our problems. But it will open a new space for looking afresh at our national malaise. Whoever wins we cannot leave our lives in the hands of politicians. An independent and vigilant citizenry is indispensable to ensure they fulfill the promises they make. Globalisation is not an eternal ‘yatharthaya’ as tuition master Bandula Gunawardene would have us believe. “It is a monster, but a dying monster”, says reknowned Chilean economist Dr. Manfred Max Neef winner of the Alternative Nobel Peace Prize. What became of Latin America countries yesterday can be our lot tomorrow, if we choose politicians subservient to the West and are tantalised by the globalizing and soul destroying American consumerist culture. Man does not live by bread alone. There are values in life that are more precious than monetary value.

courtesy The Island