“The U.S. and its allies are not going to want governments which are responsive to the will of the people. If that happens, not only will the U.S. not control the region, but it will be thrown out,” said renowned intellectual Noam Chomsky, addressing 25th anniversary of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), last month and commenting on the US response to popular uprisings in West Asia and North Africa. Responding, a Political Science academic in Jaffna said that even the progressive Western intellectuals, in their preoccupation with the Islamic World, pay little attention to more dangerous happenings in the island of Sri Lanka, where not only the US and its allies but all the powers in their greed to grab the island as a whole, set a new world record in collectively upholding genocide and extermination of a nation as means of ‘stability’ of their interests.
“The U.S. and its allies will do anything they can to prevent authentic democracy in the Arab world. The reason is very simple. Across the region, an overwhelming majority of the population regards the United States as the main threat to their interests,” Chomsky said at the FAIR silver jubilee, reported Amy Goodman in Democracy Now, May 11.
“Stability is—it’s kind of like democracy. Stability means conformity to our interests. […] Instability is when anyone gets in the way,” is what stability of a state means to the powers, Chomsky said.
“You check history, virtually every resort to force, by whoever it is, is accompanied by the most noble rhetoric. It’s all completely humanitarian. That includes Hitler taking over Czechoslovakia, the Japanese fascists rampaging in northeast China. In fact, it’s Mussolini in Ethiopia. There’s hardly any exception. So you produce that, and the media and commentators present—pretend they don’t notice that it has no—carries no information, because it’s reflexive,” he further said.
On the US and allies promoting dictators, Chomsky said: “When there’s a favoured dictator and he’s getting into trouble, support him as long as possible, full support as long as possible. When it becomes impossible to support him—like, say, maybe the army turns against him, business class turns against him—then send him off somewhere, issue ringing declarations about your love of democracy, and then try to restore the old regime, maybe with new names. And that’s done over and over again.”
“If the dictators support us, and the population is under control, then what’s the problem? This is like imperialism. What’s the problem if it works? As long as they can control their populations, fine. They can have campaigns of hatred; our friendly dictators will keep them under control. That’s the reaction not just of the diplomatic service in the [US] State Department or of the media who reported this, but also of the general intellectual community,” Chomsky said commenting on US media’s zero coverage of polls and democratic opinion in West Asia, adding that “There’s a few comments in England, but very little. It just doesn’t matter what the population thinks, as long as they’re under control.”
Precisely this was the language of India’s extra-parliamentary policy maker and National Security Advisor Shiv Shankar Menon, who implied sometimes back that why should the people of Tamil Nadu make any qualms if the ‘home-made solutions’ of Rajapaksa could succeed in silencing the Eezham Tamils, commented the academic in Jaffna.
The people of Tamil Nadu came out with extraordinary mass response in the polls. But media and state in India down play it. Now there is also disappointment in grass-root political circles of Tamil Nadu that the Governor’s Speech in Tamil Nadu didn’t reflect the expectations of the masses on the core issue, the Jaffna academic said, adding that the trend was set when the world intelligentsia was hardly moved when the entire Eezham Tamil diaspora went to streets, during the genocidal war.
Chomsky in his speech, while listing examples of the US manoeuvrings, covered not only West Asia and North Africa, but also touched Nicaragua, Philippines, Haiti, South Korea, Romania and Indonesia.
But he had no reference to what the US did and is doing in the island of Sri Lanka, from setting the stage for a world-mobilised genocide to adamantly upholding militarization and ‘genocidal unity’ of the island, the Tamil academic pointed out.
Last month, while giving an interview to Norwegian Council of Eezham Tamils, and advising Tamils to press the USA, UK and France to negotiate with China and Russia to find a solution for their national question, Vidar Helgesen of the Stockholm-based International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance said that “a dilemma for Tamils is that Sri Lanka is not always on the top of the agenda as the world is full of burning issues.”
Mr. Helgesen was the highest ranking Norwegian diplomat who headed the Norwegian facilitated peace process in its initial years.
The world intelligentsia is making a grave mistake in failing to recognize the island of Sri Lanka as a hub, and this failure is effectively made use of by the powers to imperceptibly set a dangerous paradigm to be implemented in densely populated Asia and elsewhere. The backbone of this all-power conspiracy conceived by some individuals behind the establishments has to be broken in the specific case of Sri Lanka, if the world has to be relived of such dangerous paradigms, commented the Jaffna academic.
Unfortunately the Eezham Tamils in the USA itself don’t raise the issues where they have to be raised, even when an Asst. Secretary of State who misled his government over the course of the war in Vanni continues to handle the affairs and a US defence attaché makes a mockery of the US boycott of genocidal Sri Lanka’s military conference by participating the conference, the Jaffna academic further said.
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