Nuts and Nazi, response to Dr Wijeyawickrema

“Dr Wijeyawickrema has proved himself to be incapable of doing even that. If he can pin his thesis on such a whopping lie, one can imagine the veracity of his views on all the subjects he has gone on at length about in this essay and the one that preceded it. Life is just too brief to reply to such racist lunatics and liars.”
_______________

By Dayan Jayatilleka

(July 13, Geneva, Sri Lanka Guardian) If Dr. Wijeyawickrema has a problem with the 13th amendment he must take that up with President Mahinda Rajapakse who said in his most recent interview (recorded June 30th), given to N Ram the Editor in chief of The Hindu that : “Even today somebody said: “The 13th Amendment. We are not for…” I called them and gave them a piece of my mind.” This was part of an answer to N Ram’s question which was as follows: “Now about your political solution. You talked about the 13th Amendment plus”.

I must however thank Dr Wijeyawickrema for sparing me the time and trouble of having to reply him, by the simple expedient of exposing himself as a racist and an ignoramus to boot. In his own words: “…Dr. Dayan Jayatilleke (DJ), a hybrid product of Sinhala-Tamil parents, a talented person, has every right to use any forum that he can lay hands on to promote his 13-A plus plan… Unfortunately hybrid products like DJ serves [sic] as their cat's paws, knowingly or unknowingly.”

Now Dr Wijeyawickrema proves several things here at one go. Firstly he proves that he thinks that remarks about a person’s parentage are important in debating someone’s ideas. It is ill-mannered and boorish.

Secondly it demonstrates that he thinks that having mixed parentage and by extension mixed marriage, Sinhala and Tamil, is a negative thing, of the sort that lends itself to promoting ideas that he thinks are dangerously divisive. In short he is opposed to mixed parentage or what he calls “hybridity”, and is by implication, for ethnic homogeneity or “purity”. I wonder what he thinks of Barak Obama. This negative view of mixed parentage is quite simply, racism of the most undisguised sort. This privileging of a notion of ethnic purity is also a component of fascism, which lent itself to the extermination of the Jews by the Nazis. So Dr Wijeyawickrema condemns himself by his own words as an ill-mannered racist and a fascist.

He also condemns himself as a liar and an atrocious researcher. I do not expect anyone to know my parentage though it is known to the president and half the cabinet and has been known to every Sri Lankan leader commencing with Madam Bandaranaike. Furthermore, and before my existence, my parents were known, as a couple, to every Sri Lankan leader apart from DS Senanayake. They were also known to several heads of state of South Asia. No matter: as I said I do not expect anyone to know that, because it is irrelevant. However, if and when someone chooses to comment on my parentage and bring it in as some sort of explanatory factor, then it is incumbent on such a boorish person, to get his or her facts right.

Now, not only were Mervyn and Lakshmi de Silva (nee Fernando) both Sinhalese, both their parents, i.e. all four of my grandparents, were also Sinhalese. For better or worse, I cannot recall a single Tamil member of my extended family on either side, though there was a good looking Tamil aunt by marriage (but that didn’t last - the marriage, not the looks). Again for better or worse, I do not have any first cousins married to Tamils. I think I have second cousins somewhere who are, but I cannot name them offhand. So my views are not due to mixed or hybrid Sinhala-Tamil parentage. In case he is interested, my patronymic is Ahangama Vithanage, and both my grandfathers and my father were Buddhist. Luckily though, neither of my parents or grandparents were racist ignoramuses like Dr Wijeyawickrema. Furthermore, I have learnt enough Buddhism from my maternal grandfather from Panadura, TR Fernando (member of the BJB and lieutenant of LH Mettananda), who even delivered Dhamma sermons by invitation at the Governor General Sir William Goppallawa’s, to know that while my views on the 13th amendment may be non-Buddhist (and I have never pretended to be a Buddhist), they are not “Un-Buddhist” (as in “Un-Buddhist ideas of DJ”) and cannot possibly be.

As I said, I do not expect anyone to be aware of my parentage but if someone is going to make a reference to it , it is incumbent on that person to do even a cursory Google search which would have uncovered the empirical truth. Dr Wijeyawickrema has proved himself to be incapable of doing even that. If he can pin his thesis on such a whopping lie, one can imagine the veracity of his views on all the subjects he has gone on at length about in this essay and the one that preceded it. Life is just too brief to reply to such racist lunatics and liars.

-Sri Lanka Guardian