What will be Dr. Dayan Jayatilleka’s next stupid question?

" Defending dictators may be a profitable business. It may create some job opportunities, even though the same people who give those jobs can also give them the sack. Then there is a cry and lamentation of unjust dismissal."

by Basil Fernando

(September 17, Hong Kong, Sri Lanka Guardian) In the next article by Dr. Dayan Jayatilleka you are likely to see some four letter words. Having no ideas to express and nothing to defend except the idea of the need of a strong leader, he now resorts to all the insults he can think of. He can’t think of much but he selects the most vulgar. Such is the natural end of anyone who wants to be an advocate for authoritarianism.

The funny part of it is that to defend dictatorship he quotes the names of Lenin, Trotsky, Grasmsci and all the rest. He has forgotten to quote the person he has admired the most for most of his life: Joseph Stalin. Reggie Siriwardene once called this newly baptized political scientist the last Sri Lankan admirer of Joseph Stalin. His being unable to meet with the challenge made to his very claim of being a political scientist is of course no surprise.

His last trick is to find a quote from ‘a serious scholar’, perhaps to give an impression that he is one too. There is nothing in his record to give him any credit for being any kind of a serious scholar. Political stooging to R. Premadasa is of course in his record, and that is not something on which one could claim the right to serious scholarship or to any kind of rationality at all.

Defending dictators may be a profitable business. It may create some job opportunities, even though the same people who give those jobs can also give them the sack. Then there is a cry and lamentation of unjust dismissal.

It is not a scholar but only a fool who could have asked the question, ‘Here’s my problem: If we don’t respect the decision of the courts and disagree with those of the people at repeated elections (which Mahinda Rajapakse wins handsomely), what do we have left, and who is the ultimate arbiter whom the citizens of Sri Lanka should follow?’ Even a student who would ask such a question does not deserve to pass their first year of university. But such ‘political scientists’ are the persons who are educating students of political science in one of our universities.

Please refer to previous article: Lucid Critics and Loony Critics