Why ape the West in trampling free speech?

by Rajpal Abeynayake

(December 15, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) To continue from where this column left off last week, the Oxford fiasco was born out of a desire to pull off a publicity coup. It was a gung-ho move to leave for England, thump the tub and say ‘catch me if you can.’ And it backfired.

But good money was spent, and it was decided that if certain opposition MPs could be scapegoated, all would not have gone waste. Therefore, Jayalath Jayewardene was attacked in Parliament, and Bahu was nearly mauled as he left the airport upon arrival.

Boralugoda Weeraya’s son Dinesh acted in the manner of a cheap hired thug in the House, which goes to show the generational deterioration in terms of the quality of the people who represent us.

A dozen or so journalists may have got beaten up (and some killed) during the war, but the fact remains that there are much deeper-going traditions of freedom of expression in our political culture than in the idolized political culture of the West that is held out to us as example. Helen Thomas a sweet old lady was forced to leave the White House reporters Co. after she was quoted as saying that the Israelites should get the hell out of Palestinian land. Recently, Columbia University withdrew an endowment made in her name for the same reason.

Bill Mahr US talk-show host was forced to leave the cable organization he worked for when he said after the 9/11 attacks that, ‘We have been the cowards, lobbing cruise missiles from two thousand miles away. That’s cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building. Say what you want about it. Not cowardly. You’re right.”

Mahr made the comments responding to a guest on his show who said that those who piloted the aircraft onto the World Trade Centre building are not cowards.
Agree with Bill Mahr or not, that was his right to say what he wanted.

But not in the West, where the message is carefully tailored, in order that the consent of the people could be manufactured for various key policy positions.

The way the political establishment of the US and the Western powers are going for Cyber journalist Julian Assange, should put to rest any fond notions about the West having a better record on freedom of expression issues than we do.

It is true that our fealty to the liberal idea of free speech lands us sometimes in more trouble than we should want.

It is extremely difficult to manufacture a constructive central discourse in this country, because of the diversity of views that are tolerated here.

But we believe in the clash of ideas. There was no McCartysm here; on the contrary the Trotskyites were in Parliament until they proved themselves to be colossal ineffectual failures.

It is this deep-going tradition of free speech that is being challenged when Dinesh and Co. set upon Jayalath Jayewardene, or mobs are unleashed on Vickramabahu Karunaratne.

Bahu in this writer’s opinion is a quaint joker as far as the Tamil issue or the so called post-war debate is concerned. Nobody really pays any attention to him when he says for instance that he ‘mourns the death of Prabhakaran.’ Anybody who mourns the death of this arch fascist tin-pot war-lord — local Pol Pot — should definitely have at least one or two marbles missing in his ensemble.

So why assault irrelevant Bahu?

A sinister political motive cannot be discounted. In the aftermath of the Oxford fiasco, certain political operators may have calculated the potential vote getting benefit of exacerbating the Us vs. Them polarization that exists in the political domain.

Shorn of frills, it was a cynical attempt to catch some more votes before the local government election by reheating yesterday’s jingoism gig.

But this is the cyber age. Reporters Without Borders (RSF) are themselves forced to make some noises about justice for Julian Assange, despite the fact that with its ingrained Western bias RSF still gives top billing on their website to the story of the Nobel award for Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo over the Assange story.

So why not recommend that the next Nobel Prize for peace be give to Julian Assange eh, RSF?

You got to be joking. Not when a past member of the Nobel Hall of Fame, peace laureate Barak Obama himself has turned to be Assange’s chief persecutor, what?
The notion of free speech in the West is that you could say just about anything as long as it is within the structure of the freedoms predetermined by the state. Shades of West Side Story — “Life is all right in America — if you’re all white in America”.

Everybody’s guess is that Wikileaks would have a substantial further chilling effect on free speech in America and the Western cultural domain with the Internet being sought to be policed and regimented in future, though in fact accomplishing that would be harder than bombing the daylights out of Afghanistan.

It’s all the more reason that we cling to our own long-held traditions of freedom of expression without letting a mob led by some half baked parliamentarians mess with our rights to ideas by enthroning mob rule in parliament and elsewhere.