by Rajpal Abeynayake
Hosni Mubarak was a successful dictator until he decided to install his son after him. Mubarak may last but the movement that has shaken comfortable imperialist backed regimes the world over cannot now be turned back.
In Sri Lanka, all would-be dictators learnt that it ends all too soon — and if JR was low- tackled by the JVP and Premadasa in the waning 80s, the latter was overtaken by his own hubris and his pitiable underestimation of the enemy, the LTTE, which he thought he had transformed into his own malleable putty, having cast his own special spell on those ghoulish merchants of terror. What hubris?
This was all part of the 500 year syndrome. And yet this is the thickest season for change. Empires are coming undone 10-1due to a combination of factors — the folly of greed and resultant economic collapse, incredible changes in the weather patterns and resultant damage, and the power of the information age which has allowed for the best laid plans of mice and men to be discovered, to their chagrin, by the common hordes.
Julian Assange now nominated for the Nobel Prize is the ultimate iconoclast who changed the global power calculus by releasing documents in defiance of the apparent internal security concerns of the big powers.
The currents of change generated by all of the transforming factors stated above would change the world - and, as surely as they do, change this country now.
Here then are some possible scenarios in which transformative global events would force the pace of transition in this country in the current decade:
The president has spoken about a possible food crisis.
But, in this part of the world, it could be the least of his worries. It is more likely that no regime here would be left untouched by the current blitzkrieg of street level sensitization of people to the erosion of essential values.
If it happens in the most docile of polities, it could be a matter of time before it happens in Sri Lanka though People Power in this country is an idea which is generally treated as some huge joke.
The biggest crisis of values in those fallow years of neo liberal economic domination on planet Earth, was that the common denominator was not given leadership by people who had the courage of their convictions.
Conviction was a commodity in such short supply that one often wished one’s own detractors had it; nay, displayed a smidgen of it. But neo liberalism was a mass opiate. We continue to suffer from the hangover to date.
Take last fortnight for an example when Orham Parmuk the Nobel prizewinner and his Booker prize-winning beau Desai decided to stay home in Goa and avoid the Galle Literary Festival which had already sold tickets in their name.
For sheer nonchalance, this attitude was priceless. The duo blamed everything except the boycott GLF call for their absence in Galle, but they could have saved everybody the embarrassment of having to put up with their cloying double-act melodrama if they had simply stated the truth being that they were so intellectually intimidated by the boycott call, that they decided to take the easy way out and call it quits.
Okay, they could not have said that without looking like prize idiots, but they could have said that they are answering the boycott call for what it was worth.
Now instead, Nobel and Booker are both names that stand for moral cowardice.
But I digress, because suddenly, the mass of the unwashed are finding their voice. From Tunisia, and then onto Egypt.
It is not a phenomenon that would cover the globe in a day - So Ranil Wickremesinghe who hopes that people would flock the streets from Colombo to Galle to install him in power should pinch himself.
It is the long-term unsustainability of Global Empire and the collapse of the undergirding economic systems that is the striking image in the midst of the furious chaos that surrounds the events of Egypt, Tunisia, and the other flare-points where it is hard to tell economic change apart from weather change in these near apocalyptic times.
The next scenario in Sri Lanka may not happen in the life cycle of this regime - but indigenous revolt, independent of the design of the puppet-masters of the West, is brewing. Every act of corruption, every act of subversive maladministration is adding to the values deficit that would be far more dangerous than any food crisis which would, all said and done, depend on a crisis in commodities, which can always be fixed. This is in contrast to a blowout crisis in governance. One straw there would do, to break the camel’s back.
 The rich and the powerful act as if we would live for 500 years. Quite oft...){kind=link}
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