Massacre in Sri Lanka and traffic concerns

Another bloodbath. Another mass-killing. Once again certain forces in the United Nations warned against a coming nightmare, and once again too many ignored the warnings. The New York Times reports UN spokesman, Gordon Weiss, saying that over the weekend the civilian death toll had gone substantially up and included more than 100 children. Thousands have been wounded over the past month and the pain and suffering is incalculable. But once again Western Governments have barely raised an eyebrow to another massacre. Here in Canada Tamils have been engaging in various peaceful protests, ostensibly aimed at just getting a meeting with a representative of Prime Minister Harper’s government. At first the Government said that they would not meet with anyone who was displaying the flag of the Tamil Tigers, because the Tigers are considered a ‘terrorist’ organization and the flag is banned in Canada. (The whole idea of banning a symbol is another sticky issue we can leave for another time.) But even when the Tamil protesters removed the flag, the government refused to meet with them and hear their concerns. And average Canadians seem to be horrified not by the massacres in Sri Lanka but by the gall of protestors ‘holding up traffic’ during their protestors. People forget the long and  significant tradition of peaceful resistance from Thoreau to Gandhi  and the roll that such protest can play in waking people up to important issues. But the real tragedy here is the degree to which Western Governments, particularly right-wing ones, are willing to ignore the brutal militarism of governments with which they are allied, all the while painting practically any resistance movement with the brush of terrorism. The Tamils have legitimate and serious concerns regarding their treatment by the Sri Lankan government, concerns that have been largely ignored by governments in Sri Lanka and elsewhere. Now average people are paying the price for the failure of those in power to act on behalf of the weak and vulnerable. It seems to me that people turn to armed resistance only as a last resort and over time these resistance forces often lose touch with their roots and become little more than criminal enterprises. But the regression into crime and violence is the failure of people and governments to address injustices from the earliest possible moment. The Tamil Tigers may in fact be a terrorist organization. But we need to get past such issues and talk to whoever is willing to talk and speak up for those with no voice. Instead of worrying about whether a protest group is holding up traffic let us open up a discourse with them and try to address their concerns. And most of all let’s remember that governments can be just as criminal and brutal as ‘terrorists’ in the pursuit of their interests and the most vulnerable are always the ones who pay. 

Shelley and the Beliefs of politics

“Belief and disbelief are utterly distinct from and unconnected with volition. They are the apprehension of the agreement or disagreement of the ideas which compose any proposition. Belief is an involuntary operation of the mind, and like other passions, its intensity is precisely proportionate to the degrees of excitement.”  So wrote Percy Shelley in his early prose piece entitled A Letter to Lord Ellenborough, a remarkably eloquent statement from the pen of an eighteen year old boy. And while this passage is a very small part of a fairly long text that deals with the persecution of deists in England, I quote it here because I find it at once interesting and a little scary. I find it daunting because it seems true but its truth has problematic implications for politics. This is because belief doesn’t just form the foundation of religion but people’s politics also seem to be founded on some basic beliefs about what can or should be, what the goals of society should entail etc, etc. We have all experienced this firsthand. Someone has a particularly noxious political belief which they attempt to justify with an elaborate rational discourse which is really just a sophistic defense of some core beliefs. I have argued so many times with people about politics only to find, after a long process, that they have some outrageous belief about people that is not based on any rational discourse but is just a frightening bigotry. (I recently saw this in action when someone was speaking with utter derision of the Tamil protestors that were on Parliament Hill here in Ottawa for nearly a week – disrupting traffic and trying to gain attention for their cause. Instead of addressing the important issues that the Tamil’s were attempting to raise about the bigotry and brutality that the Tamil people have suffered, this person just waved them off as ‘stupid trouble makers.’ ) This is, for me, particularly disturbing in right-wing ideology which is so often rooted in an underlying belief that certain people are simply more worthy of prosperity and power than others. In action we can see this in their continual and nauseating attack on the most vulnerable people in society. This is not to imply that the political positions of left-winger’s are not rooted in certain beliefs; they are indeed. However, I simply find the beliefs of the left, for the most part, more attractive and beneficial than others. They are, I think, rooted in compassion, equity, and a society that not only the strong or connected enjoy prosperity.

Yet, all of this still leaves us with a difficult quandary; how do we engage in political struggle when at the heart of these struggles are beliefs which are not necessarily subject to rational discourse?