Deliberate act of disinformation; Prabhakaran a Roman Catholic

In Monsoon, by Robert Kaplan, senior adviser to American foreign policy makers, in the chapter on SL, Prabhakaran was deliberately referred to as Roman Catholic not once but three times. That was a deliberate act of disinformation – he deliberately emphasised a lie. One can only surmise nefarious intent when something as blatant as that occurs.

Now we have “The Economist” in its latest edition saying that MR’s star sign is Virgo (see link below). Really? In November? When did the star signs slip so far?

Either top level academics and professionals in the West are slipping in academic integrity or this is deliberate. I lean to the deliberate option because both points of misrepresentation are easily verifiable facts – any trishaw driver and his wife, any hotel or resort employee, any employee of Barefoot or Odel’s or the grocery stores or MacDonalds (people that foreigners encounter easily) could clarify those two facts for any foreign academic or professional. It seems that there is a subtle campaign of manipulating the facts going on. First they manipulate apparently inconsequential facts. Then they move on to more consequential facts. I suspect that this is where we are – revving up to move on to deliberate misrepresentation of more consequential facts.

I’m not sure, though, how inconsequential the two misrepresentations above are. By calling Prabhakaran a Roman Catholic, they can appeal to North American and (more conservative) European inclinations to “protect church people.” Protestants are more liberal and more indifferent: Protestants are more inclined to let people take the consequences of their actions, so they won’t jump to the defense of total strangers on the other side of the world. So by calling VP a Roman, Kaplan and his associates put themselves in a good position to whip up sentiment amongst people who would then be invited to express their “concern” about the prevailing regime here. Besides, there are more Romans than Protestants here anyway.

With the second misrepresentation above, by saying that MR is virgo, they establish a gulf between him and Prabhakaran, rendering him “The other.” Both these chaps, MR and VP, were born in the same month, but by distancing MR from VP, it makes it easier to attack MR.

What’s insidious about this is that the nasty stuff is being written by people who have no idea what the inside of a church looks like. What’s worse is that they are setting up a Buddhist-Christian antagonism. Has anyone responded to that ridiculous Kaplan to point out the deliberate error in his book? I shall write to “The Economist” about their error. The West is deliberately cultivating the minority groups in a bid to get them to turn against and vote against MR. The latest edition of “The Economist” is now loose in SL with the disinformation. We need to be proactive about countering the lies.

I realise that most of you on this list would rather not have MR in for a third term. That’s fine. Go ahead and vote against him. It is, however, crucial to stand against foreign misrepresentation of our context. If we let them get away with the disinformation, we are pretty well agreeing to every manipulation that follows. By standing up to them, we refuse lower levels of manipulation of our country. That’s the only reason I’m asking for everyone to write to “The Economist,” the papers, the magazines, the websites and so on. We need to put our collective foot down and let them know that we will not acquiesce when lies are spoken about us no matter how apparently trivial.

Source: www.economist.com

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