Features

Recalled to Life: America’s Brush with Neo-Fascism

Published

5 years ago

2021/01/17

by Kumar David

Several months ago when things were coming to a boil I argued that despite Trump’s autocratic intentions, expectations of a collapse of democracy in America were unduly gloomy. It was my view that society and polity was more robust than many gave credit for and that at rock bottom fascism was impossible though appalling events were likely – and did occur after November 3, 2020. My case for the sturdiness of American polity was (Quoting):

a) The people are unusually robust and independent. It is very difficult for some Mussolini mob to cow down 100s of millions of over-‘testosteroned’ Americans.

b) Constitutional processes are very strong. If DJT loses the election, as seems likely, he will be escorted out. His riff-raff won’t be able to stop that.

c) Except for the Trump loonies (maybe 25% of the electorate) even the GOP won’t be able to stomach an unconstitutional grab for power. Nor will the Supreme Court, even with the new nominee in place, sanction it.

d) The military will not move grossly unconstitutionally.

In comparison, SL is a banana republic since it does not have (a) to (d), nor does it have deep 200 year old constitutional traditions, nor virile public opinion. (END QUOTE).

I have been proved more correct than I imagined possible but time has moved on and we will, post January 20, have to give thought to America’s future after its brush with disaster. It will not, within foreseeable historical times, become a dictatorship; that is impossible. What is possible is unrest, skirmishes and political instability, mediated by livelihood issues, equity concerns and racial tension. And don’t forget that what transpires in America will be influenced by, and will determine what happens in the rest of the world. My concern for the protection of American democracy – socialism is not imminent – brought a sharp rebuke from a reader, a Mr or Ms Ajay, who cautioned “Sometimes one wonders if (KD’s Marxism) has gone too far in the opposite direction and defected to the West; it appears he is looking at the world through American eyes”. A brief diversion to explore modern Marxism is therefore warranted.

The theoretical and philosophical crux of classical Marxism consists of two concepts; dialectics and the materialist outlook. To keep it simple let’s say dialectics is the same as how science comprehends change, development and evolution. Forget the mumbo-jumbo of interpretation-of-opposites, quantity transforming into quality etc. inherited from Hegel and reflect on how science thinks of change. The classic example of dialectics in science is not Marx, it is Darwinian evolution. Darwin’s observations of species change, followed by Mendel’s population genetics, leading all the way to 21st century genetics (some call it genomics) is dialectical. How and why do things change? What dynamic drives mutations, metamorphoses, transformations and revolutions in the physical, biological and the social world; how do we employ concepts to generalise and abstract processes of change? That is dialectics at work in nature and its comprehension in thought. If you are practical scientist who is not philosophically inclined, forget all this and get on with your real-world science.

The materialist conception of society and history, however, affects us all, especially if you have an interest in sociology or politics. Marx’s materialism argues that the way humans and societies “produce and reproduce” their material lives is crucially important. Work, skills even in primitive times, production and technology, and even war to grab more resources, are the raw material of what is called historical materialism. On this foundation, societies organise, appropriate the usufruct as per their social organisation – class structure – and therefrom issue unavoidable class struggles leading at times to revolutionary makeovers of the state. Ideology, that is what people think of themselves and others, (great Imperial Civilisation, Tamil is the oldest living language, God’s command to subdue the heathen, our glorious Mahavamsa culture) are not garbage, Marx never said that. But he did think that ideas are a product, to a prodigious extent, of the aforesaid social premises. Of course ideas reflects back as any good dialectician will grant. For example, the rise of Islam cannot be grasped without knowledge of Arabian society; but in turn the impact Islam has had on the world is driven by its belief systems. My plea to Mr/Ms Ajay is that I try to be loyal to these essential premises while I think through day to day issues which of course is the job of this column.

What about modern Marxism? True, Marx did not pay enough attention to race and ethnicity and focussed on class. Second, great advances in science and technology, and their intrusion into production and society – just think communications, electricity, IT, aviation, space travel, and the impact of social media – are a new world (Marx would call then advances productive powers) to be assimilated. Third, Marx left his life’s project incomplete. He did not complete Kapital (just the first volume and 75% of the second; the third was a trunk-load of scrawls and scribbles). The work on the State, Finance and Internationalism, once projected by young Marx, would have needed a few life times to complete! Legions of latter day Marxists have devoted themselves, sometimes reaching contradictory conclusions, to these tasks. It is totalising and assimilating all this that makes modern Marxism. It blends seamlessly with the values of the Enlightenment – liberty, reason and justice. This is certainly not the same as ‘Liberalism’ so pejoratively spoken of today.

That was an expensive digression in word-count terms. Enough lofty abstractions, back to my topic. I spoke confidently of political stability in the US but the scene these last two months is distressing. Following the Trump incited storming of the Capitol by extremist mobs fed on lies and conspiracy theories, it has come to light that members of the Capitol Police Force were involved in opening gates and the invasion; officers have been suspended, more than a dozen are under investigation; hundreds of rioters have been arrested; staff are being probed for sedition and conspiracy. The FBI says armed militias are organising in all 50 State capitals on 20 January to coincide with the Biden-Harris swearing-in and a 4,000 person armed neo-Nazi rally is planned for Washington DC. The Mayor of DC, a Democrat has called on people not to attend the inauguration to avoid confrontation. Twitter, Facebook and Amazon have banned Trump; the House impeached him for a second time (another first in US history) a week before he leaves office; the Trump mob is enraged; death threats have been made against Bidden, Harris and Pelosi. What a month!

The Transport Secretary and Education Secretary (Cabinet Ministers) and the Attorney General (Minister of Justice), the National Security Advisor, the White House Chief of Staff and a gamut of officials have resigned in recent days and been replaced by nondescript persons or people of questionable repute. A TV commentator asked “Who is the government? There is no government now”. Two state-powers are running the country in parallel. To resort to a Leninist imagery, it is ‘Dual Power’ but of an unusual form. (Lenin used the term for the September to December 1917 period when two ‘governments’ ran separate structures of state and military command – the Provincial Government and the Petrograd Soviet).

Geographically separated dual power existed in Lanka at the time the LTTE governed the Vanni. I don’t want to overdo it, but the allegiances of sections of US State apparatus these weeks is suspect. I have known America from 44 years ago when I spent a year in New York as a visiting professor, but have never seen anything like this; these ugly shouting matches in public places. I am truly afraid that the US is headed for deep and protracted conflict.

As I write these lines, a suicidal attempt at a Trumpist putsch, with or without his personal involvement, but incited by him, is not impossible. Spokesmen on American TV fear that a desperate lunatic in the White House with his finger on the nuclear button bent on creating turmoil in whose fog he can prolong his tenure is perilous. I have to modify these passages very day as the situation changes. Trump visited Alamo town last Tuesday in a last ditch effort to fire up the faithful. The symbolism is rich; “The Alamo” a fortress nearby, was the site of a battle between Texas and Mexico in 1836 in which every American soldier was killed.

I have asserted in this column on previous occasions that the way forward in America depends primarily on addressing the livelihood concerns of the poorest miserable half of society; this is the way to castrate the Trump base – cutting the existential ground under its feet. However this is premised on the new Administration restoring normalcy in the sense that it can govern at all in the face of millions who believe that the election was stolen. The rioting mobs invoked by Trump are determined to prevent just that; the ultra-right and the fascist are dead set on preventing Team-Biden from getting started on the task of governance. This is dangerous since there may be no option but to meet it head on with force; crush or capitulate. The great undefined then is not confrontation per se but the use of state power. Lanka has had the dreadful experience of what happens when a Sinhala State and a Tamil Insurrection collide violently. No one wins; no one has won yet; the country still lies in economic shambles and the state is turning increasingly authoritarian.

Nevertheless I do not envisage a fatal blow to American democracy within the next four years though the unfolding rebellion is ugly and putting it down by force may be the least desirable but only feasible option. I wonder what my former HK colleagues and Western liberal media and commentators, who encouraged nine months of non-stop rioting and destruction of public property in Hong Kong, now have to say! I hold Hong Kong’s Pan-Democrats, student mobs and their foreign cheer-leaders entirely responsible for the repressive laws enacted by Beijing and for denting the One-Country-Two-Systems programme which was chugging along tolerably, though not without hiccups and burps.

China will become the world’s largest economy and a diplomatic and military power on par with the US soon, but as a global exemplar and a moral influence the American legacy will last. The PRC’s economic model will be the preferred strategy for developing countries, but China’s moral influence will be crippled unless the Communist Party learns to live with other mass inspirations such as Islam in Xinjiang Province.

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Features

The Division Bell Mystery

Published

2 days ago

2026/05/29

Thilina Walpola

Tales of Mystery and Suspense 3

The murder, in a private dining room in the house, is of a financier with whom the government was negotiating a loan. When this seemed difficult the Minister of Home Affairs agreed to lead discussions, since he had known Mr Oissel the financier when they were young. Hence the private dinner, but when the Minister stepped out for a vote, Oissel was shot just as the Division Bell rang.

The Brahms and Simon detective novels, the first of which I wrote about last week, were amongst several books by the pair that Robert Scoble gave me when I was in Australia towards the end of last year. Amongst them was another thriller of a very different sort, though that too was written and set between the wars.

Called The Division Bell Mystery, it was set in the House of Commons, the first such book I believe, and was by Ellen Wilkinson, a Labour MP who became Minister of Education in Attlee’s government after the war, having served previously as Parliamentary Private Secretary to several ministers. Her hero Robert West is also a PPS, but a conservative, and his Minister, of Home Affairs, is an old style aristocrat, not much loved by the less orthodox Prime Minister, who nevertheless needs his support on many occasions.

The murder, in a private dining room in the house, is of a financier with whom the government was negotiating a loan. When this seemed difficult the Minister of Home Affairs agreed to lead discussions, since he had known Mr Oissel the financier when they were young. Hence the private dinner, but when the Minister stepped out for a vote, Oissel was shot just as the Division Bell rang.

West was just outside the door when the shot was heard, and when he opened it saw only the dead body with a revolver beside it. The assumption that this was suicide was however challenged by Oissel’s grand-daughter Annette, who was his heir, on the grounds that he would never have killed himself. But her view was given greater credence by the Inspector put in charge of the case who said there were no burn marks on the body which would have been the case had Oissel fired the pistol himself.

Matters are complicated by the fact that Oissel’s flat had been burgled while he was at dinner, and Jenks the policeman allocated to him, who had served the Home Secretary and seemed more acceptable to Oissel than someone from the Security Service, had been killed. Matters get even more complicated when Annette says her grand-father’s notebook in which he wrote his secrets in cipher was missing.

That was found in Jenks’ pocket, and then a photographer came to West to say he had been asked by Jenks to photograph this. More worryingly for West, he finds in the Home Secretary’s drawer a few pages from the notebook with what appears to be an interpretation of the cipher.

Ellen

Overwhelmed by all this he confides in a recently created peer who knows all about the business world, who insists that they leave the house party at which they had met over dinner and discuss the matter with the Prime Minister who promptly summons the Home Secretary.

But the Home Secretary had gone to Scotland to launch a ship over the weekend, so the meeting could take place only on the morning of the Monday, when difficult questions were expected on the adjournment motion. He admits at the meeting that he had got Jenks to take the notebook, and also that he knew the code since it had been created by him and Oissel when they were young.

He thought he should resign, and even contemplated suicide, but the Prime Minister told him that that would be even worse for the government, and that he should go home to bed. The Prime Minister said that he himself would handle the question, which he did with aplomb, insisting that confidentiality was needed until the inquest. What had happened would be made clear then, he declared, leaving West and Inspector Blackit and Lord Dalbeattie what seemed the impossible task of solving the murder.

Dalbeattie had suggested that West ask a female Labour MP who was very fond of him to get what information she could from the staff. That there was some involvement there had become clear when West, going back late one night to collect a briefcase he had left in a dining room, found someone lurking in the dark in the corridor outside the private rooms. Room J, where the murder had happened, was meant to be guarded throughout by a policeman, but he had left the room having felt dizzy, and it seemed that his coffee had been drugged. West’s sudden appearance however had prevented anyone else getting into the room.

Dalbeattie decides to recreate the scene of the murder and has a dinner party in Room J on the Tuesday night, inviting West and Annette and the society hostess at whose house he had met, and also Patrick Kinnaird, an MP who was engaged to Annette, as well as the Permanent Secretary to the Home Ministry.

After coffee Inspector Blackit comes in with Grace, the Labour MP who had got the confidence of the staff, and a journalist who had also been helpful, and just as they say they think they are on the track the division bell rings. Grace jumps up and tells the Inspector that that provides the solution and they get a ladder, and sure enough find the revolver in the space where the bell is. Directed at the place where Oissel had sat, it had been primed to go off with the ringing of the bell. The waiter who had helped to set things up made clear who the murderer had been.

The reason for the murder and the confused motives of all those involved made for a fascinatingly intricate mix. But also impressive in the book were the descriptions of the isolation possible in the crowded premises of the house, the forceful characterization of the members – Grace based on the writer, the society hostess based on Nancy Astor, the first female MP – and the laid back nature of senior politicians which West realized had to change in the brave new world of high finance.

Features

The challenge of keeping value-based politics alive

Published

3 days ago

2026/05/28

Sahan Weerasooriya

Anti-migrant protests in Durban, South Africa. BBC

The current outbreak of anti-immigrant protests in Durban, South Africa is bound to have taken many a subscriber to value-based politics or political idealism quite by surprise. After all, this is evidence that despite the historic accomplishments of nation-builders of the stature of the late President Nelson Mandela it cannot be taken for granted that identity politics, including racism in its worst forms, is no more in South Africa.

At the time of this writing details are scarce on the substantive root causes of the protests but it could very well be that economic grievances, particularly on the part of the majority community in South Africa, are contributing considerably to the disaffection. Shrinking employment and material prospects are likely to figure majorly among the factors igniting the unrest.

Fortunately, the local authorities in Durban are losing no time in calling for peaceful co-existence among the relevant communities and are pointing to the vital importance of stepping-up national integration processes. Apparently, immigrants in sizable numbers from neighbouring countries are present in Durban. However, international TV footage of the protests quoted some local authorities as saying that the majority of the immigrants in some centres that housed them were not illegal migrants and had the documents that entitle them to be in Durban.

In the Durban protests the world has fresh proof of the socially divisive consequences of the gathering globe-wide economic disaffection, touched off particularly by the continuing crisis in West Asia. Going ahead, the world would need to brace for increasing identity-based unrest of the kind it is just witnessing in South Africa.

Considering that the material lot of ordinary people everywhere could only aggravate progressively, with the US and Iran showing no signs of negotiating an end to their confrontation any time soon, it will be left to the more democratic and progressive sections of the world community to initiate positive measures collectively to bring a measure of relief to the discontented.

The swiftness with which such relief will be provided would depend crucially on the importance those sections taking up these undertakings attach to value-based politics as opposed to Realpolitik of power politics.

Going by these yardsticks, Italy could be considered to be moving in the right direction. Recently Italy came to the fore in initiating the collective named, ‘Rome Coalition for Food Security and Access to Fertilizer’, which has as one of its aims the swift provision of fertilizer to economically weak African countries.

In a recent statement Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, Antonio Tajani, said that a principal aim of the project was to ensure that the farmers of Africa gained easy access to fertilizer, considering that food security is a growing concern among some of Africa’s economically vulnerable countries.

The statement went on to mention that some 30 countries hailing from the Mediterranean region, the Middle East, the Balkans as well as the FAO had been invited to join the coalition. The venture is far-seeing in that food security is main among the reasons for social discontent which in turn could degenerate into endemic political turmoil and bloodshed. Separatist violence and geographical fragmentation of countries wouldn’t be too far behind these developments, as Africa itself has often proved.

It is hoped that more G7 countries would take the cue from Italy and do what they could to ease the hardships of economically distressed countries, particularly of the global South. In these efforts they would need to break rank with the US, which is today brutally indifferent to the consequences of its policy of making ‘America First’, come what may.

Going by current developments, the Trump administration seems to be blithely oblivious to the wider, deleterious effects of its policy course in West Asia. Besides rendering Iran militarily and otherwise impotent nothing else seems to matter to Washington, as regards West Asia. This is policy short-sightedness of an extreme kind. After all, right now West Asia could be said to be sitting on the proverbial powder keg.

On the other hand, Iran is not giving the world the impression that it is doing anything constructive to get out of the policy straitjacket that it wove for itself decades ago. Rather than enter into a policy of ‘live and let live’ in relation to Israel in particular and initiate a process of reconciliation with the latter, it has chosen to operate within policy parameters that continue to damn Israel. This has put Israel always on the ‘defensive’ so to speak and prevented the opening up of space for meaningful dialogue.

That said, Israel is obliged to explore the possibilities of entering into a negotiatory process with the Arab-Islamic world that could lead to a de-escalation of tensions and bloodshed. It cannot continue to look at its neighbours through lenses that distort them as archetypal enemies who should be ‘wiped off completely from the face of the earth.’

In other words, the need is urgent for Realpolitik to give way to value-based politicks. Italy is beginning to prove that the latter approach could be pursued with some success. May be the EU and the UK could throw their weight behind these initiatives as well and establish that international politics could be refashioned on the basis of humane, civilized norms. The UN would need to be fully supportive of these moves and prove an organizational nucleus of the operations that follow.

In fact the time is ripe for people of conscience to collectively stand up on the side of peace and say ‘No’ to war and violence. Organizations such as the ICRC, the WHO and Medicines Sans Frontiers have already taken up this call. Referring to the widespread destruction of health facilities and their dehumanizing results these organizations have said, among other things, that ‘This is not a failure of the law. It is a failure of political will.’

True, ‘failure of political will’ among those powers that matter accounts for the runaway, uncontrollable nature of war and destruction in contemporary times, but more fundamentally it is a failure of the human conscience. It could very well be that the phenomenal levels to which violence and war have been unleashed today have had the effect of deadening consciences. This is a matter for urgent study and wide discussion.

Features

Vesak celebrations … with Cuteefly

Published

3 days ago

2026/05/28

Sahan Weerasooriya

Perfect for celebrations, gifts, and meaningful occasions // Gift pack

I would describe Indunil Kaushalya Dissanayaka as innovative and creative, and she operates under the name of Cuteefly.

Indunil always comes up with something novel to celebrate special occasions, and she does it with candles … and that’s her profession.

She was in the spotlight when she created a happening scene, with candles, for Christmas, Sinhala and Tamil New Year, and Valentine’s Day.

As lanterns light up Sri Lanka for Vesak, the Colombo-based candle maker is quietly turning wax and wick into little pieces of the festival.

Candles reflecting Vesak themes

Her candles reflect Vesak themes – light, peace, remembrance, giving, etc., to enable you to fill your Vesak celebration with devotion and beauty.

Among her Vesak creations is a lotus-shaped soy candle, scented with sandalwood, lavender, etc., meant to burn during this Vesak Poya Day.

Indunil Kaushalya Dissanayaka: Customers
praise her for her creativity

These handcrafted Vesak candles are perfect for offering at the temple, she says.

What makes her creations so novel is that they come in different shapes, scents, themes, and all are handmade.

What’s more, her customers have heaped praise on her for her creativity.

According to Indunil, her creations are perfect as a thoughtful gift … to bring beauty, unity, and light into every moment.

Says Indunil: “Our beautifully handcrafted Unity candles are designed with premium detail and love, making them perfect for celebrations, gifts, and meaningful occasions.”

Cuteefly, says Indunil, is available online.

Readers could contact Indunil on 0778506066 for more details.

He Facebook Page is: Cuteefly.