Features
Pursuit of Knowledge The purpose of war and conflict
Seeing through the myth:
An analysis By Dr. R.R. de Silva
Man’s greatest feat has been his constant pursuit of knowledge. Unlike other sentient beings in the animal kingdom who do, to some extent, display momentary interest such as when ‘having to gain entry to a container of food’, man has constantly delved on matters of philosophical interest such as where we hail from and where we are headed. The entire story of humanity then oscillates between not knowing and not knowing.
Within these two anthropological milestones, a few men have discovered a formula for achieving great comforts at the expense of other men. Whether these men come from the East or West, whether they are white, oriental or black (although most often white), they have but one objective – global domination, holding no less than the rest of the population in bondage.
The average citizen has been made too busy to see through the myth. Prof. Herbert Macusse in his essay, titled “An essay on liberation,” explains in the very first few pages, how the masses are being provided the necessary training to become obedient workers. These obedient voluntary slaves then become the fodder that fuels the major corporations. Living a life tuned into a rhythm of never-ending obligations, the average citizen is programmed through conditioning to feel the need to seek employment, earn a fair living, pay taxes and keep their heads down while looking after family and friends. This, the citizen is expected to continue until death with no regard to “the virtues of selfishness” that Ayn Rand had so beautifully and succinctly articulated in a book by the same name. The Media first sets the standards that alters your needs into wants. Then using the smallest social unit – “the couple” – the corporation drills into the psyche of man, the need to follow the prescriptive path laid out into modern financial slavery. Unbeknown to many, the trap is set as early on as conception as antenatal care costs commence and continue until, as in some countries, such as Japan, where the parents’ debt is handed down to successive generations.
Have you ever stopped to ask yourselves the questions – Why does school last 12 years, and not nine years or 15 years? Why are the subjects we study the subjects we study? Who chose and defined the syllabus? Why are we forced to attend a registered school? Why are we punished for truancy? Why are we put into tribal uniforms – when uniforms divide and are the instruments of mass identity culling. There is rarely room for individuality among uniformed individuals.
Meanwhile, we experienced to a great extent disruption of life and lifestyle through the grace of the Coronavirus (SARS-CoV -2). Suddenly there was no rush and the most important people around the world spent time at home, washing their hands and hiding behind masks. One cannot but stop to wonder what rush our lives had been until then. People began to experience solitude. Many, could not handle the loneliness, the isolation. Many could not live with the people they had vowed to spend their lives with – till the day death parts them. But others picked up very fast and engaged in gardening, reading, watching movies and if one had sufficient stocks even a booze.
Home cooking became option-less and many despite the shortage of material did experiment. Life and nature, at least for a short while, had a break. But alas, the race is back on with possible truths labelled as conspiracies, governments across the globe acting in concert with numbers that do not appear to reflect the true position.
The Coronavirus has rendered borders closed and time immemorial advice to stay together has made a 180 degree turn with government public health advice now to socially distance ourselves from our normal gregarious selves. The last such epidemic, which may have required face masks and social distancing, took place in 1918 at the tail end of World War 1 – the so called ‘Spanish Flu’. Every war as we know has had a purpose.
In the case of the Covid-19 virus, face masks have rendered us asexual and identity-less minimising any form of human interaction, including sexual attraction. In fact, Public Health guidance forbids social contact through enforced social distancing, in some countries even sex is forbidden. How will this affect our population, especially the young and impressionable? Is this a depopulation attempt? The question should cross your mind! Meanwhile, the situation is pushing people towards a cashless society, digitalising the undigitalised, as more and more people are captured by global digital surveillance systems. Pandemic commotion allowing for uncontrolled data harvesting of vulnerable populations by opportunistic governments colluding with corporates. For instance governments have only hitherto dreamt of citizens volunteering their every whereabout.
The purpose of war has always been commerce. Imperial colonisation was the beginning of the exponential ascent of money and wealth for Europeans, in particular, the British, funded by their Monarchy of German descent. To understand this let us take a look at an article from no less than the BBC – the British Broadcasting Corporation, a media group funded by Her Majesty’s UK Government. Lets review World War 1 because that is what children are most likely to be taught first in world history. I say that the purpose of this war was profiteering as this article by the BBC also suggests. After all the British who are now recognized as the frontline saviours of the world in that war actually have German heritage. This is why the Royal family changed its name to Windsor from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha in 1917.
As the bodies piled up in a war known to have been fought in the trenches, technological advancement saw the development of tanks and aeroplanes develop rapidly to be tested on the field while money was being made. However, not enough people were suspicious of this. Why ? The reason is education – the brainwashing that schools undertake on behalf of their corporate masters whose proxies in legislative bodies around the world prescribe for the average citizenry. To understand this let us dig deeper. According to Elizabeth Bruton of Leeds University, what a lot of people did not see was how the war drove technologies that we are using today like the development of communication technology. The Marconi Company, whose founder was Guglielmo Marconi, led the way with transatlantic broadcasts. They developed voice over wireless. Subsequently Mark Harrison, an economics professor at Warwick University, describes the war as a driver for production. According to this professor, the allied forces/ nations out-produced the Germans. On the other hand businesses, such as shoe-makers and shoe polish producers, had done immensely well according to Terry Chairman the historian at the imperial war museum.
Though seen as the ‘war to end all wars (referring to World War 1)’ The BBC article cites Smedley Butler then a US marine corps Major General who had written in 1935 that “war was far too profitable to be impossible again” points to the profits of steel and weapons manufacturers. Munitions maker du Pont had had the value of its stock rise 374% from 1915 to 1918 and had consequently distributed dividends worth 458% of the value of each share. Shipping companies also paid dividends of 44.7% in 1915 and 47.5% in 1916.
Meanwhile, in the public space media promoted the idea of righteousness and noted that outright profiteering that hurt people would be punished heavily. As a result one article in the Western Daily Press reported in November 1917 that Henry Thompson, a Lincolnshire farmer, was fined £1,800 (about £90,000 in today’s money) for selling potatoes above the maximum allowed price. Does this ring a bell? We certainly do not live too far from that.
Finally, the sweeping meant disconnecting from the other side. For example, “Having a German-sounding name like Schweppes was bad for business and lots of firms made a declaration that they were British through and through. “Lyons Tea sued Liptons for suggesting its board were German. Bovril had it in its adverts that it was all-British and always was British,” he says, while hotels and restaurants stated that they had fired their German and Austrian waiters.
And this then is but a part of World War 1’s commercial interests. Did anything in the above paragraphs sound familiar? Well if it didn’t, read on.
According to a research article on the website of the National Bureau on Economic Research, one researcher points out that when World War I began the US economy was in recession. But a 44-month economic boom ensued from 1914 to 1918, first as Europeans began purchasing US goods for the war and later as the United States itself joined the battle. “The long period of U.S. neutrality made the ultimate conversion of the economy to a wartime basis easier than it otherwise would have been,” The researcher adds that “Real plant and equipment were added, and because they were added in response to demands from other countries already at war, they were added precisely in those sectors where they would be needed once the U.S. entered the war.” Moreover, Entry into the war in 1917 unleashed massive U.S. federal spending which shifted national production from civilian to war goods. Between 1914 and 1918, some three million people were added to the military and half a million to the government. Overall, unemployment declined from 7.9 percent to 1.4 percent in this period, in part because workers were drawn into new manufacturing jobs and because the military draft removed many young men from the civilian labour force.”
Today, a few friends who have had difficulty with their payments on leases for their vehicles have shared with me the institutions from which these leases had been sought had not honoured the so called ‘Moratoriums’ that news telecasts across channels in Sri Lanka have spoken so highly of. Yet in another case several individuals are now having to pay even more so than they had had to. Building owners continued to earn albeit in some cases at discounted rates the rent due for the curfew days of March to June, and now for October and possibly November.
But essentially, people dug into their savings, as their fixed deposit interest diminished and interest rate drops have not been passed on to people’s debt as credit card payments, loan repayments as well as leases pile up with no recognition of the situation.
“Minimisation of life’s volatilities is the secret of long term survival”—Dr. R.R. de Silva 2010
References
https://www.hnb.net/media-center/2020/hnb-group-posts-rs-3-3-bn-pat-for-q1-2020
https://www.ndbbank.com/investor-relations/reports
https://www.combank.net/newweb/en/interim-financials
The writer is a doctor of medicine & invites feedback via email to rds001@protonmail.com
Features
The challenge of keeping value-based politics alive
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
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.

Handmade with love
Features
Dark Spots …
Yes, dark spots do crop up on the skin, especially with sun exposure and, of course, as the skin ages.
However, these tips should be of immense benefit to those who are faced with dark spots.
* Lemon and Honey Glow Mask:
You will need 01 teaspoon lemon juice and 01 teaspoon honey.
Mix the lemon juice and honey well and then apply this mixture, only on the dark spots.
Leave for 10–15 minutes and then rinse with cool water.
Benefits:
Lemon helps brighten pigmentation.
Honey moisturises and heals skin.
Gives a natural glow.
* Aloe Vera Gel Treatment:
All you need is fresh aloe vera gel.
Apply the gel apply on dark spots, before going to bed.
Leave overnight and wash in the morning.
Benefits:
Reduces acne marks and pigmentation.
Soothes irritated skin.
Helps skin repair naturally.
* Turmeric and Yoghurt Paste:
You will need 01 teaspoon yoghurt and a pinch of turmeric
Mix the yoghurt and turmeric into a smooth paste and apply on affected areas.
Leave for 15 minutes and then wash gently with lukewarm water.
Benefits:
Turmeric brightens skin naturally.
Yoghurt removes dead skin cells.
Helps fade dark spots gradually.
Use these packs 02-03 times a week as results are generally seen over time.
You can also try this out: Mix a ripe papaya into a smooth paste and apply to the face, or directly on to the dark spots. Leave for 15-20 minutes and then wash with lukewarm water.
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