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Violence Rules Every Aspect of Our Lives Today
“I
object to violence because when it appears to do good,
the good is only temporary; the evil it does is
permanent” — Mahatma Gandhi
Gandhi’s point is that violence as a principle is always
destructive and debilitating. It grows like a cancer
upon us. We choose it for only one sphere, but it spills
over into another. We may sometimes feel that the end
justifies the means, that in order to achieve a
desirable result we have to resort in the short-term to
violence in order to overcome an obstacle that appears
otherwise insurmountable. Yet, in doing so we pay a
price that is too high: our entire society is brutalised.
Embarking on violence is similar to selling your soul to
the devil. Beyond a point there is no going back.
Violence is irreversible because once we have broken the
ethical deterrents against committing and justifying
violence, we can no longer stand on the moral high
ground. In order to espouse violence we relinquish our
belief in reason, negotiation and consensus-building,
substituting in its stead the claim that greater
physical (or other) force determines who is superior. We
say that our enemy only understands the language of
force, of violence, but as the conflict drags on we
become more and more like our enemy so much so that in
the end there is nothing to distinguish us.
Violence has seeped in to every nook and cranny of Sri
Lankan society today. We can blame terrorism and the
war, but the cause is not as important now as is its
effect on Sinhalese, Tamils, Muslims, Malays, Burghers,
Adivasi and others. Aggression, hostility, even
brutality, has crept into our religious institutions,
our cultural practices and belief systems. Our ways of
life, once tolerant and hospitable, welcoming of
visitors, has become suspicious to the point of
paranoia, intolerant of any kind of difference, and
narrowly sectarian.
One
simple current example is worth thinking about: this
year’s New Year festivity. It appears that we can no
longer enjoy ourselves without the occurrence of major
incidents of violence. Every village had a surfeit of
fights and altercations. Hospitals were chock full of
evidence that our collective “gentleness” is a myth of
the past. Friends attacked each other over Avurudhu
games, old vendettas were revived, even domestic
violence was reportedly higher than normal. Alcohol may
be the immediate cause, but what often fizzled out as a
drunken argument in the old days now inevitably ends
with a few in hospital or the morgue.
Violence has become an action of first resort, human
life is cheap here. People have become insensitive to
death, suffering and pain. This is brutalization. Gone
are the days when people would be debilitated by the
news of a single death (such as Weerasuriya at
Peradeniya University in 1976) or even a few dozen. We
takes such things in our stride now. The victims of road
accidents regularly find that they are robbed as they
lie bleeding and in pain, by ordinary people who appear
and disappear into the spontaneous crowd that
materialises at the scene of a crash.
This
is not to suggest that people were wonderful before the
war and that they have become terrible now. No, similar
acts of violence and brutality have always taken place
in human society. The difference is that, in the past,
these acts of a small pathological minority generated
public outrage and contempt from a vocal majority,
irrespective of ethnic or religious origin. Today, in
the face of more vicious and systematic violence, the
majority is at best apathetic, and responses to violence
are determined by ethnic and religious affiliations.
Surely, it should be completely irrelevant whether the
persons affected are Sinhala, Tamil, Muslim or
Christian? Sadly, this is not the case in our response
to victims of violence.
Constant exposure to gratuitous violence and its
persistent justification in the name of national
security or anti-terrorism has brutalised us to the
point of insensitivity. This brutalisation has made us
apathetic and cynical in the face of the other forms of
more subtle violence – structural, epistemic – as well
as towards corruption, nepotism and the general
breakdown of the rule of law. From here it is but a
small step towards complete amorality and the belief
that expediency and power (both physical and political)
should determine this country’s course of action
irrespective of any code of conduct or internationally
recognised covenant to which we are signatories.
We
have discussed in previous editorials how violent
election campaigns have become, how candidates fielded
by the main parties have violent and corrupt track
records, and how their real clients are underworld
leaders who have turned to financing politicians to
ensure uninterrupted access to illegal sources of
income. We have demonstrated the nature of the more
subtle violence that is used by unscrupulous businessmen
to rake in huge profits, and we have shown that
government regulatory agencies are both unable and
unwilling to act as watchdogs in the public interest.
All of
us know that the inefficiency, waste, mismanagement and
worse that goes on unchecked in government offices is
debilitating and unfair to those who do not have
influence etcetera to get the job done. Add all this to
the all-consuming violence of the war, and you still
have only the most superficial picture of the multiple,
complex and inter-related ways in which the cancer of
violence has infected our society today. Its secondaries
have begun to attack the very foundations of our
society. For instance, religious belief systems based on
non-violence to all living beings are being distorted to
support military conflict.
Perhaps Bob Dylan was right when he sang, “Democracy
don’t rule the world, You’d better get that in your
head; This world is ruled by violence, But I guess
that’s better left unsaid.” But, then, in the same
idiom, in a metaphorical sense, are we who believe in
democracy, good reason and consensus-building, going to
give up without a fight?
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