Daring to know

My thanks to an anonymous reader who reminded me of Georg Glaser’s moving description of the intellectual paralysis that grew even in the early days of Hitler’s stewardship of Germany. The deadly combination of coercion and consent, gradually increasing like pain threshold, made it possible to annihilate entire groups of people while others simply looked on, or looked away.

As Glaser writes, “dead bodies were found in the surrounding forests, and no one dared to know anything about them. People disappeared without a sound, and their best friends did not have the courage to ask where they had gone. Only very rarely did a scream, a gruesome rumour … make itself heard; they were paid less notice than everyday traffic accidents.”

Robert Gellately in his book, Backing Hitler, says “There was no reason for the Nazis to ‘purge’ the police, because most police found it easy to adjust.” Fortunately for us in this lovely country we have a democratic meritocracy, not a dictatorship or pseudo-democracy. Our election victories are not based on a combination of nationalist propaganda and brainwashing through media control, an imbecilic opposition, rigging and disenfranchisement of various stripes, even brute force.

Highest national priority

Our regime truly embodies family values, which has, quite rightly, become the highest national priority. Politicians and policemen alike look after their sons, protect them from the repercussions of their youthful excesses, grooming them for more serious and less clumsy rites of passage, no doubt.

Throughout the animal kingdom, offspring of even the most ruthless predators must learn from painstaking parental guidance and example, all the while honing their emerging skills through trial and error. The survival of the fittest demands no less, and what if some unnecessary but clearly expendable blood is spilled in the tutelary process? Such squeamishness is a luxury that the super-races cannot afford.

The only problem we can have with this wholesome family-centered worldview is to provide some space for our daughters too, without them having to wait for husbands, fathers and brothers to die in order to become politically acceptable. But we’ll get there in our own good time, because we don’t want Western notions of gender equality to corrupt our pure cultures which have done the right thing by men and women for three thousand years, thank you.

Germanesque amnesia

Therefore, most intellectuals and academics, captains of industry, gurus of development, purveyors of religious wisdom, opinion makers, the rich and famous, the movers and shakers, and so on, do not have a problem of Germanesque amnesia or, to continue the biological metaphor, the three-monkey syndrome. We can sit back and relax, secure in the firm conviction that our country is in safe hands, and will continue to prosper in this safety for a long time to come. So reassuring for us men who love their families, especially their sons, and us women who are even more committed to this dream than our husbands.

Thus, reading about the early days of Hitler’s regime is a complete waste of time for us in Sri Lanka today, and one that will give us no insights at all into the ways in which middle class and elite alike actively supported, tacitly condoned or at the very least dared not know what exactly was going on.

The Emergency has been extended according to the Prime Minister to “silence the guns of the underworld.” Dead bodies have been regularly found in highly populated street corners (not forests like in Germany: see what an important difference), and perhaps this is a promise of more to come; the underworld’s insane desire to escape captivity is proving to be deadly for them (when will they ever learn?), but let’s be honest — we don’t really care about what happens to criminals as long as they stay out of our hair. Journalists — ditto. IDPs — double ditto.

A bunch of lazy parasites

University students surely deserve all they get, and academics are a bunch of lazy parasites anyway, so what’s the problem. The SLIIT student? Well, I’ve told my putha not to get involved in any fights (he’s a good boy, very religious too), and besides he’s getting a place in Muddy Waters University, USA, next year.

Columnists will write about injustice perpetrated on killers and drug dealers, terrorists and rapists, alleging that they are the  result of government crackdowns. They will tell us it is selective; they will seek to depress us with stories of doom and gloom. That’s what they’re paid so handsomely to do, but we know better. Don’t cry wolf. When it’s a serious infringement of rights, tell us and we’ll think about it, but in the meantime let us enjoy our peace (of mind) and concentrate on our jobs, lives, families, please.

Where, dear reader, will you draw the line? Is an impending election at which the public media are prohibited even as observers not serious enough a portent of things to come? Journalists rig elections, intimidate voters, impede democracy so they must be left out, while armed militaries and para-militaries with records of terror and violence are conducive to the unfettered exercise of popular choice, right?

Uncertain and clumsy

The rule of law is uncertain and clumsy, filled with delays and abuse, so is it not easier and more just to entrust the implementation of justice to those whose track record has been pure and non-partisan, our police force?

If ours is a society in which only criminals (and their families) are affected by the arbitrary elimination of those accused of criminal activity, only Tamils (naturally, especially their families) are moved when other Tamils are ill-treated, none but friends and family are appalled when a young woman is abused, then we deserve the future that is in store for us in Sri Lanka.

I place in this category the charities we perform as Sinhala to Sinhala, Tamil to Tamil, Muslim to Muslim, Christian to Christian, Buddhist to Buddhist, Hindu to Hindu, because these (though “positive” acts) reinforce the same essence where we feel for and help only our own, not those in greatest need or whose rights have been most violated.

 Impervious to injustice

There are many variations of the theme that if we are impervious to the injustice meted to others, we too will be alone and isolated when our time to face injustice emerges. This, however, is an instrumental and self-centered argument, and one that many have counted on in their calculated silence.

They believe that if they play their cards well they’ll never be singled out, and, hence, do not need to take up common cause with others. This may be true, but ethics has little connection to direct personal benefit. It is ultimately a matter of individual (and thereafter collective) conscience.

Do you dare to know, for “after such knowledge, what forgiveness?”

If we cannot bring ourselves to dare, know that this diminishes us in the most fundamental of ways. Worse still, it is this stubborn refusal to know (understood as the courage to recognise a fact or trend, however distasteful and destabilising, and to act on this knowledge, whatever the consequences) that has seen history repeat itself in post-independence Sri Lanka as a series of catastrophes.

(gongalegodaya@hotmail.com)