Is There A Substitute For Simple Physical Bravery?

By Emil van der Poorten -April 30, 2014

Emil van der Poorten

With all the posturing that goes on in this (and other countries as well), one begins to wonder whether the movements of resistance are hamstrung by two factors: their very middle-class composition and their abject cowardice at so much as the suggestion of physical violence of any kind.

Sometime ago, I wrote a piece to the pre-Asanga Seneviratne Sunday Leaderwhich spoke to the fact that the only journalists with intellectual and ethical “cojones”  were women.  Nothing seems to have changed over those years and while the likes of “Forums” of one description or another continue to “tut-tut” their way across the printed pages of English-language journals which are only too ready to use such puffery in order to maintain the absolute fraud that is “media freedom” in Sri Lanka, cojones seem confined to those who are biologically not supposed to have them.  Typically, since I wrote that piece several of these women have been pushed off the pages of the English media and are able only to find publication in foreign journals and/or web publications.  The fact that a media controlled by the launderers of government behavior has contributed to this state of affairs is hardly surprising and the only thing more obscene would have been the recognized (by the public) and cherished (by the government) narcotics barons moving to “front and centre” positions in the print trade.  Ah, well, give them time because, as they say, all good things come to those who wait!

Reverting to the title of this piece, what is evident to anyone with even a tiny bit of intelligence and observational skill is the fact that these women and a (very) few men are, literally, risking their lives in their efforts to “tell it like it is.”  There has been speculation that Mel Gunasekera might have met her most untimely death because she was mistaken for another high-profile critic of the government bearing the same last name.  Stranger things have been known to happen so something like this should hardly be cause for surprise!

But, in a land where the drug baron and the contract killer are the crème de la crème of society and where persuasion’s last journey is conducted in a white van, it does take a modicum of physical bravery to go on record in criticism of the most corrupt and violent government in the history of Sri Lanka                 .Read More