රට තිබෙන්නේ මහා විනාශයක් අත ළඟය
The country is being pushed towards bloodshed, and it looks like the wish of the government as much as of the LTTE. Norway is close to withdrawing as facilitator and the donor group has given up hope. Ivan reads Soosai’s speech as the sign that the LTTE has come to despair and is preparing to fight by dying — it cannot be defeated militarily, but a war fought in that spirit can destroy an enormous amount.
අන්තෝ ජටා බහි ජටා
When a political system decays and neither the elite nor the society will change it, the collapse comes in a farcical shape — as it did at the end of the Greek city states, where vomitoriums became the newest mark of a distinguished house. Ivan reads Sri Lanka’s present the same way, and tells the president that the road the Hela Urumaya is pointing him down leads to ruin and not to rescue.
නලින් ද සිල්වාගේ සංස්කෘතියේ ප්රධාන සංරචකය
Answering Nalin de Silva’s reply in Irida Divaina, Ivan agrees that the professor meant culture and not mere numbers — and then shows that the measure he uses is the number of people who speak Sinhala and profess Buddhism. He traces the Karava caste’s part in the Buddhist revival, cites the sociologists on its south Indian origins, and ends by saying that a Sinhala Hitler is what this argument is preparing the ground for.
මොළයෙන් වෙනුවට හදවතින් තර්ක කිරීම
Ivan’s August article on the war and the Tamil people was translated into Tamil and English and answered by Kumar David in the Sunday Island and criticised by Gamini Viyangoda. This is his reply to Kumar David: the LTTE and the JVP, freedom from naked power, the separate state, the Vaddukoddai resolution, the silent revolution, and the difference between pride and emotion.
ඔබාමාගේ ජය සැමරුම හා විජේවීරගේ ඉල්මහ සැමරුම
Ivan reads everything written about Obama in the Sinhala press, and finds two sentences in the JVP’s own paper and no analysis at all. The same weekend the papers give Rohana Wijeweera large space. From there he asks the question the two commemorations put together: who may lead this country — and answers that leadership here is still fixed by race, religion and caste, and that the day talent alone decides it is the day the country becomes free.
අවශ්ය ව්යාජ වෙනසක් නොව, අව්යාජ වෙනසකි (මංගල සමරවීරට පිළිතුරක්)
Samaraweera’s reply avoids the arguments and re-describes the man making them: someone who thinks nobody else may change his mind, who has softened a hard position on the ethnic question, who is now propping up the Rajapaksas. Ivan answers each, and says what he actually objects to — a change of government that leaves the right to plunder intact, which is a false change standing in the way of a real one.
විග්නේශ්වරන් මුවහමක් කරගැනීම
Answering Sinhala nationalist attacks on C.V. Wigneswaran, the TNA’s Northern chief ministerial candidate, as a new Anton Balasingham, Ivan argues that the dream of Eelam died with the LTTE. The TNA’s surviving leaders were hostages of Prabhakaran, not his followers, and signalled goodwill that the victors ignored. Wigneswaran — a retired Supreme Court judge who refused to bow to Sarath N. Silva, never an LTTE sympathiser, with children married to Sinhalese — should be welcomed. As Europe learned after the Thirty Years’ War, racial and religious extremism is losing its hold in Sri Lanka too.
රාවය ප්රතිසංවිධාන
Ivan replies to Mahesh Hapugoda, who read his wish to make Ravaya a paper for readers’ wives and children as a slide into Nihal Peiris-style entertainment. He rejects both that reading and its view of women, and offers as proof a piece written for parents and daughters: on whether one needs a hero. His own is Gandhi, with Socrates second; he recalls his lawyer Suranjith Hewamanna, who modelled himself on Dostoevsky’s Prince Myshkin, contrasts J.R. Jayewardene’s Napoleon, and warns through Nietzsche, Wijeweera and Prabhakaran against hero worship.
අවිචාරය, උද්ධච්චකම හා අශීලාචාරත්වය
Ivan argues that by ignoring the judgments of the Supreme Court and the Court of Appeal in the impeachment of the Chief Justice, the government has done what no previous government dared, destroying both the courts’ legitimacy and its own. He traces the Supreme Court’s power to interpret the constitution and the ancient reach of the writ jurisdiction, recalls the Bracegirdle case under colonial rule and Sirimavo Bandaranaike’s certiorari against J.R. Jayewardene’s commission, and warns, with Musharraf’s Pakistan as the precedent, that two rival Chief Justices could now follow.
අර්බුදය ඓතිහාසික දෘෂ්ටියකින් දැකීම
Political outlook is an important factor in whether political struggles bear fruit. Ivan is not a Marxist, and he accepts the idea that theory guides practice: there are political struggles in this country and they happen without a meaningful forward vision, and that is why the fighters have become people running on the spot.