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.

දාර්ශනික මාක්ස් හා දේශපාලනික මාක්ස්

A reply to Sumanasiri, who holds that Marx the philosopher is not dead. Ivan grants that the world Marx hoped for is more beautiful than liberal democracy, but separates the philosopher from the politician. Drawing on Dmitri Volkogonov’s biographies of Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin, drawn from the opened Soviet archives, he argues that attempts to build Marx’s world produced tyranny, likens Pol Pot, Wijeweera and Prabhakaran to those figures, and concludes that capitalism cannot be replaced and must be reformed through liberal democracy, his preferred model being Gandhi’s India.

ප්‍රචණ්ඩ අරගලයේ දුෂ්ට චක්‍රය

Writing in the first person, Ivan defends a view that angered Tamil intellectuals at a seminar: that the LTTE’s demand for absolute power should be met but confined to Tamil areas. He argues that every violent movement ends by devouring its own dissenters, citing Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky and Bukharin, the JVP’s killing of former comrades and the LTTE’s murder of Amirthalingam and Neelan Tiruchelvam, and advises dissident Tamils to stand aside while Prabhakaran is judged by the Tamil people.