Sunday, June 17, 2012

What the dog brought in this morning's newspapers - The Government misinformation campaign is on overdrive


Today’s Nation newspaper another mouthpiece of the State is on a dedicated campaign to mislead their readership of a division between the SF campaign and the UNP and to continue to portray the UNP as one in league with the LTTE. By highlighting an interview with Buddhika Pathirana with him saying that police and land powers should be given to the North,(an insignificant portion of the interview) this attempts to further add a spanner of mischief into the debate of Reconciliation.

They are on a diatribe to proscribe a sincere attempt by a very patriotic MP in the form of Wijedasa Rajapakse who sees the few Buddhist clergy in Parliament as another barrier in the portrayal of Buddhism as a purely peaceful and non threatening philosophy devoid of any malice and enmity against any other religious belief. In fact he is protecting Buddhism from opportunists who use it to further selfish aims, and spread lies. He to me is more of a Buddhist than the MP priests.

Today’s Sunday Observer states that the Ven Athureliya Rathana Thera says that Bhikkus always represented the national interest! It is obvious it is his interpretation of national interest that it protects, which actually destroys a nation, an obvious traitorous act, which cannot be condoned. Do not forget it is a small number of Bhikkus who give the clergy a bad name, and so his using the collective of all Clergy is in itself wrong.

The intention it appears that this Newspaper, as a matter of editorial policy has no intention of being fair and balanced but even as the majority oppose the regime, to show by way of division that it is only the Govt. which has a dubious mandate to do as they please. Sadly Sri Lanka does not have a paper that tries to glaringly show their disgust to counter such balderdash that is written today.

An uneducated nation, taught to believe what is written and not to reason, falls for this trap, time and again and have to pay a price of years of destruction to appease the virulent racists on both extremes of the debate.

It is therefore important to appeal for people of sound mind to reason, and form their opinions based on different aspects of reasoning so that once they are able to look at different angles including the extremist positions of both sides, realize what is obvious.
Giving SF a level of leadership that he does not have, further misleads the public. Balanced opinion will portray his attempts as being opportunistic, which can only gain traction within one of the two main political parties and not from outside. This campaign to imply he has a following that can be sustained is also a ploy by the state, using another pincer paper, Ceylon Today to extol the virtues of SF at the behest of the state. The cunning of the Government in power knows no bounds and their slaves who report on their behalf have such a low level of understanding (see the previous blog entry) that even they are fooled.

Little wonder that the journalists of the Nation, another pincer in the campaign, are completely fooled as to what their part in the show is!  If they have any self respect they would jump ship, but as they are still hidebound by the educational establishment that has not taught them to think, are tone deaf to reason.

It is now up to the rest of us to do our utmost to teach our youth to think. Only then will we be able to reason with them. If you cannot think, you cannot reason. Hence with journalists of the Sri Lankan tribe are of the unreasonable sort, except for a handful, who have to carry the cross of reason for a whole nation, and find it hard to penetrate the minds of readers as thinking is as alien to them as taking flight with a pair of wings.

I have now followed the biases of about 100 journalists in Sri Lanka, and realize that many are mindless parrots looking for an easy way out, by espousing safe causes and leads. It is interesting to note that I have observed that the few female journalists I have followed have more of an independent mind and are the least swayed by what they see and read, and only believe once they are able to evaluate from different sources what the truth and opinion of a story are.

I was talking to a senior retiree from the forces, who was convinced that the Hambantota killings was a work of a break away paramilitary group bent of mischief on behalf of the Government. Obviously they are either currently serving in the tri-forces or have just left their service and are part of a goon squad set up by the government to instill fear amongst those who oppose the regime. Coming from Hambantota, the bastion of the regime it is all the believable, but as I said it came from someone who knows how paramilitaries are set up and operate within an existing set up 

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