By Nalin De Silva.

The thesis on right to protect is in the final analysis based on the concept of so called human rights. As we have said there are no human rights as such but individual rights as against the state and may be as against other individuals. The concept began to evolve with the renaissance or the modernity in the fifteenth century in Europe. It is not quite clear as to the origin of the concept of modernity but it is obvious that the name given modernity stems from the arrogance of the western mind. Those who formulated the concept probably thought that the world ended with modernity and what the west had achieved is the end result of social evolution. They probably thought that there would not be any evolution after the modernity phase and there was no harm in naming the process that began in the fifteenth century so as to give the impression that it is the climax of social evolution. They would not have thought that some of their successors would be in difficulty in trying to name a process that began in the mid twentieth century according to the latter. These successors had to name this so called new process or the next stage of evolution as post modernism as the predecessors had resorted to a nomenclature that ended up with modernism. We do not think that modernism has ended, though as any other stage it would die and give rise to another stage unless of course the human society is doomed to vanish with modernism, which is not a remote possibility.

It is nothing but the arrogance of the western mind to think that whatever they create would be the last and the final phase of an evolutionary process. The liberals would think that liberalism is the ultimate while the Marxists would call communism that comes after socialism the last stage in social evolution. In spite or because of Darwinian biological evolution man and his creations (keruwava) have not been displaced from the apex. The so called Copernican revolution that is supposed to have displaced man from the centre of the universe (rather the solar system, which the westerners knew at that time) has gradually eroded as there was no mental revolution that took place with the `discovery` of the heliocentric solar system. The western cos mology after Einstein has brought man back to the centre of the universe under the pretext of what I would call a cosmological democracy that pretends that the universe is everywhere the same.

Human rights

The cosmological democracy is not very much different from political democracy where all the citizens of a country (do I have to say a nation state) are supposed to be equal. There are people more equal than the others, and very often one could observe that those more equal people talking of more democracy than the others. As we have said previously the so called human rights are rights of individuals vis a vis the state and when the western states were weak the individuals did not `enjoy` many rights. The nascent states in Europe did not give the individuals the rights that are supposed to be enjoyed by the people living today. In the USA the situation was not that different and everybody knows how the blacks were treated then and the way they are pretended to be treated now with an occasional Barak Obama and Condoliza Rise.

With the states becoming stronger and richer what has happened is that a semblance of individual rights has been created after satisfying the basic needs of the people. It is true that there is freedom of speech at Hyde Park in London, which could be called Hyde Park Hypocrisy, but the English know that this freedom is not going to be a threat to those who are more equal than the others in England. As we have questioned in these columns what impact has Chomsky on the American society. He has the freedom of speech, expression and what not but how many Americans hear him? Even among those who hear him how many are influenced by him? Chomsky`s writings are ignored by the large majority of Americans and the American society has found a way of reducing him to a soap box speaker at the Hyde Park in London.

The trouble with individual rights is that the fifteenth century modernity, renaissance or what ever one may call it was concerned with giving the individual the freedom from society that was the dominant partner of individual society dichotomy under Catholic Chinthanaya in Medieval Europe. As Derrida also has pointed out the European mind thinks in terms of dichotomies and they always have one partner of a dichotomy dominating the other. This is not a surprise as the Aristotelian logic that is used by the westerners is a two valued twofold (dvikotika) logic. The individual became `dominant` gradually after the renaissance relegating the society to the role of the weak partner in the dichotomy, and the sensory satisfaction of the individual became the dominant theme of the society. Capitalism arose as a result of this process with the help of western science and technology that too was a product of `modernism`. To cut a long story short the western states played on this satisfaction of the sense organs of the individuals, and the consumer society with `poojas` to freedom of expression and other ideals superficially came into existence. The western states now have a sophisticated machinery that gives the impression that the people have freedom from fear etc. but in essence they have the freedom to satisfy their sense organs subject to the condition that an individual does not interfere with the freedom of another to satisfy his/her sense organs. The machinery is so sophisticated that the people are not aware that they live in fear. In other words by catering to the need to satisfy the sense organs, the need to express has been eliminated. People do not have to think as thinking is done by the state, meaning the agents of state. The agents of state could also be found in the private sector, which act in unison with the state.

The irony is that few people have become all that powerful that they decide what the vast majority of people have to do, select, etc. In the name of individual rights, the freedom of the individual has been suppressed. The individual is supposed to have the freedom of selection say from a number of TV channels, but what he/she can chose is from a set of channels where the production of programmes is not in control of the individual. However as the individual can satisfy the sense organs from what is offered, the programmes being produced to satisfy these basic instincts, the individual is `kept` happy. This situation is not post modernism as some westerners believe but only a continuation of modernism.

The USA which `tells baila` on rights of the individual, giving it the more sophisticated term human rights, can even tap telephone calls of individuals legally if the necessity arises. The FBI is not there to look after the rights of the individual whether they are called human rights or not, but to find out those individuals who could become a threat to the state. As we said earlier the western states are strong and have the resources to see that the people `feel` happy giving the impression that human rights are respected while strengthening the state more and more. When they were weak they could not afford to do so and the so called human rights were violated in open. Today the `human rights` are violated in a very subtle way even taking people such as Chomsky for a ride.

It is not my intention to analyse what happened in the name of modernity that arose as a movement to free the individual from society but suffice to say that in the name of satisfying individual rights the state has become more powerful and protects the western Judaic Christian Culture and the its Chinthanaya namely the Greek Judaic Christian Chinthanaya sacrificing the individual at the altar of consumerism. The western states that do not give much freedom for the individual in their countries, except the freedom to satisfy the sense organs, are very much concerned with the so called human rights in the non Christian states. (A Christian state is a state where the hegemonic culture is Christian.) If somebody states that the western states are secular all that I can say is Obama is tolerated even to this level in USA because of his Judaic Christian culture. Obama is also trying his best to forget his Muslim connections. The blacks in America have now been absorbed into the Judaic Christian culture without paying any respect to the Muslim or any other African culture which they belonged to.

In Sri Lanka the state is not very strong and the individual rights are violated here and there. Also a terrorist group that is supported by the west is challenging the Sri Lankan state. It is not for nothing that Prabhakaran has told a TNA MP recently that the west would help the LTTE to achieve a Kosovo type solution. LTTE today is the vehicle of western Judaic Christian culture against not only the Sinhala Buddhist culture but Hindu culture as well. It is the west that projects the separatist movement of the LTTE as a clash between Sinhala Buddhists and Tamil Hindus. If there was a separatist movement in USA how would Washington react to it? In fact how did George Washington deal with the southern states during the civil war?

The so called right to protect is the right of the western Christian states, the so called international community, to protect the individual rights of terrorists and supporters of terrorists and others who are fighting against non Christian states, meaning states that are non Christian in culture. Surely Russia or China would not have the right to protect or they are not in a position to make use of that right, though they also belong to the international community literally. On the other hand the right to protect operates only one way. Would Sri Lanka have the strength or the right to protect the `human rights` of some section of the community in a wes...