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LTTE & Fanaticism
18 January 1997 (from the Tamil
Circle)
The HK Standard/Asia Pacific report
of January 16, 1997 has Sri Lanka Foreign Minister
Lakshman Kadirgamar saying at a press briefing on
Wednesday night: "Mr V Prabhakaran (rebel leader) has a
goal, that is a separate state ..You cannot settle with
people who are absolutely fanatical''.
Foreign Minister Lakshman Kadirgamar
appears unaware of something that, Sri Aurobindo, wrote, in the Bande
Mataram , some 90 years ago:
"The mistake which despots..., have been making ever
since organised states came into existence and which,
it seems, they will go on making... is that they will
over estimate their coercive power, which is physical
and material and therefore palpable, and under estimate
the power and vitality of ideas and sentiments.
A feeling or a thought, democracy, nationalism...,
the aspiration towards liberty, cannot be estimated in
terms of concrete power, in so many fighting men, so
many armed police, so many guns... ...the physical
power and organisation behind the insurgent idea are
ridiculously small, the repressive force so
overwhelmingly, impossibly strong that all reasonable
prudent moderate minds see the utter folly of
resistance and stigmatise the attempt of the idea to
rise as an act of almost criminal insanity. But the man
with the idea is not reasonable, not prudent, not
moderate. He is an extremist, a fanatic. He
knows that in the fight with brute force the spirit is
bound to conquer...
He knows too that his own life and the lives of
others are of no value, that they are mere dust in the
balance compared with the life of his idea. The idea or
sentiment is at first confined to a few men whom their
neighbours and fellow countrymen ridicule as lunatics
or hare brained enthusiasts. But it spreads and gathers
adherents who catch the fire of the first missionaries
and creates its own preachers and then its workers who
try to carry out its teachings in circumstances of
almost paralysing difficulty. The attempt to work
brings them into conflict with the established power
which the idea threatens and there is persecution. The
idea creates its martyrs.
And in martyrdom there is an incalculable spiritual
magnetism which works miracles. A whole nation, a whole
world catches the fire which burned in a few hearts;
the soil which has drunk the blood of the martyr
imbibes with it a sort of divine madness which it
breathes into the heart of all its children, until
there is but one overmastering idea, one imperishable
resolution in the minds of all besides which all other
hopes and interests fade into significance and until it
is fulfilled, there can be no peace or rest for the
land or its rulers. It is at this moment that the idea
creates its heroes and fighters, whose numbers and
courage defeat only multiplies and confirms until the
idea militant has become the idea triumphant. Such is
the history of the idea, so invariable in its broad
outlines that it is evidently the working of a natural
law.
But the despot will not recognise this superiority,
the teachings of history have no meaning for him... He
is deceived also by the temporary triumph of his
repressive measures... and then stands alone erect
amongst the ruin he has made and thinks, 'The trouble
is over, there is nothing more to fear. My rule will
endure forever; God will not remember what I have done
or take account of the blood that I have spilled.'
"
If democracy means rule of the people, by the people,
for the people, then the right of self
determination proclaims that every people shall be
entitled to freely choose their political status and that
no one people may rule another. Democracy and the right
of self determination go hand in hand - neither can truly
exist without the other.
And, if the Liberation Tigers' unswerving commitment
to the Tamils' right to self determination is perceived
to be fanaticism, then so be it. But, an unswerving
commitment to the right to self determination does not
have the result that two peoples, sitting as equals,
cannot
agree on political structures within which they may
associate with each other on equal terms. The
modern day European Union affords an example of that
equal and free association of states.
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